to cover an area roughly within thirty miles radius of the Town Hall, including North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. 1939 - 1945 The outbreak of hostilities in 1939 and the heavy air-raids on Sheffield in December 1940 affected the development of the archive collections in several unfortunate ways. Staff shortages soon meant that only routine attention could be given them, and in December 1941 they were removed for safety to a comparatively rural branch library where premises had been specially strengthened to protect them. More disastrous, the Sheffield Union offices in West Bar, where the Guardians' records still remained, together with the surviving records of the old overseers of the poor, were completely destroyed by enemy action. At the same time business firms were turning out their old records for salvage; the Library does not appear to have taken any steps to save such records from destruction and much was undoubtedly lost at this period. The war years were not, however, entirely devoid of interest, for 1942 saw the purchase of part of the antiquarian collection of Bacon-Frank of Campsall (Talbot correspondence), the gift of family records from Beauchief Hall and silver-plating records and catalogues of the firm of Thomas Bradbury & Sons. 1945 - 1960 After the war the collections were brought back to the Central Library and the reading room, which had been closed for the duration, was re-opened in November 1947. A turning point came about a year later on 31 October 1948 when, with the City Librarian's active support, a meeting of the National Register of Archives was held at the Central Library with the late Lord Scarbrough in the chair; at the meeting it was decided to set up a South Yorkshire committee of the National Register. Colonel G. E. G. Malet, the Registrar of the National Register, was faced with a particular South Yorkshire problem at this time. The great Fitzwilliam mansion of Wentworth Woodhouse was about to be let to the West Riding as a college. There was an immediate need to find a repository willing to receive the whole of the family archives (except the muniments of title) many of which lay stacked in the corridors there. The City Librarian and the Libraries committee agreed to accept them into custody on loan deposit and on 26 and 27 January 1949 three large furniture vans transported the archives to Sheffield. It is difficult