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Merseyside-born, Charlotte ‘Lottie’ Dod, is the youngest ever winner of the Wimbledon Ladies Singles Championship, achieving her triumph in 1887 at the tender age of 15 years and 285 days.She won the singles title a remarkable five times in total, between the years 1887 and 1893.An article in the Sheffield Independent chronicles Lottie’s first ever Wimbledon victory in 1887.About the ladies’ singles there is little to be said – only five entered as against eight last year. Miss Lottie Dod simply “cantered” through the…

This week we’ve added 320,174 new pages to The Archive.  We have added a baker’s dozen, 13, brand new titles.  We are delighted to have added new titles for England and Ireland this week.  We’ve added to our Sports Titles with the Football Gazette (South Shields), the Sports Gazette (Middlesbrough), and, for Ireland, Ireland’s Saturday Night which covered football, cycling and athletics.As always we’ve added more pages to our existing titles, both old and new.  Forty-nine titles have had pages added…

We are delighted to feature a guest post this week by Peter Manning, who used The Archive to research his new book Palace at the Palace – A History of The Crystal Palace & Its Football Club 1851-1915.My project started out as research into the Crystal Palace football teams that played at the old Crystal Palace at Sydenham, but the history that was revealed by searching the BNA’s archives was so interesting and so compelling that I ended up writing a book…

This past week we released 105,098 pages to The Archive.  In time for International Women’s Day we are thrilled to add nine new titles to our Suffragette Collection.  We have also  updated four existing titles including The Globe for which we now have editions spanning 1804 to 1921, and our recently added Scottish title The North Star and Farmer’s Chronicle for which we now have a run from 1893 to 1911.Our new titles represent the full spectrum of the feminist and suffrage movements, from…

This year, in recognition of the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, we will showcase the lives and activities of women involved in the Suffrage movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Despite making headlines for their activities many of these women are now forgotten.In this blog post we will revive the memory of Irish Suffragette, Anna Garvey Kelly, whose support of the cause of Suffrage saw her spend a month in Holloway prison in…

The British Newspaper Archive is the perfect research tool for discovering the history of your favourite sports team or delving into the origins of your local club or venue.Register today!Sport is one of the most searched topics on the site and it’s easy to see why. From historical match fixtures and results, through to news articles and photographs of history’s most iconic sporting moments, the depth and breadth of knowledge the Archive can offer is truly endless.How…

Last year, we donated 100 subscriptions to Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to help expand public information about historical topics. Brian Chapman has worked with Wikipedia for over five years and made around 42,000 edits to the online encyclopedia. He got in touch to tell us about one of the pages he’s improved with the help of our newspapers.**************When I heard about the collaboration between The British Newspaper Archive and Wikipedia, I jumped at the chance to take part. I’ve long been fascinated…

A 13-year-old schoolboy has held the record for the highest cricket score for over 100 years.Arthur Edward Jeune ‘James’ Collins, also known by the initials A. E. J. Collins, scored an incredible 628 not out in June 1899. The cricket match took place over four days at Clifton College in Bristol.Blackburn Standard reports a score of ‘628 not out’A copy of the Blackburn Standard printed on 1 July 1899 reveals that Collins achieved the majority of his team’s total score. Out of a…

We’ve been reading stories about the history of Wimbledon in The Archive, and have found some terrific newspaper reports.Here’s an article about the arrival of the electronic scoreboard on Centre Court in 1929, published in the Derby Daily Telegraph.Derby Daily Telegraph | 21 June 19291929 Ladies’ Wimbledon Final | Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News | 13 July 1929Read some of the other historical newspaper stories about Wimbledon that we’ve been posting on the blog.Derby Daily Telegraph – Friday 21 June 1929Image © Northcliffe Media Limited. Image created…

The fact that the green, purple and white colours of the Suffragette Movement are the same colours used by Wimbledon, has sometimes been commented upon.With this in mind, we thought we’d try and find some newspaper stories that bring together Wimbledon and the suffragettes.Oh, and we found some stories! We found two reports about an incident in 1913 when a suffragette attempted to burn down Wimbledon. One from the time, in the Derby Daily Telegraph, and another from fifteen…