All enquiries to Caroline Jacobs, Secretary  email: jacobscme@gmail.com phone: 07988171708

Unless otherwise stated, meetings take place at Hunnyhill Room Riverside Centre, The Quay, Newport, PO30 2QR

Meetings start at 7.30pm and finish at approximately 9pm.  Doors open at 7pm

Talks free to Associate branch members, National HA members and Students, visitors £3.

Branch Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HistoricalAssociationIW

 

 

Isle of Wight Programme 2026 - 2027

 

 

Thursday, 8th October 2026

‘America’s not a bowl of cherries': The US Civil Rights Movement and the American Dream 

Dr Lee Sartain, University of Portsmouth. 

Dr Lee Sartain is Senior Lecturer in American History, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and winner of the Landry Prize for the Best Book on a Southern Topic (2007). An expert on US civil rights activism, he has worked extensively on the NAACP and lists his research interests as focussing on the African American experience in the twentieth century civil rights struggle in the United States. His talk will explore ideas of Black leadership within the American dream, from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the movements that grew during this period from Martin Luther King to Black Power to the Rainbow Coalition with Jesse Jackson.

 

Thursday, 12th November 2026 **Note earlier start time**Doors open 5.15pm Lecture 5.30-7pm

From Resignation to Resistance: the Role of Popular Music in Remembering and Revering the Isle of Wight's Royal Exiles. 

Dr Angela McShane, Warwick University

Dr Angela McShane is Honorary Reader in History at the University of Warwick. A social and cultural historian, she is researching the political world of the broadside ballad, the cultural history of intoxicants, and the material culture of the everyday. 

Her talk will explore the role of the ballad in the particular context of the Islands historic role holding captive Charles I, alongside his daughter Princess Elzabeth, during the English Civil War. 

 

Thursday, 10th December 2026

The Englishman Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo

Anne Fletcher, Historian

ZOOM lecture - Lines open 7.15pm with the lecture starting 7.30pm

This is a members only event and free, but you must register with our secretary for the access code - jacobscme@gmail.com

Anne Fletcher read history at Oxford University and enjoyed a successful career in heritage, before turning to writing books. The great-great-great niece of Joseph Hobson Jagger, her search for his story started with only a photograph, a newspaper article and the lyrics of the famous song.

This is the story of a man who went from Yorkshire mill worker to Monte Carlo millionaire, and the only man known to have devised an infallible and completely legal system to defeat the odds at roulette and win a fortune. But he was not a gentleman or an aristocrat, he wasn’t even a professional gambler, he was a Yorkshire textile worker who had laboured in the Victorian mills of Bradford since childhood. 

 

Thursday, 14th January 2027

'The Napoleonic Wars: The Soldier's Experience'

Professor Alan Forrest, York University 

ZOOM lecture. Lines open 7.15pm with the lecture starting 7.30pm

This is a members only event and free, but you must register with our secretary for the access code - jacobscme@gmail.com

Prof Alan Forrest was Professor of Modern History at York from 1989 until his retirement from the University in 2012. During that time he served as Head of Department, as Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, and as Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research). 

His principal research interests lie in history of the French Revolution and Napoleon, the history of war, and the study of experience and memory; he is also increasingly interested in France’s global links with the rest of the world. Since retiring Prof Forrest has remained active researching and publishing in these areas and his talk will draw on this. Recent books include Waterloo, in Oxford’s ‘Great Battles’ series and The Death of the French Atlantic, also for Oxford University Press.

 

Thursday February 11^th 2027 

Elizabeth I and William Cecil, Lord Burghley: two minds or one?

Dr Janet Dickinson, Oxford University 

ZOOM lecture. Lines open 7.15pm with the lecture starting 7.30pm

This is a members only event and free, but you must register with our secretary for the access code - jacobscme@gmail.com

Dr Dickinson obtained her degrees from the Universities of Southampton and Bristol, where she began her postgraduate work as a medievalist before recognising the early modern period as her natural home. Janet is a co-convenor of the Tudor and Stuart Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research in London and a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Court Studies. She recently served on the steering committee of the Lord Burghley 500 Foundation, celebrating the 500th anniversary of William Cecil’s birth. She is currently co-editing two volumes: ‘The Embodied Court’ and ‘Burghley at 500: Quincentennial Essays on William Cecil’.

Her main research focus is on the Tudor nobility and the Tudor court and as such this is the starting point for her lecture on the extraordinary dynamic between Queen Elizabeth I and her chief minister William Cecil

 

Thursday 11th March 2027

The Changing Lives and Townscapes of Iron Age and Roman Silchester 

Professor Mike Fulford, University of Reading 

Professor Fulford, CBE, FBA, FSA is a British archaeologist and academic, specialising in the British Iron Age, Roman Britain and landscape archaeology. He has been Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading since 1988 and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He was appointed CBE in 2011. 

For many years he has been researching through excavation and publication the Iron Age and Roman town at Silchester, Hampshire and this will be the subject of his talk. He will describe how modern practice in excavation and subsequently in research in the laboratory has transformed our knowledge of the town from its origins in the Late Iron Age to its demise in the 5th to 7th century AD.  

 

Thursday, 8th April 2027

Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style

Caroline De Guitaut, Surveyor of the King’s Works of Art

Head of one of the largest and most important collections of decorative art in the world, numbering around 800,000 items, Caroline de Guitaut is an art historian and curator with more than thirty years’ experience. Responsible for the Decorative Arts curatorial and conservation departments of the Royal Collection, her work encompasses the research, conservation and presentation of arms and armour, ceramics, clocks, fashion, furniture, metalwork, tapestries, textiles, jewellery including the Crown Jewels, and sculpture. Caroline will lecture on the fashion archive of Queen Elizabeth II – one of the most important collections of twentieth century British fashion in existence - explaining the requirements of dressing for a female monarch from childhood clothing to ceremonial dress, eveningwear and tour wardrobes.