Modern Britain The Great British Story: A People's History

In the story of the British people,

we've reached the 20th century - our time.

Through civil wars and foreign invasions,

the British forged the roots of their democracy.

In the Industrial Revolution, they invented the modern world.

Creative and adaptable, they built the first industrial society.

-Join the march!

-Join the march!

But the British would go through few more testing times

than the 20th century.

The last 100 years have seen the greatest changes

to our society and even to our character as a nation.

Through two world wars,

we've become a multi-racial country and a post-industrial nation

but the British people have remained hugely creative and inventive,

pioneers in technology, arts and sciences.

It's the last chapter

of the Great British story.

As we look at it now,

the Edwardian age, before the First World War,

was the high noon of British self-confidence.

During the previous century,

we'd become an industrial, urbanised nation.

Now the power of the people was growing.

Horizons were opening up.

For the first time, the cinema showed us our own image.

But that imperial, industrial heyday was inevitably brief...

..as it appears now, an almost incredible adventure

by the people of this small island off the shore of Europe.

The big story for the 20th century, through two world wars,

was the loss of empire and the dramatic collapse

of the heavy industries on which our wealth depended.

Just as the British people were the first nation in history

to become an industrial country,

so they were the first to go through that and come out the other side,

forced now to reshape their identities

once more in their history - as workers, as citizens

and indeed, as Britons.

The Edwardians ruled a maritime empire.

At its heart was shipbuilding

and nowhere was that more clear than Glasgow.

To arrive in Edwardian Glasgow was to see the achievements of the age.

But its powerhouse was the teeming shipyards of Govan,

whose population had grown 30 times in three generations.

It was something of gold rush proportions, what took place here.

1864, I think there was probably a population of about 2,500.

It was an idyllic village on the river Clyde

where people come to do watercolours and things.

By 1912, there was 90,000 people living in Govan.

And beyond that, there was people pouring in

from outside Govan, from Glasgow to work here.

By 1914, there were 48 shipyards on the Clyde.

Shipbuilding guaranteed the empire

and the empire guaranteed the shipyards.

Glasgow really was prosperous when our trade was with America.

-That's what built Glasgow.

-Right.

Everybody either worked in the shipyard

or worked in an associated industry like myself.

I actually started off in an engine works,

building engines for the ships.

We probably thought it would always last, but obviously it hasn't.

And what was made here was not only ships, but an identity.

A solidarity in labour, a pride in being a shipbuilder.

As in Belfast and on the Tyne,

in a few generations, shipbuilding became part of the people's DNA.

Country folk mixed with traditional city dwellers.

Eventually, they merged to become a completely new tribe.

What were they? The Clydesiders.

They became Clydesiders.

From whatever Govan was before then,

they came there and they almost formed a different nation.

That is astounding, isn't it?

'And shipbuilding meant more than earning a living -

'it was something heroic, the sum of a community's creativity.'

The ship's just been launched,

so it's gathering speed.

The drag chains hit.

CLANKING

The sound is horrendous.

It drags the ship right back.

That's it born. She's born, ready for the river.

It's a rush of adrenaline.

-It's the apex of satisfaction.

-Yeah.

-Remember, you've built the ships,

you build yourself to a frenzy for the day of the launch.

It's going in and it hits the water and you say, "Done it!"

This was the time

when the British defined themselves by their industry.

At Halesowen in the Black Country,

in the workforce there were people whose ancestors

had worked metal in Tudor times.

Me grandad did it and me dad

and me brother works here, he works in that department there.

So all my dad's brothers have worked in the steel as well.

-Quite a few of them, yeah.

-Wow.

Before I worked here, me grandfather worked here,

me uncles worked here. I've also got a son here at the moment.

Me great-grandparents, mother, worked here during the war.

She used to drive the crane.

'The greatest expansion here was before the First World War.'

3,600-tonne steam hydraulic press.

How about that? The old folks in Halesowen used to say that

you could hear this wheezing, thumping,

and feel it shaking the ground

all the way through the night when they were on big jobs.

DISTANT CLANGING

Britain's pre-eminence was reinforced

by a sense of British identity.

The values of British society - hard work, deference, patriotism,

were articulated in a myriad societies, mechanics' institutes,

sports teams, boys' brigades, working men's clubs.

Together, at work and play, the British knew who they were.

..they're wearing from the time, and tennis rackets,

but I didn't bring them today. I didn't know exactly what you wanted.

It's a wonderful archive of stuff.

'A crucial social role was played by organised sport.'

The British, of course, had invented the rules.

They actually won the Sussex Senior Cup.

I think they also beat Ipswich Town as well.

Fabulous.

Yeah, that's the gardening club.

The gardening club.

-Fantastic. These amazing social documents, actually...

-Oh, yes.

The cycle volunteer force.

-First World War period.

-Yes.

I could name all those people.

But across Edwardian Britain, there was still a huge gulf

between rich and poor.

In 1910, the chain-makers of the Black Country went on strike.

# Now pin back your ears and I'll sing you a song

# Of a town that is dear to my heart... #

The chain-makers were a cottage industry,

unchanged since the Industrial Revolution.

# And everyone's mad about darts.

# So take me back...

They worked in conditions almost impossible for us to imagine now

and the most exploited were the women.

# Where factory wenches lined all the park benches

# Cradley Heath means home to me. #

If you were a chain-maker, how would you have felt and why?

You would have felt as if you was a slave.

You'd work 12, 13 hours a day

for next to nothing.

No wonder they was angry.

I get five shilling a week for what?

Working from 7 o'clock in the morning till 7 o'clock at night!

They had to buy their coal and their metal from a fogger.

Some foggers actually boasted

that they could sell metal to the women

and then buy the made chain back

for cheaper than the constituent components.

And in Edwardian Britain, women still didn't have the vote.

Any one of you that goes out on strike, you'll never work again!

The press called it white slavery in the Black Country.

They didn't get a living wage

or a working wage. They were on starvation situation.

SCREAMING

The first strike to appear on cinema news in Britain

was led by a young Scot called Mary Macarthur.

This hopeless, despairing, struggle for survival will go on

unless we gather our strength and our determination

and we move as one.

Let us take to the streets and make our voices heard

for freedom and the rights!

CHEERING

BAND PLAYS

So one side of life in Edwardian Britain was class struggle.

Come and join the march!

The first ten years of the century

saw bitter strikes and unemployment marches,

the rise of trades unions

and from 1900, a labour party,

all fighting to better the conditions of the people.

And in no area was that more important than women's rights.

The suffragettes, who were battling

against one of the worst injustices of British society -

that women still didn't have the vote.

Women's franchise movements had a long history in Britain

but now they found a national voice,

despite at times brutal repression.

But democracy was put on hold by the First World War.

Across the country, the war had mass support,

even in Ireland, which was still then a part of Britain.

It was working-class patriotism

that made the volunteer armies in the first total war.

CHEERING

From the riveters and platers of Ulster, Tyneside and Govan

to the miners and steel men of South Wales,

Britain lost nearly a million men.

No place in Britain was untouched.

The First World War is still a mystery -

why a prosperous country at the height of its success,

the source and agent of wealth and civilisation,

chose to risk all in such horrors...

..and to create a lost generation.

In the industrial cities,

where unemployment was already high on the eve of war,

the government encouraged volunteers from the same towns,

the same streets, so friends would fight together - Pals.

One of these Pals' battalions

came from a small Lancashire cotton town, Accrington.

On the first day of the Somme, out of 700 Accrington Pals,

235 were killed and 350 wounded.

He's your grandad?

He's my grandfather, yes.

-And what happened to him?

-He got killed on the Somme

on the 2nd of July, 1916.

They worked and played together, and they died together.

Do you know what actually happened to him?

I can't tell, they just said, "No known grave."

His body were never found.

All they can say is, he went missing on that day.

There's a lot like that.

How it could have happened is still impossible for us to grasp.

You're like, you see him here,

on one panel, on one wall.

-Sad.

-Yeah, it is sad.

-Very sad.

Honestly, I'm a grown man, 76,

and it brings tears to my eyes.

I know I'm very proud of him and all those who served and died with him.

Because if it hadn't been for him,

I wouldn't be here talking to you now. Very brave men, they were.

Blood brothers, they were.

Stand at...ease!

The First War was the great divide for modern Britain.

It also left its mark on daily life -

on our pub opening hours, our love of allotments and cigarettes,

our universal mistrust of the honesty of the press,

but above all, in the loss of a generation who would have been

the future doctors, judges and teachers.

This is a way of a community way of remembering things -

not just the ones we lost but also the ones who came back as well.

People lost whole streets.

They lost brothers, sons, cousins.

These remembrance ceremonies stir the memories

like sediment rising in the glass -

memories of our common history shared by all of us as Britons.

But they're memories shaped, conditioned, by an imperial past,

by that astonishing arc of narrative

which has taken our country, over a couple of hundred years or so,

from being a small land on the fringe of Europe

to world dominion,

and then back to being a small island on the fringe of Europe.

And ever since, Britain's most solemn ritual

is not Good Friday but Armistice Day.

In the aftermath of the Great War

came the first cracks in the British Empire

and the first part to go was Ireland.

Up here in the north,

the Protestant majority gave

unstinting support to the cause.

The Ulster Volunteer Force had actually formed before the war

to block plans for Home Rule

for Ireland, which was still a British colony.

On the Somme, they performed heroics

and up here, it's never been forgotten that they gave their all

for king and country.

But in the South, though many Catholics had fought for Britain,

there were older loyalties.

Here, many saw the war as a chance for freedom.

The rising of 1916 had failed

but in 1919, the Irish War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War

brought the end of British rule after more than three centuries.

At the time of the Anglo-Irish War, 1919-21,

the British government in London

would have been happy to see a united Ireland

remaining within the British Empire

but that idea was fiercely resisted up here in Ulster by the Protestants

who feared being the minority in a Catholic-dominated Ireland.

And so, Ireland was partitioned

with an Irish Free State to the south

and Ulster up here remaining part of the UK

with consequences that are still rumbling on today, of course.

But in the 1920s,

darker storm clouds were rolling across the world.

With fascism rising in Europe,

Britain was swept by the Great Depression, with recession

and mass unemployment.

The empire was now at its greatest extent

but it hadn't recovered from the war.

With huge war debts, industrial output declined

and the old industries in the north, coal, steel and ships,

were devastated - especially up here, on Tyneside and Jarrow.

Here, the bitter experience of the 1930s

is still a part of people's memory as if it happened yesterday.

They walked to London as a protest

-just to try and raise awareness.

-When they shut the shipyard

that employed 80% of the population of Jarrow,

once that was shut, that was the town finished.

What there is now, there's no work here, since the shipyard's finished.

By 1936, unemployment in Jarrow reached 73% - the worst in Britain.

For jobs for the youth of today, that's why we're doing it.

Trying to make a change.

Trying to make a stand and make a change.

And for the alternative,

an alternative to no jobs and no education for ordinary people.

And that was what drove the marchers to make their protest...

..not just for themselves

but for their children and their grandchildren.

In October 1936, they walked

from Tyneside down to London, to present a petition

asking for the right to work.

The Britain they walked through was still the green and pleasant land

but the nation was changing, its heavy industries out of date,

overtaken by newer countries

following in Britain's industrial path.

On 22nd October, the marchers entered London,

watched with curiosity by the rich.

It's often said the Jarrow March achieved nothing.

The Prime Minister here in the Houses of Parliament refused to see them.

They got a minute or two at Question Time

and each marcher was given a pound to get the train back home

where unemployment stayed at the same horrendous level.

But it's not true to say it achieved nothing. It wasn't only a matter

of the dignity and discipline of the marchers,

it was a visual demonstration

of the huge disparities in work and health

and housing and class that ran right through British society.

Things had to change, and they did.

"As I write," George Orwell said in 1940,

"civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

Yet again, the British people were to be tested.

Where I live on the Leicester boundary,

the noise was horrendous so you couldn't get any sleep.

Bombs were falling, then you'd hear another wave of bombers coming.

Britain's industrial heartlands were devastated,

her major ports, like Liverpool, systematically smashed.

We lived by Edge Hill Station,

which was very dangerous,

so five of us were evacuated from our family.

We didn't know where we were going.

Nobody knew where you were going to finish up.

3.5 million people, mainly young children,

were evacuated from the most threatened cities

and billeted with families in the countryside.

It was an internal migration unprecedented in British history.

We finished up in North Wales, Snowdonia.

It's a part of Britain's war experience

still imprinted on the generation that lived it.

We couldn't find the youngest of the family,

she hadn't had her sixth birthday

and she was taken off with the infants.

And my brother, he was taken away with the boys

because boys and girls didn't mix in those days.

He was about 14 miles away.

Three of us were together

and when we were taken to a billet,

they only wanted two.

She only had a little cottage with three rooms.

She said, "Well, if you're prepared three of you to sleep in a double bed

"because I've got a guest," she said, "you can come here."

So we went in there.

They were genuine and really did give us a lot of love.

So while nearly 6 million British men and women

fought in the Armed Forces,

their children were also learning what they were fighting for.

By the Christmas, most of the children

and all our friends had returned.

My sister had a friend round about who had gone from Liverpool,

she was one of our neighbours.

She said, "Edith, I'm going back to Liverpool."

And Edith said, "Oh, you can't go back to Liverpool,

"because you're my friend!"

She did come back to Liverpool

and unfortunately, she was killed that very month.

One of the many extraordinary things about

what our country did in the Second World War,

and there were many extraordinary things,

and most of them were quite remarkable and absolutely essential.

'One of the greatest industrial powers in the world...'

The great economist Keynes said in 1941,

we threw good housekeeping to the winds

and in so doing, we saved ourselves and helped save the world.

Never has a superpower put in its last throw

to greater effect than we did in the year we stood alone.

For 20 months, from Spring 1940 to December 1941,

Britain stood alone -

along with the Greeks, don't forget.

Then came help from across the Atlantic,

a former English colony founded in the 17th century

and now the new powerhouse of the world.

But the victory wouldn't have happened

without the support of the Empire -

people from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia

also fought against fascism.

India alone provided 200,000 troops,

of whom 35,000 were killed.

Together, in the end, they brought victory.

The Strand was already filling up with crowds,

lots of people arm in arm, right across the street.

There was a lovely, effervescent atmosphere.

I remember lying on my back and hearing all the cheering going on,

my head on the silken lap of a charming young woman

who was gently pouring champagne from the bottle into my open mouth.

Victory over fascism crystallised the ideals

the British people had nursed for over 300 years,

from Bunyan and Blake to the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

The Labour Party's victory in the election of 1945

put in hand a visionary project by Sir William Beveridge,

commissioned by the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill.

Sir William Beveridge came out with a manifesto for the post-war world

and he said, adapting Bunyan's language,

"There are five giants on the road to reconstruction -

"ignorance, idleness, squalor, disease, want."

And he said, "A revolutionary era

"is a time for revolutions, not for patching."

We'd lost a third of our wealth in the war, irretrievably, gone up in smoke.

And yet, they put in place a full employment policy,

universal benefits.

The health service came into being.

Never again the interwar era of deprivation and slump.

A British New Deal.

At that moment, it seemed

that Jerusalem could be built in our green and pleasant land.

And in the Commonwealth Conference of 1947,

they asked what it meant now to be British.

Were we still only the people of a small island?

The British Nationality Act is another product

of that extraordinary time of the post-war settlement,

the British New Deal.

It was nothing less than a redefinition

of what it meant to be a British citizen.

You were either a citizen of the UK

or of the colonies or of the independent Commonwealth countries

like Australia and New Zealand and Canada

and astonishingly, the moment that they were drafting it here in 1947,

that could have amounted to 800 million people,

a third of the population of the planet!

It's ecumenical, cosmopolitan, liberal,

an astounding vision of the future.

# It was a silent night...

And on June 22nd, 1948, the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.

# Holy night

# All is calm...

The new arrivals from the Caribbean

were mainly war veterans seeking work.

# All is bright

-NEWSREADER:

-He is here because he's heard there are jobs

for coloured men in Birmingham.

They'd come as British citizens

to meet the chronic shortage of jobs in hospitals, transport

and in the factories.

# Tender and mild... #

There are jobs in Birmingham.

There are more jobs than there are men to fill them.

We were young and we had the world news

that come over every morning.

And all you would hear, "Your mother country needs you."

And they would encourage us to come to England

to help rebuild the country after the war.

# It was a silent night... #

"Your future lies in England," and they would tell you

it's a better life over here.

And you want a better life for yourself.

Your mother and your father want a better life for their children also,

and that's part of it, coming to England. We had to come.

Without them, a war-battered country would have ground to a halt.

You expected a smooth path, you're coming to a better country,

a better place, so things are going to be better for you.

Oh, no. It wasn't.

# Prise the sail... #

Looked at now, it was another testing of the nation.

Black and white.

-VOICEOVER:

-'It's hard to say which is more bitter,

'the cold street or the cold shoulder.'

How would one like to be going out in the evenings after work

and find yourself going into places where you'll not be accepted?

Well, I don't think anyone would like having experiences like that,

and the most that we can do is to stay at home.

'In the city's dancehalls, nobody is barred,

'but coloured men are not encouraged.

'He'll be asked to get out if he does much of this.'

I am married to a coloured man, and I am proud of him.

He helps me with all my work, he helps me to do the washing,

he's very good to me and my baby.

When we walk along in town, they call out, black this, black that,

why am I married to an Englishwoman?

"Where are you coming into this country from," all that,

they're telling us. And that's why I keep out of trouble.

Over that time, about half a million people came from the Caribbean

and Africa to work on the buses and the railways.

And especially in the overstretched health service.

When I went into nursing, even the patients that you are just

giving a bath to, I did everything for them,

they'll call you a black bastard.

THEY SING

Because of my beautiful skin.

Me couldn't get anywhere decent to live.

When you knock on the house community doors and asked for a room,

they would say, "No blacks, no dogs.

"And no Irish."

We learned how to survive, and it was your determination.

Your pride.

Sense of achievement at the end of the day,

and your ability to do what you'd set out to do.

APPLAUSE

The Commonwealth immigration of the '50s

had been a new experience for the British people.

And yet, in a way,

it mirrors every tale of migration into these islands.

Jews, Flemings, Huguenots,

they'd all suffered racism in the beginning.

Whenever a black person bought a house,

we would all descend on this person for a room.

And a room became a house.

That one room, you cooked there, you bath there, you sleep there.

We could not go on like that.

So we had to meet together as citizens that want a better life.

And now, 60 years on,

the black community's an integral part of our society and culture.

We're merging together,

as did all those previous migrations in history.

And, black or white, it's the Empire that made us who we are.

And now, as the legislators of 1948 had wished,

each of us can say, as the Romans did, civis britannicus sum.

# Oh, happy day

# Oh, happy day... #

Princess Campbell's friends and neighbours in Bristol

are celebrating her work in forming a housing association,

providing affordable housing for all.

Thank you, thank you.

# Oh, happy day... #

We did not discriminate, we provided affordable homes at affordable price

for everybody, black, white, blue, pink, because everybody

needs somewhere to live decently, and that's how we kept going.

# Oh, happy day

# Oh, happy day. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

To me, I was very proud that we were able to do that, because they

stigmatised black people as lazy, and don't do anything for themselves.

But we proved different.

We got up, we did it, we achieved it, and that's something to talk about.

And some would say those are British virtues.

The 1950s was also the time when Britain became a consumer society.

# We're all going on a summer holiday... #

From fridges and cars to the summer holiday,

after the austerities of war, it was a heady time.

# ..summer holiday

# No more worries for me... #

We were the best provided-for generation ever.

# ..week or two

# We're going where the sun shines bright... #

I've never forgotten the first time I tasted my first piece of real steak.

I mean, it sounds absurd now, but when I ate my first steak

in a Berni Inn in Bristol, it was remarkable.

# Everybody has a summer holiday... #

Macmillan's famous phrase, "having it so good," resonated.

But it also came with a warning.

The one element that people forget

is the dissolution of the British Empire.

What became India and Pakistan went. '47, as did Burma.

And not till 1957 did the next lot of Imperial disposals start,

with the Gold Coast, which became Ghana.

Nigeria, 1960,

and then the huge rush to dispose of the British Empire.

This huge territorial empire,

the magnitude of which the world had never seen, was disposed of

pretty well, apart from the Indian subcontinent, in eight to ten years.

But once the Empire had gone,

Britain's industrial decline was inevitable.

The very existence of the British Empire

and its commercial supremacy depended on ships.

And when the Empire went, so, to a large extent,

the shipyards went, too.

Harland and Wolff, the builders of the Titanic,

the greatest single shipyard in the world, were among the hardest hit.

When I came into the shipyard in 1948,

there was 21,000 men worked in here.

Previously, in the Second World War, it was 40,000 men working here.

This was a place for outfitting and for dry docking,

and making sure the ships' bottoms weren't damaged during the launch.

This was a great place.

Pumping the dock dry, the men came down here just when there

was about eight inches or six inches of water left in the dock,

and then they headed up to where the water pumps out of, and they were after fish.

The people here depended on Harland and Wolff,

they thought it was going to last for ever,

and they couldn't believe it when it went away.

It is just derelict, the first yard to close down was the Abercorn yard,

and they were still launching ships from the Queen's yard,

but the Victoria yard went next.

The women at home were wondering what was happening,

and people were paid off, sacked.

There was 21,000 men in here when I came in this place,

but that went downhill very quick.

Went downhill very quick.

So, a tremendous effect on the life of the city?

Yes, you take the wages each man was earning here,

20,000 men going out with wages,

and all of a sudden, no money at all, they are on the dole.

So, the tide of history comes in and it goes out.

These are moments in a nation's story as great as any war.

The decline from such a height was a bitter and troubling time for Britain.

From the steelworkers of Corby and Sheffield to the cotton mills of Lancashire,

the world was doing it cheaper and more efficiently than we were.

In the '60s and '70s,

we lived through strikes and winters of discontent.

But what we didn't see then,

perhaps, was that the British people,

with their resilience, their basic tolerance and humour,

were already creating a new society,

as they have before in their history.

They were becoming the first post-industrial nation,

and, in the process, they were transforming themselves.

The loss of our heavy industries

and of the British working-class identity that went with them

has caused huge bouts of introspection about British identity.

About the success of the citizenship project on which

we all embarked in 1948.

Back then, you could hear politicians of all persuasions

arguing over what one can only call the soul of the nation.

Take Enoch Powell, for example,

a politician now remembered above all for his ill-considered

and inflammatory remarks about immigration.

But Powell asked, what is the clue that binds us all together,

that we may, in our time, know how to hold onto it fast?

Well, as so often in life,

the answer seems to be not to hold on fast, but to let go.

What the British people have learnt over this last phase of their history

is that identity is a lot more fluid than they might have thought,

and that in many places in the world,

multiple identities are the norm.

And, that you can choose them.

And those different identities are now coming home.

One of the things that is important in the arrival here

is the difference in music.

This is Manchester, the first city of the Industrial Revolution.

And here at Peace Radio in Moss Side,

the Friday phone in has a-panel of Moss Siders past and present,

looking back at what's already history.

And then coming to Moss Side.

I belong to one of the oldest African families in the city.

My dad came as a seaman,

he did not come with any kind of Fantasy Island vision

of where he was coming to, he came, he arrived in Liverpool,

Liverpool was the place, and then after a period of time,

they moved and settled here, because they joined the war effort.

I was born and brought up in Moss Side,

and I still live in Moss Side and I think Moss Side's a great place,

-but I'm allowed to come out of Moss Side.

-Yeah.

You can do and you can be whatever it is you want to do

and whatever you want to be.

The only person that stops you is yourself and ourselves.

We belong here.

You know, we're here, we're not going anywhere quick,

we may go on holiday, you know, but we belong here.

When I grew up here, the people were mainly of Scots,

Welsh and Irish descent.

Later, they were Caribbean, Indian and Bangladeshi.

It's always changing.

We've got quite a large Somali population

just to the right of us over in part of Moss Side.

To the left of us we've got the old Victoria Park area,

which is traditionally white British residents,

we've got quite a large Pakistani population, and it's really very well integrated.

We have very little hate crime reported.

'In just a few years, we Britons have changed our culture and our music...'

-Oh! Manchester weather!

-I know.

'..and, of course, our food.'

We've got a mile of curry houses, where's the best one to go?

I have to say, there are some real favourites from our local

policing team here, and, you know,

they can be regularly seen getting their chicken kebab in a naan bread.

This area is so well-known for its festivals.

We've got Diwali coming up this weekend,

we have the Caribbean carnival over in Alexandra Park, we have Mega Mela.

We had the Eid celebrations towards the end of August,

and the next Eid, Eid al-Adha, I believe, is coming up at the start of November.

It's going to be really interesting, because that coincides with

Bonfire Night, so, of course,

we'll have some kind of firework celebrations around Eid.

It's all part of the legacy of Empire.

But isn't that what makes our times so dynamic and so interesting?

What we're seeing now is another radical reshaping of our identities,

national and tribal.

CHANTING IN GAELIC

And that goes for the old British, too. Under the Empire,

the Scots and Welsh shared with the English a common identity as Britons.

But now, with the Empire gone, old allegiances are resurfacing.

SHE CHANTS IN GAELIC

Independence could be on the way soon.

Here in Govan, one of many regeneration projects

is exploring Glasgow's Scots Gaelic roots.

This was one of the biggest shipbuilding areas in the world,

but it had been almost wiped out by the shipyards closing down,

and when people are poor, they seem to be stuck within a couple of streets, that's their world,

they don't have the money to get out of it,

and they don't have the transport, sometimes.

So, by reconnecting people with a cultural, natural heritage,

we open up the world a wee bit to people,

and that works on their identity,

their self-esteem, how they feel about themselves in a connected way.

And, after all, as we've seen in this series,

the Scottish past goes back before the coming of the English.

After a visit to the Govan Old Parish,

obviously I'd seen all the crosses, I was so impressed with it.

I thought, "Why not have a go?" See what kind of job I could make of it.

CHANTING IN GAELIC

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

My father was a plater,

and stayed in an area just across the road from the shipyard.

My grandfather, he was a coker, again,

stayed within 200 yards of the shipyard's front door.

There's enough in the city telling the stories of the industrialists,

the tobacco trade, the grandmasters.

We wanted the people's story.

The industrial past, too, still has the power to inspire.

Above all, perhaps in places like Govan.

And in a new cycle of growth, the giant Fairfield Shipyards

regeneration project is beginning to draw a new population to Govan,

despite the ravages of its recent history.

People are moving into the old shipbuilding heartland again.

And it was all wasteland, where it used to be streets and houses.

Just a mile square of rubble. Thousands of people were gone.

Nae jobs, nae nothing.

Govan's like a phoenix, it's beginning to rise again.

There's talk about another 4,000-5,000 people coming to Govan.

It's incredible.

I think they're starting a fish farm with salmon.

That was originally an industry in Govan, salmon fishing.

Possibly, you might get done for salmon poaching in Govan!

Very soon, in the future.

Great!

And back in the Black Country, the tradition of chain making and metalworking

that we've traced in this story from the 13th century has never been broken.

Great. Great-great grand uncle.

He is part of a group called the Titanic Chain Gang,

and they made really big chains.

Wow. And this is a photograph of them, is it?

That's three and three-eighths on there,

and then when I worked in different chain places,

you got the odd few links lying around,

which went up to as near as six inch.

And how old were you when you first started doing this?

Well, I started making chain when I left school at 15,

but I used to work with my dad at five, and they bunged me on fire.

-At five, did you say?

-Five years old.

-Five years old?!

Yeah. I used to do jobs for her grandmother or great-grandmother.

-Have you met before?

-No.

-No. We know your son.

We're like a little chain community.

It's amazing, isn't it? You think of it as old history, but it's quite close, isn't it, in some ways?

Joe, what did you find out?

My great-great nan, called Matilda Taylor, she was a chain maker.

And I've got a picture of her with her chain maker family.

This is a wonderful photograph, isn't it? Look at that.

They've got their Sunday best on, haven't they?

They're not wearing chain maker's clothes!

And you've looked at the census as well?

God, I'm really impressed, Joe!

It's a great piece of research, Joe, I'm really impressed by what everybody has done.

Let's just ask Ben, finally, may we?

-It's my dad, and he does chain making for a living.

-What, still?!

-Yeah.

-I know Ben's dad, I worked with him for a bit.

Sometimes, in the school holidays, because my mum died

a couple of years ago, and sometimes there's nowhere for me to go,

so I go with my dad, and sometimes I make some links and stuff.

So, any thoughts on what you might do when you leave school as a job?

Make the chain for the navy ships and stuff.

-What, seriously?! You might do that as a career?

-Yeah.

Well, good for you.

If you do, we'll have to come back with a camera

and find out what happens.

And, let's not forget, through this latest testing time,

the British people remained phenomenally inventive and creative.

From atomic theory to the Pill, the Beatles, the jet and the computer,

television and the iPod, DNA and the World Wide Web,

we still help make the modern world, as we did in the Industrial Revolution.

And, meanwhile, the ancient Britons, with whom this story began,

are finding their voice again.

SPEECH IN CORNISH

The Cornish language died out after the Civil Wars,

but it's coming back.

Gayver is crawfish.

A small swimming crab which is called a velvet crab now,

they'd call guliark.

-Ozle.

-Ozle.

-That's a good word.

-Shakespearean.

Ozle can be used for everything.

It's a piece of twine, something like that,

although years ago it'd been cotton or hemp and then nylon.

It's the bit of twine between the conger hook and the main back line.

And ozles have been used for tying everything up from time

immemorial, including the front door.

Language is a funny thing. I was thinking about it last night.

I just wonder if over the years

there's probably 50 languages

gone before we've got this far

and I wonder there's a new one being rebuilt.

Because the youngsters sort of do tend to grunt at each other

and make funny noises, don't they?

They obviously know what they're talking about

and you can't knock 'em for it.

It's just the way the world is. Everybody needs an ozle.

In the British story

nothing is ever quite lost.

Especially with what Bede back in the eighth century called

the original Britons.

Welsh language poetry has continued to be the most social

of cultural media - a media of the people

because it's about the people.

Telling simple stories and celebrating simple,

but significant events.

The birth of children, marriages, someone coming of age, for instance.

And, of course, not just celebrating but also lamenting.

There are poems in condolence,

so poetry always has a very practical application,

almost utilitarian, it becomes a service.

It still as current now as it was

when Aneirin was writing back then in the sixth century.

It's in the memory. It's in the nation's memory, really.

Official policy from London that Welsh should not be spoken in school.

In fact what they did was they sent inspectors around the school

and if the marks were low, if the standard was low,

the headmaster lost his salary.

There was a deduction in his salary.

The easy way out was not to teach two languages,

concentrate on English and therefore he had more money in his pocket.

That came from London.

It was official policy as it was in Ireland,

so no wonder we feel we must fight for our language.

The language is far more for us than just a cultural medium,

it defines us in many ways.

It almost a political expression.

It's Royal wedding day in Birmingham.

Just now the priest, he moves the gods to bless

the newly married couple,

to prosperity as well as they should have children,

grandchildren and be happy.

And yes they should live more than 100 years.

"Nothing ever stands still," George Orwell wrote,

in the dark days of 1940.

"We must add to our heritage or lose it.

"We must go forward or we go backward."

I felt that their mother is not dead.

So we all mothers will pray for them.

This is not only a Royal wedding, it is a festival of the UK.

We've eaten their salt. So, we have to contribute to them, isn't it?

-Yeah?

-That's lovely.

-I feel that.

We can still shock the world.

Not in terms of territory, military kit

but in terms of our education,

our science and technology,

the quality of our democracy - all sorts of things.

We can still be an exceptional nation, if we want to be,

far greater than the sum of our parts.

There you are, a swift snapshot of our story,

taken between the Royal Wedding of 2011

and the Jubilee of 2012.

If you view British history, not from the point of view

of the Kings and Queens from the palaces of the rich and powerful,

but from the street, the Govan Road in Glasgow.

From Liverpool, from the potteries and the Black country

and the Rhondda, then you start to see the common experiences

that bind us as Britons.

The civil wars of the 17th-century, industrialisation,

Empire, world wars, the post-industrial decline

that we first of all in world history, have had to negotiate.

Then, you see our history, our tribal identities as Britons

in a 21st century may still seem obstinately distinct,

but our destinies, are inextricably bound together.

-I'm a Midlander.

-We're from Liverpool.

Londonderry.

-I'm English.

-I'm Irish.

BOTH: We're English and Irish.

BOTH: We're from Northern Ireland but our grandfather's from Brazil.

I'll always be Scottish and proud to be Scottish.

I'm a Liverpudlian from Britain.

I am British but I'm a Kent girl at heart.

I'm a Geordie living in Leicestershire.

And I'm a Yorkshireman living in Leicestershire.

-English.

-Definitely London, English, yeah.

I love the Irish heritage of my family.

It's Glasgow where I want to be.

British Indian.

British.

English, African and almost adopted Scouser.

English, Mancunian and a huge Huddersfield town fan.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd