Odds, ends, and archival exclusion: ephemeral archives and counter-history in the English country house

ABSTRACT

Ephemera — material culture not generally considered to be of enduring cultural or historical value — has long confounded archivists and recordkeepers. Often considered anomalous within broader institutional repositories, ephemeral records are further side-lined by dominant archival processes, standards, and logics; they lose their contextual nuances and thus become hidden collections within collections. Despite persistent professional anxieties and archival omissions, ephemeral archives often constitute a powerful source for counter-histories of a given institution, community, movement, or era. Such materials are imbued with the specific social and emotional textures of their creators’ lives and accordingly, they require a level of familiarity with their context in order to produce useful, meaningful layers of interpretation. Taking as its site of investigation the English country house archive, this article explores an ephemeral collection which offers a radically different history of an institution often perceived as a bastion of patriarchy and privilege, but which has simultaneously been obscured because of its ephemerality. In offering a close reading of a collection that represents working-class and non-heteronormative archival practices and genealogies, I draw from feminist and decolonial approaches to the archive that centre notions of care, slowness, and intentionality and present ways of better understanding, valuing, and making use of ephemeral collections.

KEYWORDS:

• estate archives
• historic houses
• ephemera
• social history
• slow archives

Introduction

What use is a scrapbook about which only the creator’s name is known? Can a postcard collection ever tell us much more than what meets the eye? Ephemera — material culture not generally considered to be of enduring cultural or historical value — has long confounded archivists and recordkeepers.¹ Often already marginal in institutional archives, wherein long-held professional principles of originality and uniqueness are still overwhelmingly prioritized and valued, ephemeral materials are further marginalized by the organizing principles and dominant practices of such repositories. Amidst cataloguing standards rooted in particular knowledge categories and target-oriented workflows that do not allow for the necessary, foundational research needed to contextualize them more fully, ephemeral collections are easily sidelined, becoming hidden collections within collections.²

A case in point is my doctoral research site, Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, ancestral seat of the dukes of Devonshire. As an institution predicated on immense privilege and patrilineal inheritance, the English country house is perhaps not an obvious place to go looking for working-class histories or traces of LGBTQIA+ lives — yet in the archives at Chatsworth, there are surprisingly rich archival records of the working-class majority who have lived and worked on the estate over the years, along with potential links to queer history. Many former workers and local residents have donated their personal records as a way to stake their place in Chatsworth’s storied history, but such records have historically been treated as ephemeral and tangential to the archive’s scope and its central collections. Although these records sit within the physical archive, they are often only minimally referenced in (or occasionally omitted entirely from) finding aids and research guides. In this article I offer a close reading of one such collection: the Grafton Papers, a series of scrapbooks and postcard albums passed down through three families and several generations.

The Grafton Papers offers another view of the English country house, one that decentres the landowning family’s history and offers a glimpse of the lives and record-keeping practices of members of the wider estate community. It is also transgressive — of socioeconomic boundaries, familial ties, generational divides, and of the heteronormative genealogy and inheritance that defines the English country house. In tracing the custodial history of the Grafton Papers, my aim here is to prompt critical consideration of how and why ephemeral archives are so often decontextualized in institutional spaces. Having defined the parameters of the term ‘ephemera,’ I assess the state of the archival profession’s relationship with ephemera, including the impact of a climate of austerity in the sector and, related to this, the professional anxieties fuelled by ephemeral archives. I then offer some background to Chatsworth and the Devonshire Collection Archives before exploring, in detail, the chain of creators and custodians of the Grafton Papers and the links between them; I do so in order to show how, through their archival practices, these men modelled a different mode of kinship and inheritance that signifies a radical departure from the heteronormative genealogy underpinning the grand historical narrative of the English country house. Finally, I offer some critical reflections on how archivists might better understand, and care for, the ephemeral materials in their collections, drawing from the feminist and decolonial conceptions of radical empathy and slowness in the archives.

A note on method

This article emerges from my doctoral research as a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) holder based at the University of Sheffield and embedded within the Devonshire Collection Archives at Chatsworth House. My broader thesis explores the history of archival practices in the English country house at the intersection of class and gender, considered from a critical feminist standpoint that draws on (and hopes to find a place within) the wider landscape of feminist archival scholarship. As both an embedded researcher and a qualified archivist, my methodology partly comprises archival practice as research, meaning that much of my on-site work at Chatsworth entails arranging, cataloguing and publicly disseminating knowledge about the archival materials, some of which are uncatalogued, that I encounter throughout the course of my research.

The collection that serves as the case study for this article, the Grafton Papers, is minimally catalogued, but until this research project it lacked the contextual and interpretative layers that can make a given archive useful or meaningful for researchers. As shall be explored herein, this collection’s potential to tell radically different stories about the country house and the estate community had been blunted, because it was previously considered ephemeral, anomalous, and only tangentially related to the core functions and purposes of the country house archive.

The Grafton Papers collection covers impressive ground in terms of both materials and timespan, dating from the 1880s to the early 1990s, and its custodial history is a fascinating one which illuminates the close homosocial bonds between the three men who variously collected, shaped and handed on the collection. This custodial history is complex and, at times, difficult to follow, and tracing it necessitates moving far beyond the estate boundaries and placing this ephemeral archive in dialogue with census data, civil records, and the archives of other institutions. As such, the reflections presented in this article are drawn from my research in the archives at Senate House Library, University of London, from tracing the collection’s creators in civil data and local newspapers, from oral history interviews in the Devonshire Collection Archives, as well as from my own work to better understand the Grafton Papers and augment the collection’s catalogue metadata.

Defining ‘ephemera’

‘Ephemera’ is a capacious umbrella term encompassing a huge variety of record types, so it is useful to set out the scope and the parameters of my use of the term herein. The Society of American Archivists’ Dictionary of Archives Terminology succinctly defines ephemera as ‘[m]aterials, usually printed documents, created for a specific, limited purpose, and generally designed to be discarded after use.’³ Although useful for its clarity and its emphasis on the transitory qualities of ephemera, this definition misses much of the contextual nuance and messiness innate within ephemeral records. My own interest in ephemera and its attendant practices of cultural production, circulation, and preservation stems from queer and feminist scholarship on ephemeral material. I draw particularly from Alana Kumbier’s notion of ephemeral material as unusual archival records defined by their mass production, their transitory nature, and by the fact that they ‘aren’t valued in the same way conventional archival items are.’⁴ As Kumbier highlights, cultural ephemera tends to be produced en masse — examples of print ephemera relevant to the scope of this article might include picture postcards, news clippings, travel tickets, print illustrations taken from publications, and greetings cards — and therefore, at least historically speaking, it has largely been deprived of the organizational and evidentiary values typically ascribed to ‘unique’ archival records, manuscripts, and more traditional record types, such as correspondence or financial ledgers.⁵

This does not, however, leave ephemera bereft of any assignation of value — quite the opposite, such materials often hold highly subjective, deeply personal sociocultural value as material corollaries of cultural practices and collective memory for their respective communities of origin and use. Ann Cvetkovich contends that for organizers of gay and lesbian archives, ‘insisting on the value of apparently marginal or ephemeral materials’ means acknowledging the emotional affects — ‘associated with nostalgia, personal memory, fantasy, and trauma’ – which make them significant.⁶ Cvetkovich’s focus on the affective economy of ephemeral archives, which she neatly defines as ‘the archive of feelings’, makes them difficult to place within conventional archival infrastructures. Any attempt to contain or process such archives demands that the archivist is well-versed in the context of their origin and use, familiar with (perhaps even a member of) their communities of origin, and, to borrow again from Kumbier, ‘an understanding of why these things are worth saving.’⁷ As the case studies in this article seek to illustrate, placing ephemeral materials into an institutional environment and attempting to shoehorn them into existing collections and containers – without doing the requisite groundwork to understand them — can push them further out of view. Indeed, this is an age-old scenario which has played out time and again in institutional repositories, further marginalizing such materials and compounding their perceived anomalousness and lack of intrinsic value.

Ephemera, professional practice, and archival anxieties

Ephemera has never sat easily within the professional archival landscape, both in regard to physical, institutional archives and across wider professional discourse and practice. This is partly because of the defining characteristics outlined above — its nebulous qualities, its inherent nonconformity to traditional archival infrastructures and schemas, the demand for familiarity and context in order to make much sense of it. In turn, these factors have fuelled a professional anxiety that persists today, in which ephemeral materials are understood as a problem to be ‘solved’ either by shoehorning them into existing archival classification systems and principles or by devising a new, often idiosyncratic, system for cataloguing and describing such materials. Writing in 1987, Michael Organ, a university archivist striving for solutions to this perennial problem, captures something of this archival anxiety:

At one end of the spectrum of descriptive media we have traditional library books; at the other end we have unique archival records, manuscripts, and documents; in between lies ephemera.⁸

Organ posits that archivists have historically ignored and/or regarded printed ephemera as falling within the purview of their library colleagues, while on the other hand, librarians interpret its highly subjective, diverse, and often unpublished or self-published nature as distinctly archival, discrete from rare books and other printed matter usually found in a library. The result has been a professional impasse which Organ rightly recognizes as detrimental to the archival sphere, leading to lacunae in collections which only compound the mis-/non-representation of minoritized groups in the archives whilst legitimizing a singular, elite, and officially quantifiable historical narrative.⁹

Organ’s recognition of this neglect, and the importance of rectifying archival gaps by asserting the significance of ephemera, is broadly echoed by his contemporaries — for instance, the Archive Association of British Columbia’s 1988 Manual for Small Archives, a no-nonsense guide to archival practice for non-professionals in small, under- or unresourced organizations, advises its readers to ‘[t]reat ephemera as important archival material […] Accession them, describe them, and store them properly.’¹⁰ Pertinent in the context of this article, however, is the authors’ guidance regarding scrapbooks: they advise readers not to expend ‘a great deal of effort’ in preserving them, and thereafter, to remove or copy ‘any particularly valuable material, such as original documents or photographs.’¹¹ Again, then, professional distinctions and preconceptions of what is and is not specifically archival, based on long-held notions of originality and uniqueness, come into play — and as shall be explored later in this article, such heavy-handed tactics have come to shape the lives and uses of ephemeral materials after they pass over the archival threshold.

Although critical discussion of ephemera is relatively thin on the ground in the archival literature, those who have grappled with the topic repeatedly point out the inadequacies and unsuitability of traditional archival practice for both processing and proactively acquiring ephemeral materials for collections. Jim Burant posits that professional archivists’ historical reluctance towards doing so stems from a recognition that ‘it is difficult to appreciate, appraise, locate, catalogue, and make accessible’¹² unless one is intimately familiar with its social and cultural nuances, and therefore with its specific importance. Joan M. Schwartz’s consideration of photographic archives highlights some of these same perennial issues — the author contends that:

[B]y embracing a textual model of recorded information and by adopting a bibliographic model of image classification, archives continue to fixate on the factual content rather than the functional origins of visual images.¹³

This observation pithily summarizes the professional treatment of ephemeral records just as accurately as photographic ones, emphatically highlighting the unsuitability of cataloguing standards developed for primarily textual archives for describing and making accessible a diverse, multimodal range of ephemeral media. Schwartz goes further still, positing (somewhat controversially) that if historical researchers and other users of archives continue to prioritize textual sources over visual ones and fail to appreciate the value of the latter, then archivists — through the professional dictums and standards that guide their work and shape the collections in their care — are directly responsible.¹⁴ Although there is certainly truth to this argument, what Schwartz fails to account for here is the ways in which economic austerity, and its attendant resource scarcity, have deeply permeated the archival profession in the UK, making the work goals-oriented, profit-driven, numerically quantifiable according to market metrics, and — within both large and small institutions — at near-constant risk of service cuts and/or defunding (thus resource advocacy has become a mainstay of the job description).¹⁵ Labouring under the purely utilitarian (and seemingly benign) edict of ‘More Product, Less Process,’ professional archivists increasingly lack the resources, institutional support, and time in the day to do the kind of empathic, deep research that Organ, Schwartz and others rightly identify as necessary in order to make ephemeral records accessible and useful to researchers and to honour these records’ communities of origin and use.¹⁶

Within country house archives specifically, the issue of resource scarcity — and the constraints it poses — has long thrown up challenges for professional archivists working in such repositories, beyond government-enforced austerity measures. In 2004, the authors of the Logjam report, an audit of uncatalogued collections in archival repositories across the North West of England, established that although estate archives make up a significant part of the country’s archival landscape (they comprised the third-largest portion of the total number of uncatalogued collections surveyed in that study, 14%), they remain one of the least-catalogued and therefore least accessible of all record groups. A survey respondent in the study observed that ‘it is difficult to attract funding to catalogue [estate archives], because of their traditional associations with antiquarianism, and the false perception that they represent [only] the interest and views of the landed elite.’¹⁷ Elsewhere, the Historic Houses Archivists Group, an advocacy group for those working with estate archives, offers a dedicated training course, ‘Collections Care on a Shoestring,’ which practically addresses the lack of time, funding, and material resources (for instance, archival-standard housing or electronic document and records management systems) with which many country house archivists must contend in the course of their daily work.¹⁸ With these points in mind, then, the side-lining of ephemera at Chatsworth is as indicative of a host of practical constraints as it is of archival hierarchies.

Despite these professional roadblocks, over the last decade or so there has been a profusion of studies which take ephemeral archives, in all their glorious range and diversity, as their key sites of investigation. Alana Kumbier, Cait McKinney, Rebecka Taves Sheffield, Jamie A. Lee, and Marika Cifor are several amongst a wave of queer scholars writing specifically about the vital role of ephemera within LGBTQIA+ community and activist-led archives; much of this scholarship is notable for the ways in which the archives and archival practices studied therein actively subvert or outright reject the archival status quo in favour of a radically community-oriented practice.¹⁹ Cultural and linguistic historians, most notably Julia Gillen and Bjarne Rogan, have carved out a niche in the study of picture postcards as ritual communication and social practice, reading these objects as a communication technology, cutting-edge in its day, and a means of social networking.²⁰ Literary scholar Saidiya Hartman uses ephemeral materials and found photography to write counter-histories of African-American life, pioneering a way of doing archival research and creative non-fiction that radically resists the gaps and erasures wrought by institutional archival hierarchies and dominant modes of knowledge production.²¹ Elsewhere, scholars including Ellen Gruber Garvey, Katie Day Good, and Cherish Watton bring scrapbooks — typically assemblages of ephemera selected on the basis of their affective and social connections to the creator/s — into sharp focus as a mode of life-writing and self-historicizing, too long overlooked by scholars because of the gendered (read: feminized) dynamics of their production and circulation.²²

Aside from their focus on ephemera as a powerful entry point for alternative histories, what these studies have in common is that they each spend time slowly and carefully unspooling the narrative threads bound up in records that might otherwise, in the archival domain, be dismissed or sidelined as decontextualized anomalies or largely irrelevant material bound for deaccessioning (that is, if such material was accessioned in the first place). Scholars of ephemeral archives recognize the revolutionary potential of slow, intentional work as a tool of resistance and a means of (re)claiming alternative histories — and in what follows, I demonstrate both the value and necessity of slowness and intentionality for constructing counter-histories, particularly in sites of immense privilege and patrilineality.²³

Contextualizing the Devonshire collection archives

Nestled in the bucolic Peak District National Park, Chatsworth House is prominent in the British cultural imaginary.²⁴ Now a popular tourist attraction and an iconic silver-screen location, since 1549 Chatsworth has been home to the aristocratic Cavendish family, whose male inheritors hold the peerage of Duke (and until it was elevated in 1694, Earl) of Devonshire. The family remain in residence at Chatsworth and in the present, the estate maintains a thriving commercial empire encompassing a 105-acre sculpture garden, a farmyard and playground, a bustling farm shop and café selling produce from the estate’s working farms, picturesque holiday cottages, a one-thousand-acre deer park which is entirely publicly accessible, and — perhaps most significantly — a 30-room tour of the house and the Devonshire Collections, which comprises one of Europe’s most important private collections of art, interiors, rare books and manuscripts.²⁵ The Devonshire Collections are, in many ways, a living record of the family’s shifting tastes and collecting habits over more than four centuries, and at the heart of their history — indeed, the known history of the wider estate — is the Devonshire Collection Archives, an extensive and immensely rich repository documenting many aspects of life and work at Chatsworth over the years.

Estate archives are widely understood as ‘an accumulation of records relating to the acquisition and management of a landed estate,’²⁶ and to a large extent, this is an accurate summary of the Devonshire Collection Archives. The earliest known incarnation of the archive as a recognizable archive, took the form of an extensive collection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century muniments — that is, records which evidence landownership and peerage, as well as certain legal and political entitlements — now known as the Hardwick Archive. Much of this collection was originally housed in a purpose-built storage room known as the Evidence House at Hardwick Hall, an Elizabethan prodigy house which belonged to the Cavendish family until its eventual transfer to National Trust ownership in 1959.²⁷ The Evidence House comprised 492 numbered wooden drawers, primarily containing deeds but also including household accounts, inventories, surveys, memoranda, rentals, and other material relating to the management of Cavendish land or property; the room’s name aptly illustrates the core function and purpose of this archive, and many such like it, which was chiefly to evidence claims to land, property, and titles. This same core function can be traced right through the chronology of the Devonshire Collection Archives, from the inclusion of the Hardwick archive in the Historical Manuscripts Commission’s 1872 report on privately held estate archives, to the consolidation of papers from various Cavendish estates and their transfer to Chatsworth in the 1950s, to the present day: the underlying purpose of the archive is to provide documentary evidence of the family’s rights to its estates across time.

In the introduction to a special edition of this journal focusing specifically on estate archives, Sarah Higgins, Shaun Evans and Julie Mathias identify their integral place in the archival landscape of the UK and Ireland, highlighting their diversity of forms, meanings, and uses.²⁸ The authors also define estate archives as ‘the record of how landed estates have been, or continue to be, managed, and the families who own and manage them.’²⁹ Inherent in this definition is a tacit recognition of the fact that such repositories also contain records documenting the many non-elite families and individuals who have sustained and occupied such institutions — even though the primary focus (and therefore the organizing principle) is typically the landowning family and their friends, relatives, and business associates. Such is the case at Chatsworth, where archival holdings are broadly arranged into two distinct groupings: family papers, arranged principally by notable earls and dukes of Devonshire and by their spouses thereafter; and estate papers, pertaining to (and organized according to) the management and administration of the family’s network of properties, with Chatsworth being the nucleus. A subcategory of the estate papers has emerged within the last decade or so, somewhat nebulously called the related papers; diverse in format and subject matter, this tranche of records mainly comprises personal papers originating from former employees and estate residents, and some additional records that are not clearly linked to either the Cavendish family or the estate. Despite their unassuming name, these papers of former servants and workers are an abundantly rich, foundational resource for understanding Chatsworth’s social history — in large part because extensive, personal records of working-class people are rare to come by in estate archives, wherein workers are typically represented at arm’s length through their employers’ gaze in documents like wage ledgers, estate correspondence, and insurance records.³⁰ Although country house servants and workers are not generally, as Carolyn Steedman has suggested, ‘demographically elusive’,³¹ the richness and quantity of records created by and about servants, workers, and local residents at Chatsworth is rare for a country house archive, not least because recording their own experiences and opinions might well have put them at risk of losing their jobs, livelihoods, or even their homes.

In many ways, then, the least-catalogued and least-explored facet of the Devonshire Collection Archives, the so-called related papers, is one of the archive’s greatest assets. Beyond the fact of its existence — which is remarkable in and of itself — this unusual tranche of records is made all the more interesting by its diversity of formats and by the uniquely direct perspectives offered by the (auto)biographical material it contains (diaries, letters, photographs and scrapbooks are all among the related papers). In their quantity and variety, these records directly contradict popular notions among historians that the working classes simply did not possess any sense of the archival — to quote Michael Winstanley, the idea that even literate people of means ‘rarely considered their simple lives worthy of recording for posterity’³² continues to shape modern conceptions of working-class representation, or the perceived lack thereof, in the archives. By this logic, then, this record group provides a way into counter-histories of the country house that centre the working-class majority who variously lived and worked there; it is a much-needed point of divergence from the deferential master-servant trope that looms large in the popular imagination of such sites.³³

Yet historically, these records have been regarded as ephemera and therefore anomalous to the rest of the Devonshire Collection Archives; their treatment is reflective of the broader marginalization of ephemeral materials in institutional repositories. Until recent years they were not proactively acquired but accepted as donations, minimally catalogued, and sometimes had portions of their contents parsed and inserted into other collections, in a manner similar to that advocated by the authors of A Manual for Small Archives.³⁴ Even where workers’ records have been catalogued and kept with their originating materials, until recently, many were not catalogued in sufficient detail as to render them useful to staff or researchers — for instance, a photograph album originating with Nellie Lea, a housemaid at several Cavendish properties throughout the 1920s, was catalogued simply as ‘Unnamed servant’s album’ until Lea’s identity was rediscovered in 2022.³⁵ A lack of cultural and contextual specificity (and additionally, a lack of resources) in the past has led to vague, general catalogue entries, thereby further marginalizing already marginal ephemera in the archive. In this way, these records exemplify the need for the kind of familiarity that Cvetkovich and others argue is necessary to render ephemeral archives useful and accessible in the present.

The Grafton Papers: an intergenerational and interfamilial archive

The Devonshire Collection Archives contains a variety of ephemeral materials relating to former workers and servants, most of which are fragmentary in nature, dispersed across collections or else housed within DF33, a general collection of former servants’ personal papers. Each donation typically comprises a handful of records, sometimes a compendium thereof (such as an album or a folder, an object that functions as a sort of portable archive in and of itself) originating with someone who worked for the family at some time or another. Given the fragmentary nature of these donations, it is perhaps surprising that the archive also holds a discrete collection of ephemera that is astonishing in terms of extent and richness. Spanning 15 boxes, the Grafton Papers comprises news clippings, scrapbooks, postcard albums, letter and autograph books, and loose correspondence, accumulated by — and passed down through — several generations of three local families. The Grafton Papers wields immense potential as a source for the social history of Chatsworth, yet its catalogue description and other finding aids belie little of its remarkable history. In what follows, I piece together the Grafton Papers’ genesis and social life as a living, moving archive throughout the twentieth century, before pivoting to examine how and why its cultural and social specificity, the contextual folds and nuances that mark it out as a tool for counter-history, were all but lost once it entered the archive.

Cecil Crofton’s scrapbooks

Although the Grafton Papers collection is named after its final custodian, Tom Grafton, it was begun over 40 years before Tom was born, around 1888, with a young man who was at that time a theatrical star on the ascendant: Cecil Crofton. Crofton was born Frederick William Martin in Thorney, Cambridgeshire on 10 November 1859, to Gilson, the land agent at Chatsworth from 1881–1908, and his wife Elizabeth (née Mawer).³⁶ In the social hierarchy of the estate, the Martins were at the upper echelons of the managerial middle class, afforded a level of prestige befitting their close association with the landowning family. Frederick himself did not spend much time at Chatsworth, only occasionally visiting to see his parents and his younger sister Kathleen, who lived at the Martins’ tied accommodation in nearby Edensor well into adulthood.³⁷ Rather than following in his father’s footsteps, Frederick Martin pursued a markedly different path — from his earliest days as a boarder at Forest School in northeast London, he demonstrated a flair for creativity, regularly publishing his poetry and short-form essays in the school magazine, directing and performing in theatrical productions, and painting watercolours, evidence of which he kept and later meticulously preserved in his personal scrapbooks.³⁸ From the early 1880s onwards, he began landing minor roles in comic productions that toured theatres and arts venues across the country, building on a solid foundation as a classically-trained singer. It is unclear when Frederick Martin became Cecil Frederick Crofton, although extant playbills for his productions suggest that he first adopted the stage name Cecil Vere (occasionally Cecil de Vere, with a French flourish for sophistication) around 1880; by late 1881, he was mentioned on playbills and in local newspapers as Cecil Crofton.³⁹ During this time he was also beginning to amass the sizable archive of theatre and arts ephemera that would become his legacy.

Crofton was a distinctly different man from his father, and indeed, from the majority of men who lived or worked on the Chatsworth estate. First and foremost, he was an avid collector of everything from jewellery and minerals to engraved plates, fine furniture, silverware, ceramics, and Indian embroidery — a cursory search of Crofton’s name in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s digital catalogue reveals more than one-hundred donations gifted by Crofton to the museum.⁴⁰ He forayed into more eccentric collecting habits too, assembling albums of Victorian valentine cards, celebrity autographs, and news clippings that documented the lives and glittering career trajectories of his favourite actors and opera singers; surviving albums are held by several institutions including the V&A and Bristol University’s Theatre Archive. He was also an enthusiastic collector of the homoerotic art of the painter Simeon Solomon, bequeathing his collection to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1924.⁴¹ This, coupled with his lifelong bachelorhood and the fact — evident in census returns and probate records (Crofton died in 1935) — of his frequent cohabitation and trusted relationships with other men has inevitably spurred speculation over Crofton’s own sexuality.⁴²

Crofton meticulously documented his own life, from his schoolboy poetry to his bequests to major cultural organizations, personal correspondence, and theatrical ephemera documenting both his own achievements and those of his idols and aspirant friends, such as the American-born soprano and actor Dame Geneviève Ward. Senate House Library, University of London holds two of Crofton’s personal scrapbooks, the contents of which brilliantly illuminate some of the nuances and otherwise tenuous links between people, places and events during the course of his life, bringing a vague biographical sketch into sharper focus. Chatsworth holds a picture postcard album bearing a pictorial ex libris bookplate marked with Crofton’s name (the same bookplate identifies some of Crofton’s possessions in the V&A archive).⁴³ This small, red, leather-bound album constitutes the starting point of the Grafton Papers, the first of the 13 albums and scrapbooks that make up the bulk of the collection; fittingly, it contains picture postcards of the kind that began to be produced en masse for the burgeoning tourist trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, depicting pastoral views of the local villages, landscape shots of Chatsworth, and interior shots of lavishly decorated rooms therein, as well as handwritten menus and dance cards from society events at Chatsworth.⁴⁴

Sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, Crofton gave this postcard album to a young man named Walter Longden, the son of a Chatsworth gardener, who had grown up in the nearby parish of Edensor — a 1994 oral history interview with Tom Grafton, the collection’s namesake, clarifies this.⁴⁵ Until I began researching the Grafton Papers in earnest in 2021, this oral history interview was not transcribed, nor was it catalogued in a manner consistent with other archived oral histories or linked to the Grafton Papers through catalogue metadata, even though it offers invaluable insight into the collection’s complex and oft confusing genesis and provenance. Even with Tom Grafton’s helpful clarification, though, questions remain as to how and why an upper-middle-class stage actor would bequeath a portion of his personal ephemera collection to a local working-class lad with no obvious links to Crofton nor to the esteemed Martin family. Unearthing the links between Crofton and Longden requires time, patience, and access to records far beyond the scope of the Devonshire Collection Archives — and it persistently evades the grasp of institutional metadata schemas and archival practices.

‘Sent with affection to swell your collection:’ Walter Longden’s postcard albums

The postcards in Cecil Crofton’s red leather album are stuck firmly down to their card mounts, their written contents inaccessible but for a few centimetres around their edges. To an extent this is irrelevant, because the majority of the postcards are blank, apparently intentionally saved as souvenirs; in itself, this is indicative of their contemporary status as an affordable cultural commodity to be bought, exchanged and collected.⁴⁶ There is, however, a handful of used cards in Crofton’s collection, and poring over these cards one day I managed to manoeuvre myself into just the right position (head tilted to a 90-degree angle, face pressed against the reading room desk) to glean a few signatories, or at the very least, some of the recipients’ postcodes. On one particularly loose postcard, featuring an image of the Great Conservatory botanical glasshouse at Chatsworth, both the signatory — Walter T. Longden — and the addressee — Cecil Crofton Esq, Drewstead Road, Streatham Hill SW16, Crofton’s address in his twilight years — are clearly legible.⁴⁷ Although the message is inaccessible, lodged between the format and the container, this single postcard is clear, tangible evidence of cross-country communication between Crofton and Longden. Crofton might not have grown up at Chatsworth like Longden did, but he certainly did spend time there — ample flyers in his scrapbooks at Senate House Library document music recitals at the village hall in the 1870s, and his starring roles in theatrical performances staged within Chatsworth’s private theatre up until 1895, when he took early retirement from the stage.⁴⁸ This same scrapbook features another tangible link to the Longdens: a reproduced photograph, lodged right at the back, of the Longden family’s cottage in Calton Lees, Bakewell, dated 1926 in Crofton’s hand. It is unclear how Crofton and Longden knew each other, but the inclusion of the Longdens’ house here, amongst Crofton’s cherished fragments and the material records of his achievements and friends, infers a familiarity — a closeness, even — between the two families that is almost entirely absent, certainly undetectable, in the Devonshire Collection Archives.

Walter Thomas Longden was born in Edensor on 18 July 1884 to George, a gardener at Chatsworth, and Elizabeth (née Roose), a former schoolteacher.⁴⁹ Although Walter was nearly 25 years younger than Cecil, his father George was much closer in age, just three years older. George Longden was well-known and well-liked across the estate, starting work in the Pleasure Grounds (ornamental gardens designed for public entertainments including theatricals, opera, and dining) and working his way up to being the gardener for U. R. Burke, chief agent to the Duke of Devonshire from 1908–1938.⁵⁰ As it happens, George was also closer to Cecil in terms of vocation than one might assume — he was tangentially involved in staging the productions at Chatsworth’s private theatre, assisting with the set-up of props and stage rigging. This is possibly how he got to know both Cecil and his father, Gilson, who acted as the administrative stage manager and oversaw the theatre’s operational and financial affairs.⁵¹ In her doctoral research, Louise Calf maps the complex social networks involved in the running of the theatre and the ways in which the worlds of several key demographics — namely professional theatre workers, amateur thespians, aristocratic patrons, and working-class estate staff — collided and overlapped in this space. Their convergence here defies any attempt to impose a rigid class hierarchy and directly challenges what Lauren Butler calls the entrenched ‘physical and ideological boundary between upstairs and downstairs, master and servant,’ reified through contemporary visitor interpretation that confines the workers to the servants’ quarters.⁵² Given that Gilson Martin, Cecil Crofton and George Longden worked in such close quarters then, it is not inconceivable that the two families became friendly, with George’s sons Walter and his younger brother Ernest revering — perhaps even befriending — the minor celebrity visiting the Derbyshire countryside from the bright lights of Drury Lane.

However Walter came to inherit Cecil’s postcard album, it clearly motivated him to begin building his own collection — a hobby he appears to have taken up with great relish, collecting more than 500 postcards in three bulging tomes (each album bears Walter’s name inscribed neatly on the flyleaf, a proud mark of ownership).⁵³ Walter was not a pure collector, so to speak, and roughly one-quarter of the postcards in his albums bear written messages overleaf and other indicators of use as a communication technology, such as stamps and postmarks. Walter’s collecting habits are however evident in the arrangement of the postcards themselves, which are typically grouped by place, subject matter, or by theme or set. Walter’s status as a collector is also occasionally referenced in messages written on the address side, an example being a picture postcard from Davis’s of Oxford’s ‘Oxford University Robes’ series, addressed to Walter from an unsigned sender and dated 14 October 1904, which bears the inscription, ‘Have you any of these? Think them rather entertaining.’⁵⁴ Another example is a postcard from an unidentified sender to Walter, dated 23 June 1905 and featuring a picturesque landscape of the Derbyshire village of Castleton; the inscription simply reads, ‘To add to your collection,’ a token of affection from a friend.⁵⁵

In the Devonshire Collection Archives, Walter Longden’s postcard albums have historically been regarded as mass-produced ephemera, of little value aside from perhaps as a quirky example of early twentieth-century print culture. Yet when their messages are transcribed, and their recipients and senders are (where possible) identified, Walter’s postcards become a tool for Chatsworth’s social history, enabling one to trace social relations and networks that would otherwise evade one’s grasp in other, more ‘official’ documentation such as census data or employment records. Walter Longden is the most common recipient — perhaps obvious, given that he collected most of them — but there are also cards from Walter to his mother Elizabeth, his brother Ernest, and to Miss Nellie (Ellen) Bacon, a woman around 14 years Walter’s senior who ran the Edensor Post Office along with her mother and two sisters.⁵⁶ Nellie and her sisters Elizabeth and Mary all feature as recipients in Walter’s collection, either as singular addressees or as a collective — one memorable postcard, sent from Wirksworth by an unidentified sender, addresses the sisters rather whimsically as ‘The Three Misses Bacon’ and urges, ‘Don’t squabble over this card, will you?’.⁵⁷ Like Walter and the thousands of others avidly collecting postcards at the turn of the twentieth century, the Bacon sisters appear to have been amassing their own postcard collection, no doubt attracted by their brightly-coloured illustrations and photographs (a technological innovation pioneered by the picture postcard), their speedy despatch (in which the Bacon sisters, as postal workers, would have played a part), and what Julia Gillen pithily calls ‘their highly-accessible multimodality’.⁵⁸ Given that Walter and his brother clearly maintained a correspondence with the sisters, the Bacons may well have chosen to gift their own postcards to Walter in order that he might flesh out his collection — which would explain their appearance here. Other senders and recipients in Walter’s collection include his maternal grandmother Sarah Roose, his cousin Peveril Carter, and Cecil Crofton’s mother, Elizabeth Martin, to whom Walter’s mother writes in December 1909 ‘[w]ishing you a happy Xmas & a long happiness in your new house, from an old friend.’⁵⁹ In this way, then, Walter’s postcard collection maps the corollaries of kinship between different community members, going beyond his immediate family unit and further illuminating the Longdens’ relationship with the Martins.

The Grafton Papers’ namesake

The Grafton Papers’ custodial journey also illustrates the kinship network between the Longdens and another family, namely the Graftons. How Tom Grafton came to inherit this collection is not immediately apparent, and it does not become any clearer until one listens to Tom’s 1994 oral history interview, in which he explains that he became custodian of the collection when Walter handed it on to him in 1947.⁶⁰ The age gap between Walter and Tom is worth noting — Tom was 56 years Walter’s junior — as is their close geographical proximity to each other, to which Tom does not allude in his interview but which explains much about how he came to lay hands on the collection.

Born and raised in Calton Lees, a hamlet just south of Chatsworth House, Tom Grafton was the youngest of four siblings. The Grafton and Longden families’ cottages were next door to each other, which at least partly explains their close relationship. Tom and Walter’s lives followed markedly different trajectories, professionally speaking — aspiring towards the emergent professional class, Walter diverged from his father’s path and got a clerical job with a railway company, while Tom followed his father Wilfred into forestry and worked as a forester at Chatsworth from around 17 years of age until his retirement. However, in other respects, Tom Grafton and Walter Longden’s lives followed a similar pattern, particularly as regards marriage and familial arrangements. Neither Walter nor Tom ever married, apparently eschewing this path in favour of remaining in their family homes and cohabiting with their siblings. Historian Leonore Davidoff notes that although cohabitation amongst adult siblings was not uncommon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has received little scholarly attention — despite the fact that unmarried adult siblings (especially those living together) often furnished each other with substantial material support and lifelong companionship, and the additional fact that by 1881 over half a million adults aged 30–50 lived in a household with one or more siblings.⁶¹

Related to this, Davidoff observes elsewhere that this increase is broadly representative of a general transition ‘from “clan to kindred” from ancestors, or lineage, to interlocking exchanges of horizontal kin groups which accompanied the shift from closed estates and hierarchy to free-floating capital.’⁶² Such was the case with the Longdens and the Graftons, who — without marriages and heirs and apparently without the compulsion to eke out their familial legacies along these lines — distributed and shared their knowledge, collective memory, and even their finances horizontally, in a manner which entirely circumvented the conventional family model. When Ernest Longden, the last remaining member of his family branch, died in 1961, he bequeathed half of his estate to the then 31-year-old Tom Grafton and the other half to the Longden brothers’ cousin Philip Roose, an auctioneer.⁶³ This redistribution of wealth exemplifies Davidoff’s claim about the transfer of wealth and the transition from tenantry and landlordism to wealth accumulation on a smaller, individual scale, and it is particularly important here, in the context of a country estate, because the country estate was predicated on the former economic model. Moreover, Walter Longden’s decision to hand on his archive to Tom Grafton infers a common interest in local and community history — or at least Walter’s aspiration towards this — and might also suggest a semi-paternal or grandfatherly relationship to the young man who lived next door.

Tom Grafton clearly shared Walter’s interest in collecting and archiving fragments of local history, because he acquired or assembled 11 volumes of press cuttings to be added to the collection. Many of the earlier volumes appear to have been acquired from the Chatsworth estate office rather than produced by Tom himself, as they largely predate him and their uniformity and finish suggest that they were professionally produced by a clipping service employed to collect and collate press cuttings relating to Chatsworth and the Cavendish family. In the ducal secretary’s financial accounts at Chatsworth, there is also evidence to suggest that the family were indeed using a clipping service to monitor their media profile, with payments made to Romeike & Curtice Ltd several times in the early 1910s.⁶⁴ Although it is unclear how these volumes came to be part of the collection, Tom continued the tradition himself from the 1950s onward, assembling several volumes of press cuttings that reflect not only the affairs of the estate and the family but also his own personal interests, including technological innovations, local news, and people he admired or knew. Tom’s assemblages are altogether less polished than the earlier albums, not necessarily ordered chronologically and interspersed with handwritten captions, bus tickets, receipts and other ephemera; all of this imbues his volumes with the qualities of personal scrapbooks rather than professional, orderly cuttings albums. In this way (and much like Cecil Crofton’s scrapbooks at Senate House Library), they exemplify Garvey’s assertion that scrapbooks are ‘diaries of sorts — a form of life writing that may or not be chronological but records and preserves elements of life experience and memory cues.’⁶⁵ Interestingly, Tom also annotated some of Walter’s postcards — ‘Perhaps someone can identify this place?’ scrawled under a rural village scene, for instance — and some of the professionally-assembled cuttings albums. His mark-making suggests that even where he himself did not collect or produce material, Tom Grafton actively repurposed existing material as aides-memoire or prompts for further research.

Following Garvey, Tom Grafton’s additions to the collection are thus inherently archival in nature; they may therefore be understood as a powerful mode of self-historicization for those who otherwise lacked economic or political power relative to the landowning family.⁶⁶ Speaking specifically of rural families like Grafton’s, Garvey reflects that ‘[b]y sifting through and gleaning the detritus of the cheap press, the marginalized rural family can glean, classify, and recontextualize marginalized material and thereby create value from it.’⁶⁷ Certainly, this is what Tom is attempting to do when he sticks down his bus tickets and annotates them in a style imitating the clipping company employed to document the Cavendish family; materially, then, he is asserting that his ephemera and ‘detritus’ is just as worthy of archival preservation as the press cuttings documenting the Cavendish family. Garvey continues:

As a group gathers to pull apart mainstream culture and remake it for their own uses, they create their own cultural nexus, a knot of threads leading into and out of the family or community, and they make themselves more culturally central.⁶⁸

In repurposing, preserving and asserting the long-term significance of the ephemera that held personal value for them, Tom Grafton and his predecessors chose to tell their own stories, by their own hands. By handing the collection on, across different families and generations, they forged a cultural and archival tradition amongst themselves. The result is a wonderfully rich, diverse collection which ultimately decentres the precedence of the aristocratic family for whom they either worked or on whose land they lived. Their custodial history hints at other ways of existing in the country house that radically subvert the curatorial emphasis on what Alison Oram calls ‘genealogy as a heterosexual effect of kinship — who married whom, how many children they had and how the inheritance passed down through the generations.’⁶⁹ In so doing, the Grafton Papers profoundly unsettles the binarized power dynamic of privilege, servitude, and patrilineage that has come to define the English country house in the popular imagination.

Working with ephemeral archives, slowly

Thus far this article has considered the exclusion of ephemeral material within institutional archives and professional discourse, and by way of a case study, it has attempted to highlight the power of ephemeral archives to activate subversive counter-histories of the English country house, an institution that for many represents singular grand narratives of privilege, problematic power relations, and, in their long shadow, glaring historical omissions. Despite its immense potential to tell radically different stories about Chatsworth, until recent years the Grafton Papers had received minimal scholarly treatment and even less background research, and this is largely because of the collection’s perceived lack of value as little more than a ragtag and anomalous, if quirky, addition to an archive that primarily documents the landowning family’s affairs and estates. In practical terms, this means that they have been minimally catalogued and that crucial contextual and archival links — between the Grafton Papers and the catalogue entries for Tom Grafton’s oral history interview, for instance — have not been made. As Tom Nesmith explains, ‘[s]ome of what makes a record meaningful is inscribed in it by those who literally made it, but most of what makes a record intelligible lies outside its physical borders in its context of interpretation.’⁷⁰ Where the layers of context and frames of interpretation are lacking or filtered through unsuitable containers (here invoking Schwartz’s comments on the failures of textual approaches to processing photographic archives), a record is stripped of much of its meaning. In turn it becomes an anomaly, a quirk with little apparent social or historical value.

How, then, to pull back so-called ephemeral archives from meaningless obscurity? How best to make sense, meaning and use of them? While it is beyond the scope of this article to offer a framework by which the archival profession might better serve ephemeral archives and their communities of creation and use, I contend that working slowly, guided by a feminist ethical framework that centres empathy and care, is one path forward. When researching the Grafton Papers and their material corollaries elsewhere (Cecil Crofton’s scrapbooks, for instance), I constantly returned to Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s conception of radical empathy in the archives. Radical empathy acknowledges the affective, even intimate attachment an archivist feels for the creator whose records she processes — the authors explain:

A feminist approach not only acknowledges this emotional bond [between archivist and creator], but also hinges an ethical orientation on it. By stewarding a collection, the archivist enters into a relationship of care with the record creator in which the archivist must do her best not only to empathize with the record creator, but also to allow that empathy to inform the archival decision-making processes.⁷¹

Caswell and Cifor advocate for an acknowledgement of this relationship of care and an understanding of how it comes to shape a collection. This notion of a familiar, caring relationship between archivist and creator recalls Cvetkovich and Kumbier’s assertions that in order to make meaning from an ephemeral archive, one must be intimately familiar with its contextual folds. For Caswell and Cifor — and for me, too — this intimacy entails reckoning with the responsibility of care one bears, as a researcher and as an archivist, to those who created the archive. In practice, this means attuning oneself to the intricacies and seemingly irrelevant details of a given record, slowly and intentionally, and putting in the groundwork in order to provide sufficient context for its interpretation. Additionally, it means reflexivity about how one’s own interests — in queer and working-class histories, for example — inevitably bear on the processes of accessioning, appraisal, description, and use thereafter.

With regard to ephemeral material and the importance of context, the archival profession has much to learn from decolonial methodologies and strategies — namely Kimberly Christen and Jane Anderson’s conception of slow archives, an approach to decolonizing archival structures and practices that insists on slowing down, re-examining and then disrupting the ‘seemingly benign practices and processes of the profession’⁷² that perpetuate colonial knowledge paradigms by legitimizing structural oppression, dispossession, and erasure (in the authors’ case, specifically of Indigenous populations). Like Caswell and Cifor’s vision of archival empathy, Christen and Anderson’s notion of slow archives fundamentally centres care, connection, and acknowledgement of cultural and contextual specificity; this is about fostering collaborative and reciprocal relationships between creators, archivists, and communities. Instead of ‘treat[ing] access and ownership as blunt instruments’⁷³ with which to get the job done and meet performance targets, the authors posit that slowing down makes room for considering knowledge production, circulation, contextualization (or lack thereof) and exchange, in turn ‘open[ing] the possibility of seeing the intricate web of relationships formed and forged through attention to collaborative curation processes that do not default to normative structures of attribution, access, or scale.’⁷⁴ Recognizing the shortfalls of — indeed, the active harms enacted by — the austerity-driven, target-oriented approach that is now commonplace in many institutional archives, Christen and Anderson’s pivot towards slowness offers radical possibilities for enacting care and centring those whose archival record is further marginalized by existing infrastructures.

It should be emphasized here that Christen and Anderson’s conception of slow archives unfolds in the context of Indigenous knowledge forms, ethical collaboration, and reparative archival work in North America, and as such it is part of a much larger body of decolonial scholarship on the archive. When I trace the gossamer threads between dispersed archives or attempt to draw lines between seemingly disparate people in census records and postcard collections, I am not by any stretch of the imagination doing the difficult work of decolonizing the archive — not least because my subjects here are predominantly white men. Nor am I building relationships with the creators of the Grafton Papers, all of whom died without direct descendants. Nonetheless, there is much to be taken from feminist and decolonial articulations of archival work in which marginal lives and bodies are prioritized — all the more so in the context of ephemeral archives, which so often record the intricacies and emotional histories of their communities and creators, and which are simultaneously marginalized and pushed out of view by existing archival infrastructures and processes.

Conclusion

In summary, ephemeral archives hold immense potential and power as sources for counter-histories of both individuals and communities, but they continue to be decontextualized — and therefore marginalized — by institutionalized archival infrastructures and professional workflows that prioritize quantity over quality of archival catalogues. A light-touch, more-product-less-process approach to cataloguing is actually antithetical to making meaning or use of ephemeral archives, given that such materials usually necessitate a degree of familiarity and contextual specificity in order to make any sense of them as objects and documentary sources. If anything, such an approach further marginalizes materials whose innate archival value is already constantly undermined in the profession in favour of prioritizing ‘originality,’ corporate memory, and transactional or juridical evidence. Taking a substantial, but historically overlooked, collection of ephemera in an English country house archive as my case study, I have here attempted to make the case for slow, intentional, and research-intensive archival work that goes beyond the boundaries of the institutional archive, guided by feminist and decolonial archival scholarship that advocates for more caring, connective approaches to archival work and research.

Much more work needs to be done to establish how, in a professional climate increasingly shaped by precarity and target-oriented, profit-driven work, the slow and caring archival work needed to make sense of ephemera can unfold in any meaningful, sustainable way. My own experience as both archivist and embedded researcher perhaps offers one path forward, whereby archive services might take on collaborative projects with external organizations and communities, but further case studies of the value of ephemeral collections and collaborative archival projects such as my own are needed in order to begin building a framework for slow, caring, and meaningful archival engagement with ephemeral archives. For now, this article constitutes a first step towards what it is hoped will be a rich and generative discussion about archival labour and the place and value of ephemera in institutional repositories.

Acknowledgments

An early iteration of this paper was presented at the 2022 International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (ICHORA), and I thank the organizers for the opportunity to share this research. My PhD is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via my doctoral training consortium, the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. My thanks go to the Chatsworth House Trust, and to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire for generously granting me access to the Devonshire Collection Archives. Heartfelt thanks to Fran Baker (Archivist), Louise Clarke (Assistant Archivist) and Aidan Haley (former Assistant Archivist) at Chatsworth for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Lucy Brownson

Lucy Brownson is an archivist and researcher based in Sheffield and London. She is currently completing a PhD on the history of archival practices in the English country house, a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield and the Chatsworth House Trust. She is a co-organiser of Sheffield Feminist Archive, a community archive documenting grassroots feminism in the city, and she also teaches at the University of Dundee's Centre for Archive & Information Studies.

Notes

1. Burant, “Ephemera, Archives, and Another View of History;” Organ, ‘Ephemera in Archives;’ Clarke and Warren, “Ephemera: Between Archival Objects and Events.”

2. Cf. Altermatt and Hilton, “Hidden Collections within Hidden Collections.”

3. Society of American Archivists, ‘ephemera, pl. n.,’ Dictionary of Archives Terminology, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/ephemera.html.

4. Kumbier, Ephemeral Material, 16.

5. Cf. Shepherd and Yeo, Managing Records, 148–151.

6. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 243.

7. Kumbier, Ephemeral Material, 17.

8. Organ, ‘Ephemera in Archives,’ 107.

9. Ibid., 109–110.

10. Archive Association of British Columbia, A Manual for Small Archives, 99.

11. Ibid., 100.

12. Burant, “Ephemera”, 192.

13. Schwartz, “Coming to Terms with Photographs”, 143.

14. Ibid.

15. Cf. Newman and Tourle, ‘Coalition Cuts 2: Museums;’ Bowden and Ciesielska, ‘Accretion, Angst and Antidote.’

16. Greene and Meissner, “More Product, Less Process.”

17. North West Museums Libraries and Archives, Logjam, 21.

18. Historic Houses Archivists Group, “Training: Collections Care on a Shoestring”, https://www.hhagarchivists.org/training/conservation-care/.

19. Kumbier, Ephemeral Material; McKinney, Information Activism; Sheffield, Documenting Rebellions; Lee, Producing the Archival Body; Cifor, ‘Stains and Remains;’ Cifor, Viral Cultures.

20. Rogan, ‘Stamps and Postcards;’ Rogan, “An Entangled Object;” Gillen, “Writing Edwardian Postcards;” Gillen, ‘The Picture Postcard.’

21. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; Hartman, Lose Your Mother.

22. Garvey, Writing with Scissors; Good, ‘From Scrapbook to Facebook;’ Watton, ‘Suffrage Scrapbooks.’

23. Cf. West, “Social Space and the English Country House”, 104.

24. Calf, “Establishing the Origins of Chatsworth’s Theatre”, 134.

25. Chatsworth House Trust, “Art, Archives & Library.”

26. White et al., “The Arrangement of Estate Records”, 1.

27. Towe and Clarke, “The Hardwick Archive”, Hardwick Hall, 330.

28. Higgins, Evans and Mathias, “Editorial: Estate Archives”, 1.

29. Ibid., 3.

30. Butler, “Power at the Power House.” Unpublished PhD diss., University of Sheffield, 2019, 33.

31. Steedman, Master and Servant, 14.

32. Winstanley, “Voices from the Past”, 626.

33. Smith, “Deference and Humility”, 48.

34. Archive Association of British Columbia, A Manual, 99.

35. Photograph album of Nellie Lea, c.1920s, DP16/33, Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth (hereafter cited as DC).

36. Historian Stephen Matthews summarizes the role of the land agent as fulfilling a ‘managerial role as the critically important link between landlord and tenant and […] with wider aspects of the business world.’ On large estates like Chatsworth, the agent presided over the management of the landowner’s properties and incomes, delegating to a fleet of sub-agents. Cf. Matthews, “Landlord, Agent and Tenant”, 197; birth certificate of Frederick William Martin, digital image via FindMyPast.

37. 1901 census return for Edensor, Derbyshire, England, digital image via FindMyPast; England & Wales National Probate Calendar, 1858–1995, digital image via Ancestry.

38. Cecil Crofton’s scrapbook, n.d., MS1009, Archives and Special Collections, Senate House Library, University of London.

39. Ibid.

40. Victoria & Albert Museum, ‘Collections.’

41. Conroy, “Simeon Solomon in Queer Victorian London”, 189.

42. 1911 census return for Paddington, London & Middlesex, England. Digital image via FindMyPast.

43. Cecil Crofton’s postcard album, c.1888, CH11/2/1, DC; Cecil Crofton collection of autograph letters, 1849–1924, MSL/1924/1779, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum.

44. Gillen, “The Picture Postcard.”

45. Oral history interview with Tom Grafton, 30 October 1994, uncatalogued, DC.

46. Rogan, ‘An Entangled Object,’ 11–13.

47. A notice of Crofton’s financial bequest to his servants, published in the Norwood News (3 January 1936), gives his address as Drewstead Road. ‘Gifts of £100 and £500 this Week,’ Norwood News (3 January 1936), digital image via the British Newspaper Archive.

48. Cecil Crofton’s scrapbook, MS1009, Senate House Library.

49. Pleasure Ground vouchers, 1891, uncatalogued, DC; 1891 census return for Edensor, Bakewell, England, digital image via FindMyPast.

50. Pleasure Ground vouchers, 1891, uncatalogued, DC; Letter of recommendation (copy) from U. R. Burke, 7 April 1919, DE/CH/2/1/99, DC.

51. Calf, “The Theatre at Chatsworth House”, unpublished PhD diss., University of York, forthcoming.

52. Butler, “Historical Graffiti”, 7.

53. Walter Longden’s postcard albums, [c.1890s-1940s], CH11/2/2–4, DC.

54. Ibid., CH11/2/2.

55. Ibid., CH11/2/4; cf. Rogan, ‘An Entangled Object,’ 11.

56. 1901 census return for Edensor, Derbyshire, England, digital image via FindMyPast; 1911 census return for Edensor, Derbyshire, England, digital image via FindMyPast.

57. Walter Longden’s postcard album, CH11/2/4, DC.

58. Gillen, “Writing Edwardian Postcards”, 490.

59. Walter Longden’s postcard album, CH11/2/2, DC.

60. Oral history interview with Tom Grafton, DC.

61. Davidoff, Thicker than Water, 141–142.

62. Davidoff, “Kinship as a Categorical Concept”, 412.

63. England & Wales Government Probate Death Index 1858–2019, digital image via FindMyPast.

64. Private Secretary’s A/C cash book, 1909–1924, uncatalogued, DC.

65. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 15.

66. West, “Social Space”,104.

67. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 49.

68. Ibid.

69. Oram, “Sexuality in Heterotopia”, 537.

70. Nesmith, “Seeing Archives”, 32.

71. Caswell and Cifor, “Radical Empathy in Archives”, 33.

72. Christen and Anderson, “Towards Slow Archives”, 90.

73. Ibid., 111.

74. Ibid., 90.