History Cafe

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 to prevent an American invasion, but also to keep Fidel Castro sweet. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 trade deal with the American government. So why does Kennedy fight the presidential election of 1960 on getting tougher than the Republicans with Cuba? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 develop into the closest we’ve ever come to nuclear war? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 for C4. It was the men who crewed them that fascinated him the most. Down in Brixham, Devon, they had four crew – skipper, mate, deckhand, and a cookie who was often only 12 or so. Theirs was an unremitting routine. Danger and death were never far away: it was the most dangerous job in the land. Yet they earned a reputation as supreme, quietly proud seamen, religious, brilliantly able to navigate without charts and survive just about anything. Except, maybe, falling in love with the town’s most complicated young woman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 years later, he was remembered as lying and self-serving. ‘The King’s misuser, the Parliament’s abuser, Hath left his plotting… is now a rotting.’ On the first anniversary, 5 November 1606, people were forced to celebrate by going to church and lighting bonfires. Anti-Catholic sentiment has kept the anniversary alive. But if the Gunpowder plot was the invention of a vicious, torturing and intolerant regime, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating it any more? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ‘booted and spurred’, ready for a quick get-away. Or maybe not. The government account keeps changing. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 we examine Cecil’s imaginative embellishment: a mystery letter delivered to a compromised Catholic peer on 26 October warning of ‘a terrible blow this Parliament.’ It was handed to the king to decipher. If anything was designed to terrify James I, whose father had narrowly escaped death from a gunpowder blast, this was it. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 enemies. All of which historians now agree were largely fabrications. Father and son had spies everywhere and openly boasted of their policy of entrapment. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the government stepped up its anti-Catholic legislation. They apparently lived on site, in an upstairs room, seven to a bed. They dug unnoticed, only in the day (or was it only in the night?) for almost a year, before spying a handy cellar next door for the gunpowder barrels. Yes. Of course. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 are calmly informed that there has been a devilish Catholic plot to blow the lot of them up. A plot that their king and Cecil have brilliantly foiled. Unsurprisingly, this time, they vote the king the money he so badly needs. Job done. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 father had caused the execution James’ mother, Mary Queen of Scots) he would stoop to anything. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 trial from the State Papers, there is no reliable corroborating evidence for the gunpowder story we’ve been told. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On 14 July 1916 senior officers finally decided to ignore Haig. At the Battle of Bazentin Ridge they put to use everything that was good practice and broke in to the German lines. But because junior officers at the front were not permitted to take a decision, and their commanders in their chateaux were hopelessly out of touch, it was never converted into a ‘break through.’ Another 9,000 lives lost for very little gain. After the disaster of the Somme, whitewash was elevated to a new military art form. Haig and other senior officers lied in their accounts. Haig ultimately blamed the French. Haig was even promoted by his friend the King. But he got his comeuppance on 26 March 1918 when command of the British army was handed to the French. The defeat of the Germans would be masterminded not by Haig but by Ferdinand Foch. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At the southern end of the line, next to the French, British units took all their objectives on the first day of the battle. They succeeded mainly because their maverick commanders had learnt from the French how to bombard the Germans accurately, putting them out of action long enough for the infantry to mop up. They’d also been assisted by the French big guns. By lunchtime some of these units were being served a hot meal in a newly occupied German trench. It’s a remarkable story the British Army has done its best to forget. Some military historians say, with all that French help, they cheated! (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The French decided they only had enough artillery to attack on a 9-mile front if they were to neutralise the German guns so that their infantry were not needlessly slaughtered. Haig had fewer guns – enough for perhaps 4 miles of front – but he chose to attack across 16 miles. 57,000 British soldiers died on the very first day, 1 July 1916, and no ground was gained. The French achieved all their objectives and lost 1,500 men. This is not a story that’s usually told (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the eve of the Somme the British had far too few artillery guns, and most of the ones they had were the wrong sort. They needed five times as many heavy guns before they could launch an attack. The few big guns they did have were grossly inaccurate, sometimes missing a target by one mile. They were firing shells that were not fitted with delayed-action fuses which meant the German machine-gunners were safe in their deep underground bunkers. And yet British schoolchildren are still taught it was a surprise that the bombardment that preceded the infantry attack failed so catastrophically. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The British Army wanted to throw men against machines. Its generals had not thought about how to cross 100-200 yards of open space with wire entanglements. They had been offered plenty of designs for armoured tractors with caterpillar tracks but had ignored them. It was Churchill, head of the Royal Navy, who eventually funded the development of the first ‘tank’. But they arrived late at the Somme and were so badly deployed they couldn’t save lives. And that wasn’t the worst of the problems the British army had created for itself. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Unlike the Royal Navy, the British Army proved itself over the course of decades incapable of taking new ideas on board: trench warfare, the machine gun and the tank to name a few. And at the heart of the problem was that too many men in the army refused to take orders. Not the rank and file, you understand, who were executed for any refusal to march into a hail of bullets. But the officers. The reason was that they regarded themselves as gentlemen – and gentlemen could not be bossed around. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench warfare seriously even though it had been around for 60 years. (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup? (R) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.