Alice Pemberton: In twenty twenty-two, Halloween crowds fill a narrow alley in Seoul’s Itaewon district, and a crush exposes failures in crowd control. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen forty-eight, Israeli troops enter the Palestinian village of al-Dawayima, prompting an investigation into their conduct. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen eighty-six, Margaret Thatcher opens the M25. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the twenty-ninth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on five citizens of Geneva who gave the world's wounded a single sign. Arthur Nightingale walks Sir Walter Raleigh to the scaffold. Doc Sullivan on a world's fair built partly on an island that didn't exist. Judge Marion Calloway, Vivian Hale and Rufus McCrae open a Paris court register. And Eleanor Shaw, Wells Harrington and Beth Hartley take the table. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: The almanacs say eighteen nations founded the Red Cross in Geneva on this day in eighteen sixty-three. The records tell a smaller story. Our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Smaller, because no government called that meeting. Five private citizens of Geneva did — a general, two doctors, the head of a local welfare society, and Henry Dunant, whose book Un Souvenir de Solferino had shamed them into it. Dunant was their secretary. Sixteen states answered the invitation, with four charities alongside, and a few dozen delegates sat down in the Palais de l'Athénée. Alice Pemberton: And what did a few dozen delegates actually agree? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Ten resolutions. Every country should build a relief society for wounded soldiers, organised in peacetime and ready for war. And every one of those societies would carry the same sign: a red cross on a white ground. Alice Pemberton: No treaty, no signatures — so where's the echo? Professor Edmund Cavendish: The five kept going, and their little committee became the International Committee of the Red Cross. Which is exactly why the almanacs insist on eighteen nations. Nobody quite believes that five neighbours in one Swiss city could give the whole world's wounded one sign to look for. Alice Pemberton: The night before he was beheaded, in sixteen eighteen, Sir Walter Raleigh argued that the king had already freed him. Our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: Freedom was always a near thing in Walter Raleigh's family. He grew up at Hayes Barton in Devon, in a house so Protestant that under Queen Mary his father hid in a tower to escape execution. The boy carried that hatred of Rome into the French wars of religion before he was out of his teens. Alice Pemberton: And then Elizabeth noticed him. Arthur Nightingale: Raleigh was knighted, then handed a royal patent to explore Virginia — the paper that opened the way for English settlement. Then he secretly married one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The queen sent them both to the Tower. Alice Pemberton: His first Tower. Arthur Nightingale: Not his last. He chased a City of Gold in South America and wrote it up so extravagantly he helped invent El Dorado. Under King James, Raleigh was condemned over the Main Plot and spent thirteen years back in the Tower. Alice Pemberton: Yet James let him out. Arthur Nightingale: To fetch the gold. Sir Walter sailed with a royal commission giving him power over life and death. But his commander's men sacked a Spanish outpost, breaking the peace — and to appease Spain, Raleigh was arrested on his return. Alice Pemberton: So, the argument. Arthur Nightingale: At Westminster they reopened his old treason judgment. Raleigh said the king's commission had cancelled it. The court refused, and set the next morning. Between eight and nine, in Old Palace Yard, before a row of earls, Walter Raleigh climbed the scaffold cheerful and saluted the crowd. The king had given him power over life and death. It turned out he had only lent it. Alice Pemberton: Expo sixty-seven closed in Montreal on this day in nineteen sixty-seven, having drawn nearly twice the crowd it was built for. Our science and medicine man, Doc Sullivan. Doc? Doc Sullivan: Nearly twice the crowd, standing on ground the fair had partly invented. Montreal enlarged one island in the St Lawrence, Île Sainte-Hélène, and created a brand-new one, Île Notre-Dame, out of the river itself. The theme was Man and His World, and they started by making some of the world. Alice Pemberton: So the planners guessed wrong. Doc Sullivan: Gloriously wrong. Expo sixty-seven was planned for about twenty-six million visits. It sold over fifty million admissions, and the fifty-millionth came through the gate on the second-to-last day. As experiments go, that's a hypothesis failing in the best possible direction. Alice Pemberton: How do you close a thing like that? Doc Sullivan: Gently. At Place des Nations the flags came down — Canada's first, Nigeria's last. The minirail stopped by mid-afternoon, and the last Expo Express train left at four. Then the Governor General, Roland Michener, set aside his prepared speech and said only this: “It is with great regret that I declare that the Universal and International Exhibition of nineteen sixty-seven has come to an official end.” Pages of remarks, set aside, because the only true thing left to say was that he was sorry. Alice Pemberton: On this day in thirteen ninety, Paris's royal court finished its first witchcraft trial and sent the condemned to their deaths. Our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway; our economist, Vivian Hale; our resident sceptic, Rufus McCrae. Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: Royal is the word that matters. This was the Châtelet, the king's own criminal court, not a church tribunal — and its clerk, Aleaume Cachemarée, kept a register of every case. Alice Pemberton: Vivian, where does it lead? Vivian Hale: Outward, and upward. Europe's witch trials over the following centuries took tens of thousands of lives. Belief only ebbed after the Enlightenment — and witch-hunting has never stopped; it still happens in parts of Africa and Asia. Alice Pemberton: Rufus — who's in that register? Rufus McCrae: That summer, two women: Margot de la Barre and Marion la Droiturière, accused of bewitching Marion's old lover and his new wife. The evidence was love potions — a few drops of blood in red wine, herbs picked on Saint John's night. The sentence was the pillory, then the stake. The only reason we know their names is that the court that burned them wrote them down. Alice Pemberton: Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: And read how it was proved. After the torture chamber, both confessed to abjuring Christ and calling on the Devil. The court built the crime with one hand and punished it with the other. Alice Pemberton: Margot and Marion — remembered, at least, by name. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Five echoes, three guests: Eleanor Shaw, our diplomacy hand and a former ambassador; Wells Harrington, our young reader; and Beth Hartley, our culture correspondent. Wells, first. Wells Harrington: In nineteen sixty-nine, late at night at UCLA, a young programmer named Charley Kline tries to send the word LOGIN across ARPANET to another computer. He types L. Then O. Then G — and the far machine crashes. Beth Hartley: So the first word computers ever said to each other was “lo”. Lo and behold. Wells Harrington: His supervisor, Leonard Kleinrock: “They succeeded in transmitting the ‘l’ and the ‘o’ and then the system crashed!” Alice Pemberton: Beth — a break-in. Beth Hartley: In nineteen sixty-four, Jack Murphy — Murph the Surf — and his friends roped in through an open window at New York's American Museum of Natural History, armed with a glass cutter and a porter's squeegee. They took the Star of India, then the world's largest star sapphire, and ignored a case of ordinary sapphires worth a hundred thousand dollars. Eleanor Shaw: Taste is a terrible thing in a burglar. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor — a nation names itself. Eleanor Shaw: Ankara, nineteen twenty-three. Turkey's Grand National Assembly votes one line: “The form of government of the Turkish State is the Republic.” Unanimous, to cries of “Yaşasın Cumhuriyet!” — long live the Republic. Within the hour Mustafa Kemal is president, promising: “The Republic of Turkey will be happy, successful and victorious.” Beth Hartley: And Turks still start celebrating the afternoon before. Alice Pemberton: Beth, the oldest arrival. Beth Hartley: Rome, in the year three hundred and twelve. Constantine rides in to cheering crowds the day after defeating Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. Maxentius had drowned in the Tiber; they fished him out and took his head. Wells Harrington: Nothing says new management like a parade and a severed head. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor. Eleanor Shaw: Wilhelmshaven, nineteen eighteen. The admirals order the German High Seas Fleet out for one last battle — their chief of staff, Adolf von Trotha, called it “a death fight.” The sailors douse the boiler fires instead. Within days it's Kiel, then revolution, and the Kaiser's empire is finished. Alice Pemberton: Two letters, one sapphire, one vote, one head, and a fleet that stayed in port. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the twenty-ninth of October — where in nineteen forty-four the tanks of the Polish First Armoured Division liberated the Dutch city of Breda; where in seventeen ninety-two William Robert Broughton, sailing with Vancouver, saw a peak in what is now Oregon and gave it a British admiral's name — Mount Hood; and, more recently, where in nineteen eighty a secretly modified Hercules, built to rescue the hostages in Iran, crash-landed in Florida and took Operation Credible Sport down with it. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped Joseph Pulitzer — the man whose will created the Pulitzer Prizes — dead aboard his yacht in Charleston Harbor in nineteen eleven. Mortimer Finch: Pulitzer? The yellow journalism man? Sex, crime and graphic horrors, a million copies a day? Humphrey Thwaite: The same. Spent a career selling the lurid headline, then left the money to reward the sober one. Mortimer Finch: Penance with a medal ceremony. And the yacht? Humphrey Thwaite: Called the Liberty. Of course it was.