No . 130
The Trusty Servant
Charles Stevens : an archive in miniature
The Archivist , Suzanne Foster , explores a highlight of the collection :
The archives at Winchester College are large and diverse . The bulk of the collection , stored in six medieval rooms , consists of formal records relating to foundation of the college , the acquisition of its estates and the subsequent management of the school and its endowments . It can be relatively easy to find documents relating to our buildings , our estates and our tenants , but more difficult to answer questions about what life was actually like for our pupils . For these questions , we rely on material generated and donated by pupils – magazines , letters , diaries , reminiscences and photographs .
One particularly useful collection of memorabilia , essentially an archive in miniature , is a set of scrapbooks called ‘ Winton ’ compiled by Charles Stevens ( Coll , 1917-22 ). The six volumes were put together by Stevens in his retirement from material collected whilst at school . They offer a snapshot of life at Winchester College , particularly in College itself , just after the First World War . The books have been described as ‘ a unique resource for the history of Winchester College : at once an exploration of its development over several hundred years , and a detailed insider ’ s account of its life in the early twentieth century ’.
Volume 1 covers the buildings and general history ; volume 2 is more general and looks at sport , traditions , music and drama ; and volume 6 covers more of our history – the quincentenary , the foundation , and War Cloister . Volume 3 concentrates on life in Chambers and volumes 4 and 5 give us descriptions of the headmasters and staff that Stevens remembered . Each volume is illustrated with sketches drawn by and photographs taken by Stevens and his friends in the early 1920s , and pasted in are all sorts of other ephemera – notices , letters , circulars ,
College Clock
newspaper cuttings , hat bands , menus , caricatures , plans , and much else besides .
The photographs show aspects of the school not otherwise shown in our archives – the workings of the College clock , the interior of Musa
College Cook An upstairs Chamber
17