1949-1980s
These documents are mostly in the form of a statement or invoice detailing the items or services to be paid for with a receipt for the money paid attached.
The invoices and receipts for rates and for building or repair work are for Crag House or The Red House Aldeburgh, apart from when stated for The Old Mill.
The garage invoices and receipts for car hire detail the date of hire and destination travelled to.
Some of the hotel invoices and receipts are for stays by Peter Pears as well as Britten.
Different parts of this run of documentation have been held in varying arrangements, both in Britten and Pears's lifetimes and subsequently. The current order reflects later reordering rather than duplicating necessarily how the papers were held by Britten and Pears.
Receipts and invoices from a particular calendar year are held together. Those relating to each year up to the early 1960s had at some stage been divided into thematic groupings - household, car and so forth - and within these held in chronological order. Because of inconsistencies in how material might be classified, that arrangement has now been abandoned and the earlier material brought into line with that from the mid-1960s onwards, for which there was no subdivision within each year's file and instead material was held in simple chronological order.
From about 1970 onwards material was originally grouped by financial year but for simplicity's sake this material has been brought into conformity with the rest of the run and grouped into files by calendar year.
Within each year material is in chronological order. The papers have been arranged by the date of the invoice itself rather than of the transaction documented or of the receipt that is sometimes attached. Where no date is given for the invoice but a dated receipt is held, the paper has been filed according to that date; where absolutely no precise date is given - a common scenario for those firms for which Britten held an account, and which would submit a bill every month - the item has been filed at the end of the material from the month to which it relates. In a few cases there is no indication of the date of a document other than the year: in those cases, the material has been filed at the end of the relevant year, after December's papers.
From about 1970 onwards the documentation also includes small pieces of paper to mark the place of transactions for which the invoice does not survive, apparently placed there at the time of the annual accounting. These carry a serial number but that number is not necessarily strictly chronological. Where they also carry a date, they have been inserted at the appropriate point in the chronological sequence; where no date is carried they are held at the end of the year.
Archive
https://www.bpacatalogue.org/archive/BBF-2
