Boaters and Bright Sparks project update

The halfway point has been reached in the project to catalogue the archives of the Willans Works engineering site at Rugby, so it’s a good time to see what’s been achieved so far.

Cataloguing

The aim is to increase awareness of the historical importance of the site, which was opened by engine and turbine makers Willans & Robinson in 1897. Successor companies such as English Electric, GEC and now Alstom continued the innovative Willans designs such as the central valve engine, and cataloguing the material has helped to show this.

Highlights include:

• late 19th and early 20th-century worldwide sales contracts for supplying engines to generate electricity – an important part of the firm's early success
• brochures showing where products had been installed
• ledgers, volumes and instructions showing how orders were received and how products and parts were built and delivered
• administrative files
• patents
• staff and apprenticeship records.

There are also files on running various sites such as Rugby, the first company location at Thames Ditton in Surrey and the short-lived boiler manufacture works at Queensferry in North Wales. These include references to temporary huts built for Belgian refugees in Rugby during the First World War, which were still being used in the 1930s as worker’s accommodation and known as ‘King Albert Row’. They were demolished after being deemed unfit for human habitation.

Thousands of negatives and prints from the Rugby site’s photographic department show:

• products being manufactured
• finished products installed in power stations
• works buildings, offices and departments
• staff
• social and sporting events.

Funding is also helping with the conservation and re-packaging of records, especially technical drawings (worked on by the project conservator) and glass plate negatives (cleaned and re-boxed by volunteers under supervision).

Additional deposits

The project funding is to work on records already deposited by Alstom but further transfers were made in 2014, including more items from the photographic department (which means the images now date from the 1880s to the mid-2000s).

Volunteers

Volunteers have continued the long-term work on the photographic negatives logbooks and also started on technical drawings, sales contracts and other files. They have also been looking at staff and apprentice records, particularly ledgers from the First World War period so that information from these can be used in other Heritage & Culture Warwickshire projects. Other First World War-related items include correspondence about work for the Armed Forces and the government (showing details of secret contracts and the code words used to disguise the work being carried out) and contracts for US workmen coming over to the UK because of labour shortages.

Material elsewhere and links made

The Project Archivist met staff working at Rugby Museum & Art Gallery and Rugby Library to see what Willans Works material they held. This exchange of information was extremely useful and duplicate material from our collections has been transferred to both organisations for local display and use.

Information on the Marconi collection held at The Bodleian Library in Oxford has been noted as it includes records relating to Willans & Robinson, English Electric and GEC.

Publicity

The project has been publicised in articles in the Archives & Records Associations ARC magazine and The Friends Of The Record Office newsletter, and also online via the Our Warwickshire website.

The Project Archivist also met organisers of the annual ex-English Electric apprentice’s reunion event to talk about the project and potential deposits from them.

Short presentations about the project were made at the Record Office Volunteers Training Day in May 2014 and a talk is planned for the Willans Works Retirement Association meeting in October.

Next steps

Plans for the last half of the project include the completion of listing as far as possible, numbering the documents, making the catalogue available online, and holding events at the Record Office and in Rugby featuring talks and exhibitions.