🎉 It's one month until we'll be hosting our stall at History Day! 📅 Tuesday 4th November 🕰️ Drop in between 11:00-16:00 📍 Senate House, London 🎟️ Book your free place here: buff.ly/fBb8TJR @senatehouselib.bsky.social @ihr.bsky.social #HistDay25

📦 In 1983, Black Labour Party MPs established the Labour Party Black Sections. Black Sections worked towards political representation for Black communities. 📕In 1988, the group published The Black Agenda, exploring policing, racism, fascism, immigration, education, and employment.

🎥 Last week our team of Archive Assistants spent an afternoon filming a video on what we do to make our reading room a comfortable and productive space for our researchers. 👀 Keep your eyes peeled for the final video appearing on our socials soon.

Article by one of Friday evening's panellists Emma Barnett reflecting on the Bob Edwards Centenary conference panel session: emmabarnett.substack.com/p/the-painfu... #ivf #ivfhistory

On Friday evening we were delighted to host a panel session for the Bob Edwards Centenary conference: His life, work and legacy Thank you to all our speakers, our chair @rogerhighfield.bsky.social and everyone who came along and made it such a great event! 🙏 Supported by @cam-repro.bsky.social

📖 In our latest blog, former Archives Centre By-Fellow Richard Vinen shares some of his favourite documents which he found in our collections when working on his new book 'The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle' published by @bloomsburyhist.bsky.social last month. buff.ly/iuFIXWi

🚼 On this day, 100 years ago, the IVF pioneer Robert Edwards was born. 🎓 One of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century, Edwards spent much of his career in the Department of Physiology at the University of Cambridge. He was also a Fellow here at Churchill College.

📣There are still a few tickets available for the Bob Edwards Centenary conference tomorrow, Friday 26th September. Register now to join us for this special event ⬇️ @loke-ctr.bsky.social @cam-repro.bsky.social @pdncambridge.bsky.social @rogerhighfield.bsky.social

⭐ It's hard to believe it was just a week ago that over 70 people joined us for our Open Day! 🔎 As always, we loved talking to visitors about our collections, work, & anything archive related! 🙏A big thank you to everyone who came over to the Centre & the #OpenCambridge team.

📺 70 years ago today, commercial television was broadcast in the UK for the first time. To mark the occasion, History undergraduates at @angliaruskin.bsky.social have curated an online exhibition, drawing on our collections, to explore this moment in broadcasting history. buff.ly/5GMK7na

📚 Whether you're an undergraduate, postgraduate, academic, or independent researcher, our research grants and By-Fellowships are designed to support work using our collections here at Churchill Archives Centre. 🔗 Click the link to find out more & apply: buff.ly/JGsTtHK

Happening today! Drop in between 11:30 and 15:30 here at the Archives Centre to see our collections, meet our team, and learn about how we care for our collections. @cambridgefestival.bsky.social #opencambridge #heritageopendays #Cambridge

Barbara Hepworth's 'Four-Square (Walk Through)' is a much-loved landmark of the Churchill College grounds. But did you know that it is actually a replacement for a different Hepworth statue that lived at Churchill briefly in the 1960s? Read more in our new exhibition in the Wolfson Theatre foyer!

It's just one week to go until our Open Day! Visit our reading rooms, find out how architectural blueprints are made, and see demonstrations by our conservation team. 📅 Wednesday 17th September ⏰ Drop in anytime between 11:30 and 15:30. No booking required. 📍 Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge

Everyone who visits Churchill College loves our green spaces – but have you heard of Sheila Haywood, the landscape architect who designed the site? Visit our new exhibition outside the Wolfson Lecture Theatre to read about her work…

Did you know Churchill College’s first cohort of students came from 10 different countries? Arriving in October 1960, the matriculating postgrads hailed from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, Scotland, and South Africa. (© Lafeyette Photography Ltd.)

❓ How much do you know about Churchill College's history? 🤔 If the answer is "not much", you can learn more from our new exhibition, located just outside the Wolfson Theatre! 🖼️ The exhibition explores the college's history, from its Cold War foundations to our vibrant community in 2025.

⏰ Only 10 days left to sign up for this one-time event at St Paul's Cathedral! Our director Allen Packwood will be exploring the links between Winston Churchill and the iconic London building... buff.ly/zBjxSJh

⭐ Churchill and St Paul's: Icons of the finest hour⭐ Join Allen Packwood as he explores the enduring connection between Churchill & St Paul’s Cathedral, 2 icons that stood firm through the Blitz & beyond. 📅 16th September 2025 🕰️ 6:30-8pm 📍 St Paul's Cathedral 🎟️ Free, book here buff.ly/piGCwwE

🙏 Thank you to @tomhurst.bsky.social, a former Antcliffe By-Fellow, for giving us a copy of his new book 'Making Speeches: The Speechmaking of Margaret Thatcher, 1975-1990', published by @bloomsburyhist.bsky.social. 📚 We're looking forward to making this book available to our researchers.

💪 Archival aerobics: lifting history one box at a time... 📦We have recently had to move 100s of archive boxes of material off and back onto shelves to allow for crucial repairs to be carried out to some mobile racking. As you can see from the photo, it was a surprisingly enjoyable task!

🗂️ Dive into the archives! @chuarchives.bsky.social is opening its doors for one day only—17 Sept, 11:30–3:30. Explore 600+ collections, watch cyanotype demos, and see how historic papers are preserved. More information 👉https://www.opencambridge.cam.ac.uk/events/churchill-archives-centre-open-day

🐶 Happy International Dog Day! 🐕 Meet Nell, a rare duck-hunting retriever, pictured here with her first litter. This photo was saved by Vanda Salmon, one of Churchill’s secretaries. 🐾 Vanda adored dogs & bred her own Spaniels. We look after her fascinating scrapbooks here at the Archives Centre.

☀️🕶️ Bank Holiday Closure ☀️🕶️ We will close today, Friday 22nd August at 5pm and reopen on Tuesday 26th August at 9am. Wishing everyone a relaxing Bank Holiday. 📷 Clementine Churchill visiting Casablanca in spring 1960, CSCT 5/8/172.

📚 New books for the Roskill Library! 📚 Books in the Roskill Library complement our archive collections. You can find them online on iDiscover, and physically on the shelves in our reading room!

We were delighted to support @kate-werran.bsky.social's First Wives Club research, exploring World War Two through the eyes of Allied leaders’ wives, thanks to the Jennie Churchill Fund. You can find out more about Kate's research here ⬇️ buff.ly/EUEH5vQ

Last week we welcomed 18 students to the Faculty for our Sutton Trust Summer School. Thank you to @chuarchives.bsky.social, @theul.bsky.social, the Fitzwilliam Museum, our PhD students, and our student ambassadors for all their help and hard work throughout the week!

🏫 In 1941, Oswald Tuck (pictured front row, centre) founded the Bedford Japanese School to train linguists who would go on to decode secrets at Bletchley Park. 📸 This is the school’s final cohort who studied from May to November 1945, focusing particularly on the “study of character texts".

"As Mary Palmer (News Week) & I came out of lunch at the Savoy paper was floating down like snow - "what is this?" we ask the doorman. "Japan capitulates". [...] We stare at one another & can hardly take it in." 📖 This was the last entry which Mary Agnes Hamilton wrote in her WW2 diary.

🏙️ "It is after 9 in the evening and I am still at my desk in the Foreign Office looking out of the window across the Park. The sky is a brilliant sapphire blue like the wings of butterflies. This is the end of the war, Japan surrendered today, & the people are cheering as they throng the streets."

Today marks 80 years since Victory over Japan day, which brought the Second World War to a close. 📝 These are the notes of the speech which Winston Churchill delivered in the House of the Commons as Leader of the Opposition on 15th August 1945. #VJDay #VJDay80

✍️ 'On V.J. Day many people gathered round this block of flats to see Papa and cheer him and he got mobbed in Whitehall by a frenzied crowd.' ✉️ This is a letter which Clementine Churchill sent to her daughter Mary, capturing the crowd’s reaction to Winston Churchill on this historic day. #VJDay

Today is #InternationalYouthDay. Did you know that young people have been involved in politics & activism for decades? See these documents about youth peace protests and the Second World Youth Congress, which took place in 1938. From the archive of Viscount Thurso (THRS II 78)

🖼️ New online exhibition! We worked with @angliaruskin.bsky.social History students to explore archive material about the 1975 EEC vote - which was the UK's first ever nationwide referendum. Take a look on our website here:

Happy #BookLoversDay! Here are some beautiful bindings from the Anglo-Saxon Review, 1900-01. This arts journal was edited by Churchill's mother Lady Randolph (but was so ruinously expensive it went bust after the first ten volumes).

🐈 Happy International Cat Day to all of our feline historians who enjoy our purr-sonal papers.

2 #BDOHP interviews for the price of one! Nicholas Archer, who was wrestling with the Palestinian question 20 years ago, and Geoffrey Cowling, who has some hair-raising tales of dealing with hippie trail overdose cases in Kabul in the 1970s. buff.ly/u3ET8kf and buff.ly/JeCi2vf @FCDOHistorians

Sophie Bridges, one of our archivists, will be presenting on ‘Responsibility without authority’: Angela Raspin and Churchill Archives Centre’ at the Women's History Network conference this September. You can register to attend online at the link below ⬇️ #WomensHistory #Archives

📚Last week we joined up with Annie, Librarian at Churchill College to host a visit for our friends in the library and archives team at @ballioloxford.bsky.social. ❤️We love it when we get to meet with fellow library and archives professionals and learn from each other about our approaches & work!

🖼️ New Online Exhibition Launch 🖼️ We’re excited to share the launch of 'Groundbreakers: In Their Own Words' — a new online exhibition celebrating the voices and experiences of some of the most influential women in British parliamentary history. www.chuarchivestories.uk/stories/grou...

80 years ago today, the Potsdam Conference began. Lettice Marston (later Churchill's personal secretary 1946-65) went to Berlin as a member of the planning staff making arrangements for the conference on the post-war future of Europe. Marston's archive is a recent addition to our collections

👋 Hi again, it’s David, one of our Conservation team. We recently conserved the scrapbooks belonging to Jean Barker, Baroness Trumpington. Being poor quality materials they have suffered deterioration. Some were able to be repaired but all albums were re-housed into custom-made ‘clam-shell’ boxes.

On this day in 1940, the Battle of Britain began. It was the first major military campaign fought entirely by air forces. The Battle of Britain marked the first major defeat of Germany's military forces, with air superiority seen as the key to victory.

🌟It's Open Day time here in Cambridge!🌟 👋If you're around in Cambridge, then do visit our Archives Centre stall in the buttery at Churchill College. 🔎You can explore highlights from our scientific collections with our rummage box and help yourself to our Archives Centre goodies too.

🎾As another week of tennis begins at Wimbledon, we had a look in some of Clementine Churchill's photograph albums and found this lovely shot of a young Randolph & Diana Churchill in their tennis whites! 📷 Browse the full album on our Access Portal: buff.ly/UpyCssg

📊 Ever heard of ABC1? It's the most widely understood & quoted of Britain’s social stratification schemes. But where did it come from and when was it first used? 📖 Find out in our latest blog by Robert Kelsey, one of our researchers here at Churchill College.

On this day in 1916, the Battle of the Somme began. Archives are an invaluable resource when researching events such as this. You can use various diary entries, letters to loved ones and autobiography reminiscences to view the event through numerous points of view. #otd #onthisday

🔥 Our latest conservation challenge is from the Davidson Nicol collection – a letter partially destroyed by fire during transit in the post. 🏊🏼‍♀️ David, our Conservator, ‘float’ washed the damaged papers using a silk screen, then lined them with a layer of pre-adhered Japanese paper.

On Monday we ran an induction day for people interested in a career in archives, records management or conservation. We loved meeting the attendees and showing them some of the areas we work in. It was a packed schedule! More about our volunteer programme and induction days here: buff.ly/vxFMH3y

It was great to connect with @teichlab.bsky.social‬ earlier this week. Our volunteers curated an exhibition about scientific breakthroughs, particularly the discovery of DNA, for current researchers based in Cambridge. A meeting point for modern and historical science! #archives