Oh What A Time... - #193 History’s Mysteries and Hamstring Updates (Part 2)

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re discussing some of the greatest mysteries that history has to offer: we’ve got the infamous tale of The Princes in the Tower, and the big one - Who Shot JFK? Plus we have a brief history of the literary true crime genre.This week we’re chatting embarrassing injuries - if you’ve got one to share, you know what to do. Email us about anything you’d like right here: [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, Whatter 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 Oh Watertime group chat. Plus, if you become an Oh Watertime 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 oh, water time. Hello and welcome to part two of mysteries. Let's get on with the show. So to start this part, I'm going to be telling you lovely boys, all about the history of crime fiction. But there's one mystery I want to get into first, which is I've just taken this pint of water from the bedside table, next to where I'm recording at the moment.

And the mystery is, I can say, after one sit, how long has that been? there because I've just had a sip of water that could. It's either been there 24 hours or seven to eight months and I cannot work it out. It's stale beyond belief. But I'm stuck with it now because we're recording. It's all the water I've got. You ever had that?

Yeah, all the time. On the bedside table, you're like, when was that put there? I don't know when that was put there. Tom, why do you think I'm such a big, strong boy? I don't drink anything. I would love a scientist to explain to me how, water goes stale because it does in a day

of being left to my bedside table it's stale I don't know what is that I had an idea which I sketched out my pad once which was a design for a bedside table which is also a water tank and has a tube that goes from it and means that you can roll over the

night and suck on the tube and have fresh constantly churning water that doesn't go stale and also doesn't go anywhere it's not tipped anywhere because it's contained in the body of the side table. I'd love to go to bed with one of those bottles like hamsters have in cages where it's just a metal tube straight into my mouth.

Reach over. So I can drink all night. What I would pay to have a good look at Tom Crane's notebook. If that's the kind of gold that's getting served up. Can I suggest for that, oh, what a time. As they're like maybe our upcoming merch shop, Tom Crane's notebook in full. Okay. So you want to open up my personal diary?

Is that what you're saying? And then sort of sell them. Okay, good. See what other goals in there? But, you know, like when they did this with Leonardo da Vinci, they were finding designs for the helicopter and things like that. Yeah. Yeah.

The 500 years of time when everyone is using these water tank beds, people are like, oh my God, he was a genius. He was ahead of his time. Because he's a bedside table, you could call it the water table, which is also a water table is a phrase to do with water, isn't it? I don't tell you short it. What is the water table? I love that.

How much water there is in the country, isn't it? That's the water table. Yeah. And you've got to use, and you've got to make sure it's connected to a crane drain. Look, if there's any money men out there, all women do get in contact with the show. We'll see where we can take that idea.

Right. On to more important things, though. As I say, I'm talking to you now about the history of murder mysteries. Let's start by asking this. I think it's crucial. Are you into crime dramas? Are you into crime novels? What's your sort of feeling towards this?

I have watched them in my time, the killing and broad church and things like that. What about Sherlock Holmes? Have you ever read Sherlock Holmes or stuff like that? The Sherlock Holmes novels are some of the most gripping page turners. Really? I've ever read. Amazing.

The Valley of Fear is fantastic. Yeah, they're fantastic. But it's been a while since I've read Sherlock Holmes. But I did go through a big Sherlock Holmes face. Well, if you go to the toilet at Josh Whitcomb's house, you get to read it because he has Sherlock Holmes. in every toilet in his house. That's his like toilet read.

Yeah. Do you want to read a really filthy book? Which, and then clean your hands thoroughly afterwards. Britain's dirtiest book. There was a time when crime dramas weren't anything. This didn't exist. They weren't around, despite their huge popularity now, there was a point when he said,

have you ever read a crime drama? People would say, I have no idea what you're talking about. And to discuss that, discuss where this idea first came from, the whole history of crime fiction. We need to talk about a man called Jack Witcher. Now, Jack Witcher, you may have heard about. He was one of the first ever detectives

appointed by the Metropolitan Police in London in 1842 through his work at Scotland Yard and he became one of the most famous policemen of his day. My understanding, basically, if you were a policeman about there, there was like six of you. It seems like early city police work. It was like a group of like eight people trying to deal with the whole of Birmingham, basically.

And they were rubbish. Yeah. To be fair, they didn't have a lot of tools at their disposal. Yeah. No, that is true. They had a wooden baton. That was it. And a whistle.

That's all they had. A wooden batten, a whistle and a badge. Right, off you go. Yeah, exactly. Maintain order. And they'd entirely be going on the hunches and bias of locals they happen to have spoken to directly after cry. whoever someone has said, yeah, it's definitely Steve from the butcher, like, okay, well, that guy's now back to rights because that's who they're going to follow and accuse.

Now, which, okay, he's... And by the way, have you got a problem with Steve the butcher? That's irrelevant, I think. Yeah, yeah, fine, fair. So Jack is born in London in 1814. He's a son of a gardener, and he enters the Met in 1837 as a constable. But as a detective is when he kind of makes his name for himself. Here's some of the crimes he solved And I absolutely love these They all sound like he's lying on his CV Or he's showing off at a house party

He solved the theft of valuable paintings From the Earl of Suffolk by his valet And he also tracked down Italian anarchists After they tried to assassinate The French Emperor Napoleon III in 1858 Are you lying, Jack? Are these lies? But that sounds like some Michel Lacombs would have done

Well, you know, tracking down Italian Marxists Exactly, Elle. And, well, you've hit the nail on their head. This is where the idea of Sherlock Holmes comes from, okay? Because there was one particular mystery, though, which cemented this for him. And this took his fame up a level and brought him to the attention of novelists and soon saw him being used as the inspiration for a new type of fictional character and for a new type of fiction. This crime was called the Mystery of Road Hill House. And the case itself began in the summer of 1860. There's a young boy, it's called Francis Kent. He's found, sadly, murdered in a privy outside his wealthy family home in the West Country Village of Road. Local police attention is initially focused on the boy's nurse, a lady called Elizabeth Goff, but after a series of mishaps, including a bungled attempt to entrap the killer when they return to the scene to recover incriminating evidence, which seems to be absolutely classic 20th century crime work, that, bungled attempts to catch a killer when they return to the scene of the crime,

which is called in, okay. So there's been failures on the part of the police to sort of solve this murder. They miss catching the person once they've returned to the scene and Witcher is Bralkin's trying kind of solved the situation. He suspects that the boy's older half-sister, a lady called Constance Kent, is responsible, but he struggled to pin it on her. Do you want to guess why he struggled to pin it on her and why it kind of says so much about the time. Why do you think he failed to kind of pin it on Constance? Zero evidence and she wasn't in the village at the time. No, very much the opposite. This lady is very much responsible. But her contemporaries felt that it was unpalatable for a working class detective,

which was to cast so much doubt on a well-to-do woman. So basically, you could get away with anything if you were posh. So no spoiler. This is, you know, no great surprise. She had done this. She was responsible, as we'll find out. Because of her standing, and because he was working class, he was unable to pin it on her. So Constant Kent, she gets away with it. The investigation collapses and Witcher leaves for London somewhat in disgrace, and to escape the attention, the Kent family moves to Wrexham, and Constant is sent away to finishing school in France.

However, in 1865, Constance finally confesses, and after a trial, she sentenced to death, which is a conviction later commuted to life in prison. And in the end, she only served 20 years and was released in 1885. That's quite a drop, considering she was initially sentenced to death for this. And she ended up getting out after 20 years. A year later, she emigrates to Australia, settles near Sydney, and she lived until 1944 when she was 100 years old at her death. Okay. It doesn't mind me, though.

I got to improve my social standing. Yeah. Exactly. Before you go in your killing spree, Al, do improve. Yeah. Either your social understanding has to go up or you've got to knock all the murders on the head. You decide.

Pick a lane. However, and this is kind of crucial, this case would likely have been forgotten if it wasn't for the close attention paid by Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins. The reason, okay, both men were coming around to a new type of writing, which was the detective novel.

This is slightly different to the detective story, which can be traced to earlier writing and Edgar Allan Poe. But Dickens famously never completed his attempt for the first detective novel. He died before finishing the mystery of Edrin Drood, although he did inlay a private detective into his earlier novel, Bleak House. Collins, on the other hand, made the genre his own. Indeed, he's often credited with launching the detective novel into English literature as well as an early form of the police procedural.

So the book, okay, that he wrote is called The Moonstone. It's published in 1868, and it gives a version of Detective Inspector Witcher in the guise of police sergeant Richard Cuff. Okay, so they use this real-life detective as the inspiration for this first detective in a novel, who's a working-class Bobby with intelligence and ability. And his name is taken from the Victorian slang,

Cuff, referring to handcuffs that the police would use. And the Moonstone is adapted. It adapts the real-life events of this road hill house murder, the murder of this child. However, it turns it into a story instead, which is something more palatable, about diamond theft. To be exact, a diamond inherited by a young, well-to-do English woman, Olin, after she wears it to a party. Suspicion falls on various characters with gender, social class, imperialism, addiction, particularly to opium, which is a drug to which Collins was himself addicted, all framing perceptions of the suspects just as in the murder case. And this is an amazing fact on it.

In fact, Collins later admitted that he wrote large parts of the book while high on laudanum, a cocktail of booze and opium, and often had no memory of what he'd written when he returned to his normal. Yeah. Let's get into that. The idea of writing a murder mystery when really high on opium and having no idea what you've written when you wake up each time. It was quite a popular drug amongst novelists in the 19th century, Lordenum, Loddenham opener.

I've read The Moonstone. It's a great book. Have you really? Yeah, it's one of my mother's favorite books. I read it when I was a teenager. Yeah, it's brilliant. Rookie Collins. I tried to write a sitcom episode,

which was a crime drama with lots of intricacy. And it's unbelievably complicated, actually. Yeah, yeah. And the idea of doing that when you're high on booze and opium as well is bonkers. But he pulled it off, okay? So much so. And your mum loves it. it and generally audiences loved it across the board. Despite being as high as a kite,

it was just a massive smash. Within a decade, there was a theatrical version while fellow novelists took writing detective stories of their own on board themselves and kind of started furthering the genre. To give you an idea of how ahead of the curve, Wilkie Collins was, it would be some 20 years before Arthur Conan Doyle came up with Sherlock Holmes, Study in Scarlet, which was written in 1886. And the way he did it is exactly how people, do it today. Basically, he took what he'd learned of writing sensation novels, e.g. The Woman in White, and gave his readers insight into crime and then the process of deduction as investigators pieced together what was going on. This is all the sort of

same techniques that are used today. To keep readers guessing, that's the reveal. He even has a detective, get it wrong, but then get it wrong because as a working class, Bobby cannot seem to break through the upper middle class rank pulling affected by the kind of the upper echelons and their associates. And over time, Collins fashioned many of the details that we now take for granted in our detective stories, our mysteries and our cozy crime page turners. This is what the historian Matthew Sweet writes about Collins's work. Villains are particularly delicious. One villain likes eating bonbons and rolling his own cigarettes. One dyes her hair, red and favours poisoned lemonade. Another keeps a monkey inside his coat. And now crime fiction is the

number one genre on the shelves around the world, selling millions and millions and millions of copies every year in the UK alone. And that's kind of, I just find it amazing, really, that it was all really because of this detective Jack Witcher and how this real-life detective gripped the nation and people found him fascinating, but also the social issues that he came up against are being so important in the creation of this brand new genre of writing, a writing which now dominates the shells today and if it wasn't for Wichester, probably wouldn't have crime novels as we do today.

Okay, now I'm going to take you back. This is a very famous mystery is one of the Chris Skull's got an awful lot of time for. Now, for centuries, it had hung round the British royal family like a bad smell and it had also helped shape the popular perception of the late 15th century.

So we begin in 1483 with the death of King Edward the 4th, the Yorkist ruler of England, although there was like a six-month interruption when the throne was seized by Edward's predecessor and rival, Henry the 6th, who was a Mancastrian. So King Edward, he was ruthless in his revenge when he regained the throne in 1471, and he had Henry's heir killed.

He was only 40 at his death in 1483, which left his own heirs, Edward, who exceeded the throne, is Edward the 5th and Richard the Duke of York as young boys. Okay. So this is classic royal stuff. So Edward Juno, Edward Juno was 12. Richard was only nine. So that meant inevitably a period of regency when somebody else has all of the power

because the royals were too young. These were the years that were too young. So this was the boy's uncle, another Richard, the Duke of Gloucester. So it's already confusing. We've got loads of Edwardsies knocking around. We've got lots of Richards knocking around. Now, Richard the Duke of Gloucester is currently the regent, right? So to prepare for Edward the 5th's coronation, so he is 12 at this point.

The boys were lodged in the Tower of London early in the summer of 1483. This had the advantage of keeping them safe from any Lancasterian intrigue or plot. But the real threat, as so often as the case, came from the Duke of Gloucester, who organises allies in Parliament to have Edward V and the Duke of York declared illegitimate, and so ineligible for the throne. So Gloucester would pull the same trick a year late in 1484 when he had Edward the 4th and his wife Elizabeth Woodville declared illegitimate too

just to make things doubly secure. So he's walking around going, you're illegitimate, you're illegitimate. You know, a bit like, like the office. No, when Oprah was handing out, was giving cars to people. You get a car.

You're illegitimate. You don't get a car. to take the throne. You're legitimate. Now, can I just say, you know, this Richard we're talking about here, Richard, who would become Richard III, he's currently in your story, I'll use the Duke of Gloucester. This is the same guy we dig up in that Leicester Car Park. Yes, he is the Car Park man. Yeah. So England needed a king, so in-stepped Gloucester, who sees the throne for himself,

and he became Richard III. Yes, the Car Park Man who was found in the Car Park King. The Car Park King in Leicester. Why don't we call him the Car Park King? That's so obvious. And he had scoliosis as well, didn't he? Yeah. Very bad scoliosis. Now, none of this was out of the ordinary for medieval monarchs, like you have family squabbles and people being usurped.

That was part of the course across Europe, including in England, where previous kings, notably Richard II and Edward II, had been deposed. Neither of them met particularly pleasant ends. Richard II was starved to death in Pontifract Castle. Wow. He was the one who got the old Red Opelker at the Bamb in Berkeley Castle in Glosseshire

if I had to die please stab me chop my head off so not natural causes just sort of calmly in your sleep I mean if I'm being

deposed by an enemy okay yeah in it's medieval times just yeah stab me through the harker up the bum do not poker me up the bum

for crying out you'd never ever use your one day time machine to go back and be a medieval king, would you? I'd have a zero into. That'd be so far down the list of things I'd be interested in. Yeah.

The poker up the bum. I don't know. I also imagine it's a hot poker as well, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He gets burned from the inside. So red hot, rectal poker gets on. Do you know what? I bet you don't even really notice the temperature.

I think you do. On the plus side, I'm imagining a medieval Britain was quite chilly a lot of the time. Yeah, exactly. But you'd appreciate the warmth. It'll be a brief moment where you go, oh. I think the phrase you're looking for is scant consolation. By dying on a cold day by getting a red hot poker up the bum.

Am I misremembering this? But isn't it a red hot poker up the bum and then they throw him out of a tower? Isn't it like, it's quite, I'm sure there's the one, it's quite a one too. I would welcome being thrown out to the tower. I think I'm lobbing myself out of the tower, to be honest at that point. Like a cartoon? Nearest window. Hoping I hit the most.

Steam coming out of your bum. You want to hit a body of water. Let's see what you want. Oh my God. Very quick. It does not spoil the mystery to say that the two princes were also bumped off, but by whom that's what's missing from the records together with a date for the deed. So at the time this vacuum of knowledge was exploited,

pretenders to the throne popping up now and then, especially in the early years of the first Tudor King, Henry the 7th, to claim that they were one or other of the princes, usually the nine-year-old Duke of York. So one of the very few contemporary records written alongside events in the summer of 1483, not afterwards, as so much of the other stuff was, was a chronicle by an Italian monk, Dominic Mancini,

Roberto's great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, branda. Nice. He was in London until the middle of July that year and put together what he learned, much of it from the gossip circulating around the city. So alas, his chronicle was then lost until it turned up in a library in Lille, in France, in 1934.

Yeah, it was quite recent, wasn't it? Yeah. That account, they discovered it quite late into mystery. Yeah, which means that centuries of propaganda has tended to shape our understanding, instead, including, of course, Shakespeare's play, Richard III. So Mancini's account delivers a sparing sense of what happened that summer

since he says that he doesn't know very much, only that the princes were seen but now no longer are. It didn't take longer for the rumour mill to get going. So across in France, the court there regarded the matter is open and shut. Boys have been done away with brother-uncle, who then himself gets crowned king. The Spanish added their own twist, murder weapon, had been poison. Others suggested it had been a case of drowning or suffocation

by being smothered between two mattresses. Worse, boys were simply stabbed to death by an assassin, right? Now, none of the accounts doubted the orchestrator. They all thought that it was Richard the third. Clearly. He had such a good motive. Do you want to be the most powerful man in the land?

Yes, please. Do you mind killing your nephews? Not at all. They're annoying. As motives go, it's a good one. Yeah. So why is the mystery hung about, that's the big questions. We still have the story because of the way the Tud has changed the way we all perceive the past. So the Tud has built up

a narrative of a coup against legitimate royal authority. Richard III had no right to the throne, according to this argument, and he especially forfeited any legitimacy by having his nephews murdered. But Henry the 7th, who defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth,

near Leicester, 1485, and so became King. He was also hardly a rightful heir, not least because his own claim came via the Lancasterian cause from Lancashire. So although his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Edward the 4th and sister of Edward V, the fifth was a Yorkist. So to reframe himself as the one true king,

Henry needed to have history on his side. So throughout the two years from 1485 until the Stuarts in 1603, propagandists and writers, they produced this huge body of work, one which acted as a kind of historical ash on top of earlier periods, disguising, and often even erasing what had really happened, rewriting the past in favour of the new regime

to legitimise the new regime. So Sir Thomas More, one time advisor to Henry VIII, wrote one such account of the reign of Richard III, which he based in part on an earlier interrogation of one of those apparently involved in the murder of the boys, so James Tyrell. And yeah, that name crops up in Games of Thrones, and that's not a coincidence.

So Tyrell was in Knight. Tyrrell Lannister. Yeah, had been charged by Richard III with carrying up the murder. Only he passed the gig on to an underling, Miles Forrest, a big, broad, square, strong knave, as Moore called him. I bet you were Miles Forrest didn't pull his hamster in playing football with his four-year-old son. Because some grass was a bit wet.

Now, I'm not delighted when someone tried to pass that job onto me. I've got some work for you. Oh, have you? How good? What's that? Yeah. And, you know, you're self-employed. You'll do most stuff. But, yeah, I've got a gap in the diary. I have actually thought about this.

Like, it is in terms, even for medieval times, it is such a gruesome job. But the reward is he's king. He's going to sort you out some land and earldom. In medieval Britain, it doesn't get much better than that. As long as he's king, as long as he stays king. Well, you say that, but it's also a massive danger that he's going to have you killed too to silence the truth, isn't there? That's the other major thing, isn't there? that there's often in sure lots of cases

that people can't you. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So you do the act and then you're forever silenced. That's your danger. But nowadays, people can commit murders in the 70s and get caught for it now because of DNA. In the 1480s, if you got away with it, after a week, you're sort of alright, I think.

After a give it a week. It was too muddy for fingerprints. Now, not that anyone could ask, Miles Forrest, if this was true, three died in 1484 so Moore was writing more than 20 years after this but Forrest's children were around working for Henry the 8th at his court or else

in the employ of Cardinal Walsy and so alongside Thomas Cromwell and Moore seems to have discussed the matter with them so was that the end? Well not quite so in the reign of Charles II a box was discovered at the Tower of London which then opened was found to contain the bones of two small boys

immediately the association was made with the princes in the tower and the bones were buried as the relics of a lost king but deep down the mystery of the princes is easily solved Richard keen for the throne saw his chance and he took it now the first victims of that

seizure of power were these two children but we hold on to the idea of a story because there are just enough gaps in the record for doubts to creep in because you think to yourself what if it wasn't Richard what if they lived what if what if what if and this is yeah this has captured the imagination

for well over 500 years. I became obsessed with this because when I was in primary school, they took us to the Tower of London, because I grew up in London. They took us there, and I went to that staircase. They have a thing there where the princes had the alleged bodies of the princes had been found. And I just became gripped by this story. Did you?

Yeah. It's a nice and light school, primary school trip, isn't it? Yeah, not a nice late afternoon. Well, the students at the students at the students, is all this. I think this is why it's so fascinating for a young mind. Is there just violence and drama? Yeah. But the thing

that fascinated me with this in one of the books I read was that people would come forward years after the prince has disappeared and be like, no, I'm the prince. And obviously they were like Conlin, but people were pretending years and years after that they'd gone to France and come back, like they'd been sent abroad. So people, there was at least

a couple of cases. Bonjour. You'll never guess who I am. Yeah. Yeah. Probably wondering where I've been. Yeah, bonjour, bonjour, bonjour, au re of course. But I don't think, I think I'm right in saying, did they not DNA test those bodies? They've never, they don't know,

they don't think those bones are necessarily the bones of the princes in the tower. Oh, I didn't know that. And there's something else I've read as well. And it's just another, just a box of someone, just other people's bones. It's just an perfectly normal at home. There's nothing weird about the royal family. It's just a box of, no, no, no, it's not them. a box of other bones.

I think you make a good point. I think if there's any home, and the Tower of London is a home to beef eaters, if there's any home in the UK in which it's completely acceptable to find boxes of bones, I would go Tower of London right at the top of that list, wouldn't you guess? The other thing with Richard, with the sort of the stewards and the two

as being fascinating to young kids, which I agree with, is especially when we were young, the Royal Family was the Queen, and the Queen was an old woman who waved a lot. Yeah. So the idea that her ancestors were all killing each other. Yeah. To get power.

It's so different to your experience of the royal family if you were a little kid, grew up in the 80s and 90s. You sort of can't believe that that was ever the case. Yeah. It's exciting. Medieval time is an exciting time. Oh, yeah.

For Monarchs. Much more. Today's so prosaic. No one's getting murdered in cold blood, allegedly. if we go back to the princes in the tower there the thing that is fascinated is fascinated me is like where are the bodies there's another one that they went down into

some of the tombs of some of these older monarchs and I think I'm writing saying there's a couple of caskets that are unaccounted for for young people that they think they don't know who those caskets are and it's weird with all this I know they rediscovered the tomb of Henry the 8th not so long ago I think it was

And you're just like, wouldn't you love to DNA test the bone? But it is, you know, has enough time passed. Yeah. Can we resolve some of these mysteries? Because it's funny, isn't it? Like, I DNA test it all. Love it.

Can we just have a big DNA test amnesty? Just DNA test it. Give everyone a day to DNA test it all. And then I've done with it. I'd fall on the side of let's just go for it. Yeah, me too. And after 500 years, after 500 years, treat the bones with respect, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, but just get a scientist in a lab coat to DNA test it, then wallet, Bobbs your uncle. Do it live on BBC 1 on Saturday night. Get Anton Dek to present it. Exactly, yeah. Get Josh Riddick to present it, and he can bring Anton to play.

They can dance around the bones. Dress as skeletons. Use the DNA to recreate Henry Trudeau and have him on Strictly. Have him on strictly. Yeah. The last thing I'll say about the whole print. is in the tower thing is that I think it was Richard the 3rd.

I think all the evidence points that way. But the respect, the body of Richard the 3rd was given when he was found in that car park. He's got a burial. He's in Leicester Cathedral. He's a lovely old slab. You're like, this guy was, I mean, they're all bad all these medieval kings, but I don't know.

I mean, shouldn't he have been cancelled? Yes. If there's any medical king that needs cancelling is this guy. There was a pride of place in Leicester Cathedral. It never made sense to me. Also, you know, I mean, obviously he did some awful stuff, but his scoliosis was so bad. The guy must have been in a very bad mood all the time. Yeah, in some respects, fair enough. Thank you guys. That was a really interesting episode. I love that.

Which, let's ask this question. I mean, mine doesn't really count because mine is where crime drums that come from. Which do you think remains the most mysterious of your two, JFK or the Prince is in the Tower? Which do you think it's the one you feel more assured about? You're convinced about JFK, aren't you? Chris. You think that's... Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Well, Prince is in the Tower for me 100%. But I don't think it's that much of a mystery. It's clearly Richard III. But I think the impressive thing is that we don't know. We don't know who actually did. I doubt Richard the Third did it himself. But the fact he was able to keep that kind of secret, secret.

blows my mind. Well, they released a lot of the files, didn't they, last year, around JFK. Did they? And the documents

don't really give anything new away because they were going to be kept redacted for another, until 2063, I think. But they released them last year

because they thought it was in the public interest. And I read a book debunking the conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination, which I found very

compelling. The thing with the princes in the tower is it's so long ago and there's so little evidence. Yes. You never quite know. Even though the sensible thing is to think that it was Richard III. But I think that there's more leeway with that one. I gave a little tease about they discovered a couple of coffins. Do you want a bit from Wikipedia on this exact subject?

I love this stuff. In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward. with the fourth and queen elizim for Woodville, discovering in the process what appeared to be a small adjoining vault. This vault was found to contain the coffins of two unidentified children.

However, no inspection or examination was carried out and the tomb was resealed. What are we doing? Test them all. Five hundred year amnesty, something. We need to know this stuff. Get swabbing. Get swobbing.

Very respectfully. Get swobbing. There you go. thank you guys for joining us on yet another historical ride. That was a really interesting episode. I'd love that. We'll be back next week with more history. If you want to support the show, you can come with O-Water Time, Full Time, if you want. You get access to all our many, many, exclusive Patreon-only episode.

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