Amberley Blog

My late father believed that people liked gardening because it was an aspect of their lives that they could control. I always thought he was wrong, as the vagaries of nature lie well beyond human agency. But the style of gardening in the 1950s and 1960s was to plant bright, long-flowering annuals and serried rows of dahlias. It only recently...

Frederick Douglass in Bristol: Time for the African-American Abolitionist’s Visit to the City to be Commemorated with a Blue Heritage Plaque? While actions from the naming of Pero’s Bridge after a Caribbean slave almost twenty years ago to the unveiling of plaques commemorating the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s stay in Bristol are marks of a city attempting to acknowledge and learn...

There have been so many books on Victoria Cross heroes that the London auction house Spink actually published a bibliography. Most of the books follow a similar path, focusing on the heroism. But after researching many of the stories I came to realise that there was another dimension. As the blurb to my book points out, ‘. . . this...

Paul Theroux’s amusing quotation, from his book The Great Railway Bazaar, sums up the sense of anticipation that a long railway journey encourages. I remember very well that sense of excitement when as a twelve year old boy I boarded the Royal Highlander at Euston Station to travel north to Inverness at the beginning of our summer holidays. It is...

Looking back on my life I was so incredibly lucky to have grown up as a boy in Weymouth in the 1950s and 1960s at a time when the harbour there was such an epicentre of paddle steamers activity. Not only did the Consul, Embassy and Monarch lay up there each winter but they were subsequently joined by the Princess...

Anne Boleyn’s rise to fame as Henry VIII’s second queen is often quoted as a case of a king raising up a commoner for love. The reality is far more complex. While Anne descended from a background of solidly noble maternal ancestors, and upwardly mobile courtiers on her father’s side, Henry’s own antecedents were shaky. His father and mother both...

While writing my new book on the history of Ford tractors, I was very aware that at the same time it was exactly one hundred years since the first Ford tractor entered production in the autumn of 1917. It had been rushed into production with such haste that it hadn’t even been given a name and, because Henry Ford could...

I have already done Secret Chester and found this new work Secret Wrexham is nothing like it, it’s like chalk and cheese. Chester, as we all know, is charm personified. You go back to the Romans, who set its street pattern, and historically it was rich with traders and merchants who occupied its varied locations in the town’s streets, marked by ‘the...

The Special Operations Executive's French Section and Free French Women Agents It was not until the last few decades of the 20th century that history books and media coverage of the Second World War began to change their focus from men’s roles to include the experiences of women and girls. It was the rise of feminism in the 1960s and...

For transport enthusiasts and historians, anniversaries are always important occasions, and 2018 is no exception. For railway enthusiasts 2018 marks fifty years since the end of main line steam on British Railways with the “15 Guinea Special” on 11 August 1968. Many of the heritage railways will be commemorating this in various ways. Already the Mid-Hants Railway have held a...