| Administrative History | Operation Mole was founded in 1949, the year in which Doug Nash first wrote to Nellie Kirkham with a request for advice and information, thus beginning a correspondence which was to span three decades (see D8097/3/1). Its original aim was the exploration of caves and mines around Matlock Bath but its activities expanded beyond this area as the years went by. By the 1960s, Operation Mole was known as OM Research and Exploration Group, a not-for-profit organisation which accepted donations (see Nash's letter of 2 Dec 1961 in D8097/4/7) and was described as "specialists in geological field research" on the group's letterhead, which also gives the address of a Field Headquarters in Snitterton. Nash's title was Director of Field Operations.
As at 1954 (see D8097/3/5) Doug Nash had custody of some fifteen volumes of Operation Mole's operational and research files. Derbyshire Record Office has no information as to whether this collection survives (as at 2017), either as described by Nash in 1954 or in some other format - however, the British Caving Library holds a John Beck/Doug Nash collection, which apparently contains related material (see http://caving-library.org.uk/collections/nashbeck.shtml).
One of Nash's letters notes that he has adopted a new filing system for 1957 (see D8097/3/7) suggesting that the arrangement of Operation Mole material underwent occasional revision. In some correspondence, Nellie Kirkham makes use of the alpha-numeric referencing system which is encountered in the papers of Nellie Kirkham, series D5675/2.
A 1985 letter from Nash to Christine Bonner (D8097/4/18) indicates that Nash, who became literary executor of Nellie Kirkham after her death in 1979, was treating all the files as a single archive which "could be collectively called the Nash/OM/Kirkham Collection". Derbyshire Record Office's distinction between a Nash collection (D8097) and a Kirkham collection (D5675) is therefore somewhat artificial.
Of his address in Eyam, Nash wrote: "Glebe Cottage is not what you would normally think of as a cottage. It was originally the Glebe Mines Ltd, Glebe Cottage Offices. When I took early retirement as Mines Archivist to Laporte Industries, Glebe Mines Ltd., I bought it from them, since no normal house was large enough to house the collection. Dr John Beck (Geology) joined me, and I suppose you could say that our lives have become dedicated to the collection. A further complication is that I am head of OM Mines Research and Exploration and John represents the Technical Speleo Group who, in turn, absorbed the old British Speleological Association Section". |
| Custodial History | These records were deposited in Derbyshire Record Office in May 2017. |