Author Archives
Award-winning journalist and digital history specialist - creating historical content for the web.
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Scotland goes tapestry bonkers (part two)
The Scottish Parliament has never seen anything like it – more than 30,000 people queuing up outside and desperate to get in. Over three weeks they waited patiently for an hour or more just to see the Great Tapestry of… Read More ›
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Polish women soldiers in Gullane
One of the great pleasures of wasting an idle hour looking at archive film is the electric jolt of surprise that causes you to fall off your chair. In my case it was this clip of around 100 female… Read More ›
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Archie Cochrane, father of evidence based medicine
This wee gem from Cardiff University shows Archie Cochrane, the father of evidence-based medicine, in his prime. He is the narrator so you see him from the start in a 1970s-style pullover. Then it cuts to scenes from the 1950s… Read More ›
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How the Chest was Won
Professor Jimmy Williamson, who died in June, was the last surviving member of the Edinburgh group which found the first 100% cure for tuberculosis. In 1954 he was the last consultant to join Sir John Crofton’s team in Edinburgh. As… Read More ›
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Health, the Highlands and Tony Benn’s dad
1913 was anything but a quiet halcyon year, a point well illustrated in Michael Portillo’s recent Radio Four series Two important Scottish centenaries also came out of it. On August 15, royal assent was given to bill setting up the… Read More ›
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Highland Doctor – the Hebrides and Goebbels (part 2)
Stand by for a treat – if you haven’t already seen it, Kay Mander’s Highland Doctor from the Scottish Screen Archive is an absolute delight. Click on the image to watch…. It tells in around 20 minutes the story of the… Read More ›
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Early women’s football films
British Pathe has pulled together a set of 51 short newsreel films about female football teams as part of the English FA’s 150th anniversary. They are intriguing for a number of reasons – not least because of the FA’s ban on… Read More ›
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War turns into Peace – the 1914 Christmas Truce
British propaganda said the First World War would be over by Christmas 1914. It wasn’t. But peace of a different kind broke out on the Western Front when soldiers on both sides found their common humanity instead of the senseless… Read More ›
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Mountain Midwives – Queens of the Wild Frontier (part two)
By 1930 the Frontier Nursing Service had shown that childbirth was safer in a remote area of Kentucky than in most of North America – and even much of Europe. But for its charismatic founder Mary Breckinridge, it was the start… Read More ›
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Mountain Midwives – Queens of the Wild Frontier (part one)
There’s a reckoning at the end of every war. Counting the cost of American dead after World War One caused a few to reflect on a much more disturbing statistic: far more American women had died in childbirth than American… Read More ›
