The Pyre of Progress: British Technocrats to Burn Our Ancestral History

As the Justice Ministry considers making savings by destroying historical legal documents, Alexander Adams finds the left and right uniting to oppose the idea.

Earlier this month, the English and Welsh Justice Ministry floated the idea of digitising its massive national archive of wills, which it is required by law to conserve. So far, so unobjectionable. However, upon reading the consultation proposition in full, observers noted that this had more to do with cost-saving than improving accessibility.

Mike Freer MP, Minister for His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service(which is overseeing the consultation), wrote in the introduction to the consultation paper, “At the moment there are no limits to how long courts hold these original will documents and they are held long past the period when a challenge might be brought. HMCTS has original wills dating back to 1858.”

The paper describes the burden of physical archiving. “The current system involves significant storage and preservation costs which increase each year and are difficult to justify when digital preservation offers an equally efficient, much more economic and environmentally beneficial alternative.” The consultation argues that the destruction of 100 million wills on paper would be beneficial overall. It is clear what the preference of civil servants is.

It is undeniable that maintaining an archive of old paper documents is complicated and costly. Conservation issues range from fading pigment, corrosive ink, crumbling paper, damage by mould and vermin, to the necessity of fire-suppression systems. Documents can be difficult to access and easy to misplace. Digitisation would allow anyone around the world instant access to an important historical database.

The priority should be keeping our historical records as faithfully as possible; sadly, the truth is that many modern archivists (like librarians and museum curators) have a combination of a distaste for actual documents and embarrassment about the idea of being custodians of a legacy of (apparent) historical inequality.

Digitisation: Expensive, Slow, Unstable

An expert warns that “manual scanning is one of the only responsible options” for delicate documents and that “scanning a single archival box of records can take days”. Digitisation includes time-consuming tasks of editing, adding metadata, proofing, and quality assurance, which can only be done by archivists.

Any IT specialist will tell you digital data is neither stable nor legible in perpetuity. Solid-state storage devices are not immune to corruption. Digital storage needs vigilant maintenance. Hidden (but inevitable and predictable) costs of digitisation could exceed those of running document-storage facilities.

Even if digital data is preserved, there is no guarantee that such data will remain usable or compatible with reading systems. Converting information to a new format comes at a cost; hence, much goes unconverted, such as yesteryear’s magnetic tape and punch cards.

Senior civil servants unversed in technology have been presented with the promise of savings and the chance to offload dusty documents. They will plough on regardless of warnings. By the time the consequences become fully clear, decision-makers will be safely retired. Like politicians, civil servants who act recklessly never face personal consequences.

We already have experience of irreversible archival ‘progress’.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, newspaper and journal archives were copied to microfilm by libraries. Microfilm is a photographic film negative, which stores black-and-white data in miniaturised form. After transfer to microfilm, paper originals were given away or incinerated, destroying unique journals of record stretching back a century. Microfilm was more convenient to store but unsatisfactory: poor quality and prone to irreparable damage. The microfilm mania was covertly promoted by the photographic industry – which manufactured microfilm and microfilm readers.

Drubbed by Right and Left

The ministry’s consultation received nearly unanimous opposition on social media. As expected, genealogists and conservatives advocate conservation, but – more surprisingly – leftists also object. The suggestion that the wills of “famous and historic figures” should be retained has roused the ire of class warriors, who object to preferential treatment of the privileged.

People of all political viewpoints have pointed out that parameters of significance shift with historical research and social tides, meaning that we cannot predict who might be considered significant by future generations.

Cost-cutting arguments applied to archive management ring hollow, coming as they do from a Conservative government that spent £2.7 billion on COVID-related health equipment so poor it was considered wastage. Any project to save £4.5 million per year seems irrelevant.

We can give the final word to Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold, which exposed the microfilm scandal. When I discussed the consultation with him, he responded, “A will is a lasting memory in paper of a particular person's life. A large collection of wills is itself an impressive historical achievement, like a bridge over a gorge or a noble building.”

The email address for responses to the consultation is [email protected].