Mountbatten was a controversial figure who died in tragic circumstances but Adrian Smith demonstrates that, behind his aristocratic facade, he was a very adept, talented and formative personality. Four years have passed since the re-opening of Broadlands, the Hampshire home of Lord and Lady Brabourne. The house was subject to...

Much has been written during the last 50 years about the events leading up to and during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Less consideration has been given to the students who arrived in Britain as refugees. During the weeks following the Soviet intervention in Hungary around 25,000 people were killed...

The term "Amphibious Warfare" was adopted a few years ago to indicate a form of a strategy of which the characteristic was the descent of the sea-borne armies upon the coasts and ports of an enemy. It is not a method peculiar to Great Britain, for all maritime nations from...

An au revoir but not goodbye from outgoing HA President Professor Jackie Eales  Jackie Eales has been an enthusiastic President for the last three years who has been very happy to visit many of the branches to give lectures and to assist in key HA events.Jackie's lectures at the HA annual...

‘You've gone over to The Dark Side'. These were the words of a well-respected historian to whom I'd been enthusing about the pleasures and perils of Dressing Up. During 2009-10 I spent several months in historic costume, recreating the habits and rituals of domestic life in the past. It was...

Peter Liddel introduces us to a rich source of historical information and encourages us to make some purposeful visits to museums. From the seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century, travellers from the UK explored the Mediterranean lands of ancient civilisations in search of trophies that demonstrated the achievements of the classical world. Highly...

First referred to by Richard Morton (1637-98) in his Phthisiologia under the denomination phthisis nervosa as long ago as 1689, anorexia nervosa was given its name in a note by Sir William Gull (1816-90) in 1874. Gull had earlier described a disorder he termed apepsia hysterica, involving extreme emaciation without...

No longer "A Pole Apart": Antarctica 100 years on from Captain Scott At last on 12 November 1912 the search party found the tent almost totally buried in snow. According to Thomas Williamson: ‘Mr Wright came towards us, and said it was the Polar Party ... it was a great blow...

The Second World War saw the development of significant anti-Americanism in Britain. This article locates the centre of wartime anti-Americanism in the politics of Conservative imperialists, who believed the USA was trying to deliberately dismantle the British Empire in order to fulfil its own imperial ambitions. The Second World War...

Roisin Inglesby introduces us to the life and work of a lesser known member of the Arts and Crafts movement, Arthur Heygate  Mackmurdo, who helped to change the face of European architecture and interior design. Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851–1942) may not be a household name, but he is arguably one of the most significant figures in British design...

Whenever British radar is discussed the name that usually comes to mind is that of Robert Watson Watt. Our history books and our dictionaries of biography consistently attribute the discovery of radar in Britain solely to Watson Watt, with little or no mention of the key role played by his...

Stephen Bourne examines the life of Amanda Ira Aldridge, the multi-talented singer, composer and voice teacher. Amanda Ira Aldridge may have lived a quiet life but she was a trailblazer in the world of music. After a career as a concert singer, she became a composer in a male-dominated profession, for which she adopted a male pseudonym, Montague Ring. In her...

Prior to abolition in 1807, Britain was the world’s leading slave trading nation. Of an estimated six million individuals forcibly transported from Africa in the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century, almost 2.5 million (40 per cent) were carried in British vessels.2 The contemporary attitudes and assumptions which underpinned...

The versions of history on our cinema screens have an important influence upon public perceptions of the past. In his article Taylor Downing explores how the wartime British government used the cinema for propaganda purposes and how the film Battle of the  Somme contributes to portrayals of that battle to this...

Before Windrush: West Indians in Britain, Asher and Martin Hoyles, Hansib, 2020, 144p, £9-99. ISBN 978-1-912662-29-6. This is a very significant book, being highly relevant to the politics and attitudes of our own times. Asher and Martin Hoyles explore the presence of West Indian people in Britain before the arrival...

'An attack on the United States with 10,000 megatons would lead to the death of essentially all of the American people and to the destruction of the nation.’ ‘In 1960 President Kennedy mentioned 30,000 megatons as the size of the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.’ In the autumn of 1962...

On 14 February 1868, the Carlisle Journal reported as follows: … two meetings were held in the Athenaeum in this city , “for the purpose of forming an auxiliary to co-operate with the Church Association in London, to uphold the principles and order of the United Church of England and...

Christine Merie Fox compares the impact of the Black Death on fourteenth-century London with our present-day experience. In 1347, a terrifying disease was carving a path from the East into Northern Africa and Europe. Its entry point into Europe was the south of Italy, via merchant ships from the Black Sea. The...

Captain Thomas Wyndham of Marshfield Park in Somerset was on voyage to Barbary where he sailed from Kingroad, near Bristol, with three ships full of goods and slaves thus beginning the association of African Trade and Bristol. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bristol was not a place of...

When the First World War started in the summer of 1914 it began a series of events that would change the world for ever; it also accelerated changes and ideas that were already underway. In some cases, big issues appeared to be put to one side while the immediate needs of...