I have taken out a subscription to The British Newspaper Archive at a cost of £99 for the year. This gives me access to every newspaper that the Archive has digitalised, which is quite a considerable number of newspapers and magazines. It has a powerful search engine which, if you input the correct information, such as names and dates and places, will generate what you are hoping to find fairly accurately. In the initial stages of playing with it I found some fascinating news items about my family that I had never known about. More importantly, when I searched for my brother’s own articles from the days when he was a journalist, I had an extraordinary haul of his weekly columns for the various newspapers that he wrote for. On that basis alone, the subscription was good value.
The British Newspaper Archive (BNA) is a partnership between Find My Past and The British Library. From what I understand, the UK’s collection of newspapers is kept by the British Library and Find My Past (FMP) have the contract for digitalising and creating the means by which the public can access it without going to London to search the physical records.
When the 1921 Census Returns were released the Government awarded the contract to FMP which at the time annoyed me because it meant that I had to take out two subscriptions, one to Ancestry who gave me access to all the Census Returns since 1841 and then the second one to give me access to the 1921 Return. However, when I started using the FMP site, I discovered that it also gave me access to the Newspaper Archive and each time I searched a particular family member, if they had a mention in their local newspaper, it would throw up that record. It was fun at that point to discover that most of the records were reports in local newspapers about the bad behaviour of some of my ancestors, or wedding notices with lengthy lists of the gifts that were given to the bride and groom. My particular interest was the activities of my parents and siblings in the local newspaper from the 1950’s onwards. The 1921 Census Return rights that FMP had ran out after two years and were then available via Ancestry. This meant that I could cease my subscription to FMP. For just over half the price I can now subscribe to this haul of newspapers.
The BNA search engine enables detailed searching by name, place, date, and publication. Once you get the hang of the results that get thrown up, you begin to learn how to refine your search. Using just my surname might result in newspapers with adverts selling ‘carver chairs’.
I started my search with my father’s name. I knew that he appeared regularly in the Surrey Mirror, usually in connection with his business as a Turf Accountant and his various memberships, golf and British Legion among them. I was surprised to find a report from 1952 when we were living at 59 Ladbroke Road in Redhill, Surrey. My father was appearing in front of the Magistrates Bench in Reigate where he was accused of leaving his parked car on the road without lights. In his defence he claimed, ‘someone must have turned the lights off in his absence’. The magistrate was having nothing of that and fined him £1.
Report from the Surrey Mirror,1952
So, discovering information like this gives a lot of attention to detail in the days when reporting had accurate detail. The report listed his full name and address. The report gives us a date and then comes the interesting social history of car driving. The road traffic regulations regarding keeping parking lights on did not change until 1968 but then it was only when parking on streets with a speed limit not exceeding 30mph.
Another search for the family of Nicol in Stevenston, my wife’s great grandparents family, presents me with a copy of the Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald and a report about Miss E Nicol who in 1912 was working as a Primary School Teacher in Muirkirk, which at that point in time was a coal mining village in Ayrshire, about 15 miles away from her family home. Elspeth Nicol was 22 years old, and the report was about her new appointment with the Kilwinning School Board. Beneath the notice there is a Motion to the Board to abolish school leaving dates because there was concern about ‘lads’ leaving school at in appropriate times to discover there were no jobs or trades available for them. Presumably ‘lassies’ would find employment more easily. Abolishing leaving dates meant that schools could hold onto their pupils until work was available. A radical idea I would have thought, at that time, but probably not popular with families who were desperate for the income.
All search returns are downloadable in PDF format. To use them in a blog such as this they must be transferred into JPG or other formats. The problem being that the cropped enlargement is not very good to read. The content is excellent for the social history context for the stories that I write about.
Searching this archive can be a bit like going down a rabbit hole, frustrating, tiring, but the results can be exciting and informative.
My history during the 1960’s when I was active in the peace movement, CND and the Peace in Vietnam campaign, are all mapped out in articles that appear in the Surrey Mirror of that decade, including letters that I regularly wrote to that paper. It is an extraordinary record of my life from that point of view.
For the price of the subscription BNA needs to be used regularly. It has a useful saving facility of the searches that you want to retain and this also includes a folder system which I am currently using with family names as titles.
Overall, I would only recommend this archive subscription if you are researching regularly. If it is for family history only, then a long-term subscription is not necessary. For social history or specific research for a project, I can see the sense in taking out a subscription for as long as needed. It is the equivalent cost of an expensive coffee each month.
So, make your own coffee and invest for a short while in this helpful research tool.