Kate Webster liked to drink, and the place where she most enjoyed quenching her thirst, was a public house in the London suburb of Richmond, called The Hole in The Wall.  Unmarried and with a young son, Kate was 30 years old and in need of work. Julia Martha Thomas was a retired school… Read More

  If you ask the question; “Who was the first person to achieve powered flight using a heavier than air craft?”, the answer most people will give you, is Orville Wright. Some, particularly those who read my earlier story entitled Wright? Wrong!, will gleefully tell you it was actually Gustave Whitehead. Certainly, Gustave, who took… Read More

This story about a ghost dog, begins not with the birth of a puppy, as one might expect, but with the arrival of a bouncing baby boy. Robert, the latest addition to the Steuart clan, was born on 7th January 1804, less than 2 years before the family completed the construction of Ballechin House, their… Read More

“My wife is an angel.” said a man to another he had just met in a pub. “You’re lucky, mine’s still alive!” came the reply. An old joke, but pertinent to this story. At least that’s my excuse for including it here. To even things up gender wise, one of the oldest jokes in the English… Read More

  Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the life of Bill Coltman had been unexceptional. Born in Staffordshire, England on 17th November 1891, he was a market gardener by trade and taught at his local village Sunday school. As a member of the Plymouth Brethren, his religious persuasion meant that he held… Read More

As pioneers of aviation go, Jean-Pierre Blanchard may not be the first name that springs to mind, but it was certainly not for the want of trying. Born in Les Andelys, France in 1753, Blanchard was both an inventor and a shameless self publicist. Early in his career he had designed and constructed a variation… Read More

Hawley Harvey Crippen was a small, mild mannered man. At just 5 feet 4 inches in height, of slight build and bespectacled, perhaps the only noticeable feature of this otherwise unremarkable man, was his large walrus moustache. His wife, on the other hand, was an extremely noticeable individual. Cora Crippen was an unsuccessful music hall… Read More

  Long before Muhammad Ali and George Foreman squared up to each other in a boxing ring in Kinshasa, Zaire, on October 30th 1974, in a fight that would become known as The Rumble in The Jungle, an altogether different kind of altercation took place in the jungles of East Africa during World War One; a… Read More

Language evolves over time. If we were able to converse with our ancestors from five or six generations removed, we would be quite surprised at how many words we use today, that they would not recognise. Conversely, words also fall out of use, and we would be equally bemused by some of the archaic vocabulary… Read More

That a man named Jesus of Nazareth lived in Galilee around 2,000 years ago cannot be proven. Nevertheless, most historians today accept that he actually existed, and was active during the period detailed in the New Testament. Whether you believe him to have been the son of God, God the Son, a prophet, or just… Read More