J D Davies - Historian and Author

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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.

***

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.’

***

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.

***

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.

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. 

Carmarthenshire Archives: the Right Hand and the Left Hand

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Democracy is a wonderful thing; or, as President Harry S Truman said, ‘if you can’t convince them, confuse them’. (Or don’t reply to their Freedom of Information requests; but that’s another story, for another day.) Such has been the case with the ongoing saga of a possible future location for a new Carmarthenshire Record Office. At pretty much exactly the same time that the county council was explicitly assuring several of those who had written to it about the matter – or at least, those to whom they deigned to reply – that they were seeking a site in Carmarthenshire, a very different story was appearing in the minutes of the latest meeting of the West Glamorgan Archives Service committee, held on 19 June 2015. These minutes have been mentioned in some of the local press reporting of the archives story, but they are available in full online, here, and tell a rather more complex tale than that which has appeared in either the press stories or Carmarthenshire’s own bland and uninformative statements.

West Glamorgan Archives Service is already run by a partnership, consisting of Swansea City Council, Neath Port Talbot Council, and Neath Antiquarian Society. Therefore, it has to hold regular meetings of the representatives of all the partners, and on 19 June they received a report from the County Archivist. The relevant text reads as follows:

Planning for the Future

It was outlined that the Archive Service was in the initial stages of preparation for a period of profound transformation which would see the most significant alteration for more than two decades to the way in which the service was delivered.  The current challenge was to understand and integrate each factor forcing change on the Archive Service and to produce a mutually agreed vision and forward plan which maintained service quality and was financially sustainable in the long-term.  It was added that the factors necessitating change were threefold: impending Welsh Local Government reorganisation; the generic remodelling of the way Local Authority Cultural Services were delivered; proposed sale of Swansea Civic Centre.  It was added that the anticipated deadline for Council services to vacate Swansea Civic Centre was approximately 5 years which provided a timeframe for the Archive Service to plan for its relocation of over 600 sq. metres of historic records from the Swansea Civic Centre basement. 

Reference was made to discussions between Swansea University, the City and County of Swansea, Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council and Carmarthenshire Council [my emphasis] to explore whether it was possible to develop together a shared vision for archive provision in South West Wales [ditto]. These talks had been attended by Welsh Government and facilitated by an external consultant.  It was added that a fact finding tour of the Keep, a shared archive facility in Brighton, took place in early May 2015. 

RESOLVED that a more detailed report regarding the fact finding tour of the Keep in Brighton be provided to the next scheduled meeting.

The specific background to this is that the current civic centre by the Marina on Swansea seafront is to be sold off and demolished in order to provide yet more yuppie flats – sorry, desirable bijou residences – despite it being a relatively modern building. Regardless of Swansea’s particular property juggling, though, this minute raises some very intriguing questions; indeed, the ‘right hand’ of Swansea’s relatively transparent proceedings has effectively pulled the rug out from under the ‘left hand’ of its rather less transparent counterpart across the Loughor Bridge. (My apologies for mixing my metaphors.)

Let’s leave to one side the issue of the probity of Carmarthenshire’s public statements, which still make no mention of a possible move to Swansea or of the discussions outlined in these minutes, despite the fact that this information is all in the public domain. Instead, let’s unpick some of the more intriguing elements of this story. Firstly, this project is to be part of ‘a shared vision for archive provision in South West Wales’. This will probably come as news to the good people of Pembrokeshire, which must have been physically ripped from South West Wales and is presumably now floating off into the Atlantic, next stop Barbados, taking its inconvenient state-of-the-art (but, sadly, already full) new record office with it. But hey, who cares about geographical realities if they stand in the way of neat corporate branding?

Secondly, the reference to ‘the Keep’ in Brighton, the new joint archive repository for East Sussex (despite being outside its borders), the University of Sussex, and Brighton museums, needs some clarification. There are several partnership schemes running archives in different parts of the country; in her guest post on this site, for example, former West Glamorgan county archivist Susan Beckley identified the complex arrangements that pertain at Glamorgan Archives in Cardiff. The difference between this and the facility in Brighton is that the latter involves a university, as would the proposed scheme at Swansea; there is a similar arrangement at Hull. (One wonders why the fact-finding team preferred a visit to Brighton over one to Hull. Answers on a postcard, please.) However, there is otherwise virtually no comparison between the situation in Brighton and the one which would exist in Swansea. All of the organisations involved in ‘the Keep’ are within the boundaries of one historical and geographical entity, namely Sussex (as is also the case at Hull); one can only imagine how the people of, say, Kent or Surrey would react if it was proposed that their archives should be moved to Brighton, yet that is effectively exactly what is being proposed for the people of Carmarthenshire. It is clear from the West Glamorgan minutes that a Welsh government representative has been involved in these discussions, and it’s common knowledge that the relevant government agency, MALD (no, that’s not the Welsh for ‘mould’: this is the new acronym for the former CyMal, and yes, I know it’s difficult to keep up…), is very keen for this partnership to go ahead. Indeed, the letter I received from Linda Tomos, its director, essentially admits that quite freely, even if it does not mention Swansea by name. One wonders why there is such apparent enthusiasm within MALD for an arrangement that quite evidently treats Carmarthenshire as a tacked-on afterthought to the so-called ‘shared vision…for south west Wales’, which is clearly nothing of the sort due to the omission of Pembrokeshire. (Further answers on a postcard, please.)

One also wonders how on earth this proposed partnership will fit into the proposed local government reorganisation in Wales – if Carmarthenshire is likely to disappear in the relatively near future, what on earth will be the sense in a ‘shared vision’ encompassing Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, and, umm, one third of the revived county of Dyfed, but not the other two-thirds? The only ‘vision’ apparent here is of one of Dante’s circles of hell, as reimagined by George Orwell. Moreover, as Susan Beckley demonstrated in her post, Neath Port Talbot has consistently been treated as a junior partner in the West Glamorgan partnership, and has suffered disproportionately as a result of cuts. Surely that would only be repeated in spades in the case of Carmarthenshire, which (apart from the Llanelli and Amman Valley areas) is completely different in nature to the other components of this potential shotgun marriage?

The dangers of Carmarthenshire being marginalised in such an arrangement are obvious, quite apart from the issues, previously explored on this site, of access to the new office, particularly for those who live in the west and north of the county and who rely entirely on public transport. Again, the comparison with Brighton’s Keep does not hold water. Sussex as a whole has incomparably better public and private transport infrastructure than Carmarthenshire – I lived there for a while, so I experienced the comparison at first hand. The Keep is served by no fewer than four bus routes which stop immediately outside it, as well as being a ten minute walk from a railway station; somehow, one doubts if any new site on the Fabian Way campus in Swansea would be anything like as accessible. Rye, on the eastern border of East Sussex, is almost exactly fifty miles from the Keep. To get from one to the other by public transport involves a train journey of one hour and twenty six minutes, followed by the ten minute walk in question, with at least one train an hour throughout the day. Newcastle Emlyn, on the north-west border of Carmarthenshire, is nearer to Swansea – forty-five miles – but to get just to Swansea rail station would take two and three quarter hours by bus and train, with a further leg out to Fabian Way (by means as yet undetermined) to add on top of that.

The conclusion to all of this is obvious and inescapable. Shoehorning the Carmarthenshire archives into a new partnership based in Swansea would obviously suit the county council, as it could effectively wash its hands of a significant amount of responsibility for something that has clearly become a severe embarrassment to the corporate image it wishes to present to the world. It would clearly suit the other partners, as they would acquire – for next to nothing, relatively speaking – a much richer and more comprehensive collection of archives than they would otherwise possess, in order to achieve their ‘shared vision for archive provision in South West Wales’ (still begging the question of where Pembrokeshire has got to; probably past the Azores by now). It would suit those who would like more democratic oversight of the Carmarthenshire archives, as a partnership would, of necessity, mean the establishment of the sort of committee that already exists in West Glamorgan, with public access to its proceedings; and involving other bodies would significantly reduce the possibility of Carmarthenshire council making yet another shambolic pig’s ear of its guardianship of the priceless documents in its care. It would most certainly suit the supervisory authorities, as noted above. It would, if truth be told, suit professional historians with cars who are based in Llanelli when they are in the area. Indeed, it would suit nearly everybody – except, that is, for the likes of the poor pensioner in Newcastle Emlyn or Llandovery or Laugharne, who decides one day that she’d really like to investigate an aspect of local history in depth.

But then, who cares about her?

 

Carmarthenshire Archives: the Perils of the ‘P’ Word

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This week, I’m delighted to welcome Susan Beckley with a guest blog about the Carmarthenshire Archives situation, essentially a response and sequel to last week’s post on this site. Susan worked as an archivist in Carmarthenshire from 1974 to 1986, and wrote the book Carmarthenshire Record Office: A Survey of Archival Holdings (1980). She was the County Archivist for West Glamorgan from 1992 to 2004, and is thus uniquely placed to comment both on the current situation and on a potential ‘partnership’ arrangement which could see the Carmarthenshire archives relocate to Swansea.

Next week will see a return to the usual subject matter of this blog, when I’ll have some very exciting news on the book front!

***

As one of the county archivists involved in setting up one of the much vaunted successful  joint archive services in urban south Wales following Local Government Reorganization in 1996, I thought I should comment on the background to this.

  • Section 60 of the Local Government [Wales] Act, 1994 required each of the 22 new Principal Councils in Wales to set out a Scheme for Archives detailing their plans for delivering an archive service.
  • In Glamorgan and Gwent, the urban south Wales counties, the four post- 1974 County Councils of Mid, South, and West Glamorgan and Gwent, were to be replaced by twelve unitary authorities. The counties, by 1996, had three Record Offices: the Gwent Record Office at Cwmbran, the Glamorgan Record Office at Cardiff, jointly serving Mid and South Glamorgan, and the West Glamorgan Archive Service in Swansea.
  • Clearly it would have been impracticable and non-cost effective to dismember the three Record Offices between twelve successor authorities, and so Joint Archives Committees were established to oversee and monitor the services continued from the three existing Record Offices as follows:
    • Gwent Record Office serving the Councils of Torfaen, Monmouthshire, Blaenau Gwent, Newport, and Caerphilly [part]
    • Glamorgan Record Office serving the Councils of Cardiff, Vale of Glamorgan, Bridgend, Merthyr Tydfil, Rhondda Cynon Taff, and Caerphilly [part]
    • West Glamorgan Archive Service serving the Councils of Swansea and Neath Port Talbot

In this way, the ancient County boundaries, which have so much significance for the shape and content of the collections, were respected, and, as far as I am aware, no collections were withdrawn, as essentially the same services continued, albeit with more complicated governance arrangements.

Since that time new archive premises have been opened in Gwent (at Ebbw Vale) and in Cardiff. While external grant funding can be obtained by some archive services, this is not always the case, and, at the very least match funding is normally required from the recipients. Carmarthenshire should be aware that should it transfer custody of its collections to Swansea, it will have to contribute towards the construction of a new facility on Fabian Way, and also to the exorbitant  costs of operating such premises nowadays, especially in an area where security concerns would be significant.

The proposal to make the treated documents available while they are being held in Cardiff in the short term, is effectively to render them inaccessible. I well remember when I was in Swansea, how members of the public from Swansea would complain about travelling to Cardiff to view local archives before the facility in West Glamorgan was established, and Swansea is only 40 miles from Cardiff, whereas Carmarthen must be 70 miles away.

If Carmarthenshire presses ahead with the idea of transferring custody of its collections to Swansea (following appropriate consultation with its depositors), it would be well advised to talk directly to Neath Port Talbot residents about exactly what they get out of their joint arrangement other than some outreach to schools. When I left West Glamorgan in 2004, there was equitable public access provision to the Archive Service in each of the three main towns, Swansea, Neath, and Port Talbot, and a part time service in Pontardawe (also within Neath Port Talbot).

Since then, presumably as the result of successive rounds of budget cuts, of which the service within Neath Port Talbot appears to have repeatedly borne the brunt, the public service in Port Talbot has been virtually abandoned by the Archive Service, the Pontardawe service has been discontinued, and efforts have been made to withdraw from the service in Neath, though this is being resisted by the Neath Antiquarian Society, the current ‘partners’ of the West Glamorgan Archive Service. The whole focus of the service is centred on Swansea, rather than on serving the wider West Glamorgan community.

 

Carmarthenshire Archives: The Future

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For those who might be new to the fraught saga of Carmarthenshire Archives, you can catch up on the ‘story so far’ here, here and here.

I expected this to be the first of two new posts about the situation in relatively short order. However, I’m still waiting for a response to the Freedom of Information requests I lodged with Carmarthenshire County Council, despite the deadline for this being today (12 August); I’ve received a holding reply, stating that ‘due to the fact that we having to carry out a manual exercise to identify all relevant correspondence, combined with officer’s leave commitments, we will be unable to respond within the 20 working days required by the Act’.

(I half expected this, given the difficulty of contacting pretty much any organisation during August; and to be fair, the Council’s Information and Data Protection officer has apologised fulsomely for the delay. Of course, the 64,000 dollar question will be the duration of the delay, but I’ll keep everyone informed about progress through the Facebook page.)

The post derived from the FoI material is likely to focus heavily on historical matters, namely the question of how and why the mould problem in the archive strongrooms was able to develop. However, my principal concern since beginning this online campaign has been with the future: namely, with ensuring that the collections are cleaned and made available again as quickly as possible, and that a new, properly staffed record office opens at a suitable location within a reasonable timeframe. In that respect, a little more information is now available, so I’ll place that in the public domain immediately, without waiting for the full response to the FoI request.

First, the Council has fulfilled a promise it made to me to provide a page on its website explaining the closure of the record office, and, in turn, I’m very happy to fulfill my promise to link to it on this site. However, this page still begs the critical questions of location, timeframes, and so forth, and provides no specific contact information for those like the several people who’ve told the Save Carmarthenshire Archives Facebook page that they were planning trips to the record office, in some cases from very long distances, but simply didn’t know that it was closed. (One wonders how many have turned up in the last few months at the former record office in Parc Myrddin after lengthy journeys, scratched their heads, cursed the Council, and set off forlornly for home again?) Perhaps most concerning is the single sentence about the bulk of the collection, ‘Phase two of the work on the remaining material is currently underway‘, which gives no indication of duration and which is then ‘parked’ to concentrate on the ‘good news’ story about the family history service that the Council clearly wants to trumpet. (As I’ve suggested before, though, I wonder what the chances are of this apparently so-successful service surviving in the long term in addition to a new record office…?)

Secondly, I wrote some weeks ago to Linda Tomos, Director of CyMal (the Welsh Government’s Museums, Archives and Libraries arm), and Jeff James, Chief Executive of the National Archives of England and Wales and Keeper of the Public Records, the individuals who head the two organisations responsible for oversight of Carmarthenshire Archives. I posed three questions:

  1. Does your organisation propose to take any punitive action against Carmarthenshire County Council for its clear and demonstrable failure to safeguard these nationally important archives?
  2. Is your organisation engaging with, and exerting pressure on, the Council to expedite the cleaning of mould-damaged documents, with the aim of making them available to the public again as soon as possible? If so, are you satisfied with the response from the Council?
  3. Is your organisation engaging with, and exerting pressure on, the Council to identify an appropriate new site for a replacement record office as quickly as possible, and to ensure that such a site is in Carmarthenshire itself, not outside the county boundaries (as has been widely rumoured)? If so, are you satisfied with the response from the Council?

They have both now replied, and the substance of their replies follows. First, Linda Tomos of Cymal.

The delivery of an archive service is the responsibility of Carmarthenshire County Council. However, in the current circumstances specialist staff from the Museums, Archives, and Libraries Division (MALD) of the Welsh Government are working closely with officers in Carmarthenshire to support the authority to address the issues facing the service.

Measures are in place to stabilise the environmental conditions in the archive storage areas. With the co-operation of officers in Carmarthenshire, MALO staff are monitoring the conditions in the storage areas and providing advice on any actions required to prevent further deterioration in the condition of the collections. Regular on-site visits are being undertaken by a MALO official (an accredited Conservator).

The Authority has assured us that firm plans are now in place to ensure the uplift and removal of the archive collections for cleaning and decontamination by the end of December 2015. The Authority is also discussing with neighbouring and other archive services in Wales, interim arrangements for the storage of, and access to, the collections once they are free of mould. We expect that these arrangements will be finalised in coming weeks and that the Authority will make details of the arrangements publicly available as soon as possible afterwards.

Once the uplift is completed. cleaning and decontamination of the collection will commence. This is a major undertaking and we do not anticipate that the majority of collections will be available until sometime in 2016. To assist researchers, we are working with the Authority to identify and prioritise the most in-demand collections for cleaning and return.

In the meantime, you may be aware that some material has already been cleaned and taken to Glamorgan Archives in Cardiff for storage. We have asked the Authority to explore what measures can be put in place to allow access to this material as soon as possible. This is now well in hand.

The future location of the Carmarthenshire Archive Service is a matter for the local authority to determine. However, we do expect Carmarthenshire County Council to explore all of the available options for the effective and efficient delivery of an archive service. This includes the potential for a partnership arrangement, as well as the development of an independent facility within Carmarthenshire. This is based on our experience in Wales of successful and highly regarded services provided through joint arrangements between up to six local authorities, as well as by individual local authorities.

Any new arrangement will require the Authority to draw up and submit to the Deputy Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism a revised scheme for archives to comply with s60 of the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994. The Authority would need to have regard to any advice that the Deputy Minister provided. The Deputy Minister would need to be satisfied that any proposals would enable the service to meet the Archive Service Accreditation Standard in relation to governance arrangements, collections care, access and user experience.

This letter provides significantly more clarity than the Council has provided about the current location, and schedule for cleaning, of the archive collection. However, CyMal’s evident liking for partnership schemes rings alarm bells; while it is true, for example, that the multiplicity of ‘county boroughs’ in the historic county of Glamorgan share two facilities, this is a consequence of very different historical and geographical circumstances, as is the situation in Powys. Not that a partnership is necessarily a bad thing per se; indeed, some might say that anything that results in the County Council having less direct control over the archives can only be a good thing. Ultimately, everything hinges on the question of location.

Next, the reply from Jeff James of the National Archives.

I would like to reassure you that I am aware of the issues facing Carmarthenshire Archives Service. To date, The National Archives has sought a commitment from the County Council that the archive collections will be cleaned, properly preserved and made available to the public. This is a significant task, however, for the Council and its staff. [Especially as the record office has always had too few staff – D]

A number of actions have been taken already in order to achieve these objectives and ensure that collections are safe and secure in the short term, whilst plans for tackling the immediate mould problem are developed and implemented. A proportion of the collection has already been removed and treated, with the aim of making it publicly available at an alternative location. It is my understanding that the access arrangements are currently being agreed.

I have been informed that plans are being finalised to remove the remainder of the collections for treatment, which should result in the completely cleaned collection being made publicly accessible during 2016. The National. Archives will continue to monitor the response of the County Council to the issues and work closely with the Museums Archives and Libraries Division of the Welsh Government, which is providing practical support.

The accommodation at Parc Myrddyn is no longer suitable for archival purposes [it never was! – D]; however, the choice of location for the Carmarthenshire Archives Service is a matter for the County Council. My role as Keeper of Public Records is to ensure that any new arrangements are sustainable and meet archive standards for a Place of Deposit under s.4(1) of the Public Records Act, as well as the Archive Service Accreditation standard. To achieve this, ·The National Archives will seek to work with Carmarthenshire County Council in exploring all options, including partnerships. A considered approach should help to establish and maintain a service that will be viable in the long-term, ensuring that the collection is accessible to the public and preserved for generations to come.

There’s the ‘P’ word again, which, as I’ve previously suggested in this blog, might be an euphemism for ‘Swansea’… On the other hand, one could hardly demur from the sentiments expressed in the final sentence, which surely ought to be the objective of everyone responsible for, or simply interested in, the future of Carmarthenshire Archives.

Significantly, both letters ignore my first question about possible punitive action against the Council; clearly, this is not on the agenda, although readers of this blog might well think that it should be. However, both letters are models of openness compared to the vagueness and obfuscation one encounters elsewhere, so I want to thank both Linda Tomos and Jeff James for their responses, and for replying to me in person, rather than delegating the replies to subordinates. Above all, both contain clear statements that the supervisory authorities expect the entire collection to be available for public viewing, albeit at a place or places to be decided, during 2016, a significantly clearer commitment than the Council has yet given. This is clearly something for all of us to monitor, and to hold the Council to account over if it fails to deliver.