J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Archives for September 2015

Carmarthenshire Archives: J’accuse, Part 2

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In the immediately preceding post, I produced incontrovertible evidence that Carmarthenshire County Council never installed dehumidifying equipment that would have enabled environmental conditions in the archival strongrooms to meet BS5454, the national standard for such facilities, despite provision to do so being set out explicitly, and costed, in the business plan submitted to, and accepted by, the Heritage Lottery Fund in 1998-9. Further proof of this failure, and its direct connection to the outbreak of mould in 2013, is provided in this post. However, some additional thoughts before we proceed.

Of course, not installing the correct equipment was not only taking a risk with the archive material owned by, and often created by, the county council; it was also potentially endangering the survival of the archives that had been deposited at the record office in good faith by their private owners, which included a significant number of collections – perhaps more than at any other Welsh county record office – of national and, indeed, sometimes international importance. Indeed, the business plan explicitly leaned upon the impressive nature of the office’s ‘documents of national importance’, describing the Cawdor, Dynevor, Cilcennin, Rebecca Riots, Carmarthen Borough and Carmarthen Gaol collections under that heading. (Personally, I’d add some of the contents of the two Stepney collections, too, but then, I’m biased.) The Council suddenly seems to have rediscovered this importance, albeit belatedly: the current invitation to tender for the cleaning of the bulk of the archive declares the collection to be ‘UNIQUE and IRREPLACEABLE’. The council’s capitals, not mine, although curiously, that precise form of words actually does appear to be mine – it’s so nice to know that one has such attentive readers, and although I’m not particularly religious, I’m put in mind of Luke Chapter 15, verses 7 and 10… Some rather more substantive thoughts about this invitation to tender can be found here, the latest post on Jacqui Thompson’s blog.

It’s also worth noting in passing that the business plan projected for archives service staffing consisting of a county archivist, two senior archivists, two records assistants, a modern records officer and a modern records assistant. We’ll return to the issue of the service’s staffing in due course.

***

The ultimate regulatory authority for archives in England and Wales is the National Archives at Kew, formerly known as the Public Record Office, hereafter referred to as TNA. As part of its duties, this body inspects every archive service once every few years, and, since the opening of the Parc Myrddin building, it has inspected Carmarthenshire in 2001, 2005, and 2011. These reports have been released to me following a Freedom of Information request (to TNA; I’d previously requested the same material as part of my broader FoI request to the county council, but fulfilling this still seems to be causing the relevant parties some difficulty). The remainder of this post focuses on them, together with two more recent documents that have already been placed in the public domain.

Some redaction has taken place under section 31(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act, which ‘applies to information the release of which, would or would be likely to prejudice law-enforcement matters, including preventing or detecting crime, arresting or prosecuting offenders and the proper administration of justice’. In this case, it was made clear in the covering email from TNA that the material being redacted relates to the security arrangements at Parc Myrddin: ‘Section 31(1) (a) is engaged when, to quote the Freedom of Information Act, ‘disclosure … would, or would be likely to, prejudice the prevention or detection of crime’. In considering the public interest in this case, as to whether the benefits of releasing this security information outweigh the risks that release poses to the security of these collections, we have concluded that the security considerations are paramount in this case. Disclosure of this detailed information would be highly likely to undermine the measures designed to protect the archival and manuscript collections exposing them to a much greater risk of theft. To place this material in the public domain would undermine the Record Office’s ability to maintain these security arrangements’.

I have no difficulty with any of this – after all, the safety of the documents has been the rationale behind this entire campaign – but there does seem to be rather a lot of redaction on this subject, and the unredacted comment about security in the 2001 report, below, is troubling.

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The 2001 inspection report, which can be viewed in full here – R – Carmarthenshire Inspection Report 2001 – was actually commenced in July 2000, essentially while the new office was being commissioned, so inevitably, many of its conclusions are quite provisional, while others are simply descriptive of the new facilities. The salient points are as follows:

  1. The service did not meet the Historical Manuscripts Commission’s standard, and was not recommended for it, as it was felt it fell short on staffing and security (see above); it was judged too early to judge the environmental conditions. (The current version of the standard can be found here.)
  2. The County Archivist had effectively been ‘demoted’
  3. Although not spelled out by TNA, staffing was one short of the level stipulated in the business plan; the number of archivists was rated as ‘barely adequate’, number of support staff as ‘inadequate’
  4. The County Council ‘forgot’ to install smoke detectors in the searchroom
  5. There was a substantial cataloguing backlog
  6. Strongroom temperatures were within BS5454, but relative humidity was higher than that standard. However, these may have been freak readings; subsequent readings put the main strong room within the standard, although readings in the other strongrooms were unreliable because the heating had been ‘cut off by the builders’
  7. Material returning from the previous out-store had to be reboxed because of ‘problems with damp’
  8. Part of the conservation budget had been diverted to other purposes, as not everything promised for the new office had been delivered
  9. There was a lack of sympathy and interest on the part of senior council officials and councillors

***

The 2005 inspection report can be viewed in full here – R – Carmarthenshire Inspection Report 2005

Again, the salient points are as follows:

  1. The county archivist was excluded from important decisions, e.g. budget setting, and the budget had been severely cut, leading to a reduction in the amount of conservation work that could be carried out
  2. Staffing remained inadequate, and the modern records staff had been transferred to a different jurisdiction
  3. There was still a substantial backlog of cataloguing
  4. The originally projected expansion space had been largely eaten up by large transfers from Llanelli Library and elsewhere
  5. The HLF grant was dependent on continued investment by the Council in the service, but this had not happened- ostensibly because of heavy spending on school buildings.
  6. There had been several incidents of flooding following leaks from offices above and blocked drains, although no documents were damaged in these
  7. Searchrooms 1 and 3 were too warm, and all areas had humidity levels in excess of BS5454. Variations were substantial, and exacerbated by the heating being turned off overnight, at weekends, and on holidays. All of the strongrooms contained radiators and pipes, with the largest containing a rising main. There had been water penetration from above into both strongrooms 1 and 2, while a flooding incident may have contributed to problems with the shelving in strongroom 3, the largest. The large roof area of this room heated up in the summer, the reverse in winter, with temperature difficult to control due to the lack of air conditioning. In the TNA’s opinion, many of these problems were caused by the fact that the original conversion work was not thorough enough. ‘The dehumidifiers are totally inadequate for the size of the strong rooms.’

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The 2011 inspection report can be viewed in full here – R – Carmarthenshire Inspection Report 2011

Once again, the salient points are as follows:

  1. Budget control had returned to the County Archivist, and an archives action plan was supposed to be drawn up in 2011-12; there were proposals to upgrade the service, or to move it again, but these were being affected by cuts in Welsh government funding
  2. Staffing remained unchanged
  3. The cataloguing backlog had grown worse, and as in 2005, very little conservation work could be carried out
  4. New drainage seemed to have eliminated the flooding problems, although many water pipes continued to flow through the strongrooms
  5. The comments about environmental conditions are essentially repeated from the 2005 report – i.e. too warm, humidity too high, etc. There was now clear evidence of damp damage on the walls in Strongroom 2, and of dry rot in Strongroom 1. ‘Residual heat from hot water passing through heating pipes to other areas of the building also impacts detrimentally on environmental control within the strongrooms.’ Once again, the dehumidifiers were said to be ‘totally inadequate’. Various concrete proposals were made to improve conditions (see full document, pp.5-6).

***

Taken as a whole, the TNA reports, when compared with the original business plan, undoubtedly provide a clear explanation of the sequence of events that culminated in the shocking state of affairs that came to light from November 2013 onwards, described in this document and this one, released under a previous FoI request (not mine, and previously flagged here). This leads me to the following conclusions, based on the evidence contained in this and the immediately preceding post.

  1. According to TNA, the staffing of the archive service in the period under discussion has never been more than barely adequate at best, meaning relatively little could be done to address the huge backlog of cataloguing and conservation work.
  2. During the period to 2011, at least, the TNA reports suggest that the attitude to the archives service within the council could be regarded as dismissive, viewing it as something of at best marginal importance, with little attempt being made to understand it on the part of either officers or councillors, and with the archivists themselves being sidelined or ignored in relation to strategic decision making. Whether all of that continues to be the case today remains to be seen; but anecdotal evidence, such as the failures to appoint a new county archivist, to explain the current problems with the archives on the council’s website (a situation remedied only after many months had passed), and to respond to correspondence about those problems (notably the case of the letters sent by the Friends of the Archives to every single county councillor, not one of which received a reply), does not provide much cause for optimism.
  3. Finally, though, on the most important matter of all: From the evidence presented in this and the preceding post, the outbreak of mould in Carmarthenshire Archives would appear to be a direct consequence of the failure to install proper dehumidifying equipment in the strongrooms when the conversion of Parc Myrddin took place, relying instead on domestic-style dehumidifiers which were never adequate for the task. This was exacerbated by what TNA regarded as the inadequate nature of the conversion itself, which meant that the nature of the strongroom roofs, along with the presence of active water pipes, the frequent turning off of heating throughout the building to save money, and so forth, all contributed to an environment in which conditions were often well outside the national standard, BS5454. The council seems to have been warned about the strongroom conditions on a number of occasions, most obviously by the TNA reports of 2005 and 2011, but appears to have disregarded those warnings.

Further posts in this series are likely to follow in due course, so watch this space.

 

Carmarthenshire Archives: J’accuse, Part 1

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…or, if you prefer, rwy’n gyhuddo.

Readers of the previous posts in this series will know that when I first started to express my concern about the future of the archives, and began the online campaign to raise awareness of the situation, there was virtually no clarity at all about what was likely to happen in the future. This, it has to be said, was due almost entirely to the County Council’s woeful failure to communicate with its stakeholders – for example, by providing no information whatsoever on its website about the closure of the record office, and by simply not replying, or not replying within acceptable timeframes, to many of those who contacted it.

Things have improved substantially since then. More information has been provided online, various public statements have been made by leading figures in the Council (not all of them terribly informative, it must be said, but let that pass), and the local press has weighed in, as have various individuals and organisations in positions of influence. It’s become clear that the supervisory authorities, the Welsh government and the National Archives, are on the case, although whether their involvement, especially in the case of the former, is leading to outcomes that are necessarily in the best interests of the people of Carmarthenshire, and of the archives themselves, remains to be seen. We now know that the documents are being cleaned, albeit at a staggering cost, and timetables exist for them to be made available to researchers once again, albeit in temporary locations that will not necessarily be very accessible or user-friendly. We know that serious discussions are under way about the creation of a new facility, although there appears to be a strong likelihood that this will be outside the county, and, again, might well have serious issues of access, especially for those who depend upon public transport.

So, yes, we are much further on than we were three or four months ago, and in the narrow sense, I suppose one could even say that Carmarthenshire archives, i.e. the priceless documents themselves, have been ‘saved’.

But that leaves us with the 64,000 dollar question, which I’ve deliberately left to one side until now in order to concentrate on the more immediate and more important questions of the future of the archives.

That question, of course is: why did mould develop in the record office in the first place?

This will be the first of a number of blog posts to address this issue. For a number of reasons, I’ve yet to decide on the exact timing of these posts, although they’ll probably appear over a matter of weeks rather than days – except in the case of Part 2, which will be posted here within the next couple of days. The posts will examine the matter in considerable, and often pretty boring, detail, so they’ll make for very lengthy reading, but I think it’s important that all of this information is placed on the record. I’m going to present that information in as factual and neutral a manner as I can, and leave it to others to draw their conclusions from it. However, I’ll conclude each post by posing the questions which, in my opinion, are raised by the information within it. Again, it’s for others to provide answers to those questions, or to use them as the basis for further lines of enquiry of their own.

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‘Let’s start at the very beginning: a very good place to start.’ (Oscar Hammerstein)

In 1998, Carmarthenshire’s archives were in a mess, and the county record office itself was, to put it mildly, a disgrace. It was housed in three separate premises, four miles apart, and the searchroom could accommodate only about ten researchers at a time, despite the fact that the number of visitors had increased from 1,705 in 1990 to 3,385 in 1997. The searchroom was in the basement of County Hall, adjacent to the cafeteria and kitchens, so that researchers had ‘to study in the constant aroma of cooked food’ (I can vouch for this, because, to quote Max Boyce, ‘I was there’). Staff had to carry documents to the searchroom through the kitchen and dining area. School groups, student groups, and family history societies had to be turned away because of the inadequacy of the facilities. With unwitting irony, too, the county council of the day stated that ‘the strongrooms are not up to the required standard…the documents are in danger of rapid deterioration’, while, plus ça change, a serious outbreak of mould had developed in one of the out-stores – so the current crisis is actually the second time in less than twenty years that this problem has arisen. Unsurprisingly, the ultimate regulatory authority, the (then) Public Record Office, soon to be rebranded as the National Archives, had ‘issued an ultimatum that, if storage and research facilities are not improved, the County Council will lose control of its Archives Service’. The acquisition of further manorial and tithe documents had been prohibited, and the removal of tithe records already held was regarded as ‘a very serious threat’.

To remedy this dire situation, a plan was drawn up to establish a new record office in the former Queen Elizabeth Grammar School site at Richmond Terrace, Carmarthen, a building that would be renamed Parc Myrddin under its new dispensation. A gymnasium and two classrooms would be converted into strongrooms, a laboratory into a searchroom, another classroom into a microfilm and computer reading room, and a further classroom into a public reception area. Other classrooms would be converted into a sorting area for new accessions, a cataloguing room, a public meeting room, and staff rest rooms. In total, there would be accommodation for about fifty researchers at a time. This was all summarised under a total of fifteen ‘project objectives’, which seem to have been listed in order of perceived importance: thus number 1 was ‘to ensure that responsibility for the Archive Service remains locally and with the Local Authority’, number 3 was ‘to ensure the correct storage of the region’s archives in order that they may be preserved for posterity’, number 5 was ‘to provide a modern, effective county archive service’, and so on. Intriguingly, number 15 was ‘to provide expansion space for the next 15 years or so’, hardly a long term solution; but ‘the site is such that it allows for ample space for far greater expansion, which can be undertaken periodically as and when required’.

(The archive then had 300 cubic metres of material; the three new strongrooms contained about 525 cubic metres, hence the 15-year calculation, based on the average rates of accrual at the time.)

One of the other reasons for the conversion which was stressed heavily in these objectives was to re-use a historic building and retain the green field site around it. Serious consideration was given to demolishing the former school and erecting a new build, but it was felt that this would mean the ‘loss of a historic building of great significance to the town of Carmarthen’, while ‘a new build would, probably, not be as substantial and solid a structure as the present building’ and ‘the present building is ideally suited for the proposed project’. A substantial number of representations had been made to save the building, including from Old Girls’ groups.

The Council decided to apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a substantial grant towards the conversion costs, with £117,000 being requested – 75% of the total project costs of £155,827, in other words the maximum proportion that the HLF allocated to any project that successfully applied to it. A business plan was drawn up to support this application. This is quite an elusive document to track down – for example, the HLF’s own copy was apparently destroyed during routine weeding in 2010 – but fortunately, the copy of it that was sent at the time to the secretary of the Welsh County Archivists Group was retained by the person in question, who passed it on to me. Unless stated otherwise, all facts, figures and quotations in this post are taken from that document, and from other documents released to me by the HLF, as described below.

The business plan estimated that the number of users at the new office would rise by more than a third, to an estimated 6,700 visitors per annum. Income was forecast to be £108, 781 for the first year, 1997-8, with expenditure at £104,841; by 2001-2, following the opening of the new office, income was expected to be £155,724 as a result of an ‘increased annual revenue grant from Carmarthenshire County Council of £28,500 per annum plus inflation’, while expenditure was expected to be £154,274; this point was footnoted, ‘increased income will be reinvested in the County Archives Service’.

Detailed costings for the project included the following:

  • £11,675 for the public search room
  • £11,225 for a disabled WC (perhaps a surprisingly large figure when compared with the search room cost; it included £3,000 for providing a new roof and £3,500 for waste pipes and connections to existing drains)
  • £79,005 for strongrooms 1, 2 and 3; this was far and away the largest item of expenditure, and forms the main focus of this post.

The figure for fitting out the strongrooms included £10,700 for ‘works to mechanical and electrical installations’; a further £44,850 was to be spent on ‘strongroom shelving as quoted by Nordplan’. Section 2.12 of the plan described the proposed strongroom conditions. These were to comply with the British Standard Recommendations for Storage and Exhibition of Archival Documents, part of what was then known as BS5454 and is now known as PD5454. The strongrooms were to be controlled within the temperature range of 13-18 degrees celsius, with relative humidity of 55 to 65%. Preliminary readings had indicated constant levels within those ranges, and two wall-mounted dehumidifiers would be installed in Strongroom 1 to maintain them; this was by far the largest of the three new strongrooms, at 370 cubic metres out of 525 in the entire building, and would thus contain the vast majority of the collections. Two portable dehumidifiers would be placed in Strongroom 2, while Strongroom 3 would be developed after expansion space had been exhausted after 10 years, ‘when an air circulation scheme will be considered’ (my emphasis). The temperature range would be maintained by thermostat controls on the strongroom heating system.

(Perhaps confusingly, the room identified as Strongroom 1 in the plan was actually designated Strongroom 3 after the record office was commissioned, the new numbering being based on the distances from the searchroom.)

The business plan was duly submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund. This routinely destroys most of the documentation relating to individual grants after ten years, but it still retains both the case paper and the contract relating to its agreement with Carmarthenshire County Council, and both of these documents were released to me under a Freedom of Information request. Much of the case paper simply summarises the business plan, but it does provide some interesting and useful additional information, notably the opinions from the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (more usually known as HMC) and the HLF’s policy advisor for archives and libraries, Stephen Green.

The RCHM/HMC opinion states:

RCHM strongly supported the application. It was reported that the poor accommodation was very worrying given the importance of the collection, a matter of some concern both to the Public Records Office and RCHM. The proposed project was supported by RCHM as a workable plan and an immense improvement on the current situation but it was also emphasized that it must be the first stage of a concerted effort by the local authority to place the service on better footing. RCHM felt this should be the first move towards the Commission’s Standard for Record Repositories. Without lottery support, it was opined that this project could not go ahead. The public benefits were praised but concern was expressed over the backlog of cataloging. While an increase in reader numbers is considered likely, the figures given by the applicant were considered ambitious. A member of the Commission visited the school and considered it suitable for the project. The project was seen as financially and technically feasible. The organisational viability was judged adequate but RCHM would like to strengthen the role of the County Archivist in its execution. It was judged a likelihood that the service would cease if this application fails. RCHM have been involved in advising the applicant on the project and feel on the whole their advice has been followed. They are strongly supportive of the project but would seek a clear strategy on the continued investment and development of the service and an undertaking to implement and sustain the service over the next five years to meet the Commission’s Standard for Record Repositories.

Stephen Green’s verbal advice was:

SG supported the project strongly and endorsed the points made by RCHM. He confirmed the importance of the collections held by the service. He provided additional comment to the issues raised by RCHM. He felt the over-estimate in user numbers was not a serious issue, given that it is likely that there will be some rise in reader figures especially given the new facilities and ease of access. SG recommended that the application be supported in full but a special condition should be included in the contract that the applicant provides a strategic overview of the service taking account of cataloging and conservation of the existing archive.

The HLF committee for Wales approved the grant of £116,500 at its meeting on 10 December 1998, thus effectively rubber stamping all of the financial provisions in the council’s business plan. A contract was signed on St David’s Day 1999; this is provided here – Carmarthenshire Archives Project contract. The case paper contains one additional proviso at the behest of RCHM, namely that ‘a condition should be the full involvement of the County Archivist in the implementation of the project’.

The building at Parc Myrddin was duly converted, opened to the public, and served as the county record office until its closure in 2014, following the discovery of mould in the strongrooms in November 2013.

Finally, then, we come to the nub of the matter.

Contrary to the stipulations in the business plan, as submitted to the HLF, dehumidifiers that would have made the strongrooms compliant with BS5454, especially the two wall mounted dehumidifiers explicitly specified for the largest strongroom, were never installed.

To quote the recently retired former County Archivist of Carmarthenshire, in a public comment on a previous post in this series: The three strong rooms at Parc Myrddin have domestic dehumidifiers installed – the sort that work in one’s kitchen. They are useless as a means to regulate the environment in archival strongrooms.

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I suggest that the evidence presented in this post permits the following questions to be asked.

  1. Why is it that a location which, in 1998-9, was regarded as being so ideal by the Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Historical Manuscripts Commission, and others, should be condemned by the Council’s own spokespersons little more than fifteen years later as being totally unfit for purpose? 
  2. Why was the appropriate dehumidifying equipment not installed at Parc Myrddin, when it was stated explicitly in the business plan that it would be – in order to fulfil what the Council claimed to be its third most important priority for the new record office?
  3. What happened to the money specifically allocated for such equipment? (In revised form, questions 2 and 3 could also be asked of other aspects of the business plan that were apparently never implemented, notably the failure to provide the public meeting room.)
  4. Did the regulatory authorities, namely the HLF for the duration of their 10-year contract, the National Archives, and (then) CyMal, know about the failure to act upon the business plan by not installing the specified dehumidifying equipment? If so, what action, if any, did they take, and how did Carmarthenshire County Council respond?

It is principally to questions 1 and 4, and the many ramifications of the answers to them, that subsequent posts in this series will return.

An Important Announcement

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There will be an open meeting for those concerned about the current issues with Carmarthenshire’s archives, museums and heritage at the Ivy Bush Hotel, Carmarthen, on Monday September 28th, between 7 and 9 PM. For those not able to get there, I hope to be able to provide a detailed report on this site as soon as possible after the event.

Carmarthenshire Archives: The Fait Accompli

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Back to the seemingly endless and tangled saga of Carmarthenshire Archives today, and some clear evidence that we are approaching the end game – at least as far as the future location of a new record office is concerned. (The issue of why mould appeared in the strongrooms of the old facility is a very different matter, and one which I suspect is a very long way from the end game; strange to say, the county council has still to comply with my Freedom of Information request on the subject…)

Regular readers of this series of posts won’t be surprised to learn that the clear evidence in question hasn’t emerged from any statement by Carmarthenshire Council. Instead, it’s emerged once again through the significantly more transparent proceedings of the West Glamorgan Archives Committee, whose agenda for their next meeting on 18 September includes a most enlightening report by the county archivist. (My thanks to Susan Beckley for drawing my attention to this.) Those who want to look at the original of this can find it in the public domain here, but in summary, it refers to a further meeting held on 20 July, attended by representatives of Swansea University and Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire Councils. This produced a statement, drafted with the aid of archive consultant Elizabeth Oxborrow-Cowan, which is now meant to be going to each governing body for approval; Carmarthenshire’s share of the consultancy fees would appear to be £5,000, as the archivist’s report states that this is the one-third share which the existing West Glamorgan partnership is paying. Ms Oxborrow-Cowan’s credentials are certainly impressive, so her input can only be welcome.

The document in question contains its fair share of W1A-like meaningless ‘management speak’ (for example, what, pray, is an ‘audience development aspiration’?) and, unsurprisingly in this day and age, its centrepieces seem to be statements of ‘joint vision’ and, inevitably, ‘mission’. The former states:

‘Connecting global and local audiences with the documentary heritage of our areas in Wales, to enrich lives and communities by inspiring learning, research, discovery and identity.’

No doubt Dylan Thomas could have put it better – come to that, my grandmother could probably have put it better – but chwarae teg, nothing particularly contentious there. As for the mission statement:

‘By 2020 we will create an innovative combined archive service for Carmarthenshire Archive Service, Richard Burton Archives and West Glamorgan Archive Service. It will be located in a purpose-built facility in the Swansea Bay City Region and will be a focus for civic pride. The new service will be known and valued by diverse audiences, bringing together our local and academic communities to foster opportunities for research and exchange. This service will professionally manage, employ and develop the totality of our rich collections to meet stakeholders’ needs and ensure the ongoing curation of the region’s documentary heritage, celebrating its cultural and linguistic diversity. It will radically exploit digital and analogue technologies to create a range of relevant amenities and products for audiences ranging from the local to the international. This will be a high profile organisation, grounded in excellence, with a strong service ethos and a culture of innovation from which others can learn. It will be funded from a diverse range of income streams and will be creative in how it accesses and uses resources.’

It is interesting to note which fashionable ‘buzzwords’ are considered worthy of inclusion in such statements, and those which are now considered thoroughly old-fashioned and politically incorrect: words like ‘history’, ‘researchers’ and ‘manuscripts’, for example. More importantly, the news that they are now part of the ‘Swansea Bay City Region’, a nonsensical concept that must have countless generations of Welsh Geography teachers spinning in their graves, may come as a surprise to the good folk of, say, Llanybydder, Rhandirmwyn and Whitland; while as noted in my previous blog on this subject, a ‘West Wales archives partnership’ that doesn’t include Pembrokeshire would seem to be very much a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. However, the most alarming element of this ‘mission statement’ is its reference to ‘by 2020’. What, exactly, is meant to happen to access to the Carmarthenshire Archives before then, especially if, as we are currently being told, the cleaning will be complete and the documents accessible again during the course of next year, 2016? Where will the documents be held for the next four years – perhaps Cardiff, where the documents already cleaned are currently being stored? – and how will they be made available to the public?

(Incidentally, it’s emerged from other sources that apparently some £550,000 has had to be spent on the process of cleaning the mould-damaged documents – and no, I haven’t accidentally mistyped the numbers of fives and noughts.)

The ‘next steps’ identified by the document also raise some interesting questions. These specify that decisions need to be taken on –

  • Scope of the partnership
  • Location for the service (which suggests, perhaps, that a site on Swansea University’s new Fabian Way campus isn’t necessarily a done deal)
  • Governance model and management arrangements
  • Investment requirements / costs / funding options
  • Options for local service delivery (online provision; local hubs; outreach work) (interesting; might there be a small ‘out-office’ or ‘local hub’ in Carmarthen, for example, and will the current family history outreach service in Ammanford, Carmarthen and Llanelli libraries continue? Such provision would at least partly mitigate the move of the main facility to Swansea.)

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that this partnership now seems to have an unstoppable momentum, especially as the Welsh government has clearly thrown its weight behind it. Therefore, Carmarthenshire Council’s bland assurances to various correspondents, myself included, that it has been considering other sites in the county itself, seem no longer to be worth the paper they’re written on, and any prospect of a partnership with Trinity St David University, an outcome strongly favoured by several interested parties, seems to have been kicked well and truly into the long grass. Whether county councillors will be presented with a list of alternatives before the end of this year, as the council has claimed in the past, or whether that list will contain precisely one option, remains to be seen.

As noted in a number of my previous posts on this issue, there are undoubtedly strong arguments in favour of a joint facility in Swansea. For example, one can say with considerable confidence that such an arrangement will safeguard the future of the archives rather better than if they reminded exclusively under the tender loving care of Carmarthenshire Council. The new facility in question is also likely to be vastly superior to anything that might be provided in the county, and should certainly provide a much better working environment and experience for those researchers who are actually able to get there. The critical issue, as has been pointed out all along, will be access – but who knows, perhaps the ‘Swansea Bay City Region’ will be providing a fast, efficient and integrated transport scheme, covering even its most outlying peripheries?

Methinks we know the answer to that one, mes amis. 

A Breath of Fresh Sea Air

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I thought I’d take a break this week from the ongoing issues with Carmarthenshire archives, and even from the range of issues that I normally blog about, to have a look at a refreshing little story which does much to restore one’s faith in humanity after too many dealings with local authority apparatchiks and the like. When I was down in west Wales a couple of weeks ago, I visited the small heritage centre established by the West Wales Maritime Heritage Society in part of the former Hancocks shipbuilding yard in Pembroke Dock. Although the centre has existed for a while, restoring various local heritage craft, it’s only opened to the public for the first time this summer. It has pretty well no security of tenure – the area is likely to be part of a new marina development – and has received relatively little publicity, but even so, the band of volunteers who run it are truly impressive in their enthusiasm, knowledge, and friendliness towards visitors. All over the world, unsung heroes like these are the real beating heart of maritime heritage, preserving craft, skills and memories in ways that few more commercial and large-scale enterprises can match.

The centre has some real treasures on display, ranging from the small craft themselves to some excellent photo display boards. Inevitably, I was particularly interested in those relating to warship building at Pembroke’s royal dockyard: the centre has some very rare photos that I’d never seen before, including one of the keel laying of the cruiser HMS Amphion, the first British warship to be lost during World War I, on 15 March 1911. This little centre really deserves to succeed, so if you’re in the area, it’s well worth dropping in (especially as a visit could be combined with one to the new and much larger heritage centre in the former dockyard chapel, which has much more about the dockyard and the huge flying boat base that was subsequently established on the site). It’s open for four days a week until 27 September.

The heritage centre's workshop
The heritage centre’s workshop
Display about the time that HMS Warrior (1860), the world's first ironclad battleship, spent as an oil fuel jetty at Pembroke Dock
Display about the time that HMS Warrior (1860), the world’s first ironclad battleship, spent as an oil fuel jetty at Pembroke Dock
The centre's example of the coracle, the ancient Welsh vernacular craft
The centre’s example of the coracle, the ancient Welsh vernacular craft