Memorandum: the pre-1968 material and what may be said about it

MEMORANDUM TO THE STEWARDSHIP MEM/2007/02

SUBJECT: MATERIAL PREDATING 1968 HELD IN THE COMMON RECORD

1. The Record now holds some forty items dated before 1968: household

books, a settlement rota, hospital accession papers, family

correspondence, domestic cards, and photographs bought with a

newspaper morgue. Most came to us in 1999 with the Vale papers or

were acquired locally afterwards.

2. Members have begun to ask whether these items show that the

Practice is older than the Institute says it is. The question is

fair and the answer must be given carefully, because the honest

answer is easily mistaken for evasion.

3. Similarity of practice is not evidence of institutional continuity.

A rota that says those who cook do not serve is a sensible way to

run a kitchen and was arrived at independently in a great many

kitchens. That we now do the same thing establishes that the thing

works, not that we received it from anyone.

4. Three explanations are available and the Record does not choose

between them:

(a) that ordinary useful habits recur wherever people eat and

repair together, and the resemblance is coincidence;

(b) that the founders saw such arrangements at Ashfield Road, at

the settlement, and in the records offices where they worked,

and adapted what they had seen, which is what sensible people

do and is not descent;

(c) that we have selected these items out of the ordinary rubbish

of the period precisely because they resemble us, and would

not have kept them otherwise. This last is the explanation

most damaging to our own collecting and is on present evidence

the strongest of the three.

5. Accordingly: the material is catalogued as what it is — domestic,

institutional and local records of the period — and not as an

early history of the Institute. No item is to be described as

Continuance material. The series label is “institutional

antecedents”, which is a shelving convenience and not a claim.

6. The Institute was established in 1974. Its informal origins are

the Thursday gatherings of 1968 to 1973. Nothing in this material

alters either date and staff should decline, politely, to say

that it does.

7. It should also be said plainly that the resemblance is real and

that noticing it is not a failure of discipline. We are asked to

hold two ordinary thoughts at once: that these documents look

like us, and that looking like us is not descent.

G. Sørhaug, Archivist. Adopted 4 May 2007.