Bonus Episode: The History Guy with Dan Snow

Dan Snow is a BAFTA award winning historian, broadcaster and television presenter. Dan makes programmes around the world on a range of historical topics, from the abandoned Viking churches of Greenland to war damaged sites of Timbuktu. He is the host of one of the world’s biggest history podcasts, Dan Snow’s History Hit and is the Founder andCreative Director of History Hit TV, a digital history television channel described by the Times, ‘The Netflix of History.’

Transcript

Dan Snow The History Guy

Intro: Welcome to Hampshire HistBites. Join us as we delve into the past and go on a journey to discover some of the county's best and occasionally unknown history. We'll be speaking to experts as well as enthusiasts asking them to reveal some of our hidden heritage as well as share with you a few fascinating untold stories.

Julian: Welcome to Hampshire HistBites. I'm your host, Julian Gerry, and I've a rather special episode for you because my guest today is a patron of the Hampshire History Trust, which is the charity that lies behind both the annual Heritage Hemp Days Festival in September, and also behind this podcast series. He also happens to be one of the country's best known popular historians, as well as an award winning broadcaster, having previously BBC, Channel 5, and Discovery Channel, amongst others.

He now directs his own history hit TV channel and podcast series, which amazingly now runs to more than 1200 episodes and more than a million downloads a week. Who else could I be talking about, but the history guy, Dan Snow, Dan, welcome to the pod. 

Dan: Hey, thanks for having me. 

Julian: You're welcome. So you have a very global outlook in your own history channels, but we're a Hampshire based podcast series and you're a Hampshire resident, although I think you grew up in London.

So perhaps I could start by asking you, how did you come to be connected with Hampshire? 

Dan: Well, I, because Hampshire obviously is the greatest and best county in the UK, we spent time here as kids. My family were from Dorset Hampshire border. Originally, my dad moved to, my dad was an army brat. So like lots of people of that generation, they didn't get to be from somewhere really, because my grandpa was in the army and was moved around constantly around the empire.

And my dad grew up in Libya and Gibraltar and various places like that. And then. Had a career in London, but we used to come to Hampshire all the time. We came every weekend, came down to Bucklessard for a sailing. When the opportunity came, I moved down here when I was 30, and I have obviously never looked back!

Julian: It is a great county and, and by the sound of things, you like being by the sea as well. I 

Dan: think once you live by the sea, it's very, very difficult to turn your back on that. It's very difficult to, to not live by the sea. I, I love it, I love it now. I, it changes every day. It's, I think I would find just staring out at the same view now a bit claustrophobic, but the sea changes all the time and there's always something going on.

And in the summer, of course, it's, you can get out on it, um, or even under it. And in the, um, winter, it's, you can sort of occasionally maybe get out of it. But, um, yeah, so I love the sea. I love the history, obviously, maritime history. I mean, Hampshire is extraordinary because it's got so many different kinds of history.

It's got sort of second world war, it's got wonderful, you know, ancient medieval, you know, Got some Roman, it's got a classic, you know, Georgian and, and, uh, it's got II. So the history here is, is so rich. 

Julian: So if you had a first time visitor coming to stay with you, and they were short of time to explore the county, what would you recommend to them as the must sees in Hampshire?

Dan: Well, it's very difficult because Hampshire's got several world class sites in it, but I'm afraid I would say that, depending on the visitor, but I probably would say Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is one of the best museums in the world. And we're very, very lucky to have it here. Not enough people in Hampshire go to it.

It's full of overseas visitors and Londoners and stuff. And I think we neglect it because, you know, it's easy to neglect what's on your doorstep, but. It's also very, uh, hard to overlook, you know, start at Winchester, incredibly special place. You know, I always, I always joke that the Roman empire, we all call it, we say, Oh, I [00:04:00] can't believe one city managed to conquer all that territory.

That's amazing. Well, you could call the British empire, the Winchester empire, really, because that was the heart of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom, Alfred's kingdom. Wessex went on to conquer England and then went on to Conquer, as we know, many other parts of the world, largest empire the world's ever seen. So I think that we kind of underestimate Winchester as an ancient capital of Wessex and Britain.

And it's a, it's a wonderful place to go. I love the fusion of, of the heritage environment there and the natural landscaping on the edge of the South Downs and everything. So it's very special. I live in the New Forest, so therefore also just explore. If it's out of the way places and weird and unusual and overlooked places, I would definitely say the New Forest.

Just look at some of the layers of history there. 

Julian: Yeah, as a Winchester resident myself, I'd certainly agree with everything you say. It's a very special place to be. Absolutely. Have you got any sort of undiscovered secrets or hidden secrets that you've discovered in Hampshire? 

Dan: Yeah, I think lots of, I spent a lot of time traipsing around the New Forest with some wonderful people that know it [00:05:00] very well.

And so I would say that, yes, there's some very special places, you know, markings on trees from 19th century foresters and people working for the Navy or, or, or the government looking for like correctly shaped trees, which are great. Uh, I've, there's, there's, uh, aircraft crashes in the New Forest and Second World War where you can still smell aviation fuel.

So yes, I may, I really am a sort of, um, I'm a fan, I think, of some of that, that slightly more undiscovered history. And then, yeah, I mean, Leap Beach, I love, I always love it. People go and just sit in the car and enjoy the sun, rightly so. But there's, it really is an extraordinary bit of D Day history there.

And it's a wonderful, a wonderful place to explore as well. So, God, I could go on for hours. Yeah. 

Julian: I should have checked this, but have you done a history hit on, on the Solent or the New Forest? 

Dan: I have. I made a, I made a documentary that went on the history, hit channel. Uh, on on the, on the D Yeah. Well, I guess I've done a podcast, a history podcast on, on the New Forest with a brilliant Richard Reeves, who's an institution in the New Forest.

And [00:06:00] then I, I made a, Stephen Fisher is another brilliant Hampshire archeologist. I made, um, a program with him looking at all the amazing stuff we have left from the Second World War along the Solent. 

Julian: Yeah. And I mentioned earlier that you're one of our patrons of the Hampshire History Trust, which lies behind Heritage Open Days, which has taken place every September for the last few years and opens up all sorts of fascinating places.

Have you ever discovered anywhere new or particularly interesting through Heritage Open Days? 

Dan: Yes, I have visited a few sites on open days that have surprised me some to do with the railways. Um, uh, you know, the historic railways that we have in the county, and then a few sites around Winchester itself that I, you know, Winchester's, you know, it's, it's the other side of the county for me in a way.

So I, I, I don't go there as much as I should to. It's really good. The heritage Open days kind of got me up there and, and exploring and, and you realize how much there is, you know, the cathedral close, for example. Just unbelievable. Uh, and so. Yeah, the open day is a really good way to get [00:07:00] out and go to places that you wouldn't, you wouldn't have otherwise go.

Julian: Yeah, that's probably a good point to remind our listeners that this year's Heritage Open Days take place from the 6th to the 15th of September. There's already loads of events planned so see heritageopendays. org. uk or winchesterheritageopendays. org to find out more about that. So perhaps we can turn our attention down away from Hampshire a little bit.

and look at your own role in bringing history alive for the public. You know, anyone who's listened or watched any of your programs will know the extent of your passion and energy and enthusiasm for history. Can you tell us where that came from and how it developed? 

Dan: When I was a kid, I mean, everyone in my family loves history and they're obsessed by history.

My grandma was a wonderful storyteller, oral historian, I think we say she could trace her family generations that she was Welsh and we called her our nine. And she would tell us about um, the, the achievements and characteristics and, and crimes of our forebears in lurid and wonderful detail. And so I just got, I became fascinated by storytelling.

My dad and mum were both journalists, so they were obsessed with trying to find out the backstory, really, of the news stories they were covering. So, you know, Israel, Gaza, Palestine, um, you know, Lebanon, when they were in the 1980s, they spent a lot of time in Lebanon. So, trying to work out why the world was the way that it was.

And the answer was history, of course. The answer was, the answer was what had happened in the past. It shaped us and made us. So, I was Just, just, and then, and then every weekend we just went and visited the wonderful heritage sites that this country is so famous for. You put a dot on my house in, uh, in London, and then you just draw a big circle around about 150 miles.

Then we went to every single battlefield and church and cathedral and museum within that area. And I'm really glad we did. And now I inflict it on my kids, because that's Stockholm Syndrome for you. But, um, uh, it's, so, so I was just, I just grew up with this sense that history mattered. It was engaging and fun and colourful and exciting, and I've never really lost that sense.

Julian: So I like the dedication in one of your books, which reads, explore the past, shape your future. With that in mind, how do you engage your own children and engender an interest in history with them? and make that connection with their future, especially in an era where lots of kids basically want to spend a lot of time looking at screens.

Dan: We are, we are quite Victorian when it comes to screens. So we, we, we're quite, my wife and I are quite tough about that. Luckily we're both, you know, thank goodness. So we, we, we are on the same page, so it's easy to parent, but my kids watch telly like everyone else. And they, my daughter's allowed to use screen time occasionally to contact mates and stuff.

But we, we, we're quite robust about being outdoors, quite robust about having family adventures. And I think. The weird thing, I think the thing for me I try and do is just get them excited about going to Portchester Castle or, you know, a site in the New Forest because it's just a day out. We're together as a family.

You know, we go and look for Roman pottery at one of the, one of the kiln sites that used to be attached to a villa in the New Forest. And I'm not, we're not there, I'm not there like teaching about Roman pottery, but that just gives, a sense of purpose to the day. And actually the real thing is that we're together, we're laughing, we're messing about in nature, we're getting some exercise.

And at the end of it, the history, it's just a peg. It's just like, you know, you pick up a bit of pottery. So it's not that we're there to make a detailed sort of PhD level study of the stuff. And I think that's the key. It's just, it's, it's a source of fun days out. You get a porch to castle. It's a big green space to run around on.

It's just fun. It's nice to, nice to be there. It's good, good atmosphere. Have an ice cream, buy a wooden sword, whack each other. It's fun. You know, that's, it's, so it's, it's trying to focus on using history simply as a way of creating fun family experiences. That, that's, that's all I, the only advice I have.

Julian: Okay. That's a good goal. Thank you. Uh, the revolution in digital media over the last 20 years or so has been remarkable, of course, and you've really seized that opportunity to share your passion and explain history to a mass audience. Now, History Here is one of the most successful history podcasts out there, although other podcasts are available, of course, but did you ever expect to reach those levels of success, and how do you explain its popularity?

Dan: Well, I think, um, I think people, I, I would, I was, I sound old now because I'm in my forties when young people always laugh at me, but when the internet was happening, I was young. And so I was sort of aware that I made a program for the BBC on the battle of Hastings. And we spent months doing this, put my life into that program.

And it went out against the opening ceremony of the Olympics on BBC One. Right. And, uh, no one watched it. And everyone was like, oh, that was a shame. No one watched it. It can't have been very good. And I said, well, you know, it was all good. It was good. But the problem is, I don't know if you noticed, but the Olympics opening ceremony was, so the, the metrics that the BBC kind of, we'd have these washout meetings.

They're like, oh, episode two didn't do very well, did it? And you're like, yeah, but no one, on that spreadsheet, no one puts asterisk the Olympic opening ceremony was on the BBC one. So I just thought this is bonkers, what a weird industry. And this is at a time when my friends were starting to open their laptops and watch videos on them.

It's before YouTube and things, but then video, people were sharing and watching content online. And I was like, this is, what are we all doing here? This is ridiculous. If I make programs, I want to be able to share them and watch them and make sure they, they aren't just obliterated by being broadcast at the same time as a massive international global event.

So, uh, I've always, I always could have had this passion and thought, saw my friends using the internet thought, I reckon I can use that for history too. And now of course everyone's doing it. It's fine. And, and, but, but I was guessing, I guess a bit lucky and I got ahead, slightly ahead of it and podcasts and Instagrams and subscriber channels and all the rest of it.

Everyone's so used to hearing about now, but yeah, I, I created a digital history channel called history here and it's been great fun. And the real excitement is that. When someone rings me up now and goes, we've got a shipwreck off the, off the needles, come and have a look at this shipwreck. I can go, okay.

And I don't have to go to the BBC and say, Hey, there's really interesting shipwreck off the needles. And we've got an opportunity to go and dive on it. And the BBC be like, no, I don't know about that really. What's the, what's the purpose of the story? I don't know when I, instead I just go with my team and we video it and we film it.

And we break audio recordings. We do podcasts on it. We do Facebook posts on it. We do Instagram posts on it. And we, and we, Stick it on our subscriber TV channel. And before you know it, it's, we've got a model that sustains us and we've got 30 or 40 people. We all work together and we have a great fun time running around the world, chasing down history stories.

We're very lucky. 

Julian: It's the joy of being your own boss rather than working for a corporation. 

Dan: Yes. And, and it's the joy of being your own boss. And it's the joy of, of self. You know, the what, what a lot of people in the creative industries will, will tell you is [00:14:00] that they're wonderful creative people, sorts of ideas.

And, and they end up having to go and work for the man to produce their, you know, autumn advertising campaign. And what we get to do is do exactly what we wanna do. So we sit around the office, we done on Lady Jane Gray ever. We, you know, we should go and do that. And then someone, one of our team, uh, Luke and Suze will.

pedal off and go and do some things on Lady Jane Grey and we'll stick that up on the channel. It's great fun. 

Julian: Yes. And I'm sure you must have an inexhaustible supply of ideas for topics for future podcasts. I know we do on the HisBites channel, even though we're limiting ourselves only to Hampshire. 

Dan: Well, that's right.

I mean, that's the joy of history, right? Is that there is no upper limit on what you can do. And the most amazing thing is, I mean, look at those football podcasts. They talk about the same thing every week. I mean, we could basically do a podcast now in Berlin every week and people listen to it. So we've got unlimited, literally unlimited, because it's everything, history is everything that's happened to anyone on the planet who's ever lived.

So we've got unlimited content. Uh, you can even revisit the same content because of course the different spins and discoveries that are made, different takes on, on [00:15:00] things. So yeah, I mean, it's just a wonderful world. You're never, ever short of ideas and amazing people to work with. 

Julian: Yeah, you'll never be out of a job.

And of course, one of the things which has taken place during the period you've been producing HistoryHit is an increasing awareness of difficult or contested history. Do you have a view on how that's handled and how have you approached it in HistoryHit? 

Dan: Well, it's quite, I mean, it's hard really, isn't it?

Because people get very upset if you do a program about Captain Cook. And you say, actually, let's, um, I think we should probably ask what, you know, we, I dressed up as Captain Cook when I was a kid and I'm a school player, Captain Cook, my Captain Cook project in, in primary school is one of the things that got, you know, really cemented my love of history.

And, and, uh, Uh, so I'm, and I love 18th century naval history. I'm fascinated by it, but you know, we interviewed an Aboriginal, Australian Aboriginal person, and he talks about Captain Cook as the arch villain. You know, when, when kids were being naughty, their mothers used to shout, Cookie, I'll get you. You know, this is something that's, was difficult for me to hear and difficult for me to understand.

Now we've got two actually, we've got two ways of responding to that. One is you go, shut up. Don't tell that story. Why do you hate your country so much? The other is to go, well, that's interesting. Let's learn and explore a bit about that. See, pull that thread and see where it leads. I personally think we should probably do the latter.

It doesn't, doesn't mean I'm any less fascinated by that story. And there's. elements of Captain Cook and his most astonishing navigator, leader of men and sailor. Wonderful. But you can be brainy enough and sophisticated enough and grown up enough to go, well, it was hundreds of years ago and maybe it's time we go, oh, there are good things and bad things about it.

I mean, it doesn't seem to me that hard. And so whether it's Winston Churchill, the British empire or the Roman empire, or my own grandparents or my own family, I mean, if you're, if you're, if you're telling, if you're, if you're trying to suppress research and investigation and good faith interrogation of the past, then something very odd is going on.

So, I love, I love this country. I love Hampshire. I'm very proud. I would never live anywhere else. I'm very proud of so many elements of it, of its past, but I'm also grown up enough to admit that British people were involved in genocide in Tasmania. Like, I don't think that's, I don't think that's something that is very hard.

Those, those two ideas are not super complicated to hold in your head at the same time. Yeah. So, uh, that's, that's kind of where I am. Let's start. 

Julian: Okay. That's a good open approach. Thank you for that. One of your books contains a quotation from George Bernard Shaw, which says, we learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

I only know that actually, Dan, because I found it in your history hit, Miscellany. But do you think that's true? 

Dan: I don't think it's true, actually. I think it's one of those things that everyone complains about, we don't know if it's true. I think people usually think, what they're usually thinking about is these kind of very unfortunate repetitive streaks and strains and currents that we have in our society, like our tendency to follow charismatic or, you know, apparently charismatic leaders into war, for example.

It's very depressing. We see it now around the world at the moment. And it's, it's a, it's a fault, seems to be some kind of fault in our human makeup that we, we are, we are so beguiled by these people. And, and we repeat these mistakes, but we do learn things from history. Of course, otherwise we'd all be sitting, living in caves and, and whacking things.

We learned how to make bronze. We, we, we learned how to make iron. We learned how to create wheels. We learned the alphabet languages, and, and then we learned how to make better bridges, and we learned how to make better flying machines. And now we're on the moon and, and now, and we just diverted a comet that was, you know, not, not heading for earth.

In fact, we, you know, we diverted a comet, a comet, an asteroid that took out the dinosaurs last year. NASA were able to divert a celestial object from, its from its track, meaning that we think we could, we can. perhaps protect Earth if another object appears. That's a pretty amazing achievement for two or three hundred thousand years.

You know, dinosaurs didn't achieve that in several million decades on Earth. So I think that we do learn a lot from history, but we, there are persistent strains that are difficult. They are around, you know, around our behaviours. But, you know, we, we think that, that we think, we think that the, the pre industrial world or the sort of pre settled world was more violent than the world is today.

We, you know, we, we have developed a system of information that pipes any violent instance straight into our heads. I don't think, I don't know if we think that's very good for our mental health, but, but, you know, violent crime is falling and yet, although we all think it's rising, it's actually falling.

And we think that violent death is, is much reduced from what it would have been in a, in a pre settled society. uh, of, of nomads or hunter gatherers. So, more of us die in our beds, we live to an old age, we live much more pain free lives we would have done in previous generations, that our dentistry is far better than it would have been certainly 200 years ago.

So we learn a lot, you know, we learn a lot in all these fields. The trouble is those fields get hived off and called like medicine or engineering or, you know, oh, engineers are brilliant. They've done so well, hang on. what they've done is learn from the past and improve upon it. I mean, that's sort of history, right?

So the, the, the, the bits of history that we struggle with, the bits that we struggle with are just described as history are like conflict that, you know, that, that, but the, the bits that in which we've advanced beyond all recognition. Well, they're all described as sciences and other stuff that's sort of siloed in different places.

So I do think humans have learned a lot. We, for example, in Britain now know that slavery is both an abomination, sort of, we've worked out philosophically, but it's also deeply uneconomic. It's, it's counterproductive in every conceivable way. That's something we've learned. And that's why there aren't slaves or, you know, why we, why we're vigilant when we do come across rare examples of slavery in our society, we immediately pounce on it.

But that's why slavery is not normalised in our society because we've learned that [00:21:00] from history and we can learn other things. And I hope if you, it's been a hard decade to be optimistic, but the 1990s certainly felt like we'd, we'd learned, we'd learned to banish Great power rivalry and war as well, but now we know it turns out we haven't but but we made it You know, we may do one day And we're still working on that, but we're still trying to learn but I think it's unfair.

I think it's wrong So we don't learn anything 

Julian: That's a really interesting take that we have to view history in the round And objectively and not perhaps focus on some of the negatives that the digital media we mentioned earlier Lead us to focus on if we're not careful You can take the whole view.

One of your most remarkable experiences in recent years, surely having been present at the discovery of Shackleton's ship Endurance in the Antarctic in 2022, I believe. What was it like to actually be there when the first pictures were beamed up from the seabed? 

Dan: Well, it was a very special moment because I'd been awake for 36 hours at that point, running around the boat like a.

bear with a sore head because it took a long time. The weather was minus 20, very difficult weather conditions. We had to bring the, we're having found the sonar image of, of the wreck. We immediately had to return the drone to the surface to fit the cameras on to get an actual picture visual image of it.

And so that process took hours, 12 hours probably. So it was just completely exhausting and I was desperately waiting. And then they had to drop the drone back to the bottom 3000 meters, 10, 000 feet, which took a couple of hours. And then finally we saw the images and they were breathtaking. People were cheering and sort of weeping and there was a few tears.

Um, it was a moment of pure elation, a moment that all of us who participated in, realised would be something that would stay with us for the rest of our lives. And that's rare. I mean, that's an, it's an amazing thing to sort of witness history. And I'd never, maybe I, I, I've been lucky. I've had a sort of ringside seat sometimes when.

The Queen saluted the last First World War veterans or things like that. But this is something that you felt like you were really part of and that the rest of the world would be talking about. And at that exact moment, you knew that the only people on earth that knew it were just the people sitting in that little cabin with those monitors watching it.

And it's something that would soon be broadcast all over the world. So it felt very special indeed. As I keep saying to my wife, it felt like the most brilliant professional moment of my life. 

Julian: Yeah, it must be quite an incredible experience. I mean, it was obviously a huge operation that led to that and that there must have been a lot of investment to get to that point.

Do you think it was value for money in terms of what we learned from it? 

Dan: I mean, not when you compare with the money that we spent that could have gone to feeding the hungry. I mean, it depends how you, you, you know, is, is going to the moon value for money? Is, is the, is the Mona Lisa value for money? Is the Olympics value for money?

I mean, I don't, I don't know, um, to ask those things. But what I do know is that [00:24:00] human beings are distinguished from other animals because we do weird things. for the sake of it. That's why we climb mountains for no reason. That's why we look at art. That's why we create art. That's why we take on personal challenges.

And rather than kind of fight it, I think it's what makes the world Wonderful. The fact that they, there's a passion to dive deeper than ever before under ice, under sea ice, to go and visit the bottom of an ocean that's less known about than the planet, than the surface of the moon. An international team of experts working together against the context of the, you know, the war in Ukraine.

A Russian scientist was aboard the expedition. There were people from, there was a zu, the captain was a Zulu, uh, the first Zulu ice captain in history. There were Americans. South Americans, Europeans, Asians on that expedition. So I think it was. An incredible example of what we can achieve when we work together.

So was it value for money in a narrow sense? We came back with a photograph of a ship that sunk 120 years ago, perhaps not, but in a way as a way of inspiring, as a way of reminding us, lifting our eyes from the daily grind of the newspaper and our daily grind. And I think perhaps it does, but that's immeasurable.

Julian: Yes. And now it's been located, do you think there are likely to be future expeditions to go and investigate more? 

Dan: Possibly, I think so. I mean, if they get smaller drones, which of course they will eventually, everything will be tiny and remote, um, they can send them inside the wreck and they can look at Shackleton's cabin and it will be incredibly exciting.

Look at the, look at the, um, so called Ritz, where the, where the men used to stay in the hideout in the winter months. But it was stuck in the ice. So, and then there's a debris field around it, which needs more exploration. So I'm sure they will, perhaps. Sadly, climate change means that's more likely because there's less and less sea ice.

So it'll be easier to get to, but there's, as I understand it, nothing planned in the near future. [00:26:00] 

Julian: And what do you think is the next endurance, if you like? What is out there waiting to be discovered that we lost years ago? 

Dan: It's, it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, there's definitely, there are, there are still pharaonic tombs in ancient Egypt, which, which we, which are yet to be discovered.

Alexander the Great's tomb, uh, is, is another thing that we know is out there. Genghis Khan's tomb. So, so there are still things we, there's, there's things we know about that we haven't excavated yet, like the wonderful first empress tomb, Chincha 1D. We know where it is. It's a big, big, huge hill, pyramid hill in China, in Xi'an, outside Xi'an.

So that's there. So that will be excavated. I expect in our lifetime. and will be the most exciting archaeological excavation on earth at the time. So there are things and technology is going to make those things quicker and easier and happen in unexpected ways. So yeah, it's really exciting. 

Julian: So Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us at HistBites.

I know we've probably, you know, barely scratched the surface of the topics that we could cover with you. So perhaps we can come back and speak to you again at a future episode. It's been a real pleasure to share this episode with you. And I should just mention for our listeners that you can learn more about this episode and our others via our social media feeds or via Winchester Heritage in days.

Thank you very much, Dan. 

Dan: Thank you.

Intro: Hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode. If you would like to find out a little bit more about what we've been talking about, then please visit the website www. winchesterheritageopendays.

org Click on Hampshire HistBites and there you'll find today's show notes, as well as some links to more information. Thank you.