Twitter Digest October 2022

Welcome to the latest Twitter Digest! We’re going to bend the rules a little this month, as we got inspired by the Archives & Records Association for Scotland’s Archive Box initiative, which began on September 26th. Each morning they would release a number and we would find something in our collections to match. Here’s our …

Finding Derbyshire Business archives

A guide to finding the archives of Derbyshire businesses. Derbyshire Record Office holds nearly 1000 collections for businesses and trades across the county and city of Derby, primarily for the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, although some date as early as the 16th century.  Amongst the largest of these collections are: D1851 Bryan Donkin and …

An intriguing photograph

Sorting through a records of the Record Office earlier this week, I came across a small bundle of copy photographs of images elsewhere in the archive collections. The images were rather eclectic in their subject matter, featuring photographs from World War One, family and industrial photographs, and I browsed through them again whilst waiting for …

Treasure 26: Ferodo’s imaginative advertising

This treasure is an extraordinary map of another world called Nevacantell - a world filled with motoring hazards, mitigated by brake linings manufactured in Chapel-en-le-Frith. It has been nominated by a former archivist at Derbyshire Record Office, Gary Tuson, who is now County Archivist at Norfolk Record Office. He writes: The business archive of Ferodo, …

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ferodo and the Bullet-Proof vest

Now then... Stop me if you have heard this one before (and if you have, it may be because you recall a flurry of press activity in the late 1990s), but did you know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle submitted a design for a bullet-proof vest to Field Marshal Haig during the First World War? …

Derbyshire Motoring Pioneers added to Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Here's a press release from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.   You can access this invaluable resource for reliable biographical information by visiting http://www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/libraries/online_information/oxford_biographies/default.asp, with your Derbyshire Library card near at hand. Two Derbyshire pioneers, who helped to shape British motoring in the twentieth century, are included in the latest update to the Oxford Dictionary …