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10 children and 12,000 pieces of art: the remarkable life of Lady Charlotte Schreiber
She was a headstrong scholar who contributed hugely to the study of medieval literature and challenged the societal norms of the 19th century. So why isn’t she better known? Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth traces the adventures of an unsung heroine
While hunting for antiques in the Netherlands in the 1880s, the esteemed art dealer Joseph Joel Duveen received a tip-off that some “wonderful pieces of china” had come up for sale in a remote village. Getting there would involve a tediously long journey but, undeterred, Duveen set out. Several hours later, however, he spotted a carriage speeding past in the opposite direction, and was able to make out its passenger. Recognising the face of his great rival, Duveen promptly turned around, empty-handed, ruefully realising that she had beaten him to the village and “snatched the prize”. The victor on this occasion was Lady Charlotte Schreiber. Surprisingly, given her long life – she was 82 when she died, in 1895 – which included two marriages, 10 children, scandalous affairs and a celebrated translation of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion, Lady Charlotte remains relatively unknown today. Often erroneously dismissed as a mere magpie obsessed with trinkets, for decades her second husband and sons were credited for accumulating her great collection. Yet, shortly before her death, she donated a trove of some 5,000 pieces to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum. Defiance and scandal Charlotte endured a difficult childhood. Born Lady Charlotte Elizabeth Bertie in 1812, she lost her father, the 9th Earl of Lindsey, when she was only six years old. Her mother remarried, and her new stepfather, the Reverend Peter Pegus, turned out to be a violent alcoholic; he once drank a whole mug of lamp oil, mistaking it for beer. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain At the age of 10, Charlotte started keeping a diary, in which she wrote almost every day until she lost her eyesight in her late seventies. A true polymath, she gave herself “a man’s education”, studying history and literature, and learning Arabic and Farsi (Persian) as well as Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and even Hebrew. She dedicated hours to her “oriental studies”, devouring Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville’s monumental 1697 compendium Bibliothèque Orientale, and later became a subscriber to the Oriental Translation Fund. To a young woman frustrated by her privileged yet undeniably restrained upbringing, the ‘Orient’ represented an imagined place of freedom where the stagnant and gendered traditions of elite British life did not exist. Throughout her years, Charlotte defied the strict protocols of Georgian and Victorian society, causing various scandals. As a teenager she fell in love with a local squire, Augustus O’Brien, but her mother “had sooner see me in my grave than married to Augustus”. She also had a dalliance with her brother’s tutor, a Mr Martin, and shortly after became “very good friends” with Benjamin Disraeli, whom she described as “wild, enthusiastic, and very poetical”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/HYB33K-fcd5698-e1771492464411.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical-style painting of a large industrial complex with many smokestacks releasing thick smoke into the sky. Several furnaces glow with open flames. In the foreground, workers shovel coal and operate machinery, surrounded by carts and industrial equipment. The scene conveys the intensity, pollution, and harsh labor conditions of early industrialisation." title="A painting of the Dowlais Ironworks, where Charlotte and her husband Josiah oversaw the management of over 5,000 employees (Image by Alamy)" /> In 1833, Charlotte married Welsh ironmaster and Whig politician Josiah John Guest. Although he was 27 years her senior, the two fell madly in love and had 10 children. Together they oversaw the day-to-day management of the Dowlais ironworks and its 5,000-plus employees. Charlotte managed the financial accounts, translated engineering manuals, established evening schools for the workers and their families, and even conducted business meetings. By 1839, she observed that she had successfully “schooled myself into habits of business that it is more congenial to me to calculate the advantage of half percent commission on a cargo of iron than to go to the finest ball in the world”. Welsh legend Charlotte’s marriage to John – whom she called Merthyr, Welsh for ‘martyr’ – gave her the freedom she so desperately craved. She used her autonomy to embrace her passion for history, carrying out archaeological excavations at ruins such as Morlais Castle in Glamorgan, where she discovered medieval seals and coins. Inspired by her “violent affection for Welsh castles”, Charlotte became a founding member of the Cymdeithas Cymreigyddion y Fenni (Abergavenny Welsh Society), encouraging the use of the Welsh language among all social classes. Resolving to outwardly demonstrate a sense of Welsh patriotism befitting her new social position, she wore traditional Welsh dress, taught herself medieval Welsh and received the Bardic name ‘Olwen’ – a famous protagonist from Welsh folklore. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/AY4G19cmykwebready-8a87b35-e1771492225305.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of two women dressed in long dresses with aprons over the top, tall black hats and shawls around their shoulders. One is standing in front of a spinning wheel, and the other is to the left behind it, standing in a doorway" title="This photograph shows women in traditional Welsh dress, which Charlotte adopted on marriage to Welshman John Guest (Image by Alamy)" /> While still in her twenties, Charlotte began the colossal task of writing an English translation of the Llyfr Coch Hugest (Red Book of Hergest), a compilation of medieval Welsh ballads and oral traditions including the tales known as the Mabinogion. It was not a straightforward undertaking. Contemporaries were concerned that the work would not be taken seriously if translated by a woman, never mind an English one, and she suspected that her Welsh teachers were passing her translations on to others. Read more | She held wealth, power and prestige: so why did this Georgian aristocrat fake her daughter’s death? Her fears were realised when the French writer Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué tried to publish her translation of the Mabinogion story Peredur, passing it off as his own work. Determined to thwart his plans, Charlotte poured all her energy into completing her version. At one point she worked on it for 12 hours straight, taking a break only to give birth to her fifth child. Thanks to these monumental efforts, she published her Mabinogion in seven parts between 1838 and 1845 to great acclaim. In the 1840s Charlotte began to assemble an art collection, seeking out works from the great European schools of the Renaissance. Her purchases included a piece by a follower of the great 16th-century portraitist Hans Holbein the Younger, which she acquired in 1842 at the ‘Great Sale’ of the celebrated 18th-century gossip and socialite Horace Walpole’s estate of Strawberry Hill, near London. Her husband, John Guest, died in 1852, and the following year Charlotte hired Charles Schreiber (1826–1884), a young Cambridge academic, to tutor her eldest son. They initially attempted to hide their affair, but it wasn’t long before Charlotte appeared with her hair dyed brown – likely to diminish the couple’s 14-year age gap – and announced their engagement. Court cases ensued, and only three of her 10 children attended the wedding. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/Credit-Common-Crow-Bookss000104757cmykwebready-e198adb-e1771492058978.jpeg" width="1500" height="1001" alt="An open book showing a colour illustration of ornate Persian glassware on the left page and a title page on the right. The illustration depicts a tall decorative bottle with a stopper and two matching cups, all with intricate floral and bird designs. The title page lists bibliographic details for “Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals,” including publication information and handwritten catalog markings." title="The opening page from a copy of Lady Charlotte Schreiber’s Journals, which was originally published in 1911, detailing all 12,000 objects that Charlotte had collected (Image by Common Crow Books)" /> Making a mark With newfound joie de vivre, Charlotte spent the next few decades travelling the world with Charles, dedicating herself to forming the greatest collection of ‘ceramic art’ ever seen. She acquired more than 12,000 objects, all of which she numbered and recorded in her journal. Armed with a red velvet bag, she often spent upwards of seven hours per day in search of objects, particularly European and Asian ceramics. Back at home in London she meticulously researched everything she’d bought, transcribed archives and documentary sources, and even got her hands dirty assisting with excavations at archaeological sites. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history Charlotte approached collecting just as she did everything else in her life – with an unyielding commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, and an ever-growing desire to succeed and make her mark on the world. As a committed cultural philanthropist, she believed in the educational power of museums and, after Charles’ death, declared her collection “the property of the nation”. From 1885 until her death 10 years later, she gave thousands of pieces to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the British Museum – unprecedented bequests for a woman collector. At a social gathering one evening in the 1840s, Charlotte was perusing the ‘finest London ladies’ featured in Heath’s Book of Beauty for 1839 – an annual of contemporary fashion and style. A fellow guest, seeing that Charlotte was not listed among the women, commented that “not all the fairies are present; the Welsh fairy Olwen is missing”. “She was not a fairy,” Charlotte replied, “she was a Goddess.” Here’s to that. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Meet the incredible woman who saved Portugal's Jews
With the Inquisition active throughout much of Europe, the first half of the 16th century was a perilous time for Jewish people. Andreé Aelion Brooks explores how the fabulously wealthy Doña Gracia worked tirelessly to protect her community
Still in her 20s, Gracia Mendes Nasi (Nacy), better known as Doña Gracia, was recently widowed and fabulously rich. She should have been able to live in comfort for the rest of her life. Her husband, Francisco Mendes, a spice dealer and banker, had divided his wealth in his will between Gracia and his brother, Diogo. Yet without her husband’s protection, even her money could not shield her from a looming crisis. Indeed, being in possession of such a fortune in patriarchal and Catholic Lisbon in the middle of the 1530s was inherently dangerous for someone of Doña Gracia’s background. She was a converso, a term for a person forced to convert from Judaism. When the papal nuncio, an ecclesiastical diplomat, paid a visit to her palatial home in the old Jewish quarter of Lisbon, he demanded yet another bribe to keep the Inquisition from beginning work in Portugal. The Inquisition, Gracia knew, rounded up conversos, who were then charged with being insincere Catholics and imprisoned. Whether this was true or not, their assets were confiscated. Furthermore, Doña Gracia certainly wasn’t sincere in her public faith. While she had married Francisco, who was also her maternal uncle, at Lisbon Cathedral, the ceremony had been preceded by a secret Jewish wedding. Compounding Doña Gracia’s problems, representatives of the Portuguese king, John III, had also visited her. They told her they wanted to take her young daughter, Ana, to the palace to live as an adopted child of the royal family. According to local laws, the king could thus gain the use of any portion of the Mendes fortune that belonged to Ana. It was clear Doña Gracia needed to make a new start elsewhere in Europe, but there was another problem: converso families were forbidden to leave Portugal. Demonstrating the skill that would make her an outstanding leader, she set two plans running simultaneously, an approach she would follow for the rest of her life. Read more | Your guide to the Spanish Inquisition Firstly, she sent a message to the king explaining that most of the fortune he sought was with her brother-in-law, Diogo, in Antwerp. To retrieve the fortune, she needed the king’s exemption to leave the country. And, of course, she could not leave her baby daughter behind. Nor her two nephews, who were registered to begin studies at university in Louvain. Nor her younger sister, Brianda, who was betrothed to Diogo. She also contacted Diogo to bring one of his spice ships, pick up the family from Lisbon and take them to Antwerp. The greedy king, hoping to maximise the amount of money he could seize, agreed to let her travel. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-173449744-8114cab-e1768985633175.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration of a man in a white and red apron, a tall white coned hat, and holding a stick in one hand. Behind him, there is a large building with many windows" title="A depiction of a man condemned to be burned on the orders of the Inquisition (Image by Getty Images)" /> But Doña Gracia had no intention of giving up her fortune so easily. Before departing for Antwerp, she had also set the second part of her plan in action. She had applied to the Vatican for a ‘Safe Conduct’, a super-passport valid throughout Christian Europe and which overrode any local laws preventing someone from travelling abroad. Throughout her life, Doña Gracia believed in doing what she could to maximise her chances of success. Her skills went beyond protecting her own family. Not only did she take the helm of her late husband’s business, an unusual enough development in itself in the late Renaissance era, but she assumed a leadership role within the converso community. With the threat of the Inquisition looming, Doña Gracia began to expand a nascent escape network that spirited members of the community out of danger and helped them travel to the Ottoman empire, which offered a haven for Europe’s Jewish community. In 1536, with the formal establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, the situation for conversos in the country grew even more perilous. Read more | Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: the history of a city of many names Speaking truth to power In 1553, Doña Gracia too would relocate to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), but in the latter half of the 1530s her focus was on building a new life in Antwerp. Yet here, she encountered many of the same problems she had faced in Portugal. The rulers, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and his sister, Mary of Austria, who acted as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, were quick to pick up where the Portuguese king had left off. The royal duo tried to pledge young Ana to a marriage that would be advantageous to them. Summoned to Mary’s palace to approve the match with Don Francisco D’Aragon – an illegitimate Spanish nobleman and descendant of the royal house of Aragon – Doña Gracia played for time, repeatedly implying she was sick. But she was so opposed to the union that she was reported as saying she would rather see her daughter drown – an audacious and insulting remark. Doña Gracia didn’t back down. She told Mary that she was furious about how Ana’s selected suitor had blamed the continuing persecution of conversos on Doña Gracia’s own obstinacy. Doña Gracia’s confrontational manner shocked Mary, a blue blood who had been queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia before she was widowed and became governor. Once again, Doña Gracia was forced to leave, fleeing to the Republic of Venice in 1544. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463914533-e7876ff-e1768986146801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large snaked line of people processing through a town square, surrounded by white building with blue and orange roofs. A crowd watches on as hundreds of men in black cloaks walk behind one another" title="An 18th century depiction of the procession of criminals sentenced by the Inquisition of Lisbon. As the persecution intensified, Doña Gracia helped many to flee to Constantinople (Image by Getty Images)" /> Compounding her difficulties, Doña Gracia did not even have the support of her own family. While in Antwerp, Diogo had died and named Doña Gracia as the guardian of his infant daughter rather than the child’s own mother – his wife and Doña Gracia’s sister, Brianda, who was talked of as untrustworthy. This so angered Brianda that, when both were living in Venice, she betrayed Doña Gracia as a secret Jew. In 1549, Doña Gracia again had to flee, this time to Ferrara, a tolerant duchy in northern Italy. Throughout, Doña Gracia continued to be a leader among her people, despite facing many setbacks. At one point, she helped lead a boycott of the Italian port of Ancona in retaliation for the burning of more than 20 conversos by the Italian Inquisition – an outrageous act even by the standards of the era. But the boycott was not a success in the long run because the Jewish merchants in the Ottoman empire who used the port could not agree on a combined strategy. Doña Gracia also failed in efforts to persuade the Venetians to give the conversos one of their lagoon islands as a place to settle. Read more | “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history Life in the open But Doña Gracia’s sheer persistence also paid off. In 1553, she settled in Constantinople with her entourage. Here, she could live publicly as a Jew. Moreover, she persuaded Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman empire, to grant her a long-term lease on Tiberias (in present-day Israel). She helped finance the rebuilding of a city that nestles on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it became a refuge for those conversos wishing to live in their own semi-autonomous area. Doña Gracia thus headed one of the earliest attempts to found a modern Jewish state in the Middle East. Her efforts here likely saved a significant portion of the ethnic Jewish world at a critical juncture in its history. She planned to settle in the region herself and built a mansion in Tiberias, but she died in Constantinople in 1569. In the years since, knowledge of Doña Gracia’s remarkable life has gradually faded, but that may be changing. Four years ago – during a period when the State Archives in Modena, northern Italy were closed because of the pandemic – archivist Alberto Palladini took advantage of the peace and quiet to clean out a box of old letters. It included two from Doña Gracia. These showed she spelled her last name as Nacy, not Nasi as the historical record currently suggests. It’s a small detail, but significant, if only because it hints at the possibility of further revelations should researchers go looking, which seems likely given the current interest in the lives of powerful women whose place in history has been under-appreciated. As for Doña Gracia herself, she certainly never sold herself short. As the seal for her correspondence, she used the Lion of Judah. This suggests she saw herself not just as a rich and successful businesswoman and philanthropist, but as someone descended from the House of David, a Jewish royal. Andrée Aelion Brooks is a journalist and lecturer. Her books include Russian Dance: A True Story of Intrigue and Passion in Stalinist Moscow (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
In 1756, a young Englishwoman was taken hostage by Barbary pirates. This is her story
Taken hostage by a Barbary ship’s captain in the 18th century, a young Englishwoman found herself fighting for her freedom in Marrakech. Adam Nichols introduces a brave captive who later wrote a book about her dramatic experiences
The Barbary corsair ship appeared suddenly on the horizon, bristling with cannon. Its decks swarming with armed men, it sliced through the waves at a clip that its quarry – the British merchant ship Ann – could not match. At that time, in the mid-18th century, such pirate attacks were violent, bloody affairs; if the Ann’s captain tried to resist, he would be risking the lives of his crew, his passengers and himself, and would likely see his ship sunk. He surrendered. The corsair captain swaggered aboard the British vessel without firing a shot, and surveyed his captives. He was one of the infamous Sallee Rovers operating out of Salé, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, who sold any Europeans they captured into slavery. The captain ordered the Ann’s four passengers to be taken to his ship, along with the crew, who were chained up in the hold. One of the passengers was a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Marsh, barely 21 years old. It is because of her that we know these details. She later published an account of her experiences: The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, Written by Herself. The corsair attack occurred in August 1756, a few months after the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. Marsh’s father, an administrator for the Royal Navy, had moved his family from their home in Menorca to Gibraltar, which he considered safer. To further protect his daughter, he then booked her a berth on the Ann, which set sail for England in late July. Read more | Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates Marsh’s family aspired to be “respectable people”, and she had received a genteel education. The future planned for her was typical of young women of her position and era: to marry a well-to-do man and bear his children. Now, torn from that sheltered life, she faced a very different fate. As a young, attractive European woman, Marsh would have been a highly sought-after commodity in north African slave markets – one that any Moroccan sultan would be very interested in acquiring for his harem. The corsair captain kept Marsh isolated – not for her comfort but to keep her safe and unmolested. One of the other passengers, an English merchant named James Crisp, had been tasked by Marsh’s father with looking after her; he convinced the corsairs that he was her brother, so they permitted him to stay by her side. African captivity After a week at sea, the corsairs reached Salé. There, the British party was housed in a dilapidated building for several uncomfortable and uncertain days. Their situation was complicated. In 1750, England and Morocco had concluded a treaty of mutual cooperation, and were trading partners, with Morocco supplying beef to the British garrison in Gibraltar. However, the Moroccans found the treaty unsatisfactory, and had also been incensed by what they considered to be the disrespectful actions of a British emissary who had attended an audience with the sultan while wearing muddy boots. Marsh and her companions were, technically, hostages rather than outright captives. But the British feared that Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah, the Moroccan sultan’s son and heir, might live up to his reputation and take an amorous interest in Elizabeth Marsh. And that is what happened. Marsh and her companions were taken to Marrakech, Sidi Mohammed’s home city – a journey of some 300 miles across rough, mountainous country. On the way, Marsh and Crisp received some advice from a friendly slave: they should now claim to be husband and wife. Sidi Mohammed was in his forties. His father was aging and sick, and Sidi Mohammed would soon inherit the sultanate. For all his power, though, he could not force Marsh into his harem. The Qur’an’s Chapter 4, Verse 24 decrees: “Forbidden to you are women already married, except those whom your right hand possesses” – that last clause being a euphemism for slaves. Marsh was not a slave so, if she and Crisp successfully maintained the fiction of their marriage, Sidi Mohammed could not take her for his harem. Before the acting sultan In Marrakech, Marsh was housed with the other English captives in a house in the town, hostages in the ongoing negotiations between the Moroccans and the English. She was quickly brought before Sidi Mohammed, though, alone and still dishevelled from her long journey. He grilled her about her marriage, observing that married English women customarily wore wedding rings – which she did not. Marsh declared that she had taken off her ring for safety during her voyage. He was not convinced, but he allowed her to depart and rejoin the other captives. At their next meeting, Sidi Mohammed – dressed in a pink satin vest with diamond buttons – presented Marsh with “a great collection of rarities” and told her that, as she recounted it, “he did not doubt of my preferring, in time, his palace to the confined way of life I was then in… and that the curiosities I had seen should be my property”. Marsh declined this offer. Sidi Mohammed, used to having his own way, was not pleased. But then something unexpected occurred. A woman who was in the room started talking to Marsh, using a phrase in Arabic and making encouraging gestures for her to repeat it, which Marsh did. “Too late,” she wrote, “I discovered that I had renounced (completely innocently) the Christian religion by saying in Morisco: ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet’.” Read more | Barbary pirates: the Muslim corsairs and their role in the slave trade Marsh was now in real trouble, having unintentionally recited the Shahadah – and thus converted to Islam. According to Qur’anic law, this automatically invalidated her Christian marriage to Crisp, making her fair game for Sidi Mohammed. The Prince, as Marsh refers to him, then resorted to threats. Here is her account: “Throwing off the mask he had hitherto worn, he cruelly informed me that I had renounced the Christian faith and turned Mohometan [Muslim], and that a capital punishment – namely burning at the stake – was, by their laws, inflicted upon all who recanted from... their religion. “The shock of this pronouncement was severe...I assured the Prince that, if I was an apostate, it entirely proceeded from my being tricked, and not from my own inclination, and that if my death would give him any satisfaction, I no longer desired to avoid that last and final remedy to all my misfortunes, for to go on living under the terms he proposed would only add to my misery. “The Prince seemed greatly perplexed by my resolute declaration, and, though he continued his importunities, yet it was now more with the air of a supplicant than that of a sovereign.” Marsh’s language does not really do justice to the drama of the situation. Sidi Mohammed, the second most powerful man in Morocco, threatened to have her burned at the stake if she refused to join his harem. Alone and defenceless, Marsh faced him down and dared him to do it. Baffled by such unexpected and indominable resistance, Sidi Mohammed capitulated and let her rejoin the other captives. Read more | Shipwrecked: the 18th-century looters who endured five months of hell Release and return The political tensions between Britain and Morocco were eventually resolved – in part by the arrival of a British warship – and Marsh and her companions, along with the Ann’s crew, were allowed to depart. Marsh returned to England, where she married James Crisp. However, Crisp went bankrupt and fled to India to try to revive his fortunes, leaving Marsh behind with two small children. Without any means of support, she went to live at her parents’ home in Chatham, Kent. Desperate for money, she resorted to writing a memoir of her captivity in Morocco. Marsh eventually joined her husband in India, where she travelled widely. She died there of breast cancer at the age of 50, surviving a mastectomy without anaesthetic but then succumbing to the disease. Her memoir, The Female Captive, is the first full-length Barbary corsair captivity narrative written by a woman in English. The book enjoyed some notoriety when it was first published but was never a bestseller, and only a single copy is known to survive. If that copy had disappeared, we would likely never know Elizabeth Marsh’s remarkable story. Marsh was not famous. She played no role in world events. Hers was a private life. Yet the courage she showed during her Moroccan ordeal is an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Adam Nichols is a historian and writer. His latest book is Corsairs and Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates (Pen & Sword, 2024), featuring Marsh’s full account This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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
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, in his youth Barker worked in the theatre industry, then began publishing, writing and editing stories about UFOs, monsters and the paranormal. He graduated from Glenville State College in 1947 – the year in which the phrase ‘flying saucers’ was coined to describe a formation of strange batwing-shaped objects reported by a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, in Washington state. Arnold’s sighting was quickly followed by the Roswell incident, when wreckage of a flying object was recovered from the desert in New Mexico. This story would later become a central element of the most popular UFO conspiracy theory, which claims that the US government is hiding crashed alien spacecraft. Read more | The Roswell incident: Did the US Government cover up an alien crash in 1947? The real history that challenges the conspiracy Barker enjoyed blurring the line between fact and fiction, and in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers he dramatised and embellished his account of Bender’s story to capture the public imagination. It worked: his retelling of the episode launched the legend of the ‘men in black’ into the paranoid world of ufology at the height of the Cold War. Silent alarm Written around the time of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous campaign to expose alleged communist infiltration of the US government, They Knew Too Much… became the best-known title in a series of books that Barker edited and published from his home in West Virginia. The book charted the activities of what he called the ‘Silence Group’, whom he claimed had warned Bender and other IFSB members to end their investigations. In it, Barker quotes Bender: “Just as the three men were leaving, one of them lingered for a moment and said, ‘In our government, we have the smartest men in the country. They can’t find a defence for [UFOs]. How can you do anything about it?’” As rumours about the ‘Silence Group’ spread following the book’s publication, other enthusiasts and people who claimed to have witnessed UFOs came forward, insisting that they’d also received visits from men in black. Like Bender, many appeared genuinely terrified – yet none suffered any reprisals after talking about their experiences. The menacing ‘agents’ often, but not always, travelled in groups of three, wore black suits and drove large, brand-new automobiles, usually Cadillacs or dark sedans. Bender’s encounter occurred in the same year that the CIA convened a top-secret panel of scientists to decide how to deal with the growing number of unsolved sightings reported to the US Air Force. UFO writer Jerome Clark speculates that the men who visited Bender might have been genuine secret agents who were following the panel’s recommendations that civilian UFO groups should be closely watched. The legend blurred with science fiction in 1962 when Barker published a book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, written by Bender – who had now emerged from hiding, and promised to reveal the truth about his visitation. Even the more open-minded UFO believers found it hard to swallow one extravagant addition to Bender’s story – an account of his abduction to the south pole by monstrous aliens from the planet Kazik. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/0902455webready-4f3e69e.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a young man in a suit, standing next to a large drawing of a UFO" title="Albert K Bender, pictured with a sketch of a flying saucer. The visit of shadowy ‘men in black’ to his home in 1953 sparked the enduring legend that spawned comics and films (Image by TopFoto)" /> Aliens in disguise More enticing to the UFO industry was the revelation that the ‘agents’ who visited Bender were aliens in disguise – a fresh theme that imaginative writers and artists could develop further. Barker continued to promote the legend, alongside UFOs and other mysteries, via the magazine he edited, The Saucerian (later The Saucerian Bulletin), while rival authors also began creating their own folklore. The Silver Bridge, a creative fiction book published by Barker in 1970, linked the collapse of the bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in December 1967 with a frightening creature called the Mothman. His friend John Keel, another occult journalist, expanded on the legend in a book-length account, The Mothman Prophecies. Published in 1975, it featured Barker and was adapted into a 2002 Hollywood film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney. In his book, Keel – the first to use the acronym MIB – detailed visits to the homes of witnesses who had reported encounters with both the Mothman and UFOs before the bridge tragedy that claimed the lives of 46 people. From the late 1960s, accounts of MIB visits were becoming ever more bizarre and surreal. Stories described MIB moving robotically, or having telepathic powers, odd hairstyles and shaved eyebrows. Their weird demeanour placed them alongside depictions of gangsters, fictional terrorists and spies in contemporary films and TV shows. They resembled, for example, the SMERSH agents pursued by James Bond in novels and films. Meanwhile, MIB links with conspiracy theories were cemented by ‘sightings’ in Dallas soon after John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Believer or sceptic? Barker died in 1984, aged just 59, having contracted HIV. A decade after his death, the Men in Black launched onto the global medial landscape. They appeared in The X-Files TV series, then the first of four Men in Black movies was released in 1997 – the 50th anniversary of Arnold’s report of the first ‘flying saucers’. Based on a comic by Lowell Cunningham, the first three of these comedy sci-fi films follow the exploits of two agents, played by Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith, who work for a secret agency that polices extraterrestrials living secretly on Earth. Read more | Watergate is the ultimate American conspiracy – but what if we’ve been misunderstanding it all along? Did Barker really believe the stories that he promoted? Or was he purely motivated by financial gain? Evidence suggests that he was a sceptic: he told his friend (and fellow UFO writer) James Moseley that he “pretty much took all of ufology as a joke”. After Barker’s death, Moseley confessed that in 1957 the pair had written a fake letter, on US Department of State stationery, sent to George Adamski – who claimed to have met aliens from Venus and Mars, and travelled in their flying saucers. The letter appeared to corroborate Adamski’s fantastic tales. In 2002, another of Barker’s circle, journalist John C Sherwood, published an exposé that revealed the MIB creator’s ‘dark side’. “He launched hoaxes, joined others’ deceptions, and manipulated people’s beliefs,” Sherwood claimed in Skeptical Inquirer. Gray Barker laid the foundations for the modern belief that the US government is actively involved in a cover-up. In 2019, a Gallup poll found that 68 per cent of Americans believe “the US Government knows more about UFOs than it is telling us”. That came shortly after an online campaign called Storm Area 51, which drove support for breaking into the secret military base in the Nevada desert where many believe the US government is flying captured alien craft. In July 2023, US intelligence officer David Grusch testified before a congressional hearing that the Pentagon was involved in reverse-engineering non-human spacecraft, and had recovered their dead pilots. He also claimed that people had been threatened and killed in order to conceal what has been called the ‘Cosmic Watergate 2.0’. If Grusch is to be believed – and his claims have been challenged by numerous experts – then the ‘men in black’ are more than a mere fantasy conjured up by Gray Barker.
Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation
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
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, until a seat was vacated by a departing white passenger. When Flemming took the seat, however, the driver shouted at her to move. According to contentious evidence he gave later in court, she had breached the ‘colour line’ – the long-standing system of racial segregation enforced by so-called Jim Crow laws – by sitting in front of two white women. Embarrassed, Flemming decided that she would walk the remaining 2 miles to work, and pulled the cord for the next stop. At that time, black Americans were required to enter and leave buses by the rear door – but the aisle was too crowded, so she tried to follow white passengers through the front exit. The driver stood in her way, then struck her in the stomach. Flemming was forced to shuffle through the rear door, and from there to a hospital. Worse than the pain from the punch was the wound to her dignity. From insult, opportunity The hurt and humiliation of one young woman did, though, present an opportunity to the broader black community. Just a month earlier, the United States Supreme Court had reached a landmark decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, outlawing school segregation. To Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the secretary of the South Carolina branch of the NAACP – the national organisation founded in 1909 to fight for civil rights for people of colour – Flemming’s mistreatment presented a chance to test whether that ruling also applied to public transport. Flemming agreed to help, resolving to challenge Jim Crow laws despite the risks to which she would be exposed. Simkins hired white lawyer Philip Wittenberg, who filed a suit accusing the bus company of having violated Flemming’s right to the full protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. He sought $25,000 in damages. The legal process in Flemming v South Carolina Electric and Gas Company (who operated the bus) was convoluted and slow. District Court Judge George Bell Timmerman, a staunch segregationist, dismissed the case on the grounds that the Brown decision applied only to schools and not to public transport. The NAACP assisted with an appeal to the US Fourth Circuit Court, which deemed that the Brown decision applied to all aspects of public life – and that the Flemming case must proceed to trial. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-838649138-ac65a26.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Four men stand in a line, holding up a poster that reads "Stamp out Mississippi-ism! Join NAACP"" title="NAACP leaders hold a poster against racial bias in Mississippi at the peak of the civil rights struggle in the mid-1950s – a battle involving countless ordinary black people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Civil rights activists sensed that they were on the verge of a breakthrough – a perception sharpened when, in April 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the bus company. NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins saw the decision as the end of bus segregation, telling reporters: “Now that the Supreme Court has spoken with clarity, we are hopeful that the majority of communities throughout the South will fall in line.” There seemed good reason for such optimism. Within a day, transit companies in 13 cities across the region had announced the desegregation of their buses. That included Montgomery City Lines, which instructed its drivers not to enforce segregated seating, an action blocked when city officials secured a court injunction. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? Yet the Flemming case did not win the fight against the colour line in Montgomery – where the boycott was ongoing, and would continue for over a year – or elsewhere. Both sides in the civil rights struggle soon realised that the Supreme Court had not actually determined whether segregated busing was unconstitutional, only that it would not consider an appeal until the lower court had actually heard the case. Battle lines in Montgomery remained drawn: white city leaders secured an injunction that stopped the bus company desegregating, while black activists persevered with their boycott. “Jim Crow Dies Hard,” affirmed a headline in the Washington Post. Proving the point, when the Flemming case returned to the district court in June 1956, Judge Timmerman dismissed it a second time. Not until June 1957, following a successful appeal by Flemming’s lawyers, did the case finally convene. It was not worth the wait. An entirely white male jury took only 30 minutes to decide against the plaintiff. Serving a greater good Flemming had lost the will to fight. Rather than remain involved in the escalating civil rights struggle, she retreated into the privacy of family life, raising three children with her husband, whom she married while the case was ongoing. “As for myself,” she informed the press, “I never rode a city bus since they put me off and I never will again.” Her own battle had ended in defeat, but Flemming had contributed to the broader triumph of civil rights activists. In February 1956, lawyers filed suit on behalf of four black female plaintiffs who had been mistreated on Montgomery buses. Four months later, a district court ruled in their favour, striking down bus segregation. In November, the US Supreme Court affirmed the decision in the case of Browder v Gayle. A year after it had begun, the organisers of the Montgomery bus boycott had won a decisive victory. It is not known whether Flemming was even aware of the fact, but the judges who ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional cited as precedent the appeal court ruling in her case that ‘separate but equal’ no longer had any basis in law. Flemming did not receive justice, but her fight through the courts had served an even greater good. Sarah Mae Flemming lived the rest of her life, away from the spotlight, in Eastover with her husband and their three children until her untimely death on 16 June 1993, aged just 59. By then, Rosa Parks had long overshadowed her – a situation compounded by the fact that Flemming never spoke publicly about her contribution to the civil rights cause. Barely a footnote in histories of the movement written during her lifetime, her story has belatedly been rediscovered. Today, locals and visitors to downtown Columbia can stroll along Sarah Mae Flemming Way to see the impressive mural that honours her memory. It is a reminder that, though charismatic civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X became the focus of most attention, the fight for racial equality was as much – if not more – about ordinary people such as Flemming performing extraordinary acts of courage. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies are, respectively, professor and associate professor of American history at the University of Sussex This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
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
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 James’s life such a misery that he eventually sold her on; he also signed manumission papers granting freedom to their sons, Robert and James Jr. That was lesson one: by being obstinate and difficult, and not shying away from confrontation, even apparently powerless people could negotiate a change in their circumstances and secure a better life for their children. Robert was sent to Kingston to be raised by his maternal grandmother, Amy. She was reputed to be an Obeah woman – a healer and spiritual guide with the power to communicate with spirits, hence her nickname, ‘Talkee Amy’. Wedderburn himself had no time for mysticism, leaving superstition to “silly Europeans”. But he always remembered that Amy’s ‘owner’, a man she had cared for when he was a child, whipped her mercilessly under suspicion of bewitching his father’s smuggling ship and causing him to be captured by the Spanish. That scene – a young man brutally beating a defenceless old woman accused of witchcraft and facing no repercussions – was seared into the young Wedderburn’s memory. Here was lesson two: he would never accede to the ‘legitimate authority’ of either religion or law – two means used by the powerful to justify trampling on the powerless. Listen | Gretchen Gerzina discovers the story of a forgotten revolutionary, Robert Wedderburn, in BBC Radio 4's Britain's Black Past Working-class insurrectionary Wedderburn worked as a millwright, a sailor and a soldier before crossing the Atlantic and forging a career as a tailor in England. In 1813, he was implicated in a scam involving pilfering excess fabric from the production of military uniforms. He escaped conviction partly because tailors were a notoriously tight-knit group, and prosecutors could find no one willing to inform on their brother tradesmen. It was probably through his trade club that Wedderburn first got into radical politics. Mentored by the renowned radical polymath Thomas Spence, he surged to the forefront of London’s militant political scene, rabble-rousing in smoky pub back rooms and setting the world to rights. By the end of the 1810s, Wedderburn was publishing pamphlets and running his own debate club, the infamous ‘Temple of Sedition’ at a chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho. Listen | Black British history: everything you wanted to know One of the most distinctive things about Wedderburn’s politics was his ability to see the working-class struggle in global perspective. Most radicals of his generation were fixated on Britain: how to improve conditions for British workers, how to reform the British parliament, how to save the children of the British poor from the factories. Wedderburn addressed all of these issues, but also saw the cause of exploited white workers in Britain as inextricably entwined with that of enslaved black workers in the Caribbean and Africa. As he asked his predominately white readership in 1816, “should the receivers and stealers of Africans become rich, and buy one of those seats in the House of Commons, which is sold at noon-day, ought they to be called the representative of a free people? Ought they to be obeyed, when there is an opportunity to oppose with success?” Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity He even went so far as to encourage enslaved people to rise up and kill their ‘masters’, calling to mind the successful insurrection that led to the establishment of the free black nation of Haiti in the former French colony of Saint Domingue: “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you,” he wrote. “O ye planters, you know this has been done; the cause which produced former bloodshed still remains – of necessity similar effects must take place.” No other British abolitionist had previously been so bold as to suggest that the enslaved should take their freedom for themselves. Such hot rhetoric about rebellion in the empire was alarming for the Home Office, increasingly paranoid about the rise of all forms of radicalism during the bitter recession that followed the Napoleonic Wars. But Wedderburn’s domestic politics were what really landed him in hot water. At a debate in 1819, he proclaimed that the Prince Regent deserved to die for failing to protect his subjects, shouting: “My motto is assassinate stab in the dark.” He had already made a name for himself and, his actions reported by several government spies, came under the unforgiving scrutiny of the very highest ranks of the British establishment. In August 1819, the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, personally wrote to the Prince Regent about “a man of the name of Wedderburne, a notorious firebrand”, reassuring the future George IV that the troublemaker would soon be arrested. In February 1820, Wedderburn was convicted of seditious blasphemy for one of his Hopkins Street speeches, and served two years in Dorchester Jail. Listen | The children who fought for the abolition of slavery Radical abolitionist Prison proved extremely hard for Wedderburn. His hypervisibility as a black man, as well as his notoriety as an enemy of the state, meant that he was singled out for especially harsh treatment by the guards at Dorchester. After his release, Wedderburn’s life was marked by a steady decline into destitution and vice, including multiple convictions related to running brothels. Yet Wedderburn remained committed to the abolition of slavery. In 1824, he wrote his most famous text, The Horrors of Slavery, in which he described the injustices faced by his mother and grandmother. He wrote another anti-slavery tract, An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, from a jail cell in 1831. When he died in the winter of 1834–35, Wedderburn left behind some of the most uncompromising anti-slavery and anti-racist writing of the 19th century. Despite every conceivable disadvantage in life, he led the vanguard of the struggle for workers’ rights across the empire, regardless of colour or creed. At its most utopian, his work dared readers to imagine a world in which solidarity, not profit or self-interest, could determine the course of history. Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Wedderburn’s final descent into criminality and vice forms a bitter coda to a grittily inspiring story, but in his final year he did at least get to see one of his cherished dreams become a reality. On 1 August 1834, after years of uprisings in the Caribbean and activism in Britain, the enslaved celebrated the first day of their legal freedom. Among them were several members of Wedderburn’s immediate family. He might have derived some satisfaction from knowing that – though he also would have understood that legal emancipation was only the first step. The fight for equality was just beginning. Read more | Black Victorians: the hidden Britons who helped shape the 19th century Ryan Hanley is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, and author of Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale University Press, 2025). This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action
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
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 Whitehall and the West End of London. Emmeline Pankhurst called these raids the “argument of the broken pane”. Read more | 8 famous suffragettes and votes for women campaigners Under the alias Ida Inkley, Lilian was sentenced to two months in Holloway Prison for smashing the windows of the Oxford Street Post Office. The sentencing magistrate commented that “only very ill-regulated minds could conceive of such ideas”. Lilian was rarely out of the news in 1913. Telling WSPU headquarters that she wanted to progress from breaking windows, she declared that her mission was to burn down two empty buildings each week. At three o’clock on the morning of 20 February, she and a comrade, artist Olive Wharry, set fire to the tea pavilion at Kew Gardens – which was reduced to a heap of ashes. They left postcards at the scene from “Two voteless women”, offering “Peace on earth and goodwill when women get the vote”, then ran off – but dropped two suitcases containing a hammer and their combustible materials. Behind bars and forcible feeding Lilian and Olive were rapidly apprehended by two policemen, denied bail and taken to Holloway Prison. Lilian refused to be medically examined or to “give any particulars”. She was moved to a special cell after she “smashed up everything in the cell she was first placed in”, and was kept apart from all other suffragette prisoners. She was well aware of the fate that would likely befall her. “When I went to prison for fires, I knew the sentences would go into years,” Lilian later recalled during an interview with the BBC. “So I went on hunger strike for release, on the grounds they had no right to imprison women for breaking man-made laws. The forcible feeding process was extremely unpleasant. But some people managed to put up with it literally for months – which meant hundreds of times.” On 23 February 1913, it happened to Lilian. “They pushed a tube up the nostril, which went wriggling down into the stomach,” she later recalled. “Then they poured the food in through the funnel at the end of the tube. But I was determined to stop them if I could. “All the time they were trying to push this tube down, I kept coughing and coughing incessantly. They kept on trying, and after a bit I suppose they thought they’d succeeded, because they poured the food in… In almost no time I felt intense pain all round my chest and I could not breathe.” Read more | What was the difference between the suffragists and the suffragettes? Food had been forced into Lilian’s lungs, and she soon developed double pneumonia and pleurisy as a result. She was released from Holloway’s hospital wing and taken to the home of suffragette friends in north London, where she was kept under house arrest. One day, a laundry van arrived at the house. The driver was a female friend in disguise, and the laundry basket carried out was suspiciously heavy – because the extra weight was Lilian. She was whisked away, “leaving a squad of lynx-eyed detectives industriously watching an empty nest”. The Cat and Mouse Act Stories of women being force-fed created adverse publicity for the Liberal government, and in April 1913 the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act was passed. Under its terms, hunger-striking suffragettes would not be fed by force; instead, they were released when their weight dropped dangerously low, and were served with a licence specifying that they should remain at a pre-agreed address. If they then regained weight, they would be returned to prison. Read more | What was the Cat and Mouse Act? The reason why suffragettes were force-fed The suffragettes likened it to a game of cat and mouse, and the act failed spectacularly. Very few ‘mice’ were ever recaptured; instead, most went on the run and committed more militant acts. Force-feeding was reintroduced in the autumn of 1913. Master of disguise After evading authorities earlier that year, Lenton laid low until June, when ‘May Dennis’ (another alias) was found by a local reporter in a burning building in Doncaster. She managed to escape, but gave herself up when she read that a servant had been charged with arson. Lilian was sentenced to six months in Armley Gaol (now HM Prison Leeds); again she went on hunger strike, but this time was not force-fed. She was released on licence after seven days to the home of local suffragette sympathisers, effectively under house arrest. Though under close observation, Lilian escaped from under the noses of the police keeping watch on the house, this time disguised as a delivery boy carrying a hamper. Read more | From china cups to letter bombs: how suffragettes got out the message of votes for women She spent the rest of the summer dressed as a boy, on the run between Harrogate and Dundee, evading the Special Branch and other police officers who were hunting for her. She then disguised herself as an old lady, hobbling through Cardiff to escape by train to London. From there she travelled to Dover, where she boarded a yacht owned by a suffragette sympathiser and fled to France. Returning to England, during the autumn of 1913 and spring of 1914 Lilian was hugely active. She continued to burn empty buildings and, when arrested, went on three hunger-and-thirst-strikes; each time she was released and then evaded police. A life dedicated to fighting for women's rights When the First World War began in August 1914, the government granted an amnesty to all suffragette prisoners on the understanding that their militancy would end. Lilian diverted her energies to other important work, first as an orderly for Dr Elsie Inglis’s Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit in Serbia; she received a medal from the French Red Cross for her efforts. Read more | Sisters in arms: women at war during WW1 After the war she took a role at the British embassy in Stockholm, and went to Russia with the Save the Children Fund, which had been founded in 1919. She also worked as the financial secretary of the National Union of Women Teachers and, in her final years, was the honorary treasurer of the Suffragette Fellowship, founded in 1926 to keep alive the memory of the militant campaign. The earliest surviving photographs of Lilian show her lying in bed in prison, recovering from force-feeding; there are also surveillance images taken by Special Branch officers. The last known picture of her was taken in 1970 at the unveiling of the Suffragette Memorial in London’s Christchurch Gardens near Caxton Hall, which had been the venue of the ‘Women’s Parliament’ held in 1907. She had led the fundraising for the memorial. Lilian Lenton died in 1972, after 60 years of activism dedicated to improving the lives of women. Diane Atkinson is a historian and author of Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (Bloomsbury, 2018) This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sarah Biffin: the brilliant artist who found fame and royal favour – despite having no arms or legs
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
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 twenties, Biffin travelled extensively, exhibiting at fairs in towns and cities across Britain. Audiences would pay a fee to see her at work as she sewed, wrote and painted. “The greatest wonder in the world” Artworks and archival material now held at the Philip Mould & Company art gallery in London shine a light on this part of Biffin’s life. One large poster advertising her touring exhibition celebrates Biffin’s “astonishing powers” and declares her to be “the greatest wonder in the world”. It also proclaims that “each visitor will be entitled to a specimen of her writing”. Incredibly, some of these specimens have also survived: little pieces of paper given out as souvenirs on which Biffin had – with beautifully formed letters – written her name and sometimes the location and date. Read more | “People have achieved all kinds of crazy things at the age of 18” | Alice Loxton on the teens who've changed British history Another surviving object is a handbill advertising her appearance on Tuesday 1 December 1807 at “Mr Henzell’s, Long-Room, Old Flesh Market” in Newcastle. Biffin is described as “of comely Appearance, 22 years of age, and only 37 inches high”. There are practical details at the bottom of the document, including an admission fee (“Children, half price”), and sales talk: “Embrace this opportunity, as another may never offer!” A turning point in Biffin’s life came in 1808 when she met George Douglas, 16th Earl of Morton, who was so impressed with her skill that he presented her work to King George III, and paid for more artistic training. Her career as a portrait miniaturist began to take off, and commissions soon flooded in. Sarah Biffin's royal reception Another big year was 1821, when she took a studio in London, her work made it to the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, and she received a silver medal from the Royal Society of Arts. A few months later she travelled to Brussels, becoming miniature painter to Willem Frederik, future king of the Netherlands. A short-lived marriage to a man called William Stephen Wright in 1824 (they appear to have separated soon afterwards) didn’t slow Biffin’s career, which continued to blossom. She taught in Birmingham, sharing a residence with an assistant, Miss Mary Ann Saunders. In 1830, she moved to Brighton, where George IV bought one of her self-portraits for 25 guineas. Later that year she began working for Augusta Sophia, second daughter of George III, promoting herself as “miniature painter to HRH Princess Augusta”. Plans to make it big in America Even after gaining this royal approval, Biffin didn’t rest on her laurels. More determined and entrepreneurial than ever, she hatched plans to make it big in the US. “I am induced to take the advice of some of my friends and apply to you for your opinion respecting an intended project which I have for some time had in mind,” she wrote to an acquaintance in 1841. “This project is to visit America.” That year, Biffin moved to Liverpool, the main port for Atlantic crossings. There she spent several years managing a studio and gallery on Bold Street, where members of the public would pay to see her work. Sadly, Biffin’s global ambitions were scuppered by ill health. She died in 1850, aged 65, in her home at 8 Duke Street in Liverpool. Her death certificate cites the cause as a “disordered stomach and breaking up of the constitution”. Her gravestone, which stood at St James Cemetery, Liverpool, but no longer survives, declared her to have been “Gifted with singular talents as an artist,” going on to say that “thousands have been gratified with the able productions of her pencil, while her versatile conversation and agreeable manners elicited the admiration of all.” Biffin’s fame was immense during her lifetime. While her siblings continued to live in sleepy East Quantoxhead, she became a 19th-century household name who was referenced in three Charles Dickens novels. The great painter Sir Thomas Lawrence is said to have declared that he “would rather have one of his pictures copied by Miss Biffin than by any artist he was acquainted with”. Sarah Biffin's 21st-century revival During the 20th century, her name rather faded into obscurity – but it’s now back in the spotlight: the Sarah Biffin revival is on. When a self-portrait was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2019, the estimate was £800–£1,200 – but it fetched £137,500. In 2022, Philip Mould & Company dedicated a major exhibition to her work – “Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin” – bringing together many of her pieces for the first time. Alongside exquisite miniature portraits were meticulously rendered studies of feathers, showcasing an extraordinary technical ability and beautifully delicate handling of watercolour. Aside from her artistic skill, it is Biffin’s spirit that captivates. Newspapers of the day championed “the earnestness with which she has struggled, and the perseverance with which she has laboured, to attain by her own efforts an honourable independence”. Read more | Sarah Biffin: the artist without arms who wowed Queen Victoria Not only did she excel in a society in which she seemed to have no place, she used her physical disability to break through barriers and thrive outside social and cultural norms. She gained recognition as a female artist, supported herself financially, and often went further even than non-disabled women of the day. Importantly, she never allow her disability to restrict her ambitions, and even championed it. “Sarah Biffin”, she signed her works, adding proudly: “Without hands.” Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and the author of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives (Pan MacMillan, 2024) This article was first published in the December 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Harry Grindell Matthews: the strangely inventive mind behind the aerophone and Death Ray
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
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, Gilbert Sackville, 8th Earl De La Warr. These included ‘wireless torpedoes’ and wireless telephony – transmission of speech by radio. Read more | Daily life in the Edwardian era: from hobbies to gadgets In 1911, he staged a demonstration of that latter invention, communicating from the ground with the pilot of an aircraft flying two miles away. The Admiralty requested a presentation, and Matthews agreed – but stipulated that no ‘experts’ be present. On the day, he found Admiralty men taking apart his equipment and making notes. Matthews stormed out, taking his ‘aerophone’ with him. It would be tempting to conclude that Matthews feared being exposed as a fraud, but he was probably trying to protect his intellectual property – because the aerophone worked. Soon afterwards, a south Wales newspaper, the Western Mail, successfully used the invention to link their Newport and Cardiff offices. The Admiralty decided to stick with the established system of wireless telegraphy, using dots and dashes to send messages in Morse code, which was clearer and less prone to communication errors. However, clarity and accuracy may not have been the only reasons for that decision: it later emerged that various government ministers held shares in the Marconi company, which was threatened by Matthews’ development. Even so, his ideas were gaining traction. During the First World War, Matthews successfully demonstrated a remote-controlled boat to Admiralty officials on a pond in Richmond Park. He was paid £25,000 for his invention – a huge sum at the time, and a clear indication of official confidence in him. Talking pictures and Death Rays In 1921, Matthews demonstrated a ‘talking picture’ – a short movie of explorer Ernest Shackleton speaking about his Antarctic expedition – with a narrow strip between the picture frames and the sprocket holes at the edge of the film ensuring perfect synchronism of image and sound. It was a brilliant innovation, but film industry bosses were sceptical, insisting that ‘talkies’ would never catch on. In any case, no cinema had the equipment to show such a film. It was with his next device that Matthews really seems to have overreached himself: the weapon that the press quickly dubbed the “Death Ray”. By 1923, when he announced his new design, it was accepted wisdom that any future war would inevitably involve aerial bombing on a massive scale. So Matthews’ claim to have devised a ray that could make aircraft fall from the sky provoked a sensation. “I am confident,” he said, “that if I have facilities for developing it, I can stop aeroplanes in flight. Indeed, I believe the ray is sufficiently powerful to… explode powder magazines and destroy anything on which it rests.” Read more | How a death ray was one of Archimedes’ greatest inventions In 1924, Matthews demonstrated a prototype to newspaper reporters, who were impressed, then to government officials, who were not – in part, perhaps, because he offered only the vaguest explanation of how it functioned. Irked by this lack of confidence in his work, Matthews claimed that he’d received an offer from France to buy the ray. And, despite the efforts of an Air Ministry official to renegotiate, and his investors’ dash to the airport, he flew to Paris to start talks. In the event, he failed to make a deal in France, and was soon back in Britain – but still refused to allow a proper examination of his device. Instead, he made a 25-minute (silent) film promoting his ‘Death Ray’, which was widely screened in Britain and the US. Read more | The phantom menace: 10 milestones in science fiction The press remained firmly on his side. In a full-page article in the ultra-patriotic magazine John Bull, he told readers that his invention was “not a death ray, but a ray of hope” that could end wars and might also, he mused, be able to cure cancer. Crossing the Atlantic, Matthews found US scientists as unimpressed with his invention as their British counterparts. One professor even offered to stand in front of the ray to prove that it didn’t work. Needless to say, no deal was forthcoming, and talk of the ‘Death Ray’ soon ebbed away. Remaining in the US, Matthews began working for the film studio Warner Brothers, helping them develop ‘talking pictures’ – movies with sound. The sky's the limit It wasn’t until some years later that Matthews unveiled his next invention in Britain. On the evening of 24 December 1930, astonished crowds watched as pictures from his ‘sky projector’ appeared over Hampstead Heath. An image of an angel was so convincing that some people reportedly fell to their knees, believing that the Second Coming was nigh. Yet the dramatic impact of that creation wasn’t enough to stave off his creditors. The following year, Matthews was declared bankrupt, with court proceedings revealing that much of the money lent or invested by various backers had been spent on stays in hotels and high-end rented homes. Despite this setback, Matthews somehow found new sponsors. Relocating to a remote spot north of Swansea, he built a large bungalow with six bedrooms, a laboratory and his own private airstrip, all guarded by an electrified fence with steel gates. There he continued working on new inventions. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was working on a rocket plane powered by liquid hydrogen. He also offered ‘aerial mines’ and a device for detecting submarines; as before, though, officials were sceptical. Harry Grindell Matthews died of a heart attack at his Welsh home on 11 September 1941, aged 61. Just seven people – including the local police constable – attended the funeral. What are we to make of him? In the debit column, we have to include his love of fine living, leading him to squander his backers’ money, as well as his poor treatment of many of those around him. He deserted his first wife, Kate Williams, shortly after their marriage in 1904; it took her years to track him down to Bexhill – where he was living with another woman – and divorce him. His second marriage, to an American woman, also didn’t last. Finally, in 1938, he became the fifth husband of the hugely wealthy opera singer Ganna Walska; that, too, didn’t last. Matthews’ ‘Death Ray’ was his invention that attracted the most attention. He may have believed honestly that he could build it, given enough time and money, but his claims for it and his surrounding activities were unquestionably suspicious. Nearly all of his other inventions were successful, though, and his work was the stuff of science fiction. Look at Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and other interwar visions of the future, and you can see Harry’s ideas embedded in them. Liquid hydrogen has been used as rocket propellant in US, European and Japanese space launches. And the signal beamed into the night sky to summon Batman to save Gotham? That’s Harry Matthews’ sky projector. This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Emily Anderson: the secret life of Britain's most senior female wartime codebreaker
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
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 German and French from a young age. But the studious girl with an aptitude for languages was also a talented pianist, and it was music that became the grand passion of her life. Graduating in 1911 with a first-class honours degree in modern languages, she went to Germany to pursue postgraduate studies at the universities of Berlin and Marburg. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Anderson fled Marburg and began teaching languages at a girls’ boarding school in Barbados. In December 1916, her brother Alexander, serving with the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over the Somme and taken prisoner by the Germans. Anderson returned to Galway in May 1917 to take up an appointment as professor of German, but she was also motivated by a desire to play her part in the war effort, and her father’s Cambridge connections led to her being “passed under the microscope” to assess her suitability for what was termed “military intelligence work”. Anderson resigned her chair in July 1918, having agreed to serve for the remainder of the war, and became part of a secret group of female language lecturers known as the Hush WAACs, who were trained to decode the SIGINT (signals intelligence) messages sent in Morse code by the enemy. The work required mental gymnastics skills that defeated most linguists, but from the outset Anderson proved to be a quite exceptional codebreaker. When the war ended, she was one of only four women asked to stay on and form part of a new permanent SIGINT organisation, known as the Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS) – the forerunner of today’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). From Bletchley to Cairo Anderson’s metier was diplomatic intelligence (DIPLO), and in the interwar period she was acknowledged as the ‘Queen of Diplo’, becoming head of the Italian Diplomatic Section at the GC&CS. DIPLO was particularly important during these years, as intercepting diplomatic messages between embassies and politicians was key to understanding the intentions and ambitions of rival powers. Anderson was considered one of the top three female codebreakers in the world; the other two – Agnes Meyer Driscoll and Elizebeth Friedman – were both American. Anderson moved to the GC&CS’s war station at Bletchley Park in August 1939, where she began a relationship with a female colleague, Dorothy Brooks, the two women sharing a billet in the village of Swanbourne. She remained at Bletchley until July 1940, when the Italian threat in east and north Africa increased, and at her request she and Brooks were sent to a newly established joint Military and Air Force cryptologic bureau in Cairo, known as Combined Bureau Middle East (CBME), to be closer to Italian SIGINT traffic. As the position in Cairo related to military and not diplomatic codes, Anderson relinquished her position as head of Italian DIPLO, and never held the role again. Read more | Noor Inayat Khan: the daring life of the British WW2 ‘spy princess’ Anderson’s work in Cairo was the high point of her career. The SIGINT that she provided helped bring about Allied victory in the east Africa campaign and the loss of Italy’s colonial territories in the region. As a result, she was awarded an OBE in 1943. Of the role played by SIGINT, the man in charge of Britain’s East Africa Force, Lieutenant-General Sir Alan Cunningham, acknowledged that: “There can seldom in the history of war have been a campaign in which the commander was so continuously served with accurate information of the enemy’s movements and dispositions.” Disappearing from view In 1943, with the Italians all but defeated, Anderson returned to London, where she worked on German, Italian and Hungarian codes at the GC&CS’s Berkeley Street office. Her relationship with Dorothy Brooks did not survive their time in Cairo; Brooks later married and had a son. Anderson retired in 1950 as the most senior female codebreaker in the British intelligence service, and began living with another woman in the mid-1950s, before that relationship, too, ended. Remarkably, in spite of the intense pressures of her professional life, throughout her codebreaking career Anderson spent her spare time undertaking two significant scholarly works. The first, an English translation of The Letters of Mozart and his Family, was published in 1938. The second, a translation of The Letters of Beethoven, was published in 1961. None of her many musicological friends throughout the world ever suspected that the genteel Miss Anderson, usually attired in a smart silk blouse and well-cut suit, who visited archives in Berlin, Bonn, Vienna and Salzburg and spoke German like a native, was anything other than the “civil servant with the Foreign Office” that she professed to be. Following her death from a heart attack on 26 October 1962, Anderson’s remains were cremated. Per her instructions there was to be no interment and no monument: her ashes were scattered on the crocus lawn at Golders Green Crematorium by the venue’s staff. As she had intended, all trace of this intensely private woman disappeared. All that remained was what she perceived as her greatest legacy: her collections of the letters of Mozart and Beethoven. Jackie Uí Chionna teaches history at the University of Galway. She researched Anderson’s life for her recent book Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain’s Greatest Female Codebreaker (Headline, 2023) This article was first published in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine