Between the wars, a Bradshaw's was an essential guide
during a golden age of rail travel,
when glamorous locomotives travelled at world record speed.
I'm using a 1930s edition to explore a discernibly modern era
of mass consumption...
Bravo!
..when Art Deco cinemas and dancehalls entertained millions,
while industrial Britain was thrown into unemployment and poverty
and storm clouds gathered across the Channel.
My rail journey that began in Cornwall
will conclude with military precision on Salisbury Plain.
Before that, I'll consider where youngsters
and an emperor could lodge.
My travels commenced in the holiday hot spots of the West Country,
where I visited St Ives, Newquay and Paignton.
My journey will conclude in Wiltshire on Salisbury Plain.
The final leg starts in rural Taunton.
I'll continue to enjoy the countryside in Castle Cary,
head east to Bath and finish outside Salisbury.
This time, I see a British invention on parade...
Very intimidating.
It's the definition of shock action on a battlefield.
..encounter inter-war agricultural technology...
My goodness, Jonathan, that may have been mechanised,
but it's still highly physical.
..and explore how British appeasement
brought an Ethiopian emperor to England.
You touch on an episode of shame in British history
that Haile Selassie and Ethiopia were not strongly supported.
I start in Somerset,
in what my Bradshaw's calls,
"The fair vale of Taunton Deane."
And I'll ponder,
how would you make a basket, a coffin or a cricket bat?
Where there's a willow, there's a way.
I'm alighting at Taunton,
on the edge of the flat countryside of North Somerset.
Thousands of years ago, this area was covered by the sea
and today it's a landscape of rivers and wetland.
The Somerset Levels, an area of arable farming and pasture...
..on average six metres above sea level,
where the peak tides are eight metres.
And, so, since Roman times, at least,
man has struggled to keep the waters at bay and the land drained.
And not always successfully.
In 1607, there was the catastrophic Bristol Channel flood
that swept away villages and left more than 2,000 people dead.
And since then, the schemes to prevent such disaster
have become more and more ambitious,
because defying nature is a huge undertaking.
Few plants are easy to cultivate in such watery terrain.
But the Levels are ideally suited to growing willow,
and at the time of my guidebook,
about 3,000 acres were under production.
Nicola Coate is the director of the family business
Coates English willow, which grows and processes willow.
Nicola, this is willow and a surprise to me.
What's the connection between this
and the thing that gives us cricket bats?
The cricket bat willow is a tree
that'll grow for about 25 years or so.
So they take the trunk.
This willow, what we're aiming for is single rods
that are just very tall and straight and very flexible
and perfect for making baskets.
Is there much demand these days for willow for basket making?
Very much so.
One of the biggest growing demands now is for willow coffins.
They're very popular
because this is so sustainable.
I mean, this, what we're looking at here
is all just this season's growth.
And traditionally, how would they have been harvested?
Oh, gosh. It would have been backbreaking work.
They would have harvested with a hook, like a sickle,
and they would have chopped them down at ground level.
Then it would have been taken back to the farm
where it would have been processed throughout the rest of the year.
A lot of the area, there were whole families involved
with the willow industry. And it would be the men who did the cutting
and then the women and the children would have helped
with the stripping, getting the bark off of it.
At the time of my Bradshaw's,
there was a revolution in the labour-intensive process
of stripping the willow.
Jonathan Coates oversees willow processing here.
Jonathan, hello.
What a pleasure,
because you are part of the Coates family, aren't you?
Seventh generation.
That's astonishing.
How long have you been in the willow business?
Well, 200 years.
Started in 1819.
I've seen the willow growing now.
Once you get it out of the field, what do you do to it?
You've got to sort willow into lengths.
We've then got to boil it, so we can get the bark off.
It's then got to be dried before it's ready for the basket maker.
In the old days, when women and children were stripping willow,
how were they doing it?
Well, it was a break, which is basically...
We call it a "break" locally.
Basically, a bit of spring steel, they'd have a piece of willow...
This has been boiled.
In fact, it was boiled last night for about ten hours.
So it's quite fresh.
And just pulling it between the bits of spring steel
actually splits the bark. We turn it 90 degrees.
It just comes away at the bottom end.
Turn it round and then...
And that is perfectly stripped.
Isn't that lovely?
How did you move on from this to something better?
1929, they actually had a competition
which was won by a Frenchman
and basically, they had 108 of these bits of spring steel,
put them in a drum and connected them up to a diesel engine.
Between the wars, the production of plastic as an alternative
threatened to undermine the willow industry.
Mechanisation offered the hope of remaining competitive.
The Somerset willow peeling machine transformed the process.
So this machine, it'll actually just rake the bark
off the whole handful of willow.
OK. No safety guards.
I think I may stand back if that's all right?
My goodness, Jonathan, that may have been mechanised,
but it was still highly physical, wasn't it?
Yeah, they always said a good worker stripping by hand
would break one rod at a time,
seven bundles a day.
This machine came out and that became 40 bundles,
so a significant improvement.
Building on that 1920s technology,
at Coates today they use an even faster and safer stripping machine.
This is the most astonishing machine I've ever seen.
It's in a Y shape, so as it goes up the stem of the Y,
the centre of the willow is stripped.
Then as it goes into the Y shape, the ends are stripped...
..and they pop out here.
Stripping the willow makes it more pliable,
so it can then be used to make baskets and caskets.
So what are you doing now?
It's what we call a wale.
So we're actually weaving outside of two, behind one.
So it's a three rod wale.
This is the last piece of weaving to go in this basket
before we border it down.
So in a minute all these tops will come down
and actually form the border.
May I attempt that three rod weave? Yeah.
Take the back rod of the three,
So these long ends, you go outside of two, behind one.
So outside of two... Outside of two. ..and behind one. Behind...
And you've gone outside of three. OK.
Outside of two and behind one.
And pull that through.
You know, I don't think I'm being any help at all.
I think I'm just hampering your efforts.
I'm continuing my journey through the West Country.
At the time of my guidebook, urban life was often smoky, grimy
and slummy, not unlike Victorian times.
What had changed was the concern for health.
Ideally, children from the cities would get out into the countryside
and take hikes and breathe fresh air.
But these were not ideal clients for guest houses.
Where were the youngsters to stay?
I'll alight at Castle Cary.
I find myself in rural Somerset.
By the 1930s, British agriculture was in depression.
The countryside was increasingly celebrated by urban Britons
as a place for leisure activities,
including newly popular outdoor pursuits like rambling.
I'm meeting Duncan Simpson,
archivist of the Youth Hostel Association
on the outskirts of the village of Street.
Duncan, hello. Hi, Michael. Good to meet you.
It is very nice to meet my Street Youth Hostel,
which is a handsome, charming building.
Is it quite an historic one?
It is. It was one of the first of the youth hostels to open in England
and Wales in 1931.
So it's the longest established youth hostel in this country.
Were the British the first to accommodate youth in this way?
No. The first youth hostel in the world opened in Germany in 1909.
People from this country going over to Germany
discovered youth hostels in the 1920s,
thought they were a really lovely idea
and wanted to bring them back
and so founded the Youth Hostels Association in 1930 in this country.
So if you came here shortly after opening day,
what were you offered?
Pretty simple accommodation in 1931.
It was very much bunk beds in rooms,
fairly limited washing facilities,
but people didn't pay a great price.
It was a shilling a night.
It was a great place where young men and women met,
and at the time, that was actually regarded as fairly scandalous,
that men and women were sleeping in the same building unchaperoned.
Presumably, the men and women were segregated by dormitory?
They were. Men and women were in separate dormitories. Definitely.
What other rules did you have to abide by?
There was this really strict curfew.
As well as that, they had to be out in the morning by ten o'clock,
so they were expected to leave and to get out
and do something active in the countryside.
By 1939, there were some 400 hostels in Britain and Ireland.
Over 80,000 members of the YHA could take advantage
of the falling cost of living and reduced working hours
to stay in hostels like this one in Street.
I thought it would be interesting to look at this
because 1936 was the year you've been looking at
and it's a handbook of hostels
and there's the entry for the youth hostel at Street.
The Chalet Ivythorn Hill.
It tells you a little bit more information
about what you can expect when you stay at the youth hostel.
Something that does surprise me is,
it says that there's accommodation for 25 men and 20 women.
45 people in this building?!
Yeah. Amazing, isn't it,
how people were willing to stay with less space, I think. Yeah.
It's a lovely book, this.
A real thing of its period.
And there are lots of references to travelling abroad.
Yeah. It's quite moving, isn't it, that they're advertising, there,
Germany and Austria, which very shortly after that
would become enemy powers?
Yeah. And youth hostels were part of an international movement
and were very much in favour of peace.
And I think you might be interested to see
that there's a lovely foreword in this from the Prime Minister
of the time, from 1936,
From the Prime Minister, that's Stanley Baldwin.
"I send my cordial good wishes to the Youth Hostels Association
"for 1936, and I've chosen the following quotation from my speech
"delivered on the occasion of the annual meeting
"of the International Peace Society on the 31st October, 1931,
"as a foreword to your handbook."
So the Prime Minister also picking up on international peace.
"This dear, dear land of ours,
"Shakespeare was not ashamed thus to speak of his love
"of his native land and why should we be?
"We think perhaps of the level evening's sun
"over an English meadow.
"To what risks do we expose our treasures?
"Irreplaceable treasures, for you cannot build up beauty like that
"in a few years of mass production."
Charming.
It's a new day
and I'm on my way to my last calling point in Somerset.
I will stop in Bath, which Bradshaw's describes as,
"A handsome city built entirely of stone
"with so many historic associations that there's scarcely a house
"but has at least one famous personage associated with it."
I'm on the trail of someone who arrived only in 1936.
A distinguished refugee
who foresaw that fascism's appetite for conquest was insatiable.
During the 1930s, Britain tried to avoid war in Europe,
allowing Hitler to expand German territory unchecked
and standing by while Italy's Benito Mussolini
sought to build a new Roman Empire.
How did the affluent Georgian spa town of Bath
come to welcome such an unlikely resident
as the emperor of Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, Haile Selassie?
I'm meeting Dr Shawn Sobers at Fairfield House,
overlooking the city.
Hello, Shawn. Hello. Hello, Michael. Good to meet you.
Good to be here. Thank you.
So Fairfield House is quite an imposing house, isn't it?
Do you know anything about the origins of it?
Well, it's a late-19th century house,
a grand family house, really.
And when His Majesty came to Bath,
he wanted somewhere private, very secluded
and this fit the bill perfectly.
How was it, then, that His Imperial Majesty,
the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, comes to Bath?
So Mussolini invaded Ethiopia,
and His Majesty was forced to flee on May 5th, 1936.
Ended up in London. Then, actually, he was very popular.
The British people were watching what was happening
in the newsreels, etc.
So when His Majesty landed, there was huge crowds for him.
But the British government at that time
was still appeasing Mussolini.
Having a very popular political refugee, essentially, in London
was an embarrassment to the British government.
So he was forced out into the provinces,
and one of the reasons why they say he came to Bath
was because of the healing waters.
He had mustard gas burns on his hands,
where the Italians used mustard gas damage.
You touch on that episode, really, of shame in British history
that, you know, despite the aggression of the fascists
in Ethiopia, Haile Selassie and Ethiopia
were not strongly supported.
No, no. But at the same time, Haile Selassie was a diplomat
and knew how politics works and went to the League of Nations
and gave a very passionate speech to say that, actually,
the League of Nations should defend small states
and saying that "If it's us today, it might be you tomorrow".
I decided to come to defend the cause of my people
before the council of the League Of Nations.
Both Abyssinia and Italy were members of the League of Nations,
an international organisation set up in the aftermath
of the First World War to preserve peace.
The League's charter stated that if one country was invaded,
its fellow members would come to its aid.
Despite Selassie's pleas, Britain and other member states
refused to intervene.
And he remained in Bath with his government in exile.
What was his daily life like in Bath?
So, daily life was quite mundane.
He went to the little theatre, for example,
and he watched newsreel films of the Ethiopian campaign.
He became friends with local businessmen, local politicians.
People saw him going for walks.
There is a lovely apocryphal story to say that he loved walking
so much and he is very on time,
that they would know if they're late for work
depending on how far down the road he was on any given morning.
After war broke out and Mussolini allied with Hitler,
Britain began to support the Abyssinian cause
and liberated the country in 1941.
The emperor returned to rule Abyssinia,
which became Ethiopia, until he was deposed in 1974.
He left Fairfield House to Bath City Council,
but his legacy extends across the world.
Shawn, here we have Haile Selassie
and we've talked about him as Emperor,
but he's also a deity for Rastafarians.
Please explain the connection.
Yeah. Rastafari is the name of Haile Selassie.
So "Ras" is a title, a government title that's like duke or head.
And "Tafari" is like creator, so head creator,
you could shorten it or translate it as.
He's the 225th descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
And there were certain prophecies that came into play.
One of them was Marcus Garvey.
Marcus Garvey was a prominent Jamaican philosopher, activist
and in 1925, he said,
"Look to Africa, where a king shall be crowned
"and the day of deliverance will be had."
So, five years later, when Haile Selassie was crowned,
they saw that as the fulfilment of Marcus Garvey's prophecy.
When Haile Selassie was crowned in 1930,
Africans in the West Indies believed he was god of the black race,
and Ethiopia the promised land.
The Rastafarian movement began.
How did Haile Selassie react to being deified?
He didn't ask to be deified.
And it's not always documented that he's comfortable being deified.
But also, at the same time, he is very supportive
because he could see what the Rastafari philosophy was all about,
which essentially is a Pan-Africanist philosophy.
What was the impact on Rastafari of Haile Selassie's death?
He died, rather miserably, deposed and in prison.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
But you know, Rastafari, as Bob Marley famously said,
he said "Rastafari are children of life and not of death."
So his teachings live on, his example lives on.
And that's the legacy that still maintains today.
I'm leaving Bath and rejoining the rails
towards my final destination.
During the First World War,
the Western Front became stuck in the trenches and the mud.
One innovation during the conflict
was intended to restore movement to the battlefield.
I'll examine its development between the wars
when I arrive at Salisbury Plain,
which the guide book tells me is that vast open space
in the centre of Wiltshire,
famous on account of the military manoeuvres held there.
The medieval cathedral city of Salisbury
sits in a valley where five rivers meet.
12 miles north lies Salisbury Plain,
home to 150 square miles of Ministry of Defence land,
the British Army's largest training area.
I'm visiting Tidworth Camp, a garrison since 1897
and home at the time of my guidebook to a new division of the army.
I'm meeting Captain Tom Quant,
intelligence officer with the Royal Tank Regiment.
Tom, good to see you. Hi, Michael, thanks very much for coming down.
Welcome to the Royal Tank Regiment in Tidworth.
I think you might need a pair of these. We're going somewhere noisy?
We certainly are.
Tom, I believe the tank was a British invention.
How did it come about?
It was. So, at the height of the First World War,
the British realised that something was needed
to break the deadlock on the Western Front.
So, a stalemate had emerged through the use of trench warfare.
So the tank was designed to be able to cross
what had hitherto been an impossible stretch of no-man's-land,
go over the barbed wire entanglements
and finally get to grips with the enemy.
It must have been terrifying for the Germans to see these things.
They'd never seen them before. But was the tank also effective?
Yes, indeed. So as you say, I think the psychological element
of watching those first tanks roll across no-man's-land
must have been enormous.
It was very effective as well.
It meant the infantry could, for the first time,
cross no man's land in that hail of machine-gun fire and shrapnel,
using the tanks as moving cover.
The tank was first used in combat during the Battle of the Somme.
The name comes from a deliberate subterfuge,
Britain pretended that the new vehicle was a water tank.
By the war's end in 1918,
Britain had made 2,600 tanks.
In the interwar period, what are the discussions going on
about the future of tank warfare?
So the tank effectively undergoes something of a fight for survival
after the end of the First World War.
So despite its sterling performance on the Western Front,
there was a great deal of reluctance from some regiments.
There's a wonderful quote
from the Secretary of State for war at the time, who said that,
"Asking a cavalryman to no longer use his horse
"was much the same as asking a famous musician
"to throw his instruments away
"and stick to playing the gramophone for the rest of his life."
When does the word "tank" get used by the British army
and how does that develop?
So, in the First World War, there was the Tank Corps,
but we don't get the Royal Tank Corps until 1923.
And it's not until 1939 that the Royal Tank Regiment,
the RTR, first comes into being,
just in time for the Second World War.
When war broke out again in 1939,
armoured vehicles proved vital, tactically and operationally.
Today, tanks remain integral to the British army's ability
to use shock action,
the application of sudden force, rapidly,
to overwhelm an enemy.
Tom, what an intimidating piece of kit. What is this?
Yes, indeed. This is a beast.
This is the Challenger 2 main battle tank, Street Fighter variant.
So it's the British Army's premier shock action capability.
This here is a bulldozer blade.
So this enables the tank to clear through roadblocks,
cars, anti-tank berms,
basically ensure that it can move around a cluttered
and congested battle space.
The Royal Tank Regiment's Street Fighter variant
of the British Army's main battle tank is on manoeuvres today.
The tank is going to conduct a bit of a thunder run down the road,
so you might want to put these on now. I think I might.
Weighing 62 tonnes
and equipped with an armour-piercing 120 millimetre main gun,
a multi-barrel discharger to create a smokescreen,
the tank at full pelt is an awesome sight.
Very intimidating.
That it is. It's the definition of shock action on a battlefield.
Gentlemen, hello.
Thank you very much for letting us play.
Are you pretty happy with Challenger 2?
I love it. I think it's an amazing platform.
When we roll up in these on exercise, everyone's jealous.
All the boys look at us and think,
especially when it's raining, "I wish we was on one of them."
It's a lot better. They're fuming when we turn up.
Digging holes, fuming, we're on this.
How fast can you go in this?
Max speed on one of these is 60km per hour,
which is decent over rough terrain.
Not so much for the crew members inside, but...
And Jonesy, what did you drive before, a Fiat 500 or...?
Nah. A little Ford Fiesta before this.
THEY LAUGH
Definitely does not compare.
During this long rail journey,
I've viewed contrasting images of the 1930s.
Cornwall - ruined by the end of tin mining,
yet also home to a thriving colony of artists.
I've glimpsed cloth cap Britain,
but also Agatha Christie's imagined world of stylish globetrotters.
The strongest indicator of how the decade would end
was the arrival in Britain of refugees fleeing from fascism.
Britain, desperate to avoid another world war,
would go through it all again,
for as the exiled emperor of Ethiopia said,
"Today, it is us.
"Tomorrow it will be you."
Next time, I'll discover the origins of the Poppy Appeal...
This most British of symbols
was a Canadian-American-French co-production.
..explore the home of Britain's greatest statesman...
It's an incredible who's who of the early 20th century.
..and visit the birthplace of the small screen.
It is inspiring to stand here and think,
in these rooms, men and women made up television
with fantastic passion and drive and innovation.