Just over seventy years after his death, the name Hermann Goering (1893-1946) is still sadly familiar to most of us today. A leading member of the Nazi Party, he founded the dreaded German secret police known as the Gestapo, and was appointed Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Germany’s Air Force, from 1935 until… Read More

  On 17th October 1678, Sir Edmund Godfrey was discovered lying face down in a ditch on Primrose Hill,North West London. He had been strangled and his neck broken. He had also been run through with his own sword. The perpetrator, or perpetrators, had clearly adopted a ‘belt and braces’ approach to the killing. But… Read More

  If you ask a historian today why the continent of America is so called, the chances are they will tell you that it is named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. And they may well be right. There is, however, a lesser known candidate for the accolade, and although it seems unlikely that documentary… Read More

  Most of us will be familiar with the legend of King Arthur and the sword in the stone. According to the story, the hilt of a sword named Excalibur protruded from a large stone, and only the true King of England would be able to pull the sword from the stone.  Arthur, it turned… Read More

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of London stood at just under one million. By 1851 it had swollen to almost two and a half million. Increased mechanisation meant less work for agricultural labourers, but also more work in newly built factories in towns and cities across the United Kingdom. Consequently,… Read More

  Most of us today are familiar with what has become collectively known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Discovered between 1946 and 1956, in caves located just over one mile inland from the shore of the Dead Sea, in the modern day Palestinian territory of the West Bank, the scrolls are of great religious and… Read More

  The CS Mackay-Bennett was a cable repair ship that operated primarily in the North Atlantic, between 1884 and 1922. Now, mending underwater cables is not a terribly interesting subject to be writing about, I agree; but it is the Mackay-Bennett’s role in the aftermath of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous tragedies, for… Read More

  On the 18th April 1943, four boys with an interest in ornithology, were enthusiastically going about their bird spotting in Hagley Woods, near Birmingham, England, when one of them made a grizzly discovery. Climbing a wych elm tree, one of the boys peered inside the hollow trunk, and discovered a human skull residing there.… Read More

  I do not usually write about events from the recent past, as my personal preference is for events or characters that predate living memory. Yes, I know that history includes events from the modern era too, but that’s just the way I am. Occasionally , however, I come across a story that is so… Read More

  War is not normally an amusing subject. Most commonly wars occur as a result of disputes over territory or religion, with death and injury the inevitable consequences. In what follows, I do not intend to make light of the seriousness of the subject, but there are occasions in history where wars broke out for… Read More