The administrative records of the Institute form the core of the collection: minutes, annual reports and legal and financial material. Supporting correspondence is more patchy. Five bundles of early letters and reports had been kept (these have been listed as F.2/1, F.2/3, F.4/1-2 and S.2/2): apart from these and the runs of post-war correspondence (F.6-7), correspondence was scattered amongst the 'historical' filing cabinets and the 'Archive' files, and the archivist has had to reconstruct the series from which letters and files might have been extracted. Correspondence around the founding and early years of the Institute has been placed together with what appears to be collected or deposited correspondence of the founders (F.1), and a series of 'Subject files' has been created, pulling together scattered files and publications on particular topics (some 'files' consisting only of two or three letters). The destruction of correspondence files leaves sadly little to illustrate conditions under which district nurses worked in the early years. Some impression can be gained from correspondence with the Scottish and Irish branches (S.1-2) as well as less vividly in the reports in section Q. One letter dated 1904 survived alone, mentioning somewhat obliquely conditions in the East End of London: it has been placed with the bundles of letters and reports, ref F.4.
There is a good accumulation of publications and information put out by the Institute, and other publications relating to district nursing (Section P). It was feared that the only record relating to Florence Lees's 1875 survey of district nursing provision in London was the single letter from Florence Nightingale to JJ Frederick (F.1/3), but in 1998 the QNI offered a manuscript volume which appears to be a transcript of at least part of the report, plus a report to William Rathbone on district nursing in Liverpool (also dated 1875). This volume has been added to the archive as Y.1.
Records of other bodies which had been collected or accumulated over the years include Federations of member associations of the Institute (R.2-3), nurses' representative bodies (Section V) and individual district nursing associations (Section X). Minutes and memorabilia of Elizabeth Fry's Institution of Nursing Sisters (Protestant Sisters of Charity) dating from 1840 to 1939, have been listed as section W; unfortunately, only the first of each of that body's registers of nurses survive, the rest having been sent for salvage during the Second World War. The National Gardens Scheme, although established to raise funds for the Institute, is now separately administered, and no records of the administration are found here apart from the sub-committee minutes in C.3, but five bundles of correspondence in Section F.6 touch on the subject, including one with Alfred Wagg.
Papers of individuals also occur. Those of Dame Rosalind Paget have been sorted into an order reflecting the different stages and interests of her life (Z.1): they include Dame Rosalind's annotated copy of the 1925 report on maternal mortality by Mary Beard of the Rockefeller Foundation. Memorabilia of district nurses sent to the Institute at other times, and obituaries of Institute officers, also occur in Section Z.
Queen's Nursing Institute