Posted on behalf of Caroline Kimbell, Head of Commercial Digitisation:

In the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic, UCL has contributed around 12,000 images of rare books and original documents from our Special Collections to a prestigious new online teaching resource from British Online Archives:  Pandemics, Society and Public Health 1517-1925 launched this month (April 2024).

UCL content from 6 named Special Collections, the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES), rare books from Stores, and the archive of Edwin Chadwick forms around a quarter of the new resource, alongside records from the National Archives, the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives.

Spurred by an all-too-understandable upsurge in research interest in pandemic history, the project focuses on primary sources relating to outbreaks of 4 diseases in British history – plague, cholera, smallpox and influenza. The academic call-to-arms for the project is summed up by editorial advisor Emeritus Professor Frank M Snowden of Yale: “Epidemic diseases are not random events that afflict societies capriciously and without warning… To study them is to understand [a] society’s structure, its standard of living and its political priorities”.

The online resource starts with documents relating to the first state-mandated quarantine in England, in 1517, but the earliest UCL items in the collection is a 1559 edition of William Bullein’s A newe boke of phisicke called ye gouernment of health. The project ends with the Spanish Flu epidemic which followed the First World War, on which UCL contributes a Ministry of Health Report on the pandemic of influenza 1918-1919 and a 1920 typescript Report on mortality among industrial workers, in relation to the influenza epidemic. UCL sources reflect the university’s preeminent focus on medical history, the development and application of vaccinations, and UCL sources are strong in campaigning, statistical and investigative works. Named Special Collections included in the selection include the Hume and Lansdowne Tracts, London History, Mocatta and Ogden collections, and material from our Medical History, Rare Books and SSEES collections are also included.

The main UCL archive represented is that of Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890), who began his career as secretary to UCL spritual founder Jeremy Bentham and was a lifelong campaigner for public health. He believed strongly that poverty was often the result of poor health, and poor health in turn was the result of poor living and working conditions, in particular sanitation. His lifelong campaigns, many focused on cholera, resulted in the passing of the first Public Health Act in 1848 and the establishment of the Board of Health, which he chaired until 1854. This digitisation programme includes selected reports, memos, statistics and 120 letters from his collection, with correspondents including Florence Nightingale, Lord Palmerstone and agriculturalist Philip Pusey.

The online collection is available now, and UCL library members will have access to the entire collection, which groups source materials into five themes: economics and disease, control measures, international relations, medicine and vaccination and public responses.

If you are a member of UCL Libraries, the new resource can be accessed by visiting our online Databases page and searching for ‘British Online Archives’. 

On a recent (well, November) trip to the USA to see family, I managed to visit ‘All That’s Fit for Student Print’, a fascinating exhibition of student publications at Binghamton University Special Collections, and meet University Archivist Maggie McNeely and her colleagues – should you happen to find yourself in the Southern Tier of New York State, pop in!  So, for this ‘UCL birthday’ post, I thought I might highlight our own student publications.

Our student magazines are part of College Collection. This is an unwieldy agglomeration of over 5,000 items related to the history of UCL, and includes monographs, periodicals, ephemera (tickets, programmes, invitations and more), and official publications, such as Calendars and Annual Reports, dating from before UCL’s foundation on 11 February 1826 up to the present day. There are also published lectures, examination papers, prospectuses, and works on the Bloomsbury area of London, as well as the other institutions which form part of the wider University of London.

Magazines in general, and student-focused ones in particular, tend to have a short active life, and are little regarded. You read it, you bin it, you move on – ephemeral indeed. But it’s their transitory quality that gives them such a fascinating afterlife, even in the gaps and silences (there’s usually a reason why we don’t have something), because you get a real snapshot of student life and preoccupations at a specific point in time.  And let’s not forget the aesthetic aspect. I love the jaggy design on the cover of Savage (2015 – the only issue we have so far), which fairly hurts the eye:

And you don’t need to be told the dates of these numbers of Pollardian and Torque – everything about them says: it’s the 70s, and nothing but the 70s.

The earliest student magazine that we have is the London University Chronicle, from 1830 – before UCL was UCL – but the main student organ remains Pi, founded in February 1946, and named for the Provost of the time, David Pye. There was a strong feeling that, following the trauma of the war, an effort needed to be made to bring together what was now a highly disparate group of 2,100 individuals (‘the largest single college in the British Empire’) who had been scattered abroad in the armed forces or evacuated with their departments to various parts of England and Wales. There are some echoes there of the shock of Covid – a large body of students with little or no experience of a real, in-person Bloomsbury community.

Pi was always a campaigning paper, or at least offered a platform to student campaigners, as we can see in these examples from the 1970s and 1980s. In November 1979, the front cover shows a man climbing over security gates, which had just been installed following a series of robberies and sexual assaults – and some fierce student campaigning:

And wider politics make their presence felt in arguments over student unions as a closed shop, and the relevance of the Miners’ Strike to student life (October 1984):

As a semi-official voice of the Union, Pi has always reflected student politics and local concerns, such as direct action to get pedestrian crossings installed around campus, and our old favourite, refectory food (price and quality!), but also student involvement in the politics of the wider world, for example the fate of students caught up in the unrest of Eastern Europe, and campaigning on apartheid.

Of course Pi has its more frivolous side, with its fair share of ‘Miss Fresher’ contests or burning questions such as ‘Should College dances have chaperones?’ (yes, really), pop star interviews, and Rag shenanigans (you can find a couple of dedicated rag mags elsewhere in College Collection).

There were other ‘mainstream’ publications before Pi, such as the Union Magazine (1904-1919), University College Magazine (1919-1939), and New Phineas (1939-1956). But for the unexpected, and to get a picture of sometimes niche preoccupations and interests, it’s the smaller-scale efforts that shine. Sportophyte, a magazine of ‘botanical `humour’, was founded in 1910 by none other than Marie Stopes. (College Collection also contains copies of Stopes’s Married Love and, unfortunately, her poetry.) Crosswords and Maranatha are Christian publications, and we have one copy of Not the Pakistan Society Magazine:

There are of course party-political publications, most of them fairly short lived, for example Red Dwarf (Labour Club), Blue Dwarf and Tory (Conservatives), and Red Giant (Socialist Society), and departmental ones, which can provide unique information about local goings-on and personalities.  I’m a fan of the Library School publication The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1970), which manages to link the singer of the psychedelic classic ‘Fire’ with Professor Arthur Brown, Director of the Library School and Professor of English:

We love to use this kind of material in our teaching and outreach activities, and you can of course visit us to consult them yourself – a shelfmark search for COLLEGE COLLECTION PERIODICALS on our library catalogue, Explore, will bring up most of the titles, though we are still finding more. And of course many titles have been digitised: see the History of UCL page of our Digital Collections. You can also see many titles in our current exhibition Generation UCL: 200 Years of Student Life in London, in the UCL Octagon until August this year:

We are also very keen to close the many gaps that exist in the collection, so I want to end here with an appeal to anyone who thinks they might have something that’s missing from our current holdings, and might be willing to part with it, to get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you!

More than a decade ago, the family of Eleanor Jacques discovered a cache of papers hidden in a handbag in a garden shed. On the envelope was written ‘Letters to be destroyed’ and upon opening them, they found handwritten letters to Eleanor from George Orwell, who had been her next-door neighbour in Southwold, Suffolk.

At an event in 2018 to celebrate the discovery of these letters, another sensation was created when an audience member announced that she had at home letters from Orwell to her aunt, Brenda Salkeld, also a Southwold neighbour.

 

There had long been rumours of the existence of these letters amongst Orwell scholars, who hoped to uncover more correspondence with these long-standing female friends. Through serendipity, both sets emerged with a year and were purchased by Richard Blair, Orwell’s son. The letters have now been placed in the Orwell Archive in UCL Special Collections, catalogued and digitised for public access, with the kind permission of the Orwell Literary Estate.

 

 

What is so special about the letters?

The letters span a long range of time, 1931-1949, and continue throughout both of Orwell’s marriages – to Eileen in 1936 and Sonia in 1949. They reveal new details about Orwell’s life in the 1930s – including his overlapping romances, his love of ice skating, and his struggle to write and publish his first novels. They also show that the two women, whom he met while staying with his parents in Southwold, had a profound importance in his life lasting long after his romances with them appear to have ended. Eleanor would go on to marry one of Orwell’s best friends, Dennis Collings.

In a letter to Brenda in 1940, four years into his marriage with his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and as a German invasion appeared imminent, he wrote: “It’s a pity … we never made love properly. We could have been so happy. If things are really collapsing I shall try and see you. Or perhaps you wouldn’t want to?” Orwell also wrote to Brenda from his hospital bed (at University College Hospital), sending his last letter four months before his death in 1950, just as he was about to marry his second wife, Sonia Brownell.

The letters also reveal something of Orwell’s writing practice. D.J. Taylor, who helped to track down the letters and has just published an updated biography of Orwell, said:

“In terms of improving our understanding of Orwell’s work, I have a strong suspicion that his letters to Eleanor reminiscing about their country walks at Southwold may have inspired similar passages describing Winston’s affair with Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

The collection is also notable for the playful drawings Orwell added in the margins of his letters to Brenda, something that is rarely found in his other correspondence. They include images of Billingsgate Fish Market, windmills and the infamous ice rink.

The bulk of the letters have not been publicly available before.

The George Orwell collections at UCL

The George Orwell Archive has been a cornerstone of UCL Special Collections for over 60 years. Deposited by his widow in 1960 and built up over subsequent decades, it is the main resource for Orwell scholars around the world. Comprising manuscripts and typescripts, diaries, notebooks, letters, photographs and family material, including the papers of his two wives, Eileen and Sonia. UCL also holds substantial book collections relating to Orwell, including books owned by him and rare editions of his works.

This blog was written by Katie Meheux.

Volumes 1-13 (1938-1958) of the Annual Report of the Institute of Archaeology (formerly University of London, now UCL) have been digitised and made available as an open access resource through UCL Digital Collections and the Internet Archive following a project initiated by the UCL Institute of Archaeology Library and funded by UCL Special Collections.

The Annual Report was the Institute’s first annual journal, a tradition still continued today by Archaeology International. Each volume combined administrative information with academic research articles. Administrative reports outlined teaching, outreach, exhibitions, projects, excavations, collections, and lectures from visiting scholars – all the Institute’s day-to-day activities and a snapshot of its students, who came from all over the world. Research articles highlighted the international archaeological interests of the Institute’s staff – not just the academics, but librarians, photographers, and technicians too. Students also contributed research articles in a tradition now continued by Papers from the Institute of Archaeology.

The Report was the first journal produced by a university archaeology department in the UK and forms an important research resource for the history of the Institute of Archaeology and archaeology as an international discipline. Like all archaeological journals, the Report reflected and absorbed changes within the wider discipline and as such, charts key developments and changes in archaeological practice during the twentieth century. Volumes also allow us to see how the Institute chose to present itself to the contemporary British academic community and its wider public audience.

The COVID pandemic, which caused extended periods of closure and limited access to libraries during 2020 and 2021, highlighted the problems of retaining such a valuable research resource as print only. There was also a conservation imperative behind the project; to protect the fragile print copies held by the Institute library. The Annual Reports join other open access Institute of Archaeology resources, notably the Gordon Childe Skara Brae Notebooks (1928-1930), digitised as a joint project with Historic Scotland. British archaeological societies and organisations have been making historic journal content available for over twenty years, both independently and through the Archaeological Data Service (ADS), the leading digital repository for heritage data in Britain. Digitising historic journals means they can be used in new ways; for example, Gwynedd Archaeological Trust volunteers have been using open access historical journals to enhance the regional Historic Environment Record (HER) for north-west Wales.

Although print copies of the Reports can be found in libraries world-wide, providing online access will assist researchers, students, and the public and help to raise awareness of the rich and significant history of the Institute of Archaeology. Digitising the journal will broaden access for scholars, students, and the public, raise awareness of the rich and significant history of the Institute of Archaeology, and protect an increasingly fragile ‘in demand’ print resource for the future.

French Protestants became one of the largest group of immigrants in England from the 16^th to the 18^th century. A small number of refugees started arriving from the 1520s onwards, especially during periods when persecution increased in France. Emigration began to decrease at the beginning of the 17^th century thanks to more favourable conditions for Huguenots in their own country after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, but then increased again during the dragonnades, which started in 1681, and peaked in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau. The latter, which effectively revoked the 1598 Edict, stipulated that all Huguenot ministers were to be expelled and that the laity had to convert to Catholicism and was furthermore forbidden to leave the country. Nevertheless, c. 40-50,000 French Protestants fled to England but for the most part had to leave all their belongings behind and therefore, many arrived entirely destitute. It soon became clear that substantial aid would need to be dispensed.

James II initially ordered collections to be carried out in Anglican churches for the benefit of Huguenots between 1686 and 1688. The first brief was issued on 5 March 1686 and originated from a petition by the Ministers and churchwardens of the Savoy French Church. The King intended the collection to be for the relief of Huguenots conforming to the Church of England only. Indeed, the potential applicants had to show certificates of having received communion according to the Church of England’s practices. A second brief was issued in 1688 but crucially did not mention that Huguenots had to conform in order to be considered.

A more structured way of providing for the refugees directly from funds from the Civil List was then created by joint monarchs William and Mary, in 1689: The Royal Bounty. On 5 May 1689, William III issued a declaration encouraging Huguenots to make their way to England and promised them protection and support. Responsibility for administering the funds was given to a number of eminent Englishmen, called the Commissioners, and to a French Committee. The Commissioners were appointed directly by the King and were responsible for overseeing the entire operation. On the other hand, the French Committee was composed entirely of Huguenots who had to decide who would get financial assistance and then allocate the money accordingly. From 1696, the distribution was split between the laity and the clergy, represented by two distinct committees. In 1705, the English Committee was set up and its members, nominated by the Commissioners, were tasked with auditing the accounts. These were deposited in the Chamber of London, at Guildhall.

Outside of London, distributions to the poor were carried out by the Huguenot churches, who received block grants, whereas other categories of recipients, such as the nobility and the bourgeoisie, had to apply directly to London. In the capital, two companies were set up to achieve the same aim: one in the City and one in Westminster. Below are two petitions from the French Hospital collection mentioning that both individuals were reliant on the Royal Bounty or bénéficence royale, prior to applying to live in the Hospital.

 

The papers housed in the Huguenot Library are those of the French Committee. The largest group of manuscripts are the certified accounts which were kept meticulously and list all those receiving funds as well as the respective amounts. They were divided into several categories differentiating the various persons receiving aid and/or the reasons why they needed it. Categories would include, amongst others, funds for the nobility, clergy, country churches, bourgeoisie and those of the lower classes. The amounts allocated to each category was decided in advance with the higher classes, incongruously from a modern viewpoint, receiving the most funds.

 

Funds were not just distributed to individuals but sometimes also earmarked for a specific purpose, such as payments for funerals, emigration to colonies in the West Indies, establishment of apprenticeships and payment for Huguenots who looked after French Protestant orphans. They were also providing aid to Huguenot organisations such as schools for refugee children and the Pest House, the precursor of the French Hospital, located near Bunhill Fields.

 

In 1802, the Treasury, which had become responsible for issuing payments for the Royal Bounty, began to question the Committee more rigorously, with the intention of eventually winding up the funds. The gradual extinction of the pensions paid concluded in 1876, when the last payment was made to one Sarah Rignon.

The importance of this collection is not limited to the story of the grant itself, its organisation, distribution and the challenges it faced, but also derives from the detailed information it provides on the individual recipients: their family unit, original provenance in France, occupation and possible health conditions. Finally, it documents to some extent the running and activities of the French Churches involved in the distribution, as well as giving us a snapshot of part of the Huguenot community in England during this period. It can be argued that the Royal Bounty was instrumental in helping Huguenots to assimilate and in some cases prosper in England.

The Huguenot Society decided to digitise the microfiches of this entire collection and make them available on the members’ area of the Society’s website, which can also be accessed by UCL staff and students, upon request.

The project was approved in May 2019, and went live a year later. The digitisation of the 646 fiches, consisting of 12 x 5 images each was outsourced; whereas the creation of a searchable catalogue to which the images of the manuscripts would be attached was done in-house. The resulting resource has not only made this collection more accessible, especially during the various lockdowns, but has also substantially improved its cataloguing, as records for each constituent item had to be created. In turn, this benefits those who prefer to still visit and see the original documents.

If you would like to access the Royal Bounty archive online or would like to visit the library, please contact the Huguenot Library at: library@huguenotsociety.org.uk

By Micol Barengo

Further reading:

Escot, Margaret M., ‘Profiles of relief: Royal Bounty grants to Huguenot refugees, 1686-1709’ in Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, vol. 25, issue 3 (1991)

Rey, Claudius, An account of the cruel persecutions rais’d by the French clergy since their taking sanctuary here… (London: Printed for J. Roberts, 1718)

Smith, Raymond, Records of the Royal Bounty and connected funds, the Burn donation, and the Savoy Church in the Huguenot Library. Quarto Series volume 51 (London: Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1974)

Smith, Raymond, ‘Financial aid to French Protestant refugees 1681-1727: Briefs and the Royal Bounty’ in Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, vol. 22, issue 3 (1973)

Sundstrom, Roy A., Aid and assimilation: a study of the economic support given French Protestants in England, 1680-1727 (PhD Thesis: Kent State University Graduate School, 1972)

In my last post I explained what I have been up to for the last 9 months as the Bridging the Digital Gap trainee at UCL. Now, I will show you some of my favourite digitisation projects so far…

The UCL College Collection

The UCL College Collection contains, among other things, photographs of the exterior and interior of UCL buildings.

The Little Magazines Collection

The Little Magazines Collection was set up in 1964 to gather together little magazines from the UK, North America, Commonwealth and Europe. We have defined Little Magazines as “those which publish creative, often innovative work, with little or no regard for commercial gain.”

Jewish Pamphlets

I worked on a joint project with Dr. Maria Kiladi to digitise the Jewish Pamphlets Collection.

One challenge with these was that some pamphlets were read from right to left, when in Hebrew, as opposed to ones written in English. Another challenge was that I am unable to read Hebrew, so with pages entirely in Hebrew it was not easy to know which way round they were supposed to be. Additionally, the pages containing Hebrew characters were automatically rotated by the OCR software when generating PDFs, so I had to manually go through these and change them individually.

The entire collection can be found in our digital collections repository.

Library Exhibition

Again working alongside Maria, we digitised material that was going to be on display for the exhibition, ‘From Small Library Beginnings: a brief history of UCL Library Services.’ The photographs are online but were also printed in the exhibition catalogue.

Dante’s Divine Comedy

This copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy features illustrations that go across a double page spread. This is not straightforward to capture with one camera pointing down towards the item, as the print is not flat, and cannot be made flat. There was also a problem of shadow appearing in the centre along the gutter. In order to capture the print as best I could, I ended up taking two separate images, on of each side of the book so that there is even illumination, and merging them in Photoshop.

You can read more about this item in this related blog post.

Slade Archive Reader

Finally, the Slade Archive Reader is now available as four fully digitised, searchable PDFs.

My first thought was, why, if this is a printed, word processed document, do we not have a digital copy already? Unfortunately this is often the case with older word processed material. So, we have the task of re-digitising something that was already digital! Once we began looking at the volumes, it was clear that digitising the Slade Archive Reader would not be without its fair share of challenges. Primarily, the four volumes are bound quite tightly, which made it hard for me to keep the pages flat when photographing them. This curvature of the pages leads to a distortion of the text, which in turn makes it difficult for the OCR software to pick up.

You can browse all of our digital collections online.

UCL Special Collections is committed to making digitised content available online. Although every effort has been made to identify and contact rights holders, we recognise that sometimes material published online may be in breach of copyright laws, contain sensitive personal data, or include content that may be regarded as obscene or defamatory.

If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on our Digital Collections repository for which you have not given permission, or that is not covered by a limitation or exception in national law, please contact us at spec.coll@ucl.ac.uk

I joined UCL in October 2018 as the Bridging the Digital Gap trainee from The National Archives. I have been learning about all things digital in relation to archives, working with UCL’s Special Collections and the Institute of Education archives. In order for me to produce meaningful work with the material, I first needed to understand a bit more about archive repositories and what they contain. As part of my training, The National Archives runs a Moodle course where I have learned about archives, records and repositories, as well as about a key problem facing holders of archives today: digital preservation.

My work so far has ranged from cataloguing to digitising material. A key part of my work at UCL has been digitisation. I photograph or scan original items so that they can be put online and be made more accessible to a wider audience. In addition to accessibility, digitisation aids in preservation. The copies of the original items generated through digitisation are archived so that we have a digital version in case anything happens to the original, or if, for example, it becomes too fragile for readers to view in person.

Most of the time I use a Canon EOS5D camera alongside a Kaiser RS1 copy stand and lights for digitisation. For some material I use an Epson12000XL flatbed scanner. Some items cannot be completely flattened for scanning, for example rare books, as this would cause severe damage to the item. In these cases, I will always use the camera and copy stand. In digitisation, we aim to get the most true to life image of the item whilst handling and moving the item as little as possible, in order to cause the least damage or deterioration to it. As digitisation requires handling and placing items in particular ways, we must liaise with the conservation team prior to digitisation, to make sure the item is in a suitable condition to be used. If an item is badly torn, falling apart, or very dirty, for example, it would have to be conserved before digitisation.

Once all of this is sorted out, I capture the photographs in RAW before editing them in Adobe Photoshop and saving them as high quality TIFF files for archiving, and JP2 files for use online. For some items with text, it is possible to use OCR software such as Nuance to generate searchable PDFs. However, some text proves too tricky for the software to pick up, for example unusual fonts or handwriting, so we don’t use it every time. However, we have begun to work with the OCR for handwriting software, Transkribus, so watch this space!

Now that you have an overview of what I have been up to, stay tuned for the next post where I will show you some of my favourite projects so far…