Borthwick Newsletter - August 2025

Posted on 31 July 2025

Welcome to the Borthwick's August newsletter.

August in the Archives - delve into our catalogues with this month’s featured description.

Transcript of a lecture on ‘The Woman Alone’ by Frau Dr. Liselotte Nold, delivered at the Consultation of the Commission on the Life and Work of Women in the Church, at Lake Forest, Illinois, on 13 August 1954 [Papers of Dame Christian Howard, CHOW/2/8/2]

What’s New?

July has been a relatively quiet month on campus but a typically busy one for us. As well as launching a brand new Borthwick Podcast, we’ve been hosting onsite events, completing new catalogues, and prepping a forthcoming pop up exhibition on the life of Joseph Rowntree. Visitors might also notice one or two small additions to the searchroom reception. With the closure of King’s Manor we have inherited a beautiful wooden lectern which belonged to Professor George Garmonsway. The lectern was given to the university in the 1970s, along with a set of Professor Garmonsway’s notes on Anglo-Saxon history, and it will be used in future to display each new Archive of the Month. Close by you can find the answer to a very frequently asked question at the Borthwick - what’s with the pig? If you haven’t spotted the answer in our searchroom, you can find out below!

Poster explaining the origins of the Borthwick Pig in a sketch of a wooden boss made by Canon Purvis at our old home, St Anthony's Hall, York

New Accessions

We accepted 12 accessions in July, 8 of these being additions to the University of York Archive. These include recent university prospectuses, handbooks and teaching materials from the Department of History, and photographs of the first phase of the building of the Heslington East campus from 2009 onwards. We’ve also added further records to the archive of the Goon Show Preservation Society, including a performance script for ’The Caine Mutiny’ sketch written by Galton and Simpson; and another Rowntree Mackintosh vinyl LP, this time ‘The Magic of Love’ from the 1970s, featuring the theme tune for the Black Magic chocolate assortment and a variety of other romance themed hits.

Finally we received a very interesting deposit relating to the career of a nurse and occupational therapist who worked at Claypenny Hospital from the 1960s to the 1990s. As well as papers concerning training, copies of codes of professional conduct, and administrative papers, the small archive includes Claypenny’s ‘Philosophies of Care’ and a number of annotated photographs and press cuttings relating to work and social activities at the hospital. Once catalogued, the archive will be added to our York Health Archives Private Deposits which already contains a range of fascinating additions dating from 1722 to the present day.

New Catalogues

Number of archival descriptions on Borthcat on 1st August 2025: 143,453

You can read all about our new Yvonne Mitchell Archive in our Archive of the Month feature below, but that’s not the only addition to Borthcat this past month. We have also added the catalogue for the parish archive of Westow and of Holme on Spalding Moor. Westow only just pips Holme on Spalding Moor to have the earliest record of the two, with a parish register beginning in 1549 to Westow’s 1559. It was a fairly eventful ten years for the church, passing as it did from the reign of the Protestant Edward VI in 1549, through the restoration of Catholicism under Mary I and into the first year of the reign of (the much less Catholic) Elizabeth.

As with last month’s catalogue for the parish of Birkin with Haddlesey, it is sometimes the incidental survivals that are the most interesting. The Overseers’ of the Poor accounts for Westow includes a 1789 entry for putting George Wilson in the town stocks for four hours on a February afternoon.

Account of the punishment meted out to a resident of Westow who spent four hours in the stocks for refusing to pay a fine in 1789.

According to the clerk, the parish curate had reported George for spending an hour in an ale house kept by Jeffrey Richardson (in which time, the clerk notes rather disapprovingly, he spent no more than sixpence). Both the men were fined but only Jeffrey paid up, leading to George being placed ‘in the common Stocks of the said Town’ - although it was not thought much of a punishment as ‘the neighbours were very kind to him.’ The entry concludes that not even the oldest person then living ever remembered anything of the kind!

Borthwick Out and About

We started July by looking to the future with a talk on archives and archival careers for the pupils of St Paul’s School in Holgate, delivered by Research Services Archivist Lydia Dean. We had a very busy day on the 3rd, with a class for PGCE History students on using archival sources for teaching, hosted by Access and Digital Engagement Archivist Laura Yeoman, followed in the afternoon by the ‘Celebrating Spaces’ event. The event, which drew 45 visitors to the searchroom, was designed to give staff and students from across the university the chance to see some of our archives and learn more about what we do.

Records from our Bootham Park and Retreat Hospital archives were also used to support three sessions of the Mentally Fit York programme across the month, including another ‘Walk of Alfred’ based on the detailed diaries of Retreat patient Alfred Smith. Alfred’s diaries can be read for free online, if you fancy recreating his walks for yourself! The end of the month found us at History Day North at Durham, part of the annual DCDC Conference, with our usual stall, leaflets, pencils and enthusiasm for answering any and all questions about our collections.

Finally, we also launched a brand new podcast series of Borthwick Papers in July. The Borthwick has been publishing pamphlets and books since the early 1950s through St Anthony’s Press (named after our original home in the city centre). In fact the first St Anthony’s publication was in 1951, two years before we opened to the public! Since then we’ve published 133 Borthwick Papers on the history of Yorkshire and the North of England, from medieval priories to the campaigns of the Chartists and the Suffragettes. Many of these pamphlets are still available to buy in the searchroom or through our website, but we are now bringing the series to a global audience as a Borthwick Podcast. Our first episode is available now - follow the link to hear Stan Young read his paper on the ‘Life, Letters and Legacy of Noel Terry’, which draws on the extensive family correspondence gifted to the Borthwick by the Terry family in 2023.

Screen capture from The Rowntree Society's website

Looking ahead to August, we will be hosting a pop-up exhibition on the 8th on the life and legacy of Joseph Rowntree, part of the celebrations for his centenary year. From 11am until 1pm you can drop by the Yorkshire Room in the Raymond Burton wing of the Morrell Library to view a range of original archival documents from the Rowntree family archives. We are all familiar with the white haired Joseph, noted philanthropist and successful businessman, but his personal archive and that of his family can tell us so much more about his journey from apprentice at a busy grocery shop on Pavement to the celebrated head of the Rowntree company and trusts.

If you’re in York on the 9th you can also drop into the York Army Museum's Military Memorabilia Day, where our Access & Digital Engagement Archivist, Laura Yeoman, will be manning the Borthwick stand. Bring along your archives, photographs and questions to put to a range of experts from regimental museums, local archives, historical societies and regimental associations. This is a great chance to discover your family’s military history for free. Drop in and chat to specialists, find out how to research your military ancestors, bring in objects, documents, medals or memorabilia you’d like to know more about and we’ll be very happy to help. There is no need to pre-book, and we'll be there from 10am to 3pm!

Archive of the Month: Yvonne Mitchell Archive

What is it? The archive of British actress and writer Yvonne Mitchell (1915-1979).

Where can I find it? The archive has been fully catalogued and can be searched on Borthcat.

Why is it Archive of the Month?

If you were a cinema-goer in 2018 you might have seen the film ‘Colette’ starring Keira Knightley, which told the story of the titular Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, the French author, actress and journalist whose work had entertained (and sometimes scandalised) Europe in the first half of the 20th century. But you might not know that the first English language biography of Colette was published by actress Yvonne Mitchell in 1975, or that in the same decade she translated two of Colette’s famous ‘Claudine’ stories from the French for radio and wrote and starred in her own one-woman play, ‘An Evening with Colette’, which followed the titular Colette from youth to old age.

Photographs of the actress and writer Yvonne Mitchell

Today, Mitchell is perhaps best remembered for her award-winning television and film work. She won a BAFTA for her role as Sonja in ‘The Divided Heart’ in 1954 and in the same year played Julia to Peter Cushing’s Winston Smith in the first BBC adaptation of Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. In 1956 she was the sympathetic prison guard watching over Diana Dors’ condemned murderess in ‘Yield to the Night’; a very different role to that of Amy in ‘Woman in a Dressing Gown’ the following year, a film since heralded as an early example of the ‘kitchen sink realism’ popularised in the 1960s. All of this work is well represented in her archive, whether through the survival of annotated scripts, photographs, publicity materials or press notices.

But perhaps less well known is her long and acclaimed career on stage and as a writer, playwright and novelist. As well as ‘An Evening with Colette’, Mitchell’s 1951 wartime play ‘Here Choose I’ (later renamed ‘The Same Sky’) was produced for the stage, radio and television. She wrote the script for a BBC documentary on the Venus de Milo as well as a range of unproduced scripts on everything from the trial of Mata Hari to a modernised King Lear and a one-person stage show about the Devil in literature which was later produced in the 1990s as ‘Speak of the Devil’.

In fact, if the surviving archive shows anything, it is that Yvonne Mitchell was a woman bursting with creativity and with a need to write, whether the results made it to print or not. Very often they did. Her short stories appeared in newspapers and magazines and she also published novels for children and adults. If you were a child of the 1970s you might remember a book about seven small cats called ‘But Wednesday Cried’, or perhaps you read ‘Cathy Away’ or ‘Cathy at Home’.

Drafts and rough illustrations for the children's book 'But Wednesday Cried', published in 1974

As an adult you might have picked up ‘Martha on Sunday’, ‘God is Inexperienced’, ‘Fables’, or ‘But Answer Came There None’, the latter tackling themes of old age, illness and death. There are also outlines for stories never realised (whether plays or novels), partial and completed poems, pen and pencil sketches, and a host of articles on various aspects of drama training and the life of an actor in the 1940s-1970s, a theatrical world Mitchell was all too familiar with.

Together, the archive provides a small but fascinating insight into the life and achievements of a multi-talented actress and author whose premature death in 1979 cut short a varied and still very active career.

We’ll be back in September with more news and events from the archives!