Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. A moment in time captured by what they heard. I heard some people making phone calls. Okay, which runway would you like at Teterboro? What they saw. I put my head down, I saw the movie of my life start going through my head. What they smelt. I still remember the smell of the fresh fish. And I completely lost my appetite.
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I left the office with tears in my eyes. She called me and told me, I'm doing Studio 54. She had already become a star in Paris. She came back a superstar. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson, featuring interviews from witness history and sporting witness on the BBC World Service. This week, one of the most daring military missions of the Afghan conflict in the early 2000s. When it eventually landed and touched down, you couldn't actually see anything. You're just surrounded by dust and dirt.
And if I was a Taliban fighter or enemy fighter, I'd be shooting at that dust cloud. Also, we've got a couple of stories from Cuba's past, the controversial visit to the communist state by the former US President Jimmy Carter in 2002, and the mass exodus of Cubans to the US in 1980. 22,000 have come so far in 700 boats shepherded by the US Coast Guard to landfall at Key West.
Smaller pleasure boats have been just as crowded and at even greater risk to the fleeing Cubans. Plus, Austria's poisoned wine scandal. The first thing was a shock and people thought, wow, what is happening? The people of Rostfeld really upset. But first, let's take a step back from conflict and controversy.
In the 1970s, a cast of characters with names like Mr Tickle, Mr Happy and Mr Bump were introduced into the world of children's fiction. The Mr Men, and later Little Miss, is a British series of books created by the English author Roger Hargreaves, which became a global success. Megan Jones has been to meet Roger's son, Adam, whose own curiosity inspired the very first character.
I think my dad's main thought and ambition was just to make young children giggle. They're all about humour and turning the kind of real world upside down. It's 1971 and we're in Surrey, a county in the south-east of England. During the week you'll find Roger Hargreaves writing adverts for everything from chocolate to cars.
When I was young he was working in London and commuting up to London so I didn't see him in the week at all. I was in bed by the time he got home. But his ambitions were bigger than advertising. He was always having ideas, creative ideas, and he was ambitious creatively. I think his greatest ambition was to be a strip cartoonist. His great hero was Charles Schultz.
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Chapter 2: What triggered the Mariel boatlift crisis in Cuba?
The man who invented the Mr Men has died. Roger Hargreaves drew the first blob-like Mr Man 17 years ago. Roger was 53. At the time, Adam was working in farming. But at just 25, he stepped in to run the family business. It's a strange thing. At the time, I didn't think too hard about it. But looking back on it, I think it was strangely cathartic.
even though I was sitting at my dad's desk and in his office, it gave me something to concentrate on. It took a little time before Adam began drawing, but in 2003 he released his first characters. I created three Mr Men and three Little Miss.
Today, the Mr Men and Little Miss books have sold more than 120 million copies, been translated into over 15 languages, and there are now over 90 characters. So, does Adam have a favourite? My favourite character is Mr Silly. I think he really epitomises my dad's sense of humour. I always imagined that that was my dad's favourite character. And I also love the story. I think the story is genius.
It's really funny. 55 years after Roger Hargreaves drew that first orange circle with long arms, the world he created is still expanding, with a new TV series and film coming out. The question is, what would he have thought of it all? Oh, he'd be incredibly chuffed. I mean, really excited to have Mr Men up on the big screen in the cinema.
He would have been very, very happy to have seen that, and it's a terrible shame that he can't. Adam Hargreaves was speaking to Megan Jones. Professor Nina Christensen is the head of the Centre for Children's Literature and Media at Aarhus University in Denmark. Let's look at the history of literature specifically aimed at children. When did the first texts that were aimed at children emerge?
Well, it depends very much on where in the world we are talking about. If you are in a European context, then the first printed text appeared in the 16th century with the printing press because ABCs and primers were a huge part of publications then. And you also have a lot of religious texts from that period.
But if you're talking about fiction for children in the modern sense, then we have to move on to the 18th century if you speak from a European context. Scandinavia has a particular connection to the history of children's literature.
So when children's literature emerged on the Danish market, it was also under the influence of French Enlightenment thinking and Rousseau's ideas about the child being an individual in itself that deserved special attention and with special qualities. And then, of course, this child should have a literature.
From around 1750 in Germany and in Denmark and in England as well, we saw an emerging market for fiction for children. really an emerging market, because surely literature has to depend on rates of literacy. Was there enough childhood literacy in those days for there to be an actual market for children's literature?
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Chapter 3: How did a simple question inspire the creation of Mr Men?
If you want schools, you also need to have publications to use in schools. So there was this increase in the publication of fiction and facts books for children from the 1750s onwards. If children's literacy was of interest to decision makers, was also what they were reading of interest? Were children, if you like, molded actively by what they were not forced to, but encouraged to read?
Well, this was exactly the idea that fiction could be used to kind of mold, as you say, your character. So in many prefaces to children's books from that period, you can see that the ambition was to educate children's hearts and minds. And the basic idea, of course, being that if you have a character, that character would have certain characteristics and incarnate certain vices or virtues.
So the idea was that the child would... Take inspiration. The reading child would take inspiration from that character and try to copy or avoid copying the actions of that character.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of Roger Hargreaves in children's literature?
Because, of course, virtuous actions would lead to a good life. And if you didn't adhere to the virtues and behave very badly, your life would not be very good. And I think that idea of fiction as a part of character development is still alive in children's literature today. I think that is a global aspect.
And that goes when children's texts are transmitted orally in many cultures where the history of printed books for children has a shorter history, so to speak. And was the advent of children's literature really a European phenomenon? Texts and books traveled a lot. So you see that text from Germany traveled to France, and back you see text traveling to what is now the United States.
Catherine the Great in Russia wrote children's texts. travel to India, to China, and all these transnational movements. That was something that authors and publishers were proud of. There is a strong international canon of children's literature today, with some of the books that were published in the 19th century, Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales.
And then we see traditions from Asia travel to Europe through manga comics, through Japanese animated movies that are present in a Western context. So I think we see that children's literature today is transnational. It's also very much a transmedial phenomenon. There we also have a connection to the 18th century literature.
Because, for instance, one of the very popular books in the 18th century was Robinson Crusoe in versions for children. And at that time, you would also have Robinson Crusoe the book and Robinson Crusoe the board game. So this idea that characters move across media was something that is a strong tendency in children's text and media. But it is, of course, also something that we see today.
That's Professor Nina Christensen, head of the Centre for Children's Literature and Media at Aarhus University in Denmark. Next, we've got a first-hand account of a remarkable military mission from the war in Afghanistan. It involves a young British Royal Marines commando, Captain Chris Fraser-Perry. What he and his comrades did has become legendary in military circles.
He told his story to Kevin Corr. six magazines, two high explosive grenades, two smoke grenades, a bandolier of like an extra 150 rounds, because worst case scenario, you'd be fighting your way out of there on your own. Royal Marines Commando Captain Chris Fraser-Perry is ready for battle.
In 2007, Chris volunteered to take part in what historians call one of the most audacious rescue attempts in modern military history, clinging on to the side of a helicopter as it flew into a Taliban fort in Afghanistan to rescue a comrade. He was a teenager. One thing I sort of reflect on now is there probably wasn't many 17, 18-year-old kids, especially at that time, who'd written a will.
The worst thing I've ever done, I've only ever done it once, is having to write the what-if letter at 18 years old, and it's a letter to your family if you get killed and then that gets passed to your mum and dad.
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Chapter 5: What led to the Austrian wine scandal of 1985?
On my 16th birthday, February 10th, I was in the countryside... My parents were very, very late that day.
Chapter 6: How did the wine scandal impact Austria's winemaking industry?
There was no way to get to the countryside from Havana. And eventually they showed up. My father was very frustrated. We ate rather quickly. And they unwrapped the cake that my mother had lovingly made for me. I don't know how, how she got the ingredients. And then it started to rain. And...
The wind blew the candles from the cake and my father was very upset and he, very out of character for him, hit a tree. And I understood immediately that we needed to get out of Cuba or I was going to lose my father. Fidel Castro responded to the embassy crisis with an unexpected move. He announced that all Cubans who wanted to go were free to do so.
Cuban exiles, including Mirza's uncle Osvaldo, headed to Mariel in a flotilla to pick up their relatives. But leaving Cuba would not be straightforward. The government branded anyone who wanted to go as scum or worms, and its revolutionary defence committees harassed them. On May 7th, the police came to the Ojitos' house to tell them they could leave.
They asked the president of the neighbourhood committee, why don't you do something for these people? And she said, to her enormous credit, I saw these girls grow up, nobody's touching them. And so we left our home in the best way possible.
Contrary to what those men wanted, our neighbours were incredibly gracious and basically gathered to say goodbye to us as if we were a bridal party, not people who were abandoning the country, as the government liked to say. The Ojitos were taken to a camp near Mariel Harbour to wait for their uncle's boat, the Valley Chief.
It was a place near the beach, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by dogs. Clearly, it was the kind of place where once you were in there, you could not get out. And there were loud speakers droning on through the night and spotlights. And there were tents. Of course, we didn't sleep. I remember particularly that the rice was green and the bathrooms were just really horrifying.
It wasn't just Cubans with connections like the Ojitos in the camp. Fidel Castro's strategy was to use the Mariel crisis to get rid of thousands of criminals and mental patients and dump them on the United States. After a few days in the camp, the Ojitos were finally taken to meet Uncle Osvaldo. It was just an incredibly happy occasion. He was very tanned.
He had on a white T-shirt that was very dirty. And we were just so anxious to hug him. It was very, very emotional. But when we arrived at the boat, very quickly after us, Lots more people, dozens. In the end, about 230 of us crowded in the Valley Chief. People we didn't know, people who to us looked a little strange. Some didn't have any shoes on.
Some clearly were wearing clothes that had been folded for too long, as if they had been in an institution before. perhaps an insane asylum, perhaps a prison. And one asked my father for a nail clipper. And my father said, what do you want that for? And he said, to cut my veins. So there were some clearly disturbed people in that boat.
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