J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Carmarthenshire Archives

Serendipity

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Sometimes – very, very rarely, but sometimes – thinks click together in an unexpected but beautiful, seemingly preordained way. This is the moment called ‘serendipity’, and it’s doubly appropriate in this case, as that was part of the official pedigree name of my first dog.

(‘Peredur Serendipity’, since you ask – a distinctly wilful dachsund whom I christened Perry. And no, Russian hackers, none of those words are in any of my passwords, and I don’t use the ‘name of first pet’ option in security questions. So sucks to you, Vladimir.)

As mentioned previously in this blog, I’m currently in the distinctly unusual situation for an author of having to double the length of a book, rather than going through the usual purgatory of trying to edit something by culling vast amounts of purple prose. This is the first of my planned Tudor naval trilogy, originally intended to be novellas, now growing exponentially into full-length novels to be published by Canelo. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to expand a story so much, and it’s a steep learning curve. Simply tinkering with the existing text isn’t enough; you don’t get from 40,000 words to at least 80,000 by adding more adjectives, and although the extra space for character development is very welcome, an extra 40,000 words (or more) is one heck of a lot of character development…

So I knew I’d need to add some extra chapters, including additional events, new characters, and even an entire sub-plot, something you don’t really have the space to include in a novella. I had the additional events sorted in short order: when you’re talking about the reign of Henry VIII, after all, one thing that no historian or novelist lacks is juicy material. But the new characters and the sub-plot were proving a little trickier. Then I decided that one passage in what I’d already written would permit a flashback scene, in which my central character encounters the holder of a particular office. Now I needed the name of that office holder at that particular time, so went to the dreaded-but-indispensable Wikipedia, and found that the holder of said office was somebody who, to avoid spoilers, I’ll call Han Solo.

(Do you have any idea of how difficult it is to write a blog like this without spoilers?)

Of course, I’d come across the name of Han Solo before (* avoid gratuitous Millennium Falcon joke *), but realised it would be a good idea to know a bit more about him, e.g. to see if there were any portraits of him that I could use as the basis for a physical description. This meant going to the good old Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. No picture, alas, but some interesting detail about his life…and as I read on, it became very, very interesting detail indeed…and then the timing and circumstances of his death couldn’t have been more perfect for my narrative. All I needed now was a supplementary character to provide the link between the hero and Han Solo (* avoid gratuitous Princess Leia joke *), and hey presto, the sub-plot came into being. Hopefully, by the time the finished article is complete, nobody will be able to see the joins! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is very much what you call serendipity.

Seriously, though, it demonstrates a point that’s absolutely critical, in my opinion, for all writers of history, be it fiction or non-fiction, at any level whatsoever. Never be content with a narrow focus on just your specific area; I know plenty of people who’ve spent so long burrowing deep into the research materials for their particular niche that they’ve completely missed huge aspects of the bigger picture. Context is all, and it’s vital to know what else was going on at the same time – e.g. when I was doing my doctorate in naval history, I realised pretty quickly that to do it properly, I needed to be across the latest research in political, economic, religious and social history, and so on and so forth. Even for a novel, looking at such a broad picture is vital. Personally, something I often find useful on the still-dreaded-but-indispensable Wikipedia is its provision of entries for individual years. Type in any date of your choice and take a look at what was going on; the list of deaths often throws up some useful little connections. And let’s all count ourselves fortunate – nay, serendipitous – that we no longer have to research such things by making a special trip to the local library to spend hours ploughing through the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

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A couple of quick announcements to end with. For those within range, I’ll be talking at Hitchin Library, Hertfordshire, at 11am on Saturday 9 June, my title being ‘The Pleasures and Perils of Writing Nautical Fiction’ (more detail on the library’s Facebook page and Twitter account). Finally, regular readers of this blog will recall that, three years ago or thereabouts, I devoted rather a lot of posts to the calamitous situation at the Carmarthenshire Archives Service, where mould was discovered in the strongrooms, leading to the indefinite closure of the record office and the despatch of the entire collection for cleaning, rendering it inaccessible. This was a huge blow to me, as it denied me access to the principal materials I needed to complete my book on the Stepney family. However, and to be scrupulously fair to all concerned, it’s only right for me to point out that the entire sorry saga is now pretty close to a happy ending. All of the documents are now available again, albeit in Cardiff – or at least, when I sent Glamorgan Archives a list of particularly vital Stepney manuscripts, they were able to confirm that they were all there and all open. Better still, this week work starts on the brand new archive facility in Carmarthen, and having seen the plans, I can only think that maybe, despite all the grief it caused me and all the expense it’s caused the Council Tax payers of Carmarthenshire, this saga has proved to be a blessing in disguise.

Finally, there’ll be no post next week due to the Bank Holiday and general stuff (a little-known Swedish commander of the Thirty Years War).

The Top Ten

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I’m not tweeting very much at the moment, as I’m largely keeping my head down and working on my new Tudor project, but the other day, I had a bit of a brainwave, and tweeted a ‘top ten’ of the most popular posts ever (in terms of visitor numbers) on this blog. This seemed to go down very well among the Twitterati, with lots of positive reaction. I realise, though, that a lot of you aren’t on Twitter, and besides, giving the ‘countdown’ here means that I can say a bit more about each of the posts than I could with 140 characters. So, in the spirit of Top of the Pops (unless it was presented by him, obviously, or featured songs by him…), here we go, pop pickers!

I decided to split my top ten into two fives, one for guest bloggers, one for my own posts. So starting with the guest blogger chart –

So moving on to the chart of my own posts:

  • At number 5, and with a major ‘assist’ from Richard Endsor, it’s a pretty astonishing historical find – quite possibly the fingerprint of Samuel Pepys!
  • In at number 4, a post from back in 2012, looking forward to the temporary return of the Royal Charles sternpiece from the Rijksmuseum for the National Maritime Museum’s Royal River exhibition.
  • Number 3 is probably my personal favourite among all the blog posts I’ve written over the years – my lament for the death of the ‘naval pub‘, broadly defined. Since I originally posted it, another nail’s been hammered into the coffin of the species with the closure of the Lord Nelson at Burnham Thorpe. Hopefully this will be temporary, but could there be a more potent metaphor for the decline of…well, pretty much everything, really?
  • At number 2, the first post in my long series about the sorry saga of Carmarthenshire Archives – if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, read the three subsequent posts entitled ‘J’Accuse’ too, but for the rather more optimistic current situation, have a look here.
  • And at number 1…cue drumroll…my post from four years ago, ‘A Journalist’s Guide to Writing About the Royal Navy‘, inspired by the consistently dreadful coverage of naval matters in the national media, and which went about as viral as niche naval blogs get. As some of the below-the-line comments proved, though, one should always be careful before sticking one’s head above the parapet in such instances, and I was rightly taken to task for some of my own inexactitudes of terminology!

As I said on Twitter at the weekend, a big thank you to everybody who’s followed this blog since it started back in August 2011. It’s good to know that so many people seem to find things to interest them among my rants and ramblings, so I hope to keep calm and carry on shedding light on some of the more remote corners of naval history and seventeenth century history, and on the process of writing about them, for the foreseeable future!

UPDATE – The Battle of Northampton; or, Are You Carmarthenshire in Disguise?

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This afternoon, Friday 4 August, Northamptonshire County Council has announced that, in the short term at least, it’s backing down over the woefully misconceived and crassly announced scheme described in my post below. You can find a link to the full statement, and some clarifying remarks, here. While this is clearly welcome, the long term prognosis remains uncertain, but at least the council is finally acknowledging the need to consult with its stakeholders, rather than using the school holidays to cynically try and push through a wholly unacceptable proposal with profound and worrying implications across the entire country. It’s also good to see that, as mentioned below, there’s now an active effort to form a Friends of the Archives group; if you want information on the latter, sign up here. 

Anyway, on with what was apparently ‘social media misinformation’ 48 hours ago, but which is now ‘listening to the views of its regular users and supporters’…

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An additional post this week, and a long one at that.

Regular readers will know that over the years, I’ve worked in many local archives around Great Britain, so naturally, I’ve developed something of an interest in how they’re run, and in their relative merits. More recently, I’ve taken a particular interest in the near-catastrophic situation that developed in the archives of my home county, Carmarthenshire, where the sheer ineptitude (and probably worse) of successive regimes led to their closure for several years following an outbreak of severe mould in the strongrooms, an eventuality which said regimes had been warned about many, many times (this blog passim, to paraphrase Private Eye). An incidental side-effect of this was that it prevented me from completing a book I’d been working on for many years, and turned me into an unlikely Freedom of Information warrior and crusading blogger in an attempt to get to the distinctly unsavoury truth of the matter. Surely, then, no local council could run its archive service even more ineptly?

Step up to the plate, Northamptonshire County Council, an authority that makes Carmarthenshire’s officials look like the Founding Fathers of the United States.

I’ve worked in the Northampton record office several times over the years, and found it to be an excellent working environment with helpful staff, so what I’m about to say certainly isn’t a criticism of them. However, in their infinite wisdom, their superiors have decided that from 21 August, the office will charge an eye-watering £31.50 an hour – that’s right, an hour – for visits on Tuesday-Thursday afternoons from 2-4pm, and all day on Mondays and Fridays. Yes, there is still free access, but this will now be available only on Tuesday-Thursday mornings, 9am-1pm, and on seven Saturdays in the year.

While I have no idea of the financial situation of Northamptonshire county council, I would respectfully contend that this scheme is wholly and demonstrably wrong, on several interconnected levels.

First, there is the principle of charging for access to archives at all. Many of these are, after all, public records, and thus have exactly the same legal status as the public records preserved at the National Archives in Kew – and imagine the outcry there’d be if it was ever proposed to charge for access to those. Many of those archives that are not public records, held in archives like Northamptonshire’s, are often those of institutions like schools, churches and, indeed, individual families: in other words, the collective history of the people of the county. Moreover, many of the documents will have been deposited, perhaps on loan, by individual contributors over many years. So does Northants CC propose to charge people to come and study what, in some cases, might actually be their own property? I see from the Facebook page of those campaigning against this move, of which more anon, that some who have deposited material in this archive are seriously considering moving their papers to alternatives that have better opening hours and, obviously, no charges; a direct parallel with what happened in Carmarthenshire, although there, the depositors in question were more concerned about the likelihood of their precious archives being destroyed by mould. Ultimately, there is no moral difference whatsoever between charging to access a record office and charging to access a library. But, of course, Northants CC’s policymakers know full well that far more people use the latter, and know what sort of outcry they’d face if they tried that; whereas they’ll presumably think that users of record offices are relatively few, and won’t be able to kick up such a fuss. If the experience in Carmarthenshire is anything to go by, little do they know how wrong they are.

Second, there’s the amount that Northamptonshire proposes to charge, which is simply extortionate. Even if one sets aside the overriding point of principle, which I certainly don’t intend to do, £31.50 a day might possibly be justifiable as a starting position in a negotiation which eventually leads to an agreement on maintaining no charging at all; £31.50 an hour is completely unjustifiable, and is presumably a figure plucked out of the air by a ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ who has probably never set foot in a record office in his life, or hers, if it’s a ‘Spreadsheet Philomena’. From long experience of working in many local record offices, though, I know that many of their regular users are pensioners, many of them on relatively limited means, for whom the proposed amount will be a very significant chunk of their week’s income. Many of the other regular users are students, for whom, of course, exactly the same applies. By applying this policy, therefore, Northamptonshire is effectively forcing entire groups of users, notably two of its largest, into the free slots, which together constitute less than 1.5 working days per week for a conscientious researcher. This means that individuals’ research, including many students’ work for postgraduate degrees in particular, will inevitably take much, much longer. As a result of all of this, the proposed policy means that Northamptonshire record office will essentially become exactly the same as a train company, with First Class for those who can afford it, and everybody else crammed into Cattle Class for a service that might possibly turn up three times a week. Does the county really want to become known as the Southern Rail of British archives?

Third, there is the complete ignorance of how researchers actually need to work, and utter contempt for those visiting the office from further afield than Northampton town itself, that this proposed policy reveals. It’s usually pretty well impossible to predict how long one needs to work in an archive; it’s perfectly possible to arrive at 9am, fully intending to put in only a free shift until 1, and find that for whatever reason – delayed deliveries, say, or following up leads provided by information discovered in the morning – one needs to overrun into the afternoon. (In which case, is the £31.50 for a whole hour or part thereof? If one completes one’s work by, say, 2.37, will the council charge a percentage of the fee, with some poor overworked archivist having to get out a calculator to work out the amount, or would it be free until 2.59, and then £31.50 for working on for just one more minute?) Then again, this policy is clearly discriminatory against those travelling any distance, including those in outlying, rural parts of Northamptonshire itself, who might be trying to get to the office by infrequent public transport and thus, perhaps, might not be physically able to get there until lunchtime, and will thus be hammered for over £60 for only two hours work (not to mention the cost of their transport in the first place). Charging only in the afternoons, and permitting free access only in the mornings, blatantly discriminates against those whose work commitments, childcare arrangements, or place of residence and available travel options, mean that they can only get to the record office during afternoons.

Now, I expect that if Northamptonshire county council deigns to respond to such criticisms at all, be they from myself or from the many others who have expressed outrage at this scheme, they will trot out the usual feeble old platitudes about effects of budget cuts imposed by central government, yada yada, the need to make difficult choices, yada yada, more people accessing digital resources, yada yada. (Oh, I see that they already have. How utterly predictable, apart from the closing statement about hoping that researchers will support them in this ‘bold step’, which is surely both beneath contempt and beyond parody. But oh, all right, since you ask… ‘So, turkey, exactly what is it about the bold step of Christmas that doesn’t appeal to you?’) None of this bears a moment’s scrutiny, partly because Northamptonshire has statutory obligations in relation to its archives, and that statutory role has a regulator, the National Archives, which can, if necessary, withdraw a local authority’s status as an approved place of deposit for public records – a scenario that came very, very close in Carmarthenshire’s case. I don’t know whether Northamptonshire CC has already cleared this outrageous proposal with the regulator; if it has, then shame on the latter, which runs the risk of opening the floodgates for other cash-strapped councils to take similar action. (I suspect that other local authorities will already be watching this situation like hawks to see if Northants manages to get this through.) Just in case nobody has done so already, it might be worth an interested party in the county submitting a FoI request for all correspondence between the regulator and Northamptonshire CC in, say, the last six months; from my own experience, it’s best to submit this to both parties, which should ensure that all elements of the correspondence are put into the public domain, and that one side or the other doesn’t mysteriously ‘mislay’ any items. Again from my own experience, submitting a FoI request to the National Archives is very easy, and they respond efficiently and in good time. You can obtain the details here. It’s also possible to ask for copies of the regular reports (every five years or so) made on the record office by an inspector from the National Archives; those for Carmarthenshire were particularly revealing of the council’s consistently appalling attitude, down to 2011 at any rate, to the record office building and its staff. As an example, here’s a link to the 2011 report.

(Of course, it would also tell us a great deal if such a FoI request demonstrated that there’s actually been no correspondence at all between Northants CC and the regulator over this matter.)

Perhaps the council thinks it can get away with this because it’s still providing a fig leaf of some free access, but its breathtakingly disingenuous claim that it’s actually increasing the office’s opening hours is demolished at once by the fact that it’s halving the free opening hours from 24 hours per week to 12, Saturdays aside (and Saturday hours themselves are being virtually halved). One wonders, though, if anybody, anybody at all, will actually turn up and fork out £31.50 an hour during the ‘charging’ sessions, other than, perhaps, the odd unfortunate pensioner travelling in on a bus from an outlying village that doesn’t reach Northampton until 1. I certainly won’t, and I can afford it; and if all researchers who can afford these extortionate fees boycott the charging slots, then where, exactly, will this policy stand? If people simply don’t go on Mondays, Fridays, and the other afternoons, the searchroom will presumably sometimes be overcrowded during the three free mornings a week when as many researchers as can physically squeeze into the space will be working flat out to complete what they need to do during their four free hours; the staff will be rushed off their feet by the demands from the extra bums on seats (assuming, of course, that there are enough seats for the bums to sit on anyway); the record office will effectively be closed to the public for nearly double the time it is now; and the county council will have raised little or no extra money, while significantly damaging its reputation throughout the UK’s heritage and archives communities. After all, ‘charge an outrageous amount for it and they will come’ is not usually considered to be a viable basis for a business plan, unless you’re the Royal Opera House.

On the whole, then, absolutely outstanding work, whichever Northants CC apparatchik dreamed up this disastrously misconceived policy.

There is hope, though, and minds can be changed, as my own experience with Carmarthenshire demonstrates. (For proof, see here.) There’s an online petition, and although I’m not usually a great fan of these, I’d strongly urge you to sign this one. There’s a new Facebook group to promote the issue, and I’d urge everybody concerned about the potential implications of this policy to join it, regardless of whether or not you’re directly connected to Northamptonshire; solidarity is all, as Bonhoeffer’s famous poem reminds us. There are few things that these sorts of institutions hate more than being ‘named and shamed’ on a national, and indeed an international, stage, and the FB page that I set up to ‘Save Carmarthenshire Archives’ had over 1,000 followers in a week, including comments and pledges of support from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and beyond. Blitz social media via your own accounts, retweets, etc etc. Perhaps concerned parties might want to form a Friends of Northamptonshire Record Office group, as I can’t find any trace of one online (apologies if there is); the pre-existing Carmarthenshire Friends did absolutely fantastic work as a pressure group over the fate of their county archives, and are now being consulted frequently by the county council on the plans for the new record office. If possible, try to find one or two ‘celebrity supporters’ who’ll come out publicly in your support; we had a certain high-earning BBC newsreader on board, and his intervention was really helpful. The Northants campaigners already seem to be vigorously canvassing local councillors and local MPs – the simple law of averages means that some will have historical interests, and might be sympathetic (as proved to be the case in Carmarthenshire, where some influential councillors started backing us). Getting as much coverage as possible in the local press is a given – we cultivated direct, strong ties with a couple of reporters in particular. Something else that might be a case of grandmothers and eggs, perhaps, but familiarise yourselves with all relevant legislation that applies to archives – there’s a useful link here, although trust me, few things are more tedious than archive regulations! National bodies, like this one and this one, are already getting involved, and making their criticisms known, so if you’re connected with one, make sure it sticks its oar in. More and more excellent, perceptive blogs, such as this one and this one, are appearing online, so if you’re a fellow blogger, no matter where in the UK (or, indeed, the world) you’re based, please consider posting your support, your thoughts about Northants CC’s proposal, and, if applicable, how it will directly and adversely affect your own work. Finally, though, there’s another course of action that several of us took in the case of Carmarthenshire: write directly to the Chief Executive of the National Archives, who also bears the splendid historic title of Keeper of the Public Records. His address is Jeff James, Chief Executive and Keeper of the Public Records, the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU. When I wrote to him, I got a personally signed reply, and he was very helpful.

Of course, cynics might well wonder if this is all a Cunning Plan by Northamptonshire CC: either pitch something so outrageous that they hope campaigners will tug their forelocks gratefully in return for ‘concessions’ of, say, an extra free afternoon a week and a charge of ‘only’ £20 an hour, or else hope that by boycotting the charging sessions, researchers will provide them with the perfect excuse to give reduced footfall as the reason for slashing the office’s entire access time to just the three mornings a week. Who knows, perhaps they even secretly hope that by behaving so appallingly, the National Archives will, indeed, withdraw their place of deposit status, and thus save them the inconvenience and cost of providing a record office at all. However, the fact that the policy was publicly announced on 24 July (the Monday after Northamptonshire’s schools broke up, which must, of course, be a complete coincidence), with implementation just four weeks later, on 21 August, following no consultation, and at a time when many potential critics of the scheme may well be away on holiday, hardly suggests an organisation confident of its position; rather, and far from being a ‘bold step’, boldly going where no record office has gone before, the whole thing is reminiscent of the sort of dodgy government policy that’s slipped out quietly in a written answer on the day before Parliament’s summer recess, or else on ‘a good day to bury bad news’.

Machiavellian, then? Hardly; as the experience of Carmarthenshire proved, local authorities often have a surfeit of Baldricks and Field Marshal Haigs, but precious few Blackadders.

Whatever the upshot of all this, though, good luck, people of Northamptonshire, and those of us who campaigned – and won – over the Carmarthenshire debacle are with you all the way!

 

 

Carmarthenshire Archives: the End of the Beginning?

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Last Thursday, I attended a two-hour consultation meeting in Carmarthen on the proposed new record office for the county, following the closure of the previous one after the discovery of mould in the storerooms. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have just a little bit of history with this particular issue; I’m not going to provide links to all of the previous posts, but anyone so inclined can enter ‘Carmarthenshire Archives’ in the search facility and then trace the story in chronological order. (Note: entering ‘Hammer House of Horrors’ or ‘Dante’s Circles of Hell’ will also produce the same search results.) After the sorry saga of the record office throughout the last twenty years or so, to say that Carmarthenshire County Council has rather a lot of trust to rebuild on this issue is a bit like saying that Donald Trump isn’t quite in the Abraham Lincoln league yet. Therefore, some of you might have expected me to go to this meeting armed with the sword of scepticism and the shield of cynicism. Far from it: remember that I was a teacher for the best part of thirty years, so I always believed that even the most feckless little toerag was capable of redemption – unless, obviously, his/her name was ***** or *******. So I went with an open mind, and, indeed, a positively receptive one, because after all, my principal hope all along has been that Carmarthenshire’s nationally and internationally important archive collections should be preserved, and presented to the public, in a safe and appropriate facility that complies fully with national standards.

That being so, I have to say that I was largely impressed by what I saw and heard. The new building will be a three-storey, then two-storey, extension at the back of the current Carmarthen Library building, of which more anon. The two-storey structure will contain a repository capable of accommodating both the current collection and 25 years’ worth of accruals; the three-storey section will contain staff work rooms and facilities of various sorts, plus, on the third floor, the public search room. The building will have exemplary eco credentials, notably a ‘passive house’ system, and should look impressive, both externally and internally. Above all, being on the same site as the library, and on the same floor as the local history reference collection, should permit considerable flexibility for researchers. Inevitably, some of those present had reservations. Would it permit digital photography, always a bugbear at the old office? Would the outsourcing of conservation work be detrimental to the office’s work? How long might it take to tackle the huge cataloguing backlog (a commonplace, alas, at many repositories the length and breadth of Britain)? For my part, I thought the new search room looked on the small side, but the current and former record office staff who were present assured me that it could easily accommodate the sorts of numbers that the old facility used to see, and that increasing use of digital materials was progressively reducing the pressure on physical seating. The new building is due to open in 2019, until which time the county’s collections will still need to be consulted principally in far-distant Cardiff. But at least there finally appears to be light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

It has the potential to be quite an impressive light, too. Many county record offices these days are housed, to paraphrase an earlier post on this site, in anonymous out-of-town sheds that could easily be on industrial estates, and in some cases, actually are on industrial estates. Not so the new office in Carmarthen. Not only is the main facade and structure of Carmarthen library, through which one will have to pass in order to reach the archives, an eighteenth century listed building in its own right, but it stands directly opposite St Peter’s Church, one of the most historic in Wales – so if you feel like a stroll through history during a lunch break, you’ll be able to go and pay your respects at the spectacular Tudor tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, staunch ally of Henry VII and quite probably the man who killed Richard III, or else the memorial to Sir Richard Steele, the ‘father of journalism’, or perhaps that of General Sir William Nott, or maybe even my particular favourite (for obvious reasons), that of John Williams of Edwinsford, who was serving aboard the frigate Kingfisher during its famous fight with seven Algerine corsairs in 1681. If you fancy a slightly longer stroll, a few hundred yards in one direction will bring you, via the remaining fragment of the ancient tree that was long held to be ‘Merlin’s oak‘, to a Roman amphitheatre, no less (and, to boot, the most westerly surviving example in the entire Roman Empire) – while a few hundred yards in the other direction will bring you to the ruins of the huge castle that was once the seat of royal power in south Wales. (Note: do not confuse with Caernarfon, especially if you’re meant to be getting married in one and not the other.)

Thus from having one of the worst archive facilities in Britain, a national scandal that was condemned time after time by the regulator and finally closed after a perfectly foreseeable near-catastrophe (none of it the fault of its hard-pressed staff), Carmarthenshire potentially stands on the threshold of having one of the best. So I hope there’ll be no spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar: no backsliding on this, no penny-pinching on that, no corner-cutting on the other, and above all, no mindset to the effect that the building has cost so much that economies need to be made in the staffing. The ship may not have looked quite so smart without the proverbial ha’porth of tar, but if it had set sail without sufficient sailors to man it, inadequate tarring would swiftly have been the least of its problems – and after all, Carmarthenshire, of all counties, should know a thing or two about shipwrecks.

So if all goes to plan, gentle readers, this will be my penultimate post on the subject of Carmarthenshire Archives. The last one of all, I fervently hope, will be posted some time in 2019, and will report on my first day in the new facility, praising it to the heights, and saying how inspired I now feel to finally complete my book on the Stepney family. But before then, there are some quite important things to do – starting next week, when all the shenanigans surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway kick off. More detail next Monday!

Carmarthenshire Archives (and more) Revisited

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Regular readers will remember that, some eighteen months ago, this site built up quite a head of steam about the dire state of Carmarthenshire’s county archives. To cut a long story short, a serious outbreak of mould was discovered in the strongrooms, leading to the closure of the record office, the records becoming completely unavailable (initially because of our old friend elf ‘n’ safety, then because they had to go away for cleaning), and serious suggestions that the county’s archives would end up in a shared facility completely outside the county, e.g. in Swansea. Obviously, this had a huge impact on those who wanted to work on the archives; and one of those, a normally mild-mannered historian who’d been researching the fascinating and eccentric Stepney baronets of Llanelli for many years, but whose book about them was now completely stymied by the closure, decided to investigate further. Following a crash course in Freedom of Information requests and the like, a sorry saga emerged of a local authority that, over many years, had simply refused to spend money on maintaining the correct conditions in the strongrooms, which blatantly ignored warnings from the national regulator, and which then simply didn’t communicate on any meaningful level with any of the stakeholders in the record office once the inevitable crisis developed. This all eventually got picked up by the press, and strange to say, the council then did begin to engage with those whose persistent requests for answers had fallen on deaf ears, most notably the Friends of the Archives, and to work towards a new facility in the county. For those interested in tracing the entire affair, or who are otherwise in a particularly masochistic mood, go to this website’s search facility on the main menu, type in ‘Carmarthenshire Archives’, and then follow through the sequence of posts.

Since then, things have been relatively quiet. The County Council committed itself to spending over £2 million on a new records office in the centre of Carmarthen, and that should be going ahead over the course of the next year or two. Meanwhile, the irreplaceable documents themselves are being cleaned, albeit at a staggering cost which would not have been necessary if the council had invested a tiny fraction of it in properly maintaining the archives over the last fifteen years or so. When they’ve completed the process, the documents are going to Glamorgan Archives in Cardiff and the Richard Burton Archives at Swansea University for temporary storage, and are being progressively made available once again for public access. For my part, I’ve been keeping my powder dry (and any further potential FoI requests, etc, on the back burner), giving the council the benefit of the doubt – and, if truth be told, my work schedule has militated against getting more actively involved.

The old bishops’ palace, home to Carmarthenshire county museum

Meanwhile, though, the wider heritage situation in Carmarthenshire has seen some dramatic changes. There’s also been considerable concern in recent years about – to give but two examples – the state of the county museum in the former bishop’s palace at Abergwili, and Parc Howard in Llanelli, where I spent many happy hours as a child. Abergwili is a marvellous museum, reflecting the county’s rich and remarkably varied history, and it’s in a historic building; William Laud, no less, lived there, as a did a later bishop, Lord George Murray, who invented the Admiralty shutter telegraph system used in the Napoleonic wars. (I wrote an article about him in the county’s outstanding local history journal, The Carmarthenshire Antiquary.) But chronic under-investment over many years, combined with under-staffing, led to serious issues with the fabric of the building, and questions over the future of the collection. Parc Howard, which was gifted to the people of Llanelli by my old ‘friends’ the Stepney family, contains the town’s museum, but for as long as I can remember, it’s been under-publicised (not even signposted from the main road) and consequently under-visited.

The conjunction of all these concerns led a like-minded group of individuals to come together to see if something could be done. These are people who have had many years’ experience of working or volunteering in various heritage sectors, plus the odd stray blogger-cum-mild-mannered-historian, and they organised a series of meetings open to all interested parties. Many representatives of local groups throughout Carmarthenshire came along, demonstrating a real depth of interest and concern, and to cut a long story short, out of this emerged the Carmarthenshire Heritage Group, a properly constituted ‘umbrella’ group which has been engaging with the council and trying to raise awareness. Toward the latter end, this group now has a Facebook page, which has ‘inherited’ the old one called ‘Save Carmarthenshire Archives’, which I ran, and I’d strongly urge anyone who’s interested or concerned to ‘like’ us there! (A new Twitter account will also come on stream soon.)

Parc Howard mansion and grounds, Llanelli

The good news is that there’s been some positive movement. At Abergwili, for example, substantial funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund will see major work on the grounds to transform them as part of the exciting ‘Tywi Gateway’ project, and remedial work will also be carried out on the building. The council has also appointed a museums development manager, and seems at the moment to be bucking the nationwide trend of closures and rundowns. The future of Parc Howard, though, remains uncertain, following botched attempts to involve commercial organisations in developing it as a wedding venue, real concern about future access to the museum collection, and questions about how sensitive any developments at this much-loved site will be. Meanwhile, too, there remains uncertainty about other heritage sites in the county, not all the direct responsibility of the council, such as the former Gelli Aur mansion and country park in the Tywi valley.

As for the archives, while all might be well in the medium to long term, the short term situation remains unsatisfactory. Although I haven’t worked on the records that have become available after cleaning, I know someone who has; and according to this contact, accessing Carmarthenshire’s records can involve a fraught saga of contact details that don’t work, a lengthy journey to Glamorgan Record Office (which is well outside the centre of Cardiff, and thus very difficult to reach by public transport), and dealing with staff who, naturally, aren’t familiar with the Carmarthenshire materials. Admittedly, things might improve somewhat when more of the records are available in Swansea…but somehow, I can’t see myself completing the Stepney book any time soon (also in part, of course, because people keep signing me up to write fiction, and with the best will in the world, that pays rather better!)

To end, though, on a really upbeat note – I was astonished and delighted to learn that Llanelli library, where I basically self-taught myself my initial historical research skills, is in the top three of the entire country for loans made … At a time when libraries are being closed left right and centre, partly by local authorities using the specious grounds that ‘nobody uses them any more’ in order to cut costs, it’s pleasing to see that Llanelli is bucking the trend. Maybe one day, too, I’ll go in there and see some annoying bespectacled twelve year old demanding to see the latest edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships…and at that moment, I’ll know that my work here is done.

 

(NB all views expressed in this post are entirely personal, and do not necessarily represent those of the Carmarthenshire Heritage Group.)

Carmarthenshire Archives (and Museums): a Brave New World?

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It’s been a while since I posted about the situation with Carmarthenshire Archives, which took up so much space on this blog in the second half of last year, so I thought it was time I provided you with an update. My last post on the subject contained the unexpected but very welcome news that the Council’s executive board had decided to invest in a new facility within the county. Following this, things seems to be moving forward quite rapidly. Here’s the text from a newsletter that’s been sent out by the heritage monitoring group nominated at the end of last year at a well attended meeting of representatives from many of the local history and heritage groups; the next of these meetings takes place this week.

“ARCHIVES – HOME IN CARMARTHEN” – the future for Carmarthenshire Archives looks cautiously promising thanks to the efforts of the Friends of Carmarthenshire Archives and other dedicated historians.  Discussions between concerned parties and CCC have taken place on three occasions in recent months with a shared vision of a successful, modern and sustainable future for the archives prioritising a Carmarthen/Carmarthenshire service. £2M now confirmed in the capital programme (£125k 2016/17 and £1,750K 2017/18) and CCC are currently working with a Consultant to “scope a number of properties in Carmarthen against a set of criteria – economic, practical and access”. A recommendation is anticipated in 6-8 weeks.  CCC has agreed to consult with the Friends on a regular basis to consider developments and to keep in touch with members’ views – including the vision for an archive service remaining within Carmarthenshire rather than a regionalisation model which could result in the loss of the archives from the county, negative consequences for depositors and researchers within West Wales. It has been agreed to improve the archives services on CCC website and the Friends are inputting into this process.

Regardless of what happens over the new building, the thing that particularly pleases me about this is the way in which the council is now actively consulting with the Friends of the Archives – something that was one of my principal objectives when I started to campaign about the issue last year. The timescale is also positive, although there are still plenty of unanswered questions, such as the exact location, size and staffing of the new site. But one of the most important points of all, that the facility should be within Carmarthenshire, now seems to be set in stone. As for the other most important point – that the damaged archives themselves should be cleaned and made available to the public as soon as possible – progress has certainly been made, and one can only assume that the remaining materials will gradually become available again in the coming months.

However, the group has also been trying to raise awareness, and to secure the future, of Carmarthenshire’s museum service, which has suffered from severe underinvestment over many years. Unfortunately, whereas the archives situation is unique to the county, that with the museums is part of a much bigger national issue; virtually every day seems to bring a new report of a fine and much-loved regional museum being threatened with closure, or actually closing. I very nearly blogged last week about the threat to the Lloyd George Museum in Gwynedd, but fortunately that decision has been deferred. However, I intend to produce a substantial blog about the museums crisis some time in the next few weeks, either myself or with a ‘guest blogger’ who’s very experienced and knowledgeable in the sector. In the meantime, here’s what the newsletter says about the specific situation in Carmarthenshire.

MUSEUMS CHANGE LIVES – but throughout the UK they are closing or are under threat because of cuts in council budgets by the government. The Welsh Assembly’s “Expert Review of Local Museum Provision in Wales 2015” and Welsh Heritage Bill – propose ways forward. At our county museum in Abergwili, County Councillor Gravell reports that “plans are moving forward at a pace with the Tywi Gateway scheme” – initiated by the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust to develop the Bishop’s Park with plans being submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund this summer. Meanwhile, in limbo, in the midst sits the Bishop’s Palace, a Listed building, home to the wonderful treasures given by us, the public, over more than a century. At Llanelli Museum Cllr. Gravell reports that “the Leader and our officers are meeting with user groups there to positively discuss the future viability of the Mansion house”. Plus “exciting plans are also afoot for the Museum of Speed, linked to the wider regeneration masterplan for Pendine”. Even before the recent cuts, our museum service was suffering from twenty years of neglect – BUT there remains huge potential for local regeneration, job creation, social inclusion, tourism, pride – and fun!

In a nutshell, then, watch this space for further updates on all of these important heritage stories (particularly as I guarantee that for the next four months, this blog will be a referendum-free zone…)