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

#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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#71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?

January 29, 2025 • 41 mins

Until six weeks before the child was due, everybody at court and indeed in Europe, believed Mary was pregnant. She suffered a rare disorder - pseudocyesis - maybe triggered by a tumour on her pituitary gland that would eventually kill her. The imminent birth of a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty meant that the select council governing the kingdom really now had no alternative but to grasp the nettle of suppressing any pot...

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#70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?

January 22, 2025 • 39 mins

Who ran the persecution of heretics in England 1555-58? England was a joint monarchy but historians traditionally accused bigoted Mary of running the clamp down herself - with her cousin, Reginald Pole the Archbishop of Canterbury. There’s no evidence it’s true and Pole was useless at running anything. But didn’t Mary intervene to make sure Thomas Cranmer was burned – Henry VIII’s archbishop? No, again. Cranmer was tried by the pop...

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#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

January 15, 2025 • 38 mins

England in the mid-1550s was being governed by a joint monarchy: Philip and Mary and a select council of extremely able English politicians. Almost all of them had experience in government stretching back through the violently protestant regime of Edward VI. To all appearances they had for years been living as active protestants. And yet here they were in a government that was conducting a campaign against religious heresy that we ...

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#68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 Bloody Mary Tudor?

January 8, 2025 • 40 mins

Bloody Queen Mary? 313 people died for their beliefs 1555-58. We owe it to the victims to get the story right. In 2020 historian Alexander Samson said about the reign of Mary Tudor ‘it feels as if we are at the start.’ So dismiss everything you thought you knew and be prepared to be amazed. Ever since Mary died childless, at the age of just 42 in 1558, the history of her reign was written almost exclusively by English Protestant hi...

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#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

December 31, 2024 • 35 mins

In 1983 Professor Hugh Trevor Roper claimed that Scottishness had been invented. We enjoyably demolish Trevor Roper’s theory and reveal that the commercialisation of romantic Scottishness in the nineteenth century had far deeper and darker roots than the manufacture of tartan and romantic fiction. (R)

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#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

December 24, 2024 • 29 mins

A whole lot of nonsense has been written about the invention of the modern Christmas. It was thought up by Washington Irving or Charles Dickens or Prince Albert. We just can’t resist attaching a famous name to things, especially if the name belongs to a writer or a royal. We deserve better than this. (R)

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#107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

December 18, 2024 • 30 mins

We present the final, damming evidence that the neoliberal case for freedom from all government regulation was always a dangerous deceit. It was always intended to make us prisoners of the unaccountable rich, as we are today. This is not liberty. It is not even the twilight of sovereignty. This is Armageddon.

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

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}#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?

#71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?

#70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?

#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?

#68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 Bloody Mary Tudor?

#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness

#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers

#107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut

Popular Podcasts

#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