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This month, we have three complete products from Anguline and MyHistory worth £35. These include a directory of Bedfordshire dating from 1903 – containing indexes, Bedfordshire facts, a Towns and Villages Directory, plus a listing of private residents – and a 1939 directory of Luton. developed from the 1870s with firms, such as Howard, making farm machinery at the Britannia Iron Works and WH Allen making pumps and engines at the Queen’s Engineering Works. Other companies were Grafton Cranes, Igranic Electric and, much later, Texas Instruments.
In Luton, the hat trade was the biggest industry and this brought chemical companies to the town. Other Luton bbusinesses iincluded George Kent Ltd and HHayward Tyler. Pamela says: “We hhold substantial records for all tthese companies. We are pparticularly pleased to have rrecently received the George Kent rrecords on loan from Luton MMuseum and some more HHayward Tyler material with wwhich we hope to help the ccompany celebrate its 200th aanniversary this year.
“The records we hold are often tto do with the history of the ccompany and its products. The bbest source of material for the family historian within business collections is likely to be a company’s in-house magazine.”
New acquisitions come in all the time and one recent deposit was the collection of architects Franklin, Deacon and Briars.
“We have made some progress on sorting and cataloguing the 800 bundles of plans but need some help to tackle the 25 or so
“We were one of the lucky offices to have our school records digitised and put online in the first batch and to have school logbooks included as well as