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...
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- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 32 minutes
- Episodes
- 294
- Years Active
- 2020 - 2025
#13 'Russian roulette' - Ep 4 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
15 October 1962: Soviet nuclear missile sites are discovered. It’s only three weeks before the mid-term elections. Kennedy decides that to negotiate publicly with Khrushchev would be a disaster at th…
00:24:03 |
Wed 17 Sep 2025
#12 'The only way to save Cuba' - Ep 3 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
The Cuban Missile Crisis begins not because Castro is a dangerous communist but because he is NOT. Khrushchev tells his ruling council: ‘The only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there’ - not only…
00:22:21 |
Wed 10 Sep 2025
#11 Fidel Castro was not a communist - Ep 2 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
1959: The first country the new revolutionary president of Cuba visits is the United States of America. And he’s a big hit. The students at Princeton carry him on their shoulders. Castro wants a trad…
00:28:44 |
Wed 03 Sep 2025
#10 'These missiles do not significantly alter the balance of power' - Ep 1 Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?
We have the memo to President Kennedy dated Day 2 of the crisis with his own security chiefs clarifying that the Soviet missiles on Cuba made ‘no significant difference.’ So why does October 1962 dev…
00:31:30 |
Wed 27 Aug 2025
#112 Loss, love and the struggle to stay alive in 1912
Jon explains his decision to write an historical novel, A Spring Marrying. He discovered the extraordinary history of the sail trawlers working off the English coast before 1939 whilst making a film …
00:26:59 |
Wed 20 Aug 2025
#31 'Remember, remember, the fifth of November' - Ep 8 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
At the time, London gossip accused the king’s chief minister Robert Cecil of fabricating the entire plot to blow up everyone who mattered and leave the country ungovernable. When Cecil died seven yea…
00:22:25 |
Wed 13 Aug 2025
#30 'A tall and desperate fellow' - Ep 7 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
The night before - 4 November 1605: Guy Fawkes, a Catholic with experience as a soldier fighting for the Spanish, is found with matches and fuse powder in a storeroom under the House of Lords. He’s ‘…
00:33:20 |
Wed 06 Aug 2025
#29 The King's Fear - Ep 6 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
As his father had done, Cecil built his entrapments around a germ of genuine plotting. We uncover a small Catholic rebellion in Warwickshire in response to the king’s tougher anti-Catholic laws. And …
00:32:12 |
Tue 29 Jul 2025
#28 'A formidable network of secret agents' - Ep 5 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We dig deeper into the animosity between the king and Cecil whom he bullied and called names. And we see the Gunpowder plot in the context of the previous plots hatched by the Cecils against their en…
00:31:50 |
Wed 23 Jul 2025
#27 'Hellish miners' - Ep 4 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
To avoid any possible blame for the plot falling on himself or the king, Cecil procures confessions saying the seven gentlemen plotters began excavating a tunnel under the House of Lords long before …
00:33:33 |
Wed 16 Jul 2025
#26 Why blow up Parliament anyway? - Ep 3 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
The parliament of 1604 refuses to grant the king money. They’re still paying for the effects of the last plague. But this is Cecil’s job. What to do? On 5 November 1605 the assembled MPs and peers ar…
00:30:19 |
Wed 09 Jul 2025
#25 'Here lieth the Toad' - Ep 2 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We take a look at James I’s shadowy chief minister Robert Cecil who manages to implicate most of his Catholic enemies in the plot. Cecil was so desperate to improve King James’s dire view of him (his…
00:34:55 |
Wed 02 Jul 2025
#24 'There is no state trial so totally devoid of reality' - Ep 1 Blowing up the Gunpowder Plot
We look at the story the government published as The King’s Book, more than 500 witness statements and other contemporary sources and conclude, like the Victorian antiquarian Jardine who wrote up the…
00:32:31 |
Wed 25 Jun 2025
#67 The King, the lies and the whitewash - Ep 7 Nightmare in the trenches 1914-16
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 …
00:41:43 |
Wed 18 Jun 2025
#66 The British who cheated on the Somme - Ep 6 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
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 th…
00:41:34 |
Wed 11 Jun 2025
#65 Haig's war crime on the Somme - Ep 5 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
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 – …
00:43:50 |
Wed 04 Jun 2025
#64 They had the wrong guns - Ep 4 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
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. Th…
00:40:33 |
Wed 28 May 2025
#63 The generals never studied how to attack trenches - Ep 3 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
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…
00:40:16 |
Wed 21 May 2025
#62 They refused to take orders - Ep 2 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914:16
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 o…
00:37:41 |
Wed 14 May 2025
#61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
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 ex…
00:40:08 |
Wed 07 May 2025
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