Lords

"Lords" is considered to be the home of cricket (yes in all the world) and it's "spiritual headquarters". It is owned by the Marylebone Cricket Club who have the role as the guardians of both the laws and the spirit of cricket. A big responsibility given how deeply ingrained both cricket and Lords are in the British psyche. Nice touch with the living gardens being developed on the outside - modernisation Lords style!

Watching the Cricket

Sunday afternoon on Parliament Hill watching the cricket. An English past-time.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing - August 2010

August saw the completion of several long-running projects, with newly catalogued collections and retroconverted catalogues both entering the online database for the first time. Several thousand new records were made available for searching, chiefly relating to twentieth-century collections.

Our first highlight this month (already described more fully in an earlier blog posting) is an indication of how up-to-the-minute archives can be and a valuable addition to our holdings on genetics, complementing the hard science with information on its human impact. Genetic Alliance UK is an umbrella organisation bringing together various groups representing persons affected by genetic conditions (the initial impulse came from a member of the Huntington's Disease Association, whilst in its first years it was run on a voluntary basis by a member of the Tuberous Sclerosis Association): it was founded in 1989 as the Genetic Interest Group and adopted its new name in June this year. It deals, then, with very current issues and the archives include material created only a few months ago. The papers total four boxes (50 database records) and include minutes and agendas of the society's AGMs, Trustee Board and Operational Group, annual reports, and newsletters and publications produced by the society, either alone or in conjunction with other groups. The papers are available under the reference SA/GIG.

In the 1980s the Library received a small collection of papers relating to the work of the biochemist Norman Heatley (1911-2004) and his work as part of the team that developed penicillin; these were made available under the reference GC/48. At the end of Heatley’s life a much larger amount of material was given to the Library, transforming the original single box into a collection filling thirty: this new material has now been catalogued and the original GC/48 merged with it, to form a large new collection with the reference PP/NHE. A fuller description of the papers is to be found in a blog posting by their cataloguer.

A letter by the great cricketer (and general practitioner) W.G. Grace (1848-1915), previously held in the Library’s old Autograph Letters Collection, was added to the online catalogue. It includes information on one of his younger brothers, who is about to take an exam at the Royal College of Surgeons: Grace discusses with the College how to minimise the effects of his exam nerves. The letter can be consulted using the reference MS.8746.

As noted last month, work continued behind the scenes on the papers of the psychiatrist Henry Dicks (PP/HVD) and on a project to expand the amount of material catalogued and available that relates to Wellcome Witness seminars on various topics in medical science (GC/253). Work also continues on a radical expansion of the catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Professor Hans Grüneberg (PP/GRU) which will make available much more detailed information about his individual correspondents. For the moment, the original catalogue of the Grüneberg papers has been taken off-line to avoid creating confusion: contact the archives and manuscripts department to access this material.

Last month's cataloguing highlights mentioned that the retroconversion project, which aims to convert all the Library's old hard-copy archive catalogues to database form, is coming very close to completion. We mentioned then the catalogue of the Abortion Law Reform Association, which completed retroconversion in the final hours of July and went live very early in August, adding 758 new records to the database. The archive includes records of the Association, its officers, and individuals connected with the attempt to reform the abortion laws, plus various associated materials such as papers of Chairman Janet Chance, and, following the passing of 1967 Act making abortion legal, papers of the 'Lane' Committee on Working of the Aberdeen Act and Abortion Amendment Bills. Its reference is SA/ALR.

In an allied area, the catalogue of the Birth Control Campaign was also converted. The 257 new records for searching document the work of the Campaign and its parent body the Birth Control Trust, focusing in particular on Parliamentary action: topics addressed include wider availability of vasectomies, free provision of contraception under the NHS, and general improved NHS facilities for contraception, abortion and sterilisation. There is also a large section of press cuttings, and files relating to attempts to promote and publicise its aims and to relations with other bodies in connected fields. The papers can be found by searching for the reference SA/BCC.

Earlier we mentioned new cataloguing that relates to genetics: retroconversion also contributed to this theme, making available the catalogue of papers relating to the
Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit. Another 498 records were added to the database, the many scientific symbols used in the data leading to a considerable extension in the archivists' HTML abilities. The MRC Blood Group Unit succeeded the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit set up in 1935 under the direction of Professor (later Sir) Ronald Fisher and financed through the Medical Research Council by the Rockefeller Foundation (the need for safe transfusion therapy intensified blood group research in the run-up to the Second World War). The Unit was reconstituted in 1946 at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine as the Blood Group Research Unit, under the directorship of Dr Robert Race, and acquired an international reputation in the highly specialised field of haematology, extending its work in 1965 into the genetics of blood groups. Upon the retirement of Dr Race in 1973, Dr Ruth Sanger became director of the Unit. Under Dr Sanger's direction, the Unit continued to make a unique contribution to the identification of blood groups, and to the applications of the blood group systems to the problems of human genetics. The Unit was disbanded in September 1995, although its work continues in other research centres. This collection will be one of those to be digitised early as part of the Library’s focus on material relevant to the history of genetics; the data can be browsed under the reference SA/BGU.

Finally, the catalogue of the papers of Sir Edward Mellanby FRS (1884-1955) and Lady May Mellanby née Tweedy (1882-1978) was converted. The Mellanbys worked together in the field of nutrition, with particular emphasis on vitamins and deficiencies; in addition, Sir Edward was Secretary to the Medical Research Council from 1933-1949. The papers include personal material, correspondence, research notes, lectures and drafts, and add another 876 records to the database which can be found under the reference PP/MEL.

Images:
1/ screenshot of the website of Genetic Alliance UK.
2/ Lady Mary Mellanby and Sir Edward Mellanby in Kew Gardens, c.1950, from PP/MEL.

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Confrontation at Crystal Palace: The Adventure of the Bearded Colossus

One hundred and ten years ago, two doctors confronted one another in South London. One, in his fifties at the time, was the acknowledged leader in his field. The other, ten years younger, was a few years into a stellar career in a different area. In Upper Norwood’s Crystal Palace Park, a few yards from Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ dinosaur sculptures, in a bowl of land that now houses the famous Crystal Palace athletics track, the two men met head on…

Their meeting – as the mysterious opening paragraph probably indicates – was not to do with any medical issue, and although both are instantly recognisable to this day, in neither case is it for their medical career. The older man is William Gilbert (“W.G.”) Grace, the brilliant cricketer (and general practitioner). The younger is Arthur Conan Doyle, author, general practitioner and one-time eye specialist.

Born in 1848, Grace had starred for Gloucestershire since he was a teenager, chiefly as a batsman but also as a bowler (initially medium-paced, but growing slower as his waistline increased with the years). In 1895, well into his forties, he had had a great “Indian Summer” season, compiling statistics that ranked with any season of his career – for example, he became the first player to score 1000 runs in May, something only two other people have achieved subsequently. In 1899, however, he quarrelled with the authorities at Gloucestershire and became the lynchpin of a new London County Cricket Club, based at Crystal Palace Park. Although he never had another truly great season, even in the twilight of his career he was a feared player: Grace in decline was as good as many players at their best.

Arthur Conan Doyle, by contrast, loved cricket but performed at a much lower level. At this stage in his career, he had already achieved huge success as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The great detective had made his debut in two novels in the late 1880s but it was when Doyle began to write a series of short stories featuring Holmes for the Strand magazine, the first appearing in summer 1891, that public enthusiasm really went through the roof. The Strand rapidly made the Sherlock Holmes story its lead item, and circulation doubled. Notoriously, Doyle felt Sherlock Holmes was crowding out all his other literary projects and in December 1893 sent him and his arch-rival Professor Moriarty tumbling, apparently to their deaths, into the Reichenbach Falls; the remainder of the 1890s were spent in a variety of literary endeavours, including other mystery stories, historical fiction and tales on medical themes. When the two men met in 1900, in South Africa the Boer War was under way - something to which Doyle gave enthusiastic support – and he had just revived his medical skills to serve as a volunteer doctor at the Longman Hospital in Bloemfontein. In the late summer, he was back in England and back in the area of South London where he had lived with his wife and daughter earlier in his career (there is a blue plaque on Conan Doyle’s old house in Tenison Road, South Norwood, a mile or so to the south of the Park), on a collision course with W.G. Grace.

Doyle was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club, and on 23rd-25th August 1900 the MCC took on Grace’s London club in a three-day game at the Crystal Palace. It will not surprise anyone familiar with the English summer to learn that the match was affected by rain – there was no play at all on the first day - and that the two clubs needed to negotiate ways in which the fixture could be brought to a conclusion despite time lost to the weather. Grace agreed to a proposal to extend the final day’s play into the evening to get a result. On the 25th of August, the LCC – who had batted first - were into their second innings. Neither side had scored heavily in the first innings and each had been all out for a very similar figure, so this final day would decide the game. No London batsman was particularly impressive, with the exception of Grace: he scored a century, with his nearest colleague scoring only 36 and all the others struggling to break double figures. Getting Grace out would be crucial for the MCC.

Conan Doyle, a slow-to-medium paced bowler for the MCC, had had a quiet game: taking no wickets in the first innings, and scoring only 4. Now, on the final day, he found himself wheeled in to bowl again. The two main MCC bowlers, Thompson and Cranfield, had taken all the wickets so far. Doyle later recalled the occasion in a long poem, “A Reminiscence of Cricket”:

“Before me he stands like a vision,
Bearded and burly and brown,
A smile of good humoured derision
As he waits for the first to come down…

And I - I had tricks for the rabbits,
The feeble of mind or eye,
I could see all the duffer's bad habits
And where his ruin might lie.

The capture of such might elate one,
But it seemed like one horrible jest
That I should serve tosh to the great one,
Who had broken the hearts of the best.”

And yet: Doyle’s very lack of threat as a bowler, his sheer amateurishness, may have served him well in the end. As he tells it, he sent down two deliveries that Grace treated with perhaps more respect than they deserved, killing them with the bat but not attempting to hit them beyond the crease. Then, on Doyle’s third delivery, when Grace had finally decided that there was no secret weapon and that Doyle was every bit as unpolished as he looked, the great man uncoiled a ferocious shot, and…

Still when my dreams are night-marish,
I picture that terrible smite,
It was meant for a neighboring parish,
Or any place out of sight.

But - yes, there's a but to the story…

But indeed: Grace’s bat swung a fraction too low and the ball, instead of sailing over the trees and landing in Penge, rocketed up vertically and dropped… safely into the gloves of the wicket-keeper.

The London club promptly declared and sent the MCC in to bat for their second innings. As mentioned above, the day’s play was extended to ensure that a result could be reached and, ten minutes after the game had been scheduled to end, the MCC reached their target and secured the victory. Doyle batted in the second innings but was out for a duck; however, his work was done. It was to be the only first-class wicket he ever took, but after W.G. Grace – even in his twilight years – anyone else would have been an anti-climax.

We remember neither man for his medical career: although Grace put in many years of general practice and Poor Law work in working-class areas of Bristol, he was no high-flyer, and Sherlock Holmes claimed Doyle before his medical career really gained any momentum. It is clear that if he had stuck to cricket we would not remember Doyle for that either. But the beauty of a sport wedded to statistics is that his feat – which clearly gave him enormous pleasure – is part of the official records to this day. Cricket fans wanting to see the full scorecard can do so here. And the Wellcome Library recognises both medical high-flyers and those whose main interests lay elsewhere: biographies of both Grace and Doyle can be found in the book collection, whilst Wellcome Images provides several illustrations of both men; there are also small collections of papers relating to both in the Archives and Manuscripts holdings. The main focus of their lives does lie outside medicine, but nonetheless the medical world can claim each as one of ours.

Images, from the top (all from Wellcome Images):
1/ W.G. Grace in middle age.
2/ Arthur Conan Doyle, undated.
3/ Crystal Palace Park, shortly after its opening in the mid-19th century. The cricket ground took over the area occupied by the large fountain to the left of the picture, beyond the dinosaurs.
4/ W.G. Grace in his prime.