Changing Britannia Archive Project

We started this Heritage Lottery Funded Project in October 2002, and have made steady progress over the last 15 months. We spent the first six months organising ourselves - which meant enlarging the office/reading room by knocking down the dividing walls to make one large room, moving the kitchen unit, installing three new fire doors and new windows (both in the archive room and downstairs in the meeting room which means it is a lot less noisy there!). We also got new blinds for the archive room and bought a thermohygrograph to monitor the temperature and humidity there. Although there are still a number of ‘finishing off’ building jobs to be done, the office is now fairly well organised and is quite homely with its huge house plant and working fridge and kettle!

The GPI was fortunate in finding and appointing (after two recruitment drives) an excellent archivist to run the Changing Britannia Archive Project, despite the current shortage of qualified archivists. Sarah Garrod started with us in May and has become an invaluable member of the GPI team. She was given an induction programme to meet many of the Trustees and to familiarise her with the history of the GPI and our collections. She also met our two consultants, Janet Foster and Amelia Rampton, and had a half-day refresher course on the CALM software (which a number of volunteers joined too). Since then she has settled in well and has been working steadily on cataloguing the Caribbean Artists Movement papers. In October she, along with Brian Alleyne and Sarah White, interviewed candidates for the post of Archives Assistant to work on sorting and cataloguing the collection of Newspapers, Journals and Ephemera (1960s and 1970s) from the UK and the Caribbean. We are happy to be welcoming David Govier to this post in the near future.

The appointment of our first professional in the field has not meant that all our volunteers have gone into retirement. While we were on our second round of recruitment for the Project Archivist volunteers and consultants pressed ahead with the work, in particular cleaning, boxing up and organising the Caribbean Artists Movement materials, including some new letters that Anne Walmsley added to the collection early this year. And since Sarah Garrod's appointment the volunteers have continued to work regularly. They are currently cleaning, organising and boxing the materials in the New Cross Massacre collection. The next step will be cataloguing which we hope to get done early in the New Year.

Amelia Rampton, our conservation consultant, did a tremendous job in the summer with the help of a colleague and Janice Durham in cleaning a vast plan chest we had acquired and the various materials being stored in it. These included display boards and other exhibition materials representing the activities of the black community in Manchester during the 1950s and 1960s, that had generously been given to the GPI by Eloise Edwards.

Two of our volunteers - Janice Durham and Zuleika Dobson - suffered major illnesses this year and were off work for several months. We are delighted they are now recovered, wish them well and thank them for all their hard work and commitment.

Public Events

This year has been fairly quiet in terms of public events as we have been concentrating on the behind-the-scenes work. Nevertheless we have held a number of significant events. On 14 January David Abdulah, Education Officer of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union in Trinidad, spoke about the current situation in Trinidad and the Caribbean; three months later on 14 April Abdul Alkalimat from Toledo University Africana Studies Department spoke about the USA and the Iraq War. Both talks were extremely informative and appreciated by the audience.

In the summer, Trustee Linton Kwesi Johnson organised the GPI’s first attempt to coordinate an event with the 198 Gallery in Herne Hill, South London. Linton is a patron of the gallery which has a similar space to the GPI and the joint event helped to publicise the GPI. American reggae archivist Roger Steffens presented his visually illustrated talk on Bob Marley at the GPI on 3 June and then at the 198 Gallery on 5 June. Both talks received a lot of publicity and were sold out. BBC Radio London presenter Vanessa Feltz attended the GPI talk and gave it rave reviews on her radio show the next day!

John La Rose’s 75th Birthday Tribute

In 2002 the GPI and New Beacon Books commissioned Errol Lloyd to sculpt a bust of John La Rose to mark his 75th birthday on 27 December 2002. £4344.67 was raised from 77 people. Gus John organised a Musical Tribute at Ocean, Hackney on 12 January 2003 to celebrate the birthday and present the bust. The artists participating included Dennis Bovell, Jean Binta Breeze, Aubrey Bryan, Paul Gladstone-Reid, Gus, Ndidi and Carl John, Errol Lloyd, Joe Mogotsi, Deirdre Pascall, Johnny T, Shirley Thompson, Andrew Thorpe-Anderson and Keith Waithe, all of whom gave their services free. Linton Kwesi Johnson compered the event and Jeffrey and Joyce Simon provided refreshments. It was a memorable evening, enjoyed by all. The bust was presented to John by his two granddaughters, Chantelle and Ramona La Rose. Since then we have produced a colour postcard of the bust, which is on sale in the book shop. And the bust itself will soon be on display in the GPI meeting room. - Thanks to everyone who donated so freely of their time and money to make John’s 75th birthday a truly memorable occasion.

Publications

Our work is currently very much ongoing. We have received a number of grants (see Finance section below), which are enabling us to push ahead more quickly on two important projects that we consider to be of great interest and significance for the black experience in Britain.

The first is the research into The Origins and Early Work of the Black Supplementary Schools Movement, a project which we started in 2000 with the holding of three seminars. We have now transcribed the first seminar and are working on the second. We also aim to carry out some additional interviews to supplement the seminars and then edit all the material we have gathered to produce an authoritative book on the subject.

The second is a comprehensive volume on the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. This will contain a full set of brochures from the 12 Book Fairs held between 1982 and 1995, as well as memoirs from participants at the Book Fairs, and background information on the Book Fair’s origins, structure, organisation and significance.

We continue to make slow but steady progress preparing the second and third Life Experience With Britain books for publication. They have been delayed due to a lot of other work going on, but hopefully next year will see their joint publication!

Website

The website has recently been redesigned by Hardip Mothada, an IT expert. The new site, which will be up and running very shortly, looks much brighter and will be easier to navigate. It will also include a Comment Box for browsers to email us directly. We hope to have a relaunch of the site soon and look forward to receiving your feedback about it. We hope that this means we will be able to have a more regular email service for those who want to receive information from us. - Thanks to Hardip for all his hard work and advice about the website.

Finance

This year the GPI has been fortunate to have received a number of grants, apart from the ongoing one from the Heritage Lottery Fund. In May the Matthew Hodder Charitable Trust granted us £250 as a first time applicant. The Hilden Trust have given us £4000 towards our work on the Black Supplementary Schools Movement. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has granted us £12,131 towards the cost of publishing and promoting the book on the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. And finally Two Garden Court Chambers gave £2000 towards the general work of the GPI. - We would like to thank all our donors both large and small for their generosity.

Fundraising Lunch

Last year's lunch raised £957.12 and 103 people attended. Janice Durham, Jeffrey and Joyce Simon’s organisation was great, as always, and they were assisted by a number of food contributions. This year’s lunch will be held on Sunday 7 December here at the GPI. We’re looking forward to seeing you all again for this annual introduction to the Christmas season!

Other News

Roger Sylvester Inquest

The GPI were heartened by the historic verdict of unlawful killing that the jury returned in October after the four week inquest held into the death of Roger Sylvester. Roger was killed whilst in police custody in North London in 1999 and his family, along with the support group Inquest, have consistently campaigned for a full inquest to find out exactly what happened. GPI Trustee Ian Macdonald QC acted on behalf of the Sylvester family. Since the verdict some of the officers involved have been suspended from their posts. We offer our congratulations to the Sylvester family in obtaining this verdict and continue to support them in their struggle to bring those responsible for Roger’s death to justice.

Lonnie Bunche

We were very pleased to welcome leading African American librarian and archivist, former deputy director of the Smithsonian and now president of the Chicago Historical Society, to the GPI on Sunday 24 August. Lonnie Bunche was in the UK as a keynote speaker at the Slavery Remembrance Day celebrations organised in Liverpool by Trustee Garry Morris.

Resource

On 21 July Brian Alleyne and Sarah Garrod gave evidence to a task force panel organised by Resource - the Council for Museum Archives - about how a small organisation such as the GPI sees its way forward in the world of archives.

George Padmore Conference

A successful conference entitled The Life and Times of George Padmore: Black Radicalism in the 20th Century was held at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad, in October. It was attended by his daughter Blyden Nurse-Cowart, who visited the GPI in 2000.

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Finally

As usual, we would like to thank everyone who has supported us this year with donations, attending events, volunteer work and in any of the other countless ways that we rely on you. The GPI has taken some purposeful steps this year and we look forward to going from strength to strength with your continued interest and support.

The GPI always welcomes any donations towards our work. Cheques should be made payable to the George Padmore Institute. Standing order forms are available if wanted, and we are now registered for Gift Aid which means we can benefit from receiving an extra 22% of your gift if you are a standard taxpayer.