The All England Women’s Hockey Association (AEWHA) Collection is looked after at the University of Bath by their Archivist, Lizzie Richmond. The collection contains many unique and irreplaceable items documenting the evolution of women’s hockey in the UK.

Two items, the Hockey Jottings scrapbook and the very first minute book of the AEWHA dating from 1896, were in a particularly poor state of repair making them very difficult to interrogate without further damaging them. Following the award of a grant from the National Manuscripts Conservation Trust, Lizzie Richmond and THM arranged for conservator Clare Prince to undertake the painstaking work to restore them. The scrapbook is one of the most precious and fragile items in the collection and was the work of Edith Thompson who went on to be one of women’s hockey’s great early twentieth-century pioneers. This book was compiled in 1898 while she was still a student at King’s College in London. It contains poems, match reports, player profiles and original watercolour illustrations.

Illustrated extracts from the scrapbook.

The scrapbook was in very poor condition and required urgent restoration; its binding was breaking down and its covers were held together with disfiguring Sellotape. There were tears around page edges and across text and images. It was almost impossible to handle it without causing further damage and losses. Prince’s work focussed on rectifying these three distinct areas.

Front cover and pages of the scrapbook before conservation began.

Each tear was ‘patched’ with barely visible tissue and the Selloptape across the front cover was very carefully removed to protect the pen and watercolour designs underneath.

Applying a paper repair.

Removing Sellotape.

Finally, the reassembled scrapbook was resewn using the original red silk spine pieces and threads where possible.

The time-consuming restoration process to strengthen and stabilise the scrapbook will now ensure that its original, quirky charm and amateur spirit is preserved intact for future generations of historians, researchers and hockey players to study, learn from and enjoy.

Restored Hockey Jottings scrapbook

The next step will be to scan all the pages so that THM can reproduce copies of this fascinating book. Many more people will then be able to access a copy and marvel at its contents.

Katie Dodd, December 2019
Original text (by Lizzie Richmond, Archivist, University of Bath) updated to reflect completion of this project.