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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…