British Museum (Natural History): Department of Palaeontology: Departmental correspondence

This series contains departmental correspondence of the British Museum (Natural History) Department of Palaeontology. It consists of unbound letters, volumes of incoming letters, press-copy books of outgoing letters, and files of loose incoming and outgoing letters.

Earliest letters in the series date from well before the founding of the Department in 1857, while post-1970 correspondence files are still held in the Department. DF 100/1-66 mostly contain letters addressed to successive keepers, or passed to the Keeper by the Museum Secretariat. These letters deal principally with the acquisition and identification of specimens. DF 100/76 onwards contain the correspondence of all senior staff after 1920, together with earlier letters addressed to F A Bather, G C Crick, C W Andrews and others. These letters deal with the acquisition and exchange of specimens, general palaeontological and curatorial topics, and the research interests of the staff concerned.

Letters of those who kept their own files, such as Miss Muir-Wood, were added to the main collection after their retirement. Pre-1921 correspondence of Crick, Bather and others was likewise added to the filing system. It passed out of general use in the 1960s, and had only sporadic additions in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Series held at The Natural History Museum are catalogued more fully in its online catalogue (reference DF PAL/100). Online descriptions of some individual records can also be viewed on Discovery, see DF 100.

Unbound letters arranged chronologically (DF 100/1-31), volumes of incoming letters (DF 100/17, DF 100/32-66), press-copy books of outgoing letters (DF 100/67-75), and files of loose incoming and outgoing letters arranged alphabetically by writer (DF 100/76-234).

Early letters seem to have originally been arranged in yearly bundles, although many of these were moved into subject boxes. The subject boxes have now been dispersed, and the original chronological order reconstructed.

Further letters of G R Waterhouse and H Woodward are to be found in the Handwriting Collection in the General Library.

Correspondence files of those connected with the Piltdown affair have been removed to DF 116/18 -35

The correspondence of R B Newton was not incorporated into the main collection, and is in

DF 122

Topics

Pay and pensions

Museums and galleries