Here at Gloucestershire Archives, we are lucky enough to deal with many rare and unique items. One such item that recently made its way to us from Canada is the Catherine Dickinson sketchbook which has been assigned the reference D6/F172/5.
What is the connection between Gloucestershire, India and Canada you may very well ask?
Continue readingWorking out what you want to do in your career can feel like an impossible challenge. When I was at school, I had no idea what a good choice might be or what I was particularly interested in doing. Everything seemed appealing but nothing was jumping out to me. I wasn’t alone in this. The only people I knew who were certain of what they wanted to do with their lives all wanted to go into medicine. But they were the minority, everyone else was also drawing a blank.
Continue readingThe subject of mental health is very much in the news these days, but the historic record shows that the topic is anything but new. In fact, Gloucestershire Archives holds the largest collection of mental health records of any repository in the country. These are on the whole related to the City’s three mental health institutions Barnwood House Private Mental Hospital and Trust, Horton Road County Lunatic Asylum and Coney Hill Hospital.
Continue readingOur tale this time takes us to Cheltenham. Or as it was known when I was a wee boy “Chelpenum”. Cheltenham is the second biggest town in Gloucestershire after Gloucester which is the county town. Cheltenham is famed as a spa town and the home of the Cheltenham races. Cheltenham stands on the small River Chelt, which rises nearby at Dowdeswell and runs through the town on its way to the Severn. It was first recorded in 803, as Celtan hom; the meaning has not been resolved with certainty, but latest scholarship concludes that the first element preserves a Celtic noun cilta, ‘steep hill’, here referring to the Cotswold scarp; the second element may mean ‘settlement’ or ‘water-meadow’.
Continue readingIt is that time of the year again when we look at the accessions of the first quarter of the year, January to March 2024. The accessions can be from any place, person or organisation in Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire.
Continue readingI’m retiring after a very fulfilling and happy 36 (gulp!) years working at Gloucestershire Archives and have been asked to a write a farewell blog. So, here it is. I have eschewed any attempt at a chronological narrative, and instead have decided to focus on three collections which have run like threads throughout my career. My acquaintance with all three began early, during my ‘Collections’ era, and I’ve been able to reconnect with them several times as my role has become more outward focussed.
Continue readingAmongst the records placed onto the online catalogue in the last quarter was a long-distance traveller, all the way from Australia! A register of cases at the Cotswold Maternity Hospital for the years 1937-1945, it emigrated post-War with one of the former midwives. Recently her daughter contacted the Archives (through Gloucestershire Family History Society) offering to return the register. We are very grateful to her for this initiative, and for offering to pay a fair sum in postage.
Back in March, Gloucestershire Archives was given some documents and photos pertaining to the Pringle family of Longhope (D11928, accession 16319).
The photographs came into Collections Care to receive custom protective enclosures, as carefully wrapping and boxing in archival-quality materials is one of the best ways of ensuring their preservation. Good protective enclosures help to protect them from physical damage and other agents of deterioration.
All the portraits were attractive and appealing, but there was something particularly intriguing about this portrait of a little girl.
Continue readingColleagues and I at Gloucestershire Archives have been delighted to witness the tremendous success of the BAFTA, Oscar and IFTA winning short film, An Irish Goodbye. Why? Because it is a brilliant film, but also because Tom Berkeley, one of the two writer-directors of this film is the son of our colleague Kate, and former colleague Nick, and lives just round the corner from the Archives. So massive congratulations to Tom and his Belfast co-writer and director, Ross White. The film features two Irish brothers working through a bucket-list following their mother’s death and is both amusing and profound. If you haven’t seen the film, I strongly recommend looking for it on I-player.
Continue readingChurchwardens are lay officials who oversaw the routine running of parishes. They were elected to their positions by other members of the laity (a body of people not in orders as opposed to the clergy) and usually served a single term. Their primary job was to procure and disburse funds from parishioners for the maintenance of the parish church and other parish buildings. To keep track of all this, churchwardens created account books which recorded their income and expenditure. All manner of things are represented including incomes and expenses of parish officials, church repairs (to doors, gates, pews and graveyard walls), plus sundry items such as washing surpluses, brooms, bell ropes and communion bread and wine.
However, another, more tragic aspect of these records is that they usually list bounties paid for catching ‘vermin’. By the mid-1500s, the population of Britain had recovered from the Black Death and was starting to rise rapidly. However, agriculture didn’t keep pace and frequently harvests were poor – the harvests of 1527, 1528 and 1529 were particularly dreadful. In just over three years, most food prices doubled in England. A further abysmal harvest in 1532 was the final straw and concerned least this cause major civil unrest, Henry VIII passed ‘An Act made and ordained to destroy Choughs Crows and Rooks, 1532’. This Act was specially aimed at reducing the number of rooks, crows, and choughs [jackdaws], in the hope of protecting grain harvests and it stated that:
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