Long before Anne Lister of Shibden Hall was known to TV audiences, her coded diaries, around 5 million words, were being rescued from obscurity, recatalogued and, in 1982, microfilmed by my friend Alan Betteridge, who has died aged 81. Alan served as Halifax and then Calderdale archivist between 1970 and 1994, followed by an active retirement that included teaching for the University of Leeds and much archive consultancy work. He brought Lister to public attention and identified the antiquarians who first cracked Anne’s code in around 1892.
Alan was a superb archivist with thorough knowledge of every class of document in his care. Many historians of West Yorkshire industry and society are indebted to him. Dedicated to accurate cataloguing and preservation, he encouraged all users, from amateur genealogists to senior academics. His doctoral study of Halifax administrative records remains a key source.
When Calderdale Archives moved to the new Halifax Library in Northgate (opened 1983), Alan ensured the incorporation of state-of-the-art standards for archive storage, a first for West Yorkshire. Two decades later, the building was earmarked for demolition to make way for a shopping centre, the archives to be relegated to a former industrial building. Incensed, Alan spearheaded a high-profile, successful, campaign ensuring that the present library was designed to house the archives appropriately.
Born in Castleford, near Wakefield in West Yorkshire, Alan was raised by his mother, Irene (nee Swift), in the mining village of Fryston. His father, Ernest Betteridge, a collier and jazz musician, left before Alan was born. Following Castleford grammar school, Alan gained a BA in modern languages (1965) at King’s College London. He spent the following two years teaching at the Humboldt Gymnasium in Kiel, then travelling to Berlin and elsewhere.
Alan became deeply interested in central European philosophy (a favoured thinker was Karl Jaspers) and in Neue Linke politics, particularly the internationalist emphasis on environmentalism and pacifism. These ideas remained touchstones. In his Eco-Humanist Manifesto, written in the 1990s, Alan emphasised: “We form part of a fragile interdependent web of life, and are members of an extended and intergenerational biotic community … comprising both human and non-human life and … members as yet unborn.”
On arrival in Halifax in 1970, Alan lodged with Bessie Eaton, a widow, and her daughter, Mary. Alan and Mary married a year later and became soulmates. Through vegetarianism, environmentalism and campaigning in the peace movement, they set a high ethical standard, and passed a rich cultural inheritance to their daughter, Katherine, including Alan’s passion for music, from Messiaen to Miles Davis.
Days before he died, Alan was wearing one of his existentialist T-shirts, with a quote from Sartre, “L’existence précède l’essence”: the belief that individuals must create a meaning for their life through their values and actions. Alan certainly did that.
He is survived by Mary and Katherine.
