Hello and welcome to the first of our two Christmas 2025 History Reclaimed newsletters. Look out for another one over the Christmas holidays.
We start this bulletin by drawing your attention to three articles we’ve published recently on the subject of Allied military cemeteries and the honour due to our war dead. In the BBC’s televised coverage of Remembrance Sunday last month reference was made to discriminatory treatment of imperial soldiers who died on active service. This perpetuates a story that emerged in 2019 but for which there is no evidence as Nigel Biggar demonstrated in his report on these allegations, published two years later (see https://www.nigelbiggar.co.uk/p/building-a-racist-mountain ). Robert Tombs sets out the accusations and the actuality in his article here.
Even on Remembrance Sunday the BBC insults our Glorious Dead
Robert is echoed by Geoffrey Van Orden’s experiences of Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries around the world, which he’s visited as a high-ranking British army officer and subsequently in retirement. We add to these essays another from the senior and influential American journalist David Shribman, who draws attention to the recent removal from the American cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands of commemorations of black soldiers who died in the Second World War in northern Europe. It cannot be right to play politics with those who died serving their nations in war. They should be treated with all the dignity and honour they deserve and left to lie in peace.
The problems with the BBC’s versions of history are evident in three articles, two of which focus on David Olusoga’s recent series ‘Empire’. Lawrence Goldman reviews the series as a whole and criticises two aspects in particular: the focus on only the most controversial episodes in British imperial history and the failure to present the full facts in some of the case-studies chosen by Olusoga for special attention:
History on the BBC: The Prescott Report and David Olusoga on ‘Empire’
David Elstein examines Olusoga’s presentation of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s as set out in the final programme of the series and uncovers a host of errors and distortions, not least the failure to explain that the Emergency arose when the Kikuyu tribe descended into civil war. This was never a simple anti-colonial rebellion as presented by some historians, Olusoga included.
Quite different in subject and tone is the essay by Lona Manning explaining the errors in a recent BBC programme on the life and work of Jane Austen who has been turned into a social justice warrior of the early nineteenth century. As it’s the 250th anniversary of her birth this very week, the article is timely and may act as a necessary corrective to things said both now and earlier this year when this documentary was broadcast.
Another cinematic distortion is examined by the historian Tony Lentin in his critique of the recent Indian film on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 and its aftermath entitled “Kesari. Chapter 2’. The film’s focus is the libel action brought by Sir Michael O’Dwyer (1864-1940), Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab 1913-19, against an Indian author, Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, for some remarks made in Nair’s book entitled Gandhi and Anarchy, published in 1922. A court-room drama, the film has been commended for his own party-political reasons by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But neither the account of what went on in Amritsar nor of the actual legal dispute and its resolution are rendered accurately in the film. Through its many refractions and distortions the truth recedes and is obscured.
Restitution is never far from the news: as this newsletter is going to press we read in the newspapers of the British Museum’s project to ‘decolonise’ itself by sending artefacts from its collections on loan to different parts of the world. So it is timely to read David Abulafia’s essay on the Rosetta Stone which rightly and appropriately belongs exactly where it is, and where it can be seen by anyone, in the British Museum.
We continue our coverage of restitutions to Benin but with a slightly different subject on this occasion: not Benin bronzes, the usual issue of controversy, but Benin royal coral headdresses. It has been claimed, though on very thin evidence, that in the 1930s the British returned coral regalia that had been taken from the Oba of Benin at the end of the nineteenth century. By careful work in the archives and with photographs from the period, Andreas Roth shows, however, that the real story of the coral regalia does not fit the postcolonial narrative some want to attach to these artefacts. They don’t provide a precedent for the return of Benin Bronzes.
Colonial Myths and Coral Headdresses: A Benin Restitution Story Re-examined
The subject of eugenics is never very far from the news as well, and is almost always associated with right-wing political figures. That seems to have made it easier for academics to remove memorials and to rename rooms and buildings commemorating scientists and statisticians associated with eugenics. But as Jesper Rosenløv’s second of two articles on British eugenicists demonstrates, the left was as notable as the right in its enthusiasm to control fertility and remove so-called ‘degeneracy’. Rosenløv pays particular attention to George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in his article.
Human Breeding and the Lethal Chamber: Eugenics among British socialists
We’ve also published two pieces on the history of anti-slavery. Robert Tombs reminds us that in the eighteenth century slavery and forced labour were ubiquitous, features of the labour systems of every continent and of most civilisations and cultures. As he explains, the important historical question is therefore why and how in Britain pre-eminently so many people from the 1780s onwards came to question the morality of slavery and to organise themselves into a movement for its abolition.
It’s Britain’s abolitionism, not its slave trading past, that is unique
No single individual better exemplifies that change of heart than John Newton, the Liverpool slave captain of the 1750s who ceased to trade slaves, became an Anglican curate and minister, the composer of many famous hymns, and a notable protagonist of anti-slavery at the end of his life. We’re very pleased to publish Richard Longfoot’s personal memoir on his quest to uncover Newton’s relationship with Alexander Clunie, another ship’s captain, who was instrumental in Newton’s conversion from slave trader to slave emancipator. The story begins with Mr Longfoot’s purchase of a portrait. You will greatly enjoy the rest…
The Conversion of a Slave Trader: John Newton’s friendship with Alexander Clunie
For devotion to duty under extreme duress we recommend Professor Nigel Biggar’s performance while being interviewed (mugged) by the broadcaster Medi Hasan on ‘Head to Head’ on Al Jazeera TV. Zewditu Gebreyohanes has written a review of the programme which you can read here: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/mehdi-hasan-vs-nigel-biggar-debate/. You can also watch the debate (if that it was) on YouTube here: .
Someone has compared it to Daniel in the Lion’s Den. In that Bible story, the Lord sent an angel to shut the lions’ mouths. You may come to the conclusion that at least one side in this debate gave us rather too much mouth, and that Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas behaved impeccably in his measured and thoughtful responses.
Finally, some news from our museums. We learnt this week that the Tate Galleries – Tate Modern and Tate Britain among them – are in financial difficulty necessitating a change of leadership (The Times, 16 Dec. 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/culture/art/article/maria-balshaw-tate-director-st6hffhcs). Among the first of our national museums to advertise its ‘decolonization’, Tate Britain, home to the Tate’s collection of British Art, has tried to obscure its origins as the benefaction to the nation of Sir Henry Tate. Sir Henry’s fortune derived from sugar plantations in the West Indies, though after the abolition of slavery there. The declining number of visitors to the gallery – ‘slumping visitor numbers’ – tells a simple story: it is going broke.
Meanwhile, the Imperial War Museum is – rather late in proceedings – going woke. This year it has closed its gallery devoted to heroism in war that featured many winners of the Victoria Cross and it now invites the public to a lecture on ‘Lifting the LGBT Ban’ in the forces, in association with Queer Britain Museum, and to an exhibition on ‘The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus’ (enews@iwm.org.uk). We wish the IWM good luck with this redirection and we’ll follow footfall in the Museum with interest. Meanwhile, the wonderful exhibition on Victorian military art at the National Army Museum in Chelsea continues and we encourage all our readers to see it before it ends in November 2026. https://www.nam.ac.uk/whats-on/myth-and-reality
As always, we thank you for reading History Reclaimed and supporting us. Please consider making a donation so that, if at all possible, we can extend this website and also begin other projects to counter disinformation about British History. Expect another newsletter reviewing our work in 2025 shortly. In the meantime we wish everyone a Happy Christmas and New Year. Please keep the flow of articles and news items coming, and contact us if we can be of assistance.
Lawrence Goldman
Robert Tombs
David Abulafia
Alex Gray
Zewditu Gebreyohanes
