Curling at Hogmanay

The British Newspaper Archive is the project to digitise some 40 million pages from the British Library's large collection of newspapers. It launched in November 2011 with 4 million pages, and four years later over 12 million pages from over 540 individual titles are now online.

The BNA is a wonderful resource for those interested in social history. It is proving invaluable to the curling historian too. News clippings with evidence for those places where outside curling was played in years past now grace the subsidiary pages of many of the entries in the Historical Curling Places website.

Aside from using the BNA specifically for 'pond hunting', there are many, many entries therein which give a glimpse of what it was like to have been a member of a curling club in Victorian times.

This being Hogmanay, 2015, with no sign of sufficiently cold weather here in Scotland, all one can do is dream of curling outside. So perhaps an article from the Dundee Courier of January 8, 1869, will serve as a prompt!

Curling by moonlight at Braemar! How wonderful. With candles burning at the end of each rink.

The story continues:

Note that play carried on until 01.30, but with a break at midnight to celebrate the incoming year, with suitable refreshment!

A Happy New Year to all curlers everywhere.

Bob Cowan

The images are screenshots from the online paper and are reproduced with kind permission of The British Newspaper Archive. The images are © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED