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Now on BBC News, Witness, with Tanya Beckett. | :00:00. | :00:27. | |
Hello, and welcome to Witness, with me Tanya Beckett, | :00:28. | :00:29. | |
here at the British library in London. | :00:30. | :00:34. | |
We've got another five witnesses who have given us a glimpse | :00:35. | :00:37. | |
This month on the programme, the Bulgarian dissident stabbed | :00:38. | :00:42. | |
with a poisoned umbrella in a London street. | :00:43. | :00:46. | |
Thousands of children flee the Spanish Civil War. | :00:47. | :00:50. | |
And a royal wedding causes uproar in Botswana. | :00:51. | :00:56. | |
But first we go back 40 years to September 1976, | :00:57. | :01:00. | |
when Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong died in Beijing, | :01:01. | :01:04. | |
starting a period of national mourning and political upheaval. | :01:05. | :01:07. | |
American Sydney Rittenberg was Mao's translator and knew him well. | :01:08. | :01:16. | |
He was so idolised, and it was so impossible to criticise him. | :01:17. | :01:21. | |
He finally convinced himself that China needed an emperor figure. | :01:22. | :01:29. | |
I think Mao before coming to power and after coming to power were two | :01:30. | :01:34. | |
quite different personalities, but he was enormously courteous. | :01:35. | :01:40. | |
He could make you forget that you were in the presence | :01:41. | :01:46. | |
He was a large man, and he had great personal dignity, | :01:47. | :01:55. | |
Jinan was the nerve centre of the entire Communist movement. | :01:56. | :02:06. | |
It was so rare in those days to have an American | :02:07. | :02:10. | |
I was fascinated by the work they were doing, and I decided to | :02:11. | :02:19. | |
stay and act as an English-language person for their radio programme. | :02:20. | :02:21. | |
I would say even of great pride and joy to be there, | :02:22. | :02:44. | |
to be part of that movement which people felt was | :02:45. | :02:46. | |
There was one American movie every week. | :02:47. | :02:55. | |
I used to go and interpret, and Mao's favourite films, | :02:56. | :03:03. | |
were Laurel and Hardy, but they loved that! | :03:04. | :03:13. | |
When Mao laughed, he laughed like a baby laughs. | :03:14. | :03:16. | |
Like, every muscle in his face was laughing. | :03:17. | :03:18. | |
I would go to the party headquarters and play Chinese gin rummy cards, | :03:19. | :03:23. | |
they would all tease each other, cuff each other around and be very | :03:24. | :03:26. | |
He would sit there, nobody would tease him or cuff him around. | :03:27. | :03:33. | |
Maybe I felt that because I did argue with him on occasion. | :03:34. | :03:43. | |
I think Mao never intended that people should die in the great | :03:44. | :03:53. | |
famine in the great leap forward, but he didn't really make it stop. | :03:54. | :04:00. | |
I think the official estimates in China run around 30 million | :04:01. | :04:03. | |
I was suddenly arrested and held in solitary confinement | :04:04. | :04:18. | |
When I heard in the prison that Mao had died, I thought this | :04:19. | :04:31. | |
was the most terrible blow that the revolution could suffer. | :04:32. | :04:38. | |
I think Mao was an extremely difficult character to analyse. | :04:39. | :04:49. | |
He could do, and did do, good things for China that nobody | :04:50. | :04:52. | |
He also did horrible things for China that nobody | :04:53. | :04:56. | |
Sydney Rittenberg still writes and lectures on Chinese politics. | :04:57. | :05:07. | |
In September 1978, London saw one of the most dramatic moments | :05:08. | :05:11. | |
of Cold War espionage when Bulgarian dissident and journalist | :05:12. | :05:16. | |
Georgi Markov was assassinated with a poisoned umbrella. | :05:17. | :05:20. | |
I remember walking into the cubicle and Georgi Markov was | :05:21. | :05:28. | |
He was hot, toxic, had a rapid pulse rate, and his temperature was up. | :05:29. | :05:40. | |
The first thing he said, "I was warned three months ago | :05:41. | :05:47. | |
that they're out to get me, and I've been poisoned by the KGB | :05:48. | :05:50. | |
and I'm going to die, and there's nothing you can do about it." | :05:51. | :05:53. | |
Markov was driving to work at the BBC. | :05:54. | :05:55. | |
He parked, as usual, below the Waterloo Bridge. | :05:56. | :05:58. | |
Markov came up the steps to the bus stop on the road above. | :05:59. | :06:01. | |
As he reached the bus stop, suddenly something happened to Markov. | :06:02. | :06:10. | |
He suddenly felt a sharp stabbing at the back of his right thigh, | :06:11. | :06:14. | |
and he looked around, expecting the person behind him | :06:15. | :06:16. | |
to apologise for prodding him with an umbrella. | :06:17. | :06:19. | |
Instead of which, the man hailed a taxi. | :06:20. | :06:27. | |
Mr Markov finished his shift and it wasn't until late that | :06:28. | :06:30. | |
night at his home in Clapham that he developed a high fever. | :06:31. | :06:34. | |
When I examined him systematically, the only thing I could find | :06:35. | :06:37. | |
was on the back of his thigh he had perhaps a six centimetre diameter | :06:38. | :06:44. | |
swollen area with about a one-to-two millimetres central puncture mark. | :06:45. | :06:50. | |
I thought, I'd best phone Scotland Yard Special Branch | :06:51. | :06:53. | |
because they're the sort of people who deal with defectors. | :06:54. | :06:56. | |
His own room at the BBC Bulgarian service was used | :06:57. | :06:58. | |
by anti-terrorist squad detectives investigating the murder. | :06:59. | :07:03. | |
I thought, it can't be cyanide, that would kill you too quickly. | :07:04. | :07:07. | |
It can't be thallium or arsenic, that's too slow. | :07:08. | :07:10. | |
It had to be a toxin, and if it was a toxin, | :07:11. | :07:12. | |
So I then went home and my wife said, "You should read | :07:13. | :07:17. | |
She had just read a book called The House Of The Lurking Death, | :07:18. | :07:27. | |
Now, I don't think that this was an intuitive diagnosis, | :07:28. | :07:31. | |
it was just because of the book she'd read at the time, | :07:32. | :07:34. | |
but of course the odd thing was that she was proven right, | :07:35. | :07:37. | |
Georgi's heart had started giving out, and I just saw | :07:38. | :08:02. | |
the heart machine, I saw it die away, and shortly | :08:03. | :08:04. | |
I remember the pathologist taking a segment of site issue, | :08:05. | :08:09. | |
As this was being handled, a very small metallic | :08:10. | :08:13. | |
It rolled onto the table and they then looked at it under | :08:14. | :08:17. | |
a microscope and realised it was actually a very round, | :08:18. | :08:19. | |
circular, tiny little ball, about just under two millimetres | :08:20. | :08:21. | |
in diameter, and that it had holes in it. | :08:22. | :08:24. | |
And obviously something could have been contained in those holes. | :08:25. | :08:26. | |
They decided almost straight away that this was going to be ricin. | :08:27. | :08:29. | |
It is an ideal poison because it is incredibly toxic. | :08:30. | :08:31. | |
It's strange that you encounter one patient so early on in one's | :08:32. | :08:34. | |
career that actually changes your entire life. | :08:35. | :08:36. | |
All I wanted to be was a forensic pathologist. | :08:37. | :08:41. | |
I wanted to be someone who looked at dead bodies, looked | :08:42. | :08:45. | |
at laboratory findings and decided why people died. | :08:46. | :08:50. | |
And this was the first patient that I'm trying | :08:51. | :08:52. | |
desperately to keep alive, and failing, and realising that, | :08:53. | :08:57. | |
actually, I didn't want to find out why people died, | :08:58. | :09:02. | |
The investigation into the killing of Georgi Markov is still open. | :09:03. | :09:08. | |
Now to America, where in September 1971 a prison riot at Attica | :09:09. | :09:14. | |
Correctional Facility ended in the deaths of 39 people | :09:15. | :09:20. | |
after inmates took prison guards hostage in protest at what they saw | :09:21. | :09:23. | |
Carlos Roesch was serving 35 years for robbery. | :09:24. | :09:30. | |
This film contains offensive language and upsetting footage. | :09:31. | :09:45. | |
I was sentenced to Attica for robbery in 1966. | :09:46. | :09:52. | |
From the moment I got there, I was conscious of racial prejudice. | :09:53. | :10:11. | |
They had no qualms about calling you 'not or'. | :10:12. | :10:23. | |
We heard that a prisoner was killed by guards in another prison. | :10:24. | :10:33. | |
Everybody felt like, if they did it to this guy... | :10:34. | :10:38. | |
It wasn't planned, it was spontaneous. | :10:39. | :10:57. | |
I came out of the shower and everything was different. | :10:58. | :10:59. | |
I'm naked, I'm soaking wet, I'm looking around, | :11:00. | :11:05. | |
People were crazy, and I got crazy with them. | :11:06. | :11:11. | |
It was just total chaos, nobody in control. | :11:12. | :11:20. | |
You can make out the Molotov cocktails sitting on the | :11:21. | :11:22. | |
ramp between the two chairs in the barricade. | :11:23. | :11:24. | |
We'd seen some guards from the metal shop, | :11:25. | :11:26. | |
We urgently demand immediate negotiations... | :11:27. | :11:34. | |
Over a course of about two or three days, we tried to negotiate | :11:35. | :11:38. | |
with the authorities, but it was all a game. | :11:39. | :11:41. | |
It wasn't really a negotiation, it was like make-believe. | :11:42. | :11:53. | |
We're on the roof of A-block, waiting for the assault to begin. | :11:54. | :12:11. | |
The hostages are on the catwalks with knives at their throats. | :12:12. | :12:14. | |
When they stormed the prison, they came in dropping | :12:15. | :12:17. | |
I remember guys getting shot to pieces. | :12:18. | :12:52. | |
I saw a guy, they took his head off, blood was pouring out | :12:53. | :12:58. | |
I had nightmares like you wouldn't believe. | :12:59. | :13:04. | |
It was a very defining moment in my life. | :13:05. | :13:26. | |
It changed me, because I realised how precious life is. | :13:27. | :13:33. | |
Carlos eventually left prison in 1995 and now lives in New York. | :13:34. | :13:39. | |
Remember, you can watch Witness every month on the BBC News Channel, | :13:40. | :13:43. | |
or you can catch up on all of our films along with more | :13:44. | :13:47. | |
than 1000 radio programmes in our online archive. | :13:48. | :13:55. | |
Now, we're going back to the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War. | :13:56. | :14:00. | |
When thousands of children from the Basque country | :14:01. | :14:02. | |
Emilio Martinez was just seven years old when he boarded a ship | :14:03. | :14:11. | |
May 1937, 4000 children packed in there, escaping from the Spanish | :14:12. | :14:26. | |
I remember as a child the Civil War, every day we would see airplanes | :14:27. | :14:46. | |
flying over the hill just on their way to Bilbao, | :14:47. | :14:54. | |
because we lived just outside Bilbao in a little village | :14:55. | :14:57. | |
in the Basque country, and of course we were being bombed. | :14:58. | :14:59. | |
When we were evacuated, my brother was 11, just 11, | :15:00. | :15:02. | |
and I was just seven years and one week. | :15:03. | :15:04. | |
We were taken to the boat by my father, and he just went off | :15:05. | :15:07. | |
There simply wasn't the space - we were lying on the floor, | :15:08. | :15:21. | |
rolling about being sick, we encountered a storm. | :15:22. | :15:24. | |
When we arrived at Southampton, the quayside was quite full | :15:25. | :15:42. | |
When we arrived at Southampton, the quayside was quite full of people | :15:43. | :15:48. | |
greeting us. We were sent on double-decker buses from the boat to | :15:49. | :15:53. | |
the camp just outside Southampton. The camp is being run almost | :15:54. | :15:57. | |
entirely by voluntary workers helped by gifts from every corner of | :15:58. | :16:01. | |
Britain. A Baker sending 50 loaves of bread each week and employees of | :16:02. | :16:06. | |
the wash houses are working over the weekend to do the camp laundry free. | :16:07. | :16:14. | |
They gave us an incredible degree of support. But Southampton was only a | :16:15. | :16:23. | |
temporary measure. We were sent to different Spanish children's | :16:24. | :16:27. | |
colonies or homes over the country, from one place to another to | :16:28. | :16:31. | |
another, constantly on the move. I was quite bewildered by all this, | :16:32. | :16:38. | |
sometimes you were separated from your friends and you didn't know | :16:39. | :16:47. | |
why. The Civil War finished on April one, 1939, so gradually we were | :16:48. | :16:55. | |
being repatriated. In the case of my brother and myself, the Red Cross | :16:56. | :16:59. | |
had managed to contact my mother in Spain, and she assured them she | :17:00. | :17:05. | |
couldn't have us back because my father was in prison, she had | :17:06. | :17:12. | |
another five children, they were absolutely starving and destitute, | :17:13. | :17:15. | |
so my brother and I remained in England. To try to make a life for | :17:16. | :17:27. | |
ourselves. I was a teacher for 29 years, but basically I'm a craftsman | :17:28. | :17:32. | |
by birth and I enjoy working, creating things. The experience of | :17:33. | :17:43. | |
being a refugee totally affected me. The reception and the solidarity of | :17:44. | :17:47. | |
the British people was fantastic. It has made me a more worthy human | :17:48. | :17:56. | |
being, and I have always felt a sense of duty to society. It hasn't | :17:57. | :18:01. | |
been easy, but it has been very fulfilling. I have had a wonderful | :18:02. | :18:05. | |
life. Emiliano Martinez still lives in | :18:06. | :18:10. | |
London. And now for our final film this month, we are going back to | :18:11. | :18:15. | |
September 1948, when an African king in waiting lost his title for | :18:16. | :18:22. | |
marrying a white woman. He was due to become a chief in what is now | :18:23. | :18:27. | |
Botswana when he met with Williams when studying in London. Her sister | :18:28. | :18:33. | |
Muriel tells the tale. I never met an African until I went | :18:34. | :18:40. | |
to this missionary conference. I went up to dinner to the table of | :18:41. | :18:50. | |
Seretse Khama. He was the chief of the tribe, which is like a king. We | :18:51. | :18:54. | |
became good friends and I used to go up every Saturday night. My sister | :18:55. | :18:58. | |
Ruth did not have anything to do on Saturday night so I asked if she | :18:59. | :19:02. | |
would like to come with it. We met through my sister, indirectly | :19:03. | :19:05. | |
through the London missionary Society. They clicked from the word | :19:06. | :19:13. | |
go. You get this attraction, it is impossible to describe but it is | :19:14. | :19:19. | |
just there. We like the same type of music, jazz, Ella Fitzgerald. It was | :19:20. | :19:24. | |
amazing how they had so much in common with such different | :19:25. | :19:29. | |
backgrounds. In those days, the racial situation in London was not | :19:30. | :19:34. | |
very good. White and black did not go out together, especially a white | :19:35. | :19:41. | |
girl with a black man. We knew that we were going to upset our immediate | :19:42. | :19:45. | |
families but at the same time we didn't want to be apart. I think she | :19:46. | :19:51. | |
was very brave, but so was he. His father had died when he was very | :19:52. | :19:54. | |
young and he was brought up by his uncle. He was very much against the | :19:55. | :19:58. | |
marriage and he thought he would be letting the tribe down and you could | :19:59. | :20:03. | |
not have a cheap with a white bride. They wanted to be married in the | :20:04. | :20:11. | |
Anglican Church. Unfortunately, his uncle broke to the society to stop | :20:12. | :20:15. | |
the wedding and they broke to the Bishop of London and he telephoned | :20:16. | :20:18. | |
the vicar, warning of the marriage, just saying he wasn't to marry them. | :20:19. | :20:27. | |
Said that was the Saturday. On Monday morning, Seretse went to a | :20:28. | :20:30. | |
registry office, bought a special licence and on the Wednesday morning | :20:31. | :20:35. | |
at 9am they arranged to get married. We were stubborn but other people | :20:36. | :20:45. | |
were equally stubborn. It was discussed in parliament, Churchill | :20:46. | :20:47. | |
said they were very brave couple, even though he didn't approve of the | :20:48. | :20:51. | |
marriage. The British Government sent out a team to look under | :20:52. | :21:05. | |
Seretse being bitchy. -- being the chief. They had a lot of protests | :21:06. | :21:14. | |
from South Africa. They said, we don't approve of a coloured couple | :21:15. | :21:20. | |
being in such a prominent position, said the British Government exiled | :21:21. | :21:24. | |
Seretse, even though the committee that went down there couldn't find | :21:25. | :21:27. | |
anything wrong with the marriage. Had we not had the aggregate would | :21:28. | :21:33. | |
have been better but I think just the fact people were trying to | :21:34. | :21:36. | |
separators, even after we married they were still trying to separate | :21:37. | :21:40. | |
us, someone described it as trying to split the atom. It was news all | :21:41. | :21:44. | |
over the world, I just couldn't believe it was me and my family, and | :21:45. | :21:48. | |
with, and we were living through this. In six years, the British | :21:49. | :21:53. | |
Government allowed Seretse to return to his homeland. At last, the ban is | :21:54. | :22:01. | |
lifted. When Seretse was setting up the political party, he travelled | :22:02. | :22:05. | |
all over Botswana. One of these times the car broke down so Ruth had | :22:06. | :22:12. | |
had three months training in car maintenance, so she got out and fix | :22:13. | :22:17. | |
the car. He said, I certainly married the right woman! | :22:18. | :22:21. | |
Muriel William Sanderson died last year. Seretse Khama became | :22:22. | :22:25. | |
Botswana's first elected president after independence in 1966. His and | :22:26. | :22:33. | |
Ruth's son, Ian, is president today. That is all from Witness this month | :22:34. | :22:37. | |
here at the British library but we will be back next month with another | :22:38. | :22:41. | |
round-up of history. Thanks for joining me, and Bromley and the rest | :22:42. | :22:43. | |
of the goodbye. That afternoon. We have had | :22:44. | :23:13. | |
virtually every variety of autumn weather so far today. Certainly some | :23:14. | :23:15. | |
heavy | :23:16. | :23:16. |