Making History


Some of us are lucky enough to have a ‘lightbulb’ moment, when we suddenly realise what we want to do in life. For a ten-year old Ursula Pearce, hers was watching whilst the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s famous warship, was carefully raised from the seabed. From that moment, she has built her career in history and archaeology. Ursula tells us what she has unearthed so far.


When I rang my Dad to tell him that I’d been offered a job at the Royal Victoria Chapel at Netley near Southampton, he laughed out loud. “Did you know your Granddad worked there as a hospital porter during World War Two?” he chuckled “What a coincidence!” It certainly was as I grew up in Essex and Granddad was from Leicestershire so I would never have guessed. But that’s what I love about history and archaeology, not just preserving old buildings as monuments but bringing them alive as places where real people lived and worked. Sadly, I hadn’t thought to ask Granddad before he died what life was like for him at Netley.


As a child, I guess history was all around me. Growing up near Colchester, you trip over the Romans at every turn, closely followed by Anglo-Saxons and Normans! At secondary school, my love of history was inspired further by a fantastic history teacher. He leant me a book called “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey, which is about a modern policeman investigating what happened to the Princes in the Tower (the vanished sons of King Edward IV). I was fascinated at the thought of applying modern scientific methods and analytical thinking to historical evidence and I started exploring archaeology as a career option. When I was about 14, we


20 Make The Future Yours! Issue 3


visited York and I immediately fell in love with the city. Fast- forward a few years and that was where I went to study my Archaeology Degree. We were a small group of 28 students in my year and lucky enough to have the opportunity to dig on some well-known archaeological sites, like Sutton Hoo in Suffolk. It was a three-year, BA (Hons) degree and you could study just archaeology or archaeology with history. We covered topics from history and geography to technical drawing and statistics – it was really diverse. Today, there are also options to study archaeology with subjects like sciences or the environment. Doing those excavations at


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