NRS-17728 | Minute Books: Board of Directors, House Committee and Finance Committee [Royal Newcastle Hospital]

Full description

This very extensive series contains the minutes of the Board of Directors, House Committee and Finance Committee, and their predecessors, from 1866 to 1984, in 85 volumes. The series has been created in such a way that one volume, more often than not, contains the minutes of the Board and of one or both Committees for a given year.

The extant volumes of this series contain the Minutes of the Hospital’s governing General Committee (later the General Committee of Management) from 1866 to 1892 and 1897 to 1915, and of its successor, the Board of Directors, from 1916 to 1984; of the Acting Committee from 1866 to 1875, and of its successor, the Committee of Management, from 1875 to 1903; of the Committee of Management’s effective successor, the House Committee, from 1904 to 1912, 1915 to 1938, and 1964 to 1984; of the Finance Committee from 1918 to 1921, 1948 to 1954, and 1964 to 1984; and of the Meetings of Subscribers from 1866 to 1893, after which these form a separate series. Often the Minutes of one body have continued to be entered into one volume after the contemporary Minutes of another have been moved to a new volume. Moreover, it will be evident from the gaps in the representation of some of these bodies that there are now several volumes missing from the series.

From 1915 onwards the surviving volumes of this series are mostly annual volumes made up ex post facto from typed foolscap sheets. Previous volumes are of the quarter-leather-bound ledger type, with minutes entered by hand, not uncommonly accompanied by published newspaper accounts of meetings which have been clipped and pasted into the volumes. Whilst the earliest volumes in the series display marked signs of wear, and some are beginning to exhibit crumbling of the leather on their spines, the series is, on the whole, in remarkably good condition.

The core of the series is, of course, the Minutes of the General Committee and Board of Directors. These are complete from 1866 until 1984, with the exception of the period between October 1892 and February 1897 – which probably represents a single missing volume. References at the beginning of the earliest surviving volume indicate, however, that still earlier minutes once existed. These do not now appear to be extant, and may have been amongst the materials acquired by local historian Dr Ben Champion in the 1930’s, the subsequent fate of which is unknown.

The Minutes of the Acting Committee, and of the Committee of Management which succeeded it in 1875, are complete from 1866 until the absorbtion of the Committee of Management into the General Committee in 1903. Until the beginning of 1894 these minutes share space in the same four volumes which contain the General Committee minutes; thereafter they are kept in three successive separate volumes. The last of these volumes also contains the first Minutes of the House Committee, which was established in 1904 and effectively succeeded to the functions formerly the responsibility of the Committee of Management.

The Minutes of the House Committee until 1912 occupy the remainder of this volume and two further separate volumes. Thereafter one volume appears to be missing, but from 1915 until 1938 the Minutes of House Committee appear in the same twenty-four annual volumes as do those of the Board of Directors.

From 1939 until 1966 the Minutes of the Board of Directors have twenty-eight annual volumes to themselves. For most of this period House Committee minutes have not survived; when this element in the series resumes in 1964, they are sharing a volume with the Minutes of the Finance Committee. From 1967 onwards, however, all three bodies – Board, House Committee and Finance Committee – share the same eighteen annual volumes until the end of the series in 1984.

The least complete element in this series is the Minutes of the Finance Committee. Prior to 1964, only eleven years’ worth of this Committee’s minutes has survived. These share the same annual volumes as the Minutes of the Board and of the House Committee from 1918 (which may have been the year of the Finance Committee’s establishment) until 1921, and a single separate volume is extant which contains Finance Committee minutes for 1948-1954. From 1964 until the end of the whole series, Finance Committee minutes have survived complete.