Peter Walne, MA, FRHistS

Peter Walne was born in Blackburn in September 1925 and educated at Audenshaw Grammar School. He won an open exhibition in French to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1943 but his studies were interrupted by the war, which he spent in the RAF, mainly in Sri Lanka. Returning to Cambridge in 1947 Walne chose to read history rather than modern languages and, on graduation in 1949, was accepted as one of the first students of the newly established postgraduate diploma course in archive administration at Liverpool University, in which he achieved distinction. A professional appointment followed swiftly in 1950 when he joined Dr Felix Hill, the first county archivist of Berkshire, in a two-man, one-room, partnership. When Hill moved to Kent in 1952, Walne took over and for the next ten years continued to expand the scope of the Berkshire Record Office with his customary energy. In 1962 he was appointed county archivist of Hertfordshire in the footsteps of Colonel William le Hardy, a gifted amateur who might not have perfected an archive service but who had certainly fostered a favourable climate for the creation of one. Walne, the highly trained and experienced professional, swept away the cobwebs, tied up loose ends and updated all procedures. He remained at Hertford until retirement in 1990, almost thirty years of commitment, innovation, modernization and, above all, vision and vitality.

Walne also brought these qualities to his involvement in the protection of the national and international archival heritage. Within months of his Berkshire appointment he joined the Society of Local Archivists (as it then was) and was elected honorary secretary in 1952. Two years later, as the Society of Archivists, its constitutional obligations were widened to include responsibility for conservation and the training of all archivists in the UK. Walne served continuously as honorary secretary for twenty-six years. To mark his quarter-century in office he was presented with a pair of silver salvers: some small acknowledgement of the dedication with which he had worked for the society during its formative years and subsequent expansion of membership and range of activities. Walne had always been aware of the need for an international dimension for the promotion of efficient archival co-operation and in 1960 he became closely associated with the International Council on Archives (ICA). The Council’s Guides project, aimed at making European sources for the history of other continents readily accessible, caught his imagination. He directed the preparation of the British volume of the Latin American Guide (1973) and served on the project’s International Technical Committee until completion of the series in 1984. The production of an international archival dictionary had long exercised the Council; a first hesitant Lexicon of Archival Terminology was published in the early 1960s and in 1977 a working group on terminology was established with Walne as chairman. The first edition of Dictionary of Archival Terminology, edited by Walne, appeared in 1984 and a second revised edition in 1988, the year in which he retired from office and was elected an honorary member. He had been deputy director of Archivum (the ICA’s annual journal) from 1968 to 1973 and director from 1973 to 1976.

Walne was an active supporter of the Hertfordshire Buildings Preservation Trust and the Hertfordshire Local History Council, of which he was chairman from 1989 to 1996 and to which he not infrequently contributed papers. From 1956 to 1971 he was a visiting lecturer and external examiner in the University of Liverpool’s archive diploma course and subsequently served in these capacities at the UCL archives course. In Europe, his collaboration with French archivists earned him appointment as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Early in his career, an interest in Thomas Jefferson led to an invitation to visit the University of Virginia and all his life he maintained contacts with record societies in the Carolinas and New England, often publishing papers in their journals on the great seals of the North American colonies. Indeed, he had hoped to complete research and publication of his work on seals, particularly golden bulls, during retirement, following the award of a Leverhulme grant in 1991, but declining health prevented this and he died on 13 August 1999.