A year in the school archive
Archivist Isabel Hesketh gives an update after a year in post…
One of the highlights of the year was taking a group of former scouts from the early 1970s to see their names on a Monitor’s board in the maths corridor, just down from the school archive. It was wonderful to hear their stories and to be able to show them the archive briefly before heading back to the OMT Clubhouse for more scones. Nick Toovey (1962-1970) has kindly offered to put pen to paper to reminisce about his scouting days at Merchant Taylors’ in the 60s.
Other OMTs kindly offered contributions and donations to the archive during the OMT event: Rod Fine (1970-1976) has proposed that he catalogues the cricket scoring books, and there were four donations of other historic material, all gratefully received for the archive. In total this year, the archive has received thirteen donations from individuals, families and MTS departments. It is hoped that this number will grow next year.
One of the major projects for the next academic year is to devise a new archive catalogue which will eventually be put online, increasing access to archive material. Two students from a local girls’ school worked in the summer term to move the archive boxes into numerical order; and next term, two new volunteers will work with the archivist to organise the material within the boxes into an order that reflects the activities and structure of the school. The annual conference of the School Archives and Records Association in June presented a good opportunity to talk to fellow school archivists about the structure of their archives, and this summer holidays the archivists at Winchester College and King Edwards School, Bath will be quizzed as well. By conducting a records audit and reorganisation project, it will be easier to know what material is duplicated and what key documents are missing. The volunteers will also help to finish off cataloguing and sorting through the Everitt Collection of photographs which are being scanned by an external company. We hope to have this material available digitised and online in the autumn, via the Development department’s new website.
There has been lots of interaction with students in the archive this year: a talk about WW2 at MTS was given to U3rds to mark VE Day on 17 June 2025; students from the Lower Sixth enjoyed a session looking at linguistics in texts from the rare book collection, the Goad Library, including Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen and Sonmer's Anglo-Saxon dictionary; and the Fourths enjoyed a session called History in Your Hands whereby five archaeological objects were brought over to the Classic department for a bespoke object handling session.
In May, four students in Fourths started an archives club which met weekly in the Hour. They have begun by auditing the archaeological collection, a process whereby each item is checked against a master list and a note on condition is made. Once this is done, the archivist is hoping to rehouse some of the items into bigger boxes and to separate the items according to material and country of origin. The environmental conditions in the archive are also being monitored because some of the objects that are organic are particularly vulnerable to the effects of fluctuating relative humidity and temperature. Another student gained work experience in the archive, and recatalogued the school’s collection of antique coins. Research into the archaeological collection will continue next year.
Please feel free to contact the archivist if you have any questions about the archive. She will be back at school in September and is looking forward to another bumper year.