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
#109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
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 Simps…
00:32:59 |
Wed 30 Apr 2025
#108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
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 o…
00:26:01 |
Wed 23 Apr 2025
#07 That Dress - Ep 1 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster'
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 Da…
00:24:22 |
Wed 16 Apr 2025
#111 A live donkey or a dead lion? - Ep 4 Amundsen vs Scott - a very British failure
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 tho…
00:38:31 |
Wed 09 Apr 2025
#110 ‘the worst has happened’ - Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
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 w…
00:37:55 |
Tue 01 Apr 2025
#109 The Worst Journey in the World - Ep 2 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
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.…
00:35:33 |
Wed 26 Mar 2025
#108 Lop Ears and Jackass Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
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 …
00:39:37 |
Tue 18 Mar 2025
#59 The crimes of the rector George Wilson Bridges - Ep 5 Money not Morality ended British enslavement
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…
00:40:36 |
Wed 12 Mar 2025
#58 The ship that sank and took the slave trade down with it - Ep 4 Money not Morality ended British enslavement
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 …
00:37:12 |
Wed 05 Mar 2025
#56 The Empire strikes back - Ep 3 Money not Morality ended British enslavement
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…
00:36:32 |
Wed 26 Feb 2025
#55 The woman behind the abolition of slavery - Ep 2 Money not Morality ended British enslavement
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 tu…
00:35:12 |
Wed 19 Feb 2025
#54 'Slavery was even worse than we thought' - Ep 1 Money not Morality ended British enslavement
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 …
00:36:00 |
Wed 12 Feb 2025
#72 It was mainly the poor who burned - Ep 5 Bloody Mary Tudor?
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 b…
00:42:57 |
Wed 05 Feb 2025
#71 Most who were burned were not Protestants - Ep 4 Bloody Mary Tudor?
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 pituita…
00:41:49 |
Wed 29 Jan 2025
#70 More interested in pirates than heretics - Ep 3 Bloody Mary Tudor?
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 Po…
00:39:16 |
Wed 22 Jan 2025
#69 Who exactly was a heretic? - Ep 2 Bloody Mary Tudor?
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…
00:38:07 |
Wed 15 Jan 2025
#68 Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - Ep 1 Bloody Mary Tudor?
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…
00:40:06 |
Wed 08 Jan 2025
#32 The curious case of inventing Scottishness
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 nine…
00:35:30 |
Tue 31 Dec 2024
#79 Santa Claus and the Knickerbockers
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 famo…
00:29:25 |
Wed 25 Dec 2024
#107 This is Armageddon - Ep 7 Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut
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 unaccounta…
00:30:47 |
Wed 18 Dec 2024
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