The 1930s were a decade of aviation records. Airmen and airwomen from across the globe pushed their aircrafts to the limit, travelling thousands of miles in pursuit of world firsts and fastest travelling times. And these men and women became the superstars of their day, bona fide celebrities alongside the stars of stage and screen. Chief amongst the royalty of the air was Amy Johnson, Britain’s answer to Amelia Earhart. In this special blog, as part of aviation April on …
Headlines from History
This week we’ve added 320,174 new pages to The Archive. We have added a baker’s dozen, 13, brand new titles. We are delighted to have added new titles for England and Ireland this week. We’ve added to our Sports Titles with the Football Gazette (South Shields), the Sports Gazette (Middlesbrough), and, for Ireland, Ireland’s Saturday Night which covered football, cycling and athletics. As always we’ve added more pages to our existing titles, both old and new. Forty-nine titles have had …
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150 years ago this March, on 16 March 1872, the first ever FA Cup final was played between the Wanderers and the Royal Engineers. Register now and explore the Archive In this special blog, we will take a look at this historic match, which was played at Kennington Oval in South London, using newspapers taken from the time, as well as a very special account that was written some 66 years later. The Association Challenge Cup Final Tie On 13 …
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To celebrate International Women’s Day this year, and as part of our look at the history of football this March, in this very special blog we will be taking a look at pioneering early women footballers. Register now and explore the Archive From those who took to the pitch in the eighteenth century Bath, to those who played in the first international match in 1881, we will look at the women who disrupted the status quo in order to play …
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Russia is building up a formidable air fleet and doubling her military railways. America is laying down new capital ships. Britain is strengthening her Navy and her Air Force. A few days ago Belgium announced her intention to spend more money on her Army…One never quite knows what Germany is doing. Her budget reveals her intention to re-arm to a modest extent…No doubt she is drilling her young men and inuring them to war on land and in the air… …
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In late 1937 in the borough of Croydon, South London, people began to fall ill with typhoid. Typhoid is a disease that is associated with contaminated water and outbreaks of the illness, at least in the United Kingdom, is something that we might associate today with the nineteenth century, before an age of improved sanitation and safe supplies of drinking water. And so, in this special blog, we will take a look at how the Croydon typhoid epidemic gradually unfolded, as …
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In early May 1933 reports that some kind of monster had been spotted in Loch Ness, in the Scottish Highlands, near Inverness, reached the press. By the end of the year, national weekly publication The Sphere wrote: When the Loch Ness monster first came into the news many believed that the stories published in the Press were nothing more than mere sensationalism. To-day this theory does not hold good. People, whose judgement can be relied on, have seen the ‘monster,’ and …
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Just after the turn of the nineteenth century in 1901 1.5 million people across the United Kingdom worked as domestic servants. That’s 4% of the population engaged in domestic service, as butlers, footmen, valets, housemaids, cooks, scullery maids and the like. And so, as part of our investigation of the history of employment this month, in this special blog we are going to take a look at what it was like for those who worked in domestic service in the …
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With the release of the 1921 Census of England and Wales on our sister site Findmypast last week, we were delighted to discover a range of unusual occupations returned within its pages, from knocker-ups to lamplighters, from rag and bone men to rat catchers. And so, using our newspapers, we thought we’d shine a light on some of the past’s most unusual or indeed lost occupations, and try to understand what it was like to actually be a crossing sweeper, …
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On 2 April 1748 the Ipswich Journal reported on ‘the most terrible‘ fire which had broken out at a Mr. Elridge’s, a peruke maker, in Exchange Alley, London. Rumours soon spread that a boy had left a candle near some wig boxes, which had been set on fire, and then: The Flames [had] extended themselves into Cornhill, and burnt down the Houses of Mr. Walthoe, Mr. Strahan, Mr. Meadows, Mr. Brotherton, and Mr. Astley, Booksellers; Toca’s and the Rainbow Coffee-Houses, the Fleece …