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Mercedes Gleitze (1900-1981) was the first British woman to swim the English Channel, and the first person to swim the Straits of Gibraltar. In an amazing career that spanned the 1920s and 1930s, Mercedes captured the imagination of the British public and became a household name.Born to German parents in Brighton, Mercedes was one of three sisters. Skilled in languages, she moved to London where she worked as a secretary and stenographer. Whilst living in London she began swimming in…

This week at The Archive we are proud to welcome a gem from Guernsey to our collection of newspapers, with the addition of the Guernsey Evening Press and Star. Meanwhile, we have added two further brand new titles from London’s East and West, as we have passed the spectacular milestone of 67 million pages all now available to search.And that’s not it, over the last week alone we have added a total of 470,868 brand new pages to The Archive, with…

This week at The Archive we have been busy adding new pages from Bracknell to Bristol, from Cambridge to Chester, from Newcastle to Nottingham, from Scunthorpe to Staffordshire. In fact, we’ve added 134,187 brand new pages to our collection this week, covering over 170 years of headlines, from 1821 all the way through to 1997.We’re delighted to announce that two brand new titles have joined us over the past seven days, and they hail from Nottingham and from Somerset respectively. Meanwhile, we’ve updated…

On 1 December 1900 the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette reported on ‘The Death of Mr Oscar Wilde:’The Paris correspondent of the Dublin Evening Mail telegraphs that Mr Oscar Wilde died yesterday at three o’clock in the Latin Quartier. He had been suffering for some time. Two days ago he became unconscious. Six weeks ago he underwent an operation, which appeared to have been successful, but a complication which followed proved fatal.The death of the poet, playwright and novelist…

In the decade after the Second World War had come to an end, and indeed beyond, many communities across the United Kingdom were faced with very vivid reminders of the conflict: bomb sites, the country’s ‘war scars.’In this blog, we will examine how people in Britain lived alongside bomb sits in the 1950s, using newspapers taken from The Archive. We will explore how communities adapted to live beside bomb sites, and how they transformed them into gardens and playgrounds.…

This week we are delighted to welcome 69,150 brand new pages to The Archive, with the addition of one very special brand new title from London. Meanwhile, we have updated twelve of our existing titles, with updates to our newspapers from Scotland, Wales and England, as well as to one our of special political titles.Meanwhile, this week marks 125 years since writer Oscar Wilde was released from prison, having been sentenced to two years’ hard labour for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895. So…

This week you might just be able to witness steam coming off our presses, as we have added an impressive 343,381 brand new pages to The Archive, with 22 brand new titles joining us this week alone. Comprising of special interest titles devoted to music and the cinema, as well as to different spheres of employment, from postal work to pawnbroking, our new titles this week are an eclectic mix, comprising also the regional and the international, covering the latest from both…

Imagine yourself back in December 1925, with Christmas fast approaching, in London where:All the pavements are alive this week with purchasers moving in ceaseless procession from window to window as they search for the particular Christmas gift for the particular person who is to receive it. They wander down street after street, for London nowadays is the finest city in which to purchase a gift – humble, rich, or rare – that the world knows.It’s time for Christmas shopping, and there’s…

By November 1920, some ‘three millions of money‘ had been spent on ‘memorials of various kinds and designs…in the United Kingdom,’ as reported the Milngavie and Bearsden Herald. In today’s money, that’s roughly £87,000,000 – the equivalent of £2 donated by every person in Britain.The strength of the nation’s desire to remember their war dead is manifested in these memorials, as the population struggled to come to terms with the great losses suffered during the First World War, in which 744,000 men lost their…

This week at The Archive we have added 99,778 brand new pages, with seven brand new special interest titles joining our collection over the past seven days, which provide an incredible snapshot of early twentieth century culture. From cars to yachts, from movies to the modern man, our new titles this week furnish an exciting panorama of what life was like over one hundred years ago.Meanwhile, we have extensive updates to some of our existing titles, with over 50,000 pages being…