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Churchill Archives Centre

The Churchill Archives Centre (CAC) is one of the largest repositories in the United Kingdom for the preservation and study of modern personal papers. It is best known for housing the Churchill Papers, the massive archive of Sir Winston Churchill, as well as the private papers of Baroness Thatcher. Yet it also holds a whole range of political, diplomatic, military and scientific collections, capturing many of the great personalities of the modern era, including: Ernest Bevin, Enoch Powell, Lord Kinnock, Sir John "Jock" Colville, Lord Hankey, Admiral Lord Fisher, Field Marshal Lord Slim, Sir John Cockcroft, Sir James Chadwick, Professor Lise Meitner, Dr Rosalind Franklin and Sir Frank Whittle.

Located in the grounds of Churchill College, Cambridge, England, itself the National and Commonwealth Memorial to Sir Winston, the Centre has been awarded ‘Designated’ status by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. It is open to the public and welcomes enquiries about its collections. The mission of the Centre is twofold: to preserve the collections in its care so that they can continue to inform the debates of future generations, and to strive to make those collections as accessible as possible.

Holdings

Collections

Although it is the papers of Sir Winston Churchill that give the Churchill Archives Centre its name, this institution houses more than simply Churchilliana; nor is it limited simply to the papers of politicians and statesmen like Churchill. Instead, the nearly 600 collections at the Archives Centre are delightfully diverse, containing the records of lives lived as soldiers, sailors and airmen, journalists, reformers and activists, public servants, diplomats, physicists, chemists and biologists, not to mention as the wives, mothers, fathers, siblings, and children of these figures. Between them, the collections span the world, offering a multiplicity of perspectives of twentieth-century history.

Subjects

This range in the nature of the collections means that a similarly wide array of subjects can be explored through them. For instance, most aspects of the Second World War can be traced in the archives, while records pertaining to both the birth (with Churchill’s so-called Iron Curtain Speech) and death of the Cold War are found in CAC archival boxes.

In addition to serving as a valuable resource for military, political, and diplomatic history as well as the study of international relations, the collections at the Churchill Archives Centre are as relevant for research into aspects of social and cultural history, colonialism, as well as labour, science, and women’s history. This is particularly true of these themes as they pertain to the British context, with countless files of letters from constituents, correspondents, fans and opponents to political, military and scientific personalities, not to mention their own letters penned to family and friends, as well as personal diaries and scrapbooks. Many such series read like an issue of National Geographic as diplomats, secretaries, journalists, and society wives travelled the world photographing and noting down their experiences.

Types of documents

The collections at the Churchill Archives Centre include speeches, memoranda, reports, minutes, letters, postcards, diaries, appointment books, telegrams and memoirs, diagrams, maps, sketches and doodles, audio and video recordings, and photographs. The Archives Centre attempts to preserve these whilst rendering them accessible to the public.

The collections include

Examples of a few of the many figures, events, themes or broader topics in CAC's holdings:

People

Politicians	Scientists	Diplomats & Civil Servants	Military/Intelligence	Various
Winston Churchill	Frank Whittle	Nicholas O'Conor	Alexander Denniston	Clementine Churchill
Margaret Thatcher	Lise Meitner	Percy James Grigg	Jackie Fisher	William Deakin
Enoch Powell	John Cockcroft	Alexander Cadogan	William Slim	William Thomas Stead
Florence Horsbrugh	James Chadwick	Jock Colville	William Reginald Hall
Maurice Hankey	Rosalind Franklin
Ernest Bevin
Neil Kinnock

Events & Broader Topics

Political	Scientific	Military	Various
Appeasement	Jet Engine	Yalta Conference	Eliza Armstrong Case
UK General Strike of 1926	Nuclear Fission	Battle of Gallipoli	Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Iron Curtain

Access

The Churchill Archives Centre is open to the public, though appointments must be arranged in advance to guarantee a place in the Reading Room.

The aim of the Archives Centre is to open up as much material for research as possible, but there may be closures on conservation, personal, or official grounds. For material which is open, they boast an average delivery time of five minutes following the placing of a request for a file.

Preservation & Conservation

A core policy of the Archives Centre is to preserve archival material as far as possible in perpetuity for the use of present and future generations. This policy impacts on almost every activity within the Archives Centre and is quite a challenge given that some collections are used very heavily while others contain badly damaged items.

Although most of the archive material is in the form of loose papers, there are many other exciting types and formats including large photograph albums, posters and plans, cine film and artefacts such as one of Lady Thatcher’s handbags!

Only a small proportion of the papers are significantly damaged, but these require attention in order to make them usable. Often, they will need intervention to render them more chemically stable for long-term preservation. Sometimes the damage is extremely disfiguring and dramatic:

Conservation staff at the Archives Centre undertake the following treatments in order to conserve damaged archive material:

Surface dry cleaning to remove abrasive, oily and acidic dirt
Relaxation of creased/warped items and flattening
Washing out acids or impurities from paper and photographs to stabilise them chemically
De-acidification of acidic and brittle papers and the addition of alkaline 'buffers'.
Repairs to tears or weak areas using fine acid-free tissues/papers and reversible adhesives.
Removal of pressure-sensitive tapes, mounts etc which can cause damage over time.
Stabilisation of mouldy material
Housing in conservation bindings

Key to preserving the archives at the CAC is the specially equipped storage facility or strong room, which features a sophisticated fire detection system which suppresses fire using a mixture of inert inergen gases. The strong room, which is monitored against insect pests, provides a stable, cool and relatively dry strong environment with clean filtered air.

The archives themselves are stored in protective packages made from high-quality acid-free (alkaline buffered) paper and card and sometimes inert polyester film. This not only protects archival materials physically, but also provides a safe, non-acidic environment. Sturdy boxes are used to further shield files from light, dust and disaster.

To maintain the physical integrity of the archives, all staff and visitors or readers are instructed regarding appropriate handling procedures, while all exhibition of original material is strictly controlled.

History

Churchill College began to collect papers in 1965, with the papers of Clement Attlee being the first collection. The Archives Centre was purpose-built in 1973 in order to house the papers of Sir Winston Churchill. His papers dealing with his life after 1945 were given to the college by his wife but the papers dealing with his life pre-1945 remained in family ownership (though housed in the Archives Centre) until 1995 when they were bought for the nation. The grant to purchase the papers also included funding for a dedicated team of archivists to catalogue the papers. This task took a team of five archivists five years to complete: the catalogue to the Churchill papers was finished at the end of 2000 and was made available online 12 months later.

Meanwhile the Centre had continued to collect personal papers from other figures from the fields of politics, the military, diplomacy, technology and science. By the end of the twentieth century, the Archives Centre was running out of space in which to store these archives. In 1997, Margaret Thatcher gave her papers to the Archives Centre. Funding was raised to build a new wing of the centre to house the Thatcher papers and to ensure that the Centre could continue to add to its collections in the 21st century.

The Archives Centre has collaborated with organisations around the world on projects and exhibitions about Winston Churchill. One highlight has been a joint exhibition with the Library of Congress.

Another milestone for the Archives Centre was reached in 2006 when catalogues to all the collections (excluding Churchill and Thatcher) were made available online via the Cambridge-based JANUS webserver

For a detailed history of the Churchill Archives Centre, please consult the official website