Ernest William Denham (1922–2019)

Abstract

Ernest William Denham, who died on 27 August 2019 three weeks short of his 97 th birthday, spent all his archival career at the Public Record Office and is probably best known to archivists outside the PRO as their teacher of palaeography and diplomatic, as liaison officer with places of deposit for public records or as a member of the Council of the British Records Association. 1 Denny (as he preferred to be known) was born on 16 September 1922 and grew up in Dalston, east London, the son of William and Beatrice Denham. He attended Wilton Street Primary School, where he already showed his academic qualities, winning a scholarship to the City of London School for Boys. From there he won another scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where he began to read classics. His time there was interrupted in 1942 by wartime service with naval intelligence in which, after a crash course in basic Japanese at Bletchley Park, he worked as a translator alongside the codebreakers at HMS Anderson in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Needless to say, he kept his specific duties a close secret until the role of Bletchley Park and its codebreakers became public knowledge in the mid-1970s, and even then remained reluctant to discuss them. On returning to Merton after the war he switched to law and after graduation he worked briefly as assistant secretary with Plant Protection Ltd (a subsidiary of ICI) before entering the civil service examination, in which he was proud to have been placed immediately above Ian Bancroft, later Permanent Secretary in the Civil Service Department and Head of the Civil Service. At that time appointments to the Public Record Office were made on the basis of general civil service examinations not, as later, by specific recruitment, and in 1949 Denny was posted to the PRO as an assistant keeper. He was to spend the rest of his working life there. At that time most of the work of assistant keepers was focused on the medieval and early modern records, but Denny soon found himself on a different path when he was appointed secretary of the Master of the Rolls' Archives Committee, established to consider legislation necessary to deal with the bulk of more recent (especially wartime) records still held in government departments. The selection and transfer to the PRO of public records of enduring value and questions of public access to them were to be the area in which he would work for most of his career. In 1952 he became secretary of the Inspecting Officers Committee established by the Public Record Office Act 1877 to draw up schedules authorizing the disposal of public records considered to be of no further administrative value by transfer to the PRO or destruction. 1952 also saw the establishment of the Grigg Committee on Public Records and its report of 1954 was very critical of the cumbersome and legalistic Inspecting Officers Committee system, proposing new, less formal arrangements for dealing with the selection and safekeeping of public records which ought to be permanently

The possible benefits of freedom of information laws to the records management landscape in the ESARBICA region

“…There is, therefore, a strong relationship between up-to-date archival legislation, the implementation of records management systems and access to information. Roper (1999:3) warns that the enactment and implementation of comprehensive, up-to-date records and archives legislation is a critical prerequisite for the establishment of an effective, integrated system for managing records and archives throughout their life cycle. Moreover, Kemoni et al (2003) stress that outdated archives and records legislation provides limited access rights to archival materials.…”