Winter news from the Constabulary Archive Officer

Despite the weather and lots of illnesses amongst the team we have been as busy as ever.

During November half term several days were spent at Northleach prison for their history week and our exhibition was there from the end of September to the end of December. We are just waiting for the weather to improve so that we can go and collect all our boards and artefacts.

We are hoping to do some further work with the prison team especially on children who were held in Northleach Prison, their crimes and the punishment.

We attended the Buttons, Badges and Blazers exhibition at Gloucester Museum in November.  Every day is a school day as there were things there that the team had never seen such as the helmet and the leather suitcase.

We have lots of projects ongoing and the volunteers are working their socks off talking to retired officers, collecting information from personnel files, researching links between officers to see if officers with the same last name are related and looking at what officers were writing in their pocket books in the 1870s. We are also trying to put added context to memories of a deceased officer which means that members of the team are spending a lot of time on research across the historic county of Gloucestershire.

As usual we have had many queries for example

• offers of items discovered in the attic after retired officers have died,
• research into careers of named officers
• information about the police forces in Tewkesbury and Gloucester
• officers who had been commandos during World War ll
• we even had a photograph donated to us that was not Gloucestershire and managed to track down the force that it belonged to. No mean feat as it was the 1920s and the force no longer exists!

There are also lots of other things going on behind the scenes, the police archives are like a swan, serene on top but paddling like mad underneath.

If you have any police related photographs we are always happy to receive Jpegs via gloucestershirepolicearchives@gmail.com and queries can also be sent to the same email address. We are also able to scan photographs in the office at the Heritage Hub. We are usually on site Monday to Wednesday until 2.30 but it is worth checking before you make a visit as we do go out and about quite often.