Michael Collinson will be well known to many members of this society for several reasons. Michael and his wife, Catherine, were joint editors of the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, volumes 72 to 75, 2000–2003. Both were involved with the society’s medieval section and in the production of its journal. To society members based in Leeds Michael will also have been known, before his early retirement in 1982, as a helpful, courteous, and gently humorous city archivist. He was fortunate to preserve a sprightliness, lightness of touch, and engaging good humour into a remarkably advanced old age.
Michael was a native of the West Riding, having been born in August 1929 to parents living in Halifax, although they moved to Burslem in 1932. There his father, James, took up the headship of a newly established junior technical school, a type of school increasing rapidly in numbers in the 1930s. Educated at Newcastle under Lyme High School, Michael was awarded a scholarship to read history at Queens’ College, Cambridge. On graduation, he moved to Liverpool University where in 1951–52 he took its pioneering diploma course in archive administration.
Working life began with a post as assistant archivist in the East Suffolk Record Office at Ipswich. After working there for five years Michael moved to a similar post in Leeds. Like other cities, Leeds had begun to accumulate archives in the 1930s as part of its library service. It had rescued the substantial accumulations of the Yorkshire researches of the regional historian William Farrer – the YAS took only his relatively few papers on early Yorkshire charters – and bought manuscripts in the posthumous auction sales from the collections of the compulsive ‘velo-maniac’, Sir Thomas Phillipps, although such piecemeal acquisitions at first merely went into storage. It was only with the purchase of Temple Newsam House and its archives from the earl of Halifax in the later 1930s that the appointment of an archivist became a necessity. The appointee was Amy Foster (1905–1991) from Cardiff City Library, who in retirement became the first archivist at the YAS.
While the YAS fretted about the potential socialist threat posed by the creation of the National Register of Archives in 1947, the library-based archive services in Leeds and Sheffield divided the West Riding between them and became, in effect, the county record offices for the north and south of the West Riding respectively. Both soon began to take in major estate archives: Sheffield gave a home to the papers of the earls Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse, and Leeds the records of the earls of Harewood. A stream of other major acquisitions followed, as did the records of Anglican parishes and nonconformist churches. Both services had a free hand in their collecting as the parsimonious West Riding County Council refused to create its own archive service, leaving it in 1974 as the only county, apart from the exiguous exception of Rutland, to have no county record office.
After the Leeds City archivist Richard F. Dell (1926–1936) left to become the first county archivist of East Sussex, Michael was promoted to his place. Shortly afterwards, Leeds Archives moved out of the central library and into accommodation in the first floor of the branch library at Sheepscar, where archive users worked in the former Jewish reading room. This, handsomely furnished by Joseph Porton, had housed his notable collection of Jewish literature which was transferred to the Central Library in 1965, and subsequently into the safekeeping of Leeds University’s special collections.
The building may have been of historical interest, and was listed as grade II by Historic England in 2013, but it was ludicrously inadequate as accommodation for a major archive service and remained so for the next fifty years. Nor was staffing sufficient for the tasks involved, with Michael assisted only by a succession of archivists to the single supplementary post. Those who occupied this as their first appointment received generous social and professional support from Michael and from Catherine, whom he married in 1971.
What is often supposed to be the placid tenor of an archivist’s life was interrupted at times by administrative conflicts between the competing managements of district and county councils over the future of archive services in the metropolitan county of West Yorkshire, created in 1974. Both county council and the five districts claimed the right to provide archive services, the former by statute, the later by custom and possession. This sterile conflict rumbled on intermittently for eight years. Paradoxically, Michael, who himself favoured archive services independent of library control, found himself, as discussions continued, at odds with the proponents of a county service entirely separate from library management.
Matters resolved themselves in 1982. The county council (to be abolished only four years later) took over the management of a county-wide joint archive service and Michael took the opportunity to retire early. Liberated, he was able to spend four decades in pursuit of his interests. These included researching local history, especially Headingley, the Leeds suburb where he had moved when newly married; and an increased involvement with both the YAS and the Thoresby Society. Besides articles in the Thoresby Society Miscellany volumes, in his mid-eighties he self-published Chapters in Headingley History (2016). There are fifty-six chapters, covering aspects of its history from the earliest times to the mid-nineteenth century, filing 479 pages of meticulously footnoted text. With advancing age, frailties naturally encroached and increasing deafness drew his attendance at Opera North to an end. His eightieth birthday saw him in Paris, his ninetieth in Whitby. Yet his infirmities seemed to be borne with reserves of humour and amused exasperation.
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