HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-12-16T14:15:58.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: "War's greatest picture"? Inside the night St Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz
items: How to celebrate a Victorian wedding
items: Class warfare: a day in the life of a Victorian schoolchild
items: The two sides of George IV: is his wretched reputation deserved?
items: If King Alfred was great, was Æthelstan even greater?
items: Women's rights in the 20th century: what happened after the vote was won?
items: How the battle for female suffrage in Britain was won
items: The Jarrow march: the lasting legacy of the 1936 protest
items: 5 of the worst years in British history
items: Dorothea Bate: A fearless fossil hunter

"War's greatest picture"? Inside the night St Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz
type: item
date: 2024-12-29T12:25:32.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
description: On 29 December 1940, a night of havoc broke bricks and mortar and claimed more than 160 lives. But it also created a moment that was used to bolster British spirit for years to come…
encoded: The Blitz had halted briefly over Christmas 1940, but on the evening of Sunday 29 December the Luftwaffe resumed bombing an already hammered London. The whistling sounds of incendiaries were first heard at 6.15pm, and for the next three-and-a-half hours more than 100,000 such bombs fell. The attack was so ferocious that one American reporter telegraphed his office with the words: “The second Great Fire of London has begun.” While most people huddled in shelters or Tube stations, an act that had become all too familiar, firefighters and volunteers tirelessly tackled the 1,500 or so blazes across the city. Dozens of buildings were utterly destroyed – but not one crucial landmark. Why did Churchill want to save St Paul's Cathedral? St Paul’s Cathedral was surrounded by smouldering ruins, while flames licked the edges of the churchyard. But Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recognising its importance to British morale, sent a message saying St Paul’s must be saved at all costs. The cathedral’s volunteer firewatchers, the St Paul’s Watch, spent the evening putting out the fires from the 28 incendiary bombs that rained down on the building, using stirrup pumps, buckets and sand. One crashed through the dome and lodged in the support beams – causing molten lead to drip down – before it finally fell to the stone floor. Yet, incredibly, the cathedral sustained no irreparable damage. By dawn, the fires had been brought under control by the exhausted firefighters, the ‘heroes with grimy faces’. The night had left more than 160 dead and around 500 injured. War's greatest picture? A couple of days later, once the photo had been cleared by the censors, the Daily Mail's front page featured what it dubbed "war's greatest picture". St Paul's was still standing and almost emerging, defiant, from the black smoke. It was taken by Herbert Mason from the roof of the newspaper's office, around half a mile from the cathedral. "The shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in t…

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How to celebrate a Victorian wedding
type: item
date: 2024-12-11T09:00:38.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
description: Whether you were marrying lavishly like the royals or eloping in secret, Rebecca Probert offers six tips for the perfect Victorian wedding
encoded: Select the perfect partner For Victorians, finding someone of the right status and temperament was crucial. Love often came afterwards Choosing a suitable spouse was essential at a time when it was difficult to get out of a marriage. Before 1858, divorce was only available by private Act of Parliament; even after that date, adultery was the only basis for divorce, and wives had to prove additional aggravating factors, such as desertion or cruelty. Lonely hearts ads (typically put out by men) were increasingly likely to emphasise the desire for an attractive mate who would be a good homemaker. It was recognised that love, while important, might well develop after marriage. In Harriet Martineau’s 1839 novel Deerbrook, Dr Hope marries out of a sense of obligation but grows to love his wife, while Charlotte Brontë urged a friend to consider a proposal of marriage – even if she felt disgust for the man – if he had “common sense, a good disposition [and] a manageable temper”. While husbands and wives were expected to play different roles within marriage, society frowned on unions in which the differences between them were too great: marriages across classes were rare. When it came to age, most brides and grooms would have been in their mid-20s. Of those marrying for the first time between 1850 and 1899, the average age was a little under 26 for men and a little over 24 for women. By those ages, most working-class couples would have been in employment long enough to have built up some savings. Nevertheless, some married first and set up home later. The rector of Wortham in Suffolk described how one couple married and then lived separately while they saved up for a bed. Larger age gaps – and longer engagements – were more common among the middle and upper classes, where couples would defer marriage until the man had established himself in his profession and could furnish a suitable home. At 21, the writer Molly Hughes became engaged to 30-year-old Arthur, an aspiring barris…

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Class warfare: a day in the life of a Victorian schoolchild
type: item
date: 2024-11-18T09:00:05.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Victorian
subject: Children
subject: Education
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Victorian schools could be ideological battlegrounds, where harassed teachers did their best against a backdrop of grinding poverty. Ellie Cawthorne and Susannah Wright study an era's education
encoded: The 4th of May 1899 was not a good day for the head-teacher of St Mark’s School in Leicester. Less than two weeks into her job, she recorded in her school logbook an incident that had begun with the caning of a boy for lying and disobedience. Revolting against his punishment, the boy had started “flinging himself about”, before kicking her and even threatening her with “a clasp knife open in his hand”. To make matters worse, the child’s mother had arrived at the school to castigate the head-teacher in “abusive and threatening language” before demanding that magistrates investigate the school’s conduct. While incidents like this led to lengthy logbook entries, most school days in Victorian Britain were not so dramatic. But daily life in the elementary school classroom was often a battleground between idealistic educationalists, governmental interlopers, struggling parents and hard-pressed teachers. Not to mention the children. Over the course of the 19th century, a patchwork of school systems operated across the country, and the experience of learning in one classroom could be very different from the next. Those who could afford the small fee might attend local parish or church schools. Another alternative, for those willing to embrace a more informal approach to education, were privately run ‘dame schools’ that operated out of local teachers’ homes. From 1833 onwards, child labourers were supposed to receive schooling from their employers under the Factory Act, while those found homeless or begging might be sent to tough industrial schools to learn a trade. Another option for those unable to fund their own education was schools established by charitable organisations. Most notable were the so-called ‘ragged schools’, formed in 1844 to offer free education to Britain’s poorest children. By the 1870s, there were around 350 such institutions across the country, which (in the words of Charles Dickens) “stretch[ed] out a hand” to those children “too ragged, wretched, fil…

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The two sides of George IV: is his wretched reputation deserved?
type: item
date: 2024-01-08T09:00:37.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: HEx Academy Regency Course
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
description: George IV was cultured, urbane and generous. Yet he trashed his reputation with his weakness for women, wine and spectacular self-indulgence. Two centuries after he became king, Stella Tillyard introduces the two, contrasting, sides of a little-lamented monarch
encoded: At the end of January 1820, Charles Greville, young man-about-town and future clerk to the Privy Council, was enjoying the good life at the Duke of Bedford’s luxurious estate of Woburn in Bedfordshire. He “shot the whole week”, he recorded in his diary, “and killed an immense quantity of game”. The solemn news that demanded his close professional attention was more laconically reported. “On Sunday last, arrived the news of the king’s death,” he wrote, adding without comment: “The new king has been desperately ill. He had a bad cold at Brighton, for which he lost 80 ounces of blood; yet he afterwards had a severe oppression, amounting almost to suffocation, on his chest.” So George III was dead, and the British crown passed to his son George IV, who, at only 57 years old, was almost too broken down to receive it. Greville was to spend many hours in the company of the new king, but he never came to like him. Ten years later, on 16 July, the day after George IV's funeral, Greville noted, as if he had never known him: "Nobody thinks any more of the late king than if he had been dead 50 years, unless it be to abuse him and to rake up all his vices and misdeeds." The august Times newspaper ran a leader the same day declaring with relish that: "There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king," and asked rhetorically: "What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? If George IV ever had a friend – a devoted friend – in any rank of life, we protest that the name of him or her has not yet reached us." George IV’s reputation was thus poor when he acceded to the throne in 1820, poor when he vacated it in 1830, and has not really recovered since. Part of the reason for this is the fact that he was held in low esteem both by his chief executor, the Duke of Wellington, and by his niece, Queen Victoria, who disapproved of his spendthrift ways, his morals and his laziness. The duke destroyed many of Geor…

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If King Alfred was great, was Æthelstan even greater?
type: item
date: 2023-04-14T17:15:51.000Z
subject: Anglo-Saxon
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Seven Kings Must Die
subject: The Last Kingdom
description: Alfred the Great's achievements are dwarfed by those of his grandson Æthelstan. So why, asks Sarah Foot, is the former still venerated while the latter is overlooked?
encoded: Was King Alfred (reigned 871–99) really the greatest Anglo-Saxon king? Certainly he remains the best-remembered – even if it’s only for burning the cakes. But should it really be his grandson Æthelstan (reigned 924–39) – now largely forgotten – whom we celebrate as the most significant pre-Conquest monarch? Alfred was a highly successful military leader who, in a battle at Edington in AD 878, resoundingly defeated the Danish army that had almost conquered Wessex. In the ensuing period of peace he launched a programme of educational reform that transformed the use of English as both a literary and a governmental language. Yet Alfred only ruled the West Saxon people, and those in the western part of the Midland kingdom of Mercia not under subjection to the Danes. When he died (the sole remaining native king in England), the east Midlands, East Anglia and Northumbria all lay in Danish hands. View Green Video on the source website Who was Æthelstan? Æthelstan, on the other hand, was the first king to rule all England and laid claim to an imperial overlordship over the whole of Britain. His military prowess brought him direct authority over not just Wessex and Mercia, but the Danelaw (the name given to the area of northern England where Vikings settled) and the kingdom north of the Humber. Celtic rulers from elsewhere in the British Isles subsequently submitted to his authority. He crushed a rebellion of the Scots king in AD 934, attacking his realm with a land and sea force and ravaging as far north as Caithness. When Æthelstan defeated a combined Norse-Scots-Northumbrian force at the battle of Brunanburh in AD 937, a contemporary poem entered into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recalled: "Never yet in this island before this was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword since the Angles and Saxons came hither from the east, overcame the Britons and won a country." Read more | Why can't we find the battlefield of Brunanburh? Foreigners also recognised Æthel…

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Women's rights in the 20th century: what happened after the vote was won?
type: item
date: 2023-03-01T06:06:00.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: The vote was finally won for some women in 1918, but the battle for equality continued. Sarah Crook offers her thoughts on the hard-fought struggle for women's rights that followed
encoded: Asked for her address in the 1911 census, Emily Wilding Davison gave the unexpected answer “The House of Commons” – as indeed she was entitled to, for she had spent the night before hiding in a cupboard in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster. Just two years later, Davison would die after throwing herself at (or, arguably, under) the king’s horse, perhaps the most famous fatality in Britain’s move towards a more democratic politics. As these two actions show, women’s campaigns for equal rights in 20th-century Britain required courage, creativity and sacrifice. Not all sacrifices were as visible or as notorious as Davison’s, of course, and the work of black and working-class women has been critical to, and comparatively unsung, in feminist activism in 20th-century Britain. As we edge towards the centenary of women’s suffrage, we are provoked to look back and to ask what has been achieved, how, and for whom. Have “deeds not words”, the slogan of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, changed women’s lives across the last 100 years? Have women moved from the cupboard to the cabinet? Not exactly. While the 1918 Representation of the People Act allowed some women over 30 to vote, women were to wait a further 10 years for the passage of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act to attain the same voting rights as men. Although they did then achieve equal voting rights, they did not achieve the same levels of representation. It was not until six decades later, in the 1987 election, that women finally made up over 5 per cent of the Commons. Significant for another reason, 1987 also marked the election of the first black woman to parliament, Diane Abbott. The 1980s were not a decade of unfettered feminist progress, however. Margaret Thatcher, who ascended to the post of prime minister in 1979, was no ally to the Women’s Liberation Movement (which in 1978 she declared to be “too strident”). The movement, which had emerged from the student movemen…

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How the battle for female suffrage in Britain was won
type: item
date: 2023-01-24T12:53:51.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: The Suffragettes
description: Did suffragette violence hasten victory? How critical to the campaign were the Pankhursts? And why did many women not want the franchise? Four expert historians – Jad Adams, Julia Bush, June Purvis and Fern Riddell – answer the big questions on female suffrage
encoded: Can the passing of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 – which, for the first time, gave some women the vote – be attributed to the suffrage campaign, the First World War, or other factors? Julia Bush: The suffrage campaign and the First World War both contributed to the timing and specific content of the 1918 act. However, it was probably inevitable that a century of democratisation, accompanied by growing government involvement in education and social welfare reform, would eventually encompass votes for women. Long-term, peaceful pressure from the organised suffrage campaign helped move this change slowly forward. The war, combined with prewar suffragette militancy, initially delayed suffrage legislation. But by 1917–18 it was generally accepted that serving soldiers had earned the right to vote. As a result, when legislation was passed in 1918, it enfranchised all men over the age of 21, and also gave the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification. Older women were included less because of their war work than because politicians hoped they would provide conservative ballast within the new mass electorate, reinforcing the stability of a society threatened by war and the spectre of Bolshevism. Jad Adams: The act was part of a wave of national enfranchisements that started in 1893 with New Zealand and which was largely completed by Switzerland in 1971. Britain was no pioneer. Seven countries had enfranchised women before Britain, and at least another seven enfranchised in the same year, 1918. The most important common factor in the enfranchisements of women was the re-evaluation of national identity in the face of catastrophes such as war, revolution or independence struggles. Old ideas had to be rejected and the nation reformed. This is what happened in Britain in the wake of the sacrifices of the First World War, with the granting of universal male suffrage and a limited franchise for women. June Purvis: Some historians claim that i…

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The Jarrow march: the lasting legacy of the 1936 protest
type: item
date: 2022-10-05T08:40:16.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Period
description: Do you hear the people sing? British politicians didn’t at the time, and yet, writes Stuart Maconie, the lasting legacy of the 1936 Jarrow ‘crusade’ can still be felt to this day
encoded: There are certain British place names that carry an enduring weight of meaning; a deep and sonorous ring, and not always a pleasant one. Hillsborough, Orgreave, Aberfan, Armagh… these are all places that have become synonymous with some great and profound emotion or event, woven into history through accident, struggle, tragedy, wickedness or bravery. Jarrow is another. In 1936, this industrial town in the northeast of England became, in the words of its MP, “the most famous town in England”; a byword for hardship and misery, but also for defiance, fortitude and dignity. Jarrow’s MP was Ellen Wilkinson, better known as ‘Red’ Ellen, a brilliant and passionate firebrand who later became a pillar of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour administration as Minister for Education. But much of her lasting fame rests on her movements in October 1936, when she led 200 of Jarrow’s unemployed men 300 miles to London. The intention was to publicise Jarrow’s plight and to deliver a petition of 10,000 signatures to Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, pleading for help for their dying town in the form of a steelworks, or a similar shot in the arm. Baldwin refused to see them; the petition was taken from them by the Special Branch and then it vanished, and the aid the town needed was never properly given. But the Jarrow 'crusade' lives on as a remarkable, romantic, contentious piece of our social history. In Matt Perry's excellent, definitive historical account The Jarrow Crusade: Protest And Legend, he cites some of its varied legacy: "Five plays, two musicals, an opera, three pop songs, two folk songs, several paintings and poems, a short story, performance art, a mural, two sculptures, glassware, four television documentaries, four radio programmes, a children's story, a cuddly toy, a real ale, a public house, an election poster, street names, innumerable pieces of journalism and historical references and of course hundreds of often reproduced photographs." This list is proba…

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5 of the worst years in British history
type: item
date: 2022-09-26T15:20:17.000Z
subject: General Early Modern
subject: General History
subject: Georgian
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Tudor
description: Uncertainty may dominate the news, but Britain has survived difficult times before, as this 2008 article from Derek Wilson shows. Here, he nominates five years that saw the greatest tests in our history
encoded: If there is a commodity every politician would love to be able to bottle, it must surely be the "feel-good factor", that sense of wellbeing that Voltaire lampooned so effectively in Candide with the philosophy of Dr Pangloss: "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". Ironically, it is our confrontational political system that helps to ensure that, like the end of the rainbow, that blessed state of universal satisfaction remains elusive. Any party in opposition devotes itself to playing on the discontents of sections of the population in order to rubbish the claimed achievements of the party in power. They know that they can rely for emotional backing and votes on the much more substantial “feel-bad factor”. Thus, for example, education and the NHS will remain contentious subjects as long as there are people with unhappy experiences of hospitals and schools. It was President Hoover who observed pessimistically, but I believe correctly, that consumer-led capitalist democracy produces “constantly moving happiness machines” controlled by their autocratic desires and expectations. 9 of the worst monarchs in history Such reflections led me to ponder the question, “What times were there in British history that were really bad?” Can we identify any “no hope” years? It soon became obvious that I had to remove several possible candidates that might immediately thrust themselves into the spotlight. For example, years in which there were national disasters, such as bad harvests, or civil war did not necessarily meet the criteria. They did not affect all sections of the population (one man’s famine is another man’s increased profit) and calamities, such as the Blitz, often brought out the best in national character. Distant and not disastrous I also had to be wary of events that historians have dubbed “important”. The arrival of William of Orange to expel James II in 1688 was the last successful invasion of our shores and was pregnant with political consequences…

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Dorothea Bate: A fearless fossil hunter
type: item
date: 2022-08-30T09:23:31.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Victorian
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Life in Victorian Britain
description: Karolyn Shindler introduces the palaeontologist Dorothea Bate, who climbed mountains, swam to remote caves and cheated starvation to discover a series of remarkable dwarf mammals
encoded: Even at four o’clock in the morning it was warm. The stars were just beginning to lose their brilliance, but it was still dark. Light would not come for at least an hour. But Dorothea Bate had just one thought: to reach her goal at the edge of the sea on the far side of the inhospitable Akrotiri peninsula in western Crete. It was a hazardous journey, by pony, of several hours, and even by 8am the temperature on that exposed, limestone terrain could be 30C or more. Bate had arrived in Crete on 5 March 1904, and for nearly five months the courageous 25-year-old had explored from one end of this long, mountainous island to the other. She was hunting for extinct fossil mammals to add to the collections of the Natural History Museum in London. She had no companions. Dorothea explored alone, hiring local men as guides or to do the heavy digging – or to set the gunpowder or dynamite when the only way she knew to get through a rock floor was to blast it open. So far she had discovered extinct species of dwarf hippos, no larger than a pig, extinct species of deer and the bones of an ancient species of full-size elephant. What she was desperate to find were the remains of the dwarf elephants she was sure must have once existed on the island, but had so far eluded her. This hot July morning was her last chance before she had to return home. Read more | Mary Anning: the woman who hunted dinosaurs So difficult was the going as she neared the sea that she left her pony and continued on foot. “Beastly hot and rough walking,” she noted in her diary, but in the blazing sunshine and with the heat of the rock coming through her boots, she struggled on. And finally, on the sea-battered shore of the Akrotiri, she was finally “well rewarded for this at last was the place I have been looking for”. Some weeks previously, Dorothea had been given a fossil dwarf elephant tooth (see illustration, right) which she had been told came from the area, and incredibly, here in the rock she “saw the i…

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