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Michael Wood on China's immense suffering in the Second World War
"China suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union", writes Michael Wood
The Second World War still plays a massive role in our national mythology in Britain. But if I were to ask you: “Who was the fourth ally?” I imagine that most readers would have to think twice. The answer is China. China fought the entire war – and longer – and suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentaries, which included a 1944 film called The Battle of China, saw the war with Japan as part of “the struggle of freedom against slavery, civilisation against barbarism”. Films in the series close with the hope that a victory for the democracies – Republican China in the 1930s, don’t forget, had been a fledgling democracy – will bring about “the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan”. Today, history is a big deal in China. Since 1949, the Chinese view of modern history has centred on the ‘century of humiliation’ following the First Opium War (1839–42), when foreign powers carved up the country. But more recently, the Second World War has assumed a powerful new role in Chinese nationalism. There’s a museum to the war in Beijing, the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and a harrowing memorial to the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. At the China Modern History Museum in Nanjing, you can dress up in nationalist Kuomintang or communist uniforms and have your photo taken in wartime dioramas. The Chinese view of the conflict has shifted towards showing the country as a heroic participant in a war that was moral and just. The Chinese had been engaged in hostilities with Japan since 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. The conflict proper lasted from July 1937 until 2 September 1945 – the 80th anniversary of the conflict’s end is being marked this year. So the Second World War effectively started earlier, and lasted longer, here than in Europe. And without China, the course of the wider war might have been very different. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The Chinese lost a million soldiers, but civilian deaths numbered somewhere between 10 and 15 million, maybe more. Hitherto enemies, the Kuomintang and the communists both resisted the invader, but afterwards fought a deadly civil war that was won by the communists, whom the war had turned into a national liberation movement. (Mao later claimed that the communists might never have won victory without the Japanese.) So China played a leading role in the creation of our postwar world. As one of the four victorious powers, they should have been able to articulate their own vision of east Asia. The problem, of course, was that in 1949 China became a communist country – and in the Cold War, communism was an enemy of the so-called ‘Free World’. The Chinese Communist Party was not formally recognised as the country’s government by the US till 1979. Read more | Why were these British Second World War burials draped with Nazi flags? There are many incredible stories of wartime China. One involves a young British hero, who is also being celebrated on the 80th anniversary this year. George Hogg was an adventurer who, in January 1938 – shortly after the Nanjing Massacre began – travelled to Shanghai. He helped a New Zealand nurse, Kathleen Hall, smuggle medicine and food to the communist resistance. Witnessing first-hand the brutality of the Japanese imperial army towards the Chinese people, on impulse he decided to stay and help – a story he told in his book I See a New China, published in 1944 and adapted into the film The Children of Huang Shi in 2008, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. In Hogg’s most famous adventure, he saved 60 Chinese boys orphaned during the war and led them west to Gansu, mostly on foot – 700 miles through dangerous passes, on snow-covered mountain roads. In the end he commandeered six trucks to complete the journey to Shandan county where he created a safe haven for war orphans, founding a school that still exists. Hogg died in Gansu on 22 July 1945 after contracting tetanus. His tomb in Shandan has a traditional Chinese grave stele with four lines of a poem Hogg loved: Into Battle, by the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, who was killed on the western front in 1915, the year of Hogg’s birth. Recently there has been huge interest in China about the Briton who selflessly gave his life for the Chinese people. Just one story – but what a story. So, as China commemorates the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in September, should we not invite our Chinese friends to join us in the rituals at the Cenotaph, to lay a wreath on behalf of our forgotten ally? It would be high time. This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
This ancient goddess commanded a Wonder of the World – but why did she have thirty breasts?
The strange and powerful symbol at the heart of one of history’s greatest temples reveals the importance of the goddess Artemis in ruling fertility, childbirth and nature
When we think of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon may be the first examples that come to mind. However, the oldest-known versions of the list start with a landmark that is often forgotten: the Temple of Artemis. Located in the ancient city of Ephesus (near modern-day Selçuk, Turkey), this remarkable place of worship was renowned for its size and scale, standing at least 20 metres tall and boasting an enormous tile-covered roof supported by 127 marble columns. With a floor plan of some 6,000 square metres, the temple was also nearly three times as large as the famous Parthenon in Athens. But some of the most startling archaeological evidence from Ephesus isn’t concerned with the dimensions of the temple, nor its complicated history of destruction and rebuilding. Instead, much attention has been directed towards a collection of statues depicting the temple’s patron deity, Artemis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL957668-36357fc.jpg" width="7715" height="4533" alt="A large temple with a triangular roof and many columns holding it up. It sits on top of a large flight of stairs. The roof has a mural of the goddess sitting in the middle and surrounded by crowds of people and two golden horses" title="A 20th-century depiction of the Temple of Artemis, dedicated to the goddess Artemis (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Rather than portraying the goddess as a conventional Greek beauty, the sculptures display Artemis in an altogether different guise. And, according to classicist and broadcaster Bettany Hughes, these statues bear a particularly striking physical characteristic. Read more | On the steps of a sacred temple, Cleopatra's feud with her sister came to a blood-soaked end “[This] is not the Artemis that you probably have in your heads… this image of a beautiful young woman in a tiny Greek chiton, artfully pulling a bow and arrow,” reveals Hughes on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast. “She is a huge, towering figure, covered in birds and bees, goats and curious figures. But what none of you will miss… is that she looks as though she has 30 or so breasts.” Thirty breasts… or testicles? What need did Artemis have for 30 breasts? As well as being the goddess of hunting and the moon, Artemis was also revered as a deity of fertility and childbirth. Having a multitude of breasts would therefore be a fitting attribute for a goddess so intrinsically connected with fecundity and womanhood. In fact, even alternative theories – which suggest that the ‘breasts’ are actually bulls’ testicles or sacks of honey – bolster Artemis’s association with abundance. Both motifs have also been used as symbols of procreation in Greek art, so the ambiguity was likely deliberate. “These ancient craftsmen are likely playing a game with us,” says Hughes. Ultimately, the ancient Greeks believed that Artemis was so potent in her fertility that “she didn’t need anything as mundane as sex to procreate”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/M42ADD-2-4bc4f79.jpg" width="5560" height="3707" alt="A large statue of a woman with black hands and face, and covered in light brown bulbous growths. On her head, there is a well-shaped crown" title="A second-century AD interpretation of Artemis, with the head and hands cast in bronze added in the 19th century. Artemis is an enduring symbol of fertility (Image by Alamy)" /> A goddess of power and procreation It’s not just the features on the statue[s] itself that suggest Artemis’s importance – the location where they were discovered is notable too. Ephesus was situated on the eastern edge of the ancient Greek world, where Artemis’s association with fertility and childbirth was perhaps stronger than elsewhere. Read more | Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World “The Artemis who was worshipped in Ephesus was an ‘eastern Artemis’ – a direct descendant of the great nature goddesses of the eastern world,” says Hughes. “Any ancient traveller who went to visit the temple would have been left in no doubts of how extremely strong and potent she was.” While Artemis was regarded as a powerful goddess for all, she was particularly important to women. Care of the temple was entrusted to high priestesses, a system that Hughes likens to a “hive buzzing around, serving the queen bee”. Overall, maleness was not well tolerated at the site; it was intended to be devoted to female presence and power. An offer of sanctuary But it wasn’t just the high priestesses who devoted themselves to Artemis. Countless ordinary women also dedicated themselves to this bastion of fertility, travelling from far and wide to give offerings. “Poor female pilgrims would beat a path to Artemis’s door, and some of them would leave extraordinary gifts [and] beautiful gold offerings,” says Hughes. “They were left as temple dedications and then buried as hoards.” In some cases, the poorest pilgrims would simply leave a seashell for Artemis instead. They merely offered whatever they could, in the hope that the goddess would provide protection and preparation for marriage and childbirth. Crucially, the Temple of Artemis wasn’t solely a place for worship – it also functioned as a place of refuge for the oppressed. Hughes adds, “If you were being persecuted politically, and even if you were a woman escaping domestic abuse, you could go to sanctuary at the temple.” Read more | The gods and their whims: your guide to ancient Greek religion <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/WHA0108722-2-0d5f3b2.jpg" width="5000" height="3542" alt="A brown terracotta jug with a circular spout and no handle lays on its side on the left of the image. On the right, there is a pile of small gold-coloured coins" title="A round-mouthed jug and an assortment of Electrum coins, discovered in the foundations of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Image by TopFoto)" /> A forgotten legacy The Temple of Artemis was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World for good reason. Its sheer scale and beauty were matched only by the power of the goddess it honoured. To the modern eye, her many breasts might seem slightly mystifying. But – whether seen as symbols of fertility, abundance or simply a playful riddle set by ancient craftsmen – they remind us of the complexity and depth of her worship. Bettany Hughes was speaking to Rachel Dinning on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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.
Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos
For our ancestors, death was part of daily life. We can learn from their open conversations about this taboo topic, says Dr Helen Gittos, and create modern rituals to help us cope
We don’t know how to talk about death. It’s a modern taboo. Search the topic online and you’ll quickly find people who deal in end-of-life matters arguing that we need more transparent, more honest conversations about an event that is, after all, going to come to us all. Charities like Hospice UK definitely want us to be better about talking about it. It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it’s only really in the 20th century that we’ve actively disassociated ourselves from death. The process has been institutionalised and medicalised. The palliative care physician and author Kathryn Mannix wrote about it in a Guardian article a few years ago. In the 19th century, according to the historian Judith Flanders, discussing Victorian death and mourning on a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, “ it was part of daily life. It wasn’t tucked away neatly in hospitals where you go in and visit for an hour, but you don’t see all the day-to-day stuff, you don’t see people die”. She continues: “Many people go happily through their whole lives without ever seeing a dead person, which is simply not possible in the 19th century. Then, hospitals were very limited in the kind of diseases or illnesses they cared for. They were very specifically for certain things only. If you could afford it, you were looked after at home. Hospitals were a place of last resort for people who were too poor, too desperate, so everybody saw death.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-464472069-ccb7e8d.jpg" width="5204" height="3383" alt="A bracelet with two gold edged picture frames on it. In each, there is a photo of a girl with brown ringlets and wearing a purple dress" title="This Victorian bracelet has a band of woven hair and may have been a piece of mourning jewellery, which was in fashion during that era (Image by Getty Images)" /> Past and present rituals I went to a funeral the other day. It was of a dear friend who had died far too young, of cancer. She knew it was coming and had been able to prepare, and had, I think, had frank and open conversations with her husband and daughters. I don’t think that’s the norm, but that did mean that the crowded crematorium felt more like a genuine celebration of her life. There was also a modern ritual as we wept through a slide show of her greatest hits, set to music. Obviously my thoughts were drawn to this when I was talking to Dr Helen Gittos, a medieval historian at Oxford University. Her Life Lesson from History was that rituals really matter, and that we can learn from the past to make better use of them. It can be hard to identify what medieval people were doing by way of rituals, because that sort of activity isn’t necessarily documented. We’re talking about things that might be more informal and familial. That’s where archaeology comes to the fore. Helen told me about her research into a collection of 12th-century lead crosses that had been discovered in the grounds of the monastery at Bury St Edmunds. They all had scratched inscriptions on them. Read more | “There was a general perception that Queen Victoria’s mourning was neither normal nor acceptable” Helen worked out that the inscriptions related to a ceremony of consecration of a new church, and they were the words the bishop would say as he stepped over the threshold of the building. But these crosses had nothing to do with new church foundation – they were found with the remains of dead monks. Helen concluded that this was evidence of some sort of protective ritual for the monks, to keep the devil away and Christ close. We wouldn’t know that without her close detective work and leap of imagination to tease out the ritual underlying the artefacts. Navigating grief <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-132703805-1e3ce2e.jpg" width="2710" height="3840" alt="A painting shows a woman leaning over the edge of a bed, holding the arm of an unseen person. She has her head resting on it and a sad expression on his face" title="A 13th-century fresco by Giotto shows St Clare mourning St Francis, one of the many depictions of lamentation in the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Rituals and death are close bedfellows. End of life is a time when we need a support structure to navigate the grief. Helen’s academic experience sadly collided with her everyday as she coped with the death of her young daughter, Harriet, and the challenge of finding the right way to say goodbye. “At the time at which she died, I was writing that piece about the Bury St Edmunds crosses. I was in the middle of it and it’s hard sometimes to be a historian and not to turn off your historian’s head. So all the way through, I was watching and contrasting the way in which we now deal with death, with what I was looking at in the 11th and 12th centuries,” she explains. “Harriet died in hospital and the staff there wanted to try and help us, to wash her, to give her the kind of care that would have happened at home in the period that I was studying. Real efforts were made to try to include families, but there were also bits of it that were just so far away from what I’d been seeing that these monks were doing.” Helen described the perfunctory experience of being handed a “cool bag and a chit, which was a bit like the kind of thing you might get if you’d taken your shoes in to be mended” for her daughter’s body in a hospital. She felt “the contrast between thinking of those monks who were employing such care, love, attention, effort and craft to help their loved ones. That was one of those sudden moments of shock, a reminder that history isn’t a linear progression of things getting better. Sometimes the contrasts are really, really stark.” Death as part of life <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2198979076-d1954a9.jpg" width="4960" height="3364" alt="A group of people dressed in smart Victorian clothing (waistcoats, white shirts and long coats) stand around fresh burial spot" title="A painting of a peasant burial in the 19th century, an era when the realities of death and dying were not hidden away (Image by Getty Images)" /> The medieval world, like the later Victorian period, was, as Helen points out, a place where death was a close reality, not hidden away. People died at home, surrounded by family, and the community came together to mark the passage from life to death. Helen told me this ritual process started before the death. People got ready for the inevitable: “One of the most striking things is that you have these ritual texts that are about guiding you to a good death.” It seems that people in the Middle Ages strove to make death a community activity, to create “a moment in which people were coming together to commemorate and note what’s passing, and also to manage the change that comes with that”. Fascinatingly, and I’d agree that this is something we really don’t do enough of today, Helen explains how there were rituals designed to follow up after someone’s death. “There were rituals for the deathbed, for the moment of death, for the funeral, and for the months and years that followed,” she says. “We’re all very good at contacting somebody in a moment of crisis. Many of us are less good at contacting them a month later, three months later, a year later. One of the things that was really characteristic about the Middle Ages was this formal way in which there were rituals that followed death that helped people to negotiate the aftermath, not just the moment itself.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2188132656-f7fb776.jpg" width="3803" height="5369" alt="An illustrated page that shows a small yellow skull on a green table, surrounded by a pink letter O and several flowers" title="A 15th-century illuminated initial with a skull, a symbol of death, found at the start of the Office of the Dead, a Christian prayer read in spiritual preparation for death (Image by Getty Images)" /> Reclaiming ritual and conversation So what can we do? How can we learn from the past to face death more honestly and compassionately? Read more | What do we know about Viking funerals? Helen believes that we need both structure and flexibility. “Ritual often gives us a sort of framework for how to act at moments in which we feel lost, shocked and uncertain, and when we want a map for how to navigate some period of major change and a way of doing that collectively. But I think what rituals also do, and we have increasingly understood this, is to give a sense of freedom, flex and scope to create anew within that framework. That allows these improvisations to feel right and appropriate.” She describes how, in planning her daughter’s funeral, she drew on both historical knowledge and personal intuition. “I was glad that what we crafted in a very short period of time did end up feeling really right. We dispensed with all of the formality and we simply put together things that involved real music and musicians playing live. A friend found a wonderful pianist and we had a whole series of family members who read things that mattered to them. And then afterwards we took everybody and we walked back to the hospital where she died because there was a playground there, and we all gathered there among these play things and were able to be in an environment that felt right for me and right enough for the people who were close to us.” Moving forward <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-2188126796-c3a9a0b.jpg" width="4361" height="6408" alt="An illustration of a group of people dressed in green and brown robes surround a body wrapped in a shroud and rope, which they are burying" title="A burial scene from the Middle Ages, as shown in 15th-century illustrated romance in verse titled Barlaam und Josaphat (Image by Getty Images)" /> So I’m getting a couple of really good lessons here from Dr Helen Gittos, and from our medieval forebears. Firstly, we should be better about talking about death: with our families, our friends, and our communities. Secondly, we should be open to claiming and creating the rituals that help us to mourn and remember, and we should not be afraid to improvise, to make them our own. As Helen put it, “Rituals are things that we can use creatively in order to be able to manage. I think that we can be braver about creating rituals that work for us, even with the institutional context that so often surround major moments in our lives. We don’t have to simply accept the impersonal, formulaic, 30 minutes in and out of the crematorium.” She points out that there are people who are “creating new ways of doing things, burying people in woodland, making services which are a bit less formulaic, a bit more creative”. This can be “enormously beneficial for feeling like these are moments that we have managed, that we can dare to navigate ourselves – that we don’t need to rely on outside professionals to do them for us.” Let’s embrace rituals that help us cope with times of grief, and let’s be creative about them. Let’s talk about death. It’s going to happen to us, and our loved ones. We can make things easier on ourselves, and everyone around us, by just being a bit more honest and open about it. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "A UK museum that tells the long, rich history of migration is long overdue"
Kavita Puri on explorations of the migrant experience
If you gaze up at the skyline in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, you might spot a new addition. Made from stainless-steel panels and shaped like a rollercoaster, the Tornado sits on top of the city’s newly opened Fenix, a museum that tells the story of human migration. Visitors climb to the distinctive Tornado up a sweeping staircase at the museum’s entrance, along a meandering route that represents the many different journeys people take to reach their destinations. On arriving at the viewing platform, you can take in a panoramic view of the city and its waterways where millions of Europeans once boarded ships in Europe’s largest port, many of them leaving for a new life in the US. Today, Rotterdam is home to more than 170 nationalities. It’s an interesting choice to open a museum to migration at a time when the subject has become so toxic, not least in the Netherlands. Designed by the Chinese firm MAD Architects, the museum displays have exhibits including thousands of suitcases, images of refugees, and a life-sized city bus. Perhaps reasoned discussions about migration can be inspired by art. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history This is not the first European museum dedicated to migration: they exist in many countries, including Germany, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Poland and France. So it is surprising that the UK does not have a permanent migration museum, only one that has spent years in makeshift venues. After all, millions of people have left Britain over the centuries, not least during the building of its empire, while inward migration – particularly during the postwar years – has shaped our language, culture, cuisine and art. Until recently, you could visit the Migration Museum in its temporary home in Lewisham Shopping Centre, housed in a former H&M store between Foot Locker and TK Maxx. Outside the entrance stood a sculpture entitled Wall, comprising two panels from the Berlin Wall painted by artists. During its five years in Lewisham, the museum displayed significant exhibitions including Taking Care of Business: Migrant Entrepreneurs and the Making of Modern Britain. In listening booths (repurposed H&M changing rooms), visitors could hear oral histories recounted by local businesspeople, including one Italian who ran a delicatessen and described how different Lewisham was from Puglia. More well-known voices including Lord Bilimoria who, frustrated by the lagers on offer at Indian restaurants, created his own hugely successful beer, Cobra. There was also an impressive installation replicating a Chinese takeaway. Read more | How has migration changed the world? Lewisham has a hugely diverse population, and in 1977 saw members of the far-right National Front clash with anti-racist protesters on its streets. It’s fitting, then, that the Migration Museum was embedded in the heart of that community – a place where anyone could feel comfortable, especially those who may never have crossed the threshold of a museum before. It has now closed, though, and the mall is being redeveloped. A permanent Migration Museum is planned for a new site in the City of London, which has been donated by a British Sikh entrepreneur. It’s due to open in 2028. The new space will span three floors, covering nearly 3,000 square metres. Members of the curatorial team are currently discussing how they might approach the project, including how they can co-curate with local communities. Subjects for temporary exhibitions might include local migrant stories from around the City, climate refugees, the role of humour in the migrant experience, and how protest has driven change. The story of migration in these islands is a long one, written by those who left and those who came. Britain today has been shaped by movements of people in both directions. A museum that tells this long and rich history – a shared story, one of interconnectedness – is long overdue. It does not need to be divisive, but can be a reflection and recognition of who we are today. This column was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
A communal toilet might be an unlikely place to seek life inspiration, but we can all learn from Roman community values, Dr Jess Venner tells Dr David Musgrove
Would life be better if we all went to the toilet together again? That’s a question that I wonder about sometimes, and if you know your ancient history, you’ll know that I say ‘again’ because I’m drawing on the experience of the Roman communal toilet. Go to somewhere like Chedworth Roman villa in Gloucestershire, or Housesteads Roman Fort on Hadrian’s Wall, and you’ll see the remains of their multi-occupancy latrines. There people sat cheek by jowl doing their business, with no screens to hide their modesty or disguise the fact that they were relieving themselves in the company of their peers. I’m an enthusiast for lavatorial matters, so I gave a talk on the history of toilets at the fabulous Chalke History Festival this summer. When I raised the idea of a return to communal defecation in the Roman style, it returned a surprisingly positive reaction from the audience in the marquee. That was probably just a response to my rabble-rousing rhetoric in the moment. I rather doubt that a petition for open loos would be well received in reality. However, maybe there is something in the ancient Roman attitude to the importance of community and neighbourly values that we could learn from. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/GettyImages-825926258-a34b24b.jpg" width="2000" height="1493" alt="A large Roman stone wall with deep trenches in it. On top, there are round, bowl-like stones. On either side of the wall and in the distance, there are green fields and trees" title="The communal latrines at Housesteads Fort, at Hadrian’s Wall, are the best preserved from Roman Britain (Image by Getty Images)" /> Community spirit Dr Jess Venner is a Roman historian, with a particular expertise in Pompeii and Herculaneum, and when I asked her for a Life Lesson from History, she proposed that we might take something from the Romans’ strong sense of community. “Romans were good neighbours because they built their lives around community,” she explains. “Community was everything to the Romans. They considered it to be honourable and virtuous to rely on one another. And above all, to be kind and to make sure that everything you choose to do is virtuous in the sense that it’s not stepping over other people to get there.” For Jess, this sense of community is expressed most clearly in a crisis situation. When the chips are down, you default to your base instincts, and that’s what she reckons we see in Pompeii in the year AD 62, when the now-famous Roman city in the Bay of Naples was struck by disaster. If you’re thinking that I’ve got my dates wrong because everyone knows that Vesuvius erupted and engulfed the place in molten rock and pumice in AD 79, that’d be fair comment. But in the decade before that, Pompeii suffered a different disaster – an earthquake. Read more | A brief history of the toilet: wiping, washing – plus, who invented the flush? The date is slightly contested, because Seneca the Younger says it was in AD 63, but most experts today would plump for disaster striking in AD 62. “A big earthquake hit Pompeii and took out a lot of the city. A lot of the people there, as Seneca tells us, were so shocked by the event that they wandered around aimlessly afterwards and didn’t know what to do with themselves,” says Jess. “People were maimed and people died, and a lot of buildings, public and private, were destroyed. This was the start of the earthquakes that continued up to the eruption of AD 79, which we know today as being a warning sign.” As if the quake wasn’t bad enough, it precipitated a tidal wave, and released poisonous gases (which curiously, and very specifically, were said to have killed 600 sheep). So, clearly that was a substantial shock, but it’s the crisis response that is interesting. Normally, in this sort of situation, an embattled Roman community might have expected to get imperial support, but in this case that wasn’t forthcoming. Perhaps that was because the emperor Nero was otherwise engaged establishing his reign, or maybe it was a response to Pompeii’s history of rebellion against Rome. Rebuilding Pompeii <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/GettyImages-122222124-56b78b9.jpg" width="1500" height="1185" alt="A marble relief shows 5 people at work in a coppersmith's shop. A small child to the left, behind a man holding something hanging from above. Two men in the centre, one holding a piece of copper and the other standing over him with a hammer to hit the copper, and a man to the right, sitting on a stool, working some copper into shape" title="A marble relief sign of a Coppersmith’s shop from Pompeii in the first century AD. In AD 62 the city was damaged by an earthquake (Image by Getty Images)" /> Whatever the reason, it seems that the Pompeians were left to deal with the aftermath as best they could themselves. Despite this absence of imperial support, they built back quickly. The first public building to be erected anew was the Temple of Isis, but it was funded privately rather than from the emperor’s purse. The people of Pompeii didn’t just rebuild though – they also creatively responded to the earthquake by making agricultural gardens in the spaces freed up by the fallen buildings. “I fondly think of Pompeii as an incredibly resilient city. They bounced back by finding opportunity in the gaps, literally. They were taking materials, reusing them from buildings that had been demolished, or they were demolishing them themselves. And they were opening up huge vineyards, orchards and vegetable plots. It was very, very green. Walking through it in the ancient period, it would’ve been amazing. You would’ve had birdsong and trees poking over the side of walls.” Fruit was grown in these new green spaces, and with the upsurge in post-quake urban gardening, we can see the community ethos of the Romans bursting through. In Pompeii after AD 62, we find the first evidence of the ‘pomari’ or united fruit sellers. This was a support group that was set up to offer financial backing to fruit sellers if they were down on their luck. It provided help in life, and in death: funerary epitaphs make note of their assistance to the deceased. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/GettyImages-122315243-97b07ef.jpg" width="1500" height="1189" alt="A red, orange, black and white mosaic shows an image of two men picking apples. One is standing, while the other climbs a ladder into the tree" title="A mosaic, from Saint-Romain-en-Gal, France, shows apple pickers. The Romans set up groups, known as ‘pomari’, to support fruit sellers (Image by Getty Images)" /> The fruit sellers are just one example of several occupational support groups, and they appear to be a practical response to the catastrophe. As Jess explains, in Pompeii, they seem to come to prominence in the aftermath of the earthquake: “When crisis hits, you find these things becoming more obvious in towns in the archaeological record: like with the pomari, they suddenly pop up. They may well have existed before this but it is unusual that we have no record before this point.” Read more | Are you healthier than a Roman? These ancient secrets for longevity are still shockingly relevant A support network It wasn’t just money that these groups provided – they were also there for knowledge sharing. As Jess points out, the sharing of expertise is acknowledged today as being a key driver in developing resilience. Over time, the support groups changed from being agriculturally focused to being more involved with merchant activity. But throughout they were allowing people to learn and share from another: they even had apprenticeships of sorts. We’re talking local initiatives, built around neighbourhoods, with people looking out for each other in an organised and intentional way. There might have been elite individuals or families driving things as patrons, but the impetus was grass-roots. The Roman empire was a diverse place with a lot of different peoples and communities living together. That was particularly the case in Pompeii. So you might be wondering how a community spirit was fostered in such a cultural melting pot – it’s certainly something we seem to struggle with together in Britain. According to Jess, religion was a powerful connecting force: “There were neighbourhood communities; they had shrines in the neighbourhoods, on street corners, and they would all gather there. There’s graffiti from very many different people around these shrines, acknowledging that lots of people would be passing and interacting with this piece of graffiti.” So you’ve got occupational support groups, religious worship providing a glue of shared interest, and neighbourhood communities where people knew each other. This might sound like a nostalgic 1950s throwback, but Jess describes life organised around these neighbourhoods, with doors that were left open and a sense that you knew who your people were. Of course this only goes so far, because clearly there were folks in these communities who probably didn’t have the chance to engage in this neighbourhood structure – I’m talking about the enslaved in this society. Clearly those people broadly had to do what they were told to do, and their lives were far removed from this supportive umbrella. But for those whose social status did allow them to be part of the network, no doubt this was a great boon. It probably encouraged entrepreneurship and risk-taking because you felt you had something to fall back on if things went awry in whatever venture you attempted. Apparently, according to Jess, the Romans didn’t even have a concept of failure, but instead saw things that hadn’t gone well as simply opportunities for reinvention. That all sounds very positive and forward-thinking – it is the sort of mindset that a 21st-century business cries out for in its employees. Toilet wisdom <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/FREE-The-Victorian-shooting-lodge-and-remains-of-the-latrine-at-Chedworth-Roman-Villa-Gloucestershire1297031National-Trust-ImagesJames-Dobson-12afd1c.jpg" width="2000" height="1333" alt="In the foreground, there is a deep Roman wall with smaller blocks of stone on the floor in front of it. In the background, there is a Victorian white and brown lodge" title="At Chedworth Roman Villa, in Gloucestershire, the public today can admire (or shudder at) the prospect of a Roman communal toilet (Image by James Dobson)" /> So, back to the communal toilet. Is that the ultimate manifestation of Roman community spirit? Surely you can’t get much closer to your neighbours than by unburdening your bowels in their company. ”It was a very communal area. It seems completely wild to us now, and actually it's probably only from the Victorian period onwards that we started getting really fussy about it. But it was a very communal thing,” comments Jess. “So you would go into the public latrines and they would be a lot of benches with semi-circular cut-outs. You would do your business and you would be sitting right next to somebody else. You would be having a conversation with so and so down the road or across from you”. Read more | What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion The amount of graffiti in these toilets suggest that people were spending a decent length of time in the public latrines, long enough to make their mark on the walls. Jess even goes so far as to opine that it might not have been dissimilar to the experience of going to a pub in Britain – the communal toilets would have been a place to meet, chat, maybe even do business (while you did your business). Failing well This might be going too far, I know, and there are obvious safeguarding concerns attendant with toilets that are as public as the ancient examples we’re talking about. So maybe Roman-style toilets isn’t the answer. But there is something we can take from their approach to community, and the clear value they placed on it as something to strive for. Not only would it bring us together and help us find harmony in an ever-more diverse world. But also, and this I find a very diverting line of thought, maybe this sense of a community safety net might unlock our inner risk-taking entrepreneurial selves and inject some blistering fresh energy into the economy as well. It’s basically the same argument as that proposed by people who talk up the Universal Basic Income as the driver to unlock national productivity, but in this case, without the expense of paying everyone a salary. Because we know our neighbours have got our backs, we’ll all be free to fail and fail big, even if that isn’t a concept that the Romans would have been able to get their heads round. It’s a short step from a communal toilet to a glorious national social and economic rebirth. As a coda, sadly, we know that even the resilient Pompeians weren’t able to overcome the catastrophe that overtook them a few short years after the earthquake of AD 62. No amount of communal support could hold back the venting fury of Vesuvius and the destruction if wrought on the city. Of course, we know what we do about the neighbourly virtues of Pompeii’s people because the place was preserved under the pumice that pounded it, but there was no chance of the city reinventing itself after AD 79. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
Zoot suits, mashers & New Romantics: the evolution of the dandy
Peter Andersson delves into various dandy subcultures that saw men dressing immaculately, from the early 19th century to the 1980s
From zoot suiters and mods, to mashers and Congolese sapeurs, since the early 19th century, fashionable male subcultures have popped up across the globe. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Peter Andersson examines how the idea of the 'dandy' has evolved over time, and argues that the idea of dressing well was not limited to the elites. Peter Andersson is the author of The Dandy: A People's History of Sartorial Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2025) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon <a href="https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?id=489797&clickref=historyextra-288194&awinmid=3787&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.waterstones.com%2Fbook%2Fthe-dandy%2Fpeter-k-andersson%2F9780198882435%23%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe%2520Dandy%253A%2520A%2520People%27s%2520History%2520constitutes%2520the%2520first%2520ever%2520history%2Cstyle%252Dconscious%2520men%2520about%2520town.#:~:text=The%20Dandy%3A%20A%20People's%20History%20constitutes%20the%20first%20ever%20history,style%2Dconscious%20men%20about%20town." rel="sponsored" target="_blank">Buy now on Waterstones
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
Hug a tree like a pagan from the margins of Europe
David Musgrove finds out from Francis Young why we should engage in creative spirituality in the same way that the non-Christian people of the Baltic and far north did for centuries
I used to be able to say, unequivocally and without hesitation, that I’d never hugged a tree. I can’t do that any more, and it’s all Francis Young’s fault. He told me to be creative with my spirituality, and I took him at his word. Dr Young is a historian and folklorist specialising in the history of religion and belief, and also particular expert on the Baltic. With my inaugural arboreal embrace, I was following in the footsteps of the people that Francis has been studying in his most recent book, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2025). It’s a cracking read, and a revelation if, like me, you could do with being much better informed about the historical and religious story of the peoples living in the geographical northern and eastern margins of Europe. In Silence of the Gods, Francis outlines how in the Baltic region, parts of the far north towards the Arctic, and an area of what’s now Russia today, non-Christian practices persisted for centuries after the church had become established across the rest of the continent. It wasn’t until 1387, as he explains, that Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe, became officially Christian. Even after this, non-Christian practices persisted for centuries in the region, certainly into the 18th century, and in some places, to the present day. Given the wide spread of space and time we’re talking about, you won’t be surprised to hear that the actual nature of these pagan practices was varied, from shamanism in the far north, to polytheistic veneration of pantheons of multiple gods and spirits, to animism, and to worship of sacred places. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/GettyImages-987973286-6b8c286.jpg" width="4928" height="3648" alt="Two women in large flower crowns dance together, arms linked. The one on the left is dressed in khaki and the one on the right is dressed in red" title="Lithuanians celebrate the summer solstice wearing wreaths of wild flowers and dancing round a fire. Lithuania was the last pagan country in Europe (Image by Getty Images)" /> Woodland wonder On that latter point, these sacred places often involved woodland: forests, groves and clearings, or particular trees. Indeed, Francis explained to me that in Lithuania the celebration of trees continues to be a national obsession to this day. Seeing wonder in woods is not something unique to the Baltic though – it’s a broader human condition. “There is something about an ancient tree, a living being that is so much older than us, and has seen all the generations pass. Somehow that is in and of itself a focus of the sacred. I think you see these patterns again and again in Europe's indigenous religions,” explains Francis. “Many of the concerns that people have now about the environment, they actually can be connected to much older and more primal anxieties about deforestation, which are not just to do with climate change, but are to do with a sense in which deforestation or the felling of trees or the transformation of your environment is somehow depriving you of an ancient place of the sacred.” Back to the Baltic countries, the question is “why did these places and people not succumb to the temptation of Christianity like the rest of Europe?”. Francis’s answer is that it’s partly a language barrier, and partly a factor of geographical remoteness and sparsity of population. But also, it’s because many of the people in these areas lived a less settled way of life, a form of nomadic agriculture, which meant that a religion born of settled city-states didn’t hold much appeal. That all meant that for centuries across Europe, there were people who were able to engage with their spirituality in a much more individual and creative way than generally was the case elsewhere on the continent. Where the Christian rules of religious observance were written down, it was harder for people to be inventive in their approach to worship. Now, that’s very interesting, but what can we learn from this? Does this offer any insights into ways that we might live happier, or maybe more meaningful lives today? You can guess the answer is yes, because otherwise this article would end in a disappointingly abrupt way around about now. Spiritual societies “When we delve into the history of spirituality in this marginalised area of Europe, we find something which I think is a lot more interesting than these prepackaged spiritualities. And that is people who have effectively found themselves cut off from other religious traditions and therefore they’ve forged their own, largely in a response to the environment in which they live,” says Francis. “I find that a rather refreshing perspective on religion, and on spirituality, from which perhaps we can draw some life lessons for today.” Before we carry on, it’s probably worth clarifying the difference between spirituality and religion. There are many answers to that, but in Francis’s view, it’s this: “Spirituality tends to refer to an awareness and connection with the numinous that does not necessarily have to have any link to organised religion. And religion in the way that we tend to talk about it in everyday speech (in Britain at least) tends to be to do with some kind of organised worship of a deity.” So when we’re talking about these non-Christian people in northern Europe, spirituality seems a more appropriate word. How that spirituality was actually manifested is hard to get at, because in the absence of a literate tradition, we are relying on second-hand accounts of their practices from Christian writers. Clearly we should be mindful that we’re looking through that lens. The fact that literacy wasn’t embedded in their cultures is a key element in the story though, according to Francis: “The creativity does come from the absence of a literate tradition because clearly that pins down things like rituals and beliefs and stories in a way that an oral culture tends not to. But I think the creativity also arises from the challenges that they faced in that their traditions were constantly being disrupted by attempts to convert them to Christianity, none of which really worked until quite late on in the story. If you are constantly enduring this kind of cultural attrition, you have a choice: you can capitulate, or you can devise your own way. What I find really interesting about these people is that they chose to find their own ways of being spiritual.” Sacred trees It seems that the spirituality of these non-Christian people was malleable and reactive, able to flex under pressure from external sources. Let’s go back to these sacred trees. From the late 15th century onwards, Christian missionaries recognised that there were still people worshipping trees in the Baltics, and so chopped them down to put a stop to it. That didn’t work. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/HIP2814415-36f2371.jpg" width="4000" height="2939" alt="A 15th-century German woodcut of the earlier Saint Alto chopping down trees, which Christian missionaries did during this period in the Baltics (Image by TopFoto)" title="A 15th-century German woodcut of the earlier Saint Alto chopping down trees, which Christian missionaries did during this period in the Baltics (Image by TopFoto)" /> “There’s one remarkable source that describes how these people developed a ritual for making new sacred trees. Now, it seems highly unlikely that this was part of their original tradition because the whole point of a tree being sacred is that it’s very, very old. It’s sacred because it’s always been there, and goes way, way back to your ancestors who also worship it. But if your sacred trees are constantly being cut down, you need a way of making new ones,” explains Francis. “So, according to this account, people in Latvia would go to a sacred tree that had been cut down. They would recover a branch or some part of the tree, and ask the permission of the tree that had been cut down to make a new sacred tree. It had to be of the same species as the original tree. They would ask the permission of that tree if it would become a new sacred tree, and then touch it with the branch of the tree that was originally sacred. That would make the new tree into a sacred one. And that, to me is extraordinary.” Becoming a tree-hugger Clearly a big part of the story is the persistent importance of the veneration of the natural world to these people. That’s something that has been lost, or at least denuded, in the Christian west, for want of a better way of describing it. I’m not a practising Christian, but I’ve read Tom Holland’s Dominion, and I buy into the idea that western morality and values are the inescapable product of Christianity. If I want to break free of that and find a bit of personal, creative, spirituality, it feels like trees are the way to go, in the spirit of Francis’s Latvian branch communicants. And thus, I went and hugged a tree. It wasn’t a great tree or an ancient tree. And it wasn’t even my favourite tree, the Scots Pine, which I’ve always found to have a particularly satisfying shape. It was an oak tree, in a little woodland down the road from my house. I talked to it a bit and asked it if it minded me hugging it. It didn’t reply. It’s a tree after all. But it didn’t drop any acorns on my head so I think we were in accord. I quite enjoyed hugging it. It was a warm day, and the experience was somewhat cooling. It was pleasantly scratchy on my face. I lingered for a minute or two in a woody embrace, and thought about stuff that was on my mind. I pondered on the strength of the trunk and the roots that no doubt extended some distance beneath my feet. “Most people will have memories of a particular place that's very significant to them, or perhaps a particular kind of tree which they find particularly beautiful or have a personal connection to: places which have some kind of numinous power,” suggests Francis. “And what if you didn't just leave that in the realm of a happy and pleasant memory. What if you actually imbued that with the sacred? What if you went that extra step of fashioning your own way of thinking about what is sacred?” I didn’t get as far as imbuing my hugging tree with sacrality, but I think it was a nice ritual (I’ve got an upcoming article in this series on the importance of ritual, so I’ll come back to that). I felt a little bit of a sense of arboreal power, which just made me reflect on myself a little more deeply than I ordinarily might. If that’s creative spirituality, I think it’s quite helpful. It certainly wasn’t a bad thing. This builds on something that Professor Ronald Hutton told me in an earlier Life Lesson from History, when he opined that now is the perfect time for us to DIY our own religions, and that’s the benefit we get from living in a modern disenchanted world. I got a similar sense from Francis: “You can think about spirituality in a more personally creative way than simply going through a kind of shopping list and deciding ‘which of these spiritualities that I found online should I go with?’. I would encourage people to be creative and to explore the potential of spirituality as something which they fashion themselves as well as something which you might inherit from a tradition.” So the tradition I’m fashioning is to hug a tree. It’s not a new idea, I know. I’m not the first tree-hugger. But it gave me something a bit different, and maybe I’ll refine the ritual as time goes on. I salute the historical peoples of the pagan north and east of Europe, and Dr Francis Young, for reminding me that spirituality is in our gift to explore and fashion as we wish. Now, more than ever, we need to find connection with the natural world around us. So hug a tree, if you like, or do something else, but be spiritually creative and curious, and see where it takes you. This article is part of HistoryExtra's new Life Lessons from History Substack newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter for more articles and podcasts exploring the ways in which history can help us live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.
"There's little understanding of the shared history of Britain and the subcontinent" | South Asian Heritage Month
As Britain celebrates South Asian Heritage Month, Shalina Patel, Sumita Mukherjee and Shrabani Basu talk to Matt Elton about how histories of the subcontinent can be better shared and explored
Matt Elton: What do you see as the value of South Asian Heritage Month? And do you think this kind of specific history month is generally a good thing? Shalina Patel: Black History Month was first marked in the UK in 1987, at a time when there was a huge absence of understanding about black history. Fast forward 30-plus years, and there are groups now advocating for black history 365 days a year. They feel that it shouldn’t be relegated to a specific month, but should be integrated [into conversations] all year. So if we think about the journey, I’d say that South Asian Heritage Month [SAHM, first held in 2020] is really important as a starting point, because there is currently an absence of understanding of the diversity within South Asian culture, communities and history. True, there’s a risk that this is the only time of year when people will talk about this topic, but we’re starting from a place where so few conversations are taking place on a public scale. So marking SAHM is really important now – and I hope that we will get to a point where we won’t need it anymore, because [South Asian stories] will be really integrated into people’s understanding. Sumita Mukherjee: I agree that it’s really important to increase the diversity of history that is being told. SAHM gives us the opportunity to have this conversation – it encourages the media and other forums to showcase stories and histories around South Asia. I would say that there’s an issue, though, with the timing as it stands, because most schools and universities are closed in late July and August, and lots of people are on holiday. Shrabani Basu: I think the important thing is to make it inclusive – it shouldn’t just be South Asians eating curries and watching dances. The point is to make it a national festival that everybody looks forward to. It’s the holiday season, so go for that – make it something that excites people. The danger with all these things is that they lose momentum. To keep it fresh and popular we need to raise the bar, make it exciting, make people want to see what’s on the agenda, and take it forward that way. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/shutterstockeditorial12129324a-1e62406.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A family gather together. They are dressed in white robes and the woman is balancing a jug on her head. She is carrying a child. A man next to her is carrying a child on his shoulders" title="A family undertakes a lengthy migration following the partition of India in 1947. Millions of Muslims left India for Pakistan, with Hindus and Sikhs trekking in the opposite direction; perhaps 1 million died (Image by Shutterstock)" /> So it has a value as a springboard for these kinds of conversations, but also as a way of connecting South Asian history to wider society? SB: Absolutely. Far too little is known about South Asian history – which is the history of undivided India to some extent, and our cultures from all these countries that make up the region. Even many South Asians don’t know much about it. SP: I agree. SAHM is also a really important opportunity to unlock those conversations within the community itself. I think that we as a community are not necessarily great at talking about our history, partly because of things that happened within the memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents. SAHM is about having those internal family conversations as well as having conversations on a public scale. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" SM: This idea of inclusion and celebration is a great thing, but sometimes – and we see this with Black History Month – there’s a focus on celebrating certain figures and palatable histories without looking at the dark side of history. There’s a tendency to celebrate South Asians and not criticise their roles in history. Also, a lot of the focus is on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – places that were part of the British empire. But South Asia is a much broader region than just those places, and that inclusiveness has not yet come through in the events and celebratory elements I’ve seen so far. SB: Absolutely. Very few people in north India know anything about Sri Lanka, for example. The whole region is so vast and so varied that we ourselves don’t know everything about it. As Sumita said, we have a very dark history, too: partition, riots, wars within the region – there are a lot of dark, dark patches for which our own countries are to blame, not just outside forces. SP: This month provides a really good opportunity to celebrate that diversity and to push the idea that the South Asian community is not some kind of monolith. Sometimes I put myself in a category – as ‘British South Asian’ – but what does that mean? There are so many different types of people and different experiences within that. We need to engage with all of those differences, even within the communities. SAHM is still relatively new, so I hope we will see more and more of that kind of diversity and those different types of stories coming through. How can this process work better, to foster research across communities – particularly on migration and movement, a major theme of this year’s SAHM? SP: I’ve been a teacher for 15 years now, and I’ve been very lucky to work in a secondary school in north-west London that is very diverse. My school is so positive about making sure that we share histories that are relevant to our students, so there is a huge amount of South Asian history explored. But that’s been a real journey. Ten years ago, it was just me and my department researching these things on our own, because there weren’t the resources out there. Now I’m really proud to say that I’ve helped write material about a lot of these issues. Just a couple of months ago, a textbook called Asian Empires in the Silk Roads was published [by Oxford University Press], for which I wrote the chapter on Mughal India. I’ve also helped write a textbook about the British empire. So things are definitely changing, and many more resources are available. The problem is that it’s up to individual schools whether they teach the British empire at all, and whether India is part of that story. It’s so important that we don’t teach only the British Raj as South Asian history. Students also love learning about the Mughals, because they are fascinating and dramatic – much more interesting than the Tudors. But I also teach my students about South Asian migration, as well as stories of more modern South Asian people – [Second World War spy] Noor Inayat Khan, for example, and [Sikh princess, suffragette and Queen Victoria’s god-daughter] Sophia Duleep Singh. The big problem is that there’s still little understanding of how much shared history there is between Britain and the subcontinent. If kids are learning about the First and Second World Wars but not hearing about the contributions of Indian soldiers, then that is not telling the full story. Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism” SB: I feel that there is still little knowledge about that topic. During the recent VE Day celebrations, there was only a little mention of how many Indian soldiers played a part. I do understand that time is very limited in a commentary but a few more lines, a little more emphasis, would’ve been great. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1278032407-1db2f2d.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A group of British Indian soldiers stand and sit around a single chair with a draughts board on it. Two men are playing draughts" title="British Indian Army troops play draughts following evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. The role of the 2.5 million Indian troops who served in the Second World War is sometimes overlooked (Image by Getty Images)" /> At the front of the procession were the FANYs [First Aid Nursing Yeomanry] – women who also served as secret agents in the Second World War. I would’ve loved to hear that these secret agents came from all parts of the world: Noor Inayat Khan was half Indian, and Krystyna Skarbek was from Poland. The war was fought on the shoulders of the people of the empire, and I think that point should have been raised. More than 2.5 million Indian troops served in the Second World War – the biggest volunteer army in the conflict – and they didn’t merit a single mention at the VE Day concert. So this narrative is still not there – and it needs to be told, to be taught in schools. That is the only way forward. SM: British history itself is South Asian history. It’s not just about the history of the empire, because South Asians have been in Britain since the 17th century. Migration is not just a contemporary phenomenon: in the 19th century, South Asians of all ilks were influencing culture in Britain and working in its port cities. South Asians also went to Mauritius, to Malaysia, to Uganda, to South Africa, to Guyana, to Jamaica, and to other places – the South Asian diaspora has such a vibrant, interesting history. When discussing migration, I’d return to the problem of centrism around India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – there’s so much to say about other parts of the region such as Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal. SP: When I teach the transatlantic slave trade, I also speak about indentured labour. Because the root cause of more than a million Indians going to places such as Mauritius was the abolition of slavery. So the histories of the Caribbean, South Asia and Britain all intersect. SM: And of course the history of Windrush, which is relatively well known and taught in schools, is also about Indo-Caribbean people who came over with that generation. Do tensions, such those that arose between India and Pakistan in May, make researching the region’s histories harder? SB: Oh, absolutely. Because the first thing when you have a situation of conflict is that visas get cancelled. So researchers can’t go, academics can’t travel. India cancelled visas for people of Pakistani origin, and the same probably happened for British Indians wanting to travel to Pakistan. So British Asians of Indian or Pakistani origin who want to study [on the subcontinent] will find it difficult to access archives or do any sort of research. That’s the first practical block. Then it spreads to filmmaking and cultural life as well. The minute you have conflict, these barriers go up – filmmakers can’t travel, musicians can’t travel. It doesn’t help anybody. SM: It’s been very difficult over the past few years anyway, with geopolitical tensions in the region, for people with Indian passports to research in Pakistan and vice versa. So the current conflict has only escalated things. It’s important to note that, though these recent conflicts are rooted in present-day issues, they also have longstanding historical reasons. So there’s an opportunity to reiterate and understand the history behind these troubles, especially in Kashmir. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2215785244-c282475.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="An Indian soldier is in the centre of the image, wearing a black mask and green helmet. Behind him, there is a crowd and two Indian flags" title="An Indian soldier stands on alert in Srinagar, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, following the terrorist attack that killed 26 people in Pahalgam in April 2025 (Image by Getty Images)" /> SB: I don’t think people know the real story of what happened in Kashmir – how this line of control was drawn, how the Hindu maharaja went over to India, how the invasion happened, why this conflict started. SM: It’s also coupled with geographical literacy – understanding the geography of the region, Kashmir’s location, the environmental reasons, the water lines and so on. SP: There’s a real absence of understanding of the partition story, of how these borders were drawn. Again, this is a shared history with Britain – the story of partition is a British story as well as a South Asian story. It was framed as a peaceful takeover, which we all know was absolutely not the case. This history shouldn’t be contentious, but it is, because Britain portrayed partition as a peaceful handover, which undermined the reality of the violence and bloodshed that engulfed these new nations in 1947. There’s also been an absence of personal stories about this history because of the horrific things that happened at that time. The personal, the political, the geographical – so many factors involved, which is why this is such a misunderstood history. SB: When the conflict broke out in May, there were ugly scenes outside the Indian High Commission and the Pakistan High Commission. It’s something we absolutely do not need. The South Asian community here should be united rather than divided, when it becomes a law and order problem. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war What areas of historical research would you highlight as important today? SM: I’m working on the history of South Asian children and their migration to Britain. This is part of a growing field looking at children in history not just as distant people in the background but as historical actors themselves. I’m exploring the role that young people played, changing society, changing politics. Colleagues are also working on the informal labour of women in housework and homeworking – sewing, childminding, the things that women often do at home that isn’t recorded within formal economic histories – to understand the contribution that South Asian women have made to the economy in Britain, especially women of Pakistani origin in northern England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2155867340-6eda065.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A row of South Asian women sit at tables in a factory, using sewing machines. Some of them are looking at their work, while others are looking at the camera" title="Women of South Asian heritage work at a clothing factory in Newcastle, 1968. The contribution of South Asian women to the British economy, particularly those involved in homeworking such as sewing, is now being researched for the first time, reveals Sumita Mukherjee (Image by Getty Images)" /> SB: I would love to see oral histories from earlier generations being recorded. Not enough of this has been done. There was a little documentary recording people who migrated to Britain in the sixties. It was so interesting seeing their lifestyles, how they were so formally dressed at all times; compare it with today, when everyone is so casual, even the new immigrants. These stories tell us so much about how these people came here. I feel more and more that, as we lose that generation, we need to save their stories. I wish they would be recorded on film and audio as much as possible. SP: Oral histories, real personal stories, are so important. I always encourage young people and others to record their family histories – to talk to their grandparents, if they still have them, to record those migration stories. I did that with my granddad: there are so many things I didn’t know about his migration story. A friend of mine, jeweller Anisha Parmar, invites South Asian women to come together and use family jewellery as a way to explore their heritage and their history. It’s been incredible to see young South Asian people delve into their identity and heritage through the medium of gold jewellery in particular. When we think about South Asian items in museums, often we are thinking about beautiful, ornate pieces of jewellery worn by maharajas and royalty. But she’s made more personal connections. We’ve all got such items – I’m wearing my grandma’s bangles right now. SB: The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ordered a report looking at the names of soldiers from India and Africa who, despite a pledge that every soldier who died in the world wars would be commemorated with a headstone, were not recorded in that way. To address that, fantastic work has been done by Greenwich University and the UK Punjab Heritage Association to find the names of soldiers from the Punjab in the First World War, as well as details of regiments, when they joined, if they died. I find that quite exciting: a way of making right something that was wrong – to commemorate some 50,000 Indians whose names were lost. Shalina Patel is a historian, teacher and author. Her first book is The History Lessons (Icon, 2024) Sumita Mukherjee is professor of modern history at the University of Bristol. Her books include Indian Suffragettes (Oxford University Press India, 2018) Shrabani Basu is a historian, journalist and author. Her latest book is The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer (Bloomsbury, 2021) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine