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ELIZABETH HAINES: My name is Elizabeth Haines, and I work in the Department of Collections, Expertise and Engagement at the National Archives. I'm Team Leader Overseas and Defence,

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which means that I lead the team that work with records related to diplomatic and military history, and also the records of the British Imperial past. The Foreign Office was founded in the 1780s.

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So what we have here is more than 200 years worth of the British perspective on world events and world history, and the development of British overseas policy during that time.

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What these files contain is a record of information sharing from British posts around the world. Also, a record of the development of British policy, and also the record of British decision-making

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both in London and overseas, in responding to different kinds of international events and crises. It's particularly valuable as a source for world history, because of the scale of British involvement around the world.

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And that's partly to do with its kind of diplomatic status during those 200 years, but also very deeply embedded to its role as an imperial power. So not only was the British government negotiating

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with individual territories-- --it was negotiating with other imperial powers, and then dealing with the legacies of that imperial past. So, British international and overseas policy

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covered a vast swathe of the world in a great deal of detail, which means that these records are a really unparalleled resource for that period of time on a geographical scale, which is really impressive.

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So I think there are three key ways in which we can understand the role of the Foreign Office in managing the relationships between the UK and overseas states and powers. The first of these, is that the Foreign Office is fundamentally

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a hub. It collects information from all over the world, from the embassies, consulates, and high commissions. All of those different posts are reporting continuously

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back to London about the nature of government, about cultural policy, economic situations, and obviously, kind of more problematic kind of political events and so on. So all of that information is coming back

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to the Foreign Office as a kind of hub in London. And the Foreign Office is receiving that, kind of organising it, digesting that information, and then storing it.

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So you can imagine it as a kind of huge centre for information gathering. And before the internet, that's really something which is, again, on a fairly unprecedented scale.

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The correspondence coming into the Foreign Office is amongst the largest quantities of material we have in the National Archives, which speaks to that kind of global network of overseas missions.

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So the second thing that we can see in these files, is the development and thinking through all of that material in London. So we can see the minutes from meetings

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held in the Foreign Office. We can see the meetings held between the Foreign Office and other government departments. So thinking about the Ministry of Defence or previously,

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the Colonial Office, all of those kinds of decisions that were being made within the government, but also within the Foreign Office, but also between departments and the kind of development

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of those. Almost in real time, you can follow the decision-making processes. You can see how those decisions were reached,

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but you can also see the factors and the pressures from different areas that affected the final decisions. And then you can also see, and I think again, I think this helps to understand this,

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you have to really imagine back to ages where we didn't have the internet to what the ambassadors, the high commissioners and the consuls were doing themselves. So they were representing Britain in the world.

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And obviously, these days, if anything comes up, they can email. There's a kind of constant flow of information to and from those offices.

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Earlier in the 20th century and back into the 19th century, they might have to wait days, weeks, or months for a response. So they were having to improvise in situ in what they thought were the interests of the British state.

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So we can see the activities and decision-making of those figures out in the field, as it were, overseas, as well as their relationship with London. So you have this kind of vast, complex machinery

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literally situated all around the world. And these files bring you right to the centre of that. The records of the Foreign Office itself broadly fall into two categories.

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So the first are those records that were either collected or produced in London initially. So all of the correspondence coming into London, but also the meeting minutes or documents

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that were produced by civil servants in the Foreign Office itself. That sort of constitutes one set of material. But then we also have a set of material,

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which was produced overseas in the various different diplomatic missions. So in the embassies, consulates, and high commissions, they also had their own recordkeeping practises.

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They also had archives in the buildings themselves. And they, broadly speaking, kept those archives with them and used them. But then intermittently, they also

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sent those archives back to London. But you have basically two sets of material, one that was more or less organised in London, and one that was organised overseas and later transmitted

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to London. So there's two slightly different types of records. So sort of foreign office records, as it were, pure foreign office records, and records

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that come from embassies and consuls predominantly. The ways in which the UK government and the Foreign Office, in particular, has dealt with files, has changed quite dramatically since its founding,

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so in the late 18th century to today. And that responds to two things, really. Partly to technology, so to the speed available of communications.

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So whether the things were travelling by horse and by sailing ship and later by steamship, the invention of the telegraph, and later, obviously, the telephone, different kinds of communication changed

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the ways in which the government compiles and keeps information. It also changes the quantity of information that the government is receiving. So over time, there's different emphasis

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on different kinds of ways of managing information that respond to those technologies. So, for example, through the 19th and 20th century, up until the 1960s, the Foreign Office used several different

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systems of managing all of this correspondence it was receiving from around the world. Fundamentally, the same principles apply. It would need to give each letter a unique identifier,

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so that it could at any future point, say that's the letter I'm talking about. But it would also need to find some way of making that document visible within the kind of huge set of information

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that they had. So it would need some kind of indexing or keyword. And as kind of time changed, as time passed, that system changed on a regular basis.

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I think mostly in response to the quantity of material that the Foreign Office was receiving. In different periods, we have different filing systems at work, but there are some key things, which

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I think cross across periods. In this folder, which is FCO [? 15792, ?] for example, we have a letter that comes from the British Embassy in Paris. This letter has been given a unique identifier

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as it comes into the department. You can see it connected to the letter before and the letter which follows it in the sequence by the use of a kind of stamp. This is done in different ways, in different periods,

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but there's usually an indicator about how to pick up the trail of the paperwork and go from one document to another. And so amongst the letters that come in,

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the various different kinds of pieces of correspondence from British diplomats overseas, but also from other sources, we have documents that will look something like this. Again in different periods, these

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will look a little bit different, but they're usually interleaved amongst the correspondence in a file. And these are called minutes.

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But what they basically are, is a record of the movement of the correspondence through the Foreign Office itself, and the kind of notes and comments

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of different individuals. So you have here a kind of summary of the original letter and a kind of opening gambit by one civil servant, who's asking for the opinions of his colleagues.

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As the letter moves around the department, you can see they add their comments and their names or sometimes initials, and the dates that they've seen it. So as well as the actual correspondence,

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you get to see the kind of paper trail of documents as they move through the Foreign Office itself. And often, these individuals may be identifiable. You can work out who they are.

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Another form of document that you'll often see in files, again, in between the minutes and the original correspondence, are draughts of responses. So the responses may be being made by different parts

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of the Foreign Office. But what you often get, is a kind of, you can usually tell that they're draughts, because they come down one side of the page

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with space for classification and comments in the margins. And again, these are passed through the office, and you generally get to see annotations by different people as they kind of comment and help shape the draft response.

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So these are fundamentally structures of managing and organising discussion from overseas, but also within the Foreign Office, that persist right the way through the period from

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the 1780s to the present. Although they visually might look a little bit different, you can kind of spot that skeleton structure through the records.

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And depending on the period, you can see similar kinds of things on the cover of the file itself. So you'll see the title, something about the original file reference

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within the government department. And then you can see often something about when either information was added or letters were added, or sometimes again, if the whole file has travelled around the Foreign Office,

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you can see the file's journey. Again, these practises change a little bit in different periods, so you won't necessarily always find these reproduced. But I think the general message is, that it's always

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a really important to pay attention to those kinds of details, any annotations, any kind of numbers or references, because they might provide you information that helps you interpret the source.

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So thinking again about filing practises, here we have another file, which we're going to look at. And again, working through these documents, you'll notice that the oldest document in the file

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is usually at the back. It works through to the most recent file at the front. Sometimes there's a kind of cluster of correspondence, and you might get caught out, because sometimes correspondence

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has been circulated to different people. But broadly speaking, the oldest is at the back and the most recent correspondence at the front. I mean, this is basically just a kind of practical question,

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so that when a civil servant pulls that file off the shelf, they're most likely to want to know the things which are at the top of the file, the same as in your email inboxes. You have the most recent emails at the top.

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But it's something to take into account if you are starting and you want to know the full history of something to begin at the end, as it were, and work backwards. Another interesting feature of the file, just as

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a sort of example here, again, draws attention to the question of timing and order. It matters what order material arrives in. Sometimes it matters just which day it comes in,

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and sometimes if the government's receiving reports on an hour by hour basis from an important kind of negotiation or conference. So here, for example, you can see something which is basically

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a stamp which records the exact time of arrival of this specific letter. And I think it's something to keep in mind as you're working through how dense is the correspondence

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you're working with, and what is the kind of frequency and fro on this topic. Because that helps you understand something about the level of urgency

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with which the government is dealing with the topic. So here, for example, we have another kind of facet of the same issue around the density and frequency of communication.

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Here we have one file, which is not the fattest file in our collection, but it's one file on a single diplomatic visit. So sometimes a single file might cover years or occasionally

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decades of discussion on a topic. And sometimes an entire file might cover a fortnight's worth of to and fro. That tends to happen, particularly

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around various kinds of diplomatic negotiations and discussions. So you get this really kind of dense correspondence. There's various bits of vocabulary

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around this kind of bureaucratic process and recordkeeping that to some extent, you'll learn as you work through the documents. But I think there are some key things that we can definitely

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pick out. And one of the most important is that information which is coming from a British diplomat, an ambassador specifically, or a high commissioner,

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is called a dispatch. That's not part of, I think, of ordinary vocabulary. And so if you see references to dispatches, it means that it's come from a person

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with a very specific status. And those are sometimes in different periods organised separately from other correspondence on the same topic, because the ambassador or later, the High

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Commissioner, are prioritised as correspondence over other kinds of incoming information. As you're looking through documents, you may notice that some of those documents

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appear to be bound in what looks like books. So with a kind of hard cover and a spine. And others are just assembled together in folders, soft cover folders, with markings on the front.

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There's no substantial difference between the material, which is bound into a book and material, which is bound in folders. It's really just a technique for organising and preserving them.

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So different choices were made at different times. Particularly in earlier material, particularly in 19th century material, what you'll often get is a book, which is made up of all

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of the different letters as they've come in one after the other. So every page will be a different size. And sometimes they're letters, which have

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been substantially unfolded. Later material tends to be a little bit more standardised, but nonetheless, a file or a book, it doesn't usually say anything about the difference

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between two types of material. It's fundamentally a way of storing and organising it. Another way in which the Foreign Office, as well as other government departments organise the material

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that they were receiving from around the world, was to produce what are called confidential prints. In fact, as you can see on the title here, these are often selections from correspondence.

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It's a sort of, what I describe, as a sort of best of compilation. So the government, on any particular topic which they think might be of interest to a wider

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range of people, then can access the letters themselves, choose the most interesting and useful documents or sections of them and put them together in a kind of best of album. So you can see extracts here from different letters

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that went to and fro. Rather than the original letter, what we have is a kind of typed up version of that. Sort of different pieces of information, different pieces

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of correspondence sitting side by side to give of rapid overview of a topic, which is going to be of interest or consequence to quite a wide audience within government.

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So these were, obviously it's time and effort involved to set the type to put these together, and then editions of these would be circulated sometimes to different parts of the Foreign Office, sometimes

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perhaps to other government departments, and sometimes to then embassies and other diplomatic missions overseas. So it's a way of allowing a wider audience

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than the limited people who would have access to the original paper correspondence to get to grips with what's been going on a specific topic. The Foreign Office produced hundreds and hundreds of these.

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Sometimes thick, sometimes very thin, on a wide range of topics. But usually things that have a very significant and quite wide-ranging international consequences. So here, for example, we have this kind of selections

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from correspondence respecting the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela, what is now Guyana and Venezuela. And this was an ongoing boundary dispute since the early 19th century and continues to be live today.

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So the material on this reflects the back and forward between the British government, the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office and the government of Venezuela, in an attempt to draw together the sources that

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tell that story. Different files have different ways of indicating the level of confidentiality or secrecy that was being applied to the information

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that the Foreign Office was circulating. And there's different ways you can pick it up. So in the case of telegraphs or telegrams, for example, you can often see in somewhere

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around the document, whether it was originally transmitted in what they called en clair or open, whether it was coded with a kind of standard coding, or whether it used a cypher that was specific to the government

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department, and was kind of highly protected. So within the kind of transmission of very important and urgent information, there's a kind of coding and then

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decoding process that's used. More generally, up until 2014, there was a system of classification of documents that affected who could see or interact with those documents.

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And although again, there's some slight changes to this system, broadly speaking, through the 19th and 20th century, there were six categories. The most secret being top secret.

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We then moved through secret, confidential, restricted, protect, and then unclassified material, to which you needed no particular security clearance to access.

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Those markings will usually be found on the documents themselves. So they give you an indication of the implications that the government at the time felt that this information might

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have for UK policy or different kinds of activities, such as military campaigns. So here we have an example of a top secret file. Before the Second World War, that would be more likely to be

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labelled most secret. And this is a file which was-- this is the highest classification of government sensitivity. So the implications of unauthorised access

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to this material, the government imagined might be very serious international diplomatic incidents, significant loss of life, and/or disruption of secret intelligence

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on a very large scale. So here we have an example of a file with a classification, secret, the second level down. And the implications of unauthorised access

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to this material, the government assumed might be disruption to public order, the disruption of relations with governments with whom we have friendly relations,

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and potentially, it might be it might have life-threatening consequences for members of government. So here we have a file, which is labelled confidential.

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And that, in terms of these kind of classification sequence, means that the material might risk not somebody's life, but perhaps their personal liberties. It might disrupt the day-to-day running of government

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in one way or another, or have smaller, less dramatic, but nonetheless negative impacts on our diplomatic relations. Here we have a file, which is classified as restrictive.

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Again, kind of one level down on the classification system. And the potential impact of this was imagined possibly to be individual distress to a particular individual, an impact on military operations,

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and potentially compromising the enforcement of law and order. All of government recordkeeping is governed in the UK, by what is known as the Public Record Act. And this was first instituted in the early 19th century,

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and has undergone various kinds of changes. But the fundamental principles are that the records the government produce are of national interest, and that they

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should be preserved for public use and interrogation. What this means in practise has changed over time. Initially, it was just legal records that came under the Public Record Act.

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In the 1950s, most government recordkeeping started to come under this law. From the 1960s onwards, a 30-year closure rule was in place.

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And what that means, is that material that was older than 30 years old was at that point, assessed to be transferred to the National Archives.

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So anything, for example, so this law changed in 1967, which meant that in 1972, we saw the first records from the Second World War coming into the National Archives.

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In the 2000s, that law changed again. And rather than a 30-year rule, that period was reduced to a 20-year rule. So what we receive now, is basically on a 20-year kind

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of rolling basis. Material from the year 2004 is potentially now entering the archive. So you have basically a kind of 20-year,

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kind of buffer that moves through time. And not everything comes to the National Archives. So the assessment of what should come to the National Archives is made by each government department itself

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under the terms of the Public Record Act. And this governs how the department chooses what to select. And the selection of material is based initially

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on historical interest. So what will document either the functions of a department, the unrolling of a particular kind of event or a crisis, what will document the kind of people

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or places or typical processes. There's a really large number of criteria, and that criteria of historical interest is something which is assessed by specialists

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within those government departments. The Foreign Office or the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, as it's now called, has its own record specialists that

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work through the material to assess that historical interest in the present. After interesting material has been selected, it then undergoes a sensitivity review

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to work out what is or isn't appropriate to share in the public domain. And there are very few criteria, which means that records should not make it into the public domain.

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And the predominant one is national security. So if a document has potentially a significant impact on international security or diplomatic relations, it may not make it to the archives.

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That sensitivity review process has three potential outcomes. The first is that after 20 years, you can say yes. Maybe it used to be secret, but now it's fine. We can just put that out in the archives.

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People should be able to read this. The second potential outcome is that it comes over to the National Archives, but it remains closed. In that case, it's something that

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would have been a lower level of security classification originally. So although we can't share it with the public, it won't be open or available for a certain duration.

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It comes, nonetheless, over to our building. The third potential outcome is that the material is retained in the department itself. That is reserved for material which

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has both significant potential impact, but was also originally produced at quite a high security clearance level. So some material remains basically

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in the walls of the government building, the government department that created it, and that is described as retained material. And we can see examples of all of those three

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different outcomes of the review process in the documents that we have here. So here, for example, we have a kind of dummy sheet, which has been inserted in to say, there is a letter here

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in the original file. You would have found a letter here, but that's specific letter, and it gives a very small description, something about its details,

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has been retained by the government department. So it gives you the number of the department series and file. It tells you when it was retained. And often, although not in this case,

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it will tell you when it will be reviewed. So you know that although you cannot read that document, there's a piece of missing correspondence which will eventually make its way into the public domain.

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However, the spirit of the Public Records Act means that the goal is always to make the maximum amount of information available to the public as possible.

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So in some cases, you might have, rather than a whole letter being withdrawn, a letter which is redacted. And basically, you have the same processes in place, except that it's considered it's only a very specific piece

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of information in that letter, which is covered by the Public Records Act, by this kind of question of national risk or security, and the rest of the letter can go out into the public domain.

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But fundamentally, it's the Public Record Act that governs both the production of dummy pieces and the kind of redaction of individual sections of documents.

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And it determines not only what can or can't be put into the public domain, but also when it will eventually be made public. Geographical information was vital to the functioning

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of the Foreign Office. You can imagine that it didn't only rely on verbal reports from around the world about what was happening, but it wanted to be able to visualise them as they

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were happening in the field. So maps were being sent to London from all around the world right from the beginning of the Foreign Office, and continue to be right up to the present.

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The Foreign Office in the 19th and 20th century had its own special room full of maps, a map library, that it used as a research resource. So the civil servants could say, ah,

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we've been talking about Southern Africa, I'm going to go to the map room, the map library, and look for the latest, most up to date maps on Southern Africa that we have.

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So sometimes, maps that were being sent to the Foreign Office would have been extracted and entered into the Foreign Office library itself. And most of those maps, you can identify

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with the reference F0925. So they may have originally been associated with a piece of correspondence, but they ended up in this kind of specialist map collection.

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Other maps you might see with the term extracted. And what that means, is that they have been removed from, or disassociated from the correspondence which they

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came with since they arrived in the National Archives. And this is quite unusual. As a rule, what we receive, we leave in the condition that it was.

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We have kind of working documents in the condition that we receive them. However, maps and plans are extremely vulnerable. You can imagine that for a kind of working reading room,

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unrolling, rerolling, folding maps into folders, is in itself, something that poses quite a lot of risk to the integrity of documents. So various maps have been extracted from documents.

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And what that means, is that they've been separated into a new series and preserved separately, so that they retain physical integrity and can be consulted for longer.

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So instead of being folded up inside a kind of A4 size folder like this, the map will have been separated out so that it can be in the reading room, consulted by readers without damaging it, without folding and unfolding.

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Every time we take out a map like this to preserve it separately, we always preserve a direct link, a reference back to the material that it came from.

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So although they're now physically stored separately, you can always trace the link from one to the other through the material. The digitization process gives an extraordinary opportunity

00:29:26.660 - 00:29:36.600

to keyword search within the documents, that if you're handling paper documents, you don't have. And this is an amazing tool, but one that needs to be used with care.

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So the first thing I would say about keyword searches, is that in order to use them successfully, you really have to immerse yourself in the language of the bureaucrats in the specific time

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that you're interested in. And obviously, that will be very, very different if you're looking at China in the 1830s, or relations with China in the 1830s,

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than it is if you're looking at, for example, the conflict in the Falklands in the 1980s. So first of all, you really need to work out a little bit about the types of vocabulary

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that bureaucrats would be using to describe the process that you're interested in. And this isn't always obvious. So, to give one example, if you were

00:30:12.230 - 00:30:23.840

interested in books which were banned as a result of, you know, books which were censored or publicly banned in one way or another they usually described as undesirable publications.

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This isn't something you'd necessarily in advance, so it helps to prep your research with the primary sources with some secondary reading. The second thing to be aware is then,

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that also, this is language which is of its time, and often, the government will be describing, particularly people or peoples in opposition to it, with really pejorative language.

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So there's offensive language in these files as well, and you need to be aware of that. And unfortunately, in some cases, that offensive language is the key word

00:30:52.650 - 00:31:03.360

that you might need, in fact, to unlock the particular history that you're interested in. So as you're using keyword searches, really think about the historic specificity of the language

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that you're looking at, and taking some time to go through the files can start to give you a sense of what that is before you really do targeted research.

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The second thing to say, which sounds obvious, is to take really good care to observe who the letter is from and who the letter is to. Sometimes these are celebrated people.

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If you look them up online, you'll be able to see obviously, that this is the ambassador or this was the secretary of state at a particular moment in time.

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Sometimes you won't be able to find out who they are in that way. But nonetheless, if you're able to look at where the letter was written, was it written overseas in an embassy,

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was it written by a foreign company, was it written by a specific part of the Foreign Office in the UK, that will be able to tell you something about the stake that the letter writer has

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in whatever process is unfolding. And it will allow you to interpret what they're saying better. The Foreign Office, let alone the UK government,

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they're not monolithic. So there's constantly dialogues and tensions inside of those departments and inside the government itself. And one of the magical things that these sources do,

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is help reveal how those tensions and different points of view played out over time. So take very good care to think about the perspectives of the specific documents and the specific letter writers

00:32:21.900 - 00:32:28.770

and minute makers or civil servants that you're interested in. So the third thing I would say, is that there are clues in all of this

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about how those documents were used, and how they move through government, how they influenced processes and decisions. One of the ways in which you can do that,

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is through the minutes, seeing the comments of different people, annotations on the documents. But also, it's always worth moving backwards and forwards through your files.

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So, for example, if you've arrived at a specific letter through a keyword search, it's always worth going back and forwards through that same file, or even through different files in a kind of numerical sequence,

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backwards and forwards, to see how that specific letter sits in a larger picture. And often, within the document itself or with the documents alongside it,

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you'll be able to really interpret exactly not just what was said, but exactly what that meant in terms of the processes that document was part of.