Regional history - where is Bedfordshire?

From time to time the editor of BHRS has been offered articles for publication and has had to turn them down because the Society has no plans to publish a collections of essays and does not publish a journal. It has been possible to suggest a few journals to which the articles could be submitted as there are academic journals for the history of most subjects and periods.

It was less obvious which regional academic journal would include Bedfordshire because the county can fall into a bewildering range of regions. Is it in central England, the Chilterns, East Anglia, the east midlands, the home counties, the midlands or south midlands or ... where? In addition to a journal's territorial coverage, authors also have their own definition of Bedfordshire's regional place so that, frequently, when looking for the Bedfordshire content of an article with an appropriate regional coverage, it is lacking.

At the Local History conference at the University of Leicester in July this year, I talked to the publisher of Midland History about this problem and discovered that I was talking to the right person. Midland History, published by the University of Birmingham is the place for articles about Bedfordshire. According to the publisher's information (Maney Publishing) -

"Its aim is to publish scholarly work on the counties of Bedfordshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. It is a refereed journal which prints articles on midlands topics: from professional and amateur historians alike, locally based and from overseas."

It would be good to find that in the journal's thirty five volumes there were a lot of articles specifically about Bedfordshire. But alas, only three articles had the words Bedford or Bedfordshire in the title. Is there anyone out there reseaching and writing about Bedfordshire to fill this gap?

Bedfordshire at LMA

Amongst the manors purchased by the City of London from the King around 1628 were several in Bedfordshire - Biggleswade, Ampthill, Houghton Conquest and more.

Auditors' reports on rentals and the surveys of these manors undertaken by the City are amongst the papers held by the London Metropolitan Archives . For example one of the auditor's reports of 1627/8 is described as "Mr. Knights brief report as to extent of the Manor of Littington and the names of tenant and reversioner".

LMA's online catalogue only includes minimal information about these and many other documents with a Bedfordshire focus, but there is sufficient to awaken interest in any serious researcher.

Bedfordshire at the Imperial War Museum

Staying with the wartime subject of the last post (A Soldier in Bedfordshire 1941-42), I recently discovered the rich collections of the Imperial War Museum - illustrations, posters, interviews, films, books, diaries, letters and personal accounts of wartime or by service personnel.

A basic search in the IWM collections' catalogue for Luton resulted in 128 hits, beginning with a beautiful picture of the De Havilland Mosquito B35, probably built by Percival Aircraft Ltd at Luton in 1945 and a long description of the aircraft itself.

A search on Bedfordshire brought up more than 400 hits including diaries and letters written by men of the Bedfordshire Regiment during WWI and a 1918 film of the Inspection of volunteer regiments at Bedford in March 1918 by Field Marshal Viscount French.

For anyone researching 20th century Bedfordshire, this is a collection well worth consulting.