Neil Oliver: News, Comment, History

In this episode we travel with Neil to meet the man who split the atom! Ernest Rutherford’s father said to his children, ‘without money we have to think’ – and think Ernest did. Ernest’s brain took him from his childhood home in rural New Zealand to a scientific career that spanned right around the world. In Manchester he assembled a brilliant and diverse team of fantastic minds. He built one of t...

In this episode we’re in the midst of the great Victorian engineering revolution as the dream to reconnect with Europe begins.   8,000 years ago the Storegga Slide hit and severed the British Isles from the European mainland. To thrive and prosper the new islanders had to develop a mastery of the sea, and those coming to the islands had to be determined and committed. For thousands of years t...

In this episode we set sail with Neil and find ourselves at the centre of a devastating hurricane that’s intent on destroying a proud and hardworking fishing port.   In the 1800’s Eyemouth’s fishing fleet found itself battling the elements, bureaucracy and the church. As the harbour remained dangerously inadequate a hated ecclesiastical tax was draining resources. One fateful day bad weather...

In this episode we set sail with Neil, past Fasnet Rock, fleeing the horror of famine.   The Vikings called it Hvasstann-ey, ‘the island shaped like a sharp tooth’, the Irish knew it first as Carraig Aonair, ‘the Lonely Rock’, then as Fastnet, ‘Ireland’s Teardrop’. A treacherous island, little more than a jagged rock, it has been responsible for countless shipwrecks and deaths at sea. It was...

In this episode a dark shadow falls across all of Ireland. A time of unimaginable pain and suffer, which has caused a deep wound between the British Isles ever after. It is known as An Gorta Mor or The Great Hunger. For years starvation stalked the land and over a million people died of hunger as ships fully laden and brimming with food left the Irish ports. Standing on the edge of a mass grave in...

In this episode as machines begin to flex their muscles the spectre of human poverty rises darkly and menacingly across the whole of the British Isles. In C19th Dorset a small group of workers came together to dream of a better future. But for daring to stand up straight, demand dignity and call for a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work they were crushed by the authorities: arrested, tried and tr...

In this episode Neil travels to the breathtakingly picturesque seaside side town of Lyme Regis. Sitting on the rugged Jurassic Coast the town was home to a determined, fearless woman called Mary Anning who battled the convention of the day to stake her claim in scientific history. The Jurassic coast is famous for fossil dinosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Ammonites, Belemnites, and plesiosaurus. Often workin...

In this episode Neil strides across the beguilingly beautiful, wild Yorkshire moors to meet three sisters whose brilliance would shape and change the world of literature. Tough, strong-willed survivors, the Bronte sisters laid bare the crippling social conventions of the day with perfect prose. Their own lives were edged with hardship and tragedy, but their imaginations, stubborn genius and dazzli...

This week Neil spends time on one of the most notorious lighthouses in the world – a place with a profound sense of isolation and a dark history. The British Isles are home to an island race, and to survive and thrive its people have depended on a mastery of the seaways and protection from its dangerous coasts. Ever since King Henry VIII Britain have made lighthouses their own. Dotted around the c...

In this episode we’re stepping aboard a legend. A ship built from 6,000 trees, 27 miles of rigging and 4 acres of sail. She fought in the American and French Revolutionary Wars and came to symbolise the Britain’s dominance of the world-ocean as she battled to keep them free. But it was in 1805, with Admiral Nelson at the helm, that she sailed into the history books. With her 104 guns fully loaded...

In this episode we’re walking with a hero of mine, Admiral Nelson – a man with a life full of high drama and adventure, violence and great passion. He was born near the North Norfolk coast in 1758, in the sleepy village of Burnham Thorpe. His father was the local parson and at the ripe old age of 12 he set off to join the Royal Navy and sail the world’s oceans. Horatio Nelson was an ambitious and...

In this episode Neil takes us on an emotional journey that affected hundreds of thousands of people and systematically destroyed an ancient way of life – the Highland Clearances. Driven by greed the aristocratic landowners brutally cleared people from what they claimed as their land and replaced them with sheep in one of the biggest mass movements of people in all of British history.   To hel...

In this episode Neil takes us to walk side by side with William Wilberforce, one of the unwavering bright lights who stove to abolish slavery in the British empire. Nations throughout history have plagued the world with this abhorrent trade, but the British took it to another level in the C18th, growing fat on the colossal profits to be made from African slaves. As opposition to slavery in this co...

In this episode we join Neil in1796 as a heavily armed French invasion fleet is spotted off Fishguard in south-west Wales. Seven years earlier revolution had swept across France. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and a great swath of the French aristocracy found themselves on the sharp end of the guillotine. Europe’s royalty reeled in horror and Britain and others sent forces to try and crush the new Fr...

In this episode Neil takes us on a very personal journey around his old stomping ground, the Merchant City district in Glasgow. It was built by the mighty Glaswegian Tobacco Lords, men whose trading fortunes made them the Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates of their time. In the late C17th and into the C18th their trading ships ensured great wealth poured into Glasgow and they built huge warehouses, veritab...

In this episode Neil takes us to the beautiful coast of Cumbria as it’s attacked by a warship from the United States of America. Angry and dissatisfied with the punitive taxes and harsh rule of the British monarchy the people of America rise in rebellion. Intent on helping his new adopted country throw off the shackles of colonial rule, John Paul Jones captains an American naval ship of war, and i...

In this episode we travel with Neil around the world with the words of Robert Burns, a poet and lyricist whose work has touch millions and directly helped to shape Neil’s own life. Robert Burns was born in Ayr, lived in Dumfries and went on to be the national bard of Scotland. His brilliant body of work stretches from Auld Lang Syne to his famous epic poem, Tam o’ Shanter – work that continues sti...

In this episode Neil takes us to age simmering with the steadily building heat of technological change and advance. We stride across a landscape of great beauty, full of the things needed to kick start a profound transformation; the natural energy of powerful rivers, land rich with minerals, coal and iron ore. Here in Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire a heady mix of human ingenuity, innovation and the...

In this episode Neil takes us to the top of one of Scotland’s most beautiful mountains – Schiehallion in Perthshire. Following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton and a group of intrepid C18th scientists we set off to the wonderful wilds of Rannoch moor to measure the weight of the world. To help support this podcast and get exclusive access to new videos packed with history, current affairs and a wh...

In this episode Neil climbs the hill to the Royal Observatory and finds himself at the centre of time & place. Henry VIII’s hunting lodge where he kept his mistress of the moment once stood here. Then in 1675 Christopher Wren was commissioned to build the Royal Observatory in this spot, a building that stood at the forefront of astronomy and mapping for centuries. It’s here that the prime meri...

In this podcast Neil enters a city fizzing with new idea. In the late C18th and early C19th Edinburgh was the beating heart at the centre of what many people have called the Scottish Enlightenment. The intellectual thinking generated here was recognised around the world with men and women of genius said to be on every street with new ways of thinking bussing around every part of the city. It was h...

This week we’re setting sail on a legendary voyage of exploration with the greatest navigator ever to come out of the British Isles - Captain James Cook.   We follow James from the beginning of his adventure, when he leaves his job as a grocers lad in Staithes and travels to the hauntingly beautiful port of Whitby to pursue his dreams of a life a sea. It’s here, as a merchant seaman transport...

In this podcast, it’s 1745 and we’re walking along the cobbled streets of a busy, bustling fishing port, off to buy groceries from a young lad named James Cook.   Staring out at the sea every day from his shop window in Staithes, North Yorkshire the teenage grocers boy, James Cook, dreamt of future that would take him around the world. Staithes is a striking fishing port, filled with beautifu...

In this podcast I’m taking you to a place that’s part of my ‘origin myth’, it’s a location that witnessed a bloody and brutal battle which is famous around the world. As a wee lad, it was here, that I discovered many of my ancestors from Clan Cameron were killed and buried. This realisation clicked a switch in my young brain and I realised that if I was connected to this part of history then I was...

In this podcast we’re walking down the aisle with a couple who fought like cat and dog for years, but are now about to be joined in union.   The Act of Union came into force in 1707 and England and Scotland were finally brought together by the pen and not the sword. The independent parliaments of Scotland & England were united and a prosperous new beginning was promised, but as the Act th...