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Celebrating Amy Johnson – ‘Queen of the Air’

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

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Tragedy on the Thames – The Princess Alice Disaster

‘Perhaps the most terrible catastrophe that ever occurred on the Thames took place last night,’ writes the Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette on 4 September 1878, ‘when the saloon steamboat Princess Alice, with about eight hundred passengers, was run down by a passing screw-steamer.’ This tragic incident, representing the largest loss of life on Britain’s inland waterways, saw pleasure steamer the Princess Alice, laden with London day-trippers, cut almost in three as she collided with collier Bywell Castle. The Princess Alice and

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Person or Persons Unknown – Five Unsolved Murders from UK History

Pages from the British Newspaper Archive abound with reports of crimes and their perpetrators, and some of the most intriguing of these are the UK’s unsolved murder cases, where a verdict of ‘murder by person or persons unknown’ has been reached. In this special blog, we explore five of the most notorious unsolved murders from UK history, ranging from the Thames mystery of the late 1880s, which came to be overshadowed by the Jack the Ripper killings, to the strange

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The Freezing of the River Thames – January 1814

waterman on thames

Historical newspaper reports describing the big freeze in London in the winter of 1814 With the predicted snow and ice all set to turn much of the UK into a ‘retreat from Moscow’ landscape, we thought we’d post some old newspaper stories about the freezing of the River Thames, back in January 1814. There are certainly some striking and surreal images described in these stories – not least of which is the poor pig, stuck on an ice floe and

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