Page 98 - The Wish Stream Year of 2020 Crest

The national lockdown in March 2020, due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus, had an immediate effect on the staff of the Sand- hurst Collection. All three elderly volunteers and two permanent members of staff (our support officer and our cataloguer), were clearly in the vulnerable category and had to cease coming to work. Also, one of the senior members of staff whose wife was a nurse was unexpectedly required to home-school his daughter while his wife worked long shifts in a hospital. For a while the Curator came in to check emails etc., but was furloughed when the RMAS instructed all non-key staff to work from home/isolate.
The lockdown meant that all tours, and official (and unofficial) visits to the Academy, ceased. It also meant that contractors could not come on site to carry out refurbishment to important ele- ments of the Collection such as the Trophy Guns located on Old College Square and the large Cap- per family medal collection on display in the library.
After the ‘false dawn’ of Summer 2020 when the Covid crisis appeared to be receding, the Col-
Dr Anthony Morton, Curator
lection once again had to curtail some of its core activities following the second national lockdown in November of that year. However, one signifi- cant difference this time was the issue of MOD laptops to the senior Collection staff, which ena- bled about 50% of enquiries received by email to be answered from data saved onto the laptops, while working from home. Answering enquiries that required data from the Collection database (unsupported by MODNET) or retrieving cadet personal files for Group Headquarters, required occasional forays to the office by the Curator and Collection Support Officer.
At the time of writing, the Collection staff antici- pate a return to normal activities later in 2021 including providing tours, allowing researchers back into the archives in the next few months, resuming the cataloguing and digitising of the archives, and crucially, arranging for contractors to carry out vital conservation work on many of the historic cannons on display in the Academy grounds.
Covid and the Collection
A section of the cadet report archives
96 HISTORICAL