This paper presents the first results on parsing the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE), a millionword historical treebank with an annotation style similar to that of the Penn Treebank (PTB). We describe key features of the PPCMBE annotation style that differ from the PTB, and present some experiments with tree transformations to better compare the results to the PTB. First steps in parser analysis focus on problematic structures created by the parser.