Guest blog by Dr Elizabeth Hallam Smith Jane Julia Bennett, née Wright, Deputy Housekeeper and then Housekeeper to the House of Lords, holds a remarkable place in the history of Parliament. For she was the only woman to occupy a …
Almost too surreal is the strange consequence of a snail in a bottle. Not a Goon Show sketch this was a Year Zero moment for negligence courtesy of the highest court in the land, the House of Lords Judiciary. Here …
On Friday 2 April 1982, Argentinian forces landed on the Falkland Islands, a British territory, and occupied the islands. This crisis led to an emergency Saturday sitting called for both the House of Commons and House of Lords the following …
Eighty years have passed since the soothing sound of By the Sleeping Lagoon was first heard across our airwaves as the theme tune to the debut episode of BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs. A multitude of MPs and Peers …
This blog explores several petitions from early 1621 which tell the story of accusations, evading arrest warrants, eventual arrests, and imprisonment in the infamous Fleet Prison. The two main characters of this tale are Jeffrey Passmore, a wax chandler, otherwise …
By Mari Takayanagi, Senior Archivist Did you know the House of Lords set up a commission in India in 1938? The Lords Committee for Privileges was investigating a peerage claim and found that not all witnesses could travel to London …
By Dr Andrew Thrush, History of Parliament Four hundred years ago, shortly after the start of the third Jacobean Parliament in 1621, the House of Lords created its first set of Standing Orders. Divided into thirty-three numbered clauses and amounting …
Learn more about the Parliamentary Archives photograph collection and the secrets hidden in them. This blog was written by Simon Barnes and Tim Banting, Heritage Photographers in the Parliamentary Archives The UK Parliament recently shared a photograph from our collections, …
Ten Things you need to know about the first Black Parliamentarian Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial National Portrait Gallery This article was written by Richard Ward, Assistant Archives Officer. Warning: This article uses contemporary quotes which contain offensive language that some …
This blog post is the fourth in a series on the Queen Caroline Affair to mark its bicentenary. For an outline of the full story of the Affair, see this introductory blog post and this video. In this blog post, Dr Katie Carpenter …
