The Good Friday Agreement, reached on 10 April 1998, was a careful balancing act, reflecting the competing demands and aspirations of the different parties to the talks. Yet, despite the widespread euphoria that greeted the deal, this was only a beginning. Implementing the Agreement has been a difficult process, depending on the willingness of the political representatives of Northern Ireland’s two communities to work together. That willingness has frequently been missing…

The Good Friday Agreement: the background

The partition of Ireland in 1921 followed more than a century of unrest between Britain and Ireland. Under the Act of Union of 1800 Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and became governed directly from Westminster. For much of the 19th and into the 20th century, varying states of tension and conflict developed as unionists campaigned for Ireland to remain part of the UK, while nationalists campaigned for either home rule or an independent Irish state. The issue of Irish home rule dominated domestic British politics from 1885 to the start of the First World War.

In April 1916, the Easter Rising shook Dublin, as a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic and clashed with British troops in the capital. The rising, which resulted in the loss of 450 lives and destroyed much of the centre of Dublin, was ended by the British within a week. However, the public mood shifted decisively when the 15 leaders of the rising were executed by the British authorities in May 1916. The executions and imposition of martial law fuelled public resentment of the British. The next five tumultuous years, including the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), resulted in the end of British rule across most of Ireland.

• Read more | The Easter Rising: when Ireland went to war
• Read more | Bullets and ballot boxes: a history of Anglo-Irish relations since the Easter Rising 

The Government of Ireland Act, which became law in May 1921, split Ireland. Northern Ireland was formed from the six predominantly unionist counties in the north-east of the island. The remaining 26 predominantly nationalist counties formed the ‘south’, becoming the independent Irish Free State in 1922.

The Good Friday Agreement and the Troubles

For 30 years in the late 20th century, Northern Ireland was wracked by a bloody ethno-nationalist conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, which has left over 3,700 people dead and thousands more injured.

At the heart of the Troubles is the division in Northern Irish society. The majority population in Northern Ireland – the unionist community – identify as British and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. The minority community – the nationalists – want Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of Ireland, in an independent Irish Republic. As the nationalist community is predominantly Roman Catholic and the unionist predominantly Protestant, the conflict has often been portrayed as a sectarian one. Certainly, sectarian attacks occurred throughout the Troubles. However, the conflict was a consequence of the competing national identities and aspirations of the two communities occupying Northern Ireland.

• Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments 

As a result, Northern Ireland’s politics did not develop on class lines, as in the rest of the UK. Instead, Northern Ireland’s politics centred on the constitutional question. Following the partition of Ireland, the unionist community generally voted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which remained in permanent control of Northern Ireland’s devolved government from 1921 until its abolition in 1972. Discrimination against the minority, particularly in housing and employment, led to the growth of a civil rights movement in the 1960s, demanding ‘British rights’ for the nationalist population. However, the civil rights movement was met by a loyalist backlash and violence flared. Finally, in August 1969, the British government was forced to step in and deploy troops in Northern Ireland. They were to remain there until 2007.

Out of the violence, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) re-emerged, and the focus of the conflict shifted from civil rights to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. The IRA dated to back to the Easter Rising and had launched sporadic campaigns since partition directed at trying to achieve Irish unity. Its recent ‘Border Campaign’ (1956–62) had ended in failure and over the course of the 1960s the IRA came to focus more on extreme leftist united front politics rather than militant republicanism. This caused a split in the republican movement in December 1969, from which the Provisional IRA was born. While most nationalists supported the newly formed Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who sought to achieve Irish unity by political means, there were those in the minority community who supported the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’, attempting to gain Irish unity by force. Unionists fiercely resisted any moves towards a united Ireland. Loyalist paramilitary groups also formed and contributed to the developing violence. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) emerged from 1966, and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and its proxy Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) from the early 1970s.

• Read more | The big question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

As the conflict deepened, the death toll rose rapidly. Events like Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972 – in which British troops killed 13 unarmed civilians and injured several more (one of whom later died from his injuries) while taking part in a protest march – acted as a catalyst to the increasingly bitter conflict.

The prelude to the peace process

Over the course of the Troubles, British governments attempted to develop political initiatives that sought to end the conflict. Edward Heath’s government (1970–74) developed an ambitious programme, resulting in the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. This combined a devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, involving power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties, with the creation of a Council of Ireland to institutionalise links between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, this was brought down by a two-week general strike in May 1974, as the unionist population rejected the involvement of the Irish government under the cry that “Dublin is just a Sunningdale away”.

Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90) was more modest in ambition, with Mrs Thatcher’s focus on securing cooperation from the Irish government in tackling the IRA. In exchange the Irish government was given the right to put forward its views on Northern Ireland’s affairs. This again infuriated the unionists, who sought to bring the Agreement down.

However, as the 1980s progressed, some significant developments began to reshape the approaches of the participants in the conflict.

• Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher?

Republicans increasingly saw the benefits of combining a political strategy with the armed struggle. Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political counterpart, began contesting elections, and regularly polled between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote. This caused deep concern in both the British and Irish governments and influenced the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The ‘bullet and ballot box’ strategy caused tensions within the republican movement that had to be carefully managed by Gerry Adams, who became Sinn Féin president in 1983. Experience of the drift to far left politics in the 1960s and the ingrained abstentionism – the refusal to accept the legitimacy of, or to take seats in, political institutions in the Republic, Northern Ireland, or Westminster –  in the republican movement made many suspicious of political engagement.

The IRA had not been defeated and a flow of weapons was reaching Ireland from Libya. Significant IRA attacks continued, such as the attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in the 1984 Brighton Bombing. However, Sinn Féin could achieve electoral legitimacy by contesting elections, for example through Adams’s election as a Westminster MP in 1983. In addition, in 1988 Adams began a series of talks with John Hume, leader of the constitutional nationalist SDLP. While the Hume-Adams talks had no immediate successes, they were influential in steering the British and Irish governments towards the Downing Street Declaration, which would come in 1993.

There was also some movement from the British government. Influenced by Hume, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, delivered a speech in November 1990 in which he declared that the British government had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. Instead it was for the people of Northern Ireland to decide its constitutional future. Coupled with this change in mood music, Brooke also approved the opening of a secret communication channel between MI5 and the republicans.

Brooke also sought to get Northern Ireland’s constitutional parties talking to each other. He proposed that inter-party talks should cover three strands: the first dealing with relationships within Northern Ireland; the second dealing with relations between the two parts of Ireland; and the third dealing with links between the British and Irish governments. The talks began in April 1991, but quickly became bogged down in procedural disagreements. But the three-strand format was to be at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Downing Street Declaration and IRA ceasefire

The peace process picked up momentum in 1993. The British prime minister, John Major, worked closely with the Irish Taoiseach [prime minister], Albert Reynolds, on a joint declaration that was hoped would form the basis of a peace initiative. This resulted in the Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993. The declaration recognised the two different traditions in Ireland and stated that peace could only come through reconciling the differences between them. The two governments committed themselves to building that process of reconciliation and creating appropriate political structures to facilitate it.

In parallel to the Downing Street Declaration, Reynolds worked to persuade the IRA to declare a ceasefire. Both Reynolds and Hume were convinced that tying Sinn Féin into a cross-nationalist coalition would show them the benefits of using purely political means. This would involve nationalists in Northern Ireland, the Irish government, and Irish America, and would provide the republicans with access to the highest political levels in Washington.

To show Sinn Féin the benefits of constitutional politics, Reynolds lobbied the US president Bill Clinton to grant Gerry Adams a visa to visit the United States. Clinton agreed, and Adams was granted a 48-hour visa to visit America in February 1994, despite most of Clinton’s senior advisors being against the move, and much to the fury of John Major. The visa was important as part of the wider choreography of peace making. But it did not lead to an immediate IRA ceasefire. Indeed, a month later the IRA demonstrated its continued reach by attacking Heathrow Airport. However, the visit was important as part of the process of debate within the republican movement, and finally, on 31 August 1994, the IRA announced its ceasefire. The ceasefire was followed in October 1994 by a ceasefire called by the loyalist paramilitaries.

However, the ceasefires did not lead directly to all-party talks. Instead, the peace process quickly became bogged down over the question of arms decommissioning – the hand-over, or verified disposal, of weapons. The IRA would not consider anything that could be perceived to be surrender and Sinn Féin argued that decommissioning should be negotiated as part of a process of ‘demilitarisation’. But neither unionist politicians nor the British government would countenance talks with Sinn Féin until decommissioning had taken place. Unionists had been disconcerted by republican celebrations following the announcement of the IRA ceasefire; they were not willing to take Sinn Féin at their word.

In an attempt to break the impasse, the British and Irish governments created an international decommissioning body, chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell. This was part of a ‘twin-track’ approach, with decommissioning to accompany political talks rather than precede them. Mitchell delivered his report in January 1996, setting out six principles that should be endorsed by all parties to the talks. This included a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Mitchell recommended that all parties should sign up to these principles and that some decommissioning could take place during the talks. However, this was not enough to prevent the slide back to violence. On 9 February 1996, the IRA released a statement announcing the end of its ceasefire. An hour later a massive explosion rocked Canary Wharf, killing two people.

What was the Good Friday Agreement?

The election of Tony Blair’s Labour government, on 1 May 1997, was transformational. Blair was as committed to the peace process as Major had been, but had the advantage of being able to approach Northern Ireland without the baggage that Major had accumulated over seven years of talks.

The IRA renewed its ceasefire on 20 July 1997, opening the way for Sinn Féin to be included in the inter-party talks that had begun under Mitchell’s chairmanship. The question of decommissioning remained though, and the British and Irish governments sought to fudge the issue rather than allow it to derail the process again. This led to Ian Paisley’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walking out of the talks, never to return. The DUP rejected the notion of making any concessions on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland or negotiating with Sinn Féin, whom they considered terrorists. While deeply unhappy, the more moderate UUP remained in the talks. Given the DUP’s declared desire to break the talks, Mitchell wrote later in his memoirs that their decision to walk out actually helped the process of reaching an agreement. However, it was to have a lasting impact on the politics of Northern Ireland, as the DUP’s opposition to the Good Friday Agreement severely hindered its implementation. Sinn Féin entered the all-party talks on 15 September 1997, having signed-up to the Mitchell Principles.

After marathon negotiations, agreement was finally reached on 10 April 1998. The Good Friday Agreement was a complex balancing act, reflecting the three strands approach. Within Northern Ireland, it created a new devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, with a requirement that executive power had to be shared by parties representing the two communities. In addition, a new North-South Ministerial Council was to be established, institutionalising the link between the two parts of Ireland. The Irish government also committed to amending Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic’s Constitution, which laid claim to Northern Ireland, to instead reflect an aspiration to Irish unity, through purely democratic means, while recognising the diversity of identities and traditions in Ireland. Finally, a Council of the Isles was to be created, recognising the ‘totality of relationships’ within the British Isles, including representatives of the two governments, and the devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Referendums were held in both Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland on 22 May 1998. In Northern Ireland 71 per cent of voters backed the Agreement, with 29 per cent voting against. While this was a significant endorsement, an exit poll for the Sunday Times found that 96 per cent of nationalists in Northern Ireland backed the Agreement, compared to just 55 per cent of unionists.

What is the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement?

The Good Friday Agreement was hard won. But it has faced considerable challenges over the 20 years since its signing.

On 15 August 1998, 29 people were killed when dissident republicans exploded a car bomb in Omagh. This represented the largest loss of life in any incident in Northern Ireland since the start of the Troubles. While the Omagh bombing was committed by republicans opposed to the Agreement, it returned the spotlight to the question of decommissioning paramilitary weapons, which the Good Friday Agreement had stated should happen within two years. Unionist anger at the refusal of the IRA to give up its weapons was combined with frustration at the refusal of Sinn Féin to accept the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Under these circumstances, power-sharing proved impossible to sustain. Meanwhile, voters in each community started to turn away from the moderate parties, and instead support for Sinn Féin and the DUP increased, displacing the SDLP and UUP in the process. For a significant part of the decade following the Good Friday Agreement, devolution was suspended because of the inability of the largest parties from each community to reach agreement on power-sharing. Progress was made on decommissioning, which was confirmed to have been carried out in September 2005, but political agreement remained elusive. Eventually, the British and Irish governments hosted crunch talks at St Andrews in October 2006. There, Sinn Féin finally agreed to accept the PSNI, while the DUP agreed to share power with Sinn Féin. In May 2007, an Executive comprised of the DUP, Sinn Féin, UUP and SDLP was finally able to take office. This time, the institutions created under the Good Friday Agreement were to remain in being until the current political crisis led to the collapse of the Executive in January 2017.

Despite the fragility of the institutions created and the continuing bitterness between politicians representing the two communities, the Good Friday Agreement remains an important landmark in Northern Ireland’s history. The Good Friday Agreement was able to bring to an end 30 years of violence, and allows Northern Ireland’s two communities to pursue their contrasting aspirations by purely political means.

Dr Alan MacLeod is a historian of modern Britain and Ireland and Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of International Politics and the Northern Ireland Conflict: The USA, Diplomacy and the Troubles (IB Tauris, 2016).

This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018

If – or when – a nuclear bomb was dropped on Cold War Britain, the nation was primed to react fast. When the sirens sounded, children would run home from school using the quickest familiar route. Families would wait out the nuclear fallout under the stairs, while political leaders would evacuate to bunkers across the country, ready to launch the regeneration plan. But were all these plans actually just a load of nonsense? Julie McDowall tells Matt Elton about Britain’s nuclear response plans, and questions their effectiveness when faced with the reality of instant annihilation.

Julie McDowall is the author of Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War.

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When did you first hear about James Baldwin?

While doing my A-levels, although my studies were focused on the classics. I was very interested at the time in America’s civil rights movement, as well as hip-hop bands like Public Enemy. Then I came across some of Baldwin’s work in the library and his pro-black writing just blew me away.

What kind of man was he?

He was brought up in the church but was not afraid to shout from the rooftops about being black and gay. He was a highly intelligent man but at the same time had enormous empathy for others. Moreover, he was all too aware of the power of his words and their ability to motivate people, and he used them to do just that.

• Read more | Black British history: a timeline

What made Baldwin a hero?

The way that this black gay man wrote so positively about his colour, a provocative thing to do in the 1950s. This was a very different time, when it was dangerous to be so outspoken about America’s treatment of black people. He argued that all the things that white people hated were things that we should love about ourselves. His outspokenness helped give black people pride in the colour of their skin, and encouraged others – such as Nina Simone, who wrote the song To Be Young, Gifted and Black – to speak out. He would have been so proud to see people like Serena Williams and Tiger Woods excel in tennis and golf, which weren’t supposed to be “black” sports.

What was his finest hour?

For me, it is the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which is so powerful, and a great entry point for those wishing to know more about Baldwin. It sums up just how unfair life was for a black man in the America of his day, and how illogical it was to hate someone for the colour of their skin; he highlights the sheer stupidity of racism. Literature-wise, it has to be his novels Go Tell it on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room – he’s such a beautiful writer.

• Read more | From the ancient world to the 1969 Stonewall Riots: a brief guide to LGBT+ history

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own?

Like him, I’ve experienced racism, and people telling me I couldn’t work in certain genres because of my colour. But his writing gave me the strength to overcome such prejudice – for instance, I was the first black person to appear in the West End show Beauty and the Beast – and be honest about my blackness.

What would you ask Baldwin if you could meet him?

I’d ask him about his creative process and how he freed himself up to be so honest in his writing. I’d also ask what gave him the courage to be so honest.

Michelle Gayle is a singer, songwriter, author, actor and co-founder of the World Reimagined arts programme, which aims to transform understanding of the transatlantic slave trade

A handful of photographs from the 1970s, though slightly blurry and faded, paint a vivid picture of what appears to be a classic scene from the countryside. A boy in flares pushes a wheelbarrow laden with straw. Nearby, youngsters gingerly marshal a pair of goats, while a woman leads a horse around a muddy paddock. A hand-painted sign advertises a riding school and a chicken club.

On first glance, these images seem to depict a busy stable yard on a farm deep in the countryside. Look more carefully at the outer edges of the photos, though, and the perspective changes. Train carriages overlook the paddock, and Victorian terraced houses loom behind the stables. Look closer still and the straw-littered enclosure looks more like a builder’s yard.

If you’re exploring the family tree of the city farm movement, all the roots would lead back to where these images were taken. Fifty years ago, a derelict site, sandwiched in between two railway lines (barely 3 miles from London’s West End as the crow flies) would become Kentish Town City Farm. It began a quiet revolution that swept across the country, inspiring a new movement rooted in communities.

When Inter-Action, a small arts and drama-based social enterprise, took on this site in Kentish Town, it was intended as a place to store the fleet of vehicles used for educational and community events in west London. “There wasn’t a grand plan to turn it into a city farm,” explained co-founder David Powell, who also lived on the site with his young family. “It’s an idea that grew organically as we discovered the old Victorian stables, spotted an opportunity to use some of the railway embankment to create allotments, and saw this space as a place for young people to come together and hang out.”

Connected communities

The concept quickly proved its worth. Five years after this first city farm opened, a young volunteer told the local paper that “before we went to the farm we were hanging about street corners, smashing windows and picking fights”. Growing food and rearing farm animals such as goats and sheep were essentially the means to an end. The goal was to create newly connected communities that would thrive and feel a sense of togetherness in places that had often lain neglected for decades.

• Read more | Victorian zoos: animal attraction in the 19th century

The north London district of Camden was a prime example. Its dense network of railway lines had made it a target for devastating bombing during the Second World War. In the decades that followed the conflict, parts of the borough had been badly neglected. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, people occupied squats in run-down terraced housing. Many of these new residents were buzzing with creativity, and Camden became a hotbed for counterculture ideas. Kentish Town City Farm was a place where they could be put into practice.

Around the same time, in July 1970, the first edition of The Ecologist appeared, sharing the latest thinking on creating more sustainable and greener cities. Together with the founding of organisations such as the Child Poverty Action Group in 1965 and Shelter the following year, this fed into the rise of community activism that sought to tackle the deprivation affecting inner-city areas across the UK.

“City farms provided a blank canvas for the emerging movements of the 1960s and 1970s to put their ideas and thinking into practice,” says Professor Simon Gunn, an expert in urban history at the University of Leicester. “They became places at the frontline of efforts to support people and communities that had slipped through the safety net of the welfare state, giving them new opportunities to transform their lives and flourish.”

• Read more | City of fur and feather: the animals of medieval London

Birds and butterflies

The movement grew through the 1970s and into the 1980s. Funding from the Department of the Environment enabled the creation of the city farms advisory service in 1976, providing practical guidance and support to newly established city farms across the UK. One opened in 1981 in Heeley, a district in the south of Sheffield, where the local Residents and Tenants Association newsletter proclaimed that “the idea of an urban farm is to bring a bit of the countryside into our busy cities”. A column in the Sheffield Star lauded the benefits of bringing together “sheep, cattle and hens, as well as trees and flowers to encourage birds and butterflies”.

A year earlier in Liverpool, Rice Lane City Farm breathed new life into an abandoned cemetery. Even earlier, in 1976, Byker Farm – now known as Ouseburn Farm – was established in the centre of Newcastle. It turned a landscape once dominated by the sounds and smells of heavy industry into a place where families could access nature and learn about growing food and looking after animals. And in Edinburgh in 1982, following five years of hard work by volunteers to transform a long-abandoned site, Gorgie City Farm opened.

Another early success story was Surrey Docks City Farm, founded in 1975 in Bermondsey, a dockland area of south London that had seen jobs and hope vanish. “Local people became very interested, and we cut the land up into allotments,” explained founder Hilary Peters in 1977. “Then we brought some goats and poultry in, and the local children came to help look after them. Suddenly all the vandalism in the area stopped: people were too busy helping us. And Southwark Council were so pleased they gave us the land free, because they consider the farm a local amenity.”

Veronica Barry, who worked at the farm and is now a researcher on food policy at Birmingham City University, remembers how much its year-round activities meant to those who visited. “We’d let the children run the farm for the day. By 7.30am they’d be gathering at the gates, eager to get started. They’d let out the chickens, milk the goats and plan the feeding and animal care for the day.”

As one teacher told The Times in November 1977: “When they [local schoolchildren] first come here [Surrey Docks City Farm], they have never had any contact with animals, and they are frightened. But they gradually overcome their fear, and a whole new world opens up for them.”

Today, almost five decades later, that new world is being opened up to communities at more than 50 city farms across the country – from Leeds to Leicester, Bristol to Balsall Heath. Inter-Action’s quiet revolution remains as relevant as ever.

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Mike Collins is a communications and engagement professional, and a trustee at Bath City Farm

This article was first published in the March 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

In January 1982, the Conservative Party of prime minister Margaret Thatcher was trailing in third place in the opinion polls, behind the Liberal-SDP Alliance, which stood at 40 per cent, and Labour at 30 per cent. By June of that year, the polls had been turned on their head: Labour were still second, but the Tories now had the approval of 51 per cent of the country.

The Falklands War had been fought between these polls, and the events in the South Atlantic, where Britain’s naval taskforce had evicted the invading Argentinians in a bloody conflict, transformed Thatcher’s political fortunes. As the taskforce sailed home in triumph, her future in Downing Street was assured. The following year, she recorded the biggest landslide victory in a general election since 1945.

• On the podcast | Helen Parr discusses the conflict that erupted between Britain and Argentina 40 years ago

But what if the Argentinian military had sent the Royal Navy packing? The popular belief is, after all, that the electoral success of 1983 was all due to the war and that, without the air of triumphalism, the Conservative Party would have been on shaky ground heading towards a general election. That belief isn’t completely watertight.

“Even without a Falklands victory, the re-election of the Conservatives in either 1983 or 1984 was still more likely than not,” explains Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. “But, in the event of an Argentinian victory, Thatcher would have resigned immediately and a new leader would still probably have gone on to win, as Harold Macmillan did in 1959 after replacing Anthony Eden, who had been brought down by his own foreign crisis – Suez.”

Had Thatcher resigned, her unpopular economic policies may well have been jettisoned by the party. “It would have all depended on when a subsequent leader replaced her. Early on in her premiership, there were few sufficiently senior figures who were so like-minded, but over time, as she transformed the party, there were more. The 1983 general election gave the impregnable base – and a majority that took three elections to erode – but the subsequent election, held in 1987, ensured the effective irreversibility of the revolution.”

Had, though, the Conservatives lost the election in either 1983 or 1984, the weakness of the Labour Party and the rise of the Liberal-SDP Alliance would almost certainly have meant no one party taking sole control of government. “It was a uniquely divided electoral opposition,” says Dr Farr.

“Labour’s Michael Foot would still have been the alternative prime minister, as the Alliance was hampered by uncertainty in voters’ minds as to whether David Steel, the Liberal leader, or Roy Jenkins, the SDP leader, would be PM. Labour could still rely on its heartlands: in 1983, 28 per cent of votes provided Labour with 209 MPs, while 25 per cent for the Alliance delivered 23. A hung parliament would have been most likely, with some sort of Labour-Alliance agreement – but one probably short of a coalition.”

Self-inflicted wound

With Thatcher not in Number 10 – and regardless of which party held the reins of power – the brutality of the 1984-85 miners’ strike almost certainly wouldn’t have been witnessed. “There had been miners’ strikes before, but never one engineered by a government for expressly political purposes. It is unlikely that another prime minister would have sought it and, therefore, that such a protracted dispute, where victory was all, would have happened. But the erosion of the sector, with the weakening of the union, would still have occurred, merely over a longer period.”

Had Thatcher fallen from power, it would have been a self-inflicted wound. “The greatest irony of the Falklands War is that what became known as a testament to British resolution and strength was occasioned by the absence of either. It was an avoidable conflict,” Dr Farr stresses.

• Read more | How the Falklands War fired up Britain

“The Argentinian invasion was almost invited by the actions of the British government, including the planned decommissioning of HMS Endurance, which had maintained a naval presence in the area. Indeed, had the war taken place even a year later, the chances of British success would have been much lower, following the Nott Defence Review of 1981 that had promised substantial cuts to defence spending.”

• Read more | The Falklands War 40 years on: why did it happen?

As Dr Farr observes, the timing of the war had a profound effect on subsequent foreign policy. The British victory “renewed the enthusiasm for hard power in foreign policy. Admiral Sir Henry Leach famously stiffened the prime minister’s resolve: if we ‘do not achieve complete success, in another few months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little’.” A failure to reclaim the Falklands would have diminished Britain’s standing on the international stage, meaning its place at the forefront of future conflicts in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan wouldn’t have necessarily been guaranteed.

The result of the war had profound consequences in South America, too. The Argentinian retention of Islas Malvinas would have strengthened the junta, allowing it to continue its repression of the population. Instead, the British victory hastened its demise, as Dr Farr concludes. “Defeat certainly brought an end to military rule quicker than would otherwise have been the case. After all, what’s the point of a military government if it loses wars?”

• Read next | The Falklands War 40 years on: why did it happen?

Martin Farr is senior lecturer in contemporary British history at Newcastle University. His upcoming book is Margaret Thatcher’s World

This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed

Seventy years since James Watson and Francis Crick first revealed DNA’s double-helix structure, Dr Kersten Hall shares the story of the scientist who almost beat them to their major discovery: molecular biologist William Astbury. Speaking with Emily Briffett, Kersten details how, despite missing this major opportunity, Astbury forged a new discipline, made pioneering steps in the field of X-ray crystallography – and also wore a coat made of peanuts.

When did you first hear about Betjeman?

As a child, I was absolutely transfixed by his 1973 BBC documentary, Metro-Land. What made it so memorable was this erudite, grandfatherly figure, who told the story of how the north-west London suburbs around the Metropolitan Line developed in the early 20th century. That was where I grew up, but thought it rather uninteresting until Betjeman immortalised it.

• Quiz | London history quiz – how much do you know about the city?

What kind of man was he?

Sometimes he would wear his heart on his sleeve, as he did in some of his poetry – for instance, talking about the women he admired from afar. But in other respects, he was a private character and something of a snob, as he himself admitted, who enjoyed being seen as part of the upper set.

What made him a hero?

His unassailable devotion to celebrating the world around him; his quest for the joy in everyday life; and his ability to take people with him on that journey. He did this primarily through his poetry and prose, which was nostalgic for English culture slightly out of reach in time. If he was alive today, he might well be making references to things like Blockbuster Video.

• Read more | From the ancient world to the 1969 Stonewall Riots: a brief guide to LGBT+ history

I admire him for trying to save historic British buildings – becoming the public face of the modern conservation movement – and for being a friend of the LGBTQ community at a time when we had few allies. Lastly, I love how gentle yet exceptionally naughty he was. On being asked in old age, “Do you have any regrets in life?” he replied, “Oh yes… I haven’t had enough sex!”

What was Betjeman’s finest hour?

Culturally, it would have to be Metro-Land, a BBC collaboration with director Edward Mirzoeff, in which he took the idea of looking at an area, examining the mundane he found and celebrating it. There was another finest hour too: his public campaign to save St Pancras – but for that, the train station would almost undoubtedly be long gone. There’s a statue of him there, and the coattails of his jacket are an exact replica of the roof above him. I think he’d be saddened by the demolition of fine old buildings and their replacement by substandard modern rubbish.

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own?

I have no ambition to be a poet, but he inspired me to make the programmes I do, and I have also helped save a few buildings, such as Smithfield Market in London.

What would you ask Betjeman if you could meet him?

I’d ask him whether he would write a new set of county-by-county architectural guides. I like to think he’d be delighted and say yes, which would give us at least another 30 years of him to enjoy.

Tim Dunn is a railway historian and TV presenter. His series The Architecture the Railways Built and Secrets of the London Underground are both available on UKTV Play

This article was first published in the October 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine 

Daylight saving time – setting the clocks an hour forward from spring to autumn – enables regions to gain more daylight hours in the evening at the expense of later summer sunrises. But who first proposed daylight saving time? And which country was the first to adopt it? Dr David Prerau, author of Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time, explains…

Why do we have daylight savings time?

The current system of daylight saving time (DST) is used in many countries around the world – including almost all countries in Europe, most of North America and some in the southern hemisphere – and its usage covers more than one billion people. But its history is a colourful and contentious one, with each country facing its own controversies.

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It was American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin, while living in Paris in the late 18th century, who first conceived the notion of rising closer to sunrise to make better use of sunlight. Imagine, he observed in 1784, how many candles could be saved if people awakened earlier. Although he never proposed putting the clocks forward, he whimsically suggested firing cannons in each square at dawn “to wake the sluggards effectually, and make them open their eyes to see their true interest”.

It wasn’t until 1895 that New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson became the first to propose putting the clocks forward in summer. He proposed an adjustment of two hours for five months of the year. While some New Zealanders were intrigued by Hudson’s idea, many ridiculed it, and New Zealand didn’t adopt DST until 1927, more than ten years after numerous other countries had begun using it.

Whose idea was daylight savings time?

The man whose idea led directly to the DST we have today is a British builder named William Willett. In the early 1900s, Willett was up early each spring and summer morning for his daily pre-breakfast horseback ride outside of London. He lamented that few people were enjoying the “best part of a summer day” and, reflecting on this distressing waste of daylight, in 1905 he independently conceived of the idea of putting the clocks forward in summer.

Willett believed that this would take advantage of the bright beautiful mornings and give more light in the evening, and yet not change anyone’s normal waking hour. In 1907, he issued a pamphlet entitled ‘The Waste of Daylight’, giving details of his proposal. Robert Pierce MP favoured Willett’s idea as soon as he heard of it, and in 1908 introduced it in parliament as the Daylight Saving Bill of 1908. Willett fought for years to gain approval of the concept in Britain.

There was very strong opinion on both sides. Among the many supporters was Winston Churchill, who gave a rousing pro-DST speech at Guildhall: “An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.” Other supporters included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and astronomer Sir Robert Ball.

But there was strong opposition from farmers, many scientists, and others. For example, farmers needed to follow the sun, not the clock – and a clock change would put them out of sync with the non-farming world. Scientists worried about the lack of continuity of data collection, while those who had recently finally achieved a worldwide standard time zone system didn’t want to introduce any irregularities.

Yet Willett was relentless in his pursuit of DST (later called summer time). But his repeated attempts to pass a bill in Parliament all failed, and Willett died in 1915, never seeing his idea come to fruition.

Which country was the first to adopt daylight savings time?

However, word of Willett’s concept had spread around Europe. As the First World War continued, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany recognised that using Willett’s DST would bring more sunlight to the evenings, replacing artificial lighting and saving precious fuel for the war effort. Thus taking the British idea, in 1916 Germany was the first country to adopt DST. Once it did so, Britain and European countries on both sides of the war quickly adopted DST, with the United States following suit on 31 March 1918, after it had entered the war.

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Though Britain continued summer time each year after the end of the First World War, many countries, considering DST a wartime measure, discontinued its use. American farmers defeated urban dwellers and President Woodrow Wilson to get DST repealed, returning the US to ‘God’s Time’. Between the world wars, spotty and inconsistent use of DST in parts of the United States and around the world sometimes caused problems, unusual incidents and, occasionally, tragedies. For example, disregard of a DST clock change caused a major train wreck in France, when one train’s crew neglected to make the correct clock change and thus was one hour ahead of where it should have been.

When the Second World War began, all combatants on both sides quickly adopted DST to save vital energy resources for the war. The United Kingdom extended summer time to the entire year (and thus the sunrise was a hour later the entire year), and later added double summer time (two hours advanced) in the summers. The United States similarly enacted Franklin Roosevelt’s year-round DST law 40 days after Pearl Harbor was attacked. With the end of the war, some countries abandoned their wartime DST while others continued it into the postwar years. Britain reverted to its prewar policy of summer DST.

In the US after the war, national DST was repealed, and DST became a local option. This caused widespread confusion because each US locality could adopt, start, and end DST as it desired. For instance, one year saw 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates used in the state of Iowa alone. And on one West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times when travelling just 35 miles. The situation led to millions of dollars of costs, especially in transportation and communications. Finally, in 1966, the US enacted a law requiring that if DST is utilised, it must be statewide, and that all states using DST must start and end it on the same dates.

The UK experimented with year-round summer time, called British Standard Time (BST), for three years, from 1968 through 1971. Opposition had grown from many, especially northerners, because of their strong dislike of the very dark mornings for going to work and their anxiety about possible accidents caused by sending young children to school in the dark. Farmers, building trades workers, foresters and others voiced deep opposition because they could not start work properly in the dark mornings. This opposition led the House of Commons on a free vote to vote strongly, 366 to 81, to end BST.

In 1973, an Arab Oil Embargo caused the first prolonged peacetime energy shortage in the United States. President Richard Nixon and Congress quickly established extended DST as a way to save energy. After the crisis was over, the US reverted to six months of DST, from May through October. This period was extended in 1986 to include April.

Why do the clocks go forward at different times in the US and the UK?

In 1996, after many years of non-uniformity of DST policy in Europe – especially between the continent and the UK –the European Union, including the UK, adopted a summer time period from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October.

As part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the US DST period was extended by about one month, commencing in 2007. Since that time, the US has begun DST two or three weeks before the UK and the rest of the Europe, and has ended it one week later.

Most studies show that DST for all the days from spring to autumn has several benefits, including: reducing automobile accidents; reducing energy usage; cutting outdoor crimes like mugging; and increasing public health by getting people outdoors more. And there’s the simple quality-of-life advantage that most people prefer having an extra hour of sunlight in the evening rather than the early morning. There are some recent proposals in Europe and in the United States to extend DST year-round. This might extend some of DST’s benefits to winter, probably at a diminished level – but would bring very dark mornings for sending children to school and for going to work.

Dr David Prerau is the author of Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (Basic Books, 2006) 

This article was first published by HistoryExtra in May 2019

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When did you first hear about Compton?

As a boy, from my father. I grew up in a sports-mad household, and my dad was a massive Middlesex and Arsenal fan – as I am. When I wasn’t playing cricket in the back garden, knocking the heads off roses, I’d be listening to the family talking about Denis Compton. I suppose I just inherited my dad’s love and admiration for the great man.

What kind of man was Compton?

The son of a painter and decorator, he grew up in north-west London. While still a boy, he scored a century as captain of an Elementary Schools XI. He was a handsome chap, adding a touch of glamour to the game – “a bit of a one”, as they say, with a twinkle in his eye. He wanted to win, but never took things too seriously. If things didn’t work out as he’d hoped on the day, he’d just pick himself up and look ahead to the next match.

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What made him a hero?

First and foremost, his extraordinary ability as a cricketer. A first-class batsman and bowler, he scored his first Test century aged just 20. One Aussie opponent, Sir Don Bradman – another legend – said that he was one of the greatest cricket players he’d ever seen, which is praise indeed. Second, he played for my beloved Arsenal; nowadays it’s hard to imagine a great cricketer also playing for a football team in the top division. Third, there was a real joie de vivre about him – he loved his cricket but he also loved life. He was the sort of chap people just wanted to be around.

What was his finest hour?

Where to start? He hit nearly 2,500 runs in 1939 alone, including 120 against the West Indies at Lord’s. Like other sportsmen of his generation, he lost some of his best years to the Second World War – he served in the army in India – but went on to thrill fans with his magnificent batting for country and county in the late 1940s and early 1950s, scoring famous centuries against the Aussies and South Africans. He had numerous finest hours!

Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about him?

Nothing springs to mind.

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own?

We both played cricket for Middlesex and England; like him, I was a left-arm unorthodox spin bowler. Unlike him, I sadly never got to play for the Gunners! I’d also like to think that I had a bit of his devil-may-care attitude to the game.

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What would you ask Compton if you could meet him?

Luckily, I did get to meet him when I was a young man, and I asked him if all the things my dad told me about him were true. “Most, but not all!” he chuckled.

Phil Tufnell is a former England cricketer who is part of the BBC’s Test Match Special team. His latest book, How Not to Be a Cricketer, is out now in paperback

This article was first published in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine