Home Office correspondence 1839-1959

1. Introduction

The Home Office dealt with a wide range of subjects, relating to daily life in England and Wales: these have included the administration of the criminal justice and penal systems, the maintenance of public order, the regulation of aliens, naturalisation, the control of explosives, firearms, drugs and poisons, charities, electoral administration, and civil defence and fire services, to name but a few. These records are essential for any serious study of nineteenth and twentieth century domestic history. To cope with the growing diversity of subjects, the Home Office established a central registry system. The daily registers of correspondence are in HO 46 with the files on which the letters were placed, in HO 45 and HO 144. The register may confirm the creation of particular papers: but please remember that only a sample of the files referred to in these registers have in fact survived.

2. Home Office correspondence: registration systems

In HO 46, there is a separate register of special subjects and alphabetical index of correspondents, together with a register of papers preserved. From 1848 all papers reaching the Home Office were registered centrally in the registers now in HO 46. Earlier papers were numbered retrospectively. Those papers selected for preservation were re-registered as OS (Old Series) papers. From 1871 to 1880 all incoming papers were registered in a series running from 1 to 100,000. In 1880 a new system of consecutive numbers started, with an A prefix; this was followed shortly afterwards by a series with B, V and X prefixes. These series were replaced in 1902 by a six figure series starting at 100,001. In 1949 the six-figure series of general correspondence files was replaced by separate series of files for each subject or function, each distinguished by letter symbol, e.g. POL symbol files for Police files. These symbol files are in separate HO record series - POL files, for example, are in HO 287. See the PRO Guide, Part 2, under HO.

These files described above are divided between HO 45 and HO 144: the latter contains files closed to public inspection for longer than the usual thirty years.

3. How to use HO 45 and HO 144

The online cataloguing of these records has greatly improved the ability for researchers to use these records. In the past, as the files are dated by the date of the last document filed on them, you had to look after the date of a specific event in order to find the file. Each class is divided into block of dates: each of these has a subject arrangement within it. As a result, the documents are not listed in numeric order, and you may need to use the class list together with a packing list to get a full reference.

The packing lists contain references to boxes in which papers are filed away. You will have to match up the file numbers in the HO 45 and HO 144 class lists with the box numbers in the HO 45 and HO 144 packing lists, also filed in the standard list set.

Keyword searches can now be done via Discovery, our cataloguea search tool with descriptions of tens of millions of documents from the UK central government, law courts, and other national bodies, and full references (including the packing list reference) can be obtained. However, for naturalisation papers in HO 144 you will still need to use the packing list.

4. Other correspondence classes

Files on criminal matters 1849-1871 (OC-Old Criminal Papers) are in HO 12. Papers too bulky for filing (Long Papers) are in HO 326. Some files kept in the Private office are in HO 317. Earlier Home Office correspondence can be found in HO 44 (1773 to 1861), HO 42 (1782 to 1820) and HO 52 (1820 to 1850) with entry books in HO 43 (1782 to 1898). Separate correspondence for disturbances can be found in HO 40 (1812 to 1855) with it's own set of Disturbance Entry Books in HO 41 (1815 to 1916). There is a pilot project examining the potential cataloguing of these early (1782-c1850) Home Office records. There is some overlap between these classes and the State Papers Domestic, George III in SP 37 (1760 to 1783).

5. Further reading

PRO Guide: part 1, 401

Sir E Troup, The Home Office (Puttnams, 1925)

R R Nelson, The Home Office, 1782-1801 (Durham, N.C., 1969)

Sir F Newsam, The Home Office (Allen and Unwin, 1954)