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.
Come on!
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 1936 Bradshaw's Guide has steered me to Kent,
from which the British had supplied the Western Front
during the First World War.
Now a Kent resident, Mr Winston Churchill MP,
warned of a resurgent and aggressive Germany
whose British sympathisers battled with Jews on London's streets.
But appeasement was in the ascendant.
The middle classes had enjoyed a housing boom,
and the population was not surprisingly gripped by the fear
of aerial bombardment that would leave behind a wasteland.
I'm exploring the east of England, starting in Kent.
I'll then visit the Docklands and suburbs of London,
before heading to the counties of East Anglia.
I'll finish in Lincolnshire.
The first leg will take me from Canterbury in Kent
to the county town, Maidstone.
I'll travel to Sevenoaks, then strike north into the capital,
where I'll finish at Alexandra Palace.
On this journey, 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.
I'm arriving in Canterbury on a high speed Javelin train.
The cathedral city has been an important centre of pilgrimage
for a thousand years.
Built by the Normans, today it's a Unesco World Heritage Site
and home to the mother church of the worldwide Anglican community.
Canterbury is described in my Bradshaw's
as the cradle of Christianity in England.
England's premier cathedral.
Thousands of pilgrims have journeyed here ever since the Archbishop, Thomas a Becket,
was murdered in the northern transept in 1172.
The Archbishop's murder, actually in 1170,
was the culmination of a bitter quarrel with King Henry II
over the balance of power between the church and the monarchy.
Becket's brave stand against the state,
and his killing by the King's knights,
made him a Christian hero
and he was canonised by the Pope.
A man of conscience killed at the behest of a tyrant.
And in 1935, as the tide of fascism and Nazism rose in Europe,
the perceived parallel had inspired a play by an American author
settled in London.
Thomas Stearns Eliot.
To find out more about the 1930s dramatisation of the killing
of Becket, I'm meeting Cathedral archivist Cressida Williams
and Caroline Plaisted, head of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral.
Caroline, hello. Pleased to meet you.
Here in the cathedral, you get the sense that Thomas a Becket
is everywhere in the building.
But this particular spot.
What's the association with him?
This is the exact place where his shrine was created,
where thousands, millions, probably, of pilgrims came
to pay their respects to Thomas after his martyrdom.
And a word about TS Eliot.
Who was he, first of all?
Thomas Stearns Eliot.
So, he was born in the United States, but came over to England,
became a British citizen in 1927 and actually was confirmed
into the Church of England in that year as well.
And how did it come to be that the play Murder in the Cathedral was commissioned?
TS Eliot was commissioned in 1934 to write the play,
and it was staged in June the following year, in June 1935.
So it was one of the plays in the Friends' festivals
of art and drama.
What was the thinking behind commissioning plays for performance
in the cathedral?
Well, it was a great innovation.
And that's perhaps surprising for us today to think that performing plays
or even music in a cathedral, even secular music in the cathedral,
that was an innovation at the time.
With TS Eliot attending the festival,
the production drew huge audiences to the cathedral
for its world premiere in June 1935.
A cast of professional actors performed alongside amateurs
who were residents of Canterbury.
And the play may have been to the audience in a somewhat unexpected form.
Yes, it's a very interesting play
that brings together different traditions.
So it harks back to Greek drama, to medieval drama,
maybe with a little bit of Shakespeare.
It was performed with no interval.
So there was a lot of innovation in the play.
Can you imagine an audience that was coping with the rise
of fascism and Nazism in Europe
being confronted with this martyrdom?
Yes, it's making some quite bold statements.
So, TS Eliot is exploring the role of the church, the untouchability,
if you like, of the church in the context
of these developing totalitarian regimes.
The play was performed not at the spot where Becket was murdered
in the north transept, but a few metres away,
in the cathedral's Chapter House.
There, I'm joining four actors from Canterbury
to perform an extract from the play.
So, is that the original production?
It is. So this is the Chapter House, June 1935,
with Robert Speaight, the actor playing Becket.
How did this extraordinary play in this extraordinary place go down?
How was it reviewed?
It was quite clear that people had been very moved by discovering
the true story behind the martyrdom.
And I understand that, I think, was it something like 20,000 people
saw the play in total over the years?
In its first decades, yes. Yes. Extraordinary.
Because it toured even to the States.
Where is Becket, the traitor to the King?!
Where is Becket, the meddlesome priest?!
Come down, Daniel, to the Lion's Den!
Come down, Daniel, for the mark of the beast.
It is the just man who, like the bold lion, should be without fear.
I am here.
No traitor to the king.
I am a priest.
A Christian saved by the blood of Christ,
willing to suffer with my blood.
This is the sign of the Church always.
The sign of blood.
Blood for blood.
His blood given for my life.
My blood given to pay for his death.
KNIGHTS CHANT: Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!
I'm continuing my journey through Kent, the Garden of England.
I will alight at Maidstone, which Bradshaw's reminds me
is the county town, situated almost in the centre of Kent,
on the banks of the River Medway.
During the Great War, columns of young soldiers were cheered
at Kent railway stations and Kent ports as they embarked for the trenches.
But many would return to Kent on ambulance trains,
their bodies and their minds shattered.
In the years after, Britons were determined not to forget those who had died,
and the public was seized by a sense of responsibility
for those who had survived.
Maidstone and its surrounding towns enjoy a proud military heritage.
Goodbye. Thank you. Thank you, bye-bye. Have a good day.
On the outskirts of Maidstone, close to Aylesford,
is the Royal British Legion Village
built after the First World War to house injured soldiers.
It's also home to the factory producing the British Legion's
internationally recognised symbol of remembrance.
Robert Lee is the assistant director.
Robert, after the First World War,
a nation determined to remember the fallen
and to look after those who'd survived.
How does that lead to the Royal British Legion?
Veterans returning from the First World War
faced monumental challenges,
and came together to form the British Legion in 1921
under the leadership of Earl Haig.
They were united by three principles -
collective self-help, urging government to do its bit,
and to remember the sacrifice of those who'd given their lives
and those who'd suffered life-changing disability as a result of their service.
Hundreds of thousands of British dead, but what about wounded?
The British Empire had some 2.1 million wounded and injured
returned after the War.
Britain bore the brunt of that,
possibly 1.8 million wounded coming back to the country.
A great many of these with permanent, life-changing disability.
And is it fairly early on in this process that they hit upon the idea
of an annual fundraising event?
Miraculously, it was from the very beginning,
and this most British of symbols
was a Canadian-American-French co-production.
The poppy was adopted after an American academic, Moina Michael,
sold them to her friends as a way of raising funds
for returning servicemen.
She was inspired by the mention of poppies in the first line
of the war poem In Flanders Fields,
written by Canadian field surgeon John McCrae.
The poppies themselves, in the very first year, 1921,
were assembled in France by a woman named Madame Guerin,
and the many orphanages that she ran for widows and orphans
who put them together by hand as a gesture of thanks and goodwill
to the returning veterans of the United Kingdom.
And did the poppy always look the way that it does today?
No, initially it was made of silk. I'll show you.
It was handmade of red silk and thread,
and they were affixed by thread to the collar.
This process, though, was extremely laborious,
and limited the numbers that could be produced,
so as soon as we could, the British Legion built a poppy factory
to industrialise the manufacture of the poppies.
How quickly does the poppy take off?
It was an instant, enormous success.
In its very first year, 3 million of these silk poppies
were manufactured by hand, completely sold out.
The following year we trebled production to 9 million.
That also sold out.
Today, the Royal British Legion produces 40 million paper poppies
and around 130,000 wreaths every year.
Ben Martin is factory manager.
Hello, Ben. I'm reporting for bucket duty.
Michael, nice to meet you.
My goodness, these boxes. How many in there?
Yes, we have around 50,000 poppies in each of these pallets.
And they have to get into there, right? Indeed they do.
So, we two thirds roughly fill a bucket.
And then we place these into each tray.
How many poppies are you producing?
We produce around 100,000 poppies a day.
I'm trying to imagine what kind of quantities of paper you're getting through.
We use probably around 6 kilometres of paper a day.
November is clearly your crunch time,
but when do you have to start gearing up for that?
Indeed, we start dispatching the poppies straight after the appeal that's just happened.
So really a year round operation?
Absolutely, 365 days a year.
Every year, on the Sunday nearest to the 11th of November,
poppy wreaths are laid at the Cenotaph in London
during the National Service of Remembrance.
In Maidstone's Brenchley Gardens stands a replica
by the architect of the Cenotaph, Sir Edwin Lutyens,
a memorial to the Queen's own Royal West Kent Regiment.
Bradshaw's tells me that at Sevenoaks is the beautiful Knole Park,
a grand Elizabethan mansion.
At Penshurst, another stately English home, Penshurst Place,
and Hever Castle is also in the neighbourhood.
I think a modern Bradshaw's might put at the top of the list
a more modest pile.
It was sold in 1922 to an aristocrat,
but one who could scarcely afford the price of £5,000.
Just west of Sevenoaks, on the edge of the North Downs,
is the country estate of one of my political heroes.
This is a moving moment for me.
This is Chartwell, Winston Churchill's house.
Although he was the grandson of a Duke of Marlborough,
he was not rich.
His political career was a seesaw.
He was in and out of ministerial office, in and out of Parliament,
and he had to use his pen to make financial ends meet.
Here at Chartwell, what one friend described as his word factory,
he churned out the books and articles that brought in the cheques.
Today, the home, which is decorated and furnished
as it was in the 1930s,
is in the care of the National Trust.
Katherine Carter, the curator and collections manager,
is meeting me on the terrace.
Katherine. Hello. I'm Michael.
Hello. Welcome to Chartwell. I'm so pleased to be here.
And just walking through the house, two things strike me straight away.
That the house is very homely, and this extraordinary view.
The view is absolutely wonderful.
It's the reason that Churchill bought this house.
When he saw it first, it looked very different, shrouded with ivy
and looking very overgrown, and he completely transformed the building,
but the view was the constant and that's what he loved the most.
Why was it not good enough as he found it?
The Churchills hired an architect, Philip Tilden,
who quickly diagnosed the house as having a very not-intuitive layout,
but also a big part of it was bringing light into the house.
Churchill, with his artist's eye,
always wanted as much light as possible.
Churchill spent here at Chartwell
what he described as his wilderness years,
although he produced a lot of words.
Was he politically active in that period?
He certainly was very politically active,
and if we look at the visitors' book that we have here at Chartwell,
you'll see just how much activity was going on here.
I'd love to see that. Thank you.
At the time of my guidebook, Churchill was a backbench MP,
banished from the government because of his opposition to appeasing Nazi Germany.
He spent much of the 1930s at Chartwell receiving influential
visitors and becoming expert on Germany's secret rearmament.
Here we have Chartwell's visitors' book,
which is one of the most important objects in our whole collection.
It's unique in its representation of the Churchills' private lives.
So it's an incredible who's who of the early 20th century.
During the wilderness years,
when Churchill is not in political office,
what sorts of people are coming to Chartwell?
We see far more people who are, by definition, bringing intelligence
to Churchill here at Chartwell.
So you're losing some of the wider political figures,
but those who are his closest supporters are visiting here very frequently.
And Brendan Bracken is a very good example
of that very close inner circle he had at that time.
Brendan Bracken, if I recall, was a businessman,
was a member of parliament and a Churchill acolyte.
He certainly was. He was arguably, at the height of appeasement,
Churchill's closest friend and most trusted confidant.
We also have here the signature of Charlie Chaplin,
who one doesn't immediately associate with Churchill,
but the pair became friends after they met in America in 1929
and then Chaplin visits here twice two years later.
You mentioned intelligence.
So Churchill had started making speeches against Nazi Germany
from as early as 1933.
But it was the information coming here - graphs, maps,
lists of aviation developments in Germany -
that were what armed Churchill with the information
to start to sway the tide towards anti-appeasement.
And the people who brought that sort of specific intelligence,
did they sign the book?
Some did and some didn't.
One of the most famous visitors to Chartwell, who didn't sign
during that point, is Albert Einstein.
Since April 1933, there's been a law in Germany
stating that German Jews can't work in state employment,
and that included academics and professors.
So Einstein is very aware that he is in a precarious situation.
He leaves Germany and comes to Chartwell
and not only asks for sanctuary for Jewish scholars,
but starts to tell Churchill this man is bent on war
and he is preparing now.
So that document, it's really an essential document in the history
of how we got from appeasement to opposing Hitler.
It certainly is.
It depicts Churchill preparing for the fight of his life,
trying to sway the tide in Westminster that we should be preparing for war.
This was Winston's study.
The 1930s were, for Churchill, wilderness years here at Chartwell,
but for Britain, they were fruitful years.
The procession of politicians and thinkers and civil servants
who visited him here built up his deep knowledge
of the threat from Nazi Germany.
His consistently well-informed warnings gave him towering moral
authority when eventually war came and made his accession
to national leadership irresistible in Britain's darkest hour.
TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENT: The next station is London Bridge.
I'm leaving Kent for the capital.
In purple prose, my Bradshaw's urges the visitor to London
to look out from the northern heights
over the province covered with buildings,
which is the capital of the king, on whose dominions the sun never sets.
The strategic value of high ground is obvious
and led our ancestors to build hilltop fortresses and palaces.
In the age of telecommunications,
the merits of commanding heights were learned again.
I'm changing at London Bridge,
the capital's oldest railway station, which opened in 1836.
It's recently undergone a £1 billion transformation.
London Bridge Station, I remember it as a warren of tiny, crowded
walkways, and over the years I've watched it being reconstructed
and it is now one of the most generous spaces
on the whole network.
I'm taking a Thameslink train north, under the centre of the capital.
I've travelled to Alexandra Palace Station.
Alexandra Park enjoys commanding views over the city.
At its highest point sits the vast Victorian-built Palace.
The year before my guidebook was published,
the British Broadcasting Corporation leased the Eastern Wing to launch a new technology.
Robert Seatter is an expert on the history of the BBC.
Well, Robert, with London at our feet,
it's evident that the BBC would want a high place for broadcasting television.
But why Ally Pally?
Well, the great advantage of Alexandra Palace
was that it was already very high, about 300 feet above sea level.
So all the BBC had to do was add the very famous transmitter mast
on top of the building to get even more enhanced height.
But also, as importantly, it was available.
So the pioneers of television were distant from Broadcasting House,
which is over there?
Yes, so Broadcasting House, created in 1932,
was, by now, the established centre of radio.
So television was created here, and it was a very different atmosphere.
They were called the Fools on the Hill and they created a sort
of Liberty Hall here because they made up television -
literally made up the grammar of television in this place.
John Logie Baird had invented television.
How did the BBC move from this invention
to believing that there should be a public service?
Reith, who was the Director-General of the BBC,
actually knew John Logie Baird and personally did not like him,
so there was an animosity between two men
and an animosity between the two media, radio and television,
and radio was always deemed the more serious medium,
but it was finally the pressure of the government,
who looked towards Europe and gathering clouds of war in Germany,
and the way that Germany was using television as a propaganda means
to implant the Fuhrer in the hearts of the German people,
so that it was that pushed the government and pushed the BBC
into finally launching a television test here at Alexandra Palace.
Despite the BBC's initial reservations,
on the 2nd of November 1936,
the first pictures were broadcast to just 400 television sets
within a 30-mile radius of the transmitter.
And now I'm going to see and hear someone you know well,
Miss Helen McKay.
Oh, dear, Robert.
These historic studios are looking pretty run down.
What was it like when the BBC arrived?
Well, not much better, Michael.
It was roofless, damp.
There were cats. There were rats.
It was a very, very dark place to begin television,
and the BBC had only 18 months to transform it
into a state of the art television service.
What sort of fare did they serve up to the British public?
Cecil Madden, who was the producer who was in charge of the schedule
initially for television, he had huge ambitions.
In his first week, he wanted to have a ballet, a theatre and an opera.
He went to the West End,
he saw that they were fascinated by this new medium, and up they came,
up the hill, to deliver live shows on television.
But then television closes down during the Second World War?
Right at the beginning, in September 1939,
the screens go black just in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon.
He says, "I think I better go home,"
in an accent resembling that of Greta Garbo, for some reason,
and then television ceases.
And that was because there was a fear from the government
that the transmitter mast would help guide German bombers to bomb London.
What do you think is the legacy of these Alexandra Palace studios?
I think it is inspiring to stand here and think, in these rooms,
men and women made up television with fantastic passion
and drive and innovation.
In his inter-war poem, The Waste Land,
TS Eliot sees a crowd surging across London Bridge.
"I had not thought death had undone so many."
At the time of my guidebook, death was on its way to British cities
because Churchill had been right about Nazi Germany's preparations
for aerial warfare.
During the Second World War,
the BBC broadcasts the voice of freedom to occupied Europe,
and, decades later, its television coverage of Churchill's funeral
will be seen by one in ten of the world's population.
Next time, I'll get behind the wheel of a pioneering pick-up...
And off we go!
..learn of an unusual alliance between railway engineering
and conservation...
By bringing 3.2 million tonnes of spoil in,
it allowed us to raise the land.
..and get the scoop on a seaside favourite.
Gelato!
Ice cream!