Owen Wilton wrote:Minutes
Dickie handed me a fascinating book produced by Marcus Booth: it contains "The Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the Board of Ten" with all the relevant minutes and circulated papers of his presidency.
How intriguing! Is this a recent publication? He certainly never mentioned it to me, although he and I did discover Graham Stewart's History from 1990. Do you guys still know where to get hold of a copy? If need be I have a photocopy in my hands right now; I must say my eye was drawn to the final paragraph, which is surely as relevant today:
"This is the unfinished history of the Union Debating Society. It is only possible to chart the Society's future once its bearings have been discovered by a knowledge of its past. There have been times when the Society has been close to extinction, only to be saved by the wisdom and the hard work of those who took over its steering. Likewise there have been times when the Society has sailed through good weather only to lose course because of the complacent inattentiveness of those at its helm. So far it has weathered the storm. Future generations may chart a completely different course to that of their predecessors. As long as they realise that they have a responsibility to these predecessors, and that the Society is not theirs to do as they please but merely theirs in trust then there is every reason to believe that the next two hundred years of the Union Debating Society will be as fruitful as the last. Let us wish them well."
Required reading for all new members of the Board of Ten, I'd say!
I'm willing to assist in the transcription/unearthing of "historic" minutes, by which I mean, those from 2006/7-2008/9. Apparently "The Book" contains some references to Tom Cahn's year. I think the master electronic copies have been destroyed, but I'm prepared to spend some of my summer typing stuff out of The Book. I know that Joe has produced calligraphic minutes and written them into The Book for Jess's year-it should be fairly straightforward to copy those.
Why not simply scan and PDF them? Come to think of it, if you could persuade Special Collections in the library to let you, an extremely useful project would be to get the entire extant set of written records available as PDFs online, as is increasingly the trend with important historical data. I went down there to take a look at it just after I was elected Clerk, in 2002 - the earliest I found were from about 1810, but then that was about the time of the merger between the Literary and Philosophical Societies, and it hadn't occurred to me that had I asked for the Literary Society's earliest records I could probably have got us right back to 1794. Now, I'm not sure exactly how one goes about photographing or otherwise producing electronic copies of pages in old books, at least without damaging them, but surely someone in the University must know. You might even be able to gain full co-operation from the University, which could use it as some kind of PR stunt, - you know, a feel-good media story about how a university is allowing public access online to the records of one of its most prestigious student societies, with all the usual chuckles about how some of the more recent efforts at record-keeping have been somewhat less assiduous. Give graduates a reason to feel good about their university, and make them more likely to open their wallets.
I think we may all have to face the possibility that a substantial chunk of the minutes are never going to emerge, but who knows? I have an inkling that the Union Debating Society filing cabinet contains more wondrous secrets than the Vatican Library.
I wouldn't bet the house on it. There is a list of every Convenor and Father of the House in history, at least up to a point after which living memory could easily reconstruct - but I'm sure you must have that already? Come to think of it I might even have the file somewhere on my own computer.
For the moment, I'd point out my predecessor's discovery:
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Thanks for this.[/quote]
Any time. Actually, looking at the thread somebody requested that those minutes be made available on the new web site alongside the work you're doing, which admittedly to an outsider would make the records look patchier still but would nevertheless be an easy win if you're serious about reconstructing our history.