Browsing Category
History of Europe
Caroline Norton, Criminal Conversationalist
It's a testament to Caroline Norton's charm and personality that despite her involvement in a sex scandal that nearly brought down a British government in the notoriously prudish 19th century, she managed to remain free of public distaste.…
Roger Casement, British Knight and Irish Martyr
Roger Casement was born in Dublin in 1864. His father, Captain Roger Casement, was a Belfast-born soldier who had served in India and fought in the bloody war for Afghanistan in 1842. Young Roger was raised on his father’s tales of travel,…
Alfred Daniel Wintle, English Rascal and Hero
Alfred Daniel Wintle (known throughout most of his life as “AD”) was born in Ukraine in 1897. His father John was an English diplomat who was posted there along with his wife Teresa, Wintle’s mother. The family spent some time in Romania…
Samuel Pratt aka Courtney Melmoth, Playwright and Writer
Samuel Jackson Pratt was born on Christmas Day 1749 in the historic English town of St Ives. At the time it was the last stop before London for many travellers, as well as being a nexus for canal traffic to move onland for transportation to…
Barbie, Lenin and Fake Hand Grenades | My Childhood in the Wild East
I was born in a country that today doesn’t exist anymore. It was called the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. Founded in 1949, after the Second World War, as a socialist bulwark against West Germany, it became a satellite…
Count Johann von Bernstorff, Ambassador and Spymaster
Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff was born in London in 1862. His father Albrecht was a Prussian Count and experienced diplomat who had just spent seven years as the Prussian ambassador to Great Britain. Shortly before Johann’s birth he had…
Ignaz Semmelweis, Persecuted Medical Pioneer
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was born in Buda in Hungary on the first of July 1818. Nowadays Buda and Pest form a single city (Budapest), but that unification wouldn’t happen for another 55 years. Ignaz was the child of an ethnically German…
Horatio Bottomley, British Politician and Fraudster
Horatio Bottomley was born in the East End of London in 1860. He had only one sibling - an elder sister named Florence. When he was three years old his father, an ex-tailor named William, died in Bethlehem Hospital (better known as Bedlam).…
Delia Bacon, Writer and Shakespeare Theorist
Delia Bacon was born in a log cabin in Ohio in the February of 1811. Her father David was a Congregationalist minister who had been born in Connecticut forty years earlier. In 1801 he had tried to establish a mission in Detroit, but it had…
William Corder, the Red Barn Killer
William Corder was born in 1803 in the village of Polstead in Suffolk, England. His father John was a well-off farmer, though as his second youngest son William wasn’t expected to inherit the farm. His father made sure that he didn’t forget…