Shoreditch Incident

The Shoreditch Incident, known to the Time Lords as the Hand of Omega Incident, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) was an event in which Imperial and Renegade Dalek factions battled in Shoreditch in November 1963. The area was evacuated to prevent civilian casualties. At that time, the Daleks were engaged in the Imperial-Renegade Dalek Civil War. Each side tried to procure the Hand of Omega so they could gain the power of the Time Lords.

Preparations by both sides
According to the Dalek Combat Training Manual, the First Doctor was always aware that the Daleks would one day seek the Hand of Omega and thus hiding the stellar manipulator became one of the reasons he fled Gallifrey. After his TARDIS wiped his memory of this, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) the Doctor was unfamiliar with the Daleks until he encountered them on Skaro. (TV: The Daleks) The Doctor's memory of the plan itself would not resurface until his seventh incarnation, who would return to Earth to execute it. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual) By other accounts, the Doctor truly had no knowledge of the Daleks until his first encounter with them on Skaro, (TV: Into the Dalek, et. al) meaning he had hid the Hand for other reasons at first. Nevertheless, he eventually knew the Daleks sought the weapon.

A Renegade Dalek faction from approximately the 30th century, according to the Seventh Doctor, and an Imperial Dalek faction arrived in Shoreditch in 1963 to seek the Hand of Omega, which the First Doctor had brought there with him. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) One Renegade Dalek followed the Doctor whilst he was considering where to hide the Hand, however was foiled by the Seventh Doctor, seeking a disguised segment of the Key to Time in his younger self's possession, who pushed it into a path of an oncoming bus. (COMIC: Time & Time Again) The First Doctor eventually concealed the Hand in a coffin and left it in the care of an undertaker (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)

By August, Renegade Daleks had used robotising technology to control a local gang. They sent them to investigate signs of alien technology, unaware they had been caused by future Daleks from the Last Great Time War who were attempting to manipulate Susan Foreman into leading them to the Hand of Omega. (AUDIO: The Shoreditch Intervention)

The Imperials set up a concealed transmat in the basement of Coal Hill School to transport themselves there so they could infilitrate the area without being detected. They enslaved the headmaster, H. Parson. The Renegade Daleks employed George Ratcliffe and linked Judith Winters, a schoolgirl, to their Battle Computer so her young imagination could generate ingenious stratagems to defeat the Imperial Daleks. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)

On 29 November 1963, the Doctor returned in his seventh incarnation with Ace in tow. From his perspective, several hundred years had passed since his departure, (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) although he was known to have visited the village's 1985 future in the interim. (TV: Attack of the Cybermen)

The course of the conflict


A human military force, the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group, was led by Group Captain Ian Gilmore. Dr Rachel Jensen and her assistant Allison Williams were their scientific advisors. They had arrived to investigate unusual magnetic fluctuations. The troops had a brief battle with a Renegade Dalek at Foreman's Yard. For the most part, however, the group ensured the evacuation of the area to minimise human casualties and allow the Doctor to put his plans into motion. Later the Doctor and Ace discovered the transmat and they destroyed the Dalek guarding it, but the transmat was still working and a small squad of Daleks managed to transport down from the mothership. Ace returned to the school and discovered the Daleks when she went to get her tape deck which she had left behind. She was able to fight the Daleks thanks to her baseball bat which had been augmented by the Hand of Omega, but she was trapped before the Doctor and the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group arrived.

An Imperial shuttlecraft landed in the yard of Coal Hill School. Aided by the Special Weapons Dalek, the Imperial Daleks won their battle on the streets of Shoreditch. The Imperial Daleks took the Hand of Omega, as the Doctor had planned all along. Davros (as "Emperor" of the Imperials) (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) plotted to detonate the second sun of the Daleks' homeworld Skaro, (PROSE: The Stranger) making it go supernova, and giving the Daleks the power of unlimited time travel. In the Imperial Daleks' time zone, he did so. This action, however, destroyed the planet and the Imperial fleet. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) The Time Lords' time scale of Dalek activity placed the destruction of Skaro as occurring in the far future following the 47th century. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual)

The Dalek Prime later claimed that it was not Skaro, but another planet, Antalin, that was actually destroyed. (PROSE: War of the Daleks)

On Earth, the Doctor talked the last Renegade Dalek, the Black Dalek Leader, into self-destructing. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks) However, Judith Winters, the young girl linked to his mind, was broken mentally for the rest of her life. (PROSE: In the Community)

The Time War
Andrea Quill would claim that the destruction of Skaro at the hands of the Seventh Doctor was a cause of the Last Great Time War. (AUDIO: In Remembrance) According to the Seventh Corsair, the Hand of Omega's destruction of Skaro triggered a "little" time war, which was eventually erased by the greater Time War. (PROSE: One Virtue, and a Thousand Crimes)

The Shoreditch Incident briefly became a battleground in the Time War when Dalek agents duped Susan Foreman into returning to August 1963 by following her younger self's path through the time lock protecting Earth from the Time War. Sending a control signal after her to take control of nearby humans, the Daleks attempted to trick her to leading them to the Hand of Omega only for the Eighth Doctor to intervene. He tricked the Daleks into letting him and Susan leave 1963 to deliver the Daleks a fake Hand. Once they discovered the deception, the Daleks attempted to exterminate him however he escaped. (AUDIO: The Shoreditch Intervention)

Imperial Dalek in 2016
Following the incident, the Doctor and Ace took their leave back to the TARDIS. There, the Doctor picked up signs of temporal abnormality at Coal Hill in 2016, as well as a possible Dalek lifesign. However, before he and Ace could attend to it, they were distracted as the TARDIS was attacked. As recalled by an older Ace to the best of her memory, the attacker may have been a Bandril timeship, but the incident was so far in her past that she could not say so for certain.

Despite the distraction, Ace made a note of the date in 2016. Eventually, after she participated in the Last Great Time War, Ace appeared at Coal Hill where she encountered the Imperial Dalek that had crossed through the temporal anomaly. Charlie Smith fell through the temporal anomaly, and ended up on the periphery of the conflict. He briefly encountered the younger Ace, and some of the Imperial Daleks stationed within Coal Hill.

In 2016, the surviving Dalek downloaded in-depth details of the Shoreditch Incident from the internet and decided that it had to return to 1963 immediately, as the information would be valuable intelligence that could alter the course of the conflict. Quill and Ace were able to work together to lure the surviving Dalek to the chemistry lab, where they damaged it. Quill decided that saving Charlie was the greatest priority and tied Ace up. She repaired the Dalek's casing and took it back to the anomaly. On the other side of the anomaly, in 1963, Quill was able to rescue Charlie from extermination at the hands of the Imperial Daleks in Coal Hill, and return to 2016 with him.

The surviving Dalek, now returned to 1963, attempted to upload the recovered intelligence from the future but it was immobilised by the Counter-Measures Group, alongside the other Imperial Daleks within Coal Hill, via the usage of a device constructed by the Seventh Doctor. It was destroyed using explosives before it could upload the information, thus preserving the course of history.

Though Ace believed that the Doctor had forgotten about the matter at Coal Hill, (AUDIO: In Remembrance) the Twelfth Doctor was aware that time had "worn thin" in the area. (TV: For Tonight We Might Die)

Human reaction
From the viewpoint of many key scientific and military authorities in Great Britain, the conflict constituted undeniable evidence that aliens existed. The conflict was later named "the Shoreditch Incident" by these authorities. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) The Shoreditch Incident was also the title of a book on the incident written by ex-UNIT officer Hamlet Macbeth. (PROSE: The Left-Handed Hummingbird, Return of the Living Dad)

However, the incident was covered up from the general public, with The Evening Star attributing the six official casualties to an unexploded bomb. (PROSE: The Shoreditch Incident) Second Lieutenant Gary Jonathan Finch died in the incident but it was hushed up by the military. This inspired his son, Clive Finch, to begin his research on the Doctor. (PROSE: Rose)

In the post-Time War universe, this incident was covered as a part of known Dalek history in The Dalek Conquests, a documentary which was itself produced following the Van Statten Incident on Earth in 2012. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)

Alternate timeline
In an alternate timeline where WOTAN succeeded in taking over the minds of large portions of the population, Dalek artefacts from the Shoreditch Incident were recovered by the British, who began to make slight advances in time travel studies and, by 2006, hoped to use it to win World War III, which began as a result of the broken world left behind in WOTAN's wake. Because WOTAN had destroyed many great minds, the only people left to carry out any experiments were, as the First Doctor opined, "idiot[s]".

The First Doctor prevented these studies from taking place in October 1972 of this timeline by transporting the artefacts into the Sun. Nevertheless, the appearance of a Dalek manipulator arm caused alarm for both the Doctor and Susan, who, by this point in their personal timelines, had only encountered the Daleks once before. The Doctor concluded that the Daleks must have visited Earth at some point. The WOTAN-controlled timeline (PROSE: The Time Travellers) was ultimately totally averted when the First Doctor, later in his personal timeline, changed history by defeating WOTAN in 1966. (TV: The War Machines)

Behind the scenes
The Discontinuity Guide takes the Doctor's words that the Supreme Dalek was "a thousand years from a disintegrated home" literally, while supposing that it is more likely in the future than the past, and so states that Skaro was destroyed around the 30th century in the new timeline where Davros survived, whereas Skaro was known to exist later in the old timeline.