Dominic Sandbrook's blog

When I lived in Sheffield some years ago, Halloween was a night to be feared and dreaded. As night fell, packs of feral children roamed the streets extracting foodstuffs with menaces, while terrified householders shuddered behind their makeshift barricades, anxiously clutching sticks and cudgels. It comes as little consolation to discover from this month’s issue that Halloween is not a ghastly American import, as we generally believe, but a much-loved Yorkshire tradition, taking its place alongside the pudding, the shell-suit and the merry wit of Geoff Boycott.

Since the New Year always brings with it a spate of interest in anniversaries, perhaps we can start 2011 with one likely to raise a scowl in the vast majority of readers. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the introduction of payment for Members of Parliament, seen at the time as a great reforming measure, but now one indelibly associated with the expenses scandal that has left the reputation of the Commons so badly tarnished.

I love Christmas. As a child, I spent hours puzzling over my list for Father Christmas. As the holiday approached, I diligently circled the television highlights in the Radio Times. I savoured every mouthful of my turkey, and devoured every moment of the big day’s Bond film.

Appropriately enough, we were in a history class, waiting for our teacher Roy Allen, when we got the news. “Have you heard?” he said, bustling excitedly into the classroom. “She’s gone!” The date was 22 November 1990, the time about 11 o’clock.

When the Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole returned to London at the end of the Crimean War, she cut a sadly reduced figure. Pursued by creditors, she was declared bankrupt in November 1856. What happened next, however, should make us rethink our lazy clichés of Victorian racism. Once her plight reached the ears of the national press, money poured in.

Contemplating this summer’s great explosion of interest in the Battle of Britain, I was reminded of an ancient exam script that came to light when I was reorganising some of my old files (or as my wife would have it, sorting through my piles of rubbish) a few weeks ago. If I remember rightly, my old history teacher, the great Roy Allen, dug it out of his archives when I left school and presented it to me with some witty remark about how little my style had changed over the years.

Ever since I was a boy, I have remembered the opening paragraph of one of my favourite books almost by heart. “It is a curious thing,” our narrator says, “that at my age – 55 last birthday – I should find myself taking up a pen to try to write a history.”

Britain, as this month’s issue reminds us, has long been a country of immigrants. Far-right groups like the British National Party may mutter darkly about ‘indigenous Britons’, but it only takes half a brain cell to realise how ridiculous that notion is. From the Anglo-Saxons and Norsemen who poured across the North Sea in the Dark Ages to generations of Huguenots, Dutchmen, Indians and Jamaicans, waves of migration have left a deep imprint on British life.

The story of the first black South African football team to visit these shores, as June's issue reminds us, is not only extraordinary and inspiring, but a very fitting tale as we approach the first World Cup to be held in Africa.

It is also a welcome reminder that sporting stories, so often consigned to the back pages of the tabloids, can shed just as much light on the past as any well-worn political or economic narrative.

In many ways, the decade since the first issue of this magazine hit the shelves has been a great one for history.

Merely to glance at a list of titles published around the time of BBC History Magazine’s launch is to be reminded of the extraordinary depth of talent to be found among today’s historians.

In the spring of 2000, a keen reader might have had on his bedside Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley, Norman Davies’s The Isles, Andrew Roberts’s life of Lord Salisbury or Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx.