Back to the Files: A Quiet Week at the National Archives

After a gap of almost seven years, I finally made it back to the National Archives at Kew. Between Covid-19 travel restrictions and personal events, the last seven years have been a bit of a blur, and international travel kept getting pushed onto the back burner. But in November 2025, the stars aligned and I booked a two week trip to London! Finally!

Two weeks in London, however, does not mean two weeks at the National Archives. Between travel days, other commitments, and the Archives being inconveniently closed on Sundays and Mondays, I was left with a paltry five days.

Sitting at home, planning my time, I realized that five days was not a lot of time in which to handle all of the files I hoped to access and copy. Top of the list were the Bad Nenndorf files, including a very thick volume covering the court martial of our friend, Lt. Col. Robin William George Stephens. I had viewed the file and taken a few photographs of select pages, back in 2018, but the thought of handling the entire thing was daunting. And beyond that, there were the preliminary court-martial files, the T. Hayward investigation, and several other accompanying bundles. Thousands of pages of documents.

In the past, I have taken photographs of key documents using my smartphone camera. At other times, I’ve used a digital camera mounted on the camera stand. Either way, I ran into the same two bottlenecks after a few hours: limited memory and fading batteries. The handheld phone method could also produce out-of-focus images which was obviously not ideal.

In preparation for my November visit, I did a bit of research to handle these issues. I bought a smartphone mount that screws onto the camera stand and a Bluetooth shutter release for the phone. I also brought my charging cable and a power bank. For the memory issues, I cleared over a year’s worth of photographs from my smartphone memory and brought an external 1 TB storage device that could serve as USB storage if I ran out of memory mid-day. Technologically speaking, I was as prepared as I could be.

I booked my days at the archives and had the Stephens court martial file pre-ordered for the first day. Even with a pre-order, though, there’s always the chance another researcher might have the file out. I had my fingers crossed. I knew it might take a while to handle that file, but I was as prepared as I could be.

When I arrived at the archives on the first day, Stephens’ file was waiting for me in my assigned cubby! I set up all of my tech gear and began to take pictures of file pages. It required a bit of tweaking but once I had the camera mount height perfect, and the folder lined up on the table, it actually went incredibly smoothly. The Bluetooth shutter release was a dream. Flip, click, flip, click, flip, click. And just like that, a file of over 800 pages was done. Total time? Two hours. Had I done it the old way, it would have taken far longer, but with the new set-up, it went incredibly fast. And with the spare time that opened up, I was able to choose several other files to copy, specifically the court martial files for two of the other Bad Nenndorf officers: Langham and Smith.

On the first day, I took over 3000 images and just under that on the second day. I reviewed the images at several points through the first day, just to make sure that they were all in focus and… it all looked good. Every evening, I downloaded the day’s images to my laptop and the external storage device. It would not do, after all that work, to lose all those images due to a hardware failure!

There’s something deeply satisfying about a system working exactly as it should.

Now comes the daunting task of reviewing all of that information and pulling it together. But that can be done at home, at my leisure, now that I have the core documents. Where the wider Stephens story will go from here, I’m still deciding. But having the material in hand is the necessary first step.