This week we have added 180,279 pages to The Archive. We have published five brand new titles covering the counties of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire. We have also updated 27 titles across The Archive, with additions to titles such as the Music Hall and Theatre Review and the Daily Herald, the precursor to the modern The Sun newspaper. Our updated titles this week span Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England.

We have added pages from the year 1926 to the Daily Herald. The Daily Herald was founded as a socialist daily newspaper, and between January and April of 1911 it was published as a strike bulletin. Britain in 1926 was in the throes of a general strike, after unions came out in support of the coal miners’ strike which began on 1 May 1926. You can read about the strike in the pages of this newspaper.

In 1926 celebrated crime author Agatha Christie sensationally disappeared. The Daily Herald covers her disappearance and the desperate search to find the bestselling novelist. Her car was found abandoned in December 1926 beside a chalk pit on the outskirts of Guildford, Surrey. Like something out of one of her novels, foul play was soon suspected, with police appealing to members of the public to come forward to assist with the search.

Daily Herald | 07 December 1926

A reported 2,000 motor vehicles came forward to assist with the search, with traffic clogging up the North Downs. Spiritualists offered their help, claiming Mrs Christie had certainly met with foul play. In a bizarre twist, Agatha Christie was eventually tracked down to a luxury hotel in Harrogate, where she claimed to have no memory of the events leading up to and following her disappearance.

The Daily Herald, true to its socialist roots, questioned who would be footing the cost of the extensive search, whilst Mrs Christie had been enjoying herself in a Harrogate hotel. However, the paper concluded that due to the big volunteer effort, ‘the cost to the rates should not be very great,’ and Agatha Christie went on to sell over two billion copies of her work, only being outsold by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.

New Titles

Updated Titles

This week we have updated some of our recently added titles.

You can learn more about each of the titles we have added to this week by clicking on their names. On each paper’s title page, you can read a FREE sample issue, learn more about our current holdings, and our plans for digitisation.

Register now and explore the Archive

You can keep up to date with all the latest additions by visiting the recently added page.  You can even look ahead to see what we’re going to add tomorrow.