Records Management and the Decline of the English Archival Establishment, 1949–1956

Abstract

Records Management and the Decline of the English Archival Establishment, 1949–1956 Hans C. Rasmussen (bio) Sir Hilary Jenkinson and the assistant keepers of England's Public Record Office (PRO) lost their position of international leadership in public archives management between 1949 and 1956 because of a failure to appreciate progress in modern records management pioneered in the United States. Conversely, archivists of the British Commonwealth, the Committee on Departmental Records in Britain, and some younger assistant keepers and senior executive officers in the PRO all welcomed these developments as a challenge to the established order. Might it not, after all, merely be that we were old and weary and they were young and vital and full of the joy of living! That their society was adapted to the times it had played so large a part in forming, while ours was obsolescent, fatally weighted down under the burden of its glorious past? That this, in short, was more than ever the American Century? —H. Hopkins, The New Look The tale of the creation of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin is the kind of story that Texans love to tell.1 It was the stunning intrusion of oil-patch bravado on the mahogany-paneled elitism of fine book and manuscript collecting. Over about a dozen free-spending years in the late 1950s and 1960s, America's proudest provincials confounded the world's literary connoisseurs with their breakout cosmopolitanism. Harry Huntt Ransom, the irresistibly persuasive visionary, spent millions of fashionably suspect but highly effective West Texas petrodollars on the unappreciated castoffs of the market, the twentieth-century papers disregarded and undervalued by Europe and the aristocratic eastern universities. His inspired acquisitions abruptly shattered the Western intelligentsia's long-standing belittlement of Texans as dusty cowhands and pitiable cotton croppers with no appreciation for the intellect or imagination. This turnabout [End Page 442] was verified by the fawning approval of authors and collectors now flush with cash and the apoplectic astonishment of the cultural aristocracy, who never saw it coming but had no choice but to admire it once it had been done. In the end, Texans had accomplished what they had always prided themselves on being able to do—making it big in the world by their own will and on their own terms. But farsightedness, ambition, and vitality go much farther if the competition is slow, uninterested, and unimaginative. Texas's buyers had the good fortune to find an especially languid English records community when they arrived to commence their buying spree at the end of the 1950s. Well before Harry Ransom intrigued the Philosophical Society of Texas in December 1957 with his proposal to establish "a research center to be the Bibliothèque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation," the English archival establishment had begun its spiraling decline over the issue of what to do with twentieth-century records.2 Both observant amateurs and more probing scholars agree that English indifference to modern manuscripts, rather than a lack of money, accounted for the loss of ponderous amounts of literary papers to North America.3 This apathy among archivists, librarians, and literary scholars was endorsed by the government in 1952, when it exempted works of art, manuscripts, and antiques less than one hundred years old from export control.4 Still, England's archival tribulations were not limited to the export of manuscripts, nor did they begin at the dockside. Instead, the well- documented loss of private papers should properly be viewed alongside a similar though less appreciated episode of neglect of twentieth-century public records that immediately preceded it. The classically educated civil servants of England's famously torpid Public Record Office (PRO), who had built their reputations on mastering the archaic skills needed to comprehend medieval and early modern documents, failed to comprehend adequately the rushing, drowning tide of records from the war, the welfare state, and the nationalization of key industries.5 During the crucial period between 1949 and 1956, English archivists, fatally unappreciative of more perceptive developments in America, simply lost their edge. The Americans pioneered the field of modern records management and...

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