The collection mainly consists of a set of Isabel Fry's personal diaries and notebooks dating from 1878-1958. These are supplemented by letters to her friend Eugénie Dubois, c1930-1958, and a few publications and photographs. The diaries reflect all aspects of her life and career including her teaching activities and educational ideas; her preoccupations with political and social affairs, including political reform and emancipation in the East and in Turkey and Persia; her friendships with liberal intellectuals; and her involvement with anti-militarist movements, slum clearance, socialism and feminism. Also included are details of her relationship with her family, friends and their wider social circle.
Fry , Isabel , 1869-1958 , educationist, social worker and reformerBiographical material includes the draft of Mourant's autobiography, Blood and Stones published after his death in 1995, together with the correspondence and papers Mourant assembled while writing it. There is also documentation of Mourant's education at Victoria College Jersey and at Exeter College Oxford. The latter includes notes on lectures 1922 - ca 1926. Documentation of Mourant's career, honours and awards is patchy, although there is material relating to his search for employment in the early 1930s. There are pocket diaries spanning 1915-1982, with a fairly continuous sequence 1922-1961. Biographical material also includes extensive family and personal correspondence, much of which dates from or relates to the German occupation of Jersey or shortly thereafter. Mourant's other documented interests include his membership of the Methodist Church and his political affiliations, the League of Nations Union in particular.
There is a little material relating to Mourant's early career with the Geological Survey 1929-1931, miscellaneous material relating to Mourant's service with the MRC's Blood Group Reference Laboratory at the Lister Institute and the Nuffield (later Anthropological) Blood Group Centre at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, and more extensive but uneven coverage of the Serological Population Genetics Laboratory. Although there is some documentation of the foundation of the Laboratory 1964-1965 and of its staff, the surviving material consists chiefly of correspondence and papers relating to Mourant's largely successful efforts to find continued funding for the Laboratory 1969-1977. Haematological research material, though not extensive, covers Mourant's work in a number of areas from research on blood serum in the mid-1940s to the mapping of blood groups in the 1960s and 1970s. There are early research notes, correspondence and papers relating to student and other expeditions undertaking blood group and physical anthropology research and some MRC material assembled by Mourant relating to projects in which he had an interest. The largest group of research papers, however, is maps and data produced during preparation of the second edition of The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups. There is a chronological sequence of drafts and correspondence relating to Mourant's publications, 1929-1991, with extensive material relating to editions of The Distribution of the Human Blood Groups and to The Genetics of the Jews (1978). There is also editorial correspondence relating to publishers and journals, chiefly invitations to review books or referee papers and an incomplete set of offprints. There is correspondence and papers relating to some of Mourant's lectures and broadcasts, most notably the lectures on blood groups given at the Collège de France, Toulouse, 1978-1979. Societies and organisations material is not extensive, and is confined to brief documentation of only a few of the societies and organisations with which Mourant was associated. It includes professional and geological bodies as well as haematological, biological and medical organisations. Visits and conferences material covers the period 1960-1987. It is not comprehensive, though there is also considerable documentation of Mourant's visits and conferences in the papers he assembled in the course of preparing his biography and with lectures material. Mourant's correspondence is extensive. Its complexity reflects Mourant's organisation of the material, the bulk of which was found in three main series: 'Foreign 1965-1977', 'Biological' and 'Geological', together with a fragment of a fourth series 'Home 1965-1977'. Principal correspondents include C.C. Blackwell, B. Bonné, O.J. Brendemoen, V.A. Clarke, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, A. W. Eriksson, T.J. Greenwalt, J.K. Moor-Jankowski, T. Jenkins, W.S. Pollitzer, D.F. Roberts, J. Ruffié, D. Tills and J.S. Weiner.
Mourant , Arthur Ernest , 1904-1994 , haematologist and geologistPapers, 1919-1990, of and relating to John Emmett Woodall and Tientsin Grammar School (TGS).
Papers, 1927-1946, of John Emmett Woodall comprise applications for positions at the TGS and contracts of employment, 1927-1937; correspondence and papers, 1941-1943, relating to the occupation of the TGS by the Japanese; correspondence and papers, 1942-1945 and undated, relating to the Woodall's family's case for repatriation after internment; personal correspondence, 1935-1942, including two letters from Woodall to his parents; applications for employment in the UK, 1945-1946.
Records, 1919-1990, of and relating to Tientsin Grammar School comprise publications, 1919-1938, 1990 and undated, including prospectuses, Speech Day pamphlets, and alumni magazines; school documents, 1926-1942 and undated, relating to student numbers, examinations, finance, school activities, and text books, and including school journal and order of examination of Daphne Payne, 1928; press cuttings on the TGS, 1928-1939, 1982; photographs, 1919-1941, including staff, students, school activities and buildings, and miniature photographs of scenes in Tientsin (Tianjin), including floods and Japanese bombing; miscellaneous papers and ephemera, 1928-1940, 1978-1987 and undated, relating to the TGS and its alumni and to Tientsin, including the flood (1939).