Endangered Records and the Beginning of Professionalism Among Archivists in England, 1918–1945

Abstract

Archivists in England formed themselves into a self-conscious profession over about three decades following World War I. Domestic threats to archives during World War II, especially the indiscriminate pulping of paper, provided an important motivation for this development. Furthermore, this wartime peril was straddled by a century-long period of decline among the landed aristocracy that likewise endangered important cultural objects. The legitimacy and legality of these dangers demanded that English archivists employ subtle yet assertive means to defend archives. Consequently, they created advocacy organizations and networks, educational programmes, county records repositories, and professional attitudes and ideas that collectively formed an archival profession in England by the mid-1950s.

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