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SERIES 2 |
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Melvyn Bragg follows his long historical exploration of the Routes of English with Voices of the Powerless, in which he explores the lives of the ordinary working men and women of Britain at six critical moments across the last 1,000 years.
 Listen to the latest programme
Programme 1 - Industrial Revolution: Man and Manufacture
Melvyn Bragg is in urban Lancashire to explore the the warp and weft of the the Industrial Revolution - how the upheavals of the new mechanisation affected workers who found their traditional trades, like hand-loom weaving, superseded and marginalised by the growth of industrialisation and mechanisation.
He looks in particular at the way children were used in both the new trades and in the traditional world of agriculture.
Using the hundreds of first-hand accounts by ordinary and often impoverished workers, who found themselves frequently thrown out of work at the whim of the mill-owner or a shortage of raw materials, who trudged literally hundreds of miles in search of work, Melvyn Bragg hears, in the true voice of the powerless, the way the Industrial Revolution fashioned men's and women's lives.
Programme 2 - Napoleonic Wars: Below Decks and Boney
The Napoleonic Wars have come down to us as the era of the press-gang, with men seized from the streets of towns and villages and "pressed" into the King's service. Although the extremes have sometimes been exaggerated, the life of the seaman under arms in Nelson's Navy is one of obeying orders and often harsh conditions.
Chatham, the historic dockyard in Kent is the focus for this episode of the series, now a heritage site, but once the birthplace of many of Britain's most famous - and often tough-living - vessels.
But for some, the discipline of a ship of the line was preferable to the savage poverty of life on the land…
Programme 3 - Transportation: A Journey Beyond the Seas
"Sentenced to Transportation to New South Wales for seven years..."
The harsh penalties handed down to wrongdoers at the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries were preferable to death by hanging which was still the sanction in place for more than 150 crimes.
But the sentence still often seemed far from commensurate with the crimes that it punished - often no more than a few pounds stolen by a servant from his master, a sheep thieved at dead of night from a farmer's flock.
Using the first hand testimony of convicts who survived the journey "beyond the seas" as they termed it, Voices of the Powerless is in Tasmania to find out what a sentence of transportation to Van Diemen's Land (as it was still known) really meant in the penal settlements of Hobart and elsewhere.
Programme 4 - Highland Clearances: The Crofters' Farewell
Visiting the Hebridean island of Mull today, it's not long before someone mentions the steep decline in population that the Scottish highlands and islands suffered 150 - 200 years ago.
And it was a depopulation that the crofters were powerless to do anything about - in a phrase that sounds a knell almost as chilling as today's 'ethnic cleansing', the Highland Clearances are still talked of as one of the most harsh pieces of social manipulation in Britain's history.
A long-drawn-out lament mourned in song and poetry ever since.
Programme 5 World War One: The Wagoners at War
The story of British tommies sent 'over the top' to fight the Germans in the trenches of the First World War is one of the most vivid emblems of powerlessness in the face of military discipline and social pressures that required young men to join up and do their duty.
As the voices of the powerless become truly audible with the dawn of the recording era, we travel to East Yorkshire to tell the little-known story of the Wolds Wagoners, a regiment drawn up by the local landlord, almost feudally, from the men on his estate, and to the fallen of whom he raised a strange and beguiling monument adorned with grotesque cartoon images of warfare, unique in Britain.
Programme 6 - Miners in the Depression: Coal and Dole
In Merthyr Tydfil in 1935, thousands of men and women, like many other thousands across the South Wales coalfield seized power to demonstrate against the decade or more of poverty that had destroyed their lives and their livelihoods.
Proud Welsh miners, once amongst the best-paid industrial workers in the country, had found themselves forced into indigence by levels of unemployment that reached as high as 75% as the full effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 yet further tightened the economic squeeze.
Melvyn Bragg is in South Wales to explore what was, in many ways, the beginning of the end of powerlessness that culminated in 1945 with the election of the post-war Labour administration.
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Audio Help
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DON'T MISS |
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Thursday 9.00-9.45am, rpt 9.30-10.00pm. Listen again online or
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CURRENT SERIES |
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Index.
Industrial Revolution: Man and Manufacture
Napoleonic Wars: Below Decks and Boney
Transportation: A Journey Beyond the Seas
World War One: The Wagoners at War
Miners in the Depression: Coal and Dole
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PREVIOUS SERIES |
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Index.
Castles and Cruelty
The Peasants' Revolt
The Reformation
The Plantation of Ireland in the Counties of Armagh and Tyrone.
The English Civil War and the Siege of Chester
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PRESENTER |
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| Melvyn Bragg |
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Melvyn Bragg presents In Our Time for ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4, a series where he and his guests discuss the "Big Ideas" of cultural or scientific significance.
He also presented The Routes of English, his millennial series celebrating 1,000 years of the English language.
Melvyn Bragg was born in 1939 in Wigton, Cumbria - where many of his books are set. He won a scholarship to Oxford to read history, and in 1961 he gained a coveted traineeship with the ´óÏó´«Ã½.
He has presented a number of television series including: Read All about It, Two Thousand Years, and Who's Afraid of the Ten Commandments? and createdThe South Bank Show.
Melvyn presented Start the Week between 1988 and 1998. In his 1998 series On Giant's Shoulders he interviewed scientists about their eminent predecessors.
As well as presenting for Radio 4, he is Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television. He's written 17 novels, the latest of which, The Soldier's Return, won the WH Smith Literary Award.
Melvyn Bragg was made a Life Peer in 1998 and he took the title of Baron Bragg of Wigton in the County of Cumbria.
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