On Finding Precedent Where There May Only Be Resemblance

There is a card in our collection giving quantities for bean and barley for twelve to sixteen. It was written before the Institute existed, in a hand we cannot identify, and it is still the way the North House kitchen cooks that dish. Members who are shown it tend to lower their voices. I have watched it happen and I understand it, and I want to explain, at some length and without much sympathy for my own position, why the lowered voice is a mistake.

We hold perhaps forty items dated before 1968. A household repair book from a lodging house in Bangor. A settlement's meal rota. Accession notes from a hospital records office. Letters from a woman in her thirties complaining about a roof. A press photograph of a long table laid for eighteen. Individually they are the ordinary paper of ordinary lives, and any local archive in the state has a shelf of the same.

Read together, they are harder to put down. The rota says that those who cook do not serve. The repair book has a column in which things are carried forward, and once, at the back, kept continuous. The hospital note directs that a record be retained in both forms and that corrections be entered beside and not over. If I gave you those three sentences without dates you would place them in a House kitchen this Thursday.

Resemblance is the cheapest evidence there is, and the most satisfying to find.

The satisfaction is the problem. An institution in its second half-century wants ancestors in the way a man in middle age wants to have been promising. Depth is flattering, and it is flattering in a particular direction: it converts a set of decisions people made, and could have made differently, into an inheritance nobody is responsible for. That is a considerable relief and we should be suspicious of relief.

Consider what the alternative explanations actually cost us. The first is coincidence: that if you put fifteen people around a table twice a week for years, somebody will eventually work out that the cooks should not also be carrying plates. This is dull and it is probably true of most of the resemblances, and I notice that nobody enjoys hearing it.

The second is influence, and it is the one I would put my money on. Vale lodged at Ashfield Road. She ate at the settlement on Wednesdays for the better part of a decade and said in a letter that it was the best meal of her week. She spent her working life in a records office where the phrase continuous copy was as unremarkable as a paperclip. Orrell, who did not know her then, had done the same kind of work in the same kind of buildings, where a chore rota on the wall was as ordinary as a kettle. People build what they have seen built. This explains a great deal and diminishes nobody: it makes the founders competent rather than visited.

The third explanation is the one that implicates me. We selected these items. The lodging-house book came in with the Vale papers because it was in the same tea chest; the settlement rota was bought deliberately, by an archivist — me — who had read it and recognised something. We did not acquire the forty items of local ephemera that resemble us nothing at all. A collection assembled by people who know what the present practice looks like will contain the past that looks like the present practice. That is not fraud. It is not even carelessness. It is what collecting is, and it means the pattern in our shelves is partly a picture of our own attention.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this argument that is merely fashionable, in which nothing can be known and the archivist congratulates himself on saying so. The documents are real. The dates are sound and two of them are independently confirmed. Mrs Aherne, who lodged at Ashfield Road from 1957 and was not a member of anything, remembered a Thursday meal and work afterwards, and placed it years before our founding date, and was not corrected by the interviewer, and should not have been. Her memory was at forty years' distance and there was a Wednesday meal at the settlement that would account for it. Both of those sentences are true at once and neither cancels the other.

What I will not do is arrange them into a story. The Institute was established in 1974. Its informal origins are the Thursday gatherings of 1968 to 1973, and the people who were there are mostly dead, which is exactly the condition under which prehistories get written. Similarity of practice is not evidence of institutional continuity. I have written that sentence into the standing guidance and I have been asked twice this year to soften it.

The concession I owe is this. The resemblance does not go away when you explain it, and the explanations do not sit comfortably together. I have given three and I believe all three are partly operating and I cannot tell you in what proportion, and I have noticed that when I re-read the repair book I still stop at the back page. An archivist is permitted to find his own collection strange. He is not permitted to publish the feeling as a finding.

So we keep the card in the kitchen box where it belongs, and the rota in the antecedents series, and we tell members who ask that the Institute is fifty-two years old and that people have been feeding each other and mending chairs for rather longer. It is a flatter answer than they want. It has the advantage of being the one we can support.