Britain

In September 1939, writes J.V. Woolford, a British war in Europe seemed alien to many Dutch South Africans, but General Smuts changed the country’s mind.

“The son of a cotton millionaire scouring the auction rooms of Europe and building lavishly in the latest architectural style,” the Tory leader was a highly representative early nineteenth-century figure. By J. Mordaunt Crook.

A prosperous member of the commercial middle class, writes Roger Fulford, Whitbread made his name as the champion of radicalism and the persistent advocate of unpopular causes.

W.J. Fishman writes that Rocker devoted nearly twenty years of his life to organising and inspiring the immigrant Jewish tailors in the East End of London.

A series of cases over a period of sixty years had raised the question of whether juries could pronounce on the substance of charges of libel and sedition or merely on the facts of publication. H.M. Lubasz writes how Fox’s Libel Act of 1791 put an end to doubt and thereby admitted the public to a larger vote in political affairs.

Of the British officers who fell at Waterloo, writes Antony Brett-James, none was more distinguished than General Sir Thomas Picton.

Christopher Lloyd profiles a highly successful businessman of modest and abstemious habits, John Julius Angerstein, who formed a magnificent collection, the nucleus of London’s National Gallery, at his house in Pall Mall.

Eighteenth-century men of taste had begun to build themselves mock-medieval houses. Tudor Edwards writes how their descendants carried on the vogue by constructing a series of impressive castles.

Despite sneers and some natural forebodings, writes Joanna Richardson, this brief alliance proved extremely happy.

Widespread fever followed military sloth, writes Antony Brett-James, and the fiasco on Walcheren brought down the tottering British Government.