On this day in 1968 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was created. But how did it come about, and what changes has the organisation seen in the last 50 years? The hole in the wall Back in 1963, a confrontation …
In 1918, the death rate in Britain exceeded the birth rate for the first year since Government started maintaining records in 1837. Yet this was not due to the First World War, but to so-called ‘Spanish Flu’. At the time, …
This is not the action of strong ‘expansionist’ leaders, but of frightened men reacting indecisively to a situation which they judged to be crucially dangerous, but with which they did not know how to deal.[i] On the night of Tuesday, …
General Ludendorff described 8th August as ‘the black day of the German Army’. Many British Historians consider it the final turning point in the First World War. To say that the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and Field Marshal Haig …
The Berlin Blockade began 70 years ago, in June 1948, and became one of the first great tests of the Cold War. The Allied response, in the form of the Berlin Airlift, contributed to the formation of NATO and the …
Captain Robert Scott’s legacy will forever be an irreconcilable contradiction. At times, he has been venerated as an icon of Edwardian masculinity: a stoical, humble pioneer whose Antarctic expeditions discovered the Polar Plateau and made many significant contributions to scientific …
100 years ago this day saw the execution of one of the most daring amphibious raids of the First World War, in an attempt to stop German U-boats from attacking British ships. German submarines posed a constant threat to British …
21 April marks the centenary of the death of the highest scoring fighter ace of the First World War, Baron Manfred von Richthofen.[1] Known to the French as the Red Devil, because of the colour of his aircraft, it was …
Recalling those days one is not only impressed, but almost oppressed, with the sense of how many issues we were faced with and had to handle at the same time.[i] When George Brown stormed out of Downing St in the …
On Sunday, 20 February 1938, after two days of fraught Cabinet discussion, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that he must resign rather than agree to enter into early talks with the Italian government led by Mussolini. …
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