Search the blog

As part of Black History Month this October, we have taken a look at the extraordinary life of Learie Constantine (1901-1971), a cricketer from Trinidad who would go on to become the United Kingdom’s first ever Black peer.The first player to take a Test match wicket for the West Indies, and described as one of the best all-round cricketers the world has ever seen, Learie Constantine’s career extended beyond sport, as he fought tirelessly against racial discrimination, as he became…

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 have published an incredible 425,285 brand new pages on The Archive, with 22 brand new newspaper titles joining us over the last seven days alone. Our new titles hail from the north and south of England, as well as from Scotland and from Wales. Meanwhile, we have updated 147 of our existing titles, from Abergele to Acton, from Southall to Spalding, and beyond.Furthermore, using our new newspapers, we discover more about the tragic sinking of the SS Utopia off…

This week at The Archive we have added an amazing 293,242 brand new pages, with 29 brand new titles joining us from Scotland, Wales and eighteen English counties. Meanwhile, we have also been busy attending to our existing titles, with 60 of these updated in all over the past seven days. With all these brand new pages added to The Archive, we now have over 48 million pages available to search, with the milestone of 50 million pages on the horizon.So read on to…

As we move now into February we have been extremely busy here at The Archive, adding 139,438 brand new pages to our collection, with the addition of two brand new titles over the past seven days. Meanwhile, we have made significant updates to a range of our existing titles, with 26 titles updated in all.So read on to discover more about our two new titles of the week, one of which represented the interests of the various Nonconformist Protestant groups of…

When the Blitz began on 7 September 1940, ‘It was the people of London who took command…Men, women, and children went straight to the safest place they could think of – the Underground stations.’In this special blog, over 80 years after the beginning of the Blitz, we take a look at how London’s main transport system – the Underground –  became a popular place of shelter for those seeking protection from the German bombing campaign, using an assortment of articles and photographs all to be…

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…

Alice Maud Mary Arncliffe-Sennett was an energetic militant suffragette, determined to fight for women’s suffrage even if that meant getting arrested and going against prominent leaders such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Milicent Fawcett.  Through the newspapers, we can find details about Arncliffe-Sennett’s life, career, and activism.Alice, or Maud as she was often called, lived in London and worked as an actress.  Her stage name was Mary Kingsley.  Here is a review by The Era of her performance as Lady…

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…

In honour of Remembrance Day, during the month of November, The British Newspaper Archive will be focusing our attention on military in the newspapers.  Coming up this month we will feature blogs about our special military titles, researching military history, women and war, and wartime rationing and fashion, as well as a guest blog about a remarkable Great War discovery from The Archive.  To begin our military month, we are delving into the newspaper headlines through the years for the…