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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
Nicholas Winton: the real history of the 'British Schindler'
In 1939, as the Nazis closed in on Czechoslovakia, hundreds of Jewish children were transported to safety in Britain. Edward Abel Smith tells the story of a young British man at the heart of these rescue efforts
In the early hours of Saturday 1 July 1939, 10-year-old Věra Diamantová was jerked suddenly awake. Her train had lurched roughly across a railway junction on its way out of Czechoslovakia (today divided between the Czech Republic and Slovakia). As Vera’s eyes adjusted to the pitch-dark carriage, she could just make out some of the other 240 children, mostly Jewish and aged 3–15, crammed in around her. Sitting next to Vera was six-year-old Alfred, who recalled years later that, when leaving the Czech capital of Prague, “I was aware of my mother’s nervousness, but I did not understand the reason why... for me it was a holiday trip and a tremendous adventure.” The children aboard that train came from widely different backgrounds and had very little in common – except that almost none of them would ever see their parents again. They were among 669 children who, between 14 March and 2 August 1939, left behind their families in Czechoslovakia and were evacuated to England thanks to a small group of individuals headed by Nicholas Winton. You might also be interested in | Oskar Schindler: your guide to his life and legacy Born in 1909 to German Jewish parents, Winton grew up in north London, where his family suffered ostracism because of their Jewish heritage. They lived there in an enormous 20-roomed house that was managed by four members of staff including a cook and a nanny. “We weren’t, by any means, rich... our class was, I suppose, moderately middle class,” Winton later reflected. At the age of 14, Winton was sent to the newly opened Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, where the eccentric headmaster taught his students the skills necessary to be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck”. While there, Winton enjoyed an eclectic range of hobbies including rugby, horse riding, fencing and pigeon-fancying. Although his academic results were mixed, he left Stowe with a set of strong beliefs and an impressive work ethic. Winton’s father – whose glass-importing business was slowly failing – encouraged his son to go straight into work in order to help support the family financially. “Father was very keen that I should become a banker,” Winton recalled, somewhat resentfully. Although he never really enjoyed banking, the job enabled him to live in Germany for a year in 1929, where he witnessed first hand the dire impact of the economic depression on the country. Winton’s life changed forever when his close friend Martin Blake cancelled a skiing holiday arranged to celebrate new year 1938–39. The day before their flight, Blake called Winton to say: “I’m going out to Prague tomorrow... Give up your winter sports holidays and come and join me.” Intrigued, Winton swapped his ski outfit for a thick woollen suit, and changed his plane ticket to book the next available seat to Czechoslovakia. Evacuation in action Nothing could have prepared him for what he experienced when he arrived in Prague on 31 December 1938. In a bid to appease Adolf Hitler, earlier that year western powers had agreed to allow Germany to take control of the part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. This thin slither of territory bordering Germany had been incorporated into Czechoslovakia after the First World War, when Austria-Hungary was dismembered. The advent of Nazi rule in the Sudetenland immediately sparked a mass exodus of terrified citizens, many of them Jewish and only too aware of the persecution they would face under German control. Perhaps 200,000 refugees swarmed into Prague, desperately seeking safety. Arriving in the Czech capital, Winton was faced with sprawling refugee camps, homeless people wandering the freezing streets, and terrified, lost children who had become separated from their parents. It was clearly only a matter of time before the Nazis invaded the rest of the country, so Winton immediately offered his services to the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, alongside Blake. The Prague office was led by a remarkable woman called Doreen Warriner, an academic from England who had also changed her travel plans, forgoing a research fellowship in the Caribbean in order to help people suffering in Prague’s sub-zero temperatures. Read more | The Jews who fought back: the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising She was immediately impressed by Winton. “Miss Warriner has already asked me to be secretary of a children’s committee,” he wrote to his mother on his second night in the country. Having only three weeks in Prague before he needed to return home for work – and with little help from Blake, who was there for only a few days – Winton immediately set to work trying to understand the practicalities of enabling unaccompanied children to escape the country. Herculean effort The task was Herculean. Winton and his colleagues needed to establish the mode by which children could travel, gather the paperwork to enable their exit from Czechoslovakia and into Britain, and finally source families who might foster these children upon their arrival. Winton began the daunting job of gathering the details of all Jewish children whose parents were desperate to get them to safety. Queues of families would form outside his hotel room from 6am each day, and Winton met each of them in order to create a lengthy list of children. Meanwhile, he set his mother to work in London arranging the necessary travel documents. As his three weeks in Prague came to an end, Winton flew back to Britain on 21 January 1939 clutching a file with the details of 5,000 children he desperately wanted to help. At that point, Trevor Chadwick – another British man who travelled to Czechoslovakia to offer assistance – took over operations in Prague. Meanwhile, Winton assembled a small team in London – including his mother and Blake – and began trying to find families in Britain who were willing to offer homes to the children on his list. Working as a stockbroker by day, he returned each evening to his flat where he would continue his humanitarian task, writing endless letters to potential foster parents and other people who might be able to donate money. Journey to safety A few weeks after leaving Prague, Winton stood with his mother on a damp railway platform at London’s Liverpool Street station, where a green steam train carrying the first 20 children from Prague came to a stop. As they descended from the carriages, Winton introduced each child to his or her new foster parents, and watched them leave to start a new life in England. This became a routine for him over the next few months, greeting each train as it arrived. “I really don’t quite know how we managed to sort the chaos which ensued when the train pulled in,” he later reflected. Read more | Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust In total, 669 children, mostly Jewish, escaped Prague in this way – until such transports were cancelled just before Britain entered the war. Tragically, many thousands of other Jewish Czech children not lucky enough to get a place on one of the eight trains organised by Winton suffered very different rail journeys to Nazi concentration and death camps. Only a handful of them survived. It was not just Winton’s modesty that prevented him from speaking about his actions in 1939, but also a sense of sadness for those children he was not able to save. His achievements became widely known only when he was invited onto Esther Rantzen’s show That’s Life in 1988. In a moving piece of television, Winton heard his story recounted – unaware that many of those he had saved were sitting around him in the audience, meeting their rescuer for the first time since 1939. They later presented him with a ring inscribed with words from the Talmud: “Save one life, save the world.” Winton died, aged 106, in 2015. Edward Abel Smith is the author of The British Oskar Schindler: The Life and Work of Nicholas Winton (Pen & Sword, 2023). Nicholas Winton is the subject of new biopic One Life, released on 1 January