An online journal for the North Devon Athenaeum
To celebrate ten years of our blog we thought we would share the top ten posts from the last ten years! 10) The Ballad of Barnstaple's Gaols We're kicking off the countdown with this post written during the first lockdown in 2020, giving a very brief history of some of the prisons of Barnstaple. 9) …
Continue reading "Our Top Ten Posts of All Time – Ten years of Tales From the Archives"
Described as the Grand Old Man of Barum on his death in 1976, Bruce William Oliver was born 140 years ago on 28th May 1883. He is probably most well known as a local architect along with his father William Clement Oliver who was responsible for designing many of the nineteenth century buildings in Barnstaple. …
Continue reading "Introducing Bruce William Oliver…10 things you may or may not know about him."
To celebrate the life of Charles Kingsley a few years ago we traced the local links between him and PG Wodehouse via Rudyard Kipling and H H Munro (aka Saki). However, these are not the only Literary Links in North Devon. On this day in 1851 George Newnes was born in Matlock, Derbyshire, the youngest …
Continue reading "Literary Links, Discover Sir George Newnes…On Our Shelves!"
Discover the Thomas Becket Connection...On Our Shelves! One of the oldest seals of Barnstaple commemorates one of the most infamous murders in English History…the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket on this day in 1170. The seal belongs to Barnstaple’s Bridge Trust and depicts the Chapel built at the town end of the now grade I …
My mother remembered that in 1927, after her younger brother was born, he had to wear a shoulder and arm splint because his arm had been broken during his delivery. My Grandmother had been assisted during the birth, like most lower-class women, by an untrained local woman. The cost of a doctor per visit of …
We often come across intriguing items which have a story to tell when we are looking for something else in our collections, this generally happens when we are doing something quickly for someone! This was the case when I kept coming across images of a rather imposing building from various angles and in various states …
Tales From the Archives 