The Great British Story: A People's History (2012) s01e08 Episode Script
Modern Britain
1 In the story of the British people we've reached the 20th century.
Our time.
Through civil wars and foreign invasions the British forged the roots of their democracy.
In the Industrial Revolution they invented the modern world.
Creative and adaptable, they built the first industrial society.
But the British would go through few more testing times than the 20th century.
The last hundred years have seen the greatest changes to our society, and even to our character as a nation.
Through two world wars we've become a multi-racial country and a post-industrial nation.
But the British people have remained hugely creative and inventive, pioneers in technology, arts and sciences.
It's the last chapter of The Great British Story.
As we look at it now, the Edwardian Age, before the First World War, was the high noon of British self-confidence.
During the previous century, we'd become an industrial, urbanised nation.
Now the power of the people was growing.
Horizons were opening up.
For the first time, the cinema showed us our own image.
But that imperial, industrial heyday was inevitably brief.
As it appears now, an almost incredible adventure by the people of this small island off the shore of Europe.
The big story for the 20th century through two world wars was the loss of empire and the dramatic collapse of the heavy industries on which our wealth depended.
Just as the British people were the first nation in history to become an industrial country, so they were the first to go through that and come out the other side, forced now to reshape their identities once more in their history, as workers, as citizens, and, indeed, as Britons.
The Edwardians ruled a maritime empire.
At its heart was shipbuilding.
And nowhere was that more clear than Glasgow.
To arrive in Edwardian Glasgow was to see the achievements of the age.
But its powerhouse was the teeming shipyards of Govan, whose population had grown 30 times in three generations.
It was something of gold rush proportions, what took place here.
1864, I think, and a population of 2,500.
It was an idyllic village on the River Clyde where people came to do watercolours and things.
By 1912, there was 90,000 people living in Govan.
Beyond that, there was people pouring in from outside Govan, from Glasgow, to work here.
By 1914, there were 48 shipyards on the Clyde.
Shipbuilding guaranteed the empire.
And the empire guaranteed the shipyards.
Glasgow really was prosperous when our trade was with America.
That's what built Glasgow.
Everybody either worked in the shipyard or worked in an associated industry, like myself.
I started off in an engine works, building engines for the ships.
We probably thought it would always last, but obviously it hasn't.
And what was made here was not only ships but an identity, a solidarity in labour, a pride in being a shipbuilder.
As in Belfast and on the Tyne, in a few generations shipbuilding became part of the people's DNA.
Country folk mixed with traditional city-dwellers.
Eventually they merged to become a completely new tribe.
What were they? The Clydesiders.
They became Clydesiders.
From whatever Govan was before then, they came there.
They almost formed a different nation.
That is astounding, isn't it? And shipbuilding meant more than earning a living.
It was something heroic - the sum of a community's creativity.
The ship's just being launched.
It's gathering speed.
- The drag chains hit.
(Metallic scraping) The sound is horrendous.
It drags the ship right back.
That's her born.
She's born, ready to deliver.
It's a rush of adrenaline.
It's the apex of satisfaction.
Remember, you built the ships.
You built yourself and your friends up for the day of the launch.
It's gone in and it hits the water.
And you say: Done it! This was the time when the British defined themselves by their industry.
At Halesowen in the Black Country in the workforce there were people whose ancestors had worked metal in Tudor times.
Grandad did it and my dad.
My brother works here.
He works in that department there.
All his brothers have worked in the steel as well, my dad's brothers.
Quite a few of them.
My father worked here, my grandfather worked here.
My uncles worked here.
I've also got a son here at the moment.
My great-grandmother worked here during the war.
She used to drive the crane.
The greatest expansion here was before the First World War.
3,600-ton steam hydraulic press.
How about that? The old folks in Halesowen used to say that you could hear this wheezing and thumping and feel it shaking the ground, all the way through the night when they were on big jobs.
Britain's pre-eminence was reinforced by a sense of British identity.
The values of British society - hard work, deference, patriotism - were articulated in a myriad societies, mechanics'institutes, sports teams, Boys'Brigades, working men's clubs.
Together, at work and play, the British knew who they were.
And tennis rackets.
But I didn't bring them today.
I didn't know what you wanted.
A wonderful archive of stuff.
A crucial social role was played by organised sport.
And the British, of course, had invented the rules.
They actually won the Suffolk Senior Cup.
I think they also beat Ipswich Town, as well.
- Fabulous.
- Yeah.
That's the gardening club.
The gardening club? Fantastic.
These are amazing social documents.
Oh, yes.
The Cycle Volunteer Force.
- First World War period.
- Yes.
I could name all those people.
But across Edwardian Britain, there was still a huge gulf between rich and poor.
In 1910, the chainmakers of the Black Country went on strike.
Now, pin back your ears and I'll sing you a song Of a town that is dear to my heart The chainmakers were a cottage industry unchanged since the Industrial Revolution.
And everyone's mad about darts They worked in conditions almost impossible for us to imagine now.
And the most exploited were the women.
Where factory wenches line all the park benches Cradley Heath means home to me If you was a chainmaker, how would you have felt and why? You'd have felt as if you was a slave.
You worked 12, 13 hours a day for next to nothing.
No wonder they was angry.
I get five shillings a week for what? Working from seven o'clock in the morning till seven o'clock at night.
They had to buy their coal and their metal from a fogger.
Some foggers actually boasted that they could sell metal to the women and then buy the made chain back for cheaper than the constituent components.
And in Edwardian Britain, women still didn't have the vote.
Any one of you that goes out on strike, you'll never work again! The press called it "white slavery in the Black Country".
They didn't get a living wage or working wage.
They were on starvation situation.
The first strike to appear on cinema news in Britain was led by a young Scot called Mary MacArthur.
This hopeless, despairing struggle for survival will go on unless we gather our strength and our determination and we move as one.
(Cheering) Let us take to the streets and make our voices heard! - For freedom and the right! (Cheering) So one side of life in Edwardian Britain was class struggle.
The first ten years of the century saw bitter strikes and unemployment marches, the rise of trades unions.
And from 1900, a Labour Party, all fighting to better the conditions of the people.
And in no area was that more important than women's rights.
The Suffragettes were battling against one of the worst injustices of British society - that women still didn't have the vote.
Women's franchise movements had a long history in Britain, but now they found a national voice, despite, at times, brutal repression.
But democracy was put on hold by the First World War.
Across the country the war had mass support, even in Ireland, which was still then a part of Britain.
It was working-class patriotism that made the volunteer armies in the first total war.
From the riveters and platers of Ulster, Tyneside and Govan to the miners and steelmen of South Wales, Britain lost nearly a million men.
No place in Britain was untouched.
The First World War is still a mystery.
Why a prosperous country at the height of its success, the source and agent of wealth and civilisation, chose to risk all in such horrors and to create a lost generation.
In the industrial cities, where unemployment was already high on the eve of war, the government encouraged volunteers from the same towns, the same streets, so friends would fight together.
Pals.
One of these Pals battalions came from a small Lancashire cotton town - Accrington.
On the first day of the Somme, out of 700 Accrington Pals 235 were killed and 350 wounded.
- He's your grandad? - He's my grandfather, yes.
An what happened to him? He got killed on the Somme on July 2nd, 1916.
They worked and played together and they died together.
Do you know what actually happened to him? They just said he had "no known grave".
His body was never found.
All they can say is he went missing on that day.
There's a lot like that.
How it could have happened is still impossible for us to grasp.
The amount you just see here, on one panel, on one wall.
- Sad.
- It is sad, isn't it? Very sad.
Honestly, I'm a grown man, 76, and it brings tears to my eyes.
I know I'm very proud of him and all those who served and died with him.
If it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't be here talking to you now.
They were brave men, they were.
Blood brothers, they were.
Parade, stand at ease! The First War was the great divide for modern Britain.
It also left its mark on daily life, on our pub opening hours, our love of allotments and cigarettes, our universal mistrust of the honesty of the press.
But, above all, in the loss of a generation who would have been the future doctors, judges and teachers.
This is a community where you're remembering things.
Not just the ones we lost but also the ones who came back as well.
People lost whole streets.
They lost brothers, sons, cousins.
These remembrance ceremonies stir the memories like sediment rising in the glass.
Memories of our common history shared by all of us as Britons.
They're memories shaped, conditioned by an imperial past, by that astonishing arc of narrative which has taken our country over a couple of hundred years or so from being a small land on the fringe of Europe to world dominion and then back to being a small island on the fringe of Europe.
And ever since, Britain's most solemn ritual is not Good Friday but Armistice Day.
In the aftermath of the Great War came the first cracks in the British Empire, and the first part to go was Ireland.
Up here in the North, the Protestant majority gave unstinting support to the cause.
The Ulster Volunteer Force had actually formed before the war to block plans for Home Rule for Ireland, which was still a British colony.
In Ulster, it's never been forgotten that they gave their all for king and country.
But in the south, though many Catholics had fought for Britain, their were older loyalties.
Here many saw the war as the chance for freedom.
The rising of 1916 had failed.
But in 1919, the Irish War of Independence, or the Anglo-Irish War, brought the end of British rule after more than three centuries.
At the time of the Anglo-Irish War, 1919-1921, the British government in London would have been happy to see a united Ireland remaining within the British Empire.
But that idea was fiercely resisted up here in Ulster by the Protestants who feared being the minority in a Catholic-dominated Ireland.
And so Ireland was partitioned, with an Irish Free State to the south, and Ulster up here remaining part of the UK, with consequences that are still rumbling on today, of course.
But in the 1920s storm clouds were rolling across the world.
As Fascism rose in Europe, Britain was swept by the Great Depression.
The Empire was now at its greatest extent, but it hadn't recovered from the war.
With huge war debts, industrial output declined and the old industries in the north - coal, steel and ships - were devastated, especially up here on Tyneside at Jarrow.
Here the bitter experience of the 1930s is still a part of people's memory as if it happened yesterday.
(Brass band plays) They're walking to London as a protest, just to raise awareness.
It was when they shut the shipyard that employed 80% of the population of Jarrow.
Once that was shut, that was the town finished.
There's no work here for us since the shipyard's finished.
By 1936, unemployment in Jarrow reached 73%, the worst in Britain.
For jobs for the youth of today.
That's why we're doing it.
Trying to make a change.
Trying to make a stand and make a change.
And for an alternative - an alternative to no jobs and no education for ordinary people.
And that was what drove the marchers to make their protest not just for themselves but for their children and their grandchildren.
In October 1936, they walked from Tyneside down to London, asking for the right to work.
The Britain they walked through was still the green and pleasant land.
But the nation was changing, its heavy industries out of date, overtaken by newer countries following in Britain's industrial path.
On 22nd October, the marchers entered London, watched with curiosity by the rich.
It's often said the Jarrow March achieved nothing.
The Prime Minister here in the Houses of Parliament refused to see them.
They got a minute or two at Question Time.
And each marcher was given a pound to get the train back home, where unemployment stayed at the same horrendous level.
But it's not true to say that it achieved nothing.
It wasn't only a matter of the dignity and discipline of the marchers, it was a visual demonstration of the huge disparities in work and health and housing and class that ran right through British society.
Things had to change.
And they did.
"As I write," George Orwell said in 1940, civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
" Yet again, the British people were to be tested.
Where I live, on the Leicester boundary, the noise was horrendous.
So you couldn't get any sleep, the bombs were falling.
Then you'd hear another wave of bombers coming.
Britain's industrial heartlands were devastated, her major ports, like Liverpool, systematically smashed.
We lived by Edge Hill station, which was very dangerous.
So five of us were evacuated from our family.
We didn't know where we were going.
Nobody knew where you were going to finish up.
3.
5 million people, mainly young children, were evacuated from the most threatened cities and billeted with families in the countryside.
It was an internal migration unprecedented in British history.
We finished up in North Wales, Snowdonia.
It's a part of Britain's war experience still imprinted on the generation that lived it.
We couldn't find the youngest of the family.
She hadn't had her sixth birthday.
And she was taken off with the infants.
And my brother, he was taken away with the boys, because boys and girls didn't mix in those days.
He was about 14 miles away.
Three of us were together.
And when we were taken to a billet, they only wanted two.
She only had a little cottage with three rooms.
She said, "Well, if you're prepared, the three of you, to sleep in a double bed, because I've got a guest, you can come here.
" So we went in there.
They were genuine and they really did give us a lot of love.
So while nearly six million British men and women fought in the armed forces, their children were also learning what they were fighting for.
By the Christmas, most of the children and all our friends had returned.
My sister had a friend roundabout who had gone from Liverpool.
She was one of our neighbours.
She said, "Edith, I'm going back to Liverpool.
" And Edith said, "Oh, you can't go back to Liverpool.
Because you're my friend!" She did come back to Liverpool.
And unfortunately she was killed that very month.
One of the many extraordinary things about what our country did in the Second World War There were many things, and most of them were really quite remarkable and essential.
NEWSREEL: One of the greatest industrial powers in the world.
PETER: The great economist Keynes said in 1941, we threw good housekeeping to the winds and in so doing, we saved ourselves and helped save the world.
Never has a superpower put in its last throw to greater effect than we did in the year we stood alone.
For 20 months, from spring 1940 to December 1941, Britain stood alone along with the Greeks, don't forget.
Then came help from across the Atlantic, a former English colony founded in the 17th century, and now the new powerhouse of the world.
But the victory wouldn't have happened without the support of the Empire too.
People from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia also fought against Fascism.
India alone provided 200,000 troops, of whom 35,000 were killed.
Together, in the end, they brought victory.
The Strand was already filling up with crowds.
Lots of people arm in arm, right across the street.
There was a lovely effervescent atmosphere.
I remember lying on my back and hearing all the cheering going on, my head on the silken lap of a charming young woman, who was gently pouring champagne from the bottle into my open mouth.
Victory over Fascism crystallised the ideals the British people had nursed for over 300 years, from Bunyan and Blake to the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
The Labour Party's victory in the election of 1945 put in hand a visionary project by Sir William Beveridge, commissioned by the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill.
PETER: Sir William Beveridge came out with a manifesto for the post-war world.
He said, adapting Bunyan's language, "There are five giants on the road to reconstruction: Ignorance, Idleness, Squalor, Disease, Want.
" And he said, "A revolutionary era is a time for revolutions, not for patching.
" We'd lost a third of our wealth in the war, irretrievably, gone up in smoke.
And yet they put in place a full employment policy, universal benefits, the Health Service came into being.
Never again the interwar era of deprivation and slump.
The British New Deal.
At that moment, it seemed that Jerusalem could be built in our green and pleasant land.
And in the Commonwealth Conference of 1947, they asked what it meant now to be British.
Were we still only the people of a small island? The British Nationality Act is another product of the extraordinary time of the post-war settlement the British New Deal.
It was nothing less than a redefinition of what it meant to be a British citizen.
You were either a citizen of the UK, or of the Colonies, of the independent Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Astonishingly, at the moment that they were drafting it here in 1947, that could have amounted to 800 million people, a third of the population of the planet.
It's ecumenical, cosmopolitan, liberal - an astounding vision of the future.
It was a silent night And on June 22nd, 1948, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.
Holy night The new arrivals from the Caribbean were mainly war veterans seeking work.
All is bright NEWSREEL: He is here because he's heard there are jobs for coloured men in Birmingham.
They'd come as British citizens to meet the chronic shortage of jobs in hospitals, transport and in the factories.
Tender and mild NEWSREEL: There are jobs in Birmingham.
There are more jobs than there are men to fill them.
We were young and we heard the world news that came over every morning.
All you would hear: "Your Mother Country needs you.
" And they would encourage us to come to England to help rebuild the country after the war.
It was a silent night "Your future lies in England.
" And they would tell you it's a better life over here.
You want a better life for yourself.
Your mother and your father want a better life for their children also.
And that's part of it, coming to England.
We had to come.
Without them, a war-battered country would have ground to a halt.
You expected a smooth path.
You're coming to a better country, a better place, so things are going to be better for you.
Oh, no.
It wasn't.
Looked at now, it was another testing of the nation black and white.
NEWSREEL: It's hard to say which is more bitter - the cold streets or the cold shoulder.
How would one like to be going out in the evenings after work, and find yourself going into places where you would not be accepted? Well, I don't think anyone would like having experiences like that.
The most that we can do is to stay at home.
NEWSREEL: In the city's dance halls, nobody is barred.
But coloured men are not encouraged.
He'll be asked to get out if he does much of this.
WOMAN: I am married to a coloured man.
And I am proud of him.
He helps me with all my work.
He helps me to do the washing, he's very good to me and my baby.
When we walk around in town, they accost us.
"Black this, black that.
" "Why should you be married to an English woman? What did you come to this country for?" All that, they're telling us.
That's why I keep out of trouble.
Over that time, about half a million people came from the Caribbean and Africa to work on the buses and the railways.
And especially in the overstretched Health Service.
When I went into nursing, even the patients that you had just given a bath to, and did everything for them they would call you a black bastard because of my beautiful skin.
We couldn't get anywhere decent to live.
When you knocked on the house community door and asked for a room, they would say, "No blacks, no dogs and no Irish.
" (Dialogue muted out) We learned how to survive.
And the survival was your determination, your pride, sense of achievement at the end of the day.
And your ability to do what you'd set out to do.
(Applause) The Commonwealth immigration of the '50s had been a new experience for the British people.
And yet, in a way, it mirrors every tale of migration into these islands.
Jews, Flemings, Huguenots - they'd all suffered racism in the beginning.
Whenever a black person bought a house, we would always descend on this person for a room.
And a room became a house.
That one room - you cooked there, you bathed there, you'd sleep there.
We could not go on like that.
So we had to meet together as citizens that wanted a better life.
And now, 60 years on, the black community is an integral part of our society and culture.
We're merging together, as did all those previous migrations in history.
And black or white, it's the Empire that made us who we are.
And now, as the legislators of 1948 had wished, each of us can say, as the Romans did, "Civis Britannicus sum.
" Oh, happy day Oh, happy day Princess Campbell's friends and neighbours in Bristol are celebrating her work in forming a housing association, providing affordable housing for all.
Thank you, thank you.
Oh, happy day We did not discriminate, we provided affordable homes, at an affordable price, for everybody - black, white, blue, pink.
Because everybody needs somewhere to live decently.
And that's how we kept going.
Oh, happy day Oh, happy day To me, I was very proud that we were able to do that.
They stigmatise black people as lazy and don't do anything for themselves.
But we proved different.
We got up, we did it we achieved it and that's something to talk about.
And some would say those are British virtues.
Summer Holiday The 1950s was also the time when Britain became a consumer society.
We're all going on a summer holiday From fridges and cars to the summer holiday, after the austerities of war, it was a heady time.
Summer holiday No more worries for me We were the best-provided-for generation ever.
a week or two We're going where the sun shines brightly I've never forgotten the first time I tasted my first piece of real steak.
I mean, it sounds absurd now.
But when I ate my first steak, in a Berni Inn in Bristol, it was remarkable.
if it's true Everybody has a summer holiday Macmillan's famous phrase, "having it so good", resonated.
But it also came with a warning.
The one element that people forget is the dissolution of the British Empire.
What became India and Pakistan went in '47, as did Burma.
And not until 1957 did the next lot of Imperial disposal start, with the Gold Coast, which became Ghana.
Nigeria in 1960, and then the huge rush to dispose of the British Empire.
This huge territorial empire, the magnitude of which the world had never seen, was disposed of pretty well, apart from the Indian subcontinent, in eight to ten years.
But once the Empire had gone, Britain's industrial decline was inevitable.
The very existence of the British Empire and its commercial supremacy depended on ships.
When the Empire went, so to a large extent, the shipyards went too.
Harland & Wolff, the builders of the Titanic, the greatest single shipyard in the world, were among the hardest hit.
When I came into the shipyard in 1948, there was 21,000 men worked in here.
Previously, that was the Second World War, it was 40,000 men working.
Here was a place for outfitting and for dry docking and making sure the ships' bottoms weren't damaged during their launch.
This was a great place for pumping the dock dry.
The men came down here just when there were about eight inches or six inches of water left in the dock, and all headed up to where the water pump spurted.
And they were after fish.
The people here depended on Harland.
They thought Harland & Wolff would last forever.
And they couldn't believe it when Harland went the way it did do.
It's just derelict.
The first yard to close down was the Abercorn Yard.
They were still launching ships in the Queen's Yard, but the Victoria Yard went next.
The women at home were wondering what was happening with their husbands, on the brew as they called it - all paid off, sacked.
There were 21,000 men in here when I came into the place.
But that went downhill very quick.
Went downhill very quick.
So a tremendous effect on the life of a city? Yes.
You take the wages each man was earning here, 20,000 men going out with wages, and all of a sudden, no money at all, depending on the dole, or the brew, as they called it then.
So the tide of history comes in and it goes out.
These are moments in a nation's story as great as any war.
The decline from such a height was a bitter and troubling time for Britain.
From the steelworkers of Corby and Sheffield to the cotton mills of Lancashire, the world was doing it cheaper and more efficiently than we were.
In the '60s and '70s, we lived through strikes and winters of discontent.
But what we didn't see then, perhaps, was that the British people with their resilience, their basic tolerance and humour were already creating a new society, as they had before in their history.
They were becoming the first post-industrial nation.
And in the process, they were transforming themselves.
A loss of our heavy industries and of the British working-class identity that went with them, has caused huge bouts of introspection about British identity, about the success of the British citizenship project on which we all embarked in 1948.
Back then you could hear politicians of all persuasions arguing over what one can only call "the soul of the nation".
Take Enoch Powell, for example, a politician now remembered, above all, for his ill-considered and inflammatory remarks about immigration.
But Powell asked, "What is the clue that binds us all together, that we may, in our time, know how to hold on to it fast?" Well, as so often in life, the answer seems to be, not to hold on fast, but to let go.
What the British people have learned over this last phase of their history is that identity is a lot more fluid than they might have thought.
And that in many places in the world multiple identities are the norm.
And, that you can choose them.
Reggae And those different identities are now coming home.
One of the things that is important in all of the arrival here is the difference in music.
This is Manchester, first city of the Industrial Revolution.
And here at Peace Radio in Moss Side, the Friday phone-in has a panel of Moss Siders past and present, looking back at what's already history.
And coming to Moss Side I belong to one of the oldest African families in the city.
My dad came as a seaman.
He didn't come with any kind of fantasy island vision of where he was coming to.
He came, he arrived in Liverpool.
Liverpool was the place.
And then after a period of time, they moved and settled in because they joined the war effort.
I appreciate Moss Side.
I was born and brought up in Moss Side.
I think Moss Side's a great place.
But I'm allowed to come out of Moss Side.
You can do and you can be whatever it is you want to do and want to be.
The only person that stops you is yourself and ourselves.
We belong here.
We're here, we're not going anywhere, anywhere quick.
We may go on holiday, you know, but we belong here.
When I grew up here the people were mainly of Scots, Welsh and Irish descent.
Later, there were Caribbean, Indian and Bangladeshi.
It's always changing.
We've got quite a large Somalia population just to the right of us, over in part of Moss Side.
To the left of us we've got the old Victoria Park area, which has some traditional white British residents.
We've got quite a large Pakistani population.
And it's really very well integrated.
We have very little hate crime reported.
In just a few years we Britons have changed our culture and our music.
- Waarh! Manchester weather.
- I know.
And, of course, our food.
We've got a mile of curry houses.
Where's the best one to go? I have to say there are some real favourites for our local policing team here.
They can be regularly seen getting their chicken kebab in a naan bread.
(Both laugh) This area's so well known for its festivals.
We've got Diwali coming up this weekend.
We have the Caribbean carnival over in Alexandra Park.
We have Mega Mela.
We had the Eid celebrations towards the end of August, and the next Eid - Eid ul Adha, I believe, is coming up at the start of November.
It's going to be really interesting, cos that coincides with Bonfire Night.
So, of course, we'll have some firework celebrations around Eid.
It's all part of the legacy of Empire.
But isn't that what makes our times so dynamic and so interesting? What we're seeing now is another radical reshaping of our identities - national and tribal.
(Woman singing in Scottish Gaelic) And that's goes for the old British too.
Under the Empire the Scots and Welsh shared with the English a common identity as Britons.
But now with the Empire gone, old allegiances are resurfacing.
Independence could be on the way soon.
Here in Govan one of many regeneration projects is exploring Glasgow's Scots Gaelic roots.
This was one of the biggest shipbuilding areas in the world, but it had been almost wiped out by the shipyards closing down.
When people are poor they seem to be stuck within a couple of streets, and that's their world.
They don't have the money to get out of that, and they don't have the transport sometimes.
So by reconnecting people with their cultural natural heritage we open up the world a wee bit to people.
And that works on their identity, their self-esteem, how they feel about themselves, and what they're connected with.
And, after all, as we've seen in this series, the Scottish past goes back before the coming of the English.
Well, after a visit to the Govan old parish, obviously I'd seen all the crosses, the stones.
I was so impressed with it.
I thought, "Why not have a go?" See what kind of job I could make of it.
(Woman sings in Scottish Gaelic) (Cheering) My father was a light plater.
And stayed in an area just across the road from the shipyard.
My grandfather, he was a coker.
Again, stayed within 200 yards of the shipyard's front door.
WOMAN: There's enough in the city telling the stories of the industrialists.
You know, the tobacco trade, the grandmasters.
We wanted the people's story.
The industrial past too still has the power to inspire.
Above all, perhaps, in places like Govan.
And in a new cycle of growth the giant Fairfield's shipyard's regeneration project is beginning to draw a new population to Govan, despite the ravages of its recent history.
People are moving into the old shipbuilding heartland again.
And it was all wasteland, where it used to be streets and houses.
Just all a mile of rubble.
Thousands of people gone - nae jobs, nae nothing.
Govan's like a phoenix, it's beginning to rise again.
You're talking about another four or five thousand people moving into Govan.
It's incredible.
We're thinking of starting a fish farm, with salmon.
That was originally an industry in Govan, salmon fishing.
Possibly you might get done for salmon poaching in Govan.
Very soon, in the future.
(Laughs) Great.
And back in the Black Country, the tradition of chainmaking and metalworking that we've traced in this story from the 13th century, has never been broken.
Our great-great - great-grand uncle, he's part of a group called the Titanic chain gang.
And they made really big chains.
Wow.
And this is a photograph of them, is it? That's three and three-eight on there, and when I worked different chain places, you've got the odd few links lying around which went to nearly six-inch.
And how old were you when you first starting doing this? I started making chain when I left school at 15, but I used to go to work with my dad at five, and they bunged me on a fire.
- At five, did you say? - Five years old.
- Five years old.
- Yeah.
I used to do jobs for her grandmother, or great-grandmother.
- Have you met before? - No, I know a Lucy Woodall.
We know her son.
We're like a little chain community.
It's amazing, isn't it? You think of it as old history, but it's quite close in some ways.
Joe, what did you find out? My great-great nan called Matilda Taylor, she was a chainmaker in Cradley.
And I've got a picture of her, and all the chainmaker family.
This is a wonderful photograph, isn't it? Look at this.
They've got their Sunday best on, don't they? - They're not wearing chainmaker's clothes.
- (Laughter) And you've looked at the Census as well.
Cor, I'm really impressed, Joe.
It's a great piece of research, I'm really impressed by what everybody has done.
Let's just ask Ben, finally, may we? Yeah? It's my dad and he does chainmaking for a living.
- What? Still? - Yeah.
I know Ben's dad.
I worked with him for a bit.
Sometimes in the school holidays, cos my mum died a couple of years ago sometimes there's nowhere for me to go, so I go with my dad and sometimes I bend make some links and stuff.
So, any thoughts on what you might do when you leave school, as a job? Make the chain for the Navy ships and stuff.
What, seriously? You might do that as a career? - Yeah.
- Well, good for you.
If you do, we'll have to come back with a camera and find out what happens.
And let's not forget, through this latest testing time, the British people remained phenomenally inventive and creative.
From atomic theory to the pill, The Beatles, the jet and the computer, television and the iPod, DNA, and the World Wide Web, we still help make the modern world as we did in the Industrial Revolution.
And meanwhile, the ancient Britons, with whom this story began, are finding their voice again.
(Man speaks Old Cornish) The Cornish language died out after the Civil Wars, but it's coming back.
Gaver is crayfish.
A small swimming crab which is called a velvet crab now, they'd call guliark.
- Ozle.
- Ozle.
- Ozle, that's a good word.
- Shakespearean.
An ozle can be used for everything.
- It's a piece of twine.
- Yeah.
Something like that, although years ago it would have been cotton or hemp, and then nylon.
It's the bit of twine between the hook and the main back line.
And ozles have been used for tying everything up from time immemorial, including the front door.
Well, language is a funny thing.
I was thinking about it.
I just wonder if over the years, there's probably 50 languages gone, before we got as far as And I wonder now if there's a new one being rebuilt.
The youngsters do tend to grunt at each other and make funny noises, don't they? - But they know what they're talking about.
- Yes, yes.
You can't knock them for it, it's the way the world is.
Everybody needs an ozle.
(Gulls cry) In the British story nothing is ever quite lost.
Especially with what Bede back in the 8th century called the "original Britons".
Welsh language poetry has continued to be the most social of cultural medium, a medium of the people, because it's about the people.
Telling simple stories, and celebrating simple but significant events.
The birth of children, marriages, someone coming of age, for instance.
And, of course, not just celebrating, but also lamenting.
There are poems in condolence.
So poetry always has a very practical application, almost utilitarian.
It becomes a service.
(Woman singing) And it's still as current now as it was when Aneirin was writing back in the 6th century.
It's in the memory.
It's in the nation's memory.
Official policy from London that Welsh should not be spoken in school.
In fact, what they did was they sent inspectors round the school, and if the marks were low, if the standard was low, the headmaster lost his salary.
There was a deduction in his salary.
So the easy way out was not to teach two languages, concentrate on English, and therefore he had more money in his pocket.
And that came from London.
It was official policy as it was in Ireland.
So no wonder we feel we must fight for our language.
The language is far more to us than just a cultural medium.
It defines us in many ways.
It's almost a political expression.
(Man chants in Sanskrit) It's Royal Wedding day in Birmingham.
Just now the priest invoked the gods to bless the newly-married couple.
To prosperity, as well as they should have children, grandchildren, and be happy.
And yes, they should live more than a hundred years.
(Woman giggles) "Nothing ever stands still," George Orwell wrote in the dark days of 1940.
"We must add to our heritage or lose it.
We must go forward or we go backward.
" I felt that their mother is not there, so we all mothers will pray for them.
This is not only a Royal Wedding, it is a festival of the UK.
We've eaten their salt, so we have to contribute to them, isn't it? - Yeah.
I feel that.
- That's lovely.
We can still shock the world.
Not in terms of territory, military kit, but in terms of our education, our science and technology, the quality of our democracy, All sorts of things.
We can still be an exceptional nation if we want to be.
Far greater than the sum of our parts.
So there you are, a swift snapshot of our story, taken between the Royal Wedding of 2011 and the Jubilee of 2012.
If you view British history, not from the point of view of the kings and queens, from the palaces of the rich and powerful, but from the street - the Govan Road in Glasgow, from Liverpool, from the Potteries and the Black Country and the Rhondda, then you start to see the common experiences that bind us as Britons.
The Civil Wars of the 17th century, industrialisation, Empire, World Wars, the post-industrial decline that we, first of all in world history, have had to negotiate, then you see our history, our tribal identities as Britons in the 21 st century may still seem obstinately distinct.
But our destinies are inextricably bound together.
- I'm a Midlander.
- We're from Liverpool.
- Londonderry.
- Derry.
- I'm English.
- I'm Irish.
We're English and Irish.
We're from Northern Ireland, but our grandfather's from Brazil.
I'll always be Scottish.
I'm proud to be Scottish.
A Liverpudlian from Britain.
I am British, but I'm a Kent girl at heart.
I'm a Geordie living in Leicestershire.
And I'm a Yorkshireman living in Leicestershire.
English.
Definitely London, English.
Yep.
I love the Irish heritage of my family.
It's Glasgow, where I want to be.
- I'm a British-Indian.
- British.
English, African and almost adopted Scouser.
English and Mancunian, and a huge Huddersfield Town fan.
(Both laughing) February 2017
Our time.
Through civil wars and foreign invasions the British forged the roots of their democracy.
In the Industrial Revolution they invented the modern world.
Creative and adaptable, they built the first industrial society.
But the British would go through few more testing times than the 20th century.
The last hundred years have seen the greatest changes to our society, and even to our character as a nation.
Through two world wars we've become a multi-racial country and a post-industrial nation.
But the British people have remained hugely creative and inventive, pioneers in technology, arts and sciences.
It's the last chapter of The Great British Story.
As we look at it now, the Edwardian Age, before the First World War, was the high noon of British self-confidence.
During the previous century, we'd become an industrial, urbanised nation.
Now the power of the people was growing.
Horizons were opening up.
For the first time, the cinema showed us our own image.
But that imperial, industrial heyday was inevitably brief.
As it appears now, an almost incredible adventure by the people of this small island off the shore of Europe.
The big story for the 20th century through two world wars was the loss of empire and the dramatic collapse of the heavy industries on which our wealth depended.
Just as the British people were the first nation in history to become an industrial country, so they were the first to go through that and come out the other side, forced now to reshape their identities once more in their history, as workers, as citizens, and, indeed, as Britons.
The Edwardians ruled a maritime empire.
At its heart was shipbuilding.
And nowhere was that more clear than Glasgow.
To arrive in Edwardian Glasgow was to see the achievements of the age.
But its powerhouse was the teeming shipyards of Govan, whose population had grown 30 times in three generations.
It was something of gold rush proportions, what took place here.
1864, I think, and a population of 2,500.
It was an idyllic village on the River Clyde where people came to do watercolours and things.
By 1912, there was 90,000 people living in Govan.
Beyond that, there was people pouring in from outside Govan, from Glasgow, to work here.
By 1914, there were 48 shipyards on the Clyde.
Shipbuilding guaranteed the empire.
And the empire guaranteed the shipyards.
Glasgow really was prosperous when our trade was with America.
That's what built Glasgow.
Everybody either worked in the shipyard or worked in an associated industry, like myself.
I started off in an engine works, building engines for the ships.
We probably thought it would always last, but obviously it hasn't.
And what was made here was not only ships but an identity, a solidarity in labour, a pride in being a shipbuilder.
As in Belfast and on the Tyne, in a few generations shipbuilding became part of the people's DNA.
Country folk mixed with traditional city-dwellers.
Eventually they merged to become a completely new tribe.
What were they? The Clydesiders.
They became Clydesiders.
From whatever Govan was before then, they came there.
They almost formed a different nation.
That is astounding, isn't it? And shipbuilding meant more than earning a living.
It was something heroic - the sum of a community's creativity.
The ship's just being launched.
It's gathering speed.
- The drag chains hit.
(Metallic scraping) The sound is horrendous.
It drags the ship right back.
That's her born.
She's born, ready to deliver.
It's a rush of adrenaline.
It's the apex of satisfaction.
Remember, you built the ships.
You built yourself and your friends up for the day of the launch.
It's gone in and it hits the water.
And you say: Done it! This was the time when the British defined themselves by their industry.
At Halesowen in the Black Country in the workforce there were people whose ancestors had worked metal in Tudor times.
Grandad did it and my dad.
My brother works here.
He works in that department there.
All his brothers have worked in the steel as well, my dad's brothers.
Quite a few of them.
My father worked here, my grandfather worked here.
My uncles worked here.
I've also got a son here at the moment.
My great-grandmother worked here during the war.
She used to drive the crane.
The greatest expansion here was before the First World War.
3,600-ton steam hydraulic press.
How about that? The old folks in Halesowen used to say that you could hear this wheezing and thumping and feel it shaking the ground, all the way through the night when they were on big jobs.
Britain's pre-eminence was reinforced by a sense of British identity.
The values of British society - hard work, deference, patriotism - were articulated in a myriad societies, mechanics'institutes, sports teams, Boys'Brigades, working men's clubs.
Together, at work and play, the British knew who they were.
And tennis rackets.
But I didn't bring them today.
I didn't know what you wanted.
A wonderful archive of stuff.
A crucial social role was played by organised sport.
And the British, of course, had invented the rules.
They actually won the Suffolk Senior Cup.
I think they also beat Ipswich Town, as well.
- Fabulous.
- Yeah.
That's the gardening club.
The gardening club? Fantastic.
These are amazing social documents.
Oh, yes.
The Cycle Volunteer Force.
- First World War period.
- Yes.
I could name all those people.
But across Edwardian Britain, there was still a huge gulf between rich and poor.
In 1910, the chainmakers of the Black Country went on strike.
Now, pin back your ears and I'll sing you a song Of a town that is dear to my heart The chainmakers were a cottage industry unchanged since the Industrial Revolution.
And everyone's mad about darts They worked in conditions almost impossible for us to imagine now.
And the most exploited were the women.
Where factory wenches line all the park benches Cradley Heath means home to me If you was a chainmaker, how would you have felt and why? You'd have felt as if you was a slave.
You worked 12, 13 hours a day for next to nothing.
No wonder they was angry.
I get five shillings a week for what? Working from seven o'clock in the morning till seven o'clock at night.
They had to buy their coal and their metal from a fogger.
Some foggers actually boasted that they could sell metal to the women and then buy the made chain back for cheaper than the constituent components.
And in Edwardian Britain, women still didn't have the vote.
Any one of you that goes out on strike, you'll never work again! The press called it "white slavery in the Black Country".
They didn't get a living wage or working wage.
They were on starvation situation.
The first strike to appear on cinema news in Britain was led by a young Scot called Mary MacArthur.
This hopeless, despairing struggle for survival will go on unless we gather our strength and our determination and we move as one.
(Cheering) Let us take to the streets and make our voices heard! - For freedom and the right! (Cheering) So one side of life in Edwardian Britain was class struggle.
The first ten years of the century saw bitter strikes and unemployment marches, the rise of trades unions.
And from 1900, a Labour Party, all fighting to better the conditions of the people.
And in no area was that more important than women's rights.
The Suffragettes were battling against one of the worst injustices of British society - that women still didn't have the vote.
Women's franchise movements had a long history in Britain, but now they found a national voice, despite, at times, brutal repression.
But democracy was put on hold by the First World War.
Across the country the war had mass support, even in Ireland, which was still then a part of Britain.
It was working-class patriotism that made the volunteer armies in the first total war.
From the riveters and platers of Ulster, Tyneside and Govan to the miners and steelmen of South Wales, Britain lost nearly a million men.
No place in Britain was untouched.
The First World War is still a mystery.
Why a prosperous country at the height of its success, the source and agent of wealth and civilisation, chose to risk all in such horrors and to create a lost generation.
In the industrial cities, where unemployment was already high on the eve of war, the government encouraged volunteers from the same towns, the same streets, so friends would fight together.
Pals.
One of these Pals battalions came from a small Lancashire cotton town - Accrington.
On the first day of the Somme, out of 700 Accrington Pals 235 were killed and 350 wounded.
- He's your grandad? - He's my grandfather, yes.
An what happened to him? He got killed on the Somme on July 2nd, 1916.
They worked and played together and they died together.
Do you know what actually happened to him? They just said he had "no known grave".
His body was never found.
All they can say is he went missing on that day.
There's a lot like that.
How it could have happened is still impossible for us to grasp.
The amount you just see here, on one panel, on one wall.
- Sad.
- It is sad, isn't it? Very sad.
Honestly, I'm a grown man, 76, and it brings tears to my eyes.
I know I'm very proud of him and all those who served and died with him.
If it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't be here talking to you now.
They were brave men, they were.
Blood brothers, they were.
Parade, stand at ease! The First War was the great divide for modern Britain.
It also left its mark on daily life, on our pub opening hours, our love of allotments and cigarettes, our universal mistrust of the honesty of the press.
But, above all, in the loss of a generation who would have been the future doctors, judges and teachers.
This is a community where you're remembering things.
Not just the ones we lost but also the ones who came back as well.
People lost whole streets.
They lost brothers, sons, cousins.
These remembrance ceremonies stir the memories like sediment rising in the glass.
Memories of our common history shared by all of us as Britons.
They're memories shaped, conditioned by an imperial past, by that astonishing arc of narrative which has taken our country over a couple of hundred years or so from being a small land on the fringe of Europe to world dominion and then back to being a small island on the fringe of Europe.
And ever since, Britain's most solemn ritual is not Good Friday but Armistice Day.
In the aftermath of the Great War came the first cracks in the British Empire, and the first part to go was Ireland.
Up here in the North, the Protestant majority gave unstinting support to the cause.
The Ulster Volunteer Force had actually formed before the war to block plans for Home Rule for Ireland, which was still a British colony.
In Ulster, it's never been forgotten that they gave their all for king and country.
But in the south, though many Catholics had fought for Britain, their were older loyalties.
Here many saw the war as the chance for freedom.
The rising of 1916 had failed.
But in 1919, the Irish War of Independence, or the Anglo-Irish War, brought the end of British rule after more than three centuries.
At the time of the Anglo-Irish War, 1919-1921, the British government in London would have been happy to see a united Ireland remaining within the British Empire.
But that idea was fiercely resisted up here in Ulster by the Protestants who feared being the minority in a Catholic-dominated Ireland.
And so Ireland was partitioned, with an Irish Free State to the south, and Ulster up here remaining part of the UK, with consequences that are still rumbling on today, of course.
But in the 1920s storm clouds were rolling across the world.
As Fascism rose in Europe, Britain was swept by the Great Depression.
The Empire was now at its greatest extent, but it hadn't recovered from the war.
With huge war debts, industrial output declined and the old industries in the north - coal, steel and ships - were devastated, especially up here on Tyneside at Jarrow.
Here the bitter experience of the 1930s is still a part of people's memory as if it happened yesterday.
(Brass band plays) They're walking to London as a protest, just to raise awareness.
It was when they shut the shipyard that employed 80% of the population of Jarrow.
Once that was shut, that was the town finished.
There's no work here for us since the shipyard's finished.
By 1936, unemployment in Jarrow reached 73%, the worst in Britain.
For jobs for the youth of today.
That's why we're doing it.
Trying to make a change.
Trying to make a stand and make a change.
And for an alternative - an alternative to no jobs and no education for ordinary people.
And that was what drove the marchers to make their protest not just for themselves but for their children and their grandchildren.
In October 1936, they walked from Tyneside down to London, asking for the right to work.
The Britain they walked through was still the green and pleasant land.
But the nation was changing, its heavy industries out of date, overtaken by newer countries following in Britain's industrial path.
On 22nd October, the marchers entered London, watched with curiosity by the rich.
It's often said the Jarrow March achieved nothing.
The Prime Minister here in the Houses of Parliament refused to see them.
They got a minute or two at Question Time.
And each marcher was given a pound to get the train back home, where unemployment stayed at the same horrendous level.
But it's not true to say that it achieved nothing.
It wasn't only a matter of the dignity and discipline of the marchers, it was a visual demonstration of the huge disparities in work and health and housing and class that ran right through British society.
Things had to change.
And they did.
"As I write," George Orwell said in 1940, civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
" Yet again, the British people were to be tested.
Where I live, on the Leicester boundary, the noise was horrendous.
So you couldn't get any sleep, the bombs were falling.
Then you'd hear another wave of bombers coming.
Britain's industrial heartlands were devastated, her major ports, like Liverpool, systematically smashed.
We lived by Edge Hill station, which was very dangerous.
So five of us were evacuated from our family.
We didn't know where we were going.
Nobody knew where you were going to finish up.
3.
5 million people, mainly young children, were evacuated from the most threatened cities and billeted with families in the countryside.
It was an internal migration unprecedented in British history.
We finished up in North Wales, Snowdonia.
It's a part of Britain's war experience still imprinted on the generation that lived it.
We couldn't find the youngest of the family.
She hadn't had her sixth birthday.
And she was taken off with the infants.
And my brother, he was taken away with the boys, because boys and girls didn't mix in those days.
He was about 14 miles away.
Three of us were together.
And when we were taken to a billet, they only wanted two.
She only had a little cottage with three rooms.
She said, "Well, if you're prepared, the three of you, to sleep in a double bed, because I've got a guest, you can come here.
" So we went in there.
They were genuine and they really did give us a lot of love.
So while nearly six million British men and women fought in the armed forces, their children were also learning what they were fighting for.
By the Christmas, most of the children and all our friends had returned.
My sister had a friend roundabout who had gone from Liverpool.
She was one of our neighbours.
She said, "Edith, I'm going back to Liverpool.
" And Edith said, "Oh, you can't go back to Liverpool.
Because you're my friend!" She did come back to Liverpool.
And unfortunately she was killed that very month.
One of the many extraordinary things about what our country did in the Second World War There were many things, and most of them were really quite remarkable and essential.
NEWSREEL: One of the greatest industrial powers in the world.
PETER: The great economist Keynes said in 1941, we threw good housekeeping to the winds and in so doing, we saved ourselves and helped save the world.
Never has a superpower put in its last throw to greater effect than we did in the year we stood alone.
For 20 months, from spring 1940 to December 1941, Britain stood alone along with the Greeks, don't forget.
Then came help from across the Atlantic, a former English colony founded in the 17th century, and now the new powerhouse of the world.
But the victory wouldn't have happened without the support of the Empire too.
People from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia also fought against Fascism.
India alone provided 200,000 troops, of whom 35,000 were killed.
Together, in the end, they brought victory.
The Strand was already filling up with crowds.
Lots of people arm in arm, right across the street.
There was a lovely effervescent atmosphere.
I remember lying on my back and hearing all the cheering going on, my head on the silken lap of a charming young woman, who was gently pouring champagne from the bottle into my open mouth.
Victory over Fascism crystallised the ideals the British people had nursed for over 300 years, from Bunyan and Blake to the Tolpuddle Martyrs.
The Labour Party's victory in the election of 1945 put in hand a visionary project by Sir William Beveridge, commissioned by the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill.
PETER: Sir William Beveridge came out with a manifesto for the post-war world.
He said, adapting Bunyan's language, "There are five giants on the road to reconstruction: Ignorance, Idleness, Squalor, Disease, Want.
" And he said, "A revolutionary era is a time for revolutions, not for patching.
" We'd lost a third of our wealth in the war, irretrievably, gone up in smoke.
And yet they put in place a full employment policy, universal benefits, the Health Service came into being.
Never again the interwar era of deprivation and slump.
The British New Deal.
At that moment, it seemed that Jerusalem could be built in our green and pleasant land.
And in the Commonwealth Conference of 1947, they asked what it meant now to be British.
Were we still only the people of a small island? The British Nationality Act is another product of the extraordinary time of the post-war settlement the British New Deal.
It was nothing less than a redefinition of what it meant to be a British citizen.
You were either a citizen of the UK, or of the Colonies, of the independent Commonwealth countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Astonishingly, at the moment that they were drafting it here in 1947, that could have amounted to 800 million people, a third of the population of the planet.
It's ecumenical, cosmopolitan, liberal - an astounding vision of the future.
It was a silent night And on June 22nd, 1948, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.
Holy night The new arrivals from the Caribbean were mainly war veterans seeking work.
All is bright NEWSREEL: He is here because he's heard there are jobs for coloured men in Birmingham.
They'd come as British citizens to meet the chronic shortage of jobs in hospitals, transport and in the factories.
Tender and mild NEWSREEL: There are jobs in Birmingham.
There are more jobs than there are men to fill them.
We were young and we heard the world news that came over every morning.
All you would hear: "Your Mother Country needs you.
" And they would encourage us to come to England to help rebuild the country after the war.
It was a silent night "Your future lies in England.
" And they would tell you it's a better life over here.
You want a better life for yourself.
Your mother and your father want a better life for their children also.
And that's part of it, coming to England.
We had to come.
Without them, a war-battered country would have ground to a halt.
You expected a smooth path.
You're coming to a better country, a better place, so things are going to be better for you.
Oh, no.
It wasn't.
Looked at now, it was another testing of the nation black and white.
NEWSREEL: It's hard to say which is more bitter - the cold streets or the cold shoulder.
How would one like to be going out in the evenings after work, and find yourself going into places where you would not be accepted? Well, I don't think anyone would like having experiences like that.
The most that we can do is to stay at home.
NEWSREEL: In the city's dance halls, nobody is barred.
But coloured men are not encouraged.
He'll be asked to get out if he does much of this.
WOMAN: I am married to a coloured man.
And I am proud of him.
He helps me with all my work.
He helps me to do the washing, he's very good to me and my baby.
When we walk around in town, they accost us.
"Black this, black that.
" "Why should you be married to an English woman? What did you come to this country for?" All that, they're telling us.
That's why I keep out of trouble.
Over that time, about half a million people came from the Caribbean and Africa to work on the buses and the railways.
And especially in the overstretched Health Service.
When I went into nursing, even the patients that you had just given a bath to, and did everything for them they would call you a black bastard because of my beautiful skin.
We couldn't get anywhere decent to live.
When you knocked on the house community door and asked for a room, they would say, "No blacks, no dogs and no Irish.
" (Dialogue muted out) We learned how to survive.
And the survival was your determination, your pride, sense of achievement at the end of the day.
And your ability to do what you'd set out to do.
(Applause) The Commonwealth immigration of the '50s had been a new experience for the British people.
And yet, in a way, it mirrors every tale of migration into these islands.
Jews, Flemings, Huguenots - they'd all suffered racism in the beginning.
Whenever a black person bought a house, we would always descend on this person for a room.
And a room became a house.
That one room - you cooked there, you bathed there, you'd sleep there.
We could not go on like that.
So we had to meet together as citizens that wanted a better life.
And now, 60 years on, the black community is an integral part of our society and culture.
We're merging together, as did all those previous migrations in history.
And black or white, it's the Empire that made us who we are.
And now, as the legislators of 1948 had wished, each of us can say, as the Romans did, "Civis Britannicus sum.
" Oh, happy day Oh, happy day Princess Campbell's friends and neighbours in Bristol are celebrating her work in forming a housing association, providing affordable housing for all.
Thank you, thank you.
Oh, happy day We did not discriminate, we provided affordable homes, at an affordable price, for everybody - black, white, blue, pink.
Because everybody needs somewhere to live decently.
And that's how we kept going.
Oh, happy day Oh, happy day To me, I was very proud that we were able to do that.
They stigmatise black people as lazy and don't do anything for themselves.
But we proved different.
We got up, we did it we achieved it and that's something to talk about.
And some would say those are British virtues.
Summer Holiday The 1950s was also the time when Britain became a consumer society.
We're all going on a summer holiday From fridges and cars to the summer holiday, after the austerities of war, it was a heady time.
Summer holiday No more worries for me We were the best-provided-for generation ever.
a week or two We're going where the sun shines brightly I've never forgotten the first time I tasted my first piece of real steak.
I mean, it sounds absurd now.
But when I ate my first steak, in a Berni Inn in Bristol, it was remarkable.
if it's true Everybody has a summer holiday Macmillan's famous phrase, "having it so good", resonated.
But it also came with a warning.
The one element that people forget is the dissolution of the British Empire.
What became India and Pakistan went in '47, as did Burma.
And not until 1957 did the next lot of Imperial disposal start, with the Gold Coast, which became Ghana.
Nigeria in 1960, and then the huge rush to dispose of the British Empire.
This huge territorial empire, the magnitude of which the world had never seen, was disposed of pretty well, apart from the Indian subcontinent, in eight to ten years.
But once the Empire had gone, Britain's industrial decline was inevitable.
The very existence of the British Empire and its commercial supremacy depended on ships.
When the Empire went, so to a large extent, the shipyards went too.
Harland & Wolff, the builders of the Titanic, the greatest single shipyard in the world, were among the hardest hit.
When I came into the shipyard in 1948, there was 21,000 men worked in here.
Previously, that was the Second World War, it was 40,000 men working.
Here was a place for outfitting and for dry docking and making sure the ships' bottoms weren't damaged during their launch.
This was a great place for pumping the dock dry.
The men came down here just when there were about eight inches or six inches of water left in the dock, and all headed up to where the water pump spurted.
And they were after fish.
The people here depended on Harland.
They thought Harland & Wolff would last forever.
And they couldn't believe it when Harland went the way it did do.
It's just derelict.
The first yard to close down was the Abercorn Yard.
They were still launching ships in the Queen's Yard, but the Victoria Yard went next.
The women at home were wondering what was happening with their husbands, on the brew as they called it - all paid off, sacked.
There were 21,000 men in here when I came into the place.
But that went downhill very quick.
Went downhill very quick.
So a tremendous effect on the life of a city? Yes.
You take the wages each man was earning here, 20,000 men going out with wages, and all of a sudden, no money at all, depending on the dole, or the brew, as they called it then.
So the tide of history comes in and it goes out.
These are moments in a nation's story as great as any war.
The decline from such a height was a bitter and troubling time for Britain.
From the steelworkers of Corby and Sheffield to the cotton mills of Lancashire, the world was doing it cheaper and more efficiently than we were.
In the '60s and '70s, we lived through strikes and winters of discontent.
But what we didn't see then, perhaps, was that the British people with their resilience, their basic tolerance and humour were already creating a new society, as they had before in their history.
They were becoming the first post-industrial nation.
And in the process, they were transforming themselves.
A loss of our heavy industries and of the British working-class identity that went with them, has caused huge bouts of introspection about British identity, about the success of the British citizenship project on which we all embarked in 1948.
Back then you could hear politicians of all persuasions arguing over what one can only call "the soul of the nation".
Take Enoch Powell, for example, a politician now remembered, above all, for his ill-considered and inflammatory remarks about immigration.
But Powell asked, "What is the clue that binds us all together, that we may, in our time, know how to hold on to it fast?" Well, as so often in life, the answer seems to be, not to hold on fast, but to let go.
What the British people have learned over this last phase of their history is that identity is a lot more fluid than they might have thought.
And that in many places in the world multiple identities are the norm.
And, that you can choose them.
Reggae And those different identities are now coming home.
One of the things that is important in all of the arrival here is the difference in music.
This is Manchester, first city of the Industrial Revolution.
And here at Peace Radio in Moss Side, the Friday phone-in has a panel of Moss Siders past and present, looking back at what's already history.
And coming to Moss Side I belong to one of the oldest African families in the city.
My dad came as a seaman.
He didn't come with any kind of fantasy island vision of where he was coming to.
He came, he arrived in Liverpool.
Liverpool was the place.
And then after a period of time, they moved and settled in because they joined the war effort.
I appreciate Moss Side.
I was born and brought up in Moss Side.
I think Moss Side's a great place.
But I'm allowed to come out of Moss Side.
You can do and you can be whatever it is you want to do and want to be.
The only person that stops you is yourself and ourselves.
We belong here.
We're here, we're not going anywhere, anywhere quick.
We may go on holiday, you know, but we belong here.
When I grew up here the people were mainly of Scots, Welsh and Irish descent.
Later, there were Caribbean, Indian and Bangladeshi.
It's always changing.
We've got quite a large Somalia population just to the right of us, over in part of Moss Side.
To the left of us we've got the old Victoria Park area, which has some traditional white British residents.
We've got quite a large Pakistani population.
And it's really very well integrated.
We have very little hate crime reported.
In just a few years we Britons have changed our culture and our music.
- Waarh! Manchester weather.
- I know.
And, of course, our food.
We've got a mile of curry houses.
Where's the best one to go? I have to say there are some real favourites for our local policing team here.
They can be regularly seen getting their chicken kebab in a naan bread.
(Both laugh) This area's so well known for its festivals.
We've got Diwali coming up this weekend.
We have the Caribbean carnival over in Alexandra Park.
We have Mega Mela.
We had the Eid celebrations towards the end of August, and the next Eid - Eid ul Adha, I believe, is coming up at the start of November.
It's going to be really interesting, cos that coincides with Bonfire Night.
So, of course, we'll have some firework celebrations around Eid.
It's all part of the legacy of Empire.
But isn't that what makes our times so dynamic and so interesting? What we're seeing now is another radical reshaping of our identities - national and tribal.
(Woman singing in Scottish Gaelic) And that's goes for the old British too.
Under the Empire the Scots and Welsh shared with the English a common identity as Britons.
But now with the Empire gone, old allegiances are resurfacing.
Independence could be on the way soon.
Here in Govan one of many regeneration projects is exploring Glasgow's Scots Gaelic roots.
This was one of the biggest shipbuilding areas in the world, but it had been almost wiped out by the shipyards closing down.
When people are poor they seem to be stuck within a couple of streets, and that's their world.
They don't have the money to get out of that, and they don't have the transport sometimes.
So by reconnecting people with their cultural natural heritage we open up the world a wee bit to people.
And that works on their identity, their self-esteem, how they feel about themselves, and what they're connected with.
And, after all, as we've seen in this series, the Scottish past goes back before the coming of the English.
Well, after a visit to the Govan old parish, obviously I'd seen all the crosses, the stones.
I was so impressed with it.
I thought, "Why not have a go?" See what kind of job I could make of it.
(Woman sings in Scottish Gaelic) (Cheering) My father was a light plater.
And stayed in an area just across the road from the shipyard.
My grandfather, he was a coker.
Again, stayed within 200 yards of the shipyard's front door.
WOMAN: There's enough in the city telling the stories of the industrialists.
You know, the tobacco trade, the grandmasters.
We wanted the people's story.
The industrial past too still has the power to inspire.
Above all, perhaps, in places like Govan.
And in a new cycle of growth the giant Fairfield's shipyard's regeneration project is beginning to draw a new population to Govan, despite the ravages of its recent history.
People are moving into the old shipbuilding heartland again.
And it was all wasteland, where it used to be streets and houses.
Just all a mile of rubble.
Thousands of people gone - nae jobs, nae nothing.
Govan's like a phoenix, it's beginning to rise again.
You're talking about another four or five thousand people moving into Govan.
It's incredible.
We're thinking of starting a fish farm, with salmon.
That was originally an industry in Govan, salmon fishing.
Possibly you might get done for salmon poaching in Govan.
Very soon, in the future.
(Laughs) Great.
And back in the Black Country, the tradition of chainmaking and metalworking that we've traced in this story from the 13th century, has never been broken.
Our great-great - great-grand uncle, he's part of a group called the Titanic chain gang.
And they made really big chains.
Wow.
And this is a photograph of them, is it? That's three and three-eight on there, and when I worked different chain places, you've got the odd few links lying around which went to nearly six-inch.
And how old were you when you first starting doing this? I started making chain when I left school at 15, but I used to go to work with my dad at five, and they bunged me on a fire.
- At five, did you say? - Five years old.
- Five years old.
- Yeah.
I used to do jobs for her grandmother, or great-grandmother.
- Have you met before? - No, I know a Lucy Woodall.
We know her son.
We're like a little chain community.
It's amazing, isn't it? You think of it as old history, but it's quite close in some ways.
Joe, what did you find out? My great-great nan called Matilda Taylor, she was a chainmaker in Cradley.
And I've got a picture of her, and all the chainmaker family.
This is a wonderful photograph, isn't it? Look at this.
They've got their Sunday best on, don't they? - They're not wearing chainmaker's clothes.
- (Laughter) And you've looked at the Census as well.
Cor, I'm really impressed, Joe.
It's a great piece of research, I'm really impressed by what everybody has done.
Let's just ask Ben, finally, may we? Yeah? It's my dad and he does chainmaking for a living.
- What? Still? - Yeah.
I know Ben's dad.
I worked with him for a bit.
Sometimes in the school holidays, cos my mum died a couple of years ago sometimes there's nowhere for me to go, so I go with my dad and sometimes I bend make some links and stuff.
So, any thoughts on what you might do when you leave school, as a job? Make the chain for the Navy ships and stuff.
What, seriously? You might do that as a career? - Yeah.
- Well, good for you.
If you do, we'll have to come back with a camera and find out what happens.
And let's not forget, through this latest testing time, the British people remained phenomenally inventive and creative.
From atomic theory to the pill, The Beatles, the jet and the computer, television and the iPod, DNA, and the World Wide Web, we still help make the modern world as we did in the Industrial Revolution.
And meanwhile, the ancient Britons, with whom this story began, are finding their voice again.
(Man speaks Old Cornish) The Cornish language died out after the Civil Wars, but it's coming back.
Gaver is crayfish.
A small swimming crab which is called a velvet crab now, they'd call guliark.
- Ozle.
- Ozle.
- Ozle, that's a good word.
- Shakespearean.
An ozle can be used for everything.
- It's a piece of twine.
- Yeah.
Something like that, although years ago it would have been cotton or hemp, and then nylon.
It's the bit of twine between the hook and the main back line.
And ozles have been used for tying everything up from time immemorial, including the front door.
Well, language is a funny thing.
I was thinking about it.
I just wonder if over the years, there's probably 50 languages gone, before we got as far as And I wonder now if there's a new one being rebuilt.
The youngsters do tend to grunt at each other and make funny noises, don't they? - But they know what they're talking about.
- Yes, yes.
You can't knock them for it, it's the way the world is.
Everybody needs an ozle.
(Gulls cry) In the British story nothing is ever quite lost.
Especially with what Bede back in the 8th century called the "original Britons".
Welsh language poetry has continued to be the most social of cultural medium, a medium of the people, because it's about the people.
Telling simple stories, and celebrating simple but significant events.
The birth of children, marriages, someone coming of age, for instance.
And, of course, not just celebrating, but also lamenting.
There are poems in condolence.
So poetry always has a very practical application, almost utilitarian.
It becomes a service.
(Woman singing) And it's still as current now as it was when Aneirin was writing back in the 6th century.
It's in the memory.
It's in the nation's memory.
Official policy from London that Welsh should not be spoken in school.
In fact, what they did was they sent inspectors round the school, and if the marks were low, if the standard was low, the headmaster lost his salary.
There was a deduction in his salary.
So the easy way out was not to teach two languages, concentrate on English, and therefore he had more money in his pocket.
And that came from London.
It was official policy as it was in Ireland.
So no wonder we feel we must fight for our language.
The language is far more to us than just a cultural medium.
It defines us in many ways.
It's almost a political expression.
(Man chants in Sanskrit) It's Royal Wedding day in Birmingham.
Just now the priest invoked the gods to bless the newly-married couple.
To prosperity, as well as they should have children, grandchildren, and be happy.
And yes, they should live more than a hundred years.
(Woman giggles) "Nothing ever stands still," George Orwell wrote in the dark days of 1940.
"We must add to our heritage or lose it.
We must go forward or we go backward.
" I felt that their mother is not there, so we all mothers will pray for them.
This is not only a Royal Wedding, it is a festival of the UK.
We've eaten their salt, so we have to contribute to them, isn't it? - Yeah.
I feel that.
- That's lovely.
We can still shock the world.
Not in terms of territory, military kit, but in terms of our education, our science and technology, the quality of our democracy, All sorts of things.
We can still be an exceptional nation if we want to be.
Far greater than the sum of our parts.
So there you are, a swift snapshot of our story, taken between the Royal Wedding of 2011 and the Jubilee of 2012.
If you view British history, not from the point of view of the kings and queens, from the palaces of the rich and powerful, but from the street - the Govan Road in Glasgow, from Liverpool, from the Potteries and the Black Country and the Rhondda, then you start to see the common experiences that bind us as Britons.
The Civil Wars of the 17th century, industrialisation, Empire, World Wars, the post-industrial decline that we, first of all in world history, have had to negotiate, then you see our history, our tribal identities as Britons in the 21 st century may still seem obstinately distinct.
But our destinies are inextricably bound together.
- I'm a Midlander.
- We're from Liverpool.
- Londonderry.
- Derry.
- I'm English.
- I'm Irish.
We're English and Irish.
We're from Northern Ireland, but our grandfather's from Brazil.
I'll always be Scottish.
I'm proud to be Scottish.
A Liverpudlian from Britain.
I am British, but I'm a Kent girl at heart.
I'm a Geordie living in Leicestershire.
And I'm a Yorkshireman living in Leicestershire.
English.
Definitely London, English.
Yep.
I love the Irish heritage of my family.
It's Glasgow, where I want to be.
- I'm a British-Indian.
- British.
English, African and almost adopted Scouser.
English and Mancunian, and a huge Huddersfield Town fan.
(Both laughing) February 2017