HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:54:37 GMT en hourly 1 The Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry – and there's a dark reason why https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:30:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ Shirley Ann Brown examines Nazi attempts to establish a Germanic presence in the celebrated chronicle of the Norman conquest On 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 disaster https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/death-black-mountain-aberfan-disaster-welsh-history-who-blame-how-many-tragedy-survived/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:00:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/death-black-mountain-aberfan-disaster-welsh-history-who-blame-how-many-tragedy-survived/ On 21 October 1966, a spoil tip collapsed onto the Welsh village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults. To mark the 60th anniversary of the disaster, HistoryExtra revisits this article, first published in 2016, in which award-winning film-maker Steve Humphries shares recollections of that tragic day gathered from survivors, rescuers and bereaved parents. At 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.
]]> “I wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt Everest”: Tenzing director Jennifer Peedom on Everest queues, reclaiming lost narratives and dropping Loki into a crevasse https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/tenzing-movie-everest-jennifer-peeden-interview/ Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:01:09 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/tenzing-movie-everest-jennifer-peeden-interview/ Tenzing foregrounds the most famous sherpa in the world in his own story for the first time. He was, director Jennifer Peedom tells us, the classic underdog Tenzing Norgay was half of the duo who made it to ‘the roof of the world’ when he completed a historic first ascent of Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953 – and by all accounts when they stepped onto the summit, they did so together. But when the accolades were handed out, you might think he was the lesser party.
New Zealander Hillary received a knighthood; so too did the expedition’s leader, British Army officer John Hunt. But Tenzing, a man who not only made it to the summit but was the expedition’s sirdar (head sherpa) – responsible for all the logistics on the mountain that made the ascent possible – was only offered the George Medal, a civilian honour conceived to mark acts of heroism during the Blitz.
- Read more | Tenzing Norgay: the Sherpa mountaineer who first conquered Everest
The popular narrative that followed in the ensuing decades was that Hillary had summited Everest (referred to increasingly by one of its original names, Chomolungma) and that Tenzing was there. It’s one of the many misconceptions surrounding the man that director Jennifer Peedom seems to hope to dispel in her first dramatic feature Tenzing.
Peedom is no stranger to the Himalayas, having started as a camera operator on Himalayan expeditions before making films of her own – fans of mountain movies may well remember her 2015 film Sherpa, which documented the real stories from the Sherpa community in the aftermath of a 2014 avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall that caused a number of fatalities. Just as Sherpa was, Tenzing is thoughtful and reflective, aiming to foreground Norgay in his own story for the first time.
Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe are the biggest names in the cast, taking on the roles of Hillary and Hunt, but its star is undoubtedly Genden Phuntsok – a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent – as Norgay.
His casting reflects another lesser-known fact – the most famous sherpa in the world was not an ethnic Sherpa, but the son of a Tibetan yak herder who came to Nepal and later moved to Darjeeling seeking work among the expeditions. ‘Tenzing Norgay’ wasn’t even the name he was born with; that was the one given to him later.
Peedom’s Tenzing is the story of how a young boy looked up at the mountain revered as Chomolungma – the mother goddess – and dreamed of what it would mean to stand on what is quite literally hallowed ground.
We caught up with the director for an exclusive interview after the film’s London premiere to find out more.
The 1953 ascent of Everest is such a well-known narrative, but often one dominated by the idea of heroic European conquest, and I wondered what you want to reveal about this story by focusing it through Tenzing’s perspective?
Jennifer Peedom: I spent a lot of my early career working as a camera operator and a documentary filmmaker in the Himalayas, and for me what was always interesting and part of the attraction of the place was the culture and the Sherpa people.
One of my earliest films about the Sherpas [Sherpa, 2015] was because I was really interested in this idea that mountaineering for them is a job, but Chomolungma is a deity that they worship, and that the landscape means something spiritual and very different to what it means to western climbers who come and climb the mountain. I wanted audiences to see that point of view.
I’ve heard you say of Sherpa that you “weren’t making a climbing film, you were making a story about a people”. Tenzing feels like it’s doing a bit of both?
JP: The reason I wanted to make this film about Tenzing was first to redress that historical balance, because he’d never really been at the centre. He was more of a supporting character in the story.
But it was also [about] everything that Tenzing had been through in his life just to get to the starting line of Everest, let alone ascend the mountain. That story to me was fascinating – the sheer number of obstacles he had to overcome just to get to that place.
He’d been through so much in his life. He’d been exiled from Tibet to Nepal as a young boy. His family had had to leave [him] while they were looking for work just to survive. He was an outsider in that community – the classic underdog in many ways. He was underestimated his entire life.
It was about that as much as anything else, about showing the family the cultural sacrifices that he had to make along the way to fulfil this childhood dream.
I was really taken with the character that Caitríona Balfe plays, Jill Henderson. She is such a big part of the British mountaineering story overall in Nepal, but also a big part of Tenzing’s story as well.
JP: It was really she that convinced him to take on the [British 1953] expedition. He genuinely had hesitations. He had an extreme loyalty to the Swiss, who he’d climbed with the year before, and they had tried and failed. He was depleted. He was exhausted. He’d promised his family he wasn’t going to go back again, and then this invitation came.
It was Henderson and Raymond Lambert [the Swiss mountaineer with whom Tenzing had climbed to within 237 metres of the summit in 1952] who colluded to convince Tenzing to go, because they knew that this was probably going to be the one. They knew that this was his moment and that he deserved it more than anyone else.
Lambert wrote him a letter. Henderson campaigned to him endlessly until he eventually agreed to go. And I just felt like, what an amazing woman, who had such a remarkable part in history that had also never been talked about in the traditional narratives of the telling of Everest, yet she played such a significant role.
There’s an ongoing conversation right now as to the state of climbing on Mount Everest, and we’ve all seen these mind-boggling photos of the queues. What are your thoughts on the responsibilities we have as storytellers when we’re discussing a mountain that represents a peak of human endeavour, but also is a place of spirituality?
JP: For whatever reason, Everest has become this symbol of human achievement, and it’s become a bucket list ambition. It attracts people, and no matter what happens on Everest, the worse the disasters, the more people seem to come the next year to test themselves. And I think that says something about western culture in some ways, and I find it interesting, though I don’t really understand it myself.
- Read more | Race to the top of the world: the story of the 1953 conquest of Everest
It’s like a proving ground. And I would suggest that there are other ways to do that than to come to Everest and add to the traffic jam that is that mountain these days. I would not recommend anyone attempt to go there and climb, really, because it is dangerous due to the crowds. There are better ways to achieve a dream than standing in a line to put your foot on the summit of the highest mountain in the world.
That difficulty of climbing a mountain like Everest was really evident in Tenzing: the laboured breathing and heavy steps were so evocative. How important was it to give a sense that this isn’t a walk in the park?
JP: Really important, and it’s a very difficult thing to portray in cinema because it’s a feeling. Someone described it to me once as running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. You just can’t get enough oxygen into your lungs, and so your legs are burning. You’re sort of taking a step and then having about three breaths and then finding the strength to take another step.
It’s enormously challenging and the higher you get, the worse that gets. Trying to portray that is difficult, but I’m glad you picked up on the breath. We spent a lot of time with sound design working with breath because that’s the thing keeping you alive.
On the spirituality point, there was one scene I wanted to ask you about: at one of the high camps there’s a mutiny among the Sherpas that Tenzing resolves, and it concludes with a blessing using rice. I wonder if you can tell us what we’re seeing there, and more broadly how you brought the authenticity of Sherpa culture into the movie?
JP: That really came from my own experiences with Sherpas on mountains and hearing their stories. That scene where they say [of Chomolungma] that they’re too frightened to go further because now that we’re up at the South Col, we’re literally stabbing our spikes into her shoulders? They were conversations that I’d heard in camps on Everest.
- Watch now | How did Mount Everest get its name?
And one of the Sherpas in that scene – his name is Balu – was actually our expedition doctor who played that role. He also said, “Jen, these are conversations I had with Sherpas like one year ago on Everest”. So it was about bringing all of those experiences that I’d had in conversations with Sherpas over many years about what the mountain means to them, and trying to help a broader audience understand that, to them, it is a living embodiment of a deity, of a goddess.
For them, there is a quite literal feeling that the landscape is inseparable from the spirituality within it. It was really important to me to portray that perspective because the film is really from Tenzing’s point of view. I know he had a conversation like that with the Sherpas on that Everest expedition.
He had the challenge of not only climbing the mountain himself, but he was leading the Sherpa team and was responsible for getting all of the supplies. So he had this kind of double job that he had to do, and he was under enormous pressure. And he was juggling the demands of two very different competing groups. And the Sherpas did fear the unknown. Tenzing was unique in the sense that he wanted to climb, but he also chose to see the goddess not as something to be feared, but to be revered, and he was unusual in that, and he was a pioneer in that way.
There is another way to see this. We don’t need to fear her. If we ask for her permission, ask for her blessing, she will grant us passage, she will keep us safe. And that’s what that scene is about. They’re throwing rice, which is an offering to Chomolungma. And I think as you see in the film, it gave the Sherpas a sense of peace that it was okay, and of course it was. There were no accidents on that expedition. There were no deaths. It was remarkable.
It’s a very beautiful scene. I know you know Sherpa culture well from your previous works, including your 2015 documentary Sherpa. How much did your documentarian background inform how you approached Tenzing?
JP: You probably can tell from the film that we were shooting on real mountains in real landscapes. And I guess for me, that was what I knew. It seemed insane to do it any other way because part of the story is the landscape, and so to fake that didn’t make any sense to me.
I wanted the audience, but also the actors, to experience those landscapes and those cultures, and I wanted to show that when you shoot in those communities, you’re shooting with people who live in those communities, and that brings this beautiful level of authenticity.
And then the actors themselves cannot help but be affected by that. You know, many of them have talked about the fact that they didn’t really need to do a lot of acting in these scenes because when Tom Hiddleston is down that crevasse climbing out of it, he’s really down a crevasse climbing out of it. It was like, “Okay, Tom, start climbing.” He’s really doing it. That was the point.
- Read more | “Just like us and not at all”: what Tom Hiddleston wants us to remember about Pompeii
I wanted to ask you about that specific moment, where Tom falls into that crevasse. How does that actually happen?
JP: It was a trapdoor that we had set up, so when he landed in that spot, the trapdoor got pulled and he had the safety rope. When he’s hanging in the crevasse, that is just the main safety rope – so the picture rope became the safety rope, and we did a lot of work to make sure that we could make the ropes look period appropriate, but they’re also proper safety ropes. That’s how we did it. He just did it for real.
But you built a trapdoor on a Nepalese mountain?
JP: That’s in New Zealand. All of the technical climbing with the actors from Everest Base Camp up was in New Zealand [Ed’s note: everything below Base Camp was filmed in Nepal]. And those mountains really are as big from bottom to top as the Himalayas. They just start at almost sea level in the Southern Alps.
All of the actual aerials of Everest itself, [they’re] the real mountain, the real [Khumbu] icefall. But then we would shoot the specific scenes, in real crevasses and icefalls and ridges and faces in New Zealand. And the summit of Everest, we shot on the summit of one of the highest mountains in New Zealand. And you can see the awe and the emotion on the actors’ faces, because they’re standing on one of the highest mountains in New Zealand looking down at the world below them.
Tenzing is streaming on Apple TV from 16 October and is being shown in select cinemas now
]]> "No votes, no golf!": how the suffragettes made sport a political battlefield https://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:30:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/ In the early 20th century, sport came to be regarded as a male-only activity – by men, anyway. As Rachel Hewitt explains, the overlooked history of women’s participation in cricket, golf, wrestling, hockey and even mountaineering is intertwined with the emergence of the suffragist movement On the afternoon of Saturday 1 November 1902, a group of men and women careered around Hampton Court Park, enjoying a friendly game of hockey. A local newspaper reported that “the weather was glorious”, though the ground was muddy. Players included residents of Hampton Court Palace’s apartments; it is likely that Princess Sophia Duleep Singh – a talented hockey player who turned out for both the Palace team and the nearby East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club, and who lived on the Hampton Court estate – was among them.
Photographs of the Molesey club help us imagine Singh in action: they show women sprinting in determined pursuit of the ball, loosened neckties flying free from billowing white shirts, rose-red skirts ballooning to reveal shin pads and studded boots, sticks expertly poised to strike winning shots.
Daughter of the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, Sophia Duleep Singh was born in England and is known today for her leading role in the British suffrage movement. As Anita Anand recounts in her 2015 biography Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Singh boycotted the 1911 census and refused to pay taxes or fees for dog and carriage licences because she would not accept “taxation without representation”.
She joined suffrage protests and raised funds for the Kingston and district branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), selling The Suffragette newspaper outside her Hampton Court home. (Strictly speaking, suffragettes took direct, often militant, action, whereas suffragists used largely peaceful methods in pursuit of votes for women. However, the two groups were often conflated in the 20th century.)
Political football
Though her activities in support of votes for women are widely recognised, Singh’s sporting activities are mostly forgotten today. Indeed, we don’t tend to speak of suffragists and sportswomen in the same breath. That’s partly because of the enduring legacy of anti-suffrage propaganda, which depicted WSPU members as scrawny spinsters or portly old maids – tyrants in the home, not athletes on the hockey pitch.
It also reflects a popular and persistent misconception that sport – particularly women’s sport – is a trivial leisure pursuit and irrelevant to politics. If such beliefs are still widespread today, why would we imagine that anyone was interested in suffragists’ sports a century ago?
- Read more | From china cups to letter bombs: how suffragettes got out the message of votes for women
Yet these entwined ideas – that suffragists didn’t care much about sport, and that politics and sports shouldn’t mix – obscure an important historical thread. Sport was genuinely meaningful to many suffragist women, both personally and politically. When Singh declared that sport was “the birth right of every happy, healthy girl, be she princess or peasant”, she was making a political point – echoing the republican theory that English men and women had once possessed liberties that were subsequently removed by tyrannical oppressors.
Singh was far from an outlier in her love of sport. For example, the Pankhursts were members of the Clarion Cycling Club. Rosa May Billinghurst, who survived polio, used an adapted tricycle to attend suffragist protests. Hilda Webb, who threw stones at government buildings with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, helped to establish women’s hockey in Ireland.
Vera Holme, chauffeur to various leaders of the WSPU, excelled at fly fishing. There was also Lady Florence Dixie, an early suffragist and president of the British Ladies’ Football Club – co-founded with London suffragist Nettie Honeyball – as well as a passionate hunter, mountaineer and explorer. Louisa Lumsden, president of the Aberdeen branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a champion of girls’ international cricket. Across the Atlantic, Lucy Diggs Slowe advocated for the inclusion of black women in the US suffrage movement. She won the American Tennis Association tournament (which had been founded for black tennis players) in 1917, the year after the US Lawn Tennis Association had banned black athletes.
Indeed, in the early 20th century the association between suffragism and sport was so entrenched that it became a literary trope. One suffragette character in the French play Les Éclaireuses was “dressed in a short tweed hockey skirt”. Another was a “lady mountaineer” who featured in Frank Savile’s 1908 short story The Suffragette. Spare a thought, too, for the male narrator of a poem who, wearied by his girlfriend’s devotion to sport and politics, lamented that “A golfing girl is bad enough, but oh! A Suffragette!”
Mixed messages
Many of the sportiest suffragists of the early 20th century had honed their athletic abilities – along with their commitment to women’s rights – in the 1880s and 1890s. During those decades, men and women competed together in mixed-doubles tennis and in mixed-sex cricket and hockey games. Hiking, climbing, sailing, skating, rowing and running in hare-and-hounds cross-country events were shared pastimes. Men and women even bobsleighed together. They often used the same sporting facilities, belonged to the same clubs, and revelled in the reporting of their sporting achievements in the same newspapers and newsletters.
Sometimes, though, men’s physiological and social advantages made it desirable for women to play sport in all-female environments. The mountaineer Lizzie Le Blond suggested that a Ladies’ Alpine Club could counter the male-dominated nature of mountaineering literature by forming an “extensive and authoritative library” of women’s writings on the subject. She also wanted women to share female-specific information about “the formation of climbing parties, the provision of guides, means of travelling, and general accommodation”.
In addition, a wealth of women’s sports clubs and competitions sprang up in the 1880s and 1890s, including the East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club (which became England’s first ever women’s hockey team in 1887), the Irish Ladies’ Hockey Union in 1894 and, in 1895, the Blackheath Ladies’ Hockey Club and the All England Women’s Hockey Association.
Most surviving records concern upper-class pursuits, but sport was equally important in urban and rural working-class women’s lives. The 1880s saw the tail end of a craze for female pedestrianism, with women and girls earning money speed-walking extraordinary distances. In 1864, for example, Emma Sharp is said to have been the first woman to complete a 1,000-mile walk in 1,000 hours.
Researcher Sarah Elizabeth Cox has unearthed evidence of two black or mixed-heritage women known as “the Sisters Mills, or the Muscular Maids from Mexico”, who boxed in the East End of London in the 1880s.
Women’s foot-races and cricket games were staples of village fairs from the 17th century onwards – it’s said that overarm bowling was devised by women as a way to avoid getting their hands caught in skirts. Later, when women’s teams such as the Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club were formed – many of them initially drawing players from women working in factories during the First World War – they were building on a long heritage of working-class women’s sport.
Exercising ambition
As the new century began, women who had been physically active had experienced how sport promoted health, strength, education and camaraderie, as well as offering opportunities for travel, adventure and meeting new people. They knew that participating could bring money, fame and respect – and the chance to lead. Lizzie Le Blond referred to climbing as “the work”. Fellow climber Frederica Plunket described how physical activity allowed her to escape a lifestyle of upper-class feminine indolence featuring neither “hard work” nor “play”, letting her instead tire herself out and earn “absolute rest” – as men did.
Women’s sporting experiences informed their political and social ambitions, too. The late 19th-century ideal ‘New Woman’ was well educated, wanted to work and was intent upon domestic equality. She was also an enthusiast for sport, particularly cycling. Reasons for this were outlined by the American suffragist Susan B Anthony in 1895: “Bicycling… has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel… the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”
This passion for sport fed into the later female suffrage movement, often in practical ways. During the 1908 trial of the Pankhursts and Flora Drummond for inciting a riot, suffragist Evelyn Sharp described how she’d been able to dodge a policeman: “It was like a rush at hockey.” Meanwhile, Suffragists used bicycles to distribute campaign literature.
Between 1912 and 1914, though, suffragists’ approach to sport took a markedly different turn. These were years when militant suffragettes launched a campaign in which sports facilities were the primary target. At first, women approached male politicians as they played golf. They heckled Asquith at the Aboyne course and, on the Balmoral links, threw a worm at Winston Churchill.
The campaign intensified in 1913. Over just one weekend that February, at least 12 golf courses were damaged. Suffragettes used acid and weedkiller to burn phrases into the grass, including “Justice Before Sport” and “No Votes, No Golf”. They dug holes into greens, inserting suffragist magazines and posters. And they replaced the golf courses’ flags with their own, bearing mottos such as “Women’s War”.
Later the same month, a groundsman at Roehampton Golf Club interrupted two suspicious-looking women who ran off, dropping a bag whose incendiary contents suggested that they had intended to burn down the pavilion. The police raided the flat of a suffragette called Olive Hockin, where they found corrosive fluid, clippers, firelighters, hammers, flints, false car registration plates and golfing flags.
At a WSPU meeting soon afterwards, a perplexed attendee asked: “Why do the Suffragettes destroy golf links?” It was a reasonable question. After all, many suffragists had grown up loving sport. Why were they now seeking to destroy the facilities on which they’d originally flourished?
Eva McLaren – Aiming high
An activist and leading member of five suffrage societies, McLaren (1852–1921) was a keen mountaineer in her youth. Mountaineering was so synonymous with suffragism that, in 1909, Votes for Women joked that the Ladies’ Alpine Club’s membership roster could be a recruitment list for militant suffragettes. McLaren created a centre of excellence for women’s sport, with a focus on hockey.
Edith Garrud – Creating fighting chances
Trained as a physical culture instructor, Garrud (1872–1971) specialised in teaching Japanese martial arts to women and girls from the late 1890s, becoming the first known female jiu-jitsu instructor in Britain. She joined the Women’s Freedom League in 1906, offering jiu-jitsu classes to suffragettes as “a necessary safeguard for the woman who has to defend herself” against the police. She trained the 30-strong all-female Bodyguard Unit, who protected the WSPU’s leaders from arrest.
Olive Hockin – The skiing suffragette
Joining the suffrage movement in 1912, Hockin (1881–1936) took part in militant action including attempted arson at Roehampton Golf Club. According to biographies, she was a trained artist who designed suffragette banners. Less well known is that Hockin was also a champion ski-runner and ski-jumper. She went to prison for the Roehampton action, but got out in time to win the British Ski Championship in January 1914.
Male privilege
In November 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst explained that men had “made a rule that, although the ladies may play golf all the week [on days when men were typically at work], the golf links are entirely reserved for men on Saturday and Sunday”.
This was about more than day-to-day sexism. Pankhurst was identifying a dramatic cultural shift in which sport was being redefined as a predominantly male pursuit. The modern Olympic Games, which were first held in 1896 and initially permitted no female participants, marked a milestone in this shift. The Olympics’ co-founder, academic and historian Pierre de Coubertin, had decided that masculinity was under threat. He thought that “solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” was the best way to rebuild weak men – and would entail cleansing sport of female influence. This reinforced a belief extolled in all-male schools and universities, which saw organised sport as key to preparing men for careers in public service.
Sports clubs and competitions around the world followed the Olympics’ example. Cycling clubs changed policies to exclude women; new groups such as the Manchester Wheelers were male-only. Wimbledon had no official women’s doubles championships until 1913. And in 1907, the Swiss Alpine Club – which had welcomed female members since 1863 – kicked out women.
Golf had once been a quintessential upper-class female sport, but clubs started imposing restrictions of the type Pankhurst mentioned in her speech, or banning women altogether. Women’s sport was shorthand for women’s political emancipation, and there was a burgeoning backlash against both. In an 1897 protest against women taking degrees at the University of Cambridge, male students directed their ire towards an effigy of a female cyclist.
By 1910, sport had been redefined to be predominantly associated with men. Suffragettes justified their “ruin of golf links and cricket pavilions” on the basis that it was the best way to attract men’s attention while “injuring no human being”. Flora Drummond observed that “[Male golfers] don’t give a thought to the women who are being tortured in prison by the government… [but] it interests golfers to find their links damaged and they inquire who did it. Then they realise that women are asking for votes.” Emmeline Pankhurst urged angry male golfers to “tell the government to give women the vote in order to secure the golf greens from further injury”.
A man’s world?
In short, sport was not tangential to suffragist politics: it was the training ground on which many women first realised their capabilities and their deserved rights. Following male logic, which emphasised how sporting excellence helped prepare men for professional roles, it was also the arena in which women had, time and time again, proved themselves well equipped for public life. The suffragettes’ golf course campaign saw women reclaiming sporting spaces in which they had once been at home, reminding the public of this not-too-distant history.
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Their protests also drew attention to the dramatic change that was taking place in sporting culture, out of which women were being driven. Among other things, this demonstrated how men’s support for women’s rights was inconsistent, and could go into reverse. As Sophia Duleep Singh argued, sport was a “birthright”for women – an original liberty that was being denied and removed by a tyrannical oppressor. Addressing men directly, Emmeline Pankhurst pointed out that “for nearly 50 years we had your sympathy and your support, and nothing happened… [now, by targeting your sports facilities, we] have your disgust and have you thoroughly annoyed.”
In the campaign for suffrage, women’s rights eventually prevailed – but the backlash against women’s sport had long-lasting effects. It succeeded not only in suppressing women’s ability to play sport but also in obscuring records of women’s sporting achievements. It entrenched the ideas that, as de Coubertin put it, female sport is “against the laws of nature” and that sport had always been – or certainly should have been – the preserve of men.
Because of that backlash, the history of suffragettes’ sporting pursuits has been forgotten. By resurrecting this history, we can gain not just a better understanding of the suffragist movement but also a more comprehensive understanding of sport’s identity and its kinship with politics.
Rachel Hewitt is a writer and historian. Her books include In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (Chatto, 2023)
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> The country house at war https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-country-house-at-war/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:53:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-country-house-at-war/ From the conscription of upper-class women to stories of great loss, Judith S Lewis charts the roles that country houses and their occupants really played in the WW2 war effort It might be assumed that the owners of Britain's country houses weren't hugely affected by the Second World War, and that they continued to live in luxury in their vast estates. However, as Judith S Lewis explains to Lauren Good, that wasn't the case. From the conscription of upper-class women to stories of great loss, she charts the roles that country houses and their occupants really played in the war effort.
]]> The pioneering surgeon who stood up to Rasputin https://www.historyextra.com/membership/pioneering-surgeon-who-stood-up-to-rasputin-podcast/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:03:42 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/pioneering-surgeon-who-stood-up-to-rasputin-podcast/ Acclaimed biographer Miranda Seymour explains the remarkable life and accomplishments of pioneering surgeon Vera Gedroits – and why her story was erased She pioneered lifesaving battlefield surgery, challenged the medical establishment, stood up to Rasputin, and became the world's first female professor of surgery – yet today, few people have heard of Vera Gedroits.
In today's episode, acclaimed biographer Miranda Seymour tells Elinor Evans about Vera's remarkable life and accomplishments – and why her story was erased.
]]> North Korea's religious dictators https://www.historyextra.com/membership/north-korea-religious-dictators-podcast/ Mon, 05 Oct 2026 16:09:20 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/north-korea-religious-dictators-podcast/ Jonathan Cheng, Wall Street Journal correspondent, argues that the North Korean regime owes much to the enduring cult of personality around its founder, Kim Il-Sung More than three decades after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR, the North Korean regime remains steadfastly in place, defiantly ploughing its own path some eight decades after its founding. What might explain this remarkable longevity?
In Jonathan Cheng’s new book, Korean Messiah, the Wall Street Journal correspondent argues that it owes much to the enduring cult of personality around its founder, Kim Il-Sung, who took inspiration from his own Christian roots to create a modern religion that endures to this day.
Jonathan’s book is a finalist for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, and in today’s episode he explores these ideas with Rob Attar.
]]> "The Iraq War was a disaster": a historian's view on the modern Middle East https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:00:09 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-iraq-war-was-a-disaster-a-historians-view-on-the-modern-middle-east/ We have, says Simon Sebag Montefiore, long needed a history of the modern Middle East encompassing all the myriad peoples, forces and states that have shaped the region. That’s why, he tells Charlotte Vosper, he decided to brave the heat of The Cauldron Charlotte Vosper: You begin your new book with Abdulaziz’s raid on Riyadh in 1902, a major event in the foundation of Saudi Arabia. Why?
Simon Sebag Montefiore: Virtually all histories of the Arab world start with the traditional Levant – Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria – or Constantinople; anywhere but Saudi Arabia. Yet Saudi is really the centre of the Middle East. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina are in Saudi Arabia, so the Gulf has become the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds. I began my book with Riyadh to signal that this is very much an Arab-centric history of the modern Middle East. Plus I think that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s raid is one of the best stories – like something out of Lawrence of Arabia.
What powers were at play there at the turn of the 20th century?
In 1900, the Middle East was really another world – and that’s the central point of this book: to get across just how recently the Middle East, as we know it today, was created.
At the turn of the century, half of the Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The other half was ruled by the British – the Trucial States (essentially, what’s now the United Arab Emirates), plus places such as Aden, along with Egypt. France ruled Algeria and Tunisia. There were virtually no independent Arab states except central Arabia.
What happened in the Middle East when those imperial powers fought the First World War?
First of all, most people forget that a large part of the First World War was fought in the Middle East. Britain suffered some major disasters in the region – defeat at the Dardanelles, surrender at Kut in Iraq – and it’s often forgotten how resilient the Ottoman empire really was.
More importantly, the war was also a major turning point for the Middle East. With the western front in a desperate state, Britain promised swathes of Ottoman territory to other powers and groups including France, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Jews, the Italians, the Armenians, the Kurds and, above all, Russia. So there were many competing claims to Middle Eastern territory.
One of these promises was the Balfour Declaration of 1917. By the early 20th century, the ancient Jewish desire to return to the Holy Land and the longstanding connection to Jerusalem had inspired a political movement, and Jews – like other nations – sought to create a homeland with a shared religion and language in Palestine. Jewish leaders successfully persuaded the British, French and Americans that one of the entities to be carved from the Ottoman empire should encompass this Jewish ‘national home’. Zionists envisaged this as a land of socialist farming communities under British rule or an Arab monarchy, or a single state shared with the Palestinian Arabs.
In the event, the British and the French divvied up the whole Middle East between them. It was decided that the British would get Iraq and Palestine, and the French took Greater Syria (Lebanon and Syria). Constantinople would be ruled by the Allies, while the Greeks and Italians got half of today’s Turkey, with Kurdish and Armenian states in the east. The British and French provinces were called ‘mandates’: Middle Eastern states that would be under British or French control while the peoples prepared for full statehood. As we can see today in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Yemen, Libya and Sudan, the nation-state structure isn’t necessarily suited to the incredibly complex, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian patchwork that is the Middle East.
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How did Middle Eastern people respond to the imposed mandates?
Not well. They were extremely disappointed – they’d swapped one empire for another. The state of Iraq, for example, followed a British mandate in 1920 – but, though the British initially promised freedom to the Iraqis, they changed their minds and decided to keep Iraq as a client state. The Iraqis certainly didn’t want to be ruled by Britain, so they launched a huge rebellion against their new mandatory power, which the British brutally crushed. Similarly, the Syrians didn’t want to be ruled by the French, and rebelled in 1925. In 1919, the Egyptians launched a revolution that also resulted in defeat by the British.
You describe the Second World War as the start of a new Middle East. Why?
The Second World War brought about the realisation that the west needed to give independence to the Arab world. During the war, the British occupied southern Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon but, with the European powers financially exhausted by 1945, and the increasing waves of nationalist movements, several of the countries that now make up the Middle East were created as independent nation states. Syria became fully independent in 1946 and, with the termination of the British mandate for Palestine, Israel was created in 1948. Turkey had already formed in 1923, and the British mandate over Iraq had ended in 1932.
Following the world wars, a new Middle East was born – with varying degrees of success. Many of these new states proved either ungovernable or dominated by autocrats – and that’s another of the central debates that runs through the book: who or what should we blame for the failure of many of these states? Is it their corrupt oligarchical dictatorial rulers? Or the imperial powers that created the states? Does it come down to Arab culture or Jewish nationalism? Was it the creation of Israel that poisoned the whole Middle East and made it ungovernable? Or was it the Cold War, and the interference of the Americans and the Soviets, that undermined the Middle Eastern state system? These are all vital questions.
Did new ideologies or identities emerge in these newly established nation states?
With the new states came the rise of Arab nationalism, particularly the ideology of pan-Arabism. This is the idea that the Arab world should be ruled by one state, and it’s a natural reaction to the division of the Middle East by borders drawn by the imperial powers. What’s interesting, though, is that the former imperial powers also embraced Arab nationalism. They wanted to create strong Arab states, and it was actually Britain that sponsored the creation of the Arab League, which promoted the idea that the separate states should act together as a community.
For the next 30 years after independence, pan-Arabism became the ruling ideology among Arab leaders including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and its greatest champion, Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Of them, Nasser was the most successful and popular; at his apogee, he united Egypt with Syria as the United Arab Republic in 1958. (Three years later, Syria seceded.)
If pan-Arabism had such powerful political proponents, why did it decline?
In reality, the Arab world is much less monolithic than sometimes we in the west like to think. The different states and regions all had their own dialects, agendas and circumstances, and it’s questionable whether a single Arab state could ever have held together.
It also failed badly, in both governance and war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt fought Israel in a series of regional conflicts – and each time, Israel won out. The creation of Israel in itself was a huge blow to Arab pride, and its military victories undermined the confidence of the surrounding new nation states. In 1948, the UN partitioned Palestine into Arab and Jewish sectors, and the State of Israel was declared. Five Arab countries immediately invaded Israel but, with their war aims divided, Israel was able to defeat them all. Then, in 1967, Nasser hubristically threatened war – and was defeated spectacularly by Israel, discrediting Nasserism.
By the 1970s, pan-Arabism was declining and a new ideology, Islamism, was about to explode.
You’ve also described 1979 as a turning point in this history. Why was that year such a decisive moment?
It brought an ideological shift in the Middle East. Islamic anti-western radicalism had always existed in various forms, but in 1979 an Iranian Shia variant mobilised the belief that Islam should govern society as well as the state, in resistance to the west and pro-western versions of Islam. In January of that year, a huge popular revolt overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah, the last Shah of Iran, who had ruled Iran for 37 years.
When the country fell to Ayatollah Khomeini, it shook the whole Middle East. Khomeini was an incredibly brutal and oppressive figure with a vision of Islamic rule that had never really been put into practice before. His idea was that, while Shiite Muslims waited for the Occulted Imam to return as Mahdi (Messiah), a trusted member of the Islamic clergy should rule Iran. With this Islamist ideology, Khomeini created an extraordinary system that was really a sacred monarchy ruled by one man – himself. That is still the system ruling Iran today.
So, first of all, a new system was created in 1979 in Iran – a Shia theocracy, a sacred dictatorship – and, at the same time, the revolution also unleashed a radical Islamism on the rest of the Muslim world. This was a fusion of Sunni Islamist radicalism, Arab nationalism and Arab resistance, making it distinctly anti-western.
If 1979 unleashed the ideological movement, we now see its manifestation in all sorts of ways. Radical Islamism became a resistance movement against a version of moderate Islam that was open to western ideas in pro-American states such as Egypt, Jordan, UAE and, to an extent, Saudi Arabia. Today, we see the influence of Khomeini’s Islamism in Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Hamas in Gaza.
Following the end of the Cold War, did the Middle Eastern states start to become more stable?
No – and where it looked stable, that was due to the stagnant, oppressive rule of long-reigning dictators: Gaddafi, Saddam, Mubarak, Assad. It’s a question that you could ask at any point during the history of the region – or, as I’ve called it, The Cauldron – and you’d get the same answer. This is a story of continued tumultuous bubbling, which is why I gave the book its title.
Having said that, we do see something different after the fall of the Soviet Union: the emergence of the US as a unipolar paramount power in the Middle East. To be fair to the Americans, they did try to use this power in a positive way to create a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. Though these attempts are now discredited among many people, they nearly worked. Israel and Palestine needed to recognise the other’s existence, national narratives and possible Palestinian statehood – and, for around two decades (1990–2012), there were people in both nations who were willing to do so. The Madrid Conference took place in 1991 under George HW Bush, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 under Bill Clinton, but ultimately peace fell through. Israel-Palestine peace looks incredibly distant now. I still believe that a pathway to two republics, two nations, is the only way – but that means many things.
The rest of the Middle East also didn’t gain stability. It is important to note, though, that by that stage the Middle Eastern states were no longer dominated by imperialist powers, and the end of superpower competition gave them more space to assert themselves. After the end of the Cold War, they were freer than they ever had been. This idea – that the Middle Eastern states were not simply subject to greater powers but had their own agency – is another key theme in the book. The Middle Eastern states really recreated themselves, and they’ve been independent for almost 80 years now.
How much of the recent turbulence in the Middle East do you think stems from the attacks on 9/11?
A lot of it. The story of Osama bin Laden and his ‘Planes Operation’, as he called it, is just extraordinary. It was intended to draw the US into the Middle East – and it worked. When Joe Biden flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, he said of 9/11: “We overreacted”. There are arguments to say that’s true.
There was definitely a case for invading Afghanistan in 2001, but the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, I think, totally misconceived. It was based on false intelligence, but even if you believe that the invasion was justified, it was utterly misgoverned. The Iraq War was a disaster, its main effect being to empower a rising Middle Eastern state: Iran. The US knocked out the other great power in the Middle East, Iraq, and the country never recovered. To be clear, I’m not nostalgic for Saddam, but I think there’s something to be said for a measured response, particularly in the Middle East.
Why do you think that democracy has made few inroads in the region?
There are all sorts of reasons across the different Middle Eastern countries. I don’t think for a moment you could say that the Arab world is not suited to democracy, but there is a habitual resort to autocracy. I think this comes from the belief that only an autocrat is strong enough to hold together disparate states and resist Islamism, which often resorts to armed revolution. That’s combined with a long Middle Eastern tradition of one-man rule – sultanates, kingdoms. The best-ruled countries in the Middle East are actually the absolute monarchies that weren’t created by the west but grew organically – such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and Morocco.
Conflict remains ongoing in the Middle East. Do you think that it is somehow an inherently violent place?
I don’t think that’s really true. If you look at the Middle East across the 20th century, the number of deaths never came close to the bloodletting of the world wars in Europe, or Stalin’s Red Terror, or Hitler’s Holocaust, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Statistics are sometimes used in a distasteful parlour game of ‘who’s worst’, and I don’t want to play. But, if you look at the pure numbers of people killed in the entire Israel-Arab-Palestine conflict from 1948 to today, it’s a mere iota of those killed just on the western front in the First World War.
That said, every death is a tragedy. The Middle East is a very turbulent place – a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian patchwork with so many interwoven layers of tension piled on top of each other. There’s nothing quite like it.
- Read more | The overlooked history of Muslims in Europe
Why is understanding this history so important?
The truth matters in itself. Its moral lessons matter, and anything based on lies and conspiracies is brittle and will crumble. Our societies are successful because we respect facts, sources, truth – and that encompasses history. In the post-religious, post-Christian world of the west, history has assumed a moral importance that allows it to be a propellant of political power, similar to the power that religion once had.
And for history to matter, it has to be right. That’s why this book aims to show how the present Middle East –19 states in all – came to be, and how to understand the nuances that created it. I don’t just mean Israel and Palestine. You can’t really understand Saudi Arabia unless you realise that it’s the third Saudi Arabian kingdom, not the first. You can’t really understand what’s happening in Iran unless you understand Twelver Shiism and who the last shah was. You can’t understand Turkey without understanding Ataturk.
In a way, I think it’s strange that this book didn’t exist before. There are histories of the Arabs, of the Jews and of the Turks, but no one had put it together. I’ve tried to do it in a nuanced and balanced way that is entirely based on fact – though myths and conspiracies are important, too. But I also want this to be a great read. So you can read it as the history of how the Middle East came to be what it is today – or you can just enjoy this extraordinary story.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is an award-winning writer, broadcaster and historian. His previous books include Jerusalem: The Biography (W&N, 2011, revised in 2024) and The World: A Family History (W&N, 2022)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> WW2's bloody battle for Arakan https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ww2s-bloody-battle-for-arakan/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:35:26 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ww2s-bloody-battle-for-arakan/ Military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson discusses an Allied offensive that launched daring amphibious assaults deep into Japanese-held territory, turning the tide of the Burma campaign In 1944, the Allies unleashed an offensive in Burma – a brutal campaign spearheaded by 3 Commando Brigade alongside the Indian and West African troops of XV Corps. Against a ruthless enemy and in one of the world’s most unforgiving environments, these men launched daring amphibious assaults deep into Japanese-held territory, turning the tide of the Burma campaign and delivering a devastating blow to the Imperial Japanese Army.
Military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson has written a book on the subject, Jungle Commandoes, and Emily Briffett spoke to her to find out more.
]]> Robot wars in the classroom: why AI in education is nothing new https://www.historyextra.com/membership/robot-wars-in-the-classroom-why-ai-in-education-is-nothing-new/ Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:56:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/robot-wars-in-the-classroom-why-ai-in-education-is-nothing-new/ As the role of AI in education sparks debate, Laura Tisdall examines past technological advances in teaching, and how they were received at the time In 1929, the British magazine Teachers World identified ‘A Possible Menace to the Free Development of Education’. The putative culprit was BBC Radio, which had begun its schools broadcasting programme five years earlier, provoking fears that teachers would simply become ‘machine minders’. Such concerns pre-dated radios, though. The first ‘teaching machines’ were developed in the US in the 19th century; it was claimed that they could, for example, teach students to spell by getting them to turn a crank to arrange letters in the correct order.
Panic reached fever pitch by the 1960s, when new electronic ‘automatic teachers’ emerged, popularised by the American psychologist BF Skinner. More widely, commentators ranging from Canadian radical feminist Shulamith Firestone (in The Dialectic of Sex, 1970) to US businessman Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, 1970) predicted that humanoid robots would soon be indistinguishable from real people. Such an “inhuman, mechanical monster”, as one TV journalist put it in 1965 on encountering a teaching machine, was the face of the imagined future.
Anxieties about human teachers becoming redundant have so far proved unfounded, though worries have re-emerged periodically with the inception of computers, the internet and, most recently, generative AI in the form of large language models (LLMs). But the introduction of new technologies into the British classroom often sits alongside surprising continuities in the structure of schooling and the role of the teacher. Teachers have lost a significant amount of autonomy over the past 40 years as relationships with the central state have changed. But the power they hold over students in the classroom has been maintained or even intensified.
Mass education
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 introduced compulsory elementary education, originally until the age of 10, in England and Wales; similar legislation followed in Scotland in 1872. Local education authorities (LEAs), established in 1902, had the task of schooling large numbers of children, often in very poor conditions. So new technologies such as ‘readers’ – printed collections of extracts on different topics – or early projection equipment (‘magic lanterns’) could be very helpful.
Teachers continued to struggle with classes of up to 40 or even 50 children into the mid-20th century, especially in poorer rural areas, and school radio and television programmes offered means of engaging interest. On the other hand, the teachers and students who most needed these technologies were often those to whom they weren’t accessible. One secondary school in Ely was not atypical: in 1962, it still lacked wall maps, a projector and science apparatus, and had barely any books.
School inspectors sometimes addressed the impacts of limited funding from LEAs by bringing in needed items themselves – though these were often modest, such as “a large roll of kitchen paper and some tins of powder paint” given to an Oxfordshire junior school in 1959.
New classroom technologies often received a mixed reception among teachers, who might have felt as if their expertise was being undermined by ‘trendy’ ideas. In the 1980s, fears also intensified that technology could break down the distinction between childhood and adulthood. The American cultural critic Neil Postman argued in The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) that television challenged the authority of adults by giving children unfettered access to information. “Without secrets,” he wrote, “of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.”
Children themselves gave these ideas short shrift. “Childhood does not disappear because you watch TV,” 10-year-old Joseph told Postman in 1994. And teachers’ authority in the classroom remained basically unchallenged. Many British students did not feel respected by their teachers in schools, as responses to the Scottish School Leavers’ Survey from the 1980s show. “Some of the teachers were… power mad, big headed,” wrote one boy in 1983. Despite the efforts of child-led school student unions in the 1960s and 1970s to introduce innovations such as school councils and student representation on governing bodies, students still had little say in what they learned or how they learned it.
Learning by doing
Many technological innovations in postwar Britain were related to the rise of ‘child-centred education’ in primary and secondary schools, intended to suit students’ ‘natural interests’, a philosophy epitomised in the Plowden Report of 1967. One pedagogical idea promoted by child-centred educationalists was ‘learning by doing’, suggesting that children learned best when they actively found out things for themselves.
Building on earlier pieces of teaching apparatus, such as the Montessori sense-training materials of interwar kindergartens, educational innovators pushed technologies such as Cuisenaire rods. These were coloured sticks that could be used to teach basic mathematical operations. However, teachers were often sceptical of the value of these materials – and, indeed, of ‘learning by doing’ itself. “Is there nothing to maths but bits of wood?” complained a columnist in Teachers World in 1971.
Other technologies were more empowering for teachers because they built on their existing expertise. Before the 1980s, education in Britain was highly decentralised. This gave teachers significant control over what they taught, encouraged by initiatives such as the Mode 3 CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education), introduced in 1965, which allowed teachers to choose their own topics and set their own exams. Teachers used photocopiers and Bandas (a British brand name for a spirit duplicator) to make classroom resources, and employed overhead projectors to display this material easily to students. “My fingers are still stained purple,” recalled one enthusiast of the Banda machine.
A major constraint on the adoption of new technologies in the British classroom was funding. Central government did not provide dedicated funds for equipment in schools until the early 1980s, leaving them at the mercy of local authority budgets. And when funds were allocated, the focus was on electronic technologies – mainly computers, but also other innovations such as interactive whiteboards. This was not necessarily what teachers or students wanted; most continued to value older, under-funded technologies such as textbooks, though some embraced digital possibilities.
This pattern of spending began with the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major, then accelerated under New Labour after 1997, with a 2009 Ofsted report estimating that £2bn had been spent on information and communications technology (ICT) over the previous decade. The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency was set up in 1998 to promote ICT, which also became a compulsory part of the curriculum. Today, we see the same thing happening with generative AI – expensive pilot projects being funded to develop new GenAI education tools.
Teachers have expressed mixed opinions on new technologies. The Labour proposal earlier this year to develop ‘AI tutors’ to help disadvantaged students in Years 9 and 10 (13 to 15-year-olds) was strongly criticised by the National Education Union (NEU), with an NEU survey revealing that only 14 per cent of respondents supported the plan. However, teachers’ views on GenAI change when they are the ones using the technology: 76 per cent report using GenAI for day-to-day work.
Students, meanwhile, are not necessarily uniformly enthusiastic. Responding to a 2025 survey by the National Literacy Trust, 66.5 per cent of 13 to 18-year-olds reported using GenAI; however, many were aware of its potential pitfalls. One student did not want to use GenAI in written work because “It wouldn’t be actually what I truly think, it would be a vague interpretation of what I’ve told a robot to expand on, and it might not even make sense”.
Digital natives
Some digital technologies, such as the internet, initially promised students the ability to overtake teachers, with children and teenagers framed in the 1990s as a ‘net generation’ or ‘digital natives’. “For the first time ever, in one domain the students will be the teachers and the teachers will be the students,” argued the Canadian writer Don Tapscott in Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997). But the internet, like television, has failed to truly disrupt power hierarchies between adults and children.
Teacher autonomy in the classroom has been less threatened by new technologies than by political decisions that have removed power from local authorities. These included the introduction of the first GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) in 1986, the National Curriculum of 1988, and the introduction of academies in 2000. Teachers have lost much of the control they once had over the curriculum and teaching methods. However, other power relationships within schools have persisted unchallenged. The idea of ‘student voice’ is often promoted but has failed to become a reality. A report on pupil participation in Welsh schools found in 2022 that only 23 per cent of students felt they had a say over school policies.
Though certain technologies, such as GenAI, are promoted in classrooms because they are seen to teach valuable work-related skills, others are framed as harmful. Smartphones have been banned in English schools this year, and the use of most social media platforms by under-16s is to be banned altogether across the UK in spring 2027.
At the same time, the government’s New Media Unit hires for jobs such as ‘Social Content Creator’ – with requirements including: “You are a true social media native who knows exactly how to capture an audience’s attention in the first three seconds across TikTok” – suggesting that these skills should be on employability agendas.
In How Children Fail (1964), the radical American educator and teacher John Holt argued that hierarchical, compulsory, competitive schooling discourages children from learning. That kind of education, Holt suggested, drove children to focus on getting the right answers on tests rather than being intrinsically motivated to seek knowledge for its own sake.
In the context of a school system that has changed little since the Second World War, at least in terms of relationships between teachers and children, misuse of technologies such as LLMs is a symptom of a bigger problem. It is unsurprising that students who feel they have little control over their own education might turn to GenAI to produce work that they did not choose to do in the first place.
In some ways, GenAI presents genuinely new challenges for schools, even when compared with the impact of older technologies such as the calculator, the television, the computer and the internet. In other ways, though, it shows how much schools have remained the same. As in past eras, hopes and fears about the potential of new technologies in the classroom should make us think about who chooses these technologies, who funds them, and who gets to control them.
Laura Tisdall is senior lecturer in modern British history at Newcastle University, and author of We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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