Celebrating our collections dating from 780AD to the present day
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
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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…
I had assumed that every patient who died in a UK war hospital during World War 1 would have a Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstone, but I was wrong….. I am cataloguing the records of Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester, among which are some items about Graylingwell War Hospital (1915-1919). There are no existing formal…
Continue reading ➞ In Remembrance – Driver George Slater – Graylingwell War Hospital – WW1
Prior to the British Witchcraft Act of 1735, the infamous witch trails of the Early Modern period saw widespread moral panic sweep through a religiously unstable Europe, resulting in the horrific punishment of individuals for their supposed sorcery. Although no instances of witch drowning or burning have been evidenced in West Sussex, accusations of witchcraft still led to the persecution…
Continue reading ➞ Witchcraft and the ‘Wicked Women’ of Sussex
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…
Continue reading ➞ ‘All the fun of the Fair’: A history of Chichester’s oldest surviving fair
West Sussex Record Office 