| Description | Typed copies of some of the notebooks listed in MS191/1/1, with letters, press cuttings, and other documents added. Some have been bound; these (MS191/1/2/1-5) were used as source material for Shuckburgh's book 'Descent to Suez'. In the editorial note at the beginning of 'Descent to Suez' Shuckburgh says, 'The full text of the diaries, bound in five volumes, comes to about 400,000 words; this book contains about half that text. The main sections omitted are the passages covering the Berlin conference of 1953 and the tour of Middle Eastern countries which I made with my wife in 1954.' There are cuts scattered through the diaries, mainly entries about Shuckburgh's family, or comments that would have been confidential at the time of publication.
Manuscript notes made by Shuckburgh during his time as Assistant Secretary-General of NATO (MS191/1/2/7) have been catalogued with this series because they refer to the previous diary.
The page numbering of the diaries is not consistent. The diaries used as source material for 'Descent to Suez' (1951-2 to 1956-7) are numbered in a sequence that runs through all five volumes. The diaries dating from 1958 onwards either have no page numbers or are numbered with a single sequence of page numbers per volume. Documents inserted between pages of the diary are either numbered using a separate sequence of page numbers from the text of the diary, or have no page numbers.
The catalogue uses original numbers to refer to pages of the diaries whenever possible. If there are two sequences of page numbers in a diary, the complete sequence is used. If documents do not have a number, a number is created by adding a letter of the alphabet to the number of the page before the document e.g. 144a, 144b. |