Welsh Journals

work was simply another stage in an ongoing process, one that illustrates trends in the archive profession and also to some extent the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the Royal Institution itself. Francis's methods in collecting archives were different from those we would employ today. He was not a professional archivist (at the time they were an extreme rarity), but a dedicated collector, who treated his documents in a way that reminds one of specimens in a Victorian gentleman's collection: like a collection of butter- flies, removed from their original habitat and mounted carefully in a box, they were mounted and bound into volumes, with no regard for their original order and provenance. The sort of things he collected reflect contemporary trends in historical research. Broadly speaking, at that time national history was seen principally as the study of kings and battles, while local history was concerned with lords and abbots, castles and abbeys. The greatest importance was attached to charters, deeds and seals, all of which he collected with assiduity. Francis's intention was to print tran- scripts of those documents he deemed of primary importance. He produced a limited edition of the charters granted to Swansea and followed it with a serialised tran- scription of the Cromwellian survey of Gower. There are unfinished volumes of documents that provide ample evidence that his was an ongoing work which had not reached completion, but there is no sign that he intended to produce a detailed catalogue or index for his documents. The archives remained in the library at Swansea Museum, where they were added to and made available to researchers, in what was effectively the first public archive repository in western Glamorgan. The Second World War caused a complete up- heaval and the Royal Institution's collections were removed from the museum for safekeeping. The majority of the archive collections went first to Kilvrough, where they were kept in the basement in conditions that were far from ideal, but none- theless preferable to a direct hit from an incendiary bomb. The owner, Arthur Thomas, died during the War and the archives were transferred to other private premises in the Swansea Valley. The museum itself was damaged in the bombing, but this was nothing in comparison with the devastation wreaked on parts of Swansea little more than a stone's throw away. The removal of the archives from the museum was a wise course of action, but nonetheless it put several collections at risk of damage from damp and mould and further obscured the provenance and original order of others. At the end of the War, most of the archives were returned to the museum. Unfor- tunately, it appears that some of the Royal Institution collections had found their way to the store rooms in Mumbles Hill, where the Borough archives had been taken and, predictably, the two became mixed up. Some important parts of the Royal Institution collections found their way back to the Guildhall by mistake, and other collections remained in private hands long after they should have been returned to their rightful home. This rather confused, disorderly situation was a cause for concern, and led ultimately to the first attempts at proper descriptions of the collections. In Victorian times the archive profession was small and rarefied, and the way was open for enthusiastic amateur collectors like George Grant Francis to amass and arrange archives as they saw fit. By 1945 the situation had changed. The National Library of Wales had been founded in 1907. A network of county record offices was growing up, including the Glamorgan Record Office in Cardiff in 1939.