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Women

‘Wanton Wenches’ and ‘Incorrigible Rogues’ Chapter 1: Two Mutinies: a Horrid set of Miscreants

Peace with the infant republic of America was declared in August 1783. With the small detail that Britain had lost the war apparently discounted, it appears that the arrogant assumption was made that everything...
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Harriet Bumford – Another Victorian Girl – Revisited

It is often the case that the very next day after you have committed something to print more information will come to light. So it is with the family of Harriet Bumford Darke. When...
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A gift from Queen Victoria to Lady F Bailhe

A Present from Queen Victoria

Some years ago my distant cousin, the artist and author Ian Pillinger bought a bag of items in a junk shop which “looked interesting”. Being a man of many talents, he started to put...
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A A 19th century street-seller

Hard Times: Another Victorian Girl – Harriet Bumford Darke, c1831-1895

Harriet’s Story Thomas Bumford and Amelia Evans were married on 3rd August 1828 at Abergavenny, a small Welsh market town on the river Usk about six miles from the border with England. This is...
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Sarah Matthews: A Poke from the Psychic Facebook

“Overture and Beginners Please” Miss Sarah Matthews was a surprise package. I had never heard of her before. She had a life of two halves: an actress from our Theatre Royal, Bristol who was...
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Burnt at the Stake: Jane Lumock and Mary Norwood

From the Middle Ages the penalty for the murder of a wife by a husband was to be hanged by the neck until dead, but the murder of a husband by a wife was...
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College Green, Bristol ca 1830

Mrs Frances Ruscombe and her maid, Mary Champness, otherwise Sweet: A double murder at College Green

On Thursday 27 September 1764, a spinster in late middle-age, Miss Jefferies, went to her sister Frances’s house on College Green where she had been invited to dine at 12 noon. It appears the...
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St Swithin’s, Walcot.

A Lifetime in Music: The two Julias

It will be no surprise if I say I am interested in those women who in days of yore, when it was doubly or trebly difficult, managed to have a life outside the domestic...
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An Innocent Casualty of the Bristol Riots

The Bristol Mercury of 13 June 1846 tells of a recent event in Gloucester when on Tuesday night at nearly midnight, a girl of abandoned character nicknamed ‘Welsh Nan’ with her hair dishevelled, her...
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Anna Maria Falconbridge – a life that would make a good Netflix series

My previous subject (Mary Kennedy, as far as we know) wrote only one line about her voyage to the other side of the World and back.  By contrast Anna Maria Falconbridge is her direct...
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