History Cafe

By: Jon Rosebank Penelope Middelboe
  • Summary

  • True history storytelling at the History Café. Join BBC Historian Jon Rosebank & HBO, BBC & C4 script and series editor Penelope Middelboe as we give history a new take. Drop in to the History Café weekly on Wednesdays to give old stories a refreshing new brew. 90+ ever-green stand-alone episodes and building...

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Episodes
  • #61 They just pretended to shoot - Ep 1 Nightmare in the Trenches 1914-16
    May 7 2025
    1 July 1916. Had British Corps commanders understood machine gun warfare they would not have sent British infantrymen across No Man’s Land unprotected from the German machine gun crews. In fact we explain why the British army need never have been in the position it was in on the Somme, scrabbling about at the bottom of hills, peering up at German fortifications in all the strategic locations. We look at its refusal to take trench warfare seriously even though it had been around for 60 years. (R)

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    40 mins
  • #109 A quietly brilliant palace coup - Ep 3 - 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
    Apr 30 2025
    We complete our exploration of the dark shadows in the background of Cecil Beaton’s sunny photograph. The laws of the time made it perfectly possible to prevent Edward VIII from marrying Wallis Simpson. Then there wouldn’t have been any point in abdicating. But nobody even tried. Did the yet-to-be-crowned king himself manufacture the crisis? Or had Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, by never revealing the private letters he had from Wallis Simpson, carried off a very British palace coup? (R)

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    33 mins
  • #108 'I wish, myself, to talk to Hitler' - Ep 2 - 2 May 1937: the King, his wife, their Führer, the lobster
    Apr 23 2025
    As the newly appointed king, but not yet crowned, Edward VIII secretly told the Nazis he admired, that he was going ‘to concentrate the business of government in himself…. Who is king here? Baldwin or I?’ Did Prime Minister Baldwin get rid of the King because he was too pro-Nazi, as Hitler’s ambassador to Britain, von Ribbentrop, maintained? Or was there another reason? (R)

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    26 mins

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