It’s been a tough old year all round so for this blog we are going to take a light-hearted tour of some of the seasonal items in our collections to try and get us into the holiday spirit. The very first Christmas card was sent in 1843. These were expensive though, and it wasn’t until 1875 when they became mass produced that people began regularly sending them to loved ones
As we wind up for the winter holidays and bid farewell to 2017, it seems every archivist here at SOAS Archives and Special Collections has a festive archive anecdote to share, so we thought we would collate our favourites into a short seasonal Blog post! SOAS Archives and Special collections, broadly speaking, documents the British interaction with Africa, Asia and the Middle East over the past two centuries. The collections
Despite not having much to celebrate during their time in captivity, civilian inmates of Hong Kong’s Japanese-controlled internment camps during the Second World War were determined to keep up the tradition of sending each other Christmas cards. Using what little resources they had available prisoners painstakingly hand-decorated postcards with festive greetings to send to fellow inmates. The examples pictured above were sent to Charles Collingwood Roberts during his time at
This week we have selected a small sample of images from a number of different collections of archives at SOAS, on a seasonal theme. The Ceylon Christmas Annual produced by the National Christian Council of Ceylon in 1952, contains a series of articles on Christian subjects, photographs of British missionaries and indigenous teachers working in Ceylon [Sri Lanka] missions, prayers and advertisements for domestic products. The annual for this year
