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What did you do in The Great War? A family mystery explored
Historian article
Research into family history is well-known as likely to dig up some uncomfortable evidence. Nearly every family has had its bastards; nearly every generation has had someone on poor relief. We had both. But more troubling was my recent suspicion that a hundred or so years ago not one but two...
What did you do in The Great War? A family mystery explored
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Charles Gilpin
Historian article
Family Background and Early Life
Charles Gilpin was born in Bristol in 1815, the son of James Gilpin, a Quaker draper, and Mary Gilpin nee Sturge. The Sturges were a notable Quaker Liberal family, active in the campaign against slavery. Their relatives included the Darbys of Coalbrookdale. Charles Gilpin was...
Charles Gilpin
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My Favourite History Place: Tivoli Theatre
Historian feature
The Tivoli Theatre opened on 24 August 1936 with Jean Adrienne in Father O’Flynn and Shirley Temple in Kid in Hollywood, with film star Jean Adrienne appearing in person. It was designed by Bournemouth-based architect E. de Wilde Holding. The front of the building was an existing Georgian-style building named Borough House. Inside the auditorium there...
My Favourite History Place: Tivoli Theatre
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The Historian 159: Out now
The magazine of the Historical Association
Read The Historian 159: Branches
Welcome to this Branches edition of The Historian, a regular version of the magazine where many of the articles are based on talks and activities from Historical Association branches across the country. The last Branches edition came out in November 2021 and at that time...
The Historian 159: Out now
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Kristallnacht
Historian article
Why Reichskristallnacht?
In The Third Reich Michael Burleigh writes: ‘We should be cautious in seeing spontaneity where frequency suggests instigation from a central source.' He comments on ‘a dialectic between "spontaneous" grassroot actions and "followup" state sponsored measures.' These remarks relate to 1935, the time of the Nuremberg Laws [the...
Kristallnacht
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Towards Reform in 1809
Historian article
Two hundred years ago it must have seemed to some as if the time for political and economic reform in Britain had arrived. A number of the necessary conditions appeared to be in place:
recent examples from America and France showing how readily and rapidly established systems could be overturned...
Towards Reform in 1809
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It's Murder On The Orient Express
Historian article
It was the most luxurious long distance rail journey in the history of travel. Royalty, aristocracy, the rich and the famous travelled regularly on the Orient Express. Gourmet chefs prepared exquisite meals, chandeliers, luxury compartments, staterooms and dining rooms on a par with famous hotels like the Ritz were all...
It's Murder On The Orient Express
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Chamberlain Day and the popular meaning of Tariff Reform
Historian article
Few Conservative institutions appealed to the Tory rank-and-file activist like the Tariff Reform League did in the opening two decades of the Twentieth Century. From its foundation in 1903, the League spearheaded Joseph Chamberlain’s crusade to grant tariffs on imported goods, acting as his grassroots organisation. This article attempts to...
Chamberlain Day and the popular meaning of Tariff Reform
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How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?
Historian article
The Shetland Bus operation may be considered successful in that it supplied Norwegian resistance movements with weapons and took many refugees from Norway to Shetland, and that it managed to bind just shy of 300,000 German troops in Norway. However, because of this operation, forty-four men lost their lives, and...
How damaging to the Nazis was the Shetland Bus between 1940 and 1944?
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Roald Dahl and the Lost Campaign
Historian article
Following the successful filming of his book ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, Roald Dahl has an international reputation as a children’s writer. There is, however, a macabre dimension to his writing underlined by his successful TV series ‘Tales of the Unexpected’. Dark episodes in Dahl’s highly successful career touched his...
Roald Dahl and the Lost Campaign
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The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
Historian article
On 1 May 1997 the Conservative party suffered an electoral defeat so overwhelming that political commentators were left rummaging through the statistics of the previous two centuries to find anything similar. The Times concluded on 3 May that it was the party's worst performance since 1832, though 'The disaster suffered...
The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
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New Universities of the 60s
Historian article
New Universities of the 60s: One professor's recollections: glad confident morning and after
Living history
How long do professional historians wait before writing about their own personal involvement in episodes of lasting significance in history? If they wait too long they are dead, and their evidence is lost. A striking recent...
New Universities of the 60s
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The Urban Working Classes in England 1880-1914
Historian article
On reading the title of this article, any reader at all familiar with the social history of late Victorian and Edwardian England is likely to think of the revelations at the time of the extent of urban poverty. Two major enquiries, one into London poverty, and the other into poverty...
The Urban Working Classes in England 1880-1914
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Spencer Perceval: private values and public virtues
Historian article
The public man and his career Spencer Perceval's career as a public figure lasted from 1796 when he became a King's Counsel and MP for Northampton until his murder sixteen years later at the age of 49. He was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons at 5.15pm...
Spencer Perceval: private values and public virtues
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England Arise! The General Election of 1945
Historian article
‘The past week will live in history for two things’, announced the Sunday Times of 29 July 1945, ‘first the return of a Labour majority to Parliament and the end of Churchill's great war Premiership.’ Most other newspapers concurred. The Daily Mirror, of 27 July, proclaimed that the 1945 general election...
England Arise! The General Election of 1945
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Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars
Historian article
Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars
The war with France, which began in 1793, had moved to the Iberian Peninsula by 1808. This year is therefore the two-hundredth anniversary of the commencement of the Peninsular War campaigns. War on the Peninsula demanded huge resources of manpower in order to defeat...
Wellington's Soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars
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The Historian 149: Out now
The magazine of the Historical Association
Read The Historian 149: Pandemics
This edition of The Historian follows immediately after the annual Local and Community History Month, which we launched many years ago. Although our expressed purpose on this occasion is to place a special focus on the concept of pandemics and epidemics, a number of our...
The Historian 149: Out now
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How did the Civil Rights movement change America?
Historian article
In 1984 Jimmy Carter reflected on growing up in the segregated South. He recalled that, as a young child, he, like many white children, had had an African American child as his closest friend. The two children spent all their play time together. One day they travelled on the train...
How did the Civil Rights movement change America?
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Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: the career of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship surgeon and captain
Historian article
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...
Attitudes to Liberty and Enslavement: the career of James Irving, a Liverpool slave ship surgeon and captain
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'Veni, Vidi, Vici!'
Historian article
A personal reflection on Julius Caesar and the conquest of Britain
Julius Caesar always brings to mind the famous dictum of Winston Churchill, ‘History will be kind to me, for I shall write it!' In his writings Julius Caesar provides a vivid and detailed account of his invasions of Britain in...
'Veni, Vidi, Vici!'
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Out and about in Nottingham
Historian feature
There were people living in Nottinghamshire as far back as 40,000 BC, as excavations in the limestone caves at Cresswell Crags (near Worksop) have proved. Much later, when the Romans came, they drove two roads through parts of the county – the Fosse Way to the South, with associated developments...
Out and about in Nottingham
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Beware the serpent of Rome
Article
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...
Beware the serpent of Rome
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Exploring the Cornish Religious Landscape
Historian article
The Cornish religious landscape shares one particularly significant feature with its Welsh neighbour to the north. The Celtic tendency to dedicate churches to very local saints is very strong in both Cornwall and Wales, with the church dedications frequently being mirrored by the place name. This similarity is, to an...
Exploring the Cornish Religious Landscape
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Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
Historian article
125 years after his death, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, still provides the political lode-star for generations of Conservatives. Lately, for the first time in 30 years, Disraeli's name and example has been enthusiastically evoked by the party leadership and David Cameron has projected himself as a Disraeli for the...
Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
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Catch me if you can: Trevithik vs. Stephenson
Historian article
Richard Trevithick & George Stephenson: a twenty firstcentury Reassessment
Two hundred years ago, a remarkable event took place in London. At the instigation of Richard Trevithick, engineer, polymath and inventor - who many regard as the greatest Cornishman ever - an elliptical circuit of cast iron rail was laid out...
Catch me if you can: Trevithik vs. Stephenson
