Non-fiction Books
The Suffragette Bombers
Pen & Sword (2014)
Pen & Sword (2014)
- In the years leading up to the First World War, the United Kingdom was subjected to a ferocious campaign of bombing and arson. Those conducting this terrorist offensive were members of the Women's Social and Political Union; better known as the suffragettes. The targets for their attacks ranged from St Paul's Cathedral and the Bank of England in London to theatres and churches in Ireland. The violence, which included several attempted assassinations, culminated in June 1914 with an explosion in Westminster Abbey. Simon Webb explores the way in which the suffragette bombers have been airbrushed from history, leaving us with a distorted view of the struggle for female suffrage. Not only were the suffragettes far more aggressive than is generally known, but there exists the very real and surprising possibility that their militant activities actually delayed, rather than hastened, the granting of the parliamentary vote to British women.
1919; Britain's Year of Revolution
Pen & Sword 2017
- 1919; Britain's Year of Revolution tells the story of an almost unknown passage in British history. On the August Bank Holiday that year, the government in London despatched warships to the northern city of Liverpool in an overwhelming show of force. Thousands of troops, backed by tanks, had been trying without success to suppress disorder on the streets. Earlier that year in London, 1000 soldiers had marched on Downing Street, before being disarmed by a battalion of the Grenadier Guards loyal to the government. In Luton that summer, the town hall was burned down by rioters, before the army was brought in to restore order and in Glasgow, artillery and tanks were positioned in the centre of the city to deter what the Secretary of State for Scotland described as a 'Bolshevik uprising'. Industrial unrest and mutiny in the armed forces combined together to produce the fear that Britain was facing the same kind of situation which had led to the Russian Revolution two years earlier. Drawing chiefly upon contemporary sources, this book describes the sequence of events which looked as though they might be the precursor to a revolution along the lines of those sweeping across Europe at that time. To some observers, it seemed only a matter of time before Britain transformed itself from a constitutional monarchy into a Soviet Republic.
British Concentration Camps: A Brief history From 1900-1975
Pen & Sword (2016)
For many of us, the very expression 'Concentration Camp' is inextricably linked to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. The idea of British concentration camps is a strange and unsettling one. It was however the British, rather than the Germans, who were the chief driving force behind the development and use of concentration camps in the Twentieth Century. The operation by the British army of concentration camps during the Boer War led to the deaths of tens of thousands of children from starvation and disease. More recently, slave-labourers confined in a nationwide network of camps played an integral role in Britain's post-war prosperity. In 1947, a quarter of the country's agricultural workforce were prisoners in labour camps. Not only did the British government run their own concentration camps, they willingly acquiesced in the setting up of such establishments in the United Kingdom by other countries. During and after the Second World War, the Polish government-in-exile maintained a number of camps in Scotland where Jews, communists and homosexuals were imprisoned and sometimes killed.This book tells the terrible story of Britain's involvement in the use of concentration camps, which did not finally end until the last political prisoners being held behind barbed wire in the United Kingdom were released in 1975. From England to Cyprus, Scotland to Malaya, Kenya to Northern Ireland; British Concentration Camps; A Brief History from 1900 to 1975 details some of the most shocking and least known events in British history.