By Linett Morven, Domestic Affairs Correspondent
Dame Orla Winthrop is not what most expect from a Keeper of the Archives. Brisk, tall, and quick to correct a misquoted date, she runs the Royal Record Hall like a monastery crossed with a beehive: quiet, precise, and humming with importance.
“History is not a dead thing,” she insists. “It’s a beast that changes shape depending on who’s asking.”
The National Archives, housed beneath the Ministry of Records, contain over 4 million individual items: letters, maps, censuses, treaties, royal decrees, and an alarming number of complaints about turnip taxes. Dame Orla has overseen their care for 17 years.
Under her leadership, the Archive has digitized key records (though she insists on using the term “scribed onto mirror disks”), introduced open visitation days, and opened the vaults to select student researchers.
Her favourite discovery? A lost letter from Queen Elmira to her gardener, dated 743, containing the line: “You must never again plant those dreadful yellow things near my lilies.”
Asked what she sees as her mission, Dame Orla is blunt: “To remember what others want to forget. To keep the Kingdom honest with itself.”
Her office is predictably spartan—save for a basket of ginger toffees and a live pigeon named Edgar who delivers internal notes. When asked when she’ll retire, she raised an eyebrow. “The dead don’t retire. They just need better indexing.”