This week at The Archive we have added 216,287 brand new pages, as we mark the 68th anniversary of Princess Margaret’s ‘courageous decision’ not to marry divorced royal equerry Group Captain Peter Townsend. Meanwhile, we have added one brand new title this week, which covers an extreme Scottish political party, whilst we have made extensive additions this week to our existing newspapers from across the United Kingdom. So read on to learn more about how the press in 1955 reacted …
1950s
This week we return from a publishing hiatus having added a mammoth 1,610,356 brand new pages to our Archive, and it’s an especially great week for Grimsby too, as we’ve added one brand new title for the Lincolnshire town, and also extensively updated the Grimsby Daily Telegraph. All of these additions mean we have now surpassed a landmark 65 million pages on The Archive. This week also sees the addition of a further three new titles to our collection, from …
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This week at The Archive we are bringing you a duo of new London newspapers, from both north and south of the River Thames. Meanwhile, we’ve also added 156,854 brand new pages to our collection over the past seven days, with 23 of our existing titles being updated, from Coventry to Croydon, from Huddersfield to Hull, from Newcastle to Nottingham. So read on to discover more about all of our new and updated titles of the week, as well as …
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In March 1954 news broke that former Second World War fighter pilot and racing driver Roberta Cowell (1918-2011) had become the first known British transgender woman to undergo gender affirmation surgery, an important part of British LGBTQ+ history. Roberta Cowell, or Betty as she was known to her friends, soon became the ‘most talked of woman in England,’ making headlines across national and regional newspapers. And the way that Roberta used print media to tell her own story is a story in …
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This week we are delighted to have added 430,247 brand new pages to The Archive, with a trio of brand new newspaper titles joining us over the past seven days. Meanwhile, we have updated 80 of our existing titles, with updates to publications from across England, Scotland and Wales, from Abergele to Winsford. So read on to discover more about our three brand new titles of the week, as well as to discover which of our 80 titles have been updated. Meanwhile, you can learn all …
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In late August and early September 1958, the London area of Notting Hill was the scene of racially motivated riots, in which white, working-class, ‘Teddy Boys,’ and others, displayed hostility and violence to the Black community in the area. These riots took place ten years after HMT Empire Windrush arrived in Tilbury Docks, carrying 492 Caribbean migrants. Since that moment in history, more and more migrants arrived in Britain from the Caribbean, and they would come to be known as the ‘Windrush Generation.’ …
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Reading like a tabloid’s dream, or the script of a film noir, the shooting death of racing car driver David Blakely at the hands of his model girlfriend Ruth Ellis revealed the seedy underbelly of 1950s society. From the smoky, dim-lit cocktail bars of West London, to extramarital affairs and illicit weapons, this is the story of a young woman and what drove her to shoot her lover in broad daylight on Easter Sunday, 1955, as told by our newspapers. …
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‘If you want something to write, write about Rose Heilbron. She’s the greatest lawyer in history.’ These were the words of Jack Comer as he left the Old Bailey in September 1955, having been defended by 39-year-old Rose Heilbron QC, and subsequently acquitted. Who was Rose Heilbron? Born in August 1914, she was the first woman to win a scholarship at Grey’s Inn, one of the first two women to be appointed to the King’s Bench, the first woman to …
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‘…coloured velvet collars and cuffs, trousers that were so tight they couldn’t sit down in them, belts on the back of their jackets, long narrow ties like bootlaces,’ this is of course the style of the Teddy Boys, the British youth subculture which defined the 1950s, as described in the Londonderry Sentinel. The Sphere | 22 September 1956 The Teddy Boys, embracing the Edwardian style of decades before, were a threat to the status quo in a way that Britain had never quite …
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‘Neither fish, fowl nor good red herring – that feeling of being betwixt and between.’ This is how hairdresser Mr Alexi describes the experience of being a teenager in a 1954 edition of The Tatler magazine. A teenage dance in Dorset | The Tatler | 6 February 1957 In 1954, the word ‘teenager’ was a relatively new addition to the lexicon. Although it first appeared prior to the Second World War, it only really caught on in common usage during the late 1940s. And by …