Table of contents for November 2022 in History Revealed

Shortly before we sent this issue to press we, along with the rest of the world, received the sad news of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. We’ll look back at her historic life and reign in future issues of the magazine, but in the meantime, you can download a free special edition about the Queen, produced by our sister publication BBC History Magazine to commemorate her Platinum Jubilee earlier this year. You can find that at historyextra.com/queenbookazine or by scanning the QR code shown on the right. You’ll need to register for the History Extra website to access it, if you haven’t done so already. October, shortly after this issue goes on sale, is Black History Month in the UK, and we’ve taken the opportunity to explore the often-forgotten…

For the staff and patrons of The Plumbers Arms, a pub in London’s upmarket Belgravia district, the evening of 7 November 1974 began like any other. But at around 10pm, the night’s familiar rhythm was shattered when a woman stumbled in drenched in blood and screaming: “Help me, help me, help me! I have just escaped from being murdered! He’s in the house! He’s murdered the nanny!” The woman was Lady Lucan, a familiar face in the nation’s press, and, what’s more, she knew the murderer’s identity: her own husband, the Earl of Lucan. At the beginning, their relationship seemed to have been ripped from the pages of a romance novel. English aristocrat, Richard John Bingham, met Veronica Duncan at a golfing event in early 1963, and they were wed…

When Louisa Lee, a 64-year-old widow living on her own, went missing from her Kent home in April 1939, for all intents and purposes it seemed that she had vanished into thin air. Sadly, disappearances aren’t all that rare, but her case raises some intriguing details. And it demonstrates that although a suspect and a motive might be identified for a crime, this does not mean it is enough to secure an arrest and get a charge, let alone a conviction. PENSION IRREGULARITIES Louisa was originally from Leeds. There’s a possibility that she had a brief first marriage, before the records show that she wed, in 1906, a man named Walter Shaw Mitchell. He died in 1934 and, three years later, Louisa married solicitor Charles William Lee. This was not…

myth busters? 1 SAMUEL PEPYS WAS THE VICTIM OF A VENDETTA In 1679, Pepys was arrested and sent to the Tower of London on charges that included piracy and treason. It was alleged that, as an official in charge of navy stores, he plundered goods from ships captured from the Dutch. As bizarre a notion ‘Pepys the pirate’ might seem, his diary reveals the first charge to be true. By law, captured enemy goods belonged to the Crown. However, Pepys wrote of how a few goods had indeed found their way into his own coffers - as perks of the job. Luckily for him, there was not enough evidence to convict. A more damaging rumour was that Pepys had sold state secrets to the French. In order to defend himself…

SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS Much of the evidence of a black presence in Britain before the 1500s comes from a range of rapidly improving scientific techniques. By extracting and sequencing DNA samples from a skeleton, then comparing it to modern profiles, it is possible to determine skin and eye colour. Isotope analysis of the enamel from a skeleton’s teeth can help work out where that person grew up, too, as well as their diet and whether the water they drank when they were younger matches the water found where they were buried. Using methods like these, a team at the University of Reading concluded that a skeleton found in York (the ‘Ivory Bangle Lady’', so named for the jewellery she was buried with) was likely a high-status Roman woman,…

Featured on the same page of the edition of The Sphere dated 3 July 1948 were two striking but juxtaposing images: the first showed the arrival of hundreds of West Indian migrants to Britain aboard HMT Empire Windrush; the other was of the P&O liner Ranchi as it set sail with English emigrants bound for a new life in Australia. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain haemorrhaged more than 2 million people as they escaped the bleakness of austerity and the hardships of rationing. The unprecedented scale of the exodus caused Winston Churchill to plea: “I say to those that wish to leave our country… Do not desert the old land. We cannot spare you.” Yet people still left in droves, and soon, labour shortages were being filled…

The Sea at L’Estaque Behind the Trees Perched between the mountains and the sea, with stunning views of the Bay of Marseille, the small fishing village of l’Estaque in southern France has a claim to fame that few other locations can rival: it was once a sanctuary for one of the most influential artists in the history of modem painting. “Cezanne’s relationship with l’Estaque started in 1864, when his mother began renting a house in the village that she could use as a summer retreat, as well as a bolthole from which she could escape her overbearing husband,” says Natalia Sidlina, curator of international art at Tate Modern. “Cezanne would often accompany his mother, staying there for weeks at a time, painting the views from the hills above the village.…

ONE TO WATCH Elite warriors The Woman King / In cinemas from Tuesday 4 October It was 2015 when film producer Maria Bello first pitched her idea for a movie about the Agojie and Dahomey to Academy Award winner Viola Davis. Considering this was done in a Los Angeles ballroom, where Bello was presenting Davis with an honour at the Women Making History Awards, it was quite some occasion. As Bello laid out a story of female warriors and a wealthy west African kingdom, the audience cheered. Now, in late 2022, The Woman King is one of the autumn’s most anticipated blockbusters. Set in the 19th century, it stars Davis as General Nanisca, a soldier overseeing the training of a new generation of warriors. If this sounds fantastical, it’s worth…

1946 DAYDREAMING DALÍ There is no shortage of strikingly peculiar photographs of Salvador Dalí, whether he’s staring wide-eyed at the camera for a portrait, jumping around in what looks like a zero-gravity studio, or, as is the case here, sitting up in bed sporting his unique brand of moustache and some rather unusual glasses. The Spanish Surrealist believed that the most creative time of day is that space between consciousness and sleep, so even though he looks like he’s resting, he’s actually hard at work. By this point, Dalí was living in the US - his spiritual home being a hotel, the St. Regis New York - and he had actually been expelled from the Surrealist movement (either for being too surreal or for his fascination with Hitler). Still, that didn’t…

WHAT IS THE BLACK BOOK OF SOVIET JEWRY? Also known as The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, or simply the Black Book, it is a powerful document of the anti-Jewish atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in eastern Europe, as well as the activities of Jewish members of resistance movements in occupied territories during World War II. By 1944, hundreds of survivor testimonies, accounts from victims’ families, letters, diaries and other materials had been compiled by a team of journalists, led by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, to fill the 500-page book. Now regarded as a landmark work on the Holocaust, the Black Book had a patchwork publication history for a number of decades. HOW DID THE PROJECT BEGIN? As early as 1942, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in the…

YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO PODCAST Hannah Cusworth will discuss our growing understanding of black British history on an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast: historyextra.com/podcast HISTORICAL CONSULTANT FOR THIS MONTH’S ESSENTIAL GUIDE HANNAH CUSWORTH is a historian who specialises in black British histories. Formerly a schoolteacher, she is currently completing a PhD with English Heritage looking at mahogany, race and the 18th-century Atlantic world.…

YOUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO BLACK BRITISH HISTORY ANCIENT BRITAIN If you visit Arbeia South Shields Roman Fort, which once guarded the main eastern sea route to Hadrian’s Wall, it will not be long before you encounter Victor. Or, at least, you will encounter a memorial to Victor: he has been dead for around 1,900 years, and time has not been overly kind to his rather grand tombstone since half of his likeness has long been destroyed. Still, there he is in sandstone form: reclining gracefully on a couch in a beltless tunic, holding a drinking cup in one hand and a garland in the other. Its size suggests he was a person of importance when he died in the second century AD, his age being given as 20. Or, if not…

For centuries, the British empire was one of the major European powers leading the largest forced migration of any people group in history: the transatlantic slave trade. Among the most immediate consequences was, of course, the African diaspora that spread across both the Americas and Europe, and, in the aftermath of slavery’s eventual abolition, the empire’s colonisation of whole sections of Africa. Until the 1940s, migration from Britain’s Caribbean and African colonies would be slow but steady, before rising sharply in the years immediately after World War II. As such, the face of Britain in the age of empire was ever changing. The small, but significant black population would grow to become a defining feature of British culture, making contributions to everything from legislation and the economy to food, music…

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, the Italian peninsula was made up of a number of smaller states, from Piedmont in the north to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. A growing appetite for a single state was embodied by the general Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose nationalist army sought to bring this about - and to strong effect. The new state began to take shape, whether by bigger states annexing smaller ones (for instance, Sardinia annexing the duchies of Tuscany and Parma), or the influence of certain foreign powers, notably that of the Austro-Hungarian empire, being reduced or removed. Unification was eventually declared in 1861.…

MUST SEE EXHIBITION Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 offered the exciting opportunity of reading ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for the first time in centuries, but it would take until 1822 to achieve the complex task of decipherment. To mark 200 years since that landmark moment, this immersive exhibition at the British Museum explores the same hieroglyphic inscriptions used by the likes of Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion as they raced to read the lost script, and so better understand the ancient civilisation of pharaohs and pyramids. PAID ENTRY British Museum, London, 13 October 2022 - 19 February 2023, britishmuseum.org FESTIVAL Cheltenham Literature Festival The famous festival returns with a celebration of the written and spoken word later this autumn. There are plenty of events…

More than a president’s wife, the longest-serving first lady was a political heavyweight, a diplomat and a humanitarian, who dictated her own place in the world - and then changed it for the better When Eleanor Roosevelt moved into the White House in 1933, she introduced herself to the press as “plain, ordinary Mrs Roosevelt”, before going on to fundamentally change the role of first lady in a president’s administration. When she moved out of the White House 12 years later, she declared, “The story is over”, before going on to be a pioneering United Nations delegate and driving force for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Modesty? Perhaps. Or at these milestones, did Eleanor refuse to do what was expected, even from herself? Anna Eleanor Roosevelt had not been…

Among the many spectacular exhibits at the 1878 Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair held in Paris, was a solar-powered engine invented by Augustin Mouchot, which he used to make ice. This would go on to inspire a solar printing press that, even on a cloudy day, could produce 500 copies an hour of a special publication entitled the Soleil-Journal. In the research of alternative energy during the late-19th century, wind power wasn’t far behind. In 1887, Scottish engineer James Blyth built a 10-metre turbine to power the lights at his home in Aberdeenshire. He tried to sell the idea to the local villagers to light the main street, but they branded these newfangled sparks as “the work of the devil”. Still, he got a patent for his invention and managed…

How old is the rollercoaster? SHORT ANSWER Don’t expect ups, downs and loop-the-loops: the first ride was a one-direction affair LONG ANSWER A sled speeding down a human-made iee-covered ramp may not sound as exhilarating as the rides of today, but the rollercoaster had to start somewhere; and that somewhere was 15th-century Russia. These ‘flying mountains’ were more than 20 metres high with 50-degree ramps, making for a brief yet speedy ride that became a popular way to get the adrenaline pumping for Russian elites, eventually Catherine the Great herself. By the late 18th century, sleds had been replaced with wheeled carriages, and when the idea spread to Paris in the form of ‘Russian Mountain’ rides from 1804 on, grooved tracks were introduced to lock the carriages on a set…

GOLD RUSHES Discover the glittering stories of how gold fever swept the world in the 19th century - from the US to South Africa - and what life was like for the men and women involved PLUS… THE DAHOMEY AMAZONS, AFRICA’S FEMALE WARRIORS SPOTLIGHT ON HOWARD HUGHES IN A NUTSHELL: THE HUSSITE WARS NINE THINGS YOU (PROBABLY) DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT HELEN KELLER WHAT IF… ALFRED THE GREAT HAD LOST THE BATTLE OF EDINGTON? AND MORE… CROSSWORD WINNERS The three lucky winners of the prize crossword in issue 110 are as follows: E Cadwallader, Lincolnshire G Corbitt, County Durham R Honeybone, West Sussex Congratulations! You’ve each won a copy of How to Build Stonehenge by Mike Pitts. We will post your prizes out as soon as possible.…

IN A FOXHOLE 1944 Since the launch of Operation Overlord - the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe - on D-Day, 6 June 1944, the advance through Normandy has been slow, tough and tiring. Here, a US Army soldier tries to get some much-needed sleep in between the fighting near Bayeux, and the boots almost kicking him in the face show that he is not alone in the foxhole. Not only are the Germans putting up a stout defence, but the bocage terrain, (characterised by tall hedgerows, ditches and embankments) hampers progress. However, with reinforcements and resources pouring over the Channel and coming ashore at the foothold established on the Normandy beaches, the Allies are able to capture the vital port of Cherbourg by the end of the month, with Caen…