Jean Barker, Baroness Trumpington (1922-2018), served in naval intelligence at Bletchley Park during World War Two, and as a Land Girl to David Lloyd George. She went on to serve in local government in Cambridgeshire before becoming a Conservative politician and a life peer.
Her collection has recently been catalogued and repackaged to enable this wealth of research material to be accessed. In amongst the collection are over 50 scrapbooks and photograph albums dating from 1922 to 2016. Our Conservation team is responsible for carrying out any necessary repairs to the albums and, in many cases, for creating bespoke boxes to house them. Fortunately, we also have high quality digital copies of all the images.
Because of the large date range of the collection, we have an interesting and tangible history of photograph albums. These come in differing formats, sizes and materials, and although they look appealing when new, are invariably made from poor quality materials that have degraded over time – especially through excessive handling.
A good example of this being the album dated 1941-51 (TRUM 1/5). The boards were completely detached with a missing spine piece. The photographic content was interesting as it contained some early colour prints, but several of the black and white prints were loose due to the failure of the original adhesive.
These could be re-attached using small hinges of Japanese paper and wheat starch paste. The old spine coverings were removed, and new linings applied that were extended to form reattachments for the boards. These were dyed with acrylic paint to blend in with the original boards.
Many of the later albums are the ‘self-adhesive’ variety, such as TRUM 1/43 featured in the images below. These are convenient for attaching content, but the pages are manufactured from poor quality board covered in a substandard adhesive. These, combined with chemically unstable plastic coverings, can cause quite a headache for conservators!
The photographs would benefit long-term from being removed but are at risk from being physically damaged during removal due to the strong adhesion. Another consideration are the captions, which are written directly onto the pages – without the photos in place, the context and album’s integrity would be lost. Therefore, it was decided to leave them in situ.
To provide long-term protection for the albums, they are re-housed into ‘clam-shell’ boxes. We custom-make each box from archival quality box-board and has been a useful project for our conservation volunteers to undertake.
By David Parker, Conservator, Churchill Archives Centre