The personal papers of William Wedgwood Benn, 1st Viscount Stansgate were placed with the House of Lords Record Office (today’s Parliamentary Archives) in May 1973 by his widow Viscountess Stansgate and son Anthony Benn MP. Unfortunately, a considerable proportion of …
Andrew Bonar Law was famously known as the Unknown Prime Minister. He was the shortest serving Prime Minister of the 20th century with only 209 days in office from 23 October 1922 to 19 May 1923. He had to resign …
This blog article was written by Richard Ward, Assistant Archives Officer. Ask someone what The Primrose League was, and they’ll probably answer – An eighties pop band who had a few minor hits? In fact, this happened to be a …
The Lord Speaker is both a new and old role in the House of Lords. The title of Lord Speaker was created by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Before this, the role of overseeing Lords’ debates was one of the …
This blog was written by Danielle Wiles, Archive Assistant (Graduate Trainee). This blog explores Sri Lanka’s journey towards independence between 1930 and 1948. Throughout this blog, I will refer to Sri Lanka using its former name Ceylon, as this was …
Blunt, disruptive, rambunctious just some of the terms that could describe the chamber antics displayed on many an occasion by Irene Ward MP. This was a Conservative Dame who came up the hard way determined to represent people disadvantaged by …
In our Archive, there are certain private collections so large given the task of writing a blog about one of these individuals its hard to know where to start… For this reason, I’ve come up with a plan to streamline …
This blog was written by Zoe Voice, Preventive Conservator. Introduction Welcome back for part two of our series on transparent papers. In the last post, we took a look at what transparent paper is, how it’s made, what examples we …
This blog article was written by Zoe Voice, Preventive Conservator. Introduction Transparent Papers, particularly those found in archives, are a material that can look quite intimidating to handle due to their often-poor condition and brittleness.[1] However, the plans drawn on …
This blog was written by Katherine Emery, Assistant Archives Officer. Westminster Hall was originally built during the reign of William II in 1097 but most of the Hall and its iconic roof we know today is from the repairs, redesign, …
