Dan Snow's History Hit - Violence Against Women in Victorian London

Episode Date: April 3, 2021

In the 1880s and 1890s Whitechapel, in London, become notorious for its violence especially towards women but what lessons can be drawn from this period for today? In this thought-provoking episode, Dan is joined by Dr Julia Laite for a walk around Whitechapel to explore some of the locations where these terrible crimes took place and the stories of the women involved. Julia shares her thoughts on why women at the time were so vulnerable to violent crime and how things have changed since the late Victorian period.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In early March of this year, the tragic abduction and murder of a young woman, Sarah Everard, refocused the attention of people here in Britain on violence towards women and girls. At History Hit, we thought it'd be interesting to revisit a period of history that's become infamous for violence against women, the Whitechapel murders. A lot of people associate with the Jack the Ripper story, the Whitechapel murders of the 1880s and 1890s in the East End of London. I went for a walk around Whitechapel, the places where those murders occurred, with Dr. Julia Leitch. She's at Birkbeck University and she's studied violence against

women and girls in the slums of late Victorian London. In this episode, there are descriptions of the terrible crimes committed against women. They're not graphic, but I do just want to warn everybody that they are included in this episode of the podcast. It was certainly a very thought-provoking trip around the East End and at the end Julia shares what she thinks lessons from history are. I thought it was very useful and important. If over the Easter weekend you want to go and subscribe to history hit dot tv please do so. You can watch hundreds of history documentaries on there or listen to episodes of this podcast. You just go to historyhit.tv and a world of history will suddenly reveal itself at your very fingertips. In the meantime, enjoy this walking tour around

East London. Julia. Oh, hello, Dan. How's it going? Great, thanks. How are you? Good to see you. I've never really noticed Little Park before. I come past a lot. Yeah, yeah. Actually, there was a church. I've never really noticed Little Park before. I come past a lot. Yeah, yeah. Actually, there was a church here at one point in the 19th century.

Right, so it would have been an imposing church. And what about this part of town? I mean, it's a vibrant, busy part of town today, but it would have been just like that back in the day. Yeah, I mean, the East End in some ways still has that same energy that it would have had in the late 19th century. But because it was so subject to bombings in the Second World War a lot of it has changed and so I think when we think about the 19th century space of London's East End it's really

important to remember how much the built environment has changed and especially how many more small alleys there were how poorly lit it was those sorts of things that would have really affected the way a woman would walk through this space. Yeah, that's a good point, because now we're in this green space that used to be a church. You can see some broken bits of masonry around, but most, and there are glimpses of Victorian, maybe even Georgian buildings there, but most of it's quite modern. And yet, you're right, something of the energy survives. Yeah, definitely. I think part of it is just, as you say, these little slices of buildings that used to be there. But also, I think because the image of London's East End is so strong, the sort of historical memory of it,

it's obviously because of its connection to the Jack the Ripper murders or the Whitechapel murders, as they were called at the time. But also just because it was seen as the sort of site of London's problems, rightly or wrongly. It was really considered a space of poverty, of danger, of slumland, of crime. And so it kind of had that reputation, but it was also the home of thousands and thousands of Londoners who built their homes here. And so, you know, in the late 19th century, a lot of these side streets would just be filled with children and women working and playing and just really noisy, busy spaces. Much more residential, I think, than it is now.

That's such a good point. So before the railways really take people out of the city, this would have been not just a commercial place like it is today, but full of people living here. Full of people, and also people from all over the world. It was really considered the kind of immigrant heartland of London, especially in the late 19th century with the arrival of a lot of Eastern European Jews, which really helped reshape this area and create new kind of cultures within the East End,

which is a tradition that's just kept going and going over the past century, which is, again, I think something that lends this kind of wonderful energy to this part of the city. So there is wonderful energy, no question. But was it also a dangerous place to be a woman in the 19th century? Although, frankly, where wasn't dangerous to be a woman? That's exactly how I was about to answer that question. Where wasn't? The East End certainly had a reputation for being dangerous, especially after 1888, but actually all of London at this time was considered a dangerous space for women. And it's really interesting because two things kind of happen

at the same time in the late 19th century. One, people start getting more concerned about violence against women, against male street harassment of women, of attacks against women. But at the same time, more and more women are coming out in public. This is the era when they push through those shopping areas, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street in the West End, when theatre is becoming more family-friendly and when department stores are opening. And so women are just flooding into these spaces of the city

where they really hadn't been very much before. And this causes a kind of moral panic, this deep concern about well-being of women in public. And so you get things like guides being published for women about how to walk through the street, how to walk through urban space without being harassed by male pests, as they were called. And it's really easy to sort of laugh at this idea that male pests were bothering these Victorian women, but it really was their word for street harassment, for sexual harassment on the street. And so at the same time that that's happening, there's really rising concern about whether these women can be safe in public space and how to protect them.

So we've obviously got the infamous Whitechapel murders featuring the kind of semi-mythical figure of Jack the Ripper. But these are not the only women that you've made a study of. I mean, they are just a small subset. Exactly. And for about 10 years, I've been studying women who sell sex in London, and in the West End as well as the East End. And the reason I got really interested in the Jack the Ripper murders isn't because of the sort of canonical five victims or the kind of infamousness

of the murders themselves, but because the investigations into them open this snapshot into ordinary women's lives, especially poor, marginalized women's lives. And so I started looking at all of the case files around the Whitechapel murders because there were about 15 women who were murdered in that space of time between about 1887 and 1891, and they were called at the time the Whitechapel murders. And so I got really, really interested in seeing, you know, what can this tell me about the women's lives? And what can it tell me about

how they were vulnerable to violence and attack? And what's particularly striking is what the stories of the women who aren't considered victims of Jack the Ripper can tell us about the lived experience of poor, marginalized women in the East End of London in this time. Well, we're going to walk some of those same streets now and I want to hear about those stories. Let's start, though, with where we are. Exactly, why have you brought me here as the start of the journey? I've brought you here because this is where a woman named Emma Elizabeth Smith met a gang of young men on April 3rd, 1888, and she was coming home around four o'clock in the morning, probably from a pub, maybe from soliciting. My better guess is coming home from a pub.

And she passed by this churchyard back when there was a church here. And that's where she saw the men and like women before her and like women after her, including women in the present day. She got a sense these men are bad news. And so she crossed the road to avoid these men at Osborne Street. And so she continues walking up Osborne Street with them following her and I just can't imagine the sort of fear in her throat as she's doing that. Well, let's retrace the journey now. Yeah.

Would the streets have been busy, do you think? I mean, London would have been the city that never slept, I guess, in some ways. To a certain extent. I mean, the pubs were open all hours, which is why I'm pretty sure Emma was coming from a pub. So there would have been some people, but by four o'clock in the morning, it would have been fairly abandoned, would be my guess. And very, very little,

any kind of form of public supervision as well. So here we are. We are now, let's head across. Oh yeah, here's the crossing. So we're going across the old road. Oh, yeah, here's the crossing. So we're going across the old Whitechapel Road, which is one of the kind of arteries of this part of London, dead straight, unusually. And let's get up Osborne Street.

Yeah, it would have been very, very quiet at four o'clock in the morning in 1888. Okay, so Osborne Street, here we go. So, yeah, so this is where she's walking. She crossed over the street to avoid the man and they keep following her. And how do we know about this? We know about it, actually. We only have the slightest details about Emma Smith's life because while the police launched

a full investigation into her murder, the files have gone missing from the National Archives, which is actually really typical of these Whitechapel murders. Somebody or a person's unknown went into the National Archives in the 80s, and as far as we can tell, took the documents. Because it's a celebrity case. Exactly, and you can sell them, I'm assuming. So depressing.

It is really depressing. So what we know about Emma Smith comes from very, very short newspaper reports. Initially, a report about the murder itself and then the coroner's inquest, which found murder by persons or persons unknown. And so we're following the footsteps of Emma Smith and the group of young men who followed her. Was this an unusual case? You mentioned it was in the newspapers. Is this something, you know, was violence against women newsworthy? Is this part of the moral panic you were talking about? Yeah, and I mean, I think that street violence like Emma Smith experienced,

the extremity of it was actually quite rare. So while the late Victorian period in some ways was a time when violence against women was absolutely endemic, particularly domestic violence, the kind of violence that Emma Smith encountered really was considered very extreme. Because I doubt Georgian London was much of a picnic, right? So it's interesting, this coincidence of the Victorians not starting to care about these people's lives, and then obviously, and I guess the sense of the city getting too big

and modernity freaking everybody out. people's lives and then obviously and I guess the sense of the city getting too big and you know modernity freaking everybody out yeah and the police at this time was still only about 50 years old the beat patrols there wasn't a lot of police officers around and there just wasn't that much protection on the street for women but actually ironically one thing I wanted to point out about the moral panic about women in public is it also led to a drive to clean the streets, to push prostitution underground, to kind of sanitize public space. And I argue that the ironic effect of this was to create situations that made the most vulnerable women in society even more vulnerable to violence. that made the most vulnerable women in society even more vulnerable to violence.

It pushed things underground, out of sight. It got more third parties involved in prostitution. So there was more protection gangs. There were more pimps because of this crackdown. And to me, it's the greatest irony of the late 19th century is all of this sort of moral concern about the well-being of women, mostly middle-class women, leads to creating a situation that's more dangerous for the most vulnerable women, women like Emma Smith. Not to be clumsy about it, but like Giuliani's New York, let's fix all the broken windows,

you end up incarcerating a whole generation of people. Exactly, exactly. The late 19th century is really when this kind of carceral feminism begins, when women and men who are part of what was called the moral reform movement start getting really worried about spaces like this, about the sort of dark alleys of the East End as well as the big shopping streets of the West End. And they pass more laws and they change policies. They put pressure on police to arrest more women for selling sex, arrest more men for vagrancy.

The prisons fill up, but it turns out the streets don't really get any safer. And there's no sort of smoking gun that connects the Whitechapel murders to this drive to clean up the streets and shut down brothels. But I don't think it's a coincidence that three years after they start shutting down brothels and kicking women out of them into the street, that we see this huge rise in murders of women who are selling sex, as well as women who are sleeping rough or are alcoholics. So the sort of vulnerable, at-risk women pay the price for this campaign. So when she reached the corner here around Wentworth Street, the men attacked her, violently

attacked her, sexually assaulted her, and left her with life-threatening injuries. And she managed to walk to her lodging house in Spitalfields, where she enlisted the help of the lodging housekeeper and eventually was taken to hospital, where she later died of an infection because of the injuries. And this was reported on, there was a coroner's inquest, but then it was mostly forgotten. Just another story of a vulnerable woman who may have sold sex, who certainly was frequently found drunk in the streets, was homeless sort of between lodging houses all the time. Just another story of one of those women being subjected to violence and murder. And it wasn't until

more murders started happening that the press really cottoned on to the fact that there may be a larger story. And that's when you start seeing a lot more newspaper coverage of the murders. But Emma was murdered before that. Emma's case, I think, really demonstrates the kind of quotidian, everyday nature of violence toward women at that time. Far more, in fact, than the Jack the Ripper case does, because the police suspected that she was attacked by what they called a high-rip gang,

a protection gang, who would extort women like Emma, saying, you know, give us a cut of your money and we'll prevent other people from being violent towards you. I'm not sure if that's what happened. We'll never know. I don't really like to speculate on oil. They say it was this, but it really was this. But what's clear is that this group of young men saw it as their right to attack a woman. They were never caught. Another witness who saw Emma a few hours earlier had also been struck in the mouth by another group of men.

So she got out of the area because she thought it was too rough. So buried in these investigations into these very famous murders, you just see again and again and again women, especially sex workers, talking about how much violence they've been subjected to on just a daily basis. Being struck in the face, being kicked, being stolen from. And actually, they also talk about how one of the biggest sources of that violence was the police. Let's come to the police in a second. What was Emma's life story?

You mentioned lodging houses over there. Like, had she come here for work? Was she a local person? Like a lot of the victims of the Whitechapel murders and like a lot of women in the late 19th century who were poor, we don't know. The best guess that I can see from having a look at the census is that she was born in Dorset

in the 1840s on Christmas Day, if this is the right woman. But of course, Emma Smith's a very common name. If this is the right woman, her maiden name is less common. So we can be a little bit more certain. Yeah, she was born in Dorset and lived there for most of her life and seems to have only come to London in the 1880s. So she wasn't born in London like so many people in 19th century London. She wasn't born in London and had come here.

And it's really hard to know why. There's lots of reasons a woman would come following a husband, perhaps, or running away from a husband, which is my better guess with Emma Smith, because there was no husband in the picture when she was murdered. This woman seems to have married an army pensioner. So a good guess would be that she was experiencing domestic violence or poverty or some combination of the two that caused her to come to London to try to find work, a better life.

She testified because she did speak a little bit before she died. She talked about how she hadn't seen her friends for a decade. So this is a woman who's clearly been cut off from her social support networks, probably by experiences of violence at home, and who's come to London to try to improve her life somewhat. But as the story often goes, she ends up bouncing between lodging houses, engaging in all kinds of different casual work, what some historians call the economy of makeshift, where you're really just spending your days trying to get enough money to find somewhere to sleep at night. Because the last thing you wanted to do was go to the workhouse. And so that's all we really know about Emma Smith,

is that her story is a really, really typical story of a vulnerable woman in the late 19th century. You're listening to Downstone's History. We're talking about the Whitechapel murders. More after this. chapel murders. More after this. we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories,

listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week. So it's very interesting that London comes to represent that to these women. You can imagine them out in the counties, the provinces. Do you think London was a place where it was going to be hard, but single women at least could survive? I guess more so than rural Dorset. Yeah, I think there were more opportunities for casual work, for sure.

And casual work was such an important part of the economy of poor vulnerable women's lives because the alternative was the workhouse and the late 19th century workhouse had been deliberately designed as a place where nobody would want to stay because this idea is that the workhouse is supposed to be so awful that you're gonna do any other work you can think of in order to not have to stay there. Working people hated the workhouse. It was really, really the last resort. And so coming to London gave you lots of opportunities, not least being able to bounce around to different workhouses

without getting the reputation as a pauper. Because if you were branded as a pauper, then you had to stay for long periods of time in the workhouse. If you just came in for a night, you were a casual, so you could just stay for one night. So you were saying they could go from workhouse to workhouse and there was a lot of work here. Yeah, there was a lot of opportunities. But when they got here, you can't really say they had big dreams,

but they were just trying to make things a little bit better for themselves. But unfortunately, when they arrived in London, they often found it very difficult to find work. They found that selling sex was often the only kind of work that allowed them any kind of amount of income enough to survive. They were living hand to mouth without their supposed social support networks and very, very often encountered the violence that was just a daily fact of life on the streets of London. So we've come down an alleyway now, just one or two blocks back from the kind of commercial thoroughfare, we're in a residential area, this is what it would have been like I guess back in the 19th century as well. Yeah it would

have been a lot busier so this is Flower and Dean Street which is infamously connected to the Jack the Ripper murders but is also just part of East End lore. It's where organized criminals lived and it's a really typical scene of East London life would take place. So in the late 19th century, Flower and Dean Street would just be filled with people, with kids running across the road, playing with women, chatting, doing their laundry. Laundry would probably be strung across the streets. And it was just this vibrant space. But to middle-class reformers, it was also a very dangerous space. It's where all these common lodging houses were for people who couldn't afford steady rent, who would sometimes sleep rough, who would sometimes

use the casual ward, and who, when they were lucky and had a bit of money, would get a bed in the lodging house for a few nights. And so lodging housekeepers were really kind of major players in the community. And so the fact that Emma Smith goes back to her lodging house and her lodging housekeeper helps her is a really common story. They were often some of the only social support that women like Emma could count on. And so these lodging houses were considered dangerous spaces where there was too much drink and too much sex, couples using them out of wedlock, living in pretend marriages, children being dragged up inside. And so one of the reasons Flower and Dean Street and places like it doesn't exist anymore is because of slum clearances. So the idea is you haul it all down, you get rid of the slums, and of course, as you might

imagine, there was very little thought to what you're going to do about the people inside. People like Emma were considered, and this is a terrible word, but it was really commonly used in the late 19th century, the residuum, the bottom of society. And they were really, really thought of as worthless, as criminal, as semi-criminal, and very little thought was given to their well-being. And so I think when we think about violence against women in any period, but especially in the late 19th century, I think it's important to remember that any woman could be a victim of violence in London in the late 19th century, but the women who were far more likely to be victims of violence were poor, vulnerable women. So this is Gunthorpe Street, but at one point was called George's Lane, I think.

And the reason I've brought you here is because it's a site of another one of these Whitechapel murders, this time of a woman named Martha Tabram. And she was known to sell sex in the East End. So she's kind of one of the women making some amount of her money through sexual labor. And she was out in the evening with her friend, Pearlie Paul, who was a real character. Her character really comes through in the police investigation. And the two of them had solicited a pair of soldiers. And the reason I wanted to bring that up is because that's the other thing that we forgot about the East End as we walk through it today, is how it was really contiguous with the Docklands and with military bases. So there were lots and lots of soldiers and sailors in the

streets here. Soldiers and sailors brought lots of custom, so that's kind of what kept the pubs going and certainly helped women who were selling sex make ends meet. But they were also really well known for being very violent, very drunk often. And I'm really interested in this kind of relationship between military masculinity and violence against women, because I think they're really related. And that's why Martha Tabrin's story, it really helps illustrate that. She was stabbed 39 times and found dead in a stairwell in one of the buildings that used to be on this street. Again, like all the other cases, her killer was never found, but they strongly suspected it was some man from the barracks. What's particularly interesting in this story as well is that the police are interviewing

the suspects because Pearly paul identifies them she says those were the two men and martha tabram went with one of them and the police investigate they find that according to the barracks register the men were in there they don't query that any further and they say in the police report that they've decided to completely disregard the testimony of pearly paul because she was prostitute, and so her word was worth nothing. And you see this happen again and again and again in far less famous murders, in far less consequential moments of violence, where women are testifying, giving evidence,

and their testimony is completely dismissed because the police decide that they're a prostitute and they shouldn't be trusted. And this is the case in this story as well and so they don't pursue it they just assume that pearly paul must be wrong and the murder is never found so you get a sense from this little narrow passage an old building this side what this area would have been like exactly and like the east end was just full of these little passageways where people would cut through, where people would have sex, where people would sleep rough. And the reason that I've brought you here, it's called Magdalene Passage, which is, of course, really evocative.

But it was also very near, or perhaps was, what was called George's Lane, which was a little laneway around the corner from a pub. A lot of this landscape has changed, so we're nearby. And this is the site where a young woman named Frances Coles was murdered in 1891. And the reason why she was considered part of the Whitechapel murders, or the reason that we really know about it at all, is because she was considered part of the Whitechapel murders. But really, the story doesn't make her one of the canonical victims. We know that she was probably a victim of a kind of much more ordinary form of violence. It seems very, very likely that she was stabbed to death and had her throat cut by her partner,

by her boyfriend. And this is probably the most common form of violence that women in the late 19th century would have to endure. And really, as we probably know today, is the most common form of violence throughout the whole of the 20th century and the 21st century as well. Francis was found by a police officer, because actually we're just around the corner from where Lehman Street police station was, which was the biggest police station in the East End.

And we need to talk about police. They've just been set up. Did these women, did people in this area see the police as an ally in helping to reduce crime? No, I wouldn't say they did. I mean, we don't have a lot of information, right? We don't have a lot of these women's voices. We don't have a lot of people interviewing them, asking them what they thought of the police. But we do have a fairly good sense that the police weren't seen as allies. A lot of police officers saw this area of London as a terrifying place to work, as a no-go zone.

There were alleys where if you walked down, something would get thrown at you for being a police officer. So they were also quite worried about violence. But one of the reasons why people had that attitude is because the police were perpetrators of violence, and H Division White Chapel was absolutely notoriously corrupt. Police officers were known to extort women who sold sex. You give me money, I won't arrest you. They were known to drink on the beat, to harass rough sleepers,

and to just generally be policing the underworld by kind of almost being part of it themselves. And this all kind of comes to light in 1906 because there's actually a royal commission on the duties of the Metropolitan Police. And one of the reasons it was established was to investigate these allegations of police violence, harassment, and corruption. And they go systematically through these high-profile cases, and time and time again, you see the police acting very, very badly.

And almost always, it's women who sell sex who are their targets. They're incredibly dismissive toward them. They don't believe a word they say. There is an inherent sense that they believe that they deserve the violence that they experience and that they deserve to encounter police violence as well. Very little comes of this Royal Commission, but it really exposes just the culture of violence that the police are using and the culture of violence that the East End is really known for. Under this railway tunnel now feels very, well this is

probably a 19th century structure isn't it? Yeah I think so and East London used to have a lot more of these that were spaces again of shelter for people who didn't have homes. Also remember that in the night time there would have been very very little lighting so very dark. They would have been threatening places at night. Yeah they would have definitely been threatening places at night but also places of shelter for people who had nothing better. So under the railway arches was a really common place for people to sleep rough and the reason I wanted to talk about the railway arches in particular in connection with the Whitechapel murders and violence against women is because this was one of the sites, not this specific railway arch, but it was under a railway arch that they discovered the

torso of a murdered woman. And it was called the Pynchon Street murder. And it was connected to a couple of other murders of dismembered women that were found in the Thames and in other places around London all around the same time. And I don't want to get into the gruesome details, because that's not what I'm interested in at all. But what is important about these murders, and why I really want to highlight them in the context of this conversation, is because the police assumed that they were murders of women who they had labeled prostitutes. So women who were selling sex, who, because of the fact that they were selling sex were really vulnerable to violence from third parties, from gangs who could threaten them or even kill them if they didn't give

them money for protection. And so a number of things are encapsulated in these murders because you've got on the one hand that drive to clean up the streets, pushing prostitution further underground, pushing it into spaces like this, out of public supervision, out of those kind of natural spaces of the lodging houses where there was always somebody around, you know, somebody who could hear you, somebody who could help you. And the more the police were pressuring women to move on, to stop soliciting on the streets, the more that these moral reform organizations were shutting down brothels, the more women were forced into spaces like this and were forced to rely on really dodgy people, mostly men, who

were organizing their labor, so watching out for the police, taking a cut off the top of their earnings to get them good accommodation, all those sorts of things. And so they think that the victims of these torso murders or the Pynchon Street murders were some of these women. And the other really striking thing about these murders is the degree to which the police were just so fatalistic about ever being able to catch who did it, because they just sort of wrote these women off at high risk women, vulnerable women who sold sex were just supposed to go missing, right? And you're not going to be able to find their killers. And so they're just so fatalistic,

like, oh, that was a prostitute who was murdered. Happens all the time. No need to investigate. We're not going to catch the killer. And I just think that in that way, these murders just tell a story that is so, so common, both in the 19th century as well as today. We talked a lot about the women, the female victim of these crimes, about male perpetrators. Do men just kill no matter what the time period and place? Or is there something about the Eastern London in the 19th century that made men kill? I don't think there's something about the 19th century sort of milieu

that made men violent. And in fact, I would hazard a guess that if you look at the statistics, the rates of violence haven't changed. If anything, it's going to look like they've gone up because things like domestic violence just really weren't reported or recorded in the late 19th century. So there's this hidden violence. And that is an everyday thing. That's something that men were just known as doing. You know, women obviously tried to get away from abusive partners and husbands and even took them to court sometimes. But the degree to which this was just accepted as part of married life was extreme, far more than it is accepted today. And we already

know that it is a hidden pandemic of domestic violence today. It was equally true, if not more true, in the late 19th century. But in terms of street violence, I don't know if it was more common. But I do think that there were a lot of poor, vulnerable, impoverished, alcoholic men as well. And it's these sorts of social problems that just kept not getting fixed that create situations where people are both more vulnerable to violence, but also more likely to perpetrate it. And is that where the perspective of a historian is really valuable today? Because we are also coming to terms with violence against women in London, elsewhere today.

What are some of the ideas that the 19th century gives you when you were thinking about the modern world? Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I'm just very depressed at how little has changed. You know, what I see in the 19th century in terms of how women are made vulnerable to violence, the quotidian nature of violence, how much violence there is against women. You look at the present day and you think, how can we have gone through so many changes as a society and yet not been able to address these issues? But in terms of learning lessons from history, I think that is also the lesson, is that we keep kind of doing the same things. We keep suggesting that kind of carceral solutions are going to get us out of this problem, put more police on the

streets, push prostitution further underground, all of those sorts of things. There's still the same solutions being offered again today. And history shows us that that doesn't work. And it also, from that long-duray perspective, shows us the social problems that underpin this violence. And until we start doing something about those, we're really not going to change history. We're just going to relive it. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great

podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast. We can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.