Union With David Olusoga

Episode
Episode 4 - Union and Disunion
Broadcast Info
2023 (60 mins)
Description
On the 13th July 1911 the investiture of the Prince of Wales, heir to the throne, was held at Caernarfon Castle. David explores how this centuries old ceremony - by some seen as a symbol of Welsh subjugation by England - was repackaged to celebrate not only Welsh culture but the diversity of the other Celtic nations, Scotland and Ireland. David travels to the Welsh Valleys to see the impact of industrialisation and migration on this area in the early Twentieth Century. On Tower Street in Pontypridd, he uncovers how the population shift brought a particular cultural crisis to Wales - the decline of the Welsh language. But this decline was also hastened by an earlier social study, the notorious Victorian educational report known as The Blue Books. Across the Irish sea was another booming city, Belfast. It was now the largest city in Ireland, home to the biggest shipyard and linen mills in the World. But in this thriving city centuries-old divisions between Protestants and Catholics still festered. In 1912 Belfast was the centre of a crisis which threatened to tear the union apart, the Home Rule Crisis. David tells the story of the Crisis through two working class families living within a mile and half of each other in West Belfast, the Protestant Beatties and the Catholic Murphys. As tensions mounted, both Protestants and Catholics began importing arms and forming paramilitary organisations. Complete civil war between the two sides was only narrowly avoided by the outbreak of the First World War. In 1916, while Beattie family members were fighting on the Western Front, one of the Murphy daughters, Kathleen, travelled to Dublin to assist rebel leader James Connolly in the Easter Rising, an armed uprising against British authorities in Dublin. David traces how the British response to the Rising ultimately increased support of the Republican cause. After a bitter War of Independence, a new solution was proposed, the Partition of Ireland. David travels to the border, created in 1921, to explore how for the first time in centuries the process of union went into reverse. With Partition, two new states were created - what would become the Republic of Ireland, an independent and majority Catholic country and Northern Ireland, home to a Protestant majority and part of the Union. But Partition did not put an end to sectarian tensions, which would continue throughout the coming years. Two decades after Partition, the new state of Great Britain and Northern Ireland faced a fresh threat of invasion. Sixty feet underground, in a bunker near London which housed the operation of Bomber Command, David explores the devastating impact of the Second World War. But whilst the conflict threatened the very existence of the union of the four nations, it also led to the emergence of new ideas which would bind the union together. In Coventry - a city devastated by German bombs - David meets historian David Edgerton who argues that the post-war period marked an unprecedented effort to bring economic equality and a shared sense of purpose across the union. But into the 1970s economic decline and an end to the post-war political consensus would devastate previously thriving industrial communities. In Motherwell David meets Iain Lawson who helped organise a campaign in January 1986 to save the Gartcosh and Ravenscraig steelworks. He was part of a group who marched from Scotland to London to deliver a petition to Parliament. The group passed through other communities in England like Consett and Corby where industries had closed, and unemployment was rife. In the city of London David examines how the deregulation of the City of London in the 1980s sparked the re-emergence of London as a dominant force. London’s wealth was in stark contrast to the sharp decline of Britain’s industrial areas which led to resentment across the four nations and the emergence of a North-South divide. Finally, David assesses whether the historical forces which have helped bind the union throughout our history are still strong. In such a rapidly changing world, could our generation be the last of the Britons, or will the union endure?
Genre
History; Religion; Government

How to cite this record

The Open University, "Union With David Olusoga". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/246887 (Accessed 09 Jan 2025)