Investigations of a Dog

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish. (more…)

There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.

But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.

The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).

Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.

I’m very pleased to announce a new group blog: The Horse in History and Culture. This grew out of last month’s horse conference at Roehampton, which was easily the best conference I’ve ever been to. If only a fraction of the people who were there get involved it could potentially become one of the best group blogs around, so I hope it takes off and carries on.

The conference was in honour of leading horse historian Pete Edwards, who is retiring this year. I first met him when I started my PhD in 1997, and he’s given me lots of help and encouragement over the years – showing me the ropes at the PRO, giving me notes and references, commenting on my writing, and being the first person to cite my thesis in print. Also it was at his house that I first heard Kick Out The Jams by the MC5, which is possibly more important. Therefore it was fitting that the conference turned out so well. It was not like the conferences I’ve experienced before. There were interesting papers presented by confident, natural speakers who knew how to engage with an audience. There were worthwhile discussions which didn’t devolve into people getting their cocks out. I even had some good conversations in the coffee breaks! The prospect of meeting Erica Fudge and Bruce Boehrer was exciting and scary, but they turned out to be very nice in person and not at all scary. There were also some other people whose work I hadn’t come across before but who are worth checking out. In particular Kevin de Ornellas and Sandra Swart are both god-like geniuses and really cool people. So overall a fantastic experience. Can we have another one please?