This edited article about originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 704 published on 12 July 1975.

The murder of Thomas Becket by Peter Jackson

Canterbury Cathedral, that magnificent edifice of stone, founded by St. Augustine in 598, is rightly considered to be one of our great national heritages. Although by the twelfth century, its position as an ecclesiastical building was assured, its popularity as a place of pilgrimage did not really begin until after the year of 1170. Then a steady flow of pilgrims made their way lo Canterbury to stand before a shrine which had come to he considered as one of the most sacred spots in Christendom. Sacred that is, until it was destroyed by Thomas Cromwell, three centuries later, on the orders of King Henry VIII. who declared that the shrine did not belong to a saint but to a traitor. The shrine belonged to Archbishop Thomas Becket. whose story is the classic one of the king’s favourite who fell from grace and paid for it with his life.

Becket was the son of a London merchant, who had risen from his relatively humble beginnings to become chancellor, chief minister and the friend of King Henry II. Although Becket was some fifteen years older than his royal master, he had quickly endeared himself to the king because of his seemingly light-hearted attitude to life and his love of sport. As the years had gone by, the two of them had become inseparable. Unhappily for both of them, it was a friendship that was to turn to enmity.

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This edited article about the Rothschilds originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 704 published on 12 July 1975.

Baron Nathan de Rothschild

The news from the Continent in the summer of 1815 was bad. Napoleon had escaped from Elba. His old army had flocked to his banner and the French were on the march again. Then a flicker of alarm ruffled the already uneasy atmosphere in London: Field Marshal von Blucher, the Prussian commander, had been defeated by Napoleon’s troops at Ligny on June 16.

In the City of London, the Stock Exchange, international economic barometer, reactcd predictably. Share prices fell.

But in his office, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, 38, financial genius and opportunist supreme, was listening avidly to one of his agents, who had just arrived from the Low Countries. With obvious enjoyment, he heard the emissary disclose that the combined British and Prussian forces had vanquished Napoleon at Waterloo two days after Blucher’s set-back. The financial coup of the century was about to break.

With such valuable knowledge, most speculators would have bought government shares by the armful. Nathan Rothschild decided to sell and even encouraged other business houses to do the same. The already depressed shares became even cheaper.

It was literally minutes before the great news of Waterloo was officially announced, that Nathan Rothschild produced his master-stroke. He began buying back the low-priced shares in immense quantities. When the victory of Waterloo burst upon London, share prices soared. So Nathan Rothschild counted his profits in millions of pounds.

Bankers, stockbrokers and dealers gasped; more with admiration than astonishment at his nerve and audacity, for they were quickly becoming accustomed to the rising eminence of the family that sprang from a Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt in the mid-1700s. The Rothschilds rivalled royalty in opulence and splendour, financed governments by their strength as the veritable economic backbone of Europe, bought palaces and rare paintings, established quality vineyards and influenced almost every branch of public life for more than 200 years. Bourbons, Hapsburgs. Bonapartes and Hohenzollerns all came under the Rothschild spell.

In the turbulent Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries, they pulled the political strings in every capital. The art of money-making with its dynamic influence, seemed to come easily to the Rothschilds. Just as it did to the man who started it all: Mayer Anselm Rothschild, who was born in 1744 and lived in the “House of the Saucepan” in Frankfurt. Though a modest dwelling, it sported a red shield which was later to become the family coat of arms emblazoned with five arrows – Mayer’s sons – in the grip of a strong arm.

Mayer, once a bank apprentice, started on the road to fortune by selling old coins to the Prince of Hesse, arguing that they would increase in value and offset inflation. For 36 years, he traded coins and trinkets with the prince who rewarded him with a loan that led to business contracts, percentages, discounts and all the paraphernalia of money-making. During this time, he married and his wife, Gudule, had ten children and lived to the advanced age of ninety-six.

After his marriage, Mayer seized opportunities to expand. He settled four of his sons in London, Paris, Vienna and Naples where they set up money-lending businesses. The eldest son, Anselm Mayer Rothschild, stayed with his father and subsequently took over the Frankfurt establishment, became a member of the Prussian Privy Council of Commerce and, in 1820, Bavarian consul and court banker.

Solomon went to Vienna where he was known as a confidante of Klemen Furst von Metternich, the diplomat behind Austria’s rise to power; Karl operated from Naples; Jacob established himself in Paris where he later negotiated loans for the Bourbons; and Nathan embarked on his career in London.

The sons and their father built up an unrivalled news service in European financial and political centres and, by using its “scoops” to buy stocks and shares at the right time, they rose to dominate governments and treasuries throughout the Continent.

Perhaps the height of respectability arrived in 1875 when the London bank of Baron Nathan Mayer, the first Jew to be raised to the British peerage, learned that the controlling shares of the Suez Canal were for sale. The asking price was £4 million.

Parliament was in recess. Prime Minister Disraeli had no means for raising such a sum; even the Bank of England could not produce it. So once again, the Rothschilds seized the chance and put up the money to give Britain the control over the vital lifeline to the Red Sea and beyond.

Yet the Rothschilds knew misfortune as well as success. Through decades of financial battles with rival finance houses, they were equally capable of meeting adversity. When an employee embezzled cash worth c.£4 million at today’s values, one brother alone was able to bear the loss. And as recently as 1938, the entire family estates in Austria were ransomed to the Nazi Gestapo to free Baron Louis Rothschild who had been held for 13 months.

Yet curiously enough, Lord Rothschild, current head of the British family, a Cambridge don, Socialist and holder of the George Cross for bomb disposal work, became an eminent scientist instead of a banker. His sister, Miriam, is an acknowledged expert on nature study and an authority on fleas, taking years to produce a huge reference book cataloguing the habits of 4,000 species.

Lord Rothschild’s continental counterpart is Baron Guy de Rothschild, businessman and industrialist, who turns over companies at c. £400 million a time and snaps up race horses for as much as c. £60,000 each. When the Baron wanted to build three holes for his private golf course at his chateau, Henry Cotton, the famous British golfer, flew over to lay them out for him.

Another Rothschild – Philippe – owns the Chateau Mouton vineyard. It was bought more than a century ago for c. £250,000 and today produces some of the finest wines in the world.

Socialists by political persuasion, the Rothschilds are essentially Jewish, revering the family and its remarkable history. It was appropriate, therefore, that the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, stating that the British Government viewed with favour “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine should be addressed to the reigning head of the British House of Rothschild. So while remaining fervently patriotic to the country of their adoption, the Rothschilds’ hearts and sympathies are with Israel. Somehow they symbolise the indomitable Jewish determination to survive.

This edited article about King Faisal of Saudi Arabia originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 703 published on 5 July 1975.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia

Dressed in a long white gown that effectively concealed the pistol he was holding. Prince Faisal bin Museid Ibn Abdel Aziz of Saudi Arabia began slowly to walk the length of a hall in the royal palace in Riyadh, the capital. At the far end of the hall sat his uncle, King Faisal, who was receiving the members of his family and court. It was March 25th, this year, the birthday of the prophet Mohammed, a holy day.

The courtiers had given the king the customary kiss on each cheek, and they drew to one side to allow the prince to do the same.

When he was only a few yards from the king, the prince stopped. While the attendants waited politely for him to advance, he drew his pistol. They saw the glint of metal, heard the sound of three shots fired at point blank range and saw the king collapse with blood staining his royal attire. The attendants rushed the king to hospital, but they were too late. Thirty minutes after the shots had been fired, he was dead.

The killer’s motives were not clear. Some said that his mind was deranged. Others declared that he had murdered out of revenge for his brother, who was killed at a political demonstration by Faisal’s security forces.

But whatever the motive was, the fact remains that with Faisal’s death there passed from the Middle Eastern scene a man with the power to control the flow of one of the world’s most vital commodities – oil!

King Faisal, a man of austere habits and untold wealth, was becoming the most important chieftain of all Arabia. This was because a measure of unity had been reached among the desert lands after the 1973 war with Israel. The fuel crisis in the West stemmed directly from his decision to stop exports of oil to countries which supported Israel. Even those like Britain, which tried to remain neutral, suffered from the oil restrictions.

The soaring price of oil brought vast riches to the already wealthy land of Saudi Arabia, where the king counted his fortune in millions of pounds. As the country with the largest oil fields in the world, Saudi Arabia earned £10,000 million last year – or roughly £300 a second. Her financial reserves grew almost too fast for accurate assessment.

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This edited article about John Wesley originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 698 published on 31 May 1975.

John Wesley by Peter Jackson

John Wesley lived to be nearly ninety, but his life nearly came to a much earlier end when at the age of only six, he was rescued from a fire on the night of 9th February, 1709.

The house in which he lay sleeping caught fire and within a matter of minutes, its thatched roof collapsed in a cascade of sparks upon the very place where the boy had been lying asleep in his bed. But for the courage and promptness of a neighbour, who saw the child standing at the bedroom window in his nightshirt, he would never have come out of the house alive. As it was, a shout for help and some willing arms had “little Jacky” as they all knew him then, out of the raging inferno just in time. Standing in the garden of Epworth Rectory, he clung to his mother, and watched the family home collapse in smoking ruins.

John Wesley’s father, Samuel Wesley, was Rector of Epworth at the time, a village set deep in the Lincolnshire fens. In addition to being a clergyman, he was a scholar, and something of a poet, though not a very successful one. The villagers certainly thought him odd, and he was often involved in quarrels with local farmers about what they owed him or he owed them. And not only with farmers: he was heavily in debt to tradesmen in Lincoln, and as far away as London. Also his income as the local Rector was so small that his family had to live for years in grinding poverty, handing down carefully patched clothes from one to another, and eating mainly what could be grown in the garden.

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This edited article about Mustafa Kemal originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 694 published on 3 May 1975.

Kemal Ataturk replaced the traditional Fez with western-style headwear, by John Keay

For an arrogant, despotic man like Mustafa Kemal, the moment when he first realised that he was ashamed to be a Turk, was a very painful one. Yet, at the same time, Kemal could not deny that his feelings of shame were justified. In the vigorous, progressive, industrialised world of seventy years ago, when Kemal was a young army officer, any country would have been dubbed undignified if, like Turkey, it was ruled by a remote autocratic Sultan and a corrupt, inept government. And any people would have been called backward if, like the Turks, they were for the most part illiterate, impoverished and inert. The mentality of the average Turkish peasants could be summed up in the phrase, “It is the Will of Allah!” (the Muslim God), a phrase which greeted almost every disaster, natural or man-made that afflicted them. Mustafa Kemal, who was born in 1881 in Salonika, was totally repelled by this attitude. He refused to believe, as millions of peasants did, that it was the will of Allah that floods should destroy the peasants’ meagre crops, or that disease should kill and cripple their children or that rapacious government officials should rob and browbeat whole villages. Kemal believed instead in a force he considered to be much more powerful – the will of Man to improve and progress. Most of all, Kemal believed in his own will to bring that improvement and that progress to backward Turkey and so transform it into a strong, modern state.

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This edited article about Joan of Arc originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 692 published on 19 April 1975.

Joan of Arc by Pat Nicolle

The trouble with searching out the truth of what really happened in some of the world’s great mysteries is made many times worse when we have to deal with someone whose position in the world’s story has been deliberately altered to suit the crafty convenience of the people who have come afterwards.

For instance, Joan of Arc.

It would, indeed, have been hard enough for us to get at the truth of Joan’s story if we had lived in her own time – so carefully, it seems, was the truth veiled even then. But in the five hundred years since her time it is doubtful whether any single story in the whole of history has been more twisted, stretched, pummelled, distorted, taken apart and rebuilt than Joan’s story.

Somewhere you have probably read that she was a shepherd girl from Lorraine, devout but illiterate.

Well, two highly skilled researchers and writers, of whom more in a moment, have recently made out an excellent case for her being the daughter of the Duke of New Orleans – and therefore the aunt of King Henry VI of England – and the tool of the scheming, divided noble houses of the French states that existed in her lifetime.

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This edited article about St Paul’s Cathedral originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 691 published on 12 April 1975.

Sir Christopher Wren watches as the huge golden cross is placed on the top of St Paul’s Cathedral, by Peter Jackson

At the top of Ludgate Hill in the middle of the City of London, stands the architectural masterpiece of Sir Christopher Wren.

This magnificent domed building, called St. Paul’s Cathedral, was erected to Wren’s designs during the years from 1673 to 1711.

Wren had already submitted two other designs before the Church Commissioners finally accepted his third design, which was a compromise between the architect’s insistence on a Classical cathedral with a dome, and the clergy’s preference for a cross-shaped plan.

A great Gothic cathedral once stood on the site of the present building. This, the Old St. Paul’s, was one of England’s largest and finest Gothic buildings.

In September of 1666 it was almost completely destroyed by the Great Fire Of London, and it was then that Wren submitted his first design for the replacement cathedral.

In his later years, the great architect would love to visit the building and spend hours standing inside looking up at the great dome he had designed, and on which are the paintings by Sir James Thornhill.

Above is the climb to the Whispering Gallery, which picks up a whisper from the other side of the dome, then to the Stone Gallery, giving a view out across the city, and higher to the Golden Gallery at the top of the dome and finally into the Golden Ball.

The crypt of St. Paul’s is so large it is almost a cathedral in itself. It contains massive tombs of Nelson and Wellington, including Wellington’s 18-ton funeral carriage.

One monument which survived the Great Fire, was the monument to John Donne, built in the year of the great poet’s death, 1631, and re-erected in St. Paul’s.

In recent years the exterior has been cleaned of two and a half centuries of soot, revealing the beautiful carved decoration by Francis Bird, Edward Pierce, Caius Gabriel Cibber and Grinling Gibbons.

This edited article about Alexandra David-Neel originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 691 published on 12 April 1975.

Alexandra David-Neel sees Lhasa for the first time

The travellers who were making the slow, painful journey into the heart of the Himalayas were now at the most difficult and spectacular part of their task. The path clung to the sheer face of towering canyon walls as it wound its way up the slopes and soon it had narrowed to a ledge only nine inches wide.

Alexandra David-Neel edged her way along these dangerous stretches, gripping protruding iron pegs or the rock itself where she could and trying not to look at the rushing, foaming river a thousand feet below. One slip would mean certain death but she coolly kept both her balance and her possessions until, at last, the path widened and they could walk safely once more.

Not that she ever wanted to turn back. She had already completed some spectacular travels in India, China and Japan but Lhasa, the forbidden city of Tibet, was the next target for her ambition. Now, at last, disguised as a begging pilgrim and accompanied only by a Lama, she had begun the great adventure.

The mystery of Tibet had been jealously guarded for centuries and by the end of the 19th century, only a handful of Europeans had ever succeeded in penetrating this remote and forbidding land. It is guarded by both the Himalayas, the Karakoram mountains and the vast deserts of central Asia but even those who reached this strange land, often failed to do more than pass the border before they were turned back. Both politics and religion played a part in ensuring that foreigners were kept out and soon Tibet became known as “The Forbidden Land”.

A few missionaries and a merchant or two, were the only Westerners to see a fraction of the country. Then the great East India Company sent an envoy to see whether Tibet could be used as the back door to the vast markets of China. Soon afterwards, however, the Tibetans closed their frontiers completely and a century of almost total isolation began. Those who tried to evade the border guards faced, at best, humiliation and an escort back to the frontier. Others just disappeared and we can only guess at their fate.

None of this could alter Alexandra David-Neel’s obsession with Tibet nor the fascination of its strange religion. But she certainly did not rush into an enterprise that might end in disaster.

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This edited article about Sir Richard Burton originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 687 published on 15 March 1975.

Sir Richard Burton’s journey to the Forbidden City by Severino Baraldi

The days in the desert were now so hot and the sun so fierce that the pilgrim caravan could only march at night. Underneath a clear, black sky, sprinkled with stars, the long line of camels looked like dim phantoms in the light of blazing torches. Men shouted encouragement, beasts called to each other and Richard Burton sometimes reflected that he felt more like a member of a travelling circus than an English soldier attempting one of the world’s most dangerous journeys.

Soon the path narrowed to a small cut between precipitous ridges of rock. Burton noticed that the pilgrims had become strangely silent and that even the camels now hurried without being beaten. Turning in his saddle, he whispered a question to one of his companions.

“What is happening now?”

“Allah protect us!” came the grim answer. “This is the Pass of Death.”

Burton looked up at the black cliffs surrounding them and realised that if ever a place was made for an ambush, then this was it. He had hardly re-settled, when a single shot rang out and the camel in front fell with a bullet in its heart. Within seconds, other shots followed, men and animals fell to the ground and panic swept the caravan. Burton flattened himself, looking for whatever cover was available as the group of Wahhabi soldiers who were escorting them courageously swarmed up the hill to engage the robbers on the summit.

In twenty minutes, the battle was over and the robbers had fled. But they dared not stay in the dangerous defile and, leaving a shambles behind, they picked their way through to the comparative safety of the open desert once more. Not for the first time, Richard Burton wondered what had possessed him to make this forbidden pilgrimage. He had discovered that it was difficult enough for a Moslem to get to Mecca, but for an Englishman in disguise the greatest dangers were yet to come. But as he wrote later. “When I ask myself ‘Why?’, the only answer is “Fool! . . . the Devil drives”.”

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This edited article about Ancient Rome’s Praetorian Guard originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 687 published on 15 March 1975.

Maxentius and the Praetorian Guard were defeated by Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, by Severino Baraldi

“4,000 denarii!”
“4,250 denarii!”
“4,500 denarii!”

An empire was up for auction, the Roman Empire, mistress of the Ancient World, mighty realm of the Caesars.

The year was 193 A.D. and the Praetorian Guard, whose duty it was to protect the ruler of the Roman World, had just murdered the Emperor Pertinax. Now these elite troops were gathered in their barracks, busily selling the Empire to the highest bidder.

Sulpicianus who commanded the legionary cohorts stationed in Rome, (though not the Praetorian Guard) was bidding from inside the barracks.

“5,000 denarii, and that is my final offer,” he said.

But outside, down the street, there stood an incredibly rich and very stupid Roman politician named Didius Julianus.

“Then I offer the Praetorians 6,500 denarii!” he called. Even the greedy Praetorians gasped at this incredible sum, approximately £300 for each of the 6,000 men in the nine Praetorian cohorts.

The poorer people of Rome pelted Julianus with stones and rubbish as he made his way home, but what did the people matter? Julianus had bought the Praetorian Guard and that meant he had bought the Empire as well.

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