A History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-46

Papers

This section makes available a small number of information-rich documents that are of interest to anyone studying the history of the Ministry.

Part one: papers from two strategic committees

INF 1/73 Minutes of the meetings of the Executive Board. The file contains agenda, minutes, and occasional papers of this board, which appears to have had a general oversight of the Ministry of Information. The board was smaller than the Policy Committee or the Principal Officers Committee. The Director General intended that the members should meet daily to discuss matters of policy and that the conclusions should have executive authority, to be put into effect after discussion, if necessary, by the Planning Committee. Date range: 1940-1945.

INF 1/848 Ministry of Information Policy Committee including minutes, reports, and papers. First part: January-May 1940.

INF 1/849 Ministry of Information Policy Committee including minutes, reports, and papers. Second part: June 1940-December 1942.

Part two: some first drafts of the Ministry of Information’s history

INF 1/297 Histories of Regional Information Offices.This includes correspondence inviting regional offices to submit histories, and the subsequent collection of ten typewritten histories from Scotland, Southern, North East, South West, Midland, North Midland, Northern, Eastern, North Western, and Northern Ireland. Three histories were never received: London, South East, and Wales.

Please note: there are a few pages which carry the message ‘This page contains entirely handwritten text which could not be accurately captured by the project. Please see the associated image of this page to read the text’. At this stage we cannot provide the image, so reference will have to be made to the original document at TNA.

An unpublished document entitled ‘Information and Propaganda’. This is a study of some aspects of the work of the Ministry of Information written by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, Director General of the MoI between 1942 and 1945.

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Note

The material is not as well-edited as we might have wished for the simple reason that it was too large a job to be completed within the time and resources available This is no reflection on the AHRC, whose generous funding allowed us to do much. It is merely that we were too ambitious. Nevertheless, what we have is well worth making more accessible.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank The National Archives, our partner in the project, for all its help and support. We would also like to thank the following people who worked on these papers: Laura Blair, Valerie Fairbrass, Geoff Laycock and his team at Scandataexperts, and Marc Wiggam.

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