A small team of archaeologists has been undertaking research into the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides. Camping for a few days at a time over a number of years, they have carried out both survey and excavation work. Derek Alexander, Daniel Rhodes, Stuart Jeffrey, Tessa Poller, and Siân Jones describe the results of these efforts to date.
Mining is rooted in Cornish heritage and woven into the fabric of Cornwall’s historic landscape, and so it seems fitting, as we mark the 20th anniversary year of the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape becoming a UNESCO World Heritage…
When Anita Lasker came to Britain in March 1946, 80 years ago, having survived Auschwitz and having been liberated at death’s door from Belsen, she found that no one wanted to hear about her terrible experiences in the camps. Britons wanted to move on from the horrors of the past and look to the promise of the future.
Your thoughts on issues raised by the magazine.
The Imperial War Museum (IWM) has acquired the complete Second World War archive of Britain’s most famous wartime entertainer, Dame Vera Lynn. She was nicknamed ‘The Forces’ Sweetheart’ after winning a 1940 newspaper poll for British servicemen’s favourite musical performer,…
With the Old Breed is a harrowing, visceral account of a US Marine’s combat experience fighting the Japanese in Peleliu and Okinawa in 1945. Together with Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow, it provided the material for HBO’s acclaimed 2010 television series The Pacific. Excellent though the latter was, the book offers much more.
Historically, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland did not permit the burial in consecrated ground of stillborn babies and infants who died before they could be baptised (a rule that ended with the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s). Instead,…
Folk memory, songs, place names, and oral histories are being deployed by the Somerset Eel Recovery Project (SERP) in its work to bring this critically endangered species back to the Somerset Levels. Those stories and songs are a reminder that the Levels once teemed with eels.
Counting Quaker Meeting Houses I enjoyed the article on the Quaker Meeting Houses in CA 422. I have searched for the Meeting Houses associated with 250 years of my Quaker ancestors, via train, bus, and foot, and found seven extant,…
Rare photographs of Second World War filmmaking revealed To mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Historic England’s Archive has released a collection of photographs capturing behind-the-scenes stills of RAF film productions. The collection was put together by Dorothy ‘Knicky’…
A new exhibition is exploring how Jersey recovered after five years of Nazi occupation. Life after Liberation: the road to recovery is part of the island’s celebrations to mark 80 years since the war’s end. It runs until December. Jersey…
Sherds adopts a very broad definition of ‘heritage’, so no apologies for beginning this month’s column by drawing attention to the 70th anniversary of the establishment of tiddlywinks as a competitive university-based sport.
In the third part of our series marking the 80th anniversary of World War II’s final months, Taylor Downing asks whether the Allied Supreme Commander was correct in allowing the Russians to capture the German capital.
Younger readers might be forgiven for thinking that Enemy at the Gates is merely a novelisation of the 2001 film of the same name. But the movie – directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jude Law – in fact takes its title from William Craig’s groundbreaking 1973 history of Stalingrad, the first Western history to make extensive use of Russian sources.
Some of the few surviving members of the group of men who witnessed Britain’s nuclear testing programme are still campaigning for justice for what it did to their bodies. The United Kingdom conducted a series of nuclear tests in the…
Sherds does not share the passion for cycling that seems to have gripped so many people over the last two decades. In the words of the self-styled ‘Super-Tramp’, W H Davies, ‘A poor life this if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare’, and it is the standing and staring that walking permits, whereas cycling (uphill at any rate, with traffic presenting an ever-present threat) seems full of care
REVIEW BY DAMIAN SHIELS This book takes as its focus the archaeological excavation of a remote mountain cave used as an IRA hideout in 1922, a location described by the authors as a ‘Civil War time capsule’. The project was…
A further 9,000 names are to be added to the Bomber Command archive, in a project that has been described as a ‘labour of love’ by its head. The Losses Database, launched 12 years ago, already contains information about the…
REVIEW BY CH Located more than 100 miles from the Scottish mainland, the cluster of islands collectively known as St Kilda have variously been mythologised as a romantically remote place whose hardy inhabitants were torn from their traditional way of…
The discovery of an unsuspected family link to Christiansborg Castle, Ghana, led to a project examining a forgotten aspect of the transatlantic slave trade. Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann introduces us to ‘autoarchaeology’.
Everyone has a story to tell. So do warships. The saga of the USS The Sullivans, which was launched in April 1943, is still making headlines today. The Fletcher-class destroyer is one of three decommissioned World War II- era naval…
REVIEW BY CH ‘Linn gu linn, bho ainm gu ainm – “from one generation to the next, from one name to another” – people make this story what it is.’ So writes Alistair Moffat in the introduction to this energetic…
Wemyss Casts returned Two plaster casts of a boat carving in Jonathan’s Cave, east Wemyss, have been returned to Scotland after 90 years. Dated to 1st millennium BC, the original carving is possibly the earliest depiction of a boat in…
A First World War soldier was saved when a pocketbook he was carrying stopped a sniper’s bullet. The remarkable story of Private Sydney ‘Syd’ Cross is part of a new display at Knightshayes Court, a Victorian mansion in Devon which…
Christopher Catling, Contributing Editor for CA, delves into the eccentricities of the heritage world.
REVIEW BY ROBBIE MACNIVEN It is sometimes best to start a review with a comment on what a book is not: War Paths is not an academic work, as the lack of footnotes or a proper bibliography make clear. Fortunately,…
Examining artefacts from Myanmar reveals how a tale of power, wealth, people, and the rise and fall of empires played out over centuries, as Alexandra Green told Matthew Symonds.
Your thoughts on issues raised by CA.
Reviewing the best Military History Exhibitions with Christopher Warner.
REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND Britain’s ‘poor bloody infantry’ did most of her fighting and dying during World War II. For all the glamour of the SAS or the prestige of the Grenadier Guards, it was the humble county regiments who…
Review by Nigel Fletcher-Jones This volume brings together eight historians of Africa under the editorship of John Parker (formerly at SOAS, University of London) to discuss the origins and structure of kingdoms through time and across the continent – from…
'Their stories are still being written – and they won’t be complete until you share your side.'
Half a century on, the most comprehensive series ever made about the Second World War is still being shown on television channels around the globe. Taylor Downing takes a critical look.
![Above Christian with her husband John in 1943 [left] and in 2021 [right]. below An Allied tanker sinks after being hit by a torpedo fired from a U boat during the Battle of the Atlantic.](https://i0.wp.com/the-past.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/post-1_image0-5.jpg?fit=768%2C505&ssl=1)
Christian Lamb – who is now 102 years old – was involved in plotting the course of ONS-5, a slow trade convoy from Britain to North America that saw off a vicious attack from the Kriegsmarine in early May 1943.
Most of us would guess that this was a word of recent coinage, but it first occurred in the lyrics of a 1938 song by the blues singer Lead Belly
It began as an anticolonial struggle against the French, and ended as the Cold War’s bloodiest battleground. By the time the last US troops were withdrawn on 29 March 1973 – fifty years ago this month – it had cost…