Crowdfunding campaign
On 18th March, we launched a four week crowdfunding campaign to transform Gloucestershire Heritage Hub’s outdoor space into an accessible, wildlife-friendly community garden. Making the garden into a beautiful community space is outside the scope of our 'For the Record' project so we are hoping the crowdfunding campaign will enable the Heritage Hub to realise its ambitious plans for the garden.
We’d love to raise £5000 for the garden transformation. If you would like to donate – this can be money, time or materials and plants – then please have a look at this link.
This campaign ends on the 15th April.
Thank you in advance!
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/546babe926bed6c105d157528809ec63/backers#start
Kate Maisey and Ally McConnell
Now there’s even more to discover about Gloucestershire on ‘Know Your Place’!
Find out about support for Women’s Suffrage …
Volunteers at Gloucestershire Archives have completed a winter-long project to upload images and information about local supporters of women’s suffrage. Thanks to the original research of Dr Sue Jones (who generously agreed to share her findings with this project), the new layer on KYP for ‘Women’s Suffrage’ holds entries for over 500 individual supporters.
Screen shot from KYP for Gloucestershire (http://www.kypwest.org.uk). The Women’s Suffrage layer has been selected from the menu. Each green/purple icon on the map links to an individual entry .
Sue used local newspapers and national suffrage newspaper accounts of activities to identify high-profile activists. But a unique source for the Cheltenham area is a 1912 book of signatures of women and men presented in gratitude to their M.P. James Agg-Gardner for introducing the second reading of a women's suffrage bill that year. It is preserved here at Gloucestershire Archives (reference D5130/6/6). The book identifies many more suffrage supporters who did not emerge from the newspaper accounts. Additional details have been gathered from the 1901 and 1911 censuses. Images have been sourced mainly from contemporary newspapers, particularly the Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic.
You can also search KYP layers - for example for an individual name. This screenshot shows the result for a search of the Suffrage layer for ‘Platt’. Click on Map (at the end of the entry) to take you to the location on the map and thumbnail.
Emily Platt’s entry includes an image that appeared in the local newspaper at the time of her death in 1929. It gives more details about her life:
Seeing local mills through the eyes of a local photographer - coming soon to KYP
Keen local historian Miss Gwladys Davies travelled around the county during the 1930s-1960s photographing mills and other structures that caught her eye. Her photographic collection is preserved at Gloucestershire Archives (GA ref D14791) but until now it’s been very difficult to use because it is mostly negatives, without much description. Thanks to GA volunteers from the Gloucestershire Society for Industrial Archaeology led by Dr Ray Wilson, a project has begun to scan the original photographs to make accessible digital images. Miss Davies left around 1000 images and the GSIA team has concentrated so far on the 400 or so views of mill buildings. The exact locations have been identified for each image so that they can be uploaded to KYP in the near future.
New to the ‘Community Layer’
One of the fun things about my role at the Archives is that, as an ‘approver’ for KYP Gloucestershire, I get to see new content before it goes live. Some of these images are submitted by GA volunteers, some by other local heritage organisations and some by individual contributors. There are well over a thousand images on this layer now. This cheery group caught my eye recently:
Painswick postmen outside their post office, c.1910 (from GA collection, ref GPS244/56)
To everyone who has images to share, whether from a personal collection or as part of a local community heritage project, please have a look at the KYP website where there are helpful step- guides to contributing new material. And at Gloucestershire Archives we’re always pleased to hear about local archive collections and projects, so please do get in touch with us if you have any queries about using KYP or more generally about looking after your archives.
My colleague Claire Collins is taking over from me when I retire from the Archives at the end of March. Having been here since I first qualified as an archivist, I’m older than many of our collections – which is a sobering thought. Best wishes to all in the Heritage Hub network and I look forward to keeping up with developments in future Newsletters!
Julie Courtenay, Collections Leader
archives@gloucestershire.gov.uk
Goodbye Julie
Friends and colleagues at Gloucestershire Archives gathered to wish Julie Courtenay all the very best for her retirement at the end of March. Julie came for her archives job interview on the day the Record Office opened in Alvin Street in 1979. Since then she has contributed significantly to the development of the service, to change and innovation, and importantly to the collections. As a well respected colleague, she will be very much missed.
Julie has handed over the baton to Claire Collins who will be leading the next phase of collections development. Good luck Claire.
The Great Matson Bake Off.
And the 4th place winner is "The Heritage Springboard Group" with a pre 1916 recipe, Guard's Cake, from Michael Hicks Beach (gent, politician, officer killed on the 23 April 1916 in the battle of Katia, thirty miles from the Suez Canal). (GA reference D2455/F3/10/9/3).
Rachel Wales from Gloucestershire Archives suggested the recipe to the Springboard Group who meet weekly at the Heritage Hub.
And, for those intrepid readers who would like to make the cake the recipe is as follows:
Guard’s Cake
1 lb flour
½ lb butter
½ lb brown sugar
½ lb currants
½ lb raisins
Little mixed peel
4 eggs
1 tsp mixed spice
1 tsp of Carbonate of Soda or 2 of baking powder
Soften with a little milk
Butter & sugar should be well beaten together then add each egg separately & sift in the flour & other ingredients.
Bake in a slow oven.
Rachel's Guard's cake
To read Rachel's Blog (February 2017) and her tips for making the cake visit
Gloucestershire Archives Blog