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‘There will be no compulsory vaccination. That’s not the way we do things in this country,’ the Prime Minister told a news conference on 23 November 2020, on the eve of the rollout of the Covid vaccination programme. (‘Johnson says there will be no compulsory COVID vaccination’, Reuters, 23 November 2020.) Except it was how…
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On the 7th of January this year, The Sun newspaper ran the startling headline: Lags to Riches: prison chiefs blasted for blowing £12 million of taxpayers’ money on TVs for lags It reported that the authorities had been criticised for buying 128,000 flat screen TVs for prisoners. Predictably, The Sun had no trouble finding members…
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Victorian Christmas Market, from Thomas Kibble Hervey, Book of Christmas (1859) Christmas: traditionally the season to be jolly and to shop till you drop; when public transport lets you down and people bet on the chances of it being a white one! Perhaps Christmas 2020 will be somewhat different: last minute shopping online, public transport…
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Looking through the material discovered by the In Their Own Write project team, a group of letters from Stockport Union resonated with the recently dramatised story of Anthony Bryan, a member of the Windrush generation who, in 2016, came very close to being deported to Jamaica, a place he had not set foot in for…
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Temporary hospital during the Spanish Flu pandemic, 1918 In these unsettling times it might seem as though history has little comfort to offer us. When we look back for reassurance, we tend to light on the scale of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the horrors of the Black Death, or the ravages of smallpox through the…
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So ran the headline in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph of 12 March 1864. Overnight a catastrophe had struck, one of the biggest man-made disasters in British history. The story of the bursting of the Bradfield dam has a particular resonance today, with the memory of events at Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire fresh in our minds.…
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We’re all familiar with it in some form or another: either George Sims’s original lament against the cold, hard world of Victorian welfare or Robert Weston and Bert Lee’s parody, where “dangerous Dan McGrew / was fighting to save the pudding / from a lady that’s known as Lou”. But whichever version of the popular…
Projects, Poverty and the Poor Under the Poor Laws 