BUSINESS FIRMS’ RECORDS

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 48, 26 February 1938, Page 12

BUSINESS FIRMS’ RECORDS

Not To Be Destroyed

JJUSINESS MEN are to be told what and what not to destroy. Hitherto they have destroyed too much, and the Council for the Preservation of Business Records have decided that posterity must be safeguarded against carelessness or ignorance.

They propose to draw up a memorandum assisting business house’s to decide which among their contemporary, as well as their older, papers and documents ought to be kept. “The typewriter has brought such a multiplication of paper that firms destroy great quantities of records for fear of being snowed under,” Mr. A. V. Judges, the council’s hon. secretary, explained to a representative of The London Observer. “If destruction of old records goes on much faster, it will be impossible ever to write up the history of many of our early trades and businesses. We think we ought to try to prevent future histrrians having the same trouble through loss of presentday records.” Knowledge of what is worth preserving has come as the result of three years’ work. Personal letters have been sent to the heads of eight hun dred businesses in the London area alone which are over a hundred years old. The register of business records now contains some six hundred entries.

Neat-fisted, faded ink documents telling In stilted English of ancient business ventures were on Mr. Judges’s table. A jumbled, musty memory of salt pork, weevily biscuits, stagnant

water, creaking timbers, and tarry ropes was in the correspondence book of a London merchant trading to Spain and the Mediterranean ports from 1669 to 1692. Every letter sent had been copied into the book by quill pen. A* the years drew on the clerkly hand grew older, and then another replaced it.

The records of the Elizabethan Mine# Royal and Mineral and Battery Work* the first joint stock companies in England, were discovered in a brassfounder’s establishment in South Wale* The records of Hoare’s Bank, a continuous series of ledgers from th* seventeenth century onwards, will enable the history of banking In th# eighteenth century to be written. Discovery of the complete books of a# early acceptance house provides a history of the money market in the find half of the nineteenth century. But the destruction of old minut# books, sales books, cash books, bill books, ledgers, wage books, letters, agreements, indentures, goes on faster now than at any other time. They seem of so little value to a modern manager or clerk. Mergers and other businesa adjustments make so many record# seem useless.

South Wales, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and other areas where depression has brought bankruptcies and amalgamations are th# scenes of greatest destruction. Th# Council for the Preservation of Business Records intend to tackle them next •