Almost History

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According to Field Marshal Montgomery, rule number one on the first page of the book of war is ‘do not march on Moscow’.

In April 1945, Winston Churchill ordered the British Chiefs of Staff to rip up the rule book and plan for an attack on their wartime ally, Russia.

It was audacious, inconceivable and incredibly risky.

So, fittingly, it was codenamed Operation Unthinkable.

Just how close did we come to launching the Thir...

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In August of 1216, the King of Scotland rode down the entire length of England to pay homage to a new English king at Dover. 

The Scottish monarch bent his knee to a warrior prince who was the pride and hope of his dynasty. 

His name was Louis and he was the eldest son of the King of France. Louis is overlooked in most lists of English monarchs. But he was, at this point in time, in control of two-thirds of the country ...

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In the summer of 1550, Princess Mary, the eldest daughter of Henry VIII, was packing her belongings and preparing to flee her home.

Her Tudor brother was the figurehead for an increasingly Protestant regime. Mary clung to her mother's Catholicism. 

She feared for her life and, as the pressure on her to conform grew, she turned to her powerful relatives abroad.

She could be safe again, but they could only protect her...

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In 1647, the new puritan government tried to cancel Christmas. 

People in Canterbury protested in a peculiarly English way, with a destructive game of football followed by a mass brawl. 

The city’s Plum Pudding Riots led to a royalist revolt throughout Kent and the second round of the Civil War.

With Parliamentary armies fighting in Wales and Scotland, could this have marked a revival in fortunes for the beleaguered King...

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In 1822, Gregor MacGregor committed what The Economist newspaper has called the ‘biggest fraud in history’ and ‘the greatest confidence trick of all time’.

Investors, many of them Scottish, put forward vast sums towards creating a colony in central America. They were told it was a sure bet, a land of milk and honey - another paradise on the isthmus.

Sounds familiar? If you listened last week, you might think that once b...

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Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland sank a huge chunk of its national wealth into an audacious scheme to colonise central America. become a more equal partner with England under the Stuart crown. 

The colony was to straddle the Isthmus of Panama at the Gulf of Darién. It would create an overland route to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Vessels from the Old World and the New World, it was hoped...

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In the first half of 1940 only one question mattered in American politics. Would Franklin D. Roosevelt break with tradition and run for a third term as President of the United States? The New York Times proclaimed it as 'the all-absorbing political riddle'. 

Roosevelt kept the country guessing right up until the Democratic National Convention held in Chicago in July 1940. On the second day of the convention, ...

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Imperial Airships would bring the far flung peoples of the British Empire closer together than ever before. Every day, blimps would slip their masts near London carrying passengers and freight bound for Montreal, Cairo, Karachi, Singapore and Sydney. 

Journeys that had once been measured in months would breeze past in days. The Imperial Airship Service would bind Canada, Australia, South Africa, Egypt, India and New Ze...

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In 1941, Adolf Hitler issued orders to Nazi Germany’s railway officials. He wanted them to develop a new type of railway. 

It was to be bigger, far bigger, than anything that had ever been seen.

Trains the height and width of a suburban house and the length of the Empire State Building would hurtle across the Greater German Reich, from Brest in the west to Bucharest in the east.

They would be luxurious, providing unimagi...

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What if … 

 ... Nazi Germany had been able to roll out the television equivalent of its inescapable radio network?

Everywhere you turn, you see the unmistakable face of Adolf Hitler. His voice echoes in your head, broadcast from a thousand loudspeakers. His wild, gesticulating speech is reaching its foam speckled crescendo.

Nazi television is everywhere. Looming over city squares, above the concourse of the railway stati...

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In 1875, Rome came close to losing its river.In that year, the liberator of Italy, General Giuseppe Garibaldi, visited and announced plans to clean up the Eternal City. 

His main target was the River Tiber. Garibaldi would solve problems from pollution to flooding by diverting the river and completely removing it from the city. 

Where did this idea come from? And why wasn’t it carried out? 

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