HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-17T15:47:56.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00“I wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt Everest”: Tenzing director Jennifer Peedom on Everest queues, reclaiming lost narratives and dropping Loki into a crevassehttps://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/tenzing-movie-everest-jennifer-peeden-interview/2026-10-16T23:01:09.000ZTenzing Norgay was half of the duo who made it to ‘the roof of the world’ when he completed a historic first ascent of Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953 – and by all accounts when they stepped onto the summit, they did so together. But when the accolades were handed out, you might think he was the lesser party.
New Zealander Hillary received a knighthood; so too did the expedition’s leader, British Army officer John Hunt. But Tenzing, a man who not only made it to the summit but was the expedition’s sirdar (head sherpa) – responsible for all the logistics on the mountain that made the ascent possible – was only offered the George Medal, a civilian honour conceived to mark acts of heroism during the Blitz.
- Read more | Tenzing Norgay: the Sherpa mountaineer who first conquered Everest
The popular narrative that followed in the ensuing decades was that Hillary had summited Everest (referred to increasingly by one of its original names, Chomolungma) and that Tenzing was there. It’s one of the many misconceptions surrounding the man that director Jennifer Peedom seems to hope to dispel in her first dramatic feature Tenzing.
Peedom is no stranger to the Himalayas, having started as a camera operator on Himalayan expeditions before making films of her own – fans of mountain movies may well remember her 2015 film Sherpa, which documented the real stories from the Sherpa community in the aftermath of a 2014 avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall that caused a number of fatalities. Just as Sherpa was, Tenzing is thoughtful and reflective, aiming to foreground Norgay in his own story for the first time.
Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe are the biggest names in the cast, taking on the roles of Hillary and Hunt, but its star is undoubtedly Genden Phuntsok – a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent – as Norgay.
His casting reflects another lesser-known fact – the most famous sherpa in the world was not an ethnic Sherpa, but the son of a Tibetan yak herder who came to Nepal and later moved to Darjeeling seeking work among the expeditions. ‘Tenzing Norgay’ wasn’t even the name he was born with; that was the one given to him later.
Peedom’s Tenzing is the story of how a young boy looked up at the mountain revered as Chomolungma – the mother goddess – and dreamed of what it would mean to stand on what is quite literally hallowed ground.
We caught up with the director for an exclusive interview after the film’s London premiere to find out more.
The 1953 ascent of Everest is such a well-known narrative, but often one dominated by the idea of heroic European conquest, and I wondered what you want to reveal about this story by focusing it through Tenzing’s perspective?
Jennifer Peedom: I spent a lot of my early career working as a camera operator and a documentary filmmaker in the Himalayas, and for me what was always interesting and part of the attraction of the place was the culture and the Sherpa people.
One of my earliest films about the Sherpas [Sherpa, 2015] was because I was really interested in this idea that mountaineering for them is a job, but Chomolungma is a deity that they worship, and that the landscape means something spiritual and very different to what it means to western climbers who come and climb the mountain. I wanted audiences to see that point of view.
I’ve heard you say of Sherpa that you “weren’t making a climbing film, you were making a story about a people”. Tenzing feels like it’s doing a bit of both?
JP: The reason I wanted to make this film about Tenzing was first to redress that historical balance, because he’d never really been at the centre. He was more of a supporting character in the story.
But it was also [about] everything that Tenzing had been through in his life just to get to the starting line of Everest, let alone ascend the mountain. That story to me was fascinating – the sheer number of obstacles he had to overcome just to get to that place.
He’d been through so much in his life. He’d been exiled from Tibet to Nepal as a young boy. His family had had to leave [him] while they were looking for work just to survive. He was an outsider in that community – the classic underdog in many ways. He was underestimated his entire life.
It was about that as much as anything else, about showing the family the cultural sacrifices that he had to make along the way to fulfil this childhood dream.
I was really taken with the character that Caitríona Balfe plays, Jill Henderson. She is such a big part of the British mountaineering story overall in Nepal, but also a big part of Tenzing’s story as well.
JP: It was really she that convinced him to take on the [British 1953] expedition. He genuinely had hesitations. He had an extreme loyalty to the Swiss, who he’d climbed with the year before, and they had tried and failed. He was depleted. He was exhausted. He’d promised his family he wasn’t going to go back again, and then this invitation came.
It was Henderson and Raymond Lambert [the Swiss mountaineer with whom Tenzing had climbed to within 237 metres of the summit in 1952] who colluded to convince Tenzing to go, because they knew that this was probably going to be the one. They knew that this was his moment and that he deserved it more than anyone else.
Lambert wrote him a letter. Henderson campaigned to him endlessly until he eventually agreed to go. And I just felt like, what an amazing woman, who had such a remarkable part in history that had also never been talked about in the traditional narratives of the telling of Everest, yet she played such a significant role.
There’s an ongoing conversation right now as to the state of climbing on Mount Everest, and we’ve all seen these mind-boggling photos of the queues. What are your thoughts on the responsibilities we have as storytellers when we’re discussing a mountain that represents a peak of human endeavour, but also is a place of spirituality?
JP: For whatever reason, Everest has become this symbol of human achievement, and it’s become a bucket list ambition. It attracts people, and no matter what happens on Everest, the worse the disasters, the more people seem to come the next year to test themselves. And I think that says something about western culture in some ways, and I find it interesting, though I don’t really understand it myself.
- Read more | Race to the top of the world: the story of the 1953 conquest of Everest
It’s like a proving ground. And I would suggest that there are other ways to do that than to come to Everest and add to the traffic jam that is that mountain these days. I would not recommend anyone attempt to go there and climb, really, because it is dangerous due to the crowds. There are better ways to achieve a dream than standing in a line to put your foot on the summit of the highest mountain in the world.
That difficulty of climbing a mountain like Everest was really evident in Tenzing: the laboured breathing and heavy steps were so evocative. How important was it to give a sense that this isn’t a walk in the park?
JP: Really important, and it’s a very difficult thing to portray in cinema because it’s a feeling. Someone described it to me once as running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. You just can’t get enough oxygen into your lungs, and so your legs are burning. You’re sort of taking a step and then having about three breaths and then finding the strength to take another step.
It’s enormously challenging and the higher you get, the worse that gets. Trying to portray that is difficult, but I’m glad you picked up on the breath. We spent a lot of time with sound design working with breath because that’s the thing keeping you alive.
On the spirituality point, there was one scene I wanted to ask you about: at one of the high camps there’s a mutiny among the Sherpas that Tenzing resolves, and it concludes with a blessing using rice. I wonder if you can tell us what we’re seeing there, and more broadly how you brought the authenticity of Sherpa culture into the movie?
JP: That really came from my own experiences with Sherpas on mountains and hearing their stories. That scene where they say [of Chomolungma] that they’re too frightened to go further because now that we’re up at the South Col, we’re literally stabbing our spikes into her shoulders? They were conversations that I’d heard in camps on Everest.
- Watch now | How did Mount Everest get its name?
And one of the Sherpas in that scene – his name is Balu – was actually our expedition doctor who played that role. He also said, “Jen, these are conversations I had with Sherpas like one year ago on Everest”. So it was about bringing all of those experiences that I’d had in conversations with Sherpas over many years about what the mountain means to them, and trying to help a broader audience understand that, to them, it is a living embodiment of a deity, of a goddess.
For them, there is a quite literal feeling that the landscape is inseparable from the spirituality within it. It was really important to me to portray that perspective because the film is really from Tenzing’s point of view. I know he had a conversation like that with the Sherpas on that Everest expedition.
He had the challenge of not only climbing the mountain himself, but he was leading the Sherpa team and was responsible for getting all of the supplies. So he had this kind of double job that he had to do, and he was under enormous pressure. And he was juggling the demands of two very different competing groups. And the Sherpas did fear the unknown. Tenzing was unique in the sense that he wanted to climb, but he also chose to see the goddess not as something to be feared, but to be revered, and he was unusual in that, and he was a pioneer in that way.
There is another way to see this. We don’t need to fear her. If we ask for her permission, ask for her blessing, she will grant us passage, she will keep us safe. And that’s what that scene is about. They’re throwing rice, which is an offering to Chomolungma. And I think as you see in the film, it gave the Sherpas a sense of peace that it was okay, and of course it was. There were no accidents on that expedition. There were no deaths. It was remarkable.
It’s a very beautiful scene. I know you know Sherpa culture well from your previous works, including your 2015 documentary Sherpa. How much did your documentarian background inform how you approached Tenzing?
JP: You probably can tell from the film that we were shooting on real mountains in real landscapes. And I guess for me, that was what I knew. It seemed insane to do it any other way because part of the story is the landscape, and so to fake that didn’t make any sense to me.
I wanted the audience, but also the actors, to experience those landscapes and those cultures, and I wanted to show that when you shoot in those communities, you’re shooting with people who live in those communities, and that brings this beautiful level of authenticity.
And then the actors themselves cannot help but be affected by that. You know, many of them have talked about the fact that they didn’t really need to do a lot of acting in these scenes because when Tom Hiddleston is down that crevasse climbing out of it, he’s really down a crevasse climbing out of it. It was like, “Okay, Tom, start climbing.” He’s really doing it. That was the point.
- Read more | “Just like us and not at all”: what Tom Hiddleston wants us to remember about Pompeii
I wanted to ask you about that specific moment, where Tom falls into that crevasse. How does that actually happen?
JP: It was a trapdoor that we had set up, so when he landed in that spot, the trapdoor got pulled and he had the safety rope. When he’s hanging in the crevasse, that is just the main safety rope – so the picture rope became the safety rope, and we did a lot of work to make sure that we could make the ropes look period appropriate, but they’re also proper safety ropes. That’s how we did it. He just did it for real.
But you built a trapdoor on a Nepalese mountain?
JP: That’s in New Zealand. All of the technical climbing with the actors from Everest Base Camp up was in New Zealand [Ed’s note: everything below Base Camp was filmed in Nepal]. And those mountains really are as big from bottom to top as the Himalayas. They just start at almost sea level in the Southern Alps.
All of the actual aerials of Everest itself, [they’re] the real mountain, the real [Khumbu] icefall. But then we would shoot the specific scenes, in real crevasses and icefalls and ridges and faces in New Zealand. And the summit of Everest, we shot on the summit of one of the highest mountains in New Zealand. And you can see the awe and the emotion on the actors’ faces, because they’re standing on one of the highest mountains in New Zealand looking down at the world below them.
Tenzing is streaming on Apple TV from 16 October and is being shown in select cinemas now
]]>"No votes, no golf!": how the suffragettes made sport a political battlefieldhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/no-votes-no-golf-how-the-suffragettes-made-sport-a-political-battlefield/2026-10-14T14:30:27.000ZOn the afternoon of Saturday 1 November 1902, a group of men and women careered around Hampton Court Park, enjoying a friendly game of hockey. A local newspaper reported that “the weather was glorious”, though the ground was muddy. Players included residents of Hampton Court Palace’s apartments; it is likely that Princess Sophia Duleep Singh – a talented hockey player who turned out for both the Palace team and the nearby East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club, and who lived on the Hampton Court estate – was among them.
Photographs of the Molesey club help us imagine Singh in action: they show women sprinting in determined pursuit of the ball, loosened neckties flying free from billowing white shirts, rose-red skirts ballooning to reveal shin pads and studded boots, sticks expertly poised to strike winning shots.
Daughter of the last maharaja of the Sikh empire, Sophia Duleep Singh was born in England and is known today for her leading role in the British suffrage movement. As Anita Anand recounts in her 2015 biography Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, Singh boycotted the 1911 census and refused to pay taxes or fees for dog and carriage licences because she would not accept “taxation without representation”.
She joined suffrage protests and raised funds for the Kingston and district branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), selling The Suffragette newspaper outside her Hampton Court home. (Strictly speaking, suffragettes took direct, often militant, action, whereas suffragists used largely peaceful methods in pursuit of votes for women. However, the two groups were often conflated in the 20th century.)
Political football
Though her activities in support of votes for women are widely recognised, Singh’s sporting activities are mostly forgotten today. Indeed, we don’t tend to speak of suffragists and sportswomen in the same breath. That’s partly because of the enduring legacy of anti-suffrage propaganda, which depicted WSPU members as scrawny spinsters or portly old maids – tyrants in the home, not athletes on the hockey pitch.
It also reflects a popular and persistent misconception that sport – particularly women’s sport – is a trivial leisure pursuit and irrelevant to politics. If such beliefs are still widespread today, why would we imagine that anyone was interested in suffragists’ sports a century ago?
- Read more | From china cups to letter bombs: how suffragettes got out the message of votes for women
Yet these entwined ideas – that suffragists didn’t care much about sport, and that politics and sports shouldn’t mix – obscure an important historical thread. Sport was genuinely meaningful to many suffragist women, both personally and politically. When Singh declared that sport was “the birth right of every happy, healthy girl, be she princess or peasant”, she was making a political point – echoing the republican theory that English men and women had once possessed liberties that were subsequently removed by tyrannical oppressors.
Singh was far from an outlier in her love of sport. For example, the Pankhursts were members of the Clarion Cycling Club. Rosa May Billinghurst, who survived polio, used an adapted tricycle to attend suffragist protests. Hilda Webb, who threw stones at government buildings with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, helped to establish women’s hockey in Ireland.
Vera Holme, chauffeur to various leaders of the WSPU, excelled at fly fishing. There was also Lady Florence Dixie, an early suffragist and president of the British Ladies’ Football Club – co-founded with London suffragist Nettie Honeyball – as well as a passionate hunter, mountaineer and explorer. Louisa Lumsden, president of the Aberdeen branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a champion of girls’ international cricket. Across the Atlantic, Lucy Diggs Slowe advocated for the inclusion of black women in the US suffrage movement. She won the American Tennis Association tournament (which had been founded for black tennis players) in 1917, the year after the US Lawn Tennis Association had banned black athletes.
Indeed, in the early 20th century the association between suffragism and sport was so entrenched that it became a literary trope. One suffragette character in the French play Les Éclaireuses was “dressed in a short tweed hockey skirt”. Another was a “lady mountaineer” who featured in Frank Savile’s 1908 short story The Suffragette. Spare a thought, too, for the male narrator of a poem who, wearied by his girlfriend’s devotion to sport and politics, lamented that “A golfing girl is bad enough, but oh! A Suffragette!”
Mixed messages
Many of the sportiest suffragists of the early 20th century had honed their athletic abilities – along with their commitment to women’s rights – in the 1880s and 1890s. During those decades, men and women competed together in mixed-doubles tennis and in mixed-sex cricket and hockey games. Hiking, climbing, sailing, skating, rowing and running in hare-and-hounds cross-country events were shared pastimes. Men and women even bobsleighed together. They often used the same sporting facilities, belonged to the same clubs, and revelled in the reporting of their sporting achievements in the same newspapers and newsletters.
Sometimes, though, men’s physiological and social advantages made it desirable for women to play sport in all-female environments. The mountaineer Lizzie Le Blond suggested that a Ladies’ Alpine Club could counter the male-dominated nature of mountaineering literature by forming an “extensive and authoritative library” of women’s writings on the subject. She also wanted women to share female-specific information about “the formation of climbing parties, the provision of guides, means of travelling, and general accommodation”.
In addition, a wealth of women’s sports clubs and competitions sprang up in the 1880s and 1890s, including the East Molesey Ladies’ Hockey Club (which became England’s first ever women’s hockey team in 1887), the Irish Ladies’ Hockey Union in 1894 and, in 1895, the Blackheath Ladies’ Hockey Club and the All England Women’s Hockey Association.
Most surviving records concern upper-class pursuits, but sport was equally important in urban and rural working-class women’s lives. The 1880s saw the tail end of a craze for female pedestrianism, with women and girls earning money speed-walking extraordinary distances. In 1864, for example, Emma Sharp is said to have been the first woman to complete a 1,000-mile walk in 1,000 hours.
Researcher Sarah Elizabeth Cox has unearthed evidence of two black or mixed-heritage women known as “the Sisters Mills, or the Muscular Maids from Mexico”, who boxed in the East End of London in the 1880s.
Women’s foot-races and cricket games were staples of village fairs from the 17th century onwards – it’s said that overarm bowling was devised by women as a way to avoid getting their hands caught in skirts. Later, when women’s teams such as the Dick, Kerr Ladies Football Club were formed – many of them initially drawing players from women working in factories during the First World War – they were building on a long heritage of working-class women’s sport.
Exercising ambition
As the new century began, women who had been physically active had experienced how sport promoted health, strength, education and camaraderie, as well as offering opportunities for travel, adventure and meeting new people. They knew that participating could bring money, fame and respect – and the chance to lead. Lizzie Le Blond referred to climbing as “the work”. Fellow climber Frederica Plunket described how physical activity allowed her to escape a lifestyle of upper-class feminine indolence featuring neither “hard work” nor “play”, letting her instead tire herself out and earn “absolute rest” – as men did.
Women’s sporting experiences informed their political and social ambitions, too. The late 19th-century ideal ‘New Woman’ was well educated, wanted to work and was intent upon domestic equality. She was also an enthusiast for sport, particularly cycling. Reasons for this were outlined by the American suffragist Susan B Anthony in 1895: “Bicycling… has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel… the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood.”
This passion for sport fed into the later female suffrage movement, often in practical ways. During the 1908 trial of the Pankhursts and Flora Drummond for inciting a riot, suffragist Evelyn Sharp described how she’d been able to dodge a policeman: “It was like a rush at hockey.” Meanwhile, Suffragists used bicycles to distribute campaign literature.
Between 1912 and 1914, though, suffragists’ approach to sport took a markedly different turn. These were years when militant suffragettes launched a campaign in which sports facilities were the primary target. At first, women approached male politicians as they played golf. They heckled Asquith at the Aboyne course and, on the Balmoral links, threw a worm at Winston Churchill.
The campaign intensified in 1913. Over just one weekend that February, at least 12 golf courses were damaged. Suffragettes used acid and weedkiller to burn phrases into the grass, including “Justice Before Sport” and “No Votes, No Golf”. They dug holes into greens, inserting suffragist magazines and posters. And they replaced the golf courses’ flags with their own, bearing mottos such as “Women’s War”.
Later the same month, a groundsman at Roehampton Golf Club interrupted two suspicious-looking women who ran off, dropping a bag whose incendiary contents suggested that they had intended to burn down the pavilion. The police raided the flat of a suffragette called Olive Hockin, where they found corrosive fluid, clippers, firelighters, hammers, flints, false car registration plates and golfing flags.
At a WSPU meeting soon afterwards, a perplexed attendee asked: “Why do the Suffragettes destroy golf links?” It was a reasonable question. After all, many suffragists had grown up loving sport. Why were they now seeking to destroy the facilities on which they’d originally flourished?
Eva McLaren – Aiming high
An activist and leading member of five suffrage societies, McLaren (1852–1921) was a keen mountaineer in her youth. Mountaineering was so synonymous with suffragism that, in 1909, Votes for Women joked that the Ladies’ Alpine Club’s membership roster could be a recruitment list for militant suffragettes. McLaren created a centre of excellence for women’s sport, with a focus on hockey.
Edith Garrud – Creating fighting chances
Trained as a physical culture instructor, Garrud (1872–1971) specialised in teaching Japanese martial arts to women and girls from the late 1890s, becoming the first known female jiu-jitsu instructor in Britain. She joined the Women’s Freedom League in 1906, offering jiu-jitsu classes to suffragettes as “a necessary safeguard for the woman who has to defend herself” against the police. She trained the 30-strong all-female Bodyguard Unit, who protected the WSPU’s leaders from arrest.
Olive Hockin – The skiing suffragette
Joining the suffrage movement in 1912, Hockin (1881–1936) took part in militant action including attempted arson at Roehampton Golf Club. According to biographies, she was a trained artist who designed suffragette banners. Less well known is that Hockin was also a champion ski-runner and ski-jumper. She went to prison for the Roehampton action, but got out in time to win the British Ski Championship in January 1914.
Male privilege
In November 1913, Emmeline Pankhurst explained that men had “made a rule that, although the ladies may play golf all the week [on days when men were typically at work], the golf links are entirely reserved for men on Saturday and Sunday”.
This was about more than day-to-day sexism. Pankhurst was identifying a dramatic cultural shift in which sport was being redefined as a predominantly male pursuit. The modern Olympic Games, which were first held in 1896 and initially permitted no female participants, marked a milestone in this shift. The Olympics’ co-founder, academic and historian Pierre de Coubertin, had decided that masculinity was under threat. He thought that “solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism” was the best way to rebuild weak men – and would entail cleansing sport of female influence. This reinforced a belief extolled in all-male schools and universities, which saw organised sport as key to preparing men for careers in public service.
Sports clubs and competitions around the world followed the Olympics’ example. Cycling clubs changed policies to exclude women; new groups such as the Manchester Wheelers were male-only. Wimbledon had no official women’s doubles championships until 1913. And in 1907, the Swiss Alpine Club – which had welcomed female members since 1863 – kicked out women.
Golf had once been a quintessential upper-class female sport, but clubs started imposing restrictions of the type Pankhurst mentioned in her speech, or banning women altogether. Women’s sport was shorthand for women’s political emancipation, and there was a burgeoning backlash against both. In an 1897 protest against women taking degrees at the University of Cambridge, male students directed their ire towards an effigy of a female cyclist.
By 1910, sport had been redefined to be predominantly associated with men. Suffragettes justified their “ruin of golf links and cricket pavilions” on the basis that it was the best way to attract men’s attention while “injuring no human being”. Flora Drummond observed that “[Male golfers] don’t give a thought to the women who are being tortured in prison by the government… [but] it interests golfers to find their links damaged and they inquire who did it. Then they realise that women are asking for votes.” Emmeline Pankhurst urged angry male golfers to “tell the government to give women the vote in order to secure the golf greens from further injury”.
A man’s world?
In short, sport was not tangential to suffragist politics: it was the training ground on which many women first realised their capabilities and their deserved rights. Following male logic, which emphasised how sporting excellence helped prepare men for professional roles, it was also the arena in which women had, time and time again, proved themselves well equipped for public life. The suffragettes’ golf course campaign saw women reclaiming sporting spaces in which they had once been at home, reminding the public of this not-too-distant history.
- Read more | From a lion-taming lightweight to the Muscular Maids: 5 Victorian boxing sensations you need to know about
Their protests also drew attention to the dramatic change that was taking place in sporting culture, out of which women were being driven. Among other things, this demonstrated how men’s support for women’s rights was inconsistent, and could go into reverse. As Sophia Duleep Singh argued, sport was a “birthright”for women – an original liberty that was being denied and removed by a tyrannical oppressor. Addressing men directly, Emmeline Pankhurst pointed out that “for nearly 50 years we had your sympathy and your support, and nothing happened… [now, by targeting your sports facilities, we] have your disgust and have you thoroughly annoyed.”
In the campaign for suffrage, women’s rights eventually prevailed – but the backlash against women’s sport had long-lasting effects. It succeeded not only in suppressing women’s ability to play sport but also in obscuring records of women’s sporting achievements. It entrenched the ideas that, as de Coubertin put it, female sport is “against the laws of nature” and that sport had always been – or certainly should have been – the preserve of men.
Because of that backlash, the history of suffragettes’ sporting pursuits has been forgotten. By resurrecting this history, we can gain not just a better understanding of the suffragist movement but also a more comprehensive understanding of sport’s identity and its kinship with politics.
Rachel Hewitt is a writer and historian. Her books include In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (Chatto, 2023)
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Are these history's greatest losers? 19 people who had glory snatched away from themhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/are-these-historys-greatest-losers-19-people-who-had-glory-snatched-away-from-them/2026-09-27T14:30:16.000ZAt the 2026 London Marathon, Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe made history by becoming the first runner ever to finish the 26.2 miles in under two hours, breaking the tape with a time of 1:59:30. While the crowd cheered and the commentators tried to capture the significance of the moment, another runner, Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia, quietly passed the finish line too, and also under two hours. While still a remarkable achievement, it is doomed to be overshadowed by Sawe – and all for the sake of 11 seconds.
Second place, the silver medal, the so-called ‘first loser’: it can be a heartbreaking position, to be so close and yet so far from the ultimate glory. (Before you feel too bad for Kejelcha, though, it is worth noting that this was his first-ever marathon, so imagine what he could accomplish with more training.)
Whether in the field of exploration, invention, politics or sport, history is replete with examples of close-but-no-cigar runners-up, although their names don’t fill as much space in the history books as the ones who pipped them. Here, we reveal the worst cases of second-place fever, from those who fell agonisingly short and missed out in a cloud of controversy to those who seemed destined to lose and set the unwanted records.
1. Robert Falcon Scott
Second to the South Pole
In 1910, the British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott set out on his British Antarctic Expedition – often known as the Terra Nova expedition – with the goal of reaching the South Pole, something no human had done before.
On the way, however, he learned that he had a challenger in the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who navigated the Northwest Passage a few years earlier. Amundsen had actually intended to conquer the North Pole, but on hearing that someone else may have beaten him to it he turned his ship south instead.
Scott’s quest for glory turned to despair: by the time he reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, he found that Amundsen had already been there, more than a month previously, and he along with the four other men in his party would perish on the 800-mile return journey.
2. John Landy
Second to run a four-minute mile
On 6 May 1954, British medical student and Olympic athlete Roger Bannister achieved what was thought to be physically impossible. Described as “sport’s greatest goal”, he ran a mile in under four minutes. His name went into the history books, but his time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds lasted in the record books for just 46 days.
The Australian sensation John Landy shocked the crowd at a meet in Finland by setting a new time of 3 minutes 57.9 seconds. That August, the two men met on the track. Dubbed the ‘Miracle Mile’, it was a titanic duel with both men running under four minutes again, but it was Bannister who came first once again.
3. Elisha Gray
Second to invent the telephone
Elisha Gray was one of several people working on a device to transmit sounds telegraphically in the 1870s, but the American succeeded in coming up with a design for what would soon be known as the telephone. The only problem was that on the exact day he announced his intention to patent his invention, 14 February 1876, the Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell filed his own application at the US Patent Office. There the controversy began as an acrimonious legal battle ensued before Bell’s “instrument” came out on top.
4. Alan Shepard
Second person in space
One of the Mercury Seven, the inaugural group of NASA astronauts, Alan Shepard was scheduled to be the first person in space. His flight on the Freedom 7 capsule had an initial launch date of March 1961, but it was postponed to May due to rigorous testing and safety checks.
The two-month delay allowed the Soviet Union to claim a major early victory in the Space Race by sneaking ahead of the United States and launching the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 in April.
Following his own historic flight, Shepard would go on to walk on the Moon as commander of Apollo 14 in 1971, marking the moment with a first of his own by hitting two golf balls on the lunar surface.
5. Jack Nicklaus
Second in golf majors the most times
The American golfer’s reputation is unsurpassed: he won 18 majors between 1962 and 1986, putting him at the top of the pile in the history of the sport. What is more impressive, though, is that the Golden Bear’s record could have been even better if he had not come second in a major no less than 19 times. Five of these came in a playoff or by a single stroke.
6. Raymond Poulidor
'The Eternal Second' of the Tour de France
It did not take long from its inception in 1903 for the Tour de France to become the most prestigious cycling race in the world, where the greatest on two wheels competed for the famed yellow jersey.
To date, four men have won it five times, but unfortunately for Raymond Poulidor, two of those raced at the same time as him. Across his 14 appearances from 1962 to 1976, the French cyclist finished on the podium eight times without ever toppling the likes of compatriot Jacques Anquetil and Belgian Eddy Merckx.
For that, Poulidor, a hugely popular figure in the sport, earned the affectionate nickname of ‘The Eternal Second’.
7. Francis Drake
Second to circumnavigate the world
The Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan left Spain in 1519 on an expedition that would eventually complete the first circumnavigation of the world. While he gets the credit, he did not live to see Spain again – he was killed in the Philippines in 1521 – so it fell to Spanish navigator Juan Sebastian Elcano, with a crew of just 17 Europeans, to bring the expedition home.
It would be over half a century before another explorer, Francis Drake, replicated the feat, leaving Plymouth in 1577 and returning in 1580.
8. Rosalind Franklin
Second to Watson and Crick
The 1953 discovery of the double helix structure of DNA changed science and medicine forever. It is attributed to two molecular biologists, American James Watson and Englishman Francis Crick, but another scientist made invaluable contributions to the breakthrough and has historically been overlooked.
The chemist Rosalind Franklin took an X-Ray diffraction image of DNA fibre, which was a breakthrough in revealing DNA’s helical structure. Photo 51, as it became known, was then shown to Watson and Crick – without Franklin’s knowledge – allowing them to further their own research.
Franklin died of cancer in 1958, before Watson, Crick and her colleague Maurice Wilkins collected the Nobel Prize. If she had lived, she may well have joined them.
9. Washington Generals
Second to the Harlem Globetrotters
The ultimate exhibition team – not just in basketball, but all sports – the Harlem Globetrotters have delighted crowds with their unmatched skills and antics for nearly 100 years. What would they be, however, without a rival team to humiliate?
That’s where the Washington Generals come in. Since 1952, the Generals have been the regular foil to the Globetrotters’ showboating, which means they’ve lost a lot. In fact, they have been on the wrong side of the scoreboard more than 17,000 times, and in return they have only won a handful of times and none since 1971.
10. Netherlands football team
Second in the World Cup twice in a row
The Netherlands side of the 1970s is often described as the best football team never to win a FIFA World Cup. Not only was the captain one of the greatest to play the game, Johann Cruyff, but thanks to their manager Rinus Michels they had perfected a revolutionary style of play, known as ‘Total Football’.
By qualifying for the 1974 tournament, the Dutch appeared at a World Cup for the first time in 36 years and were favoured to lift the trophy. They conceded just one goal en route to the final, but lost to West Germany. The Netherlands returned four years later, without their talismanic captain, and again made it all the way only to lose again, this time to Argentina in extra time.
11. Citizen Kane
Second in the Oscars
To this day, Orson Welles’ debut feature film, Citizen Kane, regularly appears on, if not tops, the lists of greatest movies ever made. Yet the 1941 epic cannot count among its many accolades a certain golden statuette.
At the 1942 Oscars, Citizen Kane and Welles failed to win Best Picture and Best Director respectively, both losing out to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. While highly regarded, the classic drama about a Welsh coal mining family drama hardly boasts the enduring impact of Welles’s magnum opus.
12. Buzz Aldrin
Second to walk on the Moon
It is one of the most famous events in human history: 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 lands on the Moon, and the world watches as the first step is made with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And the astronaut who uttered that immortal line was Neil Armstrong. Yet it could have been Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin.
It had become custom in Nasa for a mission’s junior officer to be the first out of the capsule for spacewalks – which suggests Aldrin should have got the nod – but the decision was taken that Armstrong’s level-headed, ego-free demeanour was more fitting for the historic moment.
When Aldrin joined his mission commander a few moments later, he described what he saw with his own piece of poetry: “Magnificent desolation.”
13. Bertha von Suttner
Second woman to win a Nobel Prize
Marie Curie is celebrated around the world as a pioneer in physics and chemistry, and for breaking ground for female scientists. Her research on radiation secured her a Nobel Prize in 1903 – making her the first woman to be a Nobel laureate – and she followed that by winning another, in 1911, for discovering the elements radium and polonium.
Just two years after Curie’s first prize, the Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner won her own, the Peace Prize for “her audacity to oppose the horrors of war”.
It would be 1935 before the next woman won a Nobel Prize in the sciences, Irène Joliot-Curie, Marie’s daughter.
14. Alfred Russel Wallace
Second to come up with the theory of evolution
It is unfair to say the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was ‘second’ to develop the theory of evolution through natural selection, behind Charles Darwin. He came up with it independently, based on years travelling in the Amazon River basin and Malay Archipelago, and even wrote down his findings before Darwin published his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species (1859).
While that ensured Darwin’s title as father of evolutionary theory, Wallace never resented his situation and remained one of his compatriot’s most vocal supporters.
15. Buffalo Bills
Second in the Super Bowl four times in a row
While the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers have each won the Super Bowl, the biggest prize in American Football, six times, the Buffalo Bills hold the less-auspicious record of having the most consecutive appearances at the big game without bagging a single Vince Lombardi Trophy.
From 1991 to 1994, the star-studded Bills lost to the New York Giants – having missed a last-second field goal to win – the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) and the Dallas Cowboys twice. They have not been back to the Super Bowl since.
16. Al Gore
Second in the 2000 US presidential election
Never has an election for President of the United States been more contentious and contested as in 2000. The Republican candidate George W Bush, son of a former president, eventually claimed victory over the Democrat, Al Gore, but only after weeks of recounts and legal tussles.
Gore actually got more votes on election day, 7 November, but to win required securing a majority in the Electoral College, and it quickly became clear that this entirely depended on who won the state of Florida.
There, the race was extraordinarily close with just a few hundred ballots separating the two out of the millions cast. The matter went to the courts, culminating in the Supreme Court’s bitterly disputed decision in mid-December to stop further recounts in Florida, and so sealing the narrowest of winning margins for Bush.
17. Christopher Marlowe
Second to William Shakespeare
This English playwright and poet was the toast of Elizabethan London. No, not that one. Christopher Marlowe enjoyed a stellar few years thanks to plays like Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus.
Then, on 30 May 1593, he was killed at the age of 29, apparently in a tavern brawl, although his death continues to be the subject of mystery, intrigue and conspiracy theories.
In the vacuum he left stepped one of his contemporaries, a man born the same year and who had been inspired by Marlowe’s works; the most famous dramatist of his, or indeed any, era, William Shakespeare.
18. Jimmy White
Second in the World Snooker Championship six times
Jimmy White had two nicknames, ‘The Whirlwind’ for his quick and attacking play, and ‘The People’s Champion’. The latter is an acknowledgement of the title that eluded the English star his whole career, the World Snooker Championship, the top prize in the sport.
He got so close by making the final six times between 1984 and 1994, including five years in a row, but always fell short. The two losses that proved especially painful came in 1992, when he let a commanding lead slip by losing 10 consecutive frames, and 1994, when he missed a simple black in the deciding frame. Both were to seven-time world champion Stephen Hendry.
19. The Australian army
Second to a mob of emus
In November 1932, the Australian military – in truth, a handful of soldiers with machine guns and lots of ammunition – were dispatched to carry out a rather extreme form of animal control against the emu population. The flightless birds had become a pest to wheat farmers. By December, the army, who wasted bullets by killing less than 1,000 of the c20,000 emus, had no choice but to withdraw and admit defeat in the Great Emu War.
]]>In 1895, a Chicago housewife left her family to cycle around the world. But was it all a hoax?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1895-a-chicago-housewife-left-her-family-to-cycle-around-the-world-but-was-it-all-a-hoax/2026-09-25T14:30:28.000ZOn 12 September 1895, a young woman pedalled into Chicago. Not so remarkable, you might think, but at the time, it was astonishing. Not because the sight of a woman on a bicycle was a novelty – that decade saw a boom in female cyclists – but because this particular rider had completed a circumnavigation of the globe on her steed.
Or had she really? That’s the $10,000-dollar question. That cyclist, already world famous, was Annie Londonderry. Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, and she was a married Jewish mother of three children, all under the age of six at the time she set out. Her odyssey was, according to the New York World, “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman”.
Born in 1870 or 1871 near Riga in Latvia, Annie Cohen had come to the US with her family in 1875. She married Simon ‘Max’ Kopchovsky in 1888, and within six years had three small children and a job selling advertising space for newspapers. The family lived in Boston’s West End, where immigrants packed into tenement houses, speaking their native languages and cooking traditional foods. It may well have fired the imagination of a young woman curious about the world.
In the 1890s, the bicycle craze was peaking, and round-the-world adventures were capturing the public imagination. Londonderry joined in, not to score a victory for women, though she later cast herself in that light, but because she didn’t want to stay “home with a baby under my apron every year”.
The world for a wager
Londonderry’s improbable journey was reputedly set in motion by a wager between two “wealthy clubmen of Boston”. A $10,000 prize awaited a woman who succeeded in travelling around the world on two wheels; she was to start penniless and earn $5,000 en route, accept no gratuities, make the trip in 15 months, and cover 10,000 miles by bicycle. This was a test not just of a woman’s endurance but also of her ability to fend for herself in unfamiliar lands.
At first glance, Londonderry seemed an unlikely candidate. For a woman of the 1890s to leave her husband and children was scandalous. She was physically unprepossessing – 1.6m tall and weighing around 47kg, although she subsequently claimed there was “nothing better than a wheel to build a woman up” – and had never ridden a bicycle in her life. But riding was a learnable skill. The other traits required – courage, cunning, willpower and chutzpah – could not be taught, but Londonderry, a skilful creator of her own myth, had them in spades.
- Read more | "She saw off bandits with her revolver": the unbelievable adventures of Fanny Bullock Workman
On Monday 25 June 1894, in front of a crowd gathered at the Massachusetts capitol, Londonderry climbed onto a Columbia women’s bicycle produced by the Pope Manufacturing Company – to the delight of that company’s owner, Colonel Albert Pope, who was actively marketing bicycles to women, and for whom Londonderry’s journey would represent a public relations triumph.
After various speeches were delivered, a representative of the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of New Hampshire hung an advertising placard on Londonderry’s bicycle (paying her $100 for the privilege). With a sports marketing savvy rare in the 1890s, she adopted the Londonderry name, which also served to conceal her Jewish heritage.
Turning her bicycle, body and name into a mobile billboard was a moneymaking and publicity strategy Londonderry employed in cities around the world. She solicited advertising, attaching banners, placards and ribbons to her bike or clothing to be seen by the thousands who watched her pedal by. She also courted the press. “A bright, vivacious woman, a good talker… in fact, all fired smart,” declared the El Paso Daily Herald. And a French newspaper proclaimed: “She seems made only of muscles and nerves and in spite of her petite size gives the impression of remarkable energy.”
When she set out on her adventure in June 1894, Londonderry “sailed away like a kite down Beacon Street”, according to the Boston Evening Transcript. Carrying only a change of undergarments and a pearl-handled revolver, her plan was to ride west. But progress was slow: her bike weighed a whopping 19kg, her long skirts and tailored jacket were ill-suited for the exertions of cycling, the weather was hot, and the physical demands were formidable.
- Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Three months later, having got only as far as Chicago, she decided to abandon the trip, realising that she wouldn’t make it across the continent before winter set in. But her fortunes quickly changed. The Sterling Cycle Works offered her a men’s bicycle half the weight of her Columbia, and she adopted radical new riding attire: bloomers. Enjoying a second wind, Londonderry reversed course and headed to New York. By then, nearly four months had elapsed and she was, in terms of circling the Earth, starting from scratch.
French leave
On 24 November, Londonderry boarded the liner La Touraine for Le Havre. Then she took a train to Paris, where she lingered for several weeks earning money as a human billboard. She left on 30 December, riding through wintry weather over poor roads. It was mid-January by the time she reached Marseilles. Londonderry now had just eight months to compete the circuit – and most of the world still lay ahead. She boarded a French mail boat, the Sydney, and hopped across various seas and oceans, via Alexandria, Yemen and Singapore. Three weeks later, she was in Saigon. From there, she sailed on to Hong Kong and Shanghai, en route to Japan.
On 9 March 1895, Londonderry sailed from Yokohama to San Francisco. By the time she made landfall in the US, she had a series of hyperbolic, apocryphal stories to tell, including being caught up in the Sino-Japanese War. Breathless sensationalism was characteristic of American journalism in the 1890s and Londonderry was on song. Writing in the New York Sunday World in October 1895, she described being imprisoned by the Japanese: “The cell was merely a hut with lattice-work sides. There was no protection from the bitter cold and I suffered keenly. [A] Japanese soldier dragged a Chinese prisoner up to my cell and killed him before my eyes, drinking his blood while the muscles were yet quivering.”
Charge for Chicago
In April, Londonderry left San Francisco accompanied by Mark Johnson, a well-known cyclist from the city. Having reached Los Angeles on 18 May, she headed east alone, following the Southern Pacific Railway nearly 200 miles across the desert. Or did she? The Los Angeles Times reported that “if certain railroad men were asked how she crossed the desert, ‘they would wink their other eye’”.
Such was the anticipation in Tucson that spectators clambered up a bell tower clutching telescopes hoping for a glimpse of Londonderry as she came over the horizon. In El Paso, she was the featured attraction at a bicycle meet, riding a tandem with several cycling enthusiasts. “The way Miss Londonderry pulled Bart Allen around the track… greatly amused the crowd,” said the El Paso Daily Herald.
With little more than two months left on the wager clock, Londonderry was still 1,800 miles from Chicago. She headed north, reaching Cheyenne, Wyoming on 19 August. Then, partly by rail and partly by bike, she arrived in Chicago on 12 September – not quite 15 months after leaving Boston.
“I am a journalist and ‘a new woman’ – if that term means that I believe I can do anything that any man can do.” So begins Londonderry’s account of her trip, published in the New York Sunday World. She’d ridden thousands of miles, often alone. But did she truly pedal around the world? The evidence suggests not – but, even so, it was no small feat for an anonymous Jewish mother from the tenements of Boston to turn herself into a global celebrity, inspiring countless women along the way, without the modern tools of social media. And the wager? Most likely another of Londonderry’s fictions – a brilliant device to add drama to her singular adventure.
Soon after her return, Londonderry moved her family to New York City, where she had a brief career writing sensational features for the New York World under the byline ‘The New Woman’. She had a fourth child in 1897, and died on 11 November 1947, a year after her husband.
In her scrapbook is a handwritten note to the Sunday editor of the New York World that speaks volumes: “Mr Brisbane, I am not afraid. I’ll take the risk myself.”
Peter Zheutlin is Annie’s great-grand-nephew, and the author of Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride (Citadel Press, 2007)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Thatcher, pubs and poverty porn: a gritty history of British sitcomshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/thatcher-pubs-and-poverty-porn-a-gritty-history-of-british-sitcoms/2026-09-23T15:00:05.000ZDel Boy Trotter stands beneath an expensive chandelier in a stately home. “Look, this is the chance I’ve been waiting for – now don’t let me down Rodney, now don’t let me down.”
The two brothers from Peckham have just launched their latest enterprise, a chandelier cleaning business, and this is their first job. They stretch a large sheet beneath the chandelier, ready to catch the priceless fixture. “All right, now brace yourself Rodney, brace yourself.” The camera frames their faces through the dangling crystals, cutting between them and Granddad Trotter unscrewing the light’s holding bolt. Yet the crash, when it comes, isn’t from above. Behind them in a different room, another chandelier explodes against the floor. They’d been under the wrong light fitting all along.
In Only Fools and Horses’ famous moment from 1982, the comedy lies in its inevitability. You watch Del and Rodney position their sheet beneath a chandelier and know exactly what is coming. But the failure is even more spectacular than you imagined. Two working-class brothers from Peckham have come to clean their way into high society and instead end up destroying their already slim chances of social advancement.
The scene is a prime example of what British sitcoms do best: transforming class anxiety into laughter. For 60 years, these comedies have been Britain’s way of discussing what we can’t quite say out loud. They take our deepest tensions – who belongs where, who deserves what, who’s allowed to aspire to more – and make them safe to examine. When Del destroys that chandelier, we’re both laughing at the slapstick of it all and the absurdity of the class system itself, at the impossible gap between where Del is and where he dreams of being.
British sitcoms work as a social barometer because they catch us with our guards down. We think we’re just watching comedy, but our prejudices, fears and fantasies about class are played back to us through recurring characters stuck in unchanging situations. Where the dominant American model promises transformation and growth, British comedies tend to trap their characters in the same circumstances. It’s in the portrayal of working-class life that these class tensions become most visible, and where the question of who tells these stories matters most. Over the decades, those voices have changed. It’s a story that began in 1962, when working-class life on television meant entrapment above all else.
Generational tragedy
Harold Steptoe was entrapment personified. At the age of 37, bitter and desperate, he remained stuck in a Shepherd’s Bush junkyard with his father, Albert. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe and Son (BBC 1962–65, BBC One 1970–74) centred on the two men running a rag-and-bone business, locked in mutual dependency and loathing. Harold had already lost his best years. “On the cart at 12, in the army at 18, and back on the cart at 22,” he lamented. Delivered by Harry H Corbett, an ex-Royal Marine who said he had killed two Japanese soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, it’s a line that embodies the generational tragedy of working-class men whose youth was swallowed by a combination of labour and the Second World War, and who found themselves back where they started when the fighting ceased.
In 1957, Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan told Britons they’d “never had it so good”. For Harold, that meant nothing. Macmillan insisted on Britain’s prosperity. Within a few years, researchers at the LSE were combing through the household spending figures and finding something else entirely: seven million people barely surviving, and 40 per cent of the elderly scraping by on means-tested National Assistance. Harold’s inheritance wasn’t prosperity but the same junkyard, the same cart, the same life his father had lived. And Albert, grubby and manipulative, was content to keep it that way, sabotaging Harold’s attempts to escape.
The show struck a nerve. At its peak, Steptoe was pulling in 28 million viewers – more than half of the UK population. True, there were only BBC and ITV to choose between, but Britain kept choosing the Steptoes. Harold’s desperation, and Albert’s grip on him, resonated more than anyone wanted to admit.
Three years after the Steptoes first appeared on screen, another angry man emerged from working-class London. Till Death Us Do Part (BBC One, 1965–75) gave us Alf Garnett, a West Ham-supporting docker ranting from his East End home about race, politics and women’s liberation. The 1960s were supposedly swinging, but not for Alf. He watched the British empire crumbling, immigrants arriving and women demanding equality, and raged against it all. Creator Johnny Speight intended his sitcom, which reached more than 18 million viewers weekly, as satire. But a 1973 BBC audience research report (‘Till Death Us Do Part as anti-Prejudice Propaganda’) revealed an uncomfortable truth: among older working-class viewers, the show appeared to reinforce existing views rather than challenge them. While most viewers agreed Alf was “too extreme”, 84 per cent also thought “some of the things he says are true”. The satire had backfired. Audiences weren’t just laughing at Alf, they were laughing with him.
Get-rich-quick schemers
Harold would remain in his junkyard, Alf in his East End home, both trapped by a class system that modernisation had only disguised, not dismantled. But the promise of better outcomes lay ahead. In 1979, prime minister Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street armed with a new gospel for the working-class, one that urged them to stop waiting for rescue and instead to rescue themselves. Enter Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter, wheeling and dealing his way through Peckham in John Sullivan’s Only Fools and Horses (BBC One, 1981–2003). Del lived in a high-rise council flat with his younger brother Rodney (and other relatives during the show’s run). He scraped a living flogging dodgy goods out of an open suitcase in markets and pubs, always convinced the next deal would make the family millionaires. Whether cleaning chandeliers or selling ‘genuine’ Rolex watches, every scheme was the one that would finally deliver.
While Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher’s most loyal ministers, was telling the party conference that his father had got on his bike and looked for work, Del Boy was already mobile, transforming his three-wheeled Reliant Regal into an unlikely symbol of makeshift enterprise. Del’s delusions of sophistication – the Caribbean stallion cocktails, the borrowed SAS motto (“He who dares, wins”) – suggested that class was just performance anyway. Why not perform your way to wealth? Where Steptoe had treated aspiration as tragedy, Sullivan recast it as farce. The difference mattered because Sullivan had grown up in working-class south London, knew these people intimately and could write them with warmth. By 1996, Only Fools was pulling in 24.3 million viewers for its Christmas special, making it Britain’s highest-rated sitcom episode ever.
There was another story that wasn’t being told, though. Television’s working-class protagonists remained stubbornly white, even as real working-class communities had been multicultural for decades. The Fosters (LWT, 1976–77) tried to bridge this gap with a black family in south London. But, written by white creators adapting an American format, it felt hollow to many black British viewers who recognised neither the dialogue nor their experiences.
The 1980s brought about some degree of change. Channel 4 launched in 1982 with an explicit remit to serve minority audiences, while the decade’s uprisings in Brixton, Toxteth and Tottenham made working-class black experience impossible to ignore. These communities faced unemployment rates twice the national average and systematic police harassment.
Against this backdrop, sitcoms written by black writers about working-class life finally began to emerge, although support proved short-lived. No Problem! (Channel 4, 1983–85), created by Farrukh Dhondy and Mustapha Matura, followed black working-class siblings in Willesden, but lasted only two series. Trix Worrell’s Peckham barbershop-set sitcom Desmond’s (Channel 4, 1989–94) lasted longer, though not all its characters were working class.
The real breakthrough came from abandoning sitcom conventions entirely. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash did exactly that in 1998. The Royle Family (BBC Two, 1998–2000, plus specials to 2012) stripped away everything the traditional sitcom had insisted upon. There was no studio audience and no laugh track. What remained was a working-class family in Manchester who didn’t want to escape.
Jim Royle sat in his chair criticising the neighbours (“Earl and Lady Muck”), while his wife, Barbara, made endless cups of tea, daughter Denise and her husband Dave occupied the sofa, and son Antony was sent to answer the door. Aherne and Cash had created something revolutionary precisely because nothing happened. The Royle Family started quietly with just a few million viewers initially. But word spread. By 2000, 10 million were watching, drawn to something they hadn’t seen before: themselves, unvarnished and unashamed. Without canned laughter to cue viewers, audiences had to decide for themselves what was funny.
Everyday people
The true revolution lay in who was writing. The old sitcoms had been written by men about men. Women were wives, daughters, accessories to male frustration or ambition. Aherne changed that. She had grown up in Wythenshawe, once reportedly Europe’s largest council estate, and she gave the Royles the dignity of being ordinary. Victoria Wood did something similar with dinnerladies (BBC One, 1998–2000), set among the women of a Manchester factory canteen. Wood and Aherne, both northerners writing their own material, represented a quiet revolution: northern women telling their own stories during primetime.
These shows debuted shortly before Big Brother arrived in 2000, before reality TV turned ordinary people into performers and made everyone conscious of being watched. The Royles had no such self-consciousness. Jim’s constant refrain of “my arse!” to any pretension rejected the decade’s dominant ‘lifestyle’ ideology, where consumer choices were supposed to signal aspiration and self-improvement.
The Royles could afford to sit still. Two decades later, that luxury was gone. In an era of zero-hours contracts and austerity, working-class comedy had to move as fast as working-class life.
The joy in precarity
Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum (E4, 2015–17) captured this new restlessness. Here was something British television had barely attempted: a black working-class woman, Tracey Gordon, navigating her Tower Hamlets estate with irrepressible enthusiasm for losing her virginity and for self-discovery. As we’ve seen, this wasn’t the first attempt at black working-class comedy. But where The Fosters lacked authentic voices and No Problem! lacked institutional support, Chewing Gum was different.
Written by Coel herself, it won critical acclaim, with audience reception strong among younger viewers, especially women aged 16–34. Yet even this success didn’t open floodgates. Tracey remained an outlier – a singular achievement rather than the beginning of a new wave. Nevertheless, Sophie Willan’s Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two, 2020–24) pushed further into precarity. Alma – sex worker, aspiring actress, daughter of an addict and product of the care system – embodied the instability of modern working-class life. Despite this, Alma was defiantly, chaotically joyful.
Both Tracey and Alma represent something new, a rejection of the grim realism traditionally associated with estate life. Tracey’s colourful jumpers and sexual awakening, Alma’s bright pink coat and jubilant energy: these women dress vibrantly and refuse the drab aesthetic of ‘poverty porn’, the kind of television that treats hardship as spectacle. Working-class life, they insist, isn’t monochrome misery.
These insider perspectives are reinforced formally through direct address. Alma narrates her own life with a bold, matter-of-fact delivery, while Tracey breaks the fourth wall to share her inner monologue with gleeful confidence. They don’t explain themselves to outsiders. Instead, they address viewers directly, offering psychological depth and subjectivity on their own terms. This personal mode of address gives us accounts of precarity told with wit rather than self-pity.
- Read more | “It’s rare that a television show actually changes people’s lives”: 15 years of Horrible Histories
These sitcoms remind us that working-class life is a culture, with its own values and its own humour, and not a set of deprivation statistics. The journey from Harold Steptoe’s junkyard to Tracey Gordon’s estate is a story about authorship as much as about comedy. British sitcoms stopped laughing at the working class when working-class writers started writing them, and this transformation accelerated when working-class women picked up the pen.
In 2023, however, research found that lower-income audiences were convinced that television was made “by someone else”. One viewer complained that working-class people represented on BBC shows were “either being criticised or laughed at”. The rise of YouTube and TikTok has emphasised this disconnect. Younger working-class viewers now encounter content made by people who share their backgrounds, and can recognise when they’re being represented versus merely depicted. After 60 years, we risk television coming full circle, back to the working class being observed rather than heard.
Del Boy made his millions, then lost every penny. His response was characteristically defiant: “This time next year, we could be millionaires.” Maybe, then, money was never the point. What these sitcoms have held onto for 60 years is the hustle and the hope, and the laughter that comes with them. The question was always who got to laugh.
Laura Minor is senior lecturer in television studies at the University of Salford. Her books include Reclaiming Female Authorship in UK Television Comedy (Edinburgh, 2024)
This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Forget the Colosseum: here’s why Georgian Britons preferred to holiday at homehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/forget-the-colosseum-heres-why-georgian-britons-preferred-to-holiday-at-home/2026-08-26T15:00:46.000ZIn her journal of her travels around England on horseback between 1685 and c1712, Celia Fiennes complained that too many of her contemporaries had succumbed to “the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts”.
The “foreign parts” that Fiennes had in mind were the destinations favoured by those on the so-called Grand Tour, a label probably first used by Richard Lassels in his 1670 guidebook The Voyage of Italy. Until it was drastically curtailed by the French Revolution of 1789, the Grand Tour was an established rite of passage for predominantly young elite men who travelled to France, Italy and elsewhere on the continent to complete their education. These fashionable tourists – in theory at least – sought to improve themselves through their encounter with the legacy of Classical antiquity and their experience of cosmopolitan European cities.
As an antidote to the pull of Paris and Rome, Celia Fiennes talked up the attractions of home – such as Bath, Stonehenge and the various “wonders” of the Peak District – and she claimed that “Journeys to visit their native land” would give people a more patriotic appreciation of their own country. Yet not everyone was convinced.
In his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), Daniel Defoe dismissed the “Wonderless Wonders” of Derbyshire and the “barren and frightful” appearance of the Lake District. And, while James Brome in 1700 claimed that Stonehenge rivalled the pyramids, it was still for others difficult to conceive of the British landscape without thinking of it in relation to idealised foreign models derived from prestigious works of painting and poetry.
Inferiority complex
Thomas Gainsborough declared in 1764 that where the painting of “real views from nature in this country” was concerned, he had “never seen any place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitation of Gaspard or Claude”. Gainsborough here demonstrates the ‘cultural cringe’ by which many British artists deferred to continental Europeans – in this case the French artists Gaspard Dughet and Claude Lorrain – and regarded the subject matter of native scenes as of comparatively low status.
This reflex extended beyond landscape painting and sometimes generated a sense that Britain was deficient across the arts more generally. The architect John Gwynn in 1766 lamented the “confused… irregular, [and] slovenly appearance” of the cityscape of London, which was “thought by some… in many respects inferior in point of grandeur and affect” to Paris and Rome, and not “answerable to the character of the richest and most powerful people in the world”.
Mid-18th-century Britons were confident in their nation’s commercial and military strength, but conscious of the gap between their achievements in trade and war and their cultural prowess. By the end of the century, however, this ‘cultural cringe’ had begun to evaporate – to be replaced by pride in what British art, landscapes and urban spaces had to offer. The question is: why?
Middle on the move
One byproduct of the nation’s prosperity was that middle-class Britons increasingly gained the opportunity to travel for leisure, an experience that afforded them a better understanding of Britain’s distinctiveness.
While the natural wonders of Derbyshire were already enumerated by the mid-17th century, improvements in tourist infrastructure – most notably the development of turnpike roads – helped to establish new itineraries in other parts of the nation.
Thomas West published A Guide to the Lakes in 1778, presenting as a relatively recent phenomenon that “persons of genius, taste and observation [now] … make the tour of their own country”. The Welshman Thomas Pennant knowingly introduced his 1769 Tour in Scotland as a “petit tour”, as if to contrast his expedition with the larger-scale Grand Tour, but he likewise presented the “matchless” spectacle of the river Tay as favourably comparing with sights that might be encountered beyond Britain’s shores. Tobias Smollett’s otherwise irascible fictional traveller Matt Bramble did something similar, stating in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) that “I have seen the Lago di Garda, Albano, De Vico, Bolsena, and Geneva, and, upon my honour, I prefer Lough-Lomond to them all.”
Tourism in Scotland was made possible by the military roads constructed under the direction of General Wade after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, and then by the brutal ‘pacification’ of the Highlands following the Hanoverian defeat of Jacobite forces at Culloden in 1746.
If travel within Britain in the 18th century may for many have helped to instil a forward-looking sense of a Unionist British identity, it also meant confronting reminders of the violence of the past, whether this was the product of civil conflict or – beginning with the Romans – foreign invasion.
The experience of the tourist in this period could also be more straightforwardly pleasurable, however. The modern seaside holiday may be traced back to the second half of the 18th century, as coastal spas such as Margate and Scarborough increasingly attracted the middle classes as well as the aristocracy, lured by the health benefits of sea-bathing and the resort facilities that developed around this activity.
Southampton was hailed by one boosterish guidebook as “the Montpelier of England”, and when Thomas Gray visited in 1764, he noted that it was “full of bathers”. George III was a keen sea-bather, and Weymouth, which he first visited in 1789 as he recovered from mental illness, was reputedly his favourite holiday destination.
A metropolis of empire
By the final third of the 18th century, London was increasingly emerging from Paris’s shadow. As the metropolis of a growing empire, London, as so many said, was a world by itself, beyond comparison. The nature of London’s growth – driven by commerce – generated forms of culture that attracted visitors from overseas, through new urban institutions such as coffee houses, art galleries, museums, theatres and pleasure gardens.
Britain’s position relative to France or Italy could now be understood in terms of the distinctiveness, and no longer the inferiority, of its cultural production. The ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769 confirmed Shakespeare’s status as a national poet whose strength resided partly in his rejection of neoclassical taste. Later, the visiting of sites associated with celebrated authors such as Burns, Scott and Austen would develop into an important strand of home tourism.
The Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu described Shakespeare as “our Gothic Bard”, and the revaluing of the Gothic in the final third of the century provides another index of how Britons reimagined themselves in relation to others in this period. ‘Gothic’ could still be synonymous with barbarism (because the Goths had brought down the Roman empire) and Catholic superstition. Yet it was increasingly regarded as a native heritage that had to be understood on its own idiosyncratic terms rather than as a deviation from the Classical rules. Castles and abbeys, whether intact or in ruin, were exemplary of this heritage, gaining renewed attention through the convergence of home tourism with the archaeological discovery of the distant past and the currency of ideas of the sublime and the picturesque.
Fortress Britain
Victory over France in the global Seven Years’ War (1756–63) at once broadened Britons’ horizons and prompted some to claim that this success owed to the unique character of a self-styled ‘island race’. Defeat in America two decades later then generated a defensive introspection, where the consolation of a deep-rooted Gothic inheritance – powerful because it exceeded any straightforward definition – enabled Britons to think of themselves as unaffected by the humiliating loss of their former colonies.
During the war with revolutionary France, “the proud Keep of Windsor”, long established as a sight for day-trippers from London, was for Edmund Burke an emblem of a defiant Fortress Britain.
The Gothic tourism that flourished in Britain from the second half of the 18th century onwards was open to anyone with access to historic monuments, and experiences of it were diverse. Visiting a castle or abbey could generate serious reflection on its history and symbolism but also involve nothing more elevated than taking a picnic in a pleasant spot. Writing of Netley Abbey, a former Cistercian monastery near Southampton, John Bullar in 1799 disparagingly referred to the numbers of those “who never think seriously on any subject; and who visit this place, as they do another, merely to ‘stare about them, and to eat’”.
The idea of Gothic architecture as part of everyday life is captured by Paul Sandby’s watercolour West Gate at Canterbury from c1780. The medieval gate sits next to residential and commercial buildings, and the figures depicted include polite tourists, but also others who appear just to be going about their daily business.
As well as situating monuments of the past in a wider context, Sandby composed new kinds of urban and rural scenes that offered ‘views’ of a stable, prosperous and modernising nation. He depicted the landscapes of Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a way as to create a four-nations picturesque, which generated an inclusive sense of British landscape identity and further underscored the scenic possibilities of home ground.
In his compendium of travel-writing The British Tourists; or Traveller’s Pocket Companion (1798–1800), William Mavor celebrated how “some of our most enlightened countrymen” had in recent decades been “as eager to explore the remotest parts of Britain, as they formerly were to cross the Channel”. Mavor stated that these travellers had shown how “we shall find no equal extent of territory, on the face of the globe, of more importance, or containing more attractions” than Britain and Ireland.
If home tours had come to supersede the Grand Tour by the time that Mavor wrote, however, this was partly out of necessity, because continental Europe was off-limits to travellers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Mavor’s remarks here may, again, articulate a Unionist ideal rather than reflect a reality of travellers strengthening connections through tourist activity. Ireland was formally incorporated into the union in 1801, but this was only after the brutal suppression of the United Irish rebellion against British authority.
As is true today, Britain could be elided with England, with a green and pleasant ‘country’, offering an appealing detachment from the slavery and empire that underpinned its unevenly distributed wealth and power. However, as is the case with the Welsh-speaking Edward Pugh – whose Cambria Depicta (1816) offers an illustrated record of his tour of north Wales – non-metropolitan artists and writers could demonstrate a confident sense of a cultural identity that was not subordinated to an overarching Britishness.
Tourism for the masses
These are all important caveats that qualify any account of the unifying impact of home tourism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is still fair to say, nonetheless, that the once elite pursuit of leisure travel was substantially democratised in the decades before the coming of the railways, heralded by the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, which in turn helped to give rise to a new age of mass tourism. The travel agent Thomas Cook organised the first rail excursion in 1841, a trip from Leicester to Loughborough, on behalf of the Leicester Temperance Society.
Decades earlier, the “curious traveller” Thomas Pennant could play up the adventurousness of his journey – accompanied by an expert in Gaelic to translate for him – to “the remotest part of north Britain”, claiming that northern Scotland was to those from elsewhere “almost as little known…as Kamtschatka” in farthest east Asia.
By the 19th century such claims about a foreignness within Britain became less common. Where they were made, they often related to the urban working classes and their environs, sensationally presented as ‘Darkest London’, a label deriving from the racist idea of ‘Darkest Africa’. To Victorian social reformers, such nests of degeneracy and squalor were all but off the map, approachable only by the most intrepid of explorers. And certainly not by tourists.
Sun, sea and trusty knick-knacks
A beginner’s guide to holidaying in Georgian Britain
Where should I go? That, of course, is a question of taste. But if you love the great outdoors, then you’ll be delighted to learn that some tourist circuits such as the Peak District are now well established. The Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth House is part of the itinerary – and rightly so: it’s impossibly grand and set in Derbyshire’s stunning dales. You could also follow the crowds to spa towns such as Bath, Buxton and Tunbridge Wells, and seaside resorts such as Scarborough.
How do I get there?
The question of where you go is inextricably connected to the state of the road system. For detailed information on routes from London to various destinations across Britain, check out Paterson’s Roads books (published regularly from 1771). However, you can increasingly pack your bags safe in the knowledge that recent improvements to Britain’s highways have made it far easier to access picturesque landscapes such as the Wye Valley and the Lake District, and to savour Thomas Pennant’s ‘petit tour’ of Scotland.
How long will the journey take?
It’s not just the road system that has improved in recent decades. Thanks to new, speedier vehicles – like the enclosed horse-drawn carriage – journey times have dropped substantially. Just a few years ago, it would have taken you four-and-a-half days to get from London to Manchester. Soon you’ll be doing it in little more than 24 hours.
How much will it cost me?
Want detailed information on where you can travel to from London, which carriers will take you – and, just as importantly, how much it will set you back? Then check out The Town and Country Directory. This has all the latest fares and timetables. According to one recent edition (1773), the daily post coach from London to York left the Rose and Crown on St John Street at 3am and cost 2 pounds and 10 shillings.
What do I need to pack?
No traveller worth his or her salt should dare leave home without a range of pocket accessories. This might include the ‘Claude glass’ (below), a convex shaded mirror that produces “picturesque” views of natural beauty. Or you can take the advice of Reverend James Plumptre, who recently wrote of the various “knick-knacks” that he took with him on his pedestrian tour of Scotland. These included a telescope, a pedometer, a drinking horn and a pistol.
Where can I rest-up en route?
Coaching inns are spread out at intervals across major roads. There you can top up on food and drink. And, if they have their own stables, you can even ask them to replace your horses
– for a fee of course.
Am I taking my life into my hands?
Highway robbers continue to menace travellers – not only on remote roads. However, they’re less of a threat than they were at the beginning of the century – so much so that carriage accidents, as opposed to hold-ups, have become plot devices in a string of recent novels. You’d be advised not to read one of these novels while you’re on your travels!
James Watt and Alison O’Byrne teach English at the University of York. They are co-editors of Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period: Grand Tours (Cambridge, 2025)
This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>1966: The World Cup that changed a nationhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/1966-the-world-cup-that-changed-a-nation/2026-07-17T09:02:39.000ZThe England men’s football team has missed out on the opportunity to replicate the nation’s most-heralded victory back in the 1966 World Cup, still one of the most celebrated moments in its sporting history. But what did the football tournament reveal about the state of the country that staged it back in the 1960s?
Jon Bauckham talks to Michael Calvin about the forgotten stories of that remarkable summer – from diplomatic tensions and class divisions, to Middlesborough’s unexpected love affair with North Korea.
]]>Norway’s ‘Viking row’: the real history behind the World Cup football chanthttps://www.historyextra.com/period/viking/norway-viking-row-chant-world-cup-football/2026-07-11T00:41:13.000ZDid the Vikings chant about death, sex and masturbation while they rowed on the raiding missions that terrorised Britain and Europe between the eighth and 11th centuries?
That’s a pertinent question in the context of this summer’s FIFA Men’s World Cup. If you’ve been following the tournament, you’ll have no doubt seen clips of Norwegian supporters honouring their Viking ancestry by pulling imaginary oars in unison to the beat of a manly roar, with a drummer keeping time. The football team themselves perform the same motion when they win a game, led in general by their talismanic striker Erling Haaland (pictured above).
- Listen now | Alfred vs the Vikings: a four-part podcast series
That is the so-called ‘Viking row’, apparently invented by a Norwegian fan only in the last year or so, but building on a tradition of mass-participation rowing and clapping among Scandinavian supporters. It’ll be a feature, no doubt, of the build-up to the big game on Saturday night, when Norway face England in the World Cup quarter-finals.
The idea of the mass-participation row is not only to celebrate Norway’s Viking past, but also create an intimidating stadium experience when Norway is playing, and help foster a strong team spirit among the footballers and their supporters.
It’s a nice idea, even if some people have questioned how far we should celebrate the Vikings who paired their great seafaring explorations with murder, pillage, rape and slaving.
Those ethical considerations aside, does the Viking row have a direct historical precedent?
Blood, sex and masturbation
The Vikings’ seafaring prowess was built on their ability to swap sails for oars when they got close to land, enabling them to engage in coastal raiding or trading. And, according to experts, it does seem that they combined their rowing with songs and chants.
“In Old Norse sagas, song and battle have a very close connection,” explains Dr Eleanor Parker, a leading expert in Old Norse and Old English literature at the University of Oxford and the author of Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England. “Viking warriors are often shown chanting poetry in the midst of fighting, or before and after combat.”
“Like war chants, these poems sometimes channel the collective voice of the army, urging them on against the enemy. There is one that has Viking sailors singing as they’re about to land in England: ‘Let us be brave in battle, let us shake our spears and shoot! Great numbers of the English take to flight before our blades’.”
A few years ago, Professor Richard Perkins also wrote an academic article about Viking rowing chants, and how their rhythmic metre might have formed the basis of a particular style of court poetry that developed in the early Viking period.
- Read more | Meet the mysterious leaders of the Vikings’ most fearsome army
However, the chants that Professor Perkins identified from the Viking period are a touch more involved than those we’ve already heard at the 2026 World Cup.
They generally have more of a story to them, sometimes employing dramatic language of violence (blood raining down, men smiting each other mightily) and sometimes delivering some pretty spicy innuendo (oars as penises, that sort of thing). One verse even hints at masturbation: “While we work the soft oar stiff on the gunwale”.
It certainly sounds like there was enough going on in the songs to keep the rowers’ minds off the hard task at hand, while also keeping them to time as they pulled hard to shore.
The original England–Norway showdown
Returning to Saturday’s quarter-final clash, much capital is being made of the parallel between the match and the battle of Stamford Bridge. It was there, in September 1066, that the English king Harold II defeated the renowned Norwegian ruler Harald Hardrada, and made the river run red with Viking blood.
According to his saga, Hardrada composed some warlike verse before this battle. It’s not clear whether that would have been part of a rowing chant, but it did him no good in the battle, as he died along with most of his men.
- Read more | What if Harold died at Stamford Bridge, not Hastings?
Some optimistic English pundits might hope that Hardrada’s demise offers some sort of precedent for this year’s tournament, while enthusiastic Norwegians will be trusting that their adoption of the Viking row will allow their players to harness the spirit of the raiding warriors.
The football Viking row is distinctly sanitised in comparison to the original. If the Norwegians truly want to channel their ancestral spirit, they need to be singing about death, sex and masturbation – which might not go down well with the American TV networks showing the game.
]]>When football became a weapon of the Cold Warhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/when-football-became-a-weapon-of-the-cold-war/2026-07-06T16:02:31.000ZThe Cold War cast a shadow over all aspects of life – including the world's favourite sport. All sides of the ideological divide used football to score political goals.
Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall talk Spencer Mizen through some of the most explosive Cold War footballing clashes in a story that takes in Pele, Eusebio, North Korean upsets and a galloping major.
]]>Angry bishops, grumpy dictators and the 'wizard of dribble': 8 moments when football and politics collidedhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/angry-bishops-grumpy-dictators-and-the-wizard-of-dribble-8-moments-when-soccer-and-politics-collided/2026-07-03T14:30:39.000Z1. The fog of war at White Hart Lane
A chaotic 1945 friendly between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow saw wartime alliance splintered by Cold War rivalry
It’s not often that football friendlies spark conflict – especially between allies. The match between Arsenal and Dynamo Moscow, part of a tour of Britain by the Soviet Union’s top team in November 1945, was intended to celebrate the Allies’ recent victory over Nazism. But things went badly wrong – on and off the pitch.
Playing at Tottenham Hotspur’s White Hart Lane stadium – Arsenal’s ground at Highbury was unavailable – the British team bent the rules by fielding ringers such as England’s ‘Wizard of Dribble’, Stanley Matthews. And the Soviet referee, perhaps with half a mind on the gulags, tested neutrality to the limits.
Thick London fog, a real pea-souper, added confusion – and controversy. Visibility was so limited that players could barely distinguish teammates from opponents. Arsenal claimed that Dynamo cheated by sometimes fielding more than 11 men, slipping on substitutes unnoticed. Dynamo accused Arsenal of trying to maim its players. Soviet officials later alleged that Arsenal’s “capitalist” manager, George Allison, had tried to get the game called off once his team had fallen behind because he’d gambled a fortune on a home victory.
The match in the mist revealed a striking contrast in styles. Dynamo played a fast, fluid collective game built on discipline, short passing and constant movement. Players interchanged positions, drifting across the pitch to create space. For British spectators accustomed to more direct football, the effect was startling. Perhaps it offered proof of the vitality of communism – and a glimpse of the future of football.
After Dynamo’s thrilling 4-3 victory, both sides accused each other of bringing the game into disrepute. Writing the next month, George Orwell decried the “orgies of hatred” in such encounters, famously observing that international sport was “war minus the shooting”. The encounter suggested that ideological rivalry between east and west had reached the football pitch.
2. The 'miracle' that remade a nation
With its shock 1954 World Cup win over Hungary, West Germany emerged from the shadow of Nazism
It’s hard to believe now, but Germans were once football underdogs. On Sunday 4 July 1954, in a rainswept Wankdorf Stadium in Bern, Switzerland, the biggest match of the early Cold War saw the world’s best team – the ‘golden squad’ of communist Hungary – pitted against capitalist West Germany in the World Cup final. The ‘Magical Magyars’, featuring the brilliant forward Ferenc Puskás, were hot favourites. The only question was how many goals they would put past the Germans.
At first, the match went to script, and Hungary raced into a 2-0 lead. But West Germany had drawn level by the 18th minute, and it was still 2-2 in the 84th. Then Helmut Rahn rifled a shot past Gyula Grosics. “Germany lead 3-2!” exclaimed commentator Herbert Zimmermann. “Call me mad! Call me crazy!”
Controversy erupted late on as linesman Mervyn Griffiths disallowed a Puskás equaliser for offside. Then the final whistle blew. West Germany were world champions for the first time.
They called it “the miracle of Bern”. That was an exaggeration: the West Germans had top players, a wily coach in Sepp Herberger, and screw-in studs on their Adidas boots – a huge advantage in muddy conditions.
Miracle or not, victory in 1954 helped Germany emerge from the shadow of Nazism. Budapest, though, rioted after their national team’s loss. Two years later, a popular uprising almost toppled communist rule. Grosics hid arms for the rebels. Puskás, like many of Hungary’s golden generation, went west to continue a glittering career at Real Madrid.
Hungary’s brief time as a football superpower was over. Germany’s was just beginning.
3. Church vs communism
A “bewitching” Yugoslav team got the better of Ireland’s footballers – and incensed its religious authorities
“Football is like a religion to me,” Pelé once confessed. “I worship the ball and treat it like a god.” In October 1955, at the height of the Cold War, football and faith clashed head-on as the Catholic Republic of Ireland played communist Yugoslavia in Dublin – and God lost.
For much of the Cold War, Yugoslavia dominated eastern European football. In the 1950s it boasted one of the world’s best goalkeepers, Vladimir Beara, along with prolific striker Miloš Milutinović. When the team’s visit to Dublin was announced in the summer of 1955, Irish sports fans licked their lips at the prospect of seeing these stars in the flesh.
Enter John Charles McQuaid, Catholic archbishop of Dublin and one of the most dominant figures in the history of the Irish Republic. He hated Yugoslavia’s atheistic dictator, Josip Broz Tito, who’d infamously imprisoned Catholic priests. McQuaid had successfully lobbied against a planned 1952 fixture between these teams, and now heaped immense pressure on Ireland’s football authorities to cancel the 1955 game.
The result was an almighty public row. Clergy accused football officials of betraying church and country by arranging the match. Officials argued that vetoing Tito’s team would irreparably damage Irish football. The Yugoslavs cheekily responded by reminding Catholics of Pope Pius XII’s view that politics should not interfere with sports.
This time, McQuaid suffered a rare defeat – and the match went ahead in front of 22,000 spectators at Dalymount Park. The Yugoslavs demonstrated another communist team’s technical brilliance, their slick passing and inventive attacking play repeatedly exposing the Irish defence. Milutinović bagged a hat-trick, and Tito’s team ran out 4-1 winners. Irish newspapers claimed that the visitors’ footballing “science” had “bewitched and bewildered” their opponents.
Ireland lost on the pitch. But many later claimed that football dented the authority of the Catholic church in 1955 – so perhaps the country won something more important.
4. Franco, Khrushchev and the ultimate grudge match
Francoism and communism clashed on the pitch in the final of the 1964 European Nations’ Cup – a game that neither team dared lose
Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium is always a cauldron. When Spain played the Soviet Union there in the final of the European Nations’ Cup, it was Francoism versus communism in the ultimate Cold War grudge match. “Not just a battle – it was a war,” recalled Barcelona’s Chus Pereda.
Spanish dictator Francisco Franco was among the crowd on 21 June 1964. A Real Madrid fan, he liked football – but not as much as he hated communism. When Spain were drawn against the Soviet Union in the 1960 Euros, they forfeited the tie rather than send the team to Moscow.
Four years later, with Spain hosting the Euros, Franco’s advisors ensured that the 1960 boycott wasn’t repeated. The country was on the path to economic liberalisation, and the Cold War tensions of the early sixties had receded. Semi-final wins for Spain and the Soviets set up the final both sides dreaded.
Pre-match tensions were high. The president of the Spanish Football Federation even considered having the Soviet team poisoned. But all of this was forgotten when the game started. Pereda gave Spain an early lead but the Soviets quickly equalised, with Galimzyan Khusainov’s shot squirming under keeper José Ángel Iribar’s body.
Extra time looked inevitable – until, with 6 minutes remaining, Marcelino powered a remarkable header past Soviet stopper Lev Yashin to give Spain a 2–1 victory.
The Spanish press was cock-a-hoop. Celebrations were widespread, even in the outlawed Communist Party. But the feel-good factor didn’t last. It would be 44 years before Spain won another international trophy.
In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev was furious – both with the result and with images of a smiling Franco on TV sets across the Soviet Union. Two days after the final, coach Konstantin Beskov was sacked. Khrushchev soon followed. Leonid Brezhnev, a bigger football fan, replaced him as party leader in October 1964.
5. The 'hermit nation' steals British hearts
North Korea’s players were the darlings of the 1966 World Cup finals, but they met their match in the men of an anti-communist dictatorship
The 1966 World Cup quarter-final between North Korea and Portugal produced one of the most dramatic matches in football history – one shaped by the wider tensions of the Cold War.
By that stage of the competition, the communist Asian team had already shocked Italy, but its performance at Goodison Park in Liverpool on 23 July 1966 was still more impressive: fast, direct and fearless. Within 25 minutes North Korea led 3-0, exploiting defensive gaps with sharp passing and clinical finishing. The crowd watched in astonishment as a team from Kim Il-Sung’s ‘hermit nation’ was overwhelming one of Europe’s elite sides.
The Koreans had become unlikely favourites with British fans, especially in Middlesbrough, where their earlier victory over Italy had forged a lasting connection still remembered today. New fans chanted the names of players from the east, and waved improvised North Korean flags.
Portugal, however, represented a different Cold War story. Under António de Oliveira Salazar, the Iberian country was a staunchly anti-communist dictatorship. Its team reflected imperial ambitions: several key players, including Eusébio, were born in African colonies, embodying the regime’s claim of a unified, multiracial state.
The quarter-final match turned on endurance and quality. Portugal regrouped, slowing the tempo and asserting control. Eusébio became the decisive figure, combining strength, pace and finishing to devastating effect, scoring four goals as Portugal mounted a relentless comeback. At the final whistle they had won 5-3.
The game was a classic of shifting momentum: early shock, mounting pressure and eventual domination. Yet it also carried symbolic weight. North Korea’s performance offered a rare humanising sight of a closed communist state, while Portugal’s victory allowed Salazar’s regime to celebrate both footballing excellence and imperial identity.
6. When a regime's dream turned sour
Zaire’s appearance at the 1974 World Cup was meant to rubber-stamp its status as a rising power. That bubble was burst in 90 humiliating minutes
When Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) qualified for the 1974 World Cup finals in Germany, President Mobutu Sese Seko saw an opportunity to advertise his regime to the world. His nation had become the first from sub-Saharan Africa to reach the finals, and he intended to turn that success into a political triumph.
Mobutu was a master of Cold War diplomacy. While presenting himself as a staunch anti-communist ally of the US he cultivated relations with China and other socialist states, skilfully playing rival powers off against one another to secure aid and influence. Footballing success, he believed, would reinforce Zaire’s image as a rising African power.
Ironically, as it transpired, the team reflected Yugoslavia’s growing influence across the developing world. Zaire was managed by Blagoje Vidinić, a former Yugoslav international goalkeeper who’d previously coached in Morocco. (Yugoslavia frequently sent sporting experts abroad as informal ambassadors, in an attempt to strengthen diplomatic links through football.)
When Zaire faced Yugoslavia in their Group 2 clash in Gelsenkirchen, it proved an embarrassing mismatch. The communist team’s experienced side dominated, exploiting defensive errors and scoring repeatedly. The final score of 9-0 remains one of the heaviest defeats in World Cup history.
The humiliation had frightening consequences. Before Zaire’s next match against Brazil, rumours spread among the players that Mobutu had threatened punishments if they suffered another embarrassment. Several later said they feared for their lives.
That fear produced one of football’s most famous moments. Before a Brazilian free kick, defender Mwepu Ilunga burst from the defensive wall and blasted the ball upfield. To spectators, he seemed confused about the rules. In reality, it was a desperate attempt to disrupt play and avoid further shame.
The episode revealed the darker side of Cold War sport, in which political pride could transform a football match into something far more dangerous.
7. The derby of a doomed dictatorship
A bitter cup final contested by Bucharest neighbours exposed cracks that augured revolution
Did football ever help overthrow communism? Well, maybe. Take Romania under the tyrannical rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–89). For much of his dictatorship, Romanian football wasn’t very good. But that changed in the 1980s.
Leading the way were Romania’s most powerful clubs, Steaua Bucharest and Dinamo Bucharest. This was army versus secret police: the team run by Ceauşescu’s son, Valentin, against the team of the hated Securitate. There was no love lost in the ‘eternal derby’.
Dinamo won three league titles between 1981 and 1984, then Steaua took control, taking five straight championships and, sensationally, the Eastern Bloc’s first European Cup – an upset win over Barcelona in 1986.
Tensions peaked at the 1988 Romanian cup final in Bucharest. It was 1-1 in the 90th minute when Steaua sub Gabi Balint’s winning goal was contentiously ruled offside. The furious Steaua team stormed off the pitch. Dinamo’s bemused players eventually lifted the cup in front of their delirious fans.
The bad blood continued. After Steaua’s 2-1 win in a vital league game in March 1989, Dinamo’s players turned their anger on the authorities. Legend has it that defender Ioan Andone walked towards the VIP box, dropped his shorts and flashed Valentin Ceauşescu. More likely, he raised his middle finger at the dictator’s son – a defiant gesture that earned Andone a three-month ban from playing.
Before 1989 ended, so did communism in Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu was executed on Christmas Day. His regime’s downfall had more to do with political repression and economic misery than football, of course, but the combustible Steaua-Dinamo rivalry showed that the state wasn’t always in control. Or even on the same page. Football was a canary in the coal mine, signalling explosive change ahead.
8. A new world order
China’s victory in the opening match of the 1991 Women’s World Cup signalled the rise of a superpower
By late 1991, the Cold War was thawing and communism had collapsed in eastern Europe. Francis Fukuyama had predicted the universal victory of liberal democracy, and it seemed that a new world was coming, shaped by American power. But there was room, too, for smaller players – and a communist superpower. This was the backdrop to the 1991 Women’s World Cup.
Away from the Olympics, women’s sport had been largely ignored during the Cold War, and women’s football survived with little support from the game’s powers. The wind of change, though, eventually blew into Zurich where Fifa, hardly a feminist bastion, recognised the PR value of women’s football. As did Fifa’s biggest untapped market, the People’s Republic of China. Fifa awarded it the first Women’s World Cup, to be held in November 1991.
It was a controversial choice. In June 1989, Deng Xiaoping’s government had crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds or possibly thousands. Hosting a major sports event was part of China’s international rehabilitation. Today we’d call it sportswashing.
On 16 November 1991, at the Tianhe Stadium in Guangzhou, China played Norway in the first Women’s World Cup game. Some 65,000 spectators watched the hosts win 4-0. Liu Ailing starred, scoring two goals, the second a 30-yard screamer.
Though China went out in the quarter-finals, Norway reached the final, losing 2-1 to the USA. These three countries led the women’s game in the 1990s, a crucial decade of growth. More than 90,000 people watched the USA beat China on penalties in the 1999 World Cup final in California. Bill Clinton received the winners at the White House, saying: “It’s going to have a bigger impact than people ever realise.”
A quarter of a century later, women’s football is no longer relegated to the margins of international sport. Nor is China, which has hosted two Olympics, plus another Women’s World Cup in 2007. The Cold War might be over – but sport remains a potent weapon in tussles for soft power.
Tony Shaw and Alan McDougall are the co-authors of Cold War Football: A History in Ten Matches (Cambridge University Press, 2026)
This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>