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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…

Annie Kenney gained attention in her work for the suffrage movement in 1905 following her arrest for assault and obstruction during a rally in Manchester. Kenney would become one of the leading figures in the Woman’s Social and Political Union and face imprisonment multiple times during her activist career fighting for the right to vote.Click on an image below to enlarge then use the arrows to move image by image throughout the collection. In the image viewer, you can also…

One name that you will doubtless encounter if you’ve spent any time researching the suffrage movement in England is Pankhurst. Emmeline and her daughters were actively engaged in the work, with Emmeline and, later, her eldest daughter, Christabel, leading the Women’s Social and Political Union.Click on the next arrow to scroll through eleven images featuring one of the most famous suffragettes in history.[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”44″ gal_title=”Emmeline Pankhurst”]Subscribe today and discover more stories on the suffrage movement…

This year, 2018, is the 100 year anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918.  The Act which gave propertied women over the age of thirty, and all men over the age of twenty-one, the right to vote.  Over the course of 2018 we aim to digitise several suffragette and women’s newspapers.  These papers will allow us to explore the suffrage movement, and the social sphere of the women who campaigned for the right to vote.We are delighted to be able to…

We have come to the end of the year and for the month of December we are looking across the month at historic events that occurred during the month including the death of a famous musician, an explorer’s achievement, the first woman in Parliament, and the coronation of Napoleon. We do not claim that these are all the noteworthy historical events in December.  If you know of any significant ‘December’ events that you have found in The Archive share them…

One of the features of The British Newspaper Archive is the OCR editing tool.  This allows every user to contribute to the improvement of The Archive.  OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition– the process we use to transform millions of digitised images into searchable text.   The computer takes an image of the page and then turns each line into text.  However, as many of us have encountered, the text is not always correct and needs improvement.  As a group, we…

Emma Willis explored the back streets of Birmingham, uncovered a violent ancestor, and revealed magnificent Irish craftsmanship in her family tree.  In this week’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, we followed the lives of three of Willis’ ancestors: James Gretton, Richard Fowler, and Michael Kirwan.  We will take a closer look at the newspapers and explore what more we can discover about the stories and lives revealed.James GrettonEmma Willis found out that her three-time great…

Illustrated London NewsOn 14 May 1842, 175 years ago today, the Illustrated London News, the world’s first illustrated newspaper, debuted.  Founded by Herbert Ingram of Lincolnshire, the paper was a pioneer in pictorial journalism.  The British Newspaper Archive is proud to hold more than 7,000 issues of the Illustrated London News across its 161-year run for you to explore.Register today and explore the Illustrated London News.From its inaugural edition, the editors were confident in their endeavour.‘We take the world…

Whilst Mothering Sunday is now commonly combined and celebrated with the secular holiday of Mother’s Day in the United Kingdom and Ireland, its origin is religious in nature and separate from that of the American Mother’s Day.Starting in the 1700s, individuals would attend a special service on Laetare Sunday (the fourth Sunday of Lent) at their mother church (usually the church where an individual was baptised or their local parish church/closest cathedral). This activity was soon coined as going…

Just a month after hitting the 9.5 million page milestone, we’re very pleased to announce that there are now 10 million historic newspaper pages available at The British Newspaper Archive.The website launched with 4 million pages in November 2011, which means there’s now 150% more to explore. If you’ve not searched the collection for a while, it’s definitely time to try again.Search the newspapers –>More to search and a great-value subscriptionIt’s not just our coverage that has improved over the last few…