Our fundraising campaign for the Broadlands Archives has now reached its target following a £1,993,760 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF).
This outstanding award, plus generous gifts from individuals, trusts and foundations – including pledges of £100,000 each from Hampshire County Council and The John Henry Hansard Trust – means we are on track to secure the Archives for the nation.
Thank you to everyone who has supported our campaign.
About the Broadlands Archives
The Broadlands Archives are an important collection of historical documents covering major political, diplomatic, social and economic events of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Filling more than 4,500 boxes of documents, the Archives include hundreds of thousands of papers relating to Lord Palmerston and Lord Mountbatten amongst others. They are one of the UK’s most significant family and estate collections.
The Archives have been on loan to the Hartley Library at the Highfield campus since 1989 and are one of the principal manuscript collections in our care. Stored in purpose-built facilities in the Library’s Special Collections Division, (link to archives page) the documents are publicly available and have been used by researchers from around the world.
Among the treasures of the collection are papers of the third Viscount Palmerston, who was Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister during Queen Victoria’s reign.
The extensive archive of papers relating to Lord Mountbatten covers the whole of his career but most significantly his time as Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command 1943-6, and in 1947 and 1948 as the last Viceroy of India and the first Governor-General of the newly independent India.
Another section of the archive contains the diaries of Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, which provide a remarkable insight into social progress in Victorian England. Nicknamed the ‘poor man’s earl’, Lord Shaftesbury championed reform and religious movements, including the protection of child chimney sweeps and shorter working hours for children in factories.
