Dan Snow's History Hit - 4. Story of England: Industrial Revolution

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Modern England as we know it started in the industrial heart of Ironbridge in Shropshire- now a verdant gorge that once was black with smog, fire and slag heaps. Dan tries his hand at casting iron at one of the last working foundries in the country and gets the scoop on the scandals of Georgian high society with historian Catherine Curzon. The Regency period was a wild time of £15,000 pineapples, the marriage market and the tell-all memoir of a famous courtesan who named and shamed the Duke of Wellington. But the new wealth England experienced came at a price; Dan traces the dark history of Europe’s addiction to sugar and Britain’s slave trade, while actor Paterson Joseph recounts the powerful words of Black Georgians who spoke truth to Britain’s imperial power and fought for its abolition.Dan goes back to the Victorian times at the Blists Hill Living Museum in Telford to discover just how gruelling work at the coalface of the industrial revolution was and how great ideas...and not so great ideas... changed the daily lives of Victorians with the help of Collections Curator Kate Cadman.Produced by Mariana Des Forges. Edited and sound designed by Dougal Patmore and artwork by Teet Ottin.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. I'm in a foundry now and it's all going off. We're just waiting for the iron to heat up to around 1,450 degrees centigrade.

There's a huge furnace in front of me. I can just see through one little hole, that observation hole is just white hot in there. I've loaded charges. That's like baskets of ingredients, all bits of iron, a limestone, which has the effect of, oh, there we go, here comes the iron. Here comes the iron.

It's like a bright orange, molten river of fire, like a little waterfall. It's white hot, it's a kind of orange that I don't think I've ever seen before. It's already cooling down so the two guys are picking up this bucket and they're walking along a line of moulds and pouring this liquid iron into the moulds where it will take intricate shapes that have been carved out in these sand moulds. There might be door stops, there might be parts for cars or motorbikes, depending on what they choose to make on the day. Quick pour, three seconds, fill up the mould and then they start cooling and within five or six minutes they'll still be very hot, molten hot, but they'll have taken the shape

and you'll be able to take the sand moulds away. I'm in a place called Ironbridge, a name that gives you the clue that this is the very heart. It's the birthplace of England's industrial revolution. And it's dominated by a massive bridge made of iron. The world's first. The transition from human power to machines in Britain, well, it changed the world. Suddenly, we had the ability to create almost unlimited energy.

And that transformed transport, transformed trade, warfare, migration, our food. And we now know the environment. The modern world started in this beautiful gorge in Shropshire. We sped through the Stone Age, the Romans, the bloody battles of the medieval period. We're in Kenilworth Castle yesterday, for the golden age of Elizabethan England, and now we're whizzing forward into the Georgian and Victorian eras. When modern England, as we recognise it,

the shops, the streets, the houses, the family structures, it all began to take shape. With the help, as always, of expert guides, I'm hopping on the train of industrial change. I'm going to steam straight into the scandals of Regency High Society. We'll be looking at the ideas of the great inventors of the Victorian age, but I'm also going to hear the searing critique of the black Georgians who spoke truth to Britain's imperial power and fought for the abolition of the slave trade. This is my story of England, episode four, Industrial Revolution. All the museums that I've dragged my children to over the years in this country that I love,

Bliss Hill, Victorian Town, has been the number one box office smash hit. It is a fantastic replica of a late Victorian town, about 1900. And the worrying truth is, there's parts of it that now look more familiar to me as a child than the modern high street does, which I think means I'm getting very old indeed. The sweet shop there with its glass jars, magical. We got the pub, we got the haberdashery, the druggist. I love the druggist, all the medicines and herbal remedies piled up on the shelf there. Iron merchants.

And the other really striking thing walking through this town is just how much things have changed in the industrial age. This is a recognisably modern high street with advertising trying to get people to spend money on objects, shows, commodities. To think that 100 years before this Britain had been overwhelmingly rural. Many, many people working on subsistence farms. This now feels that we're in a modern consumer society with the organs of capitalism trying to get people to spend any money they have or perhaps don't have. And also what is so important to remember is where we are in Britain. We're in the West Midlands. This was the industrial heart of the country. Up here in the 18th century changes were underway that would transform our ability to make

stuff. And from 1770s right up until, well, 20th century really, Britain was the industrial workshop of the world. I'm just walking through town now looking for the collections curator Kate Cadman. She's going to talk me through the Industrial Revolution. Hello Kate how are you? I'm great thanks how are you? Very nice to be I'm great. Now I am friends with some people from Scotland, some people from Northumberland and there's a bit of banter about exactly where the Industrial Revolution started so now why do you claim that the Iron Bridge Gorge is where it all happened we call ourselves one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution i mean the seminal thing is actually abraham darby smelting iron

using coke rather than charcoal which enables much more mass production of iron but it's also development of things like mold technology and people like John Wilkinson is in the area as well and he's classed as the father of sort of machine tools so you've got the combination of a lot of iron production and technology developing at an amazing rate. Wilkinson Mountain School, Iron Mad Wilkinson. That's the man, the man who built the first iron boat and didn't he have an iron coffin as well? I wouldn't be surprised. Tell me why the Ironbridge Gorge is, first of all the geography, why does it all happen here? It's not Baxton is it?

No it isn't and it is more about the geology. I mean the geography comes in as well but the geology is the thing. This is one of the most really wide ranging mineral areas in the world, literally. And what you've got is things like lots of different sorts of coal people think coal's black stuff that burns no you need the right sort of coal for the right purpose so certain coals are very good for coking for instance other coal you actually call steam coal because that works on steam engines so if you've got the right fuel then that's half your problem solved and we've got a very wide range of coals in this area. Lots of different sorts of clays, limestone and iron ore so all

the ingredients you need. And the gorge, big glacial gorge, carved it all out which makes mining a lot easier, it's a lot closer to the surface. Indeed because a lot of the early stuff is surface ones and it's later on that you get the deep mines and of course that is when the whole story begins to sort of revolve around itself because the steam engines enable you to then dig deep mines because you can pump them out. All the different aspects into the revolution work together. So we can imagine this area which now is just ringing with bird song, you smell the wild garlic, there's forget-me-nots, I mean it's a very green area this now weirdly and yet this would have looked like Mordor.

It would. When you see even photographs from the late 19th century, the area is absolutely devastated. There are few trees, there's almost no undergrowth, there are spoil heaps everywhere, because, of course, nobody bothered much about, you know, what they did with the refuse. The smoke, it's so industrialised, it's unbelievable.

It's amazing to think that the last 100 years, the entire place has re-greened speaking of the dust revolution obviously we're agreeing it starts here the classic formulation is that lancashire so the area around manchester liverpool people who live abroad that is sort of textile manufacturing yeah you get cotton of course very much in manchester and they call it cottonopolis. And then you go over the Pennines, you go into the Yorkshire area, and they're producing wool. Derby becomes known for locomotive works. Newcastle-upon-Tyne does a whole range of different things, including shipbuilding. And, of course, closer to us here, the Potter is. Stoke-on-Trent is the home of the English ceramic industry.

And steel in Sheffield. And steel in Sheffield, And steel in Sheffield. And lots of different sorts of steel, of course, from the big stuff down to cutlery, sharp-edged tools, all those sort of things. What about that extraordinary invention that allows humans to suddenly produce almost unlimited energy? And that's the steam engine. Talk to me about that.

Right. I mean, that's where our position in the story comes in. Because, yes, we're able to produce more iron, but we have the technology, the engineering capacity to produce fine, detailed components. And that's what you need. Early steam engines are relatively simple. So they're a few horsepower. They're a few horsepower. Whereas once you start to get high pressure steam,

you increase the ratio of power produced to the steam you're doing exponentially, really. And that's what we started in this area, is the combination of the materials and the technology. The output of a steam engine is equivalent to like tens of thousands of humans working, isn't it? Yes, depending on the steam engine obviously but if you are limited to a horse as your major amount of motive power and then you produce a relatively small scale machine which can do hundreds of horses your capacity then is amazing and depending on how you want to use it because you've not only got stationary steam engines which can run machinery you've also got the capacity to have moving ones locomotives steam power then it expands the

ability to move around and to move objects around in a much more controllable and fast way and how much do humans matter in this story like the actual guy tinkering and inventing things and coming up with stuff like Wilkinson, like Richard Arkwright with his textile machines. Do they matter? They are absolutely seminal because if somebody doesn't recognise what the resources are and how to use them, it's not going to happen anyway, is it? And I find it extraordinary in that sort of like 100 years, late 18th to mid 19th century. I don't know what was in the air, but the number of extraordinary people who were about. It's the way they're looking at things. It's not just the new technology and things they've got. It's the way they look at things. It's the development of the factory process.

I mean, this applies to Arkwright as well, that they, instead of having individual people in small places and gathering things together, they are doing all the process in one place under one roof. They are controlling the whole process, the quality of the process. And this is where we get our modern factory process starting. In 1700, most people in England probably didn't go more than 30 miles away from their home. Now we live in a world where we're all flying off around the world every five minutes That's the steam engine, that's the locomotive and everything that followed Yes, if you've got to walk or go on a horse you are really limiting the distance you can go Rivers become really important The River Severn in this area, the longest river in England and Wales, 200 odd miles

And that was an absolutely vital transport system, but slow and not controllable. The River Severn, I mean, nowadays we suffer really badly from flooding and they did in those days as well. So there's times when you can't use the river. Canals start to be built because it's a more controllable use of water and you can move a lot more weight on water than you can on a road. So one horse can pull a barge that has quite a few tonnes where it could possibly do that on a road.

But when you start actually developing your own horse, your iron horse literally, and putting down rails, then you are now able to move enormous amounts. What about working practices? So these people, their grandparents would have worked on farms and in woods, fishermen. How is it changing now? Opening up these factories, it must have just transformed the way people lived and worked. Well, one of the things is, of course, people actually start working to the clock and not to daylight or the weather or what you have to do you know working in agriculture so particularly if you've got steam engines running your

machinery you get those steam engines steamed up which might take an hour or so once your engine is in steam you want your workers in that factory working and so you have to be there on time and you will stay there until they want to shut the engines down. So suddenly the working day becomes much more organised than it's ever been in agriculture. And you're working for the man. And you're working for the man. And in this area, of course, a lot of the industries started

with people at the Derbys who were Quakers and they did have a rather more enlightened attitude towards their workers than in some areas. But some of the big areas like, well, like Manchester, the wool industry, and South Wales with the ironworks and the coalworks, you were more or less owned by the mine owners. And if you caused trouble and you lost your job, you wouldn't get a job anywhere else. And dangerous. Exceptionally dangerous. Health and safety was not actually a factor at all most of these industries they're

extremely heavy work for a start so you are likely to be damaged in the work you're also almost certainly breathing in quite noxious fumes and there's dust all of those things i mean some industries are worse than others in the industry, somebody doing glaze dipping was lucky to get 40 because of the lead in the glaze. And kids unjamming machines and machines starting and crushing them. It's awful stories. It's terrifying. And the way they were treated as well.

We have an exhibition at the moment actually about workers' lives and there's some first-person interviews with children working in the industry and they're saying about being off work for weeks because the person they've been working for has been beating them. They've actually got broken ribs. I mean, this is atrocious. There's a lot of money being made here, probably more than ever in history. Who's taking that money home?

In general, it is the entrepreneurs, the people who are starting the industries. What you get, of course, though, is there's a lot of financial stuff going on. So people are putting money into these industries. So it's not just the person who is running the industry. It's often other people who are making money from it as well. Investors. Yeah. So this is, again, the start of our commercial world, really, isn't it? It's not the workers. It's not the workers, yeah. Because the standard of living is gradually rising throughout the 19th century, simply because certain things are becoming more available because of the development of industrial techniques. But it's not massively better, really. Extraordinary changes taking place right across society from working people

working and living differently the rich getting very rich it's all happening. Yep what you're also getting of course is you're getting a big middle class coming in as well because a lot of people who are involved in industry may not be the owners and the sort of really important people, but they are quite financially comfortable. And so you get a consumer society building up, I suppose. You know, lawyers and architects and engineers. You always read about engineers, don't you? Yes. So they're kind of middling sort. That's the ones, yes. And they can afford to buy some quite nice things. And they are obviously upwardly mobile. They are imitating the posh people and all the lovely things they have on a lower level.

Speaking of which, Kate, I'm with the outsider, a milliner's now, a draper's, lots of fancy clothes in the window. I guess that people might aspire, in this new kind of class, could aspire to buy. new kind of class could aspire to buy. Absolutely. I mean, these might be your best clothes, possibly, because I'm sure the working clothes didn't look quite like this. But this is all here available for you in the shop windows, looking very, very smart. Well, Kate, I will see you a little bit later in the sweet shop. Thank you very much. Yes. Let's go and have a look in this lovely clothes shop now. I've walked into the drapers now. Listen to that kids, that is the sound of coins. Ask your grandparents about them. Metal, bits of metal that stand in for money going into a cash machine. No apple pay in here. Previously two of the most obvious groups in society would have been nobility, the gentry, the households who owned the land and most of the wealth.

And then there would have been the people that worked the land, the peasants. But in the Georgian period, we see the luxuries once reserved for those members of the elite were now on offer to people a little lower down the social spectrum. The middle class, the people with the entrepreneurial nous, the technical skills to make some money, to advance their status on the back of this industrial revolution. These new clerks and shipwrights and mining engineers can now aspire to eat on China plates, have nice houses. They wear fine clothing with lots of nice new fabrics, some of them imported from Asia.

They can go to extravagant parties and socialise. But unlike the nobility, they do still have to think about money. And one way you can get money, of course, is marrying well. Everyone becomes fixated on eligible young men and women. To have a chat about the massive social changes going on in this period, I'm going to talk to Catherine Curzon. She's an expert on scandal and satire and life itself in Georgian society. Catherine, we're so used to talking about change with all of our exciting technology in the world at the moment. The Georgian era, the change, the industrial revolution, the kind of social upheavals. Was that even more extreme than what we experience today?

Yeah, it was really the world changed. And in England, a local level, it changed at really a huge speed and incredibly quickly. And what we saw was the kind of established old order, particularly had to suddenly, if you like, recalibrate themselves, both to move up into the classes for the middle class, into the higher classes for the middle class, and in that upper class, that real landed class, to accept these, what they were thinking of kind of new bourgeoisie. And obviously, as with all things, down at the further end of the scale, the poor had a really tough time of it. So, yeah, it was an absolutely seismic shift. It was way beyond what we see today. And Catherine, is that money? Is that cash? Is this people, these new technology, new opportunities, new people getting money? Is that what it's about? Yeah, essentially, it's a combination of all of that. So before the Industrial Revolution, really, if you had money and power, you had land. And when we think about people, you

know, if you think about sort of Mr. Darcy's or the Bridgertons, they've got land and that land is passed down and rents come in from that land. And these people were hugely wealthy. Suddenly the industrial revolution happens and you can get rich in lots of other ways. And one of the ways, of course, is industrialization. So we see people rising from what would essentially be a kind of comfortable middle class, but really rocketing in terms of finances through owning mills, they own factories, the means of industrialization, if you like, so the means of mass production, which is suddenly gathering speed. So the people that have interests in these institutions

are suddenly the ones who are absolutely vaulting up through the social classes thanks to this increase in money because one thing the Georgians loved was money. And did these new rich Georgians, did they just conform? Did they all try and become aristocrats and kick it old school or did they invent new ways of being a new culture of wealth, kind of an alternative social hierarchy it's an interesting one that because we sort of know that there was a kind of push to join that I think it was a social climbers that people had wanted to be in that upper echelon and then what happens when you don't only get into it but in some cases you start to kind of exceed it so you're

suddenly as wealthy as the people that have been, if you like, the ruling class for generations. And I think it's interesting to see that there was an attempt to fit in. And there were certainly manuals published for gentlemen, new gentlemen, that would explain to them how to wear your hair, how to stand even, what sort of conversation to make so you didn't stand out. because obviously what you wanted to do was whilst you were one of this new kind of wealth class this new middle class you also wanted to consolidate your position with the people that if you like held the reins of political power and influence and had done for years and years so it's one thing to rise newly

to the top but you really do need to consolidate that as we see now, you know, it's sort of the bread and butter of life really is networking with people. So you want to start to create your own networks. And I think what's interesting to see is that as we see these new people fitting in and creating networks of their own, that kind of they're trying to make a tapestry with the old way that the older upper classes really didn't know how to handle them so just as the new middle class were taking manuals telling you how to behave at upper class events the older landed class if you like were kind of looking down on this nouveau riche but at the same time these were the people that were coming up really fast so you have to allow them access to

your spaces and your privileged spaces whether you want to or not you really start to have no choice because they're coming in really quickly and with huge amounts of money and influence and allow them access to your sons and daughters yes indeed the marriage market right i mean it's quite handy if you've got an old title and you can swallow your pride a little bit I guess you can make sure that you can tap into that your families can tap into that money yeah and I think this is something that a lot of people miss when we think of the marriage more I think we think of this kind of you know the girls coming out at Queen Charlotte's Ball and they and their parents you know the, the Mrs. Bennets, they're looking out for rich husbands

and title husbands. But I think that quite often we miss the fact that there were people, as you quite rightly say, looking the other way. So these are the people who are this new class, and they're looking to maybe get themselves a title and get themselves marriage into a family that has that old influence. So your new money with old influence, that's kind of the dream team for the industrial revolution, new class, if you like. You're the best of both worlds. It's like the perfect mingling of two worlds.

What change? I mean, from a slightly later period, we've read Dickens' hard times, like brutal depiction of life in these new industrial towns and cities. I mean, Britain, one of the first places in the world to really urbanise. Huge changes, right? And is that reflected in people's lives and down to what they ate and wore and stuff like that? Yeah, it was.

The huge change was right across the spectrum as well. We've been talking about the upper classes and the money classes, but obviously people came in from agricultural areas, and they started to work in these huge new industrial centres. So we see the rise of the industrial cities. At that end of the spectrum, it was an enormous change. If you think that you've been working in essentially cottage industries for generations, and suddenly you're living in these kind of dark cities, and there's heat and there's pollution and at the upper end the industrial revolution both changed what people ate and more but it democratized it and it changed it

forever you know we see now today the world we're in now is if you like the sort of roll-on effect of the industrial resolution but what particularly is interesting when we look at food is we can't talk about food without thinking about like pineapples which is the famous georgian one so pineapples had always been a symbol of luxury because they were imported but then as science started to move on it became possible to grow a pineapple at home and this became the ultimate symbol of wealth then so if we think about exciting foodstuffs a homegrown pineapple was as exciting as it got because it took specialist staff. It took specialist processes of light and heat. And apparently one pineapple would be valued today at about £15,000 if it had been grown in your family's hothouse.

So famously, they displayed pineapples, they made ornaments of them. But other foods just start to come in that are less exciting, but perhaps point out more the kind of mundanity of that change, things like swedes and brussel sprouts, that now were being imported in not sufficiently large numbers to make them commonplace. So these were luxury items. And again, we come back to history with plantations because there was an absolute mania for pastries and sugar. And sugar was expensive. And if you could lay on an event, conspicuous consumption was the order of the day,

and you could show pineapples and sugar and things that had cost money to get in and to grow you were really displaying your wealth in the same way as wearing your hereditary jewels because you were saying this isn't only something that we can afford it's something perishable and you think about a real expensive perishable good is a really great showcase to your peers that you've got money to just throw away and when we think about clothes as well there was a huge impact we can't overstate the impact obviously of increased mechanization on the clothing industry so you had a change from one person or several people making cloth making clothes to huge mills and factories,

creating vast amounts of materials, vast amounts of clothing. So traditionally before then, would you have had one set of clothes, maybe two sets of clothes and just that was you done? Yeah, pretty much. Again, if we think about the real upper classes, you would have had the more clothes you had, again, it's a symbol of wealth. So if you were an upper class lady, you would go through minimum three outfits a day, every day. And that's not a big day. That's not going out on the town. But if you were kind of, you know, working class, you'd have had a handful of outfits and yeah, you're done. And you would patch up and you would make your own. And I have seen in letters people talking about, you know, people exchanging clothes back and forth.

So if somebody was going to an event that wasn't even up to get upper class, but someone was going to, you know, a kind of special event, you might borrow something from someone. But when we think about wardrobes bursting with clothes, the kind of thing you see in Bridgerton, that was absolute upper class. As it is now, if you think about couture dress this is the upper classes but yeah really down at the lower ends you had your clothes and that's it your working clothes and maybe another set of clothes. Catherine I love the stories of I know there are very tiny minority of cases but they're so striking aren't they of of women whether it's Lady Emma Hamilton or the other people who married in the aristocracy who rise, quote unquote, from the streets to marry great nobles. And that's so fun. And then the other way around, you know, the people that fall from the

pinnacle of society, which so terrified so many people. What are some of your favourite examples of that kind of rapid social change or great scandals? Harriet Wilson. She was the most famous courtesan, one of the most famous. She had lots and lots of very, very, very rich and successful lovers and patrons. But when she reached middle age, they all went, you know, there's lots of younger girls and they refused to pay out promised pensions. lots of younger girls and they refused to pay out promised pensions so she famously started to write her memoirs and in her memoirs she didn't only name names but she was savage they were real kiss and tell you know she said the Duke of Wellington was boring it was more like a rat catcher than a hero and every week before she published them she wrote to the men in them and she said you're in

the book this week but if you give me 200, I'll take you out of the book. And a lot of them did. And the Duke of Wellington famously said to her, publish and be damned. And she did, she became a bestseller. And the happy ending to this is that as all of these men were sort of being pointed at and laughed at, she became immensely wealthy and she lived to a ripe old age

and became keeper of her own salon, all on the back of her scandalous kiss and tell memoirs. So that is a happy ending, I think. The kings still matter and the queens are sort of not only obviously their political power is waning across this period to a certain extent. But what about their social and cultural power? Are they still the trendsetters? There's a division here. There's a really interesting division here because Georgeorge i of course when he arrived people didn't want him and he was not what we would call a people person so people didn't like him he didn't like people he was seen as being too german and he didn't really set any trends and he didn't try to he was like you know those sort of grumpy dads who

almost take pride in in being a grumpy dad he was that kind of guy he took pride in being perceived as quite grumpy but his son was the opposite so when he came over to England he bought with him his son and his son later George II was very very good at PR in his youth so he made sure sure to be seen out and about. He made sure that people saw him at the theatre. He did some heroic stuff. He helped put out fires. And he made sure that he talked a lot about how much he loved England and the English. Now, when he became the king, he kind of lost a lot of that favour because he was seen as being ruled by his wife. He was seen as encouraging cronyism.

But where we start to see the public really start to engage with the king is George III. And George III very famously was desperate to put himself across as English. He didn't want to be thought of as German at all. He really tried to divorce himself from that side of his family. And he also wanted to be seen, interestingly, not as upper class, but as something akin to middle class. So he lived insofar as a king can. He lived a fairly upper middle class lifestyle. He wasn't really into pomp in terms of spending a lot of money and showing off. He liked to work out in the garden. He became known as Farmer George. And when he fell ill, when he started to have his mental breakdowns,

the public who had been a bit, you know, they weren't that keen on him, but they started to really, really engage with him. And the iller he became, the more engaged they became with him. He became almost like a kind of totem for the people of england as long as he lived it seemed to them that something indefinable still existed that was i think we saw it almost when the late queen died that it was almost representative something you can't quite put your finger on something that people couldn't quite define and i think with george iii what helped him was of course son, the Prince Regent, was completely the opposite. So the Prince Regent wanted to spend money and he took lovers and he behaved appallingly.

And I think it's like a lot of things that the more one person behaves badly, the more we pine for the thing that came before it. So the Prince Regent is in the press constantly. He is living a high life while people are literally starving. And people are saying, what about his dad? Do you remember his dad before he was taken ill? He seemed to be more like one of us. He was almost like our grandfather or our father, whereas the prince region is like a badly behaved older brother. so the relationship monarchy had with the people they didn't influence it in the way we saw in the past but particularly the prince regent he influenced what we now recognize as the regency so when we look at regency fashion and architecture what we see is really an expression of the prince regent himself that he was a tastemaker and a trendsetter.

He sort of ran around with Bo Brummel. They changed fashion. They changed the way the upper classes socialized, if you like. If the Prince Regent did something, it became the fashion because everybody wanted to be in his set amongst that bright young thing population because his father had been grandfatherly and had been out of the public eye. Suddenly we have a young, glittering, anything goes prince. And for some people, that's very, very magnetic. They want to be a part of that.

We talked about the fun stuff. Let's just, I guess, finish on some of the challenges. There's gigantic upheavals, these people living in different circumstances, urban poverty. Was there a kind of breakdown of a more traditional, you couldn't call it a welfare state, but like almost a welfare system? And was government in its very limited form able to cope with these new challenges that it faced?

I think government really actually struggled. And there were moments, particularly in the reign of the Prince Regent, towards the death of George III, that became particularly worrisome at the time of the death of George III, where it genuinely looked as though we might be on the edge of revolution. People were starving. They were working for next to nothing. Living conditions were seemingly getting worse.

Whilst at the top of the mountain, if you like, those conditions seemed to be getting better and better and better, and more publicly so, because obviously now we have print shops and we have satire and people are able to see, if you like, what's going on. You don't have to be able to read to know what's going on because you can see the prints satirising what's happening at the upper end. And we have people daubing bread or the regent's head on the walls of Carlton House and throwing stones at members of the government and the upper end. And we have people daubing bread or the regent's head on the

walls of Carlton House and throwing stones at members of the government and the royal family. And it was a time as well as hardline government. So there was very little welfare state, but what there was, was philanthropy. And this was something Queen Charlotte was really deeply involved in and again the upper classes for their many many faults began to really pour efforts women in particular into philanthropy because once again firstly it shows that you have the time as an upper class woman to do it because you're well cared for you know you've got staff and all this you have the money to do it. And also it's an altruistic thing. So although the motive may be selfish, people really did benefit from that push from the upper class, which was really driven in this era by Queen Charlotte and her set. People really did benefit

from that. There were huge amounts of philanthropic endeavours, hospitals opened that were still open today and the start of an understanding that if we have so much, we should help people that don't. It was a slow growth, but it started to gather speed. Stay with us for more of England's great history after this. I'm a spy doing whatever spies do. But what am I going to whip out of my pocket next? Careful. In this special month of Patented, we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of James Bond by having a look at some of the inventions that have changed espionage. From gadgets and their creators to the cars and cocktails that make

Bond look oh so effortlessly cool. Join me, Campbell, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a history of inventions where I will have my can on a string up against the walls of some of the best historians in this field. Look forward to your company. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. There's a saying that to make money, you've got to have money. And that's certainly the case with the British Industrial Revolution. It was propped up by the transatlantic slave trade. Britain's first foray into African slavery began in Elizabethan England in the 16th century, when the Queen's privateers, the sea docks like John Hawkins and Francis Drake, took expeditions to the west coast of Africa to trade goods for human beings. In other instances, locals were captured like animals and transported across the Atlantic

and then sold to the Spanish in the West Indies. When the English tried to do it themselves, they were met with fierce resistance from locals, but they also struggled to break into the already established slave trade run by the Spanish and Portuguese. It was 100 years before the British really accelerated their involvement in the slave trade. By the 1730s, Britain was the world's biggest slave trading nation. The triangular route from Europe to Africa, to the Americas and back to Europe was highly lucrative. Goods were taken from British ports to West Africa, to countries like Sierra

Leone, where people were captured, purchased from local dealers and taken by slave ship to the Americas and the Caribbean to work on plantations producing tobacco, sugar and rice. This journey was known as the Middle Passage, an experience of truly unimaginable horror in which shackled people spent 80 days on ships ranging from small schooners to massive purpose-built slave ships. Crews packed humans together below decks without space to sit up or move around. Without ventilation or sufficient water, roughly 15% got sick and died. To give you an idea of just how unbearable conditions were, this is an extract from the memoir of Aluda Equiano, a slave who brought his freedom, who details his experience of the Middle Passage. It's read by Andrew French,

and it appeared in a previous episode of this podcast that we recorded about the BBC TV series Art That Made Us, with our guest, curator Temi Odomosu, who chose Equiano's writing as a key artefact that helps tell the story of Britain's history. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself and almost suffocated us. which had scarcely room to turn himself, and almost suffocated us. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, and the filth of the necessary tubs into which the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror, almost inconceivable. Crops were then transported back across the Atlantic to Britain, where they were enjoyed

by every strata of society to some degree. Slavery funded the building of many great Victorian country homes that litter England's map. The machinery and factories of the Industrial Revolution. It helped to build the railways and was even invested in philanthropy to provide better living conditions for England's poor. But few gave any thought to the slaves. Black people who were not seen as human, but rather registered as goods, just as cotton or sugar would have been. Caribbean islands became slave colonies, like St Kitts, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia, and Dominica, and many others. Europeans thought that Africans would be more suited to the climate, and many others. Europeans thought that Africans would be more suited to the climate,

believing it to be more similar to their own. It was hot, oppressively humid, excruciating conditions for the back-breaking labour they were forced to do. At first, tobacco was the main cash crop of the plantations, but by the end of the 17th century, sugar had taken over in a bid to satisfy Europe's newly discovered sweet tooth. When the sugar cane harvest was ready, it became an almost incessant work cycle of harvest and processing. Slaves worked day and night at peak seasons. The fieldwork was gruelling, with long hours under the blistering sun, planting and harvesting the sugar cane by hand. Others laboured in the plantation factories, processing the sugar cane to be sent back to Europe. Before industrial machines, sugar was gritty and gravel-like. But in the 18th century, with the advent of more sophisticated machinery,

it was sold in a more refined form, as white sugar loaves or cones. Slave masters were brutal and quick to punish, whip and assault labourers. Overwork, poor nutrition, brutality and disease meant that death rates on plantations were high. It wasn't until the end of the 18th century, with the passing of the Amelioration Act, that slave owners were forced to improve living conditions. the Amelioration Act, that slave owners were forced to improve living conditions. Before then, they simply replaced the dead and dying with more slaves imported from Africa. The trade peaked in the 1780s. At the same time, an abolitionist movement emerged. Famous campaigners and formerly enslaved people began to speak out against the brutality and inhumanity of the system. Georgian confectioners started purchasing sugar from the East India Company

that advertised itself as not made by slaves to try and distance themselves from the blood-stained sugar of its rivals. It became a sort of badge of honour and nobility to use East India sugar, It became a sort of badge of honour and nobility to use East India sugar. Ironic, really, given its ruthless colonisation of South Asia. Leading voices included Aluda Equiano. His autobiography, reprinted over and over, became one of the most influential and powerful condemnations of the time. Another voice was Charles Ignatius Sancho,

whose story is told here by the actor and author Patterson Joseph. I don't think the movement was a movement until much later. It became a thing that a lot of people were getting on board with. So it was only when stories started coming out of the Caribbean and people realised what was happening that there was a sort of movement. And that took a long time. I would have said in the 1770s it was just burgeoning. So are his letters and observations and witticisms part of a sort of general awakening? He was just trying to be a guy. Addressing what he knows is the most important issue to the people that look like him and come from where he's come from.

But he talks about art. He talks about the American Revolution. He's a monarchist. He's not a revolutionary. He's not Equiano, who started the Sons of Africa with Grigno Sour and the others. He hasn't been to the Caribbean. He was free when he left. He never went back. Didn't go anywhere else, far as he went was Scotland. So he feels himself to be a British man, literally just expressing himself and an abolitionist,

but not a drum beater. He just wants people to listen in reason to how irrational and barbaric this practice is. But in a way, that's a precursor to the awakening, isn't it? It's establishing their personhood. His letter to Stern literally says that. He says, humanity, humanity must comply. And it's almost as if he's calling to the empathy of the nation that he's adopted in to say, think for 10 seconds what it would be like if this were you. And that, to me,

is a very beautiful and simple way to try to get people to connect with the issues that you have around you as a black person, or as anybody who's isolated, oppressed, or in any way persecuted for who they are. The road to freedom was long and arduous for abolitionists. Campaigners like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce toured Britain and Europe, relaying in visceral detail the horrors of the slave trade. Eventually, with tireless lobbying inside Westminster, the politician Wilberforce had a breakthrough. An act was passed in 1807 with royal assent that made it illegal for any British ship or subject to trade enslaved people. But like all change, it was slow, and plantation slavery continued in the British colonies.

Full emancipation wasn't achieved until 1838, after Queen Victoria came to the throne. Even then, no freed slave was compensated. Even though the slave trade had been abolished in the British Empire in 1807, companies would still profit off slave labour in other countries, like the cocoa-producing African island of Sao Tome in Principe, under Portuguese rule. It would do so into the 20th century. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi there, how are you doing? Very good indeed, my kids favourite sweet shop in the country. We are the most popular on site. I'll bet you are. We've got that in the country but certainly here on site. I'll bet you are. So, can I take some strawberry bonbons please?

A two ounce bag or a four ounce bag? Four, I'd better do four. One ounce coming up. And then, yeah, make... And then, oh is that a bit of chocolate raisins over there? Of course. What's a Pontefract cake when it's at home? I better have one of those. It's a licorice gummy sweet. Oh, it sounds disgusting,

but I'll definitely have a bit of that. I'll have some of that. Some of that. And I'll go two ounces on that one. Jelly babies, Victoria. They are. Oh, right. They certainly are. Well, I better take. Originally they were called unclaimed babies, Victoria. They are. Oh, really? They certainly are.

Well, I better take... Originally, they were called unclaimed babies, but they weren't actually supposed to be babies originally. They were supposed to be bears. Jelly bears. Jelly bears, but something happened with the moulds and they didn't come out quite as expected. So here I am in the sweet shop.

I'll tell you one thing I've learned travelling around the world. Two things people know about England. One is football, usually Man United or Man City more recently. The other is Cadbury's chocolate. And everyone around the world just seems to recognise that signature purple wrapper. And actually, it's interesting that John Cadbury would have started out in a shop not unlike this, not actually a sweet shop. He was a tea dealer in Leeds. He opened up a grocer's shop. It was 93 Bull Street in Birmingham. He was a Quaker, like so many industrials around here, maybe that's why he didn't choose to go into the army or the

navy, and he turned his head to business very successfully. As well as tea and coffee, he started selling drinking chocolate and it was a hit. So he pivoted to cocoa. But since production costs were so high and his customers needed to be very wealthy, it was quite high-end stuff. In 1854, he and his brother received the royal warrant as manufacturers of chocolate and cocoa to Queen Victoria herself. But as with everything in the Victorian age, invention, new machines, new technology, new trade routes were developed, and the price of sugar fell, partly at the behest of Napoleon in France, who couldn't get access to global sugar thanks to the Royal Navy blockade. Research was conducted into using sugar beet,

which could be grown in Europe as an easier way to get sugar. And suddenly, sugary treats were no longer a luxury reserved for the upper echelons. They could be enjoyed by the lower classes too. And that brings me back to Kate Cadman, who's in the sweet shop with me. How are you, Kate? I'm fine, thank you. I'm happy to have you. You've got some nice sweets. I have got some amazing sweets,

some Victorian sweets I've never heard of before, and it's going to be great. My kids are going to go bonkers. So we think of some of these brands that we still know about today, Cadbury's, Roundtree. Why do these famous names date back to this period? Cadbury's Roundtree. Why do these famous names date back to this period? Well, I think you've mentioned about the Quaker influence. It was an industry that they were happy to go into because it wasn't armaments, it wasn't, you know, it was a progressive thing. What's fascinating is how technology comes in because Fry's in Bristol were one of the first companies to use steam engines and that's one of the things that enabled them to process the chocolate to the stage where it wasn't drinking chocolate anymore but could be the solid chocolate that we're so used to today. Wow the good old steam engine is at the root of this

as well. At the heart of it yes. And these companies revolutionized food production and distribution. Absolutely and it is distribution and of course themanship, you get these wonderful coloured wrappers, you get the enamelled signs. It's a visual thing as well. Some of the images, so children peering in through a window, staring at the chocolate. Which they're still doing now. Which they're still doing today, actually. Inside this window. Yeah.

And what are some of the treats that we associate with the Victorian period? I've just been given a little lesson on the Pontefract cakes, which I've heard of before. Well, what you've got is perhaps more of the slightly more herbal-y things, things like troche drops and the whole hand sticks and things like that. They're less obviously sweet and more herbal-y sort of based. Not everybody's modern taste, to be frank. Well, I'm glad I've just got four ounces of them.

Now you tell me. Tell me some other ones that we'd find really disgusting today. What I think is really frightening is that some of the bright colours in Victorian sweets were made by some extremely unpleasant additives. You know, you're talking things like copper, for instance, to actually just create very violent, brilliant colours. But they were extremely hazardous to health. And the other thing is, of course course the lack of hygiene in making things one of the local iron workers was

known to make sweets for local children in the evenings so he came home from the ironworks which you've experienced and without washing his hands would then make a load of sweets for local children and you mentioned sweets local children these kids having access to foods that traditionally would have been reserved for kind of royalty or aristocracy absolutely and that's what you get during the victorian period with the development of technology and transport and things getting cheaper it's now possible for relatively ordinary people to afford things that would never have been affordable to them even 50 years before. I might, what else, Mike? I'll just get one more on my kids. Here we go. What's a proper good Victorian one, but which kids still love today? Strawberries and cream. Strawberries and cream.

Yeah, thank you. So we're back on the mean streets of Victorian England now. I've got a huge sweet in my mouth, so I can hardly speak. It period isn't it because on the one hand things are getting better on the other hand it is really grim for kids and people and the jobs that you've described to me the chemical impurities going into diet how do we balance it what was life really like I mean some it's very grim I mean you're looking at very high infant mortality three out of every five children die before they were five. Wow. And that sort of attitude towards death,

it was an everyday thing for most people. But people still managed to enjoy themselves. Yes, there's a sweet shop. You know, they have a social life as well. A lot of it's centred around local churches and chapels. And they have lectures and things, for instance. So there were things they could do, there were social things they could do. There could do, social things they could do?

There was very much social things they could do. Admittedly, I mean, working hours were very long. You're talking about probably 12-hour days. They only had Sundays off in general, but they still managed to seem to enjoy themselves. There were very definite sort of community events going on. I mean, things like, you know, dancing around the maypole did genuinely happen. There was a lot of sort of redevelopment of what they thought of as medieval sort of fun and games. So they tended to do things that you don't expect possibly

the Victorians to do. They're really enjoying themselves in quite a simple way. There's also some really complicated things going on. Some of the sort of sporting type things we wouldn't like because a lot of it's things like cockfighting all baiting you know dog fights dog fights all of those things yes and well people fighting as well because bare-knuckle fighting among the miners particularly seems to be quite a fun event reasonably small dwellings and so are people on the street are they in the communal spaces in parks in squares in streets maybe more than today where everyone's tucked up at home watching their telly of an evening? Absolutely. When you've got sort of like 11 people living in a two and three room house,

you definitely want the kids outside, let's face it. So, yeah, it's on the streets and it's also in the fields and that sort of thing. You mentioned the terrible mortality. There is public health initiatives in this period as well. It's the sewers, cleaner water, inoculations, things like that as well. So there are advances being made in public health. called picture societies or friendly societies and they will actually themselves contribute six pence or so a week against the possibility of them being injured or ill and then they will get paid out and be looked after by their fellow workers more or less so it's a self-help scheme in many ways we're just in the part of the museum now which has been rewilded overflowing with wild flowers and a lovely smell of wild garlic

flowering hawthorn when does the kind of intense industrial period here come to an end yeah really late 19th and into the 20th century there is a steady decline as industry gets much larger scale the geography of this area doesn't allow for that expansion it's relatively hilly around here there are no large flat areas if you compare for instance one of the pottery works down in the valley which is relatively small scale to the spode works in stoke-on-trent which covers seven acres we don't have seven flat acres anywhere in this gorge so the ability to expand to get maximum production is not there for you and that means that this area falls behind other areas it's an early area and it didn't modernize particularly either so this is the very

first incarnation of the industrial revolution here and that was just unsustainable by the late 1800s it is and companies like the colbert dale company go into more specialized things like art castings so they're casting decorative things garden seats things like that small scale things that they can deal with with their rather limited facilities whereas a big modern factory is producing enormous objects. And of course, you're going through into locomotives, cars, huge steel buildings. And the interesting thing is that decline here that you mentioned, that really does coincide with the death of Victoria.

So do you think it would have felt like a passing of an era when she died? I think when you get the death of a sovereign who's been on the throne for over 60 years, you get a change from one century to another. Psychologically, it is a huge change. It's got to be, hasn't it? And I think that made a lot of social differences. People felt they were in a new age. And you get that around here.

Very quickly, for instance, when you look at the historic photographs, women start having short hair within 20 years. They are picking up on modern things really much more quickly than they would have 30 years earlier. This trip to Ironbridge has reminded me that it is simply the greatest concentration of historical sites in the UK. If you make one visit to the UK and you want to visit one heritage spot,

make it Ironbridge. Unbelievably beautiful. And it's the springboard of the modern world. I'm walking onto that Ironbridge now. This was an astonishing, striking statement about the future, about what was going on in this little island of ours. This was a place where you could make the impossible happen using new technology. And that

explosion of creativity, of innovation, of experimentation would spread from this little place where I'm standing now and reach every corner of this planet. England's population almost doubled in the hundred years up to the beginning of the 19th century. And more people meant more labour, more consumers, more produce, more money. And by halfway through the 19th century, Britain was probably the most powerful and influential nation on the planet. I wonder what the Viettorians would have thought. Were they expecting more rapid transformation? I think they'd reached a kind of plateau, a stasis. They were so impressed with their light bulbs and underground trains and refrigeration and sewers. Little did they know

what was coming. These flying machines, broadcasting, AI podcasts, and then, as ever, with technological advancement, the ingenuity and potency of killing machines and weapons increasing enormously too. And we can't think about the Industrial Revolution unless we also think about the industrial slaughter on the battlefields, the American Civil War, and then famously the First and Second World Wars, two enormous global conflicts that unleashed weapons of previously unimaginable destructive capacity. And those wars changed the global balance of power, ushering an age of new superpowers, eclipsing Britain and its empire. Join me tomorrow for my fifth and final episode of this series,

The Story of England. We're going to be talking about those global wars. We'll be talking about the 20th century. I'm going to be inside the secret wartime tunnels, dug into the White Cliffs of Dover, beneath the castle. And I'll also be in a nuclear bunker in York. I'll be talking to some brilliant historians about how conflict in the 20th century

has shaped both England and the world we know today. Don't miss it. We would love to know if you've been enjoying this series. If there's anything you want to hear more of in future on the podcast, you can email us at ds.hh.historyhit.com. And as ever, please leave us a rating and a review wherever you get your podcasts and recommend us to a friend or two. This episode was produced by Marianna Day-Forge

and edited and sound designed by Dougal Patmore. Bye! This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.