We are now about half way through the archives assessment; Elizabeth and Louise are having a fascinating, if filthy time.
I gave a talk to Operations Board just before Christmas at which I presented the project and explained that some of what we have is of national significance, the rest is of significance to the Lab. We have a moral obligation, possibly a statutory one too, to make this stuff available to taxpayers, to the general public, to researchers, and our own staff who are largely unaware of our history. I made the point that that the "suspect unexploded ordnance" dug up in the Autumn understandably caused great alarm to new staff until old staff explained about RAF Harwell and practice bombs. A few months later the Harwell klaxons went off as part of a site emergency exercise; that caused alarm as well: "What do you mean... nuclear incident?"
I asked Elizabeth what her impressions of the collection were so far. She said: "It's a remarkable collection," "It's the birth certificate of the Lab," "It's evidence of you as a world-leading centre of science, collaborating with the likes of NASA, CERN, and universities across the world" and "It's the story of human endeavour, not just the technological side but also the cost, the time, the delays, the successes -- the human experience." I really couldn't put it better myself.
Issues surrounding the archives and how to manage them will need to be addressed at some point but this won't be the first time that the Lab has struggled to do this. Quite by chance we came across a cassette recording of an ad hoc meeting held at Rutherford Lab on Tuesday 13th June 1978. The attendees included Elizabeth Marsh (Librarian at RL), Janet Dudley (Archivist at the Royal Greenwich Observatory), S (Stan?) Watson (SRC, Swindon Office), G Stapleton (RL), Jim Valentine (RL) and an unnamed person from Appleton Lab. We are trying to identify the voices. Elizabeth Marsh and Janet Dudley are relatively easy to spot and Janet is more softly-spoken than Elizabeth. The other voices are more difficult as the audio is fuzzy.
It has been a long, winding road but I'm delighted to say that Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has now awarded a grant for a professional archivist to make an initial assessment of the campus archives. Elizabeth Oxborrow-Cowan Associates arrived this month for 20-ish visits over the next six months to survey what we have, how much we have, what condition it's in and the significance of it all. It should be fascinating if filthy work. (Every time I apologise for the dust, archivists say "Oh don't worry -- we've seen worse." I can't decide whether this is reassuring or terrifying.)
The largest and most challenging archive we have is "stuff in the dungeon," or what used to be the Nimrod Motor Alternator Hall Basement. Originally this basement housed 16,000 tons of steel-reinforced concrete but it now holds a number of secure cages, the largest of which contains the bulk of Laboratory archives from the DSIR and SRC/SERC days (1950s to 1980s). This cage holds seven rolling stacks which in 1988 were estimated to hold 1500 boxes of 8000+ files, or 5 tons of material on 1.5km of shelving. The active addition of archive material dwindled in the 1980s but over subsequent years various other material had "arrived" including 14 filing cabinets, 80 storage boxes, 10 bays of material from elsewhere in the Lab and an old office chair.
In October 2022, in anticipation of the grant, we began exploring. But first we had to get in. The cage doors were blocked by a heavy trolley which could not be moved out of the way because of the 80 storage boxes stacked up behind it. The storage boxes could not be moved onto shelves because the pile was so large it blocked access to the handles to move the stacks. There was nothing for it; we clambered in and started shoving.
Some months later the basement was in a much better state. Boxes that were already on shelves but the wrong way round were repositioned so the stacks could be closed properly again; the 80 storage boxes were moved into empty sections of shelving; the 14 filing cabinets were relocated somewhere more appropriate; the "ISIS accelerator library" was whittled down to actual accelerator publications minus the random contents of office bookshelves and now that access had been restored Laboratory administrative groups were able to deal with the accumulation of many of their records.
It soon became apparent that we had (re)discovered a long-forgotten treasure trove of campus heritage material. We have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is in the archives but some sections have already been identified. Much of this has been scanned and is available in the "Rutherford Laboratory" and "AERE Harwell" sections of the Chilton Computing website.
Elizabeth Oxborrow-Cowan Associates
The purpose of the work by Elizabeth Oxborrow-Cowan Associates is to provide a Collections Significance Review for the archival collections (Chilton Computing, Ditton Park, Appleton, NDA/DIDO and others) held across the Harwell science campus. They need to understand the scale and significance of the collections, make recommendations for future archival storage, access and management, and for researcher access and public engagement.
In January 2025 there is a visit planned by someone from the National Conservation Service to advise on ways to make the basement more suitable for our purposes and for more general Laboratory records storage.
Harwell visitor centre (name TBD)
There is a separate but necessarily associated project concerning a Harwell visitor centre. The Rutherford/Harwell Open Week at the end of June 2024 received over 20,000 visitors, 10,000 of whom visited on the public Saturday. There is clearly an appetite for such a thing but turning a decennial(ish) event into a more permanent attraction needs considerable thought, not to mention funding. Members of the Harwell Campus Joint Venture (JV) Committee are on-board to represent all occupants of the campus both commercial, government and academic, and we have already engaged a museums and exhibitions consultant to advise on opportunities and challenges. We held our first Science Advisory Committee meeting in February chaired by Prof Frank Close and are now planning a two-year programme of events to build interest and provide validation of appetite. This nicely dovetails with the plans already being developed to celebrate the Year of Quantum in 2025, AERE Harwell's 80th anniversary in 2026 and UKRI Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's 70th anniversary in 2027.
I generalise, I know, but scientists are not good at looking backwards. They are always thinking about the next meeting, the next experiment, the next tranche of funding. There is little time for retrospection whether happily or as a "learning opportunity" so much of what we do gets done then just shoved in a cupboard. Next!
I have worked at Rutherford Laboratory since July 1989 so have seen this many times and yes, have been guilty myself of shoving stuff into a cupboard and moving on. The refurbishment and building works on site over the last few years have exacerbated this still further. Rutherford Lab is working hard to optimise its use of space so corridors of small offices are being turned into open-plan areas, papers disposed of, cupboards emptied and old equipment cleared (ie. chucked into a skip) because we simply do not have the space any more. But what better way to get new customers and employees on-board than to be able to say "We are proud of what we do here," for some departments to be able to say "We've been in this business a long time and here is what we were doing 50 years ago," and for all of us to be able to say We've been at the heart of science for more than 100 years and here is some of the memorabilia we have collected on the way?
In April 2022 I presented a paper to STFC Executive Board who were "...asked to agreed that our heritage is worth preserving, and approve the setting up of a small project team to develop the case for a heritage centre on the Harwell Campus." Our CEO had already read the paper and told me "It's a no-brainer -- we have to try to do this" so they would have had some difficulty persuading him otherwise but even so I was extremely nervous then thrilled when they agreed. (Well... they didn't say no.) We were extremely fortunate that a member of that board was from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) so suggested we talk to their Associate Director for Programmes. AHRC is not a Research Council that STFC generally deals with so this was a bit of a surprise, but turned out to be a happy one.
A year and many meetings later, AHRC are poised to launch on STFC's behalf a two-year research grant for a professional archivist to audit as much of the "old stuff" as I can find across the entire campus. This encompasses the Chilton Computing Collection created by Bob Hopgood, the Ditton Park and Appleton Laboratory Collections created by Matthew Wild and RAL Space, the infamous "stuff in the catacombs" that I inherited by accident from the Library and Estates, AERE Harwell memorabilia owned by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) in the shell of the DIDO reactor, and an ever-increasing list of pockets of stuff held by retired and nearly-retired staff either on site or in various spare rooms, home offices and sheds.
The initial aim is simply to find out what we've got. Some of the Ditton Park/Appleton Laboratory papers date back to when he was simply Mr Edward Appleton (early 1920s to 1970s), the Harwell artefacts from the AERE days (mid-1940s to 2000), the Rutherford Laboratory papers to when we were the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory (RHEL) under the National Institute for Research in Nuclear Science (NIRNS) (late 1950s to 1960s), and the Rutherford [Appleton] Laboratory (1970s to 2020s and onwards). As you can see, it is quite a considerable time frame.
The second aim is to figure out what to do next, and what to do with it all.
The Chilton Computing section of the website has been put together by Someone Who Knows because he was there. The Rutherford and Harwell sections are by no means comprehensive but do go some way towards documenting the "process of discovery of stuff," highlighting things that I find interesting (which is quite a lot), surprising (a fair bit) or just plain odd (more often than one would expect).
There is a separate project managed by Harwell Campus Management Ltd to develop a Harwell Visitor Centre. This would be focussed on companies and institutes across campus giving an opportunity for them to talk about the work and research they are doing right now. The Visitor Centre will also incorporate a heritage element describing what we were doing 40 (1970s CLF and RAL Space), 50 (1980s Informatics Department), 60 (1960s Atlas and Nimrod), 70 (1950s Rutherford High Energy Laboratory), 80 (1940s AERE Harwell), and 100 (1920s/1930s DSIR, Ditton Park) years ago. As I said, we've been at the heart of science for more than 100 years and here is some of the memorabilia we have collected on the way.
Victoria Marshall
