Prof Ged Martin

Historian Professor Ged Martin returns to Australia’s Ilford

Although it’s barely five miles from Hornchurch village to the borough boundary at Noak Hill, the northern half of 19th century Havering contained both a wheat belt and cattle country.

Historian Prof Ged Martin documents the rise and fall of sootigine, a cheap and, as it turned out, pretty damaging fertiliser made in Hackney Downs in the 1880s.

When I first read about the conviction of Rush Green woman Maria Kelly for shoplifting in 1893, it seemed an amusing episode of brass-necked pilfering.

If you travel Romford’s inner by-pass, you’ll glimpse Linden Street, a quiet side road squeezed alongside St Edward’s Way. It recalls a tragedy, 75 years ago, that marked the end of UK world power.

John Parker was a Labour MP for 48 years. Public school and Oxford educated, Parker was not a typical Labour man. But he spoke up for his constituents, raising local issues in House of Commons questions.

Battle of Hastings, 1066. It’s the one date everybody’s supposed to know. Friday October 14 (today) marks 950 years since the battle that changed English history.

Talk of moats and we think of castles, drawbridges and portcullises, besieged by knights in armour with battering rams.

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

One of Upminster’s saddest stories began in sunny Naples during the winter of 1934-5.