The Public Record Office 1959‐1969

Citation

Roper, M. (2002), "The Public Record Office 1959‐1969", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 2, pp. 243-245. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.2.243.10

To celebrate the sesquicentenary of the Public Record Office (PRO) in 1988, Jack Cantwell, a retired member of staff, was commissioned to write a history of the office from its foundation in 1838 to the passing of the Public Records Act of 1958 and that was published as The Public Record Office 1838‐1958 (HMSO) in 1991. In this new work he continues that history from 1959 to 1969, a decade of great change as the PRO came to terms with its new responsibilities under the 1958 Act.

Your reviewer must first declare an interest. I joined the PRO as an assistant keeper in October 1959 and served there until 1992. I was thus a witness to the events of the decade covered by this book; indeed, as consultation of the index will reveal, I am mentioned a few times, but only as a bit player or in anticipation of my roles in the later history of the PRO. So though the story told is familiar, some of the detail is new to me.

The 1958 Act gave the PRO a more active role in the selection and safekeeping of public records which ought to be permanently preserved, and made those records available for public inspection when they were 50 years old. This was a radical change from the position under previous public records legislation, which left the choice of what was transferred to the PRO and when it might be inspected by the public largely to individual departments and courts. The development of the structures and systems for implementing the new legislation, based on recommendations of the Committee on Departmental Records (the Grigg Committee) of 1952‐1954, was a slow process and continued long after 1969, the terminal date of this book. It was not all smooth going, for, as Jack Cantwell clearly chronicles, the “executivisation” of the process was not well received by the assistant keepers, who regarded themselves as the persons best fitted to apply historical criteria within the selection process (though in fact none of the assistant keepers of that generation had specialised in twentieth‐century history) but found themselves largely excluded.

Once the new systems and structures became operational, the quantities of records entering the office increased rapidly and so did the numbers of those consulting them, and both accelerated over the decade as first the returns of the census of 1861 became available for public inspection in 1962, sparking off the still continuing boom in family history, then the records of the First World War were released en bloc in February 1966 and finally the closed period for public records was reduced from 50 to 30 years by the Public Records Act 1967. Again there was cause for dissension within the PRO as demand for new finding aids and supervisors for the search rooms far outstripped the availability of assistant keepers, and further areas of work had to be shared with executive officers. The shift in the balance of work from medieval and early modern to late modern records with its consequential impact on the office’s publications programme also led to strained relations with its traditional academic users.

Another consequence of the increasing use of public records by academic and non‐academic readers alike was the recognition of the inadequacy of the existing search rooms, despite such short‐term expedients as converting a strong room into a search room at Chancery Lane, encouraging the use of the search room at the Ashridge outstation and providing three extra search rooms in the nearby Land Registry building. Moreover, the storage areas at Chancery Lane had long been full and the outstation expedient, of which Ashridge was the latest, was inconvenient and did not provide a proper storage environment. Clearly a new building which would meet modern standards for storing and consulting records and anticipated increases in demand for the foreseeable future was required. The preferred option of further development at Chancery Lane or elsewhere in central London was eventually recognised as impractical and the search for an alternative settled finally on Kew (after Milton Keynes had been ruled out), a decision which was unpopular with many among both staff and readers, though opposition became more muted when it was announced that Kew would house only nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century records and the Chancery Lane building would remain open for the storage and consultation of medieval and early modern records.

Yet the story of the decade is not just one of office politics. In it can be found the seeds of today’s PRO. The Grigg system for managing public records in departments, modified to give the PRO a more positive role as a consequence of criticism by the Committee on Modern Public Records of 1978‐1981 (the Duncan Wilson Committee) and, perhaps even more significantly, of generational changes at the PRO and in departments, has proved a firm foundation on which the present PRO acquisition and disposition policies have been developed. The number of extended closures of records under the 30‐year rule has been reduced following pressure from the Advisory Council on Public Records and changing political attitudes towards open government and freedom of information. The decision to build the new repository at Kew, opened in October 1977, proved to be only a step on the way to the concentration there of all PRO operations (apart from the Family History Centre) following the completion of a substantial extension in December 1996 and the recognition that the additional costs of managing a split‐site institution could be better employed in providing extended opening hours and improved facilities for users on a single site. The tentative exploration of the possibility of using computers for archival purposes, touched on by Jack Cantwell, was to lead in the 1970s to the development of two innovative computer‐based systems, PROSPEC for maintaining an up‐to‐date version of the PRO guide, the primary series‐level finding aid, and PROMPT for the online ordering of documents by readers, and eventually to PROCAT, the current PRO online catalogue and ordering system.

Without the (sometimes painful) shifts of attitude which the events of 1959 to 1969 forced on the PRO it is doubtful whether it could have transformed itself into the modern archival repository and information centre which we now know, and this meticulous account of those events is an indispensable guide to the first stages of the route by which that transformation has come about.