In my mind's eye, I'm seeing my semen flasks shatter all over again. And now, I'm not so sure that I do...

I am beyond devastated to hear that @olliedouglas.bsky.social is refusing to play Grade Up to Elite Cow again... my immense respect for him is starting to dissolve

Sylvia Townsend Warner Fundraising Appeal | Dorset Archives Trust Dorset Archives Trust isleading a fundraising appeal to bring the Archive of writer and LGBTQ+ pioneerSylvia Townsend Warner(1893-1978) into the public domain through the creation of a full catalogue....

Could not support this initiative more - the archives of Warner and her partner Valentine Ackland are immensely valuable for the study of queer rural histories. Not to be missed is the story of how Warner ended up in Dorset because of a visitation from her great-aunt's ghost!

And it was much easier to mind your own business in a secluded cottage! I've also seen an awful lot of prosecutions of rural people where their neighbours stand up in court to give character witness statements.

How interesting! The impression I'm getting is that rural and farm communities often stuck together in these sorts of situations, even at times when male homosexuality was illegal.

As far as I know, farm archives have never really been used to track queer histories before. Given they mostly record the financial ongoings on a given farm, you can understand why. However, my year of research at The MERL has proved their potential.

Find out more in this blog:

Fantastic to see - Enid is thoroughly deserving of a Wikipedia entry. Thank you for doing this!

Much of our information on Enid comes from her responses to Mass Observation surveys. When asked her thoughts on the situation in Europe in March 1939, and to gather opinions from others, she replied as below. Enid was nothing if not relatable.

Amazing blog post from @themerl.bsky.social on Enid Barraud, who identified as homosexual in the 1930s and whose agricultural skills became a core part of her identity. Enid was - to put it in academic terms - a total legend.

The British Newspaper Archive is such a brilliant resource for finding queer histories, even if the word recognition software sometimes leads you down the wrong path...

These look amazingly helpful; I'll definitely be coming to the session on absence in collections and maybe a couple of others too! 🙂

Two students look at objects in the reading room at The Museum of English Rural Life.

Are you a PhD student & interested in using museum collections in your teaching or research?

We're running a *free* doctoral training programme for students at any institution to learn about working with collections.

Find out more:

collections.reading.ac.uk/whats-on/

Very kind of you - will have to screenshot this and send it to potential publishers when the time comes!

ie. If a letter indicates a same sex relationship, but does not 100% confirm it, should this be highlighted on the archive catalogue as material related to LGBTQ+ history?

Genuine pleasure to be an absolute unit once more! Curious to hear listeners’ opinions on the speculatory nature of this research, and how that might clash with archival neutrality.

Could I ask why? My focus is on the other side of their lives - their rurality - and I've found Grant's letters to be a great source of rural reflections.

Is it just that they've occupied too much of the narrative when it comes to queer histories of London?

Not qualified to speak about the worlds of fashion and decoration, but I know that we still have a lot to learn from Bloomsbury. I've been going through the archives of Bell and Grant and they have so much to tell us about English queer history!

Absolutely! Let me know when you are next coming to MERL and I'll see if I can be there 🙂

That's lovely to hear - a major inspiration for doing this research is so that LGBTQ people living in rural areas today know that there is, and always has been, a place for them in the countryside

Never before has a comment on Bluesky caught my attention so quickly... the search for the queer lumberjack has defined my life for far too long now! Curious to see what you can find.

That's very kind of you to say - most of it is just patience and perseverance (but an appetite for finding gossip also helps!)

Thank you to the eternally wonderful Joe and Ollie for guiding me through my first time on a podcast - if intense ramblings about finding queer snippets in rural archives is your thing, give it a listen! @themerl.bsky.social

If there's one thing I've learned it's that marriage to someone of the opposite sex does not preclude queerness in this time period! There must be a reason why he shares a headstone with Morris rather than his wife.

Wow, thank you, what a marvelous find. I shall have to do some digging on Ancestry to try and find out more about them. I'm no expert on gravestones but I expect it's very rare to see two men named together in this time period

Given that this was written in 1930, it's the earliest instance I've seen in archives of two men being described as "boyfriends". I wonder if anyone has seen anything earlier than this? Bonus points if it's rural!

(Archive ref for this diary is TGA 8317.7.2.4)

A page from Arthur Lett-Haines's diary, dated 29th March 1930. It states "To Oswald Balfour's for tea". In the bottom corner it also reads "Oswald, Jack Webb, Boyfriend".

Earlier this year, I visited Tate Britain to explore the archive of the artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, a same-sex couple who lived in rural Suffolk from the 1930s onwards. In Lett's diaries I found this entry which describes two friends of theirs, Oswald and Jack, as "boyfriends".

Thanks for the recommendation and glad you enjoyed the talk - hopefully there's some decent gossip... I mean historical findings in there!

(Sorry for taking so long to reply!)

Cedric, Lett and queer histories of the English countryside with Tim Jerrome. – The Maltings

I'm giving a talk on queer histories of rural England in July! If you're in the Berwick area and want to find out more about how I'm using archives to explore this under-researched topic, please do sign up and/or share with anyone else who may be interested

www.maltingsberwick.co.uk/whats-on/ced...

Amazed that the cloaking device still works after all these years - looks like a classic example! (I assume, I've never actually seen one)

You deserve the credit for the photo of the Flying Fordson... by legitimately finding it in the archives of course