HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-02-01T15:31:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
items: From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
items: Which treasures were lost when Titanic sank, and what did some survivors smuggle onto lifeboats?
items: Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang
items: Lupus, lymphoma – or murder? Why Jane Austen's mysterious cause of death has puzzled historians for years

From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
type: item
date: 2026-02-01T15:30:24.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical events
description: Muckraking journalists and money-hungry editors have been publishing sensational stories since newspapers first began. Hilary Mitchell flicks through the archives and reveals some of the weirdest press cuttings of all time
encoded: 1. "German ghouls: corpses converted to soap and explosives” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, April 1917 If you think that ‘fake news’ is a new phenomenon, think again. One of the most notorious pieces of misinformation actually dates to the First World War. During the conflict, a gruesome rumour spread that German leaders were using “Kadaververwertungsanstalten” – ‘corpse factories’ – to turn the dead bodies of their own soldiers into products such as soap, candles, and even bombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/German-Ghouls-0741ad1-e1769765897344.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline GERMAN GHOULS across the top" title="German leaders were creating soap and explosives out of corpses, claimed this 1917 newspaper article. In reality, they were victims of a deliberately shocking propaganda campaign (Image by the Newspaper Archive)" /> The lurid story unsurprisingly sparked widespread outrage, but it wasn’t true. It was a purposefully shocking piece of war propaganda, and the German government protested in the strongest terms against the “loathsome and ridiculous” claims. However, that didn’t stop the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star gleefully reporting on the hoax in April 1917, in an article that claimed the Germans were making “dividends from death” by distilling glycerine from dead bodies “and so obtaining some portion of their explosives.” 2. "O Dammit wants his name changed" The Richmond Climax, 6 June 1913 Orlando Dammit was featured in the 6 June issue of the equally curiously named Richmond Climax newspaper. The short article explained that the man wanted to change his name from “O. Dammit” because he “can’t tell whether people are calling him or merely venting injured feelings when they say ‘O, dammit.’” It’s not clear what he wanted to change his name to, or if he was successful in his attempts to change it, but presumably he would have been happy with anything that didn’t begin wit…

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From goat eyelids to bread: history's 12 strangest sex toys
type: item
date: 2025-11-29T18:00:37.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: Our ancestors weren’t quite as prudish as we like to think they were. Hilary Mitchell looks at some of the tools past generations have used in the pursuit of sexual pleasure – from steam-powered vibrators to goat eyelids
encoded: This article contains explicit descriptions of sex and sexual practices throughout – please use discretion 1. The Hohle Fels phallus Around 28,000 years ago, an effigy of a human penis was left inside Hohle Fels cave, southwestern Germany. Made from fine-grained siltstone, the object was meticulously ground, polished and etched with grooves at both ends. Given its polished surface and true-to-life size, some researchers have suggested it may well have been an early masturbatory aid – or the first-ever dildo, to put it bluntly. However, that was not the artefact’s only possible purpose. When University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J Conard first announced the find in 2005, he suggested that it was also used for knapping flints. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1D3GB1X-3e0e6f1-e1764240558215.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man holds a phallus-shaped object in his hands, while a woman points to it. In the background, a group of people are working on excavating the floor of a cave" title="Archaeologists Nicholas Conrad and Petra Kieselbach pose with the Hohle Fels phallus shortly after its discovery in 2005" /> 2. Bread Yes, that’s right. As well as being a staple food in ancient times, bread may also have been used for less salubrious purposes. A passage from the Babylonian Talmud, for instance, contains a description of what should be done to treat a man afflicted by a puncture in his penis. The suggested solution is that a piece of warm barley bread should be placed on the man’s anus to induce ejaculation, proving whether or not the perforation has properly healed. Notably, the ancient Greeks are also said to have used makeshift sex toys known as olisbokollikes: batons of stale bread that were inserted into the anus, using olive oil as lubrication. It may sound far-fetched (and could have just been a rude joke), but the practice is mentioned in the lexicon of Hesychius of Alexandria, compiled in the fifth or si…

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Which treasures were lost when Titanic sank, and what did some survivors smuggle onto lifeboats?
type: item
date: 2025-06-03T12:45:39.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: Edwardian
subject: Period
subject: Evergreen
description: When Titanic sank in April 1912, undoubtedly the highest cost was the more than 1,500 people who perished in the disaster on the Atlantic Ocean. But with the prestige of its maiden voyage attracting wealthy clientele, there was also a huge number of treasures on board. Hilary Mitchell reveals the historical riches lost to the sea – from ancient trinkets to Victorian art valued as the most valuable of its day…
encoded: It’s an eerie photograph, to say the least. A two-foot-tall bronze statuette of the Roman goddess of the hunt, known as Diana of Versailles, peers sightlessly to the right, the carefully cast, delicate folds of her tunic tarnished and darkened by decades of salt water. Originally gracing the mantlepiece of the ornate fireplace in Titanic’s opulent first-class lounge, she now lies half-buried in the abyssal darkness, 2.5 miles below the ocean’s surface. The picture was taken in 2024 by oceanographers from RMS Titanic Inc, a US company that holds the rights to the 113-year-old wreck. The statuette hadn’t been caught on camera since 1986, when marine scientist Bob Ballard led an expedition to the site using the deep-sea vehicle Alvin. Eight subsequent visits had failed to locate her, and there was some concern she had been illegally salvaged and sold. Finding her was like “finding a needle in a haystack”, said James Penca, a researcher on the RMS Titanic Inc. project. She was rediscovered in the final hours of the three-week-long dive. The statuette isn’t an original Roman bronze. It’s a replica of a much-larger marble sculpture currently on display in the Louvre in Paris, itself a partially restored Roman copy (first or second century BC) of a lost Greek bronze original attributed to Athenian sculptor Leochares (c325 BC). However, it was valuable in its own right; a prestigious, costly piece of decoration. In some ways, the Diana statuette can be used as a symbol to represent thousands of artefacts that were lost when Titanic hit an iceberg and sank beneath the waves on her maiden voyage in the early hours of 15 April 1912, resulting in the tragic, harrowing deaths of more than 1,500 men, women and children. Who was the richest person to die in the Titanic disaster? On its maiden voyage, Titanic was transporting many of the era’s wealthiest people to the US, several of whom were returning from lengthy sojourns in Europe. One of these elite passengers was John Jacob As…

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Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang
type: item
date: 2025-02-21T11:45:12.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: In Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows, viewers are transported into the violent underworld of 1880s London to meet an all-female crime syndicate – The Forty Elephants. Was this a real organisation, who was its leader, and who else was really involved? Hilary Mitchell takes up the true tale of their ingenious plots, and their hapless marks…
encoded: Steven Knight doesn’t mess around with the subject matter for his gritty, historical British crime dramas. Like Peaky Blinders before it, new Disney+ drama A Thousand Blows catapults viewers head on into the seedy underbelly of 1880s London; a simmering hotbed of illegal, underground boxing rings overseen by various crime syndicates – including notorious all-female gang, the Forty Elephants. But just who, exactly, were the Forty Elephants, and what’s the truth behind Steven Knight’s carefully crafted Disney+ miniseries? On the podcast | Bruisers and bare knuckles: the brutal world of Victorian boxing Were the Forty Elephants real? Yes, the Forty Elephants – also known as the Forty Thieves – were a real, all-female crime gang that operated in London for a considerable length of time. According to London historian and crime expert Brian McDonald, author of Gangs of London: 100 Years of Mob Warfare (2010), the first mention of the Forty Elephants appeared in newspapers in 1873, and they remained active until the mid-20th century. View Green Video on the source website When researching, McDonald pored over birth and death records, newspaper articles and out-of-print books in the British Library archives to uncover the women’s modus operandi, and discovered that were incredibly creative in the way they used the fashions of the time to their advantage. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century In the late 1800s and early 1900s, women’s clothing was multi-layered; skirts fell all the way to the ground, while bustles and hoops created an almost tent-like effect, ideal for hiding stolen goods. The Forty Elephants enhanced their outfits even further, tailoring their dresses to allow them to easily squirrel away expensive items and walk away from high-end department stores unnoticed. They even sewed hidden pockets into their hats to conceal their loot. They were allied with separate male-led gangs – but were largel…

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Lupus, lymphoma – or murder? Why Jane Austen's mysterious cause of death has puzzled historians for years
type: item
date: 2025-02-04T14:49:01.000Z
creator: Hilary Mitchell
subject: Georgian
subject: Period
description: In BBC drama Miss Austen, Jane's sister Cassandra is on a mission to destroy a cache of letters following the 41-year-old Jane's death. But by destroying these documents, which may have contained key medical details about Jane's final illness, Cassandra denied historians vital evidence, causing wild theories about her cause of death to swirl for years. Hilary Mitchell investigates how much we know about the real story…
encoded: The medical landscape in the early 19th century was – unsurprisingly – vastly different to today. During the lifetime of Jane Austen, who died in 1817 at the age of 41, diseases were rife and often fatal, and knowledge of human anatomy was scanty. A visit to the doctor was expensive and there was little effective treatment available beyond alcohol, opium, and bloodletting with leeches. Germs had yet to be identified, antiseptics and antibiotics were unheard of, and surgery was performed without anaesthetic. Most medicine was herbal and came from apothecaries who made remedies and gave general health advice. Most of the ‘cure-alls’ on sale at the time were entirely without benefit. For example, London’s Old Operating Theatre museum owns a domestic medicine chest from that period, which contains a bottle of Steers’s Chemical Opodeldoc, a popular liniment. An eye-opening 1783 advert for Opodeldoc lists the many things it can cure – everything from tendon injuries (“In wounded Tendons it is likewise of the greatest Service, by Preventing the Juice which oozes out of them from fixing) to injured horses that are “strained in the back Sinews… or have their Backs galled”. Not bad for an ointment that was, according to a recipe in 1856 text The Medical Formulary, just a mixture of soap, alcohol, camphor and ammonia. What was Jane Austen’s cause of death? Against this backdrop of confusion about the nature of illnesses and how to cure them, it should come as no great shock to discover that Jane Austen’s official cause of death was never clearly documented. Instead, her family and attending physician – the esteemed Dr Giles King Lyford, a surgeon at the county hospital at Winchester – recorded that she died of a vague illness referred to as "consumption" or "decline." No post-mortem was ever performed. Jane Austen's letters describe how she was plagued by awful ill health in the final years of her life, which left her bedridden at her home in the village of Chawton, near Alton…

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