The long nineteenth century was a period of substantial trial and error and steady development by the Admiralty in its efforts to create a centralised, well-trained and reliable naval reserve, which could be called upon to augment the fleets during an emergency. Between 1831 and 1903 the Admiralty undertook a variety of measures, with the […]
Despite the cleansing of the sailor image during the late Victorian era, many contemporaries viewed sailors’ predilection for drink as a worrying problem.[1] In particular, Agnes Weston used the image of a drunken sailor riding a barrel to make her case for the temperance movement, although this portrayal was condemned by sailors.[2] Yet, the image […]
The practice of gibbeting, also known more specifically as hanging in irons, or hanging in chains, was a particularly macabre punishment for a variety of convicted felons, and yet it is the image of the pirate cadaver swinging eerily in the breeze, which appears to have become most engrained in popular culture since the eighteenth […]
In The Myth of the Press Gang, J. Ross Dancy offers a quantitative approach to the subject. He developed a sampling system and entered the details as recorded in individual ships’ muster books covering the period 1793-1801. Data entry took twenty two weeks. The end result was a database including 27,174 individuals, “roughly a 10 […]
The naval town of Portsmouth, located on the south coast of Britain, had a rich cinema culture in the early 20th century. At the peak of the leisure habit’s popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, the town was home to 29 cinemas. These ranged from the plush ‘picture palaces’ to the smaller, rudimentary cinemas. The […]
One of the elements that attracted me to the University of Portsmouth BA (Hons) History course was the department’s links with local museums, galleries and other heritage ventures. The course also has a strong emphasis on social and cultural history. The University is ideally placed on the doorstep of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Two months into […]
