Archive UTA

Irish Railway Record Society

THE UTA ARCHIVES

The UTA had been set up in 1948 to take over the functions of the Northern Ireland Road Transport Board and to operate the Belfast & County Down Railway. The railways of the Northern Counties Committee also became part of the UTA in 1948, and in 1958 the Great Northern Railway was partitioned between the UTA and CIÉ. By 1958, then, the UTA was responsible for the archives of the NIRTB, the B&CDR, and the NCC, and their constituent companies, and part of the GNR, and some records of some of its constituent companies. The offices of the UTA were at Linenhall Street, Belfast, and in 1965 the UTA handed its archives to Public Records Office NI (PRONI) and moved to other accommodation at Great Victoria Street and York Road.

PRONI had been set up in 1922, but by the mid 1960s it was functioning not only as a public record office - weeding and preserving the records of government, but as a local record office - encouraging the donation by private individuals of material of local interest, as a centre for business archives, and as a Mecca for genealogists. PRONI was then housed in the Law Courts Building in the centre of Belfast, and, because of the size of the deposit, "the UTA records", as they were always known, were transferred to the basement of the Parliament Buildings at Stormont.

On paper this solution to the problems of access and pressure on office space seemed perfect. PRONI would preserve the records and assume responsibility for access. Access by non-company users was no longer the concern of the UTA, and records required by officers of the company could be transferred from Stormont to the Law Courts in twenty-four hours, and the Laws Courts Building was reasonably convenient to the UTA’s new offices. The accession of such a major archive underlined the importance of PRONI as a centre for business archives and, furthermore, the linear footage represented by the UTA records was a useful additional statistic in PRONI’s argument for the provision of a custom-built record office. And the UTA’s 1965 Annual Report noted that a large part of the increase in its miscellaneous receipts for the year was from the letting of its former Linenhall Street offices.

In practice the transfer of the UTA records to PRONI was not a perfect solution. Perhaps this was augured by the fact that while the banquet held to celebrate the handing over of the UTA records was actually taking place the drawings of the B&CDR were being burned in the turntable pit behind the hotel. The crux of the matter was that neither the UTA nor PRONI had the staff to deal effectively with the UTA records. The division of the records of the GNR and its constituent companies had never been formalised, and no one has ever been appointed to rationalise them. Those that were in Dublin went into the custody of CIÉ, and those that were in Belfast went to PRONI, whether they related to Northern Ireland or to the Republic. No survey was done of GNR records at out-stations, and many of these perished, or found their way into private collections. There seems to have been little discussion as to what constituted current and non-current records at the time of the transfer, and no provision seems to have been made for subsequent systematic transfer. The majority of the statutory records of the NCC and B&CDR had been transferred to Linenhall Street, and hence to PRONI, but many of the non-statutory records of these two companies remained, respectively, at York Road and Queen’s Quay. In 1967 the UTA was replaced by the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company, having transferred its transport functions to Northern Ireland Carriers, Northern Ireland Railways, and Ulsterbus.

Whatever provisos PRONI stipulated when it accepted the UTA records the officers of the UTA and its successors, in fact, believed that all of their records would be preserved for all time, and that, moreover, in a very short space of time all of their records would be listed and available to them. There were three main kinds of records: drawings, volumes and files. The drawings were listed first, by Elma Carlisle, who did sterling work in the inhospitable conditions of the Stormont basement. Company users soon found that often records could not be located, or perhaps identified, and had increasingly to depend on such records as had remained in their own custody. Apart from the drawings little progress was made with listing until 1973 when PRONI moved from the Law Courts Building to a new custom-built record office in Balmoral Avenue on the outskirts of Belfast. The UTA records were transferred from Stormont about this time, which should have obviated the twenty-four hour delay which had previously faced company users waiting for records to be produced from Stormont. In the event the greater distance from the companies’ offices to the new point of access put an even greater gulf between company users and their erstwhile archives, but at least the move to Balmoral Avenue stimulated the listing again, with the late Patrick Radcliffe working on the volumes.

At the time of the transfer little thought had been given to the ways in which circumstances might change. The scheme under which qualified outsiders were brought into PRONI to work on the backlog of listing was an early casualty of the government economies of the late 1970s, and when Patrick Radcliffe died in the Heysel Stadium disaster no-one was left in PRONI who was particularly interested in the UTA records. As the economic screw tightened PRONI concentrated more on its duties as a public record office. For a while the UTA records seemed in limbo, especially as absurd sensibilities over security matters meant that even researchers who had used particular files for years could no longer consult the files until, and unless, some civil servant cleared them. Then, in 1992, some of the printed material from the UTA records was offered for sale by a dealer at the Belfast Book Fair. PRONI may have decided to disband its library, but the argument for getting rid of printed material apparently extended to the archival collections. The UTA records were re-listed, giving most items a present as well as a former reference, and the unlisted files were finally dealt with. The drawings were relisted, but have yet to be renumbered.