History Cafe

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

Episodes

#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

June 18, 2025 • 41 mins

On 14 July 1916 senior officers finally decided to ignore Haig. At the Battle of Bazentin Ridge they put to use everything that was good practice and broke in to the German lines. But because junior officers at the front were not permitted to take a decision, and their commanders in their chateaux were hopelessly out of touch, it was never converted into a ‘break through.’ Another 9,000 lives lost for very little gain.

After the di...

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#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

June 11, 2025 • 41 mins

At the southern end of the line, next to the French, British units took all their objectives on the first day of the battle. They succeeded mainly because their maverick commanders had learnt from the French how to bombard the Germans accurately, putting them out of action long enough for the infantry to mop up. They’d also been assisted by the French big guns. By lunchtime some of these units were being served a hot meal in a newl...

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#65 Haig's war crime on the Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

June 4, 2025 • 43 mins

The French decided they only had enough artillery to attack on a 9-mile front if they were to neutralise the German guns so that their infantry were not needlessly slaughtered. Haig had fewer guns – enough for perhaps 4 miles of front – but he chose to attack across 16 miles. 57,000 British soldiers died on the very first day, 1 July 1916, and no ground was gained. The French achieved all their objectives and lost 1,500 men. This i...

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#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

May 28, 2025 • 40 mins

On the eve of the Somme the British had far too few artillery guns, and most of the ones they had were the wrong sort. They needed five times as many heavy guns before they could launch an attack. The few big guns they did have were grossly inaccurate, sometimes missing a target by one mile. They were firing shells that were not fitted with delayed-action fuses which meant the German machine-gunners were safe in their deep undergro...

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#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

May 21, 2025 • 40 mins

The British Army wanted to throw men against machines. Its generals had not thought about how to cross 100-200 yards of open space with wire entanglements. They had been offered plenty of designs for armoured tractors with caterpillar tracks but had ignored them. It was Churchill, head of the Royal Navy, who eventually funded the development of the first ‘tank’. But they arrived late at the Somme and were so badly deployed they cou...

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#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16

May 14, 2025 • 37 mins

Unlike the Royal Navy, the British Army proved itself over the course of decades incapable of taking new ideas on board: trench warfare, the machine gun and the tank to name a few. And at the heart of the problem was that too many men in the army refused to take orders. Not the rank and file, you understand, who were executed for any refusal to march into a hail of bullets. But the officers. The reason was that they regarded themse...

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#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

May 7, 2025 • 40 mins

1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench w...

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#109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

April 30, 2025 • 32 mins

We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from W...

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#108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

April 23, 2025 • 26 mins

As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason? (R)

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#07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

April 16, 2025 • 24 mins

2 May 1937. Cecil Beaton photographs for American Vogue the twice-divorced American heiress soon to marry the ex-King Edward VIII. Wallis Simpson wears a Schiaparelli ‘waltz dress’ with a Salvador Dali red lobster down her skirt. The setting is a French chateau belonging to the American businessman who a few months later will mastermind the Windsors’ honeymoon tour of Germany. But what – other than Wallis Simpson - connects all the...

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#111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

April 9, 2025 • 38 mins

Amundsen reached the South Pole a month before Scott, but his story never captured the imagination of the English. They wanted heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if those conditions were of their own making. Scott went on to be glorified in the First World War by men like Haig who used young men as German cannon fodder because he believed British spirit was stronger than the polar cold, or Germa...

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#110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

April 1, 2025 • 37 mins

When Scott took a fifth man with him to the South Pole he signed each man’s death warrants. Not for the first time, Scott’s endless calculations for four men – pages and pages of scribbled notes on weights and distances and food and cooking fuel to carry – proved to be a waste of time. His surgeon had already warned him he’d calculated too little food per day for manhauling a sled. What’s more they only had four pairs of skis. They...

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#109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

March 26, 2025 • 35 mins

Over a year before he and two of his men starved to death, just two days’ march from a depot with food and fuel, Scott confided to young biologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘This is the end of the pole.’ He wasn’t questioning his planning or his leadership. He was blaming what he saw as the failure of their ‘transport,’ their dogs and ponies. Now they would have to rely on the British Naval tradition of man-hauling sledges into blizza...

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#108 Lop Ears and Jackass Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

March 18, 2025 • 39 mins

The race is on between Captain Robert Scott of the Royal Navy and Norwegian Roald Amundsen. As Scott’s wife, Kathleen Bruce, requires, and as Edwardian culture expects, Scott will test the manliness and endurance of himself and his team. Amundsen will test the efficacy of Norwegian Telemark skiing combined with Inuit survival techniques. We know which team we would prefer to be on.

...

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#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

March 12, 2025 • 40 mins

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

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#58 The ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

March 5, 2025 • 37 mins

When the HMS Lutine went down, 9 October 1799 off the Dutch coast, carrying a million pounds of gold and silver, it led to the collapse of the Hamburg sugar market and within a few years the banning of the slave trade. (R)

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#56 The Empire strikes back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

February 26, 2025 • 36 mins

We look at a map of the British Caribbean to understand why losing the British north American colonies after 1783 mattered to British enslavement. We explore how the trade winds had helped create the four-cornered ‘triangle’ of the British slave trade involving North America, Africa, England and the British Caribbean – and how this doesn't work once this section of the 'Empire' - the North American States - strikes back and becomes...

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#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

February 19, 2025 • 35 mins

efore we get down to the hard facts of whether or not British enslavement ended because the slave economy no longer worked, we should take a closer look at the moral campaign for its abolition. It turns out to be intriguing, though it was a very different campaign from what we’ve all been told (and many students are apparently still being taught). Credit for the campaign’s success should go to Margaret Middleton and an enormous num...

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#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

February 12, 2025 • 36 mins

We start this 5-part series by trying to give a factual outline of the experience of being transported in horrendous conditions from Africa to the British Caribbean against your will. And we open up the debate started in 1938 by the brilliant young Trinidadian historian Eric Williams as to whether it was money or morality that ended British enslavement? The trade in the enslaved was banned in 1807, the enslaved were 'emancipated' i...

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#72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?

February 5, 2025 • 42 mins

Most of those executed for their beliefs under Philip and Mary 1555-58 came from places with a long history of religious dissidence. It matches European evidence that many – perhaps most – of those burned at the stake were not Protestants, but ‘anabaptists’ or people with similar beliefs – usually poor - whom both Protestants and Catholics were persecuting. The government of Edward VI had already begun before Mary came to the thron...

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History Cafe

Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#65 Haig's war crime on the Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16

#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16

#109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

#108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster

#07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'

#111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure

#110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

#109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

#108 Lop Ears and Jackass Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

#58 The ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

#56 The Empire strikes back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not Morality ended British enslavement

#72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?

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#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16

#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16