Walter Wright describes the recovery and preservation of Police Records.

Bishop's Stortford's former Local History Museum's honorary Curator Mr Wright talks about the Stortford Police records coming into the museum's collection

By Alex A

As a part of Bishop’s Stortford Museum Oral history project we have been lucky to have the testimony of Mr Walter Wright, the voluntary honorary curator of the Bishop’s Stortford and District Local History Museum, based at the Cemetery Lodge at Apton Road.

He was responsible for taking into the collection the Police records from PC Evans who had discovered them in the leaking roof of the old Police station in Church Street, Bishop’s Stortford.

His statement tells us more about how the volunteer-run museum initially dealt with this paper collection in 1990s.

Non-verbatim Transcription :

PC Evans came to us one day and said he had seen all these records in the roof of the old police station.

Would we be interested ? So ‘yes’, we said, ‘we are’ and so we went and collect all these things and they’ve been in the roof, in a leaking roof and they were literally so wet that some of them we couldn’t actually handle and we needed to pick them up on the piece of support. We brought all these records back and put them out in the shed. We used to have a shed. What we had to do is, very wet ones we had to leave to dry out. Once they dried enough to be able to handle them safely, we had to open all the pages and insert tissue in between every page, for all those records. They were laid out in the annex to dry sufficiently to be able to handle. Once they were in a fit state, than we would take the tissue paper out and put them in the envelopes and in open store in boxes and then we had a young lady who came and catalogued them.

This page was added on 17/10/2014.

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