British South Africa Company The papers that are listed below are the result of this involvement with the company. In part they are the record of Gell's personal correspondence with colleagues on the board, members of staff and other interested parties, and in part they are the result of the regular circulation of important papers to the directors by the secretariat. Cognate collections of MSS. are not easily found for this period of the Company's history. The archives of the Company itself were largely destroyed by enemy action in the Second World War. Papers of other directors or members of staff have mostly disappeared. To date, the only other large personal collections immediately relevant to the Gell papers are those of Earl Grey, now in the University of Durham, of Sir Lewis Michell, now in South Africa, and some small groups in the National Archives of Rhodesia, including those of H.M. Hole and Sir Drummond Chaplin. Two public archives are obviously related: the National Archives in Salisbury [National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare] include the papers of the Administration during the period of the Company's rule and amongst these are many items emanating from the London Office. However, the Administration and the London Office were two very separate entities and the Salisbury archives indicate little concerning the internal organisation of the Company in England and little about the conflicts and combinations within the board of directors itself. The second major public collection is that in the Colonial Office papers in the Public Record Office. This covers exhaustively the relations of the Company with the British Government and also includes copies of the Company's Administrative minutes and agenda until the granting of responsible government to Southern Rhodesia in 1924. These minutes are, however, but a partial record of the Company's activities for, owing to the initial stipulation that copies must be deposited with the Colonial Office, the Company divided its business into Administrative, i.e. that which concerned the Colonial Office, and Commercial. Into the latter section were inserted a number of important matters, as well as the normal commercial business of the Company. In addition, there were a number of circulated papers that were never included in the formal minutes and agenda of the board. For these various reasons, the Gell papers are the most significant group remaining to us that describe the internal policy of the British South Africa Company. It is to be regretted that even these are incomplete. The papers described below form part of a much larger collection covering the whole of Gell's commercial career and personal life. Their identity as a group was first created by Gell himself, who operated a rudimentary filing system, and then by subsequent sorting. However, the whole of the papers has not yet been inspected in detail and it is to be expected that a number of peripheral items relating to Southern Africa remain to be identified. The collection assembled here can even so be claimed to include all the substantive papers relating to the British South Africa Company.