Back in February something quite exciting happened at the
Seven Stories archive. Late one evening, after a long drive, dozens upon dozens of crates and boxes found their way into
our archive from Beverley Naidoo’s house. Beverley wrote about the experience in her blog, where you can see some
of the collection in its natural habitat and can catch a glimpse of our
Archivist, Kris, and Collections and Exhibitions Director, Sarah, preparing the files for their
long journey to Gateshead.
Since that day in February I have been sorting, re-packaging
and cataloguing everything that Beverley gave us. The collection spans
Beverley’s career from her academic work, to her first and most recent novels. Luckily for me, Beverley’s collection has
been quite easy to catalogue; I can confirm that she is quite an organised author. Beverley
labelled up a lot of her files in detail so I knew exactly where to start and
how to order everything. All of the
papers have been re-housed into archive boxes and I’ll be replacing her colourful
folders with acid-free (but cutting out and keeping all of her helpful
labels).
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Repackaging in progress; some of Beverley's originals files for The Other Side of Truth.
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Beverley’s collection gives a perfect snapshot into her
writing process but also gives an insight into the impact of her novels. Letters sent to Beverley from children (and
adults) from all over the world span from the late eighties to 2014 and fill
approximately six of our archive boxes; these
letters are fascinating, they offer an overview of attitudes to race and
diversity over three decades and show just how moving and thought provoking
Beverley’s novels are.
The whole team at Seven Stories have been enthusiastic about
Beverley’s collection and before I’d even managed to get everything unpacked
and into archive boxes our education team were looking for original material to
use in a school project with Shotton Hall Academy. A lucky Year 8 Drama class developed a
play about Beverley’s Journey to Jo’burg, and looking at the original drafts,
illustration and research materials became part of their writing process. Our Learning Manager, Debbie, and I took a
couple of boxes of Beverley's Journey to Jo’burg material to Shotten Hall and let the
students look at and discuss the material. The students also had a chance to talk to Dave Temple who, as a local miner, was involved in anti-apartheid by supporting South African miners. It was great to see the students and Dave so engaged with the archive, it created some great discussion points about the reality of the apartheid and human rights. I was even asked questions about archive conservation!
The big performance took place at the beginning of June and
both Seven Stories and Shotton Hall were host to a very special guest.
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Kris and I with Beverley and her collection in our store.
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It seemed fitting that Beverley should visit our Collection
team and see her archive in situ before heading to Durham to watch the play it
inspired. We spent the morning chatting
to Beverley, her husband Nandha, and IBBY president for Palestine Jehan Helou,
it was great to show them some material from other collections. They
discovered familiar faces in photographs from the Elizabeth Laird collection
and I think we managed to convince them that Beverley’s archive is in good
company at Seven Stories.
Hopefully Beverley’s will be a collection that continues to
grow. We see huge opportunities to use
it in educational programmes and hopefully it will generate a lot of research
interest. It has certainly sparked many discussions between our staff and volunteers. The whole experience has been
a wonderful example of how our archive collections are currently expanding and
how our collections can be used to inspire and educate.
The acquisition of Beverley's archive is part of our 'Collecting Cultures' programme and, over the coming months there will be news of other exciting additions to the Seven Stories Collections.
The acquisition of Beverley's archive is part of our 'Collecting Cultures' programme and, over the coming months there will be news of other exciting additions to the Seven Stories Collections.
If you'd like to find out more about the Seven Stories Collection, then
email: collections@sevenstories.org.uk or phone: 0191 495 2707 or comment on this blog.
Seven Stories was able to support
the acquisition of the Beverley Naidoo collection through support from a Heritage Lottery Fund
‘Collecting Cultures’ grant. This has been awarded to Seven Stories in
recognition of the museum’s national role in telling a comprehensive story of modern
British children’s literature. For more information on our HLF Collecting
Cultures project see: http://www.sevenstories.org.uk/news/latestnews/hlf.
