This month in Hull: April

One of the resources we offer free access to here at the History Centre is the British Newspaper Archive. This is a massive project to digitise millions of pages of British newspapers, and several Hull papers are available covering 1794-1950. The huge benefit of having newspapers digitised is that you can easily search them by date or keyword, which really opens them up for research.

It’s not always the big events that tell you the most about a certain point in history; the day to day goings-on also have stories to tell. So for this post I decided to choose an April date more or less at random and, using the British Newspaper Archive collections, see what was happening in Hull.

The date I chose is 20 April 1925, and the newspaper I looked at is the Hull Daily Mail. All images in this post are copyright Local World Limited/Trinity Mirror and were created and used courtesy of the British Library Board.

Browsing through the pages, the first thing that catches the eye is of course the adverts.

The Costello clothing store is luring in lady shoppers with their Fashion Corner advert: “Here you are with MAY peeping at you, and you are still without your SPRING outfit… ARE YOU READY FOR THE WARMER DAYS?” If only it were still around, I would be down to Costello’s for a smart two piece costume in an instant.

Elsewhere on the page, we learn that “Hull has the unique distinction of having more wireless listeners per thousand than any other town in the United Kingdom,” although sadly figures are not given.

Two men and a woman were remanded for further enquiries to be carried out after a police constable found them asleep at 2am in a furniture van in a yard. This really seems to raise questions about what the constable was doing peering into vans in the early hours, but presumably he had his reasons.

A story of a lucky escape features in “Preparing for bed. Exciting burning rescue in New George Street.” Harriet Markham, 19, accidentally set her clothes on fire with a candle she was holding and was rescued by two brothers. This kind of accident was not uncommon in the days of open fires and candlelight, but luckily on this occasion the victim survived.

There is also a fascinating glimpse into both shell shock and unemployment in the piece “Explosion brings speech.” The story tells us that “Shock has cured a Hull ex-soldier who stuttered seriously as a result of the war.” He was thrown to the ground by an explosion in Falkirk and found that his speech had returned. He was in Falkirk having walked from Hull “in search of work,” a distance of some 240 miles. Unusually, the man’s name is not given; perhaps this indicates the stigma which attached to both mental health problems and unemployment?

The British Newspaper Archive is a subscription website but you can access it for free in any Hull library, including the History Centre. Why not have a look and see what you can discover?