When Clyde Sanger and his family approached the GNM archive in 2017, we were excited about the prospect of adding his papers to our collections. Sanger was the first journalist to be appointed as the Guardian’s dedicated correspondent for Africa, and held the post in the 1960s - the decade that saw more than 30 African nations gain independence.
When the records arrived we were no less intrigued. Sanger’s papers included correspondence with influential figures and statesmen including Hastings Banda, Tom Mboya and Enoch Dumbutshena, as well as 36 subject files of his research on topics ranging from the 1973 Commonwealth Conference to the ‘Missing leaders of Zimbabwe’. We did, however, note a problem.
The largest part of the collection was made up of reporter’s notebooks, chiefly written in shorthand. Sadly, a combined decade and a half as archivists in a newspaper archive had left us none the wiser when it came to reading this. When we managed to secure a precious few minutes of help from some of the Guardian’s journalists, we found out that this was Pitman New Era shorthand, not widely taught in the UK since the 1970s.
The following year, we catalogued the collection with help from a volunteer, describing the notebooks as best as we could without being able to read most of their contents. Then, a chance encounter with a representative of the University of the Third Age (u3a) encouraged us to ask their members for help. In October 2019 five u3a members with Pitman experience came into our reading room to inspect Sanger’s notes. They pulled meaning out of a few pages of mysterious shapes and squiggles, but progress was slow. Deciphering someone else’s shorthand more than 50 years after it was written is no mean feat, especially when the writer was based on a different continent.
In the months that followed, we made a successful bid for Testbed funding from The National Archives (UK) and the word “coronavirus” started to appear in the news with increasing frequency. Both factors went on to shape the project that followed.
By the summer of 2020, most of the notebooks had finally been digitised (not, as planned, with help from a group of speedy volunteers). We uploaded the scans to Transkribus – free software that enables and automates the digital transcription of handwriting.
We sought potential volunteers through u3a, our webpages and via Twitter, and between August and December 2020 nearly 50 Pitman-experienced volunteers signed up to help transcribe the notebooks. The volunteers were all women who had learned shorthand for a wide variety of reasons; we had help from a former Downing Street employee, a retired medical secretary and an academic.
Over those pandemic months – spent largely confined to our own homes – what had been intended as a pilot project turned into a full blown attempt to decipher every notebook in the collection. Volunteers worked together to unpick mystery outlines, to share what they learned from the notebooks in u3a articles and a Wikipedia entry, and even to get in touch with Clyde himself, reporting on the project (and commenting on his shorthand proficiency!) in a letter mailed to Canada in the spring of 2021.
When we asked volunteers for feedback, most noted the challenges and frustrations of trying to read somebody else’s handwriting and of using unfamiliar software remotely. Nevertheless, they not only did an outstanding job in transcribing the notebooks, but also seemed to have enjoyed the process. One independent transcriber said: ‘The time just passes by in a flash as I become so engrossed. The 60’s was a period in which I only took a passing interest in world affairs, but I am certainly catching up with the detail now!’ Those who worked together enjoyed the added benefits of meeting remotely with others during the long months of lockdown. One transcribing pair, Lesley and Moyra, commented: ‘We have really enjoyed stirring up the old grey matter, and working together really paid dividends as we were able to spark off suggestions where the outlines were challenging…It’s been a privilege to be able to contribute to a part of history which might otherwise have been lost.’
By January 2023, all 133 of the notebooks had been transcribed and reviewed. The transcripts have opened up notes on a range of topics and events including independence movements in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zanzibar and Malawi, the work of the UN Security Council and national identity in Canada. Clyde’s family were also surprised to learn that one notebook detailed an encounter with The Beatles in August 1966.
We are now using the transcripts to catalogue the notebooks in more detail and assess them for sensitive information. As of January 2023 107 of the transcribed notebooks are open or partly open for research. Descriptions of records from Clyde’s collection that are now available for consultation can be found in our online catalogue. Our digital trainee (with us through the National Archives’ BTDG scheme), also used the volunteers’ work to test out Trankribus’ transcription automation capabilities on shorthand outlines. As we expected, the automated transcripts were mostly nonsense – but with just enough hints of recognition to persuade us that this might be possible for another, larger scale project in years to come.
It’s hard to imagine replicating this work in any other context. Our transcription volunteers brought skills to the project that are increasingly rare, and gave up days they wouldn’t have had available before Covid-19. The difficulty and scale of the task they took on has, if anything, reconfirmed our doubts about accepting reporters’ notebooks into the archive. Nevertheless, over the course of two years when we were unable to welcome researchers into our reading room, or for much of the time even access our physical collections, the dedication of these volunteers has been a bright spot for our team. Their work has turned Sanger’s seemingly illegible notebooks into rich resources for researchers well into the future.
Sadly, Clyde Sanger died in January 2022 before we were able to fully complete the project, but it’s been a comfort for our team to know how delighted he was with all the interest in his work in his final years.
