Historical Manuscripts Commission

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 29th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, my speech will be both brief and personal. First, I apologise to my noble friend Lord Cormack and your Lordships’ House for being absent when his speech began, against all the rules of the rubric. I had been giving lunch for one of my sons, whose birthday occurs during the Recess, which starts today. Only one screen is on in the Barry Room, and I had my back to it, so I had no idea that our hour-long debates this afternoon were getting on so ahead of schedule.

I arrived in your Lordships’ House in time to hear my noble friend allude to the late Lord Bingham of Cornhill. The late Lord Bingham and I were contemporaries at Oxford at the same college and we were very close friends, taking coffee together after evening chapel every night for a year, with our third companion, Maurice Keen, later a distinguished medieval historian. Six or seven years later, after we went down, Lord Bingham and I were mutual godparents to our respective eldest children.

Fast forward 35 years, to when I was Secretary of State for National Heritage, I asked the authority of the Permanent Secretary, given the circumstances, to appoint the then Master of the Rolls, also known as Lord Bingham of Cornhill, to be chairman of the Royal Historical Monuments Commission. I gather that the National Archives website uses its titles HMC and RHMC interchangeably. The Permanent Secretary acceded.

Fast forward another decade and, as a 70th birthday present, I gave Tom Bingham, then a senior Law Lord, the bound volume of a Select Committee of Parliament in 1800 on our historic manuscripts. In thanking me, he said that he could not imagine any other nation which had preserved all its key constitutional documents in good shape since the 16th century. It is in the memory of the spirit of Lord Bingham that I congratulate my noble friend Lord Cormack on having secured this debate and opened it so cogently. I hope that the alliances formed this afternoon will flourish along the same lines as described in this debate.