Saxophone diplomacy and bulletproof vests

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25:56Still to come, 60 years on, the discovery of Kevlar, used in bulletproof vests and hundreds of other products, and the groundbreaking musical that made stars of the chorus line. We were the first reality show because we were playing ourselves, and the audience were allowed to judge who they liked and who should get the job. But before that, it's 20 years since an unarmed Brazilian man was killed by anti-terrorism police at Stockwell tube station in London. Jean-Charles de Menezes was shot after he was mistaken for a terror suspect. The killing made headlines all over the world. Matt Pinter spoke to Jean-Charles' cousin and best friend Patricia de Silva in 2022.

26:39It's a summer's day in London on the 22nd of July 2005. Patricia De Silva has just finished work. I went to the library to use the computer to access the internet. And I saw the police shoot to kill one guy in a tube station. Good afternoon. Armed police have shot a man dead at Stockwell Underground Station in South London. Witnesses say the man was chased onto a tube train by plainclothes officers and then shot at close range in front of dozens of terrified passengers. I remember. I am feeling not bad, not good. I am feeling strange. When Patricia gets home, her flatmate and cousin Jean is nowhere to be seen.

27:25But it's Friday night, the start of the weekend. She thinks he's probably out partying. The next morning, Patricia goes to work. But this time when she gets back, there is someone in the flat. It's her friend Jazu, and he looks upset. They said to me Jean was arrested because he suspected to be a terrorist. I said to him, what? What you tell me? Yes, Patricia, the police contacted us and the show was the Jean photo and they said Jean was arrested as a suspect of a terrorist. I think I was in a nightmare. Scared and confused, Patricia then calls her cousin and best friend Alex. Alex is already at the police station and tells her to come as soon as possible.

28:14Patricia and Jazu set off. When I got there, I saw Alex very upset. She screamed and said, come down, Alex, come down, what's happening? They put us in a small room. I remember I didn't understand nothing. I just understand when he said just that. I looked to Jazio and Jazio said to me, Patricia, do you remember the police shooting in Stockwell tube station yesterday? I said to him, yes, but what's happening? And he said to me, it was Jean. Jean-Charles de Menezes was born in the small Brazilian town of Gonzaga in the south-east of the country in 1978. From an early age, he wanted to move to England.

29:08He dreamed of starting his own business there. He was full of plans. He had plans to start a small company. He had plans to get married with his girlfriend. The conditions in Brazil were difficult there. It was a time a lot of Brazilians leave the country to try their life in other countries like America, Europe, England. We came because we wanted to change our lives. In 2002, Jean and his cousin Patricia left Brazil for England, renting a flat in South London. Jean worked as an electrician and for the first couple of months he supported Patricia. He's helping me with house, job, food, everything you can imagine.

30:04I didn't speak English, nothing, and I felt welcomed and supported. Terra came to London today, in the heart of the Russia. It was aimed at ordinary people using the tube, using a bus service. I'm sorry, we've got a meeting. Can we move off the bus, please? Four powerful bombs left people dead, dying and horribly injured. On 7 July 2005, London was hit by a coordinated attack by four suicide bombers, leaving 52 people dead and more than 1 ,000 people injured. Patricia remembers how shocked John was. We were not believing what we were seeing and thinking it was total madness. and he just tell me that they be careful on the street.

30:57Just two weeks later, London narrowly escaped another suicide attack. This time, the bombs failed to go off. However, a gym membership card found in the rucksack carrying one of the failed devices led police to believe a suspect named Hussein Osman lived in the same block that Jean and Patricia lived in. One of the lead officers believed that Jean looked like the Yemen-born Hussein Osman. and tasked other surveillance teams with following him. When Jean-Charles de Menezes emerged from his flat on Friday morning, he cannot have known the building was under surveillance as part of the biggest anti-terrorist operation ever undertaken by Scotland Yard.

31:39He was followed by plainclothes officers and shot dead by them at Stockwell Underground. Mobile phone footage shows police raiding the flats later as they announced the shooting had been a mistake. Mr Menezes was in fact innocent. News of Jean's death soon spread to Brazil, where there were protests on the streets of the capital, Brasilia. Jean's family were devastated, and Brazil's government demanded answers. Brazil's foreign minister was in London today at a meeting at the Foreign Office. The British government expressed its deep regret over the shooting. It's a shock and a perplexity that an innocent person should be caught in the fight against terrorism.

32:22Of course, as I said, we support the fight against terrorism, but I think even there you have to be cautious not to take away innocent lives. Friends and relatives simply cannot understand how this happened. They've been trying to keep up with developments in London through the television news. His grandmother described Jean de Menezes as an intelligent, hard-working, educated young man, the grandson she held close to her heart. Lots of harmful accusations about Jean's behaviour in the moments before the shooting were reported in the media. He was accused of running from the police and jumping the ticket barrier, as well as wearing unusually heavy clothing for that time of year.

33:02None of these accusations were true. I think it was the worst part of the history because until today we hear about this because people recognized me in the street. And they said, oh, but why is he jumping the barrier? Why is he running from the police? And I said, what? No, it's not happening. That time when we hear about this in the media, in the newspaper, it was very, very, very humiliating for us. In 2006, the Crown Prosecution Service decided that no police officers should be prosecuted over Jean's killing. But the Metropolitan Police was fined after being found guilty of endangering the safety of the public.

34:01In 2009, Jean's family were given compensation by the police. Patricia took the family's fight against the police to the European Courts of Human Rights in 2015. They were again left frustrated by the verdict, as the court decided that the shooting of Jean was lawful. But the family felt they hadn't received justice. I don't like to think about this. When I think about this, I come very sad and angry. It is very sad. I think we followed all steps possible. I think no more. What would you like Jean's legacy to be? I like his remember as an immigrant that coming to get a better life. I want him to remember as a good person, honest person.

35:03Patricia de Silva, Jean-Charles de Menezes' cousin, was speaking to map painters. Next, we're going back to the 1960s for the story of the invention of Kevlar. The material, which has countless uses but is best known for its inclusion in bulletproof vests, was discovered by a Polish-American scientist called Stephanie Kwolek. Tim O 'Callaghan has been digging through the archives to unravel Kevlar's history. This jacket that I'm wearing holds the key to survival from any number of attacks from that weapon. It's lined with a special material made from this stuff. It's called Kevlar, a man-made fibre developed some years ago, which in its raw state is so silky soft that you can just push your finger straight through it.

35:49Bulletproof vests from across the world, worn by soldiers, police officers and journalists use Kevlar. but it wasn't the type of life-saving that Stephanie had originally been interested in. When I was in high school I became interested in medicine and in a career in chemistry. Now my father died when I was 10 years old so I didn't have the money to go directly to medical school and at that time of course there were no student loans. So I thought that I would first get a job in chemistry and then after I had saved enough money that I would go to medical school. Well the only problem is that I became so interested in the chemistry and particularly in research and found it so fascinating that I totally forgot about medicine.

36:49I'm telling the story of her discovery through archive interviews and lectures she gave in 1996 for the Smithsonian Institution in the United States of America. Stephanie studied at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania in the 1940s. The college was split into separate male and female schools. And I guess it wasn't such a bad experience because I was exposed to women professors and to other women, you know, my own age. So that I think, you know, there was greater opportunity for expression there when you were with your own sex. When she graduated in 1946, Stephanie was offered a job at the chemical firm DuPont.

37:34We were looking for new ways to make polymers. You know, nylon and Dacron polyester are prepared by the melt method. This meant that these polymers had fairly low melting points. We were looking for polymers that were more intractable, polymers that had greater high temperature stability. And so naturally, these polymers would not melt. Right, let me just explain what Stephanie is talking about here. I'm just going to dust off my chemistry degree. It hasn't seen the light of day since I decided to abandon science and become a journalist about six years ago, but here we go. A polymer is a long-chain molecule, which is made up of repeating units called monomers.

38:24Think of it like a chain of paperclips all stuck together. Each individual paperclip is the monomer, and together they make up the long-chain polymer, Some of the most famous synthetic ones are different types of plastic, like PVC, which you might find in piping, or polythene, which is just essentially plastic bags. But back to Stephanie in her lab. Well, it was about 1964 that I was asked to look for the next generation high-performance fibre. At that time, we had already started thinking that there might be a gasoline shortage. And so we thought that if we could find a lightweight fiber that was very strong and very stiff, that we could possibly use these fibers then as reinforcement in radial tires, radial belted tires.

39:20And during the course of that work, I made a discovery.

39:30It was, I guess, a case of serendipity. I dissolved one of those polymers in a solvent in order to spin it, and I discovered that it formed a very unusual type of solution. It was very much unlike anything that we had previously made in the laboratory. You know, at that time, I asked the person in charge of the spinning equipment to spin it, and he refused. He said, well, this thing flows like water. It'll never spin. and furthermore... Polymer fibres are made through a process called spinning, which is what Stephanie is talking about here. Well, I was convinced that the solution was going to spin.

40:15And after a while, I guess I wore him down, and we spun the solution. Well, it turned out that the fibres were extremely strong and very stiff. and after a very short heat treatment, the strength and the stiffness doubled or tripled in value because the stiffness was about 1 ,000 grams per denure, which is very, very unusual. When Stephanie's company realised how strong the fibre she had made was, they decided to make it a commercial product. It now has hundreds of different applications. Here we have a helmet reinforced with Kevlar. Of course, airplane reinforced with Kevlar. Kevlar is also used in helicopters, in the space shuttle.

41:10And here we have a pressure vessel. You get the picture. It's not just bulletproof vests. But one of her favourite examples of where Kevlar is used is slightly less high octane. I've become blasé about it, to be very truthful. I did see one thing that I thought was extremely unusual. And actually, a friend was visiting in France and saw this advertisement on the window of an optometrist. And there was an ad for eyeglasses for children. And the rims were made of Kevlar. I thought that was the ultimate. Stephanie was one of the only women working for DuPont during the latter half of the 20th century, and she was passionate about encouraging more women and girls into the field of chemistry.

42:06You know, at the time that I was hired, it was not a very easy time for women, and particularly, you know, women who were involved in science. I do remember hearing and being told this by my professors, you know, at the college, that a lot of women were coming back and they were going into what were considered women's fields. And at one point, they almost thought that they would discourage women from studying chemistry. I think one reason why it never particularly bothered me that there were so few women was there, because I guess I never thought of myself in a gender sense. I thought of myself as a research chemist, and I considered myself equal to any of the other research chemists, you know, who worked in the laboratory, even though most of them were PhDs and I had only a bachelor's degree.

43:11Archive recordings from 1996 of Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar, brought to us by Tim O 'Callaghan. You can see a photo of Stephanie on our website, and her story will be added to our dedicated collection looking at inventions and inventors there. Go to bbc.com slash witnesshistory. Finally this week, a theatrical anniversary. It's 50 years since history was made by the premiere of A Chorus Line. It was seen as a seminal moment, turning the spotlight for the first time on the process of producing a Broadway show. Bayork Lee has been telling Josephine McDermott how she played Connie Wong in the original production and how her own true life story forms an important part of a chorus line's narrative.

43:56So shall we start? OK, I'm Bayork Lee. I'm from Chinatown, New York, and I'm having an interview with Josephine. A Chorus Line is the story of a group of professional dancers hustling from show to show, eking out a living in the super competitive, unforgiving world of New York City theatre entertainment. It's January 1974, and Bayork Lee has appeared in a number of productions directed by Michael Bennett, including most recently, Seesaw, about an affair between a lawyer and a dancer. It hasn't run for long, and the mood for shows with huge casts seems to be changing. So some dancers take action.

44:42We had heard that Broadway was dying and they were not going to be hiring dancers anymore. And so there was this phone call around for everybody to meet at midnight, because some of them were in shows, and that was the first tape session that we had. First they danced and they sat around and Michael said, I'll be the first. And he started talking about why he came to New York and then it went around the room. And those are the stories that are in a chorus line. And that was a very new way of working, wasn't it? Oh, absolutely. But Michael didn't know what it was. Was it a musical? Was it a play?

45:22Was it a book? Was it a television show? So from these two sessions, he took the tapes to Joseph Papp. at the public theatre and he said, listen, I don't know what this is, Michael, but some of these stories are compelling and I will give you a skeleton crew and rehearsals and you'll come up with something. I was part of a skeleton crew. There were 12 of us and Michael started to develop a show. When the lights come up on the first scene of a chorus line, the audience has the perspective of the character Zach, a director who's auditioning dancers for a musical They share their life stories throughout the audition.

46:03Those stories were first shared with Michael Bennett in workshops. We didn't know how to write a show. And so he said, well, what did you do at five? How did you get to New York? And we went around the room starting at five. And everybody had their stories at that age. And then he went on to the next, you know, at seven and then 13. And then we got all the way up until 18 years old when we all came to New York. And that's how we wrote the show. So how did they set the choreography? Michael only had a drummer, Bobby Thomas, who had worked with him, and we danced to drums. Drummer, play something and Michael would just dance.

46:44The opening of the show, you have Zach saying step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch, and that's how you teach it. Yeah, step, step, leap, step, step, step, leap, step. Again, step, step, you know. And, you know, we learn by rotation. We do it over and over and over and over again. You played Connie Wong. Can you describe her? Well, Connie Wong is me. At five years old, casting agents came to Chinatown. My father had a restaurant and they said, were looking for children and there were thousands of kids at the Majestic Theatre on the stage. I was, I think, one of the tiniest and I got the show. I saw these people warming up and dancing and singing and I just said to my mother, this is what I want to do.

47:35The personal stories, the fact there's no leading role, barely any set and the performers are in rehearsal style clothes until a storming, high-kicking, top-hat-wearing finale all made it very different to anything seen before. Most of the shows, you know, you have a star and so we're always behind her and she has her leading man. So they're basically four or five, you know, characters. We are 19 and we're all equal and everyone gets to perform their life, to tell Zach who they are, and you fall in love with them. We were the first reality show because we were playing ourselves and the audience were allowed to judge who they liked and who should get the job.

48:21The show opened in a small venue, the Newman Theatre of the new Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre, off Broadway on the 21st of May 1975. It was so exciting. It was so exciting. We knew we had something from the buzz downtown. Bob Lopone, our Zach, who sits out front and talks to us, he said, because I was the dance captain, he says, Byron, come here, look out the window. And there were a line of limousines. And I went to see us. You know, last year I was on unemployment, you know, trying to get an egg sandwich. And it was Lucille Ball, Groucho Marx. No. Yes. Chita Rivera Gwen Verdon come to see us that we looked up to all of these people Mrs Onassis has you know the kids Diana Ross is sitting on the stairs because she couldn't get tickets so they put her on the stairs with her children I mean so we're just like Is that true?

49:24Oh yes absolutely everybody wanted to see this show downtown there's something going on downtown you've got to see it You'd have to go a long way to get a review like this written by the British dance critic Clive Barnes in the New York Times. It's a show that must dance, jog and whirl its way into the history of the musical theatre. No-one with strength to get to the box office should willingly miss it. You'll talk about it for weeks. On 27 July 1975, it transferred to the bigger Schubert Theatre on Broadway and the awards followed. And the winner is Michael Bennett and Bob Avian. And the winner is Michael Bennett.

50:12Donna McKechnie, a chorus line. Kelly Bishop, a chorus line. I have to accept this along with the rest of the cast because it's impossible without. I'll keep it at my house. Thank you, thank you. The musical won nine Tony Awards. given to America's outstanding theatre performers and a Pulitzer Prize for drama. And then in 1983 came more, as reported by Pia Lindstrom on WNBC-TV. A chorus line has passed the record held by Grease as the longest-running musical on Broadway, eight years and 3 ,389 performances later. The show's director and choreographer Michael Bennett spoke to CBS ahead of a special gala performance.

50:59It opened at the Newman and it got wonderful reviews and they said, well, you know, this is too inside, too show busy. I don't know whether it'll work on Broadway. Then it opened on Broadway and they said, well, it's a very New York show. It'll never open on the road. And then it played 102 cities in America. And they said, they won't understand it in England. It's too American. So then it played England. It played Australia. And they said, it'll never translate. But they were proved wrong. Remember the excitement of backstage showbiz legends popping round when the show opened in 1975? Well, on the first night, Michael Bennett had this to say.

51:33Bayork, you are going to take this show around the world. And I went, oh, Michael, please, because I had just done two flop shows with him. He said, no, you're going to take this around the world. And here I am, 50 years later, and I have taken it all over the world. Australia and Stockholm and Berlin, Italy, Japan. I've been to Korea, South Africa, Austria. I've been to Austria, Cloggenfort, Austria, Indiana.

52:08Bayok Lee recalling the astonishing success from humble off-Broadway beginnings of A Chorus Line. She was speaking to Josephine McDermott. And that brings the curtain down on this edition of the History Hour. We'll be back with more first-hand insights into events from the past next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson. from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

52:56Many people had many things to lose by our victory. The future was not so bright. Witness History. We had a designer. He brought in a fully storyboarded idea about how the Queen would arrive by jumping out of a helicopter. And we all said, that's brilliant, but it's never going to happen. Witness History at bbcworldservice.com slash witnesshistory or wherever you get your podcasts. Before Achilles found glory and Odysseus eventually found his way home, someone had to compose the Iliad and Odyssey. But was their credited author, Homer, even real? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy show that takes history seriously.

53:42And we are travelling back to 8th century BCE to trace the origins of the Iliad and Odyssey, epic poems that became backbones of Western literature. Join me and my fantastic guests as we unpack the stories of ancient Greek culture, war and triumph and have a laugh while we do it. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.