Charles Head MRCVS

A Norwegian White Christmas

This month marks the 75th anniversary of an important military operation which paved the way for true ‘combined operations’ involving the Royal Navy, RAF and Army; an operation in which two members of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons took part. In 1941 Vaagso, a coastal town in Southern Norway, lying between Trondheim and Bergen, […]

Cataloguing Fred Smith Part 3: Say what you see

After completing the listing and arranging of the Frederick Smith collection, I now move onto the nitty gritty of archive work – writing descriptions. You can see the descriptions I’ve completed so far on our newly launched archive catalogue, and I have linked to specific records on the catalogue as examples below.     This […]

Cataloguing Fred Smith Part 2: Order from chaos

In my previous blog post about cataloguing Fred Smith, I had got as far as a huge database of information about all of the papers in the collection. In this post I will describe the next stage of the process – archival arrangement. An archivist’s job, when making historic material more accessible to researchers, is […]

Bracy Clark hoof - the wall

Bracy Clark’s hoof – an update

I am delighted to say that thanks to the generosity of members of the Central Veterinary Society we have been able to have some conservation work carried out on Bracy Clark’s pasteboard model hoof.  At the same time the surface dirt was removed which means that you can now read the labels much more clearly as you can see […]

Farrier Sergeant Faris el Beini © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 3085)

William Moss: one man’s journey through the Somme and Beyond

1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, is a day remembered as one of the worst in British military history. The attack commenced at 7.30am; by the end of the day, 19,240 British soldiers had been killed and three times that number injured. The battle lasted 140 days, and amongst […]

Cataloguing Fred Smith Part 1: Asking questions

  Now that over seven months have passed since I started this project – it is time for another update! Most of my time so far has involved looking closely at all of the archive material relating to Major General Sir Frederick Smith, which is the first stage of cataloguing the collection. I needed to […]

John Roalfe Cox – ‘a clever pen-and-ink draughtsman’

I have previously blogged about the almost 400 illustrations by Edward Mayhew that we have in our archives. We also have a number of other  smaller collections of illustrations, one of which is the illustrated notebooks belonging to John Roalfe Cox. John Roalfe Cox MRCS FRCVS (?-1903) graduated from London Veterinary School in 1849 after which […]

RCVS Archives Project: Next steps

As you will have gathered from the previous blog by our Archivist Lorna, the Archives Project here at RCVS Knowledge is well under way. Whilst Lorna is currently getting to grips with the collections (and Fred Smith’s handwriting) I have been recruited to work on the digital side of things. My name is Adele and since the […]

Captain T V Somerville c1918

Thomas Somerville: an inspiration to others

This month marks the 75th anniversary of ‘Operation Compass’ which took place in the North African desert, in western Egypt during World War 2.  It was here, on 11 December 1940, that a member of the veterinary profession was recognised for gallantry of the highest order. Dr Thomas Somerville was born in March 1887 in […]

Empty Archive boxes

“A Good Deal of Spade Work” – The RCVS Archives Project

In June this year, RCVS Knowledge were thrilled to announce that the Alborada Trust had provided funding for a five year project to catalogue, preserve and digitise the Historic Collection and Archive of the Royal College. Now, five months later, it is time to update you with the progress that has been made so far! […]