Standing up to racism is the duty of everyone. You know, when I'm being verbally attacked or there is some act of discrimination directed at me and nobody says anything the way how I feel about this is that my experience doesn't matter what happened to me, nobody cares because we're all human means we're all equal. Learn more about the impact of racism in Ireland from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission at age overeasy Dotel.

Hello, everybody, welcome to Dance Dance History. This is part two of our 2020 best op. I say best of these just episodes and conversations that have stuck in the memory of me and the team on this episode. We got Prof's, we got Toff's, we got veterans. I hope all of you are taking advantage of our special offer on history hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. You go now, use the code January January and you get our ridiculous Boxing Day January sale offer, which is a month of free.

And then for the first three months you only pay 20 percent of the subscription fee for those first three months. So basically, if you're looking at ways to get you through lockdown, stay at home orders wherever you are in the world, then I think this is a great opportunity, good opportunity for you. So head over there and make sure you see the code January to get that unbelievably sweet deal. We got a great documentary on there about the Haitian revolution at the moment and obviously the Winter Truth documentary that I've been banging on about.

Lots of you have listened to the podcast. Please go in and check it out on there. I think it's probably the best piece of work we've produced so far, and that's partly because I'm not in it is probably a correlation there. So enjoy this episode. But you'll be hearing from some of our past champions and all I can say everybody is thank you for another year, year five going strong. Thank you to the millions of people that download.

Listen to this podcast all over the world. I said it before. I'll say it again. I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful. You've made this guy very happy and very fulfilled.

Let's get started. I thought we hear from Professor Fred Logevall, it's been a big year for US politics. And Fred has just written a magisterial biography of JFK out of him. Thought so.

And I thought we'd get started with kind of discussion of why.

JFK still matters so much. I think the reason fundamentally why I think he's held in such high regard and I think maybe we need this message today, frankly, given where we are in our politics, is that. He believed Kennedy believed in government, not that it would solve all of our problems, but the government had a vital role to play in creating a more equitable and just society. He believes in politics and gave, I think, Americans a heightened belief that that that government could speak to their highest aspirations.

There's something about that idealistic message that I think matters, too.

And he remains, as you say, the kind of platonic ideal form of young, charismatic politician that seems to have seems to have endured. It's fascinating. But let's talk about the Kennedy. We talk days after one Kennedy dissent on the Senate side of the Kennedy family was just foiled in his attempt to snatch a Senate seat of a fellow Democrat in Massachusetts. So who are the keys? Who were the Kennedys when when this young man was born?

Well, it's a it's one of the reasons they decided to write this book is that I find it an absolutely extraordinary story. It is one of the great American stories. I really think it is. We have Joe Kennedy, the patriarch, and we have Rose Kennedy. And they have nine children, Irish Catholics. They become fabulously wealthy, in part because of Joe's masterful insider trading. But they amass a huge fortune and they become kind of American aristocracy, but nevertheless have to have to be sort of outside it in, if I can put it that way.

What did you find out about his military career? That in many ways, the sort of foundation myth, if you like, of JFK, is this this youthful, topless, bare chested? Was it a patrol boat captain in the South Pacific?

Yeah, he was there. He was a commander of a PT 109 was his his number in 1943 in the South Pacific. And I suggest in the book that and I'm not the first I think to do this was a profoundly important experience for him, because I think now he was a leader of men in combat. The boats were were pretty flimsy boats with mahogany shells that were kind of floating Inferno's if they were hit by a Japanese aircraft, you were a goner, basically.

And so he's in a dangerous situation. The boat infamously is rammed one night in in August 1943, and they survive. All but two of them survive. And it becomes up to Kennedy to then try to figure out what to do to save his crew. And it's a it's a rather epic story in which they do save themselves by swimming a long distance to an island and then swimming to another one and then ultimately they're rescued. But the point is that for Kennedy, I think the experience matured him.

It also had one other interesting result, I think forever after Kennedy was leery of the military, of the military as an instrument of policy. I think we see this later on in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which will be in volume two, that he's reluctant to take the advice of his military chiefs. And I think some of that skepticism about the blunt instrument of military power, I think it goes back to World War two. So it has a lasting effect in that regard, too.

And I always struck what's interesting about him in the properties, you have more autonomy as a junior lieutenant, but he's actually in command of his own vessel, isn't it? Had he gone as a junior to an aircraft carrier, just a tiny cog in a giant machine, there's a sense of that kind of slight wiggle room, the autonomy that he enjoyed in the Pacific that must have shaped his leadership style. It's such a good point.

You are you are exactly right. And I think that he talks about this in some of his letters, his closest friend really right to the end. And Dallas was a fellow named Lem Billings. And he writes to them basically that he said, you know, if I had been on an aircraft carrier carrier in a junior position, he writes this while it's going on, he says, I wouldn't be having this freedom. I wouldn't be able to to to because he he was a very experienced sailor.

So he loved being out on the on the water in command of his own vessel. He now got a chance to do this. I think his father's influence also made a difference here. It's interesting. His father was adamant that his sons not have to be in harm's way. But to Joe Kennedy's credit, when Jack said no, I want to I want to command a boat, Joe didn't stand in his way. And I think he had friends in the Navy.

And though I can't prove this, I do think that Joe Senior pulled some strings to get Jack that peaty command and then he was on his way to the Pacific.

What do you think this extraordinary rise to a position of global hegemony, superpipe? Some people call it hyper power, that the U.S. experience is really over the course of this young man's life and now he's into. Politics, how do you think he does embody that? I think he that's a really interesting question. I think he he I think he does embody it. I think he himself is, as we've been saying, is youthful. He's full of energy.

There is a kind of powerful marriage of idealism and pragmatism in the young John F. Kennedy. And I think you could say those things. Maybe this is stretching it a bit too far, but you could say those things about this young nation, relatively speaking, to the other great powers that has seen this incredible rise, partly because of demographic and geographic reasons. I mean, it's the it's where it's where the United States is situated. It's the the protection provided by the two oceans.

It's this extraordinary burgeoning population with immigrants coming in by the by the millions and then the resources of the country that make it, I think, inevitable. I mean, even Tocqueville early in the 19th century, saw the time when the United States was going to be dominant over a large part of the world. It happened. And it happens to be when John F. Kennedy, as you say, is rising. But, yeah, I think he embodies he embodies that in his in his persona.

Maybe that's the wrong way of putting it. But he embodies that in a really interesting way.

Well, it also it also strikes me from the book that unlike a previous generation who flirted, argued like his father, but certainly with the the crop of politicians after the First World War who flirted again with isolationism. Kennedy this this was America. Passionate about global engagement. Yeah, I mean, I think it's it's a really good point that that that debate, which is a really vociferous one that I go into in some detail between the isolationists and the interventionists, both of those terms are a little bit problematic, but we use them.

They were used at the time. I'm using them here. That was a that was a really bitter debate. And I think we see in this younger generation that's coming up. So John F. Kennedy, as you say, as compared to his father, that shift and it's not to say that there aren't isolationists after the war. In fact, there are. I talk a little bit about Robert Taft, for example, a very prominent Republican who could well have become president.

Taft and his supporters are in many respects, retaining that attachment to an isolationist position, a kind of Fortress America position whereby the by the nation will not be in a leader leadership position in the world, but will mind its own business at home. So one doesn't want to say that that that 1945 ends this debate. What in any sense? But nevertheless, I think Kennedy and many of those who come of political age, who come to power in Congress after the war, embody this new position which says, no, the United States working in concert with other nations has to be in a leadership position.

We've got a new threat in the Soviet Union. And we this is Kennedy speaking, but it could be others. We have to take take a leading role, no question.

OK, so last question. I have to ask anyone who writes biography because I know they fall in love with their subjects. You got to tell me the worst. What's the worst thing you found out about JFK?

Oh, you know, I think he. He could be heedless of people to some extent, and I say this I think in my preface he and many of the other Kennedys tended to see people as interchangeable. It was Family First with the Kennedys and others would sometimes be shunted to the side. That said, he also had friends who were deeply loyal to him and he was loyal to them throughout his life. So I don't want to overstate the point to other things.

I'll say that he was cautious to a fault on some policy issues, on McCarthyism, the scourge of Joe McCarthy. JFK, to my mind and I talk about this was much too even if he had to be, he had to be mindful of the fact that Massachusetts had a lot of McCarthy supporters, a lot of Irish Catholics in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he was he was cautious there. He was cautious on civil rights to to to to to to look ahead of it.

The big thing, I think, is that he saw women as objects. His father had, you know, done the same. His father had said to Joe Jr. and to Jack, in so many words, I expect you to be a skirt chaser. I expect you to get as many women as you can. That's the name of the game. Look at how I'm doing. He would on occasion bring a mistress home for dinner when the boys were growing up, which I think must have confused them.

No end, but I can't. I can't say that it's the father's fault, because if I'm going to argue in the book that JFK is his own man with respect to politics and with respect to philosophy worldview, then I've also got a must also argue that he should be able to be his own man in this area. And so that treatment of women and he's very successful with them. And I should say, at least in this first volume, there's nothing predatory about JFK s pursuit that I can see later.

I think that will become more problematic in volume two when he's in the White House and that incredible power differential must matter. But, you know, he he cheats on Jackie before their wedding and he cheats on her afterwards. And that's that's something to reckon with, especially in the media age.

But I think even apart from that to a different type of aristocracy now, the British hereditary aristocracy, I'm very memorable this year to Lady and Glenn Connor. She was Princess Margaret's lady in waiting, as you hear, among lots of other wonderful things about her. She recently wrote a refreshingly candid autobiography about life as an aristocrat and life within the orbit of the royal family. It's absolutely brilliant and our conversation was hysterical.

Now we are looking each other on Zoome and you are sitting in the most extraordinary room. Where are you in the world at the moment?

I'm sitting in the saloon. And how come to my left is a marble hall. Have you ever been to school?

I have. I've been around as a tourist. Well, I'm sitting in this wonderful room. Tom Leicester, my cousin said, you know, you must do it in the saloon, surrounded by really wonderful pictures, paintings. And I'm looking out. It's the hottest day of the year. I'm looking out on to the fountain, which is playing and right up the park. It's the most lovely position. I'm talking to you.

Is it the bells of Leicester? I've lived there for generations. Yes, absolutely. My father was a fifth out of Leicester, so I became laydown cook. It spelt Coke, but it's pronounced cook. And my ancestor who founded the family really was the chief justice in Queen Elizabeth the first day, and he prosecuted Guy Fawkes. And also I was going to invent it perhaps isn't the right word common law. And when I go to America, they are thrilled because the law in America is still common law that was created by him.

And Crist is an ostrich with a horseshoe in its mouth because he always said that the courts can digest anything.

We live very near Sandringham. So, you know, the royal family have always come over here. And that's where I first met Princess Margaret when I was three. And she was I think for my family, I've always been part of the royal family. My father was an inquiry to the Duke of York before he became king. My mother was a lady of the bedchamber at the coronation to the Queen. And of course, I was a maid of honor.

My Uncle Jack Cook was Lord in waiting to Queen Mary, you know, and so on and so on. So we've always been part like that, worked for the royal family.

It's not something that you feel is change in your life. I mean, if you look around at your wider family, there's no immediate assumption that great nephews and nieces, the grandchildren, all gonna sort of knock about with royalty and each I mean, presumably that has changed as it is changed completely.

Yes. And nowadays they marry who they like, really, you know, because when I came out just after the war, we met I mean, we had come in I had a wonderful coming out dance here where my father had a special list of all suitable young men that were asked. And then we had lots of weekend parties where, again, we met people, friends, children, old friends asked us, and then we moved up to Scotland, to the Harlem Ball.

Well, then we met all the people who lived in Scotland. But I mean, you know, I was either Blenheim or boat and or, you know, all these big houses used to have weekend parties. And that's how we got to know each other.

When you look back on that, in one way, it was probably very socially isolating and you had to behave in a certain way. But when you look at your grandchildren or other people's grandchildren that cycle, do you miss that sort of social world and that sort of sense of being part of an elite? Or do you rather like the freedom that your descendants now have? Well, no, I don't agree at all.

When you say freedom now, it isn't because they shack up with one boyfriend. When I was young, we went out with a different man or boy or every night. Where do you read my book, My Nightmare Honeymoon? I mean, I was completely naive about sex, for instance. I mean, because we didn't do it. There was no contraception. Yeah. I was terrified of getting pregnant. I mean, we just didn't do it. And now, I mean, they have so little chance.

I mean, one of my grandsons who lives in Scotland met his girlfriend at university. He's still with her. He's never actually had a chance to, you know, meet other girls.

And I think that's. I said, I'm so glad that I did when I did. We have so much more fun, you know, playing the field.

Oh, that's a tough hit on her future granddaughter in law, who she doesn't listen to this podcast. Anyway, let's get back to her totally normal honeymoon.

And then on your honeymoon was a bit of a shock. Pawling shock.

Why Colin thought I mean, I was, I suppose, very naive because in those days, I mean, all the young men and fathers used to take this sort of upmarket brothel run by Mrs. Featherston. Do you know about her?

No. I have to say, you probably want to go on there, too.

I mean, that's what young man did, you know? So, Colin, I don't think he'd ever made love to a virgin. I think that was a trouble. And for some unknown reason, when I thought I was being taken off to the Ritz, you know, put on my best dress he took, which is absolutely appalling, seedy hotel where we went into this room. I mean, luckily we sat in two wingback chair.

So I sat with my eyes closed, appalling sight in front of this awful pasty body squelching into each other in front of us. And I thought this is simply nightmarish. And the honeymoon after that wasn't all that easy, but it did improve.

Ah, the thing about Colin was that almost never bored.

He had a very quick he was very clever, amazingly well read. I always had slightly mad ideas, some of them, but he always had ideas. In fact he was very exciting person to live with. Too exciting sometimes.

What does Lady in waiting mean. What do you do to lady in waiting of Princess Margaret?

Well, she turns on her friends because a lot of the time you're alone with her. And the thing is, when you first join, you're asked if you've got any charities you're really interested in. You see all her charities and you pick ones that you feel you like to work with. And therefore then once in charge of those charities, they write to one that is an office to go into the office. And then you write all the thank you letters, say after Australia, I went round Australia.

Well, I mean, I wrote a lot of the thank you letters. But the great moment is you're with the person with Princess Margaret the whole time. And in the evening when we used to go upstairs, we used to talk. Every day we laugh. She had a wonderful sense of humour, Princess Margaret. And she sometimes when I was with her in front of other people, she'd make me laugh. You know, I tried not to.

And I say, after as Mammy, please don't make me laugh. I couldn't keep a straight face.

I had to stay. I mean, I lived with her for a whole year, Kensington Palace, because I was doing up a flat. Colin being very flaky. He always sold our houses without telling me. And then he said, I've just sold the house today. We've got to get out in a fortnight. And I got used to that. But I then in the end bought a flat for myself, small. And Princess Margaret said, you do come.

And I said, well, it'll be about three weeks. Turned out it was a year. I really enjoyed being with her and she had a very difficult husband.

And at the end of it, we both said, well, when we got on so well, by that time she was divorced, so much easier to be with each other than have these very difficult husband outcomes.

Optimistic in a second. But just quickly, with Margaret, her reputation as a sort of socialite and drinker, and what would you have to say about that? Was she a sort of hardworking member of the royal family?

I hope that's why I wrote my book, actually, because I was so fed up. People writing rubbish about it, I didn't know. So I wanted from my point of view, I put that over quite well in my book because judging by hundreds of letters I've had from people saying, I'm so glad you have showed a different side to Princess Margaret.

I mean, with me you had so I was sort of putting a handle her properly, you know. I mean, to me, she was very royal. I mean, she was brought up. Her father was king. Emperor. Half the world was pink when she brought up. There was only four of them. And, you know, she was very royal and I didn't mind. There's so royal moments, which you had occasion. But the great thing was to ask her what she wanted to do as long as she knew what she was going to do.

People didn't spring surprises on her.

She didn't like that and ask her what she wanted to eat. I mean, to me, it seemed quite simple. If you're going to have somebody like that, you want to please them. You want to say, what do you want to do? And quite often she went to stay with people and they arranged mayor and the chief of police and the bishop to come to lunch on Sunday. You know, she said, you know, weekends are meant to be my time off.

I find perhaps because I knew and I really loved her, I didn't find that difficult.

I could what I call stear sometimes, you know, like I did when we were in Australia. And she refused to go on to Bondi Beach. Oh, she said that I couldn't possibly have sand in my shoes.

They always come to me, that's part of being a lady in waiting, they always ring one up saying, what are you going to wear? What color? Because we want the flowers we're going to give to match.

In this instance, they rang me up and said, can you do anything you know is vital in Australia to go on to Bondi Beach? So I said, well, leave it to me. And I managed to get a pair of her flat shoes just as we got there. I said, look, ma'am, would you think again? Because going on to Bondi Beach is rather like kissing the Blarney Stone, you know?

Oh, man, look at my shoes. So I took the flat. Well, I said, well, actually, I got a flat pair.

And she looked at me and she just said, OK, can you win this time? And as she got her handbag later, she was asked to hold a koala bear and she said, Now, I don't think I will, but my lady in waiting would love to hold it. And Koala, we peed all the way down my dress.

And I said to her, I said, Well, you got your back on me, didn't you?

Well, you know, we had a very nice relationship come loose from something that's so extraordinary to me about inherited wealth is it can cause such extraordinary chaos within families that your husband left all his money to somebody else. And it's system like yours which involves these passing these houses down and properties and estates and things that must have been hugely problematic.

He'd already given Aglen, which is a family home to his son, Henry. So he was living there, Colin, in the ER and lived in St Lucia. He was a resident.

But of course, what was really difficult for me and the children, because in the West Indies, the will is read the night of the funeral and we had this amazing Caribbean funeral I've written about in my book. He changed his will I face five months before he died, leaving everything to Kent, who was his servant, and that what was the final nail in the coffin?

Sacred for me. You know, I've been married to him 54 years and there's nothing you can do in St Lucia. The law is quite different. So I went I thought, well, I can surely, you know, get something. And they said, no, women don't count for anything.

So, you know, anyway, I've written a bestseller, not grand old age of nearly 88, making some money for the first time.

Well done.

To Lady Glen O'Connor with another aristocratic author on the podcast. Now, Charles Spencer, he is Princess Diana's brother.

And you wrote a great book, this John Henry, the first in the catastrophe of the shipwreck of the white ship that occurred 900 years ago this autumn, a terrible event with important repercussions. And I was looking forward to this chat with him after I read the book because I was stunned by the endemic levels of violence in 12th century Europe. And on one instant in particular, I don't know how they survived half of them.

And of course, Holland. And I think one of the problems they had was the role of Christianity in all of that. So a lot of the particularly in England, there was a sort of fight between doing right by the church and doing right as a king. I think that the only way to survive in these times was to have very rigid rules which you stuck to. And the most appalling episode in my book, in the whole tale of Henry Henry, the first is the way he treated the basic laws of hostage taking.

He brokered a peace between one of his illegitimate daughters and her husband and some neighbours by making them swap each other's children as hostages. And Henry's daughter lost patience with the boy hostage she was holding and had him blinded and the father of the boy went as understandably outraged to Henry and demanded his rights.

And so Henry agreed that his to his two granddaughters, his daughter's daughters would be blinded as well and have their noses cut off as the sort of wrongful part of a hostage situation that had gone terribly awry. And I'm afraid that's the one bit where I just can't get my head around this time, you know, isn't there some way I mean, here we are. I mean, there's anything you do anything to observe that the rules have been broken, but to preserve your granddaughters, it's just an astonishing.

But to me, it says these were the rules and Henry the first stuck by them.

Well, his daughter is daughter took matters into her own hands. Tell everyone what she did.

Well, yes, she pretended she wanted an audience with their father and then whipped out a crossbow and tried to shoot Henry the first. But she missed him. And then she was besieged by her father and then jumped into the moat of the castle. And everywhere she was and the observers were most shocked that this woman was actually fleeing for her life. And I don't think that dignity was the first thing in her mind. But she showed her legs when her dress was sort of swept up from her as she as she descended very fast into the moat, people were appalled that they could see the lady's legs, different standards.

Next up, I talked to the one and only Paul Lei's editor of history today, not only no, but a historian in his own right, whose award nominated book about the interregnum in England in the aisles was fantastic. And it was great to get him on the pot.

OK, so we've got Cromwell is now the overlord of the British Isles, the Isle of Britain, Ireland. And so it's difficult to call them anything these days. And he is what he do with one. So what's the army still in charge? What is what is his plan to match his military successes with a kind of a lasting constitutional arrangement?

Well. The phrase that comma uses again and again is healing and settling. And. What we have to think about this is when he talks about healing and settling. The constitutional reforms, the constitutional projects. And the religious project. Of the moral reformation of England. Are entwined, they can't you simply cannot separate those two things, they are combined. This presents itself the most extreme. Or most obviously religious with the nominated assembly, which is the first real parliament that has it's not called it's not protected at this point as a nominated assembly of which he's the previous antipiracy.

And this is the idea not of John Lambert, who's the second in command at this point, but a person called Thomas Harrison, who is a member of a group called the 5th Monarchists. And they believe that there are going to be five monarchies on Earth before the millennium appears, before God returns to Earth, those being Babylon. Persia, Greece and Rome, Rome being both classical Rome and the papacy, and there will be a fifth monarchy and this.

If all goes well, we'll be in England and England so you can see this deeply religious providential thread running throughout this. And so Harrison becomes the kind of ideological figurehead of this assembly of an it's called nominated because the members of this assembly, the parliament, will be nominated by various churches, or at least that's the plan. In the end, they're not appointed in a much more haphazard and corrupt way than that. But it's modeled on the Jewish Sanhedrin, quite, quite explicitly modeled on the Sanhedrin, the monarchists that often represented as dominating.

That's it's actually not true. It's actually not a bad parliament. It's lampooned in some way because it's known as the bare bones parliament after one of its more obscure members is a city leather trader, I think called praise God baboon's or praise God Bilpin, which is a very Puritan name. I forget the full extent of his actual real name, but it's in the book and that's something to ponder and wonder at.

But it's actually a reasonably effective one. But there is obstruction from the more mainstream MPs, the Presbyterian parliaments, and it ends as almost all of Cromwell's parliaments do by. The eviction of MPs by military force and Cromwell will turn up and say, oh, I didn't realize this was going on and present himself as good. There's a wonderful phrase by Blair Worden, who's the great historian of this period, when he says that Cromwell is practiced at not knowing.

He always seems to be not quite there or just gone when a dramatic event happens. And you can't help but wonder with great reason just what Hamlet is playing. And there's definitely this kind of elusive figure of Cromwell, this political figure. What goes on in the background is always there.

One of the great sources, the great source for Cromwell that we haven't got will never have or dialogues with God. And those are the ones that I think there's this constant. Practice of Cromwell's to go into prayer, to go into retreat and have one to one dialogue with God. It's actually very, very well done. In a play by Howard Brenton called 55 Days, which is set during the 55 days before John's first execution. And you have these imagined conversations between Cromwell, but he's always searching for the answer to what would God want me to do.

You say out of that source, did he write down transcripts of now lost or did we just not have it because it wasn't recorded? It was just a private conversation because just in the hands of shame.

Okay, so bare bones power is gone. What's next? Well, as Thomas Harrison recedes into the background again, John Lambert comes to the fore, but not as a military figure this time, although, of course, the army is always there in the background.

But as a rather original political thinker and he composes. The first written constitution in the world, which is called the instrument of government. Which essentially tries to settle the republic on firm or firmer foundations. So essentially it replaces the old trinity of King Commons and Parliament with a sort of kingly figure or a sovereign, shall we call it a council and the parliament. And that's the new settlement. Now. Who is going to be the king like figure, the original offer is that it should be that there should be a kind of house of gromo or Commonweal resists this and instead is offered the title of Lord Protector, which obviously has some semblance in English history.

There is a tradition of it, but it's essentially as a guardian of a future monarch, as you know. But he takes on this title of Lord Protector, which is controversial and. He takes on a mantle of royalty. You know, there's no great ostentation at this point. You know, he goes to the opening of parliament and Puritan black, although actually, ironically, black is actually quite expensive to the puritz where he's actually quite expensive, relatively, because blacks are difficult color to achieve at that time.

But he takes on a kind of mantle of monarchism which really upsets his loyal Republican figures, people like Henry Vane, Thomas Cecil and of course, Milton, who responds and asks questions about, you know, this man who was the greatest among us. You know, we are keeping an eye on you and we watching how this unravels. But by this point, Cromwell's in charge. His counsel, which is often made up of his family members, people like Desboro, people like Lambert's sons or Henry not Richard Henry Fleetwood.

There's this interrelated. They're married together. You have this very, very small elite.

Our Puritan elite that's gathered around the sources of power in Whitehall and Parliament, and it's beginning to resemble that kind of Puritan aristocracy is pushing it. But there's no doubt that these are now important, intertwined, interlocked figures and there's a kind of regime about it, but it's on this foundation of the instrument of government.

So speaking of aristocracy house, the Isles, how are they being governed in practice? Mean traditional, so manorial practices still going on, but different people? Or is that now is that our government states, you know, state paid paid for troops in every town and village?

I mean, it's it's early modern Britain. The military presence. I mean, this is a place that's recovering from civil war, remember, it had famine, it's had all kinds of stuff, but it's getting towards stability. And I suppose there's with most people there's a kind of Hobbesian kind of belief in the strong arm of government. And this is a strong government.

First of all, like my belief in my ideal world will be, you know, where we don't need the law for racism because people just get along because, you know, we are all human. So we don't need the law to tell me that I shouldn't treat you bad because you will look different than me. I should know that because we're all human means we're all equal. Learn more about the impact of racism in Ireland from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.

At age overeasy, Dardari ACost recommends podcasts to keep you informed.

And as I was coming up in the left, I got a phone call from brilliantly. And in fact it was who could have phoned me to say We have our first case. From the news team at Virgin Media Arland, this is a room six three one Irelands covid crisis line reporters. King throughout the series will hear reports of key decision makers who sat inside the walls of Room six three one at the Department of Health and the voice of the people whose lives were changed by those decisions as a global crisis unfolded in their homes.

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Now, regular listeners will know that I like to get veterans activists and politicians on here as well as historians, and few of those veterans are better than Christianism. She's a naval officer during the Second World War.

It was great fun, a lovely time, went to the theater, a great deal to join the blitz when when they had a you could hear the whistle of the bombs coming nearer and nearer and the whole audience would blink like that, a sort of leaned over, then it would pass what he had now. Amazing.

And you must have had lots of boyfriends going to parties and so didn't have very many boyfriends somehow.

In London there were a few parties, but they tried to make a setback for Clark before it was dark, but says when the blitz began, which was not until the late summer rally here in London during the Blitz.

Yes.

I mean, when you go off that well, I had decided I didn't want to be a of child originally volunteered for. So I thought it sounded mysterious and interesting, but it was terribly boring and discovered plotting was much more fun. So I volunteered for that. And after I got my commission, I was promoted to an officer having dinner on Mirin. Then I was a leading rends well before that. And I was sent down to do this amazing job at Coalhouse Fort, which was Degassing.

It's about measuring the ships for their magnetic emission. And that was done by this range, which I had to run the office I was reading age 20. It was really quite exciting. But after about a year and then I went down to Plymouth and that I was plotting officer headman's wise, which was quite so you didn't the dousing.

Now tell me what plotting involves or plotting involved.

It was we had a huge, big operations room in Plymouth, Mount Wise, and it was divided into two. The RAAF had one large coastal command and one side, and there they had four of four rafts running their plot, which was a big flat table with a sort of waxed on edge and was very exciting at with convoys all and the huge ships, Salina's or things like that, all going by 26 knots and convoys going at about three knots.

You know, everything had to be kept up to date and which is very exciting for girls on each side of the table with telephones. And they were in communication with the radar stations around the coast and they took us to Spain to see a radar station. So we had some idea of what was going on, which made it much more interesting.

So you were in Plymouth plotting? Yes. And Perth must have been destroyed. Plymouth was very badly bombed. So you must've been bombed there?

No, it was bombed before I got passed, I'm glad to say so. When we got there, it was more or less flattened, but we made a lot of friends with submariners there. Now, we did have a lot of boyfriends and parties and things, which was great fun. Parties in their ships were rather fun because mess was so small. And I remember one time Eve and I, she was a with me and we used to wear our evening dresses for weekend parties and things.

We only had to each, so we used to exchange them. And one time the officer said to us, why don't you lay on our dinner jackets in exchange? We are so tired of your evening dress. I can't remember whether we did or not. That must have been great fun. It's great fun, you know.

Then you got posted up within the whole of was wise of the Western approaches headquarters was moved up to Liverpool and I moved on to various other places before I ended up in Belfast, which was another very interesting part, because all the convoys would gather together and get mixed up and ready to sail from just north of Belfast in a place called Rock. I think it was a place they all gathered and they settled on. What was Belfast like during the war?

Well, Belfast was very good with no rationing, so we had masses of food there. Nevertheless, we went down to visit Dublin from time to time and by train, and they always searched everything you bought when you were your way back. It was very difficult.

And what about your trip in the aeroplane?

We had to do a course in Bath. I've no idea what the course involved, but I do remember when I coming back, I missed my train and I never, ever did such a thing. I was always terribly punctual, always early, and I was horrified of this. And I was actually talking to a Polish man who had been at a party with the night before. And he said, Shall I give you a lift back in the crate?

I said, Watto crate. Oh, he said, my my mum had a pen. So I said, Oh, good heavens. I seem thrilled to answer. Yes, absolutely. Passionately. Can you imagine? And Miles Majesté, an aeroplane which was open to the winds, you know, I mean, I'd never flown. Anything before anyway, the thrilling moment? Absolutely wonderful. So we we made the dive, bombed a lot of cars and things which he thought would frighten me.

But I loved that. And I was really hoping he might loop the loop. But perhaps it's just as well he didn't. I had fallen out.

So you were plotting you removing the little marks on this big map and it was your husband ship and we were receiving signals all the time.

It wasn't like if we had television, we were able to see the metal. Otherwise we just waiting for signals all the time to hear what was going on and the news from each. We just just like being able to pick up the news from various places. But yes, I was plotting the battle and my friends all tried to make me go home, but I couldn't. I had to stay there. And then when they'd rammed it and so on, they could only go off.

And I think they had the speed of 12 knots, which they could just about do to get to the other side and have a new ball fitted.

Lots of women that you so wouldn't have been as lucky. I mean, you must have had friends that lost husbands and boyfriends at sea.

Know I have one friend who was bombed and killed. She, my great friend, was horrid. It was very hard. She was bombed then in their parents imagine killed of there.

And so you always felt that you what you were up at the sharp end of the world and never felt the war was distant and something apart now.

And once more I did a job which I enjoyed and which was useful. And I felt it was useful during the degassing and save people's lives. Being blown up by magnetic mines and plotting was interesting because if you saw a radar blip, which might have been a submarine or a motorboat from Germany on the south west coast, then you would send the motorboat out to investigate. It always felt useful.

And then speaking of useful, so you helped win the Battle of the Atlantic, then you helped victory D-Day as well.

So that was very exciting because I was working on the actual maps of the landings. There were five landings, as you probably know, those places on the Normandy coast. And of course, they had to be deadly secret because we were trying to persuade the Germans that we were going to use the particle and not the Normandy coast. And so everything had to be very, very secret. So I had my own little office in the basement and nobody else was in it but me.

And the whole of the walls were covered in this huge ordnance survey maps of France. And I had to draw a map of every compass bearing like that, of every French landing place to see what people would be able to see, like a motorway or a train service or a château or something like that on every all over France. It was quite an interesting job and I hope it was I don't know if they ever used by maps, but that they were.

So these are maps that when when the men landed on the beaches, I think it's a Orito when the ship arrived in the air and in the place where the actual landing place, they would look at my maps in theory and be able to identify where they were. That was the plan.

Was that rather a lonely job? What was a good team?

It was quite interesting because I was in this place, which is opposite the Horse Guards in Whitehall, and Churchill was working in the top of this enormous building. And we sometimes see him going up and down stairs, which is very exciting. But otherwise it was just the most amazing place where they had these extraordinary inventions to everything. They've invented this wonderful harmers, which they made and took over. The hundreds and hundreds of pieces of each piece had to be made in probably a different harbour and sunk below the wall so it couldn't be seen from the air.

And then eventually all had to be put together. An extraordinary behaviour story.

Do you feel that the women who worked in those buildings and what do you think the women have been so a been overlooked when we talk about the war to commemorate the war?

It's difficult to tell because an awful lot of them did the most boring job, like looking after the greenery and cooking and boiling water. That's one thing in there. But I think I mean, when you think of the job that they did with the parishes course, which was the biggest training, the most sophisticated training for captains of submarines, it was called the parishes course. And the man who ran it was a distinguished submariner, Captain DOGTV, who think of he ran it and he ran it with half a dozen sailors normally do to help him with the course and all the equipment and so on.

And he decided one day he could perhaps replace them with wrens. And I found one of the first friends who done it with him was a girl who. Lived in Cornwall, and I met her and got her to write in the description of how she'd done it.

So I put it in my book so so lots of friends and all sorts of interesting jobs.

Zackham amazing jobs and cleaning torpedoes. And I mean, they then did all sorts of jobs like that and servicing machinery and they were all trained to do it. And they'd love being in these interesting jobs to do a real treat.

Way back at the start of the year was chatting to Oscar winning director Sam Mendes.

I asked him how deliberately he'd chosen to set his brilliant film, 1917, in that retreat, the Hindenburg line early 1917, because history geeks like me kind of immediately realized it gave him that rare thing on the Western Front. It gave him a little bit of mobility in which troops could throw off, albeit briefly, the kind of stalemate of the trenches. He could tell a story at a time when mobility had very briefly been restored to the otherwise very static battles of the Western Front.

I was looking and looking for a way to have a journey that wasn't 300 yards long, you know, so I had to. And unless I found that I couldn't have made that I wouldn't have written the script, I wouldn't have made the story.

It was that that realization that there was that moment, that perfect moment, which is why, you know, the movie is played over one day and is very specific which day it is. And and indeed, that was the day that there was this confusion. There were beginning to mobilize to move up to the new German line. But some sections of the army had no idea what was going on. And that's what we that's the situation we come into.

You know, you have this combination, as you know, in the First World War, the first, you know, war that begins with horses and and infantry and ends with tanks and machine guns and weapons of mass destruction, beginning of modern warfare.

But at the same time, no communication.

There isn't a commensurate degree of sophistication and communication. There is no way of telling someone. So, you know, even people 30 yards away from orders being delivered can't hear and die. And this happens over and over and over again. The sort of level of the awful, perfect storm of the sudden development of industrial warfare and the lack of industrial level communication is is a hell, really.

And so so you're trying to find that kind of fulcrum point where suddenly through a keyhole keyhole of one man's experience, you're able to suddenly see the vast panorama of death and destruction.

You know, the whole movie is based on the idea that through the micro, you can understand the macro, you know, through just two hours of real time on one man or two men's experience, you can see and begin to understand the sheer scale of the war. It struck me even in no man's land, that the scale is not expressed, going from the British line to the German line, because that's almost visible.

You know, in many cases it was visible 200 yards away.

The scan is best expressed looking down the lines, because that goes on for miles and miles and miles, hundreds of miles.

And sometimes you you have to find different ways of looking at things in order to find a way to articulate the vastness of of the chaos that was there was the Great War, because we're so stuck in cliches, so stuck in in repeating images, you know, over the top, die over the top, die back in the trench, over the top. I mean, you know, it's almost impossible to break out of that. And I was looking for a way to try to break out of that.

But at the same time, we do have that you know, that there is there are trenches, there is no mines. And there are people who go over the top at the end of the movie, say it, but it's trying to unlock other areas of of history.

Well, the technique that is so revolutionary deserves every award in the book is obviously shooting as if it's on one study shot the whole way through. And what's so brilliant is it lends itself to, first of all, not nothing else. You see the back the rear areas that are asleep in the grass and flowers and nice, and then they can get their stuff together and they go through the communication trench and then they go over and it's all a wonder and you see thousands of people and you do get that sense of geographical scale.

But I'll ask about the technical stuff. I mean, if I have to ask every time that comes on the history books about how annoying it historians, when you wanted to do something, did they go I really go like that. How do you have a role then? Does the filmmaking come first? Which is how important the celebrities are very important.

I mean, we had two historical advisers, only Robert Shaw and Peter Barton, both of whom were brilliant. Yeah. And both different, you know, areas.

I mean, obviously know pretty much everything about the First World War, but they also had specific areas that I was sort of set them on, like attack dogs, you know, and he would talk to them and all the background about how what was in their packs and their kit, bags and, you know, and how to use their weapons. We had another military adviser, Paul Bettany, who himself had been in the military, but. Also knows about the First World War, he was training them and talking to them about all sorts of psychological elements to what they're what they were expected to do and what they would have been through just to get to the front line.

The bomb was the one he pointed out and he said, look, I want you to pick holes in every way you possibly can. And it was brilliant.

And he made a huge impact on it because, you know, even if it's just if it's just thrown a spotlight on cliches, you know, the men waiting to go over the top knowing they're about to die, he says nonsense that most men went over the top thinking they were going to victory.

You know, but that's a huge thing when you're talking to 500 background, like, you know, just reminding them of that. Yes, they're adrenalized. Yes, they're frightened, but they're not knowing they're going to die. This is a myth. And that's something we impose upon it with the kind of nostalgia of hindsight and our knowledge of the war and.

Well, so so, you know, there are those aspects and then, you know, just geography where is accused, whereas the you know, how far would they how much of a change would they have been able to dig in 24 hours, you know, on mass, all of these things and and a lot of those things went into the script, went into the way that we approached it. We just had all sorts of details because of historical.

So in a way, you know, it was crucial. But then, of course, there are things that I said, you know what? I'm going to I'm going to ignore that because, you know, film necessarily is a compression. And this is not naturalism. It's kind of poetic naturalism.

You know, there are and there's a sense and I want to give it away, but even though it takes place in two hours of real time, that time is at one point irrelevant.

You know, the central character doesn't know where he is anymore, doesn't know what time it is, even if he's been asleep or knocked out for two or three days, you know, and he physically doesn't know where he is in the landscape.

So you don't want to be you don't want to be overly literal about distances and over literal about time, because the film operates in a dreamlike way at times as well, which is, you know, which is film and it's not otherwise.

I'd have made a documentary or written an essay.

You know, it strikes me that you see how you have a story or narrative idea about this movie and you wanted to get across the scale. But it feels like technically you obviously cinematography, you wanted to absolutely click on it. And for me, it felt as big a shift as the first time I ever saw Saving Private Ryan. When that when that when that ramp goes down and suddenly you see sort of bullets for the first time in film, you know, whizzing around them.

And and talk to me a little bit about some of the techniques that you use and whether you might have time to did this film needed to do a story?

Your script needs you to make all these innovations to realize that, you know, the two things happen.

At the same time, you're searching for a perfect marriage of form and content. You know, you want to match the content.

And if you're telling a story in two hours of real time and your goal is to lock the audience together with the characters for those two hours, make them experience every second, passing with the characters, every step with them, then it seemed like a natural step to not edit, to not cut, to not give an audience any sense that there was anything except this single dialogue between the camera, the actors and the landscape, which is the choreography that we're engaged in the whole time.

But if you haven't seen it, I don't want it's difficult to imagine it because, you know, I think everyone's worst version of that is the camera's sort of trotting along behind two people and seeing what they're seeing basically for two hours and all or seeing their faces as they react to it. But the the truth is, it's a constantly shifting movement from a subject camera to the object on camera, from the intimacy of understanding their emotional reaction to what they're seeing and also showing the landscape, the journey, the scale of the journey, understanding distances.

And then there are these other characters. As I said earlier, it's nature. You know, this is a land that, yes, it's been razed to the ground largely by the Germans, but it's French farmhouses and towns and canals and rivers and orchards and streams and woods and and the spring when reimaging. And so there's this other life that comes back into the film. You also want to kind of pay homage to.

So it's that dance is an instinctive thing that you and I had one of the greatest cinematographers of all time shooting this film, Roger Deakins, and I worked with him three times before. And this is our fourth time. And most of prep for us was just talking, talking, talking, talking, trying it out, talking again, storyboarding it, trying it out, talking, you know, and then an endless amount of rehearsals. Because if you think about it, say, well, you have to if you write a scene, it says they go from a quarry to a woods down a hill through an orchard to a farmhouse.

That's all very well. But when you can't cut the distance. Choices have to be exactly the length of the scene and the scene has to be exactly the length of the set, and only when you've measured it can you then start building the orchard, building the farmhouse, digging the trenches, you know, so you have to get out there on open fields before you do anything, holding a script, just marching up and down with a bunch of people, sticking flags in the ground, saying, well, well, this is where the train starts.

This is where the home stretch and this is the left turn. This is when this is the dug out. This is where they have a little fight.

This is and there were all these there were white posts marking the trenches and then there were orange postmarking events within the trenches. And the same for no man's land, German dug out, et cetera, are right the way through the film. So, you know, if you ask George McKay now who played Scofield, he could walk the journey of the movie for you still step by step because it's so in his muscle memory. We literally did it for months because there was no way of moving.

If we have, we didn't know that it was, you know, because if you build an orchard, it's two times longer than you need. You've got a long scene with no dialogue.

You know, you just run out of things to talk about or if it's too short, they're standing still for a section of the scene because they know they can't move anywhere. So it has to be exactly the right length. And that was really a challenge.

And then rehearsals, those actors, I mean, that's someone on telly, the stress of getting something wrong at the end of the scene. I mean. Yeah, I mean, it must have been awful. Can you reveal how many times you have to say certain things or. We had to do multiple takes, 30, 40, 50 takes sometimes. But, you know, these are eight minute scenes. So that's a lot of shoe leather and travelling distances all the time.

But the truth is that all the rehearsals, in order to build a set plan, the camera meant they were very, very familiar with it. And in a kind of way, that meant that they were living it by the time we came to shoot it rather than acting it. And they I kept saying, just ignore it. Don't think about where the camera is. Very occasionally I'll say just in that moment, look over your right shoulder, you know, and they would, you know, but that's when they were so comfortable with it that it was easy.

And then, you know, what you want, though, is this very odd combination of things. You want incredible precision in the camera work, but you don't want incredible precision in the physical movement of the actors. You want them to not be thinking about how they're moving, not be thinking of how they're being with each other, just simply being.

So you want spontaneity in front of the camera and you want precision behind the camera. So that balance was always the most difficult thing because sometimes, you know, take ten takes to get the precision in camera by which time they've done it ten times and they've sort of lost their spontaneity. Often the directors will tell you the first two or three tapes are the ones where you get the most electricity and sometimes you don't need any more than that. But here, that didn't happen very often.

You know, there's no there's only one scene, which is a first take in the movie, you know, and but most of them were, you know, after some 20. And so the job is and to keep the actors alive, you know, literally alive. But also, you know, if I kept saying, look, if mistakes happen, just keep going because some of them are just human.

You're just human being. You're slipping in the mud. You're falling over. You know, one key moment at the end. Near the end, one of the characters is nearly delivering a message and he gets literally knocked off his feet.

Oh, that was a mistake. That was a mistake. But exactly.

Because I said, if that happens to you, get up and keep running, you know, and he did. And it's in the movie. So those are happy accidents that you would hope for in normal movies. But you're able to get that those rough edges, really, which which give a feeling of life rather than rather than acting.

Well, the best books I read this year was Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells about the pre European encounter history of West Africa. And I told him I was very struck by the hugely important trading and cultural links that West Africa had long enjoyed before European seafarers arrived in the 15th century. Yes, it was.

And I think that is one of that's one of the important, I suppose, rebalance things. And the book tries to do that. Yes. This wasn't a region which somehow emerged into history in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. Once the Europeans started trading down the West African coast and increasingly in slaves, it was a region which had already connected to parts of the Ottoman Empire, for example, to Saudi Arabia, to places like Iraq, and also interestingly, connected to places in Spain and and southern Italy even before the 15th century as well.

So, yes, it was it was a region which had important trading and political connections in its own right before then. And that's right. And I think that and and that's something which persisted throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries as well. You actually find diplomats from, for example, the kingdom of Homi in Portugal or in Brazil in the 18th century.

One of the bitsie, which I found fascinating was when I found this document, which described the ambassadors of the to me in Lisbon in the 1790, the bill at the restaurant where they ate. They went to the Opera House every night for a month and this kind of thing. And it. It's not the impression that if you like school history syllabi have given us of West African history, that's one of the things that the book tries to look at.

But we should but it does have a unique geographical position with advantages and disadvantages in terms of trade and and state building that come from that. Like, tell me why. How does geography how does how does the how do these empires and and polities grow, flourishing and decline in the space we now call West Africa?

Well, that's a very important question, because the things which affect the rise and fall in the way of these empires and kingdoms relate to changing geography. For example, in the expanding of dry seasons, which happens in in what we call the medieval period, but also from around 16, 30 onwards. That has a big impact on politics in the region.

Also elements of geography, such as the Savannah areas of West Africa, which are more open to being controlled by cavalries and so on, which allow for bigger states and and regions near to the coast because of the different geography. There have different types of political formations. All those things are relevant, as also are the openings which trade offers or closes in that period as well. And those do so. West Africa, West African political systems arise on their own terms.

But of course, white political systems all over the world are also related to other factors of trade and global connections and the Sahara.

In terms of so sailing, it was quite hard to sail between what we now call Morocco in West Africa.

Was it? But so it was. We're talking about trans Saharan trade.

Yes. To start with, you have this and trade. That's right. And for example, in 30 or 40 years ago, a lot of history was written about this particular in Portuguese, actually talked about the conflict between the Caravelle and the caravan. So you have a caravan, which obviously is the Sahara in trade. And yes, you know, there were very complex networks. There are maps from the 14th century, actually, which show these networks criss crossing the Sahara through the oases and so forth.

And then, yes, from the start of the 15th century, the Portuguese begin to sail down the coast of Morocco. They didn't actually have the navigational equipment to the quadrants and suchlike to make it easy to sail out of sight of land. That was one of the reasons once you sailed south of a particular cape, which is known as Cape Buzhardt, or at that time you had to sell out of land to return to Portugal, that was one of the reasons that people didn't do that because they were terrified of it.

So it took quite so. It took quite a long time for this.

But if you like the competition to really take shape between the caravan in the caravel, one of the things which is difficult, I think, with writing history over such a long period of time, is that we can compress time. We can think all you know, it was inevitable that in the course of the 15th century, this would take place. Well, actually, you know, at the time, it wasn't inevitable at all. You know, for people looking at it, 50 years in the future was a hell of a long time as it is for us today.

So I try to take account of that in the book, too.

Does racism bluntly and the impact of the shadow cast by the slave trade where we think it's technologically very sophisticated white people turning up and sort of dragging, you know, natives out of the bushes with Y and then taking them against their wishes to the new world.

Has that is that racist thinking aloud discourage us from looking at the kind of sophistication of the kingdoms and policies that have gone before?

Yes, clearly, African history has always been thought in Britain in particular for about 200 years through the lens of of the history of slavery.

Since the abolition movement in the abolition movement you had in the abolition era, you have set up two obviously opposing camps. You had the pro slavery movement who portray which portrayed Africa as a benighted continent, and slavery was saving these people from that continent. And then you have the abolitionists who portrayed Africa also actually as a benighted continent destroyed by the wars of the slave trade, which which and therefore you had to abolish slavery in order to ameliorate that.

Of course, one of the ironies of that narrative is set up an idea of African history as solely related to slavery. And it didn't allow any scope for any of the other elements of African history to to come through, such as art, literature, oral and written archaeology, sorry, architecture, elements of technology in medicine. In fact, all of those things which you could write about in which there is evidence of which wasn't which weren't written about. And of course, the other irony is that these wars were very much an offshoot of the state building process, just as they had been in Europe.

Europe's state building process in that period of history was also marked by innumerable wars and conflicts, just as just as was the case in Africa, which is one of the parallels which the book tries to look at.

And then in that case as well, why is it just a quirk of navigational technology?

I mean, this one of the big questions of history is while Earth is like Western Europeans who have played no particular role in human history so far, go and. Expands like a virus across the entire world in space. Why was it the African states technologically advanced, culturally sophisticated? Why did why did they.

Why why did it produce equal? That's a very good question, and it's a that's one of the reasons why the book looks at a long period of time. I think it's over a long period time that you can get some answers to that question to begin with. Why? Why was there an interest in that trade in the first place?

We have to remember that the coast at that time where where the Portuguese arrived in it from the sort of mid 15th century onwards was they were backwaters. They were provinces, some provinces of the central, central, central parts, for example, Senegal, which is where the Portuguese first arrived, the kingdoms around the coast. There were provinces of the empire of Mali. And so and Mali was a fate would have faced north and east into the area.

He wasn't facing much more in those directions. That's right. And so and so forth. But for the for the rulers, the viceroy's of of the provinces on the coast, it was it was to their advantage to trade with the Portuguese.

They could begin to challenge and vie with the central power of the presidency. And that happened, for example, in the Gambia. It happened in the kingdom of Congo as well, with the province and soil and their various different examples of that. So there were so when we stop when we start breaking down our idea of Africa, in quotes to the different part, different constituent parts, that makes more sense as to why it was in some people's interests to begin to to begin trade.

And then how did this trade mesh with a rise in inequality between African and European political actors?

The the book makes the case that one of the reasons for that is, is looking at this as a trade, looking at the history of money and how the types of money which were used in West Africa, which were traded by Europeans. So a lot of the early trade is in currencies, is in copper, iron Kairys, which are used as currencies in West Africa, and the value of those declined over time, whereas what Africa exported, which was gold to begin with, a lot of gold, and then subsequently captive labor, which was used to accumulate value in the Americas, grew over time.

So that's the that's the case that the book makes as to why that led to a rise in inequality.

And so when you look at these kingdoms like the king of Mali, kingdom of Congo, what are the sources like? Why do again? Why do. How hard is it for a historian to to push aside that curtain of that sort of that that bookend of the slave trade and actually see what was going on before it?

Another very good question. It can be hard. It depends. The the answer is different in different regions. West Africa, Congo is a good case. A Congo, there's a huge amount of written sources. The Congolese convert kings and ruling royal families converted to Christianity very early, a lot and became literate in Portuguese very early and wrote impassioned letters in Portuguese and some. Yes, and some of them also later in Kikongo from quite an early time.

So we have this sources and some of those sort of recounted oral histories of the foundation of the kingdom from an early time, too. But at that time, in the late 40s, hundreds in the hundreds. So we have so available. Congo is very well documented in that time.

Mali, we have a lot of Arabic accounts in Arabic of Mali, dating from the 13th century, 14th century, and more manuscripts are being found. We discussed before, actually, than you've been to Timbuktu.

You saw some of those and there are more of those being found. And then there is a history in most of West Africa is an oral genre.

It's retained already.

And sometimes and I've had this excuse myself, it's possible to corroborate oral and written sources from an early time from the 16th century. That's a slow process.

That was Toby Greene. Great place to finish up. Thank you again, listeners, everyone that's put up with me and this podcast over an extraordinary year. I hope that all of you have some cause for optimism as we move into 2021. We'll be there podcasting every day. See you on the other side. Pretty remarkable.

Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring force. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Martinus. I know, but them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome.

So thank you so much. I'll sleep well.

First of all, like my belief in my ideal world will be, you know, where we don't need a law for racism because people just get along because, you know, we are all humans. So we don't need a law to tell me that I shouldn't treat bad because you will look different than me. I should know that because we're all human means we're all equal. Learn more about the impact of racism in Ireland from the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission at age overeasy.

Dardari.