Why nationalisation made sense in 1945 — and why it went wrong Britain emerged from the Second World War victorious — yet by 1950 it could look astonishingly shabby and antiquated beside places such as Hong Kong. Nationalisation was supposed to help rebuild the industries on which recovery depended. So was the idea fundamentally flawed […]
Did Britain Choose the Wrong Cure for its Industrial Disease? Read More »
Murder at the Docks is now available on Amazon Fifteen years of research went into Murder at the Docks. Inevitably, that process spun off quite a few other topics of wider interest that couldn’t make it into the book without sidetracking the story. Many of those threads still deserve following — and that is why I
Now available – the book behind “The Missing Pages” Read More »
Reconstructing a life from silence, missing archives and contradictory memories How do you write about someone’s life when the people involved wouldn’t talk about it, the archives have holes in them, and the surviving sources sometimes disagree? While researching “Murder at the Docks”, I gradually realised that silence, missing records and contradictory memories weren’t simply
What actually defines the Middle Class? The signals are not the thing itself What if the middle class was never really about money, occupation or education? This article explores a different possibility: that its defining characteristic was adaptability — a response to relentless economic and social change, from industrialisation to today’s uncertainties. Read more on The
The people that kept having to adapt Read More »
Delighted yesterday to receive my box of author copies of Murder at the Docks. Surreal moment seeing something you’re so familiar with on your computer finally arriving as a solid item you can touch, see and read. Publication date is not until 11th September so I will have to send an update with how to
My author-copies have arrived Read More »
Why Did Britain Learn to Look Down on Industry? While researching Murder at the Docks, I kept stumbling across one particular thread that there simply wasn’t room to follow properly, although I did allude to it in the post war chapters. It concerned Britain’s curious relationship with industry itself and whether that relationship might have played
Did the British Empire Kill Britain’s Industrial Spirit? Read More »
Is the concept and understanding of “Middle Class” still relevant to Britain today? What was the British middle class? It’s a phrase we still use almost every day. Politicians appeal to it, newspapers write about it, and many of us instinctively think we know what it means. Yet historians have spent decades trying to define
What is the British Middle Class? Read More »
…and does it matter? History has an awkward habit of returning to the stories we “safely forgot”. And that is why history is more than remembrance. It is a series of cyclical patterns that beg to be recognised at the right time. We study the past not simply to admire it, but to recognise familiar
Have we ignored the history of the Far East in the C20? Read More »
Why did I call my substack site “The Missing Pages”? 16 years of research into Murder at the Docks produced a story to tell in its own right. But there were so many other themes and backstories to look into that by the time I was finished I realised I had written:– A murder mystery.–
