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History Cafe

347 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 14 ratings

True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building...

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Episodes

#94 'Political gangsterdom' - Ep 3 What Wars? What Roses?

March 27, 2024 06:39 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MB

By the time Henry VI finally lost the last bit of England's French Empire in 1453 he could no longer go to war in France to occupy and enrich his nobility. This small, interrelated and bickering group, cooped up in England with an agricultural depression settling in, now resorted to what the historian Michael Postan long ago (in 1939) famously called ‘political gangsterdom.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#93 'A plague on both your houses' - Ep 2 What Wars? What Roses?

March 20, 2024 09:13 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MB

Why was the 15th century in England and Wales so violent? It certainly wasn’t York v Lancaster, white-rose v red-rose rivalry. Monarchs were useless but that’s not unique to the 15th century. So what was it that defined this period? It has everything to do with the plague… Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#92 'Welcome Traitor!' - Ep 1 What Wars? What Roses?

March 13, 2024 07:49 - 28 minutes - 25.7 MB

Why do we know so little about medieval history? About England and Wales in the fifteenth century? The Wars of the Roses (Lancaster v York) lasted 4 months not the traditional 85 years. Even the roses were (mostly) inventions. And was it even medieval? The execution of the King’s chief minister as a traitor in 1450, by sailors dissatisfied with an ineffective king, was shocking. It revealed that the common people believed the true crown was the community. You can’t get more modern than that. ...

Ep 1 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #34 Getting the vote in 1918 - the secret strategy

March 08, 2024 10:07 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY - Mrs Pankhurst claims she won women the vote through ‘marvellous leadership.’ An all-male conference of MPs counters that it gifted women the vote. We reveal that neither is true. The door to women’s suffrage is finally opened in January 1917 through brilliant negotiations behind the scenes by Millicent Fawcett, the president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage, her female colleagues and the enlightened MPs who work with her. [Please note on our lo...

Ep 2 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #35 Most women didn’t want the vote

March 08, 2024 10:07 - 27 minutes - 25 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY We go back to the great number of unsung women and men who made great strides towards women’s votes and female emancipation by 1900. Emmeline Pankhurst sets up her Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903 as a pressure group for votes for poor working-women in the cotton mills. By then a majority of MPs is already consistently in favour. But the public are uninterested and no government will therefore act. The question is whether the WSPU can find a fo...

Ep 3 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #36 The Pankhursts didn’t want the poor to get the vote

March 08, 2024 10:06 - 30 minutes - 28 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - begin in the Manchester Labour Party in the 1890s and learn their publicity-grabbing tactics from Labour. But these tactics turn out to have the worst possible effect – making women’s votes even less likely than before. They are so bad, in fact, it makes you wonder whether the Suffragette leadership had some other agenda. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ep 4 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #37 Hunger strikes and forced feeding

March 08, 2024 10:06 - 38 minutes - 35.1 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The militant strategy of the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes - is delivering them headlines. It gets them nowhere with the government but it makes enormous sums of advertising revenue from fancy retailers, and funds Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst’s society lifestyle. Rich London ladies in silks and satins pour in the money, while working-class activists take all the risks. WSPU officer Theresa Billington drafts a constitution to give everyone a say bu...

Ep 5 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #41 The violence the Suffragettes wouldn’t admit to

March 08, 2024 10:06 - 37 minutes - 33.9 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY From 1912 the WSPU – the Pankhurst Suffragettes – are out of control and dangerous. But that is not how they're remembered. Anyone who disagrees with the violence either leaves or is thrown out. Whatever they later claim about their ‘wonderful leadership’, it is their young, poor members who are inventing new and increasingly dangerous ways of intimidating the government. The WSPU leadership claims it never threatened life, only property, but this is mani...

Ep 6 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #42 The violence backfired

March 08, 2024 10:06 - 37 minutes - 34.1 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY November 1912 sees the first defeat for women’s votes since 1891. The government has been struggling with law and order after two years of mass strikes. That year even school children go on strike. The violence of the suffragettes is barely noticed and can definitely not be rewarded. For the first time in a generation, Parliament turns against women’s votes. What little sympathy there was for women’s suffrage among the wider public ebbs away. But Christabe...

Ep 7 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #43 The Suffragettes did not win the vote

March 08, 2024 10:06 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY Suddenly, after 1913 votes for women looks inevitable. Not through the chaotic, dying campaign of the suffragettes. But through the political brilliance of Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Their 1913 alliance with the Labour Party changes the whole political balance. Now Liberal Prime Minister HH Asquith’s blockheaded intransigence over women’s votes is costing his party dearly and letting the Tories in. At the 1915 e...

Ep 8 The Secret History of the Suffragettes - #60 After 1918 - the secrets are out - Ep 8 The Secret History of the Suffragettes

March 08, 2024 10:06 - 44 minutes - 41 MB

REPEAT FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMAN'S DAY The reason we all believe Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst achieved women’s votes in Britain is because that’s the narrative created in the 20s and 30s by former suffragettes. The reality of what Emmeline and Christabel got up to post 1918 is shocking. Suffice it to say it involves racial purity and telling working women they can buy silk underwear, shapely shoes and fur hats, not by improving their working conditions but by giving into the feminine desir...

#91 Death Camp tattoos were IBM numbers - Ep 10 Trading with the Nazis

March 06, 2024 08:17 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MB

During the war US and British bankers continued to send cash to Germany, while American companies in Germany were drawn down a slippery slope of collaboration. American bosses may have kept in touch with German subsidiaries via neutral hang-outs (like the fictional Rick’s Bar in the 1942 film Casablanca). Some made use of prisoners of war for slave labour. The five-figure tattoo on every death camp inmate began as an IBM-Dehomag punch card number. Nobody was going to be called to account for ...

#90 British appeasement, a sinister game? - Ep 9 Trading with the Nazis

February 27, 2024 22:46 - 31 minutes - 28.6 MB

In 1937, the new British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, believed he single-handedly could ensure world peace. He told the King, George VI, that he would do this by pursuing his objective of Germany and England being ‘the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#89 Britain's Nazi Allies - Ep 8 Trading with the Nazis

February 21, 2024 08:18 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MB

In 1935 the Etonians in the British Cabinet and Foreign Office rejected all calls from the USSR to unite with France and Eastern Europe against the rise of the Third Reich. They were far too terrified of Communism. Instead, Britain agreed a treaty allowing the Germans to expand their navy. When supporters of the elected left-wing government in Spain faced annihilation by Franco’s fascists in 1936-7 the Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, openly welcomed the carnage in Spain. It would, he d...

#88 'It haunts me' - Ep 7 Trading with the Nazis

February 14, 2024 09:37 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MB

Horrified by the implications of aiding German rearmament, a few British and American companies made serious attempts to get out of Germany in the 1930s. Particularly after Kristallnacht, 10 November 1938, when Nazi thugs attacked Jewish businesses. But the British Establishment saw Hitler as ‘a man who could be relied upon’. The Bank of England argued as late as March 1939, four days after Hitler had marched into Prague, that the British couldn’t just pull out of Germany, without bringing do...

#87 Kill Nazism with kindness? - Ep 6 Trading with the Nazis

February 07, 2024 11:21 - 27 minutes - 25.4 MB

A perfect storm created the conditions for the Nazi’s march to war. The naïve belief that you could kill Nazism with kindness (aka trade agreements from which bankers and businessmen personally hoped to profit) was held simultaneously by the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, and the second in command at the British Foreign Office, Orme Sargent. Their opponents in government argued that tough action was necessary to contain Germany ‘even ...

#86 'Hell-bent to supplant our democratic government' - Ep 5 Trading with the Nazis

February 01, 2024 09:38 - 26 minutes - 24.2 MB

In 1936 the US Ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd, wrote to President Roosevelt warning of a pro-Nazi clique of US industrialists ‘hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government.’ We look at the notorious Liberty League and the dinner in New York’s Astoria to celebrate the fall of Paris to the Nazis. We showcase the businessmen who believed they were above democracy and could achieve world peace (under fascism) through world trade. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pr...

#85 Nazi sterilisation, the American way - Ep 4 Trading with the Nazis

January 24, 2024 09:40 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MB

For all the complaints about the difficulties of doing business in Hitler’s Germany, the Americans seemed strikingly settled there. Now we get to the nub of why, when Germany occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and then part of Poland in 1938-39, its military rolled out in General Motors and Ford cars and trucks, and its planes were using General Motors and Ford parts. They were also burning American fuel. And using American research to justify forcibly sterilising those they considered mentally...

#84 Dollars and Dictatorship – Ep 3 Trading with the Nazis

January 17, 2024 09:43 - 24 minutes - 22.3 MB

STAND-ALONE. The Americans insisted on extracting every cent from war-torn Britain and France in the aftermath of World War I. They made them repay the money they had borrowed, at increasingly high interest rates, to buy American weapons to fight Germany. It led to economic depression. The 1929 Wall Street Crash was part of a global financial meltdown which led to economic nationalism – survival of the fittest, everyone for himself. And that was before Hjalmar Schacht Reichsminister for Econo...

#83 Enrich your enemy, impoverish your allies - Ep 2 Trading with the Nazis

January 10, 2024 07:52 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MB

The US had a paradoxical strategy to ensure repayment of its WW1 loans. It would make Germany economically prosperous to ensure Germany was in a position to pay reparations to France and Britain (as per the Treaty of Versailles). This would mean that impoverished Britain and France could keep repaying the interest on their wartime loans to the Americans.Economist Maynard Keynes, aware that Britain and France would never recover from endless interest repayments, proposed cancelling all war deb...

#83 Enrich your enemy, impoverish your allies - Ep 2 Trading with the Enemy

January 10, 2024 07:52 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MB

The US had a paradoxical strategy to ensure repayment of its WW1 loans. It would make Germany economically prosperous to ensure Germany was in a position to pay reparations to France and Britain (as per the Treaty of Versailles). This would mean that impoverished Britain and France could keep repaying the interest on their wartime loans to the Americans. Economist Maynard Keynes, aware that Britain and France would never recover from endless interest repayments, proposed cancelling all war de...

#82 'The whole world belongs to the Americans' - Ep 1 Trading With The Enemy

January 05, 2024 12:32 - 28 minutes - 25.7 MB

Carl Siemens, chair of Siemens the German electronics business, complained in 1929, ‘the whole world belongs to the Americans.’ If you want to understand how it was that American businesses ended up investing so heavily in Germany in the 1920s and 30s – so heavily that eventually they enabled Hitler to arm the fascist Third Reich - then you have to start by going back to the First World War. It starts with asking why the Americans declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 but mysteriously did ...

#82 'The whole world belongs to the Americans' - Ep 1 Trading With The Nazis

January 05, 2024 12:32 - 28 minutes - 25.7 MB

Carl Siemens, chair of Siemens the German electronics business, complained in 1929, ‘the whole world belongs to the Americans.’ If you want to understand how it was that American businesses ended up investing so heavily in Germany in the 1920s and 30s – so heavily that eventually they enabled Hitler to arm the fascist Third Reich - then you have to start by going back to the First World War. It starts with asking why the Americans declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917 but mysteriously did ...

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster

November 12, 2023 18:27 - 5 minutes - 4.64 MB

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 3 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster

November 12, 2023 18:23 - 2 minutes - 2.42 MB

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 2 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster

November 01, 2023 20:00 - 5 minutes - 5.43 MB

Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot - Ep 1 Taster by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final

November 01, 2023 19:54 - 1 minute - 1.27 MB

Battle of Britain - London Fires Were Visible From France - Ep 6 Taster Final by Jon Rosebank, Penelope Middelboe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Battle of Britain - Taster Ep 5 - Forcing Britain To Her Knees

October 24, 2023 16:47 - 1 minute - 1.3 MB

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#02 A battle for air superiority? - Ep 2 of Who really won the Battle of Britain?

October 22, 2023 19:47 - 29 minutes - 27 MB

Was the Battle of Britain a fight for Luftwaffe air superiority in order to enable an invasion? The Luftwaffe itself did not think so. It had another agenda altogether. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Memory and Myth – Oxford research project ‘Their Finest Hour’ - SOUND CORRECTED

May 10, 2023 23:24 - 25 minutes - 23 MB

Their Finest Hour is a University of Oxford project that aims to collect and digitally archive the everyday stories and objects of the Second World War that have been passed down from generation to generation in the UK and Commonwealth. Closing date July 2024.We interview project manager Dr Matthew Kidd and reflect on the evidential issues this online collection raises about memory and myth. website: theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informati...

#57 From mayor to meat market. Getting elected in the 18th Century

April 26, 2023 10:00 - 35 minutes - 32.2 MB

It is still wrongly but commonly thought that in the 18th Century the gentry bought their way into a parliamentary seat, mainly by purchasing land, or by gaining the approval of some unrepresentative local patron who had the borough in his pocket. You've heard of pocket boroughs, and rotten boroughs? Well, Jon's 1985 doctoral thesis, researched entirely from local documents rescued from mouldy parish chests and corporation vaults, contradicted so many of the leading historians of the day so ...

#81 Coronation and the chilling ghost of Lord Esher

March 08, 2023 08:35 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MB

The coronation of King Charles III has prompted this humorous historical look at the British coronations. Since 1902, when Edward VII and his queen were crowned, the religious ceremony itself has drawn upon rites going back to the crowning of Anglo-Saxon kings. But reviving these old rites just belongs to an Edwardian fascination with a mythical Merrie England. And once you step outside all the solemnity of the Abbey, we are in a world that was entirely invented between the 1870s and the firs...

#80 Nazis: The Road to Power - conversation with author Jonathan Myerson

January 18, 2023 08:18 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MB

#80 Nazis: The Road to Power. Conversation with Jonathan Myerson, playwright and author of BBC Radio 4’s new drama series Nazis: The Road to PowerThe story of how in just 13 years, Hitler led a fringe sect with less than a hundred members and outlandish ideas to be the dominant force in German politics.Jonathan talks to us at History Café about the challenges of bringing this extraordinary and shocking story to life through the eyes of the people closest to him. He tells us how every scene in...

#78 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

December 23, 2022 14:27 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MB

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. So here's our offering from the History Café Christmas Party! Have a good one.

#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

December 23, 2022 14:27 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MB

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. So here's our offering from the History Café Christmas Party! Have a good one. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#30 ‘A tall and desperate fellow’ - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

December 14, 2022 13:48 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MB

The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#29 The king's fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder plot

December 07, 2022 22:53 - 32 minutes - 29.4 MB

As his father had done, King James I's Chief Minister, Robert Cecil ,built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose fathe...

#28 ‘A formidable network of secret agents’ - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

December 01, 2022 18:32 - 31 minutes - 29.2 MB

We dig deeper into the animosity between the King, James I of England and VI of Scotland and his Chief Minister, Robert Cecil, whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils (father and son) against their enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father was Elizabeth I's Chief Minister, like his son he had spies everywhere and openly boasted of his policy of entrapment. Hosted on Acast. S...

#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

November 23, 2022 08:47 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MB

To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course. Hos...

#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

November 16, 2022 08:59 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MB

The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#78 Remembrance Day - Aren't We Forgetting Something?

November 11, 2022 06:22 - 20 minutes - 19 MB

We don't apologise for repeating this broadcast made for Remembrance Day 2020. The story is so important it's worth telling again and again.At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were "civilians in uniform" - conscripts or volunteers. But do we officially remember them...

#78 Remembrance Day 2022 - Aren't We Forgetting Something?

November 11, 2022 06:22 - 20 minutes - 19 MB

We don't apologise for repeating this broadcast made for Remembrance Day 2020. The story is so important it's worth telling again and again. At least 50% of deaths from war in the last three centuries were civilians. In 2001 the International Red Cross calculated that in modern warfare ten civilians die for every member of the military killed in battle. In the two World Wars the vast majority of soldiers were "civilians in uniform" - conscripts or volunteers. But do we officially remember them?

#25 ‘Here lieth the Toad’ - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

November 09, 2022 09:27 - 34 minutes - 31.9 MB

We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his father had caused the execution of James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (Rpt) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#24 ‘There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality’ - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot

November 02, 2022 08:07 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MB

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND - FOR 5 NOVEMBER! We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

#77 Stanley never got the joke - Ep 5 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

October 26, 2022 09:04 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MB

The events that followed Livingstone’s funeral are perhaps important for the light they shed on everything that Livingstone was not. Stanley, having declared that he would complete what Livingstone had begun, undertook three ‘momentous’ journeys. Whatever the cover stories he created, Stanley’s expeditions were intended to grab and occupy African lands, sometimes through fake treaties he claimed to have signed with African leaders. One result was the wholesale mapping of central Africa; the o...

#76 Twelve reckless Americans - Ep 4 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

October 19, 2022 08:48 - 31 minutes - 28.7 MB

Henry Morton Stanley, the New York-born journalist who was actually born in Wales, ‘finds’ Livingstone, although everyone knows he’s not lost. Stanley’s employer Gordon Bennett Jr of the daily New York Herald has spotted a fantastic money-making enterprise, pedalling fictitious stories of the romantic failures of the British explorer, Dr Livingstone. It was time for the Americans to take over the exploration of Africa. The British had bogged themselves down with ‘too many theodolites, baromet...

#75 The Lion and the Tartan Jacket - Ep 3 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

October 12, 2022 08:58 - 38 minutes - 35.2 MB

The British audience for Livingstone’s book 'Missionary Travels' can’t get enough of his ‘manly’ and ‘forcible’ style. He brings a very personal mix of far-away adventure and science to his stories. His account of being mauled by a lion – shaken like ‘a terrier dog does a rat’ and how the tartan jacket saves his life – are still vivid reading. But had he not glossed over the danger of malaria and other diseases fatal to Victorian Britons (in much the same way as he casually dismissed as an ‘i...

#74 Smoke that Thunders Ep 2 Dr Livingstone, I presume?

October 05, 2022 10:30 - 37 minutes - 34.3 MB

Livingstone was the first European to record his visit to Smoke that Thunders on the Zambezi river. 100 metres of plummeting water, across the entire kilometre of the Zambezi’s width. He promptly named it after his queen, Victoria Falls. His ambition was to find a navigable river from the east coast of Africa inland. Although it was clear that Smoke that Thunders would put a stop to any trade boats navigating any further inland he remained undaunted. He calculated that just being able to brin...

#73 Stronger than the ox he rode Ep 1 'Dr Livingstone, I presume'

September 28, 2022 08:33 - 37 minutes - 34.5 MB

Exploration changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Henry Morton Stanley met Dr David Livingstone. We discover that Livingstone isn’t remembered for anything he achieved. A missionary and medical doctor from a poor Scottish background – and an indestructible traveller - he learned to make accurate geographical calculations and used them to map a small part of Africa. Amazingly he did most of his successful exploration with an African team and backed by African funds. So why did ...

#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 05 Slavery

September 21, 2022 09:10 - 40 minutes - 37.1 MB

By 1832 it was clear to both the House of Lords and the Commons that the British planters in the Caribbean were dragging the British economy into a credit crash. It looks to us very like the crash of 2008. The Jamaican Rebellion of 1831 and the vicious retaliation by the rector George Wilson Bridges and his white supremacist Colonial Church Union in 1832 was the final nail in the coffin of British enslavement. The CCU showed beyond doubt that the Jamaican planters, who had always dominated th...