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Explore Your Archive: Berrow’s Worcester Journal

  • 21st November 2013

For approximately 25 years from 1909 Berrow’s Worcester Journal produced a pictorial supplement to accompany the weekly newspaper. Photos in the newspapers themselves were quite rare at this time because of the reproduction difficulties and the supplements enabled Berrows to produce relatively good quality images to accompany the news.  These photographs record local people and events, political and social gatherings, including marriages and anniversaries, plays and concerts, church events as well as livestock sales, company socials and presentations.

The supplements give an insight into the life and times of Worcester and the surrounding area during the first few years of the 20th Century. Newspapers offer so much detail about our ancestors’ lives through reports of trials, coroner’s courts, obituaries, situations vacant, birth, marriages and deaths. The supplements with their higher quality images add ‘flesh to the bones’ as we are able to see the images as well as read about some of the social activities that our ancestors enjoyed such as football and whist drives.

During World War One the supplements included photographs of the soldiers who were fighting at the Front, had lost their lives in the conflict, were missing in action or had received honours. In the later years of the war they also included photos of the munitions workers as well as nurses and wounded soldiers at the local military hospitals.

Copies of the Berrows Pictorial Supplement (1914-1918) are available on CD in the self-service area at the Hive and an index covering the years 1914-1915 isavailable on our website.

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