What's on at the Record Office

Ian Everest's mother was one of the 80,000 Land Girls during WW2 and his talk includes some of her personal memories and a potted history of the role of women on farms during the two world wars. Vital to this was Lady Gertrude Denman and her Balcombe Place home in West Sussex.

Venue: West Sussex Record Office, 3 Orchard Street, Chichester, PO19 1DD
Date: Tuesday 31 October 2023
Time: 7.00pm
Tickets: £8.00 including refreshments, £7.00 for West Sussex Archives Society members.
Booking: Please phone 01243 753602 to book and pay by debit/credit card.

Local historian Alan Green journeys back to Chichester and its buildings, exactly half a century ago.

The talk will last up to an hour, with an opportunity to ask questions (via the chat box for our remote audience).

Venue: West Sussex Record Office, 3 Orchard Street, Chichester, PO19 1DD
Date: Tuesday 28 November 2023
Time: 7.00pm
Tickets: £8.00 (attending in-person), £7.00 for West Sussex Archives Society members, £5.00 (attending remotely via Zoom).
Booking: To attend in person, please phone 01243 753602 to book and pay.

To attend online, please book via Eventbrite:

• Eventbrite booking for Chichester in colour 1973 (online).

The modernist writer who became a Sussex smallholder and reached for new ways of writing about place.

In the first spring after the Great War, Ford moved to a derelict cottage between Pulborough and Storrington, cleaned the well, planted an ambitious garden, waited for his partner Stella Bowen to arrive and tried to work out what kind of writer he was now. He did not feel the same as the man who had published The Good Soldier in 1915.

Wanting to understand what the war had done to his sense of landscape and to his passion for rural life, he summoned fragmentary memories and studied them from the perspective of his new Sussex home.

This talk by Professor Alexandra Harris will follow Ford and Bowen as they move from ‘Red Ford’ to a larger smallholding on Bedham Hill, asking what interested them, what they knew of local history, how Ford wrote and re-wrote these places, and how why they went from a ‘nook’ to a view that seemed to show them ‘the kingdoms of the earth’.

In the last part of the talk, Alexandra will outline the larger project of which this forms a part. She’ll suggest echoes across time, connecting the people she has studied in the Arun area, and she’ll raise questions about the problems and possibilities that emerge at the meeting-points of literary and local history.

The talk will last up to an hour, with an opportunity to ask questions (via the chat box for our remote audience).

Venue: West Sussex Record Office, 3 Orchard Street, Chichester, PO19 1DD
Date: Tuesday 30 January 2024
Time: 7.00pm
Tickets: £8.00 (attending in-person), £7.00 for West Sussex Archives Society members, £5.00 (attending remotely via Zoom).
Booking: To attend in person, please phone 01243 753602 to book and pay. To attend online, please book via Eventbrite.

Amateur theatre is everywhere. Since the mid-nineteenth century, amateur theatrical productions have far outnumbered those mounted by their professional counterparts. Yet amateur theatre’s rich history and its significance to social, cultural, political and economic histories has been almost entirely overlooked.

In this talk, Dr David Coates will take you on a whistle-stop tour of Britain’s amateur theatre histories, from the French Revolution through to World War 1. On this tour you’ll encounter amateur performances in all sorts of spaces and places - from large venues in the centre of cities and towns, to intimate rooms in remote village halls and country houses.

You’ll discover theatricals on the decks of naval ships in the middle of the ocean and in army encampments at home and around the Empire. You’ll also hear about Queen Victoria’s passion for private theatricals, Jane Austen’s fictional theatricals in Mansfield Park and Charles Dickens’s amateur dramatic talents.

Most importantly, you’ll see how materials in the collections of the West Sussex Record Office are helping to piece together a narrative for the development of amateur theatre in Britain between 1789 and 1914.

The talk will last up to an hour, with an opportunity to ask questions (via the chat box for our remote audience).

Venue: West Sussex Record Office, 3 Orchard Street, Chichester, PO19 1DD
Date: Tuesday 27 February 2024
Time: 7.00pm
Tickets: £8.00 (attending in-person), £7.00 for West Sussex Archives Society members, £5.00 (attending remotely via Zoom)
Booking: To attend in person, please phone 01243 753602 to book and pay. To attend online, please book via Eventbrite.

Visually Chichester did not alter substantially under the Victorians so its character remained – and remains to this day - essentially Georgian.

In this illustrated talk Alan Green explores the Victorian era in Chichester including the coming of the railway, new buildings and the provision of the cattle market, as well as significant happenings such as the collapse of the cathedral spire in 1861 and the sorry saga of why, despite regular cholera outbreaks, a sewerage system was not to be installed until 1892.

Along the way the movers and shakers of the day will be met.

The talk will last up to an hour, with an opportunity to ask questions (via the chat box for our remote audience).

Venue: West Sussex Record Office, 3 Orchard Street, Chichester, PO19 1DD
Date: Tuesday 30 April 2024
Time: 7.00pm
Tickets: £8.00 (attending in-person), £7.00 for West Sussex Archives Society members, £5.00 (attending remotely via Zoom).
Booking: To attend in person, please phone 01243 753602 to book and pay. To attend online, please book via Eventbrite.

Date: Wednesday 4 October 2023

Time: 10.00am

Tickets: £7.50 (non-refundable) -  book in advance by contacting the Record Office.

Date: Wednesday 1 November 2023

Time: 10.00am

Tickets: £7.50 (non-refundable) - book in advance by contacting the Record Office.