Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
November 2018 marks the 80th anniversary of the Kindertransport, a British led programme which rescued over 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi persecution in Germany and annexed territories. The first trains arrived in Britain on 2nd December 1938 and the scheme continued until the outbreak of war in 1939. Many of the transports arrived in Harwich…
Continue reading ➞ Kindertransport and refugees in West Sussex
The University of Chichester (previously known as Bishop Otter College) has a rich history of female leaders - starting with Sarah Trevor, the college's first female principal in 1873, to Professor Jane Longmore, the University’s present day Vice-Chancellor. Sarah Trevor (1873-1895) became principal when the Bishop Otter College reopened as one of the country's first…
Continue reading ➞ The Women of Bishop Otter College and the University of Chichester
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
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…
Work experience student, Kathryn Mersey I’ve been on my second Work Experience placement at West Sussex Record Office this week; after being so inspired by my first, in 2015, I couldn’t wait to come back! On my first placement I was introduced to some of the diverse and mysterious departments behind the scenes, like Screen…
Continuing our week of themed blog posts focussing on West Sussex links with America, today’s focus is on Royal Naval Officer (later Vice-Admiral) Sir George Murray, a Chichester local who saw service throughout the American War of Independence, as well as the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. A few days prior to the signing of…
Continue reading ➞ Chichester’s Admiral: Sir George Murray and the American War of Independence
Alan Green ‘If you can remember the 1960s you weren’t there” runs a well-known maxim. Whether you were there or not, it was a decade irredeemably associated with permissive attitudes and the ripping out of the hearts of so many towns and cities in the name of modernisation, often as a result of dodgy dealings…
Continue reading ➞ Sense or Insensibility : Chichester in the 1960’s
Dr Caroline Adams One of the best things about archives is that they are about people – both the researchers in the present, and the men and women who wrote or handled the document you are looking at. I joined the Secrets of the High Woods project as a consultant on the advisory committee when…
Continue reading ➞ Secrets of the High Woods project; An Archives Consultant’s View
Chosen by Sue Hepburn, researcher In five manuscript volumes and an edited typed text, entitled 'A March with the Infantry', the memoirs of Ralph Ellis are a powerful and compelling record of the life of a soldier serving in the Royal Sussex Regiment on the Western Front in the Great War. Ellis, an artist and inn-sign painter, lived in…
Continue reading ➞ Great War memoir, 1914-1917 (Add Mss 25001-25006)
Kate Mosse, novelist, playwright and researcher I first hit the Archive in 2013, researching for my Gothic thriller - The Taxidermist's Daughter - which is set in Fishbourne and Chichester in 1912. I needed maps, I needed information, but I mostly needed to connect with the texture of the period. I love research, so I pored…
Continue reading ➞ Potter’s Museum of Curiosity, 1977 (Lib 12426)
West Sussex Record Office 