Tag: Margerie Venables Taylor

International Women’s Day!

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The Beyond Notability project is taking over the Society of Antiquaries Twitter feed for this year’s International Women’s Day!

As part of this event, we are featuring two audio recordings from the correspondence of two women who are now featured on our database: Eliza Jeffries Davis, a historian, and Margerie Venables Taylor, an archaeologist.

These recordings of letters in the Victoria County History (VCH) archive have been created by Professor Catherine Clarke (Davis) and Claire-Louise Lucas (Taylor). The project is particularly grateful to Victoria County History for permission to record the extracts and make transcriptions of them available here. We’re also very grateful to Professor Catherine Clarke and Claire-Louise Lucas for agreeing to record them.

Eliza Jeffries Davis worked for the Victoria County History as a researcher and writer in the first decade of the 20th century. She became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1929.

Margerie Venables Taylor worked for the Victoria County History at the same time as Eliza Jeffries Davis. She became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1925.

These two recordings feature letters sent to William Page, the general editor of the VCH, by Davis and Taylor respectively. They illuminate the working lives of these two women. Davis’s letter is celebratory, sent on the publication of the VCH volume on which she had worked. In it, she makes suggestions for publicity and in so doing highlights her non-VCH working life, as a London County Council teacher. Taylor’s letter, sent after she had been working for some years at VCH, reflects her continuing concerns about the rate of pay for VCH researchers. She also reveals the expansion of her research work beyond VCH, enabling her to push more effectively for a salary increase.

Eliza Jeffries Davis

VCH Archvie EJ Davis read by Catherine Clarke March 2022

Eliza Jeffries Davis letter to William Page, dated 5 Oct 1909, on London County Council Moorfields Training College, White Street, Moorfields E. C. letterhead (VCH 2/22/3)

Transcript:

Dear Mr Page,

Thank you for your note. I am glad the London volume is really coming out at last – though I shudder to think of the negligences + ignorances in my part!

I am writing to suggest that you tell the publishers to send a prospectus of it to the heads of various London schools and colleges. I think we discussed this once, + you asked me to remind you again. It would be so very useful in teaching, + luckily the board of Education is awake to the importance of local history just now, so the heads of schools might think it worth while to spend so much money on a book!

In the case of institutions under the LCC it would be well if the notices were sent as soon as possible, as the “Requisition” for new books (only allowed once a term) are made up about the beginning of November. I enclose lists which may be useful.

Yours sincerely,

EJ Davis

Margerie Venables Taylor

Extract from MV Taylor letter to William Page dated 24.IV.1910 from 48 Watton Crescent, Oxford (VCH 1/3/210)

Transcript

Dear Mr Page, 

I have been considering the question we discussed since I last saw you. I should very much like to work for the History again, but I think I ought to have more than 1/6d an hour. If you work out £2.10 a week, working 5-6 hours a day, inclusive of all holidays etc, it comes to more than that. At the present moment for Research work at the Bodley I am paid 2/- an hour + other workers-transcribers are paid 2/6 an hour, while the ordinary, not very skilled, catalogue assistant receives 1/6 an hour. So that I think I ought to have 2/- an hour, especially when it is not certain that the work will continue for more than two years. I put the facts before you so that you will understand my position. I really feel it is not fair to take research work at 1/6 an hour, after some years’ experiences. I am sorry to trouble you in this way, but I think you will understand + tell me exactly what you think.  […]

**If you would like to explore the lives of Eliza Jeffries Davis and Margerie Venables further, you will find them on our database at: https://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/wiki/Item:Q153 (Davis); https://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/wiki/Item:Q133 (Taylor).

Our First Trip

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By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability)

On 6 October, the Beyond Notability team took its first steps into the Society of Antiquaries archive. This will be a key research area for us, as the Society’s archive is one of our main record sets in starting to map women’s work in archaeology, history and heritage between the late 19th and the mid-twentieth centuries.  

The Society has been in existence since 1707 (more on its history here).  Its recently appointed archivist, Kat Petersen, was our guide to getting to know the SAL’s archive a bit better. She is currently going through the entire archive herself, to ensure that ultimately the Society’s rich institutional history will be discoverable through the Collections website. 

Our goal with this initial visit was to look at a cross section of the Society’s archive to get a better sense of the kinds of ways in which women’s work was recorded.  The Society’s Blue papers (records generated when a person is proposed as a Fellow of the Society) are an obvious starting point. However, women were not admitted as Fellows until 1920, so references to their work before that point can only be found by looking beyond that particular set of records.  

The Society’s various Minute Books are another key resource.  There are series of Minute Books for various groups within the Society, including the Executive Committee, the Council and the Finance and Library Committee. Women can be found in the Executive Committee and Council minutes before 1920 if they are sending artefacts for exhibition at the Society, reporting on discoveries made, or offering books or artefacts to the Society (Fig. 1). Another activity we’ll be tracking and highlighting is instances of women seeking to use the resources of the Society for their own purposes (Fig. 2). 

Fig. 1. Detail from the Society’s Executive Committee Minutes from 3 July 1913, showing that a “Miss Cobbe” offered the Society a group of manuscripts relating to Bedfordshire. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. 
Fig. 2. Detail from the Society’s Executive Committee Minutes from 18 June 1914, showing that a “Miss Portal” applied to copy extracts from a manuscript held by the Society. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. 

A further valuable record set is the Special Committee Minute Books. We looked through one volume of these, dating from the years immediately after the Second World War. We found the names of FSAs Marjerie Venables Taylor and Kathleen Kenyon among the members of some of the Committees. On the Society’s Apulia Committee, gathered to organise excavations in this region of southern Italy, we spotted the name of another woman, “Mrs J. S. P. Bradford”. “Mrs Bradford” accompanied her husband John Spencer Purvis Bradford, FSA, on a scoping mission to Italy prior to a formal application being made to excavate.  

Thanks to Francesca Radcliffe’s biography of John Bradford, a bit more information about Patience (Andrewes) Bradford is available. Prior to her marriage, she attended the Courtauld Institute, and was part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) during the Second World War. Radcliffe’s research reveals that during her lifetime Patience Andrewes Bradford was considered to be an expert in medieval archaeology and art – and that in the 1960s, she took over the management of the Apulia Committee.   

Through our project, we will be bringing together archival records at the Society of Antiquaries with information from other associated archives and sources, ensuring that we can view each of these women as individuals within the context of their time, and as a network linked across time. The first step in our programme is to understand how the Society’s institutional archive is constructed and what parts of the Society’s activities over time it represents, all the while taking note of the ways in which women appear in the records. 

We can’t wait for our next trip!