Archive Reports

MADRAS COLLEGE ARCHIVE SUPPORT GROUP

FIRST ANNUAL REPORT - DECEMBER 2011

2. Sub-group reports:

2.1 Cataloguing sub-group
2.2 Responses sub-group
2.3 Website sub-group
2.4 Burgh School sub-group
2.5 Trophies sub-group
2.6 Oral history sub-group
2.7 Scrapbook sub-group
2.8 Glen Tilt sub-group

3. Appendices to website group report

1. Short History of the Archive Support Group

The Madras College Archive has been considerably developed during the last three or four years. It has long been known that the school possesses many interesting items that illustrate its past. There are over 7000 items of various sorts that have been retained since the foundation of the school in 1833. Until the 1990s, however, there was no catalogue of any sort, and the items - mostly books, papers, logs, photographs, magazines and trophies - were not seen as a formal archive. Mr Galloway (rector 1985-97) had commissioned Miss Mary Rust from the school office to create a catalogue of items held. Moreover, many archive items were placed in A2 document boxes then stored in a small room on the third floor of what is now the Music House. This was distinct progress although the location was cold, remote and unsuitable for constructive archive work. During session 2007-08 two senior boys, Matthew Wright and Hamish Kinnear, used some of the available resources to write several articles of interest, published in "The Citizen". Following a meeting in the summer of 2008 with the new rector, Mr Ian Jones, it was agreed that ex-rector Mr Lindsay Matheson would to take on the task of reorganising the archive. A small working group was formed that included Matthew and Hamish, who by this time had left school but who worked throughout the summer to start the reorganisation of the resources. In September 2008 an inaugural meeting of the Archive Support Group was convened comprising teachers, pupils, former teachers and former pupils, with additional support and advice willingly given by Dr Reid the senior archivist of St Andrews University. The objectives set were to create a modern catalogue using current accepted archive practice, to make the resources as widely accessible as possible, and to set up a system of responding to enquiries from outside. The support group was divided into sub-groups to tackle these tasks.

By the end of 2011 the Archive Support Group had achieved the following. All the items had been re-catalogued, initially in paper form and then electronically. Over the summer of 2009 two other senior pupils who had just left school, Michael Greig and Jamie Murphy, assisted greatly in the process of re-boxing all the paper, book and magazine materials in A4 boxes kindly donated by the university. Maia Sheridan, one of the university archivists, trained the boys for their task and Liz Higgins the school Librarian oversaw the work. The entire archive has been relocated in a ground-floor cupboard (beside Room K3) generously provided by the Social Subjects department. An archive website (www.madrascollegearchive.org.uk) has been created by Arlen Pardoe (former Principal Teacher of Computing), who commenced the formidable task of scanning and making available on this website large sections of the most interesting holdings. The Responses Group, with Arlen Pardoe's assistance, developed a formal on-line registration process for all email contacts, enabling enquiries to be handled efficiently. Christine Noble (former Administrative Coordinator) has catalogued the 170 trophies held by the school, a hundred of which are used within the current Awards system. Many new items have been added to the archive, particularly through the generosity and enthusiasm of FPs Frances Humphries, Anne Morris and Edmund Robertson. Talks and displays illustrated by some of the artefacts have been given by the chairman to Dundee University, the Madras FP Girls' Club and the St Andrews Preservation Trust. A group led by Mr Galloway and Mr Hodge has created a separate resource containing as much information as could be found about the history of the Burgh School (1889-1963). Work has begun by pupils in the English Department to interview former pupils and teachers for a file of Oral History. Support has been given to a recently-retired FP in Leicestershire, Ken Paterson, who has produced a 150-page book containing the known details about the 74 former pupils who gave their lives in WW1 and WW2. Work continues on many other aspects, including the biographies of former staff, and a system of retention of current Madras College items is being developed, so that in the future it will be possible to find out more about day-to-day school life in days gone by. In session 2010-11 an illustrated description of a year in the life of the school has been produced by a local author and a local photographer. Although much still remains to be done the Archive Support Group feels that in the last three years considerable progress has been made towards its goals of organising the resources and making them widely accessible to all who may be interested. Gratitude is felt to all those who have generously contributed items of interest during the first few years of the archive support group's existence.
A particular note of thanks is also due to Dr Ian Gilroy, rector of the school from 1975 to 1985, who took a keen interest in the work of the support group, offered much sage advice and attended meetings whenever he was fit enough to do so. Dr Gilroy died in September and at our meeting in October 2011 all present shared their personal reflections on his outstanding life, humanity and contribution to Madras College and St Andrews.

Lindsay Matheson, chairman of the Archive Support Group
December 2011

2. Sub-group reports

2.1 Cataloguing sub-group

The catalogue which Madras College Archive Group inherited consisted of a single hand-written accessions ledger, begun in the early 1990s, known as the Red Book. The Register gave a single line for each item, giving a short description and provenance of the paper materials and museum objects which made up the collection.

In 2007-8, two S6 pupils (see previous section) volunteered to create an electronic copy of this Accessions book, using Microsoft Access. They also added records of unlisted materials that had accrued, and checked for missing items.. An Archive Group was convened in September 2008, and the Cataloguing sub-group was set up.

The Cataloguing group has been given much-valued support from the staff of St Andrews University Library Special Collections Department. It was established that, once our archival material was fully catalogued, the University Special Collections Dept would house the collection of archival material (though not the artefacts), and that we would create records in our database in a format that could be uploaded onto the University's CALM database, which has sophisticated search facilities.

We needed to classify, as well as list, the collection, so Maia Sheridan and Liz Higgins (Madras College Librarian) identified the categories of information that the Archive covered, and Maia Sheridan drew up an Arrangement for us to classify our archives which was compatible with the University’s archival classification scheme. The Archive group was allocated a school computer where the catalogue is held, and an external hard-drive was purchased to backup all data.

Michael Greig, then a pupil in S6, started the process of classifying and describing the items listed in the Red Book, and moving them to specialist archival storage, generously donated by the University. Michael has continued to give time to this work since leaving Madras for University.
We are now at the stage where the books, manuscripts and the photographs in the original Red Book Catalogue have been classified and described - enlarging on the original entry- and many new acquisitions have been catalogued. We now need to revisit each category and allocate a unique final reference number to the class number. We have retained the original accession numbers for reference as an Alternative ID.

One problem with which we are faced is the limitation of the software (MS Access) which restricts the field-length in a record. This means we cannot have long descriptions or lists of names. We hope to find a way around this, but need to ensure that any database will allow direct electronic transfer of records into the University’s CALM database (which is too expensive for us to be licenced for).

As the collection becomes known more widely, we are being given more items. Keeping the cataloguing up to date is constrained by a lack of manpower. We currently have one pupil member of the Archive Group who is continuing the cataloguing for an hour a week.

Liz Higgins, Madras College Librarian

2.2 Responses sub-group

From the outset of the Archive Support Group there have been many requests and approaches to deal with. These have included personal requests for information about particular individuals associated with Madras College, both staff and pupils, requests about aspects of school life in the past such as the curriculum followed or the resources used, offers of information, offers of artefacts, books, personal diaries, and class prizes. In general terms the sub-group has attempted to respond to most of these requests at least by acknowledgement or thanks, and sometimes by providing the information sought. For the first two years, however, there was no consistent system of recording the request made and the response given. This session, with the help of Arlen Pardoe a new system has been inaugurated that enables each request to receive a unique electronic reference number so that its progress may be monitored. It is also now possible for the work of responding to requests to be carried out by sub-group members at home (or in at least one case at university). The scale of requests will continue to rise as the volume of scanned material available on the website increases. Some requests, of course, are still received in letter form. The greatest limitation to effective responding is that we do not yet have most of our material indexed or "keyworded". In the years to come this will become a major objective, and will inevitably be linked to other helpful processes in which we are engaged such as the naming of individuals on archive photographs.

Lindsay Matheson

2.3 Website sub-group

The basics of the website were set out in 2008 by a group comprising Lindsay Matheson, Hamish Kinnear, Matthew Wright and Arlen Pardoe. The contents were set out into 5 groups based on important dates in the life of Madras College. These were from endowment to the First World War; from the start of the First World War to the end of the second; from the end of the Second World War to the opening of Kilrymont Road; the final cutoff was set at 1990 to divide the large amount of more recent material available.

The site was developed over the next 6 months and in June 2009 an account was set up for the website to go live. The initial arrangement was for 2 years with a provider that had no limit on either the amount of material stored or the monthly bandwidth. Over these 2 years the first efforts were put into scanning the photographs in the archive and making them available on the website. Once most were processed the next stage was to scan and process some journals, starting with the Abbey Times and the Madras College Magazine. To date over 180 copies of the Abbey Times and over 75 copies of Madras College Magazine have been scanned and made available online.

In all cases of both documents and photographs the scans have been processed to make them more suitable for online display. T this has involved reducing them in size and cropping and enhancing the images. The original images have been kept as a high quality source for future access and reference.

During 2011 the scanning of archival material has continued: other journals in the archive; events such as plays, shows and concerts; admissions registers and prospectuses have been scanned. During the year a large amount of new material has been added to the archive from a variety of sources. These have included varied materials from Kilrymont and South Street offices and also Sports and Pupil photographs from a number of individuals obtained by direct approach and word of mouth and even via Friends Reunited.

Following work done by Ken Paterson on the memorial plaques in the South Street Quadrangle a set of pages have been added commemorating those pupils who lost their lives in World War 1 and were recorded in the Madras College Magazines. We have his final work which has yet to be processed and added to the site, but there has already been an interest in this part of the archive. Some of the archive material spanned the year classification system and so was added as special online exhibitions, including sports day programmes, rugby diaries kept by John Gilchrist and Tom Croll and the literary works of Andrew Lindsay.

Two other features were added to the site during the year: a simple search facility was added to the main index page which allows searching on text one the pages in the site, though not for text included on scanned pages. A ticketing system was set up to handle enquiries for information about the archive; a number of archive members receive these requests and can reply to them online. A record is kept of all the correspondence and once an enquiry has been dealt with the completed records are archived and the enquiry closed.

As photographic material has been added an effort has been made to include as many names as possible by reference to the donor and also by circulating the photographs amongst various individuals who were able to add to the list.

In June 2011 the account came up for renewal and a special arrangement was set up allowing another 5 years with the same provider. To date the site uses 2.5Gb of storage. The monthly bandwidth has steadily built up from up to 100Mb in 2009 to the current usage of between 7 and 11Gb throughout 2011.

Arlen Pardoe


Addendum

Apart from members of the archive group, the following are known to have helped with the donation of materials or loan for scanning and in the process of naming individuals:

Ian Docherty, Colin Mitchell, Dougie Grant, Steve Methven, Neil Gillespie, Malcolm Gillespie, Fred Mackenzie, Gus Langlands, Derek Chappel, Neil Campbell, Sinclair Murray, Cally Haines, Alan Bathgate, John Darroch, Andrew Nowak-Solinski, Jane Baird, Joy Steele, Mary Hay, Irene Redford, Mrs A Meakin, Keith Neilson, Morag Wilson, Ann Adamson, Jim Tarvet, Craig Trewartha, Elspeth Wallace, Viv Rough, Ross Napier, Ken Paterson

Appendices

1  Monthly usage
2  Last 12 months access
3  Breakdown by country, October 2011
4  Users of Maths pages

2.4 Burgh School sub-group

Since there appeared to be very little material in the Archive relating to the years between 1964, when The Burgh School became Madras College Junior High School and 1967, when the new building at Kilrymont Road opened, the Burgh School Subcommittee was formed to try to remedy this omission.

A number of people who were known to be either former pupils of the Burgh or former members of staff were approached and invited to provide memories and recollections of their time there. Although participants had complete freedom to develop their own ideas, various themes were suggested to the participants so that some common threads of information would feature in all the responses. This approach proved very successful and a number of interesting and amusing contributions were received. An appeal for further information was published in the Madras College Diary and this also produced a good response. Additional material was obtained from the files of The Preservation Trust and thanks are due to the two members of the Archive Committee who undertook this task. Some of the material predates the years of amalgamation, but it was considered appropriate to include this, as the history of both schools is now inseparably linked.

It is gratifying to report that the Subcommittee has achieved its immediate remit. There is now a substantial amount of photographic and documentary information about the Burgh School in a section of the Archive, which can be further expanded, as new material comes to hand.

David Galloway

2.5 Trophies sub-group

The aim of the group is to identify and catalogue the 170 or so trophies, medals and other items which are held by Madras College. Around 100 of these are currently used as prizes with the majority being presented to pupils annually at the The Awards Ceremony, Sports Day, the Burns Supper or the 150th Anniversary Sports Tournament. A further 70 or so are held in the Archive. There are also several other items which have been presented to Madras pupils for winning, or for taking part in, competitions organised by outside bodies and most of these are currently on display in cabinets within the school. These will also be included in our catalogue.

We are now at the stage of having approximately 90 % of the identification complete with details held on a temporary data base. Photographic evidence is also almost complete. The intention now is to transfer this information to an appropriate database together with the photographs together with any information we hold as to the origins of the items. It is also hoped to produce a hard copy of the photographs of those items currently in use to be held in the School Office for ease of identification by staff.

C Noble

2.6 Oral History sub-group

Towards the end of session 2010-11 the S5/6 Journalism Activities class began to interview some former pupils and staff with a view to collecting an oral archive of memories on CD. The member of staff who briefed and trained the first team of interviewers was Mr Jason Hynes of the English Department. Three interviews were completed. In the current session a larger group is actively involved in the second phase of this project with their teacher Miss Vicki Birmingham, also of the English Department. For both groups Lindsay Matheson joined the class for half and hour in order to explain and discuss the context and purposes of the interviews within the work of the school archive group. Catherine Macrae, one of the archive group, is also conveniently in this class.

LM

2.7 Scrapbook sub-group

A Record of notable School events was initiated in 1992 by Mary Rust, a member of the Administration Team in the South Street Office.

Originally it was designed as a Photographic Record and between 1992 and 1997 four Volumes of photographs were collated.

In 1997 it was decided to expand this aspect of the Archive and Linda Murray, another member of the South Street Team, took on the task of identifying apposite Newspaper Cuttings, drawn from the local Press, for inclusion in the Scrapbooks.

In August 2011, as she was moving to the Kilrymont Campus, Linda handed over eight volumes of Press cuttings which are a significant and important contribution to the Archive.

Two members of the Archive Group are to continue with the compilation of the Scrapbooks.

Anne Morris and Frances Humphries

2.8 Glen Tilt sub-group

I joined the Archive Group primarily with a view to looking back among the old Glen Tilt logbooks. I was a regular user of the cottage with both pupils and family from the mid to late ’70s almost to my retirement in the mid 2000s.Over the years it had always struck me that a selection of extracts from both pupils’ and teachers’ accounts might make interesting reading if produced in booklet form. Those thoughts were formed however both before retirement actually arrived and proved so very busy with other things and before the new technology provided other media to preserve logbooks.

The first fact to emerge was that the earliest logbooks in the archives ( §§ 2 710 & 2 797) date for pupils from 1984 (Special Education, 29th – 31st May) & for staff from “Midnight Saturday 10th Sept. ’83”. Both of these are issued by Tom Broom and presumably date from his taking over charge of these as AHT. Earlier logbooks must have been kept in Kilrymont Road and seem to have been lost. My own memory is that JD Wallace was in charge here with Donald Chisholm tending the actual minibuses. If they really are lost this is sad as the volumes one recalls reading while in the cottage did seem to go back to the earliest days with Dr Thompson’s socializing with the Atholl Estate factor. The archive does have an early letter referring to the lease (or whatever it was) of the cottage.

What should be done now is to consider whether one should scan all the logbooks or a selection therefrom into the archives or retype some of the extracts onto disk instead or as well. Memories of the missing years (‘60s? into ’70s) should be gathered from those of us who were involved then. Ann Bridges would be a prime source here. Extracting themes and comments can be highly entertaining as I have discovered.

Brief skimmings through the logbooks reveal that many of the entries are very similar, with regular references to walks (“A long hot drag up what seemed a vertical slope”, Margaret Latto, June,84), the weather (“Pouring rain again [is this really July]”, Alan Barclay ,’85; “GLORY HALLELUJAH!!! [sic]) – the sky is an uncharacteristic blue with a strange yellow orb in it”, Dave Mole Aug.’85), fauna (“No deer….a red squirrel…[with] the palest tail I’ve ever seen in one of these animals!”, Brian Craib, July’84), & of course Elsie (“Said goodbye to Elsie”, Iain Lochhead Oct.’84) .

The pupils’ entries are more varied in style & occasionally reveal activities probably not allowable nowadays (“We all went Abseiling of [sic] The Marble Lodge Bridge”, PE Course, May ’87; “Louise bounced down the hill we climbed like a ball while Lee just about died”,May’90). They did not always escape scot-free from this (“They took her to the hospital and she got her arm x-rayed. She had a broken arm.” June’84) .

They list the same activities: walking (“We…were exhausted when after the 8 miles we eventually reached the cottage…Then Jenny & I made a headstone for Elsie’s grave”, May ’85), eating (“Our lunch of expertly prepared potnoodles and fresh fruit to follow [great].”, May’85; “Due to the large numbers and big appetites dinner was served up in the washing-up bowls! [note: they were sterilised first]’”, June’86; “Had enormous breakfast to use up supplies, did not succeed but felt sick all the same.” Sept.’84) and drinking (“Hot Ribena was in order on reaching the bottom”, June’87) , games (“chess, cards & scrabble”, June’84; “split into two groups...to Ambush the other group”, June’85). They enjoy “telling each other Horror! Stories!.”, June’84). A ghost is suspected when “someone or something locked Lucie in Elsie” (May ’84) though a comment such as this elicits a stern red-pen gloss from Mr Broom whose instruction ad initium is for a “report NEAT, BRIEF and NON-TRIVIAL [sic]”

The river often features (“I went for a little swim, and I mean a little swim in other words our big toe dipped in for a little swim”,June’84). Tasks are mentioned (“I had to clean the cottage floor and clean out the fridge”, June’84). Electricity is installed now (“The males got up at 8, collected wood for the fire, turned on radio full volume to get females up”, Sept.’84). Animals are observed (“We saw a tame deer past Gow’s bridge….it never ran away.”, June ’85)

The cottage does not always impress at first sight (“It was much minkier then we thought [except for Elsie. We thought she’d just be an ‘Oor Wullie” bucket sitting in the back yard.]”. May ’90) . Most grow to like it however: “We want to go back again next year” (Special Department, June ’85) .”Goodbye hope you have a nice time at Glentilt Cottage.” (June’84).

What should be done now is to consider whether one should scan all the logbooks or a selection therefrom into the archives or retype some of the extracts onto disk instead or as well. Memories of the missing years (‘60s? into ’70s) should be gathered from those of us who were involved then. Ann Bridges would be a prime source here.

David Cleland