David Olusoga on Tranent, Tommy guns and Celebrity Traitors
Why Celebrity Traitors' David Olusoga is going great guns with his new live show
Historian, writer, broadcaster and Celebrity Traitor, David Olusoga is having a ‘mad minute’ up on stage in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms, as part of his new live show 'A Gun Through Time' which comes to Glasgow next month as part of a UK tour.
Surrounded by an array of weaponry - a Lee Enfield rifle, a Thompson sub-machine gun, a Maxim gun and a Brown Bess flintlock musket - the BAFTA award-winning presenter and filmmaker is showing footage of what happened when he attempted the rapid fire shooting exercise for British Army riflemen with a Lee Enfield, aka the ‘mad minute’. The record of 38 by a serving soldier is safe as Olusoga struggles to discharge a handful of shots, thereby demonstrating just how difficult a feat it is.
And yet, as he explains to a sell out audience in his lively and fascinating show, millions of Britons became expert at shooting these guns during the First and Second World Wars. Another of the guns, The Maxim, was used in Africa in the 1890s to kill thousands, then thousands more in the First World War, and is still being used today in Ukraine. The Tommy Gun is familiar from every gangster movie you ever saw, while Outlander fans will recognise the musket, carried by the British Army in wars ranging from the American War of Independence to Waterloo.
But this is not a show about firearms or battle tactics. It’s about how they affected people day to day and changed history for us all, right down to our language - ‘keep your powder dry’?, invaluable advice when firing a musket.
“It’s about the cultures that emerged from the millions of people for whom these weapons became part of their lives,” says Olusoga, who has always been more interested in the ordinary people caught up in events than the politicians, royals and generals orchestrating them.
“When I was studying history when I was younger everyone seemed to be in palaces and parliaments, making decisions, not living with the consequences,” he says. “This show is more about what it is like to be a soldier sent to war with the Lee Enfield rifle than it is to be General Haig commanding the soldiers with the Enfield rifles.
“Millions of our ancestors had to fire that gun and learn how to use it, and do it better than I can. And their lives depended upon it. That was a piece of technology as familiar to them as the iPhone is to us. Seventeen million Lee Enfields were made, three and a half million British people learned to use them in the Second World War, more in the First World War. They are a fundamental part of our history.”
“I'm not interested in the details of battles and technical history of guns - but I am interested in the social history of warfare, how it changed Britain, how our ancestors' lives were shaped. Everything I do is social history.”
Olusoga has made a career of making the past come to life, as a social historian with TV shows including Black and British: A Forgotten History, A House Through Time and Empire, books including The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide, Civilisations and Black History for Every Day of the Year, co-created with his siblings Yinka and Kemi. There’s also a podcast - Journey Through Time with Professor Sarah Churchill - and now his live show, which is an interactive, lively exploration of guns that blasts away the cobwebs of dusty academia and tinkles the chandeliers of Edinburgh’s Georgian Assembly Rooms.
At 56, with his nose ring and niche Feiyue trainers, the guitar-playing (his Desert Island disc luxury item was a Martin acoustic guitar) Olusoga is more popular storyteller than dry academic, although he has the degrees, awards and an OBE to back him up. The son of a Nigerian father and British mother he was raised on a council estate in Gateshead after arriving in the UK at the age of five with his mother and siblings and has overcome racism and dyslexia to become Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester after graduating with a history degree from the University of Liverpool and a postgraduate degree in journalism from Leeds Trinity University.
Olusoga’s aim is to capture people's interest in history and for him objects are a powerful way to achieve this.
“A big part of what I do on television is try to tell history through objects because I think so much of history is about ideas and a lot of it's in the air. Objects are real and tangible, and very often an object can speak to a reality and make us feel as well as think.”
So he gives us pike heads used as a weapon of resistance in Ireland or a flag from Trafalgar, guns from centuries of war.
“There's something just tangible and emotional, like a punch in the gut, from seeing something that is the real thing that was there on that real date. As much as I think I'm a good storyteller, props really help.”
The ‘props’ are also the items handled by the people Olusoga wants to give a voice.
“I'm trying to tell forgotten, or even familiar, stories through the voices and perspectives of people we normally ignore, whether it's working class people, people from the colonies, women. That's what's really interesting.
“I like doing archival research, drawing stuff out of documents that is new, the scholarly debate, but what I really like doing is making people understand the magic of history. I see what I do as the shop window of a bigger department store and my job is to tell stories that draw people in , then they might buy a book or study history or do genealogy or engage in history in another way.“
Olusoga is relishing being in Scotland, and pleased that if he’s recognised in the street and asked where A House Through Time will be visiting next, he can say ‘Edinburgh’.
"I’m delighted that we are bringing A House Through Time to Edinburgh, a city I adore and that is bursting with history."
Returning for its sixth season later in the year, this time round Olusoga investigates a home on Calton Hill, uncovering historic events through the lives of the people who lived there.
Built in 1765, the house pre-dates the New Town and has housed multiple residents, from wealthy widows and post office administrators to bankrupts, spies and the owner of a ‘house of ill fame’ whose lives were shaped by a backdrop of political upheaval, industrial revolution, war and urban renewal.
Olusoga has a close association with the city, with family on his mother’s side hailing from East Lothian and he spent some months in the capital making the show last year, away from the home in Bristol he shares with his partner and child.
“I'm really, really pleased because we've done a lot of English cities and it seemed to be really important to be in Scotland. For generations my ancestors farmed the land near Tranent so Edinburgh was their closest town. Every year when I come to Edinburgh for the TV or book festival I stop at the farm and walk those fields and think about the Ewarts of Tranent, my ancestors.
“So Edinburgh’s a city my ancestors knew for generations, it’s a city I've been coming to since I was a child and I'm really pleased we’ve finally brought A House Through Time here. I hope it's a distinctly Scottish story because the records are different here, the history obviously is different and distinct, and some of the stories take us into some new and really interesting moments in the history of Edinburgh and Scotland.”
History was a passion of Olusoga’s from his schooldays when he was inspired by what he calls his ‘two teachers’, Mr Falkenau, his school history teacher and Michael Wood, whose TV history documentary series Olusoga would watch after school and who is a fellow professor at Manchester University.
“It is very strange to hold the same post as the man who made me want to be able to be an historian. The first time I met him I knew very well who he was but it was very surprising that he knew who I was,” he says.
Inspiration for Olusoga also came from his mother, who encouraged him and his siblings to pursue knowledge and steered the family through trauma such as having to leave their home when it was attacked and the windows smashed by the National Front. He also experienced racism at school, on one occasion being saved from bullies by the former footballer and older fellow pupil Paul Gascoigne.
How does he think having to leave their home shaped him?
“I think it traumatised me in all sorts of ways and I think it would be ridiculous to think it didn't, but I had a huge advantage in a remarkable mother. We had a really hard time, but we had a lot of advantages. I'm very careful when I talk about social class because we were brought up with not very much materially, but with lots of advantages compared to lots of people who were living around because we had a mother who was so educated and so driven to educate her children.
“We were materially lower working class or even benefits class, but culturally far advantaged and privileged compared to lots of people. You can be materially of one social class, but aspirationally and educationally in a very different position. It doesn't really feel it when you haven't got the things you want as a kid, you mourn for the material things you haven't got, and it's only later in life you realise the huge advantages you were given.
“But more so then than now, because my mother could say to her children that if they worked hard, went to university, they could change their story, because even though our schools were terrible there was a local library open late and when we went to university there were grants so we could afford to go, and we could afford to buy houses when we left. I look at the infrastructure of social mobility that allowed me and my siblings to advance and I see most of it having been dismantled.
“The country's far richer than it was when I was a child and yet someone of my background would struggle to go to university, to stay healthy and the library hasn't got the resources. So you can have that aspiration but there has to be an infrastructure and social mobility. And I think it's going.”
When he interviewed Barack Obama for his BBC programme Barack Obama Talks To David Olusoga (2021) in which they discussed the former president's memoirs, Obama had hope and optimism for the future. What does Olusoga we should have for the UK, pessimism or optimism?
“I think we have a profound mixture. If you look at long term attitudes, Britain's becoming a more tolerant, inclusive, liberal and better country in almost every criterion but at the same time we're seeing the return of ideas and language, things being sayable that were not five or 10 years ago.
“So it feels like we're moving in two different directions at the same time. The long term trend is of a nation becoming a much nicer, better place. The short term, and I hope it is short term, is of a nation that is angry with itself.
“I think a lot of this is about deliberate division. I think we have some of the worst newspapers in the world and we are a country very vulnerable to a new form of information ecosystem that is deliberately poisonous, divisive and toxic.
“On X and Facebook and places like that, people are being told a very, very negative story about Britain and I think people who consume that media believe the people they're told to hate are people they should hate, and that’s how they come to see the world.
“We have a profound problems, but our problems are to do with the disaster of Brexit and the fact we've reduced our GDP by at least 1% a year, our failure of productivity, the fact we're the least equal country in Europe other than Bulgaria, that we haven't built enough housing for 40 years now.
“And as somebody who was brought up in a council estate, who comes from one of the poorest towns in Britain, I passionately care about those things, but they're not the debates we're having. We're having debates about things we have been told by toxic algorithms should be the things we discuss.”
On a lighter note, as a talented storyteller, why didn’t Olusoga recognise Alan Carr as another storyteller on The Celebrity Traitors?
“Well, that's the thing,” he says, laughing. “I've watched all the previous series, and you forget you were let in on the secrets and it seems so obvious.
“But it was because Alan made us laugh too much. We’d corner him and go ‘what if it's you?’, and you’re laughing and have moved on before you've taken the thought to its next step.
“I love all television, grew up watching it, and to be part of that ending with Alan and that wave of emotion that poured out of him when he revealed just how difficult it had been was beautiful. You didn't in the least bit mind Alan winning and me and Nick [Mohammed] losing. We were absolutely terrible at the game, but we had a wonderful time, and we all still see each other.”
Does he have any advice for the next cohort of celebrities?
“I don't think I played it well enough to be able to give anyone advice to be honest!” he laughs.
Finally, why does history matter?
“Because to walk through the world without understanding the generations who walk through it before us is such an impoverished thing. To walk around Edinburgh and not look up at that castle and think about the sieges - the last one wasn't that long ago. Walking around George Street, I was thinking about when this was the fields in which armies gathered before trying to storm that fortress across the Nor’ Loch where the railway station is now. You think about the citizens of Edinburgh, trapped within those walls, building them higher and higher.
“It's like having a sort of extra sense, to walk around and be able to think about and recognise from the landscape, the physical imprints of previous generations. And I just think life would be so much less interesting without doing that.”
It’s time to prepare for his evening performance of A Gun Through Time and he’s due back on stage with the Lee Enfield, Maxim, Tommy and musket guns.
David Olusoga has a voice, and he’s going to use it.
David Olusoga’s new live show 'A Gun Through Time' is at The Pavilion Theatre, GLASGOW on 20 April. Tickets for all shows on-sale now via www.fane.co.uk/david-olusoga.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.