Latest news

Samuel Ernest Hemming, originally from Bromsgrove, was a member of the crew, working as a lamptrimmer on the Titanic. Samuel was one of the first people to realise the ship was sinking after it hit the iceberg. He was rescued on a lifeboat and spoke in the American investigation before returning home to his family...

A flint tool As you may have seen in our blog post for Find Of The Month – April 2021, fragile finds from the Neolithic/Early Bronze Age include tools formed from flint.  This is about a flint known as a “fabricator”. What we found From one of the quarry sites we are working on, our...

Churches, chapels and other places of worship have been central to the lives of communities from the medieval period. Over the course of the last century, however, growing secularism and religious diversity has radically changed the religious landscape. Over the past two years Worcestershire’s Historic Environment Record has been working to identify, record and better understand the...

Not just one find of the month! Every year as spring approaches many of our archaeology teams are out working in quarry sites across the region, monitoring the soil-stripping for forthcoming phases of gravel extraction. Large areas of topsoil are stripped, and it is in these sites that we most often discover archaeology and in...

Henry Samuel Morley and Kate Phillips – Second-Class Passengers Henry Morley travelled as a second-class passenger on the Titanic and sadly died in the sinking. He was listed as a passenger from Birmingham, but had shops in many places including Worcester, where one of his shop assistants was Kate Phillips. They eloped together on the...

Mr Leopold and Mrs Mathilde Weisz – Second-class Passengers Second class passengers Mr. Leopold Weisz and his wife Mrs. Mathilde Françoise Weisz travelled together on the Titanic, not as tourists, but to emigrate to Canada where Leopold had already been working and intended to continue. Early life According to his gravestone, Leopold Weisz was born...

In this blog we will consider those applicants to the Redditch Military Service Tribunals who we know of as primarily employees, either because they held exemption certificate for the whole of the war due to their jobs, or because we have not located military records. We will also look at who employed them.  We have...

In this series we look at the Worcestershire people who sailed on RMS Titanic, and the stories we can tell through the records. We start with Francis Millet, First Class Passenger. He was an internationally famous painter born in the United States and part of a group of artists based at Broadway in Worcestershire where his had most recently lived with his family. A letter he sent to a friend from the Titanic is part of the archives here.

The famously ill-fated Titanic sank in April 1912. 2,208 people sailed on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic, and the ensuing disaster on 15 April 1912 sadly resulted in the deaths of 1,503 people. It may be surprising to know some of the people aboard came from land-locked Worcestershire. An exhibition about the Titanic will be...

Private George Fredrick Irish (27465) 14th Gloucestershire Regiment (1891- 1916) George was born in 1891, according to the Census, in Redditch to Joseph and Elizabeth Irish, he had an older brother John, and a sister Alice. Joseph Irish was a labourer; his father, Joseph Irish, had been a Blacksmith on Church Green in 1875. George’s mother...