“Sheer vandalism” and “insane”. This is how leading historians on Monday described government plans to destroy millions of historical wills to save on storage costs.
The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.
But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.
Ministers believe digitisation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.
The government is proposing to keep the originals of some wills of “famous people” – likely including those of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales – but others would be destroyed after 25 years and only a digital copy would be kept.
It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost.
Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links.
The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October.
The apparent vulnerability was also revealed this month when the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson both claimed they could no longer access WhatsApp messages sought by the UK Covid-19 public inquiry.
“My real anxiety is that if everything is digitised, somebody pulls the plug,” said Holland whose awareness of the risks of mixing digitisation and archives is all the greater as he is a board member of the British Library.
Hardware goes out of date and so it might not be available in the future to recall the scanned documents, he said. Access to original documents was vital as “the physicality of the evidence matters … it is an important part of the material culture”.
Evans, who advises the government on handling claims for art works looted by the Nazis, said he felt “shock and horror” at the plan. He said the idea that officials can choose which wills to keep because, in the words of the MoJ, they “belong to notable individuals or have significant historical interest”, is “the typical arrogance of bureaucracy”.
The government is seeking views on suitable criteria for deciding whose wills to keep.
He cited the example of Mary Seacole, the Jamiacan nurse who helped British soldiers during the Crimean war in the 1850s, whose story has been revived in recent years.
“Fifty years ago, who would have thought that Mary Seacole was important or her will worth preserving?” he said. “People who are now thought of as obscure will become famous in the future because what we consider important changes over time.”
The human connection of handling the original wills and “the feel of the old rag-based pulp paper” would be lost too, he said.
“You can see the indent of the pen and if the writer is excited or tense. There are minute details on the page which digitisation [can’t capture]. There is a thrilling sensation that you are looking at a document that a real human being wrote on. You get a connection to the past that digitised versions won’t give you.”
Will Iredale, a second world war historian, and author of The Pathfinders, said: “There’s nothing like getting your hands on the original documents – you can be sure of the source and that is really important. How can you trust whoever is digitising them has scanned them correctly and you are seeing the entire document. Are there going to be robust enough websites to store and deliver this wonderful history?” he said.
The MoJ is considering “keeping hard copies for about 25 years, in recognition of their sentimental value to families, while saving them digitally longer term.”
Justice minister, Mike Freer, said: “We want to make it as easy for amateur and professional historians alike to access these documents. Digitalisation allows us to move with the times and save the taxpayer valuable money, while preserving paper copies of noteworthy wills which hold historical importance.”
A programme of working backwards to digitise all older documents will begin, the MoJ said, claiming that once digitised, access requests will be serviceable much more quickly.
But the Society of Genealogists is “seriously concerned”, said Natalie Pithers, interim co-chief executive. She said wills are “absolutely vital” social-historical documents and highlighted the emotional impact of seeing an original signature on a historic will for a family member.
“We are advocates of digitisation but not at the cost of destroying originals,” she said. “In any digitisation projects mistakes get made. We don’t know what further information could be gained in the future from the original documents. There could be somebody in there who did something extraordinary.”
