Last Friday, we published a sombre but moving post entitled A Leeds Schoolgirl Reflects on WW1. Now, blogger Maureen Jessop has sent a more lighthearted little update our way. Take a look at the photo below (which, like last week’s poem, comes from the Leeds Girls’ High School magazine) and see if you can work out which of the…
Year: 2016
A Leeds Schoolgirl Reflects on WW1
As part of Dying Matters awareness week, The Secret Library investigates the story behind a powerful poem on the subject of death and loss. Our Heritage Volunteer Maureen Jessop discovered the piece while reading and indexing the magazine of Leeds Girls’ High, the school that stood in Headingley from 1876 until its merger with Leeds Grammar School in…
Making a Drama Out of a Catalogue Card
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Last weekend, we welcomed a group of Leeds University students to the Local and Family History Library to take part in a mystery project for the Out There Challenge programme. None of them knew each other, and none even knew where they’d be meeting until…
William Darby and the Ghosts of the Past
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library The following article was edited for publication as part of last Friday’s collaboration with the Norfolk Heritage Centre. This is the unedited version and forms Part III of a loose trilogy on (some) meanings in the study of local history. Part I is here; Part…
William Darby in Norwich and Leeds: Life and Death
This week on the Secret Library we welcome Orla Kennelly from the Norfolk Heritage Centre. Orla kindly agreed to write a section for our blog focusing on the circus manager and performer, William Darby – aka Pablo Fanque. Darby was born in Norwich, but is buried in Leeds; Orla’s section looks at Darby’s early years, while our part concentrates…
Shakespeare and the Art world
by Adam Barham, Art Library. Many artists have felt compelled to depict the plays of Shakespeare. Some are attracted to Shakespeare’s universal themes and complex characters, which inspire them to produce stirring representations of the plays’ inner meanings. Others appreciate his combination of exotic locations and sparse scene descriptions, which leave them free to create…
Meeting the Ghosts of the Brontë Family
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library In his book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), James Shapiro makes the point that “every literature professor is in the business of speaking to the dead” and that, by extension, “communicating with the dead is what we all do…[e]very time we pick up a volume of Milton…
A.R. Turner’s Ironmongery Catalogue: The Communication of History
Part II in a loose trilogy of posts exploring (some) meanings behind the study of local history. Part I is here and Part III is here This article is also #17 in our People of Leeds series by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library “How much history can be communicated by pressure on a…
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