30 AUGUST

THE AUTHOR Alisdare Hickson is a graduate of the London School of Economics, with an MSc in Economic History. He also holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Essex. After a period working as a researcher, he returned to his true passions of history, politics and photography. As an amateur photojournalist, he covered…

CHURCHILL “STRONGLY IN FAVOUR OF USING POISONED GAS AGAINST UNCIVILISED TRIBES.” On 12 May 1919 Winston Churchill, now widely acknowledged to be among the most admired Britons in history, wrote a memo in his newly appointed position as Secretary of State for Air regarding the best possible British military response to an anti-British insurgency in…

EARL GREY DESCRIBES IRELAND AS ‘OUR DISGRACE’ [ 23 March 1846 ] Earl Grey, addressing the House of Lords on 23 March 1846, as the Irish famine began to take thousands of lives, declared that ‘Ireland is the one weak place in the fabric of British power, Ireland is the one deep ( and I…

  THATCHER REFUSES TO DISCUSS NELSON MANDELA’S RELEASE [ 15 July 1988 ] On this day in 1988, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher replied to Bishop Trevor Huddleston, who was asking her to pressure the South African government to release Nelson Mandela.  He had requested that she might meet himself and 25 activists who were…

ARCHBISHOP – DON’T INTERFERE IN NAZI GERMANY’S INTERNAL AFFAIRS [ 31 May 1933 ] On 31 May 1933, Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking in the House of Lords, expressed concern at the ‘the oppression of members of the Jewish race’ in Germany.  However, he reminded fellow peers that Britain also had to…

ARGENTINE SHIP SUNK OUTSIDE FALKLAND ISLANDS EXCLUSION ZONE, KILLING 323. 2 May 1982 – At 15.57 a British nuclear powered submarine, HMS Conqueror, torpedoed and sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, even though the ship was thirty six nautical miles outside Britain’s declared two hundred nautical mile military exclusion zone around the Falkland Islands and…