September 11, 2015

Finest Hour 165, Autumn 2014

Page 28

By ALLEN PACKWOOD


My first serious encounter with Martin Gilbert’s work was in 1995, when I secured an interview for the post of Archivist/Exhibitions Officer at the Churchill Archives Centre, one of a team working on the Churchill Papers, now secured for the British Nation, with the help of Heritage Lottery Funding. It was a daunting prospect, made worse by the fact that I had not read any 20th century history since university.

In preparation I first read Sir Martin’s classic, In Search of Churchill. It probably got me the job, so it is not surprising that it remains a personal favourite. Yet it is also very much an archivist’s text. For it describes how Sir Martin set about the huge task of tracking down and working through his primary source materials, tracing papers and conducting oral histories to create his own Churchill archive alongside the Churchill Papers.

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Jump forward a decade and it was my great pleasure to be shown the Gilbert archive by Sir Martin himself. It occupied most of his house and overflowed into a nearby office. But there was no sign of chaos. Everything was neatly filed in ordered lever arch files, and arranged by theme. Here were his working files for the vital Companion Volumes, grouped by year, month, week and even day; photocopies of key documents brought together from assorted archives; transcripts and commentaries. Here too were his own correspondence files, arranged alphabetically by correspondent, with titles like “Jock Colville,” giving tantalising indications of the treasures they contained. It was immediately clear to me that Sir Martin was a natural cataloguer.

We all know that the world owes him a huge debt for his scholarship. But what is less well known is that for a while, he was the de facto Keeper of the Churchill Papers. For after the death of Randolph Churchill, and until their transfer into the purpose-built Churchill Archives Centre, Sir Winston’s papers were temporarily kept at the Bodleian Library—where it fell upon the young Martin Gilbert of Merton College to help keep them safe and ordered.

It is often said that there are two types of archivist; those who wish to get on with the cataloguing, to bring order from chaos; and those who seek to engage a wider public by answering queries and helping others. To be fair, these are stereotypes, and to some degree most archivists enjoy both. Martin has always been as meticulous in his arrangements as he was generous with his knowledge. Whether responding to an eminent colleague, a professional member of the Churchill Archives Centre, an enthusiast researching Lady Randolph’s ancestry, or a student doing a school project, he has always given help and advice with kindness, patience and encouragement.

I do not know whether Martin has ever thought of himself as an archivist. Yet in his travels and in the range of his research he has certainly visited more archives than most of us can name. More than this, his work has always been grounded in original sources—and he has done more than most to highlight the value of documents and to promote their importance in our understanding and interpretation of the recent past.

To illustrate this I looked at the row of volumes that make up The Churchill Documents in their latest incarnation by Hillsdale College Press. If you combine the page counts for volumes 6 to 16—those directly edited by Martin—you get the staggering total of 15,130 pages of selected and indexed transcripts. Add Randolph Churchill’s two volumes of narrative and five volumes of documents, produced with the help of Randolph’s entire team, and Volume 17 for 1942, newly published by Hillsdale, and we have a further 2942 pages, making a total of 18,072. This is perhaps a pedantic counting exercise, and by embarking upon it maybe I am living up to some archivist’s stereotype. But I think it gives us some idea of the scale of the man and his achievements.

Martin knows that when Sir Winston Churchill showed his own first archivist, Denis Kelly, the muniment room at Chartwell, he told Denis: “Your task, my boy, is to make Cosmos out of Chaos.” Martin Gilbert has made that his life’s work.


Mr. Packwood is director of the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge, and executive director of The Churchill Centre (UK).

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