A History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-46
Directories
These two pages contain all the information made available to MoI staff by the Senate House telephone directories for 1942 (c. 841 entries) and 1944 (c. 1,040 entries) The originals can be found in the University of London’s Archive (UoL/UL/3/1). Unlike the originals, however, these re-keyed versions can be string-searched.
The directories cover Senate House (SH); the Institute of Education (IE), which at the time was a part of Senate House; and Russell Square House (RSH), which housed several MoI divisions. Of course, these directories do not cover all those who were employed by sections of the MoI in other parts of London, or in the MoI in the regions, or abroad. They do not even include all those who worked in the three locations listed. Many of the catering staff, the messengers, maintenance staff, and quite a few in clerical and secretarial grades, are not recorded. The University of London continued to occupy about 20 per cent of Senate House, but only a very small number of its staff is listed. That having been said, these directories provide us with hundreds of names of those who worked for the MoI during these momentous years but who may have left few other traces of their employment.
Acknowledgments
We must thank the University of London and its Archives for permission to reproduce these directories; and to Karen Attar for alerting us to their existence. Our thanks go also to Marcus Dahl, Henry Irving, and Marc Wiggam for their work on transferring and editing the data.