HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-17T15:47:56.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/period/modern/feed/atom Kev Lochun <![CDATA[“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/ 2026-10-17T15:47:56.000Z 2026-10-16T23:01:09.000Z 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
]]> Phil Tinline <![CDATA[The UK is about to get a new prime minister. But is the country now impossible to govern?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/is-the-uk-impossible-to-govern/ 2026-07-19T07:31:04.000Z 2026-07-19T07:30:58.000Z In 2021, the historian Anthony Seldon published a history of the British prime minister, with the rather pessimistic title The Impossible Office? At the time, Boris Johnson commanded a huge parliamentary majority. He had taken office set fair for a decade in power. But by 2022, he was out; in the years since, Britain has had three more prime ministers and will shortly welcome a fourth. For many people, Seldon’s question mark now looks daringly optimistic.
But if it’s increasingly impossible to be prime minister, what does that mean for the running of the country overall? Worried columnists and broadcasters now ask: has Britain become ungovernable?
As he settles in behind the big black door, Britain’s new premier Andy Burnham will certainly find himself confronting a series of problems that has grown steadily more difficult. Not least because of the much higher expectations that we the voters have come to place on Number 10.
Lord Salisbury, the last prime minister to sit in the House of Lords while in office, was of the opinion that “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.” After his death in 1903, this was not a view that could be sustained long into the new democratic century.
Rapid change
From 1906, an activist Liberal government swept to power and began building the rudiments of the welfare state. Then, under the pressure of the First World War, the boozy, adulterous prime minister, Herbert Asquith, was driven out by the even more adulterous but much more dynamic David Lloyd George. The new administration centralised power in a small war cabinet, and established the Cabinet Secretariat, under the command of the fearsome first cabinet secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey. At its height, the Cabinet Secretariat – the foundation of the modern Cabinet Office – was revered for its skill in forging agreement and making Whitehall work effectively.
- Read more | Who was the best 20th-century prime minister?
From the interwar period onwards, the state took on ever more responsibility. After the Second World War, prime ministers led governments responsible for much of the nation’s basic needs; the state that emerged from the war also developed the experience and expertise to deliver projects at speed and scale. Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour government, largely run by old men exhausted by years of total war, rapidly built the National Health Service and an array of new towns. Later governments, of both main parties, led the creation of nuclear power stations, the motorway network, waves of new universities, and much else.
But that is long since gone. Today, as many think tank reports attest, the centre of government has become hopelessly dysfunctional. For instance, as the Future Governance Forum reported last year, “the Cabinet Office has become bloated, particularly at a senior level where there are now multiple permanent secretaries and directors general operating in the same space.” None of this is helped by trying to run a 21st-century government from an 18th-century townhouse.
This has fuelled a loss of self-confidence in government. As many critics have argued, it has retreated into a level of risk aversion and focus on process over delivery which would make Attlee shake his head in despair. This has itself stoked public mistrust, as governments take power promising change, only to turn round and explain that it’s harder than they thought. Public disillusionment is exacerbated by impossible expectations. Social media, reality TV shows and online retail have encouraged the view that when you register a choice about something – whether by tweeting, voting or clicking ‘Buy’ – you have the right to expect an immediate response.
The difficulties of government have arguably also been exacerbated by a trend, ever since Margaret Thatcher’s day, to try to exert too much day-to-day control from Downing Street – and the Treasury – instead of setting an overall direction, then giving ministers their head.
Art of the deal
Before Thatcher, things worked differently. Fifty years ago this summer, James Callaghan’s Labour government, with a majority of approximately zero, faced an unnerving currency crisis. Amid soaring inflation, unemployment and government deficit, sterling was falling faster than the Bank of England could handle. The government faced the prospect of seeking a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Callaghan’s cabinet was divided, his government teetering. But he had already been home secretary, chancellor and foreign secretary, and rather than panic or try to rule by diktat, he coolly allowed his ministers to discuss their position for days on end, while quietly steering the situation. He emerged with a deal, his government intact, and kept going.
- Read more | A brief history of the Labour Party
The excessive focus on the prime minister alone in the decades since has led to a tendency to see our parliamentary system too much through the lens of how government functions in America. This despite the fact that, as the recent independence celebrations remind us, it was designed not to be like Britain. The prime minister is not the head of state, as the US president is: they are meant to be “first among equals”. Disempowering the Cabinet does not necessarily make a prime minister more effective.
The comeback
There is one more factor which makes being a successful prime minister harder. Even if you’re not forced out within months of your arrival, you’re only allowed one go at doing this invidiously difficult job. Lose an election and – we now seem to agree – you have to resign.
This would have surprised Harold Wilson, Winston Churchill and Ramsay MacDonald, all of whom lost an election (in 1970, 1945, and 1924) and returned to power between four and six years later. It would have startled Stanley Baldwin, who did this twice, in 1924 and 1929. And it would have gobsmacked William Gladstone, who left office three times (in 1874, 1885 and 1886), but kept bouncing back, becoming PM for the fourth time in 1892, aged 82.
This litany of woe may make it seem as though the situation has simply grown ever more dire for our PMs and will continue to do so. But not everything that currently makes the job of PM arduous is linear. History suggests that some of this is cyclical – and that we may currently be in a low from which, in time, we will recover. This is not the first time, after all, that people have worried that Britain may be becoming ungovernable.
The new normal
During the Depression of the 1930s, Britain’s leaders looked old, tired and out of ideas. Commentators churned out books worrying that parliamentary democracy looked like a Victorian relic, unsuited to a modern economic crisis. As unemployed ‘hunger marchers’ fought the police, some people turned to the impatient young fascist leader Oswald Mosley, others to the communists. But the problem was not that Britain was ungovernable: it was that the steps necessary to revive the economy seemed unthinkable.
In the 1930s, the heretical ideas of John Maynard Keynes, allowing borrowing and inflation to climb in order to jump-start the economy, particularly in areas of high unemployment, appeared to risk economic disaster. Yet after similar measures had proved unavoidable to fight the Second World War, it was high unemployment that came to seem unthinkable – and around that belief, a new political consensus formed which endured for years. We tend not to remember the mid-1950s as time of political instability, even though the Conservatives changed their prime minister twice in three years, because the economy was growing and the consensus was holding.
In the 1970s, that postwar consensus broke down and, once again, leaders seemed unequal to tackle a prolonged economic crisis. This time it was rocketing inflation and waves of strikes that led a new generation of concerned commentators to write books with titles like Why Is Britain Becoming Harder to Govern?, Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence, and The Coming Confrontation: Will the Open Society Survive to 1989?
But once again, the problem was not that Britain was ungovernable. It was that the steps necessary to revive the economy seemed unthinkable. When Thatcher took power in 1979, she gradually reduced the power of the trade unions, while letting unemployment climb to heights not seen since the 1930s, slowly establishing a new political settlement with which her defeated opponents had to come to terms. Between 1979 and 2007, Britain had just three prime ministers.
The question for their latest successor is whether he can win political support to overcome the taboos that hem in what is the politically ‘possible’ today, without tipping the country into worse crisis. If he can, he too may be able to establish a new ‘normal’ – and the decade of six prime ministers will look less like evidence that Britain has become ungovernable, and more like a symptom of the agonising nature of democratic change.
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 years of British Political Nightmares and, as a policy associate with the Future Governance Forum, of Power Failure: A New Theory of Power
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The five greatest prime ministerial downfalls of the past 100 years]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/prime-minister-resignation-downfall/ 2026-06-22T08:45:17.000Z 2026-06-22T08:40:51.000Z David Lloyd George
Liberal Party prime minister from 1916–22
David Lloyd George, the ‘Welsh Wizard’, became prime minister in the middle of the First World War by triggering a coup against HH Asquith, the man he had long served as a minister.
Lloyd George gained a reputation as “the man who won the war” and triumphed in the general election of 1918. But he commanded only a limited number of Liberal MPs; the rest had stayed loyal to Asquith. Thus, he relied on the cooperation of his Conservative coalition partners. As his own reputation declined, and as the bulk of the Tories ceased to regard him as an electoral asset, he would be more and more at their mercy.
From Walpole to Johnson: lessons from the 300-year history of the British prime minister
Three centuries after its inception, Sir Anthony Seldon charts how the office of prime minister has defied hostile monarchs, a scandal-hungry media and two world wars to become the beating heart of Britain’s body politic
Over time, Lloyd George undermined himself through the failure to fulfil promises such as ‘Homes for Heroes’ [a plan to ensure adequate housing for returning war veterans], through the highly dubious (but legal) sale of honours to raise party funds, and by his highhanded, quasi-presidential political style. Yet the coalition staggered on, and the Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain, remained loyal to him.
The final blow came in the autumn of 1922, when the prime minister seemed willing to risk war with Turkey. Former Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law signalled his willingness to re-enter the fray, and a meeting of Conservative MPs at the Carlton Club voted heavily to end the coalition, prompting Lloyd George to offer his resignation. One future prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, attacked Lloyd George as “a dynamic force”, a phenomenon which he described as “a very terrible thing; it may crush you, but it is not necessarily right”.
- Read more | Who was the best 20th-century prime minister?
Bonar Law took over in Downing Street and won the 1922 election by a landslide. Lloyd George seems to have taken his fall quite lightly. He probably thought that he would be back, and indeed remained active in politics for another two decades.
Neville Chamberlain
Conservative Party prime minster 1937–40
Neville Chamberlain, who had served for several years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, took over from Stanley Baldwin in 1937. Though he has a reputation for weakness, in truth he was domineering and dictatorial, demanding unconditional loyalty from his MPs.
The 1938 Munich Agreement, which sacrificed part of Czechoslovakia but bought short-term peace, brought him immense popularity. Despite the deteriorating European scene, Chamberlain was dominant at home in the face of the weakness of the Labour Party, which he despised. This in time proved his Achilles heel – because the feeling was mutual.
When war broke out in 1939, it was clear that Chamberlain did not relish the task ahead of him. The German invasion of Norway led to a military fiasco for which, in fact, navy minister Winston Churchill bore much responsibility. But the Commons debate that followed boosted Churchill’s chances and showed Chamberlain at his arrogant worst. The septuagenarian David Lloyd George urged that “the Prime Minister should give an example of sacrifice, because there is nothing which can contribute more to victory in this war than that he should sacrifice the seals of office”.
- Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War?
The government won the vote that followed, but its majority collapsed. Chamberlain’s efforts to restore confidence by reconstructing his government foundered when Labour refused to join a coalition led by him. The party’s leaders were willing to serve under Churchill, though, and he took over on 10 May 1940 as the Nazis launched attacks on France and the Low Countries. Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party and was a loyal member of the new government until a fatal illness forced his resignation a few months later.
Anthony Eden
Conservative Party prime minister from 1955–57
Anthony Eden had long been the golden boy of British politics. He served twice as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary and was his anointed successor when the veteran politician finally stood down in 1955. Eden suffered physically, after an operation to remove gallstones went wrong, and politically and emotionally, having been in Winston Churchill’s shadow too long. He was soon accused of failing to provide “the smack of firm government”. This increased the pressure when, in July 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal Company, which was widely seen as a blow to British prestige.
Eden did not want to be regarded as a warmonger, so after months of stalemate, he secretly agreed to a plan put to him by the French. The proposal was that “Israel should be invited to attack Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula” and that France and Britain, having given the Israeli forces enough time to seize all or most of Sinai, should then order ‘both sides’ to withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal, in order to permit “an Anglo-French force to intervene and occupy the Canal on the pretext of saving it from damage by fighting”.
- Read more | How significant was the Suez Crisis?
When the plot was put into effect it became clear that Eden had seriously misread the attitude of the Americans. The United States joined the condemnation in the UN, blocked Britain’s access to emergency oil supplies, and prevented the UK from gaining access to International Monetary Fund resources. Unable to withstand the pressure, Eden declared a ceasefire on 6 November.
After this humiliation, Eden’s colleagues were only prepared to allow him to continue as prime minister in name only. On 9 January 1957, he stood down on grounds of ill-health. The illness was genuine, but it also allowed Eden to depart with a modicum of dignity from a situation that had become untenable.
James Callaghan
Labour Party prime minister from 1976–79
James Callaghan, nicknamed ‘Sunny Jim’, looked like a safe pair of hands when he took over after Harold Wilson’s surprise resignation in 1976. He was highly experienced, having been Chancellor, Home Secretary, and Foreign Secretary. He showed his mettle when, soon after taking office, he kept his Cabinet together during a financial crisis that led to an International Monetary Fund bailout. But his party was deeply divided: he was a moderate or Right-winger but faced continual pressure from the Left, not least from the radical socialist Tony Benn.
- Read more | A brief history of the Labour Party
The government soon lost its small majority due to defeats in by-elections. It is often speculated that had Callaghan called an election in the autumn of 1978, he would have won it. In the event, the government’s hopes of victory were cast away during the wave of industrial action known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’, when unions pushed back against the government’s policy of holding down wages in the fight against inflation.
Callaghan worsened his own problems when he gave a complacent press conference after his return from an international summit. The Sun newspaper ran the headline “Crisis? What Crisis?” Callaghan had not used those exact words, but the interpretation was not unfair.
Finally, the government was narrowly defeated in the Commons on a vote of confidence. Callaghan immediately called an election, which was won decisively by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. He was a victim less of his own personal limitations than of a shift in the tectonic plates of politics, as Britain’s ideological compass shifted firmly to the Right.
Margaret Thatcher
Conservative Party prime minister from 1979–90
By the time of her third successive election victory, Margaret Thatcher had made a huge impact on Britain’s society – the very thing she claimed didn’t exist.
She had disposed of many enemies along the way, including those within her own party whom she labelled “Wets”. But the 1986 Westland affair had started a time-bomb ticking. This scandal, about the obscure issue of a helicopter firm, led to the resignation of the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, after he clashed with Thatcher over the company’s fate. For the next four years he bided his time, charming Tory audiences on the ‘rubber chicken circuit’, as the parade of constituency party dinners is sometimes called.
- Read more | Are we still living in Thatcher’s Britain?
Meanwhile Thatcher became increasingly isolated and less willing to listen to advice. In 1989 she broke with her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and was challenged for the leadership by Anthony Meyer, an unknown MP. She won easily, but a marker had been put down. The introduction of a hated new form of local taxation, the so-called Poll Tax, deepened her unpopularity with the voters.
Her growing anti-Europeanism alienated her deputy prime minister, the unassuming Geoffrey Howe. In November 1990 he resigned and delivered a devastating Commons speech, concluding: “The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.”
Heseltine then announced a leadership challenge. When the ballot was taken, Thatcher came first, but not by a wide enough margin to prevent a second round of voting. After many colleagues advised her to abandon the fight, she announced her decision to resign. She had lost neither a national election nor a Commons vote; whether she could in fact have won the leadership contest was never put to the test. As she commented at the time, “It’s a funny old world.”
Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is a historian of Britain in in its global and imperial context in the period from the late 19th century to the present day. His most recent book is Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (Oxford University Press, 2020)
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Marilyn Monroe at 100: why the blonde bombshell was so much more than a sex symbol]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/marilyn-monroe-at-100-why-the-blonde-bombshell-was-so-much-more-than-a-sex-symbol/ 2026-06-08T15:43:18.000Z 2026-05-31T23:01:14.000Z On a busy set in Pinewood Studios, tension was building. Filming of the 1957 romantic comedy The Prince and the Showgirl had been stressful from the start, with director Sir Laurence Olivier scathing of star Marilyn Monroe’s acting and perceived lack of professionalism. Finally, frustrated by her seeming inability to understand her character’s motivation in one pivotal scene, he shouted: “Will you just try to be sexy? Isn’t that what you do?”
Olivier’s dismissal of Monroe’s acting craft cut her deep, and she never forgot it. The irony is that she had chosen him as the director for this project – she was his boss. Monroe was desperate to escape the ditzy blonde roles she was being given by the Hollywood studios, and keen to play more substantial dramatic parts.
The Prince and the Showgirl was her first role after establishing her own company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc. Desperate to be regarded as a serious actress, she found herself being undermined by the most respected Shakespearean actor of his day. Yet, despite his indisputable skill on the stage, Olivier himself could not deliver a convincing film performance. (Another esteemed co-star, Dame Sybil Thorndike, proclaimed that “[Monroe] is the only one of us who really knows how to act in front of a camera.”) Olivier was out of his depth – and Monroe felt the force of his angry reaction.
Across her career, Monroe was frequently dismissed as stupid, both on screen and off it. In Some Like it Hot (1959), her character, Sugar Cane, taps her head and says: “See what I mean? Not very bright!” Yet, according to people who knew her well,
that was far from the truth. Director Billy Wilder, who had needed Monroe’s star wattage to get that film off the ground, described her as “an absolute genius as a comedic actress”. And her friend and roommate, actress Shelley Winters, observed that Monroe would have been happier if she had been more stupid.
It is often assumed, rather simplistically, that beautiful women have the natural attributes required to be a film star: faces and figures that the camera loves. This fails to acknowledge the hard yards aspiring actors have to put in before their careers take off – if they ever do. Marilyn Monroe was one of those aspiring young actors whose dazzling later success eclipsed the unexceptional beginnings to her career.
Troubled childhood
Born Norma Jeane Mortensen on 1 June 1926, Monroe was raised to love the movies by her mother, who worked as a negative cutter, part of the film-editing process. Obsessed from an early age with Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s original ‘blonde bombshell’, Norma Jeane yearned for a career in film. Sadly, her mother suffered with severe mental illness, and Norma Jeane endured a tumultuous childhood. At the age of just 16, she married the boy next door, James Dougherty, to escape that chaotic life.
During the Second World War, while her husband was away serving in the South Pacific, she worked in a factory. A photographer who came to shoot pictures of the workers for a morale-boosting campaign spotted her photogenic appeal, and in 1945 she began modelling.
While he was away, her husband was happy for her to work, but asked her to stop on his return. Instead, she signed a contract with the Blue Book Modelling Agency, soon becoming a pin-up, and divorced Dougherty. Dying her hair blonde, she took aim at the movies and in 1946 was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox. Talent scout Ben Lyon said that she reminded him of actress Marilyn Miller; adding her mother’s maiden name, Monroe, her screen persona was born.
- Read more | Marilyn Monroe: glamour, guts and misery
Her initial Fox contract was for only six months, but Monroe took this opportunity to absorb everything she could about the business, as well as taking lessons in acting, singing and dancing. Her contract was renewed, and she was offered small film roles. Then came a setback: she was dropped by Fox because her acting coaches considered her too shy and nervous to progress.
Undeterred, she returned to modelling and took small acting jobs, while continuing her drama studies. In 1948, she was signed by Columbia Pictures and made Ladies of the Chorus – but her contract wasn’t renewed. Now living hand to mouth, she posed for nude photographs used in the famous ‘Golden Dreams’ calendars – images that would return to haunt her a couple of years later. She also began a relationship with Johnny Hyde, vice-president of the William Morris Agency, who significantly boosted her film career – and also fell deeply in love with her.
Two films Monroe made while represented by Hyde were notable steps up in quality. As Miss Casswell in All About Eve and Angela in The Asphalt Jungle (both 1950), working with the likes of Bette Davis, John Huston and Joseph L Mankiewicz, Monroe not only held her own but was able to demonstrate her ambition and talent, albeit in relatively small roles. “I knew she was going to make it,” said Davis. “She was a very ambitious girl: she knew what she wanted and was very serious about it.”
That year, Monroe signed a seven-year contract with Fox and commenced a sequence of decent performances in respected films. She became popular with audiences and critics, winning the Photoplay award for Fastest Rising Star, and the Look award for Most Promising Female Newcomer. Then, in 1952, those ‘Golden Dreams’ photos re-emerged. Rather than express shame, Monroe explained she’d had to take on such jobs simply to eat and pay her rent. Showing wit that endeared her to audiences even more, she added that the photographer, Tom Kelley, had not captured her best side. Monroe knew how to relate to audiences: she was never haughty or superior, but grateful for attention and always good-humoured.
Monroe worked with acting coaches Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov, and soaked up all the information she could from film crews and sets. Her roles in Clash by Night and Don’t Bother to Knock (both 1952) were far from glamorous – a local girl who worked at a fish-canning factory, and a murderous babysitter – but she was showing her emotional and physical range. By the end of that year, Monroe had built up a strong body of work.
In 1953, she became a star. As Rose Loomis in the film noir Niagara – filmed in three-strip technicolour – Monroe, playing an irresistible femme fatale, is a stunning sight to behold. Her now-iconic look was co-created for this movie by make-up artist Whitey Snyder, who accentuated her heart-shaped face and wide-set eyes, and used five shades of red lipstick and liner to achieve the desired mouth.
In a scene that sparked controversy at the time, Niagara also showcased the ‘Monroe wiggle’. In a 27-second shot, she walks away from the camera towards the titular waterfalls, wearing a tight-fitting outfit accentuating her hourglass shape – ensuring she is the sole focus of attention for the camera, the other characters and the audience.
Shaping an image
Monroe’s commitment to attaining the face and body she wanted reflects her deliberate strategy for shaping her image. That persona – the popular, sexy bombshell – was very much a construct and, at this stage in her career, a strong indication of her determination to achieve movie success.
In her next film, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, playing Lorelei Lee, Monroe gave one of her most famous and influential performances. In it she sings the iconic tune ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’, one of the most revisited show numbers from Hollywood musicals. Later emulated by stars ranging from Madonna and Lady Gaga to Ryan Gosling and Kate Moss, Monroe’s look and moves have been imitated but never matched.
Monroe and co-star Jane Russell got along famously, and had a great time on the shoot – but the former was, unsurprisingly, annoyed to discover that she was earning a lot less than Russell. She didn’t even have her own dressing room. When studio executives explained that she was not the star, Monroe retorted: “After all, I am the blonde and it is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!”
Money was an ongoing issue for Monroe in those years. Because she was still subject to the terms of the Fox contract, she typically received a smaller pay cheque than her co-stars – despite her burgeoning status as a hugely bankable name (and face) drawing audiences to those movies.
For How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Monroe was paid markedly less than co-stars Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable: about $16,000, compared with $55,000 for Bacall and $200,000 for Grable, then considered the blonde actress at Twentieth Century-Fox. But Monroe’s star was in the ascendant, and that restrictive contract soon ended. She effectively replaced the retiring Grable, who famously told Monroe: “Honey, I’ve had mine – now go get yours.”
Monroe maintained good friendships formed during these positive filming experiences. But her next movie, River of No Return (1954), proved a less happy affair. The shoot was marred for Monroe by a difficult relationship with bullying director Otto Preminger, a badly twisted ankle and an unfulfilling role as a singing saloon girl. It augured her departure from La La Land.
The next film she was offered, The Girl in Pink Tights, would involve another ‘dumb blonde’ role and a co-star – Frank Sinatra – who was going to be paid a great deal more than her. So she wrote to Fox studio head Darryl F Zanuck: “Am exceedingly sorry but I do not like it.” Monroe was briefly suspended by the studio. That month, January 1954, she married baseball star Joe DiMaggio – nearly 12 years her senior.
Taking control
It was a tumultuous marriage. DiMaggio was unhappy about the attention his wife received, and his jealousy of Monroe’s popularity and exhibitionism came to a head when he witnessed the shooting of the white dress scene for The Seven Year Itch. Monroe had no inclination to settle down to be the housewife DiMaggio wanted her to be. Instead, after nine months she divorced him and took control of her career.
On 31 December 1954, she set up Marilyn Monroe Productions Inc. with her photographer friend Milton Greene. She also moved to New York, leaving Hollywood and fame far behind. There she took lessons at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, famous for his ‘Method Acting’ technique, who considered her both a luminous natural talent and a painfully insecure woman.
This period in New York was a time of reinvention. Monroe announced that she didn’t “want to play sex roles any more”, and would rather perform in The Brothers Karamazov. During this time, photographer Ed Feingersh took some of the most atmospheric, candid and beautiful photos of Monroe. He captured her as she sat in restaurants, rode the subway and got ready for engagements in her hotel room, applying Chanel No 5. These were published in the magazine Redbook under the headline: ‘The Marilyn Monroe you’ve never seen’. Monroe was asserting her independence from the studio system, and pushing her claim to be a star with real talent, not merely an empty-headed blonde sex bomb.
In June 1955, Fox released The Seven Year Itch. It quickly proved to be more than an overwhelming commercial success: it was a cultural moment. The scene in which Marilyn Monroe’s pleated white skirt billows up around her hips became iconic, and her star status was confirmed.
Twentieth Century-Fox caved in to all her demands, and she signed a new contract committing to make four films over the next seven years. It gave her director and cinematographer approval, plus the freedom to pursue projects with her own production company. This was a groundbreaking rebellion in terms of Hollywood star power. Monroe was one of the very first women to break away on these terms, and to successfully challenge studio exploitation.
In the 10 years since she had signed with Blue Book Modelling Agency, Monroe had built a career that enabled her to acquire the rights to Terence Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince and to announce her intentions to film an adaptation. She cast herself in the lead role of Elsie Marina, with Sir Laurence Olivier her choice of leading man and director. Meanwhile, in June 1956, Monroe had married America’s leading playwright, the intellectual and political heavyweight Arthur Miller. Her reinvention was complete.
Disappointments and betrayals
After these major successes and steps, though, several factors combined to detract from Monroe’s stability and ability to live up to the high standards she set herself. Disappointments and betrayals in her marriage to Miller took a toll. She was hurt deeply when she discovered and read Miller’s notebook, in which he described how Monroe embarrassed him, and the couple suffered more than one miscarried pregnancy.
Her focus and professionalism were also compromised by ongoing problems with excessive medication for severe anxiety, depression and insomnia, her addiction to a concoction of drugs and champagne, and chronic mental and physical health issues that led to periods of hospitalisation.
Her relationships with men, too, were high profile and disheartening. Her last two completed films blended personal and professional lives in destructive ways. Let’s Make Love (1960), co-written by Miller, was not a commercial success, and Monroe had
a brief and destructive affair with French-Italian co-star Yves Montand, who was married to Simone Signoret. Her next film, The Misfits (1961), was a traumatic experience for all involved. Miller had written this apparent ‘Valentine’ to his sensitive, troubled wife to provide her with the type of dramatic role she craved. Instead it exposed her vulnerabilities and took her to a place of illness and distress. Her addictions exacerbated, she was hospitalised for exhaustion. Clark Gable, one of the film’s male stars, died 12 days after shooting wrapped. Miller and Monroe divorced before the film’s premiere. It was not a commercial hit.
Despite her devastation at Gable’s death and the end of her marriage, Monroe seemed set for a relaunch. She received medical treatment for mental and physical health problems, and returned to Los Angeles. There she purchased her first property and hunted for furniture and tiles, ready to settle and achieve some peace on her own terms.
She entered negotiations with Twentieth Century-Fox about her last contracted movie with them, and signed on to play the lead in Something’s Got to Give, directed by George Cukor and co-starring Dean Martin. Over the next few months, though, Monroe’s health deteriorated, and her repeated absences from the set enraged Fox executives. She had flown to New York to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to President JF Kennedy – with whom she reputedly had a brief affair – against the studio’s wishes. She was certainly committed to bolstering her star power and the movie’s success: footage shot of Monroe swimming in a pool by night, apparently naked, was arranged because she said she wanted to knock Elizabeth Taylor off the front pages. But she was too frequently absent, and Fox sacked her from the film.
Operation relaunch
That moment – with Monroe at rock bottom – is where the story stops in many tellings. In fact, her situation improved. Negotiations with Fox resumed, and she was re-hired to complete the picture for $250,000. She embarked on a public relations campaign, giving interviews and photo shoots to Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Life magazines, and was in discussions with Playboy for a cover story.
In her final interview, published in Life shortly before her death, she revealed that: “I’ve always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say ‘Hi’, that the people ought to get their money’s worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.” This commitment to her public, whom she always credited with making her a star, endured to her last days.
She died late at night on 4 August 1962, aged just 36, from acute barbiturate poisoning. Despite persistent conjecture about her death – classified as a probable suicide – we should look beyond the salacious details to consider Monroe’s legacy. First, she left a body of work that remains greatly loved, and which showcases her abilities and surprising range as an actor. A towering icon of Hollywood stardom, her looks epitomise glamour, and her performances are redolent of a long-past era of style and allure.
Filmmakers and storytellers continue to create biographical vignettes stuffed with clichés that perpetuate the narrative of Monroe as tragic victim. That is not an adequate picture of any life, let alone that of a woman who built a career in the toughest of environments at a time when domesticity, motherhood and contented wifehood were the best most could expect.
Marilyn Monroe would not let anybody – husband, lover, studio head or psychiatrist – thwart her ambitions. She was a gifted actor with an emotional honesty that lit up the screen in films that have stood the test of time. Her knowing, intelligent characterisations continue to set a benchmark for unselfconscious performance and authentic commitment to the craft of acting.
Lucy Bolton is professor of film philosophy at Queen Mary University of London. She is the editor of The Feminist Film Philosophy Reader, published by Bloomsbury Academic in June
This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[I went digging for buried Nazi gold – and this is what I discovered]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-went-digging-for-buried-nazi-gold-and-this-is-what-i-found/ 2026-04-26T16:01:04.000Z 2026-04-26T16:00:57.000Z I have been appearing in history documentaries for the best part of 20 years. Usually, they are something to do with the Third Reich and for the most part, the documentaries are weighty and serious, as indeed they should be. But nearly every year, I get a call – normally from a junior producer or researcher – who tells me they wish to make a documentary about Nazi gold, and if so, do I know where they might find some?
It’s at that point that I ask them to think about their question very carefully.
If – I say – I did know the location of a load of Nazi bullion, do they think I would tell them? For a day rate? Furthermore, wouldn’t I have gone and dug it up myself, and currently be speaking from my 20-bedroom mansion in the Maldives?
The line invariably goes silent as the logic of my position seeps in. I then add that if they really want to find themselves some Nazi gold, they should just go to Zurich or Geneva and knock on the door of any Swiss bank and ask for a peek in the vaults. So far, so cynical.
But then, in January 2023, my position changed with an intriguing release from the Dutch national archives: a real-life treasure map, hand-drawn by a Nazi paratrooper, revealing where he and his comrades had buried a load of loot they had stolen towards the end of the war. The map even had a red ‘X’ that marked the spot, outside a village called Ommeren, along what was the Allied front line of Operation Market Garden in 1944.
The story goes that during the military operation, a bank in Arnhem was hit by a bomb and a few German soldiers took what they could from the remains. As they retreated, they buried the treasure to keep it safe.
So, this wasn’t technically Nazi gold, but it was close enough – actual treasure looted by actual Nazis! That would do nicely and might even make a good short film.
And so, at 5am the following day, accompanied by my cameraman son William and his mate Magnus dragooned in to do the sound, I set off to the middle of the Netherlands from deepest Wiltshire, the boot of my creaking Land Rover loaded with picks and spades. All my grown-up historian’s wariness had melted away – I was literally on a hunt for Nazi gold.
Digging for clues
We arrived at the site at around lunchtime, not surprised to discover that others were hot on the trail too. We found a couple of teenagers uprooting a bush in someone’s front garden, but I was sure they were in the wrong place. Then we came across a man in his forties digging a very deep hole on the side of a road – he even had a professional metal detector – but he too was way out.
After overlaying the rough treasure map on a Google Maps satellite view, we made our way to a spot near a wood, where we came across a retired businessman called Jan, who agreed that surely, we were pretty close to that tantalising red ‘X’.
So out came my pick, and I dug. And dug. And dug.
And – as I had subconsciously known would be the case all along – up came nothing. All I had to show for my labours were some very muddy jeans and a telling off from a policeman, who didn’t take kindly to a crazy Englishman excavating a significant part of his beat. With the light fading, we called it a day and rewarded ourselves with liquid gold in the form of the local brew.
Despite my failure, I realised that the subject of Nazi gold might at least bring some TV treasure, rather than the actual stuff. The YouTube video we uploaded got a lot of views and was bought off William and turned into a streaming documentary by a production company. The Sunday Times even dedicated the whole third page of its news section to our adventures.
All this attention convinced me there was a series in this, and soon the good folks at the History Channel had commissioned me to present and direct a six-part series called The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold.
As well as looking for Nazi gold, my co-host Justine Ostrowska and I suspected it would be fun to broaden the remit, and so we included other treasures looted by the Nazis, such as the Amber Room (a gold-panelled chamber stripped from Russia’s Catherine Palace), the fabled Nazi gold train (an armoured locomotive stuffed with treasures, supposedly buried in Poland), and countless missing paintings.
Gangsters and Monuments Men
All of these are, in a sense, Nazi gold. The tone of the show, as you shall see, is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and we have as much fun meeting the wonderful – and sometimes weird – characters who are obsessed that such-and-such a spot contains billions of pounds of treasure, as we do in doing the digging ourselves.
But despite all the jocularity and my wariness of actually finding any treasure, the story of Nazi gold is a serious one. The Third Reich was undeniably a gangster state, and like all gangsters, the Nazis stole – and stole big time. Every country they invaded was plundered, its gold, silver, and other priceless treasures taken to Germany.
This is not to forget the gold stolen from the Jews, often gruesomely wrenched out of the mouths of so many corpses. It is hard to give a precise figure, but in today’s money, it is estimated that the Nazis stole some £8.5 billion worth of gold, of which some £1.5 billion to £3 billion was taken from Jews. This does not count the other treasures stolen, the value of which runs into the hundreds of billions.
The first obvious question is this: where did it all go?
The good news is that a lot was recovered. About half the bullion was found by the Americans in a massive mine called Merkers in Thuringia, while much other gold – and indeed silver – was found in banks in Berlin and throughout Germany.
Another billion pounds’ worth was unearthed in the hills above Lake Walchensee in southern Bavaria, where it had been taken by mules led by Nazi soldiers at the end of the war. Many artworks were discovered in a salt mine above the village of Altaussee in Austria by the Americans and their unit of ‘Monuments Men’ – a team of art experts seconded into the army and later the topic of a 2014 George Clooney movie.
And now for the next obvious question: how much is missing? It is impossible to give a reliable answer. Most sensible historians suspect the figure is very low, and if any gold is missing then it is extremely likely to lie in bank vaults in Switzerland. It is well known that many senior Nazis spirited their wealth into the country towards the end of the war, but thanks to the notorious secrecy of Swiss banking laws, to establish just how much is there – if any – is very difficult, to put it mildly.
But Switzerland was not the only country where the Nazis sent their plunder, with countries such as Spain and Argentina also receiving Nazi wealth, which was often laundered through a system of dummy companies.
Those of a more conspiratorial bent firmly believe that many millions of pounds worth of gold and artworks still lie hidden, and it is these characters that Justine and I decided to meet on our month-long road trip around central Europe over the summer.
Treasure hunters
Armed with proper treasure-hunting equipment, including pickaxes and metal detectors, we joined forces with those who have been hunting Nazi gold and treasure for decades. Some of those we met more than raised our eyebrows, while others were far more plausible and made me reevaluate my scepticism.
Among the latter was the charismatic Cornelia Ostler, who has been treasure hunting across Germany nearly all her life, a passion imbued in her by her late father, who was also a fanatical treasure hunter. Cornelia’s speciality is looking for the gold that she believes is still missing above Lake Walchensee. While many believe that it was all recovered, Cornelia is adamant that there is still some to be found, and her copious documentation and archive material is undoubtedly impressive – and pretty convincing.
Also plausible was a friendly German chap called Jürgen Proske, with whom we spent a sweltering day high up a mountainside in a secret location in southern Germany. Like Cornelia, Jürgen has been hunting all his life, and while he may not have found any gold, he has certainly found all sorts of Nazi-era relics, some of which are of much historical interest, and even have some monetary value.
Lending Justine his far more professional metal detector, I am delighted to report that we did indeed find something, and we found it quickly. I am not going to give away any plot spoilers, but all I can say is that Justine has not yet replaced her old Porsche.
What was refreshing about the likes of Jürgen and Cornelia is their acknowledgement that their chances are very slim indeed, but they both share a gut conviction that if there’s even a small chance of any Nazi gold still being out there, then it has got to be worth an effort. At the very least, treasure hunting is fun, good exercise, and as their spouses often comment, at least it’s a hobby that gets them out the house at the weekend.
A dark legacy
But then there are the hunters whose tales are just a little too tall for my taste. One of our ports of call was Wałbrzych in southwest Poland, where it is said that a whole train of Nazi gold is hidden in a hillside. The leading proponent of this theory is Piotr Koper, who says that he has spent the value of a second home in looking for the train. He has commissioned extensive ground radar surveys, and while the endless readouts and bits of data all seem very impressive, I’m not sure they scream ‘Nazi gold train’ at me.
- Read more | Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
Nevertheless, we did go and have a look, and unfortunately all Justine found was the existence of a place which truckers seem to regard as an open-air lavatory, a discovery that meant we had to keep the windows open when Justine got back in the Jeep.
Then there was Burkhardt List, a historian and inveterate treasure hunter, who is absolutely determined that a stash of artwork worth hundreds of millions is located deep beneath a clearing in a wood near the Czech-German border. I liked Burkhardt, but as the show reveals, I didn’t care much for his theory. When I asked him what was stopping him from trying to arrange an excavation, he looked at me darkly and informed me that the ‘Fourth Reich’ was against him, and that agents of this nefarious network of neo-Nazis had even gone so far as to attempt to poison him.
Ultimately, the biggest lesson I learned from The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold was that you never know. It is easy to be sceptical, and to be honest, I largely still am, but there are enough sensible people who think there might be a bar or two of gold kicking around some Mitteleuropean mountainside. And of course, if they find it, then perhaps they will end up in their very own mansion in the Maldives.
But then again, the decent thing to do would be to give it back to those from whom it was stolen. What’s important to remember is that the story of Nazi gold, while entertaining on one level, is also very dark indeed.
Guy Walters is a historian, author and journalist. He is the co-host of The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold, a Sky History documentary
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it back]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/blood-and-plunder-the-looted-african-gold-and-the-fight-to-get-it-back/ 2026-04-24T14:31:04.000Z 2026-04-24T14:30:43.000Z In a poorly lit cabinet in the Oriental Armoury of London’s Wallace Collection, there is a near-life size gold cast head, weighing nearly 1.5kg. It is perhaps the largest gold object to have come from Africa outside of ancient Egypt. When this head arrived in England in 1874, part of the haul of treasure brought back by Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army from the kingdom of Asante in west Africa, it attracted widespread comment, not all favourable. The Times said: it “seems to represent the head of a victim gagged for sacrifice”, and pronounced it “ghastly”. The Illustrated London News said it was “hideous and horrible”. But Richard Wallace, the wealthy aristocrat whose collection was later bequeathed to the nation, may have disagreed, because he paid £500 for it (about £62,000 today). In 1974, William Fagg, a curator at the British Museum, said the ‘Wallace Head’ was “a masterpiece… a technically excellent piece of lost-wax craftsmanship” that impacted like “a bomb” on the complacent artistic sensibilities of Victorian London.
What was the African civilisation that had produced this golden head? And how did it, and other Asante pieces, end up in British museums and private collections? The Asante kingdom traces its origins to the late 17th century, when smaller kingdoms inland in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) amalgamated under the control of a ruler based in the emerging city of Kumasi.
Europeans were familiar with the Gold Coast, having traded there for gold, as the name suggests, but also enslaved people, ever since the 15th century. In the 18th century, Asante profited handsomely through both these trades, typically selling gold and human captives through Fante middlemen to the British, Portuguese, Dutch and other Europeans in their castles on the coast. But it wasn’t until 1817 that a British delegation travelled some 125 miles inland to Kumasi, and paid its respects to the Asante king, known as the Asantehene. One of the envoys, a young man from Bristol called Thomas Bowdich, wrote that Kumasi was a wealthy city with elegant architecture and sophisticated public hygiene. The Asantehene and his courtiers, he wrote, wore “massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction”.
Bowdich’s descriptions caused incredulity and excitement in Britain. But his delegation failed to build a lasting friendship with Asante. By the early 19th century, Britain, hitherto an enthusiastic slave trading nation, had embraced abolitionism. The Asantehene, Osei Bonsu, worried about this threat to his wealth, and asked Bowdich whether the British king could “renew the slave trade, which will be good for me”.
Over the following 50 years, as Britain tightened its control of the Gold Coast at the expense of European rivals, and as Asante maintained supremacy of the interior, there were sporadic tensions – notably in 1824 when a British invasion of Asante ended in defeat and the death and decapitation of the commanding officer, Sir Charles MacCarthy – but also decades of uneasy Anglo-Asante coexistence. This all changed in 1871, when Britain purchased Elmina, the largest trading castle on the coast, from the Dutch, despite Asante insistence it belonged to them. In January 1873, an Asante army swept south and invaded the British coastal protectorate, to the surprise of William Gladstone’s government in London.
In May 1873, Earl Kimberley, the colonial secretary, said that any attempt to conquer Asante would be “mad”. But the ambitious officer appointed to lead the British response, Sir Garnet Wolseley, had other ideas. Wolseley, just 40 but already a veteran of wars in Burma, Crimea, India, China and Canada, was determined the British would march to Kumasi. If the Asantehene, Kofi Karikari, would not make peace, he would “destroy his palaces, burn his capital, and lay waste his country as well as I could”. While politicians prevaricated, Wolseley shaped events on the ground. By January 1874, he was leading three battalions of British soldiers, plus many African allies and carriers, into the Asante forest.
- Read more | Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum
The Asante army – armed with muskets – fought bravely, but was outgunned by the British, equipped with new Snider rifles. At the battle of Amoafo, many hundreds or even thousands of Asante soldiers, but only four British, were killed. One British sailor wrote that it was “murder, not a fair fight”. On 4 February, the British entered Kumasi, only to find that Karikari had fled. Wolseley, concerned about disease and encroaching rains, decided not to linger. Instead, he would leave the Asante with “a wholesome fear of the British power”. He ordered his soldiers to take treasure from the unguarded palace, and then blow it up, and to set fire to Kumasi to ensure “its total destruction”. Then he abandoned the burning city.
Wolseley wrote that Karikari was “a brutal and deceitful monarch”. The British sense of racial superiority – Wolseley wrote that black people were suited only for slavery – had been reinforced by the apparent discovery in Kumasi of evidence of mass human sacrifice by the Asante.
Gold is always pretty
On 13 February, the Asantehene’s envoys caught up with Wolseley on his march back to the coast, and agreed to a humiliating surrender. They handed over 1,000 ounces of gold objects, a tiny fraction of the 50,000-ounce “indemnity” demanded by Wolseley, but which included a significant part of the Asantehene’s regalia, essential to his political and spiritual authority. A history of Asante, written by one of Karikari’s successors, laments that the British were so impatient “that it was not even possible to call any of the provincial chiefs into Kumasi to contribute what they could. So King Kofi Karikari was obliged to bear the brunt of this payment alone.”
Wolseley, who had already witnessed notorious plunders by British soldiers of palaces in India and China, drew a distinction between disorganised looting, which undermined military discipline and was therefore undesirable, and the acceptable collection of ‘prize’, to be auctioned off with the income shared among the troops. In accordance with this philosophy, when the British reached their headquarters at Cape Coast they held an auction of treasure from the Asantehene’s palace. The Daily Telegraph wrote: “The long centre table was covered as thickly as it could bear with jewellery and gold. The prize agent… had shown considerable taste in the arrangements of their stores… and gold is always pretty.” The auction was enthusiastically attended by many of the Cape Coast elite, delighted by the defeat of the feared Asante.
Many of the most valuable items, however, were sold in London in the spring of 1874 at Garrard, the crown jewellers in the West End, which had paid £11,000 (about £1.4m today) for the collection. Wolseley returned to Britain a hero – cheered by crowds, feted by Queen Victoria and the new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, parodied on stage as ‘The Very Model of a Modern Major General’ – and so the sale of “the golden spoil from Ashantee” attracted considerable excitement. Queen Victoria took some pieces of treasure – presented to her by the soldiers – and this added to its prestige.
For most of the aristocrats and others who crowded Garrard’s rooms, Asante objects were exotic souvenirs of a British victory, “treasured… as memorials of the recent struggle”, as The Times put it. William Cecil, the Marquess of Exeter, for example, bought two gold badges and mounted them on gilt-silver trays with his family crest and an inscription. In this way, what had been sacred objects in Asante – the badges, known as akrafokonmu, were worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul – became trophies. (One of Cecil’s mounted badges was bought by the British Museum in the 1970s, after passing through various wealthy owners).
Hints of humility
Amid the general triumphalism, there were some doubts. The Welsh nonconformist MP Henry Richard observed that “scarcely any Englishman could look back with pride” on what happened in Asante and other recent campaigns in Asia and Africa. “Those were not triumphs of Christian civilisation but of barbarism and brute force.”
Newspaper reviews of the Garrard sale also contain hints of humility. Asante, and Africa more generally, was perceived in Britain as a place without culture. And yet, The Times wrote, the gold badges were “wonderful… it would be difficult for any skilled goldsmith in western Europe not so much to surpass, but even to equal them”.
Inevitably, Britain’s museums took an interest. It was the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A) that reacted first. The keeper of its Art Library, Robert Soden Smith, recognised Asante goldwork as “the most striking illustration… of the art of an ancient race hitherto imperfectly known to us”, and bought an elegant gold pipe, several badges and pieces of decorated sheet gold.
The British Museum curator, Augustus Wollaston Franks, bought 10 objects initially, but grumbled that “some of the more dramatic specimens have been secured by private individuals”. He was probably thinking of Richard Wallace, who bought not only the gold head but also 15 other Asante objects, including swords and a pair of cast eagles, for a total of £1,256 (about £155,000 today), making him the largest purchaser. His biographer Suzanne Higgott says that Wallace craved recognition, and the Asante objects, “exceptional, high status and intriguingly ‘Oriental’”, therefore had obvious appeal. All of Wallace’s Asante purchases are still in the Wallace Collection today.
The British Museum was able to enlarge its collection of Asante gold regalia over subsequent decades. This was in part because the British government gradually released more pieces which had been taken by Wolseley’s soldiers, but also because in 1896 another British army ransacked the rebuilt palace in Kumasi, and again carried off as much treasure as it could find. Today the British Museum has about 550 objects taken in the Anglo-Asante wars, of which some 220 are made of gold.
Some of the most important pieces of Asante loot, however, remain in private hands or are otherwise hidden from public view. The Royal Artillery officer’s mess, in Larkhill near Salisbury, has an exquisite golden ram’s-head mask – 19cm in width and weighing 1.2kg – which William Fagg described as “a marvel of ethereal eggshell thin-lightness…among the most striking examples of west African metallurgy”.
It was taken from the Asantehene’s palace by officers who were close to Sir Garnet Wolseley. Rather than being auctioned off, he allowed them to buy it directly for £135 (about £17,000 today). When the officers returned to England, newspapers reported they had “the best trophy… very valuable”. In 1875, the Royal Artillery sealed the ram’s head in a glass dome and mounted it on a stand which is carried on the backs of three bowed African figures, dressed in loincloths. Once again, Asante regalia was transformed into a British military souvenir. Today the ram’s head is only accessible to officers and their invited guests. The Royal Artillery declined my requests to see it.
Decades of campaigning
The Asante people still refer to the 1874 war as ‘the Sagrenti War’, from the local pronunciation of ‘Sir Garnet’. It was a seminal moment in their kingdom’s decline. By the 1880s, according to their own histories, “Kumasi was losing its power and… falling into a ruinous state”. In 1901 the British formally annexed Asante territory. They sent the then Asantehene, Agyeman Prempeh, into exile on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he spent more than two decades.
- Read more | Who should decide the stories museums tell?
In 1957 the Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana, but the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions. They have campaigned for decades for the return of the regalia. In 1974 the Asantehene, Opoku Ware II, wrote that the centenary of Wolseley’s expedition marked an “auspicious occasion on which to press for the return of objects of the deepest significance” to the Asante. This set off a flurry of diplomacy. Some British diplomats argued in favour of returning regalia, and the British Museum’s director, John Pope-Hennessey, told his trustees “there is widely conceded to be some moral weight behind the Asantehene’s request”. But the negotiations floundered, in part because even British officials who favoured flexibility could see no way round the 1963 British Museum Act, which makes it almost impossible for that institution to permanently return, or ‘deaccession’, items in its collection.
In 2023 the current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, raised the matter again, when he visited London to attend the coronation of his friend, Charles III. This time, his appeal fell on fertile ground. Museums in the west were under pressure to address the legacies of the colonial period and, in particular, to return objects taken by force. In 2024 the British Museum and the V&A (also constrained by national legislation from making permanent returns) announced they would return on long-term loan (for probably six or nine years) 32 pieces of Asante regalia. The Fowler Museum in Los Angeles announced that it was permanently returning seven objects looted by Wolseley’s army.
In response to these developments, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the director of the Asantehene’s museum in Kumasi, said: “We want to get back as many objects as is humanly possible… We just want people to see what our civilisation was, and how it can inspire the present.” How many treasures the Asante people do get back – and for how long they get to keep them – is bound to remain the subject of intense debate for years.
“What we have here embodies the soul of Asante”
The return of 32 pieces of gold regalia in 2024 sparked joy – and anger – among the Asante people, writes Barnaby Phillips
On 1 May 2024, I waited in the sweltering heat outside the Manhyia Palace Museum, in Kumasi, Ghana, alongside local chiefs, foreign diplomats and museum officials. The banners on the museum’s walls proclaimed: “Homecoming; Adversity and Commemoration”. This was the ceremony to mark the return of 32 pieces of Asante gold regalia – among them, sacred badges, a helmet, a ceremonial sword and bracelets – that had been looted by British soldiers in 1874 and 1896. The Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, dressed in green robes and a golden headdress, arrived to the shouts of praise singers and the beating of drums, protected from the sun by a huge tasselled umbrella carried by his entourage. The director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, bowed low before the Asantehene and addressed the crowd: “We acknowledge the very painful history surrounding the acquisition of these objects, a history tainted by the scars of imperial conquest and colonialism.” It would have been difficult to imagine the director of a major British museum using these words anywhere, let alone in this context, just a few years ago. The Asantehene, for his part, said the British had returned a small part of what they had taken. “But what we have here embodies the soul of Asante. Today is a happy day for Asante, for the black African continent.” People cheered and filed excitedly into the museum, where they admired the glittering gold treasure, beautifully displayed on green cloth in glass display cases. Not everybody in Ghana felt so positive. Many were upset that the British were only returning objects on loan. Nii Kwate Owoo, a Ghanaian filmmaker who attended the ‘Homecoming’ ceremony, told me: “It turns my stomach, to be quite frank. An armed robber comes into your house, mows down your family and grabs your valuables, and comes back later and says: ‘Okay, you’re making noises, I’ll give this back as a loan!’” Inside the museum, I encountered more nuanced reactions. A museum guide, Sammy Amoah, said the return of the regalia was “important because it confirms history. That what we’ve been taught in books about our own past is true.”
Barnaby Phillips is a historian and conservationist. His new book, The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure, was published by Oneworld in March
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a mother?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/queen-elizabeth-ii-what-kind-mother-monarch-dynasty-family/ 2026-04-21T12:49:36.000Z 2026-04-20T00:30:58.000Z They might not be the first monikers to spring to mind when thinking of Queen Elizabeth II, a monarch who was renowned for her sense of duty and her dignified demeanour, but “Gary” and “Cabbage” are two of the nicknames bestowed upon her by her family.
“Gary” was how Prince William knew his grandmother as a youngster, apparently confusing the word with “Granny”, while the Queen’s great-grandchildren Prince George and Princess Charlotte know the Queen affectionately as “Gan-Gan”. As for “Cabbage”, this was the fond nickname used by her husband Prince Philip – which might come from the French term of endearment, “mon petit chou”, translated to “my little cabbage”.
Was Elizabeth II a mother when she came to the throne?
As matriarch of “The Firm” (the insider name for the royal family) and the oldest monarch in British history, it’s perhaps easy to forget that Elizabeth assumed the throne in 1952 at the age of just 25, the mother of two young children. Thrust into royal duties, she faced the immediate challenge of balancing the work of monarchy with the demands of motherhood, a battle which was present throughout her reign.
Just 18 months after her accession in 1952, Elizabeth II was called upon to tour 13 countries, including Australia, over six months, without Charles, age five, and Anne, age three. The young children were famously greeted with handshakes upon the return of their parents, and though she dispensed with some of the more formal royal traditions – the children were not required to bow or curtsey to their mother – their childhoods were marked by absence.
The prince and princess were largely raised in their younger years by governesses and other household staff, in the same way that Elizabeth and Margaret had been by “Crawfie”, in keeping with the manner of many upper-class families of the time. The children were required to understand that travel and time were part of the monarch’s commitment to rule.
It was a decade after Anne that the Queen gave birth to her third child, Prince Andrew, in 1960. Prince Edward followed in 1964, making the two sons the first children to be born to a reigning monarch since Queen Victoria. Ten years after her accession, many noted a difference in the Queen’s relationship with her two younger sons. Royal historian Robert Lacey suggests the Queen became “warmer and flexible”, able to step back a little from her duties.
What were Queen Elizabeth’s relationships with her children like?
Both Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip agreed that their children should not be hampered, as they saw it, by the social and educational constraints of homeschooling, which had previously been the norm for royals. Yet Charles’s education was far from straightforward. Prince Philip wished Charles to be sent to Gordonstoun school in Scotland, hoping to make his son in his own image. The Queen Mother (who favoured Eton, close to Charles’s Windsor home) wrote to the Queen in 1961, saying, “it is miles and miles away, he might as well be at school abroad. He would be terribly cut off and lonely up in the far north.”
The Queen Mother’s fears for her sensitive grandson were not unfounded. Two years after the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992 (which saw the marriages of three of her children break down amid tabloid scandal, as well as a fire at Windsor Castle) an authorised biography of Prince Charles dealt perhaps the harshest blow to the Queen’s reputation as a mother.
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The 1994 account, written by Jonathan Dimbleby, described the bullying and “crushing loneliness” Charles experienced at school, and a childhood characterised by long periods of his mother’s absence. Charles was said to feel “emotionally estranged” from his parents and yearning for affection that, in his view, they were “unable or unwilling to offer”. The book declared Charles’s bonds of affection to be much stronger with his nanny Mabel Anderson and detailed how the Queen would spend short windows of allotted time with her son in the morning before his daily walk and before bedtime. Historian Piers Brendon has suggested that in contrast to the “tremendously affectionate, and very welcoming and warm” Queen Mother, with whom Charles had a close relationship, Elizabeth II was “a very distant mother”.
- Read more | A brief history of royal mothers and childbirth
Yet in a 2002 BBC documentary, Princess Anne said: “We understood what the limitations were in time and the responsibilities placed on her as monarch, in the things she had to do and the travels she had to make.
“But I don’t believe that any of us, for a second, thought she didn’t care for us in exactly the same way as any other mother did. I just think it’s extraordinary that anybody could construe that that might not be true.”
What was Queen Elizabeth II like as a grandmother?
If the Queen’s reputation as a mother has been characterised as distant by some, there was a more palpable fondness for her eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. From the birth of her first grandchild – Peter Phillips, the son of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, born in 1977 – the Queen took on a new persona; the dutiful grandmother who inspired by example.
“I’ve always been very close to my grandmother, and we speak often,” Peter Phillips told The Telegraph in 2016. “She has been an inspirational person throughout my life.”
In 2018, Princess Beatrice told of how her grandmother “goes out into the community with a genuine curiosity as to how she can be a force for good in the world”.
Though duty evidently came first, there was also an enduring sense of fun that she shared with those close to her. Many royal sources have recounted how the Queen was an excellent mimic, and particularly fond of impersonating former prime ministers and US presidents she had known through the years (some favourite impressions were reported to be René from TV show ’Allo ’Allo! and Labour politician Tony Benn). One royal aide, Angela Kelly, shared how the Queen has “a wicked [mischievous] of humour”.
The Queen proved herself an adept grandmother in the 21st-century online world too, no more evident than when she joined her grandson Prince Harry in 2016, recording a sassy comedy video message to US president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama in order to promote the Invictus Games.
At Christmas, even as her descendants started their own families, the Queen remained at the centre of the royals’ festive celebrations, bringing together the whole family at her Sandringham residence. At 6pm sharp, the tradition was for adults to exchange cheap joke gifts and Prince Harry could clearly get away with a little extra cheekiness towards his grandmother. On one such occasion he gave the Queen a shower cap with the slogan: ‘Ain’t life a bitch’.
Elizabeth II’s ancestor Queen Victoria was notoriously meddlesome in the marriages of her grandchildren – as ‘Grandmama Queen’ she felt uniquely placed to orchestrate the marriages of her 42 grandchildren, manoeuvring them into seats of European power.
The Queen did hold the power to exercise control over her descendants’ marriages – though not all; since 2013, the Succession to the Crown Act has meant that only the first six royals in line to the throne require the monarch’s permission to validate their marriages. So in 2018, Princess Eugenie could marry without the Queen’s consent (though it’s unlikely that she wasn’t consulted), whereas Prince Harry still had to obtain the monarch’s permission. This the Queen duly bestowed, writing in her official capacity: “My lords, I declare My Consent to a Contract of Matrimony between My Most Dearly Beloved Grandson Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales and Rachel Meghan Markle.”
It’s clear though that her grandchildren valued the Queen’s approval beyond an official seal. And it seems that a sure way to impress the monarch was by getting on with her beloved corgis.
“For the last 33 years, I’ve been barked at,” Harry told the BBC ahead of his 2018 wedding. That apparently wasn’t the case for the Duchess of Sussex. “This one walks in,” the prince joked, indicating his bride-to-be, “Absolutely nothing. Just wagging tails.”
The Queen also publicly showed her support and welcome to her grandsons’ wives by lending them two significant family heirlooms for their weddings. The Duchess of Sussex wore the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary’s platinum and diamond bandeau tiara for her wedding in May 2018.
The Duchess of Cambridge wore the Queen’s Cartier scroll tiara, purchased by the Queen’s father King George VI and given to Elizabeth on the princess’s 18th birthday.
Long to reign over us
More than seven decades after starting her own family, it’s clear that the late Queen imbued her dynasty with her own strong sense of duty and service. She served as the figurehead of the family, an inspiring example by which to measure their own public activities.
Despite the familiarity, it’s also clear that the Queen was still able to keep her family on their toes. In 2018, Prince Harry gave the following advice to a group of visitors to Buckingham Palace: “If you suddenly bump into her in the hallway, don’t panic. I know you will. We all do.”
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[16 of the worst monarchs in history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/9-of-the-worst-monarchs-in-history/ 2026-10-14T22:34:41.000Z 2026-04-17T11:12:27.000Z The past has no shortage of disastrous kings, queens, and other rulers; such a list could easily have been filled with the worst Roman emperors alone. Some have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; simply incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France.
But who are truly the worst, and why? Jonny Wilkes makes the case against 16 rulers from history…
1. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus
King of Rome, 534–509 BC
Before Rome had emperors, it had a line of kings going back to the city’s mythical founder, Romulus. The last, however, presided over a reign of terror so bad that the people gave up on the monarchy altogether, heralding the dawn of the Republic.
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (commonly known as ‘Tarquin the Proud’) had seized the throne by planning the assassination of his own father-in-law, then once in power he killed senators on a whim and imprisoned or executed anyone suspected of disloyalty.
His undoing came when his son raped a noblewoman, which caused such outrage that a revolt broke out that saw the tyrannical king overthrown and exiled. In his doomed attempts to regain the throne, he persuaded neighbouring cities to attack Rome, seemingly unfazed by the damage this would do to his erstwhile kingdom.
2. Commodus
Roman emperor, 177–92 AD
There are a number of contenders to the title of ‘most despicable emperor of Rome’, so we could just as easily be discussing the cruel and murderous rules of, say, Nero and Caligula.
The bloodthirsty, vainglorious spendthrift, Commodus, however, went from inheriting an empire enjoying a long period of peace and prosperity, the Pax Romana, to leaving it broke and in turmoil. If not executing anyone he suspected of plotting against him, he was leaving the job of ruling the empire to a series of corrupt, cruel and incompetent favourites. He much preferred to fight as a gladiator, relishing in slaughtering a menagerie of animals in the arena.
No wonder, then, that Commodus was chosen as the villain in Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals masterpiece, Gladiator.
3. John
King of England, 1199–1216
Seriously, how could the arch-villain of Robin Hood not make an appearance? Beyond the tale of the fabled outlaw, John severely damaged the authority of the English monarchy. As a prince, he angered the nobles of Ireland and attempted to steal his brother Richard I’s crown, only ending up as king after Richard died without a legitimate heir. Notably, he also managed to outmanoeuvre a rival claim from his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, whom he is later believed to have had murdered.
Within a few years in power, John had lost Normandy – the foundation of his family’s Angevin empire on the continent – then he emptied the kingdom’s coffers trying to win it back. His oppressively high taxes, his clashes with the church and his cruel and conniving personality all led to a revolt of England’s barons.
Under threat of civil war, John was forced to seal Magna Carta, a historic document that limited royal power. He then proceeded to ignore it. The barons rose up again and John’s reign ended, dying of dysentery, as he fought to keep hold of his kingdom.
4. Wanyan Chenglin
Emperor of the Jin dynasty, 1234
On 9 February 1234, with the warriors of the Mongol empire besieging the city of Caizhou, the emperor of the Jin dynasty in China, Aizong, knew that his 10-year reign would be over shortly. That said, he did not want to be the last in his line, so he abdicated and passed the throne to his general, Wanyan Chenglin, before taking his own life.
The reluctant new emperor began a reign that would be doomed to last just a matter of hours. He was killed leading his soldiers in a last stand when the Mongols broke through the city walls.
5. Charles the Bad
King of Navarre, 1349–87
The name gives away why he belongs on this list, doesn’t it? Charles earned ‘the Bad’ for his duplicitous and treacherous behaviour in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Although King of Navarre in Spain, he owned a lot of land in northern France, which put him in the middle of the conflict, and his response was to keep flipping sides.
Driven solely by ambition, he believed he should be on the French throne, and he plotted and murdered to get it. All the while, Navarre went ignored. What made him truly bad, though, was that his schemes failed utterly. Charles is perhaps best-known today for his grisly end in 1387, when the brandy-soaked sheets he had been wrapped in to cure an illness accidentally caught fire, burning him alive.
6. Henry VI
King of England, 1422–61, 1470–71
Ascending the throne of England as an infant and the son of the hero of Agincourt, the young Henry VI was always going to struggle to live up to his dynastic legacy.
Not helped by his total lack of leadership, it went even worse than feared: he lost control of France (won by his father Henry V), suffered a mental breakdown, and saw his kingdom plunge into the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian cause would be headed not by the king, but his queen, Margaret.
Henry’s role amounted to being kicked off the throne by the Yorkist Edward IV, then placed back on it by the ‘kingmaker’, the Earl of Warwick, and finally losing it again after being captured.
7. Christian II
King of Denmark and Norway, 1513–23
Christian’s reign may seem more insignificant than terrible at first glance, but it signalled the end of the Kalmar Union, which had bound together the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden for well over a century. Having been crowned in the first two of those countries in 1513, he set out to secure the third.
It would not be until 1520 that he captured Stockholm, although, hardly magnanimous in victory, his immediate action was to execute 82 nobles. The so-called Stockholm Bloodbath fuelled a Swedish rebellion against Christian and weakened his authority back in Denmark and Norway.
He was overthrown and exiled, and then when he launched a desperate bid to win back his thrones by force, he was imprisoned for the rest of his life.
8. Ivan the Terrible
Tsar of Russia, 1547–84
As the first tsar, Ivan was in some ways an able ruler since he laid the foundations of the Russian empire. He became known as ‘the Terrible’ for a reason, though. Having hated the nobles from an early age (at 13, he had one fed to a pack of dogs), he wasted no time in purging the upper classes.
The domain he inherited clearly was not enough: he instigated numerous, and disastrous, wars of expansion, and even established his own fiefdom within his land where, essentially, anything went. With Ivan prone to paranoia and fits of rage, no one was safe: he ordered a full-on attack on one of his own cities, Novgorod, and beat his daughter-in-law into having a miscarriage, then murdered his son.
9. Rudolf II
Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612
Despite being hailed as a generous patron of the arts and sciences, Habsburg emperor Rudolf II utterly failed in his role as the leader of one of Europe’s major powers. Rather than focusing on politics and administration, he instead shut himself away to focus on personal pursuits like alchemy.
When he did show some determination – starting a war with the Ottoman empire to unify Christendom – it proved a disaster. His subjects in Hungary revolted and his family made him hand over power to his younger brother.
Rudolf’s most damning legacy, however, was that his miserable tenure as emperor has been blamed as one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.
- Read more | What was the Habsburg jaw?
10. Louis XV
King of France, 1715–74
It could certainly be argued that Louis XV’s status as a poor king of France was overshadowed by his successor, Louis XVI, since he was the one who lost his head in the French Revolution. Yet Louis XV’s reign sowed the seeds of the people’s discontent that would lead to such a violent rejection of the monarchy. In short, he was a deeply ineffectual ruler, let alone the all-powerful absolutist king that France had become accustomed to under Louis XIV.
Reports of corruption and handing over influence to his mistresses hurt the crown’s authority, while his wars and extravagant spending depleted the coffers. France became a less powerful nation under his rule, and smaller too: he gave up New France in the Americas after the disastrous Seven Years’ War.
11. Ferdinand VII
King of Spain, 1808, 1813–33
Shortly after taking the throne in 1808, Ferdinand handed over his kingdom – and himself – to Napoleon Bonaparte. Six years of captivity in France later, he returned with a need to prove his absolutist credentials and so ditched Spain’s liberal constitution that had been written in his absence. This led to multiple uprisings, notably the revolt of 1820, which ushered in three years during which the king was forced to accept a constitutional regime.
While more selfish than monstrous, Ferdinand’s legacy and place on this list were confirmed by two things: he oversaw the loss of nearly all of Spain’s colonial territories in the Americas and, following his death, his petty bid to exclude his brother from the succession resulted in a long civil war.
12. Ranavalona I
Queen of Imerina, 1828–61
To try and hold back the wave of European colonisation in Africa, Queen Ranavalona I, of modern-day Madagascar, would go to any lengths. She wanted to purge all foreign influence, expelling missionaries, persecuting Christians and restricting trade. She even tried to have a giant pair of scissors made so that she could literally chop foreigners in half.
The ones who suffered the most, however, were her people: to preserve her land’s self-sufficiency and way of life, as she saw it, Ranavalona used forced labour for her royal projects and fear to maintain order.
Many executions took the form of the tangena ordeal, a witch-hunt-style trial where the accused was made to ingest poison and if they showed any adverse effects, they were deemed guilty. It is claimed that as much as 50 per cent of the population perished during her rule.
13. Leopold II
King of the Belgians, 1865–1909
Leopold II may not have been a terrible king in Belgium itself, but with the Congo Free State, he revealed just how much of a monster he could be. In 1885, he created his own state in central Africa, having convinced European powers that he intended to improve the lives of the people living there.
In reality, this privately owned kingdom allowed Leopold to exploit the Congolese people so that he could make money from its ivory and natural rubber reserves. Under his system of forced labour, any workers who failed to meet their quotas would be punished with mutilation. Leopold’s preferred method was chopping off hands and feet. Millions died from the brutality and rampant diseases.
This was an age where European empires carved up and exploited the African continent, so the fact that international outrage finally forced Leopold to hand over the Congo Free State illustrates the appalling extent of the atrocities.
14. Khalid ibn Barghash
Sultan of Zanzibar, 1896
Not only did Khalid ibn Barghash rule for just three days, but he was ousted in the shortest war in history. So, in truth, there is no knowing whether he would have been a bad ruler: there wasn’t enough time. In 1896, the sultan of Zanzibar died, which put the British in a tough position. They controlled the islands off the east African coast as it served as a strategic trade post for the Indian Ocean.
Against British wishes, Khalid, who may well have killed his predecessor, assumed the role of sultan and fortified the palace with around 3,000 supporters. The British sent warships, though, and initiated a brief bombardment. The Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted around 38 minutes, and Khalid fled into exile.
15. Nicholas II
Tsar of Russia, 1894–1917
The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for more than 300 years – and it all ended during the reign of Nicholas II. Not suited to wielding autocratic power over a huge empire, he made a catalogue of errors and refused to adapt beyond his rigid belief that he had the divinely ordained right to rule.
In 1905 alone, Russia lost a war with Japan and broke out in revolution, yet Nicholas only made cursory changes and tried to move on. His court became dominated by the strange and ambitious mystic, Rasputin, his nobles and politicians abandoned him, and his decision to take command of the armies in the First World War meant that he was held personally responsible for every defeat and death.
Revolution erupted again in 1917, forcing his abdication. While imprisoned by the revolutionaries, Nicholas and his entire family were murdered. It was a bloody and definitive end to the tsars, as Russia became a communist regime.
16. Edward VIII
King of England, 1936
Edward became king on 20 January 1936, on the death of his father George V. Before the year was out, he had abdicated in disgrace. His brief reign had entirely been focused on his wish to marry an American named Wallis Simpson, but she had been divorced once and was seeking a second, making her wholly unacceptable to the royal family, the political establishment and the church.
Yet his reputation as a bad monarch could have been even worse had he stayed: Edward has long been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser, who toured Hitler’s Germany almost two years before the Second World War.
]]> Jonathan Wright <![CDATA[8 weird stories from the Space Age: from hungry tortoises to gorilla suits]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/cold-war/weird-stories-space-age-nasa-artemis/ 2026-04-01T18:24:09.000Z 2026-04-01T18:03:43.000Z Exploring space is a serious business. To use the term employed by Tom Wolfe in his 1979 book about the first US test pilots to enter astronaut training, you need the “right stuff” to sit atop an enormous firework leaving the protection of our atmosphere.
But space travel is also a human endeavour. In the heavens as on Earth, that means it throws up stories that can be bizarre, funny or melancholy. As Nasa prepares to send astronauts back to the vicinity of the moon for the first time since 1972, here are eight strange-but-true tales from the ongoing history of the Space Age.
1. Ballistic legacy
At the end of the Second World War, the USSR and the US competed to snaffle up as much German rocketry expertise and kit as possible. So it was that, despite his Nazi past, V-2 co-designer Wernher von Braun became chief architect of the Apollo programme’s Saturn V rocket.
Less well remembered is the role of the V-2 itself in space exploration. In 1945, US Army Special Mission V-2 recovered parts and equipment needed to make the missiles from an underground factory in eastern Germany. Subsequently, much of the haul was taken to the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, where initial work resulted in the assembly of 25 rockets.
The first flights from the US followed in the spring of 1946. By October, the grandly named Upper Atmosphere Research Panel was expert enough in launching missiles to use one to capture the first photograph of the Earth from space. A terror weapon had found a more noble purpose.
2. The dog who died
In the early years of spaceflight, it was far too dangerous to send humans into the great beyond. Instead, scientists sent animals. As early as 1946, the Americans blasted fruit flies into space. Monkeys and mice followed in their wake.
But perhaps the most famous creature to leave Earth was Laika (‘Barker’). A stray mongrel, she was taken off the streets of Moscow by biologists working for the city’s Aviation Institute – the idea being to find animals that were friendly yet also tough, streetwise. And female, so they wouldn’t need to cock their legs to pee. On 3 November 1957, Laika became the first animal to orbit the Earth.
Sadly, at a time when re-entry technology had yet to be developed, she died of hyperthermia. But her journey aboard Sputnik 2, nicknamed ‘Muttnik’ by the US press, captured the public’s imagination.
3. Space pup détente
Unlike the ill-fated Laika, Belka (‘Squirrel’) and Strelka (‘Little Arrow’) survived spaceflight. In August 1960, aboard Korabl-Sputnik 2, the two dogs circled the Earth for 27 hours in the company of 40 mice, a couple of rats, a grey rabbit and some flies. The serious point of the exercise was to understand how time in zero gravity would affect the creatures.
Strelka had six puppies. In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev sent one of the puppies, Pushinka, ‘Fluffy’, to President John F Kennedy. Once the FBI had checked out Pushinka for surveillance bugs, she joined the First Family. Less suspicious was the Kennedys’ pet dog Charlie, who fathered four ‘pupniks’ in June 1963. Although JFK wrote to Khrushchev to thank him for the gift, he was allergic to Pushinka, who made him sneeze and brought him out in a rash.
4. Aliens ahoy?
Considering the rigorous psychological evaluations required to become an astronaut, it’s unsurprising that few spacefarers have reported seeing UFOs – when they have sighted odd objects, they have offered rational explanations for what they saw. The template for this approach was set by astronaut Jim McDivitt.
Aboard Gemini IV in 1965, he reported spotting an object that was “like a beer can or a pop can, and with a little thing like maybe like a pencil or something sticking out of it”. He never saw this as an example of an alien visitation. Rather, he thought he was probably looking at a piece of ice or insulation that had broken off his craft.
That hasn’t stopped more lurid stories of UFO sightings spreading, including one involving Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 and fake “secret moon transcripts”.
5. The tortoises who survived
The Nasa astronauts heading for the moon in April will be following not just their predecessors aboard Apollo missions, but those who journeyed on the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft. This left the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 15 September 1968. Its payload included fruit fly eggs, plants and two tortoises, the first creatures to fly beyond Earth orbit and circle the moon.
They returned on 21 September 1968. Despite splashing down in the Indian Ocean rather than landing back in Kazakhstan as planned, the tortoises lived through the experience, albeit they had lost 10 per cent of their bodyweight and were subsequently dissected. The mission was also notable in providing high-quality photographs of the Earth from 90,000km out in space.
6. Posthumous Explorer
The death of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in 1991 robbed the world of the Space Age’s greatest optimist, a man whose work suggested humanity’s future would be spent zipping around the cosmos. And, in the case of James T Kirk, fighting aliens, bickering with his crewmates and kissing any willing women in his vicinity. Boldly going where few have gone before, Roddenberry requested his remains be sent into space.
In 1992, his wish was partially honoured when astronaut James Weatherbee carried a portion of Roddenberry’s ashes with him aboard Space Shuttle Columbia. Although the remains were brought back to Earth, this is widely thought to have been the first space ‘burial’.
Founded in 1994, Houston-based “memorial spaceflight” specialists Celestis have turned off-Earth undertaking into a business by buying ‘secondary payload’ slots on launch vehicles. They have twice taken small portions of Roddenberry’s ashes aloft, most recently in January 2024 when Roddenberry and his wife, actor Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, were among those fired into deep space as part of the maiden mission of the Vulcan Centaur heavy-lift launch vehicle – marketed as the Enterprise Flight.
7. Sitting in a tin can, far above the sky
At midnight on 31 December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to be a sovereign state. This put cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev in a tricky situation. The country that had put him aboard the Mir space station no longer existed and nobody seemed in any massive hurry to bring him home. Another issue was Russia’s dire financial situation. While other countries paid for places on missions to and from the station, Krikalev stayed in situ. Plus, had he left, the station would likely have had to be abandoned because it would have been without a flight engineer.
Ten months after he had departed terra firma, a man dubbed “The Last Soviet Citizen” at last went home. His mission had lasted twice as long as planned. But he doesn’t hold the record for the longest single stay in space. This belongs to Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 days aboard Mir in 1994–95. Returning to Earth, he said he wanted to prove humans could cope with travelling to Mars.
8. Silly ape
In 2016, future senator and former astronaut Mark Kelly sent a gorilla suit to his identical twin brother, Scott. An unusual gift, especially as Scott was at this point resident on the International Space Station and the suit was smuggled aboard via a SpaceX cargo mission. The result of this tomfoolery was a viral video showing Scott, dressed as an ape, chasing around British astronaut Tim Peake.
The Kellys built on a rich tradition of taking contraband into space that dated back to March 1965, when Gemini III astronaut John Young carried a corned beef sandwich into orbit. According to Young, it seemed like “a fun idea at the time”. Nasa bigwigs, worried about crumbs damaging delicate equipment, were not amused.
Lead image by Nasa/Ben Smegelsky
]]> Ellie Cawthorne <![CDATA[16 remarkable moments in the history of the Oscars]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/history-oscars-academy-awards-facts/ 2026-03-15T19:09:57.000Z 2026-03-15T19:00:13.000Z The Academy Awards were first held in 1929, and each year the film industry awards gold-plated statuettes – commonly called Oscars – in a glittering and star-studded ceremony.
Officially the Academy Award of Merit, everyone knows the golden knight holding a sword and standing on a reel of film as Oscar. Cedric Gibbons, art director at movie studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, gets the credit for designing the statuette but not for naming it.
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There are three theories. Hollywood journalist Sidney Skolsky always maintained he thought it up as a less-grandiose antidote to the pretentiousness of the award ceremony. Meanwhile, actor Bette Davis claimed she once remarked the statuette’s backside resembled that of her husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson. The most likely winner, however, is Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy, who said the knight (not just his rear) looked like her uncle Oscar.
But how much do you really know about the history of the awards themselves, and the dramatic moments that have played out on the biggest night of the Hollywood calendar?
The history of the Oscars: 16 key moments
1929: The first ceremony takes place
Founded by Louis B Mayer, head of MGM studios, in 1927, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was intended as a non-profit organisation with the goal of advancing the film industry. The first Academy Award ceremony took place two years later at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, on 16 May 1929. Tickets for the private dinner cost $5 and the presentation ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks (actor and first president of the Academy) lasted just 15 minutes.
The film industry was undergoing a dramatic change at the time, with the revolutionary introduction of new sound technology. Although hugely popular ‘talkies’ such as The Jazz Singer (1927) had been released before the first Academy Awards, they were not considered, because it was seen as unfair to compare them to silent movies.
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The first-ever Academy Award was bestowed upon Emil Jannings, for Best Actor for his leading roles in silent films The Way of All Flesh (1927) and The Last Command (1928).
The first-ever Academy Award for Best Picture went to Wings, a 1927 silent movie that told the story of two pilots in love with the same woman. The film cost $2 million to produce, making it the most expensive movie of its time. Up until the release of The Artist in 2011, Wings was the only silent film to win Best Picture.
1934: The wrong Frank gets up on stage
Arguably one of the most awkward Academy Awards moments happened in 1934, when both Frank Lloyd and Frank Capra were nominated in the Best Director category.
Caught up in the excitement of the ceremony, Frank Capra heard Will Rogers, who presented the award, exclaim “Come on up and get it, Frank!” He duly ran up to the stage to claim his award, only to find that it was in fact Frank Lloyd who had won.
Capra called the journey back to his chair “the longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life”, saying “I wished I could have crawled under the rug like a miserable worm. When I slumped in my chair I felt like one. All my friends at the table were crying”.
However, Capra’s humiliation didn’t last long: he won the Best Director gong the following year for It Happened One Night (1934).
1938: An imposter nabs an Academy Award
The Best Supporting Actress Award of 1938 went to Alice Brady for her role in In Old Chicago (1937). However, she was too ill to attend the ceremony. When her award was announced an unknown man took to the stage to collect it, apparently on her behalf. Before anyone realised something was wrong, the man had vanished. The mystery of the imposter’s identity – and what happened to Brady’s stolen statuette – was never solved.
Statuettes vanished again in 2000, when crates containing 55 Oscars disappeared from a loading bay. Some 52 of the statuettes were recovered soon after, found by citizen Willie Fulgear, who was rummaging in a bin behind a food store in LA’s Koreatown. According to The New York Times he was looking for boxes to use for an upcoming house move. Astonished by his unexpected discovery, Fulgear told reporters: “I’ve got more Oscars than any of the movie stars”.
Investigators believed that the culprits took the Oscars by accident, unaware of the crates’ contents.
1939: George Bernard Shaw becomes the first person to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize
After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, Shaw received an Academy Award for adapting his 1913 stage play Pygmalion into a film script. He didn’t attend the ceremony, however, reportedly saying: “They might as well send some honour to George for being king of England.”
1940: Results are leaked ahead of the ceremony
At the first Academy Awards in 1929, the winners had been announced to the public three months previously. However, the following year the Academy decided to create a sense of suspense and instead sent an advanced list of award winners to newspapers, embargoed for publication until 11pm on the night of the Oscars ceremony.
This system remained in place for the next 10 years. However, in 1940 the Los Angeles Times broke the embargo and announced the winners in their evening edition, meaning that nominees could find out their fate before turning up at the ceremony.
As a result of this fiasco, the following year (1941) the sealed envelope system was introduced and the results became a closely guarded secret.
1940: Hattie McDaniel becomes the first African-American Oscar winner
McDaniel made history in 1940 by winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her role as ‘Mammy’ in the 1939 Civil War epic Gone With the Wind.
However, in the year that McDaniel won, the Oscars ceremony was due to take place in a hotel that upheld a strict racial segregation policy. Film producer David O Selznick reportedly had to call in favours just to have McDaniel allowed into the building. Despite being the recipient of a major award, McDaniel had to sit at the back of the auditorium on a segregated table away from the rest of her co-stars.
McDaniel was also banned from attending Gone With the Wind’s Atlanta premiere because of segregation laws.
1943–45: Oscar statuettes are made of painted plaster
The Oscars statuette, which depicts a knight with a crusader’s sword standing on a reel of film, was designed by MGM’s chief art director Cedric Gibbons in 1929. In the early ceremonies the gongs were made from gold-plated solid bronze, which was later substituted for the pewter-like alloy Britannia metal.
However, as the Second World War raged, metal shortages meant that the awards had to be made from alternative materials. Consequently, all awards handed out between 1943 and 1945 were made of painted plaster. When the war was over, all recipients of plaster awards were invited to exchange them for metal ones.
1945: The first Academy Award comes in handy during the Second World War
Emil Jannings, winner of the first-ever Academy Award for his performances in silent films The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command (see 1929, above), was ruled out from the new Hollywood talkies because of his thick German accent.
Jannings therefore returned to Germany, where he became associated with Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda machine, starring in several films promoting Nazism. When the Allies stormed Berlin in 1945, Jannings reportedly carried his Oscar statuette around with him to win over American GIs and to demonstrate his former allegiance to the US.
1968: The ceremony is postponed
In 1968 the Academy decided to push back the ceremony from 8 April to 10 April following the assassination of Martin Luther King, whose funeral was scheduled for 9 April.
In 1981 the ceremony was postponed for 24 hours following an assassination attempt on US president Ronald Reagan, and the 2021 event was also delayed by two months due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
1973: Marlon Brando’s Oscar is rejected by Sacheen Littlefeather
Marlon Brando famously refused his Best Actor award for his performance in The Godfather (1972) in protest of Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans. He did not attend the ceremony, instead sending Native American activist and actress Sacheen Littlefeather to make a speech in his place.
When Littlefeather explained Brando’s actions, the audience was clearly unsure how to react – some people cheered, others booed. A confused Roger Moore, who attempted to present the award, apparently took the statuette home with him after Sacheen Littlefeather refused to accept it.
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Brando was not the first person to have refused an Oscar: in 1936 Dudley Nichols rejected his Best Adapted Screenplay award for The Informer (1935) due to ongoing strike action by the Screen Writers Guild.
Later, after receiving a Best Actor nomination for his titular role in Patton in 1971, George C Scott informed the Academy that if he won he intended to refuse the award. Everyone was therefore very surprised to hear him announced as the winner. Goldie Hawn, who presented the award, exclaimed “Oh my god!” when she read the result.
Unsurprisingly, Scott did not attend the ceremony, which he reportedly dismissed as a “two-hour meat parade”.
1974: Tatum O’Neal becomes the youngest-ever Oscar winner
The 10-year-old received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Paper Moon (1973), in which she starred opposite her father, Ryan O’Neal. She accepted her award wearing a mini tuxedo and platform shoes.
1998: Titanic wins 11 Oscars
With 14 nominations and 11 wins, the blockbuster epic Titanic (1997) dominated the Academy Awards in 1998. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, it tells the tragic story of the passenger ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.
Films with historical settings have long performed well at the Oscars, from 1931’s Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front, through to recent films such as Lincoln (2012), 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Oppenheimer (2024).
Other notable historical films that have swept the boards include the 1959 Charlton Heston epic Ben-Hur (11 wins), 1996’s The English Patient (nine wins) and 1939 Civil War drama Gone With the Wind (eight wins).
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dances with Wolves (1990), Schindler’s List (1993) and Shakespeare in Love (1998) each took home seven awards.
2002: Halle Berry wins Best Actress – and makes history
In March 2002, Halle Berry won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the romantic drama Monster’s Ball. The film, in which Berry plays the widow of an executed death row prisoner, was critically acclaimed for its depiction of poverty and racism in the American South, with her emotionally charged performance earning most of the plaudits.
But the moment carried wider historical significance, too: Berry became the first African-American woman to win the award. The importance of the achievement was not lost on the Ohio-born star, who tearfully dedicated the award to “every nameless, faceless woman of colour that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened”.
But while Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win the Best Actress award in 2023, Berry remains the only African-American recipient.
2010: Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win Best Director
The 82nd Academy Awards saw Iraq War drama The Hurt Locker scooping six gongs, including Best Picture. But arguably the most significant accolade was that awarded to Kathryn Bigelow, who became the first woman to win the Best Director award.
There have been two further female recipients since then: Chloé Zhao for Nomadland (2021) and Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog (2022).
2017: La La Land is accidentally named Best Picture instead of Moonlight
At the 89th Academy Awards in 2017, romantic musical La La Land and coming-of-age drama Moonlight were in contention for the coveted Best Picture prize, with many commentators suggesting it was a two-horse race between the films.
It seemed settled, then, when the ceremony reached its climax and veteran actors Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway – who were presenting the award – opened an envelope apparently revealing that La La Land had been triumphant. The film’s cast and crew, including lead actors Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, made their way on stage to deliver their acceptance speeches and begin the celebrations.
Yet it transpired that Beatty had inadvertently been handed the envelope announcing Stone’s earlier Best Actress win, leaving Dunaway to read out the only film title visible on the card: La La Land. The actual Best Picture envelope – which revealed Moonlight as the true winner – was still in the hands of an accountant from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the firm that oversees the Oscars voting process.
Once the blunder became apparent, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz halted the proceedings and held up the correct card showing that Moonlight had indeed won Best Picture, prompting the film’s stars to come forward and accept the accolade instead.
2022: Will Smith slaps Chris Rock
With the film industry returning to normal following the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 94th Academy Awards was always likely to be memorable – though not in the way most people expected.
Before presenting the award for Best Documentary Feature, comedian Chris Rock made an unscripted joke about Jada Pinkett Smith, who had shaved her head after being diagnosed with the autoimmune condition alopecia areata. Incensed, Pinkett Smith’s husband, Will Smith, strode onto the stage and slapped Rock across the face, before returning to his seat and shouting, “Keep my wife’s name out of your f******g mouth”.
The bizarre spectacle prompted speculation that the incident had been staged, but the slap was genuine – and the situation grew more awkward when Smith later returned to accept the award for Best Actor for his role in King Richard.
The rapper and former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star is currently serving a 10-year ban from attending Academy Awards events, due to expire in 2032.
This article was first published by HistoryExtra in February 2016
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