Travels Through Time

Felipe Fernández-Armesto; The Year Our World Began (1492)

1492 famously brought Columbus’s discovery of a route to America. This was, as today’s guest Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out, ‘a world-changing event if ever there was one.’ But what else was happening in that fateful year? Far beyond the courts of Europe, what was life like in China? In Africa?
In this week’s brilliantly insightful episode we set out on a journey of our own to glimpse 1492 in three telling scenes. Our guest is one of the finest imaginable. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an eminent and hugely decorated author who had written extensively about maritime and world history. In this episode he guides us from the tranquil hills of China to the rivers of Africa and the smouldering shores of the Caribbean in the year 1492.
But before all of that, he begins by telling us about another figure from this opening phase of the Age of Exploration, the character at the centre of his latest ‘myth-busting’ biography: Ferdinand Magellan.
As ever, there is much more about this episode on our website: tttpodcast.com
Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s new book is called Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan
Show notes
Scene One: 15th day of 7th month (August 7th), Xiangcheng, China. The poet Shen Zhou paints a mystical experience.
Scene Two: November or December, death scene of Sonni Ali, perhaps in a crossing of the River Niger in the vicinity of Gao.
Scene Three: 12th October, somewhere in the West Indies, probably Watling Island. Columbus meets Indigenous Americans for the first time.
Memento: One of Shen Zhou’s paintings.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1492 fits on our Timeline

Paul Fischer: Motion Pictures and the Rise of Modern Britain (1888)

In this episode we head to Victorian Britain, where leaps in technology were making the world seem smaller and faster than ever before. Our guide is the author and film-maker Paul Fischer whose new book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, charts the incredible race to invent the first film camera and projector. 
The late nineteenth century was a world full of contradictions. Categorically Victorian but also undeniably modern. Technological developments were exhilarating and anxiety-inducing. For the first time in history, it was possible to speak to people miles away using a telephone. You could sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a week. But this was also a world where the fastest mode of individual transport was still a horse, where the electric lightbulb was barely ten years old and where the idea of motion pictures was still a beautiful idea waiting to be made a reality.
In this episode we meet Louis Le Prince, the enigmatic hero at the heart of The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures. We join him as he becomes the first person to successfully capture and replay moving images, as well as visiting two other telling scenes in the rise of modern Britain.
Paul Fischer was born in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of A KIM JONG-IL PRODUCTION, the true story of the kidnapping of two South Korean filmmakers to Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea, which was translated into fourteen languages, nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and chosen as one of the best books of 2015 by NPR and Library Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Independent, among others.
This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.
Show Notes
Scene One: 30-31 August 1888, the Frying Pan public house, Whitechapel, London. Mary Ann Nichols is drinking in the pub in Spitalfields. By morning, she will be found dead — the first victim of the killer who will come to be known as Jack the Ripper.
Scene Two: 8 September 1888, Pikes Lane Football Ground, Bolton. Kenny Davenport scores the first-ever goal in the first match in the newly-formed Football League.
Scene Three: 14 October 1888, Roundhay Gardens, Yorkshire. Louis Le Prince assembles his family on the lawn of their home — to film the world’s first ever motion picture.
Momento: Some of the missing negatives from Le Prince's early films. 
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Paul Fischer
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1888 fits on our Timeline
 

Dr Suzie Sheehy: The Matter of Everything (1932)

In this episode, we are donning our lab coats and gaining access to the secrets of particle physics. We visit 1932, an astonishing year in the history of science across the world, from Carl Anderson’s rooftop cloud chamber in California, to Marietta Blau’s mountaintop experiments in Austria, via the Cavendish Lab at the University of Cambridge.
Our guest is Dr Suzie Sheehy. Dr Sheehy is unusual for Travels Through Time – she is a scientist rather than a historian – but she is also quite unusual within her own field of accelerator physics. Firstly, because she is a woman, and secondly because she is a brilliant communicator, able to beautifully articulate the wonder and complexity of Physics.
In her new book, The Matter of Everything, Twelve Experiments that Changed Our World she tells the major discovery stories of the past century: the cathode ray tube that brought us television, splitting the atom, finding new particles and, of course, the Large Hadron Collider and Higgs Boson. Behind each of these breakthroughs are the brilliant scientists whose curiosity and persistence made them possible. 
This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.
Show Notes
Scene One: 2nd August 1932. The discovery of the positron, Carl Anderson, at Caltech in America.
Scene Two: 14th April 1932. Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, the splitting of the atom Ernest Rutherford (at almost the same time James Chadwick discovers the neutron in the same lab!).
Scene Three: 1932. Hafelekar observatory, Marietta Blau and her assistant Hertha Wambacher place 'emulsion plates' 7,500 feet above sea level, near Innsbruck, Austria. They would go on to have a huge impact scientifically, but as women their work was undervalued and overlooked at the time.
Momento: Marietta Blau’s diaries so Dr Sheehy could write about her and fully reveal her genius and achievements to the world.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Dr Suzie Sheehy
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1932 fits on our Timeline 
 

Nicholas Guyatt: The Dartmoor Massacre (1815)

In the spring of 1815, as all Europe fretted about the return of Napoleon Bonaparte, a terrible massacre was perpetrated by British militiamen against American inmates at Dartmoor Prison in England.
This episode has been very nearly forgotten by history. Today the historian Nicholas Guyatt takes us back to the early nineteenth-century, to the days of the very last war between Great Britain and the United States of America, to explain just what happened.
Nicolas Guyatt is Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge. His new book, The Hated Cage, is a forensic, erudite and absorbing account of the Dartmoor Massacre.
Today’s episode comes along with a few fabulous extras. Along with the usual episode page on our website, you can also read a beautifully-illustrated and introduced extract from The Hated Cage on Unseen Histories. And, for those of you who are very interested in this story, we added the full, uncut video of the conversation between Peter and Nicolas on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!
Show notes
Scene One: Ghent, 24 December 1814 – the signing of the treaty that would end the War of 1812.
Scene Two:  Dartmoor, England. 26 March 1815. A mock trial is held by the inmates.
Scene Three: Dartmoor, 6 April 1815. The day of the massacre.
Memento: The effigy of Reuben Beasley
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Nicholas Guyatt
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1815 fits on our Timeline

Bronwen Riley: Journey to Britannia (130 AD)

This week we are setting sail for the Roman province of Britannia to traverse the empire's north-western frontier – Hadrian's Wall. 
Hadrian’s Wall is the largest archaeological feature remaining from Roman Britain, a 73-mile line of fortifications stretching from the River Tyne on the east coast to the Solway Firth on the west. Building was begun by the Emperor Hadrian in 122 AD, during a visit to this remote, unruly corner of his empire. Astonishingly, only five percent has been excavated to date, so new finds and evidence are unearthed surprisingly often.
In this episode we follow in the footsteps of a brilliant young general making his way from Rome to Britain to take up his post as governor of this outpost of the empire in 130AD. Our navigator is Bronwen Riley, a historian who traced this journey in her rigorously researched yet highly readable book, Journey to Britannia. She brings life in the second century into vivid focus by taking us to the dodgy quayside bars of Antica Ostia where the snacks were questionable and the wine was liberally watered down and into the private thoughts of Dutch soldiers on Hadrian’s Wall desperate for a taste of home.
Bronwen Riley is a writer, editor and deviser of historical and literary journeys in Britain, Byzantium and beyond. She has a special interest in the Classical world and in Romania, both life-long passions. She is a director of the Transylvanian Book Festival (transylvanianbookfestival.com). Read more about her creative writing project with the Romanians on Hadrian’s Wall at bronwenriley.co.uk/dacians-on-the-wall. Her latest book Journey to Britannia from the Heart of Rome to Hadrian’s Wall AD130 (Head of Zeus) is now out in paperback.
This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.
Show Notes
Scene One: July 130 AD. Severus and Minicius Natalis prepare to leave Rome, they visit relatives and plan for the long months ahead on the road and in their new lives in Britain. 
Scene Two: October 130 AD. On one of his many peregrinations around the empire, Hadrian visits Egypt (holiday hotspot of the ancient world) with a vast entourage including both his wife and his lover, travelling in unparalleled style and luxury on a ship with purple sails (probably).
Scene Three: 130 AD. Severus reaches Britain and begins his journey northwards taking in the major cities and camps along the way, meeting officials and inspecting his soldiers. 
Momento: A souvenir cup from Hadrian’s Wall in all its enamelled glory but also would love to visit a bookshop to see if some Greek antiquary/interpreter has transcribed any British poetry or Druidic philosophy!
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Bronwen Riley
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 130 AD fits on our Timeline 
 

Katherine Rundell: John Donne, Super-Infinite (1601)

This week we head back to Renaissance England to immerse ourselves in the world of John Donne, one of Britain’s most ingenious poets. We visit playhouses, bear-fighting pits and the poet’s marital bed to better understand Donne’s life and work. 
John Donne led many lives, from a young rake in his early years to archdeacon of St Paul’s in his old age. Born into a grand Catholic family who had suffered persecution under Protestant monarchs, he was intimately acquainted with the cruelty of sixteenth-century England. In particular, the tragic death of his younger brother who, aged just nineteen, was thrown into prison for hiding a Jesuit priest and subsequently caught the plague. 
However Donne’s poetry isn’t defeatist – he was famous in his time for his unusual, intelligent and imaginative work, which used fleas to talk about sex and violence to talk about God. And in the view of our guest today, Katherine Rundell, Donne should be considered alongside William Shakespeare as one of the finest wordsmiths this country has ever produced. That’s why she has written a sparkling new biography of the poet: Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. 
Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. She has written for, amongst others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times: mostly about books, though sometimes about night climbing, tightrope walking, and animals.
This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.
Show Notes
Scene One: 1601. John Donne composing rakish poetry as a man about town - including almost certainly Love’s Growth - attending bear baiting 
Scene Two: 1601. The first performance of Hamlet - which Donne would, perhaps, as a great attender of plays, have gone to see
Scene Three: 1601. John Donne marries the 17 year old Anne and is thrown in the Fleet prison by her father, amid ice-cold winds and lice
Momento: John Donne’s Commonplace book. 
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Katherine Rundell
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1601 fits on our Timeline

Mary Wellesley: Hidden Hands (1413)

This week we head to fifteenth-century Norwich to meet two of the most extraordinary women in medieval England: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. 
Manuscripts are one of the most tangible sources of evidence we have about the distant past and our guest this week, Mary Wellesley, has dedicated her professional life to studying them and persuading them to give up their secrets. In her spellbinding book, Hidden Hands: the Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers, she reveals traces left by the people who made these vital artefacts. As she explains, manuscripts are ‘the only connection we have with these people in the past who would otherwise remain completely anonymous and unknown.' 
In this episode Mary takes us to the early fifteenth century, a period of unease in religion when reformist ideas were circulating and the Church reacted violently against anything that appeared to challenge its orthodoxy.
Mary Wellesley is a research affiliate at the British Library and Medieval Language and Literature course tutor for the library's adult learning programme. She's a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the TLS, amongst others. Hidden Hands is her first book.
This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.
Show Notes
Scene One: Early 1413. The boisterous mystic and serial pilgrim visited the cell of the anchoress, Julian of Norwich. 
Scene Two: Late 1413. Margery sets off on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Scene Three: 1413. The exemplar of the Short Text of Julian’s Revelations was copied.
Momento: Julian of Norwich's autograph copy of the Long Text. 
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Mary Wellesley
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1413 fits on our Timeline 
 
 

Nick Higham: The Mercenary River (1837)

This week we head to nineteenth-century London, when the city's infrastructure was groaning under the strain of its exponential growth and the question of how to get a clean, reliable water supply was of upmost importance. 
We take running water in big cities like London for granted now, but for most of our history we’ve not had access to it. When did we first start pumping water up from the Thames? How did people wash themselves when they didn’t have bathrooms? Why has water been privatised or nationalised at different stages in its history?
These are all questions that my guest today, Nick Higham, answers in his new book The Mercenary River. 
Stretching from the medieval period to the modern, The Mercenary River charts the technological and scientific breakthroughs that made London’s water what it is today. Nick dives into the murky politics of this most essential of resources, and offers vivid glimpses into how water was used in daily routines. 
This episode is sponsored by ACE Cultural Tours, the oldest and most experienced provider of study tours and cultural travel in the United Kingdom. Find out more via their website at www.aceculturaltours.co.uk or speak to their friendly team on 01223 841055.
Show Notes
Scene One: 1837. A few yards back from the banks of the river at Kew Bridge near Brentford, where the Grand Junction Waterworks is building a new pumping station well upriver from its original Thames intake in Chelsea, which was at the mouth of a major sewer. 
Scene Two: 1837. Cornwall, where the talented young engineer of the East London Waterworks, Thomas Wicksteed, has gone to buy a second-hand steam-driven pumping engine for the East London's intake on the River Lea at Old Ford. 
Scene Three: 1837. Buckingham Palace, where the newly-crowned Queen Victoria is taking up residence and is (presumably) unamused to discover there is no bathroom. 
Momento: One of the minute books of the water companies. 
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Nick Higham
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1837 fits on our Timeline 
 

Margaret Willes: In The Shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1666)

This week we revisit one of the most dangerous and dramatic moments in London's history through the prism of one of its most iconic buildings: St. Paul's Cathedral. 
When we think of modern London, the places that spring to mind are Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament and Piccadilly Circus, but the true heart of the city lies far to the east, on Ludgate Hill. St Paul’s Cathedral has been at the centre of London for over a millennium, a hub of religion, politics, news, education, publishing, and of course, shopping. In her beautiful new book, In the Shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, Margaret Willes looks back on the long and lively history of this extraordinary corner of our capital.
As we discover in this episode, Old St Paul’s, as it came to be known, was a major casualty of the great fire that destroyed most of the city in 1666, paving the way for Christopher Wren’s redevelopment and the magnificent building we know today.
Margaret Willes, formerly publisher at the National Trust, is author of several books, including The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Reading Matters, and The Gardens of the British Working Class. She lives in London.
Show Notes
Scene One: 7 January. The shops are at last opening following the pandemic of the Great Plague, which had died down with the cold weather, unlike the current Covid pandemic. Pepys visits a draper's shop in Paternoster Row and buys himself velvet for a coat and camelot for a cloak. He also looks at fabrics to furnish his wife Elizabeth's closet.
Scene Two: 2 September. Pepys' maid, rising early to prepare the Sabbath dinner, wakes him to tell him a fire had broken out in a bakery on Pudding Lane, just at the north end of London Bridge. What seemed at first a small fire, took hold with very strong winds and spread fast. Pepys crosses the river to an alehouse in Southwark and watches with horror the fire taking hold of the whole of the City. 
Scene Three: 12 November. The aftermath of the Great Fire has become a source of fascination to Londoners. Pepys visits the Churchyard to view the corpse of a medieval bishop which had fallen out of his tomb in the Cathedral. 
Memento: Pepys’ parmesan cheese which he buried in his garden to ensure its survival during the great fire.
People/Social
Presenter: Violet Moller
Guest: Margaret Willes
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1666 fits on our Timeline 
 
 

Daniel Levy: The Great Fire of New York (1835)

There is nowhere on earth quite like New York City. In this episode the writer and journalist Daniel Levy takes us back to the early nineteenth-century and to a dramatic, catalytic moment in his home town’s development: the Great Fire of 1835.
*
‘It is only necessary to sit down with a minute map of the country,’ observed the novelist James Fenimore Cooper in the 1820s, ‘to perceive at a glance, that Nature herself has intended the island of Manhattan for the site of one of the greatest commercial towns in the world.’
Fenimore Cooper was writing as New York entered a crucial moment in its development. It was a time, as Daniel Levy explains, when New York was beginning its magical transformation from being a large unruly community to being a large unruly metropolis. One catalytic event that happened during this time was the Great Fire of 1835.
A fierce conflagration that destroyed almost 700 houses and could be seen from great distances, the fire was a powerfully destructive force. But it also ushered in a new phase in New York’s history, as it finally broke out of its old boundaries on the southern rim of Manhattan Island and started to grow.
As ever, there is much more about this episode on our website: tttpodcast.com
Daniel Levy’s book, Manhattan Phoenix is recently published by Oxford University Press.
Show notes
Scene One: May 12, 1835, 10 am at a church on Houston St. Lewis Tappan and others of the American Anti-Slavery Society set off the Postal campaign.
Scene Two: Late in the day October 5, 1835, 15 year old George Templeton Strong made his first entry in his diary, a journal he would write in until his death in 1875.
Scene Three: December 16, 1835 9pm. The start of the Great Fire.
Memento: One of the old NYC wooden water pipes.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guest: Daniel Levy
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
Or on Facebook
See where 1835 fits on our Timeline