The National Archives (United Kingdom)

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Archives holds the autographed confession of Guy Fawkes, signed in 1605 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Jane Austen's last will, dated 1817, sits in the same institution. So does the logbook William Bligh kept aboard HMS Bounty during the mutiny of 1789. Three of the only twenty-six surviving Dunlap Broadsides, the first printed copies of the American Declaration of Independence, are also preserved here. This institution at Kew, in south-west London, is the official national archive of the United Kingdom government. It is open to the public and free to visit. Its holdings stretch back over a thousand years, from medieval parchment to archived websites. How this place grew to carry so much, how the public reaches what it holds, and what happened when a forger attacked the collection from within are the questions this documentary takes on. Not every item is simple to reach: the most remote files require a three-working-day wait, retrieved from a salt mine in Cheshire.

• 2. The Building at Kew

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  John Cecil Clavering designed the Kew building, which Queen Elizabeth II opened in 1977 as a second home for the public records. Before that, those records were held at the Public Record Office on Chancery Lane. The site had originally served as a World War I hospital, and several government departments occupied the grounds before the archive moved in. It stands near Kew Gardens Underground station, in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.

  The institution was created in 2003 by merging the Public Record Office with the Historical Manuscripts Commission. On the 31st of October 2006, The National Archives absorbed the Office of Public Sector Information, which had itself incorporated the former Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The Public Record Office technically still exists as a legal entity because the enabling legislation was never amended. Some scholars therefore continue to cite holdings under the old PRO designation.

  A storage facility called DeepStore operates in the worked-out sections of Winsford Rock Salt Mine in Winsford, Cheshire. Files held there take three working days to reach Kew. Documents stored on-site are typically delivered to a reader within an hour of being ordered. The National Archives also maintains an office in Norwich, primarily for staff who transferred from the former Office of Public Sector Information.

  Argon gas, rather than water sprinklers, protects the sealed repositories from fire. Water would ruin the holdings it was meant to protect. When the building is evacuated, argon floods the air-tight storage rooms to smother any flames. The physical collection at Kew includes an on-site museum displaying key documents and staging exhibitions drawn from the holdings.

• 3. Nine Centuries on a Shelf

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  Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 on the orders of William the Conqueror, is kept at Kew. The institution describes it as a unique record of medieval England. Alongside it sits the final version of Magna Carta, issued by King Henry III in 1225. A chest box containing the Treaty of Brétigny is also held here. That agreement, dated 1360, brought the first phase of the Hundred Years' War between England and France to a close.

  A copy of the first item printed in England by William Caxton, dated 1476, is part of the collection. It sits alongside a letter Sir Francis Drake sent to Sir Francis Walsingham during the Spanish Armada of 1588. William Shakespeare's last will, bearing his own signature, dates from 1616. The manuscript record of King Charles I's trial for treason, written by John Phelps, was produced in 1649. An indictment letter for the highwayman Dick Turpin, dated 1739, also found its way here. The letter Captain Cook addressed to Philip Stephens, Secretary of the Admiralty, before Cook's first voyage was written in 1768.

  The Olive Branch Petition, sent in 1775 by the Second Continental Congress, is preserved at Kew. The petition was a formal attempt to prevent war between the Thirteen Colonies and Great Britain. A calling card left by the Marquis of Queensberry for Oscar Wilde in 1895 is part of the same collection. It was that card which sparked the trial for sodomy named in the archive's records. The SOS telegram sent by Jack Phillips in 1912, alerting the nearby ship SS Birma to the sinking of the Titanic, is also kept here. One of roughly thirty printed copies of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, dated 1916, sits alongside a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, dated 1919. The signed letter of abdication by Edward VIII, from 1936, is among the most recent political documents in the collection's highlights.

  Beyond individual items, the archive holds court records going back to the twelfth century, Foreign Office and Colonial Office correspondence, Cabinet papers, Home Office files, maps and architectural drawings, military service records, and the surviving papers of England's railway companies, transferred from the British Railways Record Office. All of it can be searched through Discovery, the archive's online catalogue, which also allows readers to order files before they visit.

• 4. Opening the Archive

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  Admission to The National Archives is free, and the reader's ticket required to handle original documents is also free. Anyone aged 16 or over can obtain one by presenting two acceptable proofs of identity. The Research and Enquiries Room on the first floor holds a large number of desktop computer terminals, and visitors may bring their own devices and connect to the on-site Wi-Fi. Separate reading rooms on the first and second floors are reserved for conventional and oversized documents respectively.

  Each document carries a three-part reference number used to order it from storage: a department code of up to four letters, a series number, and an individual document number. The War Office, for example, uses the code WO. Special arrangements exist for readers who need to retrieve large groups of files through bulk orders placed in advance.

  As of 2011, popular documents were downloadable through the Discovery catalogue for a fee of £3.50 per file. On the 22nd of April 2020, the institution announced that registered users would instead receive a monthly quota of free downloads. As of August 2023, three companies, Ancestry.com, Findmypast, and TheGenealogist, operated as licensed partners offering pay-per-view or subscription access to digitised records.

  On-site at Kew, visitors can access digitised records for free on in-house terminals. The paywall on the Wi-Fi network is disabled during a visit. The archive's stated policy steers researchers toward digital copies rather than originals, in order to limit wear on the physical documents. Only in exceptional circumstances, such as when successive reproductions have degraded the legibility of an image, is access to the original granted.

  In January 2011, The National Archives released its first smartphone application, Old Money, developed with historian Nick Barratt and the studio RevelMob. The app draws on historic price data from archive documents to show what any sum of money from any year since 1270 would be worth today. In September 2011, the archive's museum adopted QRpedia codes, allowing visitors to scan exhibits and retrieve related information on their phones. Those outward-facing innovations ran alongside a hidden problem: a forger had been planting fabricated documents inside the collection.

• 5. The Forgeries of 2005

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  In June 2005, journalist Ben Fenton of The Daily Telegraph was asked by a colleague to investigate documents held at The National Archives. The documents alleged that a British intelligence agent had murdered Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, in 1945. The alleged order had come from Winston Churchill. These three documents had gained prominence through author Martin Allen's book Himmler's Secret War.

  Fenton's suspicions formed when he examined photographs of the documents before visiting. He found it implausible that so sensitive a decision would be put in writing, with the assassin named. Viewing the originals the following day, he noticed what appeared to be pencil marks beneath one of the signatures. Those marks, combined with his experience reading historic documents, gave him enough to persuade The Daily Telegraph to pay for forensic analysis. National Archives staff took four files to Audrey Giles, a former head of Scotland Yard's Questioned Documents Unit. Authenticated samples of the supposed authors' handwriting accompanied them. Giles confirmed the documents were forgeries. One letterhead had been produced on a laser printer, and all the documents had tear marks where they had been threaded onto the archive's security tags. Errors in protocol and etiquette were also discovered: failures the supposed authors would not have made.

  After Fenton's account appeared in print, a German academic named Ernst Haiger contacted him to report suspicions about further documents cited in an earlier Allen book. National Archives experts identified more than a dozen additional suspicious items and submitted them to Home Office specialists, who also declared them forgeries. In total, twenty-nine counterfeit documents were uncovered, each typed on one of only four typewriters and distributed across twelve separate files.

  Each of the three Allen books had drawn on forged material. In Hidden Agenda, five fabricated documents supported Allen's claim that the Duke of Windsor had betrayed military secrets to Hitler. The Hitler/Hess Deception relied on thirteen forged papers. They supported the claim that in 1941, British intelligence had used members of the Royal family to mislead the Nazis about Britain's political direction. In Himmler's Secret War, twenty-two counterfeit documents underpinned the book's central argument. British intelligence, Allen argued, had engaged in psychological operations against Himmler from 1943 and ultimately brought about his death.

  Allen, when questioned by police, maintained his complete innocence. Health problems delayed the questioning by nine months. In 2007, the Crown Prosecution Service declared that prosecuting him was not in the public interest. In December 2007, the Solicitor-General confirmed to Norman Baker MP that the investigation had produced enough evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction. The charges would have covered forgery, use of a forged document, and criminal damage. Health and surrounding circumstances had weighed against proceeding. In the addendum to the American edition of his book, Allen offered an alternative theory. The originals, he suggested, had been removed from the archive after he consulted them. Clumsily forged replicas were then substituted to cast doubt on his discoveries.

• 6. Lost, Burnt, and Withheld

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  Between 2005 and 2011, more than 1,500 files were reported missing from the archive. Correspondence from Winston Churchill and documents connected to the courts of several monarchies were among the notable items that could not be accounted for. Around 800 of those files were eventually recovered. The archive stated its belief that most were misplaced rather than permanently lost.

  In 2017, a further problem surfaced. Around 1,000 files had been removed by government officials, in part or in whole, and reported as missing when they were not returned. Politicians and historians raised concerns, and the archive responded that the total of missing items amounted to roughly 0.01 percent of its holdings. Its annual loss rate at the time stood at around 100 documents.

  Six million sets of British Army service papers from the First World War were stored in a War Office warehouse in London. Incendiary bombs struck the warehouse during the Second World War, destroying most of them. The surviving quarter were largely water or fire-damaged and became known informally as the burnt documents. With funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the archive transferred them to microfilm in a programme that ran from 1996 to 2003. They were later converted to digital files and released on the Ancestry website from 2008, catalogued as archive series WO 363. A separate set of service papers, held by the Ministry of Pensions and unaffected by the fire, was also microfilmed and released on Ancestry from 2008, catalogued as series WO 364.

  In February 2021, the Ministry of Defence began the largest record transfer in the archive's history. That transfer covered 9.7 million military records for individuals with a discharge date before the 31st of December 1963. The first batch was added to the Discovery catalogue in April 2022. In March 2023, Ancestry announced a contract to digitise more than 3 million British Army service records, with releases planned between 2024 and 2029.

  The National Archives receives records from MI5 roughly twice a year, though some information is withheld at MI5's discretion. In 2017, journalist Richard Norton-Taylor argued that MI5 was deliberately withholding information the public deserved. He pointed specifically to Thatcher's resistance to publication of two books examining British intelligence during the Second World War, and to concerns about British activities in Northern Ireland becoming public. Additional MI5 records released through the archive raised questions about blacklists from the Thatcher era that had targeted government workers, unions, and minority groups. As of 2018, questions remained about whether such lists were still in operation. Whether they had affected the careers of those named in them was also unresolved. Since 2022, The National Archives has hosted a case law database called Find Case Law, cataloguing decisions from superior courts going back to 2003.