Archival Documentation Destruction

[Laurence Batchelor]

Unfortunately, about 99% of the working fly sheets showing modification made to cruisers during the war were dumped in the nineteen fifties by the DNCs department, but----- only after these drawings (of which there were many thousands) were offered to the Imperial War Museum, which refused to send a few taxis to Whitehall to pick up. The next day, all these drawings were placed into bags and burnt. The IWM strikes again!

Thank you.
Why did the DNC dept not offer them to the PRO or NMM?

[ar]

Thank you.
Why did the DNC dept not offer them to the PRO or NMM?

Who knows. They dumped truck loads of stuff, not just the cruiser sheets but those for carriers, destroyers and the escorts. Thousands of drawings all burnt. Should have burnt the staff at the IWM. Stupid civil servants.
Same thing with the ships logs, because some idiot decided they were NOT WORTH KEEPING. Also the ships BOOKS. What a crime.

[Laurence Batchelor]

The people at the IWM are NOT civil servants, it is a privately funded non governmental museum.
However, the people at the MoD responsible for their destruction were.
Moot point I know, but it is important as a private museum COULD have earned a fortune of of those plans if someone with a commercial mind was privy to such goings on at the time.
Tragedy indeed!

The logs seem to me to have been weeded by the MoD staff, kind of like certain other official documents I've worked through at the PRO. When a government department has a clear out they scan through the entire collection and select 10% or 'a representative sample'; send that to the PRO, and destroy the rest.
I would certainly be the first to line up such people against the wall and I'm sure there would be a long que of people all itching to pull the trigger!

Your welcome Bob!

[MichelB]

My current job consists of scanning through government archives for the National Archive and deciding what to keep. The rules are complex but there sure is no 'representative sample' methodology. They really want to keep important things, therefore they only employ trained historians for this basically simple job. Right now I�m working on documents of the armed resistance during wwII (quite drool-inducing for a historia), and this has been declared to be saved in entirety.

[ar]

The people at the IWM are NOT civil servants, it is a privately funded non governmental museum.
However, the people at the MoD responsible for their destruction were.
Moot point I know, but it is important as a private museum COULD have earned a fortune of of those plans if someone with a commercial mind was privy to such goings on at the time.
Tragedy indeed!

The logs seem to me to have been weeded by the MoD staff, kind of like certain other official documents I've worked through at the PRO. When a government department has a clear out they scan through the entire collection and select 10% or 'a representative sample'; send that to the PRO, and destroy the rest.
I would certainly be the first to line up such people against the wall and I'm sure there would be a long que of people all itching to pull the trigger!

Your welcome Bob!

At the time of the great burning of the fly sheets, the IWM staff WERE civil servants.
At the time of the great burning of the logs, there was NO MOD; the logs were ordered to be dumped by one high level civil servant (ex RN officer) working for the Navy. I have forgotten the name of he man.

[ar]

My current job consists of scanning through government archives for the National Archive and deciding what to keep. The rules are complex but there sure is no 'representative sample' methodology. They really want to keep important things, therefore they only employ trained historians for this basically simple job. Right now I�m working on documents of the armed resistance during wwII (quite drool-inducing for a historia), and this has been declared to be saved in entirety.

David Lyon, historian (deceased), who worked at the NMM had ONE RULE, which was ........ SAVE EVERTHING, BURN NOTHING!
And this should be the rule of the PRO.
It should not be the job of historians to decide what to save. If the PRO does not want the stuff, then PLEASE... offer to institutions or bung the material back into storage, but for gods sake do not burn.
I realise that my remarks are strong, but as a past researcher and writer I have personally found that far too much material has been lost because of selective retention. Once it's gone, it's too late.
A question if I may, roughly what percentage of the material are you marking for destruction?

[Filipe Ramires]

I would certainly be the first to line up such people against the wall and I'm sure there would be a long que of people all itching to pull the trigger!

Using a Gatling gun!!!!

[ar]

I would certainly be the first to line up such people against the wall and I'm sure there would be a long que of people all itching to pull the trigger!

Using a Gatling gun!!!!

Young Laurence would NOT be the first in line, it would be ME!!! And.... if he is correct about the 90% being destroyed by the MOD before it reaches the PRO, that means we have/will lose OVER 90% . Words that I would like to use here would get me banned instantly.

[MichelB]

A question if I may, roughly what percentage of the material are you marking for destruction?

It depends on what archive we're working on. We did an archive of the Agriculture ministry a while back on land reallocation, and the figure were about 80 percent destruction . You have to understand that most of it was pure bureaucratic sludge (literally requisition forms for office supplies). With other DoD archives the figures are about 50/50. Again, there's a LOT of bureaucratic paperwork in there. Technical drawings, technical data, modifications, photographs, all that stuff is almost always saved.
We have pretty detailed rules who actually make some sense, but we still need a historians' eye to save things. For example: i stumbled upon the editorial archives of a soldier's magazine of the mid-1940's. Beautiful stuff with unpublished letters-to-the-editor by big names. Unfortunatly the rules would say: this is only preparatory material, it's not the finished, printed article. So I invoked the article 5 section E-rule: material with specific historical interest. It's safe now. Save everything, burn nothing is a great principle, but infeasible considering the vast output of material from a modern bureaucracy. Except of course for military-related stuff, I agree...

[ar]

Dear MichelB,
You will forgive me, but your location prompts me to ask two personal questions.
One; Are you a citizen of the UK?
Two; Do you live and work in the UK?

[MichelB]

The straight answers are no and no, but somehow I feel there's some enormous implied *something* in your question that I'm missing... ( )

[Laurence Batchelor]

I stand by my 'representative sample' I have been through records from WWI & WW2 in the UK in numerous archives and what tends to happen when releasing certain (not all) governmental records into the public domain is that they get vetted and weeded.

Some get preserved wholesale whilst others peace meal and certain other series or collections nothing survives at all.

If the donating party thinks all the material is high value then they'll offer the whole lot. If they feel the collection is too large; the information contained within not worth preserving; or if they just need to cut back on storage costs they will offer them and if no answer they will destroy them.

This is why mainly most logs for RN WW2 capital ships survive pretty much complete, whereas now destroyer logs are hit n miss which whole ships or periods missing and finally all coastal forces logs destroyed.

It is the Mod & Admiralty I blame not the PRO. Everything which is donated to the PRO is kept.

The other major problem was the complete and dire collapse of the British shipbuilding industry where many yard records when into skips, fires and bins with museums and archives not able to save them.

[ar]

From what I read, a pecentage of the material that has already been passed to the PRO is being selected for disposal, and not by a UK citizen, and who is not even residing in the UK!
Am I wrong?

[Jean-Paul Binot]

I was under the impression that MichelB was working for the Dutch national archives.

[ar]

I was under the impression that MichelB was working for the Dutch national archives.

The gentleman wrote in such a seamless fashion and I do not recall him writing that he was actually going through the Dutch archives.
Perhaps he could confirm, and if so, accept my apology.

[MichelB]

Yes, at last I can reveal my secret identity:I work for the Dutch government on Dutch archives! Apologies not at all necessary, mr. ar, it would've been proper of me on such an international board (and with so many 'expats' around working abroad), to mention whose archives I was working on.

[Filipe Ramires]

Just out of curiosity, Michel, since now you are our "inside man" in the Dutch Archives, how much is left of the Dutch East Indies Campaign? I used several (loads actually) of British, Australian, Portuguese, American and even some Japanese sources for my essay on Timor during WWII but had quite a bit of difficulties in getting stuff from the Dutch side.

[MichelB]

Well, I have to admit... I'm not exactly in the archives proper. Ours is a temporary outfit outside the normal system, where we 'process' archival material that the different departments can't, won't or haven't processed yet. (the process is selection, description in a database and physical preparation). I'd really have to check with the National Archive to see what they have. A quick check has indicated that the Netherlands Institute for Military History (www.nimh.nl) has the original combat reports of the KNIL vs. the Japanese. That's all I can find right now but there's bound to be more.

There is a small chance that I might actually end up at the NIMH and that would open up some possibilities...