Blood diamonds and the meeting between Florence Nightingale and Aga Khan III

14:19Max Pearson:But gradually the equipment became more and more technical, largely based on the work of an American physicist, Percy Bridgman, who won the Nobel Prize for high-pressure physics in the 1940s. There were two teams that managed to grow diamonds in what was called the high-pressure, a high temperature method, both in the 1950s. But actually, they weren't the first to grow diamonds. There was another approach which won the race to grow artificial diamonds by a month. It was called chemical vapour deposition. The diamonds are grown in relatively low pressures at relatively low temperatures of around 1000 degrees centigrade.

15:03Max Pearson:We start off with a chamber and carbon-rich gases are added to this chamber. So typically methane, which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon. And that gas is heated and turned into a plasma. So when it's a plasma, what's happening is the molecules of the gas are being broken apart. And so the carbon becomes free, free of the hydrogen bonds. And then the carbon atoms move around the chamber before they're eventually settled on a seed of diamond which is placed in a slightly cooler area of the chamber. That seed diamond grows a bit like how you see water condensing on a cool window. In the winter it might cool on a car windscreen and crystallise to ice.

15:50Max Pearson:So that's the second approach to growing diamonds called chemical vapour deposition, increasingly mainstream in the market today. That's the gemologist and author James Evans. Next, to Syria and the civil war which engulfed the country from 2011 onwards was one of the deadliest and most destructive conflicts to emerge out of the Arab Spring. But amongst the chaos, a group of young men in the besieged town of Daraya came together to build a secret library, a symbol of hope for a fractured community. Surya Alango has been speaking to Malik al-Rafai, a young volunteer who helped run the library.

16:28James Evans:It's the 27th of August 2016, and we're in Derea, a town on the western fringe of Damascus. An evacuation agreement has been brokered between the Syrian government and rebel forces, ending one of the longest standoffs in the Syrian civil war. 23-year-old Malik is one of the rebels being escorted out of the town. The front lines started to collapse, and the regime started to advance in the city. The fight was so intense, the clashes were so intense and immediately they told us, you have to flee the city, you have to leave the city. As the Syrian government forces advanced, so too did the world's media, including Al Jazeera English.

17:11Max Pearson:They have suffered a siege, starvation and heavy bombardment. Now, rebel fighters and their families leave Daraya. The Damascus suburb was the opposition rebels' stronghold, a gateway to the capital.

17:27James Evans:After some days, we watched footage, and by accident, they filmed soldiers collecting books from the basement of the library. Daraya had once had a cultural centre with a small library, but this had been damaged during the war. But there was another place Malik knew about. It was secret, like no one knew the place, but for us, it was the library. Since 2013, this secret library has been tucked deep underneath the rubble of a bombed out building. In the regular world, everyone can go borrow book and read book. But the norm back then was that you are under siege, you are not allowed to study, you are not allowed to live your life as you want, you are not allowed to go out of the siege, you are not allowed to travel, you are not allowed to do anything that you want.

18:15James Evans:So it was giving us the sense of normalcy. We were treated as animals. But then we started the library. We felt like, yeah, we are human again. We have some freedom under siege. We have the ability to go to a place that we love, to discuss things that we love without any restrictions.

18:36James Evans:Let's rewind four years to 2012, the beginning of this siege. So it wasn't like that kind of idea that come in a spark of a moment. Before establishing a library, there were many people who loved reading and collecting books. And, you know, they existed anywhere. So perhaps some of them were walking and they would find a book. And then, wow, it's a book. Let me check it. They would clean it and they would keep it somewhere safe. And then some of these friends recognized that they have this emotional interest in saving the books between the rubble. So it gradually developed into a shared collective project, the library.

19:20James Evans:So let's make commonplace for everyone. Everything was worse circumstances. Everything was destroyed. People were dying everywhere. So people went and collected some shelves and some wood from a warehouse. And then they brought some sofa from the same building. They put it in the basement. And we don't know the owners of the sofa. We don't have permission to get their sofas, but that's the word. That's the word's circumstances. You don't have the options to buy sofas. You don't have the options to ask people for permission because you don't know who lives in this building. With the siege, the safest place to build the makeshift library was underground.

20:04James Evans:The regime started producing something they called barrel bomb. It's a regular barrel. They would put some teinte in it and some sharpness. And then they would throw this barrel, handmade by the regime, and they call it stupid weapon because you can't direct it. So they would drop it in the middle, but they won't use it next to the front line because next to the front line there is their soldier. It was close to the front line to avoid the barrel bombs. The library team consisted of a group of 20 to 40 young men. Each of them would rummage amongst the rubble as they went about their daily lives.

20:42James Evans:If they did happen to stumble across a book, they'd call someone back at the basement. There is no public transportation, of course, and there is some cars, but sometimes there is no fuel to use these cars. So sometimes we'd use bicycles, sometimes we'd use... Together, they collected 15 ,000 books that were brought down to the basement library. stacked neatly according to author and genre. Inside each book, the librarians wrote the original owner's name if they knew it, or the building and street name the book was found in, in case the owners ever wanted to return home or retrieve their books.

21:22James Evans:It was like a safe space for us and for the people under siege. So some people would come and borrow some books or return some books that they had borrowed before. and some people would come and read the books in the library itself because it has lighting and it's safe and it's clean and there is people who are managing this place. And there is like this social aspect as well because you meet friends and people share interests. The library became a place of hope and planning for the future. People were interested in change, changing the regime. So one of the most important philosophers of all time was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

22:06James Evans:He used to write many books regarding the French Revolution. So people started reading these kinds of books. Books about social contracts, books about revolution, books about democratic changes, stories of what went wrong, what went well, what should we do. With so much political turmoil and no civic space, Malik was involved in running a discussion group in the library. Young boys and young men, they were exposed to many new propagandas. So let's gather and discuss this political change or discuss democracy. Let's discuss, do we want our country to be a republic or we want our country to be other kind of government?

22:50James Evans:The people who came to the library were from all walks of life. Some were fighters who would take their books with them to swap at the front line. Others were practising doctors and dentists at the field hospital. Unable to complete their studies under the siege, they read anatomy and pharmaceutical books from the library. For four years, this library has been the beating heart of rebel resistance in Dorea. But then on August 26, 2016, everything changed again.

23:20Max Pearson:The Syrian army says all rebel fighters have now abandoned the town of Dorea. on the outskirts of Damascus. The last of 25 buses...

23:28James Evans:Of the day they announced that the city is going to force evacuate to Idlib, northwest Syria. I went back to our media office, we collected our stuff, and we were so overwhelmed. I didn't go to the library. My last visit was one week before the forced evacuation of the city. It was only days after Malik had left Daraya, sitting in the city of Idlib, he watched the news coverage. Government soldiers discovering and looting the secret library and its thousands of books they had collected. Their four-year-long well-kept secret was out. It was so sad. We had that emotional connect with these books.

24:07James Evans:But at the same time, I felt like at least we preserved this book. We saved these books for a certain amount of time, for these four years. But it was the bad guys who stole them and sold them. Malik now lives in Turkey. He remembers reading a sociology book at the library, in which he learned to term the third place. So we have our house, then we have the work, but the third place, when we gather us all, whenever we want to do whatever we want, we miss it. People who once lived in Derea have begun buying back their books that were sold at flea markets following the civil war, identifying them by the secret library's handwritten notes inside the covers.

24:53Max Pearson:Surya Elango was speaking to Malek Al-Rafai, the young underground librarian of Daraya.

25:18Max Pearson:The president of Poland, Carol Nowrowski. U.S. President Donald Trump.

25:22James Evans:To cultural icons. Two-time Oscar-winning actor, Sir Anthony Hopkins. The interview from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.

25:47Max Pearson:This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.

25:51James Evans:It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

26:08Max Pearson:Still to come in the History Hour, the 1981 storming of Spain's parliament in an attempted coup. and the Aga Khan meets Florence Nightingale in 1898. It was remarkable how well she looked and what an impression of health and strength she made on all who came in contact with her at this period of her life. Before that, the start of the Second World War in the Pacific. While fighting had been underway in Europe for more than two years, it wasn't until Japanese troops landed in what was then northern Malaya that the war in the Asia-Pacific region really began. Jacqueline Payne has been hearing from a woman who was caught up in that Japanese invasion.

26:56James Evans:It's just after midnight on the 8th of December 1941, and Japanese troops have just landed on Kotobaro Beach on Malaya's northeast coast. In less than an hour, Japanese aircraft will begin their surprise attack on US troops in Hawaii's Pearl Harbour. Dorothy Varayan is aged nine and living in Malacca City in southwestern Malaya with her family, including nine brothers and sisters. One day, a plane came and bombed, and that's probably when people started to get frightened.

27:29Max Pearson:And then there was nothing else for a while. My father knew that the Japanese had come to the north.

27:37James Evans:The race was on to reach Singapore and neutralise its British naval base. Across Malaya, air attacks increase as the Japanese tried to control enemy airspace.

27:48Max Pearson:Japanese planes were very funny. They used to drone. The boys could tell when it was a Japanese plane and when it was some other plane because they had a distinct sound. They must have heard that before the bombs fell.

28:06James Evans:Allied troops retreat quickly. Just hours later, Japanese invasion forces begin their advance to capture Singapore. They make swift progress through dense jungle and down the western coast of the Malay Peninsula. Their route goes directly past Dorothy's house.

28:23Max Pearson:We didn't know what it was all about when they were going down our road, track after track after track. The Japanese came later in the day. They didn't come in the daylight. They came in the dark. Sunrise in Malaya, over the jungle in which some of the fiercest fighting of the war is taking place. Near the border of Thailand, a cyclist detachment is peddling to the station. Reinforcements to stem the advance of the Japanese towards Singapore.

28:52James Evans:Japanese troops cross Malaya quickly. Using bikes and light tanks, they outpace the Allies. It's night time when they reach Dorothy's house.

29:00Max Pearson:They were already in our houses before we knew what was happening. And then they were all over us, all over the street. It was a night of horror. We could see from our bedroom windows. And because there was so much noise, they were only interested in hitting the Chinese and taking them away, all the men away. And I was terrified.

29:31James Evans:It's Dorothy's Chinese neighbours who received some of the Japanese troops' most brutal treatment.

29:37Max Pearson:They left the Malaysian alone, quite alone. They didn't bother with them, but Chinese mainly. There was a Chinese lady who was a friend of my father's. She had a very big house. She was wealthy, I think. And the Japanese just went into that place and just ransacked it and used it as a toilet and so on. and then she got so frightened, she ran out to our house. They terrorised the Chinese people, did they? God, yes, they did. They did all sorts of things, terrible things. And the women were crying, wailing.

30:17James Evans:Her horrified family flee to the countryside at first light, hoping it will be safer. They're staying in a one-roommatic above a coffee shop when Dorothy's father goes back to their old house to collect more belongings and he learns about further Japanese cruelty.

30:33Max Pearson:And somebody came and told us they cut a Chinese man's head and put it on a pole and all the brothers wanted to go and see and my mother was trying to stop them. But they did go and they came back and started talking about it and my mother shut them up.

30:52James Evans:After weeks spent looking for work, one day her father and eldest brother come back with news of a job on a rubber plantation. It comes with its own bungalow, and although the estate is under the control of the Japanese, Dorothy and her siblings can attend school.

31:07Max Pearson:Every morning we went to school to study Japanese. We had like a maypole almost, and we had to walk around there and sing there.

31:23Max Pearson:It's a national anthem, right round the thing, every morning. Oh yes, and bow. The bowing is very important. But it was a good language to learn.

31:35James Evans:I liked it. On February 8th, 1942, Japanese troops reached Singapore Island.

31:42Max Pearson:Melea is gone. Singapore next. These latest films show the final preparations for the Jap invasion that came across Johor Strait. The British loss of men and equipment in jungles and swampland was heavy.

31:55James Evans:Fighting continues until the 15th of February, when 80 ,000 allies are taken as prisoners of war. Japanese troops have captured Singapore in just 54 days. The invasion puts intense pressure on food supplies, but Dorothy's family avoid hunger by growing their own vegetables and hunting wild boar. Then, in December 1943, the family moved to another rubber plantation. After several months, Japanese soldiers stopped visiting, and they suspect the war is coming to an end. How did you know that the war had finished?

32:31Max Pearson:Because we never saw even a single Japanese for a while. Malay men used to go to shops and coffee shops and so on, and they came back and said that the war is ending. There are no Japanese around us either, so we gathered them. I didn't even think about it, maybe. I just took it that they meant times are going to be better now.

32:57James Evans:But things don't improve for Dorothy's family. In fact, at the end of the war, they get worse. Her father's gravely ill and her mother desperately needs cash.

33:07Max Pearson:She probably had 10, 12 cows and about 100 goats. Got a lot. Anyway, there was no space to put them either, you know, at that time. And all the cows and cattle and goats that she had, she had to sell them. The door was quite deep and it was full of Japanese money.

33:29James Evans:But that money is worthless. Shopkeepers will only accept Malayan dollars, sometimes called pounds. It's devastating for Dorothy's mother. Just a few months earlier, she'd burnt all her savings, fearing it could put her family at risk if discovered by the Japanese. But Dorothy had hidden some of that cash in their old house before it was set on fire. Her brother Barlin is sent to find out whether it's still there.

33:55Max Pearson:We saw him when he came back and he had it in his hand and he was showing us it was on his bike. So that£10, it was worth a lot of money because everybody was so pleased because we had good food and shopkeepers were very happy with us. And now, after three years, eight months and 25 days, the Japanese war is at an end.

34:17James Evans:On the 12th of September 1945, Japanese forces surrendered in Singapore. On their return to Malacca, British Indian Army soldiers helped Dorothy's family settle in. But it's not long before they see the full horror of the war.

34:33Max Pearson:We used to play rounders with them. And we used to run between the trees. and I can't remember who it was that found this well and they looked inside and they said, come and see this. And it was full of Chinese people's heads in the well. You know, the Japanese had cut and put their heads in the well. Just killed them for nothing, isn't it? I mean, they weren't fighting. What was happening all around us, it was actually much nicer to be away from where we were and go to the countryside. I don't know what would have happened to us if we hadn't. I really don't know. Dorothy Varian was speaking to Jacqueline Payne.

35:21Max Pearson:Next, we've got a meeting between two of the most prominent figures in history from around the turn of the last century, Florence Nightingale and the Aga Khan, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah. As Rachel Naylor reports, using a remarkable interview from the BBC archives, these individuals from seemingly diverse backgrounds had a wide-ranging and influential discussion.

35:45James Evans:It's spring 1898 and Florence Nightingale, the founder of Modern Nursing has invited 20-year-old Aga Khan III, a prominent Muslim leader to tea at her home in London, as he told the BBC in 1950. They had a wide-ranging discussion about faith, healthcare and even Queen Victoria.

36:05Max Pearson:She was then an invalid and could not move about. And I found her sitting in her lovely small house of Park Lane. She had been interested in India, and especially in the conditions of health in villages for women and children. It was at this first meeting that after she had spoken to me about the various improvements in the condition of the people in this country, that I asked her if she meant that the people believed more in God than they had in the middle years of the century.

36:49James Evans:Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, known as the Aga Khan, was the 48th Imam of Shia Ismaili Muslims. He was known for promoting Muslim rights in India and was the first president of the All India Muslim League. Florence Nightingale, nicknamed the Lady with the Lamp, led a group of nurses to care for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, revolutionising nursing.

37:09Max Pearson:She then told me that general conversations tired her, that she preferred tether-tether and thus excused herself for not inviting other friends to meet me. considering that she was an invalid and had many physical difficulties it was remarkable how well she looked and what an impression of health and strength she made on all who came in contact with her at this period of her life she fully understood and sympathized with me realizing that if spiritual convictions fell, then motives, desires and aims would also deteriorate and lead to a general concentration of supposedly real but probably imaginary material advantages and objectives.

38:21Max Pearson:No doubt material and physical advance had brought about undoubted advantages in the condition of life of the people but with the dwindling of religious faith sooner or later a collapse would take place It was on these lines that we spent the afternoon

38:46James Evans:Florence had contracted Crimean fever in 1855 and was often bedridden with chronic fatigue, but she still continued to campaign to improve health standards. If Florence Nightingale had not thought of the problem earlier, had not realised amidst the general optimism of the turn of the century, that the then prevalent agnosticism

39:13Max Pearson:could lead somehow or other to the sorry scheme of things as they are today and as they have been from the first decade of this century till now living in the midst of wars or rumors or expectation of war anyhow she understood the possible gravity of the then intellectual and moral atmosphere the moment I called her attention to it.

39:44James Evans:Florence asked the Aga Khan to tea again that summer and they picked up where they left off.

39:50Max Pearson:I've heard it said that she was brusque and overbearing. But on each occasion that I went to see her, I found a charming host ready to listen and to discuss even with a young man like I was. Though at first I was naturally diffident, then being a young man, she soon put me at my ease and encouraged me in every way to speak out my mind freely and openly to her. Perhaps it was the fact that she could not get up and wore clothes that were personal to her rather than fashionable, as well as the prestige she had that gave one the impression of royalty. That same year I had had the honor of dining with Queen Victoria, whom I had met to on other occasions, and it was remarkable how the two most prominent women of the 19th century, though so different in every way, both impressed one with great dignity combined with extraordinary simplicity and patience.

41:13James Evans:The Aga Khan's conversations with Florence encouraged him to concentrate on the welfare of expectant mothers and babies amongst his followers in Africa and Asia in the following years.

41:22Max Pearson:Florence Nightingale was very well informed about the terrible conditions of Indian women of all classes except the very rich at childbirth and in the period immediately following. She also surprised me at the time by knowing the official figures of the death rate among infants in India, especially in the great cities of Calcutta and Bombay. She also inquired about the housing conditions of the vast mill-hand population of Bombay. In 96, the plague appeared in Bombay and western India for the first time after centuries. By 1997, the number of deaths was appalling, and few knew how to meet this sudden and then little-known epidemic.

42:25James Evans:In the late 19th century, a bubonic plague epidemic hit the city of Bombay in British India, now Mumbai in India. It killed thousands, and many fled the city. The Aga Khan was inoculated by his friend, Russian professor Valdemar Hafkin, who developed the first vaccine for the plague to set an example to the general public.

42:42Max Pearson:Florence Nightingale had heard about all this. She was naturally very much interested in the plague and its causes and consequences. The medical profession in India had been conservative and rather shy of Hopkins preventive methods. There was prejudice against him at that time Possibly because he was a chemist and not a doctor Florence Nightingale told me that she would use her influence So that Hefkin got a fair and square deal But statistics soon proved how right Hefkin had been and the triumph of his sister came about by its efficiency and utility in a very short time. After the summer of 1898, I neither saw Florence Nightingale again nor had I any correspondence with her.

43:55James Evans:Florence Nightingale died in 1910. Aga Khan III died in 1957.

44:02Max Pearson:Rachel Naylor and that revealing interview with Aga Khan III, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah, was from the BBC archives. This week's sporting witness next. In the summer of 1952, the first Olympics of the Cold War era took place in Finland's capital city, Helsinki. It was in these games that a Czechoslovakian army officer called Emil Zatepek achieved a unique feat in the athletics events. Simon Watts first told this story in 2016 with help from archive recordings. In this Soviet camp, there lived the man who was to win the Olympic Games almost by himself, Emil Zatopek, the incredible Czech. Every step looked like his last, yet it was Zatopek's 5 ,000 metres, Zatopek's 10 ,000 metres, and even Zatopek's marathon, all Olympic records.

44:53Max Pearson:Not only did he achieve this extraordinary thing, but he did it all with such grace and charm and friendship and generosity. Richard Asquith, Emil Zaterpek's biographer. He loved to talk. He spoke eight languages well. To him, running wasn't just about joylessly grinding out victories. It was a vehicle for international friendship. Emil Zaterpek was born in rural Czechoslovakia in 1922. Despite his later glory, he wasn't a natural sportsman and as a boy he was always left out of football games. I was very anxious to play also football

45:29James Evans:but as I remember I was able only to run around and not to hit the ball and our teacher once, he called me boy, you are good in running but useless to play football I need somebody to run, to bring me sandwich from a shop every day After the school, I went to work in the biggest shoe factory in Czechoslovakia.

45:59Max Pearson:The shoe factory organised an annual race through the local town. Now a teenager, Zatapek was reluctant to take part. But once he started running again, he found he loved the attention.

46:11James Evans:After one kilometre, I came into the leading together with another boy. It was nice, spectators around, plenty of applause and go-go boys. Why I wanted not to take part, it is very nice to take part in sport competition. But a few seconds later, my friend started this sprint and I came second.

46:37Max Pearson:After that second place, Zatapek was determined to become a winner. And once he joined the Czechoslovak army, his training became obsessive. He used to train in the woods and in the snow because he felt that if you can't deal with a bit of hardship in your training, then how are you going to cope in the heat of a race? But he also was doing things like running on the spot on sentry duty and seeing how long he could hold his breath and sometimes passing out. Or training by running on laundry in the bath for a couple of hours on end. I think he always, right from the beginning, realised anything he wanted in life he would have to work for.

47:13Max Pearson:especially in those days a lot of the athletes of the olympics were just people blessed with natural talent and never had really had to give it much thought but him everything he achieved came from just sheer hard work i think that's another reason why so many people warmed to him and sympathized with him he was in pain he you could see everything he was going through and that made it terribly dramatic to watch he seemed to claw the air a bit um as if he might be having a fit or one you know one person said he ran as if like a man wrestling an octopus on a conveyor belt By 1952, Zatopek had become the fastest distance runner in the world, and he was so personally popular that all the other athletes in Helsinki wanted to meet him.

47:53Max Pearson:Although the Soviet group of countries joined in the Games, they lived apart from everyone else, concentrated in their own camp. As a condition for entering the Games, Stalin had demanded that all communist countries be housed in a separate Olympic village, but a string of Westerners made their way over to see Zatopek. including, on one famous occasion, the Australian coach, Percy Cerity. These really were meant to be the Cold War Olympics. There were armed guards and barbed wire, and the idea was that it had nothing to do with one another. But in fact, fairly soon, Percy Cerity, he goes around and talks to Emil.

48:29Max Pearson:Like everyone else, he finds that Emil is terribly generous about his training regime. He tells all his secrets to anyone who asks. Cerity just stays and stays and stays and asks question after question after question. and eventually it's so late that the gates have been shut and it's too late to go back. So Emil says, well, have my bed, and gives him his bed and goes off and sleeps in the woods. Can you imagine someone doing that a couple of nights before an Olympic final? I mean, it's just crazy generosity. But he had this sort of deep, deep, almost religious belief of the duty of hospitality.

49:01Max Pearson:That night in the Finnish woods didn't affect Zatapak's performance. In his first event, the 10 ,000 metres, he destroyed the opposition. but Zatapak's next race will probably be the hardest of his whole career. The real problem race for him was the 5 ,000 metres, where it was a terribly strong field. People were talking about it going to be the race of the century. And so you have this very, very tense race going on for the first 11½ laps. And then they come up to Bell, and he's just at the Bell, and he's in position. And off he goes, and this is what he's been working towards for four years.

49:33Max Pearson:And he's halfway around the first bend on this final lap, and then the other runners start to overtake him, and he's coming fourth. You can see the despair on his face as the other three are stretching away. And then he just thinks, I'm not going to give up yet. And then he just puts on this amazing surge. All four of them are level. Just as they're coming out of the bend, he moves ahead. He wants it more than anyone else. He draws away. The excitement is just incredible watching it. And he takes it, ends up taking it gold fairly convincingly. That made it two golds, which had been Zatapak's original target for the Olympics.

50:04Max Pearson:But as an insurance policy, he'd also put his name down for the marathon a few days later, even though he'd never run one before. The great Jack could have simply rested on his laurels, but typically he decided to go ahead and follow a simple tactic.

50:20James Evans:I was not really a marathon runner. I was very uncertain. Maybe the best it would be to find the favourite and to keep with him.

50:34Max Pearson:The favourite was the world record holder and veteran marathon runner Jim Peters. Peters went off very, very fast. He was sort of going at sub-world record pace for quite a long time. Emil was struggling to keep up. There's also the Swede Jansen. A bit before halfway, they finally caught up with Peters.

50:52James Evans:He looked a little tired. I was also a little tired. And I said, then it would be better to come to run together. but Jim went to another side of the street and ran alone but was no more able to keep the pace.

51:12Max Pearson:Peter sort of struggled and eventually pulled out. So Emil and Jansen go ahead. At times he had probably found it easy. You can see sometimes in the footage he's joking and laughing with the photographers and the press coach just ahead. But later on he started to get very tired and eventually he was on his own. finally gets to the stadium as he's going into the stadium all his rivals from the previous races are lining roadside cheering him on because that's why everyone felt about him and then when he comes into the stadium it was basically all 70 ,000 people in the stadium were just shouting Zato Peck, Zato Peck, Zato Peck finally he smiles as he crosses the line very rapidly recovers waits for his rivals to come in congratulates them all offers them oranges and things like that Just a wonderful, uplifting Olympic moment.

52:03Max Pearson:The Helsinki Olympics made Zatopek a hero in Czechoslovakia, but he was later blacklisted by the communist regime for supporting the Prague Spring reformers. And he died in 2000 without his reputation at home being completely restored. But in the world of sport, his triple gold in Olympic distance running has never been equaled, and he's being celebrated at the Rio Games as the very embodiment of the Olympic spirit. Sport activity, it is giving really a pleasure

52:35James Evans:by travelling, by meeting, by this friendship. It's greater than the victory. Unify all the world. Sportsmen are like brothers.

52:45Max Pearson:The achievements of Emil Zatepec, whose biographer Richard Asquith was talking to Simon Watts in 2016. Finally this week, we're going to Spain in 1981 for the moment when the country's fledgling democratic government appeared to be under threat. 350 politicians were taken hostage in the National Parliamentary Chamber in Madrid during a coup attempt by armed civil guards. Amongst those held was Joaquim Almunia. He spoke to Claire Bowes in 2021.

53:15James Evans:It was a very important day because the appointment, the vote of a new prime minister is always a very important thing. and in particular when our democratic institutions were still very weak. Joaquín Almuñá was a member of the Socialist Party. He was just 32 and had been an MP for two years. I was sitting in the left side of the room, indeed, in the second row of the Socialist MPs. Suddenly we heard some noises. that we were not aware of what kind of reason was creating these noises. And at one moment, one guardia civil, civil guard, appeared with a gun in his hand.

54:15James Evans:and we immediately recognized Tejero that was a well-known pushist that had been arrested two years before so he was a very well-known extreme right member of the Civil Guard and we immediately understood that this was an attempt to stop the democratic process and we immediately started to think what will be the solution or the conclusion of this very, very serious attempt against the democracy. Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero had planned a putsch or coup two years earlier to reverse Spain's transition to democracy. But the plan had been discovered and Tejero was jailed for seven months. For Tejero and his sympathisers, democracy meant disunity and disintegration.

55:05James Evans:They saw the killing of more than 100 people by Basque separatist group ETA as evidence that the system wasn't working. Now the distinctive-looking man with the thick black moustache was back with 200 members of the Civil Guard for a second attempt at a coup. He went up to the speaker's chair with the gun in his hands. He cried, everybody should stop, sit down, put your hands in the seats. I started to think what will happen on the one hand with my family, with my wife and my daughter. My wife was following the vote through the radio and through the TV. And my daughter was at that time 18 months.

55:53James Evans:So immediately I thought on my family and I thought in my country and that it was terrible to go back again to the dictatorship and to the military regime. So at the beginning was this feeling that the democratic process was stopped by this coup d 'etat. And also that your life was possibly in danger? Well, this was not sure at the beginning. Indeed, it was a possibility to be killed by these guys. There was a very, very terrible moment when, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes after they invaded, they called for the main political leaders and they brought them to a different room. And we were not at all aware of what has happened with them.

56:40James Evans:The initial moments of the coup were caught in a radio broadcast, but soon the station was taken over by the civil guard and ordered to play military music. the 350 MPs were now hostages. I think we were asking for cigarettes. At that time many of us were still smokers. This was the most important thing to have. But I don't remember. I think we haven't... Maybe water, maybe water but not any food. And did you get cigarettes? It was difficult. At that time I was a very, very strong smoker and I remember begging for a cigarette to some colleagues. As the night dragged on, it was hard to establish what was happening outside, whether the military and other regions of Spain were supporting the coup in the capital or not.

57:32James Evans:In fact, only one area, Valencia, announced a state of emergency. King Juan Carlos, the head of state, spent the night calling senior military figures around the country to condemn the coup attempt and at two in the morning he made this announcement on television.

57:55Max Pearson:The crown, symbol of permanence and unity of the homeland, cannot tolerate in any way acts or attitudes of people who intend to stop by force the democratic process that the constitution approved by the Spanish people in their day

58:11James Evans:determined through referendum. At that time only one member of the parliament had a radio. He was a member of the centre-right party, so he was on the opposite side of the parliament. But his information was being transmitted one by one by one and arrived to the left side of the parliament. And, well, at one moment after the king spoke through the TV and after the information that no other regions had supported the push, and after we knew that the members of the group that invaded the parliament were alone, had not real support in other parts of the armed forces, from this point of view, we received a good relief, good news, because the democracy will not end, but the Democrats that were inside the parliament were not still free.

59:10James Evans:And so this information was being passed one by one by one by one along the rows. Yeah, because it was not possible to walk inside the room or in some cases with some meetings in the toilets that were the real place to establish a dialogue with others. I see. So you found out things when you went to the toilet? Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. It was the free space for freedom of speech. The king had rejected the coup, but it wasn't until 11 o 'clock the following morning that Colonel Tejero finally surrendered and allowed the MPs to go free. One of the members of the pushes took the floor and told us, where in a few minutes you will be allowed to leave this room.

1:00:02James Evans:When the final agreement to open the doors was reached, the Speaker of the Parliament told the Guardia Civil, please wait a minute, and he formally closed the session of the Parliament. And afterwards we were getting out of this room with two rows of Guardia Civils at our left and at our side In the street, I remember a lot of people was waiting for us, a lot of journalists, some relatives of some members of the parliament, and a lot of citizens. This was a strong feeling of freedom, of relief and freedom to walk through the streets of Madrid again free and without guns pointing to us. After 18 hours held captive, the MPs were finally freed but left acutely aware of the fragility of their democracy.

1:00:58James Evans:The following year, Joaquim Almunia's Socialist Party won the general election. Lieutenant-Colonel Tejero was jailed but was released in 1996.

1:01:09Max Pearson:Joaquim Almunia, the former politician and former vice president of the European Commission, was speaking to Clare Bowes in 2021. Incidentally, Antonio Tejero Molina, the coup leader, died this month at the age of 93. And with that personal insight into the failed coup attempt in 1980s Spain, we've come to the end of this edition of the History Hour. The website is the place to visit for hundreds more first-hand stories from the past. Go to bbc.com slash witness history. And we'll be back with more for you next week, so do join us for that. This is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening.

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