Category Archives: Radio/Podcasts

Scotland’s post war ‘Tinker Experiment’

Here is a 30 min BBC radio documentary about the British state ‘helping’ Scottish gypsy travellers to ‘settle’. Nothing problematic here at all folks… move along, get along. Go, move, shift…

“The idea that the UK Government, working in partnership with Scottish local authorities and church groups, could take children from their families and put them into residential homes to ‘knock the Tinker out of the child’ is now considered to be cultural genocide.”

Charlie McCarthy, Bylines Scotland

BBC radio show – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001p77p?fbclid=IwAR1eXXX76R4FUJoz_7ti46uqAzfPKCjQrhYBYqX4VYb39O331yxvK6paXH

And here are some articles about it –
https://bylines.scot/lifestyle/history/the-tinker-experiment/

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/tinker-experiment-campaigners-accuse-scottish-government-of-ignoring-them-3785329

(1381) John Ball’s Speech before the Peasant’s Revolt by Michael Rosen

Our very own Rachel Rose Reid has written and performs a fantastic translation of this sppech which we hope to get recorded sometime soon. In the meantime Michael also does a good job, although I fine many words too detached from modernity to land with the casual listener:

Land reform and the Roman Empire (15 mins)

Mike Duncan’s two podcasts, The History of Rome and Revolutions have been a huge influence on the show.

I was relistening to the The History of Rome again recently, and I wanted to flag up this one about Tiberius Gracchus the first Roman leader to seriously attempt land reform:

mp3 – apple podcast

The audio quality isn’t great but it is short and really on point. Unsettling how many similarities there are with our present day, historic themes do seem to play out on repeat. In fact this episode is also not too different to some of the land reform themes that are on display when Mike covers the Mexican Revolution too. If you also listen to the previous episode 28, that might help with additional context.

https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/the_history_of_rome/2008/11/29–tiberius-gr.html

Popular Protest in Early Modern England (47 mins)

Yale University lecture on Popular Protest by Professor Keith E. Wrightson is taken from his Open Yale online course Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts which has links to all the lectures as videos – the one on Popular Protest can be found as a podcast here or in video form here.

If you read our blogs often, you’ll know that we are massive fans of the podcast in the herd. This one was sent over to us by Peter Bearder who has recently launched an excellent book called Stage Invasion, on the history of spoken word and poetry.

BBC ‘In Our Time’ on the Highland Clearances (51 mins)

I’ve posted links to Melvyn Braggs ‘In Our Time‘ podcasts/radio shows a number of times on this website but it has to be said that I’ve always been a little weary of them… something about the fact that the large majority of the guests are Oxbridge academics and the number of massively posh accents always leaves a little bell of warning ringing somewhere that I’m getting the official ruling classes imperial spin on history.

I remember having a post show email disagreement with one of Melvyn’s academic guests after their ‘Putney Debates’ show managed to completely ignore the issue of land during the civil war period which still seems a critical oversight from other things I’ve learnt and read.

I’ve had a number of people email me the recent episode on the Highland Clearances (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tc4tm) which seemed quite revisionist to my mind when I listened to it. I thought nothing more of it at the time, but then someone posted a fine response via Bella Caledonia which I think is worth bringing to your attention: http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2018/03/11/in-our-time-but-not-in-our-voice/

15th Anniversary of 2003 Scottish Land Reform Act (70 mins)

BBC Radio Scotland on the 15th anniversary of the 2003 Scottish land reform act,  interviewing many of the people key to the reform bill happening – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrtq1/episodes/downloads

It is primarily focused on the right to roam aspect of the act and it gives the best insight into how key battles were won of anything i’ve seen, heard or read.

Seventy Years in the Planning (60 mins)

BBC Radio 4 presents Will Self walking the London green belt in search of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act which optimistically tried to end the post-war British conflict between field and city. He retraces a countryside ramble he took with his father, the journalist, town planner and political scientist Peter Self – a leading exponent of the principles enshrined in the ’47 Act. Will argues that the public consensus to build a New Jerusalem has been squandered in the past seventy years, leading to the present day housing crisis. He goes back to first principles and argues that the offer made in 1947 by the Minister of Town and Country Planning, Lewis Silkin to build a better Britain is as relevant today as it was then. Will says that if it was an opportunity missed, then the fault doesn’t lie exclusively with the planning system, rather with our lack of desire to make the planning system work.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08k15lh

Farmerama at the Oxford Real Farming Conference (30 mins)

This podcast features some songs from the singers circle we ran at the Oxford Real Farming Conference in 2016. It includes the wonderful Ed Hamer singing the Farmer’s ABC!

Do check it out (episode #6) via http://farmerama.co/

Farmerama

Ask the Fellows That Cut the Hay (60 mins)

fellows-hayIn this BBC Archive On Four, historian Alan Dein celebrates the centenary of his mentor George Ewart Evans, collector of Suffolk farming tales. Evans began by chatting to his neighbours over the fireside in the 1950’s and transcribing stories about poaching, shepherding, smuggling and ditching.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rv8yk

The talk was of a hardscrabble life, of leaky roofs and meals of pea soup and pollard dumplings and beef only at Christmas with occasional festivities like the Whitsun fair.

Evans came from a Welsh mining village and he sympathised with the labourers’ stories about the tyranny of the trinity of the parson, squire and farmer. He was a sympathetic listener who asked allowed his community to speak for itself and he captured the stories of people whose traditions had been unbroken for generations, who worked on the land before mechanisation and who believed in magic and folk wisdom and had intuitive understanding of working with animals.

Evans’ eleven books about the working lives and folk stories of Blaxhall are a portrait of every facet of his village and paved the way for books and programmes, both fiction and not fiction, about British agricultural life.

John Ball and the Peasants’ Revolt (60 mins)

braggBBC Radio 4 hour long documentary by Melvyn Bragg on John Ball and the Peasants’ Revolt – connecting it with the English Civil War, the Diggers, the Levellers, and Blake’s words which became the song ‘Jerusalem’.

This has now been successfully cleansed from the internet so lucky I took my own backup of it to share with you here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04d8khr/melvyn-braggs-radical-lives-1-now-is-the-time-john-ball

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/voices/voices_reading_revolt.shtml

Cry Freehold – documentary on land (38 mins)

BBC Radio 4 being unusually frank here, connecting land and with the housing crisis in the England. Presented by Chris Bowlby: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03k0s5q

Hugh Jones from New Listener has written a transcript of the show which you can now find here – http://www.newlistener.co.uk/home/cry-freehold-the-transcript/

Below is a youtube video of the show – I also have it on mp3 if it gets taken down from youtube and you are keen to hear it. drop me a line…

‘There is a housing crisis in many parts of Britain. But is land the real issue? Chris Bowlby goes to Oxford, where the problem is acute, to investigate.

He hears how a dynamic city can end up with virtually nowhere to build, how land prices help make homes so costly and how land shortage creates invisible victims.’