Alan Gallop – författare

What was it like in a Victorian Workhouse? Was the food really as bad as we imagine? Take a step back in time with Alan Gallop and ask yourself if you could have survived in such harsh conditions.

Victoria's Children of the Dark tells the story of Queen Victoria's invisible subjects - women and children who laboured beneath her 'green and pleasant land' harvesting the coal to fuel the furnaces of the industrial revolution. Following the real fortunes of seven-year-old Joey Burkinshaw and his family, Alan Gallop recreates the events surrounding the 1838 Husker Pit disaster at Silkstone, Yorkshire - a tragedy which helped lead to better working conditions for miners. Chained to carts and toiling half-naked for eighteen-hour shifts in near darkness, children as young as four were employed by mine owners. Yet it was not until the catastrophe at Silkstone when twenty-six children were drowned in a mineshaft that Victoria and her subjects realised that many Britons were existing in virtual slavery. This powerful and dramatic account exposes the real lives and working conditions of nineteenth-century miners. A gripping human story, Victoria's Children of the Dark brings history, particularly the history of childhood, vividly to life.

In April 1951, the disappearance of HM submarine Affray knocked news of the Korean War and Festival of Britain from the front pages. Affray had put to sea on a routine peacetime simulated war patrol in the English Channel. She radioed her last position at 2115hrs on 16 April, 30 miles south of the Isle of Wight - preparing to dive. This was the last signal ever received from the submarine. After months of searching, divers eventually discovered Affray resting upright on the sea bottom with no obvious signs of damage to her hull. Hatches were closed tight and emergency buoys were still in their casings. It was obvious that whatever had caused Affray to sink, and had ended the lives of all those on board, had occurred quickly.Sixty years later, in this compelling maritime investigation, Alan Gallop uses previously top secret documents, interviews with experts and contemporary news sources to explore how and why Affray became the last British submarine lost at sea - and possibly the greatest maritime mystery since the Marie Celeste.

It was Halloween 1938 when twenty-three year-old Orson Welles fooled America into thinking it had been invaded by aliens. The Mercury Theatre on the Air production of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is one of the most talked-about radio broadcasts in history. The realistic retelling of Wells' original story resulted in mass panic across America. People ran into the streets screaming that the world was ending. Churches were emptied of their congregations, cinemas of their audiences, restaurants of their patrons. Panic-stricken families rushed to their cars and drove like lunatics in a bid to escape Martian annihilation. It seemed as if everyone in America knew about the 'invasion' that night, except of course the actors taking part in the live drama - they had no idea what was happening until the NYPD raided the recording studio. The Martians Are Coming! is the story of how a play that few people believed in came to be written, cast, rehearsed and finally broadcast to a credulous nation. Set against the background of America's economic depression and rumbles of another world war coming from across the Atlantic, the book sets The War of the Worlds in the context of what ordinary Americans were thinking and feeling on the night their world almost - but not quite - came to an end.