Digitised history

British Library Newspapers Online allows researchers to explore over three million pages of 18th and 19th century newspapers online. It's a brilliant resource that has changed the whole nature of historical investigation. It has also presented challenges, some of which were debated at Digitised History, a conference held at the BL on Tuesday.

I plan to write about the day on vexed issue. However, one point that intrigued me was a remark made by Jim Draper, Vice President and Publisher at Gale, when he mentioned that the Victorians were obsessed with the phrase 'eaten by' - as in humans being eaten by wild animals or cannibals.

This chimed with some of the background research I did for Those Who Dared. Starting with the obsession with sailors from Sir John Franklin's failed attempt to find the North West Passage resorting to eating their dead colleagues, to wild tales of cannibalism from around the world, the papers were indeed obsessed with the phrase. A quick search brought up numerous examples. I've chosen this Manchester Guardian story from January 14 1890, if only for the extra details about 'roasting' and 'besmeared with blood'.

Walter Bonatti

The Mountains of My Life by Walter Bonatti regularly makes it on to top-ten lists of mountaineering books. A collection of the Italian climber's classic writings on everything from his epic 1955 solo route on the Petit Dru in the French Alps to controversy on the slopes of K2, the year before. Penguin have just republished a translation of the book and the sprightly 80-year-old recently spoke to the Guardian about his life.

Bonatti is one of the 20th century's greatest alpinists so, as I've been asked on a number of occasions, why he didn't make it into the Guardian Book of Mountains? The simple answer is that his exploits just weren't reported in the paper. The vagaries of the newspaper business can mean that sometimes mountain triumphs end up being relegated to little more than a small paragraph.

However, with the Guardian piece reminding me of Bonatti's many triumphs, I double-checked the Guardian's archive to see if I'd missed something. When I compiled the book, the paper hadn't been digitised so the only way to search was by way of the old card index and then trying to find the piece on microfilm. This method certainly threw up some interesting material but inevitably a number events just didn't get noted.

After scouring the digital archive, apart from a few news in briefs, I still didn't come up with much. The following item though, which did make it to the front page on August 30 1961, does capture the essence of the man: