Scottish soldier Donnie MacRae died as a German prisoner of war during World War Two - but it was not until almost 80 years later that his family discovered he had been buried without his brain.

Donnie died in a PoW hospital in 1941 and because he had suffered with a rare neurological condition an autopsy was performed on his body.

During the post-mortem, his brain and part of his spinal cord were removed and sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry in Munich to be used for research.

His body was buried by the Germans and later reburied by the Allies in the Commonwealth War Graves cemetery in Berlin but no-one knew his brain had been removed.

In total, about 160 small slices of Donnie's brain and spinal cord have been kept in the archives of the Munich research centre - since renamed the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry - ever since.

A BBC Radio 4 documentary - Shadow of War: A Tainted Anatomy - looks at why thi

A thatcher has shared his most "unusual" find made while working on a roof - a pair of shoes believed to date back two centuries.

Chris Fellows, who lives in Thame, Oxfordshire and runs Thame Thatch, has found many other items such as tools from old craftsmen and newspapers during his career.

He said shoes were believed to have been placed in the thatch in the early 19th Century to ward off evil spirits.

Mr Fellows called the curious discovery a "good find" and said they had since been put back in the new thatch.

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His subsequent research into shoes found they dated from around the beginning of the 19th Century.

"It was a time when superstition was rife - they were put in there to ward off evil spirits and witches.

"Apparently, the shoe, because it's so close to the foot, would always contain a little bit of your soul in it - so they would stick them in the roof.

"And a lot of the roofs we work on have white window sills, because witches wouldn't cross a wh

Neil Berriman, originally from Petersfield, Hampshire is at the centre of a brand-new BBC documentary, as he works to uncover the mystery behind his real family.

The Brit thought nothing of the news that he was being adopted when he was aged 10, despite his adopted mother giving him a brown envelope that contained 'the answers to some questions'.

Shortly after she passed away due to cancer, when he was 40, Berriman opened it up and discovered a document about his adoption and a newspaper article from 1994, revealing that his mother was Sandra Rivett, who died at the hands of Lord Lucan on 7 November 1974.

After finding out this news in 2007, Berriman had become distraught and broke down as he had found out that his real mother had been brutally murdered.

He then became obsessed with tracking Lord Lucan down.

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An inquest in June 1975 determined that Lord Lucan murdered Sandra, but he has never been found and therefore had never been brought to justice.

Howe

One winter's night, 50 years ago, a crime took place that obsessed the nation.

Lord Lucan is said to have killed the family nanny, attacked his wife and vanished.

Newspapers ran wild with lurid detail and it became a story hardwired into British culture.

Why did this case capture the British imagination, and spark one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th Century?

Alex von Tunzelmann unpacks the story of our obsession, taking us into a dizzying world of high stakes gambling and exclusive London clubs, powerboat racing and pet tigers. It's also a dark realm of bankruptcy, gaslighting and stalking, and at its heart, a story with a violent and very tragic death.

She tries to get to the bottom of this case, meeting eyewitnesses from the '70s, people caught up in the crime, and those who just can't let it go.

Told and retold, the facts of the Lucan story have got lost. Alex discovers a hall of mirrors where truth and lies have distorted themselves into new myths

There used to be a parish in Surrey called Deadpool, it is now the town of Egham in Surrey:

Deadpool(lost)

Other OS name in the Parish of Egham

Historical Forms

• Dedepol 1294 Ass
• Dedeppole 1333 Chertsey
• la Dedepole 1420 ib
• Deadpoole 1605 LRMB

Etymology

The name referred probably to a still pool , cf. Dead Lake (PN D 5) .

Egham has been used as a location for films and TV series, including Hammer's The Stranglers of Bombay and The Camp on Blood Island. Perhaps one day they can take advantage of their link to the Merc With a Mouth, add it to the welcome signs for photo opportunities?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18546360

A 300-year-old gravestone commemorating a woman who was mauled to death by a tiger has been restored.

Hannah Twynnoy was living in Malmesbury in the 18th Century when the animal, thought to have been part of a travelling menagerie housed in a pub yard, escaped and attacked her.

Her gruesome death, aged just 33, has attracted visitors to her grave in the grounds of Malmesbury Abbey ever since.

The inscription on her headstone had become so illegible that, prompted by a local campaign, masonry restorers were brought in to spruce it up.

Hannah Twynnoy was working as a servant in the White Lion Inn when she died on 23 October 1703.

Believed to be the first person to be killed by a tiger in England, the exact nature of her death is unknown as nothing was written about it until about 100 years later.

However, according to local history, the pub accommodated wild beasts for exhibition, one of wh

Although women weren’t allowed to become police officers until 1917, a new book explores their vital role as ‘searchers’

Some of the “searchers” were skilled at inspecting the clothes, hair and genitals of Victorian women and finding stolen money and pawn tickets for stolen goods. Others undertook risky sting operations, catching thieves and criminals red-handed and successfully testifying against them in court. Yet for nearly 200 years, the vital role 19th-century female detectives played in the police force has been overlooked and underestimated.

Now a new book is seeking to assert the rightful place of these courageous women – who were often working class – in the history of the police and celebrate their proto-feminist contribution to Victorian society.

“Women don’t officially enter the police force as officers until 1917. But across Britain, in a commonplace way, women are working for the police long before the police tell us they are,” said Dr Sara Lodge, a senior le

A pioneering work on the decorative and functional uses of large cetacean bones, documenting almost 1,000 large-whale bones in over 650 locations in the UK. It evaluates over 1,100 written sources and hundreds of pictures and hundreds of interviews with local people, the result of 30 years of research and travels to almost every single one of these locations.

Author's website: whalebones.co.uk

Pride in Britain’s history has fallen sharply over the past decade as the country has become less nationalistic and jingoistic and more reflective about its place in the modern world, according to a leading barometer of the British public mood.

Although Brexit and immigration have created flashpoints around national identity in recent years, the wider picture shows a more inclusive and self-critical sense of Britishness emerging and a decline in my-country-right-or-wrong views.

While levels of pride in Britain’s achievements in sport and the arts have remained high over the last 10 years, the overall impression is of “a country that is quite proud of itself but maybe no more than that”, the British social attitudes survey found.

There was a striking 22-point fall in the proportion of people saying they were proud of Britain’s history, from 86% to 64%, and a 13-point drop in those who said they would rather be a citizen of Britain than any other country, from 62% to 49%.

Just across the Kent border with Greater London, one of the UK's most unique locations is hidden - Chislehurst Caves. This remarkable place in historic Kent is nestled in the town of Chislehurst, a stone's throw from Bromley.

The caves are an intricate network of over 22 miles of manmade tunnels, burrowed between the 1200s and 1800s, concealed deep beneath a leafy and unsuspecting slice of suburbia.

Kent's rich history and culture have been significantly impacted by urban sprawl, and Chislehurst Caves is a prime example of this. Although technically the town and tunnels now fall under London, much of the caves' history unfolded when the area was part of Kent, making them an integral part of the county's past.

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Ancient Origins, a site dedicated to exploring archaeological discoveries, has delved into the history of the caves. According to them, when the caves first opened to the public in 1900, visitors were informed that parts of the system had been inhabited between

A famous portrait of King Henry VIII, long considered lost, has been found after an art historian spotted it in the background of a photo shared on social media.

The painting in question was once part of a famous set of 22 portraits commissioned in the 1590s by tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon. The portrait hung originally in Weston House, Sheldon’s Warwickshire home, but barely a handful of paintings from the collection survive today.

Art historian Adam Busiakiewicz, who works as a consultant for famous auction house Sotheby’s, spotted the painting in the background of a picture posted by the Warwickshire Lieutenancy on X on 4 July. The account had shared a photo of a reception held at the Shire Hall, and the portrait is just about visible in the background.

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“The fact I was lucky to piece together [what it was] in an hour is very exciting,” Mr Busiakiewicz told the BBC.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about paintings and looking at people’s walls.”

The desk of the writer Dr Samuel Johnson is to be returned to his former London home for the first time in more than 260 years.

Except, in a strange twist, its owner is now uncertain whether it really is the desk of the famous 18th Century dictionary author.

It's been suggested that despite many years of being treated as a literary relic, it could have been part of a Victorian hustle to make money.

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What's now in dispute is the fate of the desk on which he wrote the dictionary when he was living in Gough Square, in a house which is now a museum to his memory.

Since the 19th Century the wooden desk has been in Pembroke College Oxford - and the college is lending this prized possession to the Dr Johnson House museum.

But when Lynda Mugglestone, professor of the history of English at the college, began to check out the provenance of the desk, there were some unexpected questions.

"The real story is that we don't quite know if it's the real desk," she says.

Eighty years on: the story of D-Day as it unfolds, using rediscovered testimonies of those who were there, on all sides.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15875398

The FBI is investigating the sale to US buyers of what are suspected to be hundreds of treasures from the British Museum.

The BBC understands the US law enforcement agency has also assisted with the return of 268 items, which the museum claims belong to it, that were sold to a collector in Washington DC.

The British Museum announced last year that ancient gems, jewellery and other items from its collection, were missing, stolen or damaged.

One buyer, based in New Orleans, told the BBC an FBI agent had emailed him asking for information about two pieces he had bought on eBay.

The FBI agent said they were assisting the Metropolitan Police with investigating missing or stolen items from the museum.

The buyer has said he is no longer in possession of either gem and does not believe they have been located by authorities. The FBI did not request further information from him.

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Neither the FBI agent, the mu