November 10, 2023 • 39 mins
William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: of where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from.
900 years later, the BBC began its own Domesday project, sending school children out to conduct a community survey and collect facts about Britain. This was a people’s database, two decades before Wikipedia. But just a few years later, that interactive digital database was totally unreadable, the information lost.
We tend to take archives for granted — but preservation doesn't happen by accident; digitisation doesn’t mean that something will last forever. And the erasure of the historical record can have disastrous consequences for humanity...
For a full list of sources, please see the show notes at timharford.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. As dawn broke on the fourteenth of October ten
sixty six, two great armies, each more than five thousand men,
lined up for battle near Hastings on the south coast
(00:36):
of England. Ranged along a hilltop where the English forces
of King Harold They faced an invader from France, William,
Duke of Normandy, with his force of archers, infantry, and
mounted knights. At nine in the morning, the battle began
with the terrible sound of trumpets on both sides. The
(01:00):
English formed a shield wall, holding the high ground. The
Norman cavalry and archers probed for an opportunity to shatter
the English line. Then words spread among the Norman army
that their Duke William had fallen. The left flank crumbled
and fled down the hill, pursued by the English. And
(01:21):
then what's this? William himself, helmet raised to reveal his face,
rode forth and proclaimed, look at me, I live, and
with God's help I shall conquer. His forces rallied and counterattacked,
slaughtering the English who had surged forward. The battle was brutal,
(01:42):
but as the autumn sun began to set, the final
Norman assault broke. The English line, King Harold was slain.
The next King of England would not be English, but
Norman I shall conquer, William had said, And on Christmas
(02:02):
Day ten sixty six, William the Conqueror was crowned William
the First of England. But the French invader. William faced
struggles to have his right to rule excepted. Two decades later,
he stumbled upon an idea to establish his legitimacy over
his vast fiefdom, an idea that still shapes the world today.
(02:27):
He began a grand survey of what was in that fiefdom.
Commissioners set up special sessions of county courts to hear
testimony about who owned what and what there was to own,
from land to mills to people. There was no single hide,
nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox, nor
(02:49):
one cow, nor one pig which was left out. The
result of this great survey was the Doomsday Book. In fact,
there were two of them, Great Doomsday and Little Doomsday,
remarkably detailed snapshots of William's in ten eighty six AD.
(03:12):
It was all a long time ago, and yet it's
a very modern project. If the state wishes to govern,
to tax, to help the deserving and punish the wicked.
That state needs comprehensive, detailed records of where everyone lives,
what they do, and where they came from. I'm Tim
(03:36):
Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales where they came from.
(04:07):
Michael Braithwaite came from the sunny island of Barbados in
nineteen sixty one. Little Michael, just nine years old and
traveling with his brother, crossed all the way over the
ocean to arrive under the gray skies of Britain, despite
the weather and the risk of a hostile reception from
(04:27):
a mostly white British population. It was a journey many
other people had taken. At the time of Michael's journey,
Barbados was still part of the British Empire, and the
UK government had been welcoming migrants and offering them considerable
legal protections. Michael's father already had a job with the
(04:48):
Royal Mail, his mother with the National Health Service. Michael
and his brother were traveling to be reunited with their parents.
It must have been a daunting journey, but it was
a one way trip. Michael started attending a British school,
and from that moment he recalls. We regarded Britain as
(05:10):
our home. Michael and his brother entered the UK with
a British Caribbean passport stamped indefinite leave to remain. Michael
grew up and started his own family. He went on
to have three British children and five grandchildren. What he
didn't have was a UK passport. Legally he didn't need
(05:34):
one and never applied for one, and for five decades
there was no problem. But Michael Braithwaite was going to
discover what William the Conqueror knew. Records matter. Something else
matters too, what you record them on. In nineteen eighty three,
(05:57):
the BBC television producer named Peter Armstrong is pondering the
looming nine hundredth anniversary of the Doomsday survey. That anniversary
will happen in nineteen eighty seve just three years away.
So what should the BBC do about it? Make a
television series? Sure, they could do that, but Peter Armstrong
(06:20):
had a better idea. I just thought, if we were
to have a doomsday book now, how would we do it.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Now?
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Indeed, Peter Armstrong had two ideas, both of which were
ahead of their time. The first was that the whole
community would be involved in gathering information. All of us,
who like me, were British school kids in the nineteen eighties,
knew about the BBC Doomsday Project. The BBC will be
writing to all thirty thousand schools in Britain to ask
(06:54):
them whether they want to participate in collecting facts during
the summer term next year, explained a contemporary magazine. It
is estimated that ten thousand schools will be needed to
make the scheme work, which would involve about a million children.
It was dubbed a people's database, a kind of Wikipedia,
(07:14):
almost two decades before Wikipedia. There were organized surveys and questionnaires,
but also plenty of cub reporting as children went out
to photograph their local area. It was a massive grassroots effort.
Peter Armstrong's second idea was just as visionary. The BBC
Doomsday Project would manifest itself not in some weighty encyclopedia,
(07:39):
but in an interactive digital format. The project team decided
that the best way to store this vast trove of
information would be on something called a LaserDisc. Laser discs
were silver discs of plastic, similar to the also newly
(08:00):
invented CD, but much bigger. They were a foot across
like a vinyl album. The Doomsday Project was trying to
use laser discs in a groundbreaking way. It combined digital
text and analog video with a clever, if slightly Rube
Goldberg esque technique that produced revolutionary looking results. A complete
(08:24):
Doomsday system consisted of a laser disc player, a monitor,
a track ball de ice and a beautiful, boxy beige
computer with black and red keys called a BBC Master.
It was expensive. Each system cost half a year's salary
at the typical wages of the day, but the BBC
(08:44):
and its commercial partners hoped that the system would be
the foundation of a whole new market for business and education,
with a vast range of other laser discs available. That
never really happened, alas the system was too pricey for
most schools and the technology moved on as technology does.
(09:06):
The CD ROM replaced the laser disc as a more
practical way to put multimedia projects on a silvery platter. Still,
there was no shame in the low sales of the
Doomsday Multimedia System. Peter Armstrong's project team were years ahead
of their time and had a great deal to be
proud of. They had created the mother of all time capsules,
(09:29):
a remarkably rich and detailed picture of the UK in
nineteen eighty six, one which future generations could consult, learn
from and enjoy. Or could they, because by two thousand
and two, when the Internet age had truly arrived, the
(09:52):
Doomsday Project had almost been forgotten. The BBC department that
had created it had been shut down for years. Nobody
was in charge of keeping the project alive, and so
it died. The British newspaper The Observer reported it was
meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess, a
(10:15):
computer based multimedia version of the Doomsday Book. But sixteen
years after it was created, the two point five million
pound BBC Doomsday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status.
It is now unreadable. Old documents have a habit of disappearing.
(10:38):
Sometimes that's an unhappy accident. You have a laser disc
but you can't find anybody with a LaserDisc player anymore.
Sometimes it's all too deliberate. The year is two thousand
and nine. In a basement in a towering government office
(10:58):
in Croydon, Southeast London, there are thousands upon thousands of
aging cardboard documents, each one recording the arrival in the
UK of someone from the Caribbean or from other former
colonies of the British Empire. These documents hardly ever consulted.
(11:19):
Who needs old landing cards detailing the moment someone stepped
off a boat from Barbados or Jamaica in the nineteen
fifties or nineteen sixties. Actually, every now and again someone
did need one if you'd arrived in the UK on
one of those boats. The nineteen seventy one Immigration Act
(11:39):
gave you the right to live in the UK for
the rest of your life. You hardly ever had to
prove you had that right in daily life. Nobody asked.
It was only if you were, say, applying for your
first British passport, that you might need to prove your
date of arrival, and those landing cards provided that proof.
(12:01):
One of the clerks who worked at the Croydon office
were called. Sometimes the Passport office would call up and
people would say, look in the basement. Still that didn't
happen often anymore. After four or five decades. Most people
who'd ever want a passport would surely have applied for one,
and so when an office relocation beckoned, someone higher up decided,
(12:25):
let's get rid of those old bits of cardboard. They
take up too much space. The clerks protested, couldn't we
at least make digital copies, but the bosses decided there
was no money for any of that, and late in
twoenty ten the landing cards were destroyed. A couple of
(12:46):
years later, the government introduced a new law they wanted
to get tough on illegal immigration. The law required landlords
to check for proof that their tenants had the right
to live in the UK, and banks to check their customers,
and employers to check their workers. In principle, these rules
applied to everyone, although you have to wonder if they
(13:07):
were more tightly in FROs for people with foreign accents
or people who, like Michael Braithwaite, were black. More than
half a century had passed since Michael Braithwaite stepped off
the boat from Barbados as a nine year old boy
and made Britain his home. He felt British he had
(13:29):
the permanent right to live and work in Britain, but
he'd never had to prove it. Nobody had ever asked.
Now they would. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
(13:56):
For more than two decades, Michael Braithwaite had been a
teaching assistant in a school in North London, working particularly
with young children who had special educational needs. He loved
his job and he loved the kids. We grew a
great bond between us, he told one interviewer. One day,
(14:17):
Michael was summoned to see the head teacher. The head
looked scared. Michael remembers his mannerisms were nervous. The head
explained he had been threatened with five years in prison
if he was found to be employing anyone he had
reason to suspect didn't have the right to work in
the UK. As Michael had no passport, he was going
(14:42):
to need an official biometric ID card. He kept asking,
what are you going to do, Michael. Michael had felt
like part of the school family. Now he realized that
he was on his own. I was totally confused, he said,
because I never knew of a biometric card or what
it meant to someone like me. It was a perplexing
(15:04):
and bewildering situation. The government department in charge of handing
out biometric cards was called the Home Office. Michael Braithwaite.
Remember absolutely had the right to live and work in
the UK because he'd arrived before nineteen seventy one, but
the cardboard landing card that would prove that had recently
(15:27):
been destroyed by the Home Office. Now they told him
he needed to provide documentary evidence that he had been
living in the UK since the nineteen seventies, at least
one official document for every single year for more than
four decades. It was an impossible demand. Michael was refused
(15:51):
his biometric card, and in twenty seventeen he was summoned
to another meeting at the school and told that he
couldn't keep his job. He'd have to leave that day.
You could have pulled my heart out and chucked it
on the floor, he said. Michael walked out of the
(16:12):
headmaster's office. The children had their weekly swimming lesson that afternoon.
He helped a colleague walk them safely to the pool
and then back again. Then he slipped into the school storeroom,
picked up a box of his belongings and left the building.
(16:32):
Michael was not the only one treated in this way.
A whistleblower who worked in the Home Office Archives contacted
a journalist, Amelia gentleman and told her what was happening.
Every week or so someone would say I've got another
one here. People were writing to say, I've been here
forty five years, I've never had a passport, I've never
needed a passport. Now I'm being told I'm not British. Previously,
(16:56):
the Home office worker would have said I'll look in
the basement. Now the archive of landing cards was gone. Instead,
the officials would send a standard reply, we have searched
our records. We can find no trace of you in
our files, which was perfectly true and perfectly disgraceful. As
(17:21):
Michael Braithwaite said, they took everything out of me, my confidence,
my self esteem, who I am? It tore me apart.
It's tempting to think if only the archives had been digitized,
and yes, that might have helped for a while. But
(17:44):
as the BBC doomsday fiasco tells us, just because something's
digitized doesn't mean it lasts forever. BBC remember, had embarked
on a huge project in nineteen eighty six to crowdsource
a unique historical record for the Ages, and a mere
sixteen years later it had become unreadable.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Or had it.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Gets meet Sally and Adrian Pearce a couple of civically
minded nerds who lived in a small town to the
south of London. They were interested in community activities such
as maintaining local footpaths, but also in computers and education.
Sally had been one of the original community researchers for
(18:31):
the BBC Doomsday Project in the early nineteen eighties. She
had fond memories of gathering data. By the year two thousand,
she was working as a professor of education at the
University of Brighton, teaching the next generation of teachers to
use computers to access and analyze historical documents. Her husband, Adrian, meanwhile,
(18:53):
was an IT consultant. Both of them had heard about
how difficult it was to access the Doomsday LaserDisc systems.
Adrian was feeling burned out from long hours patching old
corporate computers. He needed a change of pace, and Sally
suggested that helping to revive the BBC Doomsday system might
(19:15):
be just the project. Sally's vision was that young teachers
in classrooms of the twenty first century would be able
to access Doomsday data from the nineteen eighties, either using
CD ROMs or the Internet, and Adrian had the technical
expertise to try to make it happen, but a huge
(19:37):
challenge faced Sally and Adrian peers because digital archives are
like chains, one weak link that can break them. Consider
those laser discs. They had been touted as being almost indestructible,
and that may be true that without the player to
read them, the laser discs were just glorified mirrors. I'm
(20:03):
a child of computer engineers. I fondly remember from the
nineteen eighties the scream of the matrix printer, my mother
with a screwdriver attacking the weird inwards of a beige
computer with its lid off, fixing it so I could
play classic games again. But I can tell you from
experience there are only so many times you can pound
(20:25):
those keys excitedly as you shoot at space bandits before
the system will fall apart. So, of course, most laserdisk
systems from nineteen eighty six had stopped working by the
twenty first century, or schools had thrown them out to
make room for shiny new PCs or max. But Sally
(20:46):
Pierce got lucky. She discovered an entire doomsday system in
storage at the University of Brighton when they plugged it in.
It still worked. Yet as Adrian explored the Doomsday system,
he realized there were more weak links in the chain.
He had absolutely no technical documentary. He didn't know how
(21:10):
the data was being stored or organized by the Doomsday System.
It was all in hexadecimal, picture the slow waterfall of
green code in the movie The Matrix. How could it
be translated into a format that the modern computer would understand?
Adrian Pearce ended up decoding the hexadeesimal structure the hard
(21:31):
way by hand. He later described it as like trying
to solve a crossword puzzle, if the crossword puzzle was
enormous and written entirely in an unknown language. After a while,
like Neo in The Matrix, Pierce was seeing patterns in
the data. By eye reading programming books from the mid
(21:53):
nineteen eighties and slowly groping his way through the rows
and columns. He began to understand how the data had
been structured, and to write new programs to search and
interpret it. But Adrian also needed to solve a different problem.
He needed to get all the data off the disc,
(22:15):
and the only way he could see of doing that
was to pipe every bit of data through the old
BBC computer and onto something modern. The old computer wasn't
built for that. Some of the files took more than
fifty hours to transfer, a few of those marathon transfers,
and what happened next was inevitable. The BBC Master's motherboard
(22:42):
was fried. Adrian Pearce had started with a rare thing,
a working doomsday system, but in trying to extract the data,
he destroyed that system. Cautionary tales will be back in
a moment. Michael Braithwaite had lost the job that he loved.
(23:16):
His own school had told him that he was an
illegal immigrant. His own government had destroyed his only means
of proving otherwise. Other people in his situation were being deported.
It was just a matter of time then until he
was deported too. I was informed they turn up at
(23:38):
six in the morning, he said. I was already dressed
and ready, waiting for that moment to come. Every morning
for eighteen months he got up early after a sleepless night,
got dressed and waited for the knock at the door.
(23:59):
I talked about Michael Braithwaite recently with my friend Patricia Sleeman.
She's a digital archivist in her early career, she worked
on the kind of nerdy projects that occupied people like
Adrian and Sally Pearce, trying to pull data out of
unreadable old computer systems. Then, about a decade ago, Patricia
(24:21):
did something that at the time I couldn't really understand.
She went off to work for the UNHCR, the UN
agency responsible for protecting the rights and the welfare of refugees.
I didn't get it. It seemed like my wonderful, nerdy
archivist friend was dashing off to join an emergency relief effort.
(24:43):
What did the UNHCR need with an archivist? But when
I realized what was happening to people such as Michael Braithwaite,
I finally understood that archives are a human rights issue.
The UNHCR archive goes back to the nineteen fifties and
it contains photographs, interviews, and documents describing the lives and
(25:06):
fraught journeys of some of the most vulnerable people in
the world to prove where they came from and when
and why. A refugee needs that data or they risk
disappearing into some nightmarish bureaucratic black hole, just like Michael Braithwaite,
condemned to stress, shame, unemployment, and the fear of a
(25:31):
knock on the door at six o'clock in the morning.
Digital archives feel better to us than paper archives. Digital
files are searchable, You can back them up with a click.
You can store huge quantities of information in a tiny space.
(25:51):
In contrast, paper archives are a hassle. They take up
space in filing cabinets in rooms that could be used
for something else. No wonder. People are sometimes tempted to
save money by throwing old paper archives away, but digital
archives are also surprisingly vulnerable. While paper archives have to
(26:13):
be deliberately discarded, digital archives can be lost without any
effort at all. For example, I have Microsoft word documents
on my computer dating back to nineteen ninety four, copied
and recopied every time I bought a new computer. I
always assumed I could read them anytime, but after I
(26:34):
talked to my friend Patricia Sleeman, I wasn't so sure.
So I clicked over to the old archive folder and
double clicked on the first document I saw. Did it open?
It did not? Instead, a pop up informed me that.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
You are attempting to open the file type that has
been blocked by your file block settings and the trust Center, it.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Turns out that I can't open my own Microsoft word documents.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Well, what did you expect? This file is donkeys years old.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
I'd carefully copied those old word documents over and over again,
but at some stage my system stopped being able to
read the files, and I never knew when that moment
was because I didn't check. Joni Mitchell sang, don't it
always seem to go that you don't know what you've
got till it's gone. When it comes to digital archives,
(27:33):
you might not know what you've got till it's been
gone for years or decades. The psychologist James Reason, an
expert in human error, calls this a latent condition. When
the battery is in the fire alarm of run flat,
you won't discover that unless you check, or until there's
(27:54):
a fire. When your digital documents have become unreadable, you
won't discover that either until you check, or since you
probably won't check, you won't discover it until you desperately
need them, and by then it may be far far
too late. In two thousand and seven, three researchers studied
(28:16):
how often links from online legal articles no longer existed
on the website of the US Supreme Court. Half of
all the links cited in legal opinions didn't work. Half
of them in top legal journals, more than two thirds
of the links were broken. This is the law of
(28:38):
the land. We're talking about simply coming a part of
the seams, and it isn't just legal opinions. Political statements
are often deleted by the politicians who made them. Old tweets,
old speeches, they all vanish unless someone makes it a
priority to capture and preserve them. That somebody is often
(29:02):
the Internet Archive, most famous for operating the Wayback machine,
which allows you to travel back in time to view
earlier versions of any web page. The Internet Archive is
a private initiative run on a shoe string, and people
who don't like what it preserves keep trying to shut
(29:22):
it down. We tend to take archives for granted. We
assume that when there's a digital record of something, if
it matters, it'll get preserved. But this preservation doesn't happen
by accident. It takes money and organization and determination. George
Orwell's nineteen eighty four painted a picture of life under
(29:46):
a totalitarian state which continuously rewrote the historical record. The
past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
But we don't need a totalitarian dictatorship to lose our
grip on the past. We just need to stop paying attention.
(30:12):
It's hard to imagine all the problems Adrian Pierce had
to solve to reincarnate the Doomsday system. They went so
much further than just finding an old system in working order.
He had to find a supplier of long obsolete parts
because he kept frying them to restore the video. He
had to find the master tapes, and of course it
(30:34):
was nobody's job to keep the master tapes. In the end,
cliche of cliches, the tapes were found gathering dust in
the attic of the original BBC producer Peter Armstrong. Adrian
worked on the Doomsday Project for sixteen months, unpaid, gazing
so long at hexadecimal he could read it with his
(30:57):
naked eye. Finally he was able to realize his wife,
Sally's dream. He produced a Windows compatible version of the
Doomsday Project and uploaded it to the web at Doomsday
nineteen eighty six dot com. It all seems like a
(31:18):
happy ending, right, right, No, have we learned nothing about
taking digital archives? For granted, it was with a sinking
feeling that I looked for Doomsday nineteen eighty six, Adrian
and Sally's Labor of Love. It's offline. I discovered that
(31:41):
Adrian Pearce died in two thousand and eight, and the
site went dark shortly afterwards. That's what happens to old websites.
Adrian's obituary in the local newspaper notes that one of
his lasting legacies will be the Uckfield and District Preservation
Society website UDPS dot co dot uk. Some legacy that
(32:05):
website is gone too. There have been other doomsday preservation projects,
most of them are also gone. The BBC itself launched
a Doomsday Reloaded project. It went online in twenty eleven,
then disappeared. The BBC even made a radio program all
(32:26):
about the preservation efforts. The program has a web page
it says sorry, this episode is not currently available. The
UK's National Archives do have all the original text and
video from those nineteen eighty six laser discs, and it
is online, but in archived form. It's basically useless. There's
(32:50):
no way to navigate around and find what you're looking for,
or is there. In twenty twenty one, a software engineer
named Daniel Ierwicker packed together an interactive interface that looks
like Google Maps can pull out the relevant page from
(33:10):
the National Archives, turning an unusable heap of data into
an interactive, searchable resource again. Earwicker called his project Doomsday
eighty six Reloaded Reloaded. The multimillion pound project, built around
the labor of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, is legible
(33:34):
today because one volunteer, Daniel Earwicker, thought it would be
really cool if that happened. He was right. It is
really cool, and it works for now. But if the
experience of Adrian Pierce taught me anything it's that one
volunteer's digital preservation effort, no matter how heroic, is fragile.
(34:01):
It may all be readable and searchable today. Tomorrow it
could be gone again, erased and forgot, like all those
old landing cards that nobody could be bothered to keep.
Michael Braithwaite never did get the knock at the door.
(34:23):
Thanks to the reporting of journalists such as Amelia Gentlemen,
the plight of the people being deported came to public attention.
It became a national scandal known as the wind rush
scandal after a ship the Empire Windrush, which brought more
than a thousand people from Jamaica to the UK in
nineteen forty eight, an inquiry was held. A Cabinet minister resigned.
(34:48):
Apologies were published, but not before the UK government, to
its shame, had illegally deported more than eighty elderly people
who'd come legally to the UK as children but couldn't
prove it. Michael eventually got his biometric ID card, but
(35:08):
he couldn't face going back to his old job to
work alongside the colleagues had been too frightened to support him. Instead,
he found a new calling as a campaigner for the
thousands of people affected by the wind rush scandal, people
who'd lost their jobs, their self esteem, people who like Michael,
had been torn apart. After the inquiry, the government set
(35:32):
up a compensation scheme. It's being administered by the Home Office,
the people who caused the problem in the first place.
It isn't going well. You won't be surprised to hear
that there's still plenty for justice campaigners such as Michael
Braithwaite to do. And I wonder if we've fully appreciated
(35:55):
all the right lessons from the wind Rush scandal. It
had its roots in anti immigrant rhetoric and unexamined racism,
but also in bad archival practices, As William the Conqueror
could have told us record keeping matters. And what about
(36:15):
the original Doomsday books? Nearly a millennium old, Great Doomsday
and Little Doomsday. Today they're regarded as the most complete
surviving record of pre industrial society anywhere in the world, surviving, yes,
surviving for centuries. William the Conqueror's original manuscripts have been
(36:41):
preserved for posterity. In sixteen sixty six, for example, they
were saved from the Great Fire of London. In eighteen
sixty nine, they were rebound with an ornate new leather cover.
During the Second World War they were moved beyond the
reach of Nazi bombs. Now they're kept in dry cold
(37:03):
storage at the National Archives in London. They're perfectly legible,
nine hundred and thirty seven years old and still going strong.
If you think that archives don't matter, tell that to
Michael Braithwaite. If you think that digitization solves the problem,
(37:24):
tell that to Adrian Pierce. And if you think the
Doomsday books survive through chance, think again. They exist only
because every generation since ten eighty six cared enough to
make the effort. What archives today will we care about
(37:46):
enough to preserve for tomorrow. For a full list of
(38:07):
our sources, please see the show note Timharford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
(38:31):
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma
Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(38:55):
Vital Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends, and if you want to hear the
(39:17):
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot FM,
slash Plus,
Pushkin. As dawn broke on the fourteenth of October ten
sixty six, two great armies, each more than five thousand men,
lined up for battle near Hastings on the south coast
(00:36):
of England. Ranged along a hilltop where the English forces
of King Harold They faced an invader from France, William,
Duke of Normandy, with his force of archers, infantry, and
mounted knights. At nine in the morning, the battle began
with the terrible sound of trumpets on both sides. The
(01:00):
English formed a shield wall, holding the high ground. The
Norman cavalry and archers probed for an opportunity to shatter
the English line. Then words spread among the Norman army
that their Duke William had fallen. The left flank crumbled
and fled down the hill, pursued by the English. And
(01:21):
then what's this? William himself, helmet raised to reveal his face,
rode forth and proclaimed, look at me, I live, and
with God's help I shall conquer. His forces rallied and counterattacked,
slaughtering the English who had surged forward. The battle was brutal,
(01:42):
but as the autumn sun began to set, the final
Norman assault broke. The English line, King Harold was slain.
The next King of England would not be English, but
Norman I shall conquer, William had said, And on Christmas
(02:02):
Day ten sixty six, William the Conqueror was crowned William
the First of England. But the French invader. William faced
struggles to have his right to rule excepted. Two decades later,
he stumbled upon an idea to establish his legitimacy over
his vast fiefdom, an idea that still shapes the world today.
(02:27):
He began a grand survey of what was in that fiefdom.
Commissioners set up special sessions of county courts to hear
testimony about who owned what and what there was to own,
from land to mills to people. There was no single hide,
nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox, nor
(02:49):
one cow, nor one pig which was left out. The
result of this great survey was the Doomsday Book. In fact,
there were two of them, Great Doomsday and Little Doomsday,
remarkably detailed snapshots of William's in ten eighty six AD.
(03:12):
It was all a long time ago, and yet it's
a very modern project. If the state wishes to govern,
to tax, to help the deserving and punish the wicked.
That state needs comprehensive, detailed records of where everyone lives,
what they do, and where they came from. I'm Tim
(03:36):
Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales where they came from.
(04:07):
Michael Braithwaite came from the sunny island of Barbados in
nineteen sixty one. Little Michael, just nine years old and
traveling with his brother, crossed all the way over the
ocean to arrive under the gray skies of Britain, despite
the weather and the risk of a hostile reception from
(04:27):
a mostly white British population. It was a journey many
other people had taken. At the time of Michael's journey,
Barbados was still part of the British Empire, and the
UK government had been welcoming migrants and offering them considerable
legal protections. Michael's father already had a job with the
(04:48):
Royal Mail, his mother with the National Health Service. Michael
and his brother were traveling to be reunited with their parents.
It must have been a daunting journey, but it was
a one way trip. Michael started attending a British school,
and from that moment he recalls. We regarded Britain as
(05:10):
our home. Michael and his brother entered the UK with
a British Caribbean passport stamped indefinite leave to remain. Michael
grew up and started his own family. He went on
to have three British children and five grandchildren. What he
didn't have was a UK passport. Legally he didn't need
(05:34):
one and never applied for one, and for five decades
there was no problem. But Michael Braithwaite was going to
discover what William the Conqueror knew. Records matter. Something else
matters too, what you record them on. In nineteen eighty three,
(05:57):
the BBC television producer named Peter Armstrong is pondering the
looming nine hundredth anniversary of the Doomsday survey. That anniversary
will happen in nineteen eighty seve just three years away.
So what should the BBC do about it? Make a
television series? Sure, they could do that, but Peter Armstrong
(06:20):
had a better idea. I just thought, if we were
to have a doomsday book now, how would we do it.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Now?
Speaker 1 (06:30):
Indeed, Peter Armstrong had two ideas, both of which were
ahead of their time. The first was that the whole
community would be involved in gathering information. All of us,
who like me, were British school kids in the nineteen eighties,
knew about the BBC Doomsday Project. The BBC will be
writing to all thirty thousand schools in Britain to ask
(06:54):
them whether they want to participate in collecting facts during
the summer term next year, explained a contemporary magazine. It
is estimated that ten thousand schools will be needed to
make the scheme work, which would involve about a million children.
It was dubbed a people's database, a kind of Wikipedia,
(07:14):
almost two decades before Wikipedia. There were organized surveys and questionnaires,
but also plenty of cub reporting as children went out
to photograph their local area. It was a massive grassroots effort.
Peter Armstrong's second idea was just as visionary. The BBC
Doomsday Project would manifest itself not in some weighty encyclopedia,
(07:39):
but in an interactive digital format. The project team decided
that the best way to store this vast trove of
information would be on something called a LaserDisc. Laser discs
were silver discs of plastic, similar to the also newly
(08:00):
invented CD, but much bigger. They were a foot across
like a vinyl album. The Doomsday Project was trying to
use laser discs in a groundbreaking way. It combined digital
text and analog video with a clever, if slightly Rube
Goldberg esque technique that produced revolutionary looking results. A complete
(08:24):
Doomsday system consisted of a laser disc player, a monitor,
a track ball de ice and a beautiful, boxy beige
computer with black and red keys called a BBC Master.
It was expensive. Each system cost half a year's salary
at the typical wages of the day, but the BBC
(08:44):
and its commercial partners hoped that the system would be
the foundation of a whole new market for business and education,
with a vast range of other laser discs available. That
never really happened, alas the system was too pricey for
most schools and the technology moved on as technology does.
(09:06):
The CD ROM replaced the laser disc as a more
practical way to put multimedia projects on a silvery platter. Still,
there was no shame in the low sales of the
Doomsday Multimedia System. Peter Armstrong's project team were years ahead
of their time and had a great deal to be
proud of. They had created the mother of all time capsules,
(09:29):
a remarkably rich and detailed picture of the UK in
nineteen eighty six, one which future generations could consult, learn
from and enjoy. Or could they, because by two thousand
and two, when the Internet age had truly arrived, the
(09:52):
Doomsday Project had almost been forgotten. The BBC department that
had created it had been shut down for years. Nobody
was in charge of keeping the project alive, and so
it died. The British newspaper The Observer reported it was
meant to be a showcase for Britain's electronic prowess, a
(10:15):
computer based multimedia version of the Doomsday Book. But sixteen
years after it was created, the two point five million
pound BBC Doomsday Project has achieved an unexpected and unwelcome status.
It is now unreadable. Old documents have a habit of disappearing.
(10:38):
Sometimes that's an unhappy accident. You have a laser disc
but you can't find anybody with a LaserDisc player anymore.
Sometimes it's all too deliberate. The year is two thousand
and nine. In a basement in a towering government office
(10:58):
in Croydon, Southeast London, there are thousands upon thousands of
aging cardboard documents, each one recording the arrival in the
UK of someone from the Caribbean or from other former
colonies of the British Empire. These documents hardly ever consulted.
(11:19):
Who needs old landing cards detailing the moment someone stepped
off a boat from Barbados or Jamaica in the nineteen
fifties or nineteen sixties. Actually, every now and again someone
did need one if you'd arrived in the UK on
one of those boats. The nineteen seventy one Immigration Act
(11:39):
gave you the right to live in the UK for
the rest of your life. You hardly ever had to
prove you had that right in daily life. Nobody asked.
It was only if you were, say, applying for your
first British passport, that you might need to prove your
date of arrival, and those landing cards provided that proof.
(12:01):
One of the clerks who worked at the Croydon office
were called. Sometimes the Passport office would call up and
people would say, look in the basement. Still that didn't
happen often anymore. After four or five decades. Most people
who'd ever want a passport would surely have applied for one,
and so when an office relocation beckoned, someone higher up decided,
(12:25):
let's get rid of those old bits of cardboard. They
take up too much space. The clerks protested, couldn't we
at least make digital copies, but the bosses decided there
was no money for any of that, and late in
twoenty ten the landing cards were destroyed. A couple of
(12:46):
years later, the government introduced a new law they wanted
to get tough on illegal immigration. The law required landlords
to check for proof that their tenants had the right
to live in the UK, and banks to check their customers,
and employers to check their workers. In principle, these rules
applied to everyone, although you have to wonder if they
(13:07):
were more tightly in FROs for people with foreign accents
or people who, like Michael Braithwaite, were black. More than
half a century had passed since Michael Braithwaite stepped off
the boat from Barbados as a nine year old boy
and made Britain his home. He felt British he had
(13:29):
the permanent right to live and work in Britain, but
he'd never had to prove it. Nobody had ever asked.
Now they would. Cautionary tales will be back in a moment.
(13:56):
For more than two decades, Michael Braithwaite had been a
teaching assistant in a school in North London, working particularly
with young children who had special educational needs. He loved
his job and he loved the kids. We grew a
great bond between us, he told one interviewer. One day,
(14:17):
Michael was summoned to see the head teacher. The head
looked scared. Michael remembers his mannerisms were nervous. The head
explained he had been threatened with five years in prison
if he was found to be employing anyone he had
reason to suspect didn't have the right to work in
the UK. As Michael had no passport, he was going
(14:42):
to need an official biometric ID card. He kept asking,
what are you going to do, Michael. Michael had felt
like part of the school family. Now he realized that
he was on his own. I was totally confused, he said,
because I never knew of a biometric card or what
it meant to someone like me. It was a perplexing
(15:04):
and bewildering situation. The government department in charge of handing
out biometric cards was called the Home Office. Michael Braithwaite.
Remember absolutely had the right to live and work in
the UK because he'd arrived before nineteen seventy one, but
the cardboard landing card that would prove that had recently
(15:27):
been destroyed by the Home Office. Now they told him
he needed to provide documentary evidence that he had been
living in the UK since the nineteen seventies, at least
one official document for every single year for more than
four decades. It was an impossible demand. Michael was refused
(15:51):
his biometric card, and in twenty seventeen he was summoned
to another meeting at the school and told that he
couldn't keep his job. He'd have to leave that day.
You could have pulled my heart out and chucked it
on the floor, he said. Michael walked out of the
(16:12):
headmaster's office. The children had their weekly swimming lesson that afternoon.
He helped a colleague walk them safely to the pool
and then back again. Then he slipped into the school storeroom,
picked up a box of his belongings and left the building.
(16:32):
Michael was not the only one treated in this way.
A whistleblower who worked in the Home Office Archives contacted
a journalist, Amelia gentleman and told her what was happening.
Every week or so someone would say I've got another
one here. People were writing to say, I've been here
forty five years, I've never had a passport, I've never
needed a passport. Now I'm being told I'm not British. Previously,
(16:56):
the Home office worker would have said I'll look in
the basement. Now the archive of landing cards was gone. Instead,
the officials would send a standard reply, we have searched
our records. We can find no trace of you in
our files, which was perfectly true and perfectly disgraceful. As
(17:21):
Michael Braithwaite said, they took everything out of me, my confidence,
my self esteem, who I am? It tore me apart.
It's tempting to think if only the archives had been digitized,
and yes, that might have helped for a while. But
(17:44):
as the BBC doomsday fiasco tells us, just because something's
digitized doesn't mean it lasts forever. BBC remember, had embarked
on a huge project in nineteen eighty six to crowdsource
a unique historical record for the Ages, and a mere
sixteen years later it had become unreadable.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Or had it.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Gets meet Sally and Adrian Pearce a couple of civically
minded nerds who lived in a small town to the
south of London. They were interested in community activities such
as maintaining local footpaths, but also in computers and education.
Sally had been one of the original community researchers for
(18:31):
the BBC Doomsday Project in the early nineteen eighties. She
had fond memories of gathering data. By the year two thousand,
she was working as a professor of education at the
University of Brighton, teaching the next generation of teachers to
use computers to access and analyze historical documents. Her husband, Adrian, meanwhile,
(18:53):
was an IT consultant. Both of them had heard about
how difficult it was to access the Doomsday LaserDisc systems.
Adrian was feeling burned out from long hours patching old
corporate computers. He needed a change of pace, and Sally
suggested that helping to revive the BBC Doomsday system might
(19:15):
be just the project. Sally's vision was that young teachers
in classrooms of the twenty first century would be able
to access Doomsday data from the nineteen eighties, either using
CD ROMs or the Internet, and Adrian had the technical
expertise to try to make it happen, but a huge
(19:37):
challenge faced Sally and Adrian peers because digital archives are
like chains, one weak link that can break them. Consider
those laser discs. They had been touted as being almost indestructible,
and that may be true that without the player to
read them, the laser discs were just glorified mirrors. I'm
(20:03):
a child of computer engineers. I fondly remember from the
nineteen eighties the scream of the matrix printer, my mother
with a screwdriver attacking the weird inwards of a beige
computer with its lid off, fixing it so I could
play classic games again. But I can tell you from
experience there are only so many times you can pound
(20:25):
those keys excitedly as you shoot at space bandits before
the system will fall apart. So, of course, most laserdisk
systems from nineteen eighty six had stopped working by the
twenty first century, or schools had thrown them out to
make room for shiny new PCs or max. But Sally
(20:46):
Pierce got lucky. She discovered an entire doomsday system in
storage at the University of Brighton when they plugged it in.
It still worked. Yet as Adrian explored the Doomsday system,
he realized there were more weak links in the chain.
He had absolutely no technical documentary. He didn't know how
(21:10):
the data was being stored or organized by the Doomsday System.
It was all in hexadecimal, picture the slow waterfall of
green code in the movie The Matrix. How could it
be translated into a format that the modern computer would understand?
Adrian Pearce ended up decoding the hexadeesimal structure the hard
(21:31):
way by hand. He later described it as like trying
to solve a crossword puzzle, if the crossword puzzle was
enormous and written entirely in an unknown language. After a while,
like Neo in The Matrix, Pierce was seeing patterns in
the data. By eye reading programming books from the mid
(21:53):
nineteen eighties and slowly groping his way through the rows
and columns. He began to understand how the data had
been structured, and to write new programs to search and
interpret it. But Adrian also needed to solve a different problem.
He needed to get all the data off the disc,
(22:15):
and the only way he could see of doing that
was to pipe every bit of data through the old
BBC computer and onto something modern. The old computer wasn't
built for that. Some of the files took more than
fifty hours to transfer, a few of those marathon transfers,
and what happened next was inevitable. The BBC Master's motherboard
(22:42):
was fried. Adrian Pearce had started with a rare thing,
a working doomsday system, but in trying to extract the data,
he destroyed that system. Cautionary tales will be back in
a moment. Michael Braithwaite had lost the job that he loved.
(23:16):
His own school had told him that he was an
illegal immigrant. His own government had destroyed his only means
of proving otherwise. Other people in his situation were being deported.
It was just a matter of time then until he
was deported too. I was informed they turn up at
(23:38):
six in the morning, he said. I was already dressed
and ready, waiting for that moment to come. Every morning
for eighteen months he got up early after a sleepless night,
got dressed and waited for the knock at the door.
(23:59):
I talked about Michael Braithwaite recently with my friend Patricia Sleeman.
She's a digital archivist in her early career, she worked
on the kind of nerdy projects that occupied people like
Adrian and Sally Pearce, trying to pull data out of
unreadable old computer systems. Then, about a decade ago, Patricia
(24:21):
did something that at the time I couldn't really understand.
She went off to work for the UNHCR, the UN
agency responsible for protecting the rights and the welfare of refugees.
I didn't get it. It seemed like my wonderful, nerdy
archivist friend was dashing off to join an emergency relief effort.
(24:43):
What did the UNHCR need with an archivist? But when
I realized what was happening to people such as Michael Braithwaite,
I finally understood that archives are a human rights issue.
The UNHCR archive goes back to the nineteen fifties and
it contains photographs, interviews, and documents describing the lives and
(25:06):
fraught journeys of some of the most vulnerable people in
the world to prove where they came from and when
and why. A refugee needs that data or they risk
disappearing into some nightmarish bureaucratic black hole, just like Michael Braithwaite,
condemned to stress, shame, unemployment, and the fear of a
(25:31):
knock on the door at six o'clock in the morning.
Digital archives feel better to us than paper archives. Digital
files are searchable, You can back them up with a click.
You can store huge quantities of information in a tiny space.
(25:51):
In contrast, paper archives are a hassle. They take up
space in filing cabinets in rooms that could be used
for something else. No wonder. People are sometimes tempted to
save money by throwing old paper archives away, but digital
archives are also surprisingly vulnerable. While paper archives have to
(26:13):
be deliberately discarded, digital archives can be lost without any
effort at all. For example, I have Microsoft word documents
on my computer dating back to nineteen ninety four, copied
and recopied every time I bought a new computer. I
always assumed I could read them anytime, but after I
(26:34):
talked to my friend Patricia Sleeman, I wasn't so sure.
So I clicked over to the old archive folder and
double clicked on the first document I saw. Did it open?
It did not? Instead, a pop up informed me that.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
You are attempting to open the file type that has
been blocked by your file block settings and the trust Center, it.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
Turns out that I can't open my own Microsoft word documents.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
Well, what did you expect? This file is donkeys years old.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
I'd carefully copied those old word documents over and over again,
but at some stage my system stopped being able to
read the files, and I never knew when that moment
was because I didn't check. Joni Mitchell sang, don't it
always seem to go that you don't know what you've
got till it's gone. When it comes to digital archives,
(27:33):
you might not know what you've got till it's been
gone for years or decades. The psychologist James Reason, an
expert in human error, calls this a latent condition. When
the battery is in the fire alarm of run flat,
you won't discover that unless you check, or until there's
(27:54):
a fire. When your digital documents have become unreadable, you
won't discover that either until you check, or since you
probably won't check, you won't discover it until you desperately
need them, and by then it may be far far
too late. In two thousand and seven, three researchers studied
(28:16):
how often links from online legal articles no longer existed
on the website of the US Supreme Court. Half of
all the links cited in legal opinions didn't work. Half
of them in top legal journals, more than two thirds
of the links were broken. This is the law of
(28:38):
the land. We're talking about simply coming a part of
the seams, and it isn't just legal opinions. Political statements
are often deleted by the politicians who made them. Old tweets,
old speeches, they all vanish unless someone makes it a
priority to capture and preserve them. That somebody is often
(29:02):
the Internet Archive, most famous for operating the Wayback machine,
which allows you to travel back in time to view
earlier versions of any web page. The Internet Archive is
a private initiative run on a shoe string, and people
who don't like what it preserves keep trying to shut
(29:22):
it down. We tend to take archives for granted. We
assume that when there's a digital record of something, if
it matters, it'll get preserved. But this preservation doesn't happen
by accident. It takes money and organization and determination. George
Orwell's nineteen eighty four painted a picture of life under
(29:46):
a totalitarian state which continuously rewrote the historical record. The
past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
But we don't need a totalitarian dictatorship to lose our
grip on the past. We just need to stop paying attention.
(30:12):
It's hard to imagine all the problems Adrian Pierce had
to solve to reincarnate the Doomsday system. They went so
much further than just finding an old system in working order.
He had to find a supplier of long obsolete parts
because he kept frying them to restore the video. He
had to find the master tapes, and of course it
(30:34):
was nobody's job to keep the master tapes. In the end,
cliche of cliches, the tapes were found gathering dust in
the attic of the original BBC producer Peter Armstrong. Adrian
worked on the Doomsday Project for sixteen months, unpaid, gazing
so long at hexadecimal he could read it with his
(30:57):
naked eye. Finally he was able to realize his wife,
Sally's dream. He produced a Windows compatible version of the
Doomsday Project and uploaded it to the web at Doomsday
nineteen eighty six dot com. It all seems like a
(31:18):
happy ending, right, right, No, have we learned nothing about
taking digital archives? For granted, it was with a sinking
feeling that I looked for Doomsday nineteen eighty six, Adrian
and Sally's Labor of Love. It's offline. I discovered that
(31:41):
Adrian Pearce died in two thousand and eight, and the
site went dark shortly afterwards. That's what happens to old websites.
Adrian's obituary in the local newspaper notes that one of
his lasting legacies will be the Uckfield and District Preservation
Society website UDPS dot co dot uk. Some legacy that
(32:05):
website is gone too. There have been other doomsday preservation projects,
most of them are also gone. The BBC itself launched
a Doomsday Reloaded project. It went online in twenty eleven,
then disappeared. The BBC even made a radio program all
(32:26):
about the preservation efforts. The program has a web page
it says sorry, this episode is not currently available. The
UK's National Archives do have all the original text and
video from those nineteen eighty six laser discs, and it
is online, but in archived form. It's basically useless. There's
(32:50):
no way to navigate around and find what you're looking for,
or is there. In twenty twenty one, a software engineer
named Daniel Ierwicker packed together an interactive interface that looks
like Google Maps can pull out the relevant page from
(33:10):
the National Archives, turning an unusable heap of data into
an interactive, searchable resource again. Earwicker called his project Doomsday
eighty six Reloaded Reloaded. The multimillion pound project, built around
the labor of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, is legible
(33:34):
today because one volunteer, Daniel Earwicker, thought it would be
really cool if that happened. He was right. It is
really cool, and it works for now. But if the
experience of Adrian Pierce taught me anything it's that one
volunteer's digital preservation effort, no matter how heroic, is fragile.
(34:01):
It may all be readable and searchable today. Tomorrow it
could be gone again, erased and forgot, like all those
old landing cards that nobody could be bothered to keep.
Michael Braithwaite never did get the knock at the door.
(34:23):
Thanks to the reporting of journalists such as Amelia Gentlemen,
the plight of the people being deported came to public attention.
It became a national scandal known as the wind rush
scandal after a ship the Empire Windrush, which brought more
than a thousand people from Jamaica to the UK in
nineteen forty eight, an inquiry was held. A Cabinet minister resigned.
(34:48):
Apologies were published, but not before the UK government, to
its shame, had illegally deported more than eighty elderly people
who'd come legally to the UK as children but couldn't
prove it. Michael eventually got his biometric ID card, but
(35:08):
he couldn't face going back to his old job to
work alongside the colleagues had been too frightened to support him. Instead,
he found a new calling as a campaigner for the
thousands of people affected by the wind rush scandal, people
who'd lost their jobs, their self esteem, people who like Michael,
had been torn apart. After the inquiry, the government set
(35:32):
up a compensation scheme. It's being administered by the Home Office,
the people who caused the problem in the first place.
It isn't going well. You won't be surprised to hear
that there's still plenty for justice campaigners such as Michael
Braithwaite to do. And I wonder if we've fully appreciated
(35:55):
all the right lessons from the wind Rush scandal. It
had its roots in anti immigrant rhetoric and unexamined racism,
but also in bad archival practices, As William the Conqueror
could have told us record keeping matters. And what about
(36:15):
the original Doomsday books? Nearly a millennium old, Great Doomsday
and Little Doomsday. Today they're regarded as the most complete
surviving record of pre industrial society anywhere in the world, surviving, yes,
surviving for centuries. William the Conqueror's original manuscripts have been
(36:41):
preserved for posterity. In sixteen sixty six, for example, they
were saved from the Great Fire of London. In eighteen
sixty nine, they were rebound with an ornate new leather cover.
During the Second World War they were moved beyond the
reach of Nazi bombs. Now they're kept in dry cold
(37:03):
storage at the National Archives in London. They're perfectly legible,
nine hundred and thirty seven years old and still going strong.
If you think that archives don't matter, tell that to
Michael Braithwaite. If you think that digitization solves the problem,
(37:24):
tell that to Adrian Pierce. And if you think the
Doomsday books survive through chance, think again. They exist only
because every generation since ten eighty six cared enough to
make the effort. What archives today will we care about
(37:46):
enough to preserve for tomorrow. For a full list of
(38:07):
our sources, please see the show note Timharford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
(38:31):
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the
voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jemma
Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
(38:55):
Vital Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends, and if you want to hear the
(39:17):
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot FM,
slash Plus,
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