Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
By Nichola Court, Archivist This International Women’s Day 2023, we celebrate the achievements of the Chichester-born suffrage campaigner, Ethel Margaret ‘Madge’ Turner, a woman who spent her adult life campaigning for equity and whose efforts to achieve this have recently been recognised in the city of her birth. The Market House (Butter Market) in North…
By Nichola Court, Archivist 2021 marks the 75th anniversary of West Sussex Record Office [WSRO]. Although we now occupy purpose-built premises in Orchard Street, Chichester, the Record Office has had a number of other homes – not all of which have been very glamorous! Read on to discover more about our former homes… Door plaque…
By Nichola Court, Archivist The theme for 2021’s International Men’s Day is ‘building better relations between men and women’ and few men embodied this mantra more than the barrister and one-time Liberal MP for East Grinstead, Charles Corbett. Today’s blog explores the life and work of this now little-known campaigner and politician. Portrait of Charles…
Today, we mark International Women’s Day by taking a look at one of the lesser-known but no less important political groups which advocated women’s suffrage during the early 20th century. The activities of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and their leaders – Millicent Fawcett…
By Kim Leslie (with an Introduction by Nichola Court) In his first blog, Kim Leslie introduced us to some of his more colourful ancestors, whose lives – at times, dramatic - are revealed in his family papers – The Corfield Papers. In his second blog, Kim focuses on his grandfather, Dr Carruthers Corfield, whose papers…
Continue reading ➞ THE CORFIELD PAPERS – A New Accession: Part Two
By Kim Leslie (with an Introduction by Nichola Court, Archivist) One of the joys of working at a county record office such as WSRO is the wide variety of collections we hold and the individual documents that can be found within them. Collections of family papers can hold a surprising array of documents concerning a…
Continue reading ➞ THE CORFIELD PAPERS – A New Accession: Part One
By Nichola Court, Archivst A few weeks ago, a series of remarkable photographs cropped up in some of my social media feeds. Dating from the 1840s, the photographs captured the inhabitants of Horsham and their surrounds and were taken by Captain Thomas Honywood, a local man with a keen interest in archaeology as well as…
Continue reading ➞ A Mystery Snapper’s Sojourns Through Sussex
You may know Shippam's as the purveyors of meat and fish pastes which are sold in supermarkets to this day. They carry a strong nostalgic connection to those who grew up enjoying their products. The company has always had very close ties with Chichester, and had brilliant marketing to help them dominate the market. This…
By Nichola Court, Archivist WSRO holds a large and rich photographic archive of the county, dating from the earliest days of photography up to the modern day. One of our most compelling collections is that of the amateur photographer John Fletcher, a local man whose life was tragically cut short by World War I. In…
By Nichola Court, Archivist As a mother to three young children (6, 4 and 3 at the time of writing), coming to work is something of a break from the whirlwind of life at home; a chance to use my brain for something other than citing the members of the Justice League and Avengers teams…
West Sussex Record Office 