The Rest Is History - 89. Climate & Weather

Episode Date: August 23, 2021

From the Ice Age to the Winter of Discontent, climate and weather have hugely impacted historical events. Wars halted by freezing conditions, Prime Ministers thrown out of office by an electorate made angrier by the weather. Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland review their top ten weather affected moments in time. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Welcome to The Rest Is History. As you know, we like to take suggestions from our listeners. And the other day, I had a text message from somebody I hadn't seen for many years who was at university with me, a man called John Tinker. Now, whereas I went into the world of history to serve the public, John Tinker went into the city and made an enormous

amount of money. And from his baronial pile, he issued me with the following suggestion. He said it would be fascinating to do a podcast about a history of weather, or rather, the impact of the weather upon history. And for once, he was right. It is a good idea, and that's what Tom Holland and I are going to do. We're going to do the top 10 ways, or at least our top 10 ways, that the weather has changed the course of history. Tom, are you looking forward to this? Are you excited? I am.

And I've been very prepped by just being downstairs. And my younger daughter is in a furious debate with her friends about whether to go to a festival in Sussex. And the reason there's a debate is that it is pissing down as we sit here. And we've just finished recording an episode on the Western Front with Gary Sheffield. Lots of talk about the mud of Passchendaele. And I think that they could go

and experience something akin to that if they go down to Sussex tonight. So I'm very excited. Yeah, it is character building. So I said, yeah, absolutely, you should go. But of course, it's not just weather, is it? We're also going to talk about climate. And there is a difference between the two.

What is it? I've actually never bothered to inform myself, to educate myself, as the young people say, about this. What is the difference between weather and climate? Weather happens day to day. Climate happens over the sweep of the centuries and the millennia. So that's why it's climate change rather than weather change. So we're actually doing both, aren't we, in this podcast?

Yeah, we are. Because I know what we're going to be talking about. And there's weather here and climate. So on the topic of climate, can I kick off with mine? I think you should kick off, because I bet you're going to do something very old. Yes, incredibly old. Go on.

So my nomination is the Ice Age. Okay, well, that's pretty obvious. You've gone for the big one basically i have well and you know that we're still living in the ice age is that that i did not know yeah we're living in the ice age because there is ice on the uh caps the polar caps right that's a very broad definition of the ice age though isn't because uh up until about two and a half million years ago there was no ice on the ice caps. That I did not know.

I've learned two things already. Do you know when the last ice age was before that? I bet you don't, but I do. That's why I've asked you. Yeah, of course. It was in the Permian period, which is the period just before the dinosaurs. As a friend of mine once said to me, you don't really know that. You just read that in a book.

I do know that because you know I love dinosaurs. You know I know me you don't really know that you just read that in a book i do know that you know i love dinosaurs you know i know that you know it was called it was called the karoo ice age but we so we are living in the in the um uh cortenery ice age okay um and um so it's basically it's been going on for two and a half million years and the ice caps, the glaciation comes and it goes. And I guess what we tend to think of as the ice age is known by geologists and climatologists as the last glacial maximum, by which they mean that the ice sheets have kind of descended to their lowest level and then they kind of slowly retreat. And so basically about 11 11 700 years ago that's when it ended and and that's when a period called the holocene which means the holy new period begins so the whole of history occupies the holocene the period after the ice age so what

we're in now yeah exactly so so i think that that obviously that's absolutely huge and it's been focused for me by a trip that I've just done around Middle England. This very glamorous holiday of yours where you went to Leicester. Your stamping ground. But one of the places I went to, which is such a wonderful place, is literally on the Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire border. A place called Creswell Crags. Have you ever been? Never.

It's really wonderful. So it's kind of mining land. So kind of pot mark with mines and things. But this is a kind of series of – it's a ravine with caves on either side. And there's a lake there now, which got blocked off by the Duke of Portland because he was threatened with someone was going to build a railway through it. So he made a lake so that they couldn't build it, which I think HST protesters might want to – I mean, it's kind of a radical solution. And these caves, they contain the old Britain's only known cave art and a wonderful kind of fragment of bone on which someone carved a horse about kind of 13,000 years ago. So it's the oldest piece of British art. But it's incredibly atmospheric because this was about, I guess, about 10 miles from the Great Wall of Ice.

So it's like Game of Thrones. You know, that Wall of Ice was somewhere kind of north Nottinghamshire. And Creswell Crags was about as far as you could get back in those days and not kind of run into this wall of ice. So hold on, there were people and there was the wall of ice. Is that correct? So there's a wall of ice and then basically there's tundra just south of that. And every summer people would make the journey up north

and Creswell Crags seems to have been about as far north as they would go and they would take shelter in the caves. And I guess they'd use it because this great kind of troops of deer and whatever would be funneled through this or they could trap them there or they could kind of drive them off the cliffs or whatever. So it was a way of finding food even in the kind of absolute teeth of this horrific Arctic weather. And then gradually it retreats and the glaciers retreat and slowly Yorkshire emerges and then Scotland and then Iceland and civilisation begins. A great chorus of complaint emerging out of that.

Yes, so wide and slowly. With huge apologies to everyone north of Nottinghamshire there that was dominic's joke not mine um so that basically makes british history possible because without the end of the ice age simply you know people wouldn't be able to live here permanently um but also it has a kind of measurable impact say further south where the ice hasn't reached so in the middle east the near east where civilization begins it's around the time that that the the last glacial period ends that you start to get the very very beginnings of urban civilization so within about uh 200 years of the the end of the ice age in jerichoicho, you've got about 1,000 people

living in a kind of proto-urban settlement. And that's the oldest city in the history of Jericho? Yeah, pretty much. It's continuously inhabited right the way through. So anyway, that's mine. That's my personal relation. So hold on. Just a quick question.

Are people living in Jericho, in other words, within a few generations of the people doing the horse at the crags? Yeah, about 1,000 years. 1,000 years between the two things. Yeah. So that's quite close, isn't it? Yeah.

That's an extraordinary thought when you think of the beginnings of civilization. Yeah, and in the Near East, there are these kind of settlements that keep kind of popping up. And then you have kind of cold periods intervene. So there's one called the Younger Dryas, which sounds like something out of Narnia or something. But it's a cold spell that lasts for about 1500 years. And so the incipient process of urbanization in the Near East retreats.

And then the Younger Dryas ends, the Ice Age ends, and boom, we're off. Okay. On the long road to iPhonesiphones and podcasts yeah podcasts i'd never thought of this podcast as the summit of civilization and human achievement but now of course i do yeah um okay i buy that that i mean no one could possibly argue with that could they i actually feel slightly humiliated because you've chosen the Ice Age, and my first one is the Little Ice Age. That's not a metaphor. Bless. Adorable. Yeah.

So, yes, have you read the book called Global Crisis by somebody called Geoffrey Parker? I have. Yeah, it's fantastic. Amazing book. It's about 7,000 pages long. Full of horrible stuff about China. Yeah, it's all about the 17th century.

So we've done a 17th century podcast. We've touched on the 17th century many times. And this book is about the 17th century as a global phenomenon. So the age of the 30 Years War and the British Civil Wars and so on, but all across the world. And basically, a lot of historians are now fascinated by the issue of climate and climate change. And Geoffrey Parker, who was always a historian, I think, of war, really, of sort of early modern warfare he's now looked at this and he says you know the data is absolutely clear in the course of the little ice age so in the course of roughly the 17th century temperatures dropped by about two

degrees and you know one of the reasons why some people think this is no you don't know any of the reasons no that's great well one of them is the spanish conquest of the reasons? No. That's great. Well, one of them is the Spanish conquest of the Americas. So because it sort of decimated agriculture in some way that I don't comprehend because I know nothing of science, that affected the climate. And there was generally a climate drop. Is there more smelting? There may well be. I mean, yeah, I suppose. Well, hold on.

Smelting? Would smelting not be... Well, I know in the early Roman period, there's a lot of smelting. And this impacts on ice cores in Greenland. But wouldn't that heat things up? Don't know. Okay. Well, this is top quality podcasting.

Anyway, let's get back to what we do know about. So we know that there's a crisis that begins in the 1610s. So that's round about the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in Germany. So you've got snow in Japan. You have a huge drought in sub-Saharan Africa. You have rivers drying up in the New World. And basically, harvests failing and all this sort of carry on. And there are some amazing stories.

So people, you can walk across the Bosphorus on the ice. It's so cold from um constantinople so you can walk from europe to asia which is a cool thing to do without using it and they have ice fairs don't they on the thames yeah and later on obviously the frost fairs on the thames so this continues and the frost fairs on the thames i think are sort of 1660s ish or so um people do bear baiting on the Thames and things, and, I don't know, play football and buy snacks and stuff and dance and all these kinds of things. But there's sort of horrific consequences. So thousands upon thousands of people, I mean, starve to death.

And in Germany in particular, you see the impact of the weather because harvest failures, you've got the Thirty Years' War, massive hailstorms, and this is the year of the witch craze so people are looking for somebody to blame for these climactic events that they can't you know they don't have the scientific tools to understand and they they basically say well it must be caused by you know that old woman at number 33 she's obviously a witch and so on and so forth and the stats are actually i mean we're usually quite a stat-free podcast but so china poland russia and the ottoman empire the population falls by about a third during this period in the in germany it falls by half half and that's not all the 30 years war a lot of it is the is the climate stuff and you're right

when you mention china so it's a huge thing in China. You get the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and you have all kinds of famine and floods and the Qing or the Manchu Dynasty, they come along. So this is a real pivot in world history. And it's not just because of technology and religion and stuff. It's also because of the weather.

I remember in that Geoffrey Parker book that he quotes a poll that was taken five years after the Second World War in which Germans are asked, what is the worst political disaster that's ever afflicted Germany? And rather than picking the Second World War or the Nazis, they go 30 years war because I guess more people die. More. Proportionately. Yeah. It's amazing, isn't it?

We should do something on the 30 years walk Because it's so little known In English speaking countries And just so bizarre Swedish armies But I'm slightly nervous about doing it because it's so complicated And I can never remember who's fighting who Yeah but I don't think anybody else can either I know but you're meant to be the expert

I mean if we do a podcast We've got no idea what's going on We've never adopted that principle in this podcast. So I don't think people are going to expect expertise now. Anyway, give us one of your next examples. Okay, so we've had the Ice Age. We've had the Little Ice Age. And now I think it's time for a cooling.

So I'm going for the Late Antique Cooling. Cooling. Yeah, which begins in the middle of the 6th century AD. Is this related to earthquakes and stuff? It's probably related to the explosion, three explosions of volcanoes in succession. So 536, 539,

540, and 547. I hope people are taking notes. And 536, Procopius, the great historian and prurient obsessive who writes absolute filth the secret history Justinian and Theodora and if you haven't read it it's fine you know I don't want to put it get an e on our podcast rating so I'm not going to describe what the geese do

but but if you're interested do read it anyway so Procopius has he's writing about the the uh the gothic wars in Italy when the the Byzant, the Romans are trying to recapture Italy from the Goths. And he says that in this year, the sun, the light, it gave no heat. And there's another guy, Cassiodorus, who says that the light of the sun is a kind of bluish quality, that the seasons get blurred, that you get snow and ice in, in, in the summer. In Irish annals, you get accounts of famine in,

again, in China, horrible kind of details about the suffering, the famine, the, the, the awful experience of the people there. And there's a sense in which there's this kind of

dust veil and it seems to have led to a kind of century almost or maybe two centuries of very cool temperatures maybe going down by two or three degrees and all of this is incredibly contested and and complex because it's the interface between history, climatology, all kinds of things. But if you assume a drop in two to three degrees, then that implies famine. And basically this is a period where everybody is just above the subsistence level. And if the harvests fail,

even minutely, then people start to starve and it's in that context that the the two centuries that follow say 550 are incredibly convulsive and in in the in the mediterranean world the near eastern world basically this is the marking point between the end of antiquity and what will become the medieval world these are like the byzantine so yeah so that so the roman empire the byzantine empire it it kind of implodes it it retrenches but it's it's an absolute kind of shrunken parody of itself it when it emerges from this period the sassanian empire the persian empire

collapses completely you have the emergence of islam the caliphate um in uh in scandinavia the latest estimate is that 50% of the population starves to death. And you'll know all the stories of Ragnarok, the Wolf Age, the Ice Age. So Neil Price, brilliant historian of the Viking period,

argues that what's called the Thimble Winter is a folk memory of this period and that the kind of the convulsion the the the devastation that it brings to scandinavia is essentially what sets in train what will become the viking age um and uh in distant um mexico teotihuacan which you remember in the aztec episode um the aztec yeah there's this great great abandoned abandoned city, the kind of the Rome of Central America that the Aztec kings are going to on pilgrimage. You know, this is a vast city, a vast city.

It's kind of, you know, on the scale of Constantinople. But it implodes completely from 550 through the decades that follow. And so, again, people think that perhaps this is due to this global cooling. So at the moment, obviously, the focus is on global warming. But the experience of late antiquity suggests that cooling as well can have this completely devastating impact. That's pretty good. That gave us the Vikings, Islam, the end of the Mexican Rome, the implosion of the real Roman Empire. Yes. And so there is a, you know, historians are understandably nervous about these kind of catch-all explanations. And so there's a kind of growing consensus that the

the climatological evidence does suggest that there really was a kind of process of global cooling in this period and therefore uh that puts you know it kind of provides an interesting slant on records of of well famine but also of course intriguingly plague and that's again an open question whether there's a connection between this drop in temperatures and the emergence of plague in the 6th century. But what just occurs to me, Tom, given what you were saying, is that, of course, the weather matters more further back in history you go. I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't matter now, but obviously your point about living just above the subsistence level and reliance on the harvest means that the weather looms so large in late antique history or ancient history or medieval history, even early modern. Much more so than it does now, actually, that the weather matters less now, probably, ironically, given that we're in a period of global heating, that it has mattered in recent years less than probably ever before in human history yeah and the irony is is that the reason for that is industrialization that's

enabled us to escape well for only temporarily though yeah and so you know it's kind of a moebius strip of climatological paradox this is all very depressing um yeah so cheer us up uh well i'm going to do something really i can can't really compete with the origins of Islam and the Vikings. Something that explains both. So I'm going to go a bit obscure. Are you familiar with the Great Northern War, Tom? Remind me. So this is another war that nobody knows about

in this sort of English-speaking world. But it's a great war. I, but it's a great war. I mean, it is a great war. It's a fascinating war. So it's the war for control of the kind of northern world and for the Baltic between two empires. Peter the Great? Peter the Great?

Peter the Great, yeah. Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, and Charles XII, who is a huge figure, head of the King of Sweden, head of the Swedish Empire. Byron wrote a poem about him. Did he? Yeah. That I did not know. Of course, he was a great Byron man.

So they're fighting this massive war, and it's kind of winner-takes-all who's going to be the big northern or northeastern power. And that starts in 1700. And at about that point, you get another of these periods of cooling and you have what's called the great frost of 1709 so they've been fighting for quite a while the great frost happens now this is for reasons that we don't really understand temperatures in western europe drop to about minus 15 degrees centigrade Celsius. So the soil freezes and trees explode because their sap has frozen and people on Royal Navy

ships die because they're cold and the fish freeze in the rivers and all these sort of details. Now, Charles XII has launched his great gamble to destroy Russian power and to cement Sweden as the sort of imperial power in the north. So he's been fighting against somebody called Augustus the Strong. Great name. Crazy name. Crazy guy. Well, strong name, strong guy, I think is more accurate.

So he's been fighting Augustus the Strong. Is he strong? I don't know. I just know it's – I don't really know. I'm not familiar with Augustus the Strong's work. Does he go around lifting up heavy clocks. I just know it's... I don't really know. I'm not familiar with Augustus the Strong's work. Does he go around lifting up heavy clocks?

I like to think he... Well, he's Polish, so I don't know what he would be lifting. What do the Polish Poles... Probably, I see them as a clock-making people. Early modern Poles?

I don't know. Anyway, we're just wittering. Charles decides he's going to invade Russia at the start of 1708, so very bad timing. And Peter the Great... It's the first great instance, really,

in Russian history of that thing that becomes so familiar, the Russians withdrawing and doing their scorched-earth territory. So Peter the Great withdraws. Charles XII keeps going. And he goes on and on into Russia. And he decides he's going to winter in the Ukraine, which makes sense because Ukraine is the breadbasket of the kind of Russian empire.

And he's got allies there who are Cossacks. And he thinks he can resume the campaign in the spring of 1799. But the Great Frost intervenes. So his army is massively reduced by hunger and by famine and so on, probably about half its size. The Cossacks don't turn up, or a lot of them don't turn up, because they themselves are debilitated by the frost and they've got no food and all these kinds of things so charles is um

shorter supplies and he attacks a place called poltava very famous battle in russian and swedish history again basically unknown in anglophone countries and the russians win this crushing crushing victory. They basically break Sweden's power. So now we think of Sweden as this sort of country of very pious, wild-swimming, IKEA-mongering social democrats. But it absolutely wasn't like that in the early 18th century.

And it's because of that, because of the Great Frost and the Battle of Poltava, because their power was completely and utterly broken. Charles does this incredible thing, which is very Game of Thrones-like behaviour. He doesn't go back to Sweden. He goes south and he spends five years in the Ottoman Empire. Unexpected? Yeah, it is unexpected.

Why does he do that? To be honest, I don't really know because it's the least it's the last thing peter the great would expect him to do and so therefore that's why i'll do it i'll take an extended city break for five years in constantinople um i mean who wouldn't want to yeah we'll say the byron the byron poem mazepa is set in the aftermath of the battle of pultoa all right and what happens in the poem mazepaa is, I think, a Cossack. He is a Cossack, yeah. He's a Cossack, and he describes how he,

I think he had slept with somebody's wife, and the outraged husband strips him naked and ties him onto the back of a horse. And the horse gallops across the steps. Okay. Well, he lives to tell the tale, obviously. But I think that's basically it. And it's a metaphor for the romantic imagination.'s very good maybe we should do a podcast about

byron tommy you'd love that maybe we should and maybe byron will turn up later in the podcast oh that's exciting who knows tantalizing us yeah well i have so we've done four i should i just quickly do mine i think you do have to do another one before the break. Yeah, okay. So I'll do it very quickly. So obviously a famous way in which the weather can affect the course of history is winds shattering fleets. Spanish Armada. So Spanish Armada is the famous one. The winds that blow and destroy much of Xerxes' fleet in 480 when he's invading Greece. But the one I've gone for is the two Mongol invasions of Japan launched by Kublai Khan, the great Mongol, you know, the Mongols have conquered much of China. While Kublai Khan is ruling Northern China, his armies are invading Song China in the South.

And over the course of his reign, Song China will fall fall to him so he'll end up ruling the whole of China and he has his eyes set on further conquest so he looks across the sea to Japan and he he sends a kind of rather kind of you know it's it's it's it's kind of like on Twitter if you get someone say why can't we be kind to each other you know that the person who's sending it is about to shout at you for something yeah uh so somebody says that you know they're just about you know that try and cancel you for something exactly so kubo khan sends a message saying all countries we think belong to the one family and therefore you should join our family and if you don't you're a warmonger and the japanese basically say you know piss off so kubo khan said he sends a huge fleet from korea which he's conquered yeah the fleet crosses to japan they attack various places and they they're the japanese

are completely you know they can't really put up a fight against them because they're up it's it's actually it's kind of a teeny bit like the aztecs and the spanish that the japanese don't really know what they're facing so when they Mongols more technologically advanced? They are. The Mongols have explosives. They probably have cannon, and they seem to have hand grenades that they fire. I don't picture the Mongols with hand grenades.

I think it's the first use of hand grenades outside China. Wow. Whereas the Japanese, I mean, it's all samurai, so they're all terrifying. They've got very fast swords. I mean, not the kind of people you want to take on, but they're kind of very much in the mode of you start a battle

by firing an arrow, which the Mongols find hilarious. So basically it's looking really bad for Japan. And then you get this great typhoon which sweeps down and destroys the fleet. And this typhoon is called Kamikaze. So the Kamikaze destroys the fleet and this typhoon is called kamikaze so the kamikaze destroys the mongol fleet kublai khan you know he's he's not going to be put off by this so he sends emissaries to to the japanese and the japanese chop off their heads so this doesn't go down well so kublai khan is determined he's going to have another crack and by this point

he's conquered the south of china. He's conquered Song China. So he can launch a pincer attack. He can launch a fleet from Korea and from southern China. So that's what he does. The fleet's rendezvous. They're about to attack China, Japan, when again, whoosh, the kamikaze hits. Is that the noise of a kamikaze wind? Ooh.

Something like that. I think that's my impression of a kamikaze. is that is that the noise of a kamikaze wind something like that i think that's that's all right it's top quality uh top quality sound effects here um so so japan is saved um you know china never never conquers japan and obviously that so there's been debate about whether this is true or whether the japanese kind of invented it to show five minutes after five minutes going through it only now you tell me it may not be true but don't you know everything in ancient or medieval history people is it all made up or is it yeah but but and the reason why people have thought it may not be true is the uses the propagandistic uses to which it's put in the second world war because famously um the pilots who yes of course suicide pilots call themselves kamikazes and the hirohito the emperor kind of invokes this idea of the the typhoons

coming to the rescue and the reason why people have thought that it may not be true is that typhoons on this scale are not a feature of the waters of Japan. But I'm relieved to say that geologists have recently done a study and doing something geological, which I don't understand, they have proved that actually back in the 13th century, Japan was much more prone to typhoons than now. And so therefore, it probably did happen. Could of course have been um that's that's yes i mean that's alternative theory so so i think that's good so that is good that's five isn't it so we've done five we're halfway through um so uh don't go away because

we've got lots more yeah with a theme historical more of this scientific expertise that we're bringing to this topic possibly Possibly sound effects. Yeah. So, don't go. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History, to our weather-themed episode. We're looking at the top 10 times that the weather or indeed the climate influenced the course of history um i've just done my third so dominic it's your turn it is my turn what are you uh what's what's your um your nomination before i tell you i'll just say i'm

still reading from the fact that you ended the the last the first half of the episode by saying to the audience don't go i don't think we should conduct our podcast with that level of desperation. Please don't go. Anyway, I don't think anyone will go when they listen to this because this is such good stuff. It's so gripping. So we did an episode about the French Revolution. And we talked briefly about the causes of the French Revolution.

And one thing that we probably didn't spend enough time on was the impact of the weather. So certainly when I was studying the French Revolution for A-level many years ago the weather was barely mentioned at all I mean people sort of said offhand or you know bad harvests rain and stuff like that but but actually this is a genuinely fascinating story because we were saying earlier that the the weather seems to matter less as you come forward in history because people aren't living at a subsistence level. But this is an instance where the weather really does matter and has massive political consequences. So there'd been a volcanic eruption in Iceland in 1785, I think. What is it with these Icelandic volcanoes?

Anyway, there's an explosion, and then you have cooling in the second half of the 1780s, so an issue that we've talked about before, cooling. And in the spring and summer of 1788, you get a massive drought across France. You get a huge crop failure. So the harvest is about half its usual level. And then you get this colossal hailstorm and i mean a massive massive hailstorm that kind of a massive one is that what you mean a massive i think that's a technical term used by hailstorm hailstormologists

a monster hailstorm you get shed loads of snow. That's also a technical term. And then, of course, the one thing you always get with snow, this is also great scientific knowledge, you get floods because it melts. So all these French farmlands are flooded. So they had this sort of... A Thomas Schaffernacker of late 18th century history. Yeah. I was about to say it's a perfect storm.

Brilliant. Maybe that would be one weather metaphor too many. So, yeah, this is all awful and just this sort of combination of things. And so by 1789, bread prices have gone through the roof because there's so many shortages. So if you're a French peasant or, indeed, rather, if you're a French sort of worker, you are spending about half of your

income on bread before 1789. And then when you get to the summer of 1789, you're spending about 90% of your income on bread. And do you know when prices reach their highest level, Tom? A year and a day after the massive, massive hailstorm. Do you know when that would be? The 14th of July, 1789, the day of the storm in the Bastille. Now, I've read that fact, and it almost seems too good.

You know, it seems like one of those facts that's just too perfect. It's a great fact, though. And I wonder whether it can really be true. But for the purposes of this podcast, let's pretend it's definitely true. And that's the hail. So this massive, massive hailstorm gave you the Reign of Terror, the guillotine, Nelson on the Bridge of Trafalgar, Napoleon, the Wellington Boot, and so much more.

International human rights. Yeah. So much else. The tricolour flag, the Marseillaise. Yes. Yeah. Okay, well, continuing the French history theme. Yeah.

I think we need a tub-thumping English victory over France. We always do. There's no podcast in which that's not true. So, I'm going to... 1415, Battle of Agincourt.

Very popular subjects in French schools. So, this is the second... This is Hundred Years' War, part two. Henry V, busy and giddy minds with foreign troubles.

August of 1415, he lands in France to claim the French throne. Doesn't go brilliantly well. He kind of wastes time besieging Harfleur Harbour in Normandy. Once more into the breach. Once more into the breach. 22nd December, September it falls. It's not much to show for the enormous amount of money and investment that Henry's put in. So he decides that he's going to kind of try and fly the flag by marching from Hafla to Calais,

which England holds and has captured in 100 years or round one. So 8th of October, he leaves for Calais and he marches through Normandy up towards Calais and it's very wet and miserable and he starts to get shadowed by the French he reaches the Seine all the bridges have gone he has to kind of march down the Seine to to find a crossing point does so gets on the other side and the French are drawing in and 25th of october he based 24th of october he basically gets cornered by a village called agincourt and french vastly outnumbered the english and by quite how much is very very contested but um let's say by lots but that's the level of precision that we've had so far in this well we can't you'll know that this i mean this is hugely debated no nobody ever knows these stats today they're all made up aren't they when the sources

and wildly exaggerated but i think i think we can safely say the english are outnumbered um they're demoralized they're wet they're miserable they don't really have many supplies um the french are much better equipped and so there is a kind of universal assumption that they're going to win the battle and as in the shakespeare play the French spend the night kind of gambling and deciding who's going to lay claim to the ransom of Henry. And it rains. So it's a miserable night. And the terrain that lies between the English and the French lines has recently been ploughed. And so the rain falls on this um this plowed soil and in the morning the um the knights on horseback charge across this and it's a disaster because uh they all just sink into the mud and the horses hooves churn it up even worse than it had been before so that by

the time the the men french men at arms come to attack the English line, basically, you know, they're sinking up to their knees, perhaps up to their waist. If you get hit by an arrow and the English archers are kind of raining, you know, rain of death down on them, you'll drown because you'll just slump into the mud. You know, it's like the Battle of Passchendaele. Well, you're so heavy, aren't you?

You're so heavy. You're so heavy. And so basically it's just kind of massive pile up and you will, you know, you's like the Battle of Passchendaele. Well, you're so heavy, aren't you? You're so heavy. You're so heavy. And so basically it's just kind of massive pile up. And you drown in the mud or you suffocate and you've got the English arrows raining down on you. And it's all an absolute disaster. And the English win. Don't the English pile in?

Well, I say the English, but aren't there a lot of Welsh? A lot of Welsh, yeah. Flewellyn. Flewellyn in Henry V. All banter about a leek yes exciting and exciting to learn from from a Welsh fan of the podcast that the the Welsh for banter is banter yeah a word you can you can see why he's deploying that word to this podcast can't you absolutely um anyway so so so basically English win uh but they pay badly though don't they then don't they go around sort of stabbing daggers through there? Well, the French try and attack the baggage train.

Right. That's poor form. Very poor form. So the Battle of Agincourt, I mean, in the long run, obviously the English lose the Hundred Years' War because of Joan of Arc and the fact that France is just much bigger. But Agincourt is what enables Henry to come back in overwhelming force and conquer basically half of France, have himself crowned as king of,

you know, his son will be king of both France and England. All goes wrong. But it is the cause of Shakespeare's play. I mean, I actually think Henry V is a terrible king. Whilst overrated, terrible. He's very Christian, Tom. You should love him. It's a bloody murderous, squalid business.

You could say that about so many things, wouldn't you? You could say that about Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. You could, yes. You probably would. I probably would. But I think Agincourt is a kind of squalid business. But, you know, it gives us Shakespeare's play with the soaring poetry,

and it wouldn't have happened without the weather. Okay. Yeah, you don't need to persuade me. I'll give you that. That's a good one. So my next one is another French-based, war-based one. It's kind of a some uh listeners may sort of have seen this coming but i don't think we should ever be afraid of the obvious we never have been

so far um so it's d-day and it's a weather forecast actually rather than the weather itself so um it's a some people will know this story because um a very great actor and writer david haig did a play about it i think called pressure and it's the story because a very great actor and writer, David Hague, did a play about it, I think, called Pressure. And it's the story of a man called Brute Captain James Stagg. So he's basically an army or military meteorologist. And basically, they know they want to attack France in 1944. They're going to do these landings. And they have to pick the right date to do it.

And they basically need a whole combination of very complicated things so for the air operations they need clear skies and they need a full moon for the sea operations they need the not can't be windy and the seas have obviously have to be reasonably calm and for the ground troops ideally they'll land at low tide because then all the german obstacles that are on the beach that you'll have seen in photos the sort of strange devices that the germans have um they will be exposed you know they won't be covered by water and so they'll be easier to to deal with and so you need a combination of these things and they have these weather forecasters who say basically the ideal window is between the 5th and the 7th of june um But when, you know, they have to pick a day and Group Captain Stagg and his team

are sort of looking at the weather and famously the weather in the Channel is incredibly hard to predict and incredibly kind of variable and can turn on a sixpence from blue sunny skies to kind of storms and stuff. So they persuade Eisenhower to postpone the operation on the 4th of June, to postpone it by 24 hours.

But he can't keep putting it off because if you don't do it now, you'll have to wait for another two weeks. And the Germans will probably find out. You can only delude the Germans for so long. So there's this amazing moment late on the evening of the 4th of June. Eisenhower's in this house outside Portsmouth. And there's kind of wind howling outside. It's very kind of Byronic weather. The rain lashing at the windows.

And basically, Stag goes in and he says, it's not going to be ideal weather on Tuesday the 6th of June, but it's probably the best chance we'll have and I reckon you should go for it. And there's this wonderful moment where Eisenhower kind of looks over at this little figure hunched in an armchair

and says, you know, what do you think? And the figure says, I think we should go for it. And that figure is, do you know who that figure is, Tom? Albert Einstein. It's Monty. It's Monty. Oh, Monty, yes. It's Monty.

So Montgomery says, I think we should go for it. And they do go for it. Now, they could easily not have gone for it. They could have been conservative and said, let's delay it by two weeks. And if they had done, you know what would have happened? They'd have been in the middle of a massive storm because on the 19th of june there was a colossal storm hit the channel so who knows what would have happened probably thousands of people would have died probably they'd have gone for it and rather than put it off again and thousands of people would have died who otherwise lived so um stags weather forecast

save the day and you know we should have a statue in Whitehall to the weather forecasters of Britain. Also, most of, I mean, all the other ones have been about terrible things that happen and people dying in multitudes. And that's one that saved lives. So, yeah, you know, it's kind of, it's an interesting, of the maxim that awful things tend to make history. Yes, that's true true so bad weather makes

history good weather tends not to i don't think we've got yeah we don't really have examples of i've my my last example is not a good weather example at all is yours uh well well good things come from it okay so i said i said so i said that um uh we'd have some more Byron. Yeah. I'm excited about it. So this is the famous year without a summer, which was 1816. And again, it's a kind of cooling. It's caused by volcano, in this case, a massive explosion in Indonesia,

Dutch East Indies as was, which happens in the spring of 1815. It erupts for a week and it's... Another great sound effect. Yeah, so I've done the typhoon. That's my impression of Mount Tambora exploding. And it's, you know, the impact of the kind of ash layer, it's like a kind of a brief winter, a global winter. And the ash dims the sun. And the effects endure into 1816.

And we've talked about subsistence. 1816 is the last year that people in Paris starve because the harvest has failed. And you get terrible conditions as well say in germany um the rhine it's it said is um is rotten with corpses people are dying but also uh it's not just um humans who are dying of starvation so also are horses and in germany nobody think of the horses well no one think of the horses. Well, no one think of the horses. And that means that basically transport's wiped out. Okay. You can't ride.

You can't hitch them to wagons or to carriages or whatever. So there is a baron, Karl Drees, who thinks... He's an inventor. And so he invented... To get around this problem, he invents a laufmaschine, a running machine, which is the prototype of the bicycle. Oh, that's a good fact. So that's one positive that comes out of this, out of the year without a great section of English literature because that summer Lord Byron has left England under very dark circumstances. He's basically been canceled by a censorious English press and public,

um, because of a marital scandal involving incest and, uh, rumors of sodomy. So he's, he sells abroad and he takes up residence by Lake Geneva in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. And he is joined there by another poet, much less well known than Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

And Shelley also has a complicated love life. So he's gone with his wife, common law wife, Mary Shelley, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist, and her half-sister, Claire Claremont, whom Byron promptly gets pregnant. Byron is also there with his physician, Dr. Polidori. So they're all shacked up in this house. They can't go outside because it's miserable weather um the most famous product of this is frankenstein which is a novel that um in which the weather gets progressively worse and worse and worse so to begin with um frankenstein who

creates this monster is uh living in good weather of course it's a storm lightning that brings the creature to life and by the end of the book he's being chased by uh by by the monster across the arctic wastes so you get some yeah getting colder and colder they've gone back to the ice age um byron tells a story about a vampire uh which then gets written up by dr polidori and basically establishes the prototype of the aristocratic vampire that will feed into Dracula. And so you've got Frankenstein and Dracula basically kind of being born here. You also have a completely terrifying poem that Byron writes about the experience of the darkness that when the Soviet and British scientists presented their joint paper on the way in

which nuclear winters would be one of the results of a nuclear exchange. They put this poem by Byron and a reworking of it by Pushkin in Russian at the head of the paper. Oh, very good. Yeah, it's really good. So I'll just, it's a really, really chilling poem. I mean, I'd urge anyone who hasn't read it to read it because it's fantastic. But I'll just read the opening. I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came and brought no day, and men forgot their

passions in the dread of this, their desolation. And all hearts were chilled into a selfish prayer for light. And so it goes on. That is chilling. And it ends up with the last humans killing each other. Wow. That's very good. I like that.

So on that cheery note, that's my five. Frankenstein, vampires, nuclear winters. And bicycles. And bicycles. So there's an upside. All right. Well, talking of horror stories, I've got a great... I mean, I've shown immense self-restraint in not doing this first, or indeed every time. It's the winter of discontent.

James Callaghan, I knew you'd go for this. It's the winter. Of course. People who are overseas listeners will be bewildered by this um in richard iii shakespeare's play richard says you know now is the winter of our discontent and that the the phrase sort of has stuck in the in the english imagination and um at the end of the 1970s uh the there had been a Labour government since 1974, and they were battling inflation, and they had managed to keep inflation down

or attempted to reduce inflation by a series of deals with Britain's trade unions. It was a slight myth that Britain's trade unions were more powerful than other people's trade unions. I think part of the problem was there were just more of them, so they were very competitive, always trying to outdo each other in deals for their members. And at the end of 1978, the relationship between the governments and the unions kind of breaks down because James Callaghan,

he's postponed, he could have called a general election, but he doesn't want to. He wants to wait till 1979 because he wants to show the public, the voters, that he can work with the unions and basically force them to accept a 5% limit on pay increases, which will help him fight inflation. So he can then say to the public, well, you don't need this awful woman, Margaret Thatcher, who's very extreme because I can do the job much more consensually, and I can get it done, and you don't need her. But first of all, the union members refuse to accept it. But secondly, that coincides with this period of awful weather. So the worst winter in Britain since 1962, you get massive snow drifts across the country, you get roads closed, you get people

freezing to death in their cars, and so on. that and this coincides with as some of our older listeners will remember a series of crippling strikes it starts with a lorry driver's strike kind of over christmas and then you have the roads are obviously blocked by snow but you have rail strike you know the railways shut down you have shops running out of groceries and sort of you know images that we are perhaps now a tiny bit more familiar with because of the kind of panic buying during the pandemic but at the time are very shocking to people the fact that um your local corner shop has run out of bread because of a strike or something now you know the weather plays a huge part in this but what compounds this is that precisely this point callahan who's been

quite a popular prime minister till now goes off to a um a summit in of all places guadalupe so he flies off to guadalupe and he had and there are all these pictures coming back to um to britain of him on the beach kind of drinking out of coconuts. Hawaiian shirt. He wears a Hawaiian shirt. Does he? They're all in these, well, they're sort of in safari suit type arrangements because it's the 70s. So it's him.

I think there's Helmut Schmidt. He's quite a sort of, he likes a good time. Jimmy Carter, of course, doesn't like a good time. So he's probably quite miserable. But I think maybe Valerius Giscard d'Estaing might be there.

I can't remember. He likes a diamond diamond doesn't he? He does like a diamond He likes an African diamond So anyway, they're all there, they're having a whale of a time in Guadeloupe Callaghan then he's going to come home but he says well I won't go home straight away because I'm facing

you know, it's all pretty grim at home with his unions and stuff so the ideal thing would be to have a few days break in Barbados before I come home, which he does. Now he can reasonably say prime ministers are allowed a holiday. I've been working incredibly hard.

We've had the international monetary fund crisis of 1976. You know, I need a couple of days and it really is just a couple of days to recharge. But of course, the Fleet Street photographers are there and they get these fantastic photos

of him kind of lurking like a great mammoth or something in the shallows, inspecting girls in bikinis on the beaches of Barbados. While meanwhile at home, there's no trains, everything is frozen. And the bodies aren't being buried, are they? Because the grave diggers are on site. Well, that's about to come actually. Oh, I'm sorry. I've ruined it for you. No, no, no. I mean, lots of people will have been thinking exactly that. So then he comes home and gives this disastrous press conference at the airport.

He's really tanned. He's wearing a sort of summer suit. And he says, I don't know what you're looking at it from outside. I think things in prison are probably fine. I don't know what you're complaining about. And that's what you get the Sun's famous headline, crisis, what crisis? Jaunty Jim, I think. Which he never said, did he?

Which he never says. Yeah, jaunty Jim comes home and blames the press or something. Yeah. And this is sort of very tone deaf. Somebody was always up to that point, a master of communications. And then the weather gets worse rather than better. There's more snow. There's more freezing fog and all this stuff.

More people go out on strike. That's when you get the, all the schools are shut and you get the gravediggers in Liverpool going on strike. So the bodies, people's bodies are put in refrigerated warehouses and you get all these, I think the Daily Mail has a headline, we can't even bury our dead or they won't let us bury our dead or something.

So, and people's bins don't get collected. yes the key huge piles in leicester square yeah that's i mean these are the most famous photos of the winter discontent and there's this sort of um there's always there's this whole school of thought with politics that basically it's all about bins and bin collections yeah and that most people don't care about anything political i think there's a degree of truth in this but if their bins aren't collected, they're absolutely outraged. And the government that doesn't collect your bins will suffer for it. And of course, Callaghan's government does suffer for it. They would have done far better, I think, in the general election.

They might not have won it, but they'd have done far better had it not been for the bins, the graves, the snow, the crisis, what crisis, and all that sort of stuff. And of course, the Conservatives then basically dine out on the winter of discontent for what, their next... I mean, they were still using it in 1997. Unbelievably, they were still using it in their ads against Tony Blair. If Tony Blair gets in, you're of course a big Tony Blair man.

I suppose really until Black Wednesday. Yeah. Which then, I mean, because the winter of discontent is the disaster that shadows Labour. And then Black Wednesday is the disaster that shadows Labour. And then Black Wednesday is the disaster that shadows the Tories. Exactly. Exactly so. So even in 1997, the Tories are still saying, if Labour get back in, they won't bury your dead.

They won't empty your bins and it'll snow all the time. But I think by that point, as you say, Black Wednesday has intervened. And so that narrative has lost its force. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's a great note on which to end. Very good. We should have you talking about Sonny Jim.

So what do you have? It's always good to talk about Jim Callahan at the end of a podcast. So which is your favourite of these, of your own weather choices, Tom? You could choose one. Well, having just come back from Creswell Crags, they have this amazing video in the Visitor Centre. I know that the phrase Visitor Centre strikes a chill

in any... But this is a great Visitor Centre. Little fragments of snow hair that they used. They used the guts of the snow hair to sew their furs and things. Hold on, snow hare?

What's snow hare? Arctic hare, you know. White fur. And you kind of capture them and you make needles out of them and thread and stuff. Yeah. But they have a kind of wonderful video where they show you the Nottinghamshire Derbyshire Badlands in 120,000 years ago.

Badlands of Derbyshire. And there are hippos wandering around. So they had hippos. Then they have, I showed about 60,000 years ago when there are Neanderthals there and there are hyenas. Then they've got the kind of Game of Thrones one

that I was talking about, where you've got, you've got Thomas Appians turning up and doing this cave art. And then you've got Victorians wandering around, prospecting. And it's looking all kind of gorgeous and beautiful. That sounds good. As visitor centres go?

It's a wonderful place. It's very atmospheric, really, really interesting. And basically, it's where British art begins. Okay. You've persuaded me. Yeah. And yours, I guess, is Winter of Discontent. You know what?

I'm actually going to pick The Great Northern War. It's the most romantic sounding. I like an Eastern European story. I like stuff I don't really know about, which is why I pick it in podcasts. And also, I just think the fact that he didn't go home for five years. Yeah, that's a great detail. But The Great Northern War.

It's so much more. It's basically a video game, isn't it Northern War, it's so much more. It's a video game, isn't it? Masquerading as history or something. Or like a fantasy novel. Well, actually, both of us, because I've got a Great Wall of Ice and you've got the Great Northern War. I mean, there's a certain synergy there. Yeah, everything comes back to Game of Thrones or Tolkien,

doesn't it, basically, in history. On that note. Yes. So we shall leave you. Thanks to my old mucker john tinker for the suggestion um did you did you take that up because he's very rich and you're hoping for a slap up meal some sort of i just to be absolutely clear for other listeners i think this is a very good opportunity i would happily take bribes to suggest for topics. You can contact me on Twitter.

You know, we could have an auction. Do you know what? We could have an auction, Tom. We have a charity auction. Charity auction? No, actually, let's just have an auction. Yeah, let's just have an auction.

Let's just sell ourselves completely. I'm very tempted to do the charity auction. Because you've got your appeal. Yes, I've got my benefit. So I'm very tempted to do that. But my only anxiety is if we get something like, I don't know, the politics of Catalonia in 1830 or something. I think we should do it.

I think we should throw this open to the listeners. And if it is the politics of catalonia in 1830 you know i think we should okay so that can certainly be the topic that can certainly be the title of the podcast whether we stick to the subject yes yes okay so should we do that then let's do that yeah why not okay for the benefit'll auction it. Okay, so if you want us to do a particular topic and you're prepared to pay a fat sum of money towards our benefit appeal, which is going towards the homeless and to Yazidi refugees,

so sensational cause, let us know. And we should probably try and put this on some kind of official footnote. This is probably not a charity commission basis. And I'm afraid that the evidence is now there, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So you heard it here first. This is the first step in the road that will take Tom Holland to prison

for embezzling listeners' money. And on that note, we shall see you next time. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

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