Times Archive Blog

The shells scandal that brought down a government

In May, 1915, The Times military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, sent back a particularly shocking account of charging British infantry being mown down in droves because there wasn't enough high explosive to shut down the enemy machine-gun positions.

This video tells how his report, published in defiance of government censorship, caused an uproar that brought down the Government.

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Between today and Armistice Day, November 11, revisit this blog for daily updates on the closing weeks of the war from The Times of 90 years ago.

What Georgiana wore to the ball

Keira Knightley said the other day that the corsets she had to wear in The Duchess made her belch all the time. I wonder if you were strapped up like that every day your digestion got used to it. If not, Georgian social occasions must have been a bit less glamorous than this contemporary report suggests.

George III's 53rd birthday party was more than just an excuse for a drink and a minuet. It was a showpiece for British fashion and manufacture - and an opportunity to cock a snook at the French:

The public celebration of their Majesties' birthdays - the one in winter, the other in summer - were graciously intended by them to encourage the manufacturer, and to give emulation to the artist who, in hopes of a demand for their articles at each season, venture to speculate and prepare a number of dresses - and by these means produce novelties and improvements that give a superiority to our manufacturers unknown before. Instead of being the copiers and importers of French fashions, as the English nobility used to be, we are now become the criterion of taste in dress, and in return are copied by the French.

Thomas Hardy's new novel: it's his best yet

Our TV review of the new BBC dramatisation describes Tess of the D'Urbervilles as "a feel-bad epic". Much the same thought was expressed in The Times, more wordily, when the novel was first published in 1892: "The essence of tragedy is the loss of happiness by a hair's-breadth; and how often in the course of the story is that fine margin all but overpassed!"

The reviewer loved it: "Daring in its treatment of conventional ideas, pathetic in its sadness, and profoundly stirring by its tragic power. The very title, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman", is a challenge to convention".

Hardy was duly grateful, and wrote to the Editor, George Earle Buckle, to thank him; the letter is preserved in the Archive of The Times.

Max Gate
Dorchester
13.1.92

My dear Sir,

I cannot let your notice of my novel in to-day’s Times pass by without sending you a line to express my thanks and also my sense of the generous insight which recognizes the spirit and aim of a writer when his achievement is only too faulty.

Yours very faithfully
Thomas Hardy

Agatha Christie's vanishing act: an expensive hoax?

Newly discovered recordings of Agatha Christie are causing excitement among aficionados, but they seem not to contain any clues to the biggest Christie mystery of them all: what was going on when she vanished from home in 1929, and turned up after a massive police hunt a week and a half later in a Harrogate spa?

There are two main theories which have stood the test of time: Christie had recently discovered that her husband was having an affair, and staged her disappearance as revenge; or, she had a stress-induced amnesia attack and genuinely didn't remember who she was. But reading contemporary reports in The Times shows that the public, at least, had a less charitable view of events.

The story was hot news, and The Times followed the search with daily reports:

Are you descended from a famous murderer?

And would you tell people if you were? How many generations need to pass before a notorious ancester becomes a jewel in the family tree rather than a skeleton in the cupboard?

I wondered about this when we launched the Times Archive at the Who Do You Think You Are Live jamboree at Olympia a few months ago. Among the many visitors who came to look up their relatives in the pages of The Times was a lovely lady who wanted to find a great aunt who, it turned out, featured in the newspaper only because she had stood trial for branding her son with a red-hot poker when he was disobedient. She was as delighted as I was when up came the court case in the search results.

We were emailed at the Archive recently by Peter Wright, who is looking for help to prove his family connection with an infamous Victorian murderer, the Rugeley Poisoner who was hanged in 1856.

The Bishop and the sea monster

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, isn't the only one who has been buried before his time.

Situations Wanted: a matter of life and death

The Situation Wanted columns in The Times helped many Jews out of Nazi Germany, a recent episode of BBC1's Who Do You Think You Are? revealed.

For much of 1938 and 1939, the columns were full of applications from mainland Europe for jobs as cooks, governesses, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners, chauffeurs and men of all work. Clearly, very many of the applicants were well-educated and over-qualified for these positions. Most say that they are Jewish, although some refer to themselves as "non-Aryan". Some even specify that they have one Christian parent.