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When my parents downsized several years ago, they had a whole attic full of bric-a-brac which needed clearing out. Buried at the back under the tennis rackets, ice skates, old suitcases and mouldering baby paraphernalia were several very large tin tea chests. As it turns around, these had come from my mother’s parents attic after they had passed away some 50 years ago. They had remained pretty much untouched and were full of letters, photographs, diaries and other ephemera. 

My grandmother had meticulously kept a set of diaries which she called her ‘logbooks’. They contained a record of her daily activities, supplemented by photographs and newspaper clippings which had been pasted in to the books alongside her handwritten text. She was the wife of a colonial administrator and so they gave a fascinating insight into the colonial life as the sun set on the British Empire. As it. faded and then ceased, my grandfather was closely involved with writing the constitutions of newly liberated colonies like Malta and Zanzibar.

Alongside these logbooks, was a variety of other interesting family history material. There were letters from the First World War, ration books from the Second World War, wills and other legal documents and, surprisingly, recordings on vinyl of my grandfather giving his radio broadcasts to ‘his people’ in the colonies. These had all been in my parents’ attic, undisturbed since the 1970s.

Of course, once my parents started to downsize too, they had a whole bunch of their own letters and ephemera that they had kept because it was too precious to throw away. My mother, in her turn, had copied her mother and kept her own logbooks, documenting her time in Paris and Beijing in the 1960s as the wife of a diplomat. She had also diligently kept bundles of newspaper clippings and family photos, organised year by year, up until the end of the 80s which she had hoped to process into logbooks when she found the time. There was 17 large boxes of this type of material, since it was a project that my mother never got round to completing.

My father was career diplomat who was heavily involved in the negotiations for the handover of Hong Kong – the final part of the British Empire – in 1997. He retired at the age of 60, leaving his post as British Ambassador to Beijing having witnessed the Tian An Men Square massacre firsthand. He spent the next 20 years writing and reworking his memoirs but they were never published and he passed away several years ago. There are 20 different draft versions that I have uncovered which I plan to edit down to a single authoritative edition.

So I was looking at an archive of family history spanning two generations and the whole of the 20th century. The linking theme of all this material was the decline and fall of the British Empire, seen through the prism of mundane family life. Significant historical events are juxtaposed with the minutiae of tea parties, trips to the theatre and childhood illnesses. 

So, what to do with all this stuff? It had been carefully kept – being too precious to throw away. But at the same time, nothing had been done to process it and preserve it for all time. I felt the burden of family duty on my shoulders, and since I was also downsizing, moving from a large house in the countryside to a smaller London flat, I realised that it was my task to digitise and then electronically publish this historical archive. Hence the birth of the “Imperial Nightfall” series.

Arimaspian Rose is my publishing imprint, a not-for-profit organisational umbrella with which to assign ISBN book numbers and other publications paperwork. It also struck me that many others like me may be facing a similar dilemma. What to do with the vast amount of old letters or other historical documents in our parents’ attics. If some of you out there have already transcribed these correspondence records, or written a family history of your own, please get in touch. If you don’t mind making it freely available to the public, then maybe Arimaspian Rose can publish it for you.