TNA Annual Report

[Thunder]

This is as usual a very long document that has just been published, perhaps TNA hope to send us to sleep and is published just as Parliament rises for their holidays!. Main items of interest were:-

32 extra staff;

51 formal complaints about the 1921 Census with another 151 criticisms/concerns over it; TNA got £900,000 in royalties from the Census, rather small in my view.

It is quite untrue that TNA ensure records are transferred to Kew (there are many Treasury documents that have been destroyed or retained for years/decades on end) and that 20% are closed and over 3% are temporarily retained;

Confirmation that the exhibition at Kew to accompany the 1921 Census was about LGBT and women, not men!.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/abo ... rformance/

[VALLMO9]

Confirmation that the exhibition at Kew to accompany the 1921 Census was about LGBT and women, not men!.

I'm curious...is your remark an observation or is it a criticism?

[AdrianBruce]

... TNA got £900,000 in royalties from the Census, rather small in my view. ...

Using what as a comparision?

[Thunder]

Off the top of my head I think FMP had to have resources of £58 million, but don't quote me on that.

[Thunder]

Confirmation that the exhibition at Kew to accompany the 1921 Census was about LGBT and women, not men!.

I'm curious...is your remark an observation or is it a criticism?

It is a criticism, TNA do not like relaying stories about men in the archives, they have an obsession about LGBT and women only. There are plenty of stories about women in the 1920s which they wouldn't like to publicise, the stories are really awful. Twenty years ago TNA and the PRO would publicise all sorts of records but not any more in the 'revisionist history' world.

[Jimbo50]

Hello Thunder. I am intrigued re the cover ups (?) , but totally in the dark. I can't understand what you're trying to say about men and women.

[Thunder]

TNA don't in my view like positively publicising what men have done in history. TNA have a team which promotes women (including suffragettes who put chemicals into post boxes and almost certainly an attempt to assassinate The King in Nottingham) and LGBT people only and sidelines heterosexual men. They ignore and even try to rewrite women's history which is against the known facts. TNA would never publicise the records about the many women in, for example the 1920s, who were convicted of infanticide and the facts behind those cases. I believe that TNA needs to be more level in what they publicise and not to adhere to the 'cancel culture'.

[Jimbo50]

Thank you Thunder for your explanation. I had noticed over the last few years that there was an abundance of LGBT and Suffragette promotions from the TNA. I had assumed they were just slightly over-using these to bring in website hits. Another reason may be to inform people that there were historical records concerning those it affected. I can't recall seeing much before, maybe they're trying to catch up on a low representation ratio or something. I do agree about the level field, but the records are all there, I presume, available and searchable.

[Thunder]

There was a time at TNA when they had men in the Press Office/Events team but I believe there are none now, you can draw your own conclusions about that. The problems all started with the Suffragettes and TNA saying that what they did was good and was ok (you might have seen the programme with Lucy Worsley where she correctly identified the Suffragettes' action as terrorism). There was the first woman MP in Parliament who actually took her seat (Nancy Astor) was well-known to be anti-semitic, not that mattered to TNA!. A lot of the infanticide cases have the names of the women (it was mostly women) not entered in the catalogue, and a lot of the files are still closed (I am sure that if it was a male murderer they would be open) and TNA seems to be trying to stop them being opened.

[VALLMO9]

TNA would never publicise the records about the many women in, for example the 1920s, who were convicted of infanticide and the facts behind those cases.

Well, unless TNA were doing a series about crime during the 1920s, what is the specific justification for publicising these cases?
Bear in mind that modifications to the judicial approach to infanticide were made in the 1920s (see the "1922 Infanticide Act").
By the early 1920s, infanticide was generally considered a "much less pressing social issue than it had been in Victorian England".
So one needs to take this new judicial attitude into account when reading about infanticide cases from a century ago.

If you feel TNA has attempted 'revisionist history' as regards infanticide during the 1920s, please can you provide examples.

As for TNA's "20sPeople" exhibit including the LGBT community, what exactly is the issue? Do you feel TNA coverage of LGBT people, in general, is "overkill"? Or do you prefer little to no coverage of marginalised people? (Which reminds me of the famous Japanese proverb: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down”).

As for suffragettes: Yes, there were some barmy women using extreme tactics. But my grandmother was an ardent feminist, so suffragette history is always interesting to me. Maybe I'm in the minority here?

Would you have preferred the "20sPeople" exhibit have focused entirely on men? Heterosexual men, of course.
Had TNA chosen that route, I wouldn't have been in any rush to read the stories. No disrespect intended, but I prefer census-related histories that aren't cliche.

For example, this is a non-cliche look at various people in the 1921 census : https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59879470