Archives

The Devon Heritage Centre at Sowton, Exeter houses the county’s archives and local studies collections.

It is the main headquarters office of Devon Heritage Services, and holds all types of historical archives relating to the county of Devon and the City of Exeter. These include the records of ecclesiastical parishes, the Diocese of Exeter, county, district and parish councils, and innumerable families, estates, businesses, societies, chapels, schools and individuals. It is a designated repository for the deposit of public records of local interest (e.g. hospital and asylum records), as well as for tithe and manorial collections. It shares premises with the National Meteorological Office Archive.

The North Devon Record Office at Barnstable holds a wide range of archives for the North Devon area.

An unusually broad and detailed personal archive of one of the lesser known war poets. As well as Edward Thomas’ papers and possessions, the archive includes papers from family and friends in his literary circle, and will be equally of interest to scholars researching the life and work of Gordon Bottomley, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Also held is a notable collection of almost every published work by Edward Thomas, and associated literary criticism.

The Feminist Archive (South) in Bristol houses national and international material relating to the history of feminism, c.1960-2000. This material includes: periodicals, books, pamphlets, diaries, calendars, conference papers, personal letters, photographs, stickers, postcards, drawings, posters, banners, badges, vinyl records, mini-disks, audio cassettes, video cassettes, a 16mm film, clothing, digitised audio and film and various other ephemera. The aim of the Archive is to collect and preserve feminist material from the 1960’s to 2000. A notable exception is the Dora Russell Collection, which documents the journey through Europe of the Women’s Peace Caravan in 1958.

The London Broadcasting Company / Independent Radio News audio archive at Reading consists of approximately 80,000 individual audio files of recordings relating to news and current affairs from 1973 to the mid-1990s. These clips have been digitised from the 7000 hours of reel-to-reel tapes in the full archive collection as part of a JISC funded programme. Recordings are from a wide range of broadcasts, including coverage of the Falklands war, the miners’ strike, Northern Ireland, the whole of the Thatcher period of government and recordings of the first hour of UK commercial radio including the first commercial radio news bulletin.

Liberal Party Organisation papers and political pamphlets (1946-1970s).

The archive is available in the University of Bristol Special Collections.

The Mountbatten Papers are an archive of the first importance for the study of much of the twentieth century and they are also a collection of considerable size, containing approximately 250,000 papers, 50,000 photographs and quantities of recordings on audio-tape, film and video-tape. This includes the 907 files of papers and 68 photograph albums of Edwina Mountbatten (nee Ashley), later Countess Mountbatten of Burma, 1923-60, with papers as Vicereine of India, 1947 and c.4,000 files of papers of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, c. 1900-79.

The semi-official correspondence and papers of Henry John Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston total some 40,000 items, covering the whole of his ministerial career from 1809 until his death as Prime Minister in 1865.

Southampton’s detailed catalogue descriptions concentrate on two series of correspondence, the first of British diplomats stationed overseas, the second of British government ministers. The diplomatic correspondence, which covers from 1830 until 1864, includes material on Belgium, Turkey and Greece, Prussian foreign policy, Sardinia and Austria. The focus of the ministerial correspondence is predominately that of home affairs.

The archive and library contains a wealth of material of interest to the historian of Anglo-Jewry as well as James Parkes’s personal papers. In recent years, the Parkes Collections have developed as a place of deposit for archives concerning nineteenth and twentieth century Anglo-Jewry. Of particular interest are materials relating to national and international organisations and to Jewish individuals. These include the papers of Anglo-Jewish leaders, such as Selig Brodetsky, Neville Laski and Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz, and those of some of its most important institutions: the Anglo-Jewish Association, the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor and the London Board of Shechita.

The Parkes Library remains unique since it is the only collection devoted to the relationships between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. It includes books by most of the important writers on Jewish history from the fifteenth century to date as well as 360 periodical titles of which over 70 are current. The most important sections of the collection are those dealing with the history of Jewish communities, Jewish-Christian relations, antisemitism and the Holocaust, together with a section on the development of Zionism and the history of Palestine up to and including the foundation of the state of Israel.

The Penguin Archive contains the archives of Penguin Books Ltd. from its foundation in 1935 to the 1980s. It includes a wide variety of materials on the establishment and business life of Penguin Books Ltd., as well as social events, legal cases (particularly the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial of 1960), exhibitions on the company’s history, and the private lives of prominent figures in the early history of the company, including Sir Allen Lane, Eunice Frost and Betty Radice. It also includes a large collection of Penguin books from 1935 to date.

The archive is available in the University of Bristol Special Collections.