The official website for BBC History Magazine
In the wake of the nuclear attacks on Japan, the official Allied line was that radiation sickness was not a danger. Yet, as Steve O’Hagan reveals, the first western journalist to witness the effects on the people of Hiroshima told a very different story
At 6am on 2 September 1945, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett boarded a crowded train heading south-west from the wreckage of war-ravaged Tokyo. He was disobeying strict orders that no westerners should venture outside the Japanese capital – and, though he did not yet realise it, he was undertaking the most momentous journey of his life. The Second World War had ended. However, Japan had not formally surrendered, and American occupation was still to come. Japan’s cities lay in ruins, and Burchett couldn’t even be sure that the train line to his destination, over 400 miles away, was intact. He was also alone and in great danger – hence the Colt .45 pistol in his suitcase. Resentment towards the Allies ran high. Crammed around Burchett in his carriage were Japanese Army officers bearing samurai swords. Although he spoke almost no Japanese, Burchett could feel the animosity in the soldiers’ venomous stares. Also among the passengers was an American priest, who nervously warned Burchett that one wrong move could cost them their lives. Should they smile or shake hands, it could be taken by the Japanese officers as a sign of gloating over the Japanese surrender to the Allies that was being formalised later that day. Burchett later recalled glancing nervously at the soldiers: their hands seemed to toy with the hilts of their swords. As the train plunged in and out of long, dark tunnels, he was convinced that he could hear the sound of steel being unsheathed from scabbards. Thankfully, the assault he feared never came. But even as the train reached its destination some 20 hours after setting out, his tension did not abate. He was arriving in Hiroshima – the city that, four weeks earlier, had been nigh obliterated by the world’s first ever nuclear bomb attack. In one of the 20th century’s most remarkable feats of investigative reporting, Burchett was about to become the first western journalist to bear witness to the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. A scramble to control the narrative about the reality of the deadly nature of nuclear fallout had begun. Reputational risk Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima presented the US with a public relations dilemma. What story should the country tell the world about unleashing this terrifyingly powerful experimental weapon on a densely populated city? The ‘leaders of the free world’ did not want to be seen as having become monsters while defeating the evils of fascism. As Henry Stimson, US secretary of war between 1940 and 1945, put it, the authorities didn’t want to “get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities”. Read more | How Nazi secrets triggered the ultimate moral dilemma – and led to Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb No one is sure exactly how many were killed in the attack. The city of Hiroshima initially estimated that 42,000 people died, from a population of around 350,000. A year later this number was revised up to 100,000. More recent estimates suggest that, by the end of 1945, up to 140,000 may have died from the immediate and long-term effects of the bomb. The vast majority were civilians. So when President Harry S Truman made radio addresses announcing the dropping of the bomb, he sought to establish the official narrative. First, he referred to Hiroshima not as a city full of civilians but as a “military base”. Second, the weapon was portrayed solely in terms of its explosive potential, with “more power than 20,000 tons of TNT”. Crucially, there was no mention of the potential dangers of radiation, which the Americans expected – or, perhaps more accurately, hoped – would not be an issue. Three days later, a New York Times article quoted Manhattan Project scientist Robert Oppenheimer saying: “There is every reason to believe that there was no appreciable radioactivity on the ground at Hiroshima and what little there was decayed very rapidly.” In the weeks that followed the bombing, this was the accepted narrative – until, that is, the previously little-known journalist Wilfred Burchett intervened. Born in 1911, Burchett grew up in the Australian Outback in Victoria, and left school at the age of 15 after his father’s business failed. He spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s as an itinerant labourer. A self-taught linguist with a burning interest in the outside world, he travelled to London in 1937, where he married a Jewish refugee from Germany and worked for a travel agency arranging for German Jews to emigrate to destinations such as Palestine. Front-line reporting Returning to Australia, Burchett forged a career as a journalist. After Japan entered the Second World War in 1941, he filed stories from the Burmese and Chinese fronts. He then joined the US Marines on their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific in 1944, reporting for the UK’s Daily Express. When Japan accepted defeat following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Burchett was due to be part of the official press corps covering the final act of the Second World War: the signing of ceremonial surrender documents aboard the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. However, as some 600 correspondents gathered for the event, Burchett was not among them. Feigning illness to slip away from his US military chaperone, he set out on his illicit and perilous journey to Hiroshima. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/British-Newspaper-Archives-AtomicPlagueDailyExpresswebready-ba8b67e.jpg" width="1500" height="1189" alt="A picture of a newspaper article from the Daily Express newspaper, with the headline THE ATOMIC PLAGUE" title="Burchett’s report on the impacts of radiation sickness in Hiroshima appeared in the Daily Express in 1945. It contradicted the official US narrative about the bomb (Image by British Newspaper Archives)" /> Upon arrival, Burchett was astonished by the sheer physical destruction wreaked upon the city: almost 70 per cent of its buildings had been wrecked. “There was nothing but awful devastation and desolation,” he wrote later, likening what he saw to “some death-stricken other planet”. He was guided by a local journalist to a hospital. “If the evidence of the material destruction of the city had been horrifying,” Burchett wrote, “the effects on humans as I saw them inside the hospital wards was a thousand times more so.” Patients – often whole families – were laid out on filthy tatami mats among the rubble of the damaged facility. Burchett saw how, four weeks after the attack, people were being treated not only for the horrendous effects of the blast but also for something else more mysterious, more sinister. Victims suffered a raft of perplexing symptoms: fever, diarrhoea, hair loss, hideous marks on the skin, bleeding from the mouth and other orifices. We now recognise these as markers of the advanced stages of radiation sickness, but the local doctors at the time had no idea what they were seeing. Many believed that the bomb had released poisonous gases from the ground. Burchett immediately understood that what he was witnessing was not just a visual manifestation of the end of the Second World War but the fate of inhabitants of hundreds of cities worldwide should there be another global conflict. “If that does not make a journalist want to shape history in the right direction, what does?” he wrote. In a state of near shock, Burchett sat on a concrete block among the ruins outside the hospital and tapped out his story on his battered typewriter. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-92425109webready-9744727.jpg" width="3888" height="2592" alt="A black and white photograph of lots of people laying on the floor. One man is standing up, watching over the sick people laying down" title="Tens of thousands who survived the blast over Hiroshima suffered symptoms that mystified doctors who’d never seen the effects of radiation (Image by Getty Images)" /> Three days later, on Wednesday 5 September, Britain awoke to an apocalyptic front cover on the Daily Express. “The Atomic Plague” was the main splash, then: “Doctors fall as they work.” (In the haste to get the story published, authorship was wrongly attributed to “Peter” Burchett.) Read more | Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict" Burchett’s searing reportage painted a terrifyingly vivid picture: “Hiroshima… looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence… It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made devastation.” The focus of his piece was, though, on the “uncanny after-effects” from which “people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly” weeks after the attack. The words he chose to describe this sinister malaise – “Atomic Plague” – suggested that the bomb dropped by the US was on a par with a chemical or biological weapon, both outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Initiating global opposition Also striking was the polemical strap-line to Burchett’s article: “I write this as a warning to the world.” With these words, he arguably initiated the global opposition to nuclear weapons that persists to this day. His article travelled rapidly around the globe after the Express released the text free to the international press – but this was not the story that the US military wanted the world to read. US authorities immediately moved to shut down Burchett’s narrative. Press conferences were held at which his claims of “atomic plague” were refuted, and military officials accused Burchett of having “fallen victim to Japanese propaganda”. Hiroshima was declared out of bounds to the media, and any reports of radiation sickness were censored. Burchett’s press accreditation was rescinded and he was encouraged to leave Japan. In the American press, stories sympathetic to the official line quoted Manhattan Project officials minimising the reports of radiation sickness. “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” ran one piece in the New York Times on 13 September. General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, testified to the Senate in November 1945 that scientists believed radiation sickness “is a very pleasant way to die”. In this way, Burchett’s warning to the world was to a large extent successfully suppressed in the months following its publication. But nobody could stop the truth radiating out from Ground Zero forever. In the years that followed, more information about the effects of radiation exposure emerged. In August 1946, the New Yorker ran its now famous John Hersey-penned Hiroshima issue (published as a book later that year), which opened millions of eyes to the horrors of what had happened. In 1954, the crew of a Japanese fishing trawler were poisoned by radioactivity from a US thermonuclear bomb test, with one man dying. And victims in Hiroshima continued to die young as the years ticked by. Nonetheless, it would take decades for the US to accept the full reality of radiation sickness – even after it afflicted American citizens: it wasn’t until the 1980s that US veterans of atomic tests received any compensation. No such compensation has ever come the way of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wilfred Burchett died in 1983, at the age of 72. By then, his scoop from the ruins of Hiroshima was largely forgotten in the west. But not in the city itself. Over the course of his life, Burchett returned several times to Hiroshima, where he was welcomed and feted by the Hibakusha – the survivors of the world’s first nuclear attacks. For them, there could be no forgetting. Steve O’Hagan is a documentary film and radio producer. His Archive on 4: Exposing Hiroshima programme about Wilfred Burchett’s reporting is available now on BBC Sounds This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
When Bob Geldof exhorted audiences to fill Wembley Stadium and empty their pockets for famine relief in Ethiopia, he changed the face of charity fundraising – and of live music. On its 40th anniversary, David Hepworth – one of the BBC presenters on the day – explores the legacy of Live Aid
If not quite the moon landing or the shooting of JFK, 13 July 1985 remains a day on which most people who were alive remember exactly where they were – a day marked by a seismic social and cultural shift. The defining moment came around seven o’clock in the evening. Queen, a rock band whose star had seemed to be on the wane, was performing ‘We Will Rock You’ at Wembley Stadium. The audience seemed almost possessed – overwhelmed at simply being part of the occasion. Frontman Freddie Mercury pointed the cameraman at the crowd – more than 70,000 people clapping in perfect synchrony, hands above their heads. In this instant was born a new age of musical performance that would be notable as much for what things looked like as for the way they sounded. The road to today’s special-effects-packed, big-ticket concert experience was laid at Live Aid. The Age of Spectacle started here. Essential viewing What was to climax with a TV event that everybody watched because they wanted to began with a TV event that many watched because they had little choice. That was Michael Buerk’s report from the camps on the plain of Korem in Ethiopia’s Tigray region where, in October 1984, many thousands were dying as a result of famine and war. Bob Geldof was at home on the evening of Buerk’s broadcast – because his career as the lead singer of The Boomtown Rats was no longer quite as chart-busting as it had been. Moved and enraged by what he saw, he took the prodigious energy that would ordinarily have been put into plugging a new single, and dragooned his pop mates into singing on a charity record. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-90764827-2c6c58c.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A man in a stripey shirt stands around with several young children. The children are thin, barefoot and mostly dressed in cut-offs" title="Photojournalist Mohamed Amin and BBC reporter Michael Buerk at Korem relief camp, Ethiopia, in 1984. Buerk’s report on the famine inspired Bob Geldof to use music to raise funds (Image by Getty Images)" /> One of the most widely held misconceptions about the popular music scene of today is that it moves swiftly. That is not the case. It’s glacial. Glastonbury now involves more planning than the Normandy D-Day landings. By contrast, Band Aid (and the concert that followed, Live Aid) came together so quickly they took your breath away – and nobody realised the extent of what had been achieved until long after it was over. When I went to Sarm West Studios on Sunday 25 November 1984 to report on the recording of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, there was no guarantee that the project would fly at all. Bob Geldof’s doing a charity record, the murmurs went: we’ll believe it when we see it. Two weeks later, it was number one – the biggest story in music – and all of your neighbours had snapped up a copy. Read more | My history hero: Aled Jones chooses Freddie Mercury (1946–91) Why? Were they seized by altruism? That’s impossible to know. The motivations of those people who grabbed the single in Woolworths and Our Price and a thousand other retail outlets that December were probably as mixed as those of the people who had been invited to sing on it: happy to do something for a good cause, and also rather enjoying feeling at one with the national mood. Today we would call it a vibe shift. The record was such a phenomenon that it demanded some kind of follow-up. By some extraordinary stroke of good fortune, Geldof – whose personal success had ebbed – had caught a wave of public sentiment. Suddenly, everybody in his orbit – the broadcasters, the acts, the record companies and the media – looked to see where he might lead them next. A show of some kind? There had been benefit concerts before, of course, with proceeds donated to help the victims of wars and humanitarian disasters in Biafra (Nigeria), Bangladesh and Kampuchea (now Cambodia). In the years following Live Aid would come Farm Aid, Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday, The Concert for New York City, and so many others that they swiftly hardened into ritual. But only Live Aid reverberates strongly enough in the public memory that it inspires people to recall where they were that day, and to reminisce about how they felt history was being made. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/shutterstockeditorial117568h-0606d46.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A massive crowd of people stand together to watch singers on stage at Wembley Stadium. Above the stage, a banner reads 'Feed the world, July 13th 1985 at Wembley Stadium'" title="Performers gather at the close of Live Aid Wembley to sing ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ (Image by Shutterstock)" /> Benefit of experience The big pop names of the early 1980s – the likes of Elvis Costello, Boy George, Paul Weller, Ian Dury and Joe Strummer – were notable for two things. The first was their readiness to opine on a wide range of subjects without fear of cancellation; the second was their awareness of where their predecessors – and here they were thinking about the likes of the Beatles, Stones and David Bowie – may have gone wrong back in the days when they were the new kids on the block. None of this new galaxy of stars, whose profile was heightened thanks to MTV and the sudden ubiquity of the pop video, was more garrulous or more aware of their part in carrying on the tradition of big gestures and good works than Irishman Geldof. When he decided to follow up the roaring success of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ with a benefit concert to be called Live Aid, he consulted a former Beatle for advice. In 1971, George Harrison had organised the earlier star-studded Concert for Bangladesh in New York. Sort out the charitable side first, advised the Beatle who wrote ‘Taxman’, or the Inland Revenue will take most of what you raise. Unlike Harrison’s Bangladesh show, which was poorly filmed and given an underwhelming cinema release months later, Live Aid would be planned from the start as event television. It was designed to be experienced by as many people as could be reached on the day – and in this it was a child of the times. It would be staged at two venues on the same day, with an impressive roster of mostly British and Irish acts playing Wembley Stadium in London, and an equally stellar line-up of largely American artists at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. (In the event, Phil Collins jetted across the Atlantic to appear in both venues.) Live Aid proved an even better use of Geldof’s talents than Band Aid or any number of Boomtown Rats records. It was precisely because his group had failed in the US that he understood the importance of appealing to the American market. He could no longer allow the likes of Paul Weller and Status Quo to be his event’s only stars. He had to browbeat The Who and Led Zeppelin to get back on stage. He had to attract musicians of an older generation – veterans such as Elton John, David Bowie and Queen, most of whom were keen to be invited while wary of having their thunder stolen by each other. And, in order to ensure that the event was perceived as must-watch TV, Geldof had to get everyone to submit to playing no more than a handful of numbers – a difficult sell in a business where the pecking order is measured in stage time, and everybody wants to go on at dusk. Having worked as a journalist, Geldof understood the importance of building Live Aid as a story that the popular press – still a big deal in those days – would get behind. He knew that the attendance of Princess Diana – who liked to have it known that she was a fan of George Michael and skated the halls of Kensington Palace to the songs of Dire Straits – was far more important than that of her husband, Charles. Geldof, a media tycoon in waiting, was able to put pressure on the BBC to bring its unmatched experience of outside broadcasts to bear on the day. Nobody else would have been able to bring it off, before or since. Independent spirit Although most of the acts involved would have blenched at the idea, it owed a lot to a can-do spirit that Margaret Thatcher would have applauded. Many of the prime movers had come up via the independent record labels of the late 1970s, where they had realised that nothing got done unless you did it yourself. Furthermore, since Live Aid was being planned during a ‘Second British Invasion’ when the commanding heights of American pop had been conquered by Annie Lennox and Boy George, the British music industry was going through one of its sporadic cocky periods. The Band Aid Trust – the charity set up to ensure that the mistakes of 1971 were not repeated – may have been powered by established names such as promoter Harvey Goldsmith, artist manager Chris Morrison and television mogul Michael Grade, but it was Geldof who provided the leadership. He employed every inch of the bully pulpit provided by his unsought elevation to ‘Saint Bob’ status to pull everyone into line, from British Airways to Robert Maxwell to the trade unions. It couldn’t possibly happen today. The world in which someone like Bob Geldof could pick up the phone to a handful of powerful, well-intentioned people in the media and have them order the clearing of whole TV schedules and entire newspapers to make room for this biggest of splashes has evaporated in the 40 years since 1985. At the same time, the conquest of public discourse by social media has resulted in a world where well-meant initiatives are lambasted for falling short of perfection rather than modestly applauded for giving things a try. Back in 1985, very few people pointed out that there were relatively few women and next to no people of colour on the bill at Wembley. When you look back at the footage today, when identity politics is to our era what respectability was to the Victorians, those sins of omission are the first things that strike you. We would never be so innocent again. Read more | From Ancient Greece to Glastonbury: a brief history of music festivals Sunny disposition As proceedings got under way in Wembley at noon that July Saturday, though, I remember looking out at the spectacle and thinking: somebody must have lit a candle for Geldof. At the time, the ticket price of £25 seemed a bit on the stiff side, but people were prepared to overlook that fact because half of the proceeds were going to charity. And on the day, it was easy to see that the crowd – far more ecumenical than the standard partisan audience at rock concerts – was in a good mood. That was partly because the sun was shining – rarely something Londoners take for granted. It glinted on the trumpets of the Coldstream Guards as they played their fanfare (a very Mary Poppins touch for people tuning in overseas) before Status Quo got things up and running with the most perfect song choice of the entire day: John Fogerty’s ‘Rockin’ All Over the World’. In that glorious sunshine, the BBC’s live television coverage of the spectacle was pleasing to the eye. In retrospect, it felt as if that day had successfully sold Middle England the idea of a rock concert not as a brow-furrowing ordeal but as a festival in which you and your fellow audience members linked arms to join in with songs you had known since your teenage years. The experience of open-air live pop music, now as much a part of the British summer as Wimbledon, was at the time in its infancy. Yet throughout that afternoon, swelling numbers of Britons abandoned mowing the lawn or cleaning the car to watch Sting and Phil Collins or Sade perform at Wembley – albeit from the comfort of their living rooms. Live Aid had other unintended consequences. It confirmed the end of a generation gap that punk had done so much to foster in the previous decade. For several chart acts of 1985 – Howard Jones, Nik Kershaw, the Thompson Twins – it marked the high-water mark of their popularity. For others, such as U2 – who had feared that the whole experience would prove to be a career-ending disaster once Bono had disappeared into the crowd, unable to find his way back – it proved an accidental triumph. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-52983114-907d8a0.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="Dressed in a black, gold and red shiny jacket, Elton John sits at a piano. Behind him, a cameraman dressed in all white films him. In the background, a band plays various instruments" title="Elton John was one of a number of long-established artists for whom Live Aid helped revitalise flagging careers, argues David Hepworth (Image by Getty Images)" /> For older acts that Geldof had attracted because he considered them vital to overseas sales, it came as a massive bonus. Overnight, the likes of Queen and Elton John went from being mildly passé to becoming bona fide ‘legends’, embraced by all and sundry. And, of course, what nobody noticed at the time was that we were entering a future in which the majority of pop stars would be old ones – not that it’s dented their popularity one bit. When Paul McCartney closed out the London side of Live Aid, we looked in wonder at this venerable figure taking to the stage to sing ‘Let It Be’, and wondered at his great age. (He was 43.) But he wasn’t retiring: as we were to discover over the next 40 years, he was just getting started. Aside from all that, Live Aid provided the model for a new kind of media event on which burgeoning broadcasters would converge: World Cups, Glastonbury, the Oscars and state occasions across the world, consumed on more and more channels. Phenomenal start As it turned out, 13 July was just the start of the Live Aid phenomenon. Over the days and weeks that followed, the newspapers went all out with wall-to-wall coverage of the event, its organiser and participants. The campaign for Bob Geldof to be given a knighthood began next day, and the musicians who took part were most commonly described as ‘heroes’. Of course, most of them weren’t any such thing: they were just glad to be included, and happy to have the exposure. Yet there was no getting away from the fact that the way people seemed to feel about stars who play guitars was different from how they felt about actors or novelists. Live Aid played a key role in burnishing the status of these people to being somehow on the side of the angels. The road to the present, in which any rock star over the age of 60 has a good chance of being invited to Buckingham Palace, runs right through Live Aid. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-75502707-e5dbe39.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="Tina Turner, wearing a black leather dress, stands and sings alongside Mick Jagger, dressed in a blue T shirt" title="Tina Turner and Mick Jagger duet during the US section of Live Aid in Philadelphia. The two-venue approach was a pivotal part of Geldof’s strategy (Image by Getty Images)" /> Some £40m was raised that day for famine relief in Ethiopia, and the events of 13 July 1985 changed the face of charity. Suddenly, it was no longer the kindly old lady coming down your street with the collecting tin. It was the most famous person that the organisers could find, looming out of your TV set in a T-shirt bearing a provocative slogan, demanding that you get involved. And something else happened to us that day: we fell in love with scale itself. You can detect this every time you go to a big concert, which more and more of us do. Before anything has happened – often before a single note has been played – the crowd will begin roaring their approval, whooping and hollering to express their delight at simply being part of something. This being 2025, they will also be capturing their own film of the occasion on their phone. Will they watch it back? Probably not. But it will live long in their memory. Like Live Aid. David Hepworth is an author and broadcaster. His latest book is Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why Rock Stars Never Retire (Bantam, 2024) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"We sang, we danced and we all held hands": celebrating VE Day
It’s 80 years since Britain erupted in joy at the news that the war in Europe was over. But how did those who lived through VE Day remember it? With the help of the BBC WW2 People’s War archive, John Willis reveals a day of partying, remembrance and continuing sacrifice
The long and brutal war in Europe was finally over. At 2.41am on 7 May 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender agreement at General Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims, 80 miles north-east of Paris. Later that day, the BBC announced the news and the first celebrations began. Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared the following day a national holiday, VE Day (Victory in Europe), and checked the supply of beer was large enough to satisfy the thirst of a happy nation. In Southampton, VE Day opened with a symphony of blaring ships’ horns shortly after midnight. Later, beacons blazed, bunting fluttered in the afternoon sun and joyful parties echoed around every corner of Britain. Children tied effigies of Hitler to lampposts or burned the führer on bonfires. At 3pm, Churchill broadcast from Downing Street: “My dear friends, this is your hour. This is not a victory for any party or class. It’s a victory of the great British nation as a whole.” But Churchill also reminded the partying millions that the conflict was not yet over. A fanatical, undefeated Japan still controlled swathes of territory in the far east. In 2005, the BBC marked the 60th anniversary of VE Day by setting up a huge project called the WW2 People’s War. With help from thousands of volunteers, charities, libraries and museums, the corporation collected an astonishing 47,000 testimonies, both from those who had been serving in the armed forces and from the home front. This was not history as seen from the lofty perspective of politicians or generals, diplomats or historians. Rather, the project gathered the memories of ordinary British men and women – a ground-floor history. The WW2 People’s War (and my book of the same name) stand as comprehensive accounts by those who fought, grieved, loved and survived through years of conflict – and how they reacted when the fighting in Europe was over. Most of the testimonies on the following pages are taken from this archive. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/04/2C7DMHBcmyk-1197be3.jpg" width="2286" height="1522" alt="Four young people - two women and two men - stand with their arms around each other in the fountains at Trafalgar Square" title="One of the most famous images of VE Day from Trafalgar Square shows lifelong friends Cynthia Covello and Joyce Digney with two male companions" /> A riotous party Unsurprisingly, many of those who gave interviews had vivid memories of VE Day itself. Frank Mee from Stockton-on-Tees, who was 16 in May 1945, clearly remembered the party: “I went off to a dance and it was riotous, flags draped around the hall and lights full on, everyone kissing everyone else. I drew the line at the hairy-faced sailors and stuck to the girls, making sure I went round several times. We sang, we danced, and we all held hands singing every song we could think of… “We walked home feeling as if a huge cloud had lifted off our shoulders and I must admit I never once thought of the war in the far east still going on, as we sang and danced in the streets. Each time we met a group going the other way, we shared bottles and kissed all the girls. To a 16-year-old with raging hormones it was seventh heaven.” The scenes were similar in Glasgow. Tommy Mac was 14 and his testimony gives a sense of a topsy-turvy day when temporary connections gave rise to memories that lasted a lifetime: “She was an older girl, perhaps 16 or so. Still, she was to be my companion for the rest of the day. We made our way hand in hand from where we lived to find the main celebration in George Square… I didn’t see many drunks, now I think on it. There was no need. The spirits were lifted high enough as it was. It was quite wonderful to see all the men and women in uniform hugging, kissing and generally flirting with the civilian population. “During all this time, I never once let go of my companion’s hand. I danced with her, hugged her, kissed her too. I don’t know how many times. I never did find out what her second name was. All I knew was her name was Norah, my lovely Norah. In all my life I have never forgotten her, and although we were close to being as intimate as possible, there was never any impropriety. We stayed together until 4am when we finally kissed and said goodbye, each hugging the other. I never saw her again, and to this day I sometimes wonder whether Norah remembers as well. My lovely Norah, with you I shared the most memorable day of my life.” • Read more | A brief guide to VE Day Eight-year-old Barbara Vanderstock’s father had been away fighting for five years and by VE Day had still not returned home to Croydon. But his absence didn’t stop his family from joining in with festivities: “Never mind, we were going to celebrate. Mum organised a massive bonfire in the garden and all our friends came. The flames were as high as the house. We all sang songs of victory – ‘Roll out the Barrel’, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song I later learnt from dad made soldiers in the western desert weep. “Next, we went round to the street bonfire party where older boys carried lighted flames and marched in procession, ironically a sight reminiscent of the prewar Nazi rallies… There were flags, trestle tables, homemade paper hats, orange juice, jellies, and cakes and we sat there surrounded by laughing grown-ups who would give us anything we wanted.” But VE Day wasn’t just about bonfires and dancing. It also heralded the renewal of simple pleasures, as if a forgotten world of sensations had suddenly been found again. Mary Burgess from Liverpool enjoyed a carefree walk with her nephew, who identified himself only as ‘Tanker’ in the archive. He recalled: “The striking aspect of it all was the banks of daffodils everywhere. It was as though the whole world was new, was young again – and clean.” They joined a queue for ice cream: “Never have I tasted ice cream so creamy, so sweet and so cold. And the texture was just right perfect! So, there we were: Mary and I walking along in the spring sunshine, licking ice creams down to the last milky drops, which we sucked noisily out of the cardboard corners, and happier than we had been in years. That was when the war ended for me and that was when there seemed to be a future.” Central London was the scene of the biggest celebrations. Thousands attended public thanksgiving services at St Paul’s Cathedral. The royal family came out onto the Buckingham Palace balcony several times, waving to the joyful crowds. Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, moved anonymously as a 19-year-old through the happy evening crowds in her Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) uniform. She later described it as “one of the most memorable nights of my life”. The other foe Not everyone could face VE Day’s unrestrained jollity, especially those who had seen action. Ulric Cross, a Bomber Command navigator from Trinidad, was the most decorated West Indian in the RAF, nicknamed the Black Hornet. Cross fully intended to join the celebrations in London but, on witnessing the joyful crowds, he headed home. Having seen so many friends killed, he felt too uncomfortable to celebrate: “Everybody was overjoyed and I just didn’t feel like taking part in it. I just felt a lot of people had been killed. This was not a cause for celebration… A lot of my friends were killed… [But] I was extremely glad the war was over.” Or at least almost over. As Churchill had been careful to mention on 8 May, the Allies still faced “another foe”. This was abundantly clear to Odell Johnson of the US 453rd Bomb Group, which was assigned to fight the Japanese as the war in Europe wound down, but first had to return to the USA for training. On VE Day itself, as his troop train pulled past tenement buildings into London, Johnson witnessed a sight that made him laugh: “On the fourth or fifth floor, stood this elderly woman on the fire escape… In her hands she had a pair of red, white and blue bloomers.” Johnson was astonished at the size of the patriotic knickers: “[They] would have fitted the biggest elephant you ever saw. She stood there, waving at us Yanks going home on VE Day and wishing us well.” As Johnson was shipped out of the UK via Southampton, Ted Stocker was busy flying in the opposite direction, repatriating British prisoners from German camps. “We had the privilege of flying back over England on the evening of VE Day when all the bonfires were lit. It was a magnificent sight!… I did get a drink sometime early on the morning of the ninth as the girls in the telephone exchange found a bottle of gin that had something left in the bottom. I had a very tiny tot of gin. That was my VE Day.” Far from home If George’s VE Day pleasures were limited, he did at least make it back to Blighty. In contrast, thousands of British troops were miles away from the celebrations in the UK, maintaining order in Germany and countries the Nazis had occupied. WAAF Mary Pettit, for example, was stationed in Brussels: “What a sight! The whole city was lit up by searchlights, rockets, flares, Very lights [flares] everywhere. British, Belgian and American flags were flying, crowds were in the streets singing and laughing, car horns were sounding. As the evening sky darkened, the famous buildings were silhouetted against the glow from bonfires and fireworks. The old trams were clanking along as usual, but now with people standing or dancing on their roofs.” Mohammed Hussain was an Indian machine gunner stationed in Austria. When the soldiers learnt of Germany’s surrender: “There was a spontaneous eruption of joy. Within a few minutes the entire atmosphere had transformed from one of death to one of a potential new life.” Nineteen-year-old actor Beryl Andrews was touring Germany in an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) production. Her words similarly capture a sense of emotions being released. On VE Day, she was entertaining British troops at Emsdetten, North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany: “During the show someone came in at the back and called out, ‘The war is over!’ With one accord the whole audience rose to its feet and cheered madly, it was wonderful. I don’t know how we finished the show, we felt choked with emotion. I shall never forget hearing during the interval hundreds of happy voices singing, ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’.” Starting a fire Some, though, had to be on duty. Flight Lieutenant Albert Ricketts was also stationed in Germany. His whole base was stood down for VE Day, except Albert, who was ordered to fly to Canadian Army HQ to pick up a senior officer, Major-General Gerald Templer: “[He] greeted me with the words, ‘We must be the only silly buggers working today.’” That evening, in the absence of fireworks, Albert and his colleagues fired a Very pistol, or flare gun, instead. “The person using the pistol fired one cartridge straight up into the air and the wind carried the burning cartridge onto one of our aircraft setting it on fire, so it was completely wrecked. Somehow or other we managed to cover up this unfortunate accident.” • Read more | "The war without an end": what happened in Europe after VE Day? Ron Goldstein of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars had served in north Africa and Italy. The long battle against the Germans up through Italy was brutal and the campaign did not end until 2 May 1945, just six days before VE Day. Ron spent the day itself on duty near Venice: “There we were in this field in the middle of nowhere, when someone on another tank called out, ‘They’re going mad back home, get the BBC on your set or you’ll miss all the fun!’ I turned my set to the Forces station and, for the benefit of those outside the tank, hung all the earphones over the side of the hull. The crackle of the headphones soon drew a small crowd around the tank and we all listened in amazement to an unknown announcer describing the scenes in Trafalgar Square. “I remember quite clearly that my emotions at the time were mixed. On one hand it was good to feel that perhaps some of my loved ones back home were taking part in these scenes. On the other hand, I – and in hindsight I’m sure most of my comrades – felt somehow cheated that we, who had risked life and limb and had been away from home for so many years, were not there in England to share in the triumph.” A few days later, Goldstein received bad news that could only have compounded his sense of ambivalence: “I received a letter to say that my brother, Jack, had been shot down over Germany and had been posted as missing. It reached me within a week of the war ending in Europe.” While on VE Day itself, anxiety for the future was largely buried beneath the exuberant partying, Ron Goldstein’s memories offer a sharp reminder of how contingent the future still seemed – and was. In the domestic arena, for instance, many returning from service abroad wondered if their partners had found new love. And for those waiting at home, would their partners be the same after witnessing so much horror on the battlefield or in a prison or internment camp? A quote from Birmingham resident Eunice Edwards captures the uncertainty: “Everybody longed for the end of the war, to come home and get back to normal. Alas, no one could go back to 1939. Everything had changed. Some people had married and wanted new houses; some had lost loved ones and couldn’t rejoice. Some people got married after long separations and others got divorced as soon as they could. Some girls had married soldiers from America and Canada and went away to start new lives. It was a case of new beginnings for all of us.” Even for those not facing personal upheavals, there was a sense of needing to begin anew, as reflected in the reflective words of Kathleen Godrey, who was based at Bletchley Park and served with the WAAF: “Now it seems hard to imagine or even remember the shabbiness of our lives… No houses had been painted for years, no trees planted, no roads repaired. In cities where the parks should have been protected by elegant railings, there was either barbed wire or nothing at all. The railings and even saucepans had gone to win the war and in London most buildings which had been bombed were still standing in ruins. We all had to start a new life.” Conflict continued Some had to wait longer than others for a fresh start. On 8 May 1945, Enola Gay, the B-29 from which an atomic bomb would be dropped on Hiroshima in August, had yet to even enter service. In the far east, the fighting was still intense and thousands of British citizens were incarcerated in Japanese camps on VE Day. Cut off from the outside world, they had no idea the war in Europe was over. As Britain celebrated VE Day, Sergeant Len Baynes from Cambridgeshire was a prisoner of war in Thailand, who had been set to work repairing the infamous Burma Railway of Bridge on the River Kwai fame – a track that 12,000 Allied prisoners had died building. When a train transporting wounded Japanese soldiers pulled into a station, Baynes felt sympathy for the enemy: “Nearly every truck contained several dead. Many had terrible wounds, undressed and covered in flies. Others had amputations only covered in field dressings… Our men, their prisoners, walked the length of the train lifting those out who could stand, and filling mess tins and water bottles for others.” When he finally returned home aged 23, Len’s family scarcely recognised him: “I left home a fresh-faced young man and now I looked [to them] like an old man.” In her internment camp for women and children, deep in Sumatra’s interior, British nurse Phyllis Briggs also knew nothing about events in Europe. It was not until 24 August 1945, nine days after Japan had surrendered, that her guards told Briggs the war was over in both Europe and the far east. She had been interned for more than three years. In the final months of conflict, the number of women dying in Briggs’ camp rapidly increased: “The coffins were very rough boxes made of boards that did not even join together properly. We used to cover the coffin tops with ferns to make them look more decent and fill the gaps… I shall always connect ferns with dear friends who had gone. Miss Dryburgh, Nan Wier, Miss Livingstone, Mary Cooper, Macfie – all real friends dying one after another. Several Dutch nuns and Australian sisters died – always one or two deaths every day. The gravediggers found it difficult to dig deep enough, it took so much strength. In the end, it was the children who were the strongest and it was they who did the digging.” From an original group of 15 female internees, only five survived Japanese imprisonment. New world order For Phyllis Briggs and thousands like her, life after the war would never be the same again. Britain partied hard on VE Day, yet once the trestle tables were folded away and the bonfires burnt out, families across the nation – and in the various war zones across the globe – were confronted with the task of coming to terms with loss and dislocation in their lives. Soon they would vote out Winston Churchill, who had inspired Britons through even the darkest days of the war, and replace him as prime minister with Labour leader Clement Attlee. A new world beckoned. In Croydon, eight-year-old Barbara Vanderstock’s father had missed spending VE Day with his family, but he eventually returned home to fresh beginnings: “We went to town on the decorations, crowning our efforts with a large poster, ‘Welcome Home Dad’… We went to sleep and we were woken up by dad, who was in his army uniform standing at the door. He said: ‘Hello Erbs’, and we said: ‘Hello dad.’ It was a strangely ordinary moment.” John Willis is a historian and former TV executive. His latest book, The People’s War: Unheard Voices, is out now (BBC Books) This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
On the night of 18 July 1969, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy plunged into a tidal channel. Dominic Sandbrook details the tragedy, Kennedy's actions and the ensuing scandal that engulfed the Kennedy family, and came to be known as the Chappaquiddick incident…
In the summer of 1969, Edward Kennedy was riding high. Tall, handsome and athletic, the 37-year-old senator from Massachusetts was the last great hope of the Kennedy family. His brother Jack had fallen to an assassin’s bullet in 1963, and Robert had been shot while campaigning for the presidency in 1968. The newspapers talked of a ‘Kennedy curse’. But when Ted Kennedy’s fellow Democrats picked him as the youngest ever Senate Majority Whip in January 1969, his political destiny seemed certain. As the future Democratic presidential candidate in 1972, he would surely recapture the White House for the Kennedy family. What happened at Chappaquiddick on 18 July 1969? In July 1969, Kennedy took part in a regatta off Martha’s Vineyard, a summer playground for New England’s elite. On the evening of the 18th, the senator took the ferry to the neighbouring island of Chappaquiddick. There his staff had arranged a party to thank the six ‘boiler room girls’ who had worked on Robert’s ill-fated presidential campaign the previous summer. It was a fine evening, and the drink flowed merrily. At some point between 11 and midnight, Kennedy slipped away, taking one of the women, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, with him. Later he said that he was driving her to her hotel – though she left her handbag and room key behind. About an hour later, a policeman saw a car streaking along an unpaved dirt road. It was Kennedy and Kopechne. Lost in the darkness, Kennedy turned down an unpaved dirt road, and at the end his car slipped off the road and plunged into a deep tidal channel. It takes little imagination to picture the scene: the car falling and turning on its head; the water roaring in; the panic of the two passengers, pounding at the windows. “I remember thinking as the cold water rushed in around my head that I was for certain drowning,” Kennedy said later. “Then water entered my lungs and I actually felt the sensation of drowning. But somehow I struggled to the surface alive.” Mary Jo Kopechne, however, was still down there, trapped, possibly drowning. Kennedy shouted her name and dived fruitlessly into the water. Then he walked back to the party, passing several houses on the way. Back at the party, he told his cousin and an old friend what had happened, but nobody else. They went back to the scene, and the men took turns diving to look for Kopechne. It was no good. Kennedy was now sobbing and barely coherent. His friends told him to go back to Martha’s Vineyard and report the accident to the police. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Who killed JFK? Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now What happened next was, by any standards, peculiar. Still in a terrible state, Kennedy swam the narrow channel to Martha’s Vineyard and, streaming with water, stumbled up to his hotel. Instead of calling the police, however, he went up to his room and changed his clothes. By his own account, he was paralysed by shock: “I almost tossed and turned and walked around that room… I had not given up hope all night long that, by some miracle, Mary Jo would have escaped from the car.” But the hotel staff later reported that at around three in the morning, Kennedy, now wearing a smart jacket and slacks, complained about the noise from a nearby party. A few hours later, having risen early for breakfast, he was seen chatting with his fellow regatta competitors. He seemed in a “jovial” mood. It was not until mid-morning that Kennedy rang the police. By now fishermen had spotted the car, and divers had already recovered Kopechne’s dead body. What happened to Edward Kennedy after Chappaquiddick? The result was a media furore. After pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, Kennedy was given a suspended two-month prison sentence. Read more | The lost Kennedy: the tragic life of JFK’s sister Rosemary His presidential hopes were destroyed, but he saved his political career by giving an emotional television address. He was, he said, the victim of an “awful curse”. He mentioned Mary Jo Kopechne’s name five times. In the following decades, Edward Kennedy became perhaps the most admired senator in the country and a tireless champion for liberal causes. When he died in 2009, President Obama gave the eulogy. There were no such eulogies for Mary Jo Kopechne. The diver who found her stated that she probably survived in an air pocket for at least two hours. Had Kennedy called the police immediately after the accident, she might still be alive today. This article was first published in the July 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
The battle of Marston Moor: what happened?
Dominic Sandbrook explores the events of 2 July 1644 – the date that Oliver Cromwell's intervention in the battle of Marston Moor proved decisive in the English Civil Wars
At seven o'clock on the evening of 2 July 1644, Prince Rupert of the Rhine gazed out across the low-lying field of Marston Moor, just outside York. At his back were some 17,000 royalist troops, many exhausted after a long day's march. In front of him, across the fields, were the lines of his combined Parliamentarian and Scottish adversaries, at least 20,000 strong, their armour still glinting in the summer twilight. Rain was in the air; a thunderstorm was brewing. The king's nephew was anxious for battle, but perhaps it could wait until the morning. Hearing the Parliamentarian army singing psalms, he decided to call it a day and told his men to break for supper. Only moments later, the allied army struck. As thunder rolled across the moor, the Scottish and Roundhead allies began to stream down the gentle slope, picking up speed, adrenaline coursing through their horses’ veins. After years of stalemate, the great battle for control of the north, the decisive battle of the Civil War, was under way. Oliver Cromwell: the secret of his military genius At first it seemed that, as so many times before, Rupert’s forces would win the day. On the allied right, Sir Thomas Fairfax’s men struggled to get across the ditches between them and their royalist opponents, many falling under a hail of musket fire. Spotting the enemy musketeers, Fairfax wrote later, he decided “to charge them. We were a long time engaged with one another, but at last we routed that part of their Wing.” He turned to get back to his remaining men, “but that part of the Enemy which stood, perceiving the disorder they were in, had charged and routed them, before I could get to them.” As darkness drew in and the allied right crumpled, the royalists began to make headway in the centre, too. More than half of the Scottish infantry and many of the Parliamentarian forces panicked and ran; for a moment, it looked as though the day was lost for the allied cause. But salvation came from the left, where Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell commanded 3,000 cavalry from the Eastern Association, including his renowned Ironsides. Sweeping over the ditch, Cromwell’s men routed the royalists opposite and then regrouped for a second charge – a testament to their commander’s iron discipline, and a stark contrast with Rupert’s infamous recklessness. Scattering the royalist cavalry, Cromwell’s men then turned their attention to the infantry. And in the end, all that was left of Rupert’s army was a regiment of the Marquess of Newcastle’s men, the famous Whitecoats, who huddled in a small enclosure, holding off the Ironsides until their comrades could escape the field. Cromwell had turned a potential stalemate into victory. For the royalists, however, the day was lost. A few hours later, after darkness had fallen, their survivors straggled miserably into York. Listen | Mark Stoyle tackles popular queries about the Civil War, a conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians that wracked the British Isles in the middle of the 17th century That evening in July was a crushing blow for the royalist cause. With the Marquess of Newcastle fleeing into exile, and Prince Rupert heading south to rejoin his uncle, royalist power in the north of England had been effectively broken. What’s more, while Cromwell’s star had never been higher, Rupert’s was entering a long decline. In the Parliamentarian camp, all was jubilation. “Truly England and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this war began,” Cromwell wrote that evening to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton. “The Left Wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince’s horse. God made them as stubble to our swords.” 10 great misconceptions of the Civil War For all his religious ecstasy, Cromwell had not lost sight of the dreadful cost of victory. His next lines had a very different tone. At least 4,000 men lay lifeless on the moor outside York, among them Walton’s son. “Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot,” Cromwell wrote sadly. “It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died.” Yet he urged Walton to take comfort that his son was now with God. “There is your precious child full of glory, never to know sin or sorrow any more… He is a glorious Saint in Heaven; wherein you ought exceedingly to rejoice.” This article was first published in the August 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
Death in the New Forest: how King William II met his demise
Dominic Sandbrook explores the events of 2 August 1100, when William Rufus – third son of William the Conqueror – was the victim of a hunting party gone awry…
In the early hours of Thursday, 2 August 1100, the second Norman king of England, William Rufus, was asleep at his New Forest hunting lodge when he had a nightmare. According to one chronicler, he dreamt "that he was let blood by a surgeon, and that the stream, reaching to heaven, clouded the light and intercepted the day". In another version, William dreamed that he met the Devil, who said that he was looking forward to seeing him the next day. Either way, waking with a start, the king shouted for his servants to bring a light. It was obvious that the dream had seriously worried him. By lunchtime, however, William had recovered his spirits. It was a lovely sunny day: a perfect day, his friends suggested, for an afternoon in the saddle. While they were getting ready, an armourer presented six arrows to the king. William took four for himself; the others he handed to one of his companions, the Anglo-French nobleman Walter Tirel, Lord of Poix, who had a reputation as a fine marksman. "Bon archer, bonnes flèches," Rufus said with a smile: "Good arrows for a good shot." As William Rufus galloped into the woods that afternoon, he must have looked the very model of a medieval king. Forty years old, the third son of William the Conqueror, he cut an imposing figure. The chronicler William of Malmesbury described him as “well set; his complexion florid, his hair yellow; of open countenance; different coloured eyes, varying with certain glittering specks; of astonishing strength, though not very tall, and his belly rather projecting”. Hot-tempered and sometimes boorish, he was nevertheless a good-humoured, generous man, who liked nothing better than drinking and joking with his cronies. Contemporaries were often shocked by his blasphemy and disregard for the church, as well as by rumours of homosexual goings-on. But by medieval standards his regime seemed eminently stable. It was late afternoon when William Rufus divided up his hunting party. Most of his courtiers remained with his younger brother, Henry, while the king rode off with Walter Tirel into the heart of the forest. What happened next remains something of a mystery, but the most famous version belongs to William of Malmesbury. “The sun was now declining,” he writes, “when the king, drawing his bow and letting fly an arrow, slightly wounded a stag which passed before him; and, keenly gazing, followed it, still running, a long time with his eyes, holding up his hand to keep off the power of the sun’s rays. At this moment Walter tried to transfix another stag, but – oh, gracious God! – unknowingly, and without power to prevent it, he pierced the king’s breast with a fatal arrow.” Realising the extent of his mistake, Walter Tirel panicked, spurred his horse and fled. According to a French chronicler, he later turned up across the channel, where he claimed that he had never been with the king that day at all. Many contemporary observers were sceptical that a first-class marksman could have made such a terrible mistake; some wondered whether Tirel had been put up to it by the king’s brother Henry, who was conveniently close by (but not too close) when it happened. But the truth is that we will never know. What we do know, though, is what happened next. When William’s courtiers found the body, blood was still pouring from the wound. Carried to Winchester in a cart, it left a trail of blood behind it. In the meantime, the king’s brother Henry was making some frantic calculations. His older brother, Robert, Duke of Normandy, was returning from the First Crusade; if Henry acted quickly, he could be king before Robert had even realised what had happened. With a handful of courtiers, he rode as fast as he could towards Winchester, intent on securing the royal treasury. Once he had the money, he reckoned, everything else would follow. That night he reached Winchester; three days later, he was crowned king at Westminster. It took Henry six years to see off Robert’s claim, but those first hours were crucial. Almost overnight, William Rufus was forgotten, and one of the most successful, stable and important reigns in English history had begun. This article was first published in the March 2011 edition of BBC History Magazine
A big day in history: Mary Ann Nichols becomes the first victim of ‘Jack the Ripper’ (31 August 1888)
On 31 August 1888, the body of a homeless women, brutally murdered and mutilated, was found in a Whitechapel backstreet. Here, as part of our 'big day in history' series, Dominic Sandbrook explores the discovery of Jack the Ripper's first victim, Mary Ann Nichols
As London’s bells rang in the last day of August 1888, rain was falling. It had been one of the wettest summers in living memory, and there was thunder in the air. On the horizon a fierce red glow seared the sky above Shadwell, where a huge fire had broken out in the dry dock. Some time between one and two o’clock that morning, a woman called Mary Ann Nichols, known to her friends as ‘Polly’, was thrown out of the kitchen of the shabby lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields. Fate had dealt Polly a rough hand. A 43-year-old mother of five children, she was separated from her husband and now drifted from one workhouse to another, scratching a meagre existence from handouts and casual prostitution. Read more: Your guide to Jack the Ripper 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history The 10 worst Britons in history Short of the four pence she needed to pay for a bed in the lodging house, Polly once more found herself on the street. “Never mind,” she said, gesturing at the velvet-trimmed straw bonnet she was wearing. “I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” The implication was clear: she was heading back out to find a punter. An hour or so later, Polly was seen by one of her roommates on the corner of Whitechapel Road, clearly drunk. She had made her doss money three times over, she boasted, but had already spent it on gin and was off to make some more. That was the last time Mary Ann Nichols was seen alive. At 3.40am, a carter found her lying in the darkened doorway of a stable. Her throat had been slit and her body horribly mutilated. The murderer who would later be dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ had claimed his first victim. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and presenter. This article was first published on History Extra in August 2016
A big day in history: Hannibal smashes his foes "at the very gates of Rome"
Dominic Sandbrook explores the events of 21 June 217 BC
In June 217 BC, Rome waited for news. For almost half a century, the republic had been locked in a bitter rivalry with its chief Mediterranean competitor, Carthage. Now war had broken out again, and this time the outcome seemed terrifyingly uncertain. In a stunning manoeuvre, the Carthaginians’ 30-year-old commander, Hannibal, had led tens of thousands of troops, cavalry and elephants north from modern-day Spain and across the Alps into Italy. In December Hannibal had crushed a Roman army in the Po Valley, and by the spring of 217 he was in central Italy. Never had Rome’s survival seemed in greater danger. Even Hannibal’s enemies recognised in him a worthy opponent. Centuries later, the Roman historian Livy told his readers that Hannibal took after his famous father, Hamilcar, with “the same bright look; the same fire in his eye, the same trick of countenance and features”. Crossing the Apennines, the Carthaginian general had lost an eye to conjunctivitis and thousands of men to disease. But nothing dimmed his desire for victory. The problem was that Hannibal was fighting on foreign soil. The Romans could afford to wait and hope that he ran out of food and allies. His priority, therefore, was to lure them into battle. It was Hannibal’s good fortune that the Roman commander, the consul Gaius Flaminius, was nowhere near his equal. Flaminius was camped at Arretium, but Hannibal had a plan to winkle him out. “He calculated,” wrote the Roman historian Polybius, “that, if he passed the camp and made a descent into the district beyond, Flaminius (partly for fear of popular reproach and partly out of personal irritation) would be unable to endure watching passively the devastation of the country but would spontaneously follow him… and give him opportunities for attack.” Hannibal was right. As the countryside went up in flames, Flaminius chafed at the bit. Some of his officers urged him to wait for reinforcements, but Flaminius was worried about his reputation. “They should think about what would certainly be said by their fellow citizens back in the city,” he replied angrily, “when they saw their countryside being laid waste almost up to the very gates of Rome.” What followed was one of the greatest disasters in Roman history. Hannibal had chosen his ground well, stationing his men in the wooded ridges above Lake Trasimene. And at dawn on 21 June, as the Roman columns came into view, he knew the gods were with him. “It was an unusually foggy morning,” wrote Polybius. Yet Flaminius had not even bothered to send scouts ahead. When Hannibal struck, according to Polybius, most of the Romans were “cut to pieces while still in their marching formations and unable to support one another… So they were annihilated before they even realised what was happening, and while they were still wondering how they should react.” It must have been a dreadful scene, the air ringing with steel and screams, the earth soaked with blood. “In such a thick fog,” wrote Livy, “ears were of more use than eyes; the men turned their gaze in every direction as they heard the groans of the wounded and the blows on shield or breastplate, and the mingled shouts of triumph and cries of panic.” Flaminius himself was cut down, and Roman resistance turned into flight. His men ran into the lake and tried to swim to safety, but it was “an endless and hopeless task”. They either drowned in the lake, or struggled back to the shore, where the Carthaginians were waiting with swords drawn. Afterwards the waters ran red with blood. In Rome, news of the defeat came as a terrible shock. Weeping women gathered at the city gates, desperate for news of their loved ones, while “the people flocked into the Forum in a great state of panic and confusion”. Yet the blow they most feared – an attack on the capital – never fell. Hannibal lacked the siege engines to take Rome itself, and instead of advancing on the city, he moved south to the fertile soil of Campania. Perhaps even then he wondered whether his strategy of taking the fight to the Romans would ever really work. The battle of Lake Trasimene is remembered today as one of the most stunning victories in military history, yet in the long run it mattered little. Everybody remembers Hannibal and his elephants, yet as he would have been the first to point out, it was Rome, not Carthage, that won the war. Dominic Sandbrook is a presenter and historian. This article first appeared in the June 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine
A big day in history: Rioters give East Anglia's rich and respectable a fright
Dominic Sandbrook considers the events of 22 May 1816
This article first appeared in the May 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine In the early months of 1816, eastern England seethed with discontent. The war against Napoleon was over, but the cost of victory had fallen hard on the common people. For the men returning, proud and weary, from Wellington’s victories on the continent, there was little comfort at home. Taxes were high and prices prohibitive: in just 12 months, the price of wheat effectively doubled. And with the economy in the doldrums, jobs were in short supply. “The state of the labouring poor,” admitted one response to a circular from the Board of Agriculture, “is very deplorable, and arises entirely from the want of employment, which they are willing to seek, but the farmer cannot afford to furnish.” At the beginning of May, disturbances broke out across East Anglia. On the 20th, local magistrates meeting at the Crown in Downham Market were temporarily besieged by protesters demanding decent wages. And on the 22nd, frustration turned into open violence. That evening several dozen villagers met at the Globe Inn, just 10 miles away in the village of Littleport. And as one drink followed another, tempers flared. As one villager blew a horn, calling others to join the throng, his comrades rampaged through the village streets, throwing stones and smashing shop windows. They broke into houses and threw the residents out; they stole property and hurled furniture into the street. Littleport’s vicar, the Reverend John Vachell, tried to get them to disperse by reading the Riot Act. But since Vachell was also a local magistrate, much hated for his severe sentences, his moral authority was non-existent. Heckled by the mob, he took refuge inside the vicarage, waving a gun and threatening to fire on anyone who approached – hardly, it has to be said, a very Christian way of carrying on. Shortly before midnight, however, three men broke into the house and managed to disarm him. And while the rioters were rifling through their possessions, Vachell, his wife and his daughters scrambled out of the house and fled south, towards the sleepy cathedral city of Ely. By dawn the following morning, the Littleport rioters had moved on to Ely too. The city was braced for trouble, since Vachell had already warned his fellow magistrates, and the crowd was greeted by the Reverend William Metcalfe, who read them the Riot Act and urged them to go home. But they were having none of it. “Our children are starving!” they shouted, demanding “the price of a stone of flour per day”. In the end, the local magistrates gave in, promising them two shillings each a week in poor relief and a minimum wage of two shillings a day – a pledge they were never likely to keep. The crowd seemed appeased, though – especially when the Ely magistrates offered them free beer if they went home. On the face of it, the rioters had got what they wanted. But the authorities had no intention of letting open rebellion go unpunished. Two days after the disturbances had begun, a detachment of Royal Dragoons rode into Littleport, accompanied by a troop of volunteer yeomanry and a small militia made up of Ely’s rich and respectable. When they rounded up the protesters in the street outside the George and Dragon, one man, Thomas Sindall, tried to resist and was promptly shot in the head. The others – 82 of them, in total – were taken to Ely gaol to wait for their trial. To Lord Liverpool’s Tory government, the Littleport and Ely riots were a frightening warning of the revolutionary anarchy beneath the surface of British life. Memories of the French Revolution were still raw; for the well-to-do, it was essential to be tough. So instead of leaving the trial to the local authorities, the home secretary appointed a special commission, whose chairman promised to teach “an awful lesson… that whatever wild or chimerical notions may prevail of the power of an armed multitude, the law is too strong for its assailants”. He was as good as his word. No fewer than 24 men were condemned to death, although 19 of them had their sentences commuted to penal transportation or imprisonment. For the remaining five men, however, justice was savage. On Friday 28 June, after praying with the watching crowds, they were hanged in Ely. The next day they were buried in St Mary’s Church, where the vicar installed a stone plaque in their memory. “May their awful fate”, read its final line, “be a warning to others.” Dominic Sandbrook is a presenter and historian
A big day in history: Nevsky's Russians crush the Teutonic Knights
Dominic Sandbrook explores the events of 5 April 1242
This article was first published in the April 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine It remains one of the most exciting scenes in cinematic history. As the music swells, a vast army of knights charges across a frozen lake, their banners streaming in the wind. On the opposite shore, the ranks of pikemen stand nervous but steadfast, bracing themselves for the inevitable. “The Germans!” one cries. Standing nearby, the Prince of Novgorod remains impassive, his eyes stern, his face grim. As the soundtrack builds, he lowers his visor, embraces his comrades and issues his final instructions. The horsemen approach; the defenders lower their pikes – and then, with a terrible crash, the two armies engage. Best known for its unforgettable soundtrack by Sergei Prokofiev, the film Alexander Nevsky was released in 1938. Its director, Sergei Eisenstein, had not made a film for 10 years and was working under the shadow of Stalin’s purges. Not surprisingly, therefore, his film closely echoed contemporary European politics, with many critics seeing its hero, Prince Alexander Nevsky, as a thinly veiled portrait of the Soviet dictator. The film’s setting, however, was medieval Novgorod, one of the ancestors of present-day Russia. And at its heart was perhaps the most celebrated battle in all Russian history: the clash between the Teutonic Knights and the men of Novgorod at Lake Peipus in April 1242, better known as the battle on the Ice. In the mid-13th century, what we know today as European Russia was weak and divided, its energies sapped by the onslaught of the Mongols. To the west of the city-state of Novgorod, however, an even deadlier enemy was at hand. Twenty years earlier, in the latest episode in the long-running northern crusades, the knights of the Teutonic Order had begun carving a Christian military realm out of the lands of the pagan Baltic tribes. Up through Prussia and Courland they swept, before carrying the Catholic cause into Livonia and Estonia. And in the last months of 1240, hoping to benefit from the raids of the Mongols, the Knights struck further east, occupying Pskov and threatening Novgorod itself. Desperate for leadership, Novgorod recalled Prince Alexander Nevsky, who had been exiled after falling out with the local nobility. His impact was immediate: by the end of 1241, Alexander had retaken all the captured land east of the Neva river, and a few months later he recaptured Pskov, too. Hoping to stem the tide, Prince-Bishop Hermann of Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia) rallied the Knights and chased Alexander east. Retreating across the frozen Lake Peipus, Alexander spotted a strong defensive position at Raven’s Rock on the right shore. Here, with his infantry packed into the centre and his horsemen on the flanks, he would make his stand. The charge of the knights on 5 April sounds like something from The Lord of the Rings. Most of the crusaders were probably Estonians rather than Germans, even though Eisenstein’s film portrays them all as cruel-faced, lantern-jawed Teutons. They must have been an extraordinary sight, thundering west across the ice; even the Novgorod chronicler wrote that they drove “like a wedge through their enemy”. But Alexander had chosen his ground well, and as his flanks closed on the attackers, it was clear that the Knights’ charge was running out of steam. “The brothers’ banners were soon flying in the midst of the archers,” wrote a chronicler for the Order itself, “and swords were heard cutting helmets apart. Many from both sides fell dead on the grass. Then the brothers’ army was completely surrounded, for the Russians had so many troops that there were easily 60 men for every one German knight. The brothers fought well enough, but they were nonetheless cut down.” The Battle on the Ice was a landmark in eastern European history. Never again did the Teutonic Knights penetrate so far east, and even today Lake Peipus, located on the frontier between Russia and Estonia, marks the rough border between western and eastern Christianity. For Alexander himself it was a milestone, winning him a reputation as the supreme champion of Orthodoxy. Later he was enthroned as Grand Prince of Vladimir, and in 1547 he was canonised as a Russian Orthodox saint. Even Stalin saw him as a hero, and when Eisenstein’s film was released in 1938 it struck a powerful chord. Another war against the Germans was looming, and within six months an estimated 23 million Russians had seen the film. And even today, the Battle on the Ice continues to resonate with the people of Russia. Indeed, just five years ago Alexander Nevsky was voted the greatest Russian of all time – two places ahead of Stalin. Dominic Sandbrook is a presenter and historian