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Descendants from the Armada
Are the so-called ‘black Irish’ descendants of shipwrecked sailors from the Spanish Armada? Making History listener Martin Hurley is an Irishman living in Saudi Arabia. Like many listeners from Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland, he is familiar with the story that many of the sailors from the wrecks of the storm-battered Spanish Armada came ashore and made their homes along the Atlantic coast of Britain and Ireland. It is this, so the story goes, that accounts for the high rate of Rhesus negative blood in the population there today (some 3%) - comparable to levels found in the population of the Basque region of Spain where many of the Armada mariners would have come from.

Making History consulted Pauline Croft, Professor of Early Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London and Dan Bradley, Professor of Molecular Population Genetics at the Smurfit Institute at Trinity College, Dublin.

Heroine of Matagorda
Two Making History listeners contacted the programme about the grave of a little-known heroine in the Southern Necropolis in Glasgow. Her name is Agnes Harkness or Agnes Reston as she was to become known and her gravestone hints at a remarkable story…

The story goes that Agnes took her four year old son with her to join her husband who was fighting in the Peninsular war in 1810. There she helped to nurse the wounded soldiers and in one incident fetched water whilst under fire. However, when they returned to Glasgow after the war life was tough. They found it difficult to survive on an army pension. When James died in 1834, Agnes was thrown into poverty and lived for many years in a Glasgow workhouse.

But, a book by Joseph Donaldson brought the story of her bravery to a new audience and it wasn’t long before newspapers were running a campaign to get her a pension to live on. It’s said that even Queen Victoria contributed to the appeal. Making History consulted Eric Gruber von Arni to find out how typical the story of Agnes Harkness is and whether more women were involved in nursing in the decades before Florence Nightingale.