Funding secured to protect precious and unique archive

Funding has been secured to support the conservation, care and cataloguing of the Henderson Collection – a unique and important historical archive which was donated to the Cornwall Museum almost a century ago.

Applications to Townsweb Archiving and the Tanner Phoenix FundA sum of money made available for grant making, often with specific criteria/conditions. via Cornwall Community Foundation were successful, resulting in a combined fund of £12,500 to deliver the projectA piece of work that delivers an output. over 2 years.

The purchase of conservation materials and a digital scanner, as well as some specialist off-site scanning for particular documents, will allow the large collection of manuscript material to be preserved, digitised and shared with researchers more widely than ever before.

Collections Manager Jeni Woolcock welcomes this significant step, saying:

“The Henderson Collection is particularly important because of its scale, rarity and originality. It contains a wide range of manuscript material, including manorial records, wills, deeds, indentures, correspondence and household documents such as recipe books. Many of these items are unique surviving records of Cornwall’s legal, social and economic history, providing invaluable evidence of how communities lived, worked and organised themselves across several centuries.”

The Henderson Collection came into the care of the museum in 1933 following the death of Truro-born historian, lecturer and author, Charles Henderson. Often unwell in his early years, Henderson spent lots of time walking in the Cornish landscape, educating himself about its monuments and history. His Cornish bardic name was Map Hendra (‘Son of Antiquity’).

Henderson would go on to collect thousands of ancient manuscripts as well as pen his own scholarly contributions, many of which were never published. An Oxford graduate who was given a fellowship as a tutor, he had published one book on Cornish history – a study of bridges in collaboration with Henry Coates – when he died from pleurisy on his honeymoon in Rome at the age of just 33.

The Courtney Library

The Henderson Collection is part of the archival holdings of The Royal Institution of Cornwall, the charity which operates the museum and The Courtney Library. Together with more than one million historical artefacts in the museum’s care, the archives form part of Cornwall’s national collection, documenting the social, cultural, technological and environmental forces that shaped this unique region and defined its place in the world.

Article originally published by The Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery, read it here.