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Background
to the RBNA
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100th Birthday Party 1987
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Miss Ada Ward and Dame Margaret
Burne Hon Secretary SRN Fever
Training President of Royal College of
Midwives
President of RBNA |
Hon Secretary |
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DameJosephine Barnes MA, DM, FRCP, FRCS, FRCOG 5th President of the RBNA and 1st female President for The British Medical Association |
Mr Richard Bowden, MA Archivist (Catalogued the RBNA historical papers which researchers can view at Kings College London) |
Mrs Patricia Methven Director of Archives and Information Management |
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Background
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| The Royal British Nurses' Association (RBNA) was founded
in 1887, the first professional organisation for nurses in the world.
One of the main aims of its founder, Mrs Bedford Fenwick, was the
registration of nurses and almost at once the RBNA opened its own
membership roll and list of registered members. These uniquely valuable
documents, which contain background details about every nurse listed,
are still among its archives and can be consulted today but state
registration of nurses was only achieved in 1919, when the Nurses'
Registration Act finally became law. |
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Her Grace,
The Duchess of Fife |
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The thirty years before 1919, and the years immediately
after this, were a critical time for the nursing profession, with
new ideas of all kinds being continually debated, often heatedly
and acrimoniously, before being acted upon. A turning point came
in 1916 with the opening of the College of Nursing. At first the
RBNA gave it its support but in the end it strongly opposed it.
The RBNA's archives shed fresh light on this and on many other events
of this time, particularly the struggle for registration. As well
as two virtually complete series of minutes, those of its General
Council and its Executive Committee - starting with the two meetings
in Mrs Bedford Fenwick's house at 20 Upper Wimpole Street in 1887 at which the RBNA was founded,
and continuing to recent times the archives include a variety, of
other working papers together with letters and personal papers from
many 'Of the participants in these struggles, which should offer new insights into the early history of the profession. |
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| The RBNA has always been aware of the importance of
its history but in the past there were practical difficulties in
allowing visitors access to its archives. During the 1980s, while
Miss Ada Ward was President and Mrs Vorstermans Hon Secretary, the
RBNA's attitude towards its archives gradually became more open
and researchers began to be allowed greater access to them. The
decision to make the archives fully available to the public for
the first time was taken in 1995 by Miss H M Campbell, Vice-President
of the RBNA, and her executive committee when the RBNA's move to
new premises was being planned. Cataloguing the archives and extensive
conservation work on the collection were made possible by two British
Library Cataloguing and Preservation grants. Not surprisingly, with
the passage of time the original arrangement of the archives had
disappeared and in the process of listing them it became necessary
to find a way of presenting the collection which would be easy to
follow without imposing on it a completely new structure. So although
the subject groups which have been introduced are artificial they
were selected only because they emerged as natural and obvious ones. |
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| It seems possible that the material from the British
College of Nurses may have found a home with the RBNA after its
demise in 1956. After all, the British College of Nurses was then
at 19 Queen's Gate and the RBNA was a close neighbour at no.194.
Mrs Bedford Fenwick seems to have used the British College of Nurses'
history of nursing section as the most suitable place for some of
her own personal papers - there are some specific examples of this
in the 'Papers relating to Mrs Bedford Fenwick' section - and this
may be how all these records reached the RBNA's archives. |
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| Their subject groups could have been chosen, for example
the Society for the State Registration of Trained Nurses. One wonders
whether the sizeable number of papers from this organisation, with
Mrs Bedford Fenwick as its secretary, found their way into the RBNA's
archives by the same route. In the end the best solution seemed
to be to limit the separate groups and make a chronological listing
of the main series of papers. I am grateful to Dr Anne Summers for
her advice at this stage. This meant for the most part that each
document had to be described individually, but the size of the collection
made it possible to do this without it taking an inordinate amount
of extra time. It is hoped that the level of detail in the list
will be helpful to people using the collection. |
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| That so much has survived is due to the long years
of stability that the RBNA enjoyed, with HRH Princess Christian
as President from 1887 right up to her death in 1923, the active
presence of Mrs Bedford Fenwick up to her death in 1947, aged 90,
and not least the loyalty of Isabel Macdonald, who remained secretary
of the RBNA from 1909 up to her death in 1964, aged 89. This also
meant that for more than fifty years most of the RBNA's in-coming
letters were addressed to her. In order to avoid repetition her
name has therefore been left out of the catalogue entries where
this is the case and the name of the recipient of the letter given
only when it was not Isabel Macdonald. Similarly, Sydiley Pitt,
of Pontifex, Hewitt and Pitt, the RBNA's solicitors, whose letters
to Miss Macdonald continue over many years, is described in the
list by name only. |
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| Susan McGanns "The Battle of the Nurses", Scutari
Press, 1992, has been invaluable, not least in compiling the selective
chronology This is intended as a reference point for the flood of
different organisations that were formed and the many events that
took place within such a short space of time as nursing gradually
established itself as a profession. |
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| Every effort has been made to produce as accurate
a catalogue of the collection as possible but if any additions can
be made it was impossible for example to identify quite all the
photographs - or if anyone using the collection notices any other
ways in which it can be improved I hope that they will report them
so that they can be included in any later edition. |
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