Bolton Branch Programme
Bolton Branch Programme 2024-25
Branch contact All enquiries to Mrs Melissa Wright mwright@boltonschool.org.uk 07912369060
Venue: All talks start at 6.30pm on (mostly) the first Monday of the month, and take place in the Leverhulme Suite @ Bolton School Girls’ Division, Chorley New Road, Bolton, BL1 4PA. Parking free in the Girls’ Division Quad.
Associate membership £20 per year. Talks free to national HA members and students, visitors £5.
Branch website: www.boltonhistoricalassociation.wordpress.com
Twitter: @BoltonHistory
Facebook: Bolton Historical Association
Monday 9th September
Dr Chris Millington – Manchester Metropolitan University
‘He didn’t really talk about it: Reconstructing a Free French past in Liverpool’.
This lecture investigates the wartime experience of Hilaire Marteau, a teenage member of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French who settled in Liverpool after the war. Marteau’s tale has all the ingredients of a Hollywood adventure: courageous resistance, a daring escape from Nazi Germany, and a perilous crossing of the Pyrenees to join the fight against Hitler and Vichy France. That, at least, is the story according to Marteau’s rough notebooks and conversations with his relatives, for he died before authoring a planned memoir. This lecture presents my efforts to reconstruct his story through these writings and through interviews with his surviving family members. It reveals not only how Marteau represented his own past but also the ways in which he passed his story on to his wife and children. In doing so, the lecture suggests ways in which historians might explore ‘second-generation’ memory of French resistance.
Monday 7th October
Professor Joyce Tyldesley OBE
Egyptology – details of the talk TBC
Monday 4th November
Dr Andy Fear, DPhil, MA (Oxon)
Classics – details of the talk TBC
Dr Andy Fear, DPhil, MA (Oxon) was born in Morecambe and educated at Lancaster RGS and New College Oxford where he obtained his BA and D Phil (on Roman Spain). After a brief spell at Jesus, Oxford he went on to teach Classics at the Universities of Keele and Manchester. An ardent Hispanophile, his academic interests and publications cover the provinces of the Western Roman Empire (especially Britain and Spain), ancient and medieval Warfare, and the Iberian peninsula. He also has a strong interest in transport history. He spends his spare time wargaming and watching Morecambe FC.
Monday 2nd December
The HA Great Debate – Bolton Branch Heat: How can your local history tell a global story?
Details TBC
Monday 6th January
Dr Dean Irwin – University of Lincoln
Details of the talk - TBC
Dean is a medieval historian who works on the records generated by, or in relation to, the Jews of medieval England. His doctoral work focused on acknowledgements of debt (1194-1276). Interests include all aspects of medieval Anglo-Jewish history as well as the history of medieval records (single sheet) and seals. Dean completed his PhD at Canterbury, Christ Church, where he considered the records generated by Jewish moneylending activities in Medieval England.
Monday 3rd February
Dr Jonathan Spangler – Senior lecturer Manchester Metropolitan University
Details of the talk -TBC
My research is based on the aristocracy of France and its neighbours in the 16th-18th centuries, and the notion of frontier identities. In particular, I am working on a new history of the Duchy of Lorraine, a formerly independent state between France and Germany.
I am also interested in early modern royal courts, in France and elsewhere. I particularly focus on members of royal families besides the king: his wife, his brother, his mother, his cousins. In particular, I am a specialist on the role of the second son in the history of monarchy (the ‘heir and the spare’) and have published and spoken to the media frequently on this topic.
Monday 3rd March
Professor Martin Alexander
Details of the talk -TBC
Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Aberystwyth, Martin attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School, then read Modern History at Exeter College, Oxford, and completed a research DPhil. He taught at the Sorbonne, Southampton and Salford universities, and at the US Naval War College. His recent publications include a book on his 1960s LRGS Headmaster John L. Spencer -- signals officer of 2nd Battalion, the Essex Regiment in Normandy in 1944, the project entailing a study tour of the beaches, bocage country and the villages near Bayeux and Caen where men and women of courage and spirit decided the destiny of modern Western Europe.