Pushing the Boundaries Time to Remember

In the 1950s, the famous newsreel company,

Pathe, produced a major historical documentary series for British television.

Made by the award-winning producer Peter Baylis and narrated by an illustrious line-up

of celebrated actors, Time to Remember chronicled the social, cultural

and political forces that shaped the first half of the twentieth century.

The series covered the exploits of inventors and adventurers in several of its episodes.

The achievements of those intrepid pioneers offer remarkable insights into another era.

Things, faces, friends, places, years and moments half-forgotten.

Laughs, fears, songs, tears,

memories are made of this.

CLOCK WINDS AND CHIMES

In the first half of the 20th Century,

the arrival of new technological breakthroughs brought dramatic change to the lives of millions.

Improvements to the design of the internal combustion engine saw the roads transformed

and aviators taking to the skies for the first time in new-fangled "heavier than air" flying machines.

Experiments in communication technology brought radio,

then moving pictures, into millions of homes.

The possibility of being the "very first"

was motivating pioneers in every field of human endeavour.

This was an age of daringly ambitious engineering projects, and often eccentric modes of transport.

For those with a bold spirit and a desire to reach new horizons, the opportunities were boundless.

Adventure! Even in the changing world of 1900, adventure could still be found for the asking.

If you grew weary of pushing a clerk's pen or swinging a navy's pick

you could still find plenty of adventure under the sun.

For instance, there was still the air to conquer,

as yet only balloons and airships had risen into that element.

But though the first heavier than air machine had yet to take off,

progress was such that already flying was considered safe for ladies,

in moderation of course.

Plenty of adventure under the sun.

You could still be first at the North Pole or the South, for there no man had yet trod, only you'd have

to make the journey on your own feet with your own sweat and nobody would know of it until you got back,

if you ever did.

Get rich quick, you could still plant a stake on a diamond or gold field,

but you had to be tough enough to defend it against all comers.

Nowadays it's football pools.

You could still be first to conquer any one of a hundred virgin peaks, from the Matterhorn to Everest.

Room and scope up there for a stout heart and a strong rope.

Plenty of adventure under the sun.

But the whole century was moving forward, in communications,

in science and medicine, reason, thought, and above all in industry.

Never had there been such expansion, sprawling, messy, but where there's muck there's money.

At the end of her reign Victoria saw a transformed world and all

around her were mighty monuments to those who had had vision and courage.

A transformed world moving forward with ever increasing speed.

Though some preferred to proceed at a more stately pace.

That was about the time too when Fred got his first motorbike.

I say motor, but exactly how it did work we were never quite sure.

And sometimes I suspect neither was Fred.

Paraffin, or was it petrol?

At all events there was much priming and lighting up and clouds of mysterious threatening smoke,

lots of uncertainty.

ENGINE BLOWS

But whatever we thought about it, Fred always seemed to get there.

But changing circumstances forced some to adopt more robust forms of transport.

In the First World War, the race for superiority on the battlefield

inspired a new invention, one that wasn't to everyone's taste.

The people born and bred to horses were reluctant to accept the fact

that the day of the horse in battle was over and cavalry breakthroughs were no longer possible.

What war required now was some kind of mechanical armoured horse.

Well, there were a few weird experiments along these lines,

complete with reins, so strong was the horse influence.

But there was little doubt that something

more revolutionary was wanted, something more revolutionary.

So was born the tank.

The first of them was enough to frighten the life out of anybody,

including those who had to drive them.

Crushing a car into wreckage was quite another thing from smashing through the deep

German front. But all the same, it looked very impressive.

Britain was the first country to develop and then deploy tanks on the battlefield.

At the Somme, in September 1916.

After the war, these formidable weapons of combat fulfilled a very different purpose.

Roll out the tanks, but not for war, for memorials or scrap

or rides for happy holiday makers at the seaside resorts.

In the post-war years,

most people sought thrills in more conventional forms of transport.

The roaring 20's continued their roaring way.

Britain was not going to be left behind in the great

drive for mechanical superiority that this noisiest of eras promoted.

Throughout the decade, the desirability of the motorcar grew inexorably,

and inventors responded to the public's fascination

with ever more experimental, and sometimes outlandish, designs.

Cars were wonderful, you could do anything with cars.

How about a car driven by a propeller?

Just one question...

Why?

Then someone brought out a two-way car.

With all this race and tear to get from place to place,

it was nice to see someone inventing something

to help you should you fall over in the rush.

Another try.

And yet again.

That time, I think something bent.

And parking, watch this.

Just in case you thought you were seeing things, once again...

It has another advantage in that, if you changed your mind, you could turn around for home in seconds.

But there again, it didn't last, probably ran out of front wheels

changing direction at 60 miles an hour.

There were some pretty snappy buses too by that time,

with pneumatic tyres.

And believe it or not, road sleepers,

London to Liverpool by night tucked up in your own bed.

It didn't last long, I don't know what happened to them,

I suppose they didn't pay or they ran out of sheets or something, or alarm clocks.

Now, here was something new, a machine designed to skim the water at great speed,

neither airborne or really seaborne.

But what would it do faced with the 40-feet Atlantic rollovers?

Luckily no-one was foolish enough to try and find out.

Journeys over land and sea could be exhilarating,

but the really intrepid were reaching for the skies.

Aviation was the rage around this time.

Anybody who could afford it went in for their own private plane.

Hitch your flying machine to your car and tow it to nearest aerodrome,

there to unfold its wings and take to the air.

No knowing what the skies over Europe might become if this kind of thing went on.

Whenever there's a need there's always someone trying to fill it.

Trying was the word.

One can't help having a distinct impression that as far as this

model was concerned there was something aerodynamically wrong.

Just an impression,

but in every field of human endeavour hope springs eternal.

I wonder if he's still trying.

The odd thing about progress is that there always seems to be

somebody reading the writing on the wall the wrong way round.

To change the wheel of a car in motion would be difficult

enough for anyone, but to change the wheel of an aircraft in flight

would be a million times more difficult.

So logic said that if you succeeded

you'd make progress a million times more progressive,

if you get what I mean.

And even if you don't the wheel still got changed, so there.

An unswerving belief in the power of technology, and optimism

about all things new and modern, marked the spirit of the age.

In the '20s, the daredevils had a field day.

In 1922 it looked very much as though normalcy wasn't so much

something to get back to as something to get away from.

And there were plenty of ways open for people to try and do that.

You could be the first to hang by your teeth from an aeroplane,

this way up or the other.

Or the first to walk the English channel instead of taking the boat.

The choice was unlimited.

Two bright boys crossed the channel on a motorbike,

while two other characters paced it out to Vienna on stepladders.

The exact reason for this escapes me.

Somebody else achieved a lifetime ambition, to fly into a house at 70 miles an hour.

A steam roller that went by itself.

Went was the word.

It hasn't been seen again since.

Yes, in every field there must be pioneers.

Something not done before, and frankly I don't think ever since,

but in everything there has to be a first time.

The desire to be first was manifested in a variety of ways.

Particularly in the quest to reach some of the most inaccessible territories on the planet.

Time to Remember featured some of the greatest moments

from the heroic age of exploration,

including an epic, ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1910.

A ship leaving Britain for the distant Antarctic.

What was her name?

The Terra Nova.

Going to be away some time, so the papers said,

carrying an expedition that was to try and reach the South Pole.

Its leader, a naval man, Robert Falcon Scott. Such a little ship,

such a little band of men,

but the first chapter in a great story of endurance.

Always in history it is the pioneers who suffer for ultimate victory.

Hundreds of miles away from the little Terra Nova, Scott

and his party plod on night after night in the freezing polar air.

They set up camp to follow the monotonous routine of keeping alive on the worst journey in the world.

Farewell, Scott,

Evans, Wilson and Oates,

for your march leads only to death.

Four years later, Scott's great rival, Ernest Shackleton, attempted to be the first to

cross the Antarctic continent from ocean to ocean via the South Pole.

The expedition ultimately failed, but is recognised as one of

history's great stories of endurance.

Shackleton's fascination with polar exploration continued

until his death off the coast of South Georgia Island in 1922.

Two years later, another British expedition embarked

on an equally arduous mission,

to become the first men to scale the world's most forbidding peak.

To conquer the air or the roof of the world.

That year found another British expedition making the long trek

through Tibet to camp at the foot of Everest,

in order to attack that as yet unconquered peak.

Among that little party in camp were two men, Mallory and Irving, whose

courage and tenacity were destined to write a never to be forgotten chapter in the history of mountain climbing.

Through powerful glasses, the rest of the party watched these two

as they painfully scaled the most formidable of all mountain sides.

With all that terrible power, Everest fought back.

And two black specks near her summit was all that was last seen of Mallory and Irving.

Who can deny that even in defeat, Britain has her great moments.

That year, closer to home, there was a more successful attempt to claim a world's first.

At the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924,

a speech by a reigning monarch was broadcast over the radio

for the very first time.

We've come here today for the purpose of opening...

Wireless, they called it in Britain, and there are many of them who still do.

With crystals and cat whiskers and earphones, and the

new high falutin valve sets, most of the nation listened into that speech,

and those who managed to pick out the words from all the static and

interference declared it to be a historic moment indeed.

As radio was very much in its infancy, you had to put up the vital aerial yourself.

And if you were as inexpert as Harry Tate and friends,

there was a fair chance that you didn't catch the king's speech.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Yes, these were the first real do-it-yourself days.

By this time, the inventor who'd helped to achieve

this landmark moment in the history of communications, and made possible

special garter-mounted radios for the ladies,

was striving to make the technology accessible to all.

Senor Marconi, the radio expert.

His work in the past had revolutionised wartime navel operations.

Now, what new marvel was to come next?

Messages to the moon, some claimed.

One thing was sure, fire brigades need no longer remain

out of touch with their bases when dealing with distant conflagrations.

First, all they needed was an aerial,

and for that, any tallish structure would suffice.

The next thing was to spread out on the ground a kind of mattress.

Don't ask me why. I'm not technically minded.

This is engine number 235, ready for action.

But tell us, where's the fire?

For some time now in southern England, a little group of enthusiasts,

deep in a mass of coils and wire, had been operating an experimental radio station for half an hour a week.

And then in 1922, from London's Savoy Hill,

close by the roaring traffic of The Strand, came the

first voice of the BBC, the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then.

2LO, Marconi House, London calling.

2LO, Marconi House, London calling.

Regular radio programmes had at last arrived, open to all with a crystal and a cats whisker.

SINGS

At that time, the BBC was broadcasting radio only, but soon

a new form of entertainment would captivate the public imagination.

The turn of the century had seen the first moving pictures, a remarkable

new technology, no matter how crude and unprepossessing the images.

Sitting on hard benches before one of the first of those whirring,

erm, cinematograph machines, seeing, for a few pennies, a miracle.

What did it matter what was on the screen,

so long as it moved, and what did it matter, either, if sometimes

the lettering on the picture was unaccountably back to front.

All part of the miracle.

Fireman, save my child.

And among those leaping shadows, often you saw something else.

You saw history.

A flickering, jumpy scene.

That carriage arriving at the garden party,

an old, old lady being assisted from it.

Victoria Regina, long may she continue to reign.

Another tuppence, and something even more exciting.

Soldiers riding across the African Delt. The Boer war.

It was De Wet, Kruger and a pressman named Winston Churchill, escaping from the Boers.

£25 reward, dead or alive.

The brave, the great, the famous.

Cricketers march out into what looks like a snow storm.

Oh, but that's only the film.

Surely it never snowed in those far-off sunny days?

To the British, a beard as famous as any, well...

Since Moses. The beard of a man now a legend, WG Grace.

Soon, cinema's pioneers would marry sound and vision to great effect.

I recall about 1905, it would have been,

somebody in Germany experimenting with, surprising at that early date, talking pictures.

A crude system of synchronisation and amplification, but very interesting.

A rare glimpse ahead, the movies then were silent and

destined to remain silent for close upon another quarter of a century.

In 1929, British cinema-goers flocked to see the first-ever

home-grown talking picture.

I shall have quite a lot to say,

and the first thing I shall say is that she was there too.

Blackmail featured a trademark cameo appearance by its director, the legendary Alfred Hitchcock.

But by then, moving pictures were already making their way onto the small screen.

Under crude aerials with primitive equipment, the engineers of Baird

were dabbling in, for those days, a real far fetched realm of science.

Television. Sending pictures, as well as sound, by means of radio waves.

Oh, what an absurdity.

In any case, such a device could never have the slightest effect on the motion picture trade, could it?

Not a chance.

The land where the talkies had really taken off, the United States, was still mired in the financial

calamity that had followed the Wall Street Crash in 1929.

Even so, America was leading the world in science,

technology and immense engineering projects.

1932, in the richest country in the world.

Depression or no depression, you can't hold up progress and men thinking.

Somewhere up there, above the pinnacles, someone is perfecting

a piece of apparatus to enable aircraft to fly without a pilot.

Just set the machine on course, plug in and leave the plane to its own devices.

A real achievement.

A pity they couldn't devise an automatic pilot to steer a nation through its storms.

Then, in front of the very capital of Washington itself, an autogyro,

forerunner of the helicopter, sails in to land at the steps of the nation's seat of government.

From there, golf clubs at the ready, two VIPs take off,

bound for Gettysberg or wherever it is that golfers go from Washington.

And behind that great skyline,

new concrete steel and great spanning bridges.

An America demonstrating new strength in tremendous public works and giant undertaking.

In the name of the people of the United States,

to Boulder Dam, are a symbol of greater things in the future.

And in the honoured presence of guests from many nations, I call you to life.

At the touch of a switch, waters hitherto controlled only by nature

gushed forth to make a spectacle, as Franklin D Roosevelt had put it,

symbolic of a nation pulling itself together after the dark days of uncertainty and depression.

The early years of the 20th century had seen astonishing advances in almost all areas of human endeavour.

Despite the economic setbacks of the Great Depression, in the 1930s,

the mood was still upbeat, and faith in the power of technology was undiminished.

The 30s -

a time of optimism.

Vague and woolly, perhaps, but still optimism.

A new look to the streets, the cars, the buses,

as though we were all out to rub away the rough shapes and edges of the 20s.

All out to streamline our world for the future.

The first of the 30s promised an amazing world.

A world where science and progress were rushing ahead to make it yet more wonderful every day.

Now you could call New York or Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro,

as though you were calling the grocers round the corner.

Telephones and radio, in the 20s an amusing toy, today a worldwide network.

And through it, nation could speak peace unto nation.

But the really great revolution was mass production, the turning out of everything for everybody.

Once a radio set was largely a matter of a soldering iron and a do-it-yourself kit.

Now it was all production line and button-pressing, with millions

emerging, all ready to tune in to this new and wonderful world.

And clearly there was not only more but everything to come.

Soon, no more networks of lines.

Only sky-borne ships, in the manner that HG Wells had so long prophesised.

Just a matter of last adjustments and the proper finance.

And it wasn't just theory either.

Everywhere you looked, you could find the ingenious applications of the new knowledge.

A sliding roof for a car or a door that appeared to open without human agency.

What the world would be like by the 40s was anybody's guess.

Already someone in Germany has developed a car driven by a rocket motor, its fuel, liquid oxygen.

The shape of things to come

and the sound too.

ENGINE WHIRRING

And then there's all this scientific talk about splitting the atom.

But, darling, what on earth is an atom, let alone how do you split it?

Oh, well, it's a...erm, er...

Something very small. Er, it's a promising path to follow, isn't it?

Yes, but exactly what it does promise beats me.

Science, progress, little doubt that the sky was the limit.

The 30's promised everything.

In less than 40 years, everyday life in Britain had changed profoundly.

The spirit of endeavour and imagination of the early 20th-century pioneers

brought radical transformations to every sector of life, from new

modes of land and air transport, to revolutionary new mediums for information and entertainment.

In the early explorers' attempts to conquer the near unconquerable,

man had challenged the limits of human endurance and set the precedent for those that followed.

The inspired inventors of this period brought to the world bold

innovations, ranging from the radical and world-changing, to the playful and frivolous.

Their energy, imagination and daring blazed the trail

from the Victorian Age towards the modern, high-tech world of today.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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