Category Archives: Uncategorized

Like many children growing up in countries that still used the old British Pounds, Shillings and Pence (£sd) my early years in school was blighted by the dread exercise of reduction. Basically, take a sum of money, break it down … Continue reading →

I went for a walk a couple of days ago and I found an object – ok, an old rusty washer – on the footpath beside some old mine tailings, possibly brought to the surface by the recent rain. I … Continue reading →

State Library of Victoria – original at http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/54972 Last week, while I was working on the Dow’s Pharmacy Documentation Project we had a query from a lady researching her family history as to whether we had any bottles of Hoyle’s … Continue reading →

Our trip to Malaysia went pretty smoothly. Sure, there was the time in Penang Airport when we discovered that the booking company we had used had failed to add our bags to our Air Asia booking, even though we had … Continue reading →

   Northam Road cemetery is the oldest European cemetery in Georgetown in Penang, opening shortly after the East India Company founded Georgetown in 1794, and closing roughly a hundred years later. As a consequence there’s a lot of pre Victorian … Continue reading →

We’re back from a three week trip in Malaysia, during which we visited cat obsessed Kuching, saw wild orang utans in the Danum valley conservation area, river dolphins, proboscis monkeys in Bako national park, chilled on beaches and swam in … Continue reading →

Sometimes, we tend to think of the Victorians as quite like us, except a little more buttoned up, and wearing funny clothes. Yet, in many ways their lives were quite different from ours, one aspect being the absence of reliable … Continue reading →

What seems a long time ago, but it was only in the middle of 2013, we visited Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. It was only on our way back from Sri Lanka that I discovered that Jane Austen’s brother was buried … Continue reading →

While rooting around the bowels of Welsh papers online in search of examples of Hayman’s Balsam of Horehound adverts I came across this rather splendid advertisement for replacement teeth from 1861: Merthyr Tydfil Telegraph 8 February 1861 What I find … Continue reading →

I was documenting some nineteenth century medicine bottles the other day and came across this rather nice example in bluish glass: and it was embossed Hayman’s Balsam of Horehound suggesting that it had held a cough medicine of some sort. … Continue reading →