Claudia Jones is at last to be honoured with a coveted blue plaque, but it won’t be at her former home in Lisburne Rd, Gospel Oak. English Heritage has chosen to install it instead at an address in Lambeth, where she lived for four years until 1960. “I am delighted that Claudia is to get … Continue reading
During her long years in the monarchy, the late Queen sat for a wide range of portrait painters, patiently subjecting herself to their take on her and then perhaps scratching her head over the likes of Justin Mortimer’s disembodied head or Lucien Freud’s frowning matriarch. She would have been rather more taken with Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy’s … Continue reading
Historian Hakim Adi’s starting point for his latest book, African and Caribbean People in Britain, is not the Empire Windrush’s arrival at Tilbury from Jamaica in 1948, not even the Roman Legion of North African soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall in Cumbria in the third century, but Somerset 10,000 years ago. It was here that Cheddar … Continue reading
After being plucked from obscurity by intrepid amateur history sleuths during the 1980s, the Jamaican-born Crimea War nurse Mary Seacole has practically become a national treasure, studied in primary schools and immortalised by an almost five metre statue in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital. Much of what we know of her life is based … Continue reading
Anti-Shell campaigner looks back on execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa as anniversary approaches NEXT MONTH IS the 27th anniversary of the execution of Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, an event that caused an international outcry and Nigeria’s suspension from the Commonwealth. Saro-Wiwa and eight others had been convicted on trumped up murder charges after he led a … Continue reading
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