Ironically, the day before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a blog post about the closing of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) library caught my eye. The post contained an unsettling quote from the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs William Hague:
“Finally, as a politician and part time historian I was surprised and indeed shocked upon my arrival here by the sight of the vast expanse of empty wooden shelves where once the 60,000 books, pamphlets, reports and manuscripts of the historic Foreign Office Library were housed, here in this building.
“The Library embodied 500 years of British and world history; of our experiences of exploration, diplomacy, war, peacekeeping and the forging of Treaties; of our role in the abolition of the slave trade and the creation of the Commonwealth. It contained unique historical documents such as the 1692 Charter of Massachusetts, many of them annotated by the officials of the time.
“Once regarded, in the words of Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary Lord Granville as “the pivot on which the whole machinery of the Foreign Office turned”, it was broken up in 2008 and the collections dispersed, mainly to Kings College London, to whom we should be grateful. This revealed insufficient understanding of the sense of history, continuity, identity and tradition that strong democratic institutions need.
“It is ironic that the only object to survive the gutting of the library is a one hundred year old twenty-foot stuffed anaconda known as Albert [see a photo Secretary Hague posted on Twitter via yfrog], who remains suspended over the empty bookshelves, while the books from the period when such an unusual foreign gift found its way into the Foreign Office have been dismantled around it, and can never be reassembled. To my mind the fate of the FCO library is emblematic of a gradual hollowing out of the qualities that made the FCO one of our great institutions.”
The writer of the blog post, Robin Brown, sarcastically noted he’d been able to buy a book from the FCO library’s collection, and, according to The Telegraph, some of the library’s contents have ended up on eBay. The Kings College London and British National Archive, meanwhile, two of the British institutions receiving parts of the FCO collection, note on their websites their portions of the collection are still being catalogued and will be pretty much inaccessible for some time.
Reports Kings College London:
“At present some of the FCO Historical Collection is housed in remote storage and the bulk of the collection is uncatalogued. Prospective users of the collection should consult the guidance on Current access arrangements for further information.”
Reports the British National Archive:
“[T]hese important collections will become readily accessible to the research community in due course. Kings College are currently sorting and cataloguing the collection which consists of circa 50,000 volumes. Processing such a sizeable volume of material is expected to take some time, although it is hoped that parts of the collection will be released incrementally.”
On the eve of 9/11, I hope (or should I assume?) the British FCO’s library has been replaced with equally extensive digital historic records with searchable lessons learned/identified databases. With the FCO library’s collections out of commission in the near term, FCO staff members obviously need a way to ensure history fully informs their decisions, especially if their jobs involve counter terrorism. In the words of the philosopher George Santayana:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Your turn. What do you think closing the FCO library shows? Modernization or something else?
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