In a previous review (RR 98/29‐30) we gave a specific welcome to local history publications from this enterprising publishing house. These three further titles all continue the pattern of those noticed earlier, two of them dealing with coal‐mining and one on a rather esoteric, not to say completely unlikely, topic. Unlike the previous Ayrshire mining title reviewed, a history of a single colliery compiled by a local history society, the two volumes under review here take a broader view. They are, in fact, compilations of original photographs and postcards with detailed captions and a short introductory text; as such they need no further excuse. The photographs themselves are of great historical value and of considerable local, and wider, interest. There are so many relics, physical, social and cultural of the once dominant mining industries throughout Ayrshire and Lanarkshire, and these original photographs give a context, meaning and life to them. The generous numbers of photographs in each volume are well produced and thoroughly explained to make these works a valuable source for local history, but which also build into a wider contribution to industrial and social history.
Paisley as an early centre of the space race? Probably some unlikelier things have happened, but not much. The Paisley Rocketeers tells a fascinating local story which will have interest in a wider field also. The fields at the head of the braes just outside Paisley are in many respects ideal for letting of rockets, although preferably not when I am driving past morning and afternoon, and this story of one man’s (originally boy’s) hobby lasting into the 1960s and spreading to other rocket enthusiasts, as well as to stamp collectors with interest in the mail carried by these rockets, will interest a wider audience than simply those Paisley buddies who might recall misdirected missiles occasionally whistling over their houses or through their gardens. This is a story worth telling; if it is primarily of specialist or parochial interest, it will also attract the attention of a wider audience and full marks are due to the publisher for taking on and producing such a well illustrated account.
