![Extract of the draft note from 2 January 1917 on 10 Downing Street headed paper which reads 'To: The Private Secretary, the Prime Minister has decided, with a view to keeping himself in close touch with the several departments, to establish a ['Secretariat' is crossed out and replaced by 'Department'] in connection with Office of the First Lord of the Treasury. The following gentlemen have been appointed to act as secretaries to the ['First Lord of the Treasury' is crossed out and replaced by 'new Department']](https://history.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/01/edited-e1483652073427.jpg)
...A hundred years ago today, on 5 January 1917, in the midst of the Great War, an important note was circulated around Whitehall departments. J. T. Davis, private secretary to...
...weakened Labour government and complacent thinking by company and government officials. He also highlighted an inability to project military power following the loss of India, and a lack of support,...
75 years ago today, on 15 February 1942, British forces surrendered the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore to the Japanese army. Defeat had come swiftly after the landing of Japanese forces...
...India in the run-up to independence and in Palestine in 1947 under 'Operation Polly' at the end of the British Mandate. Plans even existed to evacuate British families from the...
Portrait Photograph, President John F. Kennedy. White House | US National Archives Fifty years ago today, the 35thPresident of the United States of America was shot dead as his...
...Cabinet despatched the Minister of Food to Washington to plead for extra wheat supplies, to avert famine in South Africa and India, and starvation in the British Zone of Germany....
...in the late 1970s many West Indians felt it inappropriate to describe people born in Britain as ‘West Indian’ 1980s: slow progress In the end, the 1981 Census didn’t include...
...and the India Office. By the time Scott was building his reputation as a geographer and explorer in the early twentieth century, the ‘Scramble for Africa’ and continuing naval dominance...
...on India, against a backdrop of inter-communal rioting, following the announcement in February that Britain would transfer power to an Indian government no later than June 1948. Problems remained in...
...1853 session the Whig Sir Charles Wood, as President of the Board of Control, passed the India Act, amending, though falling short of overhauling, the government of the sub-continent, and...