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The Public Record Office in Chancery Lane
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23 February 2008
14:00:00 o'clock GMT
Whilst out at Kew on Thursday, I picked up a copy of Memris, which is the newsletter of the National Archives' Medieval and Early Modern Record Information Service. Its summer 2007 edition contained an interview with David Crook, who has recently retired, about his years working in the PRO from the 1970s onwards. I was fascinated to read his reminiscences about working in Chancery Lane (and about the parties the staff held). My own recollections of the PRO go back to the mid-1950s when my father first took me there to look for information about Bishop Bonner's palace in Orsett. We did not find anything of note despite spending several hours in the Long Room reading through the indexes of what I think were the calendars of the Patent Rolls and State Papers Domestic. When I arrived there in my own right a decade later as a postgraduate from Oxford, nothing seemed to have changed: the Round and Long Rooms were just as they had been ten years before. I am afraid that I used to joke that the same people were in the same seats looking at the same documents as they had been when I was eleven or twelve years' old. My other impression, which contradicts David Crook's view, was that the Keepers had a good general knowledge of the sources in the PRO but that the people with really specialised knowledge of their contents and significance were academic historians in the universities. Who was right ? At this distance in time, it is impossible to tell but my instinct was and is that I was right.
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14:00:00 o'clock GMT
The Public Record Office in Chancery Lane
Whilst out at Kew on Thursday, I picked up a copy of Memris, which is the newsletter of the National Archives' Medieval and Early Modern Record Information Service. Its summer 2007 edition contained an interview with David Crook, who has recently retired, about his years working in the PRO from the 1970s onwards. I was fascinated to read his reminiscences about working in Chancery Lane (and about the parties the staff held). My own recollections of the PRO go back to the mid-1950s when my father first took me there to look for information about Bishop Bonner's palace in Orsett. We did not find anything of note despite spending several hours in the Long Room reading through the indexes of what I think were the calendars of the Patent Rolls and State Papers Domestic. When I arrived there in my own right a decade later as a postgraduate from Oxford, nothing seemed to have changed: the Round and Long Rooms were just as they had been ten years before. I am afraid that I used to joke that the same people were in the same seats looking at the same documents as they had been when I was eleven or twelve years' old. My other impression, which contradicts David Crook's view, was that the Keepers had a good general knowledge of the sources in the PRO but that the people with really specialised knowledge of their contents and significance were academic historians in the universities. Who was right ? At this distance in time, it is impossible to tell but my instinct was and is that I was right.
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