Dan Snow's HISTORY HIT

Annie Gray is a wonderful historian and broadcaster. Her latest project is a biography of the woman who cooked for Churchill. Georgina Landemare was one of the few people able to cope with the demands, eccentricities and public nudity that came with working for the Churchills. Where all the other servants came and went fairly rapidly, she remained in the family's service and helped Churchill through the war years, not just feeding him but helping his efforts to lead or cajole by providing sumptuous meals for him, his guests and subordinates. I talked to Annie about what was like being a woman in domestic service in this period as well as the challenges of working for Winston..... For information regarding your data privacy, visit

Eamonn O'Keeffe is a young Oxford Researcher in the midst of a PhD. He stopped off in Wakefield Library to look at a journal Yorkshire farmer Matthew Tomlinson to see if the author had any opinions on the subject of his research: military music. Tomlinson did not. However what O'Keeffe found in the diary proved of infinitely greater interest to the general public than a passion for marching bands. In an entry for 1810 Tomlinson argues that homosexuality is natural. He therefore questioned the death penalty’s application for homosexual activity and sodomy. How can man punish what God has ordained? The announcement of the discovery went viral and I had to get him on the podcast. By chance I am also a big fan of 18th and early 19th Century military music so I got two for the price of one. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, signup to 

We are a land animal. But millions of us have taken to the sea to live, fight, travel, eat, escape and seek fame and fortune. I am obsessed with the sea. On how humans have built ever more efficient and capable ships to exploit its riches and opportunities. This is an conversation I’ve been longing to have. David Abulafia has written massive, beautiful, scholarly books about the oceans and his most recent, The Boundless Sea, is a masterpiece. He and I chatted about why and how humans have taken to the sea in ships and why what happens on the water affects politics, economics and societies on the land. For information regarding your data privacy, visit

This is the most remarkable father and son story I have ever come across. We are still marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz here at History Hit and this time I am talking to historian Jeremy Dronfield about an astonishing true story of horror, love and impossible survival. In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested by the Nazis. Along with his sixteen-year-old son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany, where a new concentration camp was being built. They helped build Buchenwald, young Fritz learning construction skills which would help preserve him from extermination in the coming years. But it was his bond with his father that would ultimately keep them both alive. When the fifty-year-old Gustav was transferred to Auschwitz--a certain death sentence--Fritz was determined to go with him. His wiser friends tried to dissuade him--"If you want to keep living, you have to forget your father," one said. Instead Fritz pleaded for a place on the Auschwitz transport. "He is a true comrade," Gustav wrote in his secret diary, "always at my side. The boy is my greatest joy. We are inseparable." Gustav kept his diary hidden throughout his six years in the death camps--even Fritz knew nothing of it. We talked about this very rare diary, Fritz's own accounts, and other eyewitness testimony, and built a picture of this extraordinary father and son team. For information regarding your data privacy, visit

Toby Green has been fascinated by the history of West Africa for decades after he visited as a student and heard whispers of history that didn’t appear in text books. Years later he wrote ‘Fistful of Shells,’ a survey of West Africa and West-Central Africa before the slave trade, and the effect the arrival of Europeans had on those societies. I asked him about what we know about that history and how integrated this region was into the global economy. We also explored the impact of the slave trade on West Africa itself, how it turned the ruling elites against their populations which they now saw as fodder for slave traders.  For information regarding your data privacy, visit