Have you ever thrown something away and then realised that you needed it? Surely all of us have done so. There is even a collective noun for such items in The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd: ‘nottage.’
However, it is not just people who have nottage, but governments as well.
Last week, we learned how the Home Office in October 2010 had destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival by boat of immigrants into this country. These slips, stored in the basement of an anonymous tower block, had been particularly useful for Home Office caseworkers when seeking to prove how long somebody had been resident in the UK. With the passing of the 2014 Immigration Act, and with many elderly members of the Windrush generation seeking to resolve their immigration status under the now notorious ‘hostile environment’, the absence of these slips suddenly proved to be a handicap. They were nottage.
But it is not just Windrush immigrants and civil servants who are seething at their loss, but also historians such as myself. I don’t give a fig whether the destruction of these landing slips took place under a person who sports a red or a blue rosette every five years, because I’m certain that a lack of respect for archival matter runs through all governments, and has done so for decades.
For historians, documents form the very foundations of our trade. Memories are useful but our recall of events is of course selective and patchy. As somebody — perhaps Stalin — once said: ‘Nobody lies like an eyewitness.’ Documents are not perfect either, but they often prove to be more reliable sources as they are usually produced at the time of the event.
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