Cumbria Archive Service | the origin story | Madeleine Elsas, archivist and Jewish refugee
Channel: Cumbria Archive Service
Date: 2023-02-06

00:00 Peter Eyre on the history of Cumbria Archive Service
33:00 Robert Baxter on Madeleine Elsas, Jewish refugee and archivist
Peter Eyre and Robert Baxter from Cumbria Archive Service present a history of the service including a few recently discovered stories and documents!
Peter discusses how the service developed from early origins in the 1940s at Tullie House and the Courts in Carlisle to the joint service between Cumberland and Westmorland County Councils and Carlisle City Council in the early 1960s under the first archivists Tom Gray and Bruce Jones. Peter looks at how the service expanded over the next 60 years to create offices at Kendal, Barrow and Whitehaven and a new headquarters office in Carlisle.
Robert presents the fascinating recently discovered full story of Madeleine Elsas (1913-1996), first archivist to Cumberland County Council. Madeleine was the daughter of the German economist Moritz John Elsas (1881-1952). Madeleine, her sister and her parents, as a Jewish family fled their home in Frankfurt, Germany, to escape the rise to power of the Nazi party and came to England in the early 1930s. Moritz Elsas developed a career based around the London School of Economics while Madeleine began training as a librarian. Having developed an interest in archives and manuscripts she gained a post as a conservator at Somerset Record Office in the late 1930s. When the record office closed operations because of the war, she gained a post as a temporary archivist at Essex Record Office in 1941 before being appointed to Cumberland in 1942. Here she carried out a huge amount of work, much centred around evacuating the records from Carlisle to safer locations outside the city. She left Carlisle in 1946 to become County Archivist of Glamorgan Record Office and stayed there for the remainder of her career, retiring in 1973.