Coutts Woman

Tracey’s treasures

Giving historical tours, listing archives, putting collections and displays together, checking obituary pages… this isn’t many people’s idea of a perfect nine-to-five job.  But it has always been Tracey Earl’s thing.  Even before she got a degree in history from Cambridge University, was accepted on one of the very few archivist post-graduate courses, and began working for Coutts & Co, it was in her blood.

“When I was young, my parents dragged me around every National Trust house you could possibly imagine, and I loved it!  My mother was also into family history so she used to take me with her to St Catherine’s House where all the records were held in the Aldwych.  I would help her pulling the indexes off the shelves and then sit and watch her.  It was like catching a bug,” laughs Tracey, head archivist for Coutts & Co.

It was also good training.  Because, since qualifying as an archivist, this is how she spends much of her time.  “My routine varies day-to-day.  There’s a good chance I’ll be giving one or two archive tours at Coutts & Co to clients or international groups,” explains Tracey. 

“Checking obituary pages in the Telegraph and Times is another regular activity which helps keep us up-to-date on important families because they’ll often be clients or have been clients.  It also helps us to put family trees together for our clients when our private bankers go to visit them.  It’s nice to be able to give them some history around how long their family has banked with us.” 

Working with external researchers such as Philip Ziegler, Flora Fraser or Edna Healey, writing on famous people or topics, is another responsibility of Tracey’s and her two other team members.  “They might be writing about an artist and want to know about an artist’s patron. But we’re very strict about what we allow people to see.If anyone wants to look at an account, they have to get the permission of the current head of the family first.”

When Tracey joined Coutts as deputy archivist in 1989, at just 23 years of age, her main priority was

helping the team get ready for the Tercentenary celebrations in 1992. 

“It was a pressurised time because we had to have everything ready and exhibitions planned for the tercentenary,” she remembers.  “My training in my first week was reading the only history of the Coutts & Co that was available, which was written at the end of the 1920s, and a two-volume work on the life of Thomas Coutts!  I listened to every story about what had gone on, and picked up the ‘house style’ for cataloguing, the rules for external researchers, and the structure of the bank.  That’s the only way to learn.”

After the tercentenary, Tracey was able to focus on the work she loves best – listing.  “The real joy of the job is when you get a box, or complete collection that nobody has looked at since the 1800’s.  You read correspondence, get sucked into their world and create the story of this person through the documents.”

At Coutts, there is plenty of work in this area.  “We’ve covered about a quarter of all the archives we have in storage.  We’re still listing boxes that go back to the 18th and 19th century. The oldest item we have is a cashbook dating from 1699, right back to the founder John Campbell.  We’ve got ledgers from 1712, pieces of silver that the bank doesn’t use any more, and papers that are valuable from an interest point of view.”

But listing is labour intensive work – and considered a luxury job for archivists to do when they have time.  It takes a lot of time, reading a letter, analysing it, and indexing it.  And, in a business archive these days, you’ve got to be helping to promote that business and supply general information where needed – all things that can take up your day. 

“I’ve been told by other archivists that every archive is like a business now.  None of us can afford to sit back and retreat into our dusty corners of scholarship, listing items.  It’s a real luxury!” she laughs.

“The real joy of the job is when you get a box, or complete collection that nobody has looked at since the 1880’s.”

Of course, there are other rewards for Tracey outside listing - such as working with the BBC Antiques Programme and putting on private exhibitions for the Queen Mother and the Queen. 

“For the Antiques Programme, they came in and told me, ‘We’ll focus on this, this and this, and we’re looking to do it in one take, so don’t be nervous!’  I wasn’t really.  I’m alright with that stuff and generally knew what they were going ask me.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for her meeting with the Queen Mother!  “We were told ‘she was coming!’ and I was standing there with our archive exhibition absolutely petrified!  I kept trying to think, ‘She’s a nice, old lady.  Don’t be nervous’.  And then I’d remember, ‘She’s not! She’s the former Empress of India and The Queen Mother!’ Of course, she was absolutely charming and lovely.  But, for me, she was especially fascinating because she’d been around so long and seen so much.  She was history personified, history in a hat!” concludes Tracey.