Author Archive for: clare
Entries by Clare Boulton
Your horse belongs to the army now – part one
The popularity of Michael Morpurgo’s book War Horse, the success of the stage adaptation and now the release of Steven Spielberg’s film has brought the role horses played in the First World War to the public’s attention. Joey, the main ‘character’ of War Horse, belongs to Albert, the young son of a farmer. He is […]
Cattle plague in the colonies
It has recently been announced that the Wellcome Trust funded project to digitise the veterinary medicine reports that form part of the National Library of Scotland’s India papers collection has been added to the Medical History of British India website. The veterinary collection, which covers the period 1864-1959, contains important material on research into diseases such […]
Your horse belongs to the army now – part two
In the second instalment of our two part post on army horses in the First World War we will take a look at the scale of the operations of the Army Remount Service and in particular the work of the Romsey Remount Depot. The acquisition of horses for the war effort was an enormous operation. In his […]
Slaughterhouses in the Tropics
One of our ongoing library projects is to catalogue the RCVS Fellowship Theses. The collection spans approximately 120 years and fills more than 20 metres! An interesting thesis, by A. Blake, Chief Veterinary Officer in the Rangoon Municipality, Burma, is entitled ‘The management of slaughter-houses in the East’ and was submitted around 1910. He draws on ten […]
All aboard the SS Templemore
‘We embarked on Friday 10th November, but owing to bad weather did not leave L/pool [Liverpool] until 12.30 noon on 12th November’ so reads an entry in a small notebook which is part of one of the treasures of our archives – the Sir Frederick Smith Collection. Smith sailed for South Africa on the 12 November 1899 with […]
A green monkey, a baboon and…
The story of the RCVS Museum Collection is not particularly well known – any attention it has received focussing on its most famous ‘resident’ the skeleton of Eclipse (donated in 1871 by Professor John Gamgee.) This is a shame as it housed a number of other interesting items, as a glance at the catalogue (item […]