Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
@ The amnesiac Doctor was in London at this time.
[1513]
1937 - Benny: Secret Origins
[1514]
As part of his crusade against the Deindum, Irving Braxiatel endowed Frost, a Nazi officer, with an extended lifespan and tasked him with destroying Buenos Aires. Frost wouldn’t accomplish this mission until the late twenty-sixth century.
(=) Alternate versions of Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish prevented the
Hindenburg
disaster, enabling continued use of dirigibles.
[1515]
1937 - History 101
[1516]
Sabbath sent an agent to Barcelona to track down the Absolute, a being from the future that had acquired information about his activities. This disrupted history, which in turn corrupted the Absolute’s perceptions. The eighth Doctor, Anji and Fitz arrived and discovered that the Picasso painting
Guernica
had been altered. The Doctor sent Fitz to Guernica itself to check events. The Doctor restored reality and the Absolute returned home. These events inspired Eric Blair, also known as the writer George Orwell.
Aviatrix Amelia Earhart disappeared, possibly because she flew into one of the Dragon Paths, lines of magnetic force.
[1517]
The Doctor had Amelia Earhart’s flying jacket.
[1518]
1937 (August) - The Shadow of Weng-Chiang
[1519]
The fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 were drawn to Shanghai while searching for the Key to Time. They stumbled across the Tong of the Black Scorpion’s plan to recover their “god” Weng-Chiang (Magnus Greel) from the zygma beam experiment. The Doctor followed the Tong’s leader, H’sien-Ko - the daughter of the stage magician Li H’sien Chang - to the holy mountain of T’ai Shan. There, the Doctor found the Tong had constructed the world’s first nuclear reactor to achieve the power needed to retrieve Greel. The Doctor narrowly prevented a temporal paradox by time-ramming Greel’s Time Cabinet, hurling it back to 1872.
In 1937, the eighth Doctor and Fey Truscott-Sade fought psychic weasels in Russell Square. Soon after, the Threshold implanted a perceptual relay unit in Truscott-Sade’s brain, enabling them to monitor what she saw.
[1520]
1938
Ghosts were sighted on the
Queen Mary
in 1938.
[1521]
In 1938, the entire Podesta family - which had ties to the Three Families - changed their names and disappeared from the public record.
[1522]
Swan Lake
was first performed at the New Regency some time after the death of the theatre’s legendary impresario, Henry Gordon Jago. It was a huge success.
[1523]
1938 - “The Curse of the Scarab”
[1524]
The fifth Doctor and Peri landed in what they thought was an Egyptian tomb, but which was actually a Hollywood film set. The movie
The Curse of the Scarab
was beset with problems, including Raschid Karnak, the uncommunicative lead, who played the Mummy. Director Seth Rakoff was under a great deal of pressure from the studio boss, Monroe Stahr. Peri led Karnak to his dressing room, where he choked and scarab beetles started emerging from his mouth. A robot Mummy killed Stahr. The Doctor discovered more deactivated Mummies in a control centre inside a prop pyramid. Karnak was there, and told them he was cursed by the beetle god Kephri. He used the Grimoire of Anubis to resurrect Kephri. A plague of locusts was released as Kephri manifested. The Doctor held it in place with an ankh, and had a robot Mummy destroy it. The film set was destroyed in a fire.
At one point during this encounter, Peri was abducted by Threshold.
1938 - Let’s Kill Hitler
[1525]
The
Teselecta
- a robot vehicle crewed by four hundred and twenty-one miniaturized justice agents, whose mission was to pull the greatest villains in history from the end of their lives and punish/torture them - travelled through time to capture Adolf Hitler, but arrived too early in his timestream. The
Teselecta
shifted to pose as a Nazi officer and approached Hitler just as the TARDIS, with the eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory and Mels aboard, crashed through the window of Hitler’s office. Rory locked Hitler in a cupboard, but Mels was hit by a stray bullet... which triggered her regeneration into the body of the person the Doctor’s group knew as River Song.
Programmed by the Silence to kill the Doctor, Melody kissed him using lipstick laced with poison from the Judas Tree before heading out into Berlin. The justice agents identified Melody as the criminal River Song and began torturing her - but Amy sabotaged the
Teselecta
, forcing its crew to transmat to safety. The TARDIS taught Melody to fly her, enabling Melody to rescue Amy and Rory from the
Teselecta
’s interior.
The dying Doctor asked Melody to find River Song and whispered something to her that profoundly affected her. Amy used the
Teselecta
records to prove that Melody
was
River Song, whereupon River sacrificed her remaining regenerations to save the Doctor’s life. The Doctor, Amy and Rory took the exhausted River Song to the fifty-first century to recover.
1938 (8th April) - TimeH: The Albino’s Dancer
[1526]
Honoré and Emily fulfilled history pertaining to events in the Albino’s bunker by damaging and hiding a time-belt.
1938 (31st October) - Invaders from Mars
[1527]
An alien spaceship crashed in New Jersey and was looted by the gangster Don Chaney, who discovered a bat-like being aboard. Chaney hired the Russian physicist Yuri Stepashin to develop an atom bomb from the advanced technology, hoping to give America an advantage over Germany. The eighth Doctor and Charley found conflict brewing between Chaney and his rival, Cosmo Devine, who wanted to sell the technology for the Nazis.
The alien split into thirty beings and threatened to go on a rampage, but the aliens Streath and Noriam subdued the pilot as part of a protection racket. Devine convinced Streath and Noriam that their weapons could seize control of Earth without the need for deception. The Doctor went to CBS Studios and had Orson Welles stage a second, private performance of
War of the Worlds
for the aliens’ benefit, hoping to make them think that the formidable Martians had already invaded Earth. The plan failed. Stepashin detonated his atom bomb aboard the aliens’ spacecraft while it was in orbit, destroying them.
The eighth Doctor left a copy of Fitz’s journal, entitled
An Account of An Expedition to Siberia
, in a second hand bookshop for his past self to find.
[1528]
@ In 1938, the amnesiac Doctor bought Fitz’s journal from a bookshop on Euston Road.
[1529]
Adolf Hitler gained the Validium Arrow, a piece of the Nemesis statue. The Nemesis itself passed over Earth, heralding Germany’s annexation of Austria.
[1530]
1938 (Christmas) - The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe
[1531]
The eleventh Doctor destroyed a threatening alien spaceship, and donned an impact suit as he fell to Earth. A young mother, Madge Arwell, helped him get back to the TARDIS. As his helmet was on backwards, she never saw his face.
1939
In Antarctica, the Nazis started construction of a huge underground base that was shaped like a swastika.
[1532]
A photo of Jack Harkness from 1939 wound up in the American CIA archives.
[1533]
Circa 1939, a pair of Cybermen from the thirtieth century arrived accidentally in Jersey. They secretly took control of Peddler Electronic Engineering in London.
[1534]
In 1939, a failed attempt to open Devil’s Hump, “the Cambridge University Fiasco”, took place.
[1535]
A fez-wearing eleventh Doctor found his way onto a Laurel and Hardy movie.
[1536]
1939 - “Tooth and Claw” (
DWM
)
[1537]
The eighth Doctor and Izzy were summoned to Varney’s island in the Atlantic, where eccentric guests - including Fey Truscott-Sade, an old friend of the Doctor - were served the meat of endangered animals by Varney’s monkey servants. Truscott-Sade worked for British Intelligence, and suspected that Varney was creating biological weapons for the Nazis. In truth, Varney had drugged everyone’s champagne with a microbe derived from his ancestors, and this turned the guests - the Doctor and Fey included - into vampires.
Varney served the last of the Curcurbites - an alien construct fuelled by blood. The Doctor destroyed the Curcurbite by poisoning his own blood and allowing the construct to feed off him... this returned the Doctor to normal, but left him gravely ill. Izzy and Fey got him back to the TARDIS, knowing they would have to take the Doctor to Gallifrey if he was going to survive.
1939 (3rd September) – Gallifrey: A Blind Eye
[1538]
The arms and secrets broker Mephistopheles Arkadian summoned Romana to the Vienna-Calais express on Earth, 1939, and offered to identify the party behind the theft of a timonic fusion device if she turned a blind eye to his activities concerning Charley Pollard’s sister, Cecila “Sissy” Pollard. Sissy had been appointed the Munich representative of the League of English Fascists by Sir Oswald Mosely, and had met Hitler himself. One of Arkadian’s clients hoped to kill, stuff and sell her as a Nazi collectible.
Romana, Leela, CIA Coordinator Narvin and CIA agent Torvald found that Sissy’s boyfriend, Erich Kepler, was actually an earlier incarnation of Torvald. An embittered isolationist disgusted with Romana’s policies, Kepler had averted Sissy’s historic suicide by a river in Munich. Kepler threatened that unless Romana allowed the Time Lords to erase her from history, he would use Sissy – much like her sister – to unleash anti-Time throughout the Universe. Moreover, Torvald had arranged the theft of the timonic fusion device, in a further bid to discredit Romana.
The incumbent Torvald confessed that he was actually Andred – who had regenerated during the gunfight in which Torvald had died. Narvin removed Kepler’s memories of these events; Torvald would die in future as history dictated. Leela and Andred remained estranged. Knowing she’d never be regarded as anything other than an amusement to the Nazis, and a traitor to the British, Sissy killed herself.
The Second World War
During the war, bunkers were built in the London Underground, including one at Covent Garden.
[1539]
The Doctor advised Winston Churchill on policy.
[1540]
During World War II, the
Queen Mary
was used as a troop ship and torpedoed. Soldiers died, leading people to suspect the ship was haunted.
[1541]
Beings of light from Altair III observed the Second World War.
[1542]
Gaskin Manor in Creighton Mere was used as a convalescent home during World War II.
[1543]
Occultist Aleister Crowley summoned the demon Jarakabeth.
[1544]
During World War II, the United States feared that collective Nazi belief could alter the fabric of reality. The US government hired writer J.R.R. Tolkien and his contemporaries to infuse world culture with a greater sense of what was fantasy, and what was reality.
[1545]
The Doctor knew his way around the secret tunnels under the Thames used during the Second World War.
[1546]
Polly Wright’s parents were married a month before World War II broke out. Her father Edward was a doctor, and her mother was a proper society lady, being one of the Bessingham-Smiths. They lived in a big old house in the country. Edward had two siblings: his elder brother Charles, and his younger brother Randolph.
[1547]
1939 (early September) - Timewyrm: Exodus
[1548]
The seventh Doctor, having inveigled his way into Hitler’s confidence as “Herr Doktor Johann Scmidt” with Ace as his “niece, Fräulein Dorothy Scmidt”, told Hitler that if he invaded Poland, the British would declare war on Germany. Hitler refused to believe him, but the Doctor was proved right - which made Hitler trust him all the more.