Read all about it! A love letter to the British Newspaper Archive

Resources for historical writers

My favourite online research resource is undoubtedly the British Newspaper Archive. Whether you’re trying to find out about a specific event, looking for general inspiration, or want to get a sense of the mind-set of the day, contemporary newspapers are a brilliant resource for the novelist.

I started using the BNA while researching my final Helen Oddfellow novel Folly Ditch, which included a plot strand about an unsolved Victorian murder from Charles Dickens’s boyhood. I decided I needed to write a Victorian newspaper report of the crime, for my heroine to discover tucked into an old book in a dusty antiquarian bookshop.

Which newspaper should it be from? Well, I’d read several biographies of Dickens (to my mind the best is Clare Tomlinson’s 2012 Charles Dickens: A Life), and I was intrigued to learn the young Dickens had been a ‘stringer’ on a newspaper called the British Press in 1825/6. I was tickled by the idea that the boy reporter might even have written the newspaper report himself.

I scrolled through facsimiles of the British Press on the BNA site, noting the types of article it covered, the language used in its reports, and the advertisements it carried. Helpfully, the British Press had a section headlined ‘Murders’ above its reports of homicide. Presumably it knew that’s what its readers wanted - and it gave lots of gruesome details, far more than we’d expect to see in newspapers today.

I used my research to write an account of the fictional murder, which my fictional sleuth later tracked down in the archives of the British Newspaper Archive… it all gets a bit meta at this point. I also used the BNA to look up advertisements for Victorian theatrical entertainments for another plot strand, which I later dug into further in the University of Kent’s special collection of theatrical memorabilia.

Advertisements are a rich vein of social background. I was initially puzzled by finding frequent advertisements for rubber goods in 1920s newspapers, with the assurance that goods were dispatched in plain packaging. Why would people need discreet delivery of galoshes? Then I realised what sort of rubber goods they were referring to.

More wholesomely, I’ve used women’s fashion advertisements to decide how to dress my characters, including the ready-made dress that Marjorie bought in Marshall and Snelgrove’s department store in Blackmail In Bloomsbury.

Newspapers were reassuringly sensationalist back in the 1920s, as I discovered when researching flappers and gangsters for The Soho Jazz Murders. A particular favourite of mine is the Illustrated Police News, which accompanied its reports of crimes with lurid illustrations. I particularly enjoyed the drawings which illustrated an account of the murder of an Egyptian prince at the Savoy Hotel – a famous case included in the excellent Ladykillers podcast from Lucy Worsley.

The BNA was also invaluable when I decided to set my third Marjorie Swallow book, Death At Chelsea, at the 1923 Chelsea Flower Show. Many of the newspaper reports focused on the visit of King George and Queen Mary, and how they sheltered beneath umbrellas as they bravely toured the ornamental gardens in the pouring rain (see below). Until I’d read the reports, I didn’t know that it rained hard all through May that year. The constant rain – and the royal visit – became strands in the book, and King George even got a walk-on part.

For my next Marjorie Swallow, I’m investigating Fleet Street itself, so I’ll be spending many more happy hours wandering down by byways of the BNA.

Research tip of the week

The BNA search function can be frustrating. Today I was searching for information about a tram strike, using search term ‘tram’, filtered by the month and year when I know the strike took place, which you’d think would work. It returned zero hits. When I looked up a specific publication (using the ‘choose a title’ drop-down) and navigated to the month in question, I soon found articles about the strike. I guess not all search terms are logged. If you draw a blank, try navigating to a specific publication and the nearest date you have.

Favourite research moments in the BNA Archive

• Finding advertisements for Warren’s Blacking in The British Press. Dickens students will recognise this as the notorious boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Steps where the young Dickens toiled, to his great distress, while his father was held in the Marshalsea Prison in 1824. The advertisement I found was the result of a feud between the two owners of Warren’s Blacking, one of whom left and set up a rival operation on The Strand using the same name. The ad warns against the ‘vile imposters’ producing substandard blacking!

• This Illustrated Police News account of an actress’s night out, which seems to have got a bit out of hand (see below). I’m glad my own conduct in a ballroom has never come under such scrutiny.

• The Bystander account of a trip on the Blue Train to the south of France, which I discovered while researching The Riviera Mystery. ‘We had not been in Victoria [station] a minute, before the poet of the party declared that he could smell the mimosa already. He was quite right, but it wasn’t the mimosa that grows on trees at Beaulieu. There was a large basket of it just behind him.’ Later, when they reached Avignon, ‘The poet said it was like dying and waking up in Paradise, and that the way the train stopped in Avignon reminded him of old Charon’s boat gently taking the ground on the further side of the Styx. I was a bit worried about him at first, but when I saw the breakfast he was eating I gathered that it was just his poetic way of looking at things.’