Crispin Redshaw managed the Marconi Beam Radio Station that used to be situated along the Bridport/Dorchester Road, and boasted 25 transmitters, with the first service having been to New York. If you came along to From the Stacks (our free, monthly, public talk) last month, you would have heard Archivist Emma talking a little more… Read more The Photo Albums of Crispin Redshaw
This is the second blog in a short series about our research into a copy of a book by William Lilly from 1666 that had been used as a notebook and doctors accounts book. In our first blog we explored the book’s connection with the Chaplyn family and how we established that the doctor who… Read more Nathaniel Bartlett: A Doctor of Wareham
Now you might already know that Cromwell banned Christmas festivities, but did you know that he also changed the way marriages were registered? Less exciting, we know, but bear with us, because if you’ve been diligently putting together your family tree, and you’ve been able to get back to the mid-17th century, the ‘Act touching… Read more Oliver Cromwell and the Parish Registers
The archive collection of Major Bell, a water bailiff working for the Avon and Dorset River Board was purchased last year with the help of Dorset Archives Trust. The archive is a small collection of diaries, correspondence, and photographs of Major C J Bell, covering the period between the late 1940s to early 1960s. The… Read more The Archive Collection of Major Bell: Records from a local water bailiff
Hello again readers. This is the second of our blogs about the history of the Dorset regiments, with special emphasis on how uniforms changed over the years. If you missed it, the first part, covering the 18th Century is here. This time we are going to concentrate on the nineteenth century. At the end of… Read more The Dorset Regiment: An Abridged Retelling of Regimental and Uniform History (Part 2: The 19th Century)
In a previous blog, we introduced you to the Baker family, and some of their wonderful nature notebooks, filled with plant and flower cuttings, and observations about the countryside around them. This time we wanted to tell the stories of the creators of these notebooks… — Mildred Baker Mildred’s notebooks are mostly focussed on the… Read more The Baker Nature Notebooks – part 2
During our annual Collections Fortnight each year we appraise and audit boxes held in our repository. Last year, as part of this auditing process, we came across a large volume of letters. Typed-up, it was quickly clear that these were not original letters, but nonetheless they were intriguing, and became even more-so as we read… Read more ‘War Letters of an Ordinary Gentleman 1914-1918’: Part 1 – An Introduction
The information in this blog was recently presented as a free talk at Dorset History Centre as part of From the Stacks, our free lunchtime talks programme. These occur monthly and let staff showcase one or two interesting documents from our collections. If you are in Dorchester on the last Wednesday of the month, why… Read more The Baker Nature Notebooks – part 1
Between 2015 and 2018 Dorset History Centre undertook the ‘Unlocking the Bankes archive‘ project. During the life of this project, staff and volunteers contributed well over 100 blogs to the project website. By 2024, this project website was no longer functional in the way it originally was, and we made the decision to close the… Read more The American Army Hospital at Kingston Lacy
Last year we published a blog about two large photo albums that we digitised that were made by Crispin Redshaw, who was engineer and station manager for the Dorchester Beam Radio Station. See our previous blog here: World Radio Day: Photographing Dorchester’s Radio Past – Dorset History Centre blog Today we are revisiting these albums… Read more Photo Nerds!
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