Great to see another example showing just how relevant archives are and can be to our modern society – we learn about the past to inform and inspire a better future.
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is a public research centre which specialises in the history of London. We are currently focusing on work with our audio collections as part of a UK-wide project ‘Unlocking Our Sound Heritage’. LMA aims to digitally preserve almost half a million rare and at-risk sound recordings, keeping seminal speeches of Londoners safe for future generations.
Two such Londoners are Jessica and Eric Huntley. The Huntley’s played an active role in the British African – Caribbean community from their first arrival in England in 1956, and worked on seminal campaigns for racial and social justice. Their archive contains a wide range of materials relating to black supplementary schools and the Black Parents Movement, the New Cross Massacre Action Committee, international campaigns to end the South African apartheid regime, political repression in Guyana and to free former Black Panther and radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal from death row. Their…
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Derbyshire Record Office 
Thanks Sue, we shall look I believe there is a similar case in Buxton as well. Unfortunately, all too common around the country, though perhaps there are cases where the individuals were able to enjoy their freedom indefinitely but their stories tend to be even more hidden than those for whom freedom was only brief. Undoubtedly there are such stories yet to be discovered amongst the collections
One really good true story was in, I think, one of Osbert Sitwell’s books. He described how an African man, a servant at Renishaw in probably the 18thC, escaped and lived in the woods as if it was the African bush, hunting and foraging. I think it was quite a while before sadly he was recaptured.