Using Official Histories and Public Records to Present Britain’s Past to a Global Audience

Abstract

In October 1957 a lengthy Cabinet Office minute, entitled ‘The Historical Sense in Departments and so forth’, reflected the emerging debate within Whitehall about the role of history in government.¹ Written by Burke Trend, the deputy secretary to the Cabinet (1956–59), this minute fed into ongoing exchanges between ministers and senior officials about future policy concerning a range of history-related issues:

• public records, most notably the length of the closed period as well as access to and citation of closed documents by former ministers and officials when writing their memoirs;

• the future of official histories, including the proposal to move on from the Second World War to the post-1945 period;

• the case for departments to publish edited collections of documents along the lines of the Foreign Office’s Documents on British Foreign Policy (DBFP);

• the fate of the Cabinet Office’s Historical Section, which held responsibility for official histories and related matters; and

• history’s policymaking potential within the governmental machine in terms of using confidential internal histories to support a department’s everyday work.