Paris has, unfortunately, been in the news lately, which has made me think back to my visit in December 2013. Happier days. I never got around to posting any photos from that trip, so now seems like a good time to rectify that. But because you can find far more beautiful pictures of Parisian landmarks […]
Back to back Roads to War! This week’s topic is the most airminded yet: the first German air raids on Britain. I had to cheat slightly to fit them in, as technically I’m supposed to talk about the centenary events in the week leading up to the broadcast date, i.e 23 December, but the first
After a break of a few weeks, today I recorded another Road to War episode for ABC New England, covering the period 10–16 December 1914. I focused on the German naval bombardment of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, which caused the greatest loss of civilian loss of life due to enemy action in Britain for the
Yesterday was the last research day proper of my big trip. Actually, I was supposed to be having a holiday, but instead I spent it in Aylesbury at the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, trying to see if I could get to the bottom of the Great Missenden affair of 18 October 1914, when villagers decided
Chatting to Andrew Gray the other day, I realised that I’d never got around to posting about a small discovery I’d made about one of the most sensational sightings from the 1909 phantom airship scare. This is the claim by a Welsh showman named Lethbridge that he had actually seen an airship on the ground,
My fifth contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online, covering the period 8-14 October 1914. Today I looked at two major events. The first was the Maritz Rebellion in South Africa, a military mutiny by disaffected Boers who resented British influence and saw the botched invasion of German South-West
I was on ABC New England again today, my fourth contribution to ‘The road to war’, looking at the events of 3-9 September 1914. My main topic was the Battle of the Marne — the advance of the German 1st and 2nd Armies towards Paris, the evacuation of the French government from the capital along
My third contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online. Today I looked at the events of 20-26 August 1914, focusing particularly on events in Belgium: the march of the German 1st Army through Brussels, 320,000-strong; more German atrocities against civilians, as well as the burning of the library at
My second contribution for ABC New England to the increasingly inaccurately named series ‘The road to war’ was broadcast today, and is online here. Increasingly inaccurate because my topic today was the outbreak of war in August 1914 between Germany on the one hand and France and especially poor little Belgium on the other, including
When the present is too painful to think about, there is always the past to retreat into. Japanese planes forced down an airliner which was flying from Hong Kong to Wuchow to-day [24 August 1938], and, it is reported, machine-gunned the passengers. Of 18 people in the plane it is believed that 15 have either
