.;. THE TIME TRAVELLERS GUILD · THE ARCHIVE STATION XIII

Archive note · third revision

On the Founding at Cardiff

Being an attempt to fix the date of an event which is attested from both directions and observed from neither.

CLASS   ARC/FND/13
COMPILED BY   THE ARCHIVIST, STATION XIII
FIRST DRAWN   [ILLEGIBLE] · SECOND REVISION 1971 · THIRD REVISION CURRENT
STATUS   OPEN. THE FILE HAS NEVER BEEN CLOSED AND PROBABLY CANNOT BE.

The Guild has a founding. It does not have a founding date. This note sets out what the Archive holds, in the order the Archive received it rather than the order events are supposed to have occurred, and makes no attempt to reconcile the two.

IThe problem stated

Every institution keeps a story about its own beginning, and most of them are tidier than the truth. Ours is the opposite. We hold six independent attestations of a founding at Cardiff. Each is internally consistent. Each names the same room. No two agree on the year, and the spread is not the ordinary spread of faulty memory — it is eighty-one years wide.1

The conventional explanation is forgery, and it was the Archive's own position until 1971. It was abandoned for a simple reason: a forger works forward. Someone fabricating a distinguished past invents documents earlier than the institution. In our case the anomalous documents run in both directions, and two of them were catalogued by hands that had no institution to flatter.2

IIThe room

All six attestations place the founding in an upper room in Cardiff, reached by a stair, with a painted ceiling showing the heavens and a floor showing the earth. Three of them say the room was above a dock office. Two say it was in a castle. One says only the room with the sky in it, which has caused more trouble than the other five combined.3

Editor's caution

It is tempting — and every previous Archivist has yielded to the temptation — to identify this with the Summer Smoking Room at Cardiff Castle, which does carry an astronomical scheme on its decoration and does sit at the top of a stair. The identification is not supported. The Castle room is documented, dated, and has never once been described by anyone outside the Guild as a place where anything was founded. That two descriptions resemble each other is not evidence that they describe the same place. It may only be evidence that Cardiff, in that century, built more than one room with the sky on the ceiling.

IIIThe attestations

Set out in the order the Archive acquired them. The right-hand column gives the catalogue mark, not the date of the event.

ClaimedAttestationMark
1863 A bound minute book, sixteen pages used. Records the constitution of a "Guild for the keeping of instruments and the sending of fields," seven signatories, none of whom appear in any Cardiff record before this date. Four appear afterwards.4 ARC/FND/13-a
1884 A single leaf, torn, in a different hand, recording the same seven names and the same room, but describing the meeting as a re-founding "the first having failed to hold." No account of the first survives.5 ARC/FND/13-b
1901 Correspondence between two members of a Cardiff learned society, one asking the other whether he had "heard anything more of the star-men on Bute Street." The reply, six weeks later, says only that they had gone and had left the instrument behind.6 ARC/FND/13-c
1944 A wartime salvage inventory listing, among brass fittings recovered from a bombed dock building, "one orrery, geocentric, incomplete, marked XIII." Struck through and annotated not for melt in a second pencil.7 ARC/FND/13-d
1955 A typed memorandum, unsigned, congratulating the Guild on ninety-two years and noting that "the anniversary falls this year for the third time." No prior anniversary is recorded.8 ARC/FND/13-e
2008 The present Archive's own founding minute, drawn in good faith by people who believed themselves to be starting something. It is identical in six clauses to 13-a, which none of them had seen.9 ARC/FND/13-f

IVThe cataloguing anomaly

Item 13-a bears an accession stamp. The stamp is of a pattern in use by a Cardiff antiquarian collection between 1859 and 1866, and it is genuine — it has been compared against forty-one other items from the same collection and matches on all points, including a chip in the border which appears in every impression after 1861.10

The difficulty is that the minute book it stamps records a meeting held twenty-one years later.

Archive marginal, 1971 revision
"either the stamp is wrong
or the book is early.
the stamp is not wrong."

Three explanations have been offered and none is satisfactory. That the book was rebound into an older cover: rejected, the stamp is on the first leaf and the leaf is contemporary with the writing. That the minute is a later fair copy of an earlier meeting: possible, but the hand is the hand of 13-b, which is itself dated later still. That the meeting was attended out of sequence: this is the Guild's own account, and the Archive records it without endorsing it.11

VWhat the Guild says

You are asking when it began as though beginning were a thing that happens once and stays where you put it. The instrument was built to look in both directions. It should not surprise anyone that the people who built it did the same.

— ATTRIBUTED, 13-e MARGINALIA, HAND UNIDENTIFIED

This is quoted here because it is the only statement any member has made on the question, not because the Archive finds it useful. It is not an explanation. It is a refusal to be embarrassed.

VIPosition of the Archive

The Archive holds that a founding occurred at Cardiff; that it occurred in an upper room with a painted ceiling; that seven people were present; and that the date cannot be recovered and possibly does not exist in the form the question assumes. We do not assert that anyone travelled. We assert that the paper does not behave, and that we have looked at it for a hundred and sixty-one years without making it behave.12

The file remains open. If you are reading this because you hold a seventh attestation, the Station will want it, and will not ask how you came by it.

VIISources

Guild holdings are cited by catalogue mark. Items marked [GA] are held at the Station and are not on public deposit.

  1. The Archivist, Preliminary Concordance of the Founding Attestations, third revision, §1–4. [GA] ARC/FND/13
  2. Ibid., §11, setting out the abandonment of the forgery hypothesis and the dissent of two members of the 1971 revision committee.
  3. Comparative table of room descriptions, appended to the second revision. The phrase the room with the sky in it occurs at 13-c and nowhere else in the corpus.
  4. Minute book, sixteen leaves used, quarter calf, accession stamp on first leaf. [GA] ARC/FND/13-a
  5. Single leaf, torn at head, iron gall ink. [GA] ARC/FND/13-b
  6. Two letters, transcript only; originals not held. Provenance note records acquisition from a house clearance at Roath, 1968. [GA] ARC/FND/13-c
  7. Salvage inventory, carbon copy, one sheet. The annotation not for melt is in a hand which appears on no other Guild document. [GA] ARC/FND/13-d
  8. Typed memorandum, unsigned, one sheet, no envelope. [GA] ARC/FND/13-e
  9. Founding minute of the present Archive. [GA] ARC/FND/13-f
  10. Stamp comparison report, forty-one impressions, with photographic plates. The border chip is first recorded in the impression of March 1861. [GA] ARC/AUTH/07
  11. Minutes of the 1971 revision committee, sitting four, at which the phrase attended out of sequence was entered into the record over the objection of the chair. [GA] ARC/MIN/1971
  12. Standing position of the Archive, adopted at the third revision and unchanged since.

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