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Your history guide to Frogmore Cottage: who has lived there before?
How much do you know about the history of Frogmore Cottage, previously home to Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex? Who has lived there before, and why was it built?
Where is Frogmore Cottage? Frogmore Cottage, set in the grounds of Frogmore House, is part of the Frogmore estate in Windsor, Berkshire. Frogmore is situated around half a mile south of Windsor Castle, within Home Park (the private estate of the castle). It’s close to the river Thames and built upon historically wet marsh ground, which led to the estate’s name; the low-lying plot attracts a high number of frogs from the nearby riverbank. Today the cottage, nestled in a quiet corner of the estate grounds, is a private residence, and served as the British home of Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, from 2019 when it was gifted to them by the late Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Harry and Meghan were requested to vacate their British base in March 2023, as they took an official step back from participation in royal duties. It is owned by the Crown Estate, though there are no current residents based at the house, royal or otherwise. It was reported in October 2025 that Prince Andrew, younger brother to King Charles III, is considering Frogmore as his residence after leaving Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. Read more | Why has the British monarchy survived – and thrived? Can people visit Frogmore Cottage? The cottage is not open to the public, though Frogmore House and estate can be visited on a number of charity days held each year. When and why was Frogmore Cottage built? The cottage has served as a royal refuge since it was built in 1801. It was commissioned by Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who bought the Frogmore estate as a country retreat for herself and her unmarried daughters in 1792. Her husband, often referred as ‘Mad King George’, ruled Great Britain and Ireland from 1760–1820 and suffered from an illness (sometimes attributed as porphyria, a rare hereditary disease) that prompted episodes of eccentric behaviour. Historian Sean Lang explains how the king once ordered his carriage to stop in Windsor Great Park while he popped out to have a chat with an oak tree, apparently under the impression it was the King of Prussia. The royal couple had 15 children over the course of their marriage, and historian Helen Rappaport has suggested that Frogmore Cottage was designed to provide respite for the king’s family. “The king had episodes of frenzy. He was most likely very hard to live with and [Queen Charlotte] presumably utilised Frogmore Cottage as a retreat.” Who else has lived in Frogmore Cottage? Another famous resident of the cottage on the estate was Abdul Karim, an Indian Muslim clerk who became a close confidant and teacher to Queen Victoria. Karim was sent to England to wait at the queen’s table during the 1887 golden jubilee celebrations when the 68-year-old monarch wanted servants who reminded her of her status as Empress of India. She was taken by the handsome young man and Karim quickly rose within Victoria’s affections, as well as in status to the title of ‘Munshi’ (teacher or clerk), teaching the queen Hindustani and advising on all matters concerning India. The relationship between queen and clerk, recently explored in a book by historian Shrabani Basu and dramatised in the film Victoria and Abdul, is just one story of a steady stream of Indian migrants coming to Britain during the 19th century. As Basu told History Extra, “[it’s] fascinating that a young Indian Muslim man was at the centre of the royal court at a time when the British empire was at its height. It is a part of history that the royal family tried to destroy after Queen Victoria’s death.” Karim lived in Frogmore cottage with his family, and refurbished the property in 1893. The queen visited him at the house “each second day”, explains Basu. Yet following the queen’s death in 1901, Karim was forced to return to India by Victoria’s son and successor, Edward VII, who had “abhorred” his mother’s companion. Read more | Queen Victoria's Indian confidant: an interview with Shrabani Basu A home to royal refugees? In the early 20th century, the cottage also hosted royal refugees from Russia. Following the killing of Tsar Nicholas II and his family in July 1918, who were shot by their Bolshevik guards, some relatives of the tsar fled the country. One such royal group was offered sanctuary in Frogmore Cottage by King George V, and included the king's cousin Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna. The royal refugees' financial situation meant the cottage soon fell into disrepair, and when King Edward VIII offered Xenia and her family Wilderness House (in the grounds of Hampton Court to the south-west of London), the family left Frogmore. What else can be found on the Frogmore estate? Frogmore House itself dates from 1680–84, built by an architect of Charles II for the king’s nephew. It was later the home of Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, for more than 20 years from 1840, and artworks by both the duchess and Queen Victoria are on display in the house. A teahouse built for Queen Victoria also remains on the estate, alongside a 18th-century summerhouse in the form of a Gothic ruin designed by English architect James Wyatt. The estate has long been a bolthole for the royal family. King George VI and his wife Elizabeth spent part of their honeymoon at Frogmore in 1923, and it’s reportedly where the late Queen Elizabeth II walked her beloved corgis. The house hosted the wedding reception of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018, as well as that of the Queen’s eldest grandchild, Peter Phillips, and Autumn Kelly in 2008. Read more | Retiring royals: 9 rulers and royals who stepped down through history The Frogmore estate is also the site of the Frogmore Mausoleum, the burial place of Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert. The mausoleum, not open to the public during tours of the estate, is currently undergoing restoration works to protect against ongoing damp problems due to its riverside location. The site on the west side of the gardens at Frogmore House was chosen by the queen just four days after Albert’s death at the age of 42 in 1861, and construction began three months later. Following her death at Osborne on the Isle of Wight and a state funeral, Queen Victoria was buried at Frogmore on 4 February 1901. King Edward VII and his grandson, the six-year-old future Edward VIII, knelt as the queen was slowly lowered in to the crypt to be laid to rest beside her beloved husband. View Green Video on the source website
The rise of Æthelstan was as important a moment in English history as 1066 and Magna Carta. On the 1,100th anniversary of his coronation, David Woodman salutes a king who forged a nation
It’s there beside the guildhall. A large grey stone surrounded by Victorian railings. Over the years, countless visitors to Kingston-upon-Thames have strolled past it, many barely registering its existence. Yet here, nestled at the heart of the London borough, is one of the most significant landmarks in the story of early England. For it was in Kingston, 1,100 years ago, that Æthelstan was presented with a ring, a sword, a sceptre and a rod – and proclaimed king. The early medieval leader was the first of, perhaps, seven rulers to be crowned in Kingston over the next five decades. Yet none would leave a legacy quite like his. Æthelstan’s investiture on 4 September 925 acted as the springboard for a reign that would redefine the parameters of early medieval kingship. The new king triggered a cultural and governmental revolution. He became the most feared and respected leader across the British Isles. He made waves across north-west Europe. Above all, he presided over the establishment of ‘England’. To tell his story is also to tell the story of the emergence of a nation. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/dreamstime122053861webready-a294964.jpg" width="1500" height="2250" alt="A large stone sitting on a stone base with inscriptions on it. Behind it, there is a blue fence and two stone turrets, and some green hedges" title="The Kingston-upon-Thames coronation stone where Æthelstan was proclaimed ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ in September 925 (Image by Dreamstime)" /> Whirlpools of cataclysms Although Æthelstan was formally invested in the autumn of 925, he had actually become king in the previous year, following the death of his father, Edward the Elder. That delay tells its own story. Æthelstan may now be remembered as one of the great early medieval kings. But his rise to power was anything but straightforward – and far from uncontested. There is evidence that one of his half-brothers, a man called Ælfweard, had also been recognised as king in 924. Power may, therefore, have initially been divided between the two men, with Æthelstan ruling over the kingdom of Mercia (roughly corresponding to the area we now know as the Midlands) and Ælfweard taking control of Wessex (in the south and west). Read more | If King Alfred was great, was Æthelstan even greater? Ælfweard’s death soon after brought this division of power to an end, and Æthelstan now found himself sole king across both Wessex and Mercia, a polity known as the ‘Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons’. But even then his position was far from secure: there were those in Æthelstan’s capital, Winchester – chief among them its bishop, Frithestan – who opposed his position as king. Twelfth-century sources also tell us that there was a plot to end Æthelstan’s ambitions by having him blinded – only for the person involved (a certain “Alfred”) to be dispatched to Rome to be judged by the pope for his treachery. Æthelstan may have been safe for the time being, but that didn’t stop one contemporary royal document referring to the “whirlpools of cataclysms” that swirled around him. The list of potential cataclysms extended far beyond Frithestan and Alfred. For decades, successive early medieval rulers had lived in the shadow of Viking aggression – and Æthelstan was no different. In the ninth century, there had been significant Viking settlement in the eastern parts of Mercia – not to mention the kingdoms of East Anglia and Northumbria, particularly the city of York. Many of the Viking kings based in York were the descendants of Ívarr, who had risen to power in Dublin and landed in English territory in the mid-860s, causing ruin and destruction. By the early 10th century, these same Viking rulers in York maintained their links to Dublin, which meant that Æthelstan found himself confronted by potential enemies on multiple fronts. The largest threat was, perhaps, presented by Sihtric Cáech (the ‘one-eyed’), Viking king in York at the beginning of Æthelstan’s reign. Sihtric had coins minted in his name in Lincoln – a sure sign that he was attempting to increase the bounds of his authority beyond the traditional confines of Northumbria and into the east Midlands. Many of these coins give him the title of ‘rex’ (king) below an image of a sword on one side, while the reverse carries a hammer. Such objects convey obvious messages about the martial and pagan character of his rule. Fire in the skies Æthelstan and Sihtric’s relationship could, so it seems, have easily been defined by rancour and warfare. But diplomacy and then the fickle hand of fate intervened. On 30 January 926, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records how the two kings “met together at Tamworth… and Æthelstan gave him his sister in marriage”. Although the Chronicle’s account is brief, the event referred to was clearly of great significance. No details of what was agreed in Tamworth have survived, but we can assume that Æthelstan and Sihtric would have recognised each other’s authority and the need to keep the peace between both parties. Yet Sihtric’s pledge would soon be rendered redundant for, by 927, he was dead. As the Chronicle reports it, there “appeared fiery lights in the northern quarter of the sky, and Sihtric died, and King Æthelstan succeeded to the kingdom of the Northumbrians”. With this short account, the Chronicle captures what is arguably one of the most important episodes in English history. Æthelstan’s absorption of Northumbria represents the moment when an ‘England’ of a recognisable geographical and political shape was formed for the very first time. The Chronicle provides no more detail about the way in which Æthelstan had acceded to Northumbria, the challenges that he faced in extending his authority, or the importance of what had happened. Some light is perhaps shed on this episode by a 12th-century source that describes Æthelstan razing a Viking fortress at York in order to gain the city’s full submission. Whatever truly happened in the first half of 927, Æthelstan was clearly aware of the significance of this moment. After gaining Northumbria, the king held a ceremony on 12 July 927 at Eamont Bridge, a small town just to the south of Penrith, where he received the submission of various British kings, and a further Northumbrian ruler. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, here “they established peace with pledge and oaths… and renounced all idolatry and afterwards departed in peace”. Read more | 1066: who was the rightful king? It’s a shame that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does not give more detail about this momentous year. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on the Chronicle alone for our understanding of what the occasion meant to contemporaries. The retinue of people that accompanied Æthelstan north in 927 included a poet who drafted verses celebrating the fact that “Saxonia”, by which the poet means ‘England’, was now “made whole”. “King Æthelstan lives,” he declares, “Glorious through his deeds!” That there was a poet present with Æthelstan at this crucial juncture in 927 sent a strong message about the type of king he aspired to be: not just militarily dominant, but intellectually superior, too. This idea of a king who cherished learning is supported by the earliest surviving manuscript portrait of any English monarch (shown left), preserved today at the front of a manuscript in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Here Æthelstan is shown wearing a distinctive crown, book in hand, head bowed in front of St Cuthbert. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-1354472098webready-086d217.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of a king wearing a blue robe holding a book. Beside him, a saint holding a Bible and wearing a red robe stands in front of a church" title="This early 10th-century manuscript portrait projected Æthelstan’s commitment to learning, says David Woodman. It shows the king (left) holding a book, with head bowed in front of the Northumbrian saint, Cuthbert (Image by Getty Images)" /> Obsessed with theft Æthelstan now commanded more territory than any early medieval king before him.But, with his realm stretching from the English Channel in the south to the northern limits of Northumbria – and the Viking threat far from extinguished – how did he go about maintaining control? And what policies did Æthelstan enact? Thanks to surviving coins, diplomas (grants of land to favoured subjects) and a large corpus of laws that survives in the king’s name, these are questions that we can answer in some detail. Careful scrutiny of Æthelstan’s laws, for example, reveals a king who was deeply concerned by the issue of theft, a crime that he and his advisers return to again and again. We also know that Æthelstan’s legal system depended to a striking degree on the written word: on laws being sent to different parts of the kingdom to be implemented by royal officials. The king clearly sought to set up a single administrative system that worked across the entire kingdom. One of his law-codes hints at this aspiration when it calls for there to be only one coinage in use. Those coins that survive from Æthelstan’s reign are never entirely homogeneous in design, but they do all carry the king’s name. Where Æthelstan’s laws and coinage travelled, the king himself would sometimes follow. Royal diplomas – issued in the period 928–35 by an anonymous royal scribe known as ‘Æthelstan A’ – reveal that Æthelstan moved regularly around the kingdom himself, making grants of land. Most of these assemblies were convened in the heartlands of Wessex, but the diplomas tell us that they also travelled further north – convening, for example, in Nottingham in early June 934. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/BAL3964061webready-b06c79e.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large document with a paragraph of writing with lists of things below it" title="In this diploma from 931, Æthelstan grants land to a man called Wulfgar in Ham, Wiltshire. Such documents reveal the depth of the king’s interest in the administration of his kingdom plus the influence he wielded over Scottish, Welsh and Strathclyde/Cumbrian rulers (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> The royal diplomas conventionally contain lists of the important ecclesiastical and lay officials who attended the assemblies – and these make for interesting reading. Not only do they contain English names of people from Wessex and Mercia, but also Old Norse names (presumably from the north and east of Æthelstan’s realm), and those of British kings hailing from the Welsh and Scottish kingdoms. It seems, then, that these assemblies (known by the contemporary Old English word witan, literally ‘wise men’) drew powerful figures from across the British Isles, reflecting just how widely Æthelstan had managed to extend his authority. Read more | The battle of Brunanburh: the forgotten fight that changed British history Æthelstan’s status is even reflected in the sheer complexity of the language used on his royal diplomas (all written in Latin, with a deft use of rhythm and alliteration, and with a clause in Old English, too) and repeated proclamations of the king’s undoubted power. In one diploma, ‘Æthelstan A’ tells his audience that the king has been “elevated by the right hand of the Almighty to the throne of the whole kingdom of Britain”. Amazingly, two 10th-century ‘Æthelstan A’ originals survive today in the British Library in London. Large, highly professional in their script and layout – with long columns of witnesses at their conclusion – they were evidently designed to make it clear that this was a king who wielded new levels of power. Those coming from the far limits of Æthelstan’s kingdom could not fail to have been impressed by what they saw and heard. Power couples But what about those beyond the far limits of Æthelstan’s kingdom, in continental Europe? Here, too, it seems that Æthelstan was able to exert a degree of influence – courtesy of a series of strategic marriage alliances involving his half-sisters. Eadgifu married Charles the Simple, king of the West Franks; Eadhild wed Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks; Eadgyth was matched with Otto the Great, king of the East Franks and later emperor; Ælfgifu (or Eadgifu) married into the Burgundian royal line. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/BAL167523webready-a65a7f6.jpg" width="1500" height="1429" alt="Eadgifu of Wessex (second right) in a 14th-century manuscript. Æthelstan’s half-sister was married to Charles the Simple and bore him a son: the future Louis IV of France (second left) (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="Eadgifu of Wessex (second right) in a 14th-century manuscript. Æthelstan’s half-sister was married to Charles the Simple and bore him a son: the future Louis IV of France (second left) (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> While his half-sisters were dispatched to Europe, scholars increasingly moved in the opposite direction to exchange the latest prose and verse texts at an English court that was becoming a hub of bookish activity. We think it is in Æthelstan’s court that some of the earliest English interactions with the Indian game of chess can be evidenced – yet more proof of 10th-century England’s growing cultural pulling power. A hostile coalition The tentacles of Æthelstan’s power now stretched far and wide. But such power could provoke intense resentment. And so it proved in 937 when a coalition of hostile forces – led by Óláf Guthfrithson, Viking king of Dublin; Constantine II, ruler of the Scottish kingdom of ‘Alba’; and Owain, king of ‘Strathclyde/Cumbria’ – clashed with English armies at a place called Brunanburh. Modern discussion of Brunanburh has focused on the enduring mystery of its location. But it’s important not to lose sight of the significance of the battle itself: nothing less than Æthelstan’s newly forged ‘England’ was at stake that day. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/BAL3299765webready-cd67542.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A bishop sprinkles holy water over Æthelstan’s corpse in a 14th-century manuscript. The king’s death in 939 brought to an end one of the most successful reigns in all of medieval English history (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="A bishop sprinkles holy water over Æthelstan’s corpse in a 14th-century manuscript. The king’s death in 939 brought to an end one of the most successful reigns in all of medieval English history (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It was certainly a large and bloody clash. A famous poem, written in the immediate aftermath to commemorate Æthelstan’s deeds, tells us that: “Never yet in this island before this by what books tell us and our ancient sages, was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword.” Like its location, precise details of how the battle unfolded have been lost to history. But what is certain is that the English prevailed. As the Brunanburh poet tells us: “Edward’s sons [Æthelstan and his brother Edmund] clove the shield-wall, hewed the linden-wood shields with hammered swords, for it was natural to men of their lineage to defend their land, their treasure and their homes, in frequent battle against every foe. Their enemies perished; the people of the Scots and the pirates fell doomed.” So important was the outcome of Brunanburh that, unusually, sources from outside the English kingdom – from Wales, Scotland and Ireland – all register its result. Æthelstan had confronted the greatest threat to the authority of his reign and he’d faced it down. Yet his triumph was to be short-lived. Two years later, the king lay dead. And within a few short months of his burial in Malmesbury Abbey, the kingdom he had forged over the past decade began to fall apart. Vikings came to power once more. Óláf Guthfrithson, who had failed to unseat Æthelstan at Brunanburh, finally realised his ambition of seizing control in York. The political fragmentation that followed Æthelstan’s death has left some modern historians to question just how successful he had been in creating ‘England’ in the first place. We should certainly not think of his kingdom as any kind of homogeneous whole. What ‘England’ meant to the people of Winchester would have been very different to someone living in St Germans (Cornwall), or to a resident of Durham (Northumbria). But, at a time when English territories had for generations been riven by divisions, the very fact that Æthelstan was able to bring all of these areas together for the first time, and to be formally recognised as their king, shows how precociously successful he had been. It’s for these achievements that 927, the date of England’s formation, should be as well known as those other landmarks of the medieval era: 1066 (the Norman Conquest), 1215 (the issuing of Magna Carta), 1348 (the arrival of the Black Death) and 1455 (the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses). Æthelstan had presided over a transformative moment in English history. In his 15 or so extraordinary years on the throne, a new nation had been born. David Woodman is professor of history at Robinson College, Cambridge. His new biography of Æthelstan, The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, is published by Princeton University Press This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
9 things you might not know about Sherlock Holmes
The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, has for more than 130 years been a star of stage and screen, played by actors including Benedict Cumberbatch and Ian McKellen and serialised in countless books. But how much do you know about this famous crime-buster, who made his first appearance in 1887 in Beeton's Christmas Annual? Here, author Martin Davies shares 11 lesser-known facts about Sherlock Holmes...
1. The first actor to play Sherlock Holmes was American… The first actor to take on the role of Sherlock Holmes in any official capacity was the American William Gillette. His 1899 stage play was adapted from a script by Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Opening six years after the author had attempted to kill off his creation at the Reichenbach Falls, the play was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic: between 1899 and 1932, Gillette performed the role more than 1,000 times. Gillette is also credited with introducing the curved briar pipe that was to become synonymous with the great detective – possibly because a straight pipe obscured the actor’s face when he delivered his lines. On the podcast | Sherlock Holmes: the real history that inspired the detective stories On first meeting Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Gillette is said to have appeared in character, complete with deerstalker, and after examining Conan Doyle most minutely, to have opined: “Unquestionably an author!” 2. … who introduced a love interest Gillette was also one of the first to annoy the purists by introducing a love interest for Holmes. When he telegraphed Conan Doyle with the question “May I marry him?” the author is said to have replied: “You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him!” It’s impossible to count the number of writers who, since then, have taken Doyle at his word. Read more | Real-life Sherlocks: the detectives of Scotland Yard and their curious cases 3. He defied death Holmes, having survived the Reichenbach Falls, refused to die with his creator. By the time of Conan Doyle’s death on 7 July 1930, Holmes was already a star of stage and screen. His film debut, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, came as early as 1900. Just a few seconds long, the film used stop-motion camerawork to show Holmes attempting to grapple with a burglar who repeatedly disappears, then reappears in a different part of the room. 4. A 1940s duo cemented Holmes and Watson's on screen personas One of the oldest surviving film adaptations of Conan Doyle’s work dates to 1916 (William Gillette again) but it was the English duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the 1940s who for many years became identified in the public imagination as the Holmes and Watson. Rathbone and Bruce made 14 Sherlock Holmes films between 1939 and 1946 (and starred in more than 200 dramatisations for American radio), yet only the first two films were set in the Victorian period. The others had a contemporary setting, allowing Sherlock Holmes to pursue Nazi spies and to urge the purchase of war bonds. Bruce’s dim, bumbling Watson tends to infuriate Holmes purists. 5. He inspired hundreds of parodies The Adventures of ChubbLock Homes, an early comic strip, appeared in Comic Cuts magazine as early as 1893, and the urge to parody the great detective has never gone away. In 1901, while William Gillette’s official Holmes play was running in London, audiences at Terry’s Theatre were enjoying performances of the rather more frivolous Sheerluck Jones. The comic strip Sherlocko & Watso was hugely popular in the USA in the early 20th century, and silent film parodies abounded. Later in the century, Peter Cook and John Cleese both played comedy Sherlocks on film (Cleese's character was Arthur Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock’s grandson). Less well remembered, perhaps, is the 1976 TV film The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, in which a youthful Larry Hagman (before his JR Ewing days) played a deluded motorcycle cop, Sherman Holmes. Read more | Women detectives: meet the Victorian female super sleuths 6. Tobacco, cereal and… mouthwash? Holmes has sold it all Even in his early days, Sherlock Holmes was helping manufacturers to sell their products. In the 1890s, the makers of Beecham’s Pills ran advertisements suggesting that the great detective was a devoted user. And as a smoker, Holmes was popular with the tobacco companies. Early cigarette advertisements using Holmes’ image included brands such as Lambert and Butler’s ‘Varsity’ mixture, Chesterfield, Ogden’s, Gallaher’s and Players. Since then, products as diverse as furniture cream, mouthwash, breakfast cereal and photocopiers have all benefited from association with the great man. 6. He debuted on TV to mixed reviews With the growth of television after the Second World War, the Baker Street detective was quick to adapt to the new medium. Alan Wheatley was the first actor to portray Holmes on British television – his 1951 series was broadcast live. But it seems Wheatley was not a fan of Holmes. When asked about Holmes’ character, he is said to have replied: “In my opinion he just seemed to be an insufferable prig”. 7. One actor played Holmes twice… and his brother Peter Cushing appeared as Holmes on the BBC in the 1960s. He had already played the detective in the 1959 Hammer film The Hound of the Baskervilles, alongside Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville. Lee was to play Holmes himself in a 1962 film; then, nearly 30 years later, he took up the pipe again, playing an ageing Sherlock in two TV films known together as Sherlock Holmes the Golden Years. Throw in an appearance as Mycroft Holmes in Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Christopher almost bagged the complete set. Alas, he never appeared on screen as Doctor Watson. 8. The most prolific Holmes For many people, the definitive portrayal of Sherlock Holmes was by Jeremy Brett, for Granada Television, in the 1980s and 1990s. Brett appeared in 41 episodes, including five feature-length productions. However, even that impressive achievement doesn’t make Brett the most prolific Holmes. That title must go to the British actor Clive Merrison, who played the detective on BBC Radio between 1989 and 1998, and who completed the full canon – dramatisations of all 60 of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and novels. 9. Holmes, The Avengers and Britain's most famous secret agent are forever linked on screen And so to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, in which Andrew Scott rose to prominence playing Moriarty. Scott has also appeared in the new James Bond film, Spectre, joining an illustrious club of actors who have performed alongside Britain’s most famous spy and Britain’s most famous detective. But only Sir Roger Moore has played both leading roles on film. Sadly his one appearance as Holmes – in the 1976 TV-film Sherlock Holmes in New York – is not, perhaps, his most memorable work. Sean Connery never played Holmes, but he did play the ultra-astute friar William of Baskerville in The Name of the Rose, so you might say that he came close. The actor playing Dr Watson to Roger Moore’s Holmes was Patrick Macnee, most famous as John Steed in The Avengers. Macnee played Watson again, 15 years later, alongside Christopher Lee’s Holmes. Then, in 1993, he donned the deerstalker himself in The Hound of London, thus becoming that very rare thing – an actor who has starred in films as both Holmes and Watson. But all these efforts to breathe new life into Sherlock Holmes might well have been greeted with bemusement by Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote in a letter in 1892: “Holmes is as inhuman as Babbage’s Calculating Machine.” Martin Davies is the author of Mrs Hudson and the Spirits’ Curse (Canelo, 2015)
Emma of Normandy: not just a two-time queen consort of England
Emma of Normandy was queen consort to two of England’s best known pre-Conquest kings, Æthelred the Unready and Cnut the Great. But she was also a savvy political player who came into her own as queen mother, writes Dr Cat Jarman
Emma of Normandy is best-known as being queen consort to two kings – Æthelred the Unready and Cnut the Great – and the mother of two more, Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor. She was the daughter of Richard I (the Fearless) of Normandy and the Danish-descended Gunnor. She is also a pivotal character in King and Conqueror, the BBC's Norman Conquest drama, which paints Emma as a dominating force over her son King Edward – which leads to a very ahistorical demise – and in Netflix's Vikings: Valhalla, where she is portrayed as a politically-savvy queen wielding quiet power in the English court, often working to subvert the machinations of the ever-grasping Earl Godwin. Who was Emma of Normandy? Emma was one of nine children and most likely born in the AD 980s. A daughter of the Norman dukes, she was the great-granddaughter of the Viking warrior Rollo, the founder of Normandy who hailed from either Norway or Denmark. This made her of Scandinavian ancestry on both sides of the family. She was also the great-aunt of William the Conqueror. In the words of Godfrey, prior of Winchester’s cathedral monastery, writing in the 11th century: “She had kings as sons and kings as husbands; she shone forth in the glory of her progeny of kings; she excelled in virtue even the ranks of her glorious ancestors.” Emma of Normandy's first marriage: Æthelred the Unready In 1002, probably aged in her late teens or early 20s, Emma was sent to England to marry King Æthelred, as his second wife. The marriage was clearly a strategic one, aiming to strengthen an alliance between England and Normandy in light of harrowing attacks on both English and Norman shores by Scandinavian raiders. Æthelred had apparently accused Emma’s brother, Duke Richard II, of harbouring the Vikings and enabling their attacks, and the marriage was designed to ensure his allegiance. Read more | Aethelflaed: who was the warrior queen who crushed the Vikings? Their union was an unusual one, as although several English princesses had been married off to French and German rulers historically, no English king had married a foreign wife for almost 150 years. Upon her arrival in England, Emma was given the name ‘Ælfgifu’. The marriage resulted in three children: two sons, Edward (later known as Edward the Confessor) and Alfred, and a daughter, Godgifu. Few sources say much about Emma’s political activity in these years, and it seems her role was mainly one of being a wife and a mother: the most common description of her at the time was as the conlaterana regis: “she who is at the King’s side”. This first decade of her career was the one in which she was the least powerful, and one source, William of Malmesbury, suggests that she and her husband were never on good terms. The England that Emma found herself at the beginning of the 11th century was one marked by ongoing trouble and threats of Scandinavian attacks. In 1013, this came to a head when the Dane Swein Forkbeard successfully invaded England. Emma and her children were sent into exile in Normandy, later followed by her husband. Swein’s rule of England was to be short as he died the following year, and a messy two years of political disputes ensued even after Æthelred was restored to the throne. Emma of Normandy's second marriage: Cnut the Great In 1016, Æthelred died. More turbulence was to follow, and later that year England fell to Swein Forkbeard’s son, the Danish King Cnut. The following year, he is reported to have asked for Emma to be fetched to be his wife. Emma became queen of England, once again, but this time also of Denmark and Norway. As with her first marriage, this was a strategic one as it cemented Cnut’s role as king of England. Taking the widow of one of his predecessors as his own wife no doubt helped mark his superiority. At the same time, the union might be seen as symbolising friendship and alliance. While it is unclear what Emma herself really thought of it at the beginning, she later stressed that not only did the marriage bring peace but it was an equal union that she entered into with her own consent. Read more | Cnut’s invasion of England: setting the scene for the Norman conquest Her ancestry may well have affected her feelings. After all, her mother was the daughter of recent Danish settlers in Normandy, and northern origins were a key part of Norman self-identity. Emma likely spoke Danish from childhood and apart from her family connections, she was clearly important to Cnut – not least because of her knowledge of English politics. It seems likely that the partnership between the two grew over time, helped by the fact that they were more or less of the same age. In a document from the New Minster in Winchester, illustrating the monastery’s loyal benefactors, the two are depicted either side of an altar as a double act. This depiction – one of several – emphasises Emma’s political importance. Their marriage lasted until Cnut’s death in 1035. Emma of Normandy's children As well as the two sons and one daughter Emma had with Æthelred, she went on to have two more children with Cnut: Harthacnut and Gunnhild. Cnut also had two sons by his first wife, Ælfgifu (confusingly, the same name that was given to Emma), Swein and Harold Harefoot. At the time of Cnut’s death, Swein had been sent to rule in Norway along with his mother, while Harthacnut was ruling in Denmark. That left Harold as the only of Cnut’s sons still in England. Emma remained at Winchester, where Cnut’s military household was based, and was left in charge of the Royal Treasury and in a position of power. Read more | Norman women: the power behind the thrones Harthacnut was the legitimate heir and should have ascended the English throne, but he could not return from Denmark to claim the crown so Harold ruled in his stead as either regent or co-ruler. Competition for the throne was to continue. Emma’s sons with Æthelred – Edward and Alfred – had been in exile in Normandy and returned to England in 1036. Alfred was soon killed, after being captured and blinded under suspicious circumstances, and Edward may have briefly joined his mother in Winchester before returning again to Normandy. Eventually, Harold was recognised as sole king in 1037. Emma was exiled to Flanders, where she stayed with a distant relative, Count Baldwin and his wife Adela. But her ambitions for herself and her sons remained. Read more | Are women at the heart of the action in the Norman Conquest? Emma of Normandy as England’s queen mother Emma’s career in England can be divided into three distinct parts: the first two relating to her marriages, and the third to this period after Cnut’s death. Now, Emma worked to manoeuvre her sons into kingship, taking an active part in the political sphere as queen mother. When Harold died in 1040, Emma returned from Flanders and Harthacnut finally took the throne. The role as queen mother was clearly an important one, and she was recognised as an authority: she is listed as mater regis in witness lists during these years. Emma may have learnt about queenship from her mother, Gunnor, who was later hailed as the matriarch of the Norman aristocracy, dubbed the ‘mother of the dynasty’ in the 12th century. Harthacnut ruled for only two years, with Emma by his side, until his death in 1042. He was succeeded by his half-brother Edward. But the new king appears to have turned against his mother, arriving in Winchester a few months after his coronation and taking away her treasures of silver and gold, as well as most of the land she owned. Emma was allowed to stay in Winchester and eventually regained her position at court, though without her former status. The precise reasons for this are unclear: Emma was later accused of having been too harsh on Edward; of offering aid to Magnus of Norway for an invasion of England; and even of having had an affair with Ælfwine, the bishop of Winchester. It seems none were true. Edward most likely wanted to reduce her political involvement back to a simple status as the widow of the former kings, leaving him to rule independently. As far as we know, she lived the rest of her life in Winchester. What was Emma of Normandy’s legacy? Our actual information about Emma’s life is sparse, Much of what we know comes from the Encomium Emmae reginae, the Praise of Queen Emma. This narrative was written down in 1041/2 by a monk from St Bertin, in what is now France, and was commissioned by Emma herself. The Encomium, however, is not a straightforward biography, but an account – modified in several later versions – of the role she played in English politics during the reign of Cnut and his successors. A famous illustration shows her seated on a throne, a kneeling character handing the book to her, with her sons Harthacnut and Edward watching from the wings. The Encomium conjures the position she was in at the height of her power, aimed at her sons and written to influence the future. Despite her remarkable political career, her best known legacy is no doubt her Norman link to William the Conqueror, enabling the events of 1066 to run their course. In the words of 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon, describing her marriage: “From this union… the Normans were justified according to the law of peoples, in both claiming and gaining possession of England.” How and when did Emma of Normandy die? Emma died of an unknown cause on 6 March 1052. She was buried next to Cnut and Harthacnut in Winchester Cathedral. In 2019, a team from the University of Bristol announced that among the 1,300 bones mixed up in six mortuary chests from Winchester Cathedral were the remains of a woman who matched both the date and age of death of Emma. There are no records of other women of similar status buried there at the time and DNA work is in progress in an attempt to identify the remains more definitively. 1066: The battle for England Member exclusive | The year 1066 is the most famous in English history, but there's a lot more to the story than one bloody battle at Hastings. In this four-part series, medievalist Marc Morris talks David Musgrove through the full story of the Norman Conquest. Watch all episodes now Dr Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, broadcaster and author of River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads (HarperCollins, 2021) King and Conqueror is streaming on BBC iPlayer now. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
Queen Victoria and John Brown: the controversial relationship between sovereign and servant
How did John Brown become Queen Victoria’s favourite Highland servant, why was he so disliked by some but admired by others, and is there any foundation to the rumours about their personal connection?
John Brown (1826-83) was born near in Crathie, a village close to Balmoral. He entered royal service as a young man soon after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert acquired Balmoral Castle, their Highland property. He worked for the Queen for more than 30 years, his presence in her household sometimes leading to controversy and speculation that their relationship went beyond that of employer and servant. John Brown: key dates Born: 8 December 1826 (Crathie, Aberdeenshire) Died: 27 March 1883 (Windsor Castle) Parents: John and Margaret (nee Leys) Brown What was John Brown’s background, childhood and early life like, and how did he enter royal employment? John Brown was born into a farming family at Crathie, near Balmoral, the second of eleven children. His father was a former schoolmaster who later took up farming. Once John the younger was old enough to find a job, he worked at a local coaching inn looking after guests’ horses, then as a pony herder on the Balmoral estate leased by Sir Robert Gordon, who lived there until his death in 1847. He retained his post after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert leased the property. In September 1849, Albert decided that for safety reasons they needed someone to ride on the box of their carriage on some of their more narrow mountain journeys, and Brown was chosen as one of the youngest and sturdiest of the servants. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/12/GettyImages-3431677-a08b539-e1753977399856.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Portrait of John Brown" title="John Brown (1826-83) was born near in Crathie, a village close to Balmoral. He entered royal service as a young man soon after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert acquired Balmoral Castle, their Highland property. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> What duties did his role in the royal household involve? Within two years he was also asked to lead Queen Victoria’s pony on their Highland expeditions. He was conscientious, hardworking, always ready to do anything, and Albert admired his "transparent honesty and straightforward, independent character". Other responsibilities included brewing the pot of tea that she took on picnics. She once told him he had given her the best cup she ever tasted, and he told her it should have been, as he put "a grand nip o’ whisky in it". The fact that Albert had always spoken and thought so highly of Brown meant that he remained high in her estimation after Albert, by then Prince Consort, died at Windsor Castle in 1861. In October 1863 the queen was returning from a carriage ride to Balmoral one evening when the driver, who was drunk, lost his way in the darkness and took the vehicle over some very rough ground. It overturned with the passengers inside, but Brown had had the foresight to leap clear once he saw an accident was about to happen. He rescued the queen and her ladies, cut the traces to release the frightened horses, and sent the driver on foot to fetch some ponies for them to ride back. The queen was badly shaken, bruised and had to have her head bandaged. Without his intervention her injuries would undoubtedly have been more severe. Why did Brown's closeness to Queen Victoria become so scandalous, and is there any truth in some of the more colourful rumours about them? The presence of Brown soon threatened to become a liability to the queen. In June 1866 he was thought responsible for delaying her return from Balmoral to London during a ministerial crisis. A few months later, a Swiss newspaper reported that she had cancelled appointments as she was expecting a child by Brown, to whom she had been morganatically married for "a long time". The British minister at Berne lodged a formal complaint against the newspaper for spreading misinformation, which only exacerbated the gossip. The British press, even the more radical journals, showed great restraint in ignoring the story. Rumours persisted that Brown had a hold on the queen because he had been endowed with unique psychic powers, and that she used him as a spiritualist medium to contact Albert in the spirit world. While newspapers may have ignored the speculation, some satirical journals, especially Punch and the short-lived Tomahawk, a Victorian forerunner of Private Eye, published lampoons and cartoons making fun of them. Some modern historians have suggested that in a more modern age, people might have accepted a widowed queen taking a lover, but for her to have done so would undoubtedly have embarrassed or distressed members of her own family. However, a liaison with a man who was socially inferior but without any political ambitions would have been preferable to an aristocrat or a member of a foreign royal family, who might have attempted to exert political influence over her. The generally accepted theory is that Queen Victoria – who had lost her father when she was only a few months old, and her husband when both were in their early forties – always desperately needed a strong supportive male figure in her life. Over the years, some researchers have claimed that the queen and her servant had a morganatic marriage and had a child, usually on the flimsiest of evidence from people who accepted unsubstantiated gossip as a case of ‘no smoke without fire’. Brown never married, although he was fond of his nephews and nieces. Read more | Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: what was their relationship like? What was Brown’s attitude towards Queen Victoria? Was it a normal servant-employer relationship, or did he try to take liberties that might have been considered unacceptable? Most of Queen Victoria’s staff were slightly in awe of her, or at least feared her explosive temper if anybody tried to thwart her, although they generally managed to learn how to manage her with a suitable degree of tact. Brown was the exception, and could be very rude to her on occasion. If he disapproved of her clothing, he would ask coldly, "What’s this you've got on today?" He was once heard scolding her as he fastened the cloak under her bonnet, "Hoots then, woman, can you not hold your head up?" When she complained about a sketching table that she disliked, he told her to stop, "for I cannot make one for you". Victoria seems to have accepted Brown's brusque, plain-speaking manner as a refreshing change from the obsequiousness of others, perhaps amused that someone dared to speak to her so forcefully, while she apparently never attempted to answer him back. Flattery was not part of his nature, but he regularly assured her of his devotion, saying she would "never have an honester servant" than him. In 1872 he acquitted himself well when a man pointed an unloaded pistol at her while she was on a carriage drive and came within inches of her face. Brown swiftly grabbed the man and held him until the police could come and arrest him. How well did Brown get on with Queen Victoria’s family and others around her? Most of them hated him for his uncouth manner, and the fact that she granted him privileges denied to them. When she was unwell in the summer of 1871, he had unrestricted access to her bedroom as he lifted her from her bed to her couch (something her sons were forbidden to do), while delivering her orders to the household in his customary tactless manner. The Prince of Wales was furious that she always accepted Brown’s judgment, saying there was "no male head" in the family after her husband’s death. His sister Alice, later Grand Duchess of Hesse, complained that he alone could discuss anything he wanted with her, "while we, her children, are restricted to speak on only those matters which may not excite her or which she chooses to talk about". On one visit to Balmoral their brother Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, pointedly shook hands with everyone on arrival except Brown, as they had previously had their differences. The prime minister William Gladstone once tried at a dinner party to explain to her in detail why he believed she was mistaken about something. Seeing how annoyed she was becoming, Brown tapped him sharply on the shoulder, telling him "You’ve said enough". He always got on well with Victoria's private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, who admired his honesty and fearlessness, and sometimes covered up for him when he was absent from duty after sleeping off one dram too many. Did John Brown ever retire, or did he die in service? In later years he suffered from erysipelas, perhaps caused partly by heavy drinking. In March 1883 Brown caught a severe chill which rapidly worsened, sank into a coma and died without regaining consciousness. Victoria told Ponsonby that she felt "utterly crushed" after Brown’s death. To the end of her life, she wore his mother’s wedding ring that he had given her. Before her death, she asked her physician Sir James Reid to ensure that he would secretly place her favourite photograph of Brown and a lock of his hair inside her coffin with her before it was sealed, wishes that he faithfully carried out. John Van der Kiste has written extensively on British and European royal biography from the later Stuarts to the early 20th century.
Master the art of procrastination, with the help of the Virgin Queen
Elizabeth I knew that delaying decisions was her secret superpower, Professor Tracy Borman tells Dr David Musgrove, and it's a technique we could all learn something from
I’ve been putting off writing this piece for quite a while. Not because I’m plain lazy, but because I’m channelling my inner Tudor queen. My Life Lesson from History this week, as proposed by Professor Tracy Borman, is that we should master the art of procrastination. Helping us in this endeavour will be Elizabeth I, the procrastinator par excellence. I know what you’re thinking. Procrastination is a bad thing. It’s what you do when you can’t make a decision, or you’re unwilling to knuckle down to a task. This is the territory of urgently needing to tidy up your bedroom when you should be revising for your exams. We’re not talking avoidance procrastination here though – we are looking at deliberate, strategic procrastination. For Elizabeth, it was a case of good things coming to those who wait. “Elizabeth was the absolute master of procrastination, or at least that’s how it appeared. So really her strategy was to resist the pressure that she was constantly under from her male advisors, her parliaments, her people even, to do things like marry, have an heir and go to war,” says Borman. “She played the procrastination card brilliantly because instead of being pressured into making a decision, she would say, ‘Hang on, I just need a bit of time. I’m only a woman: what do I know?’” Avoiding the altar Let’s have a quick recap of who Elizabeth I was. She was queen of England from 1558 to 1603, and daughter of King Henry VIII. She was Good Queen Bess and Gloriana, the virgin queen who never married, and who navigated a half century of rule as a woman in a man’s world. Part of her success and longevity as a monarch was because she was slow to play her hand. The way she managed the pressure to marry is a case in point. “When she comes to the throne, she’s single, she’s 25 years old. Of course, the first thing everybody expects her to do is to take a husband and thus secure the dynasty, the succession. It’s the right thing to do, not just for a queen, but for any woman,” explains Borman. “But she famously declares to her first parliament that she will live and die a virgin and that she wasn’t going to marry. So you might say she didn’t procrastinate: she made a decision.” That’s true, but it was the delivery of that decision over several decades that required a long-running masterclass in misdirection, time-wasting and delay. “She showed herself willing to entertain foreign suitors and indeed homegrown ones as well. She lent them a willing ear. She entered into negotiations. She delayed, she put off. There was this wonderful phrase that her counsellors used about Elizabeth that she ‘gave answers answerless’,” says Borman. “She plays this game for a good 20 or 30 years. Her last serious suitor is the Duke of Anjou in the early 1580s, by which time Elizabeth can no longer have children. Nobody really believes she’s ever going to marry, but she still makes a good go at it and strings it out a bit and flirts with him and calls him her little frog. And then eventually he goes back to France and the whole thing is forgotten. But she’s brilliant at just playing for time.” Smallpox, strategy and succession The fact that Elizabeth didn’t marry meant that she didn’t have an obvious heir, so the next matter on which she procrastinated at length was the vexed question of who would succeed her. Everybody in her court and realm wanted to know who was next in line to the throne, particularly when it looked like she was going to die. “In 1562 she’s staying at Hampton Court and she falls ill with smallpox. This is one of the most deadly diseases of the age. Everybody thinks she’s about to die. Indeed Elizabeth herself thinks she’s about to die, and it brings this question of the succession right to the fore. From that moment on, even though Elizabeth survives, it never goes away.” As Borman explains, after the smallpox incident, she is under constant pressure to name her heir – to make a choice from Mary, Queen of Scots, or Lady Katherine Grey, or even Philip II of Spain. “This really is Elizabeth procrastinating par excellence because she manages it for 40 years,” says Borman. “She just keeps putting them off”. The queen either just doesn’t answer or offers gnomic utterances like “when I am dead, he shall succeed that has the most right”. That sort of response left a wide open goal for interpretation, but importantly made sure that Elizabeth did not have to stay on the defensive throughout her reign. Watch now View Green Video on the source website “ It was a master stroke because she knew from direct experience that the minute she named her heir, she was in trouble. The same had happened during her sister Mary’s reign, where it was very obvious that Elizabeth was the only viable successor and everybody started to gather around her and turn against Mary, and Elizabeth became the focus of rebellions against her sister,” notes Borman. “Elizabeth was absolutely determined that wasn’t going to happen to her. The only way of holding onto her power was not to give somebody else the power of knowing they were going to succeed her and certainly not the likes of Mary, Queen of Scots – her deadliest rival. “So it was politically expedient not to name an heir, although admittedly you’ve got to take your hat off to her for still refusing to do so on her deathbed when you kind of think she’s got nothing to lose. She just continues to her last breath to keep the focus entirely on herself.” You’ll want to have a read of Borman’s new book The Stolen Crown (Hodder & Stoughton, out September 2025) to find out the latest thinking on how James VI and I did eventually succeed, and why Elizabeth never did actually name him as her heir. A war of wits Elizabeth had really good reasons to prevaricate on these decisions then, and a lot of her problems boiled down to the fact that she was a woman. “She played her quite chauvinistic male courtiers at their own game because of course she was a weak and feeble woman. ‘What am I going do? I can’t make decisions. I don’t understand weighty matters. I need time to think about it’. “She does this again and again, and she employs that language to make sure that people are aware that it is just her womanly weakness. All the time it’s a very clever ploy of buying herself that precious time, particularly when it came to war. “This was one realm that was very male-dominated, and Elizabeth made no secret of the fact she hated wars. They had uncertain outcomes. They were expensive. She was much more like her grandfather, Henry VII, than her warmongering father Henry VIII. She tried to buy time with diplomacy by using her hand in marriage as a bait to keep the great superpowers of Europe on side. It was only when forced that she really had to rally and take action, notably in 1588 when Philip II launched his Armada against England, and then she did finally agree to go to war.” Even though her procrastination was probably intensely annoying for those around her, it did provide a certain predictability. Her courtiers probably knew that they didn’t need to worry about snap decisions or being caught off guard by sudden changes of plan (though she could be very mercurial about her favourites). Should any of our modern global leaders take heed of this? I wouldn’t like to say, but it’s food for thought, certainly when you consider that Elizabeth did navigate a huge international crisis in the form of the religious settlement over the bloody rift between Catholicism and Protestantism. Some would argue that her religious compromise simply laid the foundations for future strife, but as Borman notes, “ It did at least bring much needed security and peace after 30 years of religious turmoil”. You shouldn’t take from this that Elizabeth didn’t make decisions or get stuff done – quite the opposite. According to Borman, she was one of the hardest-working monarchs ever to sit on the throne of England. She procrastinated because that was the best tool in her armoury to stay in power. The power of procrastination If you’re interested in becoming a productive procrastinator like Elizabeth, might I suggest an amusing and informative little book by the philosopher Professor John Perry. It’s called The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing (Workman Publishing, 2012). Perry argues for a policy of structured procrastination, whereby you get lots of things done by not doing other things. You accomplish stuff and deliver projects by actively avoiding other things that you think you should be working on. It’s a mind-trick of self-deception, via clever manipulation of your internal to-do list, according to Perry. Queen Elizabeth was actively not doing things too, but perhaps without that slice of self-deception. If I’m hearing Borman correctly, the Tudor queen knew exactly what she was doing with her delaying techniques, because she was operating in a very fraught power-play at home and abroad. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-601100326-85a48a1.jpg" width="5109" height="4105" alt="Queen Elizabeth I in the Armada Portrait, painted by George Gower, which marked the failed Spanish invasion of England. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Queen Elizabeth I in the Armada Portrait, painted by George Gower, which marked the failed Spanish invasion of England. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Given that you’re probably not a global leader struggling with geo-political challenges, what’s the lesson that we can take from Elizabeth’s reign? I guess it’s that procrastination has its place in life, if you’re using it strategically rather than as an excuse. Personally, I have found once or twice that problems that seemed somewhat insurmountable one day just resolved themselves quite nicely the next, because some external circumstance had shifted. Sometimes, it’s best to just do nothing, deliberately, to see where the pieces land. As Borman says, “ I often channel my inner Elizabeth when faced with a dilemma and I think, you know what? I'm going to do absolutely nothing and just see what happens”. Procrastination doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of decision either – it could be that you just need a bit of thinking time. Elizabeth I was a great one for going for walks in her palaces and gardens early in the morning, presumably to free up her mind for whatever the day held. So again, we can take a prompt from her that you don’t have to rush into decisions. Take your time, go for a walk, think before you leap in. That’s what Good Queen Bess would have done, and, as Borman concludes, “if it was good enough for Queen Bess, I think it’s good enough for us”.
Shakespeare’s 'lost years': what do we know about this secretive chapter of the bard's life?
Shakespeare's 'lost years' refers to an undocumented period in his life, during which little is known about his activities or whereabouts. So what, exactly, could he have been up to? Daniel Swift explores this secretive chapter in the famous playwright's story
The idea that William Shakespeare’s life contains a stretch of “lost years” is a minor ghost that haunts popular biographies and discussion of his poems and plays. Those missing years are conventionally taken to begin in February 1585, when Shakespeare’s children – twins Judith and Hamnet – were baptised at Stratford upon Avon, and to end in September 1592, when he was described as being “an upstart Crow” in a gossipy pamphlet in London. Between these dates, we have no reliable record that ties Shakespeare to any particular location, or reveals what he was doing. Shakespeare was 20 when his lost years began, and 28 when they ended. Those seven-and-a-half lost years belong in a wider landscape in which we know remarkably little about the playwright. We know virtually nothing for sure about Shakespeare’s schooling, which he probably completed in 1578 or so; nor what he did until he married Anne Hathaway in November 1582. Listen on the podcast | What happened in Shakespeare's lost years? This is not only the case for Shakespeare: scholars may hate to admit it, but our ignorance of so much of this period is vast. Almost 60 per cent of the 3,000 different plays written between 1570 and 1642 are lost. While some titles survive, there could be some lost plays that we have never even heard of at all. It is a safe guess, but a guess nonetheless, that plays by Shakespeare are among these wholly lost plays. We are uncertain of even the most basic things. Until the remains of the Elizabethan Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, London, were discovered in 2012, theatre historians assumed that it was round; it turned out to be rectangular. Why the lost years matter Shakespeare’s undocumented years have a special quality: enigmatic, evocative and instructive. As those years began, Shakespeare was a young man in a provincial town who had written nothing and had few prospects. When they ended, he was celebrated enough as a playwright to be worth attacking. The lost years are exactly the period of his genesis as a writer. What has filled those years is a series of guesses and rumours. Half a century after Shakespeare’s death, the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey began collecting anecdotes and stories about Shakespeare from people who had known him, notably the son of an actor who had been a member of Shakespeare’s company. Aubrey recounts, in his Brief Lives – a collection of short biographies – two slightly different stories about those lost years. “This William being inclined naturally to Poetry and acting,” Aubrey wrote, “came to London I guess about 18 and was an Actor at one of the Play-houses and did act exceedingly well.” Then a little later, he added: “he had been in his younger years a School-master in the Country.” The two stories don’t quite fit together: a diligent, rural Shakespeare versus a theatrical, London one. But they establish the two main traditions of thinking about this time. The writer and poet Nicholas Rowe prepared the first real biography of Shakespeare for his own edition of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1709. Rowe had apparently not read Aubrey, but he offers an expanded version of the first idea. He repeats a Stratford legend, that the young Shakespeare fell into “ill company” and poached a deer from a local gentleman. The ensuing trouble meant he had to flee to London, where he found work at a playhouse. There, suggests Rowe, “his admirable Wit, and the natural Turn of it to the Stage, soon distinguish’d him, if not as an extraordinary actor, yet as an excellent Writer”. Read more | Did someone else write the plays of William Shakespeare? The real history that debunks the conspiracy This is an echo, or revision, of Aubrey’s first story. Another version, which circulated in the 17th century, was that the young Shakespeare held the horses at the playhouse door. The alternative and less thespian description of Shakespeare also pops up in the early biographies. Edmond Malone, in his great edition of the plays (1790) and the biographical essay which accompanies it, extended Rowe’s biography into a much more reliable timeline of Shakespeare’s life and works. This edition is the foundation of much later textual study, and while it is a mountain of scholarship it is not without a little sentimental speculation. In it, Malone speculates that after leaving school, Shakespeare was “employed, while he yet remained at Stratford, in the office of some country attorney”. Perhaps so: it is worth noting that Malone himself had trained as a barrister. Along with the development of Shakespeare biography, and the beginnings of careful scholarly work on the texts of the plays, came the realisation that some things were unknown. We might say that the lost years are really a sign of how much has been found; it was only once much was known, with some degree of confidence, that the idea of “lost years” emerged. In a further apparent paradox, in the early 20th century the phrase itself became less an admission of ignorance than a boast about knowledge. Player, teacher, clerk? Those keenest to use the phrase have been those most sure they have the answer. Arthur Acheson’s 1920 book Shakespeare’s Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 confidently uses the phrase “lost years” – and sometimes “dark years” – to refer to this specific period, but only to find them to be not so lost at all. His book discovers Shakespeare, as in Rowe, arriving early in London. E A J Honigmann’s 1985 book Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” places him back in the countryside: in Lancashire, working in the household of a Catholic family in Lancashire, perhaps as a player (actor), or a tutor. In each case, that “lost” is rhetorical. Shakespeare the player, the teacher, the clerk: the timidity of the suggestions is revealing. There is no evidence that he was not, say, a pirate or a mercenary in those years. But what he wasn’t tells us much about him. Shakespeare was not at university, while so many of his contemporary playwrights were. He was not a spy, while his great rival Christopher Marlowe was, in the same period of his life. The lost years mark him as apart and this is why they matter both as an episode and a story. They say: here is a mystery. Your attempt to solve it may reveal something only about you. Shakespeare got there first, of course. In the middle of his play The Winter’s Tale, a character called Time enters, and addresses the audience: Impute it not a crime To me, or my swift passage, that I slide O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap. Between the first and second halves of the play, 16 years have disappeared, and Time offers an apology that soon turns into a boast: Of that wide gap, since it is in my power To o’er throw law, and in one self-born hour To plant and o’erwhelm custom. The lost years are Shakespeare’s self-born hour. In them, he exits the world of conventional, discoverable biography, and enters the world of the theatre, of play and invention. Daniel Swift is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University London. He is the author of The Dream Factory: London's First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare (2025)
Might Jesus and his 12 apostles have something to do with it? Discover the medieval history behind triskaidekaphobia – the fear of the number 13 – and why it is considered an unlucky number
Forget the Ides of March and Halloween – for some, a Friday that also happens to be the 13th of the month is scariest and unluckiest day of the year. The fear of Friday 13th is very real. It's even been given a scientific name, paraskevidekatriaphobia, from the Greek words Paraskeví, meaning Friday, and dekatreís, meaning 13. But what is it about this day and date combo that has given millions the heebie jeebies. Here's what we know of we know about Friday 13th's hazy history. When did people start believing Friday 13th was unlucky? It's believed that this superstition began in the Middle Ages. Some think it's related to the Last Supper, when 13 people were present at the meal before Jesus's crucifixion on Good Friday. Others think it's related to the Knights Templar, who were arrested for heresy on Friday 13 October 1307. But fear of 13 predates Christianity. The number 13 has been considered unlucky for millenia, and by many different cultures around the world. Why is the 13th unlucky? The ancient Romans believed that the number 13 was a bad omen, foretelling ill-fortune and death. The Vikings also hated 13, because in Norse mythology a banquet was held for 12 of the Norse gods during which the trickster god, Loki, appeared uninvited, like the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty, and as a result the beloved god Balder died. The Mayans thought that the 13th 'baktun' (a period equivalent to almost 400 years) would spell the end of the world – however, this came and went in 2012. For centuries, hosts avoided having 13 people seated around a dining table, convinced that the first person to leave would die within the year. Indeed, 16th-century witch-hunters often tried to claim there had been 13 people at a gathering – proof that the accused were witches in league with the devil. Why is Friday the 13th unlucky? Why Friday the 13th is considered especially unlucky isn't entirely clear. The first written record we have of the number 13 and Friday being unlucky in conjunction only dates to the 19th century, in a biography of Italian composer Gioachino Rossini: "He was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that on Friday 13th of November he passed away." Friday the 13th remains one of the most prevalent historical superstitions that we carry on today (alongside that of kissing under the mistletoe). Many people still choose to stay in bed to reduce the likelihood of accidents, and it's estimated that in the US, as much as $900 million is lost in business each time as a result.
Victorian Britain's fearless female felons
Drugging, fraud, even murder – women couldn’t really commit such heinous crimes, could they? Rosalind Crone explores five audacious female-led felonies from the 18th and 19th centuries
1. The Victorian spiking crisis Female thieves took to drugging men’s drinks with opiates before cleaning out their victims’ pockets On 2 January 1865, Elizabeth Bagwell (alias Elizabeth Manning) was convicted at the Middlesex Sessions of “larceny from the person”, and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. It was a harsh punishment, reflecting the fact that she already had three previous convictions – but also that she was no ordinary pickpocket. Bagwell had spiked the drink of James Rintoul, a London cab driver, at her lodgings off Edgware Road, according to press reports of her committal hearing at the Marylebone Police Court. The drugged glass of gin she gave James was, he claimed, “so hot that it burnt my mouth”. He fell unconscious, and later woke to find himself “alone in the room, and in darkness. My gold watch and chain were gone… my ring also [and] 25 shillings from my pocket.” He had fallen victim to a crime commonly called ‘hocussing’, derived from ‘hocus pocus’ – the term used since the 17th century for conjuring, trickery or sleight of hand. By the late 19th century, ‘hocus’ had become shorthand for drugged liquor. Hocussing had become more prevalent by that time, likely because of the ready availability of cheap drugs including opium (in the form of laudanum), morphine and chloroform. Particularly in convivial social settings such as Victorian public houses, it was easy for thieves to slip drugs into drinks undetected. With their victims bewildered or unconscious, hocussers had time to search pockets thoroughly, remove any valuable jewellery and escape the scene of the crime, making pursuit and prosecution difficult. Poisoners in prison Hocussing was deployed by women and men against victims of both sexes. As a weapon of the weak, poison enabled female thieves to overcome stronger male victims. Men who had been lured by the promise of sex with women hocussers may have been reluctant to prosecute, for fear of reputational damage. Certainly, by 1865 Bagwell had already hocussed at least two other men – a medical student and a midshipman – both of whom declined to press charges. Following her release from prison on parole in 1869, she was convicted of theft from the person two more times. Her story suggests that there were probably many more victims of this technique – and many more female hocussers at work. 2. The counterfeit coin con Instead of stealing money from the pockets of others, some women had a go at literally making it themselves – and gambled with their lives On 3 September 1788, Elizabeth Alford went to a neighbour’s room in the lodging house she inhabited in Aldgate, London, to buy some thread. The neighbour, Christian Bowman (alias Catherine Murphy), was a single mother of three who worked as a servant in a public house and lived with a man named Hugh Murphy. On entering the room, Alford noticed “some bad money on the table”, and that Bowman and Murphy looked a bit shifty. “They wanted to shut me in,” Alford later told the court. Yet when she informed the couple that she had left her own door open, they let her go – and she went straight to her landlord, asking him to fetch an officer of the parish. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Credit-Element-Pictrures-BBC-430378-CMYK-37d46f5.jpg" width="4285" height="2855" alt="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire (Image by Element Pictures – BBC)" title="The BBC series The Gallows Pole tells the story of a gang of 18th-century coin clippers in Yorkshire" /> Fatal consequences Later that day, officers caught Bowman and Murphy in the act of colouring pieces of base metal in the hope of passing them off as silver shillings. Bowman begged the officer for mercy, explaining that she had got involved in making counterfeit coins only after her husband had left her, and “never [passed] any bad money in the neighbourhood”. Her pleas fell on deaf ears. The pair were both convicted of coining at the Old Bailey court, and sentenced to death. Murphy was hanged, while Bowman was strangled and her body burned at the stake outside Newgate Gaol. Read more | Tudor angels of death: the 16th-century obsession with female killers Christian Bowman was one of 13 women burned for coining offences in England during the 18th century. It was a terrible punishment and used sparingly, but lawmakers believed it reflected the gravity of the crime, as coining was considered a form of treason. Between 1700 and 1789, 166 women were tried at the Old Bailey for coining offences. These included making, colouring or rubbing counterfeit coins; clipping or filing precious metal from legitimate coins; possessing tools to make counterfeit coins; and ‘uttering’ (trying to use) counterfeit coins. Only 65 of these women were found guilty, and about half of those were sentenced to death. Women represented around one third of those tried for coining offences in England in the 18th century, a surprisingly high proportion. Though some women, such as Bowman, made counterfeit coins with male accomplices, others worked in single-sex groups. Coining was an activity that could be done at home, and with the help of family members. Making fake coins required skill. Advances in the manufacture of legitimate coins, such as milled edges and gilding, made it harder for counterfeiters to produce convincing copies. Some women used the skills gained from other types of delicate finishing work to make coins; most almost certainly resorted to coining to supplement meagre wages. The levels of evidence required for prosecution were demanding. In addition, most ordinary people did not regard coining as a heinous offence. So there were likely many female coiners who never came to court – and simply got away with their crimes. 3. Maladies, magic and murder Fraudulent ‘wise women’ and ‘cunning folk’ scammed desperate people hoping for cures – and some resorted to poisoning their victims In March 1809, Mary Bateman was hanged at York for the murder of her client, Rebecca Perigo. Over the previous decade, Bateman, the wife of a wheelwright and the mother of four children, had been supplementing the family income by selling fortunes, charms and alternative medicines, and claimed to act as an intermediary for other ‘wise women’, including a Miss Blythe in Scarborough. Bateman’s name was often recommended to those in need of help, including Perigo, who was suffering from a “fluttering in her breast”, believed to be an “evil wish” that required the “arts of sorcery” to resolve. In May 1806 Bateman suggested that, with the help of Miss Blythe, Perigo could be cured – in time, and at some expense. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-463913393-CMYK-b6be386.jpg" width="4299" height="2864" alt="Three women sit around a burning cauldron. One is a fortune teller, who is older and bent over, with a blue headscarf. The two women visiting her are dressed in fancier clothes, with furs and hats" title="A scene such as this, showing two young women having their cards read by a fortune-teller, was a familiar one in the early 19th century" /> Over the following 12 months, Miss Blythe sent letters via Bateman to Rebecca and her husband, William, requesting money and various items – shoes, hat boxes, a tea caddy, eggs and bacon – in exchange for charms and spells to relieve Rebecca’s symptoms. Then in April 1807, Miss Blythe warned Rebecca and William that they would soon succumb to a terrible illness. To escape death, she told them, they must “eat pudding for six days and… put into it one of my powders everyday”. The powders contained poison, and Rebecca died. William continued to correspond with the ‘wise woman’ in Scarborough until October 1808, when he discovered that the charms were fake, that ‘Miss Blythe’ did not exist – and that Bateman had killed his wife. Repeat offender The unfortunate couple were the latest in a long list of ordinary and often desperate people duped by Bateman. Some lost only money and possessions; others also lost their lives. Bateman had earlier been publicly exposed as a fraud when she was caught pushing eggs, which contained the message “Christ is coming”, back up the oviduct of her supposedly prophetic hen. Yet her perfidious activities continued. The 1735 Witchcraft Act had made it a crime to pretend to exercise or use any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration, to tell fortunes, or to use “crafty science” to locate lost or stolen goods. Offenders were to be sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment. This legislation did not stop Bateman nor, in all likelihood, others like her. Read more | Victorian murder scandals: what six killings tell us about women's lives in the 19th century We must not assume that all ‘cunning folk’ at the turn of the 19th century were knowingly fraudulent; some sincerely believed in their magic powers. The case of Bateman, though, exposes an unscrupulous side to this business – frauds who took advantage of ordinary people living in uncertain times, who sought explanations and remedies for misfortune and illness, and who continued to believe in the supernatural and the utility of magic. This type of criminal activity might have been far more prevalent than previously imagined. 4. Light-fingered lodgers People who rented rooms in furnished lodgings pilfered items to pawn or sell – and many probably got away with their crimes Criminal justice historians suspect that women perpetrated far more theft from private spaces than was ever prosecuted. Many domestic servants casually or even systematically appropriated or stole things from their employers. Larceny by a servant was even a specific category of offence. When the items were of relatively low (or sometimes even high) value, many masters and mistresses did not think taking such thieves to court was worthwhile. Instead, a pilfering servant was typically dismissed without a reference – a tough punishment. The case of Amelie Decuypere and her husband, Paul, sheds light on a different type of theft from the domestic space: taking goods from furnished lodgings. In July 1859, the Decuyperes were arrested in London, following a complaint made by their former landlord, David Berri. Just six days after moving into a furnished room in Berri’s house, the couple disappeared – along with a coffee pot, a clock and several paintings. To divert attention from their absence, or to indicate their intention to return, the couple left in the room a large chest that, on inspection, “turned out to be filled with straw”. The police found in the couple’s possession a pile of receipts issued by pawnbrokers for items exchanged for cash – property that “no doubt had been stolen from other lodgings”. Three landlords pressed charges, but the magistrate believed that there could have been “at least a dozen” victims in total. Amelie and Paul Decuypere got caught largely because of the impressive scale of their theft, and were sentenced to six and eight years’ penal servitude, respectively. Although Amelie remained silent during her trial, the judge and jury decided that she and her husband were equal partners in the crime. As historians have shown, women made good thieves in private spaces because they often best understood the value of domestic items. Read more | Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang 5. Criminal credit crunch As retail opportunities opened up to wider society, female fraudsters abused ease of credit to take goods with no intention of paying for them For centuries, wealthy people in England purchased goods and services on credit, promising to pay at a later date. In the 19th century, as real wages were rising and the ‘retail revolution’ was under way, personal credit was extended to more people across society, including the upper working classes and women. This system relied on reputation and trust – and was increasingly open to abuse in densely populated urban environments. To gain credit, a woman needed simply to look respectable and to provide a plausible address. It was often difficult for those demanding payment to prove that unpaid debts were not bad debts but were criminal frauds. The difference hinged on whether there was ever an intention to pay: bad debt was dealt with by civil courts, while fraud ended up in the criminal courts. The popular depiction of the faux-aristocratic male swindler likely enabled many fraudulent women to escape detection simply because they didn’t fit that stereotype. One woman who did get caught was serial swindler Annie Gordon Baillie – not her real name, but one of some 40 aliases she used across her lifetime. The illegitimate daughter of a farm servant from Peterhead, Scotland, Annie harboured ambitions of wealth and fame. Her career included collecting money for fake charities and the ruthless exploitation of an aged baronet, but began and ended with the fraudulent acquisition of goods and services on credit. Annie ran up debts in cities across Britain and much farther afield: in Dundee, London and Broadstairs, but also in Rome, New York and Melbourne, Australia. In 1884, the London Association for the Protection of Trade warned about a woman using several aliases who had run up bills with piano manufacturers, chemists and other businesses. By 1888, the police in London and Edinburgh were on the case, and published a full expose in the Edinburgh Evening News. Despite this publicity, it wasn’t until four months later, on 23 June 1888, that the culprit was finally arrested. At Annie’s committal hearing, Detective Inspector Marshall said that the police had uncovered “hundreds, and probably to the extent of thousands” of frauds. “The prisoner is an extraordinary woman,” Marshall declared, “one of the greatest swindlers in the country.” Greed, and a love of attention, had led to Annie’s downfall. Had she been less flamboyant, by living more modestly and eschewing interviews about her outlandish charitable schemes, she might well have got away with it. This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion
The industrial revolution caused huge growth in the urban population – and with it, a rising tide of human waste. Find out how the leaders of Victorian cities tried to cope with the excrement explosion that came hand-in-hand with the 19th century’s boom in industry
In the 1890s, Manchester’s civic leaders faced a mounting crisis. The city’s population had exploded, its industries were booming, and with them came an ever-growing tide of human waste. By the later decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain’s sanitation revolution was well underway, but as historian Richard Jones explains in an April 2025 article from the Environment and History journal, ‘Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892’ (available to purchase or access via a subscriber login), the transition from solid waste systems to water-borne sewage was anything but smooth. By the late Victorian era, Manchester’s “existing waste removal infrastructure – designed to deal with the much smaller volumes and narrower range of waste materials of the pre-industrial age – had begun to struggle with the prodigious quantities of polluting waste its people and factories now generated,” says Jones. The sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith vividly described a scene he was greeted with upon a visit to a Manchester privy in 1860: “The floor… is completely covered, several inches deep, with ashes and night-soil, so that it is impossible to get to the seat itself without being over shoes in abominable filth. The seat itself is, in every part, besmeared, and in some parts covered several inches deep, with the same filth.” By the mid-19th century, Manchester was already producing more than 100,000 tons of ‘night-soil’ (a euphemism for human excrement) annually. This waste was collected from thousands of ash-pits – an open pit into which all domestic waste and excrement was disposed, partially dried and deodorised by adding ashes from hearths and ovens – and privies. Then, it was often transported by rail to distant farming regions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. But this system was expensive and increasingly unpopular. In one step to cope with the growing burden, Manchester introduced pail-closets, which replaced open cesspits and ash-pits with sealed containers that could be regularly emptied. By the late 1870s, the city had phased out most of its older waste systems, replacing them with 28,000 pail-closets and 10,000 water-closets. But the problem was far from solved. A deluge of waste “The total replacement, by the early 1880s, of cess-pits, ash-pits and middens by the pail-closet system represented an impressive achievement,” says Jones. “Yet still, in 1884, around 200,000 tons of waste were annually arriving at the Corporation’s depot.” Though unpleasant to deal with, this was valuable stuff – it was sold as night-soil or processed into a dry powder and marketed as concentrated manure that could be delivered to farmers up to 100 miles away in less than 24 hours. With the context of current attempts to quickly transform domestic heating systems from oil and gas boilers to air source heat pumps and solar, it’s notable that the municipal authorities of Victorian Manchester were able to drive domestic infrastructure change so rapidly. According to Dr Jones, “The Manchester authorities began with a rolling programme of improving existing infrastructure rather than replacing this with new technology. Retrofitting existing properties with water closets was more problematic but was solved by requiring landlords to do this work. Building in water closets and connecting to the sewers was much easier when planned from the outset in new builds.” However, the problems kept mounting as the population kept growing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Victorian-Poo-Alamy-DYEJHH-c2ff0ee.jpg" width="861" height="574" alt="A sketch from The Practical Magazine (1874) shows a vacuum pump used for removing night soil from cesspools (Image by Alamy)" title="A sketch from The Practical Magazine shows a vacuum pump used for removing night soil from cesspools (1874) (Image by Alamy)" /> Jones memorably describes the city authorities’ struggles to “keep their noses above the rising tide of excremental waste”. The challenge was made harder because Manchester was “water poor”, which made it difficult to implement a water-based sewer system. Plus, the 1876 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act had made it illegal to dump untreated sewage into rivers, cutting off one traditional route of disposal. Faced with these challenges, Manchester looked for new ways to rid itself of its waste. One solution was Carrington Moss, an area with 600 acres of boggy land and c500 acres of agricultural land on the city’s outskirts, purchased by the Manchester Corporation in 1886. Read more | Urban animals: the growth of city farms in 20th-century Britain Roads, drains, and a light railway were built to carry the waste there. But by the early 1890s, Carrington Moss was nearing capacity. In the five years after the purchase of the site in 1886, the population of Manchester had increased by over 150,000 people to a total of over half a million. All those people had to live somewhere – and the human waste that they produced had to go somewhere too. Water-closets were being introduced in the city, but that was a slow process, and in the meantime, Manchester was producing an extra 20,000 tons of excremental waste a year. Residents kick up a stink In 1892, Manchester’s Cleansing Committee hatched a bold plan: to purchase Rampton Manor, a large agricultural estate in Nottinghamshire, and transport 20,000 tons of waste there annually, by rail. The scheme promised to relieve pressure on the city’s depots and provide valuable manure to farmers – and handily, the estate was up for sale by its owner Colonel Henry Eyre, the MP for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. But the proposal sparked a furious backlash. Rampton is many miles from Manchester and there were concerns about transportation of waste. Local residents, tenant farmers, and neighbouring towns like Gainsborough and Retford were horrified. As Jones explains: “When the residents of Rampton, surrounding villages and the nearby towns of Retford and Gainsborough got wind of Manchester’s intentions they were quick to kick up a stink.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/Victorian-Poo-Topfoto-PAST11257-6d28efb.jpg" width="861" height="574" alt="A black and white photograph shows people in Victorian dress standing on the pavement outside their houses" title="People gather in a street in Collyhurst, Manchester, c1900. The rising urban population in urban Manchester caused a problem with sewage" /> At a public inquiry held by the Local Government Board, the Manchester Corporation tried to reassure the public. It was a robust affair: “Among the testimony heard were the views of local farmers, delivered in characteristically robust language and with a general disregard for the pseudo-legal niceties of the inquiry,” says Jones. “The chairman struggled to keep order.” The inquiry revealed a clash of worldviews. Manchester saw the scheme as a practical solution to an urban problem, while rural communities viewed it as an environmental threat and an unwanted intrusion. The efforts of the Manchester authorities to demonstrate that the “problem waste removed from one place would miraculously metamorphose into beneficial manure in another” proved a very hard sell indeed. Local concerns centred around the ability of the ground to cope with the volume of manure, the risk of water supply contamination, and the threat of disease. But also, there was the question of reciprocity and standing up for one’s own area. As the vice-chair of Nottingham County Council’s Health Committee, Mr Earp, put it, “Every town should stand on its own bottom”. Read more | Victorian daily life: what was it like for 'ordinary' Victorians? “At root, what was at stake was the right or otherwise of an urban centre to colonise distant places with its waste,” says Jones. The Local Government Board ultimately sided with the objectors. In December 1892, it refused Manchester’s request for a £60,000 loan to purchase Rampton Manor. The city was forced to abandon the scheme. But the waste problem remained. In the aftermath, Manchester turned back to an earlier idea: purchasing Chat Moss, another area of bogland closer to the city. Acquired in 1895, it became a major dumping ground, capable of absorbing 50,000 tons of waste annually. The ‘sewage question’ was a topic of national conversation through the second half of the 19th century. Manchester’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ in Rampton was just one of the solutions. Elsewhere, Joseph Bazalgette’s famous London’s embankment sewage system took the capital’s waste out to the tidal Thames, but the idea of water-borne sewage networks was not the only option. Rev. Henry Moule, for instance, patented his dry earth-closet scheme (not dissimilar to modern composting toilets) and that attracted a lot of interest. Some resolution came in the form of the main drainage system in Manchester, which was designed in the late 1880s, but its operation had to wait until the construction of the Thirlmere reservoir and aqueduct, completed in 1894. This brought much needed water from the Lake District over a distance of nearly 96 miles. Read more | Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z A wasteful legacy With the threats facing today’s water supply, and growing numbers of people advocating the use of dry systems like Moule’s, the Victorian experience has long echoes into the 21st century. “In many respects, the current sewage crisis has its origins in the decisions made by Victorian civil engineers,” notes Dr Jones. “In particular, the decision to opt for combined sewerage systems that captured and combined both industrial and domestic liquid waste and rainwater and ground water (the model designed by Joseph Bazalgette for London), generated much larger volumes of albeit highly diluted but nevertheless tainted sewage water requiring treatment.” “Had separate sewerage systems been adopted, which kept these different liquid streams apart, then the volume of sewage proper would have been much reduced, and stormwaters more easily and safely sent back into our rivers and streams.”