We were all saddened to hear of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's death and will all have our own particular memories of her. For me it will be not only her dedicated service to this country and commonwealth but her sense of humour that came out on many, many occasions over the years. How many of us will still be working into our 90s?

I took a moment to browse around the archive and found four items of Queen Elizabeth memorabilia (see photos). The first is a tumbler from the 1953 Coronation, the second a 1977 Silver Jubilee beer glass, and the third and fourth are 2002 Golden Jubilee and 2012 Diamond Jubilee bottles of beer.

A few weeks ago Angela gave a talk about the Archive to the Cheshire Family History Society which went really well and one positive consequence of the talk was that we were donated a large collection of Architectural Ironmongery catalogues. These are covered in the “acquisitions” part of the newsletter.

Peter and I visited Stephen White books a couple of weeks ago. Following a call from Stephen who explained that they are consolidating their two book stores into one, and knowing that they had a large amount of material of interest to the archive, we were invited to take a look at the material before the move. Stephen’s thinking was that rather than move everything from Halifax to Bradford and then have to ship it to us when we bought it why not just ship it straight to us and agree with a payment scheme that suits us all. As a consequence of this visit, I have just taken delivery of the first instalment from this visit which consists of 125 boxes of assorted books, magazines and journals. I could not resist having a coffee after unloading and looking at one item; the first item I pulled out was a copy of the Architectural Journal from 1909. What fun we are going to have, going through the rest and getting them catalogued and onto shelves.

Fortunately, we are still finding more Billy Bookcases and are just staying ahead of the cataloguing. Paul Niblett has finally got to the end of the Shooting Times run and was pleased to note that at the end of this he had catalogued 3,002 copies from the 1940s to the present day.

Take care, keep safe and see you all soon

Richard Roberts