Articles by Rose Staveley-Wadham

On 16 January 1867 Regent’s Park in London was witness to the worst ice-skating tragedy in British history. In this special blog post, we take a look at how the newspapers in our Archive can help us understand exactly what happened that day, by hearing from the voices of those who were caught up in the catastrophe.In the Luton Times & Advertiser, 19 January 1867, the following is described:At about a quarter-past four, when a large number of persons were skating and sliding

On Christmas Day 1906 the city of Sheffield in the north of England saw the ‘heaviest Christmas snow for 25 years,’ as the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reports:On the evening of Christmas Day the snow began to fall, and yesterday morning the city was covered in a beautiful mantle of the purest white. Snow lay on the ground to the depth of about six inches, and, except in the streets, so remained until last night, when there was a further fall.Long

It’s been another busy week for us here at The Archive as we have added 148,050 brand new pages over the past seven days. We are also delighted to welcome five brand new titles, hailing from Blackpool to Bridgend, from Dorset to Kenilworth, and a very special paper which was aimed at cotton factory workers in Lancashire.So read on to find out more about the Cotton Factory Times, our four other new regional titles, as well as to learn more

Nowadays, a single snowflake is enough to send the country into a panic, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Britain faced freezing weather that brought with it extreme snowfall to all corners of the land.‘A wintry scene in Kent’ | Illustrated London News | 8 February 1947And so, using newspapers from our Archive, will we take a look at how such extreme snowfall impacted Britain, how it disrupted the nation’s communication system, from the early days of the mail coaches, through

Fresh from celebrating our ninth birthday on Sunday, and the landmark of reaching 40 million pages last week, the presses have continued to whir here at the British Newspaper Archive. This week we have added 47,958 new pages to our collection, with one regional title receiving particularly special attention.Register now and explore the ArchiveReceiving the ‘special treatment’ this week is the Leicester Evening Mail, to which we have added the years 1931 to 1949. 1931 was an important year in the history of

75 years ago, on the 26 November 1945, Noël Coward’s enduring masterpiece Brief Encounter was released to cinema audiences. A classic of post-war cinema, Brief Encounter came to symbolise the British restraint that had got the nation through the Second World War, its popularity enduring to this day.In this special blog, using newspapers taken from the British Newspaper Archive, we will take a look at the contemporary reception of Coward’s film, and how it was received by cinema-goers across the country.Celia

Anna May Wong, born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles in 1905 to second generation Chinese-American parents, is widely considered to be the first Chinese-American Hollywood star, and certainly the first Chinese-American actor to win international fame and attention.The Bystander | 27 May 1931After gaining success in such films as The Toll of the Sea and The Thief of Baghdad in the 1920s, and fed up with the stereotyped roles she was given (the Coventry Evening Telegraph in 1961 remembers her as the ‘

To mark the the release of Season Four of Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ we thought we’d take a look at how some of the key moments from the season were reported on in the newspapers from the time.So read on to discover how the press reported Margaret Thatcher’s landmark 1979 election victory, how the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was depicted, and also how the infamous Buckingham Palace break-in was covered in the press of the day.Register

This week on The Archive we have added 63,650 brand new pages, giving us a total today of 39,709,184 pages, as we move ever closer to that spectacular landmark of 40 million pages available to view.With one brand new title added this week, covering the county of Somerset, we have updates to regional titles from across England, from Yorkshire in the north to Plymouth in the south, by way of Birmingham and Shropshire.So read on to find out which new title

In 1948 cinema attendance peaked with a staggering 1,650 million visits recorded in Great Britain throughout that year. This was the height of the golden age of cinema going, something that had begun in the 1920s and burgeoned throughout the 1930s and 1940s.The Regal, Altrincham, known as ‘the cathedral of cinemas’ | The Bioscope | 24 June 1931In this special blog we will explore this golden age of cinema going and what contributed to its overwhelming success and popularity, using pages taken from the