Work in Progress 4

Time has flown by, and once again it's time to share what we've been working on over the past six months. Alongside our ongoing responsibilities, supervising visitors and managing remote inquiries, we’ve remained actively engaged in a range of projects. As a team, we hosted three work experience placements and, over the past month, undertook a thorough cleaning and shelf check. This latter task also gave us the opportunity to assess storage conditions by reviewing collection boxes that were either underfilled or overfilled—issues that can pose preservation risks. Additionally, we were able to identify much-needed available shelf space, which is becoming increasingly important as the repositories continue to fill up.

Rebecca Somerset, Province Archivist:

In my last update, I had hoped to share news of our forthcoming online portal for digital content. While that’s still very much on the horizon, it’s not quite ready to unveil just yet. As anticipated, much of my focus in recent weeks has been on completing some long-standing cataloguing projects - essential work that helps to ensure our collections are discoverable and accessible for the future.

St Ignatius students visit

A particular highlight of the past month was welcoming over 100 Year 10 students from St Ignatius College to the archives across three mornings. Sharing the story of the British Jesuits with such an enthusiastic group — even if it meant delivering the same (or nearly the same!) presentation a dozen times — was a rewarding experience. You can read more about the visit in this post on the Jesuits in Britain website.

My main focus has been reviewing and drafting a new five-year development plan for the archives. It’s been rewarding to reflect on how far we’ve come over the past five years and exciting to begin thinking about the opportunities and developments that lie ahead.

Mary Allen, Deputy Archivist:

In our last Work in Progress blog post I wrote that I had been cataloguing various collections, mostly of personal papers, and this has carried on over the summer months. This can often be a quieter time for us, with our usual visitors on their holidays, and the September closure meaning that any enquiries coming in will be put aside until October. This means I have been able to focus almost solely on cataloguing. Since May I have completed a few more small collections of personal papers of Jesuits who had died in more recent years – although these won’t open for several years (we have a 40 year closure period), it has at least cleared some accessions. I also got round to finishing a collection I began during lockdown! However my biggest achievement has been the progress I have made with the Martyrs’ Cause papers (more information about these records can be found here). I have now completed the first series, which comprises the archives of the Cause office, adding almost 300 catalogue entries to our cataloguing software, with almost 200 research files on individual martyrs currently searchable on our online catalogue, and re-packaging 29 boxes of material.

Back in May I headed to Manchester to advise on the archives held at the Holy

Name Church and give a talk on its history. It was really interesting to see what they had, including some interesting artefacts that had been uncovered during various renovations, and I spent the next couple of days writing up a report with recommendations. I am also pleased to report that the talk went well, with a good attendance and interesting discussions afterwards. More about this can be found in my blog post.

Setting up for the Holy Name talk

As mentioned we closed for the entire month of September – this is an annual occurrence that allows us to concentrate on cataloguing and cleaning the repositories. Before embarking on the cleaning allocated to me, I decided to use this quiet time to rearrange a substantial amount of boxes – clearing several shelves in one repository to make space for catalogued material which had previously been shelved in any available gaps in the other repository, putting our boxes somewhat out of order. The rest of the month was spent completing the cleaning and going through our plan chests removing items from frames to free up space for more architectural plans which will be coming to us in various accessions in the coming months.

Lucy Vinten, Assistant Archivist and Rare Book Cataloguer:

In the last Work in Progress blogpost, I described our excitement at having won funding for a PhD student from LAHP. This is a joint project with the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London, jointly supervised by Dr Michael Durrant and me, with Dr Laura Cleaver as the second academic supervisor. Since then, we interviewed several applicants, and out of a very strong field are delighted to have appointed Ted Simonds, who started his research here at the start of October. Ted has slotted into life in the Jesuit Archive with what seems like complete ease and is already getting stuck into his research. Ted will be sharing some of his research in future blog posts, so watch this space for updates.

A big win of the last few months is that I finished cataloguing the personal papers of Fr Gerry Hughes SJ, who died in 2014. I started cataloguing these papers way back in 2019, but the project got put to one side during the pandemic and its lockdowns, and then further postponed due to building works in the archive. It kept getting pushed down the priority list until I finally got back to it in the last few months, and have now –  at last, and with huge relief –  finished it.  Although now catalogued, due to the 40-year closure rule, these papers will not be available to researchers until 2054.

Charles Newdigate SJ

My other main archival cataloguing project has been the personal papers of Fr Charles Newdigate SJ, who died in 1942. I was very happy to work on his papers as he is something of a personal hero. So much of what we know about the rare books collection is thanks to his careful note-taking. Indeed many of the books in the collection are only there because of him and the care he took of them. I learned a lot about the rare books collection through working on Newdigate's archive, in particular about the movement of books between Jesuit institutions and between individual Jesuits in the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century. The collection is now available to researchers.

We have had two MA students volunteering weekly in the archive, who have been making a list of the eighteenth-century books. Lisi and Iris were studying on the 'Books that Matter' Master's course at Kings College London, and I was very happy to supervise their volunteering activities here. They produced some high-quality work and were a delight to have with us; we will miss them now that they have finished their MAs. (You can read about their experience in this blog post.) Last week we hosted this year’s cohort of the same MA course at KCL for an exhibition of rare books and we are hoping that one or two of them will want to volunteer with us in their turn and continue with Lisi and Iris’ work.

Recently I have completed a small but pleasing project which was to list and repackage all the unbound seventeenth century pamphlets. These are very fragile, ephemeral items, some just a single sheet of paper. Much of the paper is brittle and friable. The pamphlets have all been gently cleaned and individually packaged in archival folders, and are now housed in archival boxes, which should help to slow down the inevitable processes of decay.  

Jamie Hennessy Jackson, Cataloguing Archivist:

Following the completion of Beaumont College's collection, I have continued working through cataloguing the archives of some imposing Jesuit institutions both past and present. I have already written of my experience of St Beuno’s, both cataloguing their archives and attending a delightful weekend retreat in Wales, which you can read about here. I then tackled the Campion Hall, Oxford collection: whilst comparatively much smaller, cataloguing it proved a worthwhile endeavour. A visit from their Archivist Alice shortly after completion confirmed that our collection filled in some important gaps on what they held on-site, and we’re arranging to transfer over some material which they had been missing.

After a few personal paper collections here and there, some with the helpful assistance of our work experience students, in July I moved onto my biggest project yet: Heythrop College. I am currently working on “Old Heythrop”, from its establishment in 1926 near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, until its departure for London in 1970, and the archives of the London years up to its closure in 2018 will probably follow shortly after. Heythrop College was established as a “Collegium Maximum” for both Jesuit Philosophers and Theologians, taking over the mantle from Stonyhurst and St Beuno’s, and was eventually elevated to the status of "Pontifical Athenaeum" (a papal university) in the 1960s. Housed in the resplendent Heythrop Hall on some 437 acres of beautiful gardens, farmland, forest and golf course, getting to grips with this extensive collection has been equal parts challenging and rewarding. The archives encompass everything from court records (from a particularly litigious dispute with local merchants concerning damage to a bridge!) to embossing stamps, paintings, and hitch-hiking journals (or “The Apostolate of the Road”).

Engraved postcard of Heythrop Hall from a distance

Out of the office, back in May I attended the Catholic Archives Society annual conference in Headingley, Leeds. There were some insightful talks on the conference’s theme of preservation, and it was a good opportunity to meet fellow archivists from across the UK and Ireland and hear what they’d been working on. It was great getting to meet Damien Burke, Province Archivist for the Irish Jesuit Archives, and a conversation with Matthew Bruton, Archivist for the Passionists and Glenstal Abbey in Ireland, led to a video call discussing his experience using AI to transcribe 18^th century handwriting and how we might use it here. This topic came up again at the recent Religious Archives Group conference held at the London Archives, focusing on digitisation. At the opposite end of the technological advancement spectrum, I've also slowly been teaching myself Medieval Latin using The National Archives' resources among others, as this is one of the few professions where it is genuinely useful! While learning Latin cases is uniquely frustrating, I aim to stick with it over the coming months.

Archive Volunteers:

We are grateful for the invaluable contributions our incredible volunteers bring to our work. Over the past six months, Victoria, Iris, Lisi, Catherine and Lauren have assisted us in cataloguing 18th century books, digitisation projects and inputting metadata. Their dedication has contributed to our efforts, and we extend our thanks for their hard work and commitment.

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We hope you enjoyed discovering a bit about the work we are currently engaged with. Please contact us if you would like to know more about any of these areas of work.