"Dear Edith..."

In the two years of running the @RFH1955 Twitter account, probably the most retweeted/noticed/'nicked' tweet was the one including a Melvin Ramsay letter to his old RFH colleague, anaesthetist Dr. Edith Gilchrist. In later life Gilchrist became honorary archivist of the RFH., so we have her to thank for a lot of our research.

The particular letter in question was one dated 20th November 1989...

The letter is significant for three reasons:

1) Ramsay is unwell (he died four months later)
2) It is the final letter we found that he wrote to Gilchrist

3) It is the only letter we saw of his that referred to Simon Wessely.

How did we find it? Well, if anyone found it it was the RFH archivist Victoria Rea. The RFH archive was more or less a one-woman operation. You would contact the archive if you wanted to find something but if Victoria was on holiday, that was it - you'd have to wait for her return. The budget for the archive appeared to be non-existent as I seem to remember data being held on Zip drive disks when we were visiting between 2011 and 2012.

Anyway, we'd turn up having booked a slot, Victoria would have prepared what she thought were the relevant documents and some of the archive would already be in the reading/study room on shelves and in cabinets.

On the 24th February 2011, we turned up, sifted through what had been laid out for us and photographed (what we thought were) the best bits. The letters drew our attention. Only later we were able to study them properly.

I'm assuming that Gilchrist had donated the letters to the archive. She was still alive then and there was the very outside chance that we might have got to speak to her but it was deemed that she wasn't well enough.

2013 saw the death of both the archive and Gilchrist, just short of her 100th birthday. 

The RFH archive contents ended up at the London Metropolitan Archive with twelve items missing - Ramsay's letters to Gilchrist. 

The whereabouts of those letters are a mystery. My guess is that they ended up with Ramsay's relatives. 

As for the old RFH archive at 17 Lyndhurst Gardens....