Public record
Vale spent twenty years cataloguing other people's institutions before consenting, reluctantly, to the founding of one of her own.
1935–1998 · Historian of institutions; university archivist; principal author of the Founding Letter
Eleanor Vale was born in 1935 in Bangor, Maine, and trained as a historian of institutions — hospitals, mutual societies, county archives, the sort of bodies that keep minutes for a century and are then dissolved in an afternoon. She worked for eighteen years as a university archivist, and her scholarly reputation, such as it was, rested on a single argument made repeatedly in unfashionable places: that the papers an institution keeps about its own conduct are a better guide to its character than anything it publishes.
She convened the first Thursday gathering in 1968 with Thomas Orrell, in a rented room above a shop. Her own account, given in the Founding Letter six years later, is that the gatherings were intended to last a winter.
Vale distrusted institutional authority, including her own, and said so in writing often enough that the phrase 'necessary danger' has passed into house use. Her objection was not to rules but to deference: she held that a body which cannot be corrected by the people inside it has already stopped being what it claims to be, whatever its rules say. Several of the Institute's least convenient arrangements — the refusal of any single leader, the requirement that disagreeing records both be kept, the standing rule that no practice may be defended by reference to a founder's wishes — exist because she insisted on them against the preference of the room.
She was rarely photographed. Two photographic likenesses are held; one, made about 1989 by a hand the Record does not name, is reproduced here. She declined a painted portrait commissioned the same year on the grounds that the Institute had more useful things to hang.
She died in October 1998, at sixty-three. She had asked that no memorial observance be held and that the ordinary Thursday go ahead that week. It did.
Materials recovered following the October fire were transferred to the Common Record in 1999.
Eleanor Vale, North House, 14 February 1991
Two minutes from the general questions at the February meeting. The only recording of her speaking voice held in the Common Record.
Reel held at North House. Transcribed 1992 and checked against the tape in 2004. The question put to her was not recorded.
REC/1991/04Transcript, as checked against the tape
I have been asked whether a thing can remain continuous after the thing itself is gone. That is badly put.
A house is timber and stone. Certainly those can be lost. But if the work remains, and the obligations remain, and there are people who still carry them, I am not certain what useful purpose is served by declaring the house absent.
The record, therefore, retains it. That is an administrative decision. People are free to make of it something more interesting.
Extracts, printed as transcribed. The originals are held in the Common Record and are the authority in any case of doubt.
1972 · to Thomas Orrell · CR-C-0114
You want a building. I want to be certain that when we have one, we are still doing the thing we did without one. Those are not the same worry and I would like both of them minuted.
1976 · to Thomas Orrell · CR-C-0207
A practice survives only when it can be carried by ordinary people on difficult days. Everything else is decoration and I would like us to be austere about decoration.
1981 · to the stewards of the North House · CR-C-0341
I notice the minutes have begun recording what I said as though it settled the matter. Please stop. Record what was decided and who dissented; my name is not an argument.
1993 · to a member enquiring about the archive · CR-C-0902
We keep both accounts because I do not trust our judgement about which of them will look truthful in fifty years. Neither should you.
Record compiled from the North House papers, the minute books, and the 1999 accessions. Reconciliation status: Continuous. Public transcription revised 2006.
What is held
Everything below is already held and already printed elsewhere in the Common Record. It is gathered here because a person asking about Eleanor Vale should be given the whole of what is held, including the parts that do not agree, rather than the part that answers them.
Nothing on this page was written by her, about a reader, or for a reader. She died in 1998. What is held is paper, two photographic prints, and two transcripts checked against tape.
In her own hand
A hospital records office accession note of the ordinary kind, reconciled against the originals and signed by her ten years before the Institute existed.
A letter to her sister from the years of her hospital employment; chiefly domestic, with one paragraph on procedure. Released by the estate in 2003.
A letter to a hospital committee, signed in her working capacity: E. Vale, Records.
The letter customarily read at a first attendance, including her refusal to sit for a photograph and her reason for refusing.
Her account of the two directions in which an institution mishandles its papers. Quoted by both sides of the current publication disagreement, in each case from a different paragraph.
House business — a boiler, shelving, and an instruction to list an incoming deposit plainly and not to describe what its depositor had been working on.
Two typed sheets on the disposition of the Record after her death, catalogued in full and restricted in the body at her own instruction.
Sound
Remarks at the close of the first reconciliation, transcribed in 1981 and checked against the tape in 2004. The cassette is held at the North House.
Spoken reading of the transcript, not the tape
Two minutes from the general questions at the February meeting. The question put to her was not recorded; the reel is held at the North House.
Spoken reading of the transcript, not the tape
Likeness
A silver gelatin print, unmarked, dated from the accession schedule and not from the print. Photographer not recorded.
Photographic reproduction of the print
A house group in a kitchen, in which she is named in the caption and partially obscured in the frame. Entered as returned rather than as given; the original is not held.
Reproduction of the copy print
Others speaking of her
A neighbour of the North House from 1968, not a member, on the purchase of the grange hall and on what Vale was called.
A lodger at Ashfield Road from 1957, not a member, on Thursday meals, chair mending, and what the evenings were called.
Custody
The stewardship meeting of November 1998, directing that recovered papers be conserved at the North House and accessioned in the ordinary course.
The conservation note: what was carried out, how long the drying took, what was lost in treatment, and what is entered as not held.
The accession itself: 418 items entered as CR-V-0001 to CR-V-0418, with their condition and the classes recorded as not received.
Points not settled
The title is kept in the catalogue because the catalogue was made from her employment papers. The neighbour's account is entered as given and is not annotated.
The cataloguer's note of 2007 records the recollection as being at forty years' distance and offers the Wednesday meal at DOM/1962/03 as a sufficient explanation. It does not assert that explanation, and the entry is not corrected.
The catalogue follows the minute book and leaves the box as written. Neither hand has been identified.
The entry for the second is retained so that the count remains legible. Two are catalogued; one can be seen.
The refusal and the print are both held. Whether the second was made with her agreement is not recorded, and the Record does not infer it.
Both paragraphs are hers and both are quoted accurately. The Institute holds that the wishes of a founder do not settle a present question, and no reading of the letter has been adopted.
How the papers came to be held
8 June 1964
Copies reconciled against the originals by E. Vale and countersigned by the deputy records officer, in her employment before the Institute.
29 September 1998
Her own memorandum on the disposition of the Record is written and filed. The body is restricted at her instruction; the description is not.
12 November 1998
The stewardship directs that recovered papers be conserved at the North House and accessioned in the ordinary course.
21 January 1999
The conservation note records the treatment, what was lost in it, and the material entered as not held.
4 March 1999
Four hundred and eighteen items are entered, with their condition and the three classes recorded as not received.
2003
Family correspondence is released by the estate and entered.
2004
The 1992 transcript is checked against the reel. The earlier transcript of the 1979 cassette is checked in the same year.
2006
The cataloguer enters the note on the two likenesses. The public transcription is revised in the same year.
Later corrections to these entries are printed, with their dates, in the record of revisions.