These look amazingly helpful; I'll definitely be coming to the session on absence in collections and maybe a couple of others too! 🙂

Very kind of you - will have to screenshot this and send it to potential publishers when the time comes!

ie. If a letter indicates a same sex relationship, but does not 100% confirm it, should this be highlighted on the archive catalogue as material related to LGBTQ+ history?

Could I ask why? My focus is on the other side of their lives - their rurality - and I've found Grant's letters to be a great source of rural reflections.

Is it just that they've occupied too much of the narrative when it comes to queer histories of London?

Not qualified to speak about the worlds of fashion and decoration, but I know that we still have a lot to learn from Bloomsbury. I've been going through the archives of Bell and Grant and they have so much to tell us about English queer history!

Absolutely! Let me know when you are next coming to MERL and I'll see if I can be there 🙂

That's lovely to hear - a major inspiration for doing this research is so that LGBTQ people living in rural areas today know that there is, and always has been, a place for them in the countryside

Never before has a comment on Bluesky caught my attention so quickly... the search for the queer lumberjack has defined my life for far too long now! Curious to see what you can find.

That's very kind of you to say - most of it is just patience and perseverance (but an appetite for finding gossip also helps!)

If there's one thing I've learned it's that marriage to someone of the opposite sex does not preclude queerness in this time period! There must be a reason why he shares a headstone with Morris rather than his wife.

Wow, thank you, what a marvelous find. I shall have to do some digging on Ancestry to try and find out more about them. I'm no expert on gravestones but I expect it's very rare to see two men named together in this time period

Given that this was written in 1930, it's the earliest instance I've seen in archives of two men being described as "boyfriends". I wonder if anyone has seen anything earlier than this? Bonus points if it's rural!

(Archive ref for this diary is TGA 8317.7.2.4)

Thanks for the recommendation and glad you enjoyed the talk - hopefully there's some decent gossip... I mean historical findings in there!

(Sorry for taking so long to reply!)

Amazed that the cloaking device still works after all these years - looks like a classic example! (I assume, I've never actually seen one)

You deserve the credit for the photo of the Flying Fordson... by legitimately finding it in the archives of course

I'm pretty sure I'm still the undisputed MERL Grade Up to Elite Cow champion, which is definitely because I'm unbeatable, and not because no one wants to play it with me (including my mum)

Thank you Warhorse, Tom McKay and of course @lukedale.bsky.social