Saturday Service at the Heritage Hub

About this time last year, a decision was taken to resume the Saturday opening of Gloucestershire Archives. It felt such a positive step, after many frustrating months of total closure, due to the pandemic, followed by various versions of user restrictions during the week, as we crawled back to normality. However, even in pre-Covid times, we knew that our Saturday service needed further scrutiny. Who was our intended audience? What type of service was required? Was something different needed to appeal to customers specifically at the weekend? We had always thought that by opening at the weekend, people who weren’t able to visit during the week due to work or other personal commitments would have the opportunity to undertake research. This notion sounds perfectly acceptable on paper but in practice, it wasn’t happening. 

Consequently, a decision to open again on Saturdays, post Covid, could not be taken lightly. We had to justify staff’s time in terms of planning events and being on-site to present them plus have proof that this was a service truly required by the public. Was it truly worthwhile?

Television comes to Gloucester…in a world first!

The one thing that I think most people know about the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 was that it was the first such event to be televised, and many people bought TV sets just so that they could watch it. My dad was six at the time and I remember him telling me that half the street crowded into his parents’ living room to peer at the tiny screen as the Queen was crowned.

In Gloucester, the TV service arrived in the spring of 1951, and I’ve recently discovered, from the Town Clerk’s file on the subject, that Gloucester was the first place in the world to have a television service provided by relay -in other words, the signal from the transmitter was too weak to reach the city, so a further transmitter was placed on Chosen Hill to relay the signal right into Gloucester residents’ homes.

The Corporation of Gloucester had advertised for a company to work with them to provide the service and Link Sound and Vision Services Ltd got the contract. It seems as though there was a bit of a race to be the first place with a relay service, and after Gloucester ‘won’, the Deputy Town Clerk had to correct at least one claim from another local authority in an article he wrote for the Municipal Journal.

From GBR/L6/23/B4536, including certificate signed by those present at the switching on of the first subscriber’s service, and article by the Deputy Town Clerk in the Municipal Journal