Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. Protection built in.

Meet the Other Phone.
Protection built in.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

Sad over historical deaths?

335 replies

Personyouneedisnannymcphee · 10/04/2023 18:35

Obviously death happens every day and there are many recent, very sad deaths. But some historical ones actually make me ache a little when I think about them I think due to the details and historical background of them more so than sometimes things I hear on the news. Some of these being:

-the Romanov children. Of course the Tsar was horrific but how they died thinking they were going to safety and then didn’t get killed by bullets as jewels in their clothes protected them so they were finished with bayonets.

-Anne Boylyn’s death because the details of her ladies not letting the men touch her afterwards for fears they’d violate her headless body.

AIBU for sometimes being incredibly sad over these people I never knew or do you have your own historical death that makes your stomach drop when you think of it?

OP posts:
Thread gallery
8
Whenharrymetsmelly · 11/04/2023 06:01

SkyandSurf · 11/04/2023 05:11

How much agency do you believe women had back then?

I think you have to view their choices (such as they were) and actions in context of the time.

Show quote history

I think Anne Boleyn was very clever and you're not giving her much credit at all

ThefourseasonsFrankie · 11/04/2023 06:03

Emmitt Till

Whenharrymetsmelly · 11/04/2023 06:03

Shoxfordian · 11/04/2023 05:40

Katherine of Aragon had multiple miscarriages and children who died before she had Mary including a son who lived for only a few days. I often think the luck or chance of having a boy affected her and Anne so much. If Katherine’s son had lived then Henry probably wouldn’t have divorced her; if Elizabeth had been a boy then maybe he wouldn’t have gone along with the lies about Anne to get rid of her.

Totally agree

Cakeandcardio · 11/04/2023 06:19

I can't look at a picture of Anne Frank's lovely face without feeling so sad. And also the picture of her on the beach with her sister just being two young girls and then to be treated so cruelly. Of course, they are also just ones we know about and the Holocaust is awful. I remember Anne's dad, Otto, being interviewed on Blue Peter when I was a child. I was thinking about it the other day and how incredibly sad and traumatised he must have felt but it was so so important to tell their story. 💗

Emilypost · 11/04/2023 06:28

Recently been reading history. The Boleyn Family were a calculating bunch and Anne was expected to provide them with a secure route to power. Her Brother was executed as well.

2ndMrsdeWinter · 11/04/2023 06:31

Already mentioned several times, but I came on to say Anne and Margot Frank. I remember reading her diary as a teenager and then being devastated when I found out what had happened to her. She is a representative of all the young lives taken during the Holocaust and WW2. The cruelty and pain they experienced is beyond my comprehension.

Thighlengthboots · 11/04/2023 07:00

There is a letter on display at Hever Castle from Anne Boleyn to Henry VIII written a few days before she was executed and it was basically her begging for her life, saying what a just and righteous king he was and if he could show mercy on her unfortunate soul etc... Her death had never really affected me until I read that letter- it was utterly heartbreaking and I cant imagine what she must have felt writing that. It was like history had just reached through the years and slapped me in the face it was that visceral.

MinnieMountain · 11/04/2023 07:06

It was more the Howards than the Boleyns @Emilypost . Anne’s mother was a Howard.

KimberleyClark · 11/04/2023 07:12

The sinking of HMY Iolaire. On 1 January 1919 it sank in difficult weather at the entrance to Stornoway Harbour, Isle of Lewis. It had been packed with 283 soldiers returning home from the Great War and at least 201 were lost. Those poor men who had survived the trenches only to drown on the way home. And their poor families who had been waiting for them.

DueyCheatemAndHow · 11/04/2023 07:13

Brianna Lopez. It took a long time for me to stop crying every day

Nowdontmakeamess · 11/04/2023 07:16

Festivfrenzy · 11/04/2023 05:56

So many of these give me physical pain too- makes me ache to think in a wealthy country like ours we still lack sufficient police and social services resources to help these children and families that need it. Children and women are basically the most vulnerable and the lowest priority for government. The lack of protection for female only rape support/women's refuges is also horrific and makes me fear for women and girls in future.

Does anyone know whether there's any potential for a kind of private police/social services care system? Given we have private healthcare which has operated for decades why couldn't this work? To focus on child abuse and mothers escaping domestic violence basically. Run by women only/mainly perhaps given we know the lengths some men would go to to get access to vulnerable children and women.

JK Rowling has just helped set up a women only rape help centre run by women in Edinburgh. But it’s awful that these services aren’t being provided by government, you’re right they should be an absolute priority.

Emilypost · 11/04/2023 07:16

There have been many deaths in the Royal Family that altered the line of succession.
The White Ship disaster
Queen Anne's many failed pregnancies. About 10, I think.

OlympicProcrastinator · 11/04/2023 07:22

Tiffany Wright from Sheffield. There have been so many awful stories of child cruelty over the years I don’t know why this one got me so bad. It was big news but seems so forgotten now. Just like she was. Forgotten, picking at wallpaper out of loneliness as her Christmas presents stayed wrapped up behind a cupboard as nobody had even bothered to give them to her months earlier.

Such a sad story and her ‘mother’ is now free.

Timeturnerplease · 11/04/2023 07:29

Anything involving babies and small children really gets to me. I used to want to study history when I retire from teaching, but I honestly don’t think I could do it now due to hearing about babies and small children suffering. Motherhood has ruined me.

HighlandCooOnTheLoo · 11/04/2023 07:31

Sophie Scholl and the rest of the White Rose resistance group- they were just young students executed by the Nazis for distributing peaceful anti-fascist leaflets without the chance to speak during their trials. :(

notthisagainn · 11/04/2023 07:34

Where I live three out of four brothers were killed in the Second World War. They were all bell ringers and had scraped their names into the lead on the roof of the bell tower. Their poor mother

electricmoccasins · 11/04/2023 07:46

Itsbritneybitch22 · 11/04/2023 00:30

The death of River Phoenix was really tragic, my daughter loves him even though she’s only 20 it’s only when she told me all about him after she brought many books, I realised just how sad it all was, his life and death, seemed like a really innocent soul.

River Phoenix death was very upsetting for me at 14. I still think of it every Halloween.

PauliesWalnuts · 11/04/2023 07:47

The thing that never fails to touch me about Anne Frank is when she writes “I want to go on living even after my death”. And she got her wish - I think her name and what she had to go through will last for eternity.

Emotionalsupportviper · 11/04/2023 07:56

Aprilx · 10/04/2023 18:55

I watched the Challenger space disaster series on Netflix not that long ago and since then have watched a few more things about it. It makes me sad because it should never have happened, such a waste of life and there has been so much optimism about the whole thing.

I hope this doesn't sound facile, but this reminded me of a death that always breaks my heart when I think of it.

That of little Laika - the first dog in space.

She was a stray - picked for her size and placid nature, then comparatively cosseted and trained and accustomed to the tiny capsule she would be restrained in.

She was blasted into space. There was never any intention to try to bring her back - they knew that wasn't possible. They wanted to know if it could be done, and how long she would last.

She died when the cabin she was in overheated because the thermal insulation was damaged. Estimates vary - some claims are that she survived about 4 days - others that she only lived about seven hours. However long it was , it was time spent in terror, and loneliness and she suffered a horrible painful death, cooked alive in space.

We have no right to subject animals to such horror to satisfy our own curiosity and national vanity. It's just bliddy cruel!

electricmoccasins · 11/04/2023 07:59

learieonthewildmoor · 11/04/2023 05:56

I am a bit boggled at the people saying Katheryn Howard was just acting like a teenager. She was one of the few people executed by Henry VII for doing something that was actually a real crime.

What... Having sex with Francis Dereham so not being a virgin for Henry? Or possibly having sex with Thomas Culpeper?

Kathryn was a motherless child, abandoned by her father, groomed by aristocratic young men for their on sexual pleasure, married off to the King by her ambitious uncle, and executed for falling for the attentions of the King's groom. She was no older than 23 at her death and likely much younger. Yes, she committed treason, but all my pity is for her and certainly not the King!

Myknewname · 11/04/2023 07:59

Catsmere · 11/04/2023 00:47

It’s Hugh Hefner. Ten metres of concrete between them wouldn’t lessen how creepy it is.

Show quote history

HH is in the tomb beside her. A businessman called Richard Poncher bought the tomb above MM, recorded in his will to be turned face down, so he could stare at MM in the afterlife. His wife watched the undertakers turn him.

Crocodilekneecaps · 11/04/2023 08:02

Ruth Ellis

Emotionalsupportviper · 11/04/2023 08:06

The child abuse ones on this thread are hideous - I'd not heard of some f them, and wish I hadn't now. It's beyond belief how depraved some people are.

COPPER3 · 11/04/2023 08:06

Little James Bulger
Hillsborough Disaster
Dunblane
Hungerford
All of the healers, midwives, herbalists, carers who were killed for being a so called 'witch'.

PretzelKnot · 11/04/2023 08:10

This is fairly recent history. A few months after the 2011 Japanese tsunami I caught part of a tv programme about how communities were recovering. The was a brief story on a mother who had lost her children. She had obtained her excavator license and spent her days digging for her children where their school used to be. She had found the bodies of several children but not her own. I don’t know what happened after and don’t know if she ever found her children. I think about that mother and her children all the time.