EO3 – Making scrapbooks: why did an interwar police detective scrapbook?

Episode transcript (pdf)

Dr Eloise Moss

Eloise is a lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Manchester. Eloise is one of only a handful of historians who have written on scrapbooks on the twentieth century. She’s written on two scrapbooks kept by the interwar police detective Frederick Wensley Porter in an article for Social History and a chapter entitled “Scrapbooks: A proliferation of meaning” in Approaching Historical Sources in their Contexts, pp. 224-241 published in 2020 by Routledge.

Scrapbooks

Frederick Porter Wensley

A page from a scrapbook kept by the interwar police detective Frederick Porter Wensley from BLA, WENSLEY/3/1, Scrapbook with News Cuttings (1890–1929), iii.
Source: Bishopsgate Institute

Photograph published in
Moss, Eloise. “The scrapbooking detective: Frederick Porter Wensley and the limits of ‘celebrity’ and ‘authority’ in inter-war Britain.” Social History 40, no. 1 (2015): 58-81.
Eloise Moss Social History Scrapbooks
Approaching Historical Sources in their Contexts

Newspaper articles

An extract from an article published in the Children’s Hour section of the Hampshire Telegraph on 25 June 1910, p.12.

Source: British Newspaper Archive

Homemade adhesive paste - Falkirk Herald
An extract from an article published on the front page of the Falkirk Herald on 01 December 1915.

Source: British Newspaper Archive

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