E.S. Turner

“Outstanding among wartime shortages was common sense. Why certain acts were illegal was not always clear at the time and is now incomprehensible. The Transportation of Flowers Order, which banned sending cut flowers by rail, allowed them to be sent by petrol-wasting road transport. Under lighting restriction orders, a Naval officer at Yarmouth was fined for striking matches in a telephone box to read the dial.”

To kick-start a chronicle, a writer needs an attention grabber, usually a piquant item borrowed from mid-narrative. This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music,...

From the 11th century to the 19th not a single Eric was to be found in England, according to the Harrap Book of Boys’ and Girls’ Names. Then in 1858 the schoolmaster Frederic Farrar, not yet a dean, published that passionately morbid tale Eric, or Little by Little. This was the book which, in the face of much mockery, put the wind up two generations of youth. Parents, seizing the...

The Edwardians turned out for some curious entertainments. In 1907 they flocked to hear Clara Butt, that towering contralto, sing the newly published Cautionary Tales of Hilaire Belloc, Liberal MP for South Salford and defender of the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off...

The sitcom possibilities were many: the night alarm, with girls dashing from their beds, throwing battle-dress over their pyjamas and steel helmets over their curlers, naughtily adding a last-second dab of lipstick and arriving at the command post bright with excitement and night cream; the ensuing terrific din, which broke nearby windows and (allegedly) lavatory pans; the convivial stand-down, with buckets of hot cocoa drunk in the lingering scent of cordite.