Brad Beaven, is the guest curator of the new Lest We Forget exhibition at the Portsmouth City Museum. The exhibition is the centre-piece event of Portsmouth City Council’s commemoration of the First World War. Portsmouth City Museum, in partnership with the University of Portsmouth, was awarded £97,000 by the Heritage Lottery Fund for the Lest […]
Port Towns and Urban Cultures (PTUC) are pleased to announce this new vacancy from the University of Kent as part of The Gateways to the First World War, an AHRC-funded centre, of which PTUC’s Project Leader, Dr Brad Beaven is a co-investigator of. The project is designed to ensure public engagement with the First World War […]
The provincial press of the late nineteenth-century provides a fascinating insight into how imperialistic sentiment was conveyed to a newly literate working-class.[1] The provincial press adopted the conventions of ‘new journalism’, catering for working-class tastes by prioritising the reporting of sport, sensationalist news and by placing a focus upon localised issues.[2] Its rise paralleled the […]
In her book Cornish Wrecking, Cathryn Pearce relates an incident from 1755 in which Customs Officers opened fire on a pilchard sloop caught in the act of fishing two casks of brandy out of the water. The sloop fled, but was intercepted at the quay, where combat continued and blood was spilled. It emerged, however, […]
In 1925, J. Stanley Gardiner, a Cambridge don and fisheries expert, made a public statement of regret that the Great Barrier Reef existed. “It is the greatest pity in the world,” he told the Royal Geographical Society, “… a tragedy so far as the people of Queensland are concerned.” Gardiner explained that the reef was […]
When my father was seventeen years old, he lied about his age and joined the U.S. Merchant Marine. He got a lowly job in the engine room (his official job title was “wiper”) and spent several years as the misfit sailor who haunted used book shops in every port. He was one of those working-class […]
