BBC

Noddy in Archiveland

by
“Pop Career for Noddy." News Review. Sunday Times, 16 Nov. 2003, p. 14[S3]. The Sunday Times Digital Archive, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/FP1803638499/GDCS?u=webdemo&sid=GDCS&xid=141de559

│ By Rebecca Bowden, Associate Acquisitions Editor │

Everybody knows Noddy. Created by Enid Blyton in 1949, the Noddy books – and subsequent television show – tell the story of a wooden man who runs away from the toy store and finds himself in Toyland. There he makes his home after the town’s residents have established that he is, indeed, a toy. The adventures of this blue-hatted man and his friends (Big Ears, PC Plod, Dinah Doll, Tessie Bear et. al.) are a staple of the British childhood, enduring through years of changes and controversy. With this year marking Noddy’s 70th birthday, we take a look in Gale Primary Sources to uncover the history of the little man in the red and yellow car.

Read more

Between the Acts: Remembering War during the Interwar Period

by

By Calvin Liu, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford

Remembrance is repetition.

As Laurence Binyon’s poem, often the highlight of memorial services, puts it: ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:/ […]/ We will remember them.’ Ways of memorialising the world wars, too, seem never to grow old and are reinforced through recurrence. Remembrance is ritualised by each poppy-wearing politician, each BBC documentary, each Ian McEwan novel. The narratives have been retold so many times that they grow hazy and the details blend together – battle trenches upon Maginot Lines. It almost comes as a shock to be reminded that twenty-one years elapsed between the two world wars that we now jointly remember on one day. Twenty-one years during which the world regularly reminded itself of the last great war, before rushing into another. Gale Primary Sources provides a plethora of primary sources that poignantly illustrate how the world wars were both remembered and anticipated during the interwar period.

Read more

The ‘Real’ Peaky Blinders of Small Heath, Birmingham

by

│ By Megan Murphy, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool │

The hit BBC drama series Peaky Blinders – which is set in Birmingham and follows the lives of the Shelby brothers and their criminal gang the ‘Peaky Blinders’ – has captivated the minds and imagination (and – thanks to lead star Cillian Murphy – the hearts) of the British public. Given the recent fascination with Birmingham’s criminal underworld that the series has generated, I thought it would be interesting to use Gale Primary Sources to investigate the ‘real’ Peaky Blinders of late nineteenth-century Birmingham.

Read more