Provenance

RGO

The Royal Observatory was founded in 1675. Broadly the Royal Greenwich Observatory collection came to Cambridge University Library either from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich or the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux.  The collection is one of many classes and there are some gifts of personal papers made to R.G.O. Archives.  The list of R.G.O. classes available in the MSS Room at the U.L. will give guidance on the various provenances within the collection.

The classes of interest to tidal studies are:

RGO 6 George Biddell Airy (1801-1892) [1835-1881]

RGO 6.203-9 1827-1848 Correspondence with the Nautical Almanac Office primarily with WS Stratford over the Nautical Almanac. There is further correspondence with the British Association

RGO 6.368 1835-1848 -384 Miscellaneous correspondence [382 JN Lockyer]

RGO 6.402 the possibility of a tidal expedition.

RGO 6.412 W Thomson's report on Tidal observations.

RGO 6.466 1748-1852 tidal observations by A B Beechey of the Severn, English Channel and North Sea, while W Denison gives his observations of the tides around Tasmania, and maps of Maestricht (1748).

RGO 6.468 1853-1854 Correspondence and printed papers on .... tides; a newspaper cutting on the tides in the Pacific Ocean; a paper on the tides at Cat island and in the Bay of Fundy.

RGO 6.472 1857-1858 Correspondence and printed papers on chronology, and tides 474 1859-1860 A collection of papers on tides. W Parkes's work on tides in India; tidal observations at Manosa point, karachi Harbour, with calculations of the tide table; and J. Harrison's work on the tides in the mersey and Irish Sea.

RGO 6.477 1862-1863 Correspondence and printed papers on chronology and tides; a paper by G B Airy "on the effect of the Sun and Moon in producing a compound tide consisting of a semidiurnal and a diurnal tide"; newspaper cuttings on conservancy of the River Mersey; and a paper entitled "Note on the tides and the earth's rotation " by Thomas Carrick. further

RGO 6.784 First Assistant’s journal 1836-1879

RGO 6.802-3 Official and scientific correspondence

RGO 7 WHM Christie (1845-1922) [1881-1910]

RGO 14 Board of Longitude papers

RGO 14.51 Correspondence on the causes of tides and trade winds

RGO 15 Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope: papers

RGO 16 The papers of the Nautical Almanac Office:

After his trip to St. Helena in1761, Nevil Maskelyne published The British Mariner’s Guide in1763. The first edition of the Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris was compiled and published by Maskelyne in 1767. Maskelyne retained control of the Almanac until its supervision passed to the newly created Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, Thomas Young, in 1818. Young was also Secretary of the Board of Longitude, after his death Airy applied for the post but was turned down and responsibility reverted to the Astronomer Royal, John Pond. In 1831 extensive changes were made and Stratford was appointed Superintendent. Stratford introduced changes for the 1834 edition, the most significant was the use of Greenwich Mean Time, instead of apparent time and as a result of other changes, the Nautical Almanac Office was established in 1834. The next Superintendent was J.R. Hind from 1863-1891.

RGO 16 1 Miscellaneous correspondence 1835-1838, 1909-1935.

RGO 28 The Nautical Almanac

RGO 60 Francis Baily papers

RGO 69 Richard Sheepshanks papers

HOT

The historical records of  the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office are an integral part of the working records of that office. They were originally housed in London, are now located at Taunton and a catalogue to which remains unpublished. However, Lieutenant Commander A.C.F. David, in 1974, did prepare A Provisional Catalogue of Logs, Journals, Documents, Letters, Record Copies of Books and Pamphlets which is available as a handlist.

The provisional catalogue is divided into sections:

A Historical Indexes

B Miscellaneous Papers

C Original Documents

D Remark Books

E Incoming Letters

F Letter Books & Minute Books

T Tidal Records

U Manuscripts

There are three indexes to A Historical Indexes, two alphabetical lists and a subject list, the first of which Index to Original MSS and Records Letters (in) (names) before 1857 SD Branch is a list of senders of in letters, giving their location number and year, those which were considered important in 1958 are ticked. E Incoming Letters have variously been indexed in A Historical Indexes. F Letter Books & Minute Books: there are 93 volumes of minute books from 1825-1912, and there are 9 volumes of Index to Minute Books from 1846-1922; with volume 31 missing there are 32 volumes of Letter Books  (out letters) 1815-1887 together with 4 volumes of Index to letter books.

SDUK

The papers of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge are deposited in University College, London.

BAAS

The papers of the British Association for the Advancement of Science were deposited at the Bodleian Library, Oxford during 1977.

Lubbock

The Lubbock collection was deposited on permanent loan basis at the Royal Society of London in 1963 by the then Mr. Eric Lubbock, MP. The papers of Sir John W. Lubbock are pasted into 42 letter books.

Herschel

The Herschel Collection was presented to the Royal Society of London in 1944 by the Rev. Sir John C.W. Herschel from a larger collection of papers at Observatory House, Slough (now demolished). Other items at that time were passed into the care of the Science Museum and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Whewell

William Whewell was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. His papers were bequeathed to the College in 1866 and were sorted by Isaac Todhunter in 1872. The Whewell catalogue was compiled in 1973 by Patricia Bradford for the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, it is arranged alphabetically by person and is available as a handlist. Whewell Add. R.6.20 is a collection of 332 manuscripts on tides, a part index was made by D.Ward in 1967.

RG 23

The archives were formerly at Archives I on Pennsylvania Avenue, having been transferred to Archives II at College Park in the 1990’s. NARSCP = National Archives and Records, College Park. In 2000 the suffix CP, in the citation of NARSCP, does not appear on the box label. The group of documents in Washington with the classification mark, RG 23 Records of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Tidal Division, comprise some 17 boxes for the second half of the nineteenth century and just run into the early years of the twentieth century. The records have been sorted but not catalogued. Citation for the Washington documents is needlessly long and lacks precision. The box numbers are not to be cited. The folders within the boxes are to be cited, the folders simply bear the letter of all the surnames within, and sometimes bear a year group. The documents within the folders have no mark of reference. Each box has many folders or books, most folders hold many documents. Consequently, I have used the general class mark (RG 23) followed by my own number of finding. Although the folders are arranged from A to B the documents within a folder are in reverse chronology. A searcher should be able to find an individual document by sifting with date and surname letter.

The tidal division was largely concerned with setting up the telegraph service. It is largely the telegraphic records which I have omitted. Many of the documents have been transcribed by a good handwriter for the benefit of Bache and Pourtales who were poor handwriters, as a consequence there are many instances where both the original and the copy have survived. These are often preserved in adjacent position perhaps indicating the degree of sorting that has taken place.

All of the documents which I have numbered from 1 to 63 inclusive, and more, have the official citation of:

NARSCP A-1 A20/B20/C70 Series 1

RG 23 Records of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Tidal Division

Letters 1849-52. Volume 1.

In 2000 these 63 documents were in: Box 1 1672.

All of the documents which I have numbered from 64 to 111 inclusive, and more, have the official citation of:

NARSCP A-1 A20/B20/C70 Series 1

RG 23 Records of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Tidal Division

Letters received 1849-66 This box 1853-1855.

In 2000 these 48 documents were in: Box 2 1673.

All of the documents which I have numbered 112 to 148 inclusive, and more, have the official citation of:

NARSCP A-1 A20/B20/C70/Series 2

RG 23 Records of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, Tidal Division

Letters Sent, 1851-67 Box No 1

In 2000 these 37 documents were in: Box 5 1674.

StJ AC

The papers of John Couch Adams are to be found in St. John’s College, Cambridge. Adams's papers were collected up immediately after his death by Donald MacAlister (Fellow of St John's 1877-1934) with the help of Mrs. Adams, for the purpose of writing his biography. MacAlister had transcripts made of papers in the files at the Royal Greenwich Observatory and elsewhere, and collected material from Adams's friends and colleagues. In time other commitments, including moving to Scotland, caused MacAlister to abandon the idea of the biography.

What happened to the papers then is not entirely clear. Some papers were given to St. John's by Mrs. Adams shortly before her death and some rudimentary weeding and sorting was carried out on these. It seems likely that these papers were those that MacAlister had not used, including Mrs. Adams's own diaries, and unimportant correspondence of Adams's. In the 1930s MacAlister's collection of papers was passed on to William Smart, who had taken up the idea of writing Adams's biography. Smart produced a Memoir for the Royal Astronomical Society for the anniversary of the discovery of Neptune in 1946, but never proceeded further. In 1959 he presented all the papers he had to St. John's.

Subsequently all or most of these papers were unpacked and put into 19 boxes, letters being taken out of their envelopes and clipped to them with a plastic paper clip. No sorting or cataloguing beyond a single card for the collection was carried out. However, the remaining 10 boxes of the papers, probably those that came from Mrs Adams, were sorted and indexed, in some detail although very inaccurately and incompletely. The two sets of boxes were numbered in two different sequences: "Adams" and "Adams Papers". The detailed cataloguing of one part disguised from readers and staff alike the fact that the remainder were untouched.

In 1990 MacAlister's niece, Mrs, Horne, presented to the College some more papers which had stayed with the family by accident. These now form boxes 24-26. In 1996 the Royal Aeronautical Society offered the College the papers connected with the Newton Mss. Syndicate (now box 27), which they had had since 1943, though they have no record of why, or where they came from.

The above notes were compiled by, and the catalogue of the collection of the papers of John Couch Adams was completed by the then librarian, Mrs. Elizabeth Quarmby-Lawrence in 1999. The catalogue is available electronically in the Old Library and is searchable by keywords.

Add 7342

The manuscripts of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, now in Cambridge University Library were at one time all in the possession of Sir Joseph Larmor. They came to the U.L. at various dates between 1936 and 1942. All the manuscripts are now assembled in one collection called the Kelvin Collection and designated Add. MS 7342.

Kelvin

Kelvin Papers Index, Glasgow University Library, 1977. This collection of documents were deposited in Glasgow in 1963 by Lady Darwin. It exists in three boxes D1-50, D51-100 & D101-156.

DAR 251

The bulk of the MS.DAR.251 George Howard Darwin papers were placed on permanent loan with Cambridge University Library on 1975 April 30 by Sir Geoffrey Keynes of Lammas House, Brinkley, Newmarket, Suffolk. Sir Geoffrey was married to Margaret nee Darwin, the daughter of Sir George and a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. A further acquisition of three packets of letters sent by Sir Geoffrey is dated 1979 March 15. A catalogue of the 5,231 manuscripts, prepared by Mr. Nick Gill, is available as a hand list.

Add 5749, 5750

The MSS.Add.5749 and Add.5750 George Howard Darwin papers were presented to Cambridge University Library in 1913 – Adam Perkins, the librarian in 2001, presumed by G.H.D., though that information is not stated specifically within the library. 

Misc

For this bundle of documents I have made little attempt to define their provenance as they are varied and of little significance. Under miscellaneous are those which came to my attention by miscellaneous means such as that from Roorkee University and Durban local history department; and includes the isolated letters on tides from larger collections such as those of the Forbes papers from St. Andrews University.

Missing archives or documents not recovered

There are significant omissions. When Francis Davenport wrote to Edmund Halley on the 15^th July 1678 from the Gulf of Tonquin, in Indo-China, he provided information vital to Isaac Newton’s codicil to Principia Mathematica, System of the World. An abridgement of this letter was published in Philosophical Transactions, the original has not succeeded in coming to light. The unpublished papers of Thomas Young reveal nothing on tides. Each branch of the descendants of Thomas Gamlen Bunt and Edward Roberts were contacted in vain. The papers of the Nautical Almanac Office, then a part of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, are almost wholely absent for the nineteenth century and so the correspondence received by Dessiou and Ross are almost certainly incomplete, this has a more marked effect for the 1880’s because there are almost no letters preserved which Roberts received there then. Conversely what I have been able to extract and collate forms inadvertently a skeleton for a history of that office. There was also two instances of fire in the offices of the Ordnance Survey and so what they received there is also not now available. The papers received by Andrew Wilson Baird have not been preserved, he had extracted them from his office in Poona, India, before he left to take over the world’s largest mint in Calcutta. His descendants have none, nor do the Royal Engineers in Chatham; the National Archives of India in Delhi claim to have some of his papers and claim to make them available to students but in reality do not produce the records when properly requested.