Roger Henry Ellis, M.A.

Roger Ellis was born on 9 June 1910, at Debdale Hall, Mansfield, and educated at Sedbergh School and King's College, Cambridge, where he was a classical scholar and from which he graduated with first class honours. He wanted to work in a museum or gallery and did some research on Greek vase painting. Pictures remained a major interest throughout his life but his no less satisfying career in archives began with his appointment as Assistant Keeper in the Public Record Office in 1934. In 1939 he enlisted as a private in the army, rising to major in the 5th Fusiliers by 1944 when he transferred to the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives branch under his old colleague at the P.R.O., Hilary Jenkinson, F.S.A. Ellis worked in Germany and Italy with the M.F.A.A. (benefiting intellectually despite the hardships of war) until demobilisation and return to Chancery Lane in 1945. Pre-war, the Public Record Office had been staffed by gentleman-historians, loyal to the lofty nineteenth-century traditions of the original foundation but lacking the necessary specialist expertise and scientific know-how for the importance of archives to be officially recognized and their acquisition and conservation adequately funded. This was soon to change under the confident leadership of Jenkinson and his disciple, Ellis. In 1947 Ellis was appointed the first editor of Archives, the journal of the British Records Association, this office having been previously vested in the joint honorary secretaries. In the same year he followed Jenkinson as lecturer in archive administration at the postgraduate archives diploma course at University College, London, retiring both as editor and lecturer in 1957. Ellis also concerned himself with the work of the Office's document repair workshops where new conservation techniques were being developed,and became sufficiently competent to teach the subject at the London School of Printing. In 1956 he was promoted to Principal Assistant Keeper and in 1957 Secretary of the then small, but highly regarded, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts where he remained for fifteen years. The Commission's original function had been the publication of calendars of privately owned documents but the establishment of the National Register of Archives under its auspices in 1945 resulted in a dramatic expansion of the Commission's coordinating and advisory role. Ellis masterminded or supervised the many changes associated with the enlargement of its charter in 1959, when the Commission also took over the administration of the Manorial Documents Rules on behalf of the Master of the Rolls, and moved from offices shared with the P.R.O. into premises of its own in Quality Court. He took an early interest in the preservation of papers relating to the history of science and technology, and the ground-breaking joint committee of the Commission and the Royal Society set up in 1966 owed much to his initiative and enthusiasm. The committee was dissolved ten years later following the foundation of the Contemporary Scientific Archives Centre in Oxford. Ellis also encouraged the study of business archives and modern political papers, which featured alongside more traditional sources in his scholarly catalogue of the Commission's centenary exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1969, Manuscripts and Men. He retired in 1972 and, in memory of his parents, founded the Ellis Fund of the Society of Archivists to provide an occasional prize for an outstanding contributor to the profession, whether at home or abroad, or to help deserving members to attend its conferences. He was soon back at the Public Record Office in a part-time capacity working on the Catalogue of Seals in the Public Record Office, of which he published three illustrated volumes: Personal Seals, vol. I, 1978; vol. II, 1981 and Monastic Seals, vol. I, 1986. At the time of his death he was cataloguing the seals in the collection of the University of London. Ellis served on the I.C.A. Committee on Sigillography 1962-77, where his fluent French, the official language of sigillography, was an enormous asset at international conferences. His own library of works on seals, together with papers on Nottinghamshire local history, were given to the Antiquaries some twenty years ago, along with a handsome nineteenth-century bookcase to house them, which now stands between the windows in the Fellows' Room. He was a member of Council in 1962-4. Ellis's active involvement with the British Records Association spanned his professional life: he was chairman of Council from 1967-73 and vice-president from 1971 until his death. He was president of the Society of Archivists, 1964-73; a committee member of the Friends of the National Libraries 1965-88; vice-president of the Business Archives Council for almost forty years, and held many other important offices. In retirement he published two volumes of verse (he was too modest to call them poetry): Ode on St Crispin's Day, 1979, and Walking Backwards, 1986. Ellis looked the part of the fastidious scholar to perfection: even among the old guard of formally-suited Antiquaries his immaculate appearance, tall and willowy, distinguished him from his fellow brahmins on his regular attendances at the Thursday meetings, but there was always a smile at the corner of his mouth and he never missed a party. He was a familiar figure in Hampstead where, appropriately, he had lived in an elegant Georgian house for many years. In spotless Burberry and highly polished brogues he could have seen to shave in, he would leave Cloth Hill with his wife to walk on the Heath, returning some two hours later without a hair out of place, a speck of mud on his shoes, or heightened colour in his alabaster cheeks however strong the wind or sun. Impervious to the ravages of nature though he appeared to be, he died on 19 March 1998.