Over the last year, the History team’s Dr Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, has been working with a local history group to find out more about our region’s railway workers. Here he reveals more about this exciting partnership – including where you can see what they’ve produced. Increasingly over the last few years my research has become much more collaborative in approach. That’s largely to do with my work as co-lead of the Railway Work, Life & Death project. The project looks at accidents to British and Irish railway staff before 1939, working with teams of volunteers at the National Railway Museum, the Modern Records Centre at the University […]
Author Archive | Mike Esbester
50 Years On: the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act
Love it or hate it, you can’t escape it: the Health and Safety at Work Act has been an important part of UK working life (and wider) for 50 years. To mark its 50th anniversary, a day-long symposium was held in London on 25 November 2024: Health & Safety at Work Act – 50 years on: still fit for purpose? It was hosted by the Trade Union & Employment Forum of History & Policy, and brought together practitioners, trades unionists and academics – including the University of Portsmouth History team’s Dr Mike Esbester. Mike’s research focuses on histories of safety, risk and accident prevention in modern Britain. Some of that has […]
Collaboration in the Archive
The University of Portsmouth History team’s Mike Esbester has recently had a co-authored open access article published, in Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal. It’s part of a special issue, marking the 50th anniversary of the Modern Records Centre (MRC) at the University of Warwick. The MRC is the major repository for archives of trades unions and employers organisations, with a particular strength in transport collections. Mike has been using the MRC for his research for over 20 years. Over the last five years the MRC has been an integral part of the ‘Railway Work, Life & Death’ project, as a collaborator and institutional co-lead, alongside the University of Portsmouth and […]
A Norfolk train crash 150 years ago brings the forgotten deaths of rail workers into the spotlight
On the 9 September, our own Dr Mike Esbester had this piece on the Thorpe St Andrew train crash of 10 September 1874 published in The Conversation. Mike compares how memories of the loss of lives in such dramatic events compares with the often forgotten deaths of working class railway workers, whose deaths lack the single point of reference that such events provide.
They Shall Not Be Forgotten: Remembering Tangmere’s aviation dead
In this blog post, UoP students Lisa Pittman, Oliver Ballard, Jamie Edwards and Holly Scott-Wilds look at some of the men memorialised in the graveyard at St Andrew’s Church in Tangmere, West Sussex. All of these men were connected to aviation in the area, as Tangmere was the site of a significant airfield from the First World War. The work involved the group thinking about who was remembered, how and where, and reflecting on the practice of public history. Lisa, Oliver, Jamie and Holly produced this as part of their second-year module, ‘Working with the Past’, working with Tangmere local historian Paul Neary. The module helps build our students’ employability […]
Historians across boundaries: changing how we research the past
In this blog post, Senior Lecturer in History Mike Esbester introduces an important new seminar series he’s involved in leading: ‘Historians across boundaries.’ It’s based at the Institute of Historical Research, the London-based body that has promoted and championed historical research for nearly 100 years. This important new seminar series will help bring people together in their research into the past. ‘Changing the way we do research’ is certainly a bold claim – but it’s one we hope we can live up to! Earlier this year the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) called for applications to run seminar series in the new ‘Partnership Seminar’ programme. I knew just the crowd […]