Was it even a revolt? Afterwards, the government was doubtful. But in January 1872 the man on the ground in Punjab, deputy commissioner John Lambert Cowan, was sure. There had been unrest among the minority Namdhari Sikh population – ‘Kukas’, the British called them – in what was a Muslim region. The Muslim slaughter of... Continue Reading →
Teddy Boys: Post-War Britain and the First Youth Revolution by Max Décharné
On Barnes Common in West London, one midnight in the early days of 1955, a policeman approached four men sitting in a parked car. They were wearing velvet-collared jackets, stovepipe trousers, bootlace ties and crepe-soled shoes. ‘Teddy Boys’, he thought to himself. “Now then you lot,” he told them. “Get weaving before I pinch you.”... Continue Reading →
Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera
It happened by accident. In 1829 the naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was trying to hatch a moth pupa. He placed it in a sealed glass container, along with some soil and dried leaves, and left it. Sometime later he was surprised to find that a fern and some grass had taken root in the soil... Continue Reading →
Stations of the dead: London’s Necropolis railway
Death in the Victorian capital of the British Empire was problematic. “London graveyards are all bad,” the Board of Health reported gloomily, “differing only in degrees of badness”. There were 200 of them covering some 218 acres, yet by 1842 they were having to absorb over 50,000 new residents a year. “A London churchyard is... Continue Reading →
One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink by Matthew Parker
The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a “wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations”. It offered “the only solution to great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails then all else fails.” Stirring words. Not those of some sentimental old Colonel Blimp back... Continue Reading →
Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear by Klaus-Michael Bogdal; Travellers Through Time: A Gypsy History by Jeremy Harte
The Roma are an Indian people. They left what is now north-west India and Pakistan in the early decades of the 11th century for reasons which will likely never be known, but which may relate to incursions by Muslim armies in the region. They moved west around the Caspian and into the Byzantine Empire by... Continue Reading →
Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish by Francesca Peacock
“All I desire is fame,” wrote Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, in the preface to her first book, a collection of poetry, in 1653. “Fame is nothing but a great noise… therefore I wish my book may set a-work every tongue.” As a statement of the workings of celebrity it is remarkably modern. But it... Continue Reading →
Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith; Shaping the Wild: Wisdom From a Welsh Hill Farm by David Elias
In the 1870s, the Manchester Corporation Waterworks made plans to buy two small Cumbrian lakes, Wythburn Water and Leathes Water, and the surrounding land, to build a reservoir. The city desperately needed access to clean water for its burgeoning industrial population. But it met with virulent opposition: Octavia Hill, later co-founder of the National Trust,... Continue Reading →
Cleanse the causeway: murder and mayhem in early-modern Edinburgh
The death of James IV at the battle of Flodden in September 1513 was a catastrophe for his country. He left behind the one-year-old James V to take the throne, and, as regent, his English wife Margaret Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, whose army had just deprived the nation of its king. Within a year,... Continue Reading →
Macaroni, a musical dialogue and the first Anglo-Ashanti war
The Anglo-Ashanti wars began with a debacle for the British. On 8 January 1824, word reached Cape Coast that the Ashanti were advancing. Sir Charles M’Carthy, newly appointed governor, divided up the forces at his disposal and hurried a few hundred men up country. They waded through waist-deep mud and slept exposed to torrential rain.... Continue Reading →
Small Island: 12 Maps That Explain the History of Britain by Philip Parker
Roman soldiers, garrisoned on Hadrian’s Wall in the second century AD, referred to their enemies as “Brittunculi”, or “filthy little Britons”. But the Britannia that they guarded would be but the first iteration of a nation that has long outlasted them, reinventing itself, or being reinvented, countless times ever since. In 878, arguably, “Britain” was... Continue Reading →
The Grunwick dispute: workers’ rights, street violence and ‘the Ascot of the left’
“It was a long hot summer.” Thus Lord Scarman begun his account of the small dispute at Grunwick, a film-processing company in north-west London, which escalated into one of the defining industrial conflicts of the late 1970s. The dispute began with the sacking of a young worker, Devshi Bhudia, for slow work on Friday 20th... Continue Reading →
‘Humanity Dick’ and the founding of the RSPCA
On 16 June 1824 a small group of men met in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in St Martin’s Lane, London. They had been brought together by Arthur Broome, animal-welfare campaigner and vicar of St Mary’s in Bow, but the leading light was Irish MP Richard Martin, widely known as ‘Humanity Dick’. Thanks to Martin, Parliament... Continue Reading →
The Siege of Loyalty House by Jessie Childs
“There is nothing that doth more advance and sour a man’s misery”, the eulogist said at the funeral of Sir Marmaduke Rawdon in April 1646, “than this one thought and apprehension: that he was once happy.” Before the outbreak of the English civil war, Rawdon had been a highly successful merchant in London; his unofficial... Continue Reading →
‘A Socialist Romance’: Edith Lanchester and the perils of over-education
By the autumn of 1895, Edith Lanchester was 24. Born into a prosperous middle-class family, she had studied at London University and Birkbeck and was earning her own living as a clerk at the Cardiff (New South Wales) Gold Mining Company. She was also was already a seasoned socialist campaigner whose ringing voice, it was... Continue Reading →
Mary Anning: Britain’s greatest fossil hunter
Extinction is an old fact but a new idea. In the early 19th century its certainty was barely established. How many people, then, had the anatomical knowledge and geological expertise to identify extinct species – that is, creatures whose final form was largely unknown – and pull their fossils out of the rock whole? In... Continue Reading →
The Well of Loneliness on trial: the government vs Radclyffe Hall
On November 9, 1928 Bow Street Magistrates Court was crowded. DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow had been successfully prosecuted for obscenity in the same courtroom 13 years earlier. Now it was the turn of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. The perceived obscenity in Hall’s book was its subject matter: it presents lesbianism – inversion... Continue Reading →
Bonfire of the ancients: a British library goes up in flames
The British Library’s manuscript collection is built on that amassed by antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton in the early 17th century. Gifted to the nation in 1701, it was stored at Essex House on the Strand for several years before safety concerns led it to be moved somewhere “much more safe from fire” – Ashburnham House,... Continue Reading →
Ahilyabai Holkar: a philosopher queen remembered
Ahilyabai Holkar, queen of the Malwa kingdom in north-west central India, part of the Maratha empire, died on 13 August 1795, having reigned for nearly thirty years. She came to power in 1767 after the deaths of her father in law, Malhar Rao Holkar, and her young, sickly son. (Her husband had died in battle... Continue Reading →
The evacuation of St Kilda, the last and outmost isle
The small archipelago of St Kilda, fifty miles west of Harris, has long attracted romantic attention for its remoteness, with the sense of deep strangeness and difference such remoteness implies. It is the last and outmost isle, the island on the edge of the world: a place whose way of life, in the words of... Continue Reading →
Mathew Lyons 