External Events and Announcements

As you will appreciate, many external events may change their details at short notice. We therefore ask you to contact organisations directly for up to date information about whether their events are going ahead as advertised. Please note that the RHC cannot provide further information on these events and announcements, nor be held responsible for any inaccuracies in what is posted below.

Higham Hall College Lecture Series

The next lecture in the Sunday afternoon series is Sunday 12 May 2024, from 2-4pm. It highlights Clare Isobel Fell, a pioneering archaeologist who shaped research into prehistoric Lakeland. Born in Ulverston in 1912, she began studying the Langdale axe industry around 1949 and was the first person to demonstrate the scale of the activity there, coining the term 'factory' to describe it. She also guessed correctly that other quarries would be found on outcrops of volcanic tuff in the Lake District. Dr Kate Sharpe, also a native Cumbrian will look at Fell's role within the story of archaeology and in relation to the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society.

Dr Sharpe is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham University.

Venue: Higham Hall College, Bassenthwaite Lake, Cockermouth CA13 9SH

Tickets are £18 each or 2 for £32, with price including tea and cake

For more information and to book tickets, please contact Amy Andrews on telephone 017687 76276

University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) Talks

UCLan will be marking the 170th anniversary of the Great Preston Lockout 1853-1854 on Tuesday 14 May from 17.45-20.00 at the Central Methodist Church, Lune Street, Preston.

The Great Preston Strike and Lock-out was a momentous national event in Victorian Britain. It began as a series of isolated strikes at a small number of mills in August/September 1853, became a general lock-out involving most textile operatives in October 1853, and then once again became a strike in February 1854, though this time on a much larger scale than during the previous summer and continued until early May 1854. The dispute was immortalised by journalists and writers such as Samuel Bamford, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Karl Marx, who were inspired by the actions of the operatives and their famous cry of ten per cent and no surrender!’.

Join the UCLan history team for an event featuring a series of talks on new research to be published in a special edition of Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (2024), the screening of a short film by Sarah-Ann Kennedy, and a performance of songs from the Lock-out by Gregg Butler and Tom Walsh. Tickets are free but must be booked via: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/booking/t-lnmdvvy

Friends of Lancaster City Museum Talk

Professor Lindsay Allason-Jones will be delivering a lecture to the Friends of Lancaster City Museum at the City Museum Education Room at 1pm on Thursday 23 May, entitled The Roman Sculpture of Lancashire. Entrance for FOLCM members is free, and non-members are charged a £2 entry fee, with donations for a raffle encouraged during the event. For more information, please telephone 01524 64637.

Lancashire Local History Federation

The Federation's “At Home” will be hosted this year by Chorley Heritage Centre Support Group and will be held on Saturday 13 July at The Lancastrian Suite, Chorley Town Hall, PR7 1DP. It looks like a most interesting day with talks by Dr Bill Walker on Myles Standish: Man of Mystery and Alan Davies on The Pit Brow Women of The Lancashire Coalfield, an optional lunch and a range of visits in the afternoon. For more information contact Mrs Jane Atherton, 13 Fernbank, Chorley, Lancashire, PR6 7BH or email lshields26@hotmail.co.uk.

Lancashire Archives and Local History

We're delighted to let you know that Lancashire Archives and Local History now has a Facebook page!

You can also follow Lancashire Archives on X (formerly Twitter)

Also, back issues of the new Lancashire local history magazine 'Archives' are now available to purchase in all Lancashire County Council libraries and at Lancashire Archives, priced at £3. If you'd like to receive a copy by post, please contact the Archives at archives@lancashire.gov.uk.

If you have an idea you’d like to discuss, please contact archives@lancashire.gov.uk to discuss your suggestion.

Rookhow Open Days

Rookhow is a Historic Grade II* listed 1725 Quaker Meeting House in the heart of the Rusland Valley. Set in 12 wooded acres between Coniston and Lake Windermere, open days are held every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month.

Filmed Production of 400-Year-Old Play By Shakespeare's Contemporary Lady Mary Wroth

A 400-year-old play, which captures how the delights and difficulties of courtship have changed (or not), is now freely available on film thanks to Professor Alison Findlay, Professor of Renaissance Drama in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association.

‘Love’s Victory’, by Shakespeare’s contemporary Lady Mary Wroth, was written c.1617-1619 and is the earliest surviving romantic comedy by an Englishwoman.

The performance is the result of nearly 30 years of work by Professor Alison Findlay. Her research project, ‘Shakespeare and His Sisters’ was set up to explore the works of Shakespeare and his female contemporary dramatists in site-specific locations. The 2022 production, directed by Emma Rucastle and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Lancaster University, was designed to recreate the conditions of an early household performance. It was staged at the author’s home, Penshurst Place in Kent, in 2022.

Watch Love's Victory for free

Bob Dobson, Heritage Books

Bob Dobson has been dealing in second-hand Lancashire interest books for over 50 years and due to retirement is selling stock at half the catalogued price. From Lancashire Acts of Parliament to dialect poetry and old picture postcards, there is much to interest the local and family historian. To receive a catalogue, please email Bob at landypublishing@yahoo.co.uk. He can also be contacted on 01253 886103 or 0774 9838 444 (text preferred).

The Leyland Historical Society

Meetings have resumed in the Shield Room, Banqueting Suite, South Ribble Civic Centre, West Paddock, Leyland, PR25 1DH. £5 for visitors (but new members are always welcome). Visit The Leyland Historical Society to find out more.

British Association for Local History

The British Association for Local History has a new feature, the Ten Minute Talk, which has proved so popular that there are now ten talks and presentations available on their website, on subjects as diverse as nineteenth-century small businesses, marriage in early-modern Suffolk, construction of a Cambridge gas holder or the ‘Spanish’ influenza epidemic of 1918-19, so please do take a look.

Local and Family History Resources

Zoe Lawson of the Lancashire Local History Federation has kindly gathered a list of helpful resources. The following is a selection of free websites.

• National Archives

Genealogy Sites

Ancestry and Find my past are well known and offer a 14-day free trial.

Family search is the largest site to offer free access to records from old censuses, birth registers, etc. It includes the International Genealogical Index (IGI) which has parish records for several countries including Australia, Canada and the USA, as well as the UK.

Genuki doesn’t hold records but contains a vast amount of historical information that will help you find the records you need from anywhere in the UK.

Jewish genealogy website.

Births, Marriages and Deaths. The Register Offices in the county of Lancashire hold the original records of births, marriages and deaths back to the start of civil registration in 1837. The county's family history societies are collaborating with the local registration services to make the indexes to these records freely searchable at Lancashire BMD.

Free access to records of births, marriages and deaths for the whole of the UK is available at Free BMD, Note that not all records have yet been transcribed.

Archived catalogues are always a good starting point and many online catalogue entries provide significant detail, though not a substitute for looking at the original document when archives offices re-open.

• Lancashire Archives
• Manchester City Archives

Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire

The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire seeks to promote understanding of, and public interest in, Lancashire and Cheshire’s past, through the publication of editions of historical documents. For an annual subscription of £20, members receive each year a hardback volume and an invitation to a historical lecture. For more information, including details of forthcoming publications, please visit http://rslc.org.uk/

Women In Street Names

Women in Street Names is a project to highlight streets named after women, for the British Federation of Women Graduates, and Harper Adams University. It was launched at the Women’s Library at the LSE in July 2019. Carrie de Silva from Harper Adams explains that the aim of the project is “to highlight streets named after women, (and to highlight how few there are!), and to remember such women as are commemorated. Outputs will be a booklet of mini-biographies of women named and a paper to consider political and social culturalisation, conscious and unconscious, through the names we see in our streets”. Information is requested from across the UK, and from villages, towns and cities. More obscure royalty will be of interest (the collection won’t be including Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II). Obscure or less well-known saints are also welcome. Of particular interest will be little-known local women who nevertheless made a large contribution to their area. Carrie will welcome the name on its own, even if the sender knows nothing else about the named woman. Please forward the street name with district, town, city, village, etc. with the woman’s main achievement or area of operation (if you know it) to: Carrie de Silva: cdesilva@harper-adams.ac.uk. (07583 144622.)

Cumbria Prehistory Resource

Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (CWAAS) have produced a learning resource to help teachers in the county’s schools support the teaching of prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, within the History curriculum. The pack was produced with input from archaeological experts and feedback from teachers and learners after a pilot session in a Maryport school. It comprises an introductory slide show; in-school activities (covering topics like artefacts, burials, food and the home); on-site activity suggestions (using Cumbrian sites, artefacts and museums); background information and signposts to further information.

The resource pack is free and can be downloaded from the Cumbria Past website.

Or search Cumbria Past in Google, then open the tab Grants, and look under Schools Area

Global Link

Global Link has launched an exciting new online community heritage 'map' of Europe where viewers can discover previously undocumented histories of activities relating to peace and internationalism during the inter-war years of the twentieth century. Global Link has worked with volunteers to uncover local and regional histories of people who fought and sometimes died for social justice, human rights and peace. Now with EU funding from Erasmus +, this learning is being shared and developed with European partners through the project Learning from the Past (so that we are not condemned to repeat it) where partners have developed the online 'map' to document stories from across the continent. Viewers can click on areas within countries to find histories relating to that place. These include stories of people resisting fascism, colonialism and other underground resistance movements, stories of Scouting and Girl Guide movements across Europe, stories of the development of League of Nations groups, peace and internationalist activities in and out of schools, activism within international women's movements, and stories of migration. Visit Learning from the past website.

The Viking Age in the North West

The Viking Age in the North West is a free app which allows you to discover a range of sites in the Wirral that shed light on the history of Viking settlement and integration. These sites range from place names and archaeological finds to stone sculptures. The app comes with a map to help you locate sites, or you can browse through the alphabetical list. There is a brief description and image for every featured site, as well as references to find out more information. It is hoped to expand the geographical range of the app in future, and feedback via the app is welcome. You can download the app for free from the App Store.

If you would like to submit an article for this page or our newsletter, please contact us: rhc@lancaster.ac.uk 01524 593770