Jack Evans, our Collections Volunteer, has had a rather exhaustive stretch of documenting and cataloguing an entire file box worth of photographs of the Charterhouse (as part of an exciting project that is aimed at moving our collections forward), he is moving onto another intriguing set of historic documents; a collection of The Charterhouse Magazine, starting with the first issue published December 1933 (price 1s.).
Jack says: “The journals are really a fascinating period of not only Charterhouse’s history, but also of that era’s social history too, with bygone adverts for businesses and restaurants, and even some general notices and news showcasing global events and attitudes of the time. But at the heart of it are the several astounding anecdotes of the Brothers’ themselves, particularly in regard to their interesting(!) careers before they came to live at the Charterhouse.
For instance, take Roger Pocock, whose account of seafaring in his youth include surviving storms in the Pacific and some encounters with a ‘mad Swedish captain’. Or ‘R.S. McG-S.’s dangerous encounters with krait and cobra snakes when serving in the British Raj. Other fascinating stories include F.C. Dolman’s experiences of serving in the Siege of Kimberly during the Boer War, and ‘E.G.B.’, a journalist who enlisted as a ‘rebel mercenary’ during the Cuban War of Independence in 1895!
And this is just one issue, who knows what other stories will be in the subsequent magazines!”