Business archives
The Manuscripts Department holds four major collections of business archives. Records of the trading firm, Jardine, Matheson & Co., transferred from Hong Kong in 1935, form perhaps the largest single accumulation of company papers relating to commerce in the Far East during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Papers, photographic negatives, and cine film formerly stored in the head office of Vickers Plc on Millbank chart the rise and post-war metamorphosis of what was once one of the largest armaments companies in the world. The bulk of this collection covers the period 1870-1970, and includes records of Vickers' former rivals Armstrong Whitworth of Newcastle, taken over in 1928. With its absorbtion by Sun Alliance in the mid-1980s, some central archives of the insurance company Phoenix Assurance, founded in 1782, were transferred to the Library. These include surviving records of several Phoenix subsidiaries, pelican Life and the London Guarantee and Accident Co. among them. Papers and negatives of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company chart the history of a nationally-important precision engineering concern between 1878 and 1971.
Access to the Jardine, Matheson archive is subject to special conditions and is at the discretion of the company's London agents, Matheson & Co. Ltd. A statement of these conditions and an application form is available here. Printed copies of the form are also available by post: please contact John Wells in the University Library. No restriction is placed on any part of the archives of Vickers or CSIC. Those wishing to consult the Phoenix archive require the permission in writing of Royal & Sun Alliance plc, and should in the first instance contact the Department of Manuscripts and University Archives. Generally speaking a fifty-year closed period applies to papers in the Phoenix collection, although there are several exceptions.
An important section of the Vickers archives is described in L.A. Ritchie, The Shipbuilding Industry: a guide to historical records, Manchester, 1992. J.D. Scott's Vickers: a history, London, 1963, draws heavily on the collection, and Scott's own papers are themselves now incorporated in the archive.
An online catalogue of the Jardine Matheson Archive on the Janus website can be accessed here. The 180,000 unbound in-letters have been calendared and indexed in manuscript, while Maggie Keswick (ed.), The Thistle and the Jade: a celebration of 150 years of Jardine, Matheson & Co., London, 1982, provides some idea of the collection as a whole.
The Phoenix archives are described in H.A.L. Cockerell and Edwin Green, The British Insurance Business: a guide to its history and records, Sheffield, 1994 and were used extensively by Clive Trebilcock in Phoenix Assurance and the development of British insurance, 2 vols, Cambridge, 1985-1998.
For the CSIC see M.J.G. Cattermole and A.F. Wolfe, Horace Darwin's shop: a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company 1878 to 1968, Bristol, 1987.
Handlists to all four collections are available from the Manuscripts Reading Room counter. In addition, computer databases for the Vickers, Phoenix, and Jardine, Matheson archives may be searched on request.
Contact: John Wells (01223 333055; jdw1000@cam.ac.uk).