Lengthy earlier than Anne Lister of Shibden Corridor was identified to TV audiences, her coded diaries, round 5 million phrases, had been being rescued from obscurity, recatalogued and, in 1982, microfilmed by my good friend Alan Betteridge, who has died aged 81. Alan served as Halifax after which Calderdale archivist between 1970 and 1994, adopted by an lively retirement that included educating for the College of Leeds and far archive consultancy work. He introduced Lister to public consideration and recognized the antiquarians who first cracked Anne’s code in round 1892.
Alan was an outstanding archivist with thorough data of each class of doc in his care. Many historians of West Yorkshire business and society are indebted to him. Devoted to correct cataloguing and preservation, he inspired all customers, from newbie genealogists to senior lecturers. His doctoral research of Halifax administrative information stays a key supply.
When Calderdale Archives moved to the brand new Halifax Library in Northgate (opened 1983), Alan ensured the incorporation of state-of-the-art requirements for archive storage, a primary for West Yorkshire. Twenty years later, the constructing was earmarked for demolition to make method for a procuring centre, the archives to be relegated to a former industrial constructing. Incensed, Alan spearheaded a high-profile, profitable, marketing campaign making certain that the current library was designed to deal with the archives appropriately.
Born in Castleford, close to Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Alan was raised by his mom, Irene (nee Swift), within the mining village of Fryston. His father, Ernest Betteridge, a collier and jazz musician, left earlier than Alan was born. Following Castleford grammar faculty, Alan gained a BA in trendy languages (1965) at King’s School London. He spent the next two years educating on the Humboldt Gymnasium in Kiel, then travelling to Berlin and elsewhere.
Alan turned deeply considering central European philosophy (a favoured thinker was Karl Jaspers) and in Neue Linke politics, notably the internationalist emphasis on environmentalism and pacifism. These concepts remained touchstones. In his Eco-Humanist Manifesto, written within the Nineteen Nineties, Alan emphasised: “We kind a part of a fragile interdependent net of life, and are members of an prolonged and intergenerational biotic neighborhood … comprising each human and non-human life and … members as but unborn.”
On arrival in Halifax in 1970, Alan lodged with Bessie Eaton, a widow, and her daughter, Mary. Alan and Mary married a yr later and have become soulmates. Via vegetarianism, environmentalism and campaigning within the peace motion, they set a excessive moral customary, and handed a wealthy cultural inheritance to their daughter, Katherine, together with Alan’s ardour for music, from Messiaen to Miles Davis.
Days earlier than he died, Alan was carrying one in every of his existentialist T-shirts, with a quote from Sartre, “L’existence précède l’essence”: the assumption that people should create a which means for his or her life by way of their values and actions. Alan definitely did that.
He’s survived by Mary and Katherine.
