Two sepia photgrpahs side by side. They are of penguin colonies on an icy beach. White mountains are visible in the background.

It started with a Penguin…!

By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Supervisor Penguins and Glass EP I/98 Aldingbourne Faculty, 12th May 1954 A little curiosity we have in Aldingbourne Church is a stained glass window located in the Lady Chapel. This is not your typical stained glass window depicting saints, sinners and heroes, but something far more intriguing: a submarine and –…

Trafalgar Day 2021

By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Supervisor https://youtu.be/L_dGs0xVM9o Battle of Trafalgar in the Archives: West Sussex Snippets by Imogen Russell AM 760/1/126: Letter from Lady Hamilton written some time after the Battle of the Nile, 1798. ‘Lady H hopes to have the happiness and honour of your company’ Lady Hamilton wrote some time after the Battle of…

Little Pretty Housewife – Add Mss 2330

By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant Alice, one of our Social media fairies, posted images of this document at the beginning of lockdown. Click here for the original post on Facebook. I managed to gain copies before beginning to work from home, allowing me to write about the subject of this week's blog post - The…

A Day In the Life… of a Searchroom Assistant

By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant. Wednesday 1st April 2020. This is a bit like the assignment you’d get, as a child, when your teacher would ask you to write about What You Did On Your Holiday. Well, we’ve been asked by our Social Media officers - Abbie and Alice - to write about what we…

‘We’re going on a Lion Hunt’… in Bognor.

By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant Bognor Observer, Wednesday 11th October 1933. This year marks my tenth anniversary of working at the Record Office and for this blog I thought I'd review one of my most memorable cataloguing projects.  I could have chosen AM 760 – letters of Admiral Sir George Murray, the subject of previous…

An intro to Faculties @ WSRO

By Imogen Russell, Searchroom Assistant Though it is more the norm to write blogs on individual documents, I thought I’d talk about a series of records listed under our Episcopal collection, known as faculties. Faculties are permissions from the Diocese for parish churches to alter the fabric of their buildings. As the Diocesan Record Office,…

Historic baking – Little almond cakes

Like most people I like baking and cooking, so when Lauren (our Searchroom Archivist) set the challenge to try some historic recipes from the archives, I jumped at the chance to have a go. One thing I noticed when going through the recipe books held at the Record Office was that over the centuries, there…

‘All the fun of the Fair’: A history of Chichester’s oldest surviving fair

From the 18th – 21st of October this Year, the Chichester Festival Theatre car park at Northgate will be closed for Chichester’s annual Sloe Fair, representing a tradition that has lasted for over 900 years It is the longest-running, and last surviving of five ancient fairs in the city, as the right to hold the Sloe…

Record of The Month

Forgery and Scandal at Chichester Old Bank I first came across the story around this month’s record when volunteering at Chichester District Museum (now the Novium). The Social History Curator at the time said that sometime in the early 1800s a man -John Binstead, a drawing teacher, was charged with forging a bank note from…