2024 in the Archives

Olga Uvarov whose papers have been added to our catalogue

Account ledger from the archive of Christopher Jolley

2024 has been another productive year in the archives. It’s been a pleasure to catalogue the personal and professional papers of Olga Uvarov. Olga was a revered veterinary inspector, an expert in pharmacology and therapeutics, and was a key committee member for many veterinary organisations including the RCVS. Details of her collection can be found on our online catalogue, available here: https://www.rcvsarchives.org/TreeBrowse.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&field=RefNo&key=OU

New acquisitions this year include papers from two veterinary surgeons practicing in the mid twentieth century. The first is a casebook which belonged to Olwyn James when she was a student at the Glasgow Veterinary College between 1936 and 1939. In it, Olwyn records the many procedures she performed for her course, which gives us a rare window into veterinary educational techniques at this time. Another new acquisition relates to Christopher Jolley, a veterinary surgeon in County Wicklow. It consists of client accounts covering the period 1948 to 1958, plus a recipe book detailing methods for preparing a variety of treatments. Olwyn and Christopher’s collections further add to our understanding of past veterinary processes.

As always, we are committed to serving the wider research community, through our enquiry response work and through the provision of

Our temporary home

onsite access – the latter in conjunction with our temporary hosts, the City of Westminster Archives. This gives us an opportunity to interact with all sorts of researchers, including academics, students and family historians. We encounter a wide range of research topics, which this year have included enquiries into details of a former veterinary building, the RCVS’s interactions with the PDSA and the removal of stones from a tomb in Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century – not something we often get asked about, but the issue is mentioned in passing in a letter from the archive of Frederick Smith. This demonstrates that researchers come to our collections from a wide variety of angles.

2025 is going to be an exciting year for us, as we relocate to the College’s new headquarters in Clerkenwell. Although it will be sad to say farewell to our excellent hosts at the City of Westminster Archives, we are looking forward to reuniting with our colleagues in the RCVS’s exciting new headquarters. In addition, next year we shall be launching our new website of digital images. This builds on the functions of our current site and will showcase even more digitised material from a variety of archive and library collections.