Radio 4’s wartime epic, Home Front, tells fictional stories against the factual background of the Great War.

 

At least for the duration of the war, some young women had greater earning power and leisure opportunities. Women, even those from the middle and upper classes, began to go to pubs after work; and in some areas to attract these new drinkers, pubs provided meals and improved their décor. One observer remarked on the introduction of white cloths, flowers, artistic prints and shaded lamps which all gave pubs a ‘homelike quality’.

Wartime also gave an added impetus to women’s participation in public life which had been increasing in the Edwardian era as women became Poor Law Guardians, participated in suffrage campaigns and from 1907 were able to stand as County and Borough councilors. In Home Front, a real female councilor Annie Maud Burnett appears in the Tynemouth Season (played by Broadchurch’s Carolyn Pickles).

There were, however, tensions as women grasped the new opportunities war offered. One area of public life women entered was the temperance movement, attempting to restrain other women’s drinking. Home Front’s character Joyce Lyle is actively involved in the local temperance league. Similarly the British Women’s Voluntary Police also took a role in curtailing working class women’s leisure activities.

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester.

Series 3 of Home Front BBC Radio 4 on Monday to Friday at noon with an omnibus at 2100 on Fridays.

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World War One on the BBC

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Women in the workforce

100 years ago on 17 July 1915 Mrs Pankhurst led a women’s march through London to demand the right to work. Women already made up a significant element of the workforce, in domestic service, textiles, laundries, millinery, clerical and retail work even as chain-makers in Cradley Heath. Wartime conditions adversely affected some of these trades and when the July march took place, with Lloyd George’s support, some young unmarried women had already moved into new areas of work. Government and local authorities led the way, providing women with working opportunities: collecting refuse or as tram conductresses; firms like Home Front’s Marshalls making munitions followed.

For some women finding work was a pressing need. There was little organized financial assistance for wives and widows of soldiers prior to WWI; arrangements to look after soldiers’ dependents were haphazard, often delayed and organized by charitable bodies with a degree of moral censure towards women, particularly those who were euphemistically described as ‘unmarried wives’.

During the transfer to a fully regulated system and the formation of the Ministry of Pensions in December 1916, some women were homeless, destitute or in the workhouse whilst their husbands fought and died in the trenches. They consequently grasped the new working opportunities available.

At least for the duration of the war, some young women had greater earning power and leisure opportunities; they went the cinema and formed workplace football teams. Women’s football became an increasingly popular spectator sport, especially after the men’s professional game was suspended at the end of the 1914-15 season. A Munitionettes' Cup was established in 1917.

 

Maggie Andrews is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester.

 

Series 3 of Home Front BBC Radio 4 on Monday to Friday at noon with an omnibus at 2100 on Fridays.

Catch up with Home Front and subscribe to the podcast

 

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World War One on TV and Radio

 

Imperial War Museum North are celebrating #100YearsOfWomen: find out more

 

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Winston Churchill has always been a figure of extraordinary fascination to me. When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these were the years of Churchillian apotheosis, and he was the most famous man alive. On his ninetieth birthday, greeting cards were sent, addressed to ‘The Greatest Man in the World, London’, and they were all delivered to Churchill’s home address.

As Lord Moran’s diaries would later make plain, Churchill’s last decade was in many ways a sad one: he was old and infirm, which meant he was no longer able to keep the ‘Black Dog’ of depression at bay; and as his own strength ebbed and failed, he also came to feel that his life’s work, to preserve and safeguard Britain as a great empire and a great power, had been in vain. ‘We passed all the tests, but it was useless’, he is alleged to have said, as the British Empire disappeared and Britannia ceased to rule the waves. ‘I have achieved so much’, he observed on another occasion, in what must surely rank as among the saddest words ever uttered by a great man in extremis, ‘to have achieved in the end NOTHING.’ Of course, he did himself less than justice: it had been an utterly extraordinary life, and the more it recedes into the distance, the more extraordinary it seems, not less.

As Roy Jenkins observed, having written the life of Britain’s greatest nineteenth-century prime minister (Gladstone), and its greatest twentieth-century premier (Churchill), and thus being uniquely placed to compare them: Churchill was the most remarkable human being ever to occupy 10 Downing Street, and whatever the verdict of the electorate this coming May, it seems inconceivable that it will be such as to cause anyone to modify, let alone overturn, that judgment.

Since Churchill’s death exactly fifty years ago, a great deal of material has come to light which makes possible a much more rounded and nuanced appreciation of his remarkable, controversial, versatile and lengthy life than anyone could have managed half a century ago. But on his death, as I well vividly remember, there were two sentiments uppermost, both of which were very powerful, but which were also in their way contradictory.

On the one hand, his magnificent state funeral was a final gesture of homage to a man widely regarded (in Isaiah Berlin’s unforgettable phrase) as ’the saviour of his country’. But there was also a very different sense that his obsequies were not only the last rites of the great man himself, but also the requiem of Britain as a great power – a sense that would later be vividly be caught by Bernard Levin in his book on the 1960s, ‘The Pendulum Years’; by Jonathan Dimbleby in his biography of his father Richard, who delivered his last great commentary on Churchill’s funeral; and by Jan Morris, who ended the final volume of his trilogy on the British Empire, ‘Farewell the Trumpets’, with an account of Churchill’s sad but spectacular send-off as the last great imperial pageant.

That he could be at once the saviour of his country, but also a figure who had failed to halt his nation’s decline was a paradox and a contradiction that few then wished to explore in detail. But as Churchill passes from memory into history, it is one of the many ways in which his life is becoming more remarkable and extraordinary, not less.”

Churchill’s Other Lives is written and presented by Professor Sir David Cannadine. It starts on 19 Jan at 13:45 and runs every day for two weeks.

Historically, the N-word – one of the most hated and hateful in the English language – has been associated with the USA.  In the Civil Rights era the word underscored the toxic relations between black and white people in America. Among the boxer, Muhammad Ali’s pacifist objections to the draft in the Vietnam War was the fact that no Vietcong had ever called him by that name.

For all of the difficulties in 1960s Britain, race relations had never been soured by the common use of the N-word, so the narrative went. But fifty years ago the character of the British discourse on race was changed dramatically by one slogan: “If You Want a Nigger for a Neighbour, Vote Labour”. The voters of Smethwick in the West Midlands seemed to have been persuaded. In the general election of 1964, the safe Labour seat was captured for the Conservatives by Peter Griffiths; and although he had not uttered the words of the slogan, he defended the notion that it defined a malaise at the heart of British society; and illuminated the antipathy that the electorate (in Smethwick at least) felt towards their black neighbours.

Ever since the spectre of the N-word was raised in the 1960s, British people have struggled to put it back in its box. Prior to Smethwick if people had heard the N word then it might have been in reference to a shiny, black Labrador (as witnessed in the WW2 film, ‘The Dambusters’), or on the cover of an Agatha Christie story whose title was later updated with the word changed so that it read: Ten Little Indians.

At the end of the 19th century the word was used by at least one spouse as an expression of endearment and "matrimonial" ownership. The popularity of the minstrel shows in Victorian England perhaps accounts for the nicknames that Charles and Emma Darwin gave to each other. In correspondence she was “Dear Mammy” and he was her “darling nigger”.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the N-word was rarely used affectionately: it was a term of abuse. Ever since the 17^th century, from the inception of the Atlantic Slave Trade, it had been spoken and written in hatred, directed at the enslaved and their emancipated descendants as a demeaned and degraded people.

Such prejudice was lampooned by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn – a critique of American society where privilege was predicated on colour. The enslaved Jim is saintly, wise and kind, and in the novel everyone calls him “nigger”.

Notwithstanding attempts by rap and hip hop artists to re-appropriate the N-word, it is still offensive to modern eyes and ears. Diane Roberts of Florida State University who teaches the book to her students says that they will not say out loud the word that occurs two hundred times in Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps this explains why the novel has often topped the list of banned books.

Despite our enlightened age the N-word continues to leak out (even if only mumbled) giving lie to the suggestion that it had ever gone away. A rerun of classic comedy series such as Till Death Us Do Part shows us how far we’ve come but also gives us pause for thought. Distance has not diminished the offence. What should we do with all of that troublesome archive? Should the word be deleted as some have suggested?

“What, what nigger” were among the last words heard by Stephen Lawrence before he was murdered by knife-wielding racists in 1993. To attempt to wipe the word from our memory banks is to risk future generations mistakenly believing that it had never existed.

Colin Grant is the producer of BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4: A History of the N-Word, and author Negro with a Hat: the Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey.

Listen to A History of the N-Word

Hello, 

I felt more than usual trepidation about this morning’s programme.  Of course, I trepidate every time.  Who wouldn’t, when faced with some of the world’s best scholars on such a range of subjects?  But their generosity usually dissipates my anxiety, which would only get in the way if it were revealed and became part of the programme.

But there’s something very special for me about religious programmes.  As I may have said before, I was brought up as a Christian, a very eager Christian, until I was about sixteen and began a falling away which, having completed its course, has returned as a powerful nostalgia and interest in thinking about the meaning of the impact that religion has had for so long, the scope it gave to people, as well as the well-documented (especially recently) horrors that it helped inflict, although I think it was more used than using.  But that’s another matter.  I must have heard extracts from the Old Testament three or four times a week from the age of six until I went to university, when I was in the chapel choir for a very short time (I lasted about a couple of months and that was the end of that chapter).  And there was a familiarity about the names, not only from hearing them at school and in church, but the fact was that I lived in a town of five thousand people which had twelve churches in it.  Twelve.  Each one of which I remember being busy and controlling and, in effect, running most social as well as religious aspects of the town.

So we had people called Solomon and Sarah and Esther and Jacob and Ruth of course, and so it was rather like moving through the Torah.

The Talmud, of which I had the merest knowledge, proved to be a revelation in many ways.  Just to take one.  In my late teens and early twenties I began to read American fiction massively.  Soon I came across that great run of Jewish writers, from Isaac Bashevis Singer, Malamud, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer, right through to Philip Roth, and revelled in them.  Also, when I went to Oxford and then came to London, I met for the first time Jewish men and women and have retained strong friendships with some of them and even made new friendships in London.

What the Talmud revealed to me was that the extraordinary argumentativeness, one-to-one, could well be rooted in the way that the Talmud is constructed; indeed in the way that yeshivas are constructed: two students together all the time, two sides of an argument, dissecting, diverging, almost ad infinitum.  The excerpts from the Talmud I read in preparation for the programme could have been in those novels.  In fact, I felt that I almost recognised sentences which could have come out of the books of those writers I admire.  My friend Howard Jacobson rang up after the programme.  He is carrying on that tradition in this country and I realised that one of my reasons for trepidation was that I didn’t want to let myself down in front of him as well as others.

So, skimming the surface as far as they (the contributors) were concerned, but a serious toe in serious waters as far as I was concerned.

Then back to the office and now I’m dictating this from the Paul Hamlyn Hall in the Royal Opera House, where I’ve just done some links to camera for a series to be called South Bank Show Originals.  The ones I did today were about Mama Lou Parks, Merce Cunningham, Sylvie Guillem and Michael Flatley.

Covent Garden has totally, totally changed since first I came to London, when the great thing was to hang around, if you could keep your eyes open and money in your pockets, as long after midnight as you could and see the lorries crowd into crowded streets, manoeuvre down narrow lanes, fruit piled up, goods everywhere, Dickens stalking the land, echoes of opera and raunchy London sexual excitements at every turn.  Or so it seemed.  Memory is deliciously treacherous sometimes.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

PS: I think I didn’t explain the trepidation well enough, partly because here in the Royal Opera House they seem to be moving every piece of furniture in sight.  The fact is that the notion of the Word of God being given to Moses and him bringing it down to the people of Israel, the continuation of that story in the Hebrew Bible or the Christian Old Testament, whichever way you want to refer to it, and the sheer roll and might of it through the centuries, the horrors, the triumphs, the literature, the learning, is formidable.  It is a mighty fact and you feel, or rather I feel, daunted in the face of it.  So I was more than ever in need of the generosity of strangers this morning.

 

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Hello

The rise and fall of reputations is fascinating. In Iran Khayyam was known as a scientist, particularly as someone who reinvented the solar calendar. His poetry is, as was made plain on the programme, something not mentioned in his own era (or was it mentioned once?) Anyway, he was not known as a poet. Now, as a result of Edward FitzGerald’s translation, he is acclaimed as a fine poet in Iran, although the very latest scholarship there suggests that there is still some academic uncertainty about his relationship with these quatrains. I think we didn’t make quite clear the immensity of the task that FitzGerald set himself. He set himself to learn Persian as an Iranian might set himself to learn English, but the Iranian would be setting himself the task of learning English to translate Chaucer, in the way that FitzGerald was learning Persian in order to translate a 12th century text. No wonder he went through medieval Latin first. Or, another way to put it is, what a wonder he went through medieval Latin first.

So, a fine May morning and off to vote. I nipped round when the doors opened at seven o’clock. I’m lucky in that the polling station near me is near the Heath and so it was a stroll through the fresh air and birdsong to Keats House. It felt very privileged to go in there, in this calm place, and take my one-fifty-millionth part in democracy. It’s quite a treat to vote when you’re in the Lords because, along with criminals, the lords are not allowed to vote in general elections, so putting crosses on pieces of paper took me back.

Last night I was at an event to commemorate Beryl Bainbridge. Her paintings have been given an exhibition space in King’s College. Some of them are quite wonderful. She was such a talented woman. The British Library has also released some first editions of her books, on several pages of which she did paintings. There’s also a replica of a corner of her extraordinary Victorian room, although you will all be grateful to know that the full-sized bison which dominated the hall in her house in Albert Street has been left in Albert Street.

The night before that I was at the British Museum for an exhibition of Egyptian mummies. Eight new mummies, one – the oldest in the world – which comes from 3500 BC. It’s a young man who had been buried in a shallow grave of sand, but the sand was so dry that there he is, crouched foetally, a perfectly presentable skeleton. But what the British Museum has done is to bring extraordinary X-ray techniques to bear on it, so that we not only see inside the mummy cases and through the bandaging but through the body itself, so we can see which organs were taken out; where, if taken out, they were displaced; and also the amulets that were put inside the opened-up body to charm them through to the next world. A small, perfectly formed exhibition which leaves you wanting to go round a second time, instead of, as often happens at exhibitions, wanting to find the nearest armchair.

All sorts of difficulties last week. Arsenal gives you a lot of grief. Why did they have to go 2-0 down in the first eight minutes last Saturday, when we had so carefully gathered round the television, expecting, if not a walkover, then at least a well-deserved (as we thought) victory? One of the problems was a tension between sympathy for the underdog (Hull City) and a deep wish that after nine years Arsenal would win a trophy. It was resolved with dignity all round – which I’m afraid includes the fact that Arsenal won.

And again there will be problems on Saturday when Saracens face Toulon. Saracens are an English-based team (to say English would be pushing it an awful lot) and Toulon is a French-based team, but Toulon is led by Jonny Wilkinson in the second last game of his career. So there’s sympathy there. On the other hand, Saracens is led by young Owen Farrell, Wilkinson’s natural successor …

Pleasure can be very strenuous some days. I think I’ll go back to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and especially that stanza:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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The consensus seemed to be that the legacy of the 1937-1945 war is still a live issue between China and Japan. It still shapes policy. For example, there are a few insignificant islands over which there is much beating of chests and beating of drums. Those round the table thought that if the military got out of hand and did something rash, then the whole thing could be blown up by the media in Japan and China and result in … who knows. They also agreed that America’s presence in Asia was still strong enough to be a constraint. But for how long?

Under Mao, the Chinese saw the war only through the eyes of the Communists. The Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, did not exist. It was the Communists who faced the might and force of Japan and defeated them. This is not true, but there you go. In Japan the massacre of Nanking, which goes down as one of the great world massacres, simply did not happen. Perhaps the global economy and mutual interdependence will, or already has, knit these countries so closely together that the old enmities will not have the room or energy to rise up again?

Yesterday I went to Cambridge to see Clive James. We were talking about Paul McCartney and the first South Bank Show, which Clive was one of the very few critics (perhaps the only critic) to review positively. He’s frail but game. He’s coming to London to read his poetry at the end of the month and he says this will be the last time he will come to London. His poetry gets better and better, which must be really satisfying for him. I also loved his translation of Dante. Perhaps shamefully, it’s the first time I’ve read Dante right through. The wit’s still there of course; the mind is still action-packed and ready for delivery. It’s the chest, the lungs that are letting him down. But he shows no signs of giving in. Thank goodness.

Bit of a heavy day after In Our Time this morning. I decided to walk from Broadcasting House to the National Theatre, which takes about thirty or forty minutes and is a pleasant wend through Soho and Covent Garden, before you hit Waterloo Bridge and stand on it and look downriver at the growing marvels of City architecture. But not when you’re caught in a tremendous shower, wearing a light raincoat with no umbrella and arrive at the National Theatre soaked to the suit. Somehow or other, the rain seems particularly vicious on the knees. Nevertheless, we went into the Lyttelton and did the introduction to the programme on King Lear which we’re doing with Richard Dunn, Simon Russell Beale and Sam Mendes.

And then on to lunch with a good friend who knows how to retire. He worked in VSO in Africa; he’s part of a walking club that covers several miles a day in London. They go through London squares, or they go east of London and walk into the city through parks, etc, etc. He is, like so many of my acquaintances now, an addictive box set person and box set watching is the order of his day. He makes me think that I really should retire one of these days … one of these days …

So back to the cutting rooms to work on cuts of Francis Bacon, Paula Rego, the King Lear programme, the trail for the new series, and then to the office. Interviewed about the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson, who was born a hundred years ago in Millom and scarcely left it because of ill health. He died in the house in which he was born, which was half a house because the front of it was a shop which his parents ran. In those days Wednesday was half-day closing and his terrific autobiography is called Wednesday Early Closing. The children of Millom now know his poems as well as they will know any poems and that’s terrific.

I was going to go to the launch of Edward St Aubyn's new novel. He’s written some of the best autobiographical fiction of the last 25 years. Four volumes, all now in paperback, and quite special. But got tired, came home, sat down, read, did this, will read a bit more. And so to bed.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

 

Sam Wilson and Jimmy Macknade

Kitty’s youngest brother Sam and his school friend Jimmy, both eight years old, are inseparable, much to the despair of their families. The Wilsons, provided for by dad Albert, a railway signal man, and mum, Florrie, a laundress, see themselves as the respectable working class. They see Jimmy’s family, the Macknades, penniless, hungry, terrorised by their feckless, jobless, hard-drinking dad, Bill, as the opposite. Bill and his wife Alice don’t think a lot of the Wilsons either. But Sam and Jimmy don’t care. There are more important things in life, like aniseed balls and lemon drops, and borrowing a St Bernard so they can enter a dog show. War is exciting; soldiers in uniform with guns are marching around. If only they were big and old enough to fight the Germans themselves.

 

 

The Grahams

Respectable and well-to-do, the Grahams are one of the leading families in Folkestone. Councillor Gabriel Graham is a man of status, serving on Folkestone Town Council. He enjoys red meat, red wine and red-blooded English pursuits such as cricket. His wife Sylvia comes from an impeccable aristocratic bloodline in Northumberland. Commanding and committed to public life, she has just as much authority and status among the ladies of Folkestone as Gabriel does among the gentlemen. They love all their children, even the unmarried and probably unmarriageable Isabel but reserve particular pride for their only son Freddie. Isabel, pious, intelligent and ladylike, serves a valuable role in community as Sunday School teacher in the parish church, though she sometimes yearns for something more. A cheerful, vigorous product of the ‘muscular Christian’ English public school system, Freddie is a cavalry officer in the Hussars, soon to leave for France. While Freddie will be tested at the front, the rest of his family face the challenges of leading a community in uncertain times, as Folkestone’s tourist trade is shaken by the war and the town becomes a home for thousands of Belgian refugees.  

Find out more about Radio 4’s plans for World War One programmes this summer

World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Across the BBC a range of programming has been commissioned to mark the centenary of World War One, from dramas to documentaries, discussions and historical debate.

At the heart of our coverage on Radio 4 is Home Front, a hugely ambitious drama with more than 500 episodes, which will launch this summer. Distinctive factual programmes are also scheduled and we’ve designed our World War One programmes so that we’ll be telling compelling stories in real time across the four years that the war lasted. 

I hope that with our programmes this summer we’ll be able to offer Radio 4 listeners something new and insightful about the period leading up to the war and how this felt from the perspective of the home front.

In Month of Madness, Professor Christopher Clark explains the reasons for the onset of hostilities from the perspective of the key centres of action and decision making - Sarajevo, St Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and London. The five 15-minute episodes will run Monday to Friday at 9.45am, starting on Monday 23 June.

From Friday 27 June, we’ll hear Professor Margaret MacMillan present a series of short programmes chronicling the road to war called 1914: Day by Day. The 42 episodes, each around four minutes long and broadcast daily just before 5pm, will take us from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand through to the first week of the conflict.

We’re working together with 14-18 NOW and The Cartoon Museum on a project in which twelve cartoonists and graphic artists will respond as if in real time to the events that brought the world to war. Each week, the reaction of two cartoonists to the deepening crisis will be published on the Radio 4 website and distributed via social media.

Specially commissioned original drama is planned as the spine of the Radio 4 offer over four years, with Home Front starting on Monday 4 August 2014. This is an exciting drama serial, unprecedented in scale with 500 episodes between now and 2018, each around 12 minutes long.

After careful consideration about the year ahead, we’ve decided to create a new slot in the schedule after the midday news on weekdays, hosting both Home Front and new factual content. This way we can offer something fresh to our listeners, adding to the already rich mix of programmes on Radio 4, and without limiting the range of dramas we broadcast and have already planned for the next year.

Home Front will be broadcast in clusters throughout the year, enabling us to create as realistic a picture as possible of day-to-day life away from the trenches. And for the weeks when Home Front isn’t on, we have plans for interesting new factual series that will be broadcast after the midday news, commissioned specifically for the new slot. This means that from August onwards, You & Yours will start at 12.15 and finish just before the weather bulletin ahead of 1pm.

In the coming days, we'll have an update from the Home Front production team which will be giving us a glimpse of their plans so far, blogging about characters that are being developed and some of the themes the drama serial will be exploring. Here's a piece that we published about Home Front from November of last year.


World War One on the BBC

World War One on TV and Radio

Find out more about some of the characters in Radio 4's landmark new drama series Home Front

Tom Morris, the producer of In Our Time, tells me that this is the first time we’ve had a Belgian majority on the programme. Both Roel Sterckx and Hilde De Weerdt are Belgian and indeed Professor De Weerdt came over from the Continent to do the programme. Tim Barrett, the other Englishman on the programme, suggested at the end that we do something about the Chinese industrial revolution in the eleventh century, which Hilde De Weerdt enthusiastically backed up and rattled off a most impressive number of inventions and moves forward. Tom Morris and I thought this was a great idea, and then the three contributors said we would be very hard pressed to find three people in this country who would know enough about it to do it. First of all, I think it’s wonderful how modestly these clear experts on Chinese history rule out themselves. They think in this case they are not expert enough and secondly, it just eggs Tom and me on. If we have to go further afield than Belgium for our cast, then, by Jove, we probably will.

There is also an idea, cropped up from another quarter, on the history of eunuchs. We’ll have to see about that.

One of the things I regretted was that I did not raise the questions which I’d hoped to raise about the importance of religious documents. It turns out that the huge discovery in 1900 of ‘new’ documents, in a sealed cave on the edge of the Gobi Desert, contained many religious bamboo strips. In fact, one of the contributors told us that the entire history of Zen Buddhism had to be rewritten, because there was discovered to be one Zen Master, who was Master of the Masters, and had been either written out of history or completely forgotten about. What seems to excite the scholars about these tranches of archive is that they are unsifted and unmediated. The Chinese scholars and historians seemed to use the archives very conscientiously, but then discard them, because they considered the book they had written was all that was needed. And so to discover 130,000 items in the Gobi Desert alone and to have them digitised (and to realise just how many languages were involved at the time), some of them at the British Library, is a great thrill to our scholars.

It seemed a bit downhill after that. I went to have a coffee with a chap who never turned up. I walked from there the short distance to my office and in that short distance I got very wet indeed. It had dried up so I walked from there down to the House of Lords. It takes about half an hour if I go through Soho. Chinatown has now floating balloons of various sizes, celebrating Chinese New Year (I think it’s the Year of the Horse) which is almost upon us.

There are new street cries at the moment. These are the cries of, almost invariably, young people, literally screaming into their phones as they march along the pavements and sometimes coming out with strings of language which would make Robert De Niro, in the darkest Scorsese film, blush. They seem completely unconscious of anyone around them; just march down the avenues having flaming rows. Did we used to behave like this? Sometimes I think that if Charles Dickens came back and walked down the streets of London and saw all these people apparently talking to themselves, or with their hand cupped to an ear, talking into their hands, he might well think that the world had gone completely mad and who is to blame him?

Lunch with one of my daughters, then a meeting with someone who had been to a talk by Bill Gates and was rejoicing in Bill Gates’ witty one-liners. I wonder if they are witty because he’s Bill Gates, because they are one-liners, or because they are witty.

Now to do a bit more research on the next book I’m writing (or I hope to be writing quite soon), but first of all, a three-bridges walk, down past Lambeth Bridge, over Vauxhall Bridge, along the South Bank of the Thames, over Westminster Bridge, and back here to Broadcasting House where I am dictating this letter.

By the way, Tim Barrett said that the reason why philosophers like to look at the pelicans in St James’s Park is because the pelicans remind them of Bertrand Russell.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Hello, 

I think we chewed off more than we could bite in this one. Sometimes we deliberately go for a long haul, i.e. two or three hundred or, it has been known, a couple of thousand years, and try to pour a quart into a thimble, and sometimes it works. Sometimes it has a cohesion and an exhilaration which makes it worth doing.  The Medici seemed such a clan, a club, a closed little group that one can study in detail, that it was irresistible. Perhaps we should have concentrated on just one figure.  One of the Cosimos or Lorenzo the Magnificent. Still, I hope you gained a feel for this extraordinary, hydra-headed family, with its four popes and its rise from gentlemen farmers to Dukes of Florence and its, at the time, immeasurable wealth from the papacy, wars and states. And the decision taken very early on by Cosimo, the true founder of the clan, that the way to glory was through making their city glorious; in buildings, in objects, in the collection of classical manuscripts and the translation of the great ancient Greek culture into then contemporary Europe.

It took me back, I tell you, it took me back.  I did the Italian Renaissance as my special subject at Oxford in 1960. My tutor for this was a man called John Hale, well-known then and since as a great Renaissance scholar. One of the things about Oxford at that time was that you were taught one-to-one, sometimes by people who had written the definitive books on the subject, and so when they gave you reading lists they would nonchalantly add their book to the end of the list of three or four books and four or five articles, and you’d know that you should dive straight for it – for several reasons, not necessarily pure scholarship.

John Hale was a lovely man. He had the habit of jumping up when you said something that he doubted, pulling down a book and throwing it into your lap and saying “read me something in there that proves that”. Looking back, it was charming. At the time it was absolutely terrifying, because in these essays that we had to read three times a fortnight to extraordinary, intelligent and learned tutors, there had, perforce (it’s a very nice word to use), to be some sort of bluff, otherwise no normal human being could have got through it. He was ill at one stage and I was passed over to Sir Maurice Bowra, who was the Warden of my college, Wadham, and a famous, fearsome figure in his time. A man of great learning and many languages.  Obsessed by the Greeks, homosexual (although I was ignorant enough not to understand that at the time), a writer of scholarless, scandalous, scatological verses about his contemporaries… Oh, let’s leave it at that. He was a wonderful Warden.

In case Warden reminds you too much of a prison, it’s just one of the words they use at Oxford to describe the man who ran the place – in other colleges there are Presidents or Heads or Masters – but we had a Warden.  A nice little alliteration: the Warden of Wadham.

Anyway, John Hale fell ill and I had only one term to work on the Renaissance, for which I had to learn fourteenth/fifteenth century Italian to read Machiavelli and Castiglione. I made a botched job of it and then was horrified to realise that I had to get a grip on contemporary Italian to read the commentaries. Maurice Bowra took me for three tutorials. One of the problems was that he was deaf. Like many clever deaf people he got around his disability by not allowing anyone else to speak – which was fine by me because he spoke so well. But to cut to the chase. After our last tutorial, when John Hale, thank God, got better, he took a book down from his bookshelf and gave it to me. It was a collection of essays on the Italian Renaissance to which he had contributed.  “Have a look at that,” he said. I read it. They were wonderful essays.  A few days later I called round at his lodgings and handed it in. He happened to open the door in his burly, front-row-forward, rugby-fashion and growled something or other. I handed in the book and said “thank you”. “Keep it, keep it, dear boy,” he said, “keep it, keep it.” And I did. I still have it. It’s a lovely book.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Hello,

I’m afraid this will be rather short.  I’m sitting in front of a fire, bunged up with a chesty cold, put on antibiotics, taking a cough mixture, dreaming of a hot toddy, having fed on medicines for the last day or two.  I usually manage to miss these little personal calamities of winter, but it got me this time.

One of the interesting things about Pliny’s letters is their lack of modesty.  Roy Gibson pointed out that modesty and self-effacement were not considered as virtuous at that time.  He suggested that Christianity brought that in. Christianity was one of a number of sects, and the notion of it eventually eating up the Roman Empire and taking the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire and beyond would not have crossed their minds, even persons as perspicacious as Pliny the Younger.

Pliny the Elder was of course his uncle, but I did find it a little odd when Catharine Edwards referred to him as Uncle Pliny.  I suppose that was a term two thousand years ago, but it seems so contemporaneous.  But then a lot of the past is contemporaneous.

Cicero later wrote letters having published his great law cases – one of which, Pro Milone, was my set book for A-levels and a monster it was – and he too was brought into play in Pliny’s constant and almost compulsive comparisons with the great persons of letters that he saw around him; Tacitus, for instance, was also often referred to.

Pliny died suddenly at the age of fifty-two and no-one seems to know why.  Again, this was pointed out by the contributors that it was not a bad age.  Life expectancy at the time was thirty-five.  Given that so many people died before ten, that meant that there were quite a few who pushed into their fifties, but very few who got any further.

I thought that they were rather hard on Pliny the Elder (as I keep calling him) when they said that he didn’t have a plan when he went over to Vesuvius, and instead spent the night in bed and woke up to find the wind in the wrong direction, etc.  After all, he’d gone out to look at a volcanic eruption, the like of which he had never seen before and had never been witnessed before, and to think that he’d worked it all out in advance is asking a bit much of the old boy.

That incident is curious for one other thing.  Pliny’s description is so vivid and detailed, and yet it took about 1800 years for people to believe that it had happened like that.  That particular sort of volcano was not observed as closely until the early twentieth century, and it was only then that the brilliance of Pliny’s observation was given the credit it deserved.

So there we are.  Reading Plato for the first programme in the New Year.

Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg

 

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Words aren't the only tools that you can use to tell a story. Numbers have as much narrative power. A History of Britain In Numbers interrogates data to reveal the changes that have swept through our nation and created the Britain that we live in today.

From rotten teeth to toilet arrangements to austerity, here are some surprising stats unveiled by the team.

Homes

The 1861 census records that in Dundee there were about 90,000 people… and three WCs. Two of them in hotels.   

Health

Of every 100 deaths in 1840, nearly half were children.

Of every 100 today, about 1 is.  

In a survey in 1968, nearly four in ten of those aged over 16 had NO natural teeth. 

Income

To get an idea of how much lower incomes were just before the first world war, do this simple sum:

Take your current income, leave prices overall as they are, and then cut your income by 80%.

So if you are earning £30,000, imagine how you’d get by on £6,000.

Stuff

By one estimate, the same amount of artificial lighting in the year 1300, cost about twenty thousand times more than it would today (relative to income).

At the Redbridge recycling depot in Oxford ten years ago, they used to collect about 100 tonnes a year and it's now about 1,000 tonnes a year.

Population

Imagine 10 people in a room, 6 adults and 4 children. This was Britain in 1840.

Now change it to 8 adults and 2 children. This is Britain today.

Work

The number of fatal accidents at work has declined in the past century by about 97% despite a near-doubling of the population.

Women

A woman’s chance of going to university in the 1920s was about 1/3 of a man’s.

Today it is 30% higher than a man’s.

A woman today has about 100 times the chance of obtaining a degree as her great grandmother.

 Old age

At the beginning of the 20^th century about 1 per cent of households were someone living alone. Today it’s about a third.

It’s been estimated that about half of those aged 75 or older live alone.

Listen to A  History of Britain In Numbers

Download the podcast

Hello

This was a sleepless night one. Sometimes the sleepless night before the programme is because I can't quite work out what's the right time to go to bed so that I wake up at the right time to get up and do a final swot before the programme. Sometimes it seems that nerves crowd in. Last night it wasn't quite panic, but I was engulfed by the desolate feeling that I had as a teenager, that philosophy was magnificent but too difficult for me. And the stuff I was reading for this morning's programme – well, you heard about a tenth of it!

So I went over the stuff again and again, and aided, in fact supported, nay, carried by three very generous and erudite contributors, managed to start at 9:02 and finish at 9:44. I was determined to get in the illustration about the donkeys, and about the red apples, and to try to tackle Frege head-on, and to get some idea of how this had peeled away from most of Western philosophy, but, in effect, gone back to Socrates. So I think we touched those staging posts.

The history course that I did included papers on philosophy (as well as a special subject which, for me, was the Italian Renaissance, and constitutional documents in Latin and so on – history was only the tip of the iceberg) and I think that we rushed through these too quickly. The idea of gouting a few books three times a fortnight to produce essays, then read aloud to a person who'd probably written the most authoritative of the books you'd read, had settled into a routine. But I discovered immediately that philosophy could not be gouted. So a great deal of fuzz went on. Little short circuits threatened to close down grey cells unwilling to engage with Aristotle at speed.

Curiously, at Oxford, I knew Peter Strawson very well, even though I did not read philosophy. My first wife lodged in his house for a few years, and for about ten years Peter and his wife, and sometimes the family as well, and myself and my wife went on holidays together, either up to a rented house near Whitby or over to Brittany for a rented house there. He was the most extraordinary person I met at Oxford. His mind so clear about everything. And again, which seems to be a characteristic among the better academics, very generous to those who clearly wanted to know something but knew nothing. 

He particularly liked striding out and walking; I don't know whether this is relevant, but he used to play war games with his friend John Carswell. These consisted of putting little lead soldiers (or maybe pseudo-lead) in Napoleonic and Wellingtonian formations (there were other battles they re-fought as well), in suitably scouted-out terrain and with their own rules, setting out to replay the battles but allowing themselves the game room (is this the Wittgenstein element?) to do variations on the theme. I remember seeing these two distinguished, cheerful men in an area of sand dunes, replacing and replacing these tiny soldiers, some on horseback, some beside cannons, some as infantry, as they were prepared to wade through hours of intense concentration on battles fought long ago. It sounds like something out of Sterne.

Off now to a ridiculous day. To The Savoy for The Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, and then later to the British Museum for the Annual Trustees' Dinner and a chance for heavy sightseeing inside what seems to me to become, every year, an even greater museum.

Lucky, lucky.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

 

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Hello

After the programme ends we have approximately 13 minutes in the studio. Then a World Service programme moves in. In those 13 minutes we grab a cup of tea and a bit of fruit and generally talk through the programme. In this instance, the three contributors talked as fast, as enthusiastically and as intensely as they had done on the programme itself. In no particular order.

I learned that North America, China and Western Europe – all three! – would fit into Africa. Joanna Lewis said that her favourite film was Anchorman and she managed to see it through twice while flying over the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our under-appreciation of the sheer size of Africa has come about because of the ubiquity of Mercator maps.

One of the problems with Africa is massive over-population and that it's extremely difficult to grow temperate crops. Where you could grow temperate crops – in the land of the Zulus – they took huge advantage and at one stage, in battle, defeated the British.

It appears that one of the German "representatives" in Southern Africa was Carl Peters, who appears to have been a total swine. He was responsible for the virtual genocide of two peoples, the Herero and the Nama. He reduced their population to 10% of those who had been there before he got there. His patch of land was sitting on diamonds and diamonds didn't need all that many people and he didn’t like black people at all. We did not have time to get round to the viciousness of the racism involved in all this land grab. However, it turns out that Carl, who was eventually sent back to Germany, was resurrected as a heroic figure by the Nazis. He became a hero of Goebbels and of Goering, whose family came from South-West Africa.

There doesn't seem to be much point in grading shame in Africa, from what our contributors said. Lever Brothers and other European businesses were in the Congo doing the work that King Leopold's hateful forces were spearheading. Leopold, by the way, was discovered to be using a London brothel to bring over young girls. This scandal was suppressed at the time because the Prince of Wales was using the same brothel and it was thought it might become a little tricky all round.

Mark Twain, it turns out, wrote a very long poem about King Leopold called 'King Leopold's Soliloquy'. According to our contributors, Twain "got him".

There were jobs in the Congo called 'the keepers of the hands'. These were men whose job it was to smoke the cut-off hands of people who were not deemed to have tapped enough rubber on that day or in that week.

It also came out that there were African warlords who would move around the country with the guns that were supplied from the West, and with child soldiers and a highly mobile army and support force, numbering on some occasions one and a half million people, say, in the Sudan. They would set up camp cities as they looted and raped and stamped their presence on the benighted continent.

I must say the programme left me almost winded with information and in the guilty knowledge that so much had not been said. I went downstairs in the lift with Tom and into the BBC entrance where we chewed it over a little, and outside on the pavement – blow me down – the three contributors were standing together, intently continuing (with no sign of concluding) the discussion they'd had so vividly for the rest of us in studio 50F a few minutes ago.

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

PS: So far at the House of Lords – I've been here half an hour – there have been two comments on the programme. The first was from someone who told me off for rushing people too quickly and not giving them the time they needed to finish what they were saying. I see the problem he had, but it was nothing compared with the problem I had to allow these wonderfully informed people to say as much as they could while getting the programme in on time. Still. Point made. Secondly, someone came up flatly and said "why was there no black historian on the programme?" Again. Point made.

 

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