Twenty Minutes

Historian Juliet Gardiner analyses the political, social and cultural events of 1934 using clips from the BBC sound archive of the period. She uses the archive to take us through the story of Ramsay MacDonald's national coalition, the Gresford Disaster (one of the worst tragedies in Welsh mining history) and, in passing, the expeditions to Antarctica, the beginning of road-safety advice with the Belisha beacon and the impact of literature and architecture in that year. This history contextualises the world in which Delius, Elgar and Holst end their days and into which Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle are born.