Paul FrithComment

The Collections Story

Paul FrithComment
The Collections Story

It was always going to happen - if an archive has the chance to review decades of accessions files that are our records of additions to our collections – we have a confession to make …

Archivists really don’t like it when the media reports on documents being ‘found in the dusty archive’. Usually by researchers who may have discovered something new to them but have had the benefit of work that has gone before to accession, conserve, package, describe and shelve them. What if just one of those steps is inexplicably missed? The work we are doing to improve ‘discovery’ means we have ‘found’ a collection that was never added to the catalogue when it was acquired in 1989 – (our archives are still not dusty though!) – Claudia, the archivist who has now described it, takes up the story …

There is something special about being the first person to open a box in the archives for probably the first time in several decades.

It was the photograph album that I was drawn to first. Scenes from Cheshire, but also grand houses and hotels. A shooting party, a picnic in the forest. Photographs of a young lady named Kathleen Machell Smith, posing for the camera. And … a carriage drawn by zebras, harnessed and blinkered and standing to attention outside a London home.

Kathleen Machell Smith was born on 7th October 1871 and began writing a daily diary as a teenager - a habit that would continue for the rest of her life. These early diaries are extraordinarily detailed, and a fascinating insight into daily Victorian life for a young woman between 1884 and 1897:

Friday May 2nd [1884]

Showery. Draw and paint in morning and help arrange flowers. At 12-30 Miss Frinck and I went up the Buckingham Palace Road, the things were too tempting. Ethel did not come, as she was not ready in time, “all because she would look at herself in the glass” as Miss Frinck said.

There are illustrations and flowers or feathers pressed into the pages. She was a meticulous record-keeper, intent on documenting virtually every aspect of her life. This thoroughness is later reflected in one of her household account books where expenditure is broken down category by category, and every penny spent is recorded over a decade between 1944 and 1954.

Her interest in architecture and art is apparent from other parts of the collection. There are a number of watercolour and ink drawings done by Kathleen of places she visited. Particularly prominent are drawings of Wyberslegh Hall (also known as Wybersley), in High Lane near Stockport, which became her home after she married Francis (Frank) Bradshaw-Isherwood in 1903.

Kathleen and Frank had two children, Christopher and Richard. After Frank’s death, whilst fighting during World War I in Belgium, Kathleen never remarried and is said to have grieved for him the rest of her life. This affected her children greatly, as her son Christopher Isherwood wrote in his 1971 family memoir Kathleen and Frank (a deeply critical take on his parents’ marriage that used material in her later diaries that he had taken to the United States).

Follow the link to our catalogue record here to explore the description of the collection in more detail.