The secrets of the past are all around us,
hidden in our streets, buried under our feet,
and in this series, I'll be uncovering those secrets
as I explore Britain's most historic towns.
I'll decipher physical clues...
Look at that, he's covered with lizard-like scales.
...and get to know some extraordinary characters
who are often over-looked.
He operated like a spy master. They lied, they deceived, they cheated.
With the help of Ben Robinson's eye in the sky,
I'll discover which towns across the UK reveal the most
about each period in British history,
and find out how their stories still resonate today.
3,880.
More and more individuals are still dying from the plague.
Ugh!
Oh, my goodness.
From the adventurous Elizabethans to the elegant Georgians,
from medieval knights through to the height of empire,
I'll tell the story of an era through the story of a single town.
Today, I'm in a town that, for a century,
provided the brutal force that created the British Empire...
...and launched Britain's most celebrated hero
into an epic battle with Europe's greatest powers...
By the time we get to Trafalgar,
Nelson has attained this semi-godhood status.
...a town that epitomised the unimaginably
cruel treatment of the poor...
There's an eight-year-old that gets put on one of the prison hulks,
and he gets seven years for stealing 12 shillings' worth of copper.
...and where the empire's figurehead formed a relationship
that scandalised the royal family.
Does she?
If you want to understand Britain's relationship with its navy,
its Monarchy, its Empire, Portsmouth is the place to come.
When I come to Portsmouth,
I'm always struck by its energetic sprawl.
It is the most densely populated city in the UK outside London,
with over 200,000 inhabitants speaking 100 different languages,
all concentrated on and around Portsea Island.
The city's new high-tech beacon
is the glorious sail-like Spinnaker Tower.
But it's the ocean and the ships which still dominate the view.
Every year, millions of travellers pass through this city
en route to its ports.
Ships set off to France and Spain,
hovercraft to the Isle of Wight,
and smaller craft sail off to who knows where.
But the biggest ships here belong to the institution
which has shaped this city through centuries.
Portsmouth is every inch a navy town.
There's been a settlement on the South West corner of Portsea Island
since the late 12th century.
But it was the Tudors who decided that the large,
protected harbour at the mouth of the Solent
was the perfect location for a naval base.
But it was over a roughly 100 year time-span,
from the Napoleonic Wars through to the First World War,
that Portsmouth really gained its status
as the most important naval port in the world.
It was the powerhouse of the British Empire.
From here, the Royal Navy spearheaded Britain's mission
to become the most powerful nation on Earth.
And, astonishingly, from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805
through Queen Victoria's 60 year reign,
up to the shocking birth of the modern era in 1914, it succeeded.
This island became the greatest modern superpower,
violently establishing an empire
that encompassed nearly a quarter of the world's total land area
and population.
It brought obscene wealth to a few
and unimaginable misery to millions.
We're at a point in time where we're re-evaluating empire
and coming to terms with some deeply uncomfortable truths
about what our country did in the 19th century.
Today, if we see a country exploiting, even invading another,
we see that as deeply objectionable,
and yet that is part of our history.
Now, the navy was crucial to that empire-building business.
And aerial archaeologist Ben Robinson is taking a look
at why the navy chose Portsmouth as its base.
I've got a great view of old Portsmouth here and the harbour,
a wonderful natural harbour based on a drowned river valley
with deep channels running into it.
But the real secret to this place is just coming up now,
the Isle of Wight, there on the horizon.
This creates a magnificent natural barrier,
and it prevents the worst of the weather, the wind and the waves
crashing in this embayment area, the Solent.
This is a perfect place to base your navy.
Geography may have made Portsmouth a natural choice
as the home of the Royal Navy, but global politics
brought Portsmouth centre-stage in the 19th century.
I'm meeting historian Dr Karl Bell to understand the forces that stood
between Britain and world domination.
Karl, what was Britain's place in the world
at the beginning of the 19th century?
So, Britain is in the middle of a 25-year war with France.
France is its major rival,
as both of them emerge as the dominant imperial powers of the age.
And the Napoleonic Wars leads to a very strange situation
whereby you have Napoleon's mighty armies controlling the continent,
and yet very weak at sea.
And you have Britain with this massive naval power but very weak army.
If you're trying to maintain an increasingly globalised empire,
surely naval power is where it's at? Right.
I mean, that's vital to Britain's expansion as an empire
after its loss of the American colonies.
Britain's interest is fending off invasion from Napoleon
and then also using their naval supremacy
to start expanding their empire in new directions,
developing their holdings in India,
newly discovered Australia, and places like that.
If the Royal Navy was the chosen vehicle of British Empire building,
Portsmouth Dockyard was its engine.
And by 1800, this had become the largest,
most advanced industrial complex in the world.
Presumably, 19th century Portsmouth clocks
would've been even louder than it is today?
Yes, it really is a, sort of, thriving war-machine.
You've got about 4,000 people working here.
That must've been a fascinating time,
because having had ship building going on here for centuries,
it's now being utterly transformed by the Industrial Revolution.
You have got the development of steam-powered mass-production
in Marc lsambard Brunel's block house mill.
But that's not the more famous lsambard Kingdom Brunel?
No, it's his dad.
Right. Marc lsambard Brunel was a French Royalist
who had to leave during the French Revolution.
FRENCH ACCENT: Oh, Brunel!
And while he was working on this,
lsambard Kingdom Brunel was born in Portsmouth.
And as well as this manufacturing, there's R and D going on?
Yeah, you've also got the introduction of steam pumps
to remove water from the dry docks, like we're in at the moment.
And then you also have circular saws being used,
so they can cut timber faster as well.
The result of all this industrious innovation was a mighty fleet,
led by one of history's most iconic warships, HMS Victory.
Launched in 1765, she was reconstructed in 1803,
making her one of the most technologically advanced
warships in the vast fleet of the Royal Navy.
And at her helm was one history's greatest,
if least likely, naval commanders.
He's five foot four, he's blind in one eye,
he's missing an arm and, perhaps most surprisingly,
he sufferers from crippling sea sickness.
I refer, of course, to Admiral Horatio Nelson.
But both ship and commander were to become icons
of the British Empire after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
I'm meeting historian Dr Ryan Hanley on board HMS Victory
to find out a little more about the reality of the man behind the myth.
The Nelson we know is this commander of the fleet, he's famous,
but what's his background, how does he get there?
And here we are, talking about the battle of Trafalgar,
sitting on the deck of HMS Victory, and I think it's one of those moments where you just feel that
physicality of history,
and, of course, Victory left from here, left from Portsmouth.
What was so crucial about Trafalgar,
what did the victory mean for Britain?
The Battle of Trafalgar became an imperial foundation myth.
But, as schoolchildren learn by heart,
Nelson died at Trafalgar,
ensuring his status as a martyr of the British Empire.
With this martyrdom at the battle of Trafalgar,
you can understand why we still know his name so well today.
But, of course, there is another side to him.
He wasn't a fan of the Abolitionists, was he?
Hmm.
Mm.
So he was completely part of that plantation-owning,
slave-holding slice of British society?
And he wasn't exemplary in his own personal life either, was he?
Of course, it's her fault!
How do you feel about him?
I do think it's curious that history quite often feels as though it gets
boiled down to this essence,
where we just remember a few important names.
And if we're to learn anything from history,
I think we need to take a more rounded approach,
and that also involves looking away from just those heroes.
So it's undeniable that Nelson had a decisive victory
that paved the way for further expansion of the British Empire,
however you feel about that.
But what about everybody else?
What about those ordinary British sailors?
I'm in Portsmouth to learn about the astonishing period
when Britain became the world's greatest superpower.
From Nelson's Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805,
to the start of World War I in 1914.
I've heard how Trafalgar secured a naval domination that drove
the expansion of the Empire.
Now I'm keen to learn what life and death would've been like
aboard the ships of the Royal Navy for regular sailors.
I've actually driven quite a way out of Portsmouth to an outpost
of Cranfield University, its ordnance testing and evaluation
centre, but there's a very good reason for being here because
this is one of the few places in the country where I can really
get to see the harsh realities of life in the 19th century Navy.
I'm meeting Nick Hall, of the Royal Armouries.
He's got his hands on a brutal looking example of
19th century firepower.
Tell me about this gun. This is a similar gun to the ones
that would've been on the Victory, then?
It's a replica that fires exactly the same weight of shot
as the 3412-pounders on HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.
But we're very lucky today because no-one's firing back at us.
Yeah. And it's difficult, really, to make the leap of imagination,
knowing that cannonballs just the same are flying in from the enemy,
and so... Terrifying, yeah.
...you'd be next to a crewmate who's suddenly blown to bits,
and you carry on.
So hopefully what we're going to experience is
the firing of a cannon like this, as would've happened on board
the Victory, with all of the...
How many cannons did it have on board?
Just over 100.
100 of them. So we're just going to get glimpse of that.
And we've got a fragment of potentially a warship that
we're coming alongside, over there.
The fragment of warship is 50 metres away and made of oak timbers that
replicate the density of an early 19th century hull.
And actually we've got our amazing high speed camera over there
so we'll capture it and we'll be able to slow it down as well.
Right, I'm going to leave you to it.
I'm going to retreat to a safe distance.
Load.
British gun crews at Trafalgar could load and fire
their cannons every 90 seconds.
They were the fastest gun crews in the world.
Their speed and accuracy were vital.
Defeat at Trafalgar would have meant French control of the Channel,
and the inevitable invasion of England by Napoleon's Grande Armee.
But the weight of the shot fired by Victory in its first broadside
alone was 1.25 tons.
OK, all stations. Five seconds.
Four, three, two, one...
...fire.
0h!
I was ready for that and it still freaked me out!
This thunderous bombardment would continue for five hours.
By the end of the battle, 4,408 French and Spanish sailors
were killed, and 2,500 wounded.
19 French and Spanish ships were lost.
The British lost none.
Director of Operations Trevor Lawrence is going to
talk me through the damage cannonball fire did to ships
and sailors on both sides.
Oh, Trevor, it looks different on the back here.
It certainly does.
So that's the exit wound.
This is very typical of what you'd see at the back of
any sort of armour.
Nice, symmetrical hole. At the back, much more broken up, and this
spalling effect, these splinters flying off at high speed,
and you can see we've got some on the ground here and also
all over our witness screen.
So those impacts all over that, that's the wood that's thrown off?
Yes, that's the wood that's come off here. I mean, the thing is with
a cannonball, it's great for punching holes in things,
but it's not too dangerous to people unless you get a direct hit from it.
These would cause horrendous injuries all over the body.
It's enough to put anyone off, isn't it?
But, you know, if Empire was going to continue expanding,
there was a constant need for fresh recruits into the Navy.
During the Napoleonic Wars the Royal Navy recorded
the deaths of 103,000 sailors.
But only 6,000 of them died in battle.
The majority were lost to various forms of disease,
and quite a lot of those could be picked up in any of Britain's
sailor's ghettos during the 19th century.
Places where sexually transmitted diseases also destroyed the lives
of destitute women, for whom sex work was a means of survival.
I'm meeting historian Dr Melanie Bassett in what used
to be Portsmouth's Sailortown.
So what would this road have been like?
Both sides, there would've been pubs, lodging houses.
There's a brewery over that side.
And Sailortown spanned all the way from the dockyard gates,
right on the waterfront, all the way up to the centre of town.
So a lot busier, actually, noisier than it is today?
Oh, yes.
In the 1850s, around 3,500 sailors were living in Sailortown,
an area that also housed 300 brothels.
That looks like a completely modern building.
Yeah, so this is now the Royal Maritime Club.
It's still a place where the Royal Navy would stay,
but back in 1851 this was built as a dedicated lodgings for sailors.
So it's on the same site?
Yes, yes.
So this was set up as a way to stem the tide of the immorality,
but what was interesting about it is that it became a landmark
where prostitutes would then congregate... Right!
...to get - catch the men as they were coming out of an evening.
But the grim reality of life in all of Britain's ports was
a million miles from the cartoonish images of drunken sailors and
bawdy wenches in 19th century prints and movies we still watch today.
This is a time where you've got no contraception,
safe sex doesn't really exist,
and sexually transmitted diseases must've been absolutely rife.
So Portsmouth was identified as one of the areas to bring under
the Contagious Diseases Act in the first of the acts in 1864.
So these acts are really motivated by trying to protect
the health of sailors.
What do they mean?
Well, they actually meant incarcerating women.
Women in Portsmouth were incarcerated on average for 50 days.
50 days?
Yeah.
And presumably this act was designed as a deterrent to prostitution.
Did it work?
What was found was that the women,
once they had a clean certificate,
they were able to go out onto the streets with their certificate
and use it as a unique selling point to attract business
over other prostitutes.
By the late 1800s,
work in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution was providing
a far more attractive alternative to a life at sea for the British poor.
But the Naval Defence Act required the Royal Navy to be at least
the size of the combined fleets of its two major rivals.
That meant the Navy needed even more sailors, and help came
from a brand-new form of public relations,
created in Portsmouth.
This is Portsmouth's New Theatre Royal
and I'm here for a very special performance - I can't wait.
What I'm watching is a magic lantern show.
It's really lovely.
Projected from a machine that was the most advanced of its kind
in the 1890s.
Oh, this is fantastic.
It's like very early animation.
Oh, yeah, so the power of images to transport you...
This is the IMAX of the Victorian Era.
These are brilliant!
It's essentially just a bright light in a box,
with slides passed in front of it.
But it creates astonishingly beautiful effects.
Oh, and it's blown up!
And Nelson himself.
He's almost saying, "Your country needs you."
Ah, and there's Nelson on his deathbed.
So this is the creation of the Nelson myth.
Really beautiful.
Jeremy Brooker is the man who's been treating me to this wonderful show.
Oh, Jeremy, that was amazing. I loved it.
And I loved the live aspect of that.
I knew that you were doing that back here.
The sophistication of this comes from the fact that all these
three images converge on one point,
so you're building up one composite picture on the screen.
I mean, for Victorians, to go and see these places that you were
showing me, you know, places that they wouldn't even dream
of going to.
Typically, people probably didn't travel more than 50 miles
from their birthplace in their whole life, so to see these pictures
must have been more extraordinary than we can really imagine.
I thought the images of Nelson were fascinating.
There's Nelson's death, and I think that was most powerfully
represented in that slide where his dead body is being
carried off, I think in the arms of Victory. ls that right?
Yes, a sort of an allegorical scene.
Yeah, yeah, which is very much banged up with the idea of Britannia
and Britannia ruling the waves.
Well, absolutely, and I think all these themes come together,
particularly if you think of Alfred West, who was based
in Portsmouth, and he developed this entertainment,
which came to be called Our Navy.
He had access to the Navy and naval ships, and people would allow
him to take initially photographs, later on films.
Very much what we would call propaganda.
But of course we still have Navy recruitment adverts.
This is still going on.
But even if they didn't sign up, even if they didn't join the Navy,
perhaps they're going to go away from watching that with a...
I don't know, a sense of pride in the Empire.
That was absolutely his intention, and in his lifetime
he was compared to Kipling, and the way that Kipling, with literature,
he was doing the same thing, in a different medium, but serving
very much the same purpose.
And it's a little uncomfortable, perhaps, today, in the same way
that some aspects of Kipling are uncomfortable for us.
I think it's a great interest to have.
I think if I was going to collect anything,
it might be magic lanterns.
It's hard to think of anything more quintessentially Victorian
than the magic lantern.
Except, that is, perhaps, for the person who gave the era her name.
There is one British monarch who is practically synonymous with
the idea of Empire, and that's of course Queen Victoria.
And she was particularly fond of Portsmouth, and the Isle of Wight.
I'm in Portsmouth,
the town whose story is inextricably linked to that of the Royal Navy
and the expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century.
If the British Empire had a poster girl, then it is Queen Victoria,
she's practically synonymous with that myth, that image of Britannia.
It's extraordinary to think this one woman
ruled nearly a quarter of the world's population.
And her 63-year rule encompassed the apogee
of Britain's interest overseas.
But when it came to holidaying, she chose a staycation.
She would've done this so many times,
taking a trip from Portsmouth, across the Solent,
to the Isle of Wight, just as I am now.
What drew her back was this place, Osborne House,
the magnificent property her husband, Albert, designed himself,
in the classical form of an Italian palazzo...
...a style which belies a rather surprising interior.
Wow.
Look at that ceiling.
It's extraordinary! It's so ornate.
This is all based on Indian architecture.
There's just so much decoration everywhere,
and it's kind of every Indian influence you could imagine,
lots of different styles, all kind of crammed together.
I think that's Ganesh up there, the elephant-headed god.
It's quite overwhelming.
The Durbar Room certainly reflects a passion for India,
and it might also reflect another kind of passion.
It was begun in 1890, just three years after
Victoria met an Indian servant called Abdul Karim.
I'm meeting historian and author Shrabani Basu
in the magnificent public gardens of Osborne House.
Her study of the private papers of the Queen's household
revealed amazing new information
about Victoria and Abdul's relationship.
Tell me more about Abdul Karim.
You've studied him, you've found these amazing diaries
that nobody had really looked at before.
What was that relationship about? How did how did they come to meet?
He was sent as a Jubilee present, and this is... He himself?
He and there's another servant as well. So two of them are sent,
and their only job is to stand behind her at table,
look grand and sort of represent empire.
Very quickly, we know, you know, it's Abdul that's her chosen one.
He caught her eye. Absolutely did, charmed her, clearly,
and within weeks, her world has changed.
He makes her a curry. She eats her first authentic Indian curry
and describes it as delicious.
And guess what her favourite was?
Chicken Curry and dahl, and so nothing's changed, really.
It is interesting that she becomes very politicised
and aware of Indian politics thanks to Abdul Karim.
You know, the household, Victoria's own family, her son and heir,
Bertie, Edward the VII, then, hates Abdul.
They've done everything to get rid of him.
He even tries to get rid of her on grounds of insanity,
saying, "We might ask you to step down." Which is... Really?
Absolutely. I found this... Over Abdul?
Because of Abdul, yeah. Yeah.
And this is a little note in her doctor's diary,
and nobody had seen it, you know? Wow. ljust found it, and I said, "This is incredible!"
As a historian, finding something like that, I mean, that's amazing.
You've just suddenly opened a window... Yeah.
...onto the past that nobody's been aware of before. It is.
It's those moments you get goose pimples
when you think, "How could they do this?" Yeah. And they do.
And then, of course, Victoria is not going to be silenced or bullied
by her son or anybody else.
So she gives him an earful, sends him a 30-page memo,
and says, you know... "He's staying."
"Abdul is staying. You are all racist." She calls them "racialist".
Does she? And so when she dies, what happens to Abdul then?
Within hours of a funeral, there's a knock on his door,
and they take everything that she's written - postcards,
little notes saying, "Come and say goodnight to me,"
with little crosses for kisses -
take everything, and they make a big fire outside, and they burn it.
He's treated like a common criminal,
not just him, all the other Indians are all sent back.
I think Edward didn't want to see a turban any more in this place,
he didn't want to smell curries.
They used to call them the black brigade.
So, anyway, that is the start of the Edwardian era then.
In this very intimate story of Victoria and Abdul,
what does that tell us about the British Raj?
What does it tell us about Britain and India?
Well, it tells us that it was a pretty racist set-up,
because he faced real racism, so much racism.
I think Abdul has got his place back,
because he was always painted as such a rogue.
At the end of it, it's also a story about two human beings,
a very lonely elderly woman who relates to a young man who,
you know, just gives her a new sense of life,
a sense of joy and friendship.
Osborne House gives us this incredible insight
into Queen Victoria's relationship with India,
and it's such a gorgeous, small palace.
I can see why she loved coming here so much.
Now Ben Robinson is looking for clues
as to how the royal family got here in style.
We've just launched a drone here in Gosport,
just across the harbour from Portsmouth,
and I'm on the hunt for a railway.
And here, you can see the blue line coming down,
that's the main railway line, and it terminates here at Gosport Station.
Intriguingly, there's another line running from it.
That's the line I'm interested in.
Queen Victoria had this little extension of a line here,
running out to a private jetty.
Could any evidence of this survive in the modern landscape?
I think the drone's in about the right position now,
so I'll have a look. Oh, there we go, they've got it.
That is definitely the old station, those two parallel buildings there,
the arches, and you can see where the track used to run through.
Now, I've lost it in the trees there,
but wait, wait a second, there it is again.
And there's still sleepers and rail lines there.
And the cars just crossing a sort of speed bump,
which is also on the line of the track.
But here, this margin, this grassy margin,
that is definitely the line of the track, and it's never been built on.
Where does it go?
That's it, spin round, and then it seems to terminate there.
But according to the map it's at this point that it went off.
Yep, that's the jetty, that's the shape I saw on the map.
So the royal station, somewhere in here, the royal waiting room.
It's incredible to think that the route still survives,
and people walk by this every day
and maybe are not aware of its royal associations.
The royals may have arrived in style,
but theirs was a lifestyle far removed
from that of the British working class,
for whom basic survival was a struggle.
Poverty would often lead to petty crime.
But falling foul of the law was something best avoided.
I'm heading to Burrow Island, also known as Rat Island,
which lies on the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour.
I've come to meet an old friend, Archaeologist Richard Osgood.
Now, Richard, I know you've been digging here for quite a few years.
I'm really excited to be here. And it's completely different from what I expected, actually.
So, why are you here?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Seems a bit of a weird place to have a cemetery.
Do you have an answer?
Can I get a closer look, then?
Human remains were first uncovered here by heavy storms in 2014.
So far, Richard and his team have recovered the skeletons
of 22 individuals...
...including the remains of one child.
There we go.
So this is an adult, and you can see
there's quite a lot of wear on those incisors in the front.
But it's quite a robust-looking jaw, isn't it?
Quite a prominent chin.
Early indications from the labs suggest the burials took place
in the mid to late 1800s
and that none of those buried here were over 40 years old.
Ah, safely take our masks off now we're away from the dig.
So that mandible, I'm pleased with that.
So that's nearly completed the skeleton.
I would go for a probable male. So I think he's a young man.
So who are they, Richard?
SHE GASPS
Yeah, if you were in the wrong layer of society...
I imagine there must have been infectious diseases,
outbreaks all the time on those ships?
I think what you're doing is really respectful with these remains.
I mean, these are people who probably had difficult lives,
who probably suffered a lot,
have ended up lost to history.
So at least your finding them, and they're individuals again
before they're re-buried here.
Yeah.
The gruesome archaeological finds on Burrow Island
act as a stark reminder that the riches of empire
were enjoyed by only a privileged few,
whilst life at the bottom remained bleak in Victorian Britain.
But the empire continued to expand
with the navy becoming ever more crucial.
But what if an envious foreign power were to attack
and strike right at the heart of Britain, at the home of the navy?
It was time for Portsmouth to muscle up.
I'm in Portsmouth, the town that launched Nelson off to victory
at Trafalgar, and maintained a navy that ruled the waves
with a ferocity that forged the biggest empire in history.
But other international powers were looking on enviously,
and the paranoia was growing that Britain would come under attack.
When the French developed impressive new steamships, that paranoia
reached fever pitch.
Britain needed new defences,
and as home of the Royal Navy Portsmouth was top of the list.
Ben has launched his drone to look for evidence
of the fortification of Portsmouth, carried out after
Prime Minister Lord Palmerston sank £10 million -
an absolute fortune in the 1860s - into a line of monumental
coastal defences.
Now, this is Southsea Castle.
Here they used an existing castle as the centre point for new defences.
This square keep dates right back to the times of Henry VIII.
But they didn't just use existing forts - they also built entirely
new ones from scratch, and some of these were even out at sea.
And here's Spitbank Fort.
This was state of the art in middle of the 19th century.
And they've actually found a purpose in the modern world as well.
This one's a luxury hotel.
Wait a minute...
That looks like a swimming pool.
Now we've got the drone a bit lower I can see, on the horizon,
there are two more forts.
There's a great arc of forts going round,
right on to the Isle of Wight.
And here, at Fort Brockhurst, we've got forts well inland,
a whole chain of defences.
This must have been one of the most heavily defended
places on the planet.
I've come to perhaps the grandest of all the Palmerston Forts.
Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill, overlooking the Solent.
And I'm meeting custodian Marcus Harrison on the highest point
of this monumental six-sided structure, one of the biggest forts
ever built in 19th century Britain.
Amazing position for this fort.
I mean, what a view! That is fantastic.
But it does seem to be a very long way away from the harbour to be
of any practical use, really.
It does, but the whole idea was to deny the French the high ground.
Portsmouth Harbour is just under four miles away from here.
If the French had landed either east or west of us,
they could've taken this hill. Yeah.
And then bombarded Portsmouth, denying the Empire
its greatest naval base.
Britain was defending its navy by holding this hill.
So these forts form a kind of protective backup for the Navy?
Very much so, very much so.
Where does this idea come from, building what is effectively
a big castle?
These are based on what they call the Prussian design,
a continental system that laid down fire that ensured the enemy
couldn't pass between them, because many people would argue,
"Why on Earth would you just not go round them?"
So the firepower in these big forts was enough to basically cover
the gaps between?
Absolutely. So they would have flanking fire.
These were massive guns,
I mean, these are 68 pounds, smoothbore cannon.
That is enormous!
You know, when you compare that to the 12-pound cannon on the Victory.
Absolutely.
This fort was vital to the defence of Portsmouth
and the Royal Navy, so it needed to be secure.
Had any French forces evaded the crossfire from
neighbouring forts, they were in for a nasty surprise.
What's this? ls it a training ground?
A little too small for that,
but certainly large enough to accommodate the French,
should they be daft enough to have come in at this point.
These gates at each corner would've been locked, and open fire
would've happened from these gun loops here and here.
So... So it's a trap?
It's a trap. The Killing Fields is what they're known as. Oh...
And a nasty spot indeed.
But of course this is all completely theoretical... Absolutely.
...because it never happened. It never happened.
The French never invaded. They never invaded.
So is this a folly?
No, and Palmerston's follies are what they are known as by many
principally because of the huge expenditure of the state
at the time, to ensure that these were built and never used in anger,
but the preventative measure of course should be considered.
You know, we still have these discussions about our defences
today and say... Very much so.
...you know, "ls it is it totally unnecessary expenditure?"
Absolutely. I mean, you only need look at Trident.
These were, maybe, the Trident of their day.
So I don't know if we'll ever actually really know
if these Palmerston Forts were necessary.
But what is for sure is that the British Empire was now under threat.
By the time the Victorian Age came to an end in 1901 with
the death of the queen, nations around the world were
building sea forces to rival that of the Royal Navy.
The immediate threat came from Germany,
led by Victoria's grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm ll.
But then a man called Jackie Fisher enters our story.
To find out more about this intriguing character
I'm meeting Nick Hewitt, head of Collections and Research
at the Museum of the Royal Navy.
And who is Jackie Fisher?
So Jackie Fisher is the First Sea Lord,
who's the operational head of the Navy.
What he is is a technocrat, he's an innovator,
and he does a root-and-branch reform of the Navy - he tears it all up
and starts again - and perhaps the most visible way
he does that is in the design of the battleships.
Including this one... Including Dreadnought.
This is amazing.
Dreadnaught is a game-changer for naval warfare.
She's a completely new design, and she's built here.
She's built literally just over there,
underneath the infrastructure for the aircraft carriers.
And these are the photographs from building Dreadnought herself.
So in 1905. Yeah. So they photographed every stage.
These things are the most complex piece of technology
anywhere in the world, at this time. Yeah.
And they become... Dreadnoughts become the currency by which
nations measure their worth.
They're the nuclear weapons of their day.
So does Germany start building, essentially, copies of this?
So what Fisher predicts happens exactly as planned.
The Germans then start building their own dreadnoughts. Yeah.
They are constantly a bit behind.
So because Jackie fisher took that risk, because he decided to
invest in this new technology, we were slightly ahead of the game?
Yeah.
So at the end of the First World War,
there is no naval power to rival Britain.
And despite that victory and naval superiority, by the end
of the First World War, Britain is bankrupt.
That's why they embraced the arms limitation treaties
in the interwar period.
There's just a huge sigh of relief that they're not going to have
to keep up this pace of construction and development forever.
Is that really the end of empire, then?
It's the start of it.
It's that realisation that Britain can't really afford to be
a world power any more.
Yeah. And I think, you know, when we look at where we are now,
we can look back at all this history,
and say, "Well we wouldn't want to be that again."
It's the ebb and flow of world power status, isn't it?
The clays of empire are long gone,
but Portsmouth is still the home of the Royal Navy, of course,
and will always be associated with that particular period of history,
from the Battle of Trafalgar up to the outbreak of World War I.
In just over 100 years, Portsmouth would launch the fleet
that would lay the platform for the biggest empire in history,
see its streets awash with the drunken sailors
who'd helped Britannia rule the waves,
welcome an iconic queen,
become one of the most fortified towns on the planet...
...and build the ship that changed the world.
Empire has become an uncomfortable truth as we try to come to
terms with the human cost and the exploitation of that
incredibly rapacious, expansionist period of Britain's past.
But we cannot ignore history - we must face it.
We must try to understand it
And that empire wouldn't have been possible without the Royal Navy.
A navy that has long called Portsmouth its home.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media