Happy Holidays
With the end of the academic year comes the time where everyone packs their bags and treats themselves to a holiday. But the types of holidays people are choosing to go on has changed significantly over time. The East Midland Oral History Archive holds over 400 interviews that were conducted during the 1980s with residents […]
The schoolboy sketches of John Leech
The artist and illustrator John Leech, who became one of the foremost contributors to Punch and created the artwork for some of Dickens’ most popular works, notably A Christmas Carol, was born in 1817 in London, the son of the assistant proprietor of the London Coffee House. He was sent to Charterhouse School from the […]
A tulip bulb, the value of which would have fed ‘a whole ship’s crew for a twelvemonth’
The tulip, with its bold, eye-catching flowers in a wide variety of gorgeous colours, is in bloom, in many of our spring gardens, making one of their most striking features. In common with many flowers, it has gone in and out of fashion over the centuries – but the tulip’s history has been more dramatic than […]
Women in the World of Work
Over the last few centuries women’s place in the world has changed significantly, and with International Women’s Day today it is great to see how the position of women, especially in the world of work, has changed since the first International Women’s Day in 1908. The East Midland Oral History Archives hold over 400 […]
Evading a flogging by the Whipping Toms
Prior to 1846, Leicester had its own very particular way of celebrating Shrove Tuesday, which precedes the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday and was therefore the occasion for an outburst of eating, drinking and riotous entertainments. A letter written by ‘J.C.B.’ to William Hone, author of the Year Book first published in 1829, explains […]
Eric Henry Janson Teasdale (1896-1917)
21st January 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the death in action of Lieutenant Eric Henry Janson Teasdale, who at the age of just twenty gave his life during the First World War. Guest post by Sedtin Wan (Development and Alumni Relations Office). Eric Henry Janson Teasdale, Lieutenant in the 1st Battalion serving in the Machine […]
Mapping Vanished Leicester
One of our Special Collections Online that has always fascinated me is a collection of photographs of “Vanished Leicester” taken by Dennis Calow, a (now retired) architect who lived and worked in Leicester. Writing a decade ago, Dennis remembered that as an architectural student he, like most of his generation, had been ‘brainwashed into believing that everything […]
The Lord of Misrule and his band of ‘lusty guts’
Behaving badly at the Christmas festivities and doing something you would really rather not remember is not an exclusively modern phenomenon, as a trawl through our Special Collections reveals – although in the 16th and 17th centuries the scene of your shame, rather than being the office party, might have been one of the many […]
An interview with Nora Waddington
During the 1980s an oral history project was undertaken by the Leicester Oral history Archive. These interviews are now held by the East Midlands Oral History Archives at the University of Leicester. I am currently working on a project to increase the number of these interviews that are available online (check out the current collection […]
Frank, the Double Duchesse
Amongst the contents of the Fairclough Collection of engraved portraits, relating to political and social history in 17th century Britain, we have recently discovered this delicately executed miniature of Frances Stuart (née Howard), Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, who died in 1639. The oval appears to have been cut from a larger composition (in watercolour […]
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