Cataloguing the World Netball Archive

 

Hello, my name is Tobias Leech, and I’m a  final year history student at the University of Huddersfield who has been undertaking a work placement as a cataloguing assistant for Heritage Quay.

I helped to catalogue the World Netball Archive, including everything from photographs at championship matches to trophies and sports magazines. Working with them all has been brilliant, but I especially loved cataloguing the donated photographs as they all served as their own little puzzle. It was so fun to piece together the story of the picture through nametags, articles of clothing, decorations dotted around the room or familiar faces and locations. It let me use an entirely separate set of skills I had not been able to use on my history course and made my hours spent at the archives the highlight of my week. The World Netball archive is now available for viewing here.

My time at Heritage Quay has not only been exciting and fun but also inspiring as I processed and researched the items I was cataloguing; they all began combining and correlating into a story. Across decades, people have given their lives to Netball, from playing, to refereeing, to creating and running organisations dedicated to it. Photographs of players and coaches smiling are a celebration of multiple lifetimes of hard work and perseverance. A snapshot of a player aiming to

shoot became a display of the discipline and effort these athletes went through as discussed in their interviews in newspapers, magazines and reports alike. Going through this archive gave me a new perspective on the sport I was certainly aware of but not particularly familiar with. It taught me the history of an international force built on the foundations of equality, fair play and humanitarianism.

Even better, working at Heritage Quay has given me a new appreciation of the heritage sector and a whole new understanding of how history works. I would read through an article from the 1990s, and then later see the same events discussed with hindsight

in the mid-2000s. History, and more broadly, time is always moving, and through cataloguing these items I was seeing first hand revisions and versions of history being made. When I handled official documents from World Netball, I was getting to see through their eyes what the last 30 years of progress has meant. It has been said history is written by the victors, but working at Heritage Quay has shown me it is more true that instead history is written first come first served, and that often people, organisations or other third parties will already have their thumbs on the scale. My time with the archive team has involved practical experiences as well, from handling items, cataloguing them, and wrapping and protecting larger items for storage.

Working at Heritage Quay has been fantastic, and I would recommend visiting the archive and viewing the collections (which can be found here). My time as a work placement has given me a new appreciation for archival work and for Netball as a sport and international phenomenon.

Tobias Leech, BA History Student

 

 

An Introduction to Chickens’ Lib and the Chickens’ Lib Archive

View the Chickens’ Lib Archive on our catalogue.

The History of Chickens’ Lib

In the early 1970s, Clare Druce and her mother Violet purchased four live ‘spent’ hens from an East London butcher’s shop. They took them, uninvited, to the Ministry of Agriculture’s Animal Welfare Department in Surrey, along with a reporter and photographer from the Surrey Comet newspaper. The ‘invasion’ (as the press called it) earned them a front page spread in the Surrey Comet. Over the years, they took part in further campaigns and acquired the help of other animal rights campaigners, eventually naming their small pressure group Chickens’ Lib, which later evolved into the Farm Animal Welfare Network.

Their first national support came in 1975 when they were chosen as one of the candidates for the BBC’s Open Door programme, an initiative which saw them supplied with a professional    producer and TV studio to make a short programme about the group. The programme came out live on BBC2 at peak viewing time and earned Chickens’ Lib more than 500 letters of support.

Over the years, the number of supporters grew and many well-known people in the arts, sciences and Church lent their names to their campaigns. At first Chickens’ Lib were unwelcome on the premises of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (now DEFRA), but their careful and in-depth research, and their strict adherence to non-violent activism, meant that they were often treated as experts in their field. For years they were invited to official meetings where farmed animals were being discussed.

When Violet died in 1999, aged 91, and as other members of the group were obliged to other commitments, Chickens’ Lib (now the Farm Animal Welfare Network) came to an end. Since then, many bigger pressure groups and animal charities have emerged and taken their place, but Chickens’ Lib were valuable in unearthing some of the worst aspects of animal abuse in the early days.

Archive Overview

The Chickens’ Lib Archive was donated to Heritage Quay in 2021 by Clare Druce. It contains a substantial collection of letters and campaign materials covering the history of the group from the 1970s until 2017.

Some of the many campaign documents reveal how Chickens’ Lib petitioned the Prince of Wales and the Queen about game birds, specifically cruelty in pheasant shooting (item ref: CKL/CA/1/5) and the use of bird ‘specs’ (item ref: CKL/CA/1/4). The latter documentation includes an article issued by The People with headline “Queen Bans Bird Specs!,” showing the real-world changes influenced by Chickens’ Lib.

These campaign documents also include an expert witness personal statement written by Clare Druce, highlighting her qualifications as an expert in the McDonalds libel trial of 1996 (item ref: CKL/CA/5). These documents are supported by the government correspondence (item ref: CKL/CO/1) between Druce and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which reveal how the group were thought of in high standing and were later invited to official government meetings.

The wealth of correspondence available reveals the relationship between Chickens’ Lib and international organisations, asking for assistance or advice setting up their own campaign initiatives (item ref: CKL/CO/2) from groups in the USA, Australia, South Africa and beyond.

There are also many letters and cards from their supporters and patrons (CKL/CO/3). These include celebrity supporters such as Spike Milligan, Barbara Castle M.E.P, and Joanna Lumley, as well as various members of government and the Church. There are also a large variety of marketing materials (item ref: CKL/MK) including newsletters, factsheets, posters, postcards, badges, banners, and audio-visual media.

We hold a copy of their 1975 BBC2 Open Door programme (item ref: CKL/MK/5/1/2) for which they received their first national support, and their factsheets further support their reputation as an authority on bird farming. These sheets (item ref: CKL/MK/2) include a topic index for ease of access, and cover subjects such as animal diet, disease, antibiotics, foie gras, broiler chickens, the battery hen, turkey farming and the egg industry.

Their research included site visits to battery hen farms where photographs were taken to document their findings and record living conditions. The archive contains these photographs as well as images of demonstrations, hen rescues and the group’s first uninvited visit to Whitehall in 1973 (all items ref: CKL/MK/9). There are many newspaper cuttings (item ref: CKL/PR) included in the archive, covering the demonstrations, activities, and media appearances of Chickens’ Lib, as well as support from celebrities.

The Chickens’ Lib Archive tells the fascinating story of the relentless and challenging work involved in trying to achieve even the smallest of changes, and it is now live on our online catalogue:

https://heritagequay.org/archives/ckl/

The archive is open to everyone, and appointments can be made to view items using our online booking form.

What will you discover on the Archives Hub?

We’ve recently updated a lot of the catalogue information we contribute to the Archives Hub and the Archives Portal Europe.

As of right now (!) the Archives Hub contains information about 1,439,837 archive collections in 341 different repositories across the UK. 

The Archives Portal Europe currently contains information about 270,327,385 descriptive units of archives in 7,036 institutions across Europe.

Using portals like the Archives Hub is an effective way to discover unique and often little-known sources to support your research. New descriptions are added every week, often representing collections being made available for the first time. Use the portals to instantly scan the archival landscape and bring together diverse sources held in repositories across the continent.

Whether you are just starting out or are ready to explore your subject in depth, portals can help inform your work. They represent a huge diversity of content, from the archives of industries, institutions and researchers to the letters and manuscripts of writers and poets.

You can see all our descriptions and other information on the Archives Hub at https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/locations/627a22c9-d85c-3c8a-bb43-6daed9e6aa00

HLF project update

There’s been lots of activity since I last posted about how the overall project is progressing – and still more going on behind the scenes getting the final specifications for the building works right, going through the tender process, and so on.

As well as making a lot of progress with our name and branding for the new centre, we’ve also been out to tender for conservation services to repair records that are too damaged to use without intervention, and for digitisation services to help us preserve vulnerable formats like Betamax video and audio cassette tapes, as well as digitising a selection from the collections to make them available off site.

Regular readers will have noticed, however, lots of collections updates on the blog recently – and the most exciting and tangible thing to report is our Collections Access Officers (both HLF and National Cataloguing Grants Programme) are in post and going full steam ahead on uncovering and exposing the collections entrusted to us.  Kelda’s already posted about her work so far on the Rugby League board archive and Rob on the discoveries made so far in the British Music Collection, and they’ll be posting regularly.

For me, these two pictures encapsulate a lot of what our HLF project is all about: making the collections more available, and in better facilities than those available to us at the moment (this is the Library’s seminar room, used for a couple of hours in between teaching so that Kelda & Rob can spread material out to sort it):

Kelda Apr 2014
Kelda working on rugby league

Rob Apr 2014
Rob working on the composer files from the British Music Collection

 

Collections Information Policy

The Service has recently completed drafting our first Collections Information Policy.  This focusses on the provision of intellectual access to collections, both by users and by staff for management purposes.  It will assist the Service in decision making and prioritising work in a range of circumstances, including:

  • Providing access to the holdings which is balanced with their long-term preservation and legislative requirements;
  • Cataloguing work by staff and volunteers;
  • The submission of funding bids with a cataloguing and information enhancement aspect.

If you would like to comment on the draft Collections Information policy please leave a comment on this blog page, or email archives@hud.ac.uk.  The policy consultation period will close on Friday 13th December 2013.