Explore The Times Archive

For any historical writer, the prospect of being able to search 200 years of The Times at the push of a button from anywhere in the world is both thrilling and slightly alarming: thrilling because there has never been a research tool quite like this before; alarming, because it is bound to unearth one's own errors and omissions.

Even the most assiduous (or obsessed) biographer does not have time to scour every page of the world's most famous newspaper for references to his subject. Even a historian utterly steeped in her subject cannot expect to have found every scrap of newspaper evidence relating to it.

Digitisation has changed all that. With every word published in The Times between 1785 and 1985 now accessible online, anyone, anywhere can search for a name, a subject, even a word, comprehensively and almost instantaneously. The same is true of other newspaper archives, but none has quite the scope of The Times.

Historians can comb the journalistic record as never before. Even the most well-tilled historical subjects, even the most definitive biography, can now be reviewed in the light of a research machine that would have seemed magical to earlier historians.

The results may be surprising. Take Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. Having recently written a book to accompany the exhibition devoted to Fleming and Bond at the Imperial War Museum, I can attest to the wealth of material on this subject. There are two excellent full-length biographies of Fleming, the Fleming archive is preserved in its entirety, and the official documents relating to his wartime work have been released to the National Archives. Is there anything more to be discovered about Ian Fleming?

As The Times reported on Saturday, there is. A search through the Times archive turned up a letter, written by Fleming to this newspaper in 1938, carrying a strong whiff of appeasement and casting a new light on the novelist's prewar political thinking.

The letter had been overlooked by earlier historians, and the original has long since been lost. But a search of the archive website coughed it up in less than a second.

As the author of several books of historical biography, I approached The Times's new electronic archive with both anticipation and trepidation. When researching Agent Zigzag, my biography of Eddie Chapman, the wartime criminal and double agent, I had used the paper's voluminous clippings files and consulted an earlier version of the digital archive. But now I could carry out a full-scale electronic trawl through the newspaper using the latest search engine. I had a sudden, unpleasant vision of a rash of erratum slips...

Sure enough, in five minutes, I found four things I did not know about Eddie Chapman:

An account of a punch-up in 1954 at the Maisonette Club in Chelsea, involving Chapman and a South African importer with the marvellous name of Rex Morley-Morley, which left the latter with “a fine back eye” and the former with a fine for £5.

A review of Triple Cross, the dreadful 1967 film based on Chapman's partly fictionalised memoirs, which described the “continuous self-congratulating smirk” of Christopher Plummer in the role of Chapman.

An article by Bernard Levin from 1975 headlined “Is any man so wicked he can never see the light?” referring to Chapman's journey from criminal jailbird to heroic spy, and back again.

A 1978 novel by Alan Williams, The Widow's War, apparently based on Chapman's life, which I had never heard of before. The review of it described how Chapman had won both the Iron Cross (which he did) and the Victoria Cross (which he didn't). The Times is all-embracing, but not necessarily infallible.

I did not feel too wrong-footed. None of these discoveries drastically changed my view of Chapman: these were snippets, not revelations, yet they were proof of just how comprehensive electronic research can be.

The transfer of newspaper archives to digital format represents an extraordinary advance. For modern historians, newspapers are the bedrock of research, providing not only the narrative of great events but the detailed minutiae and social texture that only a newspaper can furnish. Here can be found not just high politics and culture but the warp and weft of daily life.

Scanning a page of The Times in 1947, my eye was caught, alongside a fleeting reference to Chapman (another fracas in a bar), by the personal columns, which gave a flavour of postwar British society that one could almost taste on the page.

“For sale, pair of officer's leather boots, size nine, NO COUPONS... Old Stationers War Memorial, donations invited... If you are appalled at the ever-increasing bureaucratic encroachments on individual liberty write today to The Society of Individualists... 1936 Rolls Royce, £2,500.” And then, my favourite: “Gold toothpick wanted: good condition, any reasonable offer accepted.” Who was the officer reduced to selling his boots? Was The Society of Individualists swallowed up by its own bureaucracy? And what eccentric dental Midas resorted to the columns of The Times in his quest for a single gold toothpick?

For earlier generations of historians, searching newspaper archives was time-consuming, and often thankless. While the Times indexes are things of rare accomplishment, they are inevitably incomplete and partial. The names of the great and good may appear in the index, but the chances are that the names of your great-grandparents, and mine, will not.

The invention of microfilm did not help matters for the researcher, though the reels of plastic were far easier to preserve than the paper originals. Microfilm is unwieldy and noisy to use: the reels, in my experience, tended to accelerate without warning and then ping off the spool, sending sharp-edged plastic tape scything through the air. Reading microfilm for long periods made one cross-eyed, and extremely irritable.

How different, then, to be able to track down the correct, 200-year-old newspaper article in the comfort of your own home; copy a clipping without having to order it from a grumpy archivist; skim through the past without getting one's fingers dirty.

Newspapers may be only the first draft of history, but those writing the second, third and umpteenth drafts can now access that vital first version in a way that was never possible hitherto.

Every family has stories of their ancestors, of the places they went, the lives they lived, the events they experienced. Just as genealogical archives have opened up whole new areas of family research, so the Times archive is the latest evidence of the way new technology can democratise history, putting the search for the past in the hand of ordinary people in the present.

However, like the professional hist- orian and biographer, the amateur family historian may find that the past does not always follow expectations. In an idle moment, I typed “Peter Macintyre” into the search engine. Peter Macintyre is the most revered ancestor in my family, a Scotsman who emigrated to Australia in Victorian times.

Sure enough, there was an entry in The Times from 1866, but the story was not at all what I had expected. Headlined “The Fatal Rifle Accident in Mar Forest”, it described how a Peter Macintyre had gone out stalking in the Grampians with a man named George Urquhart. They had wounded a large stag, and set off in pursuit: “Being desirous to get the stag into more open ground, Urquhart tried to drive him down the burn, pushing him with the butt end of the rifle.” The stag allegedly kicked the rifle, which went off, and sent a bullet straight through Urquhart who declared “I am shot”, and promptly died.

It all sounded very fishy to me. The Times reporter seemed clearly unconvinced. “The way he met with his death was certainly most extraordinary, for he may be said to have been shot by the stag he was pursuing.” Was there more to Peter Macintyre's departure for Australia than family history related? Did Macintyre or another stalker shoot Urquhart and then cover it up? Had the archive discovered a skeleton in my family closet? The Times archive contains seven million stories, and they are not necessarily the stories one expects: an appeasement letter from Ian Fleming; a series of new discoveries about a book already in print; and a strange tale of death on the Scottish moors that has made me wonder about my own antecedents.

There are two morals here: beware of the hidden secrets of the Times archive; and never push a wounded stag downhill with the butt of your rifle.