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SSMT ARCHIVE PROGRAMME
The archive programme is overseen by Professor John Sutherland, Lord Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London, who is Stephen Spender's authorised biographer, and by Professor Warwick Gould, Director of the Institute of English Studies at the University of London.
AIMS
The Stephen Spender Memorial Trust plans a long-term, multi-phase programme of acquisition and curatorship of primary materials relative to Stephen Spender, his circle, and the cultural milieu over the whole period (effectively 1928-95) in which he lived and wrote. The ultimate aims of this programme are to stimulate and (most importantly) facilitate constructive research and scholarship over the coming generations, and to widen knowledge of 20th Century English literature, with particular focus on Stephen Spender's circle of writers.
OBJECTIVES
To set up an archive of manuscripts, sound recordings, publications and videos of 20th Century British writers and artists, initially of the work of Spender and his contemporaries. The Trust will plan the eventual deposit of the Archive in collaboration with a national collection open to public access.
WORK ALREADY UNDERWAY
Stephen Spender, over the long course of his adult life, was more than merely a major British poet and unusually accomplished man of letters (although he was both these things). He had cultural and international connections which are unrivalled for a writer of his time. Over the last three years Professor John Sutherland and Lady Spender (Stephen Spender's widow) have been interviewing and recording reminiscences from contemporaries who knew Spender. These interviews (which already run to an estimated 200 hours) represent an extraordinarily rich and living witness not just to Spender's personal achievement, but to his time, his circle, and his cultural milieu. When completed, this unique oral history will provide an extraordinary record of Twentieth-Century cultural history, covering literature, publishing, art, music, politics and society. It is anticipated that the recordings will be deposited with the National Sound Archive.

Among those already interviewed are Janet Adam Smith, Gabriel Carritt, David Gascoyne, Stuart Hampshire, John Heath Stubbs, Dan Jacobson, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Reynolds Price, Elizabeth Longford, Christine Spender, Humphrey Spender, Natasha Spender, Edward Upward and Richard Wollheim. About thirty further interviews are planned.

A third activity of the Archive Programme is the dating, cross-referencing and contextualisation of Spender's unpublished material by Natasha Spender with the help of professional archivist John Byrne.


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