Miscellany – Snippets from the archives
October 2011
Recent researches have involved reading old York City Council minutes, and other council documents available online. Occasionally, amidst the long-winded note-taking, details jump out as being a) amusing b) baffling or c) encapsulating their time. Here's a few I noticed.
The expenditure of 6d. per head per day on cigarettes for the voluntary Czech labour given in respect of sandbag filling was approved.
In the 1930s the authorities thought it was a good and helpful thing to pay workers in cigarettes.
Now the authorities think that it's more civilised if all smokers are banished to stand outside in the rain, even the senior and otherwise respected citizens born in those smoke-friendly decades.
(Like this man ...)
The minutes from the war years give an insight into the often rather mundane details institutions had to deal with. The art gallery had to stash its artworks elsewhere for safe-keeping, have various areas 'commandeered' (as the minutes say) by the military authorities, and then there was the whole railing-donation thing:
Your Comittee beg to report that they have no iron railings belonging to them.
Things were obviously quieter after the war, but that didn't mean serious things didn't happen for the local authority to deal with. I'm sure everyone's heard about Mouldygate, a few years before Watergate. The Health Committee, in May 1969, had to deal with
A packet of Potato Crisps purchased in York and found to be in a very mouldy condition.
Records the beginnings of something now so familiar. Inverted commas are used around the unfamiliar phrase describing this strange new public transport idea, which will run from the Knavesmire to the Castle Museum and the National Railway Museum, on Spring Bank Holiday, at a cost of 30p per car:
Proposed Experimental Scheme
"Park and Ride"
All the above were from old-style musty books on shelves, but available online are more recent records, including 'A Summary of Archaeological Work in York, 1998 -2000' (PDF), which has an entry for St Mary's Tower, Marygate. Just behind it is the old WW2 hostel, used by the RCAF during the war. Apparently, work in the area unearthed some remains of that 20th century history:
Processed meat cans and a cat skeleton relate to Canadian military presence during the Second World War.
?? 'Immigrant Canadians eat pet cats when processed meat ration runs out'