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Long before Agatha Christie envisioned murder on the Orient Express, or before she wondered what might have taken place on the 4.50 from Paddington, murder, mystery and mayhem were already well established on the railways of Britain and beyond.The first victim of murder on British railways was 70-year-old Thomas Briggs. In this special blog, we will take a look at his story, as well as nine others sourced from the pages of our newspaper Archive, which tell the strange, the…

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…

This week at The Archive we have added nearly 180 years of historic headlines, with 167,302 brand new pages joining us, spanning the years 1820 all the way through to 1999. We have four very exciting new titles joining us this week too, with additions to our collection of international newspapers, as well as to our Irish and national holdings.Read on to discover more about our new titles, the updates we have made to our existing publications, as well as one of the…

This week the presses continue to whir, and we have added 129,872 brand new pages to our collection. Our additions this week are to Britain’s longest-running tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror, to which we have added over 100,000 colour pages spanning the years 1923 through to 1986, and to the Glamorgan Gazette, which covers the central Glamorgan area. Founded in 1894, it continues to be published to this day.Register now and explore the ArchiveFor anyone with an interest in crime history, the British…

‘No more thrilling a tale of guilt and crime, and scarcely one so eloquent in its lessons and cautions to those who are in danger of entering upon a life of unbridled passion, is to be found in all the history of poor humanity than this story of William Palmer.’So reads an article in the Sheffield Independent, 17 September 1888, regarding one William Palmer, better known as the Rugeley Poisoner. William Palmer, a former doctor, was convicted in 1856 for the murder…

In 1919 the country was shocked by a high society murder – dubbed the ‘West End Tragedy.’ Major Miles Seton, of the Australian Medical Corps, was shot and killed by Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Rutherford, a British army doctor, in the palatial surrounds of a Holland Park address.Using articles and photographs from the pages of the British Newspaper Archive, we explore this sad crime, which took place just a few months after the end of the First World War.Want to learn more?…

This week on The Archive we have added 20,428 brand new pages, encompassing seven new titles, which cover England and Wales, as well as a brand new title from Jamaica, a first for the British Newspaper Archive.Register now and explore the ArchiveWe have three new titles joining us this week from Yorkshire, strengthening our collection of newspapers from England’s largest county. We have two new titles from the West Yorkshire town of Batley, including the Batley Reporter and Guardian,…