Manchester's racially inclusive nightclub and the artist who portrayed Nelson Mandela from life

28:01They were there to discuss common problems, racism, discrimination, economic inequality, and how to win independence for the colonies. The world had just gone through a major war, a war against fascism in which people from Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere had contributed their lives for self-determination against racism and the ideologies of racism. And so there was great anticipation about this new world dawning. Professor Hakim Adi from Chichester University is a historian and the author of a book about the Fifth Pan-African Congress. And Africans, people of African heritage, wanted to have their own say, present their demands, as it were, their aspirations for the future.

28:42So that was extremely important. The list of delegates included a veritable who's who of prominent black activists, writers and thinkers, including some young men who would become future leaders of independent Africa. The most famous people who were there were Kwame Nkrumah, who obviously went on to lead Gold Coast, now Ghana, to independence in 1957. He had recently arrived to study in Britain. Jomo Kenyatta, who became the first Prime Minister and then President of Kenya, he was part of the Congress. Then you have somebody like Isaac Wallace Johnson, Sierra Leonean, very, very active as a Labour trade union organiser throughout West Africa.

29:22Amy Ashwood Garvey, the first wife of Marcus Garvey, who'd been based in Britain since the 1920s, chaired some of the sessions, and the famous African-American activist, academic writer, W.E.B. Du Bois. The first four congresses had all been organised by W.E.B. Du Bois, who was seen by many as the father of the modern Pan-African movement. He was one of the great scholars of the United States. He was a great sociologist. He was a very dapper man. He had a van Dyck beard, a delicate intellectual. Remember, this is the man who, at the beginning of the 20th century, said the problem of the 20th century is the problem of a color line, the problem of the relations between the lighter and darker races of mankind.

30:15But in 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress was organised not by Du Bois. It was organised by a younger group, the Manchester-based Pan-African Federation. One of the key players was George Padmore, the Trinidadian intellectual, activist and former communist. Padmore was the most disciplined person I ever knew. Remrod straight. He had no sympathy for human weakness, for human foibles. Padmore had a different vision for this meeting. He wanted more grassroots involvement. And crucially, earlier in 1945, Britain had hosted the first meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions, which had brought to the country workers' representatives from across the world, including the British colonies.

31:02Padmore and his friends invited them along. The organisers said, we are having a different kind of congress. The workers and farmers are the great majority of people in the colonies, So we want to have a Congress based around their representatives. We no longer need doctors and lawyers and professors and so on to tell us what to do. The workers themselves can articulate their own views. So in October, delegates gathered in Manchester and walked into the town hall in Chalton. On the walls were the flags of Haiti, Liberia and Ethiopia, and there were slogans too. Such things as oppressed people of the world unite.

31:40down with anti-Semitism. Arabs and Jews unite against British imperialism, down with Jim Crow, down with the color bar. Labour in the white skin cannot emancipate itself while labour in the black skin is enslaved. What that shows to us is the internationalist politics of this Congress. During the week-long meeting, delegates heard reports of the situation on the ground around the world, detailing the social and economic injustice of the colonial system and the scale of racial discrimination, not just in the colonies, but also in Britain and America. And crucially, at the meeting, there was a radical call to action, a plan to organise to end colonialism and change the post-war world.

32:26The difference in 1945 was that they said that they'd been patient, but they would be patient no longer. We're not just appealing to the colonial powers to end colonial rule. We will use false to end it, if necessary. The background to all this is black identity had been so distorted by slavery, colonial occupation. We had no sense of self, one of the key problems. And it came out in the fifth Pan-African Congress that we had to rediscover ourselves, find out who we are, what we are, and not who we are told we are. You know, it's much easier to take chains of bodies than it is to take invisible shackles of mines.

33:10Lastly, and most importantly, perhaps, they said that the great force which will bring colonial rule to an end are the masses of the people, the workers and farmers, and that force needs to be organised. organized strikes, organized boycotts. That is what is going to be victorious and bring colonial rule to an end. Writing letters and petitions wasn't going to achieve it. And sure enough, grassroots organizations were key to the independent struggle, and Nkrumah was one of the first to put it into action. As local strikes and boycotts became central to the campaign which won independence for the Gold Coast, which became Ghana in 1957.

33:53But, says Peter Abrahams, many of the issues raised at the meeting were not resolved quite so quickly. The thing we underestimated, I think, was the importance of economic independence and how cleverly the ex-colonial powers would hold on to the economic control that empire had given them. Political emancipation, they've let go. Economic emancipation is a much harder thing. And now finally, in the 21st century, we are beginning to see that real freedom has these three facets to it. It's political, it's economic, it's psychic. The words of the late ANC activist Peter Abrams and Alex Last brought us the story of the highly influential Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945.

34:53It was just three years later, in 1948, that Manchester played a central role in the evolution of the digital age. That was when a machine called Baby was born at the University of Manchester. It was a very early precursor to the modern computer. Here's Jill Kersley. Manchester University, where anyone who urgently wishes to know whether 2 to the power of 127 minus 1 is a prime number or not, can be given the answer by an electronic brain in 25 minutes instead of by a human brain in six months. And while you try and work out that calculation, here's more about that electronic brain, which is a very early computer.

35:35I've been looking through the archives to find out about this small-scale experimental machine, better known as BABY. In June 1948, the BABY became the first stored programme computer, meaning it was the first machine to work like the computers we have today. A team building it was led by Sir Freddie Williams. Although these machines can in fact do these complicated calculations at lightning speed, they can only do them because we explain to them how they should do them. We make them do them. Left to themselves, they wouldn't even have enough sense to come in and out of the rain. The world's first programmable computer shuddered into life at Manchester University in June 1948.

36:16It created a technological revolution. And it was a man in Manchester who wrote the world's first computer programme. It has been said of him that his mark is on every modern computer in the world today, and he's Professor Tom Kilburn. Tom Kilburn, along with Geoff Tootle, relocated to work with Sir Freddie's team at the university, following their top-secret work developing radar during the Second World War. Here's Tom talking to the BBC's Brian Redhead in 1981. Well, Freddie Williams invited me to come to continue to develop a memory system for a computer. About the middle of 1946, he had an idea for storing digits on cathode ray tube.

36:57The cathode ray tube is essentially like a television tube, but signals put in by an input are stored there. By December 1946, he stored one digit, one single binary digit. It didn't seem that storing just that one digit on the cathode ray tube was much of an achievement at the time, but this was to be the start of something big. By the end of 1947, the team was clear about what sort of computer they were going to build. Funding was limited, but Tom used to work for the telecommunications research establishment known as TRE. This was very useful. So I was able to draw on the stores of TRE, and by this mechanism we got cathode ray tubes and valves.

37:47So you were really just begging bits and pieces to build it? That's right, yes. With the permission of TRE, of course. Oh, of course. You weren't pinching this stuff. The computer they built was quite ugly, and it was huge. It filled a room that was just under 6 metres by 6 metres. As babies go, it doesn't really look that attractive. Three cathode ray tubes for eyes. It weighs over one and a half tonnes and stands seven foot high. But there could be no prouder parents than the Manchester scientists. That's the BBC's Maggie Philbin. Proud parent Tom remembers it wasn't particularly comfortable working in the room.

38:22It was fairly full of valve circuitry. So much so that, of course, we didn't have a luxury of air conditioning or anything. The temperature often got above 100. and it was quite unpleasant working in there when the room actually got full of equipment. Nor was it a thing of beauty, was it? No, it wasn't. It was completely exposed to the elements. In fact, in order to cool the room, we opened some windows and there was a sudden summer storm and the back of two or three racks was sprayed with water and that cost us about two or three weeks of rebuilding. Another scientist who worked with Tom on this hugely unattractive baby machine in the hot room was Jeff Tootle.

39:07The baby team built up the machine one unit at a time, making sure each unit worked before adding the next one. We would screw it into a post office rack and connect it up to all the other units and then start to find out why it wasn't working properly. We went on with this process of adding the units until we got to the stage when we'd made a computer. So they finally got the last unit in place. But would it work? We fed in a few binary numbers and switched it on. I can remember very, very clearly the day when the first computer worked. We'd been building up to this time. For several days we'd loaded the programme in, but there was always something wrong.

39:57And then as we approached one lunchtime, suddenly the thing worked. We saw the thing that'd done a computation. Geoff Tuttle and I rushed out to find Professor Williams and dragged him into the lab, and we sat there and saw it run again. There were great cheers, and it was very great excitement, actually. They'd done it. Baby was born. So let's go back to that complicated calculation that baby was asked to do. Is 2 to the power of 127 minus 1 a prime number or not? Setting the machine for this kind of problem takes a week. Then the brain is switched on and impulses passing to the computer make the actual calculation.

40:44The computer itself contains 1 ,500 valves. The brain at present is only in the experimental stage, the answer being read from a cathode ray tube. Later, an automatic keyboard will type the answer. As soon as the baby had demonstrated what was possible, the university developed it into a full-scale operational machine, the Manchester Mark I. I've been looking down on the control desk of our Mark I computing machine. I've been looking down on it because although these machines can do the quite fantastic things, they are really essentially simple-minded devices. The team who created the Mark I beat competitors in Harvard and Cambridge to build the first computer that could be programmed.

41:30This is the programme, written by Tom Kilburn, the world's first computer programmer. And a very important question. Now, what did the world think of this? I mean, people must have come, government people, other scientists, industrialists. Could they see the future? There were a very small number of people, relatively, who were interested in computers at that time. It was widely thought that two computers would serve the whole country. And there must be tens of thousands of computers in the country now, of course. In 1998, Baby hit the headlines once more. Now, it was nicknamed Baby by its creators at Manchester University.

42:15As the very first electronic brain to store a programme, it was the forerunner of all modern computers. And as our technology correspondent Christine McGirty discovered, Baby's been reborn. Putting the final touches to a machine that bears little resemblance to the computers we use today. just a jumble of wires and switches to the untrained eye but engineer Chris Burton has spent three years rebuilding this once groundbreaking computer using the same techniques as the inventors It was Tom Kilburn who wrote the first computer programme and keyed it in himself 50 years on he's been helping build the replica The replica a baby was built and is still on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester computers have changed the way we work the way we play the way we shop and the way we socialize and it all started with baby we knew that something exciting was going to happen but we thought of it in terms of scientific computation rather than the general explosion that's occurred in computers Jill Kirstie with the story of Baby, the forerunner of all computers, first broadcast in 2024.

43:29So Manchester has played a significant role in the history of so many aspects of our world, from music and art to the ending of racist colonisation and the beginning of the modern world. We have an example of the city's influence on how we think about the natural world and our rights to enjoy it. In 1932, hundreds of walkers organised a mass trespass on Kinder Scout, the highest point in England's Peak District. It was the result of a campaign by workers from Manchester for access to the surrounding countryside, much of which was privately owned. In 2012, Simon Watts used interviews from the BBC archives to tell the story through the memories of those who took part in the trespass.

44:13It's the early 1930s and a protest movement is forming in the northern industrial city of Manchester. Workers like George Haig want the right to escape to the country and walk up any mountain they choose. I was 16, coming on to 17. Don't forget that. And I had a job indoors in a bleaching and dyeing firm and to get out in the countryside at weekend was an absolute must. I was very keen on the right to ramble and we couldn't at that particular time because there were always these keepers sending you back. They had sticks and I know on a number of occasions I'd seen a shotgun leaning around, you know, within easy reach.

45:10I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler from Manchester way I get all me pleasure the Hartmolland way I may be a wage slave on Monday But I am a free man on Sunday At the time, the Peak District, a region of wild country on the edge of Greater Manchester, was used largely as private shooting estates. Gamekeepers even controlled the desolate but beautiful plateau on top of Kinder Scout, the area's highest mountain. On April 24th, 1932, the tension spilled over when George Haig and many others joined a mass trespass organised by an offshoot of the Communist Party. It was floated by a very small club of which I was a secretary, the British Workers' Sports Federation.

46:01Benny Rothman, an unemployed 20-year-old motor mechanic, organised the protest. He told the story to the BBC years later. We were working-class youngsters, largely coming from semi-slum-type towns in the Manchester area. Obviously, with a great thirst to get into the countryside from the rotten conditions, we were just ordinary working boys and girls. Benny Rothman's group organised regular walking expeditions. It was a humiliating incident on one such trip that triggered the mass trespass, as Benny's son, Harry Rothman, recalls. My dad told me years ago when I was a kid, they'd gone camping at a little place in the Peak District, and some kids had come up from London, because it was a national thing, and my dad and his mates said, oh, you know, these lads were from London, they'd never seen any wilderness, and they said, well, I'll show you this fantastic place called Bleaklow.

46:57And they weren't allowed on. There was about half a dozen of them, maybe a few more, and these gamekeepers told them to get lost, get off. And when they got back, they had a chat about it, and they said, well, if there'd been more of us, they wouldn't have been able to stop us. And out of that, that week rose the idea of having a mass trespass. We'll go with a lot more of us, and a group of keepers won't be able to stop us. There'll be too many of us. The Ramblers put up flyers and wrote messages in chalk on the roads to advertise the protest. The next Sunday, Walkers gathered in a quarry at the foot of Kinder Scout.

47:31Benny Rothman was amazed by the turnout. There were far more people than we expected. We had a membership in the whole of Lancashire of about 150 to 200 members, and there were between 400 and 600 ramlers had gathered. There was a real demand for something like that. When we had the meeting here in the quarry, There was quite a big group of policemen at the back of the crowd who'd followed us there, detectives who were listening and possibly taking notes. With their police escort, the Ramblers began to climb Kinder Scout, singing as they went. The day was just ending and I was descending Down Grimesbrook just by Upper Tor When a voice cried, Oh, you, in the way keepers do, he'd the worst face that ever I saw.

48:25We went up the bank from William Clough in a long wide line, and as we went up the bank, the person in charge of the keepers issued instructions to the keepers to come down the bank and meet us halfway. There must have been a dozen, or slightly more than a dozen keepers, came down and met this long line of ramblers, brandishing the sticks and shouting, get back, and that kind of thing. I may be a wage slave on Monday But I am a free man on Sunday There were two scuffles that I know of. One keeper, in the course of doing his piece, which he said was gently persuading the ramblers to go back, He slipped and twisted his ankle.

49:18Another keeper actually hit Wolfie Winnick over the head with his stick and Wolfie, who was a very tough lad, although he was a very quiet lad, was sufficiently provoked by this to punch him and that keeper went down. And we just carried on. The Manchester Guardian, April 25th, 1932. Mass trespass on Kinder Scout. Battle with keepers from our special correspondent. It was not an even struggle. There were only eight keepers, while from first to last more than 40 ramblers took part in the scuffle. There will be plenty of bruises in Galton and other parts of Manchester tonight, but no one was at all seriously hurt.

49:57After the fight, the police chiefs, who had accompanied the mass trespassers, left them alone to their great, though premature, relief. We continued along the hillside to Ashop Head. The trespassers were urged not to leave any litter about, and to their credit it must be said they were particularly neat in this matter. On Asherped itself a victory meeting was held and the leader now congratulated us on having trespass so successfully. As the Ramblers went back down the mountain, the police finally made their move. At the first beginnings of the village, the Ramblers were met by a police inspector in a baby car.

50:32At his suggestion, the Ramblers formed into Column and marched into Hayfield, still over 200 strong, singing triumphantly. It was their last happy moment. When they got properly into the village, they were halted by the police. Five men were taken to the police station and detained. One of those arrested was Benny Rothman. When he was sent for trial in a nearby country town, one look at the faces in the courtroom told him the game was up. When I looked at the stony faces of the jury, there was a bevy of army officers, majors, captains. There were no admirals there, but they threw a few landowners in to make it up.

51:11It was obvious that we were going to get no sympathetic hearing from them. Benny Rothman and his friends got between two and six months in prison. The jail terms caused an outcry and galvanised the movement for countryside access. Nonetheless, it took nearly two more decades for the Peak District to be made England's first national park and nearly 70 years for right-to-roam legislation to be introduced. Without that, I don't think we'd be able to wander the way that we can today, because Derbyshire really is a wonderful county. To be without that opportunity to ramble in Derbyshire would be terrible.

51:54I'm very, very proud of what I did. None of my friends now are still alive, and it's very, very sad. And it would be lovely to have them there today to be able to see what has really happened. I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler from Manchester way I get all me pleasure the hard-mulling way I may be a wage slave on Monday But I am a free man on Sunday Simon Watts with the story of the 1932 Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, an act of defiance by people from Manchester which helped to shape the rights of British people to roam in open areas as enshrined in the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949.

52:48And we can round off this week's celebration of Manchester's past with a sporting witness. The English Premier League's first female football photographer came from, you guessed it, Manchester. She's been speaking to Timo Callaghan. Well, I was the first female photographer in England, really, doing football. And never mind the Premier League. I mean, literally, I would go to grounds. I'd get stick from the stewards of what you're doing here. I'd say, well, I'm a photographer. And they'd look me up and down and go, well, right. No chance. That's Maggie Haroon. In the 1980s, she found that she had a passion for taking photos.

53:37It's seeing through a camera what you can see in real life. I thought it was great. I thought it was terrific. But my ambition was not to do sport photography or football photography. I don't know what I was doing, really. I just meandered along a path and I didn't know where I was going. But it was probably inevitable that Maggie was going to meander down the sporting path. She grew up in a football family. Well, she practically grew up in a football club. I was at Man United since I was six years old. So I knew all the old players. They'd get me a Coca-Cola or something after a match. and I'd sit there on their knee because I was a child and they were so good to me.

54:30Her uncle Louis Edwards was the chairman of Manchester United from 1965 until 1980. He was then succeeded by her cousin Martin. Oh, and her dad Denzel Haroon was also a director at the club. So after graduating from Manchester Art College, she embarked on a career in an entirely male-dominated field. I was never, never taken seriously. if anything went wrong, according to the stewards and the police, I was always picked on because I was the weakest link. If, you know, like the Leeds fans colliding with the Man United fans at Leeds and I was in the middle of it and I'm thinking, oh my God, mind my cameras, mind my cameras and everything.

55:19And it was me that got arrested because I'm the weakest link. Campbell woman. But she didn't let that stop her. This was a woman who knew football and her knowledge was her power, as she explained to a BBC television programme about photography in 1995. It's very important to know football, to be able to follow the ball. These players are moving at a hell of a speed towards us and you've got to anticipate when the player is going to come in and lunge at the ball or make a sliding tackle, which always looks fabulous in the future. Because you know the players, you know where they're going to pass it to because you can read the signs.

56:00You had to know what you were doing. You had to be what they call a proper photographer. You had to focus, you had to be quick, you had to process your own film and send it. Oh, the stuff we had to carry, I can't even begin to describe it. It was so heavy. In the 1990s, football was changing in the UK. The five-year ban on English clubs from European competitions because of hooliganism came to an end. And in 1992, the top flight in England would change forever. Football's new Premier League has finally been given the go-ahead after 10 months of argument. The league, which will replace the First Division, will start this August.

56:43Maggie's cousin, Martin Edwards, was even one of the five chairmen who initiated the creation of the Premier League. and she was the competition's first female photographer, working for the Today newspaper. It was also the start of Manchester United's dominance of the English game under Sir Alex Ferguson. Maggie would often be assigned to cover the team because she had such a good relationship with the players and the staff, something which came in handy during a UEFA Cup tie in Moscow. And I've never seen rain like it. It was going sideways and it was heavy drops. if it hit you, it would knock you out.

57:23It was dreadful. Anyway, in the second half, came back in the second half, and Alex Ferguson and Brian Kidd were sitting in the dugout. And Alex said, Maggie, are you a bit wet? I was dripping, literally dripping. He said, don't worry about that. He said, come and sit between Kiddo and myself. So for the second half of that European match, I was sitting between the manager and the assistant manager. Was it a better place to get photographs from than where you'd normally be or not? Not really. I'd rather be behind the goal. But my gear was soaking any minute and my cameras would stop working. We lost on penalties and the guy who missed the penalties was sobbing into his shirt and he was facing towards the dugout.

58:29Bosh, bosh, bosh. Great picture, back page. In my bag I had my flash and my wide angle. I thought to myself, Alex will be really annoyed at this. and he looked at me and he said if you do that he said I'll never speak to you again I went right okay fair enough and it's not just football photography that Maggie's known for she's also got a certain reputation I have a lot of cats and I've got seven at the moment but at one time I had 23, I got a phone call one day from Kath, who was the receptionist at Carrington. And she said, Maggie, we've got this cat. It's been abandoned. I think it'll have a good life with you.

59:20and I said, I've got 23 cats. For God's sake, cats, I don't need any more. And there was this Scottish voice from behind, Maggie, take the cat. And I went, OK, Alex, because I reckoned it was him. OK, Alex, I'll come round now. Maggie named the cat Carrington in honour of the Manchester United training ground where he was found. Her great relationship with players in football stretched beyond Manchester United, though. At one European game, she even told the Arsenal striker Ian Wright where to celebrate. I said to Ian, when you score, I will be sitting here and I want you to turn round. Yeah, to me.

1:00:10And he did score. And he was going the opposite way. And I thought, what? And you could see him going the other way and then stopping and then looking round and then coming back. And yeah, with the arms outstretched, yeah. So much so I had to have a wide-angle lens on. Perfect picture. But it wasn't all perfect pictures. Sitting so close to the action did pose an occupational hazard for Maggie. Trabzon Spur versus Aston Villa. Well, my God, I was suddenly knocked out because of the rock-throwing supporters. Wayne Rooney, practising, knocked me out one day. Dennis Irwin, he shot a goal, but he knocked me out.

1:01:08And I think it was Brian Robson who turned round and said, God, if you're going to kill a photographer, Dennis, make certain it's not the chairman's cousin. But despite the knockouts and prejudice that she faced, Maggie has no regrets about her choice of career. There was nothing I could have changed. I just went along with the flow and it was lovely. The inimitable Maggie Haroon, the first female professional photographer in the English Premier League, speaking to Tim O 'Callaghan in 2025. So that's all the Manchester Bases covered, a city with a history that has influenced music, art, sport and even some of the great social movements of our time.

1:01:53That's it from this edition of the History Hour. We'll be back with more first-hand stories from the past next week. Join us again then if you can. For now, though, this is Max Pearson. From all of us here, thanks for listening. Goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there. We weren't going to ask permission. We were just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling. It was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go. We cried a bit. We laughed a bit.

1:02:24It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:02:37What if I told you that most of history's underwear wasn't remotely close to the underwear you're wearing right now? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of the You're Dead to Me podcast, and we're back with a brand new season. And if you're a fan of fashion trends of the past, you'll love our newest episode on the history of underwear. We explore how our underwear has changed throughout history, and whether TV depictions of Regency-era ladies in their lacy underwear are truly accurate. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.