It has been a momentous week for me. Four years on from starting my PhD, my thesis has been submitted for examination. What a journey it has been to reach this point.
My higher education began at Newcastle University (quite a few years ago). At that time, my route to postgraduate study met a financial roadblock. My degree result was not exceptional enough to win a (very competitive) studentship and, without private funds, I was forced to abandon my dreams and commence a career that took in various forms of administration. For a few years, rather ironically, I worked in universities administering postgraduate research degrees, with a slight sense of ‘what might have been’.
A career change took me into teaching English in secondary schools for a short time, until the Covid-19 pandemic struck just as my latest fixed-term contract was coming to an end. Unable to find further teaching work during the lockdowns, I was persuaded by wife and family to think about doing an MA. I had already had to take a student loan to pay my PGCE fees, so I thought ‘what the hell’ and took a further loan to support Masters study. I chose to go back to Edge Hill University because I had greatly enjoyed my PGCE training – and it was fortuitous that I did so. It so happened that, during that year, an opportunity arose to apply for a PhD funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Partnership award, with supervision shared between Edge Hill and the British Library. Luck was on my side and my application was ultimately successful, leading to the last four years researching short-lived newspapers in the nineteenth century.
There have been many highlights along the way – meeting friends and colleagues at conferences and events in the UK and USA, winning an essay prize and having the opportunity to undertake a placement at Ironbridge Gorge Museums in Shropshire, not far from my childhood home. Even though the future is rather uncertain, this has been the most rewarding experience of my life and I’m so glad to have been able to realise a dream. I owe thanks to so many people. They know who they are and what their support has meant to me.
I struggled to find an appropriate image with which to encapsulate the occasion. (I tried searching Wikimedia Commons for ‘submission’ and saw some VERY strange results!) So, I chose – of course – a newspaper from two hundred years ago to my submission date, from Newcastle where it all began for me and because I like the masthead.