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In 1796 British doctor Edward Jenner demonstrated how infection from cowpox gave rise to immunity from smallpox. This led to the first vaccination in history and represented the first step in the total eradication of smallpox, the only human disease to ever be totally globally eradicated.Edward Jenner | Illustrated London News | 27 January 1923With vaccination again hitting the headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic, we set out to discover how Edward Jenner’s contemporaries reacted to his groundbreaking vaccination method, and to understand how…

This week at The Archive we have added 84,920 brand new pages from both North and South, spanning over one hundred years of headlines. Not only this, we are delighted to welcome five brand new titles to our collection, from Warwickshire to Yorkshire, from Durham to Kent.So read on to discover more about these new titles, to learn which of our seven existing titles we have also updated this week, and to find out more about the Christmas presents of…

On 16 January 1867 Regent’s Park in London was witness to the worst ice-skating tragedy in British history. In this special blog post, we take a look at how the newspapers in our Archive can help us understand exactly what happened that day, by hearing from the voices of those who were caught up in the catastrophe.In the Luton Times & Advertiser, 19 January 1867, the following is described:At about a quarter-past four, when a large number of persons were skating and sliding…

On Christmas Day 1906 the city of Sheffield in the north of England saw the ‘heaviest Christmas snow for 25 years,’ as the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reports:On the evening of Christmas Day the snow began to fall, and yesterday morning the city was covered in a beautiful mantle of the purest white. Snow lay on the ground to the depth of about six inches, and, except in the streets, so remained until last night, when there was a further fall.Long…

It’s been another busy week for us here at The Archive as we have added 148,050 brand new pages over the past seven days. We are also delighted to welcome five brand new titles, hailing from Blackpool to Bridgend, from Dorset to Kenilworth, and a very special paper which was aimed at cotton factory workers in Lancashire.So read on to find out more about the Cotton Factory Times, our four other new regional titles, as well as to learn more…

Nowadays, a single snowflake is enough to send the country into a panic, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Britain faced freezing weather that brought with it extreme snowfall to all corners of the land.‘A wintry scene in Kent’ | Illustrated London News | 8 February 1947And so, using newspapers from our Archive, will we take a look at how such extreme snowfall impacted Britain, how it disrupted the nation’s communication system, from the early days of the mail coaches, through…

Fresh from celebrating our ninth birthday on Sunday, and the landmark of reaching 40 million pages last week, the presses have continued to whir here at the British Newspaper Archive. This week we have added 47,958 new pages to our collection, with one regional title receiving particularly special attention.Register now and explore the ArchiveReceiving the ‘special treatment’ this week is the Leicester Evening Mail, to which we have added the years 1931 to 1949. 1931 was an important year in the history of…

75 years ago, on the 26 November 1945, Noël Coward’s enduring masterpiece Brief Encounter was released to cinema audiences. A classic of post-war cinema, Brief Encounter came to symbolise the British restraint that had got the nation through the Second World War, its popularity enduring to this day.In this special blog, using newspapers taken from the British Newspaper Archive, we will take a look at the contemporary reception of Coward’s film, and how it was received by cinema-goers across the country.Celia…

Anna May Wong, born Wong Liu Tsong in Los Angeles in 1905 to second generation Chinese-American parents, is widely considered to be the first Chinese-American Hollywood star, and certainly the first Chinese-American actor to win international fame and attention.The Bystander | 27 May 1931After gaining success in such films as The Toll of the Sea and The Thief of Baghdad in the 1920s, and fed up with the stereotyped roles she was given (the Coventry Evening Telegraph in 1961 remembers her as the ‘…

To mark the the release of Season Four of Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ we thought we’d take a look at how some of the key moments from the season were reported on in the newspapers from the time.So read on to discover how the press reported Margaret Thatcher’s landmark 1979 election victory, how the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was depicted, and also how the infamous Buckingham Palace break-in was covered in the press of the day.Register…