Business Archives at Christmas

Christmas can be a good time for business archives to showcase their collections.  Two lovely examples reflecting the need to buy presents or prepare for Christmas financially are from the House of Fraser Collection and the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Archives.

The House of Fraser Advent Calendar from Glasgow University Archive Services. 

[Image from here]

This advent calendar is showcasing images from the House of Fraser Collection which is held by the University's Archive Services as part of its business collections.

The House of Fraser Archive provides a wealth of information on the company’s history. It includes the records of the company’s management in addition to the records of individual stores across the United Kingdom.

The calendar will lead up to the launch of a new online catalogue for House of Fraser on the 25th of December.

A second example is the RBS Advent Calendar from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Archives.  This advent calendar publicised through their twitter account and using images from their flickr.

[image from here]

All the images have more detailed information available about them on the main RBS Heritage site.  For example the screenshot below shows a 'Notice announcing Nottingham & Nottinghamshire Bank's Christmas Bank Holidays, 1896'.

In the week before Christmas 1896 this cardboard notice was displayed in the banking hall of one of our Nottingham branches, declaring that the banks would be closed on Saturday 26 December – Boxing Day – for a bank holiday. Boxing Day was one of four days each year that had been officially designated by the Bank Holidays Act of 1871 as holidays in England, Wales and Ireland. Scotland had its own designated holidays on slightly different days.

You can read the full description here.