If you listen to Radio 4 regularly you can’t have failed to have heard the trailers for The Listening Project. The Listening Project is a partnership between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations, and the British Library in which people are asked to share a conversation with a close friend or relative, […]
Curious about what we keep behind our doors? Intrigued about the beginnings of the veterinary profession? Want to know the origins of the RCVS Presidential Regalia? We cover all that and more in an exciting new publication which the Trust and the RCVS have recently produced. The RCVS Collection: paintings, artefacts, presidential regalia, books and […]
As part of the celebrations for her Diamond Jubilee the Queen recently launched a website documenting the life of her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria. The site contains the journals that Queen Victoria kept from the age of 13 (1832) until just before her death in 1901. The diaries contain a staggering 43,765 pages. After her death Queen […]
This Sunday, we will be watching, with baited breath, to see if the Queen takes her corgis aboard the Royal Barge, the Spirit of Chartwell, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee with her. Well, perhaps not, but in Britain the Pembroke Welsh corgi immediately evokes images of Queen Elizabeth II, walking her adored pets through the […]
Even though the domestication of the rabbit occurred 2000 years ago, rabbit care before the 19th century was not in the local vet or farmer’s repertoire. This explains the lack of lagomorph related content in our historical collection. Contrary to what you may think, rabbits don’t belong to the rodent order but sit in a […]
May is local and community history month so that, together with a rather nice photograph from 1913 that was included in the material we received from Fegans (see the previous post), has led to me writing about one of the places I go to eat lunch – St John’s Gardens on Horseferry Road. The garden started […]
Today we are celebrating the 100th birthday of 62-64 Horseferry Road, the current home of the RCVS. The plaque on the corner of the building records the laying of the foundation stone like this: “Mr Fegan’s Homes” (incorporated) to the glory of God and the welfare of orphan, needy and erring boys, here and hereafter, […]
There has been a lot of discussion of anatomical illustrations recently following the opening of the exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery Leonardo da Vinci anatomist. We have a number of stunning anatomical illustrations in the Historical Collection – the most well known would be in Stubbs’ The anatomy of the horse and then there are […]
National Pet Month (7 April – 7 May) is now drawing to a close but one of the enduring messages of the initiative is the benefits of pets for people, and vice versa. What we need from our companion animals has changed over the centuries, dogs are no longer solely hunting partners, and cats are […]
One of the things I love about working in libraries is the weird and wonderful questions you are asked and how, on occasions, information you find for one enquirer can be useful in answering another – sometimes years later. This has happened to me recently with King George IVs giraffe! In 2010 I found an […]
Search the library catalogue for Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born on this day in 1806, and you will find one entry – for William Youatt’s book The Horse: its history, breeds, and management to which is appended, a treatise on draught first published in 1831. The link to Brunel? The inclusion of his ‘treatise on draught’ – […]
“Sore backs appear inseparable from mounted service, they have existed as long as the horse has been used in war … it was reasonable to suppose … as knowledge advanced, a reduction in this class of injury should have been possible.” So says Frederick Smith in his book A veterinary history of the war in […]
