West Preston Manor School, Rustington - South Africa scrapbooks (WPM 1/5/2-5) West Preston Manor School in Rustington was opened in September 1933 by Miss Dorothy Boykett, who remained as headmistress until the school closed in July 1979. There were 15 pupils to start with, aged from about 6 to 12 and including four small boys,…
Author: West Sussex Record Office
Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day, and keeping you up to date with Record Office events
Queen Victoria Hospital Archive Project: the history of the hospital
The story of Queen Victoria Hospital (QVH) begins in 1863 with its founding as a cottage hospital on Green Hedges Avenue, East Grinstead, in the home of Dr John Henry Rogers. It was only the fifth cottage hospital to be established in England – from its earliest days the hospital was a…
Continue reading ➞ Queen Victoria Hospital Archive Project: the history of the hospital
A Slice of Life – The Quarter Sessions records
Back in January 2012, West Sussex Record Office Conservator Simon Hopkins and I thought up a plan to make the Quarter Sessions rolls more accessible. These are local government records: essentially the business of the courts which ran the administration of the county before the advent of the County Council. The earliest ones are fascinating…
Continue reading ➞ A Slice of Life – The Quarter Sessions records
Queen Victoria Hospital Archive project: Introducing the project
As regular readers of this blog will be aware, since 2016 WSRO has been engaged in a major project involving the archive of the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, which became known during the Second World War as the centre for the treatment of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’, the RAF…
Continue reading ➞ Queen Victoria Hospital Archive project: Introducing the project
Women’s Suffrage in West Sussex
This month sees the centenary of a major success for women’s suffrage. When the Representation of the People Act became law on 6th February 1918, women over 30, who were occupiers of property or married to occupiers, became entitled to vote for the first time in British history. West Sussex Libraries have been finding out…
Record of the Month
The letters of Miss Dorothy Hartley - AM 1192 In the countdown to my departure from the Record Office, I have been busying myself with cataloguing lots of small accessions, in an attempt to ‘do my bit’ and decrease the ever-growing list of archives that are deposited at the Record Office every year. It was therefore…
What’s on: 2018 at the Record Office
Happy New Year to all who follow and support West Sussex Record Office! We have a lot planned for 2018, and thought we would use the start of the new year to highlight some of our upcoming talks and events that may interest you in the coming months. Our regular 'Talks on Tuesday' series will…
Merry Christmas from WSRO!
Wishing all of our friends and followers a very Happy Christmas from everyone at West Sussex Record Office! Many thanks to everyone who has been following our posts and supporting us through 2017. We’ll be back in 2018 with more exciting stories from the archives! Christmas/New Year closures – Saturday 23 December to Tuesday 26…
What we’ve been up to: WSRO’s annual Closed Fortnight period
Every year come December, West Sussex Record Office closes its doors to the public for an annual period of stocktaking, cleaning, and cataloguing. This year, we began closed fortnight with a deep clean of our public searchroom! Staff pitched in to dust shelves and clean books to make sure our library collection and resource material was in good shape for researchers to…
Continue reading ➞ What we’ve been up to: WSRO’s annual Closed Fortnight period
Explore Your Archive Campaign 2017
Throughout the past week, West Sussex Record Office has been celebrating the annual National Archives and Archive and Records Association's 'Explore Your Archive' campaign. The campaign 'aims to open the phenomenal archival collections held by organisations – public and private – across the UK and Ireland, whatever their size and scale, and wherever they are', and saw archive…