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Surrealism and the legacy of caricature | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
In the final episode of the World of the Georgians, Alice Loxton examines the life, work and lasting legacy of satirist James Gillray – and his influence on modern visual culture
To conclude the series, Alice Loxton turns the spotlight on the artist who shaped Georgian satire more than any other: James Gillray. This episode explores Gillray’s life, his fearless approach to power, and the increasingly surreal and grotesque style that made his work so influential. From terrifying politicians to distorted bodies and absurd scenes, Gillray pushed caricature beyond realism, laying the groundwork for later artistic movements. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians here Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.
Fashion and folly | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
In episode four of the World of the Georgians, Alice Loxton explores Georgian fashion, celebrity and excess – and how caricature delighted in cutting vanity down to size
In Georgian Britain, clothing was never just about style – it was a public performance of wealth, status and ambition. In this episode, Alice Loxton examines the extravagant fashions of the 18th century, from towering wigs and vast hoop skirts to the scandalously sheer dresses of the Regency era. She also explores early celebrity culture through figures such as opera singer Elizabeth Billington, whose fame made her a magnet for gossip and, of course, satire. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians. Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.
Health and medicine | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
In episode four of the World of the Georgians, Alice Loxton investigates Georgian healthcare, where cutting-edge science sat uneasily alongside quack cures and medical scams
Medicine in Georgian Britain was as ripe for ridicule as it was for reform. In this episode, Alice Loxton explores how satirical artists such as James Gillray mocked the confusion of 18th-century healthcare, where miracle cures, medical quacks and genuine scientific breakthroughs existed side by side. From dubious treatments to the controversy surrounding early vaccination, this episode reveals how caricature captured public anxieties about illness, science and the body. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians. Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.
Napoleon: hero or “Little Boney”? | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
In episode three of the World of the Georgians, Alice Loxton explores how British caricature turned Napoleon Bonaparte from feared enemy into a figure of ridicule
For Georgians in Britain, Napoleon Bonaparte loomed large as both a military threat and a propaganda obsession. In this episode, Alice Loxton examines how satirical artists helped shape public perceptions of Britain’s greatest enemy during the Napoleonic Wars. From heroic self-fashioning in France to the British invention of “Little Boney”, caricature became a powerful weapon of war, shrinking Napoleon’s image and undermining his authority through humour. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians. Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.
High society | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
In episode two of the World of the Georgians, Alice Loxton turns her attention from the monarchy to high society, revealing how etiquette, marriage and reputation became prime targets for Georgian satire.
After skewering the royal family, Georgian satirists eagerly turned their pens on the elite. In this episode, Alice Loxton explores the rigid social codes that governed Georgian high society, where a misplaced laugh, an awkward gesture or a poorly judged marriage could spell social disaster. Using caricatures by satirist James Gillray, she examines courtship, matchmaking and the intense pressure to marry well, revealing a world where appearances mattered deeply – and where artists delighted in exposing the absurdities behind polite manners. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians. Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.
The royal family | Alice Loxton on the world of the Georgians
In episode one of her HistoryExtra Academy series The world of the Georgians, historian Alice Loxton explores how satirical artist James Gillray took aim at the Georgian royal family, exposing excess, virtue and scandal at the very top of society.
Alice Loxton introduces the Georgian era and examines how satirical artists such as James Gillray mocked the royal family, from the frugal George III to his flamboyant and extravagant son, the Prince Regent. Through caricature, the monarchy was transformed from untouchable authority into something recognisably human – flawed, fallible and ripe for ridicule. View Green Video on the source website Want more from Alice? Find more episodes of the World of the Georgians. Alice Loxton is a historian, presenter and Sunday Times bestselling author with over three million followers on social media.
From maniacal horses to bat-men on the moon: 14 strange newspaper headlines from history
Muckraking journalists and money-hungry editors have been publishing sensational stories since newspapers first began. Hilary Mitchell flicks through the archives and reveals some of the weirdest press cuttings of all time
1. "German ghouls: corpses converted to soap and explosives” Yorkshire Telegraph and Star, April 1917 If you think that ‘fake news’ is a new phenomenon, think again. One of the most notorious pieces of misinformation actually dates to the First World War. During the conflict, a gruesome rumour spread that German leaders were using “Kadaververwertungsanstalten” – ‘corpse factories’ – to turn the dead bodies of their own soldiers into products such as soap, candles, and even bombs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/German-Ghouls-0741ad1-e1769765897344.jpg" width="620" height="411" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline GERMAN GHOULS across the top" title="German leaders were creating soap and explosives out of corpses, claimed this 1917 newspaper article. In reality, they were victims of a deliberately shocking propaganda campaign (Image by the Newspaper Archive)" /> The lurid story unsurprisingly sparked widespread outrage, but it wasn’t true. It was a purposefully shocking piece of war propaganda, and the German government protested in the strongest terms against the “loathsome and ridiculous” claims. However, that didn’t stop the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star gleefully reporting on the hoax in April 1917, in an article that claimed the Germans were making “dividends from death” by distilling glycerine from dead bodies “and so obtaining some portion of their explosives.” 2. "O Dammit wants his name changed" The Richmond Climax, 6 June 1913 Orlando Dammit was featured in the 6 June issue of the equally curiously named Richmond Climax newspaper. The short article explained that the man wanted to change his name from “O. Dammit” because he “can’t tell whether people are calling him or merely venting injured feelings when they say ‘O, dammit.’” It’s not clear what he wanted to change his name to, or if he was successful in his attempts to change it, but presumably he would have been happy with anything that didn’t begin with the letter ‘O’. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Vampires-in-Rhode-Island-Public-Domain-3e1421d-e1769766218331.jpeg" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES across the top" title="Rhode Islanders were convinced the undead were sucking the blood of their own relatives and causing consumption – sparking ‘vampire hysteria’ throughout the state" /> 3. "Vampires in Rhode Island" Boston Evening Transcript, 18 January 1896 On 18 January 1896, a particularly strange story ran in the Boston Evening Transcript. The headline was ‘Vampires in Rhode Island’, and the story went on to explain: “Respectable people [are] digging up the bodies of defunct relatives… The belief is that persons dead of consumption leave their graves and suck the blood of members of their own families.” This outbreak of ‘vampire panic’ was sparked by a wave of tuberculosis (then known as consumption) in New England. Some rural communities decided that the often-fatal illness was the work of the undead and began exhuming bodies, looking for what they believed were signs of vampirism, such as fresh blood in the heart. The most famous case occurred in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island, when the body of a young woman called Mercy Brown was exhumed. Her heart was reduced to ashes and given to her sick brother as a remedy for his own illness. He died anyway – after all, burned organs aren’t a cure for TB – but the story became a lasting symbol of the panic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Ouija-boardPublic-Domain-7d2ac73-e1769766295767.png" width="904" height="1000" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CONSTANT USE OF OUIJA BOARD DRIVES SEVEN PEOPLE INSANE across the top" title="Rooted in the Victorian obsession with spiritualism, encounters with ouija boards were common. The story of Adeline Bottini, featuring an alleged séance in the nude, was particularly dramatic" /> 4. "Constant use of ouija board drives seven people insane" The Long Beach Telegram and The Long Beach Daily News, 4 March 1920 In 1920, Long Beach newspapers reported that a 15-year-old girl in California had introduced “the [ouija board] and convinced other six [people] of its spiritual power”. The story went on to claim that all seven of the people involved were now under observation in the “insane ward”. The girl at the heart of the scandal was one Adeline Bottini, who police alleged was performing séances in a state of undress, “the better to communicate with the spirits”. Ouija boards were first commercialised in 1890 by a businessman from Baltimore, towards the tail end of the Victorian obsession with spiritualism: the belief that the living could communicate with the spirits of the dead. The craze began in 1848 with the Fox sisters in New York state, whose séances drew wide attention, and it didn’t take long before copycat socialites started to host similar gatherings. At these, participants were – unlike poor Adeline Bottini – always fully clothed. Read more | Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Boy-Eats-BibleGettyImages-164563808-960838d-e1769766508270.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A cartoon of a boy wearing a pink T shirt, green trousers, a blue backwards cap on his head, and blue shoes, eating a blue Bible" title="In one of the more trivial stories from rural 1920s Hilton, Mellzo McCoy munched on the family Bible, resulting in an appearance in the newspaper – and a stomach ache" /> 5. "Boy eats Bible" The Hilton Record, 17 June 1926 “Unknown to his parents, Mellzo McCoy ate the family Bible with the exception of the covers and a few pages. The loss was only discovered when Mellzo complained of a stomach ache.” This 1926 snippet in The Hilton Record – the weekly community newspaper for the village of Hilton in Monroe County, New York – definitely won’t win any awards for the most detailed news article of all time. This is probably why it was buried on page eight of the publication, alongside another article (‘Bee Causes Wreck’) about a man losing control of his vehicle after a bee got into it. When it comes to stories like this, it’s important to understand how local papers worked at the time. Rural weeklies like the Record often had unpaid neighbourhood correspondents who contacted them with (fairly trivial) stories about what had happened in their neck of the woods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Terrified-by-Donkey-f14e9ba-e1769766740393.jpg" width="620" height="414" alt="A black and white illustration shows a woman falling to the floor in front of a donkey" title="Scared to death by the sound of a donkey’s footsteps behind her, a young woman’s sad demise ended up in the Illustrated Police News, known for its lurid coverage (Image by The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive)" /> 6. "Trampled to death by a donkey" Illustrated Police News, 21 July 1883 The Illustrated Police News was a sensationalist Victorian weekly newspaper published in Britain, infamous for its lurid crime coverage and emotive illustrations. It launched in 1864 and this rather sad story ran in their 21 July 1883 edition. It recounts the final hours in the life of a young woman who had set off to visit her grandparents and heard footsteps behind her. She ran for her life. Her grandfather found her body the next day, noticed his donkey standing close by and concluded that she’d been frightened by the sound of the animal following her home. Although the stories featured in the Illustrated Police News were reported in a very melodramatic way, they were, unlike the German ‘corpse factory’ article above, completely true. The publication’s content, though bombastic, was based on police reports, coroners’ inquests and court reporting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Children-Not-Fish-Public-Domain-889d371.jpg" width="299" height="258" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline CHILDREN NOT "FISH" SO CAN'T BE MAILED across the top" title="After at least two separate attempts to send children via mail, the postal department had to step in. Children, they said in 1920, were not “harmless animals” so couldn’t be mailed" /> 7. "Children not 'fish' so can't be mailed" Des Moines Tribune, 16 June 1920 “Children do not come within the classification of ‘harmless animals’, and therefore are not mailable,” the Des Moines Tribune reported the postal department as saying in 1920, apparently prompted by two applications to ship children around the country inside packages. Parcel post was still a relatively new phenomenon in 1920, having been introduced in 1913. Some inventive parents realised that the cost of sending a package was often cheaper than a train ticket and news reports of the time carried stories about attempts to mail children: for example, in St Louis in 1913, a mother allegedly tried to mail her eight-year-old to relatives a few hundred miles away and in 1914, a 10-year-old-boy was purportedly mailed as a parcel to his grandmother. 8. "Battle with a bald eagle" San Francisco Call, 9 October 1891 The San Francisco Call was known for its flamboyant coverage, and this thrilling tale of a balloonist’s high-altitude encounter with an eagle, published in 1891, is a great example. The article describes the ascent of a 24-year-old named Arthur Cleveland in a hot air balloon. Once he had climbed to 3,000 feet, “he saw a huge bird flying swiftly toward him” and became aware it was a bald eagle. The article goes on to describe Cleveland’s daring – and victorious – battle with the rogue bird. He later retrieved the dead eagle, only to discover the local constable wasn’t too impressed; he suggested Cleveland be fined $550 for killing a protected species. Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Real-Puppy-Love-Public-Domain.jpg-f48d0e7-e1769767410147.png" width="620" height="413" alt="A newspaper clipping with the headline REAL PUPPY LOVE HERE AS DOGS GO ELOPING across the top" title="Canines under the spell of Cupid were the news of the day in 1910s Minneapolis – showing the sensationalism of early 20th-century press" /> 9. "Real puppy love here as dogs go eloping" The Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 2 March 1911 It must have been a slow news day in Minneapolis on 2 March 1911, as one of the headlines in the Tribune appears to have been about dogs having sex. The rest of the headline reads: ‘Canines Fall Under Shafts of Cupid and Kennel Society is Stirred, Four Hundred of Dogdom Buzzes over Scandals Among Young Set, Irate Husband of French Poodle on Warpath after His Rival.’ Although the full details of the story are lost in the mists of time, it’s another good example of early 20th-century press sensationalism, one which also documents the rise of pet culture we still have today. The early 1900s saw a rise in the popularity of organised dog breeding, which in turn led to the formation of kennel clubs; these sometimes became embroiled in controversies and rivalries, which were equally good tabloid-fodder. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Bat-Men-GettyImages-1397982878-a7ec22c-e1769767491349.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration of large winged creatures flying around a mountainous area with a river running through it" title="A lithograph depicts the lunar civilisation that New York newspaper The Sun claimed had been found on the moon (Image by Getty Images)" /> 10. ”Bat-men on the moon” The Sun, New York, 1835 In August 1835, New York newspaper The Sun published a series of six articles claiming that life had been discovered on the moon. Not only life, in fact, but an entire lunar civilisation. The stories, credited to the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel and supposedly sourced from a (non-existent) Edinburgh paper, detailed lunar landscapes populated by bison, goats, unicorns, tail-less beavers, and bat-like humanoids called ‘Vespertilio-homo’ who built temples. The articles claimed that discoveries had been made using a revolutionary new telescope. It turned out that the hoax was the work of one of The Sun’s reporters who later admitted to inventing the stories to boost sales. However, The Sun never issued a formal retraction, making the ‘Great Moon Hoax’ one of the most famous examples of 19th-century ‘fake news’. 11. "Man doesn't trust horses" Amador Ledger, 3 October 1902 Letters to the editor aren’t a new phenomenon, as this extract from the Amador Ledger, itself lifted from Harper’s Weekly, shows. In this example, a man from Kentucky wrote into Harper’s to share his opinion that, in his long experience, “every horse at some time in his life develops into a homicidal maniac… I have driven one commonplace horse every other day for six years over the same road and then had him go crazy and try to kill himself and me because a leaf fluttered down in front of him.” The entry had the subheading: ‘Part maniac and part idiot, is what one man calls them’, which many present-day horse owners will no doubt relate to. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/TypistGettyImages-97226313-cb961e1-e1769767620435.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white cartoon of a woman sitting at a typewriter" title="In an eerie ‘true ghost’ story, a woman reportedly saw a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London – the same building from which a woman had previously fallen to her death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. "Girl typist saw a ghost fall in city street" Sunday Mirror, 29 July 1934 In July 1934, the Sunday Mirror reported the case of a typist who claimed to have seen a ghost fall from a building in Aldwych, London. She fainted and was carried into a nearby chemist’s shop. When she regained consciousness, she told reporters she’d seen a girl fall from a high window and land at her feet. Interestingly, 18 months earlier, a young woman had actually fallen from an upper storey at that very location and was killed. The typist claimed she had no prior knowledge of the tragedy – whether you believe her is entirely up to you. As noted above, the mid-19th century saw a rise in spiritualism and séances. As a result, papers often reported ‘true ghost’ stories or mysterious happenings. However, by the 1920s and 30s these stories had begun to decline in mainstream tabloids, so this 1934 Mirror story is a bit of a (spooky) outlier. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Devil-WorshipGettyImages-1387752195-62248fc-e1769767805608.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Seven people are standing in a line with their heads bowed slightly forward. Each is wearing a black hooded gown and a red devil mask on their faces" title="The global ‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s led to many stories of witches and ritualistic practices. In Utah, a 12-part series in the Provo Daily Herald was dedicated to devil worship (Image by Getty Images)" /> 13. "Satan worship in Zion" Provo Daily Herald, July–August 1985 No, this isn’t a particularly far-fetched plot from hit Netflix series Stranger Things: the US newspaper Provo Daily Herald really did publish a series of 12 articles in 1985 alleging widespread devil worship in Utah Valley. The articles were written by two reporters, Patrick Christian and Vicki Barker, who claimed to have interviewed “dozens” of psychologists, therapists and law-enforcement officers so they could “educate readers about the prevalence of Satanic worship in this area”. Subjects of the articles included a teenager who, it was claimed, drank animal blood after meeting a Satanist in seventh grade. Also, two Utah County Sheriff's deputies reported on “covens of witches” operating in abandoned buildings. Proof of these claims was lacking, to say the least, and the Provo Daily Herald faced criticism for adding fuel to the global ‘satanic panic’ that gripped the media in the 1980s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/Tiger-WoodsGettyImages-1097899790-f941754-e1769767906185.jpg" width="620" height="747" alt="A man wearing a black Nike sports jacket and black Nike cap stands holding multiple white golf balls in his hand" title="Tiger Woods holding his custom-made golf balls, which caused a stir following his endorsement of Nike Tour Accuracy ones (Image by Getty Images)" /> 14. "Tiger Woods plays with own balls" Associated Press wire story, 2000 The editor of this news story by journalist David Kravets was either very naive or purposefully channelling their inner Carry On scriptwriter when they crafted this saucy headline in the year 2000. The story is about the fact that pro golfer Tiger Woods had endorsed Nike Tour Accuracy golf balls in adverts, when (shock horror!) he actually played with custom-made balls unavailable to amateur players. Nike was eventually forced to confess that the balls Woods played with had a slightly harder inner and outer core than the balls sold to the public. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting story of all time, which is possibly why it was given such a cheeky, Barbara Windsor-esque headline.
Medieval vampire slayers: why did our ancestors dig up and dismember the dead?
At the turn of the 12th century, two men from a Staffordshire village died suddenly. A few days after they were solemnly laid to rest, they were spotted walking around the village, with their coffins on their backs. John Blair investigates the medieval terror of the living dead
In the last decades of the 12th century, the townsfolk of Annan in the Scottish borders were terrified by a sinister nocturnal revenant that stalked the dark byways. “Each night his corpse, driven by Satan, left his grave and wandered through the streets” accompanied by howling dogs and spreading sickness and death, according to the contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh. Desperate to put an end to the unholy scourge, two brothers whose father had been carried off by the plague opened the grave and “exposed the corpse, which was distended to a huge corpulence, with a swollen, livid face. It was observed that the shroud, which had been wound around it, was completely shredded up. Too angry to be frightened, the young men struck a blow at the lifeless corpse, whereupon such a flow of blood gushed out that they understood it to be a sucker of many people’s blood. Dragging it out of the town, they quickly built a pyre.” Recalling the accepted wisdom that such a being would burn only after they’d cut out its heart, the brothers took their shovels and hacked out the organ – after which the cadaver was immolated. The curse was finally over. Walking corpses To modern ears, this story stretches credulity far beyond breaking point. Not so to William of Newburgh: he recorded another three such tales, and hinted at many more. There are “numerous modern cases and abundant reports”, he wrote, but “it would be just too laborious and burdensome to write down all episodes of this kind that I have heard to have happened in our own times”. Yet though walking corpses were boringly commonplace in the 1190s, they had almost vanished from the English scene only a few decades later. Apparently they retreated northwards, leaving only occasional traces south of the border with Scotland. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/W45702webready-05b1689-e1769699879666.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration shows two people standing over a cut up body, with the person on the left handing the decapitated head of the body to the person on the right" title="A corpse is dismembered in a medieval illustration. During the Middle Ages, mutilation was inflicted on cadavers believed to be restless (Image by Alamy)" /> This spotlight on high medieval Britain illustrates a basic fact about ‘vampire’ beliefs in many periods and places across the globe: they tend to come and go. Though some societies retained low-level fears about dangerous corpses over many centuries, there have also been many short, sharp episodes of corpse-killing that reached an intensity justifying the label ‘epidemic’. Some are described in medieval texts such as William of Newburgh’s, covering a period from about 1050 to 1200. Others leave no written evidence, and must be inferred from distinctive patterns of mutilation found in excavated burials: corpses turned upside-down, hearts pierced or removed, limbs broken or bound, heads removed, craniums and jaws separated. Read more | Long before Dracula, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation raised the world's oldest vampires Why do communities suddenly erupt into frenzies of corpse-killing? Fundamentally, the act reflects fear of social disruption, fear of political or religious change, or fear of disease. In fact, it can be defined as a form of persecution mania – that tragic, paranoid reaction that makes people turn against minority groups in their midst. But there is a crucial difference: unlike witches or heretics, corpses cannot suffer because they are dead already. Killing the dead is better than killing the living. Archaeological evidence from late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England suggests several persuasive cases of posthumously ‘killed’ corpses. There are too few of them to suggest clear patterns – until we reach a group of distinctive female burials in Yorkshire and County Durham from c550–80 AD. These women were buried face-down – often accompanied by charms and other ritual items – in strange, contorted attitudes, often with one leg or arm raised so that it almost touched the surface of the grave. It looks as though these were traditional healers or ‘wise women’ – powerful in life and potentially troublesome after death, so measures to restrain them were necessary. In that society, as in many others, the dangerous dead were mainly female. Unholy nuns From around 650, that perception carried over to the new world of royal nunneries that dominated early Christian England. Traditionally powerful women could reinvent themselves as holy nuns and abbesses, exercising something like their erstwhile supernatural powers within the new belief system. One narrative from Wimborne nunnery in the 720s hints at corpse fears. It recounts the story of a sadistic prioress who died unreconciled with the young nuns whom she had tormented. They gleefully danced on her grave – but then, to the abbess’s horror, the grave-earth sunk, a phenomenon explained in later eastern European folklore as a sign that the corpse has climbed out. In England around 650–700, a series of non-monastic burials – almost entirely of young women – were mutilated in a consistent way: the corpse was pulled over onto its front, the heart was possibly removed or pierced, the head was removed, and the cranium and lower jaw were thrown back in different parts of the grave. Read more | Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think The seventh century was a period of rapid religious change and social transformation, so it is unsurprising that people felt disorientated, and that their fears focussed on certain ‘special’ women who were perceived to be reservoirs of supernatural power. Corpse anxieties seem to have died down across the eighth century, but did not disappear entirely. Young women were still sometimes targeted, their trussed and mutilated corpses laid face-down in boundary ditches. The gender balance then shifted. In a ninth to 10th-century cemetery at Godalming in Surrey, it was mostly male corpses that had nails and iron spikes driven into their shoulders, necks and knees. The age of castles, military power and ‘feudal’ dominance was approaching in northern Europe, and there was no lack of disruption and psychological trauma to breed paranoid fears. In this increasingly man’s world, as traditional wise women declined in power and status, violent corpses were increasingly envisaged as male. That brings us back to the lurid prose of William of Newburgh and his contemporaries. The high medieval British epidemic coincided with a period of greater theological sophistication in north-western Europe (including, for instance, the elaboration of the idea of purgatory), more complex scholastic thought, and higher levels of literacy. Accordingly, there was more questioning of received doctrine, and more concern by the clerical establishment to define, stigmatise and punish ‘heresy’. It is very interesting that, whereas the French persecuted heretics and not corpses, England saw virtually no heresy trials but widespread corpse-killing – an excellent illustration of how attacks on the dead can help to spare the living. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL1278768webready-497e003-e1769698475877.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A red, blue and black stained glass window showing four people sitting alongside one another, praying" title="Souls in purgatory, shown in a 14th-century French stained-glass window. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory may have shaped medieval concepts about the dead who had not moved on (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Noxious corpses Ten stories survive from 12th-century England, all concerning noxious male corpses: excommunicates, oath-breakers, corrupt judges, dissolute priests. One Buckinghamshire man paid unwelcome night-time visits to his widow, “took to dancing around wildly among the animals”, and finally “started wandering around by day, frightening everyone though visible only to some”. For sheer excitement, a story recorded by a monk of Burton-upon-Trent, and set in a nearby village around 1100, is in a class of its own. Two perjured villagers died suddenly and were buried. They then appeared walking around the village, sometimes carrying their coffins on their backs and sometimes in the shape of animals. They behaved threateningly and spread disease, causing many deaths. When their graves were opened, the corpses proved to have resisted natural decay, and the cloths over their faces were “very horribly bloody”. Their heads were cut off and placed between their thighs, and their hearts were cut out and burned on a hilltop, where they crackled with a loud noise; a black crow flew up from the flames. Read more | “Ghoul-like beyond nightmare dream, they were the living dead”: belief in Vampires through history After 1200, most of the British evidence comes from Scotland. A story set in the Clyde Valley west of Glasgow in 1295 describes how an evil-living monk returned from his grave to visit a knight’s house. “Having assumed a body – it is uncertain whether natural or aerial, but it was dank, gross and tangible” – he appeared in broad daylight in his monastic habit, and took to climbing around on the roofs. People tried to shoot and stab him, but anything penetrating “that damned substance” immediately burned up. No later Scottish stories are quite so lurid, but a resilient substratum of belief can be seen in the many post-medieval oral ballads that describe dead relatives and lovers coming home in bodily form. A strand survived the Reformation and was assimilated into Calvinist theology in the idea that the devil could occupy the corpse of even a virtuous person. In his Daemonologie of 1597, King James VI (later I of England) observed reassuringly “that the Devil may use as well the ministry of the bodies of the faithful in these cases as of the unfaithful, there is no inconvenient: for his haunting with their bodies after they are dead can no-ways defile them, in respect of the soul’s absence”. Beliefs about the dangerous dead didn’t disappear from England entirely. There seems to have been an undercurrent of low-level but persistent anxiety that surfaced at different times and in different places. A 14th-century story from Byland Abbey in Yorkshire recounts that a local rector who died and was buried near the abbey’s chapter house developed “the habit of going out by night, and one night he put out the eye of his concubine”. His body was dug up and dumped in a local lake – though the oxen pulling the cart carrying the corpse “almost sank through fear”. Stone dead Some suggestively mutilated bodies from later periods have also been discovered. Perhaps the latest and strangest was a victim of the 1665–66 plague who was buried in a London church. He was later found to have a large stone in his mouth – a mode of corpse-killing that was standard in Lutheran Germany at the time but unknown in England. Was he a member of the immigrant mercantile community? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/BAL5864439webready-7cd79c8-e1769698055247.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing facing a skeleton, representing Death." title="Death meets a German mercenary in an engraving. Beliefs in the dangerous dead led to stones being placed in the mouths of corpses to quell them (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> It’s not entirely clear why such beliefs were so rare in late medieval and early modern England at times when they assumed epidemic proportions in some parts of central Europe. For instance, the Black Death plague pandemic of 1347–51 seems to have whipped up corpse fears in Greece and Serbia – so why did it have no such effect in England? It may be because the people of England now widely believed in the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which offered a different framework for conceptualising the dead who had not quite moved on. Another factor could be the English enthusiasm for persecuting witches at points in the 16th and 17th centuries. Except in a few locations – Scotland and Moravia, for example – witch-killing and corpse-killing tended to occupy different spaces in early modern Europe, and seem to have provided alternative outlets for the same anxieties. European beliefs in the dangerous dead were never the same again after a series of lurid corpse-killings in Serbia in 1725–32 were widely reported for the first time in the western press. These reports brought with them a new word – vampire – that quickly drove out all synonyms. From that moment, folklore and fiction became inextricably entwined. Sensational novelists embroidered what they read, and their own readers in turn assimilated their work into popular beliefs. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871–72 novella Carmilla sensitively reworked the idea of a loving but predatory dead female derived ultimately from ancient Chinese tradition. But it was of course Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that imposed an indelible – if highly misleading – image of the ‘European vampire’, overlaying and ultimately obliterating the last traces of genuine English popular belief. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/RJGAYDwebready-0963212-e1769700002267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white engraving of a woman creeping towards a person laying in a bed, with her arm reached out towards them" title="An illustration from the 1871–72 Gothic novella Carmilla shows the eponymous bloodsucker approaching her victim. Sheridan Le Fanu’s tale drew on ancient stories of predatory dead women (Image by Alamy)" /> Remarkably, the idea of turning a potentially dangerous corpse upside-down survived a decade or two longer. In rural Devonshire sometime around the turn of the 20th century, a farmer was recorded telling the tale of a wicked local woman who had recently died “cussin’ and dam’in”, and whose coffin had been turned over. “Her ’ont be troublesome then, ’cause if her do begin to diggy her can on’y diggy downwards,” he claimed. The grim finale to this particular English superstition was acted out during the First World War, after a slim English youth had killed a “huge, scowling” German soldier. “Later,” an officer observed, “I found our men burying him most carefully – face downwards. You know why. If he began digging his way out, he would only go deeper.” Epidemics of the undead Five periods when fears of living corpses terrified societies around the world Ancient Mesopotamia: eternal non-sleeping Fears of the dead plagued inhabitants of the neo-Assyrian empire in the near east between c911 and c605 BC. An inscription (left) in the tomb of eighth-century BC queen Yabâ of Nineveh curses any robber by imposing “eternal non-sleeping on his corpse and ghost”. And an omen text of the mid-seventh century BC describes what will happen if one sees “a dead person restrained with cloths, uprising, complaining”. The silence of earlier and later sources suggests that this may have been an epidemic generated by the violence and trauma of imperial expansion in the provinces. Early 18th-century Serbia: dawn of Dracula In the western Balkans after 1700, the central European tradition of dangerous-dead beliefs converged with a Caucasian one. This highly coloured mixture of fantasies reached an epidemic scale on the violent, unstable military frontier between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Cases in 1725–26 and again in the 1730s came to the attention of the Habsburg authorities, whose reports created a Europe-wide sensation. The details were actually rather atypical – for example, in their emphasis on bloodsucking – but inspired a series of fictional works culminating in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. 16th-century Saxony: rise of the chomping dead Devastated by plague and destabilised by the Lutheran Reformation, after 1540 the German electorate of Saxony suffered the strange visitation of the ‘chomping dead’. It was widely believed that some corpses lay in their graves noisily eating their own shrouds, and that they spread plague among the living. This idea had older roots, but it reached epidemic levels in this traumatised society. The remedy was to open the grave to check for shroud-eating and, if evidence mandated action, to behead the corpse with a spade. Martin Luther himself spoke out against the belief, but it endured for several decades before dying away naturally around 1600. 19th-century New England: a war on organs As tuberculosis swept the US between the 1780s and 1890s, the strange idea developed that internal organs of buried victims were spreading the disease. Between 1784 and 1892, at least 70 exhumations are known to have been undertaken in New England, mostly involving turning the corpse face-down, extracting the heart, liver and lungs, and occasionally burning the body. At Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1949, the exhumation of a soldier to burn his uniform represents the last known ‘corpse-killing’ in any non-Balkan and non-Aegean western society. Independent Haiti: zombie slaves In the 19th and 20th centuries, many Haitians believed that some apparently ‘dead’ people had actually been poisoned by sorcerers to induce a death-like trance. The ‘corpses’ were then reputedly stolen from their graves, revived and made to work on sugar plantations. Famously, Clairvius Narcisse (1922–94), who claimed to have escaped from such a plantation, was photographed sitting on his own tomb (above). This strangest of variants – walking ‘corpses’ that had never died – had roots in African beliefs, but developed a unique twist in this fragile republic with its tragic origins, where the unquiet dead were enslaved. Professor John Blair is emeritus fellow in medieval history at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World (Princeton University Press, 2025) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Humble Victorian heroes: the ordinary Britons who sacrificed their lives for others
Statues celebrate monarchs, rulers and conquerors – but who remembers the brave folk who gave their lives to save others? Anna Maria Barry recounts stories of self-sacrificing but otherwise ordinary people from the 19th and 20th centuries who are commemorated in one London park
Tucked away in the City of London, a short walk north of St Paul’s Cathedral, lies a curious, oddly-shaped, leafy little sanctuary. Opened in 1880, Postman’s Park is named for the workers at the nearby General Post Office who liked to visit during their breaks. Today, though, it’s best known as the home of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, honouring dozens of heroic Londoners who lost their lives while trying to save others, most in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Unusually, the memorial describes the details of each tragic death, from drownings and carriage accidents to house fires and poisonings. No wonder this moving, if somewhat macabre, celebration of bravery continues to fascinate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1411624515webready-b2b4c26-e1769529632536.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a low, long wooden and brick structure against a building. In front of it there is a garden with a stone font in the middle" title="The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice honours ordinary people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Flames faced with fortitude One such quietly heroic Londoner was Alice Ayres. During the night of 24 April 1885, the 26-year-old lay asleep in her bedroom on Union Street, in the home of her older sister and brother-in-law, who employed her as a nursemaid and household assistant. Sharing this room were her nieces Edith, Ellen and Elizabeth, aged five, four and three, respectively. Shortly after 2am, Alice was jolted awake by the crackling of flames, and quickly realised that something was very wrong. Her brother-in-law’s oil and paint shop on the ground floor was on fire, and his wares were rapidly accelerating the flames. Alice had to think fast. Unable to exit the bedroom, she rushed to the window and threw it open to scream for help. She grabbed two bedsheets to tie together before realising that this makeshift rope wouldn’t enable her to lower her nieces to safety. Instead, she heaved a feather mattress out of the window to create a soft landing. By now, several neighbours had rushed to the property, and they suspended the mattress between them. First, Alice threw Edith out; next up was Ellen, who clung to her aunt in fear. Finally, Alice dropped Elizabeth down to the waiting neighbours before letting herself drop. Tragically, the fire claimed five lives: neither Elizabeth nor Alice survived their injuries, and Alice’s sister, brother-in-law and young nephew also perished. This sad episode was not soon forgotten, though, and created a sensation in the press, with articles focused firmly on the heroic actions of this brave young woman. “Death of the heroine Alice Ayres,” reported one paper, while another led with “A Heroine in Humble Life”. Alice’s courage was potent: many people were moved deeply by this story of a lowly nursemaid – a young, working-class woman who lost her life in the process of saving others. As historian John Price pointed out, many of these reports erased Alice’s familial relationship to the young girls. It seems that the story of a devoted employee giving her life to save her charges was perceived as more poignant than that of a frantic woman trying to save her own family. On the day of Alice’s funeral, as her coffin was carried by firefighters to its final resting place, admiring Londoners came out to line the streets in their hundreds. A memorial fund raised a significant sum, eventually paying for a large memorial that still stands over Alice’s grave in Isleworth Cemetery. And these were not the only tributes: in the months and years after her death, Alice underwent a process that historian Lara Perry has described as a “secular canonisation”. She became something of a folk hero, her act inspiring poets and writers and being cited as an example of everyday heroism among working people. Read more | For ordinary Tudors, death lurked around every corner with these surprising ways to die This impact even spread overseas: six years after Alice’s death, a poem published in a Toronto newspaper ended with the lines: She did not die. Such names as hers will never, never die; They make our British blood run hot, our British hearts beat high. And as we linger near her tomb, by grateful laurels crown’d, We ask, “What braver act than hers could on the earth be found?” On battle-fields, where strong men fight, what hero’s deed compares With the noble true, self-sacrifice of this nursemaid, Alice Ayres? Among the many people inspired by Alice’s story was George Frederic Watts. One of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian age, dubbed ‘England’s Michelangelo’, Watts was a gifted painter and sculptor known for his symbolist works, public sculptures and many portraits of the era’s great and good. His most famous work is the allegorical Hope (1886), which took on a new significance at the peak of the 20th-century civil rights movement in the US, when Martin Luther King Jr discussed the painting in a sermon. Much later, after hearing about it in another sermon given by pastor Jeremiah Wright, a young Barack Obama took inspiration from its message, later writing the 2006 book The Audacity of Hope. In 1887, two years after Alice’s death, Watts wrote a letter to The Times proposing a novel way to mark the forthcoming golden jubilee of Queen Victoria. “[I]t would surely be of national interest,” he suggested, “to collect a complete record of the stories of heroism in every-day life.” This would, he mooted, take the form of a memorial in London and, to illustrate his argument, he reminded readers of Alice Ayres: such “forgotten heroes”, he argued, should be remembered. “The material prosperity of a nation is not an abiding possession,” Watts concluded. “The deeds of its people are.” Inspiring other Britons This idea of celebrating heroism was very much in keeping with Victorian sensibilities. In 1841, Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle had published his influential On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, championing the importance of heroic individuals – typically, the ‘great men’ of history. There was also a widely held belief in improvement through example – the idea that studying great lives helped an individual to better themselves. Watts’ suggestion was very much in this spirit: he hoped that his memorial would articulate a type of selfless conduct that other Britons would be inspired to emulate through their own good deeds. Although Watts’ idea was not picked up immediately, it resurfaced in 1898 when the vicar of St Botolph’s offered him a site to bring his vision to life – a public park that had once been the parish churchyard and burial ground. It was here that the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was finally unveiled by the lord mayor on 30 July 1900. Initially, just four people were commemorated, but batches of names were added steadily over the following years. After Watts’ death in 1904, the project was taken over by his wife, Mary, a talented designer, social reformer and (later) suffragette. Today, the memorial consists of 54 plaques celebrating a total of 62 individuals. Most of them are men, though nine women and eight children are honoured. The vast majority of those named were either Londoners or people who died in the capital. Though many of the subjects were working class – labourers and railway workers – there are also members of the middle class, including managers and medical men. The memorial takes the form of a wall bearing ornate ceramic plaques covered by a red-tiled roof, supported by columns. Each plaque records a name, dates and – most movingly – a short summary of the circumstances under which the subject died. A typical entry reads: Soloman Galaman aged 11 died of injuries Sept 6 1901 after saving his little brother from being run over in Commercial Street “Mother I saved him but I could not save myself” Another commemorates: Frederick Alfred Croft Inspector aged 31 saved a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal Station but was himself run over by the train Jan 11 1878 <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-144844808webready-2d9e5af-e1769530315297.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="plaque tile dedicated to a man named Frederick Alfred Croft. The tile is beige with an orange outline and has a green and cream floral pattern around it. The words are written in blue" title="A plaque dedicated to Frederick Alfred Croft, who saved a woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal station, before being hit by the train himself (Image by Getty Images)" /> Each plaque tells a vivid story in a few short lines, offering a glimpse into everyday people’s experiences of life in the metropolis. The extraordinary nature of these ordinary Londoners’ deaths means that they generated a deposit in the historic record in the form of newspaper stories and inquest reports. These, along with the information given on the memorial – dates and sometimes even addresses – yields much historical material. Read more | The Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies – so why is there no memorial to it? Many of those commemorated suffered accidents at work. One plaque commemorates Walter Peart and Harry Dean, driver and fireman, respectively, on Great Western Railway’s Windsor Express. On 18 July 1898, they were both working on the 4.15pm service from Windsor to London Paddington when a rod in the engine broke, engulfing the boiler in flames. Though they were severely scalded and later died from their injuries, the two men succeeded in bringing the train to a safe stop, preventing further casualties. Both were married, and Walter left five children. One grateful passenger on the train was George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, who wrote a letter to the Great Western Railway expressing his admiration for the men’s bravery and enclosing a donation for their families. Lost at sea Another plaque honours 44-year-old Mary Rogers, a stewardess on the passenger ferry Stella. On 30 March 1899, Mary was working on a voyage from Southampton to Guernsey with 147 passengers on board, many of whom were starting an Easter holiday. In heavy fog, the ship hit rocks, sinking just eight minutes later. Although some escaped in lifeboats, 86 passengers and 19 crew members were lost. One who made it safely off the ship was the famous opera singer Greta Williams, who sang hymns to calm survivors as they waited in lifeboats for rescue. Rogers, though, was not among them: she had given up her life jacket and refused a seat in a lifeboat, choosing instead to save a passenger. This story touched many, including writer Frances Power Cobbe, who penned an inscription for a monument to Mary containing the lines: Urged by the sailors to make sure her escape, she refused, lest she might endanger the heavily-laden boat. Cheering the departing crew with the friendly cry of “Good-bye, good-bye” she was seen, a few moments later, as the Stella went down, lifting her arms upwards with the prayer “Lord have me” then sank in the waters with the sinking ship. A monument to Mary’s bravery still stands in Southampton. It was funded by donations from an admiring public, who also raised a significant sum to support her elderly father and the two young children she left behind. Mary is one of the few heroes commemorated at Postman’s Park who did not die in London. Another plaque commemorates Sarah Smith, a “pantomime artiste” (real name Sarah Gibson) who reportedly performed an act of bravery during a show at the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street on 23 January 1863. She was on stage when the dress of her friend Anne Hunt began burning, set alight by a pan of fire that was being used in the performance. According to the plaque, Sarah rushed over to extinguish the flames but was so badly burned that she later died of her injuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/dreamstime98653751webready-8fe05fe-e1769530060418.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A plaque tile dedicated to a woman named Sarah Smith. The tile is beige with an orange outline and has a green and cream floral pattern around it. The words are written in blue" title="One plaque commemorates Sarah Smith, who sustained fatal burns when saving her friend from a fire in 1863 (Image by Dreamtime)" /> At the inquest into her death, the jury reprimanded the theatre for its insufficient fire precautions, and the coroner raised his concern about the flammable nature of women’s dress. “He thought it quite impossible by any amount of reasoning or warning to produce any effect on fashion,” reported one newspaper, concluding that “[h]e did not know how many women would be required to be burnt to death before any of their fair sex would give up wearing an article of fashion.” Read more | Why we should be better about talking about death, with Dr Helen Gittos Courageous children Some of the most moving plaques on the memorial honour children who died trying to save friends or siblings. One of these was 10-year-old John Clinton. On 16 July 1894, he was playing on the foreshore of the Thames, close to London Bridge, with another boy called Campbell Mortimer. When Campbell waded into the water and found himself out of his depth, John succeeded in rescuing him, but fell back into the river and drowned. Newspaper reports noted that John had saved another life not long before his death. His baby brother had accidentally started a fire while playing with matches, and John had had the presence of mind to roll him on the carpet to extinguish the flames while also removing a set of curtains that had been set alight. The son of a “struggling carpenter”, John was praised in the press as a “boy hero” and “a most dutiful and affectionate child”. At his funeral, the coffin was “almost hidden with wreaths”; one, reporters noted, “bore the simple words ‘He saved me.’” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2169595312webready-b75a2d2-e1769529775392.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a green heart with the word GRENFELL written across it in yellow" title="The Grenfell Tower Memorial is one of many "attempts to ensure that the lives of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices are not forgotten" (Image by Getty Images)" /> Though 120 tiles were originally planned, after GF Watts’ death the addition of new tablets became sporadic, and effectively ceased after 1931. The final plaque fixed to the memorial, in 2009, honours Leigh Pitt. He was 30 when he died in 2007 while saving a drowning boy from a canal in Thamesmead. In 2010, the group that looks after the Watts memorial decided that no more plaques would be added. In recent years, monuments have become focal points for political debate, and the wisdom of commemorating certain figures has been interrogated. Watts’ Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice seems to speak to the moment: it doesn’t celebrate military generals, politicians or monarchs, but instead pays tribute to the bravery and humanity of everyday people who were prepared to risk their lives for others. We might recognise echoes of this sentiment in the National Covid Memorial Wall on the South Bank or the Grenfell Tower Memorial Wall. All are attempts to ensure that the lives of ordinary people who made extraordinary sacrifices are not forgotten. Anna Maria Berry is a historian and writer This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
The Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies – so why is there no memorial to it?
Kavita Puri on the first event commemorating the 1943 Bengal Famine
In a museum in Manchester, on an autumn evening just a few weeks ago, history was made. I joined a group of people who had gathered to pay their respects to casualties of a long-overlooked episode of the Second World War. Curators, students, interested locals and descendants of those involved milled around, drinking chai, looking at pictures in a temporary exhibition. Organisers believe this was the first event to commemorate the estimated 3 million victims of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Those who died were Indians, but they were also British subjects. It’s one of the largest losses of civilian life among the Allies – yet there isn’t a memorial, a museum or even a plaque to them anywhere in the world. So that night – organised by the University of Manchester, Manchester Museum and the Imperial War Museum North, and inspired by my BBC podcast Three Million – marked a very special moment. Read more | The 1943 Bengal famine: "People began collapsing in the streets and dying on the pavements" The exhibition featured portraits of some of the survivors I had interviewed in the Bengal countryside. There was Jamuna Purkayeth, who had travelled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a little girl with her father in search of charity. When I spoke to her, she told me that she believed that if she had stayed in her village she would have died of hunger. Also on display were extracts of letters to and from Indian soldiers stationed in the Middle East, censored by colonial authorities for mentioning the extent of the food crisis. Now those letters – uncensored – were presented in a public space. There were also Japanese propaganda pamphlets encouraging the Indian population to rise up against the British. In one cartoon, the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, is pictured feasting on a sumptuous roast chicken, while underneath the dining table are emaciated, dead Bengalis. The message is clear: Japan will feed you, but the British won’t. Also on display were evocative photographs of Sunil Janah, who documented the human cost of the famine in the communist newspaper People’s War. Among the speakers that evening was the narrative director from the Imperial War Museum, who talked of the silences in that museum’s war archive, and discussed what can be done to remedy the situation. Another was an eyewitness to the famine, Partha Mitter. He told how, as a little boy, he would look through the iron gates of his grand house and see starving mothers clutching their babies, begging for phan dao, water in which rice had been cooked. They never asked for the rice – Bengal’s staple food – because that would be too much to hope for. Read more | Who was to blame for the Irish famine? Eighty years since the end of the Second World War, it’s about time that these 3 million lives are remembered. They cannot be a mere footnote in history. They are part of Britain’s wartime story, and its colonial legacy, that has become contentious – but this night showed that it need not be so. History is never static. Time allows people to speak, and ask, and collectively to acknowledge and remember. Forgetting need not be permanent. There will be a time to ask some difficult questions – about how this was allowed to happen, and who was responsible – but this night was dedicated to those who died. There is a dignity in remembering them – a dignity they were not afforded in life. Who knows whether this will become an annual event, or if a more permanent memorial to the victims will be established. But something is changing – and I learned this night that history can be redemptive. Everyone who gathered felt it, and it was an unexpectedly uplifting experience. This column was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine