Author: Xanthe Hall

  • B is for Berkshire, Basingstoke, Burnley

    B is for Berkshire, Basingstoke, Burnley

    Uncle Len, Wife-Killer, lived in many places, but three stand out. Berkshire, Basingstoke and Burnley.

  • A is for Ashworth

    A is for Ashworth

    Introduction to the series “Uncle Len – Wife-Killer, in which Samuel Leonard Thomas Ashworth kills his 3rd wife and then marries my Aunt.

  • Maria Joy, 1843-1894

    Paternal 2nd great-Grandmother Maria was born in 1843 in Tottenham, Middlesex, to William and Maria, their first child. William was from Sandgate, a village near Folkestone, Kent, Maria was a Londoner. He was working as a gardener in Tottenham when they married and Maria had been working in Gray’s Inn as a dressmaker. It was…

  • The Pain Clinic

    It was snowing, they were late. The cropped, blonde nurse glared at her as her husband fled, keen to escape the clutches of the clinic which radiated an air of military strictness. This was the Pain Clinic. Where everyone is in pain, except – maybe the staff. She knew better than to explain to the…

  • Remembering Nellie

    Today I am honouring my great-grandmother Ellen (Nellie) Sinclair, born 1875, died 1968. Nellie was born in West Ham, Essex, the fourth child, when her parents were both 28. Her father was an engine fitter and died when she was five. She became a nurse at the District Homeopathic Hospital in Holborn. On 30 October…

  • The Exploding Bomb

    The pain of the world is beginning to creep inside me. I can feel it. The townships. The oil wells. The children with dead eyes and guns in their hands.

  • Lost Place: Beelitz Sanatorium

    7 hours one rainy day I spent trudging around the old and crumbling buildings of the Beelitz sanatorium. »Here you can see more photos of this lost place

  • arena

    arena

    Arena complex and Spree in Berlin

  • weihnachten in berlin

    weihnachten in berlin

    Christmas market in Rixdorf, Berlin.

  • Time for nuclear sharing to end

    It is a little known fact: Germany (and four other European countries) host nuclear weapons as part of NATO “nuclear sharing”. This means that in a nuclear attack the US can load its bombs onto German (or Belgian, Italian, Turkish and Dutch) aircraft and the pilots of those countries will drop them on an enemy…