Witness History

During World War Two, thousands of Chinese sailors and engineers served in the British Merchant Navy, keeping supplies flowing into the port of Liverpool and risking their lives in crossings of the Atlantic. Many settled in the port city and started families with local women but, after fighting ended in 1945, the British authorities began forcing them to leave. Simon Watts talks to Yvonne Foley, w...

The Stele of Axum, a 4th century Ethiopian treasure, was finally returned by Italy in 2005. It had been taken from the ancient town of Axum in northern Ethiopia by invading Italian fascist forces in 1937. The huge 24 metre tall stele was originally erected to mark the site of a royal tomb during the Kingdom of Axum. The Axumites were a powerful and sophisticated civilisation which emerged in north...

Holidaymakers arrived at the first Club Med resort on the Spanish island of Majorca in summer 1950. The French company - full name Club Méditerranée - was founded to offer a new kind of post-war holiday by Belgian water polo player Gérard Blitz, who believed that "the time to be happy is now". The facilities were initially rudimentary, with guests sleeping in huts and sharing tables at meals - but...

In 1988, a group of Jewish feminists demanded the right to pray as freely as Jewish men at one of Judaism’s holiest sites. They called themselves the ‘Women of the Wall’. The organisation is made up of every Jewish denomination including reform, conservative and orthodox Jews. Its focus is one of the holiest sites in Judaism - the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Rachael Gillman has been speaking to Ana...

In the summer of 1967 more than 100 cities in America were caught up in riots. US Senator Fred Harris urged the President, Lyndon B Johnson, to investigate the causes. He set up the Kerner Commission and appointed Fred Harris as one of 11 members to find out why America was burning. The final report shocked many Americans when it blamed white racism for creating and sustaining black ghettos. It sa...

The great Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, died on July 13th 1954, at the age of 47. The art critic, Raquel Tibol, lived in Frida's house during the last year of the artist's life. In 2014 she spoke to Mike Lanchin for Witness History about the pain and torment of Kahlo's final days. This programme is a rebroadcast. Photo: Frida Kahlo with her husband Diego Rivera in 1939. (Copyright Getty Images /Bet...

When Montreal's police force went on strike for one day over pay in 1969, there was looting and rioting in the streets. But the city's problems leading to the unrest had been building for more than a decade. Organised crime, militant separatists and commercial rivalries all erupted on 7th October, just as police officers decided to protest that their pay was much lower than officers in other Canad...

The black former soldier choked to death in handcuffs on the floor of a British police station in 1998. CCTV footage taken from the police station showed the 37 year-old father of two gasping for air as officers chatted and joked around him. It took 11 minutes for him to stop breathing. An inquest found he was unlawfully killed but no-one has been held accountable for his death. Farhana Haider spe...

In the 1800s cholera was a mysterious disease killing millions around the world. No-one knew how to stop it till an English doctor, John Snow, began investigating the outbreak of 1854. At a time before germ theory was properly understood, many public health experts thought disease was carried on what they called "bad air". John Snow was alone in thinking cholera was spread through contaminated wat...

In 1990, South Africa became the first country in the world to ban skin-lightening creams containing the chemical compound hydroquinone. For years the creams had caused an irreversible form of skin damage called ochronosis for the black and Asian South Africans using the products. Rachael Gillman has been speaking to Dr Hilary Carman, one of the activists who worked to ban the creams and Dr Ncoza...

In 2012 a stunning, secret collection of art was found in Germany. Much of it had disappeared during Nazi rule in the 1930s and 40s. It had once belonged to one of the Nazi's top art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt. It was found by chance in the Munich apartment of his elderly, reclusive son, Cornelius. It contained lost works by Renoir, Matisse, Chagal and the masters of the German expressionist move...

What it was like to be a child quarantined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the 1950s. Ann Shaw was nine when she was first admitted to the Craig-y-nos sanatorium in Wales and 13 when she was finally allowed home. Until antibiotic treatments came along, to stop the disease spreading, TB patients were kept apart from the general population and their families, often for years. This inclu...

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards went on trial for drugs offences in June 1967. The case attracted attention around the world, and sealed their reputation as rebels. The men were originally sentenced to prison but on appeal their sentences were drastically cut and the trial came to symbolise Britain's changing values. Photo: Mick Jagger (left) and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones walk in the gar...

A people’s movement called Jana Andolan brought an end to Nepal’s absolute monarchy in the spring of 1990. Political parties worked together with students, workers and civil society groups to organise strikes and street protests – but although the king eventually agreed to their demands, it was the beginning of a long period of political instability. Lucy Burns speaks to activist and writer Devend...

Chaos and hardship hit Russia with the rapid market reforms in early 1992, just weeks after the collapse of the USSR. In 2018 Dina Newman spoke to one of the architects of this “shock therapy” - Andrei Nechaev, who was then the Minister for Economic Development. This programme is a rebroadcast. Photo: Old women selling cigarettes on the streets of Moscow in 1992. Credit: BBC.

Following the violent military coup that overthrew Chile's socialist government in 1973, the new regime led by General Augusto Pinochet began a radical overhaul of the economy. It was based on a free-market economic plan created by a group of economists known as the Chicago Boys. Mike Lanchin has been speaking to one of them, Rolf Lüders. Photo: General Augusto Pinochet (L) poses with socialist Ch...

In the late 1960s Tanzania's first post-independence president, the charismatic Julius Nyerere, believed that endemic poverty in rural areas could only be addressed if peasant farmers relocated to larger villages and worked collectively. It was part of a new experimental form of socialism, known as Ujamaa. In 2016 Rob Walker spoke to two Tanzanians who remember it well. This programme is a rebroad...

An eyewitness account of how a poor, war-ravaged nation became a global economic powerhouse. We hear the memories of Dr Kongdan Oh, who grew up in South Korea in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the Korean War. The country had been left devastated by the conflict. Then, in the early 1960s, South Korea's new military leader, General Park Chung-hee, launched an ambitious national drive for rapid econo...

When Franklin D Roosevelt became President in 1933 he promised to spend his first 100 days rescuing the USA from the Great Depression with one of the biggest public spending projects in history - the New Deal. Photo: Franklin D Roosevelt in 1935. Credit: Getty Images.

When Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, US school teacher, Jane Elliott, decided to try to teach her all-white class about racism. She decided to segregate them according to the colour of their eyes, and treated them differently. Although controversial from the start, the “blue eyes/brown eyes” teaching exercise has been adapted in schools and workplaces for diversity training ever si...

The passenger train service between India and Bangladesh was resumed after more than 40 years. The train service had been suspended after the 1965 war between India and Pakistan of which Bangladesh was then a part. Partitioned in 1947, Bengal was divided in half between Hindu majority India and Muslim majority East Pakistan. Families were torn apart. East Pakistan later become Bangladesh after gai...

In the late 1990s, whistle-blowers implicated UN peacekeepers and international police in the forced prostitution and trafficking of Eastern European women into Bosnia, which was just emerging from a bitter civil war. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to one of those who sounded the alarm, British human rights lawyer, Madeleine Rees, who was then working for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in...

During the early years of Cultural Revolution in China, all European music was banned. Even enjoying traditional Chinese music and art was illegal. Anyone found with old instruments or recordings could be imprisoned. But that didn’t stop some musicians and enthusiasts from playing or listening to the music they loved, sometimes as an act of rebellion. A favourite during those times in China was th...

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. When Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published her bestselling book On Death and Dying in 1969, she described a series of emotional stages that she had seen terminally ill patients experience – later known as the Five Stages of Grief. But there was much more to her work in end of life care. Her son Ken speaks to Lucy Burns. Photo: Dr. Eli...

One man's experience of the controversial US law that saw thousands locked up for life. Under the law in California, a third conviction for a felony offence would lead to a life sentence. At times in California, 45% of "three strikers" were African American. Many were sentenced to life in prison for non-violent or minor offences. Alex Last hears the story of Bilal Chatman, and his hopes for reform...