Oh What A Time... - #192 Dan Snow on Waterloo, Nazi Gold Trains and the Age of Sail (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re joined by one of our favourite historians in the whole world, it’s Dan Snow! We treat this episode like we’ve cornered Dan at a BBQ and just ping him with questions: how gruesome was the Battle of Waterloo? What was the worst job on a ship? Did the Nazi Gold Train actually exist?We cover a lot on this pod, but if we’ve missed anything, you know what to do: [e-mail] 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Tuesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh Water Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the O Watertime Group chat. Plus if you become an O Water Time All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Water Time. Welcome back to Oh Water Time and part two of our chat with the brilliant Dan Snow. Do you know what? Let's get straight back into it. Right. From people being decapitated with cannonballs,

we'd hope we'd move somewhere lighter, but we're now actually moving on to the last day of Hitler with Chris. This is lads. We're lad-podier. We're covering all the big lad topics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is it. This is it. So I've been fascinated with the final days of Hitler in the Furibunker.

You've podcasted on this brilliantly. And for me, I think what does it is, like this is one of the most evil men in history. And the way his demise comes, I think it's just so fitting. But I just love the scenes in there, the mania as these guys realize, it's all over for them and all the rancor and everything that happens in there. You've actually, I saw recently, you've actually touched, or I think you at least saw Hitler's Last Will and Testament,

a copy in the, was it the Imperial War Museum? Yeah, it's amazing. How did it feel to see this document that had emerged from that scene? It's wild, isn't it? I mean, look, one of the best, like, of the many, I'm very lucky, the travel things, but seeing the objects and the artefacts

is just extraordinary, you know, to see that. I mean, that was sort of liberated by chance, you know, by chance from an office in Berlin. It was rushed to the British. I mean, it's very interesting, it was typed up, yeah, in the last few days of it was life. Last days of the Second World War in Europe. And it's just a massive, all it is,

a big whinge about Jews. He doesn't, he hasn't learned much from his experiences. He hasn't grown. He hasn't learned. And he says, ultimately,

you know, the Jews have undone me and, and I was right all along. You know, it's just an astonishing document. It's chilling.

It really is chilling. But that, the last days in that bunker, people are rightly fascinated by the second world. I don't, I think they're right to be fascinated

because it is the largest war in human history. It's a war where no one can tell you with the first warrants. It ends in a kind of nameless place. in central to eastern Belgium.

Right, great, thanks very much. It ends with Kaiser Wilhelm taking a train to a holiday in the Netherlands. Like, it's just there isn't a kind of neat. The Second World War, you get a situation where, you know, the Germans are banging on the door of London. They get repulsed.

They go to Moscow. They get within sight of the Kremlin. They can, like, see the spires of the Kremlin, forward units. They then get repulsed from there. And then four years later, they are fighting in the streets of Berlin. Like, it's just, it's war as screenwriters,

novelists would sort of want to write it if that doesn't sound too crass. But it is. That's why people are fascinated by it. It's the war in which the first man-made object enters space, the war in which nuclear weapons used for first time. It is a war that trans, you know, jet aircraft come. It transforms everything. The genesis of the computer age really takes place and the, you know, the encryption and the decryption efforts of the intelligence services during the Second World War. It is just so extraordinary and it sort of really gives us the map of the world. and the strategic geography of the world.

In many ways it lasted today until Trump's trying to overturn it. And so, yeah, that bunker is what an – the Hitler's empire that once stretched from Brittany to style to the Volga, you know, almost Asia. And in fact, units are sort of knocking on, you know, getting to the Caspian Sea. I mean, that is the biggest European empire ever conquered, but it only lasts for a few months, basically. And three years after that moment, Hitler – and the German Empire, is bits of Germany and Hitler and Hitler's surrounded in Berlin, surrounded by and fighting hopeless battle. And in that bunker, you've got people that have lived that. I mean, that's the thing,

you know, two or three years seems like not very long to us. That's, they've gone from one thing to the other in that period. I mean, I just can't imagine it. You've, you know, one minute you're sort of in Crimea, like dipping a toe in the, in the water of the Black Sea. A year or two later, you were in a bunker in Berlin knowing that you are going to die and all of those around you're going to die and be brutalized. And so in the bunker you get those amazing stories like Hitler's living in a fantasy world. You get Goebbels killing his children. You get the kind of insane scenes downstairs of people just breaking into the booze, the drugs, the sex, the orgies.

So there were wild parties, weren't there? Wild parties. So it was really well-stocked, wasn't it? They had loads of champagne. Really well-stocked? Yeah, champagne and there's pain-killing drugs. There's dentistry drugs, a lot of anesthetic. Hitler was obviously keen on drugs anyway.

So a lot of people are using speed generally. for military purposes. You know, there's lots of speed around. There was a dentist fully outfitted dentists, a surgery suite. And they're just apparently that dentist's chair got an absolute rinsing in ways that I don't really wish to think about too much. But no, I mean, it was an orgy. I mean, it was like it was insane. And these people are drunk, they're traumatized, they're terrified.

The women know that they are about to experience appalling treatment at the hands of the Red Army. They know that. The men know that they are going to be killed. And so it is just nothing you can imagine really. And then Hitler's, but also there's like, weirdly, things are still operating. Like there's still maps around. People are kind of ordering troops to do things. The troops aren't really there anymore. Do any of them try to escape? Yeah. Or have they accepted their lot? Yeah. Some of them try and escape. But once Hitler's dead, they'd lot of them try and escape. I've always found it fascinating. We seem to have the story of what happened to Hitler's body, that the petrol was poured over his corpse. He was burned and then he was buried eventually. The Russians take him away and then he ends up in Moscow.

But then the story kind of breaks down a little bit. They test the skull. It doesn't appear that it was Hitler's. And now it feels like there's stories filling the void, maybe conspiratorial, that perhaps a Nazi sympathizer took his body and just threw it in with the rest of, Berlin's population that died in the war.

What do you think actually happened to Hitler's body after it was burnt outside the bunker? Do you have a theory? I don't have a theory. I do buy the idea that the Russians got hold of the skull. But the thing is the Russians had a just enormous, like they're going to do.

The Soviets immediately just started to encourage almost the disinformation because the Soviets were very nervous that the Nazis would find remaining Nazis find common cause with the Americans and the Brits

they knew they were communists they knew the West was sort of capitalist liberal democracy they always knew there were big issues between them and so the Soviets immediately started playing kind of fast and loose and so the So it's just, it has been complicated to this day. But I'm, you know, I'm convinced that Hitler was killed.

Oh, yeah, no. Just to be clear, I 100% agree. I don't subscribe to that Simpson's theory that he's still running around South America. No. At 130 or whatever he is. Just quickly, could we touch on the Nazi gold train? Would you mind communicating? the rumor of the Nazi gold train to begin to kick this off?

Well, I mean, this is heartbreaking. The Nazis looted everywhere they went, and they had lots of crazy ideas about bringing the world's treasures to Berlin and creating the world's best museums and palaces and showing, you kind of stamping their domination on the rest of the world by hoarding the treasures the rest of the world. And so they stripped various czarist kind of palaces in Soviet Union and artworks from around the world.

And people have heard of the Monuments Men, who these groups are going and try and sort of restore art to where it had once been. But there was a couple of things that are missing that people are fascinated by. And one is the Amber Room in the sits outside St. Petersburg. And it was a palace with a room made of amber. And that was stripped by the Germans, shipped west, but no one knows. So was that a functioning room that people use with walls and floors made of amber? No, it was gold, wasn't it?

Oh, God. Ah, okay. Not Jurassic Park Ambers. Not that, okay. That's how I imagine. I'm just basically now imagining the world's most least comfortable room. There were amber panels

and with lots of gold leaf and mirrors all over. I got you. Okay, amber's in colour, yeah. So they pulled down the walls of the room effectively and carted it off somewhere, but no one's ever found where it ended up. Yeah, it was the summer residence of the Tsars of Russia,

this palace outside St. Petersburg. Yeah. So the job, but no one knows where that ended up and it thought, you know, is it going to turn up one day in a castle basement? Is it, or did it go on one of the ships out of Germany's Eastern Empire that was something by the Soviets in the Baltic? We don't know. And so that was one of the options, one of the thoughts that could have been, you know, hidden around the German Empire somewhere. And in the naughties, some Polish treasure hunters did some ground penetrating radar and appeared to find

a tunnel, a railway siding, that led to a sort of an old tunnel that there had been, the entrance to which have been demolished. So the thought might be there could be a train in that tunnel. The Nazis had parked a train there demolished the entrance, hoping they would one day be able to counterattack and come back as they were treated through Poland and they never came back for it. And it broke my brain because they've never heard of anything so exciting. And particularly then the Polish a man who I will never ever forgive. These two fine, treasure hunters making these announcements all the time. That's all well and good. But the Polish government just jumped on it and did a press come and said, look, here's it, here it is. It's, you know, I'm the Polish Home Secretary. We've got

a treasure train here. We've got a German World War II train and it's bound to be full of treasure. So gold looted from, you know, looted from everywhere, right? But, you know, all the gold that was found in Eastern Europe would be looted and gathered up and there was being transported further west and it was left on this train. And I'll never get it. I was coming out of the hospital, my second child had been born and I got a text message going the BBC, we've got it, we've got the rights to the story, we're going

and I thought, this is it. This is your Toot and Carmoon moment? This is my Toot and Carmoon moment. Because it was, I am naively thought if the Polish government obviously a bunch of treasure hunters say with like weirdos, I was fine. So I thought I was going to be

repelling into a tunnel with a massive old steam train here which by the way is cool enough and there would be like Rembrandts and gold and maybe the amber room in boxes on these kind of freight You're thinking Bufters I mean Bafters

mate statues come on with I'm thinking Oscars and Bafter Schmafter and so I mean I couldn't believe my ears and eyes and I just this was it

and then we get I've never been so excited in my we get out there on the first day and we go to this railway siding and it's like it doesn't look great like there's no obvious railway siding

there's like there's like a piece of masonry out of the side of a hill and you're like the hill looks okay all right there's definitely no you know it's not like this the tracks you know like divide and half of them just lead into a pile of rocks or

whatever like so okay and then we like futile about and do some grandpher trade or I don't find anything and then we go to the local geologist in the Rotswaffe university and after about four days and he just went these people are idiots, they're imbeciles there is nothing down there.

Look, the ground, I've been, like the professor had been saying it, no one wanted to listen to him. I mean, lucky we didn't schedule him on the first day because I was just gone home. Oh, God. But we'd shed it. So we deliberately got me all excited and we'd schedule it. And so I was basically spending

two weeks making a show about something didn't exist. And it was just an absolute tragedy. I mean, I mean, of all the, I mean, most of my programs have been sort of crushing disappointments but I mean that was sound. Were you on the phone to the BBC in London saying it's not going according to plan?

Yeah, well no, because at that stage I remembered that I was a presenter and the producer's job was to be contacting. Nice. I said, I think this might be one for you. I'll go and have a, I'll go and have some borsh. Are you familiar with box tunnel? You heard of box tunnel?

It's near where I grew up on the outside of outskirts of bath, which is a tunnel where... Don't sell me another goddamn tunnel here. You got me. You got me. It's a tunnel where British trains would go in and then turn off and unload munitions, which are all hidden under the hills there, and then they time it. So another train would come out at the other end exactly the same time.

Amazing, incredible thing. Amazing. Yeah, yeah. Talking of incredible things, we're now going to move on to something that I find endlessly fascinating, which is the age of sail. Are we okay with that? I've just finished a book on the final voyage of Captain James, cook, which was called the wide, wide sea, which I absolutely loved.

A gorgeous book. Have you read it? Yeah, it's fantastic. I just find it, in terms of the sort of points from the past that I daydream a lot and I have nightmares about, I think being at sea on one of these big wooden vessels is just, for me, the idea of it's the most horrific life, I think, you could possibly live, but also fascinating. So on that, my first question, very simple one, which is, what do you think was the tough role on board a ship during the age of sail? How hard did life get when you were away for two

years on these floating cities? I'm glad you share my passion for that. I think the good days are very good. I think the bad days were very bad indeed. And I'm talking horrific lives, you know, well, to come back to that. So I think the toughest jobs, there were all sorts of tough jobs. There were the young, keen, agile boys and men who would go up to the tops, who would go So you climb right up, do you think of a big square rig ship, think of your kind of classic pirate ship at home, you go right, those sails are lowered and raised by humans who've climbed to the top of those masts

and then walked out along those wooden poles that hold the sails on. So you have to, with no safety lines, obviously, you're climbing up the mast, then you're edging your way out along these spas. Are they just literally just walking along the woods, or are they holding on and shimming? Well, they're walking or I tend to sort of do an embarrassing, like tummy, like arms over one side, legs over the other.

Yes. Sort of and then like sort of tummy wiggle my way across. Wow. And there are some ropes underneath that you can step on as well. But they would obviously, they would often run along the yards. Yeah, they'd be so nimble. They'd be, they'd be, I'd really struggled at Goy. Well, that's so I'm, so I'm out.

I'm out. That's how they tested your super. For a life at sea, L. And that's on a sunny day, mate. Exactly. And that's on a sunny day, because on a bad day, when you're going around Cape Horn in a gale, the ship, if you've got too much sail-ups, there's two, you have to go aloft quickly to reduce the amount of sail-up, otherwise you do things like capsize or the ship gets uncontrollable.

And so in the worst possible conditions, you're going up to do that job, which is remarkable. And if you think about the angle through which the deck is moving, I'm waving my forearm around, of it. It's an audio medium, so that makes no sense. If you're standing on a car ferry, you're on a ship's deck, it's moving through an angle. At the top of a mast, that angle is going to be sort of magnified. It's going to be exaggerated, obviously. So you're going through, like, for example, that's why you're on, when you go ice skating, if you're on the outside of the crack the whip, you go really, really quick. You're moving really fast because the angle is much greater than the angle that you're experiencing on the deck.

And so they are clinging on whilst being pushed through the most astonishing, you know, being battered by wind's ways. In the winter, there's, you know, in many accounts, 1750s, I've read accounts of, you know, the men are getting kind of frost, frostbite up there. You're trying to sail in Arctic conditions as well. Cook would have done that. So sort of in, in unimaginable, I think, for us,

the sort of the physical labour, the fear, the danger doing that. And then you do lose men overboard. There are accounts of men for. And if you fall overboard, you are done for, really, aren't you? A boat that side can't really turn around to get you. You can't, you're pretty much done for. I mean, lots of them couldn't swim. and in good weather

you'd send out the ship's boat so there's a guy called Captain Cochran who loses a man he's unable to say to his men we cannot go back for those men I'm so sorry the seas are too rough the dangers we won't we won't find them

I mean I've done a lot of sailing it's very scary how quickly you lose sight of someone little spake in the water when you're rumbling along at 10 knots 15 knots just on dangerous jobs I've read about I've gone through a big Nelson phase and I was reading about like the captains of the big boats

like in the Royal Navy you had to well gunshot and great shot is flying around you had to stand there and be a model of bravery that's right well you weren't allowed to duck yeah the narrative of sort of posh bloc's sort of hiding while normal I mean no there was

people knew that the whole system wouldn't work if your captain or your colonel in the army was a coward and a muppet like it just wouldn't work right some sort of absolute clown like I did do go ape because I in charge of the platform. You know, you've got the kids.

You've got to put those shoulders back. There were 12 kids under the age of 10. I had to do it. What are you going to do? Your child's going to look at you like. Imagine you're saying, look, you guys got to go up there without me. So, yeah, the captain's job is just to be ostentatiously brave.

That's why Nelson gets shot. He's got his medals on his chest. He's standing there on a quarter deck. He's doing absolutely nothing of any use at that point. He's made his battle plan. He's signalled the rest of the fleet. Everyone knows what to do. At that point, I cannot emphasize enough,

Nelson is just watching the battle. He could have gone down below and, you know, started writing up more orders. He's got to stand there. He's shot through the shoulder. He drowns in his own blood because he is just, he's doing the essential job of the commanders at that point.

In the army, there's an old expression. Sargent's teach men how to fight. Officers teach men how to die. So he couldn't say to his right-hand man, I'm going to go downstairs, you just give me the gist of things in about an hour. You just come and get me and let me. It wasn't an option.

I'm going to go and check the halftime scores. It's fascinating, isn't it? Just simply not an option to do that. And it was very dangerous. Being a captain, Trafalgar, is very dangerous. They suffered pretty high levels of mortality and death and injury. By the way, being on a ship is pretty tough at the best of times, or certainly in a storm, terrifying.

But also you've got to remember on top of that, disease, right? And that's both microbial disease. So that is people just having no bloody clue. And that's why on British ships, the astonishingly tough punishments for pooing and weeing inside the ship. You go down. Really? Yeah, just have a little crouching the corner behind some barrels.

You've got to go out to the front. You've got to the head of the ship where it's washed by the seawater and you've got to do your business there. Essential, like absolutely essential. Otherwise, you know. So this is the very front of the ship. Yeah, there's front of the ship. There's a front of the ship. There's a grating.

Where Jack and Rose and the Titanic do that romantic moment. Very similar. That's when people are shitting over the side. Okay. Yes, exactly. That's traditionally where it happens. That's what I remember bowels of ships. That's the head.

And there's a grating there and you do your business through the grating. And what is the, what are these punishments? You say horrific punishments. What would be the punishment? Well, horrific. Well, horrific. well they are punishment, brutal punishments. Now, you know, these differed from crew to crew,

but, you know, there were corporal punishments available. Sargent would issue, well, just, frankly, just beat people up, but they would have little knotted ropes. And if you're particularly naughty, you'd be lashed, famous cat and nine-tail. So you've got a rope that is uncoiled into its strands, and then they're knotted, and then your bosons mate, a very strong boson's mate, it'll tie you to a piece of the rigging or, and just, or the grating, and just give you a lap,

open up your back, your blood, and there'd be, your bone would be rib cage would be exposed on occasion. So those are the kind of punishments talking. But, and then, so there's disease. So there's those diseases. So, you know, people are bringing typhosable, people, bring small ports, all that kind of stuff. Yellow fever in the tropics, I mean, hideous.

But then there's also scurvy. There's other forms of disease for malnutrition until cook, you know, until no one knows why the vitamins, no one knows about vitamin C, no one knows why people get scurvy, teeth fall out, old wounds open up, hair falls out. Are there heartbreaking stories of well, I think it, of these ships, basically pulling into port, that are full of limes and everything that you'd need,

basically to sort this issue off, and getting none of it because they have no knowledge of it and just setting off. Sourkraut. Yeah, sourcrow is particularly useful because it keeps quite well. So, you know, I'm sure that would be... What would life have been like when Scurvy took hold? What would it have been like on board?

So as I say, so you're listless, so you just suffer complete and sort of body breakdown. It's a really bad one, folks. Your teeth fall out, as you say, your hair falls out. Old wounds open up, which is a weird one. So you're just bleeding from various orifices and wounds. you are unable to help steer the ship which of course means then the ship's more like to hit the rocks and crash

because you need a lot of manpower to work these ships and you eventually just well you eventually die but it's the description I mean I think it's Dargama's trip back from India the first one I mean there's about three of them left able to work the ship so there's lots of examples of ships arriving important just running themselves a ground or a sandbank

or they can't take the sails down they can't do anything Really? It's crunch. It's crunch into the shallows, yeah. Wow. So pretty crazy stuff. And then, so that's the disease. And the disease kills far more people than the French during the Napoleon Awards, for example.

A disease and weather will kill many more people than battle. But then when we get to battle, things are pretty rough as well. And the descriptions of battle are absolutely terrifying. So there's this astonishing moment when the HMS victory and the Redu Tardabler, the French ship, they are locked together, they are tangled up together. They are shooting each other. So, not point-blank range, they're shooting each other at zero range, you know, one metre, zero-metres range. Sorry, the two boats are literally touching, essentially.

Yeah, you're locked together. You're touching. Wow. Rigging gets entwangled, you know. And so crews are having to, they fire a shot into the enemy. They're traversing their guns upwards, so you're shooting up through the decks of the enemy ship. So on the lower deck, you're kind of trying to shoot up. And then you get buckets to put out the fire that your muzzle flash has caused on the other wooden ship.

You don't want you catching your fire, mate, because you'll set fire to us. So you're sort of putting out the fire on the French ship for them and then blasting them again. Oh my goodness. Yeah, and then the ready table they developed a tactic.

The British gunnery was, everyone knew it was the best in the world. So you're never going to win a gunnery duel with the Brits. So what the French captain did was he arranged. His whole crew would abandon their guns, crash into the HMS victory and then they would all board it and fight, capture HMS victory

by boarding it, by taking the fight with pistols and and hand to hand basically hand to hand yeah cutlasses and so as they're massing on the plan's going quite well and as they're massing on the bows of the rindabla and they're about to start clambering across out of the gun smoke from nowhere apparently the complete chaos to smoke everywhere you can't see anything comes hm's temerere right the fighting temererae from the turner paintings why temer is to famous ship and one of the greatest most powerful battleships on just emerges out of the gloom and the french captain looks round and just goes, oh, you know, now. Because that then comes alongside and fires its

caronades, which are these very, very high caliber, large calibre weapons, so capable of, sort of again, like a shotgun, a machine gun at the time. And again, at point blank range, just annihilates the French crew on the front of the Reda Tabor. There's a mass of men, all rating their turn to climate of victory. They fire these, you know, iron balls and shards of metal into that group of human flesh. And the casualties are kind of First World War-era casualty levels. You know, the Redi Trabler is basically taken out of action by one broadside of the Temerere, which saves HMS victory.

And that's a story that you'll see. You know, there's many other examples of that. And so the wounds in battle were, you know, shocking. And then after Trafalgar, as scary as Trafalgar, that evening, there was an astonishing storm, like an absolute, the worst storm they had ever seen. Well, doesn't this is like Nelson's, some of his final words? He's like, he's dying and he's like, there's going to be a storm tonight. And for some reason, everyone, everyone.

I've checked acque weather on my phone. And it looks really bad. Like, everyone just seems to ignore Nelson's. And he's like, look after Emma. Look after Emma. And there's going to be a storm. And like, they ignore everything he says. Yeah, I mean, I love that.

So he's like, Maximus and Gladiator. He's lying on the ground. He's like, I'm dying. But, you know, secure the prince. Tell the people there's a republic. You know, he's kind of, as he's dying, he's kind of rattling out a few instructions. So Nelson's there. just going, make anchor, there's a hell

there's a storm coming, I can feel, you can feel in the move on the ship, you can hear it in the sounds, you've been at sea since he's a boy. And they say, like, that was the worst storm they'd ever experienced. I mean, it's just completely astonishing, bad luck. So these ships are terribly damaged. Some of them are towing

other ships with no masts, and they are fighting for their lives. Their crewmates are kind of shattered and wounded and missing limbs, screaming. I mean, it's just unbelievable. It's interesting you say, you know, was that the worst. People volunteered for the Navy. It wasn't all press gangs and I do wonder

whether sometimes this is a world in which people are working in fields their whole lives in their villages they're married to whoever they're dropping dead at 40, they're dropping dead at 35 appendicitis. You don't know when you're going to live when you're going to do it. It's a strange old world the dreariness

being down the mines being in a cotton mill like spinning maybe going to see wasn't the worst. Maybe going to was better than some of the other options and the chance of making a bit of money, the chance of seeing the world. You're a very high chance of some

horrible endings, but it's weird to think about what maybe normality looked like for these people as well. What I was going to ask really, because you mentioned these storms, the battle, the risk of sinking, because so many of these ships did sink. And you were part of an expedition that

dived down to the wreck of the HMS, Northumberland, which is a Royal Navy warship that sunk during the Great Storm of 1703. Now, that for me, I find it fascinating, but that is possibly my greatest fear, the idea of diving into the deep, dark sea to a wreck. It's never going to happen. Absolutely. We're in control of that. Through some strange situation, let's say my agent got in contact and said, it pays well, you're going to do it.

That would be my horror. Can you tell me, what was that like? Is that a spooky, eerie experience? And also, what's stuck with you from it most? Talk to me about that experience. My dark secret is I think I slightly agree with you and there's something very weird about working your way along the seabed

because diving in British and Irish waters, well there's some exceptions but usually it's pretty the visibility is pretty bad and so you can only see quite brief in front of your head and so suddenly when you come to something it's quite a lot, it's quite arresting Jesus Christ so you're kind of going, you have no idea where you are

and you're going down this green and black and brown water and then you just hit the bottom And then you're kind of moving along. And then suddenly you see kind of planks or you see the sides of, you know, the wreckage of whatever it is, vessel or aircraft. And it is a very spooky moment. But you, after you get over that initial shock,

you'd like it. It's fine after that. It's fine after that. Are you able to see it as the full vessel itself? Or is it such, yeah. No, that is not a coherent wreck like you would see in a movie or you might see it in the truck archipelago, in the Pacific or something.

it's sort of collapsed it's the fact the sandbank is kind of retreating from it which is why they're going down a lot of the moment going down a few weeks time actually and so English Heritage are kind of monitoring that wreck site because once it's uncovered it's being destroyed because salt water in the English Channel will just destroy any wooden ship

so you're kind of going down to but if all the sand disappeared straight away you would see a kind of Mary Rose-like side of a ship but at the moment you're just the sand's kind of revealing the top metre or two and you get the wood you know the beams is the beautiful oak planking

of the deck, you know, and because of the visibility, you can't really see the whole thing as well. So you're not quite getting that. There's wrecks in the Baltic, so the Vasa was raised, and there is a wreck in the Baltic near where the Varsa was raised in Stockholm Archipelago, where you can, it's a sort of, you know, 17th century ship with gun.

And the Swedish archaeologist told me you can sort of swim along the decks and through it. It's like something out of the Goonies or whatever. Yeah, apparently it's just absolutely incredible, yeah. And you brought up items from the wreck, didn't you? Which of those sort of stuck with you is, you know, most remarkable? There's a, well, I don't know if I should say what's the thing. You're troubled, you always worry about people meeting these wrecks.

But the kind of, I just love the bit, you know, the rope, there's the block and tackle, which is so intricate. They were interestingly made later on. Brunel, Eisenrod King's and Brunel's dad was a French migrate, he's kind of refugee, really. And he was an engineer. And he set up one of the first factories in Britain, making mechanising the process, making blocks and tackles. Royal Navy. And that's where young Eisenbard was sort of, you know, got his experience. So I love those kind of bits

of the rig that they would be raised. I was, there was another shipwreck that we were going to announce quite soon in the English Channel where the ship's bell is, it's in mint condition, it's sunk just for the First World War. Has never been discovered, never been looted, never been dived on. So you get the ship's bell with the name of the ship on it.

You've got torpedoes, you've got shells, you've got little, you've got little plaques from various, you know, little things. One says the, you know, the magazine, they have the sort of the description of what room that would have been on the ship. They've got the compass.

They've got the engine, you know the thing on the engine of the Titanic movie where you kind of at a telegraph where you say, full speed ahead? And it goes to a stand, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. The kind of classic movie trope. They've got that on this ship, which is stuck on full steam ahead. Even it was...

Oh, really? Collided with another British ship. It was chopped in half and sank. And amazingly, on the seabed, there it is. There's telegraph still stuck in full steam ahead. So they didn't even have time to be like, guard reverse, you know, so that's kind of cool to see that after about 100 and something years. My grandfather was sunk actually during World War II. He was a captain of a merchant navy vessel and he was sunk, yeah, by a Nazi submarine. And whereabouts? It was out in the Caribbean

somewhere. Oh, right, okay. That's around that sort of area. But was he on, was he in the lifeboat for long or did he get picked up? No, there's the final sort of telegram messages saying it all is clear and all is fine, all this sort of stuff. And then after that, they, they just know. Oh, so he didn't He died? No, he died. He's died. Four days before my mum was born, actually. It was quite a thing. My mum's my mum got the telegram. Oh, my God. That's tragic. So, but yeah, so maybe that's possibly partly where my fear comes from, but also my fascination with it. And what I find remarkable about that is it's a picture of my grandfather on the wall at home of how young he was. Like, you forget, like he's probably 36, something of that, captaining a vessel. And it's like remarkable.

The young face that's sort of like the loss of war is just heartbreaking. That's heartbreaking. Your mum growing up without a dad once, what a thing. I mean, I was the thing about the second one where it's still some of the reason people are fascinated. But we're still living with the consequences. Yes, absolutely. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are physiological effects of that. You know, we now know that there is this kind of trauma.

Your mom is still, I hope, with us, sorry to be. Yes, she is, yes. Your mom's still with us. She grew up without a dad because that war. You know, that's a huge, that's, our fellow neighbours and citizens are living totally, with the consequences of that enormous stories. It's not surprising that we're absolutely fascinated by it, but what shocking story.

Due to a slight mix up in primary school, so he was torpedoed, I told all my friends he'd been harpooned. That is slightly... Which is a slightly different story. I used to get those wrong as well. They do same similar, don't they? Well, Dan, thank you so much for that.

Thank you for spending so much time with us and giving us all these incredible stories. Any time, that's... Thank you once again for inventing the medium. Well, yeah. The first history podcast in history. What's weird about, no, listen, I didn't know anything. What was weird about me is I remember Ricky Javet,

like doing a podcast in like 2001, right? Yeah. And then I didn't think about it much. And then serial happened. It was like by that stage we were kind of, I don't know, 2010, 2012, whatever. And people have podcast again. And I remember weirdly thinking podcasts, I thought they were, I thought that was kind of last decade.

Yeah, that was done, man. And so I thought I was really late to it. And then now everyone thinks I was really, Yeah, so I'm happy to take the credit, though. So there was Ricky Jubez, then 10 years of nothing, and then Dan's no. That's weird start. Let's just leave it to that, yeah. Let's claim that.

Thank you, Dan. Now, Dan, of course, you have wonderful things that our listeners can listen to. Wonderful things. Of course, so many wonderful things they can watch and listen to. What would you like them to point their ears and eyes to at the moment? Well, basically, I'll just check out history. It's a video streaming platform where we make history shows like the HMS and Thumbulland Show, It's very kind of you to mention that.

And then we got the podcasts on there as well. But yeah, so Dan Snow's history here is my podcast. And you can find that really wherever you get your pods. Yeah, you go. Fantastic. Do you remember the first time we met? Actually, it was on the Allid Jones ITV morning show. We were both guests on it.

On a Saturday morning. Yeah, yeah. That was a, that was one of those. I mean, can you imagine? Where is that show now? In the archives. Yeah. Yeah, our memories.

Thank you, Dan. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much. So there we go. That was Dan Snow. I loved that. What a pro. Yes.

I kept thinking he's so good at this. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking exactly the same thing. I was like, oh, wow, yeah, he's just really, really great at this. People who are watching a clip of this, I kept thinking he's got so many more books than I have. I've got a tiny little bookcase behind me with about 30. books. You've had 7,000 books

behind him. The guy reads Tom. He's a professional historian. I've got the Guardian app. I read stuff on that. What a lovely man, genuinely fascinating. Do go and check out his stuff elsewhere. Not that he needs support, but it's hugely popular historian for good reason, but it's brilliant stuff. If any, oh, what's a time, full-timers

have any ideas for episodes you'd like us to cover, do get in contact with the show. And we will see you very, very soon for yet more history fun. Bye-bye. Bye. Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else.

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