Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Victorian Wardrobe Secrets

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

If someone from the future looked inside your wardrobe, what could they find out about your life? That you like going out to parties? Maybe your work uniform is in there? Or perhaps there is still evidence of fashion trends of yore, like the oh-so-low rise jeans of the early noughties….We can find out so much about people, culture and society through our clothes, and it’s the same for our ancestors.Today Kate is joined by fashion historian Dr Kate Strasdin Betwixt the Sheets to delve into the wardrobe secrets of a real life Victorian woman, from deadly dyes, to an actual pirate flag.Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. Producer: Sophie Gee. Mixed by Joseph Knight.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Every for Twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, everybody. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adultery way, and you should be an adult too.

Do you know, I don't actually think that this is the rudest episode that we have ever done. We're talking mostly about Victorian fashion and fabric samples. So it's not super risque. It is really interesting, though, but I think that basically I enjoy doing the fair-dos warning so much that I'm going to do them regardless of the subject. So fair-dos! If anyone is offended by Victorian fashion samples, this is your chance to back out now. And for the rest of you, let's do this.

If someone from the future looked inside your wardrobe, what would they find out about your life? In my case, it's that I have substantial Clarnedette. But what might they find out? about you that you like going to parties? Maybe your work uniform is in there. Or have you maricondoed all of your socks? And they're all neatly rolled up in colour-coordinated fashion in order of size. Perhaps there's still evidence of fashion trends from yesteryear in there.

Like the, oh God, the low-rise jeans from the early naughties. And I'm told that they are making a comeback. Slight deviation now. But GEMSI, no, no, no, no. Don't do that. Leave those things in the gutter where they belong. They were awful. Sorry, that was just a really scary flashback there. Don't do it. But we can find out so much about people, culture and society through their clothes. And it's the same for our ancestors. Of course it is.

Today, we are doing this. We are people from the future looking into the wardrobe of a real Victorian woman. We're going to find out about the kind of deadly dyes. that she was using to make her clothes, and what she was doing with an actual pirate flag. Yes, really. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a fire. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel so done. Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister.

Today we are looking into the pages of a Victorian woman's fashion diary, a diary that was discovered in a flea market. It's a diary that this woman kept of all the fabric samples from her clothes throughout her life. And when the diary fell into the hands of fashion historian Kate Strasden, she spent the next few years researching the pieces of fabric and discovered a fascinating story about the owner, Mrs Anne Sykes, a story which took her from the Lancashire Mills to see, Singapore to royalty and the Pirates of Borneo.

We're going to be hearing intimate secrets of a normal woman's life told through what she wore. And it's an episode that my mum is particularly excited for, because she taught textiles and fashion for her entire career, and she's a dab hand with the sewing machine even now. And if anybody could equal Kate Strasden's excitement for Victorian fashion samples, it's my mum. So mum, this one is for you. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

only Kate Strasden. How are you? I'm good, thanks. It's so nice to be here and chatting with you. So thanks for having me. I am extremely excited to be talking to you. I was supposed to talk to you last week, but I got the flu. And I got the flu when I was at my mum's house. And so I had to cancel it. And I was explaining to my mum what the show was about. And she got so excited. She's a textile teacher. Like she taught textiles all of her life. And when I was telling her about your book and about all the samples, honestly, I thought she was going to take the podcast. So I'm now actually. doubly excited to be talking to you because she's got me all fired up about it. So tell me about your book, The Dress Diary of Mrs. Anne Sykes, Secrets from Victorian Woman's Wardrobe.

It was one of those things that kind of landed in my lap entirely unexpectedly. It's been such a joy to actually unravel all of these things. So basically, I'm a lacemaker, which is one of those skills that hardly anybody learns these days. It's very time-consuming and I was by far the youngest of the group that I went to here in Devon because it's a very old tradition in Devon making bobbin lace and one of the ladies that attended the group came up to me after one of the days that we'd had making lace and she said oh you work in textiles don't you you were in fashion doing history and things and I've got a load of stuff that I need to get rid of. Would you like? like it. So I went down to her apartment and had the most amazing afternoon there. It was like a

treasure trove apartment. She'd just amassed so much stuff. It was dress patterns that went right from the 1940s through to the 80s, boxes and boxes of them. There was haberdashery, trimmings, rolls of all sorts of things. It was just beautiful. And I even took an old Treadle Singer-Sown machine home with me as well, but back of my car was like it was practically scraping the floor. The very last thing that she took out of a trunk at the bottom of her bed was this parcel and she'd forgotten all about it. As soon as she saw it, it said, oh, I'd completely forgotten about this.

And when she unwrapped it from the brown paper, it was this volume. You could tell immediately that it was just this enormous scrapbook of some kind full of, as I discovered, fabrics with these little captions. written above it and it was like a spine tingling moment because as soon as I saw it I thought, oh, this is a special thing. So that was how I came to acquire it and there it went from there. I mean, amongst everything else that you managed to find in this treasure trove, what we'll talk about here is essentially a scrapbook and I'm going to ask you to describe it in a minute like it's sized everything, but it's got over 2,000 fabric swatches in it with handwritten notes above

every single one. So this is effectively a diary of someone's life through fabric. Yes, exactly that. So the lady that gave it to me didn't know anything about it. It had been given to her in the 1960s and it had come from a stall in Camden Town. There was a weekend market. And I think it could easily have just been thrown away. It didn't cost very much. It had just kind of landed on this junk stall. And it's a bit bigger than A4 size. It is covered in this bright pink silk. So underneath you can see that originally it was like a marbled paper cover. So it would have looked a bit like an old accounts ledger with like a red leather spine. And then it was covered in this pink silk. But it's much fatter now than it was originally. And yet it's just full of over

2,000 swatches of fabric. They range from cotton to silk. There's wool. There's lace. There's some interior textiles, it kind of covers the whole range of fabric and then names and dates. So I knew it was from the 19th century because even just a sort of brief scan of it showed that it was sort of 1830s onwards, but that was it. It just came to me like that. What were your thoughts when you first held that in your hand when you were just having a look at it? I mean, it sounds so rare to me. Things like that rare, fabric diaries. Are there other examples of this? No, it's really rare. I was aware of there's a very famous one at the V&A in London, which was kept by a lady called Barbara Johnson. And hers was a very practical book that kept her track of her finances.

So in the late 18th, early 19th century, she was an unmarried woman who had kept a record of her purchases of cloth that were made into garments. So she would pin in a piece of fabric and write above it how much it cost her, where she'd got it, what it was made into. It's got over 100 samples in it, but incredibly rare. I'd never really seen anything else like it in the UK. And so I knew just the scope of this one, just the sheer fact that it had many, many hundreds of swatches in made it practically unique. And so I was completely overexcited immediately.

But also kind of at that stage, because she didn't know anything about it, she didn't have a provenance, there was no, oh, this book belongs to at the beginning or anything like that. So it was a total unknown. And that's where the sleuthing starts. of trying to think, okay, how can I find out who kept this?

And, yeah, what a journey that was. Did you feel this tremendous urge to call up the V&A museum and go, no, no, no, no, no, mine's much better than yours. Yeah, look at this. Look at this. There's loads. I think just the fact that I knew, and I did say to the lady that gave it to me, I said this really is a museum piece.

I didn't want to be all grabby hands about it. Wow, that's so restrained of you. I know. But she was adamant. She didn't really want to go into the quite complicated logistics of museum donations and said, no, no, no, I want you to have it. I know that you'll do something with it. And thank God she did because I had my normal day job and kids at home and all this

because I had it at home, it meant that I could say, right, I'm just going to spend an hour starting to work my way through this diary, transcribing the captions and see what I can actually discover. and I think if it had been a museum piece, that's a much more difficult thing to do, whereas I could just sit in my lounge and do it with it on my knee. Oh, don't listen, Conservators. Million dollar question. Who did this fabric diary belong to?

Well, there are over 100 different names in the book, and it wasn't surprisingly immediately obvious because the name Anne Sykes recurred frequently, but always in the third person. So there were many, many captions that said, Anne Sykes's morning dress or Anne Sykes cloak, all of that kind of thing. And she was cagey about it. I think it was almost a bit of distance.

She didn't want to make it all about her. But luckily for me, there was just once where she, it's almost like an accidental slip. Like she kind of forgot herself for a moment. And just on one swatch of printed cotton, she wrote above it, Anne Sykes's dress, May 1840. And then it just says in tiny, tiny writing. In fact, I had to get a magnifying glass. It says the first dress I wore in Singapore. And that was it.

That was just the one and only moment that she went, oh, hi, here I am. And there were names and dates listed against things like wedding dresses. So her wedding dress was in there alongside her husband's. But again, written in the third person. So it said Anne and Adam Sykes wedding clothes without actually identifying them. So once I had her just kind of waving really from the page going, oh, hi, it's me. that meant I could start to find other people. So was she just cutting parts of her clothes out and putting them in a diary?

Like, what was she writing about them? She wasn't writing very much, and that's the thing. It's not a diary as we might know it, because she doesn't give very much away. She is pretty sparse in her descriptions. Sometimes she writes someone's name and date only. Sometimes she might say Emma Taylor's neck ribbon or something like that. So you get a sense of who it belonged to and what they used it for. but mainly she's very, very close about what it is.

So she wasn't bearing down on people with a pair of scissors, becoming the bane of everybody's life. She wasn't doing that. This is very much the period where people would be buying their fabric and then taking it to their dressmaker and having it made, and invariably there would be scraps left over that belonged to you because you bought a fabric. So I think the idea was that she was asking her friends and family

whenever they had a new garment made, or can I have the scraps that you've got left over? And then she would cut them out these kind of octagonal shapes and pastes them into the book with the name of whoever it was. And I think in a way it was like a sort of souvenir album or an autograph album. Whereas lots of people did that kind of thing in the 19th century, it was usually pressed flowers or poetry or those kinds of scraps and much less often was it about textiles.

So it's not that uncommon, but to create this record of the people that you know and love through their clothes doesn't seem to be as popular. I've never heard of anybody doing that before, ever. She was a Lancashalas, wasn't she? She was. So what I was able to find, once I'd found Anne and Adams' wedding certificate, then, of course, her whole family starts to unravel through the census records and things.

So she was born in Clitherow in 1816, and she was born into a comfortable family. So her father was called James Burton and he was a cotton spinner and had mills all around the Tilsley area. So he'd four cotton mills. She had grown up in a very new money, middle class, comfortable setting in Tilsley. And so textiles were kind of at the heart of her life, I guess, because they lived in a place called Factory Street right next to one of the big mills. And so it was, yeah, right at the heart of her whole life. And you have found some really extraordinary fabric swatches,

because it's not just this is a pair of socks or the one. You found pirate flags? Have I read that correctly? There's a pirate flag in this diary? Yeah, exactly. About 18 months after they'd got married, Anne and Adam went to Singapore. They left Liverpool in July 1840,

and then they arrived on the 1st of November that year. and then they lived there for seven years because Adam was a merchant. So he had been given the job of running operations for his firm in Singapore. And it was a kind of emerging merchant settlement at that point. And she lived there for a long time. And she would have been very much part of the European social scene that was happening there. And there is on the top of this page, it's just a very kind of ratty bit of red flannel. It doesn't look like anything very exciting, especially compared to all the luscious silks and everything else.

but the caption above it just stopped you in your tracks because it says part of the pirate flag captured by the Admiral Borneo 1845. And my research took me down that particular wormhole and it was someone called Admiral Sir Thomas Cochran and he was on anti-piracy duties in the region at the time because it was a really very lucrative setup and so pirates would regularly raid the shipping routes

and he was tasked with taking them down. By all accounts, he was a real pompous, what's it? And he did end up in Singapore sometimes to restock his ship and would go to the balls and the various parties. And at some point, Anne collared him and asked for a piece of fabric for her book, I guess. And that was what he gave her. So, yes, I do wonder in that case if she was probably quite annoying. If he was as pompous as the record suggests, yeah, I imagine that maybe he found her. a bit irritating. But a pirate flag though, I mean, that's not just important to fashion history.

That's important to naval history, to just human history. Yes, there's a lot of that in the book. You realise, I think those of us who just love dress and textiles and its many sort of cultural associations know that dress is never just about nice clothes, smart frocks. And that's something that I think as a dress historian, you can fight a bit. People can still, even now, be quite dismissive about dress and fashion and textiles, that it's not the serious bit of academic study or historical inquiry. But what I realised through the various tales that unfolded through this book, I mean, I knew already, but what became easy to tell was to just show how it's central to so much, It's industry, it's technology, it's inventiveness, global politics.

It's so much. And it's right there at the heart of it all. Yeah, I think that was the thing that it just seemed to act as a sort of vessel to show off all of those different aspects. I'll be back with Kate after this short break. We're about to witness the first coronation at Westminster Abbey in 70 years. And gone medieval from history hit is your perfect companion for the event. From the earliest English coronation records

To what the royal regalia used in the ceremony means From the surprising origins of the recognition part of the service To the lavish banquets that took place afterwards I'm Matt Lewis And I'm Dr Kat Jarman And on gone medieval in April We'll be exploring the medieval origins of this feast of pageantry We'll try to pick out the key moments for you to watch

And trace their origins back into the mists of time We've got some great guests and fascinating topics to lift the lid on a moment when, let's face it, people all around the world will have gone medieval. Subscribe and follow Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. There's a fabric that's collected in there, and I can't remember the name of it now, but it began with B, and as soon as I read it out to my mum's went, oh my, yeah, the thing. Was it its morning dress? It was a fabric that started with B.

Would that be? Oh, it's gone. No, I can't remember it at all. Yeah. Tell me about the moment. morning dress? The morning dress is really interesting because the lady that's in the Hannah Kubra, she's a lovely friend of Anne's. I say lovely like I know her. I don't know. She might have been horrible, but anyway, she was a friend of Anne's and she sent swatches of the morning dress that she wore when her mother had died. And so you get that really complex etiquette that was really important in the 19th century around that outward display of grief and how you were demonstrating that

through your clothes and it was very codified. It was easy to tell from someone's clothes at what stage of morning they were in. Yeah, that was just another aspect of the human experience at that time that came through the fabrics. I have remembered the word. It was bombazine. Oh, Bombazine, yes, Bombazine. That's particularly in the kind of early to mid-19th century, very much associated with mourning. And then a bit later on, the kind of crepe, which came from court holds. The idea with both Bombazine and Crape is that it's got a matte finish. So you shouldn't have anything in that 19th century code of mourning. In that very first full stage of morning, you shouldn't wear fabrics that have a reflection or have any kind of shiny surface. It had to be matte. And so Crape and

Bombazine have this very flat kind of matte finish. So yeah, quite simply that's it. No reflections, please. I had no idea that if you were a Victoria. funeral and someone's fabric was a little bit too shiny that you could look down your nose at them and just go, Jesus, have you seen Sarah over there in that shiny fabric? Yeah, strict. Well, see, there we go. I didn't know that. And quite dangerous some of this stuff, because you've got a whole thing about poisonous dyes in this book. Yes. So what you see through each decade, because the book runs right up until the 1870s, so you get decades worth of changing styles. And what you see in the pages that come from the 1850s, are these bright purples and magentas, and it speaks of that fashionability of women, even wherever they live.

Fashion didn't just sort of happen to people that lived in London. So they were really cutting edge women. And what you see is that they have the aniline dyes that were invented in the 1850s. They're kind of like early synthetics. And it's a way of fixing very bright colours to cloth, which hadn't previously been possible, particularly around the purples. However, because there wasn't a great deal of legislation around things like chemical processes and the kinds of materials that you could use at that time, it did mean that in certain respects, it was incredibly toxic.

So Shields Green, for example, was a dye that was used in the making of things like artificial flowers and dyeing certain dresses are very bright green, but it was made using white arsenic. And so the dressmakers seems strange. flower girls would often become the victims of arsenical poisoning. And so it was very dangerous. There were really dangerous aspects to these kinds of fashionable shades. And I mean, anyone that's interested in this, Alison Matthews-David has got an amazing book called Fashion Victims. Oh, that's a great title. Yeah, isn't it? She really goes into the details of how these poisonous dyes could create

skin conditions and all sorts of poisonous things. The mercury, hence the name of a mad hatter, because the hatting industry was rife with mercury use, which was used to help to soften the fabric. So that's where you get the name mad as a hatter. Was it dangerous to wear? Or was it just in the dying process? Yes, they were sometimes. So for example, people would complain of certain stockings, for example. So striped stockings were very popular for a time. But often the coloured bit of the stripe did have a chemical in it that was an irritant. And so people would report, it would look like they were still wearing their stockings when they took them off, because the stripy bits had actually caused a horrible rash. So yes, some really awful kind of reactions to

the unregulated chemicals that were being used. Kate, is your diary, like, radioactive? Is it safe to handle? I'm a bit worried about you now. I think if I'd have had any bright, bright greens in there, From that period, I would have wondered. But luckily, the aniline dyes, the purple dies, didn't suffer that kind of toxicity. So I think I'm all right. So the creator of the diary, Mrs. Anne Sykes, starts in Lancashire. She somehow ends up with pirate flags in Borneo. But Queen Victoria actually figures in your book. How did she become involved in this diary? It can't have been Miss Sykes was trying to get some of her dress, following around with a pair of scissors, trying to cut. bits off. Why is Queen Victoria significant? No. That is a mystery because, I mean, interestingly, the diary kind of tracks the reign of Queen Victoria because it does start in 1838. Queen Victoria came to the throne just a year before. So it kind of closely allies with that, but there are some royal samples of fabric in the book, weirdly. There's a piece that belonged to the Princess Royal,

which was Queen Victoria's daughter. And then there are a couple of pieces that belonged to Queen Adelaide. she was King William the fourth's wife, widow, who was the king before Queen Victoria. And then there is a piece that belonged to Queen Alexandra, the Princess of Wales, who was Queen Victoria's daughter-in-law. That's one of those tantalising kind of mysteries because she writes that they belonged to them. And with the Queen Adelaide swatches, it says that she got them in Malta in 1839. And I checked the records and Queen Adelaide was in Malta at that time. So it checks out, but how she came to have acquired them, I have no idea. It's a real mystery that. It's one of the few celebrity swatches that feature in the book. And I have no idea what they're doing there.

Who she knew or who she met. Yeah, they are a puzzle. Was Queen Victoria a bit of a fashion icon then? Because, I mean, when we think of her today, we tend to think of her in that proper Victorian front phase where it was all black. But was she like a sort of a fashion trailblazer? Certainly in her earlier years, when she came to the throne and took more control of her life and got out of the clutches of her mother and her guardian, she did have much more fashionable clothes. She was kind of slim and into fashion. And you see that in reports when she travelled. She went on a state visit to France in the 1850s and there was great discussion about her wardrobe and what she was going to take. So she definitely was much more interested in clothes in those early years of her reign. But of course, as soon as Albert had

died from the early 1860s onwards, that was it. She broke out the bombazine. Yeah, she did. She hit the bombazine. It was all about crape. I mean, there were changes. She changed her morning. You can kind of distinguish between the different stages of morning that she was in.

But yeah, pretty much that was it. I've just suddenly thought, now, maybe the reason Victorian dresses were so long with so many layers is because people like Mrs. Sykes were running around with pairs of scissors trying to cut bits off for a scrapbook. Yeah, there's. so much fabric in those gowns, particularly when you look at those swatches, they're only a few inches square in the diary. And the patterns are crazy, some of them. But then you do have to kind of explode it upwards into this whole garment with yards and yards of fabric. And imagine it as

these great billowing dresses. Do you know what really came through loud and clear when I was looking through this was that our own attitudes to fashion and to cloth today are so vastly different to the way that they were in the 19th century. That seems like a really obvious thing to say. But with the advent of fast fashion, and we have so much stuff, even when we think we don't have enough stuff, we have so much stuff that we've lost sight of the fact that fabric was very precious. Yeah. And I think the 19th century is often held up as this kind of, ooh, weren't they foolish? And their clothes were ridiculous and, oh, they couldn't move in them, which is absolutely not true. But I think we could learn a lot from them about approaches to dress. They were really thoughtful

and mindful about how they used cloth, how they refashioned it. Cloth cost a lot of money. And so you couldn't be profligate about how you were spending your money. Not that they would have used the term sustainable, obviously, but the idea that you did invest in clothes and fabric and that it mattered as objects that you owned, I think there's an awful lot we could learn about approaches. to dress. But you don't have to go back that far at all when people would have had one outfit of clothing for the week and one for Sunday best and maybe one for school. If you think now about all the outfits that people have and about single wear fashion, we're so far removed from the actual value of these garments. Yeah, yeah. And it was because when you look at 18th century,

wills, for example, the sort of hierarchy of cloth, it features second only to furniture. So when people were leaving their earthly goods to their descendants, furniture came first in clothing is often the second most expensive thing that people are leaving in their wills. And it actually meant something. It cost. So of course you're going to look after it and value it and think, oh, okay, what can I remake this into? I can't just throw it away or not wear it, just leave it in the back wardrobe. Do you know what happened to Mrs Sykes? What's the last fabric entry? What happened to her? Well, she obviously got a bit bored of doing it. So by the 1870s, it sort of peters out. Her handwriting got quite a lot bigger. She didn't bother writing names in there. It was like she lost interest by

the 1870s. But actually, after they returned from Singapore, they returned to Lancashire and lived in various addresses. And then by 1890, they had moved to Bispom, just north of Blackpool, and lived there in a very nice house up on the hill overlooking the sea. Adam died in 1888 and then Anne died in 1890. And I did go and find them. So last January, on a very wet and windy day, I went to Bispom Churchyard and found they're both buried under this beautiful carved Celtic cross headstone and I planted a little flower at the bottom just to kind of thank her for leaving it behind so that I could find it. And yeah, it was lovely because it was the first time I thought, oh, well, here she is. I know so much about you and your friends and your family through this book

and here you are right there. What do you think the legacy of this diary is? Because it's such a unique document. What do you think its legacy is? I think it's about women whose stories often don't get told. So very often it would have been her husband traditionally, and in fact the histories were written about her husband in as much as he was one of the founding merchants of the Singapore community. And so it was always him that was being recorded as attending the theatre or contributing to civic things going on. And the women are, she's just living her life and nobody's writing about people like that. they don't generally leave much of a record behind. And so I think that's its legacy, is that it's those stories of women

whose stories have very much been forgotten about. It shines a light on those women. And where is the diary today? Have you got it stashed somewhere? It's just there, right next to me. Right next to me in this room. Is it? Can you hold it up? Yeah, I can.

I'll describe it to you. So it's in a big brown cardboard box. I have it wrapped up in acid-free tissue paper. I do come from a museum background, just in case anyone's listening with horror thinking, what the hell, I do look after it properly. But it does mean I have access to it. Can you see how fat it is? That looks like a book from Hogwarts or something.

That is such a chunky, oh, look at it. It does. It looks like some kind of magical volume. That is so beautiful. Absolute treasure. Do you think one day you'll give it to a museum? Yes, definitely, definitely. because I would love for people to be able to study it and enjoy it for future reference,

but there's still so much to do. I'm still finding. I've even had people contacting me since the book has been published saying, oh, you mentioned this person in the diary. I know who that is, someone that I didn't know who it was. You know, I've done research on this branch of the family, and so there's still, even now, lots of stuff that's emerging. Don't give it up yet, Kate. No, you keep hold of it. No, I'm not done with it yet. Kate, you have been amazing to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and this incredible book, where can they find you?

I'm on Instagram and Twitter at Kate Strasden, so you can find me there. And also, I teach at Falmouth University, so it's very easy to email me via that account. And then, yeah, feel free to have a read of the book. I'm just really glad it's out there and people can read about Anne Sykes. Me too. What an amazing piece of research. Oh, thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been an absolute treat.

Oh, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow along, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I promise you, we do read all of the reviews. And if there's a topic that you'd like us to explore, or if you just wanted to say hello,

you can now email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Until next time, betwixters, This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds.