Calgary museum lands historic military collection

Calgary archivists have landed the largest haul of military history documents in Canada and one of the most important, say experts in the field.

The 50,000 books, pamphlets, orders, treatises and other documents collected by British military officers and diplomats from 1890 to the 1960s is a stunning treasure trove, said Dr. Dean Oliver of the Canadian War Museum.

“It is the largest book acquisition of its kind in Canadian history — it is eight or nine times the size of the largest we’ve received,” said Oliver, who’s visiting Calgary’s Military Museums, which is housing the collection.

“This becomes overnight one of the principle instruments of military research in Canada.”

The 1,289 boxes of material began arriving in the city last year and is slowly being catalogued by the Military Museums and University of Calgary personnel, said John Wright, head of the museum’s archives.

“We reckon it would take one person full-time seven years to do basic inventory on this,” he said.

Wright showed reporters two of his favourite finds — so far — an almost pristine 1868 chart of Czarist Russian army drill rules and an 1805 book written by a French marshal for Napolean Bonaparte.

Other works deal with the world wars, the Cold War and Britain’s role in the 19th century “great game” of conquest in central Asia, said Wright.

“There’s a lot of stuff that’s relevant to what’s going on in Afghanistan today,” he said.

“We’re finding items that were once restricted.”

Since 1996, the so-called Chicksands collection was housed at an old Cold War intelligence installation in England by the same name.

But the storage was considered inadequate, said Wright, and nobody knew what was in the collection.

After seven years of negotiations, the Calgarians convinced the British they would properly store, catalogue and assure access to the material.

The archival space at the Calgary museum, completed in 2009, “was actually designed with the intent of housing this collection,” said Wright.

It’ll be digitized for more public access, say museum officials.

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