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Malcolm Holmes with senior archivist Richard Knight.
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Goodbye to archivist who gave us a present of our past
MALCOLM Holmes, the head of Camden’s history archives, retires this week after 40 years chronicling life in the borough.
He leaves behind him one of the country’s largest local history collections, which fills two miles of shelving and includes 50,000 images, 100,000 newspaper cuttings and 200,000 entries.
The earliest council document in the archive is a record of a parish meeting in 1618, while archivists have also found the deeds for land in Seven Dials which date from 1540.
Mr Holmes and his six-strong team based at Holborn Library in Theobald’s Road have to determine which documents are going to have a long shelf life. He said: “You have to be clairvoyant – you have to anticipate the needs of the future. Part of the job is taking things that may seem quite ordinary now but could hold vital information in 100 years time.”
Documents come from a diverse range of sources, ranging from council papers to personal letters, photographs and newspapers. Mr Holmes, who received an MBE in the New Year Honours list, said: “By Thursday lunchtime, the New Journal has been turned into press cuttings.”
For Mr Holmes, who started work in Camden in 1962, one find in particular stands out – a stack of papers and photographs dating from the early 1900s which were given to Swiss Cottage library.
“They belonged to a woman who had acted as a companion to an elderly lady in St John’s Wood,” he recalled. “There were lots of pictures of things that just do not normally survive – just a simple story of life before World War I.”
An oral history project, King’s Cross Voices, has charted an area undergoing massive changes and has included interviews with sex workers.
Mr Holmes said: “This has given us a different aspect on life in the area – it’s a great way of considering its diversity and the changes that are taking place.”
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