Kept for a decision, a piece of work, or a disagreement. None of them ran the Institute; there has never been anybody who did.
Judith Ambleside
1941–2018 · Archivist, 1994–2001
Adopted the reference form still in use and spent five years applying it backwards to material that had been filed by whoever happened to be holding it.
Ambleside came to the office after an eleven-month vacancy and inherited a catalogue in three incompatible systems, one of which was a set of index cards ordered by the colour of the folder. Her report of 2001 describes the work without complaint and lists, by year, the items she was unable to place.
The form she adopted — kind, year, sequence — is the one every reference on this site is written in. It was not her invention; she took it from a county records office and said so. Her contribution was to apply it to eleven thousand items already accessioned, which took the whole of her term and is the reason the term was not renewed: she asked not to be.
She held that a catalogue should make an item findable by somebody who does not already know it exists, and that any other purpose a catalogue is put to is a purpose it should be resisted in. She left a list of the guesses she had made. Two have since been corrected, and the corrections are filed beside her entries rather than in place of them.
REP/2001/04 — Report on the cataloguing standard
Margit Halloran
1938–2016 · Treasurer, 1989–1997
Insisted that the accounts be published in full, including the gifts the Institute had turned down and had not thought worth mentioning.
Halloran took the office after a seven-month vacancy and found that the houses' accounts were consolidated for the stewardship and summarised for everyone else. She proposed that the full accounts be printed in the annual report. The proposal was resisted, mildly, on the ground that nobody would read them.
The minute of July 1989 records her reply: that the question is not whether they are read but whether they could be. The resolution carried, and the accounts have been printed in full every year since, including in the years when the sums were awkward.
She also caused the two declined legacies of 1986 and 1991 to be printed with the conditions that had been attached to them. Both had been declined correctly. Neither had been mentioned to the membership, and she held that a refusal made on the membership's behalf is a thing the membership is entitled to know about.
MIN/1989/07 — Minute on the publication of accountsLED/1990/01 — First published summary of house accounts
Frances Ottley
1929–2009 · Correspondent, 1982–1991
Answered a national newspaper's request for a statement of the Institute's position by explaining, at length and politely, that there was not one.
In the autumn of 1984 a newspaper asked the Institute to set out its beliefs in three hundred words for a series on private societies. Ottley's reply is two pages long and declines. It offers the reporter the procedures, the accounts, the annual report, the address of the North House, and the name of nobody.
The refusal was not a refusal to be looked at. Ottley invited the reporter to attend an Open Table, and the reporter did, and the resulting article was unenthusiastic and accurate. She kept it in the correspondence file and it is still there.
Her reasoning has outlasted her: that an institution which can produce a statement of its position has acquired a position, and will thereafter defend it. The letter is read to new correspondents, without ceremony, as an example of the length at which it is proper to decline.
COR/1984/065 — Letter declining a statement to a newspaper
Ada Mbeki
b. 1962 · Steward, River House, 2014–2020
Attached steward to three circles wound up in the 2019 review; wrote all three closing entries herself and attended the last meeting of each.
The 2019 review found three circles that had not met in more than two years. Winding them up was a matter of paperwork: a final entry, the deposit of the circle book with the affiliated house, and a letter to everyone on the list.
Mbeki did the paperwork and then did the part that is not paperwork. She travelled to each locality and sat in the last meeting, where there was one. Her letters to the members are in the file and are almost identical, which she was criticised for. Her answer was that the three closures were the same event and it would have been dishonest to dress them differently.
No member's standing was affected by any of the three closures, and the letters say so in the first paragraph rather than the last.
MIN/2019/06 — Minute of the review of circles
Naomi Whitlock
b. 1971 · Steward, Orchard House, from 2021
Objected in 2013, as an ordinary member holding no office, to a gathering held in a first-floor room she could not reach. The objection changed the procedure.
The objection is one page. It does not argue that the house was unkind. It argues that a gathering nobody can be excluded from, held in a room that excludes, is not the thing the procedure describes, and that the procedure was therefore being breached rather than merely applied awkwardly.
The stewardship agreed within four months, which is fast. The standing instruction since is that a gathering is held at ground level, or with a means of reaching it that does not require asking, or it is not held. Two houses moved their table. One rebuilt an entrance. One gathering was cancelled for a year while this was done and the cancellation is entered.
Whitlock has said, in a later minute, that she does not wish the objection cited as an example of the Institute correcting itself, on the ground that it took thirty-nine years to notice. That remark is also entered.
PRO/2014/02 — Circular amending the form of gathering
Alan Pettifer
1930–2004 · Treasurer, 1981–1988; resigned
Held the office through a third term nobody had voted for, resigned when it was pointed out, and wrote the note that produced the printed term register.
The accounts of Pettifer's third term are sound; the examination found nothing. What was wrong was that the term existed. Renewal had been by the stewardship's silence rather than by anybody's decision, twice, and the second time carried him four years past the limit.
He resigned in the same month it was raised, in a letter that does not defend the position and does not apologise for it either. He proposed that the register of who holds what, and until when, be printed in the annual report where the membership could see the dates without asking for them.
It has been printed every year since. It is one page. It is generally agreed to be the least interesting page in the report, and it is the reason nobody has held an office past its term in the thirty-seven years since.
MEM/1997/03 — Memorandum on what an office does not carry
Edwin Carrow
b. 1955 · Rota clerk, Cedar House, 1991–1994; separated 1996
Left the Institute in 1996 and has written about it critically since. The Record keeps the criticism and stewards are expected to have read it.
Carrow's account, published privately in 1999 and reprinted twice, argues that an institution which records everything about itself does not thereby become answerable; it becomes exhausting to argue with. He describes the practice of entering an objection beside a decision as a way of absorbing objection rather than acting on it, and gives four examples, of which the archivist has conceded two.
He is not a former believer and does not write as one. He held one office, for three years, and left over a specific disagreement about a specific building. He declined an invitation to reply in the Journal on the ground that publication in the Institute's own pages would make the criticism part of the Institute's record of its own good conduct, which is his whole argument.
His book is on the reading list given to incoming archivists and correspondents. Two of his four examples remain uncorrected and the file says which.
MEM/1997/03 — Memorandum on what an office does not carry