We’re open on Doors Open Day from 12-4 pm, with tours, displays and a special Taste Ayrshire book event with tea and scones. More info below -
We will have on display some wonderful food-relating advertisements from our collections, including this one from St. Marnock monthly magazine, 1898.
We recently had an enquiry about the Ayrshire gigs of a band called the In-Betweens (or In Between / ‘Nbetweens). After a quick look through some old copies of the Kilmarnock Standard it was obvious the band played in Kilmarnock and Ayr almost every week during the first half of 1967. The band weren’t from Ayrshire or even Scotland, but Wolverhampton. A few years later they’d become glam-rock superstars Slade, one of the best-selling bands of the 1970s.
The In-Betweens played alongside some fantastic Scottish bands of the era including The Poets and The Beatstalkers, mainly at the Grand Hall in Kilmarnock and Bobby Jones in Ayr. Other venues included The Roxy in Stewarton and The Beachcomber in Irvine. There are also ads for them playing for Kilmarnock Youth Club, in ‘The Hut’ in St Marnock’s Street Car Park!
The pictures below show the band in all their splendour in 1967 and 1968 (thanks Chris Selby for the images).
They were still billed as The In-Between for a Grand Hall gig in 1969, when they had already changed their name to Ambrose Slade and were only a couple of years away from megastardom.
If you have any memories of the band’s Ayrshire gigs, or any pictures, please get in touch!
We’ve been looking for food-related items from the collections recently, in anticipation of our Taste Ayrshire / Doors Open Day event on Sunday 2nd September. The Book of Cakes was a great find, particularly with so many people talking about The Great British Bake Off.
The Book of Cakes by T. Percy Lewis and A. G. Bromley was published by Maclaren & Sons, London in 1903. The copy we have was presented to a student of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College Bakery School evening class, as a Special Prize for Confectionery in 1907.
Other items on display on Doors Open Day will be menus from public dinners in Kilmarnock in the late 19th century and illustrated advertisements of food, cafes and hotels from local magazines and newspapers. Local author Agnes Monaghan will be offering visitors some home-made Ayrshire baking from her book of recipes and recollections Milk and Two Sugars: Down Memory Lane.
In a regular series of posts we’ll highlight some of the more unusual items from our Ayrshire Collection (the main book collection here at the Burns Monument Centre).
Today’s nugget has been chosen mainly because of its fantastic title -
“An Alarm unto a Secure Generation; or, A short Historical Relation of some of the most strange and remarkable Appearances of COMETS, FIERY METEORS, BLOODY SIGNS, SHIPS OF WAR, ARMIES OF FOOT and HORSEMEN fighting &c. that have been seen since The Birth of Our Saviour, (as the tokens or forerunners both of promised Mercies, and threatened Judgements,) though different ages; particularly those lately observed in the Parishes of Finwick, Eglesham, and Kilmarnock: with Some Arguments and Observations upon the whole, in way of Application to our present Circumstances.”
It was written by John Howie and published in Kilmarnock in 1809 (second edition).
We are very excited about our new collaborative workshop with novelist Zoe Strachan and Dr Christine Ewing, Principal Archivist of Ayrshire Archives. We hope this will be the first of many collaborations between writers, storytellers and artists and the staff who work here in archives, family and local history.
A Place in the Archive follows on from the extremely successful My Favourite Place workshop with Ryan van Winkle, courtesy of Scottish Book Trust. See the graphic for more info…