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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
When was the White House built – and why is it white?
How much do you know about the history of the White House in Washington, DC, which has been home to all US presidents since John Adams in 1800?
Inscribed on the stone fireplace of the State Dining Room of the White House are the words: “I pray to Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” The blessing, which was engraved there in 1945, came from a letter written by John Adams to his wife Abigail in 1800. He was the second man to be president of the United States, but the first to reside in the world-famous home of the presidency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, in Washington, DC. A decade earlier, there had been no such place as Washington, DC, on the Potomac River. Founded by the Residence Act of 1790, the new capital would be a modern metropolis laid out in a grid system and with grand boulevards and public spaces everywhere. In the short term, though, it was not a promising place to live: if not hectic with the constant building works, there was nothing around but forests and some wetlands, where sanitation was poor and conditions were cold to freezing. Still, this would be the home of the president. George Washington, the first man elected to the office, personally chose the site for what would be the White House along with city planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and launched a competition for the building’s design. When was the White House built? Construction of the White House got underway with the laying of the cornerstone on 13 October 1792. But the the so-called ‘Presidential Palace' would not be finished until after Washington had left office. Even by 1800, when Adams moved in, the building was far from complete. It would be added to, repaired and extended many times throughout the years, not least when it had to be reconstructed following the War of 1812. The photogenic South Portico was added in 1824, followed by the North Portico, completed in 1830. The West Wing was added in 1902 and within, in 1909, the first iteration of the Oval Office. The East Wing was developed in 1942 – it is the focus of a sweeping renovation by President Trump that will see a 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the building. The White House currently boasts a total of 132 rooms. White House facts: seven things you need to know Here, White House historian Lindsay M Chervinsky explains everything you need to know about the home of the US president… Why is the White House called the White House? The home of the President of the United States is called the White House in reference to its covering with lime-based whitewash to protect the porous sandstone it is built from. By President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977–81), the paint was so thick that visitors couldn’t see the carving details above the windows and doors, or any of the beautiful molding. The White House underwent a significant external renovation to strip the many layers of paint, which took 20 years and wasn’t completed until President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993–2001). When finished, over 45 coats of paint had been removed from the exterior walls. Read more: American history myths: 7 things people get wrong Who built the White House? The White House was designed by Irish-born architect, James Hoban – whose vision of a neoclassical mansion in the Palladian style won him Washington's competition – but it was built by hundreds of workers, including enslaved people. Over the next eight years, a mix of free African-American and white wage labourers, enslaved workers, and skilled craftsmen built the White House. They worked in a variety of positions, including basic labourers, overseers, sawyers, carpenters, stone workers, and bricklayers. Some of the enslaved workers were owned by the city commissioners charged with overseeing the project, or by Hoban himself. The vast majority, however, were hired out from their owners in Washington, DC, as well as Virginia, and Maryland, who then pocketed the enslaved peoples’ wages. The construction crews were often shuttled back and forth between the White House and the Capitol building sites (which were also built using enslaved labour), depending on which location needed labour or had available materials at any given moment. Was the White House set on fire by the British? Yes. In August 1814, British forces marched into Washington, DC and burned all public buildings in retaliation for the destruction of York [now Toronto, Canada], the year prior. After enjoying a lavish meal laid out by First Lady Dolley Madison, the British forces set fire to the White House. Urban legend suggests that a rain storm arrived and saved the White House. The truth, however, is that the rain actually made the damage worse. While the wet weather saved the surrounding buildings from catching fire, it nearly destroyed the walls of the White House. The stone walls were incredibly hot from the fire and the cold rain caused them to shrink rapidly and crack. Congress quickly appointed a commission to investigate the damage and rebuild the White House. The investigators discovered that almost everything inside had been destroyed except for a few pots and pans in the basement kitchens, but their report concealed the extent of the damage to get the rebuilding process started immediately. Read more: Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July? Some officials wanted to move the capital to a more developed city – like Philadelphia, New York, or Charleston – because lodging, food, and entertainment options were still quite limited in DC. Furthermore, representatives from states far away from DC, like New Hampshire or Georgia, wanted to shorten their travelling time. They saw the destruction of the White House as an opportunity to move the capital. Eager to maintain a historic link with the earlier presidents, Presidents James Madison and James Monroe rushed to rebuild the White House exactly as before. They even hired the same architect, James Hoban, to complete the renovation. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now Many animals have lived at the White House Most people are familiar with the dogs that have lived in the White House – such as Bo and Sunny Obama, or President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush’s Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley. But there have been a menagerie of animals that have called the grounds home. President Woodrow Wilson welcomed a herd of sheep to the South Lawn and they donated their wool to the Red Cross to create uniforms for soldiers during the First World War. One particularly adventuresome ram named Hi caused a bit of trouble when he repeatedly broke into the Oval Office. John F Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, had a pet pony named Macaroni; First Lady Grace Coolidge had a raccoon named Rebecca; and President William H Taft had a cow, Pauline Wayne, which roamed in front of the Old Executive Office Building. Perhaps best of all, Alice Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter) had a garter snake named Emily Spinach that she carried around in her purse and pulled out as a conversation piece at parties. Anne Boleyn’s lapdog and John Quincy Adams’s alligator: 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets The White House is bigger than you might think it is While the building appears to be two stories from the street, there are actually six floors. There are three floors above ground (the State Floor and two floors for the residence), and three floors below ground. While much of the State Floor and residence layout has remained the same since its construction, many other areas of the White House have changed dramatically. When you enter the White House today, you would probably enter on the Ground Floor, or the first of the basement floors. Until 1901, this floor was primarily a work space. Instead of the China Room, the Vermeil Room, the Library, and the Diplomatic Reception Room, there would have been a kitchen, a laundry room, a storage space for food and dishware, and sleeping spaces for the enslaved or free servants. The basement was notoriously damp and frequently infested with vermin and rodents. Read more: Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next There are other spaces that have been lost to history as well. The White House had a series of stables to house the president’s horses, carriages, coachmen, and grooms. The final and most elaborate stable was converted into a garage in 1909. The attic has also undergone many renovations. In its early years, it was used for storage, sleeping quarters for free or enslaved servants, and a hiding place for the presidents’ children. In 1913 First Lady Ellen Wilson added guestrooms and a painting studio for her own private use. During the Coolidge administration, engineers discovered problems with the roof structure. They installed a sunroom (now the solarium), larger guest and service rooms, and a new steel and concrete roof. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/WhiteHouseFloorPlanGettyImages-640477071-b94d8bf-e1761584579153.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Floor Plan of the second storey of the White House" title="A 1901 drawing by FD Owen of the floor plan of the second story in the White House, which was originally deisgned by architect James Hoban in 1792 (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" /> The White House grounds were once open to anyone When President John Adams moved into the White House on 1 November 1800, there was no fence or gate, and the grounds were open to pedestrians. President Thomas Jefferson added a fence that enclosed the grounds, but they remained open for common use. In 1873, President Ulysses S Grant began closing the grounds at sunset for additional security and in 1893, President Grover Cleveland closed the South Grounds, typically the first family’s garden, after strangers tried to take a picture of his young daughter, Esther. The North and South Grounds were closed permanently during Calvin Coolidge’s presidency at the recommendation of the United States Secret Service. The president’s cabinet hasn’t always had a home at the White House Every president has consulted a cabinet since President George Washington convened the first full cabinet meeting on 26 November 1791. While President John Adams was the first to live in the White House, President Thomas Jefferson was the first to meet with his cabinet in the White House and gathered the department secretaries in his private study on the first floor (now the State Dining Room). By the time of the Civil War, the president’s study had moved to the second floor and Abraham Lincoln met with the secretaries in his office in the south-east corner of the second floor (now the Lincoln Bedroom). Read more: American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing to provide more work space for his staff, and to give his large family more room on the second floor of the original building. In 1909, President Taft expanded the West Wing, added the Oval Office, and an official Cabinet room. The Oval Office was moved to its present location during President Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency. Since then, most cabinets have used the Cabinet room for official cabinet meetings and elected to meet with individual department secretaries in the Oval Office. Lindsay M Chervinsky, PhD is White House Historian at the White House Historical Association, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the White House. She is the author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
5 things you (probably) didn't know about the Tudors
Ruth Goodman, who teaches our new HistoryExtra Academy course on Tudor life, shares five insights about the dynasty’s legacy
1. The Tudors brought peace and prosperity to England Bringing peace was probably the most important thing the Tudors did for us. The British countryside is littered with the sites of medieval battles – places where opposing forces stomped over crops, burned barns and rounded up people’s sons. For centuries, rival aristocrats made and broke alliances, and killed those who got in their way. Henry Tudor took the throne in exactly this way at Bosworth in 1485, when he persuaded a number of warlords to desert their king, Richard III. But there it stopped. Intrigue and power politics were thenceforth undertaken by more covert means. Everyone became a bit safer, the day-to-day became a bit more predictable, and lots of people got a little bit richer. Less war meant that more crops made it to market, more young men were available for work, and there was less damage done to buildings, less thievery with menaces and safer travel. In turn, this meant more trade and a greater willingness to invest. The peace the Tudors brought to their lands benefited all – rich and poor alike. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-540735906webready-614eaac.jpg" width="5572" height="3714" alt="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" title="An engraving shows Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester during the Reformation, presenting an English translation of the Bible to Henry VIII (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Henry VIII was a reluctant reformer When the Tudors came to power, the Catholic church was already struggling to maintain its grip upon the minds and souls of Europe. New ideas about the nature of God and the state of Christianity were circulating. So when Henry VIII lost patience with the pope, there were plenty of people delighted by the opportunity to rethink England’s official religious position. Read more | Tudor England had no standing army, but this humble hobby kept its people ready for war Henry himself seems to have been happy to leave the religion as was. He just wanted the power and money the pope had been leveraging from his kingdom. He was quickly convinced, though, that he should also have the money and assets of the monasteries. A significant number of influential and vocal people wanted much more, however, pushing for a ‘purer’ form of Christianity that did away with priests entirely and abandoned the rituals and traditions of Catholicism. Others, of course, wholeheartedly defended the time-honoured form of faith. The result was a fracturing of society. Hundreds, both Protestant and Catholic, were executed for refusing to change their form of faith and follow the state-sponsored format – one that changed radically several times. But for all the death and fear, the upset and soul-searching, a new freedom of thought also emerged. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-463916919webready-ea853dd.jpg" width="3432" height="2288" alt="A painting showing a person, holding the page of a book which sits on a table" title="During the Tudor era, literacy grew, in part because Protestantism emphasised reading the Bible rather than the word of God being mediated by a priest (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. The Tudor era brought a rise in literacy A few years before Henry Tudor took the throne, in 1476, William Caxton printed his first book on English soil. As printing presses became established and the price of books plummeted, reading became affordable to many more people. There was also more choice. Alongside religious texts, books of popular stories, advice manuals, joke books, medical texts and scandal sheets were published. At the same time, there was a new religious pressure for Britons to learn to read. The Protestant faith required its adherents to stop relying on priests and to read the Bible for themselves. This applied to everyone: shepherds and ploughmen as well as nobles and merchants – even women. Teaching people to read became a new religious duty and literacy rates started to climb. Read more | What did the Tudors think was ‘good’ sex? These tips and tricks were key to relationships in the 16th century 4. They drove the expansion of industry The Tudor monarchs – Elizabeth, in particular – were very keen to kickstart new industries and update old ones. In order to do this, specialist workers from Europe were encouraged to resettle on these shores. Some came as refugees fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries, bringing new textile-making skills. Others were purely economic migrants with mining expertise or knowledge of new glassblowing and brass-founding techniques. The strategy worked – and these new arrivals provided the core of know-how and experience around which English industry could grow. Read more | 5 things you (probably) didn't know about Victorian Britain 5. The health of the nation improved Rates of fatal illness fell during the Tudor period – though this was the result of sheer luck, as certain major diseases mutated into less virulent forms. When a new, often lethal form of the plague arrived in England in 1348 – the Black Death – it killed around a third of the population, suddenly and catastrophically. Plague returned to Britain many times over the centuries that followed but, by the start of the Tudor era, the outbreaks were becoming smaller and more people were surviving. Meanwhile, another major killer known as the sweating sickness – a mysterious disease causing rapidly developing symptoms including shivers, headaches, dizziness, pains and, soon afterwards, sweating and commonly death – came and went. The first epidemic broke out in 1485, just as the Tudor era was beginning, and the last came in 1551, after which it apparently vanished completely. With both of these big killers in retreat, the population began to grow. Ruth Goodman is a social and domestic historian and broadcaster. Her books include How to Be a Tudor (Viking, 2015) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine Want to step even further into the world of the Tudors? In her brand-new HistoryExtra Academy series, Ruth Goodman takes you inside everyday life in the 16th century — from food and fashion to faith, work, and even love and marriage. The first three episodes are available now on the HistoryExtra app, with more to come soon. Start watching today Want to ask Ruth a question? Join our live virtual Q&A on 19 November. Find out more here
"Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning": a history of political violence
Following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, Matt Elton spoke to historian Adam IP Smith about the history of violent attacks on US leaders. In this interview, first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine, Smith discussed the political and social repercussions of such assaults across the decades
Matt Elton: Assassinations, and attempted assassinations, have occurred around the world throughout history. But is there a particularly American aspect to this story of political violence? Adam IP Smith: I think there is. Political violence is hardly unique to the US, sadly, so we must be careful about ascribing American exceptionalism to what we saw at Donald Trump’s rally [in Pennsylvania on 13 July 2024]. There is nevertheless an American political tradition into which this specific kind of gun violence – the attempted assassination of leading political figures, especially presidents and presidential candidates – fits. On the podcast | Adam IP Smith on assassinations that shaped US history As a historian, do you think it’s a stretch to suggest that the violence that shaped the founding of the modern nation may have paved the way for later political violence in the US? Certainly the political polarisation and the potential for political violence we’re seeing today form part of a recurrent pattern in US history. There are several reasons, but maybe the core one is that there’s long been a fundamental disagreement within the US about who constitutes the legitimate American nation. That has led to a fear, genuinely held by significant numbers of people involved in the political process, that the stakes are so high because if their political enemies win then everything will be lost – that their freedom, the republic, even their own place in society will be jeopardised. That’s partly because, from the beginning, the president of the United States has held many of the powers held by monarchs – in some respects, even greater powers. George Washington had more influence over the government of the US than George III had over the government in London, for instance. So the monarchical style of the US head of state puts a huge amount of pressure on that role, which needs to feel like the embodiment of America at that particular moment in time. The first US president targeted was Andrew Jackson in 1835 – an episode that’s less familiar to many in the UK than later attempts. Why is that? The reason may be just that it was unsuccessful: the gun wielded by the would-be assassin malfunctioned. If Jackson had been shot on the steps of the Capitol, then we would know about it. Jackson already had a bullet lodged in him from an earlier duel, one of several he’d fought (in one of which, some 30 years earlier, he’d killed a man). So Jackson himself was no stranger to gun violence. He was a deeply controversial and polarising figure – and, perhaps not irrelevantly to this conversation, the president to whom those advancing Trump’s agenda have most wanted to compare Trump. Read more | 50 assassinations that changed the world Jackson was kind of an outsider – the original ‘drain the Washington swamp’ candidate. He first ran to become president in 1824, but failed due to what he called a “corrupt bargain”, and argued that the election had been stolen from him. He ran again in 1828 and won convincingly, defeating John Quincy Adams, who was the last of the old guard. In fact, Jackson was a wealthy slave holder in Tennessee – he wasn’t some hard-scrabble guy anymore – but he had literally been born in a log cabin and had worked his way up. Like Trump – indeed, like Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, and many other big figures in American political history – he was of Scots Protestant Irish descent. The tradition that Jackson, Trump and Vance have tried to embody is one of rugged individualism, of standing up for yourself. It’s a kind of frontier mythos – the idea that in the end you have nothing to rely on but your wits and your bravery and your courage, and it’s all about you and your family. Jackson was both a perpetrator and a victim of gun violence. So in a way, if he had have been shot, it wouldn’t have fundamentally changed the image of him. It would almost have seemed fitting for him to die in that way, such was the nature of the romance built up around him. Some presidential assassinations had repercussions not just in the US but on the world stage. What examples are particularly illuminating in terms of that wider picture? The global impact of these events is one way of measuring the significance of the US in people’s imaginations. News of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 reached Britain a week or so after the event, having been carried by the fastest ship to the west coast of Ireland, then transmitted by telegraph from there to London. Clearly, the assassination of a head of state was dramatic enough, but so much more so because it occurred after the end of the American Civil War. Lincoln was a man who was imagined to have freed America’s enslaved people, and who’d worked his way up, with no formal education – a kind of working-class hero. So big public meetings were held in Hyde Park in London, and in cities all around the world, reflecting a genuine sense of shock and trauma. Just over 16 years later, President James A Garfield was shot. He didn’t die immediately, but lingered on for several months. By then, the transatlantic telegraph system had become effective, so his was the first US presidential assassination to be experienced in real time by Europeans and indeed by Americans around the rest of the country. Because it was an ongoing story, with bulletins issued from the president’s house, it was dragged out over a long period of time and became a global news phenomenon – as did the assassination of President William McKinley 20 years later. The assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963 was the first to be filmed, with footage taken by a bystander, Abraham Zapruder, made public some years after the shooting. As with so much about America, the world took notice – because everything about the US seems to take place on this massive, consequential scale. Various conspiracy theories surround Kennedy’s assassination. Is that fact linked to the international shock and the global scale of such events? It’s really difficult for people to accept that events that have huge consequences may have had tiny causes. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the idea that the life of this charismatic, glamorous young president – a hugely consequential figure in the context of the Cold War – could be cut short, that the US and the world could be robbed of his life and his leadership, struck people as a deeply upsetting, outrageous blow. So the idea that the cause of that blow could be one disaffected man, Lee Harvey Oswald, just didn’t compute. The natural tendency is to think: well, something else is at work here. This must be the Cubans, the Russians, or maybe – and of course this became one of the most prominent Kennedy conspiracy theories – we’ve somehow done this to ourselves as Americans. Maybe it’s the FBI or some sinister group within what some on the right now call the ‘Deep State’. That reinforces a recurrent fear and anxiety in American politics: we cannot hold this thing together because there are those among us, potentially millions and millions of them, who are fundamentally opposed to what we are trying to do as real Americans, defenders of the revolution, lovers of freedom, or whatever it might be. That might be a sinister cadre in the ‘Deep State’; it might be millions of MAGA Trump supporters; it might be the ‘liberal elite’ supporting Kamala Harris – whatever it is, at any given moment the stakes feel so high. So people look for conspiratorial, big picture explanations. What were the impacts of the attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan? On 30 March 1981, Ronald Reagan was approaching his limousine after delivering a speech in Washington DC when he was shot by John Hinckley Jr. The president was rushed by the secret service to a hospital, where he underwent surgery; the bullet was removed and he recovered. It was obviously a very dramatic and distressing moment – and one that Reagan brilliantly turned to his advantage. Stories circulated that as he was on the operating table, just before the anaesthetic took effect, he looked at the doctors and, with his trademark chuckle, said: “I hope you guys are all Republicans.” One of the doctors reportedly responded: “Today, Mr President, we’re all Republicans” – which of course was a great line to spin out. When he was giving a speech a few years later, a balloon popped nearby – and, without missing a beat, Reagan said: “Missed me.” Reagan was a great showman, like Donald Trump is a great showman, and he made great political capital out of this attempt on his life and the sangfroid with which he’d responded. Do you think that there is a direct relationship between political discourse and political violence, and are there examples that demonstrate that point? In a way, this gets to the heart of the problem. Is there a direct relationship? No. Is there a relationship? Yes, there surely must be. So does this explain what the shooter was doing in Pennsylvania on 13 July? In this case, of course, we will probably never know his motivations. However, plenty of Republicans have said that this shooting was a direct consequence of Democrats warning that Donald Trump is an authoritarian, a fascist and so on, and that if he becomes president, American democracy is on the line. Therefore, by implication, he must be stopped at all costs. Does it more broadly explain not just why this happened but why there was an attack on [former speaker of the House of Representatives] Nancy Pelosi’s husband; why there was an attempted kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer; why two congressmen have been shot in the past 10 or 15 years; why we see a lot of violence around the edges of political rallies; why we see pushing and shoving of press representatives; why we see frequent threats of violence to American politicians? At the moment, American politics is intensely polarised. It’s partisan in a way that is just not true in Britain at the moment, and wasn’t true in the US through the 1960s and even into the nineties, but that has been true in the US in the past. I think that, though there is no direct relationship between political violence and polarisation, it’s clear that when you have a highly polarised polity, when people are driven to the point of believing that so much is at stake if the other side wins, then it’s not really so surprising when these kinds of attacks happen. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump, President Biden said: “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.” Do you think that the US has a problem with recognising the violence in its history? The idea that this is somehow sort of un-American is palpably ridiculous. Violence and American politics have gone hand in hand right from the beginning, and some of this – perhaps quite a lot of it – is not just to do with the polarisation of politics, which is periodic, but to do with the massive availability of guns. In a country where there are more guns than there are people, where it’s extraordinarily easy to get hold of firearms, clearly this kind of assassination attempt is far more likely than it otherwise would be. Adam IP Smith is Edward Orsborn professor of United States politics & political history at the University of Oxford. He is also the host of The Last Best Hope? podcast This article first appeared in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why you should avoid hair-pulling, and cannibalism, at royal banquets
And other tips from history to avoid banquets going bad, in advance of King Charles III's state dinner with President Trump this week
There won’t be any cannibalism happening at the state banquet this week in Windsor Castle, in honour of the 47th US president, Donald J Trump. I haven’t seen the menu, but I think that’s a reasonable guess. I also suspect that Prince Harry won’t be in attendance, despite his recent trip to the UK and reconciliatory tête-à-tête with his father, King Charles III. However, if you believe this piece in The Times, while the king and his youngest son might be mending their relationship, Prince William cannot forgive his brother Harry for his apparent betrayal of trust in recent years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/GettyImages-1147873570-25735a9.jpg" width="1024" height="683" alt="Donald Trump, dressed in a black suit, stands alongside Queen Elizabeth II, Melania Trump, Prince Charles, and Camilla. The women are all dressed in white dresses, and Elizabeth, Charles and Camilla are all wearing blue sashes" title="President Trump and the late Queen Elizabeth II at the last state banquet, during the president’s first term of office (Image by Getty Images)" /> That’s where the cannibalism comes in. Back in the 11th century, two brothers – one of them destined for the throne of England – had a pretty big falling out. It led to an event at a feast that most people would find very hard to forgive. I’m talking about Harold and Tostig Godwinson. Harold, of course, went on to become Harold II of England, after the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066. He had to defend his crown against Tostig, who had joined the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada in an attack on the country from the north. Harold beat Hardrada and Tostig at the battle of Stamford Bridge, and both of the would-be invaders were killed. The root of the brotherly tiff went back a few years before that. In 1063, according to the 12th-century historian Henry of Huntingdon (who is unique in offering us this account, so we ought to be sceptical about its veracity), at the royal hall in Windsor, Tostig grabbed Harold’s hair while he was pouring wine for King Edward. Tostig, apparently, was so embittered that the king thought more highly of Harold that he was unable to “check his hand from his brother’s flowing locks”. Nobody would drink to this Hair-yanking in front of the king is one thing. But it gets worse; a lot worse. Henry of Huntingdon goes on to explain that Tostig flounced out of Windsor in umbrage and went to Hereford, where Harold’s servants were in the process of knocking up another royal banquet. It’s quite a long way from Windsor to Hereford, but in the course of what must have been a few days’ travel, Tostig’s anger had not abated. When he got to Hereford, he dismembered all his brother’s servants, and put their severed heads, legs and arms into all the drink containers. Then he sent a message back to the king saying that there was lots of salted meat waiting for him at Harold’s place. Unsurprisingly, King Edward wasn’t delighted about this act of anticipated anthropophagy, and exiled Tostig. According to Professor Heather Blurton, who has written a book about cannibalism in medieval literature, the whole thing is a symbolic fiction that draws on Greek mythology: “Tostig’s transformation of a royal banquet into a cannibal banquet is densely symbolic. The suggestion of a Thyestian feast rewrites history, casting an unnamed Edward the Confessor as the putative father of two feuding sons whose struggle for power is ultimately futile. In myth, Atreus kills Thyestes’s sons and serves them to him, leaving only their hands and feet, with which he taunts Thyestes. The invocation here of the myth of the House of Atreus, with its cursed history of murder and cannibalism, condemns Harold and Tostig as unworthy heirs to the kingdom. Simultaneously, its narrative intrusion into the prelude to the Norman Conquest of 1066 centres cannibalism as a privileged metaphoric mode for representing invasion and conquest in high medieval England.” Read more | Medieval manners and etiquette: dos and don’ts of the Middle Ages Yikes. So, basically it probably didn’t happen. Nevertheless that is pretty much the worst example of a royal banquet that I could find, with the added contemporary spice of a fraternal spat. As I say, it’s unlikely to offer any sort of model for what is going to happen at the state banquet in Windsor this week. Princes Harry and William won’t be present together, and I very much doubt there will be any hair-pulling, and definitely no cannibalism. The location of this week’s banquet is St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle. It was badly damaged in the fire of 1992 but it’s been restored and still bears the coats of arms of all the past Knights of the Garter. That is the chivalric order created by King Edward III back in 1348. Edward is closely associated with Windsor and spent loads of money doing it up in the 14th century. He was a huge fan of the legends of King Arthur and he was basically trying to reinvent Windsor as a new Camelot. King Arthur was notable as the host for another very bad banquet. It’s recorded in the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Helen Carr goes into the story in forensic detail in this membership-only article, but I’ll briefly remind you of the basics. It’s Christmas, King Arthur is enjoying a hearty festive feast with his knights arranged around the Round Table. Then an uninvited guest barges in – he’s tall, lean and strangely green. Yes, it’s the Green Knight. He bizarrely wants to play a game: a beheading game. Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and promptly decapitates the oddly coloured interloper. That would have been enough to spoil most banquets, but in a surprising plot twist, the body of the knight proceeds to retrieve his head and explain that Gawain will now himself have to submit to being beheaded in a year and a day. So that’s quite a downer for the whole feast, but Gawain’s agreement to seek out the Green Knight and accept his fate is the sort of act of chivalry that Edward III revelled in. Feasting, of course, has been a mainstay of lordly soft power for centuries, millennia probably. It was the duty of a leader to provide for his or her followers, and a great way to do that was by creating opportunities for copious and conspicuous consumption. Certainly in prehistory – and we can’t really talk about royalty here because we cannot know the make-up of their political structures – feasting was a big thing. Just last week, the results of a new survey about eating in the Bronze Age–Iron Age transition came out. It showed that back at the end of the Bronze Age, Britons were having massive food festivals, the like of which weren’t seen again until we get to the Middle Ages. People were travelling considerable distances to get to these huge banquets, and bringing their dinner with them, too. The midden, or rubbish pit, from one such feasting site stretches over FIVE football pitches. Boasting, drinking, amputation – that's some banquet For a really great banquet scene, we need look no further than Beowulf, the 10th or 11th-century story of the sixth-century adventures of the eponymous hero in Scandinavia. In the timber hall of King Hrothgar, Beowulf and his warriors engage in hard drinking, heavy boasting and lengthy tale-telling. The festivities are marred by the angry arrival of the monstrous Grendel, who sneaks in late at night and attacks the place, smashing it up with demonic glee, until Beowulf gets hold of him and literally rips his arm off. Maybe there will be some boasting and some modest drinking when President Trump is entertained by King Charles III in Windsor, but I don’t suppose they will be pinning the severed arm of a nocturnal devil-beast to the wall of St George’s Hall the day after this banquet. One thing we can be sure of is that the food served will be reassuringly expensive, because ostentatious displays of wealth have always been key to a good aristocratic banquet, as Charlotte Palmer explained in a piece about medieval banquets on HistoryExtra (read it here if you’re a member). Take, for example, the feast thrown in 1491 by Ercole I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara in northern Italy, for his son’s wedding. No expense was spared in the production of some elaborate sugar sculptures for the guests, but before they could tuck in, the servants threw these delightful treats into their laps. Bit weird. They then brought out a second round of these saccharine creations for everyone to actually eat. The point being, of course, that the duke could afford to literally throw money away. Read more | 10 foods named after famous people from history Singing deer and two-headed horses Maybe the display of wealth won’t be quite so crudely displayed, but I’m sure they will have the good silver out in Windsor this week. And of course, really nowadays, it’s all about the pageantry, because that’s the one thing you simply can’t buy. If you want to know how to really go to town on this front, consider the obscenely over-the-top banquet of 1454, hosted by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy: the Feast of the Pheasant. Will King Charles have organised for his guest to be served, as the duke was, by a two-headed horse ridden by two men sitting back to back, each holding a trumpet, and then by a monster, consisting of a man riding on an elephant? There was also apparently a white stag that sang a tenor accompaniment to a chorister. It’s hard to find deer that can do good harmonies these days, probably not even in the herds that grace Windsor Great Park, but that is the sort of display that I think President Trump would lap up. Assuming magical animals are not available to provide this level of spectacle, the food is going to have to be absolutely top drawer to give the feast the wow factor it needs. I’ve never hosted a banquet, and I don’t suppose I ever will, but Lulu Grimes, managing editor at GoodFood.com, has been to more than her fair share of posh dinners. I asked her what makes the difference: “Banquets are all about illusion. Recipes must be easily replicable hundreds of times, look impressive and taste good. The table must look astonishing, the cutlery intimidating, and the glassware signal an incoming challenge to sobriety. Above all, the meal needs to keep you entertained for a VERY LONG TIME because banquets do drag on (oh my god, the speeches), and you can’t decide who you sit next to. “I know what I’m talking about, I’ve sat and eaten through my fair share of banquets over the past few years; I am the reluctant plus-one for a liveryman of the City of London. There are few institutions more enamoured with banquets than the City, and my goodness, they do pomp and circumstance well. I once sat next to the Serjeant at Arms, who arrived with a special goblet rather than use the array of wine glasses at each setting. One would hope the threat of a bit of casual poisoning is long gone, but why change a bit of ceremonial flashiness now? “Matching menus to occasions is vital. In 2023, His Excellency the President of the Republic of Korea was treated to barbecued quail, an upscale cottage pie, and chocolate mousse – welcome to Britain. Wrestling with a small bird while chatting politely is in a frequent banqueter’s skill set. This year President Macron enjoyed a lemon curd, gin and pastis cocktail (see what they did there), Norfolk chicken and English sparkling wine made by a French champagne house. No ruffling of feathers on either side, all very diplomatic. What with all that cutlery flying around, gastronomic slights are best avoided, an incident-free banquet is a good one.” Read more | Queen Elizabeth's relationships with US presidents Wise words from Lulu there. I assume President Trump will enjoy something as exciting and innovative as that served up for his counterparts from Korea and France. But I also predict that the quantity of food on offer in Windsor Castle this week will be modest by comparison to some of the banquets that we know of from history. In 1575, there was a 19-day banquet served up by Robert Dudley for Queen Elizabeth I at Kenilworth castle. Forty barrels of beer and 16 barrels of wine were consumed, per day, between firework displays. Dudley’s aim was to persuade the queen to marry him. It didn’t work. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and despite not being a man, it ought to have done the trick because Elizabeth famously professed that “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” As Tracy Borman told me in my Life Lessons from History series, Elizabeth’s superpower was procrastination to avoid the attentions of suitors like Dudley, so even a boozy pyrotechnic extravaganza like this wasn’t going to sway the queen. In this banquet, it’s the other way round: the host is the king, and he’s trying to impress the president, and persuade him to give us all those trade deals we want. They only have 48 hours to work the royal magic on Donald Trump, but he does seem remarkably wowed by British pomp and ceremony. So maybe it’ll do the trick – just so long as he keeps the demonic monsters out, avoids decapitation and amputation, goes easy on the hair-pulling, and keeps clear of cannibalism. 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.
Soviet dissidents who challenged the Kremlin
Benjamin Nathans discusses how dissidents within the Soviet Union mounted a sustained campaign of 'civil obedience' after Stalin's death, compelling the Kremlin to live up to its own laws
In the years following Stalin’s death in 1953, a new phenomenon emerged within the Soviet Union: so-called 'dissidents'. Preferring to think of themselves as 'rights defenders', these individuals advocated a form of 'civil obedience' – a demand that the state abide by its own constitution and the basic rights and freedoms it promised on paper. Historian Benjamin Nathans speaks to Danny Bird about his Cundill Prize-nominated book To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, which examines this extraordinary movement. Find out more about the Cundill History Prize Benjamin Nathans is the author of To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press, 2024) Buy it now from Amazon
Senkichi Awaya: the lost mayor of Hiroshima
The world’s first nuclear attack brought to an end a turbulent half century in Japanese history – one that Senkichi Awaya witnessed first-hand. Iain MacGregor reveals how one man’s fate mirrored the rise and fall of a nation
Senkichi Awaya was sitting in his dining room at the mayor’s residence in Hiroshima as the clocked ticked round to 8.15am on 6 August 1945. His teenage son Shinobu, and granddaughter Ayako, refugees from a devastated Tokyo, had joined him for breakfast. His wife, Sachiyo, had walked across the courtyard to the rear of the residence to retrieve some fruit from the store next to the shrine where the family prayed daily. It was then, as the first of only two atomic weapons ever to be used in wartime detonated, that a blinding flash of brilliant light filled the room. A fireball struck the city and the front of the Awayas’ home, situated around a kilometre from Ground Zero, was swept away in a crescendo of violence and heat. Senkichi, Shinobu and Ayako were among the 70,000 people who died instantly when ‘Little Boy’ – dropped from the B-29 bomber Enola Gay – exploded above Hiroshima. Over the days that followed, the death toll rose towards 120,000 as those who had been severely wounded died without medical care. In a city where 26 of the 29 hospitals had either been flattened or rendered useless, there was simply nowhere for the casualties to go and, because nine out of ten of all the city’s doctors and nurses had died, nobody to treat them anyway. The city of Hiroshima became a dystopian nightmare. Even those emergency workers who survived inevitably struggled to care for themselves, let alone offer support to others. Tens of thousands of survivors made their way out of the city and into the surrounding mountains seeking shelter. But it was days before officials began a concerted rescue operation. In the meantime, survivors started to collapse with mysterious symptoms of vomiting, diarrhoea and internal bleeding. The city’s people were experiencing the horrors of radiation poisoning. Within this wider story, Senkichi Awaya is a man curiously absent, seemingly lost to history. You will not find his name among the myriad of books relating to the Pacific conflict, or the Second World War more generally. Watch movies or documentaries and the mystery continues. Few academics and museum directors, even in Japan, have heard of him. Nevertheless, Senkichi Awaya was the mayor of Hiroshima from February 1943 onwards. Research Awaya’s family biography in the archives of the National Diet Library in Tokyo, and you begin to realise his story is a key to unlocking a deeper understanding of the Japanese civilian experience of the war. This is because, like so many in Japan, he lived through an era of industrialisation and modernisation that was ultimately undermined – or perhaps interrupted might be a better word, considering Japan’s postwar economic success – by nationalist and reactionary forces within the country. The drive to modernity Senkichi Awaya was born in 1893, the second son of a middle-class, upwardly mobile family, who lived in the port town of Sendai, 220 miles to the north-east of Tokyo. This was a time when Japan, a cocooned and feudal society until the middle of the 19th century, had opened itself to trade with the wider world. An urgent drive towards modernity shaped the development of Sendai, as it also did hundreds of towns and cities across the Japanese home islands of Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/Alamy-2H5M9RDwebready-29cebda.jpg" width="1500" height="2232" alt="A brightly coloured poster depicting some tall buildings against a bright blue sky, with a red paper lantern hanging above them in the sky. Across the front of this image is a branch of a cherry blossom tree. Some Japanese characters are written across the top" title="A poster promoting Tokyo in the 1930s. The city was the beating heart of a nation that increasingly viewed itself as a player on the global stage (Image by Alamy)" /> A key element of this story was the coming of the railway. The Awayas’ hometown benefited from the railway connection to Tokyo, bringing the town’s inhabitants economic prosperity as well as cultural ties to the capital. The Awaya family joined the country’s new professional classes, which placed a value on elite education and western culture. Eisuke Awaya, Senkichi’s father, rose to become a senior bureaucrat in one of the largest foreign-owned railway companies, which were busy building lines criss-crossing the country. The Awayas can be seen in photographs dressed in formal Sunday attire, the kinds of clothes you might associate with attending an afternoon concert in London’s Hyde Park or strolling along the Seine in Paris. The family were patriotic and, like the rest of Japanese society, devoted to the Meiji dynasty of rulers, associated with Japan’s shift from isolationism into modernity. Thanks, in part, to the influence of his mother, Senkichi was a deeply committed Christian. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 Behind this image of familial contentment, however, lay a troubled household. Eisuke Awaya was a workaholic, often away on business for weeks at a time, and when he was at home he could be a stern disciplinarian. He also displayed another western trait of business, a taste for alcohol. Perhaps this explains why Senkichi never enjoyed the close bond with his father that he shared with his mother. It would be she who would endow him with his devotion to public service, a love of family and of country. Despite the dysfunction at home, Senkichi grew tall and wiry. He sported a pencil-thin moustache, dressed in the Edwardian style and excelled at his academic studies. As he went through the education system, Japan’s industrial and economic transformation was in the process of achieving in four decades what western countries such as Germany had taken a century to do. Japan also expanded and modernised its military, with its leaders ominously displaying ambitions to become a global power. Senkichi graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1919 and embarked on a career as a civic administrator serving the Ministry of Home Affairs. His first post was within agriculture and based in Hiroshima Prefecture. He was 25 years old and developing the skills required for a top-level administrator who would play an integral part in the growing empire, both at home and abroad. He had been marked down as a safe pair of hands to handle important roles in key cities throughout the home islands. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/Alamy-WP6WTGwebready-4d2fef8.jpg" width="1500" height="968" alt="A black and white photograph of a large hall with many windows, on the tree-lined shore of a river. On the river, there are some small boats. In the background," title="This c1920s–30s photograph shows Hiroshima’s Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, which is now commonly known as the A-Bomb Dome because it was one of the few structures in the centre of the city to remain standing after the 1945 blast (Image by Alamy)" /> In 1926, Hirohito became emperor of Japan. The early years of his reign would see the country sinking into a military dictatorship, as economic hardship, political instability and nationalistic fervour produced a lurch to the far right. Senkichi, like every other Japanese person, was now deemed a ‘subject’ rather than a ‘citizen’. These were dangerous times, when many Japanese political leaders’ careers either soared or were cut short by intrigue, betrayal or assassination. Senkichi successfully rode this wave, while still adhering to his principles and faith, in itself a remarkable achievement. To judge by his writings, he was a patriot but no zealot, a man who believed in Japan finding its natural leading role in east Asia. In his late twenties, Senkichi was chosen over more experienced candidates to become Hiroshima Prefecture’s superintendent of police and chief of Security Division. He had by now come under the influence of prewar Japan’s biggest pacifist, the Christian philosopher Uchimura Kanzō, an evangelist who had been one of the first scholars to benefit from late 19th-century education policies influenced by the United States. Fundamental to Kanzō’s teaching was to question the role of organised religion and to emphasise instead following one’s own Christian beliefs. Senkichi and his family became devotees, attending Bible study classes led by Kanzō on several occasions when they travelled to Tokyo, or when he was giving lectures around Hokkaidō Prefecture, where Senkichi was also assigned for part of his career. These experiences influenced the young administrator for the rest of his life and career. Read more | Hiroshima: the race to the atomic bomb He ascended the ladder, gaining management experience and overseeing larger budgets. Like his father before him, he travelled the length and breadth of Japan’s main islands as he balanced work with marriage, his faith and bringing up a large family. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-RV6613-5webready-a7278fa.jpg" width="1500" height="972" alt="A black and white photograph of 6 soldiers crouched behind a tank, approaching conflict. The photo is taken from behind the group, and they are all wearing helmets and holding guns" title="Japanese troops in action in the Philippines, 1941. As the country sunk into a military dictatorship, it embarked on a ruinous bid to establish an east Asian empire (Image by TopFoto)" /> In 1931, Japanese forces invaded Manchuria and, in doing so, set the country on a war footing that didn’t end until August 1945. The leaders of the imperial Japanese armed forces now held sway over all aspects of life in the country, including the police. Senkichi, as head of the Osaka police, was dragged onto the national stage in 1933 when one of his officers arrested a Japanese soldier over a minor traffic dispute. The case became bound up with questions around who had the greater power: the home ministry or the army. Indeed, Senkichi had told his men: “If the army is His Majesty’s army, then the policemen are also His Majesty’s policemen. There is no need to apologise.” Although the dispute was resolved after months of legal wrangling, Senkichi was marked out for demotion. As Japanese forces ran amok in the Pacific, he fell ill with cellulitis and took early retirement in 1942. His final duty However, events deemed that Japan needed Senkichi’s stoicism and flair for command. In early 1943, as the tide of war was turning against Japan in the Pacific, he was offered the position of mayor of Hiroshima. With US naval forces battling across the central Pacific towards Japan, senior figures in government and the military knew an invasion could occur, and Hiroshima was a central military hub for supply and distribution. Senkichi accepted the job and relocated from the family home in Tokyo, leaving his wife and children. Although he didn’t know it, the role represented his final civic duty to Japan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/ALAMY-2J8BCHJwebready-b608d35.jpg" width="1500" height="1167" alt="A black and white photograph of a war plane flying above two war ships on the sea" title="American warships Lexington (top) and Washington in the Pacific, 1943. When Senkichi was appointed mayor of Hiroshima that year, his most pressing priority was to ready the city for a US invasion (Image by Alamy)" /> “Father is thinking only about the government office,” he wrote to his daughter Yasuko. “He is thinking about the big job that will benefit Hiroshima. The important thing is to always keep your mind clear and be ready to face whatever comes your way.” Situated in the south-western part of Honshu Island, Hiroshima was the seventh-largest city in Japan. It was constructed just above sea level, on a broad, fan-shaped delta, with seven tributaries pouring out to Hiroshima Bay. Hiroshima had been a garrison city since the late 1880s. The naval port of Ujina nearby was the assembly area for troops from all over Japan as they shipped out to war zones in China and into the Pacific following the attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. By the spring of 1945, such expansionism was long past. American naval power had placed a stranglehold on Japanese merchant shipping. The American force of B-29 Superfortress bombers, based 1,500 miles out in the Pacific on purpose-built airbases on the Marianas Island chain, had destroyed Japan’s manufacturing capacity and infrastructure. The firebombing campaign across the country ultimately reduced 66 Japanese cities to ashes, including the cataclysmic raid on Tokyo on 9–10 March that killed more than 100,000 civilians in a single night. Senkichi’s family survived this apocalypse, and he asked his wife and eldest son to relocate to Hiroshima. “The enemy will return,” he wrote to them. “That is the nature of war. You and the children must come here. It is possible that we will all die in the battles to come. If that is to happen, I wish us to die together as one family.” His four other children were moved out into the country for safety. In Hiroshima, the authorities were busy with defensive preparations. The Second General Army, under Field Marshal Hata (1879–1962), a veteran of the war in China and a confidant of the emperor, assumed the pivotal role of resisting any American assault in the south, which was expected later in the year. As head of municipal services throughout the city, Senkichi had to work with Hata and his team. “With a spirit of sacrifice, discharge your duties,” he urged his workers, “and show yourself at your best in the decisive battle as governmental employees of the empire.” In practice, showing “your best” meant enforcing new rationing, pulling down thousands of dwellings to act as fire breaks, and turning a blind eye to the tens of thousands of children being coerced into working in armament shops and factories. The country was being readied for what was termed ‘National Suicide’. This was the hope that inflicting as many casualties as possible on the invaders would mean they were forced to offer more favourable terms rather than push for an unconditional surrender. Read more | Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict" For the people of the Japan, the immediate future appeared grim indeed. Yet Senkichi, in his letters at least, still found grounds for optimism. “It’s 10 o’clock at night. I should go to bed soon, otherwise it will be bad for my health,” he wrote to Yasuko. “Tomorrow morning will be another beautiful day, with the morning sun reflecting off the surface of the river. That’s what I think about when I go to bed these days.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/gr0016168Hwebready-aa480d0.jpg" width="1500" height="1146" alt="A photograph showing the devastated ground after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima." title="The destruction of Hiroshima marked a bleak new chapter in a bombing campaign that had killed perhaps as many as 900,000 civilians in the first half of 1945 (Image by TopFoto)" /> No tools for the fight At Hiroshima City Office, 60 officers were on duty 24/7. Hiroshima was divided into 24 sectors, with all city employees trained on evacuation procedures and then allocated to a specific sector. Like the rest of the country, Hiroshima had not envisaged coming under aerial attack and there were hardly any purpose-built air raid shelters. There was also a lack of tools to fight a major fire. Senkichi’s fire chief confided to him that, despite the efforts to create firebreaks, the city would ultimately be burned out. Fires would spread and conjoin. Then it was only a matter of time. But even this bleak assessment of what lay ahead proved optimistic. When it was dropped over the city on the morning of 6 August 1945, Little Boy essentially destroyed 5 square miles of the heart of Hiroshima. The blast had the force of up to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, raising the temperature at Ground Zero to several thousand degrees, resembling the surface temperature of the sun. Three days later, Nagasaki was struck in a similar manner and with equal destructive consequences by a plutonium bomb that killed 40,000–70,000 people. As President Truman had warned, a rain of ruin was falling from the air. On 15 August, Emperor Hirohito addressed his people for the first time on the radio to announce the country’s surrender. The war was lost. A nation’s defeat The destruction of Hiroshima mirrored the fate of Japan itself over the previous months of the Pacific conflict as all parts of Japan were overwhelmed by bombing raids. Anywhere between 300,000 and 900,000 civilians had perished over the first six months of 1945 – more than the total number of deaths suffered by the country in the previous three years of war combined. Now imperial Japan suffered the ignominy of surrendering even before her enemy had stepped foot on her sovereign soil. Amid this national shame, much as Hiroshima’s ruin was a symbol of the country’s defeat, the fate of one Japanese family can be seen as a metaphor for the country’s rise and fall. The dead mayor’s surviving daughters, Yatsuko and Motoko, travelled to Hiroshima to care for their stricken mother who had initially survived the blast, only to die from radiation exposure. A week later, the daughters boarded another train. In their baggage, they carried four boxes: the ashes of their parents, younger brother and Motoko’s own daughter. They arrived back in the capital on 10 September for the surviving family to bury their ashes. Their Christian community welcomed the family as the city and the country came to terms with their total defeat. Within two months, Motoko was also mourning the loss of her sister. Yasuko died in a Tokyo hospital from radiation sickness on 24 November 1945. Caring for her mother, she had unwittingly spent too many days close to the centre of Hiroshima. Including the atomic cities, more than 40 per cent of Japan’s urban areas had been turned to ashes, making more than 8.5 million civilians homeless. When the Allies moved in to occupy Japan under the stewardship of General Douglas MacArthur, they were confronted with a gargantuan task. More than 1.5 million returning Japanese military personnel had to be rehabilitated, destroyed cities had to be rebuilt, a new democratic system of government had to be instituted. This necessitated the dismantling of the old regime. And as a product of that regime, Senkichi Awaya was pushed to the side, and then entirely forgotten. TIMELINE: JAPAN'S CENTURY OF CHANGE From global rise to nuclear attack 8 July 1853 American commodore Matthew Perry sails four ships into Tokyo Bay. The expedition leads to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan and the west 1868 The Meiji restoration – named after the Empreror Meiji – marks the return of imperial rule, ends the feudal Tokugawa shogunate, and triggers Japan's rise to a modern global power 1872 Japan’s first railway line, connecting Tokyo and Yokohama, opens. The rapid expansion of the railways accelerates industrialisation, connectivity and economic prosperity across the nation 1904-05 The Russo-Japanese War. Japan’s decisive defeat of tsarist Russia in a conflict chiefly fought over both nations’ designs on east Asia, confirms its status as a formidable military force 25 December 1926 Hirohito becomes the 124th emperor of Japan. The opening years of his long reign see the nation increasingly dominated by a rightwing military dictatorship September 1931 Japan invades Manchuria. This major escalation in its imperialist ambitions leads to its withdrawal from the League of Nations July 1937 A full-scale Japanese invasion of China begins. Japan will occupy most of China’s major cities in a war that will rage until 1945 7 December 1941 The attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan’s surprise assault on the naval base propels it into all-out war with the United States. The raid coincides with Japanese invasions of several other territories in Asia and the Pacific 4-7 June 1942 The Japanese navy suffers defeat to the US Pacific Fleet at Midway. The battle is widely cited as a turning point in the Pacific, paving the way for the advance of Allied forces towards the Japanese home islands 9-10 March 1945 A devastating American air raid on Tokyo – in which B-29 bombers pepper the city with incendiary bombs – kills more than 100,000 civilians and leaves perhaps 1 million people homeless 6 August 1945 An American B-29 bomber drops a nuclear bomb, ‘Little Boy’, over the Japanese port city of Hiroshima. Seventy thousand people die immediately and the overall death toll will rise towards 120,000 15 August 1945 Following a second nuclear attack – on Nagasaki, six days earlier – Emperor Hirohito informs his people of his country’s surrender to Allied forces Iain MacGregor’s latest book is The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It (Constable, 2025) This article is in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri on VJ Day: "We don't talk about the war in Asia – which was a messy, complicated conflict"
On the 80th anniversary of VJ Day, broadcaster Kavita Puri – presenter of a new BBC Radio 4 series on the Second World War in Asia – considers why this was the conflict’s forgotten theatre
Matt Elton: Your new series, exploring fighting on the Asian front during the Second World War, is called The History Podcast: The Second Map. Why did you choose that name? Kavita Puri: It came to me after I met a man called Peter Knight, who is now 98. At the time of the Japanese attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor [on 7 December 1941], he was a 14-year-old boy living in a terraced house in Bromley, a south-eastern London suburb. He had been following the war in Europe using a map posted on the wall alongside his dresser. After Pearl Harbor, he put up another map on the other side of the dresser – a map of Asia and the Pacific. He would sit down every evening with his mum and grandparents to listen to the BBC bulletin, hearing about places for the first time, and about this other war on the Asian front, in British colonies. And he would trace what was happening on that second map. So he was now updating two maps in tandem: one covering the war in Europe against the Nazis, and the second encompassing the war against Japan in Asia. Why has the war against Nazi Germany come to dominate how we view this conflict, at least partly to the exclusion of the conflict in Asia? I think it’s understandable: that war was close by and involved places whose names were more familiar to people in Britain. And it affected people here more directly: Peter Knight had experienced the Blitz, for example. So the European war was close to home, whereas this other war was far away. It was also a messy, complicated war – and not just because it was fought in jungle terrain, and soldiers were dying of malaria and other diseases as well as in combat. It wasn’t a neat good-v-bad situation, like the war against the Nazis. The war with Japan was essentially about two empires competing with each other, so it’s a much harder story to explain. It also involved a lot of troops from the colonies, as well as from Australia. So again, it’s a story about our empire. Historians such as Rana Mitter, who helped me with the making of this series, argue that actually we should see the origins of the Second World War not in the German invasion of Poland in 1939, but much earlier in the early 1930s, with Japanese activities in China. Another aspect of that war on the ‘second map’ that we still don’t talk about much was the fact that the Chinese also fought with the Allies against Japan in some of the major battles. So do you think we struggle to see the Asian war as also being a story about the British empire? Yes – and I do think that part of the reason we don’t talk about the war in Asia is because many places that were attacked had been part of the British empire for more than a century, and the losses were humiliating. Winston Churchill said as much when Singapore fell in February 1942, describing it as one of the worst military defeats in British history. A lot of the soldiers who fought and won back places such as Burma [now Myanmar] were soldiers from the empire – and sentiments are complicated by the fact that India then won its independence in 1947. In the series, you make the point that the evacuation of Burma isn’t well known. Could you talk us through what happened there? Many people think of the war in Asia and the Pacific in terms of two incidents involving the US: Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and Nagasaki three days later. They don’t really know much about what happened in between. Particularly, one element that’s not often discussed is that British colonies, including Malaya and Singapore, were attacked at almost exactly the same time as Pearl Harbor. Read more | VJ Day: turning the tide in the east Again and again in the oral testimonies, I heard how the British saw themselves as racially superior. I think it was hard for them to understand how their colonies could be overrun by people that they considered inferior. Yet as well as possessing superior tanks and aircraft, the Japanese also used bicycles: they were nimble and they moved very, very quickly. Not only was the loss of Malaya and Singapore humiliating, but it resulted in the capture of around 130,000 British and Indian troops and other colonial and Commonwealth soldiers as prisoners of war. Then Japan set its sights on Burma. Rangoon [now Yangon] fell in March 1942, and the rest of the country was lost as early as May. The result was that soldiers had to trek across vast stretches of terrain in a devastating retreat. General William Slim, who later commanded the Fourteenth Army in Burma, described men who were just completely exhausted. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-0035936webready-3a6fee8.jpg" width="1500" height="1151" alt="A black and white photograph showing a small group of people walking across a barren landscape, carrying their belongings on their heads" title="Refugees – many of whom had to flee barefoot carrying anything they could – cross into British lines during the Japanese invasion of Burma (Image by TopFoto)" /> It wasn’t just soldiers retreating, but also colonial civilians – Europeans and Indians, about a million of whom had been working in Burma. Along with some Burmese who were afraid of Japanese reprisals, they headed for India. But the evacuation was quite racialised. White British and European people were given priority and assistance. If you were Indian or Burmese, particularly if you didn’t have means, you were on your own. And that journey was so difficult: it involved walking barefoot with whatever you could carry across very challenging terrain, much of it jungle. You had very little food. You might encounter crocodiles or elephants. An estimated 600,000 refugees were on the move but, though it was such a major event, there was so much going on – not only in that region but in the wider war – that this story has often been obscured in popular memory. It was really quite difficult for me to find testimonies of people who had made that journey. Why have stories of this event not been told before? Partly because most refugees arrived in Bengal, where a terrible famine was developing. If you were an Indian or Burmese person, you were just one of many trying to survive. In addition, that was a tumultuous time in India. There was the famine, the Quit India movement, and the Great Calcutta Killings [deadly riots in 1946], then the violence in the run-up to partition – when, again, millions were on the move, a million people died and two new countries were created. So the story has been obscured in India, even though many Indian nationalists were infuriated at the racialised nature of the evacuation from Burma. It became one of the causes underpinning the Quit India campaign. In Britain, too, it’s a very difficult part of our war story to recall: not just the retreat and defeat, but also the racialised aspect undermining the moral underpinnings of empire. In the series, you speak to relatives of people held in prisoner-of-war camps, including civilians. Can you tell us about the experiences of Shelagh Brown? Shelagh was 25 when the Japanese took Singapore, where she’d been born and had lived all her life. And hers had been a grand life, like lots of colonial families. Before the invasion, Singapore had been largely untouched by the war, unlike Britain. But it was bombed just a couple of hours after Pearl Harbor, and life changed very quickly for her. Even at that point, though, she didn’t think she would have to leave. It was only when British soldiers began to cross the causeway, retreating from Malaya, that her family realised things were really serious and tried to evacuate Shelagh and her mother. They got on a small boat, hoping to get to Australia, but were bombed from the air. Shelagh was adrift at sea for 19 hours before Japanese forces caught her and she was interned for the rest of the war. In fact, it wasn’t until six weeks after the war had ended that news reached the internment camp. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-0917695webready-2c046ed.jpg" width="1500" height="1091" alt="A black and white photograph of women sitting around a table, picking" title="Smiles belie the cruel reality of the Kampong Makassar internment camp in the Dutch East Indies. Survivors who experienced trauma often didn’t talk about it after the war. But also, says Kavita Puri, “people didn’t ask” (Image by TopFoto)" /> She died some time ago, but her daughter shared some cassette tapes (never broadcast before) on which Shelagh told her story of survival while being moved from camp to camp. It’s difficult to listen to, particularly because Shelagh’s mother died in the camps, but it’s also remarkable – particularly in how the women kept up their spirits. Shelagh had been in a choir, and her father had been the choir master. So the women formed a vocal orchestra, which was really moving: she said that the notes they were singing were the only free things they had. The Japanese guards would stand outside and listen, and were moved by what they heard. Another way that she dealt with the situation was that she somehow got hold of little bits of paper on which she wrote lavish recipes in minute detail, like cakes with 12 eggs. The funny thing is that her daughter said Shelagh had never cooked before in her life, because she had servants in Singapore. But because they were really malnourished, it was just a way to deal with their hunger. So it’s an emotionally complicated story. And the stories of women like her haven’t really been well remembered. Can you tell us about the experiences of Ursula Graham Bower? Ursula’s incredible story is told in an interview with her that we found in the archives. A young woman from north London, at the start of the war she was in her mid-twenties, working as an anthropologist in the tribal regions of north-east India near the border with Burma. She was living with a group called the Nagas when Pearl Harbor was bombed, after which she was recruited to work with Naga people gathering intelligence, monitoring what was happening across the border. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" When the Japanese tried to invade India at Imphal and Kohima in 1944, she found herself on the front line. She cabled headquarters to request weapons – and a box arrived containing grenades and guns – and she used them fearlessly. She was a remarkably brave woman – but so were the Naga people who fought alongside her. Military historian Peter Johnston says that the Fourteenth Army was possibly the greatest that Britain ever put into the field. Why don’t we hear more about the story of this ‘Forgotten Army’? The Fourteenth Army was formed after the defeats of Singapore and Malaya. It mostly comprised colonial soldiers – predominantly Indians, but also soldiers from west and east Africa as well. By the end of the conflict, it numbered around a million troops. By then, the British had learned lessons about how to lead these soldiers, who were treated much better than colonial troops had been previously. The extraordinary battles that they fought in such challenging terrain, and the conditions that they endured, are remarkable. Even at the time, people such as Lord Mountbatten and even the army’s commander, General Slim, joked that it was a forgotten army, fighting a far-away war. Partly, that’s because the Burma campaign and the battles at Imphal and Kohima were fought around the time of the Normandy landings, which of course dominated the headlines. I think there is probably a racialised aspect to it, too. The majority of soldiers in the Fourteenth Army were colonial subjects. Equally, I spoke to children of some of the soldiers in the Fourteenth Army, and they didn’t talk about it much, either. After independence, people in India and Pakistan found it hard to remember their soldiers who had fought with the British – that was not the story they wanted to tell about the Second World War. Another factor is that the collection of oral histories hasn’t been done much in India or Pakistan. The Imperial War Museum has been trying to gather oral testimonies, but it’s very late now – most of the people involved have died. There are some really important stories that we will never capture now. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/TOPFOTO-1060579webready-f742b9a.jpg" width="1500" height="1931" alt="A photo of a man dressed in a khaki military uniform and hat, with a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. In the background, the sky is blue and a blurry group of people" title="General Slim joked that he was leading “a forgotten army fighting a far-away war” (Image by TopFoto)" /> Was there a turning point when people in Britain started to find out about these wartime experiences? I’m not sure that ever happened. When I tell people that I’m working on a series about VJ Day, most people ask: what’s that? Or: is that the American War? Yet there are thousands of homes in Britain where a family member was part of this story but didn’t talk about it. I was interviewing one 98-year-old veteran, when he said to me: “I’ve got a suitcase in my study. Why don’t you go and have a look?” His daughter said: “I didn’t know about this suitcase.” I don’t know if that generation didn’t talk about it because they saw difficult things, or if they just thought, well, everyone has a war story, what’s the point of talking about mine? Or perhaps because people wanted to hear about the war in Europe. Shelagh Brown’s daughter told me that she was the only one she knew in Chichester who put out a flag for the 75th anniversary of VJ Day – no one else knew why. I think broadly people don’t know about the war in Asia, what it was about, why it was a British war, and how our country was connected to it. Yet many south Asians in postwar Britain had their own connections to that war, too, as well as British families. One thing I’ve realised making these programmes is that each generation asks different questions about the Second World War. But it’s a race against time to capture these memories – and, it pains me to say, it’s almost too late now. How is the war remembered in Japan? Are these kinds of conversations happening there at all? It was very important for me to include Japanese voices in the series. I found recorded testimony from a young kamikaze pilot in his early twenties. He was just a kid who was told that he had to undertake this mission. He wanted to do good things for his country, but he also wanted to live. He wanted to get married, have a normal life. But, interestingly, Japan doesn’t really remember the Asian war, focusing instead on the war in the Pacific. They see the conflict particularly through the prism of America, because the US rehabilitated Japan very, very quickly after the war. During the Tokyo War Crimes Trials [1946–48], Emperor Hirohito was not part of proceedings, and he built the pacifist constitution in the postwar years. An expert I spoke to for the series observed that it took decades for the Japanese people to talk about the atrocities that their forces committed, and that talking about war memory has become very politicised. But he does say that the new generation is looking at it in a different way. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/09/Bridgeman244259webready-47b2ee0.jpg" width="1500" height="1154" alt="A black and white photograph shows a group of British Indian Army soldiers huddled together, preparing weapons" title="British Indian Army soldiers during the battle of Kohima, 1944. This was one of the great Allied victories of the war, but it is not widely known today (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Now that few from the generation who lived through those events are still alive, maybe the Japanese today are freer to talk about things they weren’t able to before. For example, when their soldiers came back, they were traumatised and humiliated. They were told not to talk about it. And the children of those families are now opening up about the levels of domestic violence inflicted by some of those men. It can free you up to talk and ask some really difficult questions about your country and the people who led it at the time. So many of those who took part in the war in Asia found it difficult to talk about these events – as you say in the series, it’s almost like a confession for them. Is that one reason why it remains obscure in the countries involved? It was hard to talk about for lots of reasons, not least the traumatic nature of the events. Whether you were a PoW or a civilian, or witnessed action in battle, it was difficult. So people who came back home didn’t talk – but, also, people didn’t ask. I’ve spoken to family members who were explicitly told not to ask. Read more | "The war without an end": what happened in Europe after VE Day? When one PoW, Maurice Naylor, returned home to Manchester, his family were advised not to talk to him about his experiences – that it would be too much for him. His daughter found some sketches that he’d made. She asked her mother: what is this? And her mother said: don’t ask your father – he was in a PoW camp, and he has nightmares. She thought it had been a Nazi concentration camp, because that was the only kind she knew about. She didn’t even know that there were Japanese PoW camps. So one generation was told not to ask. But I would also say that not only do you need a public space for people to speak, but people also have to know what to ask. If your children are not learning about it in school, and if collectively we don’t know about that history, we won’t know the questions to pose. And now, because people didn’t ask, there is often a sense of regret. That’s what I meant by confession. They know something happened. They know a relative saw something, and it was probably not a good thing. I think there is a guilt in not having asked – and now not being able to ask. Were there other factors that added to the complications of remembering this story? Perhaps one reason is the simplified narrative we tell ourselves about our war: we fought the Nazis, and they were bad; we were good, and we were heroic. And that’s not wrong – but there was also this other war that we fought, and we need to understand that – not least because it touched many thousands of families in Britain. This article was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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
Jonathan Healey: “A connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street”
Jonathan Healey tells Ellie Cawthorne about the dramatic moments that sparked the breakdown of Charles I’s relationship with parliament and the outbreak of the Civil War
Ellie Cawthorne: Why was the winter of 1641–42 such a pivotal time in British and Irish history? Jonathan Healey: In the heart of that winter came one of the most iconic moments in English political history. On 4 January 1642, angry at dissent from parliament, King Charles I marched down to the House of Commons and tried to arrest five MPs. I wanted to tell the backstory of that dramatic, divisive moment. The lead-up had been a really intense period of political strife, popular protest and gradually growing disorder, all of which fed into a very frightening political crisis. Afterwards, the country descended into civil war. Often when we read books about great revolutions or political events, we look at the deep, long-term causes. However, though that’s important, we also need to recognise trigger moments. Day-by-day or minute-by-minute, it’s often incredibly difficult to see which way things will go – but, as a historian, it’s important to immerse yourself in those turning points. Can you give us a sense of how parliament functioned at the time? In the early 17th century, parliament didn’t sit regularly – it was called only when the king needed it. Its role was essentially twofold: to grant taxes, particularly for war, and to propose legislation. That legislation would then get signed off by the king, which was how new laws were made. But increasingly, in the 17th century, parliament started discussing issues of high politics such as foreign policy. In the view of the king, this went beyond its remit – monarchs in this period believed that they alone had the right to decide on foreign policy. However, because they represented the taxpayers who had to pay for the wars, members of parliament felt that they should have a say. That created a flashpoint. In the 1620s, a series of conflicts had erupted between parliament and the monarchy over issues such as tax, religion and the crown’s right to imprison people without charge. The relationship between king and parliament had broken down. Understandably peeved at this situation, Charles decided that, as far as possible, he would rule without parliament. However, over that period of personal rule, a series of serious grievances and difficulties emerged. Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad? When Charles was forced to call parliament again in 1640 because of a rebellion in Scotland, all of these issues came back to the fore, and there was a sudden ferment against royal rule among MPs. By November 1640, the beginning of the so-called ‘Long Parliament’ saw a broad consensus for reform and an intention to get rid of some of the perceived abuses of the previous 11 years but, over the next 12 months, the reformists pushed things too far. They argued for reform of the bishops, and began to engage with a much broader political constituency – both of which were controversial moves. By the beginning of winter 1641, a backlash against these reformists had started. Would these tensions have emerged regardless of the monarch, or was there something about Charles in particular that antagonised parliament? There were lots of things about Charles that antagonised people. He had a preference for a High Anglican form of worship, which many people in England didn’t like very much. Above all, though, he was someone who really liked order, traditional social hierarchies and the aristocracy. He didn’t like bottom-up political engagement when it came to the church, and he definitely didn’t like it when it came to the state. That view was not unusual at the time: lots of people were worried about popular protest and the perceived dangers of the mob – that was one of the factors that led them to rally around the king. But Charles took this view to quite an extreme level. The other thing that proved difficult about Charles’s personality was his innate sense that, as king, he was right. He thought that the choice of methods he employed to get his way didn’t matter as much as the end result – and that created a sense of fear about what he might be willing to do next. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/MNXB20cmyk-4ed0c59.jpg" width="1158" height="772" alt="A man in black clothing stands against a dark background. He has shoulder-length grey hair and a goatee and wears a black hat" title="Sir Edward Nicholas asked Queen Henrietta Maria to identify key players who might join a royalist party supporting the king – ultimately, to no avail (Image by Alamy)" /> Who were the other key figures at the time, and how did they swing the pendulum? Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, was a really important operator behind the scenes. By the end of 1641, one of Charles’ administrators called Sir Edward Nicholas (imagine a Thomas Cromwell-type figure but with a bigger diet) was trying to pull together a royalist party, but he didn’t know the key aristocrats. So who did he go to? The queen, because she knew everyone. On the parliamentarian side, there was John Pym. He was an incredibly sophisticated operator – a real political magus – but some of the tactics he used in parliament were incredibly devious and cynical. On 1 December 1641, a great list of grievances and demands called the Grand Remonstrance was presented to Charles. It was passed by parliament, albeit by the skin of its teeth, but Pym and his reformists failed to secure agreement to get it printed. So, in the Commons a few weeks later, proponents of the Grand Remonstrance waited until late, after a lot of the royalists had gone home. With the members struggling to see by candlelight, they suddenly introduced a motion to overturn the earlier vote and have the Grand Remonstrance printed. And the strategy worked – it was devious, but clever. We’re all familiar with that kind of political tactic today, but that was the first instance when we can really see it in action. It feels like something out of a 21st-century political drama... Yes, or The Thick of It [Armando Iannucci’s acclaimed 2005–12 spin-doctor television sitcom]. After all these years of tension, what was the spark for the events of 4 January 1642? Up until that point, Charles had been regaining the initiative. He was building up a royalist party, and there was a real possibility that he would be able to command a majority in both houses. He’d given a proclamation summoning back to Westminster all of the MPs who’d gradually drifted home because they were fed up of sitting in parliament. The theory was that these were moderates and royalists, and that their return would stifle the simmering trouble. However, street protests prevented the bishops (who were all royal appointments) from attending the House of Lords, and the balance tipped. By around 28 December 1641, Charles had lost the majority in both houses. He felt he had to do something to slow things down – to disrupt things. For a long time, Charles had wanted revenge against certain key players he thought had stabbed him in the back at the time of the Scottish rebellion. So he had his attorney general draw up prosecutions against five particularly troublesome MPs and one member of the House of Lords. Read more | The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won How did things unfold on that fateful day? News of these intended prosecutions had emerged on 3 January 1642, so parliament was incredibly tense the following morning. Everyone was very worried, and a lot of shops in London were shut. But lunchtime came and went with no developments, so parliament started sitting again for the afternoon. Meanwhile, after pacing about the whole morning, in the mid-afternoon the king suddenly appeared from Whitehall Palace and commanded a group of soldiers to follow him. After requisitioning a coach in a ‘follow that taxi’ moment, Charles arrived at Westminster with around 500 armed men. A group of about 80–100 of those men climbed the stairs and banged on the door of the House of Commons. The debate stopped, and the king entered; the MPs all stood and removed their hats. Charles then told the speaker, William Lenthall, that he had arrived to arrest the five members, asking where they were. There was silence. The missing MPs had been warned about what was going to happen by Lucy Carlisle, a courtier close to the queen – and it became clear to Charles that they weren’t there. Then followed a key moment: Lenthall declared that he couldn’t help Charles, because he was just the voice of the Commons. Essentially, he was expressing the point that, despite having been appointed by the crown, he was there to represent the people, not the king. Extremely angry, Charles stormed off, followed by the soldiers. It was a really dramatic moment that could so easily have ended in a massacre. Was this a ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment in the lead-up to civil war? A lot of people said so at the time, and I do think that Charles took things too far. His action was quite clearly an armed threat against parliament. But the crucial thing about this incident is that it destroyed a huge amount of trust in the king. The parliamentarians saw Charles gathering soldiers around himself, and concluded that they couldn’t trust him – they needed to be able to protect themselves. So they decided to take control of the county militia. They passed a bill to make this happen, but it wouldn’t become law unless it was signed off by the king – and of course the king was never going to sign this bill. Parliament was then forced to argue that their bill had legal force anyway. That led to a constitutional fissure: in a state of emergency, could parliament legislate without the king? This became the dividing issue. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/08/0088128-Topfoto-e6c9fae.jpg" width="1041" height="694" alt="A painting shows Charles I standing under a large arched doorway. He is dressed all in black with a white collar. Standing around him is a large group of people, including a priest dressed in red robes. In the background, there are several large buildings" title="Charles I leads armed followers into the Commons on 4 January 1642 on a fruitless mission to arrest five MPs – the moment that arguably sparked the Civil War (Image by TopFoto)" /> How much was the wider public aware of what was going on in parliament at the time? Increasingly quite well aware, because this was an era when the politics of Westminster were becoming more accessible to those on the street. England was very well connected, people knew who their MPs were, and letters were flying back and forth across the country. Scurrilous pamphlets were published in long-running battles between reformists and royalists, and the first proper political English newspaper was also launched around this time [Head of Several Proceedings, first published by John Thomas in November 1641] – a kind of weekly digest of events in parliament. After his attempt to arrest the five MPs on 4 January 1642, Charles was passing through St Paul’s when a radical parliamentarian journalist called Henry Walker ran up and threw one of these pamphlets into his coach. Called To Your Tents, O Israel, it implored the English people to resist tyrants – so you can imagine Charles’s response when he read it. In that moment, a great connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street. And it was that incident, more than anything else, that encouraged Charles to flee London. How was this all connected with events in Ireland? In late 1641, there was a massive uprising in Ireland, which was predominantly Catholic. A lot of Irish people were fed up with rule by English Protestants, but in particular they didn’t want to be ruled by English parliamentarian Protestants, who were especially anti-Catholic. It was a very violent rebellion, with atrocities committed in Ulster. However, reports of the violence were wildly exaggerated, creating a panic in England that there would be an Irish invasion, and that English Catholics would rise up. One of the immediate consequences of this intense paranoia was that someone in England had to raise an army to put down the rebellion – and neither parliament nor the king could trust the other side to do so. Eventually, an army was raised, but not before months of wrangling between king and parliament – and by the time it left, relations between the two were already descending into hostility. Did people sense that war was coming by this point? By the spring of 1642, I think there was a real sense that war was on its way. Records reveal that some ordinary people saw this as an opportunity to settle local scores. For example, one man in Salisbury basically said: “I’m going to support the king, and I’ve decided that my neighbour is for the parliament so, when the war comes, he’s the first person I’m going to bash on the head.” Read more | 8 reasons why the Civil War broke out Was there any way that the king and parliament could have found a compromise and avoided war? I don’t know if compromise is the right word. By early 1642, there was a group of very serious reformists who didn’t trust the king, and a king who hated them in return. It’s very hard to see how those two sides could have been reconciled. But what could have happened quite easily is that the day-to-day workings of politics could have gone the king’s way. Those reformist politicians could have been isolated, and found themselves in a sticky situation. Those people really did go through this political crisis on an absolute knife edge, with a real sense of dread that they could be prosecuted and beheaded. I think that dynamic of fear helped push things towards civil war. So I don’t think there could have been a compromise as such, but there might have been a different outcome. There were lots of moments when things could have gone in another direction. One potential counterfactual could ask: what might have happened if, when Charles got to parliament, the five MPs were still there and decided not to go quietly? You would have seen a gang of about 100 angry cavaliers, all with pistols, trying to drag people out of parliament. Would that have ended peacefully? Probably not. Did this era determine how the relationship between parliament and royal rule played out in the longer term? When the Restoration of the monarchy happened in 1660, interestingly it was the settlement of late 1641 that was restored. What happened in 1642 was a parting of the waves, with the radicals on the parliamentarian side headed in a much more constitutionally extremist direction. That was jettisoned after the Restoration, and parliament instead returned to a reformed position. But there were also lots of long-term consequences of this period. It emphasised the importance of the crown working with parliament, rather than being antagonistic to it. In the later 17th century, there were very few periods where parliaments weren’t held – parliament had become an accepted part of the constitution in a way that it hadn’t been before. So that turbulent era is part of the reason why the UK became the constitutional monarchy it is today. Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at the University of Oxford. His previous book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine