In May this year, the Museum hosted Caroline, a student on a cataloguing placement from University College London’s Archives and Records Management MA course, which involved cataloguing a photograph album. Read on to hear more from Caroline about her placement.
Being an archivist, to me, is all about gossip. Not the malicious kind, but the quiet uncovering of lives once lived. This being the secrets hidden within ordinary records, photographs, annotations, and memories. Archival work allows us to piece together these stories from records revealing memories which might have otherwise been forgotten. More than anything, as an archivist, I want to reveal these memories and allow others to access them too.
For my work placement with the Museum of the Order of St John, I catalogued a photograph album of photographs of the No. 18 Whitehall Nursing Division. I chose this album for exactly those reasons. During my first overview of the material, I was struck not by grand historical events, but by the deeply ordinary nature of some of the photographs. The album is filled with images of women spending time together. These range from photos of them attending events, standing proudly in their uniforms, laughing with each other, and celebrating each other. In many ways, the photographs could be seen as “normal”, but that normality is what makes them so compelling to me. The album for me paints a picture of community. These women clearly spent time in the St John Ambulance Brigade forming friendships and networks through their charitable work that lasted a lifetime. Looking through these pages, I was reminded of how rare that sense of collective community or belonging can feel today. There is something so moving to me about seeing the community preserved in these snapshots of everyday companionship.
What surprised me the most during my time on placement was the emotional attachment I developed with some of the people in the album. The mysterious figure of “Lucy”, whose name appears on the inside cover, began to feel oddly familiar. Whether Lucy was actually the creator of the album or simply a contributor, her work lingers within the pages in the handwritten notes and pasted-down images. It feels like an accumulation of 50 years of this Division’s stories. The physical condition of the album was good but well-loved and used, which in many ways makes it feel like a living object rather than a distant historical record, something which I love about photograph albums specifically. They are living memories for the people who created them.
Overall, this project reminded me that archives are active places for connection with the past. It was not the object itself that moved me, but the connection to human stories which I enjoyed. Through cataloguing this album, I was not only preserving material or making it more accessible online, but participating in a continuation of relationships and communities which are embedded in the album’s pages.
The catalogue record for this photograph album is available on Collections Online here.
