HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-21T14:54:37.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00The Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry – and there's a dark reason whyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/2026-10-21T13:30:05.000ZOn 1 August 1944, two SS officers drove a pair of trucks into the heart of Nazi-occupied Paris, and headed straight for the Louvre. These men were on a top-secret mission – one assigned to them by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.
Himmler had tasked the two men with descending into the bowels of the world-famous art museum, seizing the Bayeux Tapestry and spiriting it away to a “safe place” far from the grasp of the Allies’ rapidly advancing armies.
After 15 years as the head of one of the most feared paramilitary organisations in history, Himmler was used to getting his own way. Yet in this case he was to be disappointed. A few days earlier, a group of local resistance fighters – tipped off by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park – had learned of the SS men’s mission and rushed to the Louvre to protect the iconic embroidery. Warned at the last minute that any attempt to ‘liberate’ the tapestry would be met with a hail of bullets, the SS officers gave up on their mission.
The Nazi proclivity for buying, extorting and confiscating Europe’s greatest artworks is well documented. But there was more to Himmler’s desire to seize the Bayeux Tapestry than an acquisitive lust for one of France’s foremost cultural treasures. In the celebrated images of Norman knights putting Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers to the sword he saw evidence of medieval Germanic supremacy.
The Nazi fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry can, perhaps, be traced back to 1 July 1935 when Himmler – along with fellow Nazi ideologues Richard Walther Darré and Herman Wirth – created Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Study of Germanic Heritage. Ahnenerbe was founded to promote archaeological investigations of sites that could be associated with early Germanic settlement, and to study, in situ, works related to the history of the Aryan race. It wasn’t long before its leading lights had turned their attention to the celebrated 11th-century embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
The French had claimed the Bayeux Tapestry as a national historical monument since the early 1700s, but the Nazi regime had an alternative theory. In July 1939, a memo written by Franz Altheim, professor of classical philology at Frankfurt University, arrived on the desk of Wolfram Sievers, Ahnenerbe’s general manager. It proposed that a detailed examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would prove that the Normans who conquered England were, in reality, Vikings – and, by extension, Germanic. The idea that they were French, Altheim argued, was based on a 200-year-old lie. At the bottom of his note he wrote: “I emphasise the importance of this study.”
In July 1939, when Altheim penned his memo, the idea of a team of ardent Nazis poring over one of the most iconic artefacts in French history in an attempt to establish its Germanic origins would have been anathema to the people of France. But the fall of their nation to German forces in June 1940 rendered their opinions all but irrelevant.
And so, in the aftermath of the French surrender, Dr Herbert Jankuhn, professor of Viking archaeology at Rostock University – and a loyal Nazi – was appointed to head a team of experts tasked with studying the artefact in the northern French town of Bayeux. Jankuhn offered a clue as to what he hoped to achieve when declaring: “For general Germanic studies, the Tapestry’s visual representations, through the recording of Germanic legends and traditions, provides a very valuable source for this early period.”
Photographic evidence
Jankuhn’s first task as leader of Special Assignment Bayeux was to study the hanging, and gather information so that further studies could be carried out by research scholars after the embroidery had been moved to safe wartime storage. The ultimate aim was to produce a multi-volume publication of their findings, featuring a photographic replica of the tapestry. By examining representations of everything from boats and weapons to costumes, they would provide irrefutable scientific evidence that the tapestry was a testament to Germanic hegemony in early medieval Europe.
Jankuhn couldn’t complete such a weighty undertaking alone. He was accompanied by Dr Karl Schlabow, textile expert and head of the Germanic Costume Museum in Neumünster, whose job it was to scrutinise the fabric and take careful measurements. Rolf Alber, photographer and war reporter, was to shoot new images of the tapestry, in both black-and-white and colour. Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin, was the only member of the Bayeux team who wasn’t a member of the Nazi party or the SS. His task was to create a series of accurate, full-size drawings and watercolours of details from the Bayeux Tapestry, under Jankuhn’s guidance.
First, though, they had to gain access to the embroidery – and that would prove surprisingly problematic. In September 1939, with war clouds gathering, the French authorities had rolled it up on a bobbin, placed it in a padded, zinc-lined wooden case and deposited it in a concrete bunker in the basement of Bayeux’s Hôtel du Doyen.
Since the fall of France, German officers had peppered Bayeux’s authorities with requests to see the tapestry – a process that meant repeatedly manhandling the fragile, 900-year-old artefact. The French were reluctant to allow this to continue and, in a classic delaying tactic, began insisting that all permissions to view the tapestry be signed by the proper authorities in Paris. As a result, following their arrival in Bayeux on 8 June 1941, Jankuhn and his team would have to wait days before beginning their work.
At first, they examined the embroidery in the Hôtel du Doyen’s Bishops’ Gallery – but this entailed unrolling and rolling the tapestry every day. So, on 23 June, it was moved in a truck – accompanied by Rene Falue (the tapestry’s official guardian), three French customs officials and a lone German policeman – to the Monastery of St Martin at Mondaye, five miles south of Bayeux, where a large section could be left unrolled.
Summoned to fight
Working seven days a week, Jankuhn’s team set about studying, drawing and photographing all 70 metres of the embroidery. They hit a stumbling block on 29 June, when Alber returned to military service. A replacement photographer, Ursula Uhland, was summoned but, because women weren’t allowed in the monastery’s cloister, the tapestry had to be transported to its public gallery.
Despite this setback, Jeschke had completed his sketches by the end of July, and the project’s last week was taken up with Uhland’s work and with shooting propaganda films for Wochenschau, a newsreel series released in the cinemas.
On 1 August, the tapestry was returned to its concrete bunker in Bayeux. A few days later it was moved again – to the Château de Sourches, some 100 miles south of Bayeux, where it joined treasures from the Louvre.
The first stage of Special Assignment Bayeux may have come to an end, but the Nazi obsession with the Bayeux Tapestry was showing no signs of abating. Dr Hermann Bunjes, head of the German Art Historical Institute in Paris, now became the project’s guiding spirit, assembling a group of academics to bring the multi-volume book on the artefact to fruition.
They set about comparing Jeschke’s drawings with Germanic and Viking artefacts in museums, and considered the photographs taken by Uhland and Alber. They envisaged a book that would present essays on the past scholarship of the embroidery, its physical details, its historical authority, its significance for the history of culture. The book would also contain a study of the fabric and embroidery, and an analysis of its material and colour.
One study ‘proved’ the early Germanic origin of the wooden houses depicted; another emphasised the similarity of English and Norman boats to Viking ships.
All of this was undertaken with one overriding ambition: to prove that the Normans were still true, untainted Vikings – representatives of the pure Nordic Aryan race.
Herbert Jankuhn had little doubt that Special Assignment Bayeux had achieved just that. “The Bayeux Tapestry is not only a king’s saga of purely Germanic imprint, but also constitutes the documentary justification of William’s claim to England,” he declared in December 1942. “His actions appear to us… as the execution of his given right and the punishment of unforgiveable perjury and unfaithfulness according to the Germanic viewpoint. The tapestry not only exudes genuine Germanic joy in the tradition of heroic deeds, but also the statesmanlike desire to justify the campaign in England as a legal operation and political necessity.” Propaganda magazines agreed wholeheartedly, running articles that eulogised the tapestry’s celebration of “the joy of the Germanic tradition of great acts of war”.
In short, Special Assignment Bayeux was to reclaim the tapestry as a perfect fit with Nazi pan-Germanic ideology, since it bore witness to the early unification of the Germanic cultures of Scandinavia, Normandy and England. It would also serve as a precedent for the Nazis’ desire to recreate Germania, a homeland for all Germanic peoples.
Glorious warfare
This sentiment would certainly have struck a chord with Heinrich Himmler, who was fascinated by the Bayeux Tapestry’s imagery of medieval knights and glorious warfare. Over Christmas 1942, the head of the SS was presented with a bound volume of photos and drawings of the embroidery – a gift that delighted him so much that he sent a thank-you note to Wolfram Sievers in which he noted “the significance that this Bayeux Tapestry has for our glorious and culturally rich German history”.
The Allied invasion of western Europe on 6 June 1944 merely sharpened Himmler’s desire to secure the tapestry for the Third Reich. His fear that it would fall into enemy hands became apparent on 27 June, when the Gestapo moved the embroidery – without notice and despite local French protest – from Sourches to the basement of the Louvre. This would be followed, little more than a month later, by the two SS officers’ attempt to spirit the embroidery away to a “safe place”, only to be thwarted by fast-acting resistance fighters.
What had been Himmler’s intentions when he ordered the tapestry moved from Paris? What would he have considered a “safe place” in June 1944? One possibility is Wewelsburg Castle in central Germany, which had been chosen by Himmler as the location for his training centre, the home of the cult of the SS – a place where officers were taught how to recreate the lost world of the ‘Nordic race’.
Obsessed with the idea that the SS was a revival of the medieval Teutonic knights, Himmler imagined the castle as the home of modern Nazi Knights of the Round Table. The crypt, designed to hold the ashes of SS leaders, was named Valhalla. Himmler installed his own collection of ancient and medieval weapons in the castle, and indicated he wanted tapestries hung on the walls. This would have been an apt location for the Bayeux Tapestry, which he considered a great testament to an earlier Germanic-Nordic-Aryan triumph.
If Wewelsburg Castle was a safe place in June 1944, it certainly didn’t remain so. On 31 March 1945, with US forces closing in, Himmler ordered the castle dynamited, along with its contents.
Fortunately, the Allies had already found the Bayeux Tapestry safe in its temporary home in the basement of the Louvre. On 2 March 1945, after going on display in an exhibition in the art museum, it was returned to Bayeux.
Were the Nazis wrong to attempt to divine a Viking presence in the Bayeux Tapestry? No. It has long been accepted that the Scandinavian influence on both English and Norman societies was significant – seen, for example, in ships, ship-building tools and some decorative elements. This influence can be traced back to the Viking occupation of vast swathes of England (the so-called Danelaw), and the ceding of what became Normandy to the Vikings in 911.
All three groups – English, Normans and Scandinavians – may be considered, to some extent, Germanic. But surely Ahnenerbe would have had finally to admit that, even if the Normans were still Vikings in 1066, they were French-speaking ones.
Shirley Ann Brown is professor emerita of art history at York University, Toronto, a member of the Bayeux Tapestry Advisory Committee, and author of The Bayeux Tapestry: A Sourcebook
This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]>Death under the black mountain: surviving the 1966 Aberfan disasterhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/death-black-mountain-aberfan-disaster-welsh-history-who-blame-how-many-tragedy-survived/2026-10-21T13:00:27.000ZAt about 9:15am on Friday 21 October 1966, spoil tip No 7 – one of seven slag heaps that loomed like a mountain range high above the south Wales village of Aberfan – started to move. Then, almost in the blink of an eye, the entire edifice was transformed into a 30-feet-high tsunami of sludge that slid downhill at over 80mph. Seconds later, a wave consisting of half a million tonnes of liquefied coal waste crashed into Aberfan. The wave swept across a canal and over an embankment before bearing down on the village primary school.
The children and staff of Pantglas Junior School were about to start their lessons on the last day before half-term. Suddenly they felt a deep shuddering and heard a deafening roar like a jet plane taking off close by. Before anyone had a chance to react, the walls and windows of four of the school’s seven classrooms were violently breached and the school was inundated almost instantly by a powerful surge of cloying black sludge – over 1.4 million cubic feet of liquefied slurry. By the time the slithering mass came to a halt a few seconds later, dozens of children and adults had been engulfed where they stood or sat.
Survivors’ voices
My new BBC Four documentary brings together freshly recorded memories of the disaster. One such account came from Jeff Edwards, who was eight years old at the time that he was trapped by the sludge. “I was gasping for breath because the air was getting less and less, but at least I had that pocket of air. The panic really set in when I thought: how was I going to get out?” For a few moments after the avalanche an eerie silence enveloped Aberfan as the villagers tried to take in the unimaginable horror of what had just happened. Then they rushed to the school and began frantically clawing at the rapidly re-solidifying slurry.
- Listen now | Steve Humphries reflects on the 1966 tragedy that enveloped a Welsh village
Miraculously, some children survived. Seven-year-old Karen Thomas and four other children in the school hall were saved by their brave dinner lady, Nansi Williams, who sacrificed her life by diving on top of them to shield them from the slurry. “We were shouting and trying to pull her hair to see if we could get a response from her, because she wasn’t saying anything to us,” Karen recalled. “We didn’t know what was happening. We couldn’t hear anything else. It was just our voices and screams we could hear.”
Ten-year-old Phil Thomas was buried as he walked across Moy Road outside the adjacent senior school, and briefly lost consciousness. “I woke, pitch black, buried, I couldn’t see a thing,” he said. “Then I started crying. I was shouting for my mum.”
Phil was still in grave danger: a torrent of water from fractured mains was spreading through the slurry. “He was trapped by his feet and we just couldn’t get him out,” recounted Len Haggett, one of the first firemen on the scene. “The water was rising and coming up to his head. We thought he might drown. There were about seven of us firemen there, and we gave this one final lift and we lifted this wall that had collapsed on him. We were elated that we’d saved his life but to this day I don’t know how we managed to lift that much weight.”
A grim reality
Back in the wrecked classrooms of the junior school, more firemen were inching their way through the mass of muck and rubble. Through a window they spotted a crop of blonde hair. It was Jeff Edwards, who later recalled that “I couldn’t move at all because my desk was against my stomach. On my left-hand side there was a girl’s head next to my face, and I couldn’t get away from the fact she had died. All I could see was a small aperture of light. And the next thing I remember is that the firemen smashed the window and they got in. They got down to my desk but they couldn’t shift it to get me out, so they got their hatchets out and actually broke up the desks. Then they carried me out to safety.”
From 11 o’clock in the morning the rescuers were confronted by a grim reality – that all of the children they were finding in the school were dead. Many were still sitting at their desks, entombed by the slurry. At this point the miners, some of them fathers of children at the school, effectively took over from the firemen. The lead was taken by the local coal board’s Mines Rescue Service, established to rescue miners trapped underground.
One of these rescuers was Roy Hamer, who quickly realised that the action had become a recovery rather than a rescue operation. His testimony is important – and comforting for bereaved parents and families – because it suggests that most of the children died instantly and did not suffer for long.
“I honestly believe that the slurry travelling at that rate… once it came into that school… just swept through it, and the damage was done very quickly. If you can understand the slurry was so small and fine that I think the children were more or less suffocated straight away rather than suffered agonies.”
With the lives of so many children at stake, the rescue and recovery operation quickly became worldwide news. Early in the day, hopes of finding many survivors were high. But the mood changed with each passing hour as more bodies were brought out. Parents waited in agony, among them Marilyn Brown, hoping that her 10-year-old daughter Janette would be found. “We were waiting, thinking: yes, we’re going to have news any minute now of the children, where they are. And we kept asking questions all the time.”
Marilyn remembers how her husband Bernard had been digging all morning, hoping to find their daughter. “He came over to one of the walls of the houses opposite, sitting on the wall, absolutely exhausted, and he said: ‘I don’t know what to do, Marilyn. I don’t know what to do.’ But eventually news came through that quite a few of the children had been buried. This time you didn’t want any more news, because you’re still thinking: yes she’ll be alright. She’ll be fine.”
How many died?
The dead were taken to a makeshift mortuary set up in Bethania Chapel, where many parents had to endure the ordeal of identifying the bodies of their children. Marilyn’s husband and father returned from the temporary mortuary to tell her their news.
“My father started to cry and I said: ‘Is she alright?’ And he said: ‘No. Janette has died.’ He said he had just identified her. I said: ‘I want to go. I want to go and see her.’ ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you don’t go and see her, she’s fine.’ I said: ‘What does she look like?’ He said: ‘She’s got a tiny mark on her head and she’s sleeping,’ and that was that. Well, I just gave in to it then. My father, he was crying and I think it was because he was crying, I was crying as well. But it sort of comes over you then: yes, she’s gone.”
By the end of the day, 60 bodies had been recovered from the disaster area. The final death toll reached 144, of which 116 victims were children – nearly half of the school’s pupils.
Who was to blame?
Nine months later, a tribunal published its report on the disaster. It found that the National Coal Board (NCB) was completely to blame for the disaster, despite the fact that, while giving evidence to the tribunal, NCB chairman Lord Robens had claimed that the avalanche was caused by water from unknown springs underneath the tip. In fact, the springs had been known about for many years – they were even shown on the Ordnance Survey map of the area.
- Read more | History explorer: the conquest of Wales
Robens and the NCB also denied that the Aberfan tip complex had slid before, despite clear physical evidence, visible to the naked eye, of tip slides in 1944 and 1963. Donations from a public shocked at the tragedy and keen to help the bereaved families raised over £1.6m for the Aberfan Disaster Fund – at that time, the largest sum ever raised in Britain. But to add insult to injury, this was not given in full to the Aberfan community. Instead, £150,000 from the fund was allocated to clear the surrounding coal tips – an operation that was clearly the responsibility of the NCB.
Painful memories
Coming to terms with the loss of so many children has been very difficult for the people of Aberfan. Many still prefer not to talk about it, especially to outsiders. So it took many months for our film crew to win the trust of survivors, rescuers and bereaved families, and to persuade them to tell their stories on camera. In our film, some tell their stories for the first time.
Fireman Len Haggett, who helped rescue Phil Thomas, had never before spoken about the disaster; he had not even told his wife about anything that happened that day, for fear of upsetting her. Even after he received our letter calling for the memories of retired firemen involved in the Aberfan disaster, passed on by the Merthyr Fire Station, Len pondered for months whether to come forward and tell his story. He was from a generation who dealt with horror and tragedy by not talking about it.
Len had no idea of the identity of the boy whose life he helped save. It seems quite extraordinary today that they should have lived within a mile or so of each other and not known each other. Their moving reunion was captured on camera in a scene that, for me, is one of the most poignant in the film. Also present was Len’s fellow fireman Dave Thomas who assisted in Phil’s rescue.
They had a lot to catch up on – about each other’s lives, and what happened on that terrible day – but the most powerful moment came when a tearful Phil thanked the firemen for saving his life, saying: “Until this day and this meeting I never knew who dug me out.” Len replied: “We’re only sorry we couldn’t get more out.”
Among the most moving and emotional stories from the tragedy of Aberfan are those of the bereaved parents. They are also the most difficult to document and film. A number of the parents have died since the disaster; some are buried in the children’s cemetery on the hill, alongside the sons and daughters they lost in the disaster.
For understandable reasons, surviving mothers and fathers, now mostly in their seventies and eighties, still find it incredibly hard to talk about the day of the disaster. Marilyn Brown retains cherished memories of her daughter, Janette, who was 10 when she died. Marilyn keeps photographs of Janette around her home, and touches them as she passes.
“It gives me a sense of... she’s still with us, you know? That feeling of: yes – yes, I do remember you, and I will always remember you ... She would have been 61 now, and I think: what would she have been like now? What would she have done?”
Steve Humphries is an award-winning film-maker specialising in social history documentaries. He is the co-author with Sue Elliott and Bevan Jones of Surviving Aberfan: The People’s Story (Grosvenor House, 2016).
This article first appeared in the November 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine.
]]>Monsters of Rome: do emperors such as Nero and Caligula deserve their reputations?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/monsters-rome-emperors-reputation-tom-holland/2026-10-19T17:30:02.000ZRob Attar: Could you please begin by introducing Suetonius and his best-known work, The Lives of the Caesars?
Tom Holland: Suetonius is probably the most famous of all the ancient biographers. He was secretary to the emperor Hadrian, so was right at the heart of imperial power. He’d also worked as an archivist and librarian in the imperial palace, and therefore had access to all kinds of historical documents.
He drew on these to write [in around AD 121] the biographies of the rulers who had come to be known as the 12 Caesars: the 11 emperors from Augustus to Domitian and, before them all, Julius Caesar – the adoptive father of Augustus. The Lives has had a massive influence on how people understand the Roman empire.
Of all ancient classical texts, this is probably also the most influential on modern culture. It inspired Robert Graves, who would later translate the Lives for Penguin Classics, to write I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), which were then adapted into the celebrated 1976 BBC drama series [starring Derek Jacobi].
And that series inspired all kinds of US dramas, ranging from Dynasty in the 1980s, to The Sopranos in the 1990s and 2000s, and Game of Thrones in the 2010s. You could say that Suetonius is the godfather of the murderous dynastic drama.
As a historian yourself, do you consider that Suetonius was doing something similar to what you do today?
It’s important to say that Suetonius wasn’t actually a historian – he was a biographer. He was not aiming to do what Tacitus, his great contemporary, was doing – creating a record of the whole sweep of Roman history.
But of course, because the emperors are so important to our understanding of how the Roman world operated, his work does offer a sense of the Roman empire in the first century BC and the first century AD. That was a period of convulsive change: the Republic collapsed, Augustus established an autocracy, and then there was a process of evolution over the first century AD.
After Augustus died in AD 14, Rome was ruled by his family – the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero – after which that family went extinct. There was then a murderous bout of civil war in AD 69, notorious as the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ – Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian – whose lives were among the 12 related by Suetonius. Vespasian, who established his own dynasty, was succeeded by his eldest son, Titus, who was then followed by his younger brother, Domitian. The lives of those three emperors are covered by Suetonius as well.
What approach did Suetonius take to writing these biographies?
His range seems to have been very extensive. From surviving fragments of his other works, we get a sense that he was interested in what today we might call social anthropology: customs, habits, the things that people do. Aside from his biographies of the Caesars, he wrote a collection of the lives of the great courtesans – and sex is also an obvious theme that runs throughout The Lives of the Caesars.
But he also wrote about children’s games, and about the insults that people give one another. He wrote about clothing, and about all kinds of aspects of social life – and these in turn informed his portraits of the emperors. He wrote about what they did as children, their appearance, their sexual habits. For Suetonius, this provided windows onto their characters and the way that their reigns were shaped. It enabled him to situate the emperors more clearly in the social, political and cultural context of the world that they ruled.
Why and how did you go about translating The Lives of the Caesars?
I was asked to do it because it was felt that the translation done by Robert Graves many decades ago was a bit old fashioned. There are certain problems, I think, with his work.
One strange choice he made was that, instead of using Roman military terms such as centurion or tribune, he gave characters titles such as ‘sergeant major’ or ‘colonel’ or whatever. That’s perhaps unsurprising, because Graves fought in the First World War, but it gives his text a slightly postwar, 1930s flavour. I’m sure that in maybe 60 or 70 years, my translation will seem very 2020s, but I hope that I’ve been truer to the Latin text than Graves was.
One other stylistic quirk of Suetonius’s I noticed was that, when writing about an individual emperor, he almost never mentioned them by name – it’s always “he” did this, “he” did that. Suetonius might introduce, say, Augustus by name at the beginning of that Life, but, from that point on, it is assumed that any third person verb will be referring to Augustus.
And the effect is very powerful. By not drawing attention to the emperor’s name, it becomes kind of omnipresent: this emperor is so significant that you don’t even need to name him – everything is revolving around him. I hope that, even in English, the reader will find this stylistic effect striking.
Did you have to make any difficult decisions when translating the text?
Purely in terms of how to render Latin – and, indeed, Greek, because there’s quite a lot of Greek in the Lives, too – the huge problem is always puns. Meaningfully translating Suetonius’s linguistic puns is always a challenge. One of them revolves around oral sex, and that touches on another, slightly more moral problem: there are passages within Suetonius that are shocking. And these passages have always been shocking.
There’s a tradition that, in the 15th century, Gilles de Rais – a Frenchman fighting the English during the Hundred Years’ War – was seduced into becoming a child killer by reading Suetonius. The Marquis de Sade reputedly owned a copy of the Lives. Then, in the Victorian period, school copies featured large chunks that were just replaced with asterisks.
Even though today, in the 21st century, we might pride ourselves on being more permissive and less easily shocked, the fact remains that there are repellent passages. The question of what to do with them was a moral consideration, but in the end I decided that I wanted to give as accurate and complete a rendering of Suetonius’s language as I could.
On that point, the Lives features some truly remarkable stories about some of the emperors’ debauched behaviour. How seriously can we take these?
I would like to focus on two of those emperors, because in some ways their reputations for debauchery reflect very different Roman cultural traditions. The first of these was Tiberius. Near the end of his life, when he was about 70, he retired to the island of Capri.
Suetonius gives us completely shocking details of what Tiberius is supposed to have got up to there: child sex, brothels, all kinds of things. Tiberius was then succeeded by Caligula – perhaps the most notorious of all of the Caesars. Rather than retiring to a private island, Caligula staged his sexual depravities on the most public of stages, according to Suetonius.
The temptation is to take these accounts absolutely at face value: to assume that Tiberius was a hideous pervert, and that Caligula was such a sexual terrorist that he was in fact insane. But I think there are different layers in how you can respond to these stories. One of these is to recognise that the Roman understanding of what was shocking and scandalous about sexual behaviour is not the same as ours.
Let’s think about Tiberius. He was the emperor – and an emperor should not retire. The only conceivable reason, in a Roman’s opinion, for doing that was because the person doing it was an absolute pervert.
So you can see why Tiberius’s retirement was framed by people hostile to him as reflecting his desire to do disgusting things that he couldn’t do while he was in Rome leading a public life. The fact that Tiberius was a very old man, and that statesmen who had attained a certain age were entitled to a dignified retirement, was ignored – because Tiberius was emperor, and shouldn’t have done it.
As for Caligula, he was taking to the public stage and rubbing the noses of his enemies in the Senate in the fact of their impotence. Both Augustus and Tiberius had shown the Senate respect, but Caligula had a different strategy. He wanted to demonstrate that he was the master, and that the senators were a bunch of lickspittles, nobodies. I think that the sexual abuse to which he submitted senators – and, notably, their wives – was a way of making that point.
That was very brutal and shocking, and why Caligula became such a notorious figure, but there was perhaps an element of strategic thinking that Suetonius didn’t acknowledge. Caligula clearly wasn’t a liberal – he wasn’t Justin Trudeau – but there was probably method behind the seeming madness.
This is part of the fascination of studying the lives of these emperors. There’s the shock appeal of the stories, and there’s the fascination of working out exactly how and why Roman attitudes to sexuality were different from ours. And then there’s the possible political context that was unspoken and unacknowledged by Suetonius, but which might nevertheless explain what is going on.
Was something similar happening with Nero, who was another really notorious figure of this time? Did he get an unfairly bad press from Suetonius?
No, because Nero brought it on himself. And, as with Caligula, I think it was a deliberate political strategy. There were really two traditions in Roman politics that the emperors inherited from the age of the Republic. There was the traditionalist approach, showing respect for the traditions of the state and traditional elites.
And then there were populares – leaders who looked over the heads of the traditional elites to appeal to the masses of the people. Augustus, Tiberius and Claudius were all essentially traditionalist in their approach, whereas Caligula and Nero were both populares. They scorned the Senate and wanted to make themselves the darlings of the people.
Because they were emperors, they had opportunities to do that in ways that, in the Republic, not even the most flamboyant nobleman would have had. And I think that’s what Nero was doing. He was clearly the most tremendous showman in a way that was calculated to be shocking to his senators. Emperors were not meant to tread the boards on stage. They were not meant to play musical instruments. They were not meant to compete in the Olympics.
But Nero did all that – and he did it sufficiently well that people quite admired it. It’s as though a US president were to star in an Oscar-winning film, headline Glastonbury, or win a race in Formula 1.
And even with the most shocking crime of his reign, the murder of his own mother, Nero very pointedly didn’t try to disguise it. Instead, he drew attention to it – and I think that’s because murdering your mother was the kind of thing that a hero would do in a Greek tragedy. Nero was casting himself as literally being ‘Augustus’, someone midway between heaven and earth. He was essentially presenting himself to the Roman people, and the world beyond, as a figure from myth – as a throwback to the ancient days of someone like the notorious matricide Orestes.
This policy undoubtedly caused collateral damage, and explains why Nero’s reputation was so bad in the wake of his death. And Suetonius was clearly drawing on those traditions. After all, Suetonius was working for an imperial system founded on the ruins of Nero’s reputation and career, so there was nothing for him in trying to redeem Nero’s reputation. Again, I think – as with Caligula and Tiberius – Suetonius’s portrait of Nero gives the historian enough clues to enable them to work out what Nero was doing, what he was up to. But you’ve got to read between the lines.
In your introduction, you suggest that these rulers are both familiar and strange to us at the same time. Could you elaborate on that point?
I think they’re familiar to us because Suetonius’s biographies give us details about these individual emperors to a degree that we simply do not have for comparable imperial figures from Near Eastern and Mediterranean ancient history. Think of the pharaohs, or the kings of Assyria or Babylon or Persia: these were autocrats ruling empires and civilisations that were just as sophisticated as the Roman empire. Compared with the portraits we have of Augustus or Nero, however, they seem anonymous.
The whole point of royal iconography in Egypt or Persia was to anonymise the pharaoh or the great king. Thanks to Suetonius, though, we know how the emperors had sex, how they went to the toilet, what they looked like, the hairstyles they wore, their bodily blemishes, and so on. We know the most intimate details about them – and that makes them seem vivid and alive and familiar to us in a way that is fairly unique in ancient history. It explains, I think, why imperial Rome tends to fascinate the general public in a way that other civilisations don’t.
At the same time, I hope you will get a sense from what I’ve been saying that ancient Rome was a very alien civilisation. The codes of behaviour that governed not just the emperors but also Romans generally were very remote from ours.
And it’s that strange blend of the familiar and the weird that I think explains why Rome is so fascinating. There’s a kind of science-fiction quality to it. If you think of science fiction as being a mixture of what is familiar to us with worlds that are utterly alien, then that is what ancient Rome gives us.
Of all of the weird and wonderful stories within this book, are there any that particularly stood out for you?
One of the things that becomes very evident when you read the biographies in their entirety is that, even as Suetonius was clearly getting stuck into archives, he was also situating the stories in a dimension in which the supernatural was very vivid.
One of the most dramatic and celebrated moments in Suetonius’s Lives is Julius Caesar’s famous crossing of the Rubicon [the river that marked the boundary of the area controlled directly by Rome]. Caesar sent his legions ahead of him, then travelled in secret through the night from Ravenna up to the frontier. He stood on the bank. He hesitated. And then, Suetonius tells us, a great ghostly figure snatched a trumpet and blew it. This served as the signal to Caesar that he should cross the river.
The dice were thrown. The Rubicon was crossed. History changed – and the fact that there is this weird supernatural element, and it’s introduced exactly as though Suetonius is describing something completely everyday, is often written out of the story. For instance, I did not include that in my earlier account of the crossing of the Rubicon, but looking back at it now, perhaps I should have done.
Throughout all of these stories, there is a sense that what was happening was being governed by fate – that the gods were always watching down, and that it was possible for mortals who could read these signs correctly to intuit what was going to happen. This is a really important part of the universe that Suetonius has bequeathed us.
If, through some miracle of technology, you could interview one of the 12 Caesars on your podcast The Rest Is History, who would you choose?
Julius Caesar – simply because his combination of an extraordinary life and piercing, ruthless intelligence would make him incomparably the most interesting guest to interview. I think, though, for my own selfish purposes – for wanting to understand how the Roman world ticked and how the course of Roman history was changed – I would choose Augustus. He was probably the most remarkable political operator, not just in Rome but in the whole of western history – maybe even world history.
- Read more | Who are the most underrated Roman emperors?
Tom Holland is a historian, author and broadcaster who co-hosts The Rest Is History podcast with Dominic Sandbrook. His translation of The Lives of the Caesars was published by Penguin Classics in 2025.
This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>The Falklands War: why did it happen?https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/falklands-war-history-facts-what-happened/2026-07-15T14:20:00.000ZOn 2 April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a remote British colony in the South Atlantic. The UK, which had ruled the islands for nearly 150 years (though Argentina had long claimed sovereignty), quickly chose to fight and Britain's Navy sailed south to retake the Falklands. HistoryExtra's Matt Elton explores 12 big questions surrounding the conflict – and below, find expert insight from historians Sir Max Hastings and Sir Lawrence Freedman…
What was the Falklands War?
The Falklands War saw Britain and Argentina battle for control of the Falkland Islands – a tiny archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean made up of two main islands (dubbed East Falkland and West Falkland) and around 776 smaller outcrops.
When was the Falklands War and how long did it last?
The conflict was fought between 2 April and 14 June 1982, lasting for 74 days.
When and how did the Falklands War start?
On 2 April, Argentina invaded and occupied the British dependent territory of the Falkland Islands, and they took the neighbouring island of South Georgia the following day. However, neither Britain nor Argentina declared a state of war at any point, meaning the conflict remained, officially, an ‘undeclared war’.
Why did the Falklands War happen?
From an Argentine point of view, the war was sparked less by an ‘invasion’ and more by a reclamation of territory that was, by rights, theirs. The history of the Falklands is rather convoluted. France was the first nation to establish a colony on East Falkland in 1764, before the British claimed West Falkland as its own the next year. Five years after that, Spanish troops captured the fort of Port Egmont (Britain’s first settlement on West Falkland).
Fifty years on, a mercenary working for the United Provinces of the River Plate – a forerunner of what would later become Argentina – claimed possession of the islands. In 1833, the British reasserted their sovereignty and requested that the Argentine administration leave. Britain retained possession of the Falklands from that point on – but the issue of the islands’ sovereignty remained controversial.
In the early 1980s, Argentina was ruled by a military dictatorship – called a junta – and rocked by political unrest and economic crises. Its leadership believed that reclaiming the Falklands – the islands were about 300 miles off Argentina’s coastline, but over 8,000 miles from Britain’s shores – would appeal to nationalist sentiment and unite an increasingly fractious public behind the government.
In the early 1980s, Argentina was ruled by a military dictatorship – called a junta – and rocked by political unrest and economic crises. Its leadership believed that reclaiming the Falklands – the islands were about 300 miles off Argentina’s coastline, but over 8,000 miles from Britain’s shores – would appeal to nationalist sentiment and unite an increasingly fractious public behind the government. And the fact that the 150th anniversary of the 1833 British claim to sovereignty was approaching – which Argentina regarded as illegal – meant that speed was of the essence.
Did Britain have any idea what was about to happen?
If time was ticking for Argentina’s military leaders, the British had, in a sense, been attempting to run down the clock on the issue of the Falklands. In 1965, the United Nations had requested that the two nations reach some kind of agreement about the disputed sovereignty. And three years later, Britain made a commitment to the islanders that they would have the last word on the matter. Yet the people of the Falklands refused to consider Argentinian sovereignty, meaning that the British government was placed in an awkward position. In March 1982, the mistrust on both sides bubbled over and, on 2 April, Argentine forces landed at the islands’ capital, Stanley, before going on to invade the nearby island of South Georgia. By the end of the month, at least 10,000 Argentine troops were stationed in the Falkland Islands.
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared an exclusion zone of 200 miles around the islands, and the British government set up a war cabinet to manage the crisis. A naval fleet – dubbed the British Task Force – that eventually included 127 ships was gradually assembled, starting with two dedicated aircraft carriers and two cruise ships redeployed for that purpose.
What was the sinking of the Belgrano and why was it controversial?
A Commando unit, SAS troops and members of the Special Boat Squadron retook South Georgia on 25 April. Yet it was the sinking of the Argentine cruiser ARA General Belgrano by British forces on 2 May that has been remembered as the conflict’s first major engagement – and it proved to be one of the most controversial acts of the war. Despite being discovered by the submarine HMS Conqueror outside of the exclusion zone, the decision was made to torpedo the cruiser – leading to the loss of 323 Argentinian lives.
The decision to go to war was met with a positive reaction in Argentina, with crowds gathering outside the presidential palace to show their support. The state-monitored press helped stoke the patriotic atmosphere – one particularly striking front page depicted Margaret Thatcher sporting an eyepatch, with the headline “Pirate, witch and murderer: guilty!” The British press did their bit to stir up national sentiment, too, and The Sun’s headline in response to the sinking of the General Belgrano – “Gotcha” – remains one of the newspaper’s most famous (or infamous) front pages.
Two days later, Argentine forces launched a missile strike against a British destroyer, the HMS Sheffield, which caused massive damage. Twenty crew members were killed and another 24 injured, and the burning ruins of the vessel finally sank on 10 May. HMS Sheffield became the first Royal Navy ship to be sunk in action since the end of World War II. Several other British ships were also sunk during the course of the Falklands War, including HMS Ardent, HMS Antelope and SS Atlantic Conveyor.
Was it purely a naval conflict?
No – it was also fought on land and in the skies, notably after British commandos came ashore at Port San Carlos on the northwest coast of East Falkland on 21 May. Despite being known by British forces as ‘bomb alley’, due to repeated attacks by Argentine aircraft, the initial landing faced no resistance.
This wasn’t to last, though, and over the following days British ships faced an aerial onslaught before they managed to move men and equipment on to land.
Before reclaiming the Falklands’ capital, Stanley, British forces first headed southward to capture the East Falkland settlements of Darwin and Goose Green. Weather conditions were poor, and the ensuing battle, in late May, lasted a day and a night – some of it fought hand to hand. Although the British troops were hugely outnumbered, they were eventually successful and began the long slog east through peat bogs towards the capital.
When and how did the Falklands War end?
By 12 June 1982, British forces had reached high ground around the capital, Stanley, and surrounded and blockaded its port. A series of short battles ensued, but it was clear that the town was cut off. Argentina surrendered on 14 June. British rule was restored later that year.
How many died in the Falklands War?
The Falklands War left 650 Argentinian and 253 British people dead. Hundreds more were injured on both sides – the burns suffered by troops such as Simon Weston (a Welsh guardsman serving aboard the RFA Sir Galahad who was left with burns over 46 per cent of his body when his ship was bombed) became some of the most recognisable images of the conflict. Britain also captured around 11,000 Argentine prisoners, all of whom were freed when the fighting finished.
What did the Falklands War mean for Margaret Thatcher?
The conflict had received widespread popular support in Britain, possibly because the opening years of the 1980s had been characterised by bad news: economic recession, decline in industry, and – arguably – declining influence on the world stage. But the victory became a defining moment in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s tenure.
As she put it in a speech in Cheltenham: “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat … we rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.” It was a victory that was to translate into personal success for Thatcher: in the general election of the next year, her Conservative government won by the most decisive landslide since 1945.
What happened in Argentina?
The defeat was hugely damaging for Argentina’s military leadership, and civilian rule was reinstated in 1983 following the first free elections in a decade.
Did the Falklands War resolve the issue of sovereignty?
In a word: no. Although the two nations re-established relations in a joint statement in 1989, Argentina still maintains its claim to the Falklands islands, even adding it to its constitution in 1994. In a 2013 referendum, all but three islanders voted to remain a UK overseas territory – a result dismissed by the Argentine government as a “publicity stunt”.
Falklands War timeline: 10 key dates
Sir Max Hastings picks 10 key dates in the conflict
19 March 1982 | A group of Argentines (purportedly scrap metal workers) land on South Georgia
2 April | Argentine forces invade the Falklands, capturing the islands after a brief fight
3 April | The UN Security Council calls unsuccessfully for an end to hostilities and an Argentine withdrawal
5 April | The British task force sets sail for the south Atlantic
25 April | South Georgia is recaptured by British commandos. Meanwhile the main task force has reached the vicinity of the Falkland Islands
2 May | Argentine cruiser General Belgrano is torpedoed by British submarine HMS Conqueror, resulting in the deaths of 323. Aerial and naval combat is stepped up
21 May | After the failure of several international attempts to mediate, British troops land on the Falklands at San Carlos and establish a bridgehead
29 May | British troops attack the Argentine positions at Darwin and Goose Green, inflicting heavy losses
8 June | Argentine aircraft raid the British supply ships Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad, killing 48 and injuring dozens more
14 June | Having captured important defensive positions, British troops arrive in Port Stanley, compelling the Argentine garrison to surrender
Sir Max Hastings is a journalist, author and historian, who became a household name reporting on the 1982 battle for the Falkland Islands. Here he shares his memories of what he describes as Britain’s "last really popular war"
Was Queen Elizabeth II opposed to the Falklands War?
In Netflix drama The Crown, Queen Elizabeth II is seen looking distinctly unimpressed by events in the Falkland Islands. What did she really think of the war? Historian Dominic Sandbrook explains | Read more
What was the build-up to open warfare?
Sir Lawrence Freedman, official historian of the Falklands War, examines the build up to open warfare
Britain’s first surprise at the start of April 1982 was that it was at war; the second that it was able to respond at all to the Argentine seizure of the Falkland Islands.
Argentina believed the British had taken the islands illegally from them in January 1833. In December 1981 a new military junta, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, determined that the islands should be retaken, if necessary by force, by the 150th anniversary of this event. The British government had shown little interest in the islands, but stood by a commitment to the islanders, made first in 1968, that gave them the final say over whether sovereignty should be transferred to Argentina.
The population was tiny, barely 1,800 and declining. The British government saw little long term future, and was reluctant to invest in making the Falklands prosperous and secure. Yet it could not persuade the islanders to join Argentina, even under a lease-back arrangement that would leave them under Argentine sovereignty but British administration. By 1982 it had no policy other than procrastination, hoping the islanders might one day change their minds.
In March the dispute blew up in unexpected fashion. The island of South Georgia, uninhabited other than by the British Antarctic Survey, was administratively linked to the Falklands and also claimed by Argentina, although its constitutional history was quite different. An Argentine scrap metal merchant had a legitimate contract to clear up an old whaling station. His men were taken to the island by the Argentine Navy avoiding any formalities that would have acknowledged Britain’s sovereignty.
Their aim was to establish a long-term presence as a means of asserting Argentina’s sovereignty. From this a crisis developed that got out of hand. The junta became convinced that the British would use the crisis to reinforce their naval presence in the South Atlantic, thwarting any later attempts to take the Falklands. They decided to implement their occupation plans at once. On 2 April the Falklands was taken and a couple of days later so was South Georgia, after spirited resistance from the small Royal Marines garrison.
A plea by US President Ronald Reagan to General Galtieri not to go ahead was ignored. This was a critical moment for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She had gained a reputation for being tough yet was about to preside over the loss of sovereign territory. The Royal Navy came to her rescue. The First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, insisted it would be possible to send a task force to retrieve the islands and that it could leave within days.
The fact that this proved to be the case was testament to an extraordinary effort by the armed forces to pull together people and equipment at great speed. It also reflected poor Argentine timing, because they had picked a moment before British naval cuts agreed in 1981 had taken effect, and when one chunk of the fleet was gathered close to Gibraltar for exercises while the rest was back at port.
The fact that the Prime Minister could announce that a task force was sailing meant that political attention soon moved on from the humiliation of being caught out (helped by the resignation of foreign secretary Lord Carrington) and on to the campaign. The initial assumption was that sending a task force would create conditions for a diplomatic settlement. The US Secretary of State Alexander Haig shuttled between London and Buenos Aires trying to get a deal. Later, even after serious fighting had begun, the UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar also tried. The British agreed to substantial concessions, including a measure of Argentine influence over an interim administration while talks over the long-term future of the islands went ahead. The junta, however, could not bring itself in the end to concede that the talks might not end with a transfer of sovereignty. Diplomatic activity filled the weeks as the British task force sailed south.
How the British won the Falklands War
Sir Lawrence Freedman, official historian of the Falklands War, recounts what happened when the British task force reached the Falkland Islands
If an amphibious landing was going to be undertaken then first it would be vital to reduce the naval and air threat. The reduction of the naval threat was the result of one of the most controversial encounters of the war. As soon as the carrier battle group reached the Falklands area the commander, Admiral Sandy Woodward, managed to draw out the Argentine navy and air force by giving the impression of attempting a landing. The British Sea Harriers demonstrated their superiority in dogfights to the Argentine Mirage and Skyhawk aircraft.
Meanwhile the Argentine navy sought to catch the British fleet in a pincer movement. Woodward’s hope had been that a British submarine would be able to attack the sole Argentine aircraft carrier, but it had not been found. Meanwhile the old Argentine cruiser, the General Belgrano, had been found by a submarine, HMS Conqueror.
As this was outside the “exclusion zone” around the Falklands, within which the British had warned that any Argentine vessel could be sunk, a change in the rules of engagement was needed to permit an attack. This was agreed and the Belgrano was torpedoed by Conqueror on 2 May even though the Argentine pincer movement had by then been called off and the cruiser had turned away. This, and the loss of 323 lives in the attack, led to later controversy, including erroneous claims that the torpedo strike was really about scuppering a new peace initiative. The military effect was exactly as intended, as the Argentine navy never again ventured out.
Argentina gained revenge on 4 May when Super-Etendard aircraft executed an exocet missile attack on HMS Sheffield. The next most deadly bout of fighting came on 21 May, when 5 Commando Brigade was landed at Port San Carlos. The initial landing was unopposed, but soon waves of Argentine aircraft came in. Over the next few days the ships of the task force took a battering, four being sunk and many others damaged. By the end of the month men and equipment were ashore and the fighting switched to land. The first battle, for Darwin and Goose Green settlements, was extremely hard fought, and led to the death of the commanding officer of 2 Para, Colonel “H” Jones.
By 12 June British forces had reached the perimeter defences of the Argentine garrison in Stanley, the Falklands’ capital – achieved with a considerable physical effort by the troops and the use of the limited supply of helicopters and ships, with only one major mishap when Sir Galahad was caught as it was unloading troops at Bluff Cove, with the loss of 47 lives.
The British launched their final push in a series of short but intense battles until finally the Argentine will collapsed. On 14 June 1982 the Argentine garrison surrendered.
The war cost some 650 Argentine and 253 British dead and did not settle the dispute: Argentina still claims the Falklands. If it had left well alone in 1982, depopulation would eventually have left the Falklands unviable. Instead the victory led to firmer British commitment, and so the Falklands is more prosperous and secure than ever before.
Sir Lawrence Freedman is emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London
This content was first published in the July 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed and the April 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>After the Romans left, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived. What was the difference?https://www.historyextra.com/period/angles-saxons-and-jutes/2026-07-07T07:15:43.000ZThe answer here is still hotly disputed. It was the Venerable Bede (who died in 735), writing 250 years after the events he describes, who first claimed that Roman Britain fell to invasion by Angles, Saxons and Jutes from the North Sea coastlines of Germany and Denmark.
Victorian writers considered it perfectly acceptable to trace physical or ‘racial’ distinctions between those of ‘Jutish’ descent still living in Kent set against the Saxon or Angle peasantry of the west and north. Even today, some modern authorities claim to confirm Bede’s tripartite scheme using archaeological evidence, in particular the minor variations in the types of brooches and cremation urns found in early Anglo-Saxon burial sites.
Others argue that Bede was imposing fictitious order upon a far more chaotic ethnographic reality. The strange legal customs of medieval Kent, for example, might denote Jutish influence. They might just as easily be Roman survivals or suggest the influence of northern France.
Like the ‘tribes’ of North American ‘Indians’, the Germanic peoples were not ‘racially’ homogenous. Status and success in war were far more significant than race, with the Angles apparently commanding the highest status of all. In the 590s, the supposedly Jutish king Æthelbert of Kent was addressed by the pope as ‘King of the Angles’. But for this ‘keeping up with the Angles’, England today might be known not as England but as Saxland or Jutland.
Answered by: Nick Vincent, professor of history at the University of East Anglia
]]>The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/d-day-battle-normandy-allied-navies-sailors-operation-neptune/2026-06-05T23:01:32.000ZOn 30 July 1944, nearly two months into the Allied invasion of northern France, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay reflected on his command of the naval operations so far. “It may seem to some people that it was all easy and plain sailing,” he wrote in his diary. “[But] nothing could be more wrong. It was excellent planning and execution.”
Ramsay died in 1945 without leaving a full memoir, but thousands of sailors could testify that nothing about their lives was “easy and plain sailing”. As late as 8 August 1944, with Allied troops poised to smash the German army in Normandy, sailors were still fighting to protect the beachhead. On that same day, the German submarine U-667 torpedoed both the US freighter Ezra Weston and the Canadian corvette HMCS Regina, the latter attack claiming the lives of 30 men.
Ramsay’s words were prophetic. Today, discussions regarding sailors during the Normandy campaign mainly focus on their actions during the first day of the invasion: 6 June 1944, or ‘D-Day’. They are often absent from the wider story, despite the exhausting and dangerous campaign they fought to seize, exploit and defend the waters around Normandy throughout the summer of 1944.
- Read more | The road to D-Day: the masterplan
The focus of the campaign was the Baie de la Seine, or Seine Bay, the huge inlet of the English Channel stretching nearly a hundred kilometres along the coast of Normandy from Le Havre in the east to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula at Cape Barfleur in the west. Within the bay lay the five assault areas or so-called ‘beaches’: Utah and Omaha for the Americans, and Gold, Juno and Sword for the British and Canadians.
Through this highly congested and vulnerable body of water passed a constant stream of transport ships carrying supplies and reinforcements, without which the military could not hope to win the more widely recognised battle of Normandy on land. Defeat was unlikely, but any setback could have prolonged the war for months. As the Allied commander-in-chief, General Dwight Eisenhower, recognised in his final report: “For the successful maintenance of the armies in France… we were dependent upon the ceaseless work of the Allied navies, assisted by RAF Coastal Command.”
Normandy had been confirmed as the site for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe at the Quebec Conference, codenamed ‘Quadrant’, in August 1943. Two months later, Ramsay was appointed Naval Commander-in-Chief, Expeditionary Force, with the rest of the command team appointed in December. The overall commander-in-chief was Eisenhower, and the military and air commanders were General Sir Bernard Montgomery and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory.
The countdown to D-Day
With the leadership structure in place, Ramsay then issued his Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune, the invasion’s assault phase, on 28 February 1944. While the planners worked, extraordinary efforts were made to assemble the huge fleet required for the invasion.
Royal Navy officer Christopher Clitherow, for instance, commissioned a new Landing Ship (Tank), or LST, which would help transport men and vehicles across the Channel. Created using innovative mass production methods in the US, the vessels resembled welded steel shoeboxes, and offered very little in the way of comfort. “She reacts to a bump like a diving board off which one has just jumped,” Clitherow later recalled. “Every conceivable piece of the ship rattles as if its teeth were about to fall out.”
Meanwhile, the sheer number of men required to deliver Neptune meant that most new British recruits were posted to Combined Operations, which had been founded in July 1940 to plan and carry out amphibious warfare. They were put through their paces at special centres across the UK, before joining their units and taking part in huge pre-assault exercises.
Exercise Tiger, held on 26–28 April, saw the most significant setback of the training cycle, when a convoy of American LSTs making a practice landing at Slapton Sands, Devon, was attacked by German motor torpedo boats (also known as ‘E-boats’), killing 749 US servicemen and wounding more than 300 others.
Yet despite this tragic turn of events, Operation Neptune officially began at 11.30pm on 25 May, when commanders opened Ramsay’s sealed orders and military camps in southern England were closed off to the outside world. D-Day itself was scheduled for Monday 5 June, but after an unseasonal summer gale, it was determined that the invasion would instead be pushed back to Tuesday 6 June.
The Normandy landings in numbers
7,016
Ships and major landing craft that participated in Operation Neptune. Approximately 79 per cent of the vessels were either British or Canadian
195,701
Naval personnel involved in Operation Neptune
917
Allied ships and major landing craft lost or seriously damaged between 6 and 30 June 1944
509
German mines, of all types, swept in the Allied assault areas between 4 June and 3 July 1944
183,540
Vehicles landed in the British and US sectors by 4 July 1944 – the day after Operation Neptune officially came to an end
After setting out on the 5th, the armada passed along the south coast and turned out into the Channel, with most of the ships passing Area Z, a buoyed patch of water south-east of the Isle of Wight nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Circus’. From there, the vessels then passed down the ‘Spout’ – 10 marked and mine-swept channels – into their designated assault areas. Sweeping and marking this huge stretch of sea was fraught with danger. When the US Navy minesweeper Osprey struck a mine, caught fire and sank, the five sailors and one officer who lost their lives became Neptune’s first deaths in action.
Arriving off Normandy, bombarding warships subdued the German coastal defences while soldiers got ashore. Warships provided an overwhelming advantage on the battlefield, but bombardment was exhausting work – and quite different to the stop-start nature of conventional naval action. Gordon ‘Putty’ Painter, a 20-year-old gunlayer aboard the cruiser HMS Belfast, would later recall firing broadsides that rocked the ships “backwards and forwards” for hours on end. In fact, such were the demands of the operation that the only time that Painter and his comrades could leave the turret “was if nature called”.
View Green Video on the source website
Naval bombardment would prove instrumental to ensuring D-Day’s success, particularly within the American Omaha area, where destroyers operating dangerously close inshore helped the army establish a precarious beachhead. But the fire support came at a cost: two destroyers, the Norwegian Svenner and USS Corry, were both sunk with heavy loss of life, the former by German torpedo boats and the latter by coastal defence guns.
Meanwhile, more sailors carried assault troops to the shore in landing craft – and their experiences were often extraordinary. George Kirkby, for example, was the coxswain of a Landing Craft (Assault) launched from HMS Prinses Astrid, one of several converted Belgian ferries that was tasked with delivering British commandos and US Rangers. Later, he would describe a beach “strewn with dead and wounded bodies, the air thick with smoke and the water around us spraying up into the craft through concentrated mortar and machine gun fire”.
After D-Day: the remarkable logistics that kept the fight going
The initial follow-up forces also landed in assault craft, but from 10 June onwards, the focus of Operation Neptune switched to methodical logistics, with at least eight convoys of merchant ships sailing across the Channel every 24 hours. The process was remarkably efficient: allowing for loading and unloading, any individual ship could make a round trip from England to France in just four days. They not only brought in fuel, vehicles, ammunition and reinforcements, but they also took out wounded Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war.
Once the ships had arrived, there were several methods of getting supplies into the beachhead itself. The first was to bring everything over the beaches or from anchorages offshore, using assault craft and barges, while the second was to make use of the small harbours captured in the landings. The third option, meanwhile, was to utilise the two huge artificial harbours known as ‘Mulberries’ that the Allies constructed off Saint-Laurent in the Omaha area and Arromanches in Gold.
Assembly of the harbours began as soon as the beaches were secured, with sailors playing a leading role. Able Seaman Kenneth Bungard, for example, crossed the Channel riding on one of the prefabricated concrete caissons used to create the harbours’ walls. Crawling along on a slab-sided monster with the seakeeping qualities of a house brick was far from pleasant. “If we were hit with a torpedo, that would be the end,” he recalled. “It was all concrete [and] it would just disintegrate.”
All this vulnerable shipping had to be protected. In the Eastern (British) Task Force area, the defence was largely static to reduce the risk of collisions and friendly fire. Defence Line A, consisting of anchored minesweepers, ran along the assault area, six miles offshore, to guard against attacks from the north, while a line of armed landing craft and Coastal Forces craft (later christened the ‘Trout Line’) ran south to the shore, watching the German naval base at Le Havre.
Elsewhere, in the Western (US) Task Force area, destroyers, patrol craft and British steam gunboats patrolled the ‘Dixie Line’, which ran parallel to the coast to meet Defence Line A. Radar-equipped destroyers patrolled south of this, and more Coastal Forces craft watched the ‘Mason Line’, which ran up the Cotentin Peninsula to the northern edge of the Utah area.
Timeline: how the Allied navies turned the tide in Normandy
17–24 August 1943
The Quebec Conference (codenamed ‘Quadrant’) takes place in Canada. Allied leaders decide that the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe, Operation Overlord, will begin with an assault landing in Normandy.
25 October 1943
Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay is appointed Allied Naval Commander Expeditionary Force.
28 February 1944
Ramsay issues the Naval Operation Plan for Operation Neptune – the initial assault phase of Operation Overlord.
28 April 1944
Nearly 750 men are killed in a German E-boat attack at Slapton Sands, Devon, during Exercise Tiger – one of the final rehearsals for the seaborne invasion.
25 May 1944
Operation Neptune officially begins at 23:30. Ramsay’s sealed orders are opened and military holding camps on the south coast of England are closed off.
6 June 1944
The Allied invasion of Normandy begins. Known as D-Day, the first day of the campaign sees 132,715 British, Canadian and American soldiers coming to shore across five landing beaches, with a further 23,400 airborne troops dropping further inland.
25 June 1944
The US-led Task Force 129 bombards Cherbourg in support of a US Army assault on the city.
3 July 1944
Operation Neptune comes to an end. The last of the senior officers leading the assault are withdrawn and new headquarters are established ashore.
5/6 July 1944
Human torpedoes of the German Navy’s Kleinkampfverbände (small battle units) launch their first attack on the Allied assault area. Two minesweepers and the British frigate HMS Trollope are sunk.
12 September 1944
With much of the fighting now moving further inland, British troops finally take the German naval base at Le Havre. Three months and six days after D-Day, combat operations for the Allied navies in the Seine Bay come to an end.
Despite these formidable lines of defence, enemy attacks continued apace. E-boats and other German warships frequently sortied from Le Havre and Cherbourg, trying to strike the supply ships or lay mines, while the Luftwaffe carried out bombing and torpedo attacks almost every night. On one particularly bad day, 8 June, three US warships went down to mines, while the British lost the frigate HMS Lawford to a remote-controlled glider bomb. Another Luftwaffe raider hit a huge petrol and ammunition stores dump in the Sword area.
On 14 June, an increasingly concerned Admiral Ramsay asked for RAF strategic bombers to strike Le Havre, and they duly responded, sinking three of the German Navy’s large torpedo boats and 10 E-boats. Yet there was more turmoil to come.
A few days later, the worst summer storm in living memory swept through the Seine Bay, halting the fighting and delivery of supplies until late on 22 June. The Mulberry harbour at Saint-Laurent was smashed beyond repair, while more than 800 vital ferry craft were left stranded. The churning water also triggered the sensitive detonators on German pressure-operated ‘oyster’ mines, which blew up unexpectedly across the assault area.
The assault on Cherbourg
Once the storm had passed, the US Army attacked Cherbourg on 22 June, while a naval task force bombarded the defences on the 25th in support. This time, the German gunners were ready to respond, and all but one of the seven battleships and cruisers taking part were hit. US Rear-Admiral Carleton Bryant’s flagship USS Texas came under particularly heavy fire, with one shell smashing the battleship’s bridge structure, killing the helmsman and wounding several others. “Having 11-inch shells fired at you is no fun,” Bryant later recalled. “When the salvo hits the water there is the most ungodly smack you ever heard.”
Cherbourg surrendered on 26 June, but the submarine and air attacks continued, as did the minelaying, and July saw the arrival of the Kleinkampfverbände – the German Navy’s ‘small battle units’. The first weapons to turn up at Villers-sur-Mer near Le Havre were explosive motorboats and craft known as ‘human torpedoes’, ridden into action by young volunteers whose confidence was boosted by cocaine and amphetamines.
Twenty-six human torpedoes attacked on the night of 5/6 July, and although 10 were lost, they succeeded in sinking two minesweepers and the frigate HMS Trollope. Two nights later, the Kleinkampfverbände returned and sank the old Polish cruiser ORP Dragon with the loss of 37 officers and men.
Despite the constant pressure from sea and air, the vital supply build-up continued at an impressive rate. By 14 July, a million tons of stores and nearly 300,000 vehicles had been put to shore, and on 25 July, the US First Army was able to break out of the beachhead and race into France. The western flank of the assault area was now secure, and the fleet started to operate further west, blockading German bases in the Bay of Biscay and destroying evacuation convoys.
On the eastern flank, however, Le Havre remained an enemy stronghold. On the night of 30/31 July, German E-boats struck the Allied convoy FTM53 with long-range pattern-running torpedoes, hitting five freighters. Although only one of the freighters, SS Samwake, actually sank, none of the others went to sea again. Samwake’s captain, Owen John, described his ship’s end in a melancholy report: “She dipped by the head, the stern reared up vertically and held for a few minutes, then very slowly she rolled over to starboard and disappeared at 0545 in a small fountain of water.”
End of the Normandy's naval campaign
Alarmingly, there were more losses to come. As well as the aforementioned HMCS Regina, further Allied casualties included the hospital ship Amsterdam, which was mined and sunk on 7 August, claiming the lives of 55 patients, 10 Royal Army Medical Corps staff, 30 members of the crew and 11 prisoners of war. Among the dead were military nurses Mollie Evershed and Dorothy Field, the only women named on the British Normandy Memorial in the village of Ver-sur-Mer.
Later, the cruiser Frobisher was torpedoed and damaged on the 9th, and the valuable repair ship HMS Albatross was torpedoed on the 11th with the loss of 67 naval and military personnel. It wasn’t until 12 September, with the land fighting far away, that the British captured Le Havre and the complex infrastructure of the Seine Bay was dismantled. More than three months after D-Day, the naval campaign was finally over.
Looking back at the events more than 80 years on, the sailors who served should not be remembered as mere taxi drivers, ferrying men and supplies to the shore, but as active combatants who guarded the vital coastal waters and Allied assault areas until the very end. Whether by day or by night, they maintained a ceaseless watch against all manner of threats – and in some cases, ended up paying with their lives.
Counting casualties is not an exact science for a campaign that has never been studied coherently, but nearly 3,000 Allied sailors are known to have died in the operations in and around the Seine Bay – and possibly many more. As General Sir Bernard Montgomery would write in May 1945, “any success achieved by the British Armies has been made possible only by the magnificent support given us by the Royal Navy”.
This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>How did the world change during Queen Elizabeth II's reign?https://www.historyextra.com/period/21st-century/queen-elizabeth-reign-changes/2026-04-21T10:20:12.000ZNever before has Britain changed so dramatically during the reign of one monarch. The second Elizabethan age was defined by unprecedented transformations in every facet of life, the effects of which rivalled those of the industrial revolution more than two centuries earlier. Queen Elizabeth II witnessed significant changes in society, technology, transport and geopolitics, which created what most people would recognise today as the modern British state. The very fact that the monarchy has survived and, indeed, thrived against this backdrop owes much to the late Queen and her constant, unchanging presence over 70 years.
Before the Queen’s coronation on 2 June 1953, few people owned a television. The decision to broadcast the ceremony live prompted many to buy their first set, and well over 20 million people in the UK watched Queen Elizabeth II being crowned at Westminster Abbey in London. The BBC, then the only national broadcaster, transmitted on just one (black-and-white) television channel and three radio stations. It approached the coronation filming with reverence and deference. The director general’s views were clear: “There ought to be an absolutely rigid policy that so far as the BBC is concerned [the royal family] can be guaranteed complete privacy.”
Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now
Over the following 69 years, the media changed beyond recognition. Countless terrestrial television channels are now available, plus many more via streaming subscriptions. At the same time, the media industry has become global, with rolling 24-hour news channels, newspapers viewed online, and social media posts visible almost anywhere on the globe. Much of this was made possible by the world wide web, just one key innovation in an age marked by rapid changes in communication. At the start of the Queen’s reign, communication was primarily via letters, telegrams and newspapers. Just two and a half decades later, in 1976, she sent her first email; she uploaded her first YouTube video in 2008, sent her first tweet in 2014, and uploaded her first Instagram post in 2019. By 2022, print newspapers reached just 24 per cent of the British public, down from 40 per cent just four years previously. Also by 2022, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube had all overtaken the BBC as the prime source of news for British teenagers.
Appliances of science
It’s not just in the realm of computer science that Britain has witnessed immense technological change over the past 70 years. In 1952, when Elizabeth came to the throne, only a small minority of homes had central heating, fridges, washing machines or telephones. There were just 2.5 million cars on the roads, and for most people owning such a vehicle was a distant aspiration. Today, most households own at least one car – there are 32.9 million on the roads.
The young Queen ruled over a less-populous, younger country. Of the UK’s 50.6 million people in 1953, 21.6 million were under the age of 30, and 8 million were 60 or older – a ratio of 2.7 to 1. The population has since grown to more than 68 million and also aged. The ratio of young to old is 1.4 to 1 and falling. This ageing society is another feature of the second Elizabethan age that increasingly puts pressure on the celebrated National Health Service (NHS) – which was just four years old in 1952.
Part of the explanation for the rise in life expectancy in the UK has been local scientific excellence. The discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953 by James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, together with Robert Edwards’ IVF (in vitro fertilisation) revolution, which led to the birth of the first “test-tube baby” in 1978, played their part in changing the face of science, medicine, education and preventative treatments. The importance of these advances will never be forgotten, and these individuals proved themselves pioneers comparable to the great explorers and inventors of the Victorian period.
UK society has also become vastly more diverse year on year since 1952, when few Britons would have seen a non-white face in their daily life. Over the past seven decades, immigration has created a multi-faith and multi-ethnic society, and “Britishness” has declined concurrently as the default national identity. The instinctive, 1950s sense of British nationhood – forged through two world wars, a Protestant faith and an imperial project that elided any sense of internal UK differentiation – has come to an end. Now identities are more fragmented or multiple: many people in the UK consider themselves primarily Scottish, Welsh, English or even European.
The fact that London has a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, is indicative of the scale of change. None of this was a possibility in 1952. Then, women comprised just 32 per cent of the employed population. By 2022, they made up 48 per cent of the workforce.
The Queen joined that workforce herself during the Second World War when employed as a truck mechanic in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service. More than 70 years later, in 2015, she noted the great strides that women have taken over the course of her reign during a speech to mark the centenary of the Women’s Institute. “In the modern world, the opportunities for women to give something of value to society are greater than ever, because, through their own efforts, they now play a much greater part in all areas of public life,” she observed.
Freedom and failure
The hierarchy and deference of the 1950s has given way to a more liberal or “permissive” society. Birth control, abortion reform and the Equal Pay Act 1970 all helped combat the gender inequality of the 1950s. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts between men; 46 years later, gay individuals won the right to marry in England, Scotland and Wales (though not until 2020 in Northern Ireland). Notwithstanding, gender equality and the battle for LGBTQ rights became huge issues in the latter years of the Queen’s reign.
Despite the optimism that bloomed at the time of the coronation, the past 70 years have been characterised by the relative decline of the UK, perhaps most markedly in its economy. “There is a lot of talk about the new Elizabethan age, but whether it will be implemented will depend on all ranks in industry,” Brigadier Ralph Rayner told parliament in 1952. “The British industrialist and merchant, if given half a chance, will wipe the floor with any other industrialist in the world. The British working man, if given a good lead, will certainly beat any other working man in the world.” Yet, misogyny aside, that wasn’t to be.
British business failed repeatedly to invest in infrastructure, or to innovate or market at the same rate as their American, Japanese or European competitors. So the “never had it so good” coronation boom years of full employment, high growth and low inflation could not be sustained. UK industry, management and labour relations have proved increasingly uncompetitive on a global stage, despite political rhetoric advocating, both politically and economically, “Global Britain”. The Elizabethan era has, overall, been defined by deindustrialisation and economic decline – though, of course, some individuals have become super rich.
In 1952, the UK was the world’s second-biggest economy, behind only the US, with a GDP of £247bn. At the start of September 2022, it was the world’s sixth biggest after the US, China, Japan, Germany and India. At the same time, the economies of continental Europe have grown from their low postwar base at a much faster pace than that of the UK.
When Elizabeth II assumed the throne, Winston Churchill was UK prime minister, Josef Stalin was leader of the Soviet Union, Harry Truman was US president, and Mao Zedong was the mainland Chinese leader. The Korean War was still being fought, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was little over two years old. The UK was just about to join the US and the Soviet Union as a nuclear power, with Churchill announcing the atomic bomb project a week after the coronation. Today the PRC is an emerging superpower with the second-largest economy in the world; the Soviet Union long ago disappeared from the geopolitical landscape; and the UK has transitioned to a “lesser power”.
To many, the UK’s global reputation was indelibly tarnished in the bloody aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But fantasies about a second Elizabethan age were already fading long before then. It’s hard to overstate the humiliation generated by the Suez crisis of 1956, when Britain, France and Israel conspired together in an unsuccessful attempt to wrench back control of the Suez Canal from Egypt.
The evolving empire
During her Christmas Day broadcast from 1953, Elizabeth II declared: “The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace.” A month earlier, the Queen had set off with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, on a marathon tour of the Commonwealth nations lasting five-and-a-half months. Pathé newsreels back home showed the scenes of wild enthusiasm that greeted the royal couple wherever they went, from Bermuda to Gibraltar by way of Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia and Uganda.
But the world was changing fast, and nowhere more obviously than in the empire. That process had begun in earnest when India became independent in 1947, five years before Elizabeth took the throne, but accelerated rapidly during the 1950s and 1960s. In the first two decades of Elizabeth’s reign, 32 countries achieved independence from Britain. Hong Kong, the last major holding of the empire, was given back to China in 1997.
As the empire fractured, the Commonwealth rose. Under the Queen’s leadership, this global alliance grew from a group of eight founding nations in 1952 into a voluntary association of 56 independent countries comprising 2.5 billion people.
However, some commentators have argued that the benign face of the Queen disguised Britain’s complicated history of violence and bloody conflict, citing, for example, the brutal counterinsurgencies in what are now Kenya, Malaysia, Yemen and Cyprus in the latter days of the British empire. These imperial misdeeds have only belatedly led to a reckoning in the UK, with the government paying compensation to some victims of its colonial policies. The push by activists for the removal of statues, the revision of school curriculums glorifying Britain’s empire, and further calls for apologies and reparations demonstrates how the consequences of the rapid decolonisation of the first decades of the Elizabethan era are still reverberating.
Apologies and reparations
That said, the break-up of the empire could have been more rancorous without the Queen’s presence. Throughout Britain’s transition from an empire to post-imperial power, she made it clear that she was determined to build a new relationship with Britain’s old imperial possessions – based on friendship rather than post-imperial bitterness. In 1961 she visited Ghana and danced with President Kwame Nkrumah, who had been one of Africa’s most prominent anti-colonial leaders and had been briefly imprisoned by the British.
Certainly, Elizabeth defined this era of unprecedented global transformation by becoming a rare unifying figure; notably, she retained the affection of Commonwealth leaders even when they were hotly opposed to her government’s policies. As long as she was alive, many knotty issues were shelved; now she has died there will be much to reappraise. The Commonwealth must plot a new path and decide where its future lies. The organisation has grown of late, welcoming countries that had never actually been under British rule. It’s one of the few groups in which mature and emerging economies come together with a common agenda. And there are obvious issues in which it could still play a part – climate change and vaccine diplomacy being two examples.
The final years of the new Elizabethan age saw a movement among Caribbean nations to remove the Queen as the titular head of state and to press for reparations for the abuses of the colonial era. The process was accelerated when Barbados became a republic in 2021. Belize has announced a constitutional review of the question, while Jamaica and Antigua & Barbuda have both indicated their intentions to become a republic.
Confused identities
A defining characteristic of the United Kingdom, throughout Elizabeth’s reign and today, remains the need to accept and define its changed position in the world. Back in 1962, former US secretary of state Dean Acheson noted in a speech, to the anger of the British press, that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”. He suggested that the country was confused about its future identity – focused on its “special relationship” with the US one moment, then looking toward Europe or the Commonwealth to give it greater meaning and influence the next. These words ring as true today as they did then. Now, Britain is acutely uncertain about its place in the world and facing the repercussions of the scale and pace of change that has defined the second Elizabethan era.
As much as the Queen was a stabilising force for many people, the UK appears to be increasingly divided on geographic lines. Doubts have been growing about whether its four nations can hold together as a United Kingdom. There are growing calls for political change in Northern Ireland, and increased pressure post-Brexit for independence in Scotland, reflected in The Herald on Sunday’s headline above a picture of Charles: “Union’s Saviour or Last King of Scotland?”
Elizabeth II’s reign encompassed the transformation of culture and class; rapid technological expansion and socio-political change; the end of deference and a distinctive sense of Britishness. Yet the Queen was successfully able to navigate these changes – embracing advances in technology and communication, while also representing a reassuring bastion of tradition and age old values and virtues. She was in the world of change but somehow at once apart from that world. US President Joe Biden described her as “a stateswoman of unmatched dignity and constancy”.
That constancy belied the epochal shift experienced by her country – the consequences of which are, with her death, only now coming into full view.
This article first appeared in the December 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>The young Elizabeth II: life before she was Queenhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/young-elizabeth-ii-life-queen-childhood-princess-how-monarch-royal-family/2026-04-20T00:10:58.000ZIn April 1926, Britain was on the brink of the General Strike called by the TUC. There had been an economic perfect storm: the postwar crash in coal prices, combined with the government putting Britain on the gold standard, had put mining under pressure. After a government commission recommended reducing miners’ wages, the stage was set for an all-out strike of miners and other workers covered by the TUC, including railway and transport workers.
But despite being in a crisis, the home secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks could not be excused from witnessing the legitimacy of a royal baby. The Duke and Duchess of York – George V’s second son, Bertie and his wife, the former Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon – were expecting their first child. Although the baby was not a direct heir to the throne, Sir William still had to travel to 17 Bruton Street in Mayfair, a home owned by Bowes-Lyons, where the child was due to be born.
The little girl was born by caesarean section at 2.40am on 21 April. “We have long wanted a child to make our happiness complete,” wrote the duke. The child was “a little darling with a lovely complexion”, decreed Queen Mary. “I do hope that you and papa are as delighted as we are to have a granddaughter, or would you sooner have had another grandson?” wrote the duke to his father, George V. The baby was officially third in line to the throne, but since she was the child of George V’s second son – and female – she was destined to be pushed down the succession by sons born to her uncle, the Prince of Wales, and her father. She was called Elizabeth Alexandra Mary after her mother, great-grandmother and grandmother – after consorts, not queens regnant. The princess was destined for a good marriage and little more.
On 3 May, the TUC called the General Strike. Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin called it the “road to anarchy”, but the government played hard, drafting in volunteers and calling forth the middle classes to step in. By 12 May it had been called off and the following year the government outlawed sympathetic strikes and strikes intended to coerce the government, making another general strike impossible and restoring the existing structures of power. Two weeks later, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary was christened by the archbishop of York at Buckingham Palace.
The young princess was a favourite with her grandparents and one of the few people in the family not afraid of the king, whom she called ‘Grandpa England’. In early 1927, her parents departed on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, leaving her with her nannies. When they returned, they took a new house, 145 Piccadilly, near Hyde Park. It had 25 bedrooms, a lift and a ballroom but, by royal standards, Elizabeth was growing up in a cosy, normal house and her playmates in the gardens were the daughters of businessmen and doctors, not fellow princesses.
In 1930, Princess Margaret was born. This time the home secretary, John R Clynes, had to trek up to Glamis Castle, the ancestral home of the Duchess of York. “I am glad to say that she has large blue eyes and a will of iron, which is all the equipment a lady needs!” the duchess wrote. As they grew up, it became evident that the two little girls had very different personalities. Elizabeth was conscientious, dutiful and orderly – she couldn’t go to sleep without unsaddling and feeding all her nursery horses and lining them up neatly. Margaret was playful, determined and fond of pranks – she blamed any mistakes or spillages on her imaginary friend, Cousin Halifax.
In 1933, when Elizabeth was seven, she received a new governess, Miss Marion Crawford. She had been recommended to the Duchess of York as a “country girl who was a good teacher, except when it came to mathematics”. Fortunately, the duchess was not looking for a challenging academic schedule. Both she and her husband had hated school (the duke had been ridiculed as a dunce). What the royal couple wanted for their daughters was a “really happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories”, which meant minimal lessons. The king had only one request: ‘‘Teach Margaret and Lilibet a decent hand.” Miss Crawford’s regimen was gentle. Elizabeth received lessons from 9.30 until 11 in the morning and the rest of the day was devoted to outdoor games, dancing and singing, with a rest period for an hour and a half.
Unlike her parents, Elizabeth had an aptitude for learning and enjoyed history and literature but she had little opportunity for sustained study. Queen Mary criticised their education and recalled that she had busied herself with homework in the holidays – but to no avail. In her free time, Elizabeth was fondest of dogs and horses. She declared she wanted to marry a farmer so she could have lots of “cows, horses and dogs”.
George V died in January 1936, and the Prince of Wales assumed the throne as Edward VIII. As king he was more dependent on his lover, Wallis Simpson, than ever. But although the foreign press discussed his relationship with the American divorcee at length, the British newspapers stayed quiet. In late October, Wallis filed for divorce from her second husband and it was clear that the king meant to marry her. The government was as determined to stop him, for it was thought the people would not accept a divorced consort. The empire governments mostly refused the idea outright. “It was plain to everyone that there was a great shadow over the house,” wrote Miss Crawford.
- Read more | The death of King George V – what happened?
On 10 December, 10-year-old Elizabeth was about to write up her notes from her swimming lesson when she heard chants of “God Save the King” outside. She asked a footman what had happened and he told her that her uncle had abdicated and her father was king. She ran up to tell her sister the news. “Does that mean you will have to be the next queen?” asked Margaret. “Yes, some day,” replied Elizabeth. “Poor you,” said Margaret. In the face of crisis and change, Elizabeth adopted a technique she would use throughout her life: she stuck to her routine, attempting to appear unruffled. She wrote up her swimming notes, and at the top of the page she wrote: “Abdication Day.”
Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now
The jolly life of 145 Piccadilly was at an end. The family moved into Buckingham Palace and her father and mother – who had always been so present – became consumed by meetings, receptions and politics. The former king, now the Duke of Windsor, the Uncle David of whom the children had been so fond, was sent to Europe. Elizabeth attended her father’s coronation, accompanied by Queen Mary, writing that the abbey was covered in “a sort of haze of wonder as papa was crowned, at least I thought so”.
Elizabeth was now heir to the throne. Queen Mary stepped up her campaign over education, and more history was introduced. In 1938, Elizabeth began receiving lessons from the vice provost of Eton, Henry Marten, on constitutional history. Marten’s teachings were important to Elizabeth’s perception of her role: he told her that monarchy was strengthened by adaptability and talked of the importance of broadcasting directly to her subjects.
The palace and the government were concerned that the princess did not seem too isolated. The First Buckingham Girl Guide Pack was instituted, with 20 girls invited to the palace on Wednesday afternoons. They learned trekking in the palace grounds and practised signalling in the corridors.
On 15 March 1939, German tanks entered Prague. The ‘peace’ created through appeasement by prime minister Neville Chamberlain was shattered. “Who can hope to appease a boa constrictor,” declared The Telegraph. The country moved towards war. In the summer of 1939, Elizabeth and her parents paid a visit to the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where the king had studied. There she was introduced to Philip of Greece, 18 to her 13. The princess was fascinated by him.
On 3 September 1939, Chamberlain announced on the BBC that Britain was now at war. The king broadcast later in the day, telling the people that this “grave hour” was “perhaps the most fateful in our history”. The princesses were staying at Birkhall, near Balmoral, on their annual summer holiday with Miss Crawford – and were soon joined by hundreds of evacuees from Glasgow. After Christmas at Sandringham, they went to Royal Lodge in Windsor, the pale pink walls painted green to fool enemy bombers. The queen refused to bow to pressure to send the children to Canada, out of the range of the enemy.
- Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War?
In spring 1940, German troops invaded Denmark and Norway. Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister, declaring to the Commons that Britain must “wage war, by sea, land and air with all our might”. The dispossessed royals of Norway and Denmark arrived seeking safety in London. The princesses were sent to Windsor Castle, where they would remain for the rest of the war – along with the crown jewels, bundled up in paper in the underground vaults.
The princesses were key to the propaganda strategy – the nation was told that they were in a secret location in the countryside, where they carried around their gas masks and grew their own carrots and potatoes in a vegetable patch. But the princesses were not exempt from the terrors of war – 300 bombs were dropped on Windsor Great Park over the course of the conflict. Often they were woken at night and sent into the underground vaults of the castle. Like Churchill, they slept in ‘siren suits’, zip-up all-in-one jumpsuits designed for warmth and practicality in bombing raids.
The palace had repeatedly rejected requests for Elizabeth to speak on the radio. In 1940, with the Luftwaffe razing British cities to the ground, the king and queen changed their minds. In a time when US support for the war effort was critical, they agreed to allow the princess to broadcast on the BBC to the children of North America. On 13 October she gave her speech, expressing how she and her sister sympathised with those who had been evacuated, since “we know from experience what it means to be away from those we love most of all”. The speech was a hit. “Princess yesterday huge success here,” reported a north American representative of the BBC.
“This time we are all in the front line,” said the king in his Christmas message at the end of 1940. The bombing of British cities continued until April. Britain entered a sustained period of hardship. In 1941 it was the first country in the world to introduce conscription for single women. When Elizabeth turned 16, she begged her father to allow her to join the Labour Exchange. She was interviewed, but not placed – much to the relief of the king, who wished to protect his daughters.
At the end of 1943, when Elizabeth was 17, Philip came to spend Christmas with the family. He was charmed by her admiration and what he described as the “simple pleasure” of family life, so unlike his own unhappy childhood. He returned to war enthusiastic about the idea of marrying the princess, and his cousin, George of Greece, made a suggestion to the king that the pair might wed. It was a misstep; the king was shocked and told George that Elizabeth was too young and Philip “had better not think any more about it at present”. The king didn’t wish to lose his daughter and the courtiers thought Philip “rough, ill mannered” (in the words of one). Worst of all was his background. As one courtier put it, “it was all bound up in one word: German”.
The princess turned 18 in 1944 and began to assume royal duties. Her father insisted she be made a counsellor of state (usually only open to those who had reached 21) and she stood in for him when he was briefly in Italy, signing a reprieve on a murder case. She made her first public speech at a children’s hospital and launched HMS Vanguard in the autumn. But she wanted more – she desired to serve in the forces. In early 1945, the king relented and allowed her to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a trainee ambulance driver.
At the base in Aldershot, she was initially kept away from the other trainees and taken to eat in the officers’ mess, before the papers found out and the regime was quickly adjusted. The princess later said that it was the only time in her life that she had been able to test herself against people her own age. For the government, her training was a propaganda coup. Photos were taken of her wielding her spanner or standing by vehicles and she was on the front of every Allied newspaper.
On 30 April, Allied forces occupied the Reichstag. Hitler took his own life in his bunker and the troops surrendered. On 7 May, the BBC interrupted a piano recital to announce that the following day would be known as Victory in Europe Day. The war was over.
On VE Day, the princesses appeared with their parents and Winston Churchill on the balcony of the palace to wave at the crowds, Elizabeth in uniform. That evening, Margaret suggested that they go out to see the crowds. The king and queen relented and the girls set off, accompanied by Marion Crawford and various officers, wandering as far as Park Lane before returning back through Green Park to shout “we want the king!” with the crowds. “All of us were swept along by tides of happiness and relief,” recalled Elizabeth.
Once the euphoria had subsided, the aftermath of war seemed grey, miserable and full of privations. “Food, fuel and clothes are the main topics of conversation,” wrote the king. He was exhausted by the effort of war and found it hard to adjust to daily life. At the same time, the people were fascinated by the princess and increasingly preferred to see her opening hospitals, presenting prizes and giving speeches. She was overwhelmingly popular: dignified, a veteran of the war and full of the glamour of youth. Cambridge University suggested she might be the first woman ever to receive an honorary degree, but the palace refused the offer.
In 1946, with the end of the war in Japan, Prince Philip returned to Britain and was sent to teach naval officers in Wales. He began to court Elizabeth in earnest, taking supper with her and Margaret in the nursery and taking the sisters out to restaurants or shows. Austerity Britain was delighted by the idea of a royal romance and the possibility of a wedding. The king and queen were dubious, but it was too late – Elizabeth was determined to marry Philip.
In February 1947, the princess left the country for the first time for a tour to South Africa with her parents and sister. There, she celebrated her 21st birthday. She reviewed troops, attended a ball in her honour and gave her address to the empire. In it she pledged her future: “I declare before you that my whole life, whether it shall be long or short, shall be devoted to your service.” She had spent a long time in the nursery but now she was 21, on the brink of marriage – and in less than five years, she would become queen.
This article was first published in BBC History Magazine’s ‘Queen Elizabeth: 90 Glorious Years’ bookazine
]]>In pictures: Queen Elizabeth II on tourhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-pictures-queen-elizabeth-on-tour/2026-04-19T23:00:11.000ZCanada and the United States, 1951
As her father King George VI’s health declined, Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh took his place on a royal tour of Canada and Washington DC. In the United States, they were warmly received by President Harry S Truman, while enthusiastic crowds greeted her motorcade.
Australia, 1954
In 1954, the recently crowned Queen Elizabeth II made royal history by becoming the first reigning British monarch to visit Australia. She travelled to nearly 70 cities and towns in 58 days – the first of 16 tours she would undertake Down Under.
Malta, 1954
On her way back from Australia, the Queen travelled to Malta with Prince Charles and Princess Anne, where – among various other royal duties – she watched the Duke of Edinburgh play in a navy versus army polo match.
It was a poignant return to the island where she had lived as a newlywed between 1949 and 1951, and where she is said to have cherished the freedom of a relatively normal private life before her accession.
India, 1961
At the Ramlila Ground outside Old Delhi, upwards of 250,000 people gathered to hear the Queen speak. Although free from crown rule for more than a decade, India’s ties with Britain remained strong and there was a fervent response to the visit, with vast crowds greeting her throughout her six-week tour (which also took in Pakistan). The warm Indian welcome featured lavish banquets, elephant rides, horse racing and spectacular parades.
- Read more | 10 historical turning points for modern India
New Zealand, 1970
An exhibition of Māori culture in Gisborne, North Island (see below), was one highlight at the beginning of what proved to be the Queen’s most-travelled decade. It was this tour that saw the first ever royal ‘walkabouts’, when the monarch broke away from formal arrangements to walk among the crowds, chatting and accepting bouquets. They subsequently became a fixture of almost all royal visits from that point onwards.
Hong Kong, 1975
This was the first of just two visits made by the monarch to the British colony on the southern coast of China. In 1997, Prince Charles would later read a farewell speech on the Queen’s behalf, as sovereignty of Hong Kong was handed to China.
South Pacific, 1982
Traditional canoes brought the Queen ashore from HMY Britannia to the remote Funafuti atoll of Tuvalu. Her island-hopping itinerary also took in the other Commonwealth realms of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Nauru, Kiribati and Fiji.
France, 1992
Accompanied by President François Mitterrand, the Queen spoke French throughout her four-day tour of Paris, Blois and Bordeaux – although she remained diplomatically quiet on the arguments raging around the Maastricht Treaty and European unity.
Malaysia, 1998
Mass protests against the long-standing Barisan Nasional government coincided with the monarch’s arrival in Malaysia for the 1998 Commonwealth Games. The visit – including a “courtesy call” with the country’s prime minister – continued despite the angry clashes.
Canada, 2002
The Queen wrapped up her golden jubilee year with a visit to the newest territory in her realm, Nunavut. Carrying on a tradition of royal trips to Canada dating back to Prince William (later William IV) in the 18th century, she would end up visiting the country a total of 22 times.
Royal Women with Kate Williams Join Professor Kate Williams for a six-part HistoryExtra series uncovering the little-known stories behind some of history’s most famous queens. From Cleopatra to Elizabeth II, we’ll explore how royal women navigated power, politics, and expectation and how their legacies were shaped long after their deaths. Watch now
Nigeria, 2003
In her first visit since 1956 (four years before the country attained independence from Britain), and amid concerns of a possible al-Qaeda attack, the Queen’s contact with ordinary Nigerians was limited to meeting actors at a mock-up market created for a BBC soap opera.
United States, 2007
In 2007, the Queen paid her final state visit to the US. Highlights included a trip to Nasa’s Goddard Space Center in Maryland, where astronauts Sunita Williams, Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov spoke to the monarch on a live link from the International Space Station.
Uganda, 2007
Amid security fears, the Queen visited Uganda for the first time since the days of colonial rule. Independent since 1962, the country was nonetheless rapturous in its welcome, with half a million people thronging the roadsides as the monarch visited a centre for Aids orphans and opened the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
Slovakia, 2008
In 2008, the Queen and Prince Philip were escorted on a two-day tour of Slovakia by President Ivan Gašparovič. It was the first ever royal visit to the country, which split from the former Czechoslovakia in 1993. At a banquet in her honour, the Queen spoke of Slovakia’s troubled past: “Caught behind a line dividing east from west for so long, Slovakia has now asserted its place in a common European home in less turbulent times.”
Germany, 2015
The Queen’s 2015 tour of Germany was an emotional affair. As well as laying a wreath at Berlin’s Neue Wache memorial, she visited Bergen-Belsen, the former Nazi concentration camp where approximately 50,000 prisoners died.
Speaking at an official state dinner attended by British prime minister David Cameron and German chancellor Angela Merkel, she reflected: “In our lives, we have seen the worst but also the best of our continent.”
After 2015, the Queen did not travel abroad, leaving such visits to her children and grandchildren. Her final overseas trip came in November of that year, when she and Prince Philip travelled to Malta ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.
An older version of this article was published in BBC History Magazine’s ‘Queen Elizabeth: 90 Glorious Years’ bookazine
]]>Who were the real Peaky Blinders?https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/real-peaky-blinders-history-gangs-birmingham-who-how-violent/2026-04-10T11:35:59.000Z"Surely all respectable and law-abiding citizens are sick of the very name of ruffianism in Birmingham and assaults on police. No matter what part of the city one walks, gangs of 'peaky blinders' are to be seen, who ofttimes think nothing of grossly insulting passers by, be it a man, woman or child. I venture to say that 99 times out of 100, they are not even brought to justice."
This anguished letter, signed "Workman", was published in the Birmingham Daily Mail on 21 July 1898.
Who were Birmingham's real Peaky Blinders?
‘Peaky blinders’ were easily recognised. Contrary to the myth that grew in later decades – and the BBC drama series – they did not wear caps lined with razors. In fact, they wore ‘billycock’ or bowler-style hats, made of hard felt, with a rakish, curved rim, two-and-a-half inches wide. They moulded the brims of their hats into a point, worn tilted over one eye – hence their nickname.
They did not belong to a single gang. Quite the reverse: opposing gangs, all sharing this outlandish style, sought each other out on the streets of Birmingham and in late-night confrontations outside the city’s music halls.
The term peaky blinder, adopted in the 1890s, was distinctive to Birmingham. In Manchester and neighbouring Salford, gang members were known as ‘scuttlers’. In London, they became known by the more enduring label ‘hooligan’.
How violent were real gangs like the Peaky Blinders?
The frustration of ‘Workman’ was understandable. Three days earlier, Police Constable George Snipe had been fatally injured in a disturbance that shocked the city.
PC Snipe and a fellow constable named Mead were patrolling a poor district to the north of the city centre between 9.30pm and 10pm when they ‘moved on’ a group of six or seven young ‘roughs’ who had gathered outside the Tram Stores pub in Hockley Hill. As one member of the group later admitted, the men had spent the day, a Sunday, on a spree, “drinking all the day, and fighting all the evening”. The constables followed the men to the junction of Bridge Street West, where PC Snipe arrested 23-year-old William Colerain for using vile language.
When the two constables tried to take Colerain in, he kicked out and the prisoner’s friends attempted to rescue him. A crowd gathered. In the ensuing melee, someone hurled a brick at PC Snipe’s head with such force that it knocked his helmet off. The stricken constable was taken by cab to the city’s General Hospital, where he died in the early hours of the following morning. A post-mortem revealed that his skull had been fractured in two places.
- On the podcast | Historian Andrew Davies on the real Birmingham gangsters who inspired Peaky Blinders
The death of PC Snipe caused an outcry. Editorial commentaries in the Birmingham press railed against the brutality, violence and degradation that confronted the city's magistrates on a daily basis. According to the Mail, "A large percentage of the rising generation are emerging from boyhood into manhood without acknowledging any authority whatever, and with all the instincts of the savage brute implanted in them."
The Mail was not alone in demanding the introduction of flogging for crimes of violence. As it pointed out, a public meeting in St George's Ward, attended by a large number of working people – many of whom lived locally, close to the scene where PC Snipe had been assaulted – "enthusiastically applauded" calls for brutal street ruffians to be flogged. "Public feeling has reached a white heat," the Mail commented, "and very properly so."
A local woman named Polly Mullins identified the brick-thrower as James Franklin. Aged 19, Franklin worked as a file-cutter. He stood trial at the Birmingham Assizes on 16 December 1897, but the case against him collapsed when defence witnesses testified that the brick had been thrown not by Franklin, but by 19-year-old George ‘Cloggy’ Williams. Franklin was found not guilty.
Williams went on the run as soon as he heard that PC Snipe had died. He evaded arrest until 9 January 1898. When he made his first appearance before the city’s stipendiary magistrate, reporters noted that, “his hair, which is of a light colour, was dressed in the approved ‘peaky blinder’ style, short at the back, and pulled down in a fringe over his forehead”. His former employer testified that Williams had worked as a glass-beveller for four years before leaving abruptly, without drawing his wages, on the day of Snipe’s death. Contrary to the prevailing depiction of peaky blinders as workshy, the employer said Williams had been “very industrious”.
Williams in turn stood trial at Birmingham Assizes on 17 March 1898. After just two days of hearings, he was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to penal servitude for life. Passing sentence, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell, described the crime as "atrocious", noting that it was "thinly removed" from murder. The judge evidently thought the jury had been unduly lenient in finding Williams guilty only of manslaughter. The local newspapers applauded the sentence. As the Birmingham Daily Post put it: "We hope that every rowdy in Birmingham will take the lesson to heart."
If the term peaky blinder was new in the 1890s, concern at violence among youths in Birmingham’s industrial districts was not.
As historian Barbara Weinberger notes, clashes between rival youth gangs were first reported in the city during the early 1870s, their origins in territorial wars fought between English and Irish street gangs. Hostility towards Birmingham’s Irish-Catholic population had intensified during the previous decade. In June 1867, Park Street in the city’s Irish quarter had been largely demolished during the Murphy riots, provoked by an anti-Catholic tirade by the militant Protestant orator William Murphy.
Anti-Irish feeling was subsequently inflamed by reports of ‘Fenian’ activity. During the 1870s, according to Weinberger, anti-Irish sentiment “offered a focus and a target for the frustrations of inner city youths which… became institutionalised in gang warfare”.
Why did people join gangs like the Peaky Blinders?
Weinberger offers two further explanations for a reported upsurge in street disturbances and gang warfare in Birmingham from around 1873–74. The recession that followed the boom of the early 1870s threw thousands of unemployed and disenfranchised youths onto the streets. At the same time, police clampdowns on drunkenness and street gambling were resented in working-class districts.
Young men featured prominently in the disturbances that ensued. Weinberger contrasted the vigour of campaigns to reform “public manners” with the indifference shown by the civic authorities to the “welfare or rights of a section of the community who had no power or votes… and for whose behaviour they had nothing but disdain”.
Youthful members of Birmingham’s street gangs described themselves as ‘sloggers’. According to historian Philip Gooderson, the ethnic hostility that sparked gang conflict in the 1870s was later eclipsed by narrower, territorial loyalties.
Most of the feuds reported in the press during the 1880s and 1890s involved gangs from adjacent districts. Conflicts spread across the Birmingham conurbation, extending from the central ‘slums’ to Aston, Perry Barr and Balsall Heath, all of which lay outside the jurisdiction of the Birmingham police in 1890.
Street gangs also confronted each other at music halls. On 23 December 1893, John Metcalfe, aged 20, was fatally stabbed in the neck during a fight between rival gangs from Park Street and Barford Street. The gangs clashed outside ‘the Mucker’, the concert hall in Digbeth, fighting with the buckle ends of their belts as well as knives. Thomas Cherry, a 19-year-old nailmaker, was subsequently convicted of manslaughter. He was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.
By the 1890s, Birmingham’s sloggers had adopted a distinctive uniform. One of the witnesses at Cherry’s trial, William Bond, sported a “cropped head and bell-bottomed trousers”. It was a style shared by the sloggers’ counterparts in Manchester and London, the scuttler and the hooligan.
What did the real Peaky Blinders wear?
The Birmingham paint and varnish manufacturer Arthur Matthison saw the city’s warring youths at close quarters when his family moved to Summer Lane, close to the spot where PC Snipe was fatally injured and notorious as a rendezvous of the ‘peakies’.
In his memoirs, Matthison painted the peaky blinder as intensely style-conscious: “He took pride in his personal appearance and dressed the part with skill. Bell-bottomed trousers secured by a buckle belt, hob-nailed boots, a jacket of sorts, a gaudy scarf and a billy-cock hat with a long elongated brim. This hat was worn well over one eye, hence the name ‘peaky blinder’. His hair was prison cropped all over his head, except for a quiff in front which was grown long and plastered down obliquely on his forehead.”
- Read more | Is The Westies a true story? Here's the real history behind the Ronald Reagan-era gangster drama
As Matthison pointed out, most peakies belonged to a slogging gang. He saw these youths as “the product of poverty, squalor and slum environment”. To Matthison, living in Summer Lane with “slums abounding all around”, it was all too apparent that youth violence was the by-product of harsh social and economic conditions.
Historian Philip Gooderson qualifies this assessment, pointing out that gang conflicts not only extended beyond the city’s slums but also drew in many youths in full-time work. The occupations of the sloggers who appeared in droves before the magistrates, according to Gooderson, read like “a roll-call” of Birmingham’s industrial workforce: “brass caster, iron caster, fender maker, striker, hinge maker, filer, stamper, chandelier maker, gun polisher, coach builder, spectacle maker, glass blower”.
Half of them worked in the iron or the brass industries, the dominant sectors of the local economy. None of them, however, could be described as middle-class. Slogging, like scuttling in Manchester and Salford, was a working-class pastime, reflecting the kudos attached to displays of fighting prowess and toughness in working-class neighbourhoods. Middle-class youths, with greater opportunities and better prospects, had no incentive to risk injury and imprisonment.
The Mail dispatched a reporter to Summer Lane, where Matthison lived in the early 1890s, and the correspondent relayed an encounter with a peakie's 'moll'.
She too was easily identified by her appearance, since it mirrored those of the peaky blinder himself: "There was the same lavish display of pearl buttons, the well-developed fringe obscuring the whole of the forehead and descending nearly to her eyes, and the characteristic gaudy-coloured silk neckerchief covering her throat. Her head was hidden beneath an elaborate hat of considerable dimensions and decorated with feathers and poppies." (Interestingly, by the late 1890s, the peaky blinder's uniform incorporated the pearl buttons typically associated with the London costermonger.) The reporter concluded, ruefully, that Summer Lane's molls were a "long-suffering lot".
When did the real Peaky Blinders disappear?
In the years before the First World War, Birmingham’s peaky blinders faded from view. Gooderson attributes the decline of slogging gangs and the concomitant disappearance of the peakies to a number of factors, ranging from the growth of football as an alternative source of excitement for working-class youths to a belated clampdown by the police and judiciary.
Like all youth fashions, peaky blinder style had a limited shelf-life. In the early decades of the 20th century, young people in Birmingham, as elsewhere across Britain, began to look to Hollywood for a new sense of glamour. Had a youth dressed as a peaky blinder made an appearance in Birmingham in the 1920s he would have been greeted with astonishment, although middle-aged passers-by might have chuckled in recognition.
In 1936, nearly 40 years after their demise, memories of the peaky blinders were stirred by a series of letters published in the "Notes and Queries" column of the Birmingham Weekly Post. One reader had seen "many a policeman" and civilians alike "laid out" by them. In reply, "Bred and Born Brum" insisted that the peaky blinder was "just an ordinary working man… He could always be found at work during the day in some brass foundry, doing his bit at the lathe or vice or perhaps as a polisher or in the casting shop."
Another correspondent, F Atkins, was adamant that “a good many readers have a wrong conception” of peaky blinders: “Their actions were mostly restrained to rival gangs and the police. The general public was seldom interfered with unless they interfered.” Mr Atkins also revealed how the hat that gave the peakie his name was fashioned. It was a “Bowler hat with the brim made to fit the sides, the front of the brim came to a point almost like the spout of a jug. This was done by wetting the brim, warming it by the fire, them making it the shape required. This was worn on the side of the head to show the hair on the other side done in a ‘quiff’.”
The peaky blinders had long ceased to stalk Birmingham’s toughest streets. But their fashion sense and penchant for violence had guaranteed their spot in the second city’s collective memory.
Andrew Davies is the author of City of Gangs: Glasgow and the Rise of the British Gangster (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013). He discussed the real peaky blinders on the HistoryExtra podcast
This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]>