Episode 3 Invasion! with Sam Willis

This is the story of the invasions of the British Isles.

Whoa!

It's the story of the enemies we feared,

it's the story of the fear of invasion itself,

and of the idea that we Britons are somehow unique.

There have been battles for Britain for millennia,

from weapons like these Hurricanes

to sticks and stone axes.

Invasions come in many forms -

mass migration,

immigrants bringing ideas and religions,

all have shaped Britain and made it what it is -

yet we love to believe in the idea of Britain as an island fortress.

Shakespeare wrote of this royal throne of kings,

this scepter'd isle.

In Royal Britannia, we've never been defeated.

Churchill called us the island race.

It's a story we all tell ourselves,

but we all descend from people who came here from elsewhere,

for one reason or another.

Since the 1600s, there have been bloody battles,

invasions repelled on the beaches,

and even one planned invasion by balloon.

In this, my final exploration of invasions,

I'm going to be exploring the theme of fact and fear around invaders.

It's been a feature of our isles for millennia,

but more than ever in the last few centuries.

I'm interested in how we view invasion,

what we fear,

and how we have depicted it throughout our history.

Invasions aren't always hostile or damaging.

They can be influxes of people or ideas,

or religions that change the way we are.

Invasions can also give us romantic heroes,

like the leader of a planned invasion of England in 1745.

His name was Bonnie Prince Charlie.

His daring exploits were to fuel generations

of myths and romantic stories.

Are you from the continent?

-Yes, from the continent.

-A citizen of Edinburgh, maybe?

I meant the continent of Europe.

I meant the continent of Scotland.

-Where's your country?

-I'm looking at it for the first time.

Like this 1948 film starring a handsome six-foot David Niven.

My lord, would you read my commission

while we set up the standard?

But the reality was that Bonnie Prince Charlie was only 5'4".

He was a half Scots Italian,

fighting to restore his Catholic Stuart family back to the throne.

With some French help,

Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in the Highlands in the summer of 1745.

He quickly raised an army of loyal clansmen,

with the intention of invading England.

These invading forces headed south,

gathering support as they went.

It appeared they couldn't put a foot wrong.

Carlisle,

Lancaster,

Manchester -

all these cities fell to the Jacobites in quick succession.

As Bonnie Prince Charlie's Highland army marched south towards London,

invasion fever gripped Britain.

The closer the kilt-clad Jacobites got to the capital,

the more nervous was the reaction.

There was a run on the banks,

shutters were drawn and pubs were shut.

At this crucial moment, in Drury Lane theatres,

people began to sing a rallying cry

in the face of the Catholic invaders, God Save The King.

This is the exact moment when the British National anthem began.

By December 1745,

Bonnie Prince Charlie's band of Jacobites

had got as far south as Derby.

But then, the invasion stalled.

Surrounded on both sides by the Hanoverians,

his military council voted to head back to Scotland.

The government decided this rebel army would have to be crushed.

The scene was set for a confrontation

on a desolate field near Inverness.

On the morning of the 16th of April 1746,

the Battle of Culloden began.

But this wasn't Scotland versus England.

More Scots fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie

on the government's side than for him.

This was Protestant lowlander versus Catholic highlander,

but it was also highlander versus highlander,

who fought to settle ancient tribal feuds.

Fire!

This was clan, civil and religious war,

a conflict dating back to

Henry VIII's split from Rome and his title - defender of the faith.

The battle was bloody and brutal.

The action was depicted with shocking realism

in this ground-breaking 1964 BBC drama documentary.

On barren Culloden moor,

the formidable fighting qualities of the Highlanders

were negated by an incompetent battle plan,

which left them exposed to superior government artillery.

The Jacobites didn't stand a chance.

Against the superior firepower of government guns,

over 1,200 of them were left slaughtered in the heather.

The government only lost around 50 men.

The Battle of Culloden has entered into the collective consciousness.

Defeated and dejected,

the would-be Charles the Third fled across the Highlands,

and over the sea to Skye, disguised as a woman.

What are you doing out?

David Niven's film gives us the romantic legend in its full glory.

Nice cloak!

But the reality was,

when Bonnie Prince Charlie made it back to Italy,

he resumed an unfulfilling life in exile.

Bonnie Prince Charlie was a broken man.

Invited by the French to figurehead an invasion in 1759,

he turned up to a secret meeting in Paris late and drunk.

He was dropped, as a liability.

The Bonnie Prince saw out the rest of his days

getting fatter and drunker on the Continent.

Invasions don't have to be about battles and bombs,

and landings on our coast,

they can be about waves of people, waves of ideas,

that fundamentally change who we are.

For hundreds of years, France was England's greatest foe.

But this relationship with our Gallic cousins

has always been ambivalent.

While skirmishing and repelling invasion,

the English had also been welcoming French citizens

into their towns and cities.

The great British trait for tolerance has meant that,

throughout our history,

we've been an attractive destination for outsiders fleeing persecution.

One French group who suffered repeated persecution

under the Catholic Bourbon Dynasty

was a Protestant sect known as the Huguenots.

Up to one million French Huguenots fled to Protestant countries -

around 50,000 of them came to live in England.

Many were highly skilled artisans

who brought with them a refined culture.

The Huguenot invasion created

fashion like this extraordinary silk dress.

Soon it was said that nothing vends without a Gaelic name.

Even the word vending itself is French.

Many Huguenots settled in the Spitalfields area of east London,

selling their finery.

They lived in grand town houses.

George Foutris, whose family had come to Britain

from France a generation before,

listed four reasons why immigrants should come to Britain.

First, it was a temperate and obliging land.

Second, the law offered some protection to the individual.

Third, it was a land of opportunity.

And fourth, there was religious sanctuary.

But, just like today, the reaction to these foreigners was mixed.

Some saw the value of immigration to economy and culture

and others disagreed.

A satirist wrote in 1691, "The nation,

"it is almost quite undone by Frenchmen that do it daily overrun".

The Huguenots were to have a huge impact

and on more than just silk dresses.

They also made clocks.

A community of Huguenots watchmakers

established in the Blackfriars area of London and,

with the various conflicts in Europe,

the influx of these craftsmen

contributed hugely to an extraordinary industry.

And here we had very highly skilled people

bringing new skills into London and then,

of course, training local people.

Their contribution to the London clock and watch trade

is immeasurable.

Do you think they were welcomed in?

That's a good question.

Were they welcomed in?

I don't think there was much resistance.

In the early days of the migrations,

there was no established clock and watch trade,

so there was no ill feeling.

In the 1690s,

you do see a lot of Huguenots gaining freedom

of the Worshipful Company of clockmakers, for example,

so that they have the right to trade within the city limits of London.

We have Huguenot influence to thank for this beautiful object.

And it was ground-breaking.

In order to know your longitude at sea,

you need to measure the midday sun against a clock.

The Holy Grail of maritime technology was an accurate clock.

If a ship's clock was just four minutes fast or slow,

a ship could find itself as much as 70 miles off-course.

This was achieved in 1755,

when John Harrison designed a ship's chronometer,

which lost just five seconds in six weeks,

and it allowed extraordinary feats of pinpoint navigation,

such as Cook's expeditions to Australia.

John Harrison also designed this small timepiece.

Can you just summarise how important this watch was?

This watch is of tremendous significance

in terms of the history of navigation and cartography.

This really opened up the door, made navigating at sea safer,

and it also enabled mariners to make accurate maps.

I suppose, when we look at this watch,

there are some key features that establish it

as being at the pinnacle of quality watchmaking.

This watch has a rewind mechanism,

which operates on this every 7.5 seconds.

-Wow!

-And if you think about Cook's second voyage,

this rewind mechanism would have activated nearly 13 million times

during that voyage and did so unerringly.

13 million?

-13 million.

-That's absolutely extraordinary.

It's what genius looks like, isn't it?

Yes, if you could make genius, it's here in this watch.

Far from being an insular, inward nation,

we've always been open to cultural influences from all over Europe.

Here in Tate Britain,

some of the greatest work from the 18th century was by foreigners.

Philippe Mercier, Huguenot.

Anthony van Dyck, who transformed British portraiture, Flemish.

Jan Siberechts, the founder of British landscape painting,

from the Netherlands.

These foreign artists were welcomed into Britain

for their sophistication

and the work they produced was highly influential.

But, while we were celebrating the work of Europeans,

we were still always fearful that they might invade.

In 1789, France was turned upside down by a violent revolution.

The monarchy was abolished in favour of the concepts of liberty,

fraternity and equality.

During the early years of the revolution,

the British may have felt that French invasion threats

were a thing of the past.

Things could not have been further from the truth.

Within four years, France had declared war on Britain.

And then, in 1797, a French army did actually land on British soil.

It's a little-known footnote in the history of our invasions,

involving a middle-aged woman,

a revolutionary Irish-American commander,

some extremely incompetent French soldiers and this,

a pitchfork. You could have your eye out with that.

As you've probably guessed by now,

this invasion was more farcical than fatal.

It took place here, in the town of Fishguard,

on the south-west coast of Wales.

The French plan centred on Ireland.

They wanted to ferment a revolution there and needed some diversionary

forces to land in England first.

The original target had been Bristol,

but strong winds blew the French ships off course to Wales.

On the 22nd of February,

they landed in a rocky bay three miles north-west of Fishguard.

The French force began to make their way inland.

You might wonder why they chose to land

on the north Pembrokeshire coast in February.

It's about as inhospitable as it gets.

But in one sense, it was a stroke of genius.

The local Fishguard volunteer force was woefully unprepared and

undermanned, and their landing caused a panic.

The French force was sizeable,

around 1,500 men, who were well-armed.

The Fishguard defence force was pitiful in comparison,

amounting to just a couple of hundred men.

The town had just three rounds of ammunition.

Unsurprisingly, the first one that they fired was a blank.

To petrified locals,

it must have felt that these French marauders

could easily take their town.

The odds looked to be stacked against them.

Leading the invasion force was not a Frenchman,

but an Irish-American mercenary, Colonel William Tate.

Now, he suffered two major disadvantages.

The first was that he didn't speak French

and the second was that his soldiers left a lot to be desired,

and I mean a lot.

Almost half the invading force was made up

of the dregs of the French army.

There were more ex-convicts and deserters

than properly trained soldiers.

Not surprisingly, they didn't have much of an attack plan.

They seemed to be more interested in inebriation than invasion.

Some of these jailbirds got drunk on wine and port

that a local farmer had recently salvaged from a shipwreck.

Others came in here to the beautiful local church

of Saint Gwyndaf and began to wreak havoc.

They destroyed the church records

and tore apart the Bible,

presumably to find fuel for a fire to keep warm.

The locals grew fearful of these French invaders running amok,

especially the women, who bravely took matters into their own hands.

Legend has it that a 47-year-old spinster, Jemima Nicholas,

single-handedly arrested 12 Frenchmen

with nothing more than a pitchfork like this.

This embarrassing encounter convinced Colonel Tate

that his invasion was a lost cause.

Can I have a pint of this, please?

And, within just one day,

he decided to negotiate a conditional surrender.

At 9:00pm on the 23rd of February,

he sent a two-man French delegation to this building,

which is now the Royal Oak pub,

and they outlined their terms

in a letter they delivered to the head of the Pembroke Yeomanry,

Lord Cawdor.

Cawdor sent this amazing piece of bluff in response.

"Sir, the superiority of the force under my command,

"which is hourly increasing,

"must prevent my treating upon any terms,

"short of your surrendering your whole force."

Wow.

The French fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

The next day, Welsh soldiers lined up on the beach

and it also looked as if they were lining up on the cliffs behind me,

but, in actual fact, they were Welsh women wearing their traditional

red shawls and black hats,

and apparently they looked like soldiers to Tate.

Really? Do I look like soldier?

Or a woman?

Tate decided to surrender forthwith,

and by lunchtime he and his ragtag army were all in custody.

The Battle of Fishguard has entered into local folklore.

It's immortalised in this 13-metre-long tapestry,

which was produced to commemorate the 200th anniversary.

This is amazing.

Frances Chivers was one of the stitchers.

Frances, I'm very excited.

I've been wanting to see this from the moment I heard about it.

-Who made it?

-70 local people.

How long did it take to make?

From the original idea, four years.

Two years to design and research

because things like uniform, ships' rigging,

even the cows in the field, had to be...

What did they have? They didn't have Friesians, so what did they have?

And then two years to actually do the stitching.

Now I understand that you worked on this particular bit here.

I did this part and I did the calf.

What's this scene telling us?

People were fed up because the French came along,

invaded the farmhouses and took poultry,

and you can see here they are trying to take the calf to feed themselves,

and they were defending their property.

I'm not sure that it was a political gesture.

It was more life and death, really, for food.

-And they fought back.

-Well, they were poor,

they couldn't afford to lose their stuff.

There's a very interesting parallel between

the women nowadays stitching this

and the role of the women in the past, during the event.

What was it about this part of Wales that led to women having such an

-important role?

-I think it was a very matriarchal society, actually.

It was a fishing community, and people went further afield too,

so I think very often the men were away, the women had to run it.

The tapestry shows the Battle of Fishguard,

in all its farcical detail, and I love it.

I think this is the best example of a community

engaging with history that I have ever seen.

It's creative, it's thoughtful, it's entertaining, it's skilful.

It really is wonderful,

and you should all come to Fishguard to see it.

We now know that the Battle of Fishguard

was the last ever invasion of foreign troops

on the British mainland,

but people at the time had no idea

that this would be our last land battle

with post-Revolutionary France.

When Napoleon took over as Emperor in 1804,

our levels of invasion paranoia reached a peak.

He soon amassed an army near the Channel.

The strategic issue was the same as it always had been -

how to cross the English Channel.

But there was one option that would bypass the sea

and the Royal Navy altogether.

Rumours spread in Britain that the next French invasion

would be achieved by a very new and strange technology.

A fleet of balloons.

-Can I get in?

-You can. Hop in.

This is a new experience for me.

I've never been in a balloon before.

I've been sort of struck dumb by just how beautiful this is.

It's completely silent.

There is a bit of ticking from up here,

but, because you're going with the wind, there's no wind noise.

What's really interesting is that, as soon as you're airborne,

covering distance seems completely plausible.

The French certainly seemed to think so.

In 1799,

the French army formed a special Balloon Corps

to take advantage of new technology which had been around since 1783.

And with a capable and cunning enemy,

armed with the latest technology,

it sent the British into paroxysms of acute invasion mania.

The thought of hundreds of French soldiers

heading across the Channel in sinister balloons

must have been terrifying for the southern English.

In contemporary cartoons, they are huge and powerful,

but was invasion by balloon actually possible?

It's definitely possible, but it's unlikely.

You need the right sort of wind direction

and the right sort of wind speed.

If it's too fast, you won't be able to take off.

The balloon can only carry a certain amount of weight,

so you might struggle to get whatever ammunition, animals,

whatever you need to take across to

-further your campaign.

-How many do you reckon

Napoleon would have got in his invasion balloons?

It's normally done by weight, so maybe 24 people,

for a really big balloon,

but that's by modern-day standards.

The balloons back then were taking two, three,

maybe four people at the most.

Yeah, and it would've be terrifying, wouldn't it?

There's so many unknowns.

The first people that went across the Channel did it in 1785 -

only 18 months after the very first balloon flight.

They ended up taking off their clothes to reduce the weight,

so they could make it over on to dry land on the other side.

Right, so you arrive naked?

Just in their boxers, yes, pretty much, yes!

Ironically, this planned balloon invasion

was inadvertently funded from Britain.

Napoleon had raised 15 million francs for his invasion chest

by selling Louisiana to the Americans,

and the Americans had raised the money by borrowing it from Barings,

a British bank.

Even though we were obliquely funding

Napoleon's ambitious invasion plan, it never actually came to fruition.

Later, historians viewed the plan as a French fantasy

and I tend to agree.

Getting ready to land, it's the sketchiest

bit of this entire operation.

We've got some livestock below us.

We're up high now, going over the top of those,

and then we've got some land in front of us, that's known to us,

that we're going to descend down and hopefully land on.

My version of a landing plan is that there is a high-speed railway line

down here next to a motorway on our left.

On our right is the sea, and between that and that are loads of houses.

And there's a very small green field we're going to try and land in!

So it's the top field as you come out of woods

from Cedar Valley Golf Club.

I have no idea how the French could have possibly made this work.

Napoleon's invasion plans came down to earth with a bump.

But in Britain, invasion paranoia remained.

After abandoning the balloon plan,

Napoleon focused on sea warfare with Britain.

At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805,

the French and Spanish were defeated

in one of our greatest ever naval victories.

The hope was that the valiant efforts of Lord Nelson

had removed the threat of a French invasion for good.

In 1844,

Trafalgar Square was completed as the monument to the victory

that secured Britain from sea invasion.

This isn't jingoism, it's a vast national sigh of relief.

In 1851, Napoleon's nephew, Louis Napoleon,

declared himself emperor in a coup d'etat.

The threat of invasion,

which had been so real under the old Napoleon,

had retreated from British consciousness.

But was this new Napoleon up to the same old tricks?

There's no evidence of Louis Napoleon

ever seriously wanting invade Britain,

but it was still a major preoccupation of the British.

A series of coastal defences was constructed, at great cost,

to guard against any future invasion,

like the ones here in Dover, Kent.

These are some of the most impressive defensive structures

ever built in Britain,

particularly this part, which became known as the Drop Redoubt.

Comprising of ditches, forts and dry moats,

it was designed to protect against both sea and land attack.

Some thought it was a waste of money and would never be needed.

The Drop Redoubt drew stinging contempt

from politician William Cobbett,

who saw such a waste in all of these bricks,

which he believed should have been used to build workers' houses.

He wrote,

"This is perhaps the only set of fortifications

"in the world ever famed for mere hiding.

"There is no appearance of any intention to annoy an enemy.

"It is a parcel of holes made in a hill

"to hide Englishmen from Frenchmen."

On the outside, it's a very imposing structure.

But I think the most interesting area actually lies below ground,

where there's a mysterious subterranean spiral stairwell.

Oh!

That is the architecture of invasion paranoia.

This is the grand shaft.

It ascends 140 feet,

it contains 480 steps,

and it's not one staircase, but three,

so it allows three separate military units to ascend or descend

without getting in each other's way.

In the absence of an actual invasion,

this magnificent thing became a parody of military life.

The Drop Redoubt is yet another example

of our deep-seated fear of invasion

and the lengths we've gone to to combat it.

The greatest contribution the grand shaft made was to the economy of

Dover, with soldiers descending to spend all of their money

in the pubs and brothels of Snargate Street.

They even built cells at the entrance to lock up drunk soldiers.

These soldiers didn't, in fact, need to be sober or ready for action

because, by 1871, the French threat of invasion had receded.

France was defeated on another front in the Franco-Prussian War.

And ironically, Louis Napoleon fled to tolerant Britain,

where he sought exile in a little cottage in Chislehurst, in Kent,

where he lived until he died in 1873.

And this fortification,

built to guard against a French invasion that never came,

became a vast but curiously beautiful white elephant.

Our fear of invasion didn't just cause us

to build remarkable defensive edifices,

it also inspired a genre of fiction which explored that paranoia.

And an expert in this genre is the academic - Christian Melby.

Christian, what is invasion literature?

Invasion literature is, quite simply,

literature that presents Britain as invaded by a foreign enemy.

Why do you think it is interesting?

It's interesting because it tells a lot about British society,

and British fears, hopes and ideas

about the outside world and themselves.

When did it come about?

It comes about in 1871, so the birth date of this form of literature.

It's a guy called Lieutenant Colonel George Tompkyns Chesney.

He writes a story called the Battle of Dorking.

It publishes in Blackwood's Magazine and it becomes

an immediate and quite surprising success.

Is it about people invading Dorking?

It's about a German army landing in the south of England,

and marching on London, and the ill-prepared,

scattered British forces meeting them near Dorking,

and then gets defeated.

It's amazing. I've never heard of this literary theme

of the paranoia of invasion.

Well, quite a few people might have heard about it

without even thinking it is an invasion scare genre.

I mean, a lot of people will have read HG Wells' War of the Worlds and

Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands,

which I believe it is still in print,

which is a very popular adventure story.

But that is belonging to the genre.

This 1979 film, based on the 1903 book, Riddle of the Sands,

is a classic boys' own adventure.

My God.

I'm going.

Oh, no, it has to be me.

We knew that all the time.

Frankly, your German is not up to this.

The heroes uncover a German plot to attack Chatham in Kent.

Is it a uniquely British thing, invasion literature?

It gets adopted by other countries, to certain extents.

It gets translated into foreign languages,

but it is a British invention

and it is in Britain that it is the most popular.

Do you think the fact that, because Britain is an island,

we're paranoid about invasion?

I think that's a very good way of putting it.

Not necessarily paranoid,

but it's such a powerful way of self-identifying.

Britain is an island,

but if it gets invaded,

all of a sudden the continent comes to us, in a way.

So, yeah, I think that's one of the reasons why

this literature is so resonant.

How does the changing nature of Britain's enemies

become reflected in invasion literature?

Throughout the 19th century, it's usually France -

France in alliance with Russia.

And then, as the Edwardian period progresses,

-it's clear that it's Germany that is the big enemy.

-Yeah.

During the first decade of the 20th century,

storm clouds were gathering on the horizon.

The next threat we faced played to some of our deepest fears

and it was, indeed, from Germany.

The First World War was like nothing that came before it.

There were horrors on the battlefield,

but the technology was now there for horrors

to come from the sky as well.

Some people were so frightened of an aerial attack

that they built their own shelters,

like this one in south London.

Our long-held fear of an aerial invasion

was finally realised on the 31st of May, 1915...

..when the first ever Zeppelin air attack took place over London.

Two years after this,

we faced an even more significant aerial bombardment.

Our first ever from an actual aeroplane.

On the 25th of May, 1917,

23 Gotha bombers headed for London.

Each Gotha carried a 300kg payload

of these 12.5kg bombs.

Now, it's pretty easy technology.

You switch it to fire,

hang it over the other side

and drop it.

But the capital was shrouded in mist,

so the Gotha switched targets to the seaside town of Folkestone.

In Tontine Street,

a large queue for potatoes had formed

outside Stokes Brothers greengrocers,

when out of the sky fell a bomb from a Gotha and killed 60 people.

Folkestone was an easy target.

The town had no air raid warning system

and no anti-aircraft guns.

Men, women and children were killed.

This savage, unannounced attack

provoked a furious response among the public.

In First World War Britain,

anti-German feeling ran high.

German immigrants had their shop windows broken,

people of German ancestry were interned.

Even German dogs were not safe, as this propaganda postcard shows.

In Graham Greene's autobiography,

in which he recalls being a child during the First World War,

he writes about a Dachshund being stoned in Berkhamsted.

This is Fritz. You wouldn't want to hurt him, would you?

During the 1920s and '30s,

the threat of another war always hung in the air.

A new invasion of British airspace seemed imminent.

HG Wells grimly predicted it in his 1936 film The Things To Come.

We live in interesting,

exciting and anxious times.

Wells was a heavyweight science-fiction writer

and he too saw the potential of tapping into our fear of invasion.

Here they are. Listen!

They're coming already!

The story foresaw a global war as early as 1940,

after which these strange-looking planes ruled the skies.

Three years after the film's release,

HG Wells' prediction was becoming more likely.

Europe was teetering on the edge of a war once more.

And technological advances meant that

aerial bombardment would be catastrophic.

Advocates of strategic bombing argued

that the bomber would always get through,

so all over Britain there was a frenzy of air raid shelter building,

from those that would hold hundreds of people

to ones like this, which would hold just one.

Below this park, in Ramsgate in Kent,

I'm going to explore one of the most remarkable underground shelters,

created to defend ourselves from invasion.

During the First World War, Ramsgate was bombed in the Zeppelin raids.

A town planner and the Mayor

then got together and vowed to protect the people of Ramsgate

if anything like it would happen again.

Now, this is just one of 16 entrances

to the most extraordinary system of tunnels

that exists beneath the town.

You won't believe what's down here.

Through this Ramsgate rock, for nine months,

a squad of men tunnelled for three miles.

This was one of the largest systems of underground shelters ever built.

It could house up to 35,000 people

and is a labyrinth of tunnels six-foot wide and seven-foot high.

Nowadays, it's an evocative and haunting place.

Look at this. "I don't want to die in here".

I don't want to die in here.

Look, one of my relatives, the legendary Dave Willis.

What a boy he was!

Now, extraordinary places like this have extraordinary stories

and I'm about to meet Brian Woodland,

who is going to tell me his.

-Brian.

-Hello, Sam.

-How you doing?

-Nice to meet you.

What an amazing place this is.

It certainly is. It's quite an achievement, all these tunnels.

Yeah, it really is.

What was it like down here during the war?

Rather hectic.

We had many people down here during the air raid.

We had about five minutes to get to the tunnel entrance, to take cover.

By then, the bombs were starting to drop.

You're not telling me this because you've read history books, are you?

Oh, no, not at all.

I was actually here during the war.

How old were you? I was four-years-old in 1940.

Was there a genuine fear of invasion?

Did your parents talk about it?

Well, everybody was very worried.

My father was in the local fire brigade.

We were expecting to be evacuated,

we were standing by, but in the meantime

the air raid sirens were going off

and we had to come down the tunnels,

because expected those bombers coming over the town, to bomb us.

How many people would come down here?

We were talking about, at the time before

the full evacuation took place,

nearly 2,000 people coming down here.

-Gosh.

-All entrances.

Were people very afraid of what could come at them

from out of the sky?

Well, after Dunkirk, we witnessed Dunkirk,

the troops coming ashore here,

and everybody expected the Germans to invade.

-Ah.

-This is what we were very worried about.

It must have been strange feeling that the British

controlled the land, but the Germans were invading the sky.

Yes, yes.

We were very worried at the time.

So many of these German bombers coming over and, of course,

there was a heavy air raid on Ramsgate on the 24th of August 1940,

when many people had to come down the tunnel because of the bombing.

We had 500 bombs dropped in five minutes.

Gosh, that's an awful lot.

Do you think the younger generation now

-takes the safety of the skies for granted?

-I believe they do now.

They have no concept of how life was like in 1940.

They see an aeroplane today and they think it's just an aeroplane,

but in our days we had to know if it was enemy or friendly.

Yeah. There was no better way of understanding the fear of attack

than seeing these extraordinary tunnels.

Yes, that's right. We felt very safe down here, very safe.

This rare footage shows just how safe people felt down here.

They made it very homely.

You could even pop over to your neighbours

for a cup of tea, or a rasher of bacon.

The Ramsgate tunnels really are an amazing feat of engineering

and they provided invaluable shelter

during one of the most intense periods of the war.

By August 1940, the Battle of Britain was underway.

The story of the Battle of Britain is well known now,

but some of the planes that fought are unsung heroes.

Victory depends, to a very large extent,

on air supremacy in all theatres of war,

just as the disasters now overtaking us

are due very largely to weakness in the air.

The plane they are constructing here is one of my favourites,

the Defiant Bomber.

Any German plane, particularly one above or behind the Defiant,

would get a nasty little surprise from this turret,

which could fire up to 100 rounds a second.

The Defiant was a turret fighter,

its backward-facing guns were a powerful weapon

and they were mainly used at night.

So with plenty of practice and thanks to various devices,

plus their own skill and daring, they do see in the dark.

How else could they shoot down 30 planes in a night?

This particular Defiant shot down 13 German fighters and bombers.

Despite some impressive kill lists,

the Defiant was still vulnerable to Germany's most effective terror

of the skies, the Messerschmitt 109.

This plane was the backbone of the Luftwaffe.

Some of our more enterprising citizens

took defensive preparations into their own hands

for the Battle of Britain.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man, or in the case of Britain,

cometh the eccentric.

Faced with the prospect of German invasion in 1940,

Major David Michael Gordon Watson fell back on his own resources.

He scaled these cliffs by the most likely routes,

leaving booby-traps for unwary German assault troops.

And he also kept twin machine guns in his back garden, as one does,

and on the 31st of August, 1940,

he shot down a Messerschmitt 109 fighter over Dover.

Even the military had to adopt

some home-spun improvisation of their own.

The standard British army light machine gun

was a reliable weapon designed in Czechoslovakia, called the Bren,

but after Dunkirk,

there were only 1,000 of them left, so British soldiers,

whilst waiting for replacements,

trained using football rattles to simulate machine-gun fire.

185 enemy aircraft shot down,

seven of them by anti-aircraft guns.

It's this plucky spirit that the Ministry of Information

was trying to promote during the war.

They co-produced the Noel Coward film In Which We Serve,

which is about a depleted British army

heroically regrouping to defend against German invasion.

It's stirring stuff.

Here comes the dawn of a new day, Flags,

and I shouldn't be surprised if it were a fairly comfortable one.

Yes, sir. It's a very pretty sky, sir.

Somebody sent me a calendar rather like that last Christmas.

Did it have a squadron of Dorniers in the upper right-hand corner?

-No, sir.

-That's where art parts with reality.

Yes, I'm afraid you're right, sir.

Abandon ship!

The situation during the Battle of Britain was very different.

We tend to think that the Battle of Britain

was won by the bravery of RAF pilots fighting against impossible odds,

but in reality, it wasn't.

For me, the real deciding factor was the English Channel.

Without a navy that could dominate it,

the vast logistics required to export a land Blitzkrieg to Britain

was too much for the Germans, no matter how well their air force did.

And the Luftwaffe's plans were about to go seriously wrong.

Initially, they just bombed RAF bases,

and it was estimated the British

could survive just three more weeks,

but suddenly Germany's air invasion strategy changed.

It was the result of the actions of one man.

On the 15th of August, Hauptmann Walter Rubensdorffer

in a Messerschmitt 110,

just like this, set off to bomb RAF Kenley,

a fighter base just to the south of London.

Whilst in the air, he made a crucial mistake.

At the last minute, he decided to bomb RAF Croydon instead

and he hit some nearby factories, too.

63 innocent civilians were killed in this botched attack.

This was a game changer for Winston Churchill.

He had to retaliate and fast.

Rubensdorffer's error had escalated the war.

RAF Bomber Command had only been dropping

propaganda leaflets over Germany

for fear of the retaliation that might ensue,

but, on the 25th of August,

Churchill ordered them in to bomb Berlin.

In an insane rage,

Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe

to change targets from RAF airfields to London.

The bright day is done and we are for the dark.

This marked the start of the blitz campaign.

Some historians believe that,

if Hitler had kept bombing just the airfields,

he would have won the Battle of Britain,

destroying the capability of the RAF to respond.

Many of our cities were badly damaged during the blitzkrieg.

But by bombing cities instead of RAF bases,

I think Hitler blundered.

He overcommitted the Luftwaffe

and underestimated the spirit of British defiance.

By October 1940, the Battle of Britain was over.

Eventually the war ended,

when Britain and her allies turned the tables on Germany

and invaded mainland Europe.

In the 1950s, Britain settled down to comfortable suburban domesticity.

But the fear of invasion was still there,

and more frightening than ever before.

Our post-war fears focused on the increasing likelihood

of a devastating nuclear attack,

not so much invasion as annihilation,

and one documentary maker was bold enough to try to imagine

what that might have been like.

9:16am, a single megaton nuclear missile overshoots

Manston Airfield in Kent and air bursts six miles from this position.

In 1965,

Peter Watkins' The War Game

focused on the after effects of a nuclear bomb

dropped on a British city.

At this distance,

the heat wave is sufficient to cause

melting of the upturned eyeball,

third-degree burning of the skin,

and ignition of furniture.

SCREAMING

It was so realistic that the BBC banned it.

Its only fans were the British army,

who used it as a training film.

The temperature is rising to 800 centigrade.

These men are dying, both of heat stroke and of gassing.

The BBC wanted to protect its viewers

from seeing the inconceivable terror of nuclear war,

but everyone knew what this nuclear space invasion would bring,

an invasion that would leave nothing left to conquer.

The only way to normalise

the psychologically unbearable was fantasy.

In the '50s and '60s, science fiction grew ever more popular.

Films like HG Wells' Time Machine

showed a world that had developed

underground to shelter from space invasion.

The film won an Oscar for these visual effects.

The lead character is a Victorian-era inventor,

played by Rod Taylor,

who transports himself into the future.

The centuries roll by.

I put my trust in time

and waited for the rock to wear down around me.

I was free again.

Throughout its history,

Britain has imagined invasions of aliens and tyrants.

It has witnessed the arrival of peoples and ideas.

And in the 1960s, there were more people coming from foreign shores,

and this time the British government was inviting them in.

Thousands arrived from the Commonwealth.

Some welcomed them, others didn't.

And the BBC, in a rather clumsy manner,

was broadcasting programmes to help the new arrivals.

Six, five, four, three...

I love the countdown.

It's like we're about to take off.

So this is TV from the '60s.

It's like watching something from a different world.

In 1965, the BBC formed the Immigrant Programmes Unit,

a well-intentioned gesture

aimed at introducing British culture to its new citizens.

Excuse me, does that coach go to Longfield?

Yes, that coach goes to Longfield,

but the big coach goes first...

A government minister even makes an awkward appearance.

I hope you will find them entertaining.

If I drop this glass on the floor,

it will break.

Oh, dear, the glass has broken!

It has broken.

In making these educational programmes,

the BBC recognised that post-war immigration

was a key moment in our history.

Our national self-image began to change as a result.

But immigration into Britain didn't begin after World War II,

it's always been a continuous part of our history.

It's fascinating that basically

every generation over the centuries

has felt that it's the last to be truly British

because of this existential threat from the invasion of migrants.

My grandfather came here during Kindertransport from Nazi Germany,

just before the Second World War,

and the press at the time were talking about

the scum of Europe flooding our country.

Whereas now it's something we're proud of,

having taken in Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

It's fascinating if you read, for example,

Elizabethan accounts of foreigners flooding into the country

and Tottenham being invaded by French people.

It's such recognisable language from today,

this sense that we are vulnerable

to influxes of migrants who will change our culture,

and that's something that has existed for at least centuries.

I wouldn't be surprised if that mentality is a millennia-old one,

and it's actually a psychological thing,

rather than one grounded in reality.

The French writer Victor Hugo once wrote,

"You can resist the invasion of an army,

"but not the invasion of ideas".

We have always been a mongrel nation.

There has never been an island race.

Those invaders who came here to conquer,

whether invited or uninvited,

in campaigns that were either successful or bungled,

have all helped make Britain the remarkable country that it is today.