The archives of an historic school are a testament to its stability and to its continuity. At Radley, photographs of sports teams seated before the Mansion show youthful faces from the 1850s to the 2000s: the Mansion barely changes, nor do the faces, only the style of dress tells you the decade. In the 1900s boys wrote their prize-winning Greek and Latin translations and compositions in the Gold Book. One hundred years later in 2007, boys of the Classics Society started to transcribe them as part of a project looking at the role of Classics in education. Names of boys and their families occur through three, five even six generations of records and photographs.

Radley’s Archives are one of the finest collections held by any school. That such material still exists at Radley, and in such good condition, has been the work of two men: A.K. Boyd who assembled a solid foundation of all the key material from the earliest days of Radley, and Tony Money who has built on those foundations and created an unparalleled collection of material relating to the life of the school, particularly to drama, music, societies, the Socials and sport. Tony’s remarkable achievement has been to set the Archives at the heart of the school so that every publication, every ephemeral programme, every film or recording, has automatically been donated by its creators. It has also become the first port of call for those who need information within the school: the school play this term will be Cabaret – what previous productions have there been? What ideas on staging in the Old Gym? The gardeners need to know whether they can tap old wells during the hose-pipe ban – what do the estate maps show? A Shell from 2006 is doing a piece about prep schools for The Chronicle – do the Archives have a record of which prep schools boys came from in 1906? Those beyond the walls want information as well: the national George Cross database project wants to know whether there are team photos from the 1920s showing either of Radley’s two George Cross recipients: the answer for one of them is there in the War Memorial albums, Charles Howard, 20th Earl of Suffolk, a pioneer of bomb disposal whose work was the inspiration behind the bomb disposal team in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. Tony Money can answer all of these questions out of his head and immediately lay his hands on the relevant material.

All of Tony’s work on the Archives has been done through love and loyalty to the school. Latterly, since the Archives had no permanent home, he disposed of many of his own possessions and housed the Archives in his flat in the Mansion. The time has now come when his faithful service needs to be honoured. The best way to do that is to create a permanent, suitable home for the Archives, with a good database and conservation and digitisation projects to make them more widely known and accessible to the Radley community and the wider world. Grasping this opportunity will not only honour Tony, it will also put Radley’s remarkable collections at the forefront of school archives, in suitable housing where they can easily be cared for and added to by generations of Radleians to come.

After his retirement the Archives were moved from Tony Money’s room in the Mansion to a special area of the Library., to be known as the Tony Money Archive Centre. The Radleian Society has given a grant to help with the initial costs of the project.