Historical Story Ideas

Historical fiction premises grounded in a real era. Anchor each line in a year and let your group fill in the corners history left dark.

1. A 1920s telephone operator listens in on calls that predict the crash.
2. A WW2 codebreaker realises one of her own messages is being sent back to her.
3. A medieval cook is asked to poison the queen and writes her a recipe book instead.
4. A Roman legionnaire is left behind in Britain and starts a school.
5. A Victorian governess receives letters from her future self.
6. A 1960s air hostess witnesses the same passenger on flights years apart.
7. A Tudor playwright is hired to write a play that will get someone executed.
8. A 1980s tabloid photographer captures something that wasn't there.
9. An 1840s mill girl invents a song the mill cannot stop singing.
10. A 1910s suffragette is hired as a children's governess by a Home Office minister.
11. A 1950s scientist accidentally erases her own marriage from public records.
12. A Georgian portrait painter realises every subject she paints disappears.
13. A Norse trader makes landfall a thousand years too early.
14. A 1066 monk illustrates a manuscript with the wrong winners.
15. A 1666 candle-maker survives the Great Fire and is the only person blamed for it.
16. A 1666 cook keeps cooking through the plague.
17. A 1939 evacuee is sent to a household that has never had a child.
18. A 1972 newsroom typist is the first to know the prime minister has died.
19. A 1789 baker is asked to bake bread for a queen who has no kitchen.
20. A 1605 servant tidies a cellar and finds the gunpowder.