Articles by Rose Staveley-Wadham

This week we are delighted to welcome 137,896 new pages to The Archive, with new pages spanning 128 years from 1871 to 1999. We have additions to eighteen of our existing titles, including extensive updates to the Walsall Observer, and South Staffordshire Chronicle, which cover the years 1873 to 1969 and number nearly 35,000 pages.This week also sees updates to six of our London titles, including the Acton Gazette, as well as three of our Scottish titles, with pages added to the Hamilton Advertiser, the Dumfries

‘Apple orchards have been a familiar characteristic of the European countryside for thousands of years,’ writes Edward Hyams in a 1974 article for the Illustrated London News. Indeed, he claims they have been in existence for 6,000 years, as an integral part of rural life and a mainstay of the rural economy. But by the late twentieth century, many orchards were beginning to disappear from the landscape, and with them, another way of rural life faded into memory. In this special blog

This week we are delighted to welcome a bumper crop of new and updated titles to The Archive, with 163,404 new pages added. We have seven brand new titles added this week, covering both England and Scotland. We have three new London publications joining us – the Harrow Midweek, the Middlesex Gazette and the Middlesex Independent – as well as one Scottish title (the Northern Ensign & Weekly Gazette) and one new Essex title (the Essex Guardian).We are also delighted to welcome two

Historically poachers have often been ascribed ‘a good deal of romance’ – but are they deserving of such a description? In this special blog post, using articles and illustrations from the British Newspaper Archive, we will investigate this notion, as well as looking at the crueler side of this antiquated countryside pursuit.Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News | 31 October 1908An article in a July 1917 edition of the Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News does much to propagate this romanticised view of poaching. The writer concentrates

This week we have added 48,988 pages to The Archive, with new pages covering both England and Scotland. We’re delighted to have updated four of our Scottish titles, with additions spanning the years between 1879 to 1981. We’ve also updated the Newcastle Journal, the Manchester Evening News, the Lichfield Mercury, the Wells Journal, and finally the Reading Evening Post.One of our Scottish titles to be updated this week is the Aberdeen Evening Express, to which we have added the years 1939-1945 and 1980-1981.Eighty

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

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 Wood.Nottingham

This week we have added 57,277 new pages to The Archive. We are excited to welcome specialist sporting title – the Football Post (Nottingham) – to our collection, with 1069 issues added so far. We now have thirteen specialist sporting newspapers available to search – you can find a comprehensive list of sporting newspapers here, as well as hints and tips for using The Archive for sporting research here.We have also updated five of our existing titles, including three of our London titles – the

Using newspapers from The Archive, in this special blog we take a look at the history of Charter Fairs, from their inception in the medieval period to their continuation in twentieth century Britain.In his June 1955 article for The Sphere, entitled A Partial Eclipse of the Fair, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald notes how ‘Fairs are of very ancient origin,’ and have been part of British life for thousands of years. A Charter Fair was a fair endorsed by the Crown. Crown-issued letters

This week we have added 108,044 new pages to The Archive. We are delighted to welcome three brand new publications to our collection. For those with an interest in economic history we have added the Course of the Exchange, which is a record of various financial data such as stocks, shares and bonds across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For this specialist journal we have published the years 1825 to 1908, with 8,455 issues now available to search.Also joining us this week