The George Williams Memorial Library is located in the ringing chamber of Winchester Cathedral and is available for readers and borrowers by appointment. The system for loans provides a standard loan period of eight weeks with a liberal renewal policy for serious research and special problems. The only exceptions are the archive material and the Guild’s annual and triennial reports for which, because of their unique importance, loans are solely at the discretion of the librarian. A catalogue of the printed books and of the complete archive is maintained on the Guild website. Part of our collection of archive material, held at the Hampshire Record Office in Sussex Street, Winchester, is available for consultation only. The collection there has the call-number 20M94.
My buying last year was confined to Maureen Cubitt’s The Bells Told, the history of the bells and ringers of St Peter Mancroft, in Norwich, published to coincide with the tercentenary of the first true peal, rung there. I plan in the Spring of 2016 to buy the Central Council collections of nineteenth-century newspaper articles, and the latest DVD of The Ringing World, taking the electronic archive thereof to 2000. I have also transferred to the County Record Office the recent archives of the Alton and Petersfield District, comprising attendance registers from 1980 onwards, and minute books from 1960 to 1993; also the Guild’s albums of photograph and ephemera from 1900 to 1985.
The Guild’s online archive has the minutes of the Guild Annual meetings and Executive Committee meetings from 1980 to 2000, and from 2013 to 2014 (More recent minutes are already available from the Guild’s Document Repository) and a collection of historical articles from The Ringing World about Guild people, places and events. These are all maintained by Tony Smith, to whom I am duly grateful.
I am always pleased to assist Guild members and others with an interest in the Guild with their researches. I should like to thank my colleagues within the Guild and the Winchester Cathedral band for their continuing support.
| Income | Expenditure | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| £.p | £.p | ||
| Balance b/f | 93.56 | Sub. to The Ringing World | 68.00 |
| Sub. to The Friends of the Central Council Library | 10.00 | ||
| Cubitt: The bells told | 10.00 | ||
| Balance c/f | 5.56 | ||
| £93.56 | £93.56 | ||
Bruce Purvis