As an Archives Assistant with the V&A Archive, I spend a lot of my time working with files.
There are thousands of files in our institutional archive, dating from Victorian times to the present. They were used to document many activities at the V&A, from the acquisition of objects to putting on exhibitions and day-to-day operations.
Our files are valuable sources of information about the past, but I am also fascinated by them as unique objects rich in visual detail.
I love their handwritten titles and letters, and the layers of stamps and scrawled notes in different colours. Their slightly messy, organic look really appeals to me – partly because it is such a visual contrast to the clean design of the digital world.
I find that in museums we often talk about archives and objects as if they were separate things. It can be easy to forget that paper archives are objects as well as documents and sources of information. For me, materiality is one of the joys of working with archives: the feel, texture and look of paper, cardboard, ink, metal, plastic.
The file is also a designed object, an information storage technology from a paper-based past. It allowed important knowledge to be stored and transported from person to person long before the computer. Files and filing systems became essential to organisations and states in a modern world defined by the need to manage information on a vast scale.
Our archive includes the original card index for the files held within the V&A’s registry – a very analogue way to search! It’s organised alphabetically by subject, so you can flick through and find files on all kinds of topics from ‘Appreciations’ to ‘Bread Rationing’ and ‘Locks & Keys’. The sheer number of handwritten cards reminds me how much manual work went into making our files searchable before digital databases existed.
I sometimes think of the file as a scruffy cousin of the book. Like the book, a file collects words and ideas on a particular topic within a cover or binding. Unlike the book, papers can be added to or removed from a file at any time during its working life. It is an evolving collection of papers: ideas, communication, stories.
(That said, our archival files often bear stern instructions to staff not to add or remove papers themselves!)
And I find that reading through an archival file can feel like reading a book. Most files are arranged chronologically, allowing you to follow the events and conversations – like a real-life epistolary novel. Often there are gaps where you don’t get to find out what happened. This can be both frustrating and fascinating.
There are usually recurring characters, whose letters and notes appear throughout the file. Some letters are incredibly vivid and almost literary in the way they narrate the writer’s experiences and thoughts. I recently came across an incredible letter from March 1941 where V&A Director Eric Maclagan describes a night spent firefighting at the Museum as the bombs fell.
“I wish I could give you some idea of what the scene was like when I came round from my house shortly after nine o’clock. The whole of one end of the roof of one of the Cast Courts was ablaze and burning beams of wood kept on falling with loud crashes on to the floor…
… Once the big fire in the roof of the Cast Court had been got under, the water became much more alarming than the flames. We were wading sometimes ankle deep in the passages and a cascade of water mixed with lumps of charred wood was pouring down the staircase in the Secretariat.”
(Letter from Eric Maclagan to Sir Maurice Holmes, 10th March 1941. V&A Archive, ED 84/264)
These letters remind me that our archives are the records of people as well as the records of the V&A as an organisation. People and their experiences, their idiosyncrasies, their beliefs, their highs and lows. Even in an institutional file, all these things can come through very strongly as you read.
