The year is 1937 and the country is still reeling from the abdication of King Edward the Eighth the year before. His brother, the Duke of York, has become King George the Sixth and will be crowned in May. The country is on a high. Union Jacks are being dusted off and bunting is being […]
Homes for heroes: the council house revolution
There’s no reason to be snobbish about council houses, says Lizzie Lane. For the people who moved into the first ones, built in the interwar period, they were the clean and comfortable ‘homes for heroes’ they’d been promised – far better than the crowded, pest-infected slums they left behind. Sturdy semi detached and terraced houses […]
The House of Whispers by Anna Mazzola
Rome, 1938, and as the world teeters on the brink of war, talented pianist Eva Valenti enters the house of widower Dante Cavallera to become his new wife. On the outside, the forces of Fascism are accelerating, but in her new home, Eva fears that something else is at work, whispering in the walls and […]
Needless Alley by Natalie Marlow
It’s Birmingham in 1933. Private enquiry agent William Garrett, a man damaged by a dark childhood spent on Birmingham’s canals, specialises in facilitating divorces for the city’s male elite. With the help of his best friend – charming, out-of-work actor Ronnie Edgerton — William sets up honey traps. But photographing unsuspecting women in flagrante plagues […]
The Spanish Civil War: a war against children
“Every war is a war against children,” Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of Save the Children said. This was particularly true during the Spanish Civil War, as Maggie Brookes explains. When the bombing of Madrid by Franco‘s fascists began in the autumn and winter of 1936, women scrambled aboard trains and took their children north to […]
Barossa Street by Rob McInroy
20th January 1936, and King George V is dying. On the same day, Bob Kelty accompanies a friend to the house of a local recluse. There they find Hugh Smithson brutally murdered. Horror turns to nightmare as Bob’s friend, Richard Hamill, comes under suspicion of the murder and Bob reluctantly becomes embroiled, once more, in […]
Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare
Lena Aldridge is wondering if life has passed her by. The dazzling theatre career she hoped for hasn’t worked out. Instead, she’s stuck singing in a sticky-floored basement club in Soho and her married lover has just left her. She has nothing to look forward to until a stranger offers her the chance of a […]
RMS Queen Mary, the great transatlantic liner
While researching transatlantic liners for her new murder mystery, Louise Hare discovered the “perfect ship” already existed: the glamorous, luxurious RMS Queen Mary, launched at the perfect time: the turbulent late 1930s. She tells Historia about what was once the greatest cruise ship of all. When I originally set out to write Miss Aldridge Regrets, […]