Media careers, centenarians, assassination, disasters all feature in my Bandwidth podcast

My conversation with Katie Brewer of Bandwidth is now available. 

We talk about getting into Oxford from an ordinary Manchester primary school, getting into the media and working in radio and television.

Then there are my books: we discuss the secrets of living to 100 and whether, in spite of increased life expectancy and determined scientific research, there remains a limit to human lifespan. There's the history of assassination, and the role of love in the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand which helped to spark the First World War, plus the continuing mysteries surrounding JFK's death. 

We talked about how disasters happen and how mercilessly they can expose organisational shortcomings.

The podcast is entitled: 'Surviving the Storm: John Withington on Catastrophe, Longevity and the Human Spirit.' You can find it here on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/68HQDGsIC4vKBG6Xsw9up9?si=cefbc5dfc9354602&nd=1&dlsi=29cbb59e41194b1f

And I'm told also on @bandwidthconversations on Instagram & @podcastbwc on Twitter

Day Return to Oxford

49 years ago, in the glorious summer of 1976, I was lucky enough to persuade ATV, then the ITV company for the Midlands, to let me go back to my old Oxford college, New College, to make a film about how things had changed since I had left eight years before. The result was a programme called 'Day Return to Oxford' which can now be viewed online thanks to MACE, the Media Archive of Central London. This is the link https://www.macearchive.org/films/day-return-oxford

One of the big changes the film focuses on is the admission of women to what had been, in my day, exclusively male colleges, and one of the interviewees is the first female cox of Brasenose College's rowing eight. Then there is New College undergraduate (student) Miles Young, talking about his sadness at leaving Oxford and about how hard it was to find a good job. After a distinguished career in advertising, he would go on to become Warden (i.e. boss) of New College. There is also a veteran 'scout' (college servant) giving the lowdown on what is was like cleaning up after privileged young men, and the head of the careers service discussing the challenge of finding Oxford graduates the job of their dreams.

Other vexed questions tackled included: how much work did undergraduates do, and what was it like for young men and women to be in a university where the sex ratio was still about four men to every woman. But because the weather was so wonderful, the real star of the film was Oxford itself.

Storms - naming, are they getting worse + storms in history and literature

Links here to my interview with Nick Piercey of BBC Radio Oxford (in two parts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dx9Ii87-pM&t=24s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5QRHcxe1n4&t=115s

Coups d’état; what is the chance of succeeding?

Last month’s coup d’état against Turkey’s President Erdogan failed, but between 1950 and 2010, on average a coup had a 50-50 chance of succeeding.

Jonathan Powell and Clayton Thyne from the University of Kentucky examined 450 from that 60 year period, and found that 227 – 49.7% – were successful. And the plotters seemed to be improving, because those mounted since 2003 had a 70% success rate.

But coups have become less common. Their heyday was the 1960s, when there were about 15 a year. By the first decade of the new millennium that was down to 5 a year. One reason may be that the world is getting richer. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler of Oxford University found that if people’s average incomes doubled, the risk of a coup fell by more than a quarter.

As to the ingredients of a successful coup, there seems a fair degree of consensus – detain key leaders, take over key media outlets, control key transport arteries. The Turkish plotters failed to  implement these properly, but perhaps a new factor was at play – social media, which President Erdogan used very effectively to rally support.

Sweating sickness - an ancient epidemic

 

On this day.........528 years ago, the Wars of the Roses ended at the Battle of Bosworth Field, and the victorious army of Henry VII carried the ‘sweating sickness’ with it to London.

The illness, perhaps what we later came to call influenza, would carry off three lord mayors in as many months. Altogether a ‘wonderful number’ of people died, and there were five more epidemics over the next 70 years.

During the 1517 outbreak, there was much comment about the suddenness with which the disease could strike, as people collapsed in the street and were with their maker four hours later, or, as one contemporary put it: they could be ‘merry at dinner and dead at supper’.  In Oxford, 400 people perished in a week.

In 1528, Anne Boleyn caught the disease, and desperately in love with her though he was, Henry VIII packed her off to her home in Kent, where she survived, but her brother-in-law died.  For the full story, see A Disastrous History of Britain.

"War on terrror" + Kent a millennium ago

According to the independent Iraq Body Count group, 4,497 civilians met violent deaths in the country last year. That’s not quite as bad as the figure of 9,226 for 2008, but horrifying enough when you think how profoundly we in Britain were shocked by the loss of 56 people in the bus and train bombings of 2005.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, the death toll from the suicide bomb at a volleyball match in the north-west of the country has risen to 93. Altogether, more than 600 people have died in militant attacks since the army launched an offensive against Taliban strongholds in October.

A millennium ago this winter, Kent was suffering a reign of terror of its own after an “immense” Viking army arrived to plunder and extort protection money. Canterbury paid out a huge sum to get them to go away, which they did for a while – sacking towns like Oxford, Cambridge and Northampton instead.

In 1011, they returned, and burned Canterbury to the ground, killing, it is said, nine tenths of the inhabitants. They carried off Archbishop Alphege, but he bravely insisted that no ransom should be paid for him, so the Vikings murdered him, making him the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be martyred. I have just written the story for Kent on Sunday, and it can be accessed here on page 17:
http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/digital_editions/Page17_dceedd34-e22b-4c41-ba22-4b45e0962c66_8c14e057-f400-4ae2-a814-91554b91ef1c.aspx

Bhopal, America and extradition + 1,000th anniversary

Almost 25 years after the world’s worst industrial disaster, a new arrest warrant has been issued for the former boss of the company responsible. When the Union Carbide pesticide plant at Bhopal in India leaked poison gas in the early hours of December 3, 1984, 2,000 people were killed in the next few hours, followed by at least 15,000 over the next few weeks. How many more have died from its effects in the years that followed is not known, but it is thought that more than half a million have been damaged in some way.

Warren Anderson was arrested soon after the disaster, but got bail, left India and has never returned. Now a court at Bhopal has asked the Indian government to seek his extradition from the United States. In view of the Obama regime’s intransigence in demanding the extradition of the British computer hacker Gary McKinnon, it will be interesting to see how it reacts if a request comes from another government to surrender a US citizen for alleged wrongdoing abroad.

On this day…..1,000 years ago, a fearsome Danish army landed in England. Over the next two and a half years, the Danes harried the land mercilessly – ravaging fifteen counties and burning down towns such as Oxford and Northampton.

Eventually in April 1012, they accepted £48,000 – an enormous sum in those days – to leave the country in peace, but not before they had murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Danes had demanded a separate ransom for him, but he bravely insisted that nothing more should be paid, so they pelted him, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with the “bones and heads of cattle” then split his skull open with an axe.