HC Deb 06 March 1978 vol 945 cc1185-96

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Jim Marshall.]

2.10 a.m.

Mr. Robert Rhodes James (Cambridge)

It is unusual for an hon. Member to have the opportunity of raising in this House a matter which is of concern to him personally and professionally, in addition to his constituency interest, and although the subject which I am raising at this late hour at first sight appear to be somewhat recondite, it has implications and significance which go beyond this particular episode.

Early in 1977, the Treasury accepted, in partial settlement of the estate of the late Duke of Marlborough, the Blenheim archive, which consists of a very substantial quantity of the papers of John, first Duke of Marlborough, and including the Sunderland papers.

In April 1977, libraries and archive centres were invited to apply for consideration by the Minister for the Arts—who in such matters seeks the advice of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts—for custody of this uniquely important collection. On 12th April 1977, immediately after this announcement, application was made by Churchill College, Cambridge.

Churchill College, which was established as a living memorial to Sir Winston, possesses an archives centre which was opened in 1973 and which contains the most modern facilities for the safe storage and use of historical documents. It is a purpose-built archive centre, with the most advanced protection against fire and theft, air-conditioned and humidity-controlled, with a special fumigation for the safe destruction of fungal infestation of documents. It also possesses a comprehensively equipped conservation workshop and a full-time conservationist of very high reputation, whose preservation work, particularly on damaged documents, is of outstanding quality.

The centre has a keeper, a full-time qualified archivist and graduate assistant, and a secretary, in addition to the conservationist, and full supporting facilities cient, dedicated and widely respected one. If it is a small unit, it is a highly effi- Its facilities are outstanding, and its staff is devoted to the administration of the archive and its service to scholars.

The archive contains the voluminous papers of Sir Winston, his father, Lord Randolph, and a considerable number of the papers of John, first Duke of Marlborough. These include some 1,200 original Marlborough documents collected by Sir Winston while he was researching his biography of his ancestor, and presented to Churchill College by Lady Churchill, and also the highly important correspondence between Marlborough and Antonie Heinsius, grand pensionary of The Netherlands during the war of the Spanish succession. These papers were the gift of Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Government to Sir Winston in gratitude for his unforgettable services to the cause of Dutch liberation.

The archive also contains the papers of General Thomas Erie, one of Marl-borough's most trusted officers. This represents a major collection in itself of the Marlborough papers. Among its more modern collections are papers on Lord Attlee, Lord Swinton, Lord Slim, Lord Esher, Lord Hankey, Lord Van-sittart, Reginald McKenna, Sir Edward Spears and—a most satisfactory renewed liaison—Mrs. Virginia Crawford and Sir Charles Dilke. But the gems of the collection are, obviously, the papers of the first Duke, Lord Randolph, and Sir Winston, kept in one archive under perfect conditions in the college that bears their name and commemorates three centuries of brilliant service to this nation by one extraordinary family.

It was the wish of the present Duke and Lady Churchill that the Blenheim archive should join this collection in Cambridge. Indeed, Lady Churchill felt so deeply about the matter that she joined me in a public letter to The Times and she wrote privately to the Prime Minister. Among others who pressed the case for Cambridge were Mr. Harold Macmillan, Sir John Colville, Professor J. H. Plumb and my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford (Mr. Churchill), who is unable to be present at the debate tonight but has asked me to emphasise his personal and family concern about this matter.

Although the decision in such matters is technically that of the Secretary of State for Education and Science, effectively it is that of the Minister for the arts, who in his turn is advised by the Royal Commission on Historical Documents. I believe that that excessively complex chain was at least partly responsible for the subsequent confusion and for the extraordinary decision made by the Minister that the papers should be sent to the British Library in London.

Having invited representatives of the Department of Education and Science and the Commission to visit the centre, Churchill College was surprised and concerned to receive no reply to its application apart from a single printed card of acknowledgement. When a member of the Commission visited Churchill in July 1977, six days before the Commission met to consider the matter, he emphasised that he was doing so informally. It became evident that he was unclear on certain vital and fundamental aspects of the Churchill application.

When the college raised the matter with the secretary of the Commission, Mr G. R. C. Davis, the eminent former deputy keeper of manuscripts at the British Library, it was informed that a member of the Commission staff had recently visited the archive. In fact, the visit was paid over a month before the public announcement of April 1977 and was again entirely informal and casual in nature.

It should be said at this point that a major misunderstanding seems to have arisen between the Commission and the DES. The Commission says that its role is purely advisory and that it is not entitled to be in direct contact with applicant institutions. How it is to evaluate their merits without such contact is to me inexplicable. For its part the DES firmly states that the processing of applications lies in the hands of the Commission. In any event, no representative of the Department, let alone the Minister responsible for the decision, has visited Churchill or has been in contact with it except in response to telephone calls.

As this curious proceeding has taken so long and so mysterious a course, I asked the Minister to meet a deputation consisting of myself, the Duke of Marl-borough, Sir John Colville, my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford, Profes- sor Plumb and representatives of the college on 24th January, the day of Lady Churchill's memorial service. On 19th January I was informed that the decision was to be announced on 23rd January. In the event it was made on 25th January. There was accordingly no point in the Minister meeting the delegation.

I assure the Minister of State that I do not want to make any particular point about this, but it seemed unfortunate that the decision was announced in the week of Lady Churchill's memorial service and that it was not possible for the Minister for the arts to delay the decision until he had heard the distinguished delegation.

In his announcement of 25th January the Minister said that he had been particularly influenced by the advice of the Commission that the cataloguing, arrangement and scholarly use of the Blenheim archives will require constant reference to and close comparison with other papers of the period already held by the British Library. That statement could not have been made by a scholar and certainly not by anyone with any personal experience of working in the manuscript department of the British Library. The advantages of having the complete archive of the first duke in one site far outweighs the quite illusory asset of "constant reference" to other papers. The Minister's argument is untenable in historical, scholastic and practical terms.

The Minister went on to say: I have also been impressed by the scale of the resources required for the proper cataloguing and conservation of the collection. By that he means that he is impressed by the resources of the British Library as he has not discovered those of Churchill College.

What are the resources at the British Library? I refer the House to a devastating recent article by Mr. Nicholas Barker, the new head of conservation at the British Library, in The Times Literary Supplement of 18th November 1977, entitled "Blight in Bloomsbury", in which he rightly relates the lamentable conditions for the preservation of books and papers in the library, and concludes that The crisis can only be resolved by an increase in trained conservation staff, and by the provision of proper conditions for the storage and use of all the different kinds of material in the British Library ". Mr. Barker's strictures are fully merited. The British Library does not have air-conditioned or humidity-controlled storage facilities. It does not have adequate staff. Its record in preparing catalogues, in which it has made promises to the Minister which seem to me impossible to fulfil, is poor. The collections themselves are deteriorating. None of this is secret or new information. Indeed, the crisis to which Mr. Barker refers—and such it is—is spelt out clearly and starkly in the annual reports of the Library since 1973, and they make dismal reading. I shall quote only from the 1976–77 report: Strenuous efforts are being made to reduce the cataloguing backlog … The problem of how to best to conserve the priceless collections in the care of the Library while making them available for study to present and future readers has been the subject of a major review. It is clear that substantial additional resources will be required over a considerable period in order to halt the progressive and accelerating deterioration of the collections. All the evidence at my disposal makes me profoundly doubtful whether the British Library is technically capable at present of handling the collection in anything approaching the matter which Churchill College can, and the Duke of Marlborough has authorised me to express his considerable concern on this aspect.

I should like now to put two questions to the Minister. Is it correct that the board of trustees of the British Library had never been consulted or made a collective decision about either the application or the acceptance? Secondly, can the Minister confirm the points that I have made about facilities at the British Library?

I am asking for this decision to be at least reviewed, and at best reversed. What it means is that the wishes of the Churchill family—including what was virtually the last wish of Lady Churchill—have been ignored; that the papers of John, first Duke of Marlborough, will have been split up permanently, to the great detriment of scholars and scholarships: that these papers have been entrusted to an institution which does not at present possess the proper facilities for their conservation: and that the archive centre that is most qualified and is most appropriate has had its claims virtually unconsidered.

There is no case, in terms of scholastic value or practicality, for the Min- ister's action. It would, indeed, be a national tragedy if the papers were thus to be divided and for the concept of the Churchill archives—complete, and meticulously maintained—to be damaged so severely by this ill-considered and indefensible decision.

I should like to conclude on a personal note. As the youthful biographer of Lord Randolph Churchill and of Lord Rosebery, and who played some part in ensuring that the Rosebery papers remained in Scotland, I do not accept the proposition that great collections should necessarily be in London. The Rosebery papers belong to Edinburgh and the Chamberlain papers to Birmingham. Ideally, the Churchill papers should be housed either at Blenheim or Chartwell, but the fact is that the vast bulk of them are now in Churchill College, in my constituency. I appeal to the Minister, and to the House, that this unique collection should be housed in one place, in the building created as a memorial to that family, where it would be complete, and where it would be treasured and preserved for all time.

I am deeply obliged to the Minister for attending this debate. I am sure he will understand that I am making rather more than a constituency appeal to him.

2.23 a.m.

The Minister of State, Department of Education and Science (Mr. Gordon Oakes)

I am certain that the hon. Member for Cambridge (Mr. Rhodes James) is making much more than a constituency approach to this matter, and I am grateful to him for having raised this matter on the Adjournment.

I agree with everything that the hon. Gentleman said about Sir Winston being a great leader of this nation at a time when we were in peril. What we are concerned with, and what the Government are concerned with, is not the papers of Sir Winston but those of his ancestor—papers that originated at a time when the nation was in jeopardy many hundreds of years ago.

In a way, this debate breaks new ground. It could not have taken place a few years ago. While provision for works of art to be offered and accepted in satisfaction of tax liabilities on death has existed since 1956, it was only with the passing of the 1973 Finance Act that this became possible in respect of books and manuscripts. The Blenheim collection, which is the subject of this debate, is, in fact, the very first collection of manuscripts accepted under the extended provitions of the 1973 Act which have been referred to my Department for a decision on their allocation.

For a collection to be so accepted in payment of the whole or part of any tax liability, the Government must be satisfied that it is pre-eminent for its national, scientific, historic or artistic interest". The standard is, therefore, very high and by no means all objects offered in settlement of tax liability are accepted. Once an article is accepted and payment for it made from the National Land Fund, it rests with the Minister responsible for the arts in England, Scotland or Wales—the country in which the tax liability arises—to decide to which appropriate public collection it should be assigned.

The basic principle of allocation is that the article should go to the most appropriate public collection, whether national local authority or university. Where the allocation of books or manuscripts is concerned, the appropriate Minister, in reaching his decision, needs to have regard to such factors as the relevance of the article to a particular collection, the adequacy of resources available for cataloguing, conservation and protection, accessibility to scholars and, where applicable, the wishes of executors or testators, though such wishes cannot be regarded as overriding. The Government, as purchaser, must have the final say on the allocation of the property.

Although the decision is a ministerial one, it will be obvious that to help him to arrive at a decision of this sort the Minister needs to have access to expert and authoritative advice. In the case of manuscripts, advice is sought from that august body, the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, while a special panel of experts has been constituted under the chairmanship of Mr. Howard Nixon, librarian of Westminster Abbey library, for the specific purpose of advising on the allocation of printed books.

Turning now to the subject of the present debate, no one, I am sure, would doubt the pre-eminence of this collection of papers, known as the Blenheim archives, which formed part of the estate of the tenth Duke of Marlborough. It has been described authoritatively as indisputably an archive of the greatest national and historical importance". The collection is a very large one amounting to some 30,000 documents and falls broadly into three main groups.

One group comprises personal and official papers of John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. They include letters relating to his various campaigns, as well as letters from Royalty, politicians and other important persons of the time. Then there are papers relating to his wife Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Groom of the Stole and Keeper of the Privy Purse to Queen Anne. These include letters between her husband and herself, letters from Queen Anne to her and many letters to her from nearly every contemporary person of consequence. Also included in the collection are papers relating to the history of the building of Blenheim Palace.

I understand that a good deal of cataloguing and skilled repair work remains to be done to bring the collection into satisfactory final shape, but there can be no doubt about its being one of outstanding national importance, representing, as it does, an important source for the national, political and military history of the period.

The collection was offered to, and accepted by, the Government in satisfaction of estate duty at the cost of £342,300 to the National Land Fund. The offer was made unconditionally, and without any wishes being expressed as to its allocation. My noble Friend the Minister responsible for the arts then had the task of deciding on the most suitable ultimate destination for the collection and, as a first, but important step, he looked at the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts for advice.

I should like to pay tribute to Lord Denning, chairman of the Commission, and his colleagues, who include a number of distinguished historians, for the very great care and thoroughness which they gave the matter. Five institutions made bids for the collection. These were the British Library, Churchill College, Cambridge, the Bodleian, Oxford, the Public Record Office and the National Army Museum. The claims of each received close consideration by the Commission, but, in the end, its unanimous—I repeat, unanimous—recommendation was that the collection should, in the interests of scholarship and learning, be lodged with the British Library.

The Commission was in no doubt that the primary and central relevance of the whole collection is overwhelmingly to national rather than to family or local history. The British Library is, of course, the central national collection of manuscripts and already has a formidable holding of material closely related to the Blenheim papers. These include most notably the papers of Marlborough's contemporary, Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, the correspondence of Sidney Godolphin, first Karl of Godolphin, and of Marlborough's secretary, Adam Cardonnel. Also the British Library has long been regarded as the main archive relating to the building of Blenheim in the form of papers and correspondence of Henry Joynes, one of the comptrollers of works there. The Commission considered that the close proximity of these papers to the Blenheim collection would be of inestimable value to scholars researching the period providing, as it would, an extremely wide range of related contemporary material.

In reaching its recommendation, the Commission certainly was not unmindful of the merits of the cases put forward for Churchill College and for the other applicants. Nor was it unmindful of the fact that, while no wishes had been expressed about its allocation at the time the collection was offered in lieu of estate duty, various members of the Churchill family, including the late Lady Spencer-Churchill, the present Duke and the hon. Member for Stretford (Mr. Churchill) had subsequently indicated that Churchill College was their choice. While such wishes were most certainly taken into account, the Commission felt that greater weight must also be attached to the other factors that I mentioned earlier.

The Commission had regard to the fact that the chosen area of specialisation of the Churchill College archives centre was late nineteenth certury as well as twentieth century political, military, and scientific papers, including, of course, the papers of Sir Winston Churchill himself. The three collections of seventeenth to eighteenth century historical papers that the college holds are understood to be quantitatively of lesser importance and might be held to be historically isolated. They do not compare with the very extensive collection of papers for the period which, as I have previously stated, is already in the possession of the British Library and which makes that library, in terms of printed as well as manuscript material, the principal national centre of research for the political history of the period in question.

Thus, the overwhelming recommendation of the Commission was for the collection to be allocated to the British Library. It does not follow, of course, that my noble Friend was obliged to follow the advice given to him by the Commission, though admittedly he would need to have strong and valid grounds for disregarding the advice of such an eminent and authorative body, particularly when that advice was unanimous and so firmly stated. Nevertheless, I assure the hon. Gentleman that my noble Friend did give very close and careful consideration to the Commission's recommendation and to the reasons underlying it before satisfying himself of its soundness. As he said when announcing his decision in another place on 25th January, he was, in particular, influenced by the Commission's advice that the cataloguing, arrangement and scholarly use of the Blenheim archives will require constant reference to and close comparison with other papers of the period already held by the British Library and also by the scale of the resources required for the proper cataloguing and conservation of the collection, comprising, as it does, about 30,000 documents. I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman said about conditions within the British Library and it not being able properly to care for such a collection.

My noble Friend has also placed considerable store on the assurance given both to the Commission by the British Library and to himself personally by Lord Eccles, chairman of the British Library Board, that, if the library were to acquire these papers, an immediate and sustained major effort would be made to ensure access by scholars to the collection at the earliest possible moment. The House will, I know, appreciate the importance of this assurance. A detailed catalogue with index is expected to be available for scholars visiting the Library in about 18 months and to be published in 1980.

I appreciate the disappointment felt by those who wanted to see the collection deposited with Churchill College. But I think there can be no denying that my noble Friend's decision to assign the collection to the British Library has been widely welcomed. I hope that what I have said will have made it clear why, when account is taken of all relevant circumstances, it was considered to be in the best interests of the nation and in particular of scholarship to allocate the collection to the British Library.

2.38 a.m.

Mr. Rhodes James

With the leave ol the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I thank the Minister of State for that reply, but he will not be surprised that I am disappointed with it and that I contest some of the points that he made.

The hon. Gentleman did not answer my question whether the British Library Board had been consulted over the issue of facilities. The criticisms of the facilities which I quoted came from an article written by the head of conservation and from reports of the British Library itself. I cannot accept that the Library is able to give safe treatment to or provide proper facilities for these documents.

I genuinely thank the Minister for his reply to the debate, but I have to give notice that I shall not let the matter rest there.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty-one minutes to Three o'clock a.m.