HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2025-10-07T06:45:30.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Gray Barker: UFO conspiracy theorist
items: Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation
items: Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
items: Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action
items: Sarah Biffin: the brilliant artist who found fame and royal favour – despite having no arms or legs
items: Harry Grindell Matthews: the strangely inventive mind behind the aerophone and Death Ray
items: Emily Anderson: the secret life of Britain's most senior female wartime codebreaker
items: Nicholas Winton: the real history of the 'British Schindler'

Gray Barker: UFO conspiracy theorist
type: item
date: 2025-10-05T08:00:36.000Z
creator: David Clarke
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
subject: Historical people
description: Tales of alien sightings and government cover-ups have captured American imaginations for decades – but few with such global appeal as the Men in Black. David Clarke introduces the ufologist who popularised these shadowy space-age legends
encoded: One night in 1953, three mysterious men sporting black suits reportedly arrived uninvited at the home of Albert K Bender in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The menacing trio, who reportedly identified themselves as agents of the US government, threatened Bender with prison if he told anyone about a secret he had discovered – information relating to the source of the flying saucer mystery. They scared him so badly that he was physically sick for three days. Bender was no mere disinterested civilian. An obsessive ufologist, he was the founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), the world’s first civilian UFO investigation club. Shortly after that ominous visit, and on the orders of those ‘secret agents’, he shut down the IFSB. At least one person was both disappointed and intrigued by this development: Gray Barker, only recently recruited as the IFSB’s chief investigator and a contributor to its magazine, Space Review. “He was 6ft 4ins tall, with a gentle southern accent and a sly sense of humour,” recalled his friend John Keel, a fellow investigator of UFOs and monster stories. “And it can truly be said that he knew too much about flying saucers.” It was Barker’s exploration of the ‘men in black’ (latterly abbreviated as MIB) that had a long-lasting and global impact on ufology and wider popular culture. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GreyBakerHRillowebready-cdc7915.jpg" width="2232" height="1488" alt="A photograph shows a man in a dark shirt, sitting at a type writer with a black phone next to him. He is smiling widely up at the camera. In the background, there are the opening pages of a book called BOOK OF SAUCERS" title="Writer Gray Barker shared reports of UFOs in his books and journal The Saucerian Bulletin, but also “launched hoaxes, joined others’ deceptions, and manipulated people’s beliefs”, according to a friend and co-author (Images by TopFoto, collage by Rachel Dickens)" /> Born in West Virginia in 1925…

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Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation
type: item
date: 2025-07-08T08:00:22.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
subject: Civil rights
subject: Historical events
description: The year before the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, another black American woman started a legal fight against segregation on public transport. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies highlight her role in the civil rights battle
encoded: On 2 November 2005, thousands of mourners crowded into the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit to attend the funeral of black American civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Former US president Bill Clinton led the tributes before a congregation that held hands and sang the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’. The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama is familiar yet sometimes misunderstood. Her arrest for refusing to surrender a bus seat in December 1955 followed not the spontaneous action of an apolitical seamstress but a calculated decision by a lifelong activist who, along with other members of the black community, had put increasing pressure on white city leaders to end the daily indignities of segregated bus journeys. Her detention may have been the catalyst for the desegregation of public transport in the South, but other black women before her had also braved similar hurt, humiliation and intimidation. Among them was a woman called Sarah Mae Flemming. In June 1954, Flemming was involved in an incident that is far less celebrated than the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet it was an incident that truly laid the foundation for the eventual overturning of Jim Crow laws as applied to public transport. Flemming was a child of the Great Depression, one of seven children raised by a farming couple whose own parents had been enslaved. Born on 28 June 1933, she grew up alongside her siblings in a busy household near Eastover, South Carolina, a small community some 20 miles south-east of the state capital, Columbia. After graduating from high school, Flemming worked briefly for a relative in Ohio before returning to South Carolina to help support her family, taking a position as a maid for white residents in one of Columbia’s affluent suburbs. Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement The day that changed her life, 22 June 1954, started much as any other: she boarded a bus to work. At first there was standing room only, un…

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Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
type: item
date: 2025-04-17T08:00:46.000Z
creator: Ryan Hanley
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
subject: Slavery
description: While most British radicals fought for the rights of the exploited white working class, one man saw such rights as entwined with those of enslaved black workers. Ryan Hanley tells the story of the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
encoded: One October evening in 1809, Robert Wedderburn was walking through London, one child asleep in his arms and his daughter beside him, when he saw a gang of about 20 drunks encircling a young man near his home on Peter Street, St Giles. Things were getting hairy; it was clear the man was in danger. Wedderburn tried to pull him away from the gang peacefully, but it was no good. If he wanted to help, he’d have to get his hands dirty. He handed the sleeping child to his daughter, took off his coat and “said he would fight one or two of them at a time”. Alas, they all set upon him at once and beat him with thick walking sticks. He might have died then and there outside his house, in front of his children, if a soldier had not happened by. But that was Wedderburn: he never could walk away from a fight – all the more so when the odds were stacked against him. When the gang members were rounded up and brought before the magistrates, Wedderburn was the chief witness for the prosecution. A journalist for The Star, hanging around the courts looking for a story, noted that “the witness having betrayed much violence of temper, during his cross-examination, was reprimanded by the court”. That, too, was typical of the man who became a leader in London’s working-class radical underworld. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? It is easy to see why Wedderburn had a problem with authority. Born in Jamaica in the early 1760s, he gained his most important life lessons from the rebellious black women in his life, notably his mother, Rosanna, and grandmother, Amy. His mother had been a ladies’ maid until his father, the Scottish planter James Wedderburn, had purchased her, as Robert later put it, “for purposes of lust”. James abused his legal status as the ‘owner’ of this beautiful and accomplished woman to try to compel her into a consensual relationship. She did bear at least two of his children but loathed her captor, and was not shy about showing it. Rosanna made Jame…

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Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action
type: item
date: 2025-01-23T12:00:42.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
subject: The Suffragettes
description: Some suffragettes marched with banners, or printed and distributed propaganda pamphlets. Others took more direct action. Diane Atkinson tells the story of one activist who employed arson to spark awareness of the burning issue of women’s suffrage
encoded: Recalling her career as a suffragette arsonist and Houdini-like escapologist in interviews later in her life, Lilian Lenton lit up as if a fire had been started in her heart. “To say I enjoyed making fires sounds rather awful,” she later admitted. “But it really was lovely to find that you’d been successful – that the thing really had burned down and that you hadn’t got caught. There it was blazing, and there we were in the glare of the lights…” Listen | Deeds Not Words: the suffragette story Lilian Ida Lenton was one of the youngest, yet most militant, of suffragettes in the three years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. Her career was daring, dangerous and dramatic, reported in newspapers around the country. The new half-penny dailies, with their half-tone photographs and full spreads, often featured her pyrotechnic activities. Lilian was 5ft 2ins tall in her stockinged feet, with brown hair and eyes – a “tiny, china-like figure, but wiry and… wily”. She soon gained a romantic nickname, ‘The Elusive Pimpernel’, for her effective disguises and her ability to elude the policemen and detectives who guarded the places where she was kept under house arrest while released from prison on licence. With her tiny stature, she easily passed as a child, a delivery boy or a little old lady. Becoming a suffragette Born in Leicester in 1891, Lilian was the eldest of the five children of Isaac, a carpenter and joiner, and Mahalah, who had worked in a hosiery factory before her marriage. Lilian trained as a dancer, but was then inspired by hearing Emmeline Pankhurst speak about women’s suffrage. As soon as she was “21 and my own boss”, she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Lilian was first arrested on 4 March 1912, one of about 200 detained during a campaign of window-smashing. Frustrated at the government’s refusal to give women the vote, and outraged at the force-feeding of suffragettes in prison, activists shattered hundreds of windows in Whi…

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Sarah Biffin: the brilliant artist who found fame and royal favour – despite having no arms or legs
type: item
date: 2025-01-02T09:00:23.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
description: One of the most famous British painters of the first half of the 19th century was a woman born without arms or legs. Alice Loxton explores the life and work of an ambitious artist who became a favourite of royalty and was immortalised by Charles Dickens
encoded: The village of East Quantoxhead lies not far from the sea in north Somerset. Its medieval church still stands, a charming stone building with sandstone dressing and a slate roof, set back from the road, bordered by a low wall and surrounded by green fields. This sleepy little spot, a picture-perfect chocolate-box scene, was the birthplace of one of the most entrepreneurial and resolute artists in British history. What made Sarah Biffin unique was not just her talent but the fact that she had to overcome such significant physical disadvantages. The record of her baptism at the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in East Quantoxhead on 31 October 1784, when she was six days old, states that the “Daughter of Henry and Sarah Biffin” had been “born without arms or legs”. Yet she never allowed her disability – nor the fact that she was working class, and a woman – to get in the way of her ambition. How Sarah Biffin learned to paint “At the age of eight years I was very desirous of acquiring the use of my needle,” she later recalled of her childhood years. “I was continually practising every invention, till at length I could, with my mouth, thread a needle and cut out and make my own dresses.” By the age of 12, she had taught herself to write by holding a utensil in her mouth. In 1804, Biffin pushed herself further still. Under the guidance of a showman named Emmanuel Dukes, she learnt the basics of painting. “At the age of 20 I felt anxious to try my skill in the art of painting,” she wrote. “Here a naturally strong inclination prompted an assiduous application, and soon gave a facility to the use of the pencil; with what effect, let my humble productions speak for themselves.” Later that year, Biffin left her family home to turn her skills into a career. “It was suggested to my parents that a comfortable living might be obtained by public exhibition,” she said, “and an engagement was arranged for that purpose.” Over the years that followed, while she was in her early twent…

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Harry Grindell Matthews: the strangely inventive mind behind the aerophone and Death Ray
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:26:40.000Z
creator: Eugene Byrne
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
description: In the interwar years, the bold and brash claims of one inventor that he could design a ‘Death Ray’ sparked a sensation. Military authorities, investors and the press alike clamoured to see whether he was a genius or a grifter. Eugene Byrne explores the life of a man who was both
encoded: The 11am flight to Paris from Croydon Aerodrome on Tuesday 27 May 1924 made national headlines. True, it was an ordinary scheduled service – but one of the passengers was far from ordinary. The following morning, readers up and down the country learned of a desperate chase to prevent inventor Harry Grindell Matthews from leaving Britain, taking with him the secrets of his purported ‘Death Ray’. According to these newspaper accounts, this thrilling episode involved a high-speed chase in a hired car by shareholders armed with an injunction, who sped to the airfield – arriving just in time to watch the plane lift off and soar away. In truth, it was more Keystone Kops than Bulldog Drummond. Matthews’ shareholders weren’t the only interested parties: the British government did not want any foreign power getting its hands on a potentially war-winning weapon. But the authorities were far from certain that Matthews had made anything of the sort. Indeed, the Air Ministry released a frank and surprisingly detailed statement explaining that its officials had found a demonstration of the device unconvincing. Was the inventor a genius ahead of his time? Or merely a shameless grifter? Actually, he was both. Introduction to inventing Harry Grindell Matthews was born at Winterbourne, Gloucestershire in 1880, one of at least five children of farmer Daniel Matthews and his wife Jane (née Grindell). His father died when Harry was three, but the family appears to have been left comfortably off. His education included a spell at the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College in Bristol, where he completed the course in record time. Matthews then took an apprenticeship with a firm of electrical engineers. He volunteered to fight in the Boer War, during which he was reportedly wounded twice. For some years before the First World War he lived in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex. There, while taking on mundane electrical jobs, he worked on his inventions with the support of a wealthy local eccentric,…

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Emily Anderson: the secret life of Britain's most senior female wartime codebreaker
type: item
date: 2024-10-07T10:50:40.000Z
subject: 20th Century
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Amazing lives
description: The work of Britain’s wartime cryptanalysts is now well known – but there is one woman whose contributions have gone largely unrecognised. Jackie Uí Chionna examines the life of the linguist and musicologist who became the nation’s most senior female codebreaker
encoded: In November 1962, at St John’s Parish Church, Hampstead, the funeral took place of a 72-year-old retired civil servant named Emily Anderson. An apparently unremarkable, rather shy woman, one neighbour tellingly observed that she was “very self-contained, and very discreet, and not interested in useless chatter”. There were many among the congregation who could testify to the usefulness of those characteristics in the secret double life that this former professor of German had lived since abandoning academia to enter what was euphemistically known as “a division of the Foreign Office”. Yet the evidence was there, hiding in plain sight, for laid side-by-side on her coffin were the two significant awards she received during her lifetime: the OBE conferred on her by King George VI in 1943 for “services to the forces and in connexion with military operations... GHQ, Middle East”, and the Order of Merit, First Class, bestowed on her by the Federal Republic of Germany in 1961 for her significant contribution to Beethoven scholarship. The representative of the German embassy who attended the funeral was, like his government, completely unaware that the woman they had honoured for her work on translating Beethoven’s letters had been breaking their most secret codes for decades. Emily Anderson had lived two distinct, yet parallel lives – her public life, as an internationally respected music scholar, and her scrupulously guarded professional life, as the most senior female codebreaker in British intelligence for more than 30 years. Chevalièr d’Éon: the tale of an 18th-century gender non-conforming spy Anderson was born in 1891 in Galway, in the west of Ireland. Her father, Alexander Anderson, was a Cambridge-educated professor of physics, who became president of University College Galway (UCG). The second oldest of four siblings, Anderson grew up in the president’s residence of UCG, in the college quadrangle. Educated by a succession of Swiss governesses, she became fluent in…

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Nicholas Winton: the real history of the 'British Schindler'
type: item
date: 2024-01-11T13:50:29.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Second World War
subject: Amazing lives
subject: Trends-Entertainment
description: In 1939, as the Nazis closed in on Czechoslovakia, hundreds of Jewish children were transported to safety in Britain. Edward Abel Smith tells the story of a young British man at the heart of these rescue efforts
encoded: In the early hours of Saturday 1 July 1939, 10-year-old Věra Diamantová was jerked suddenly awake. Her train had lurched roughly across a railway junction on its way out of Czechoslovakia (today divided between the Czech Republic and Slovakia). As Vera’s eyes adjusted to the pitch-dark carriage, she could just make out some of the other 240 children, mostly Jewish and aged 3–15, crammed in around her. Sitting next to Vera was six-year-old Alfred, who recalled years later that, when leaving the Czech capital of Prague, “I was aware of my mother’s nervousness, but I did not understand the reason why... for me it was a holiday trip and a tremendous adventure.” The children aboard that train came from widely different backgrounds and had very little in common – except that almost none of them would ever see their parents again. They were among 669 children who, between 14 March and 2 August 1939, left behind their families in Czechoslovakia and were evacuated to England thanks to a small group of individuals headed by Nicholas Winton. You might also be interested in | Oskar Schindler: your guide to his life and legacy Born in 1909 to German Jewish parents, Winton grew up in north London, where his family suffered ostracism because of their Jewish heritage. They lived there in an enormous 20-roomed house that was managed by four members of staff including a cook and a nanny. “We weren’t, by any means, rich... our class was, I suppose, moderately middle class,” Winton later reflected. At the age of 14, Winton was sent to the newly opened Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, where the eccentric headmaster taught his students the skills necessary to be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck”. While there, Winton enjoyed an eclectic range of hobbies including rugby, horse riding, fencing and pigeon-fancying. Although his academic results were mixed, he left Stowe with a set of strong beliefs and an impressive work ethic. Winton’s father – whose glass-importing busi…

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