As should be clear by now, we believe that in building our website we are developing a useful and detailed historical resource. But, as any historian knows, one must always question the trustworthiness of one's sources. So can you trust us to provide accurate and comprehensive information? The Margaret Thatcher Foundation was, after all, founded by MT herself: are we not therefore providing an edited version of history in order to portray her and her premiership in the best possible light?
It is certainly true that we do have to make editorial decisions when administering the website. As already explained, a key source of documents for our website is the PREM19s. In their 'raw' form, the digitised versions of these folders are often many hundreds of pages long, and contain hundreds of documents. Throughout the course of MT's time as PM, thousands of these folders were produced. In order to make sense of all this, some sort of order has to be imposed. Our archive is intended not only to make documents freely available online, but also to make them searchable by tagging them in a useful way and adding them to our database. Yet if the database is to function properly it simply cannot include every document contained within the PREM19s. If it did it would become unwieldy, and every search would return hundreds of irrelevant and/or uninteresting results. It is therefore crucial that we make selections from these PREM19 folders, by determining which documents are of the greatest historical interest and adding only those to the database. And the same is of course true for documents taken from other sources. It is neither sensible nor feasible to add all of them to the database. (However, it should be noted that although only a selection of documents are being added to the searchable database, all of the 'raw' files are also going on our website in complete and unedited form - see below.)
Furthermore, there can be no hard and fast rules for deciding which documents should be added to the database. Generally speaking, records of MT's meetings will always go online, as will minutes and letters sent to MT by key Cabinet figures (see, for example, the Chancellor of the Exchequer's and Foreign Secretary's minutes). MT's correspondence with national and international figures always goes online as well. Beyond that, case-by-case judgements are required. For example, it is usually the case that short administrative notes are of little historical interest, but in certain cases they can be revealing. This note concerns arrangements for a 1982 constituency visit, and asks MT whether she would be willing to drive a radio controlled forklift into a warehouse as part of a function. MT's scribbled annotation shows her concern that this might look 'gimmicky' given the 'current situation', the 'current situation' being the Falklands crisis. Then, in parenthesis, she adds, 'unless it is all resolved by then'. These words, written casually in a trivial private document, only make sense if she thought that there might be a diplomatic solution to the Falklands Crisis, and the note therefore provides an interesting window into her thinking at this point in time. This example demonstrates the extent to which case-by-case editorial judgements are essential for determining the interest of historical documents.
So given that editorial judgements have to be made, how do can know that you can trust our editorial judgements?
The first thing to emphasise is that we sincerely desire that the document archive should serve as a useful historical resource for the purposes of serious and intellectually honest research. We do not want to present a narrow or distorted version of the historical record, and we certainly do not hold back or censor documents that deal with contentious or controversial topics. Some of the documents in our archive do feature redactions, but these were made by the Cabinet Office on grounds of national security. There are also documents present in the hard-copy archives that we would like to put online but cannot because we do not have the right to reproduce them. But with these exceptions, everything that is of historical interest is added to the database. Indeed, the more complicated and contentious a topic is, the more likely you are to find documents relating to that topic on our website. We are therefore focusing with particular intensity on the Falklands Crisis, and have dealt comprehensively with issues like the IRA hunger strikes at the Maze Prison. Once documents on the Miners' Strike, Hillsborough, and other potentially contentious topics are released to us, they will be given similar care and attention.
Secondly, as mentioned above, we are also making available "raw", unedited folders of documents wherever possible. This is particularly true of the PREM19s, and on this page you can find links to PDF versions of complete PREM19 folders. The obvious disadvantage to viewing the folders in this way is that they cannot be searched through in the same way as those documents uploaded to the database, but nevertheless they are (or will be) available for manual cross-checking. (NB: Uploading the complete PREM 19 files to the website is an on-going and time consuming process. Indeed, the majority of the PREM19s are still to be released to us. But we will get there, and eventually every one of MT's prime ministerial folders will be available for download in complete and unedited form.) If even that doesn't satisfy you, then you should also bear in mind that the vast majority of the documents in our database are available to view in hard-copy form at either the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, or The National Archives in Kew. It is always possible to cross-check our digital archive against the relevant paper versions.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it appears that academics of all political stripes consider our website to constitute a useful historical resource. Consider, for instance, the following description of the site by Eric J. Evans. It is taken from the bibliography to his Thatcher and Thatcherism (Routledge, 3rd Edition, 2013), a book which argues for a generally negative assessment of MT and her legacy:
Students of the Thatcher era have a distinct advantage over those working on other near-contemporary figures. The Margaret Thatcher Foundation has digitised and put online a massive amount of material, including all of Thatcher's major speeches and other primary-source material...The Foundation does not pretend to be a national archive or to represent all views equally and the brief biographical introduction is hardly a dispassionate assessment of its subject. However, the site is immensely valuable and new additions to it are regularly made. It claims, quite correctly, 'to offer thousands of documents touching on the career of Margaret Thatcher...to inform and advance understanding of the period'.There is bound to be disagreement over the correct interpretation of the documents on our website, but it is important to us that the website itself should be trusted and valued. For that reason there is a sense in which we most value praise that comes from those who are not sympathetic to MT or her legacy. It shows that we are doing our job right.
Hopefully this two-part post has given you an idea of what we do and how we work, but if you have any further questions please feel free to contact us via Twitter or Facebook.
Matt Hasler, Deputy Editor
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