‘Deaf and dumb’: disabled Victorian civil servants
The National Archives holds detailed records of people in some areas of public service - notably the armed forces – but remarkably little about civil servants. The surviving records are patchy, and...
View ArticleDisabled British Army Great War veterans, 1918-1939
With 2018 marking the centenary of the Armistice, a host of public and cultural events will take place next year to commemorate the end of the First World War. Yet, for many Great War veterans, the...
View ArticlePost-war Thailand and the onset of the Cold War in Southeast Asia
This year marks the 70th anniversary of a military coup that occurred during the first year of the reign of Bhumibol Adulyadej, the late king of Thailand. The coup took place during the chaotic...
View ArticleThe battle for heavy water
Last October, I attended a conference on ‘Résistance et Dissuasion’ – the Resistance and nuclear deterrence, held at the French National Library. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition for...
View ArticleStrange meeting: from Voysey’s heresy to Aldred’s anarchism
To me, ‘The Sling and the Stone’ seemed an odd entry to find in The National Archives’ catalogue in the records of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. I came across it by chance and felt...
View ArticleHow to read 43,000 cabinet papers
I used to spend a chunk of my time pretending to be Winston Churchill on Twitter: @ukwarcabinet. This was mostly a rewarding and interesting occupation for me, apart from occasionally having to write...
View ArticleRosa May Billinghurst: suffragette, campaigner, ‘cripple’
For the last in our series of blogs for Disability History Month I have chosen to write about Rosa May Billinghurst, an active member and organiser of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)....
View Article‘…a strange story of spirits, and worth reading indeed’
Wife and girl and I alone at dinner – a good Christmas dinner, and all the afternoon at home, my wife reading to me ‘The History of the Drummer of Mr. Mompesson’, which is a strange story of spirits,...
View ArticleCricket, tanks and panda-monium: files released from 1992
In 2013 the government began its move towards releasing records when they are 20 years old, instead of 30. Two years’ worth of government records will be transferred to us each year until 2022. We...
View ArticleThe civil servant’s tale: Geoffrey Chaucer in the archives (part three)
In part one and part two of this blog series I’ve been tracing the history of the ‘real’ Geoffrey Chaucer – the man behind the Canterbury Tales – as he worked his way through the medieval civil service...
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