About Us

History Class, since 1942. Hang on… 1942, you say? Read below!

About the Author

I have a background in speech, drama and dance and I performed on stage in several theatres in plays, pantomimes and musical festivals. I have voiced in dramatized radio plays, voiceovers as well as broadcasting.

I started broadcasting on the radio in 2009 before going to the University of Brighton. I would make content for shows such as The Film Quiz where I would play a piece of music from a movie and the audience have to guess the movie. I would write poems that would have a soundscape behind them to help set the scene at Christmas. I have a BA Hons in Broadcast Media and an FDA in Radio Production that was obtained between 2010 – 2013.

I studied history in high school and covered topics such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Second World War, before being advised to drop the topic in my final years as the topics were not that interesting. I picked up history again at college that covered topics such as German politics between 1919 and 1945, the US civil rights movement including the Jim Crow Laws, the women’s suffering movement and witchcraft in Britain.

With my studies at the University of Brighton, I continued to involve history in my media-based work where History Class started to take shape. I was lucky to get an interview with a property steward at Dover Castle for a project about things that students could do in the local-ish area. A rather typical topic from a University but I entertained it all the same. The finished product would be played out in front of the class and it was well received, although the lecturer thought otherwise.

We did script writing as part of the course and this is where the first written version of the soon-to-be-made Out of Time audiobook started.

In my final year of University, I wrote a dissertation about the birth and development of war reporting from the Second World War to the 1982 Falklands War. As my main topic, I focused on the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R Murrow, who travelled to Europe as tensions in Europe were starting to boil over. He would spend the war in London and made his broadcasts amongst the people on the streets of England’s capital with his famous words, “This is London“.

The dissertation was not well-received and it failed for not featuring a BBC reporter from the 1940s that I didn’t believe to be relevant. However, I would add Charles Gardiner and I compared and contrasted him to the style of Murrow. This was failed once more. However, a few years later, I received a letter that I was wrongly graded but they could not offer me anything higher than just a pass mark. The BA Hons awarded to me felt worthless.

The Dreams

I like to joke that History Class started in April of 1942 based on dreams I had in November 2009.

I remember waking up to the sound of a rumbling that I initially believed to be thunder. There was a light swinging in the centre of the ceiling and people around me were rushing around and talking with raised voices. A woman came over to me in a blue uniform and tried to hurry me. I sat up and turned to the left of the bed where there was a mirror on the floor that was leaning against the wall. To the left of that, there was a bedside table with a small square flip calendar that read ‘April 15th, 1942.’ The woman came around again and guided me away from the bed and the sounds from above continued. She led me down a corridor that was part corrugated tin and part stone or chalk and I noticed a woman on the right crying and a group of people on the right talking.

The woman led me up on an incline to the left of another passageway that drifted to the right and into a room full of wooden crates. She spun me around to where my back was facing the room and faced me. She embraced me and whispered into my ear that “everything is going to be ok” and I could see tears rolling down her face. She slowly walked backwards, turned and ran out of the room to where we had come. I went to follow to her see what she meant and then the roof collapsed on top of me. I woke up in a panicked state and streaming in sweat. A video idea about this in greater detail will be planned soon!!

From there on, I would have more and more dreams set in Dover during the Second World War and I was not entirely sure as to why. What I saw in these dreams would later inspire the audiobook ‘Out of Time and one dream, in particular, would cement the story I would later write.

I had a dream where I was inside the wartime tunnels underneath the towering fortress of Dover Castle. Specifically, the casemate tunnels that would lead to the area where Operation Dynamo was planned and executed by Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay in 1940. I went inside the Repeater station and the doors closed behind me. A wind blew up to a gale and there was a blinding blue glow and when it passed, there were people dressed in 1940s military uniform.

2014 – 2024

Early History Class aka History Class 1.0, was a messy channel that did not have much direction or consistent themes.

The very first video was titled “Field Trip Taster in London” almost 10 years ago and it was filmed from the back of a Thames Clipper.

As stated, Dover Castle would feature after this as well as a return video about 2 – 3 years later. However, the original has a special place in my heart as it marked the beginning of a new chapter in my life and Dover Castle has a prominence as being the place where it all started.

After this video, the channel became inconsistent and confused as it strayed away from history. Some gaming videos appeared and even a few videos about my terrible LG G3 phone with its array of issues. It would soon return to history but ran into several annoyances that made the channel feel tied down and barriers would soon appear. There were only to be another 8-10 videos on History Class 1.0 before I gave up. Why, I hear you ask? YouTube started its family-friendly content policy and at the time, I was doing videos about the First World War on topics such as shell shock that got me demonetized. Even a video about the role women took up during the 1914 – 18 conflict was hit.

Between 2016 and 2019, I did something known as a real job within the retail sector. It was grim with 4 am starts and up to 5 hours of travel on either side of the shift. But there was a nagging in the back of my head and I would spend most shifts thinking about it, a History Class return. I would spend many hours thinking about how I would bring it back from the ashes and how the format would be. I was conscious of the fact it needed to be consistent and not drift off into irrelevant topics that would put subscribers off.

It would be around 2018 when the idea came to me whilst I was sitting in the back of a van listening to the radio versions of Dad’s Army on Audible. My mind was like, “History + audiobooks = History Class 2.0!” The planning for ‘Out of Time‘ started soon after and it took about 6 months to research everything I needed. The USP of these audiobooks would be a historically accurate world with a fictional narrative within it and that is what ‘Out of Time‘ is.

However, in November of 2019 and with several drafts of the book complete, I was hit with a hereditary health condition called Pilonidal Sinus. This condition put the brakes on everything and I was stuck on my side for a few years as I could not sit and walking was very uncomfortable. Then covid-19 hit the world and society for the most part also came to a grinding halt. Given my condition, I was able to receive an extra income and I thought about how I would use it. I decided to think to the future and get equipment for the rebirth of History Class that wouldn’t come for another 2 and a half years. I planned out what I would need to get going such as a microphone, a laptop or a tablet of some kind for outdoor use which turned out to be a Microsoft Surface Go 2 and a new desktop PC that could edit 4K video with no issues or long rendering times. The microphone, by Rode, fell short of what I needed and that is still a current hole in my arsenal.

2022 arrived and my health issues were no longer as bad as it was. This was the time to relaunch History Class with new branding and new features as well as the return of the field trip videos. I did some experimental videos for a new channel using a less-than-perfect phone to film with, an Oppo Reno 2, that would stutter at the beginning of any video recording. One of the new video ideas was a walking video.

I tried successive tests with walking videos with an Oppo Reno 2 and they were not good enough

I knew Hastings County Park would be the first video and the introduction to the walking video to History Class and I wanted to make sure it would look right… which it didn’t. However, things changed. I was gifted a GoPro Hero 10 Black and after some testing with that, I recorded the walk at Hastings County Park… which turned out to be rather eventful.

I would record more videos at Battle Abbey and Pevensey Castle before I then posted the trailer video to the channel and the return of History Class.

Since the relaunch, videos have remained consistent and in keeping with the brand. My health issue did return several times and resulted in gaps between content, but I was always planning new videos in my downtime. New equipment continues to be added to my arsenal with the must that it has to be portable as I do not want to carry bags and bags of large and bulky equipment. The latest addition is the Google Pixel 8 Pro and you have had no idea how much I have wanted to use zoom video in my content… since 2014, to be exact! Next on the cards is a new microphone, a camera rig for the Pixel 8 Pro with a shotgun microphone and lighting.

Since the relaunch, I have landed a part-time job to help fund the channel with equipment and cover travel costs and it is a rather historic place in its own right. I will see if one day I can do a video not only about the place and outside it, but inside too.

If you would like to help support me, my Patreon is here: https://www.patreon.com/History_Class

Thank You