Here on The Archive we have a special collection of country and rural pursuits titles, numbering over 400,000 pages and covering the years 1849 to 1970. These titles range from the specialist – for example the wonderful Fishing Gazette, which focuses, rather unsurprisingly, on fishing in all its forms – to the more general, such as the ‘Country Gentleman’s Newspaper’ Field, which reports on a range of different country pursuits such as farming, shooting and fishing. We have a strong …
farming
If you’ve got an agricultural labourer in your family tree, chances are you’ll have an ancestor who practiced straw plaiting. Straw plaiting was a cottage industry that saw its heyday in eighteenth and nineteenth century rural Britain, and was in the main part practiced by women and children. In this special blog, using articles and pictures from The Archive, we’ll take a look at the history of this discipline, from its heyday to its eventual decline. An article in the …
Tags
At the beginning of September 1936 the Nottingham Evening Post describes ‘an invasion’ taking place in Kent. But this wasn’t an invasion of a military kind. It was in fact an invasion of hop-pickers, arriving in the county for the hop-picking season. The annual trek of 40,000 hop-pickers to the green fields of Kent has begun, with an invasion of caravans, horse drawn lorries, cars, covered wagons, perambulators and even London taxis. Our photo shows hop-pickers at work at Paddock …