The following work has been undertaken since 28 August 2024
Items added to the BRS collection: primary sources and guides
The earliest surviving report of Bristol’s suffrage society (est. 1868).
Published last December by the BRS, the pdf of the volume has now been made publicly available following a generous £2,000 donation from The Drapers’ Company to cover the Gold Open Access fee. This was sufficient to cover the BRS’s publication costs.
A visitors’ guide to the Hotwells spa, including analysis by prominent local scientists of the water, its medicinal qualities, the area’s geology and the Avon Gorge’s botany.
Home, Gordon (ed.), Cathedrals, Abbeys & Famous Churches: Bristol, Bath & Malmesbury (London, 1925)
A popular early twentieth-century guidebook.
Lee, Thomas, White-Lion Club, Late Riot and Dock Tax (Bristol, 1807)
Political pamphlet written by the Bristol radical, Thomas Lee.
Stone, G. F., Bristol Chronology 1915. The City in War Time (Bristol, 1916)
An annal of a single year produced by the Western Daily Press during World War I.
An autobiography and family history which details the lives of two of Bristol’s leading suffrage campaigners: Elizabeth and Emily Sturge.
A church guide and history written by St Mary Redcliffe’s archivist.
Items added to the BRS collection: secondary works
Moore Smith, G. C., The Family of Withypoll (Walthamstow Antiquarian Society, no. 34, 1936)
Written by Professor Gordon Moore Smith, this book reconstructs the family histories of merchant families with deep connections to Bristol – including Paul Withypoll and the Thornes.
A contemporary illustrated history of Bristol written by one of its foremost journalists. The book includes hundreds of drawings by Samuel Loxton, the leading newspaper illustrator for late Victorian and Edwardian Bristol.
Tanner, S. J., How the Women’s Suffrage Movement began in Bristol Fifty Years ago (Bristol, 1918)
A contemporary history of the women’s suffrage movement, written at the time that women received the vote.
Highlighting digital sources on our website
In addition to digitising materials ourselves, we often come across obscure publications that others have digitised and electronically published. If we think something might be of particular interest we will add links to it from the BRS publications pages. A good recent example is:
Sturge, William, Some Recollections of a Long Life (Bristol, 1893)
This memoir includes some lovely reflections on how Bristol and Bristolians changed over the course of the nineteenth century.
If you have suggestions for other publications that it would be useful to highlight, please email our General Editor: Digitisation, Evan Jones.
Wikipedia / Wikimedia
We added over a hundred high-resolution jpg images to Wikimedia that relate to Bristol history. These can be used on Wikipedia pages but are also free for any other users. Many of these images are drawings of Victorian and Edwardian Bristol by Samuel Loxton, whose Wikipedia page now includes a gallery of his Bristol images.
Following our publication of the Ledger of Thomas Howell, Wikipedia articles were created for six of Bristol’s most important Tudor merchants: Thomas Howell, Hugh Eliot, Robert Thorne the elder, Robert Thorne the younger, Nicholas Thorne and John Smyth. In addition, an article was created for the Victorian suffragist: Elizabeth Sturge. All of these articles draw heavily on volumes we have digitised and all take advantage of the ability to provide one-click links to individual pages of works in the BRS Collection. This facilitates reference checking and allows readers to easily find out more about the topic.
More than a hundred other Wikipedia pages received minor edits. Many of these involved the addition of citations / links to items in the BRS Collection, or the addition of relevant images that we have added to Wikimedia.
Support to other record societies
The Bristol Record Society is at the forefront of digitisation and open access publication. In the words of a reviewer of one of our recent volumes, record societies today are:
faced with the quandary of how to make their volumes more accessible to a wider audience better accustomed to reading from a screen than from a printed book. Bristol Record Society has overcome this. Not only does it publish volumes in traditional print, but also digitally. Furthermore, the society has digitised its back catalogue, and many other records relating to the history of Bristol and its area, all freely available online. Could this be a model for other societies to follow?1
Interest in our work has led to formal and informal contacts with other record societies that are seeking to improve their digital offer and/or update their publication strategies to enable them to fulfil their core objectives more effectively. A recent example includes a formal meeting between us and the Somerset Record Society, who are embarking on their own digitisation programme. We are, of course, always happy to help fellow record societies in a similar way – particularly those who are considering free-to-use / open access models.
Usage of BRS digital resources
From August 2024 to January 2025 the Bristol Record Society Collection on the Internet Archive received around 1,900 views / downloads per month. This is about 500 higher than the previous period. The increase was particularly pleasing given that it included a fortnight in October when the Internet Archive was down following a major cyber attack.
Following the attack on the Internet Archive, we did a ‘stock take’ to ensure that we have local copies of all pdfs in the BRS Collection. We also decided to update the licence agreement of some of the items in the collection. We have now made our own volumes and any out-of-copyright works available on a Creative Commons licence. This allows people not only to download pdfs but to post them elsewhere, or print them out privately. Permitting this increases the likelihood of users being able to access the works even if the Internet Archive is inaccessible. As ever, our guiding principle is that we seek to maximise the availability and accessibility of materials that can be used to study and research Bristol’s history.
The BRS website received 790 views in the last 30 days from 271 individual visitors. The monthly viewing figures have been broadly stable over the last year.
- Evelyn Lord, review of Richard Coates, Shirehampton Church-Yard Book (2024) in The Local Historian (2023) p. 254. ↩︎
Bristol Record Society 