Pod Insights British Scandal Guy Fawkes | The British Scandal School Trip | 4 About this episode The Tower of London is the place where the stories of so many British criminals have come to an end, including Guy Fawkes. Matt and Alice pack their lunchboxes and take a tour with the tower's curator, Dr Alden Gregory. On the agenda: the actual room where the Gunpowder Plotters were interrogated, the prisoners’ accommodation and a run-in with a rowdy raven.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alice Levine? Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. Just a warning before we start, this episode contains descriptions of torture which some listeners may find disturbing.
0:21 Alice Levine? Matt, I haven't seen your consent form. We can't do this episode until we hand it in.
0:25 Matt Forde? Well, my wife signed it and so did my mum, so I'm sure I'm fine.
0:28 Alice Levine? It's a special edition of British Scandal. I am taking you on a journey that will change how you see our country's past forever.
0:39 Matt Forde? It sounds great. I don't know why we can't just record it over Zoom like we usually do. Get a great guest, turn the camera off so that I can eat biscuits.
0:46 Alice Levine? Look around you. We're at the Tower of London, the very place we ended our series. This doesn't just get thrown together. This is the home of some of the most dramatic events in British history. That's a raven. I mean, need I say any more? We're going to be walking not only in the footsteps of Guy Fawkes, but also murderers, political prisoners, kings and queens. Almost 1,000 years of history right here.
1:08 Matt Forde? And you can feel it. It's a stunning place. It's like an old university, a grand private school. There's a religious, holy element to this, and I think most soothingly, you know it's a place of torture.
1:21 Alice Levine? Exactly. And just shortly, we are going to be talking to somebody who knows these buildings better than anybody else and can shed light on Guy Fawkes's experience here at the Tower of London, Dr. Alden Gregory. But first, shall we do what we do best and go where we're not invited and snoop around?
1:42 Alice Levine? Are we being heckled by a raven?
1:46 Alice Levine? Are you two flirting?
1:48 Matt Forde? Have you ever been here before?
1:50 Alice Levine? I'm ashamed to say, having lived in London for 15 years, I have never been here.
1:54 Matt Forde? I share that shame. I've never been here either, but I tell you what, my first impression is it feels like we're at Warner Brothers and it's like a Harry Potter type thing.
2:03 Alice Levine? For a site of torture and punishment, so clean.
2:06 Matt Forde? Do you know what? They were very clean, the people who made this. They loved torturing people, but they loved to tidy up afterwards.
2:14 Matt Forde? Traitor's Gate.
2:16 Alice Levine? That is basically like every film you've ever seen about a castle. The big gate, somebody has to wade through the moat, don't they?
2:25 Matt Forde? That's it, I didn't realise it was gonna be in water, so they'd have brought them in by boat. It stinks.
2:30 Alice Levine? And as if you didn't know already what was gonna happen to you, as if you weren't already fearful enough. The scale of this is completely intimidating. The feel out by the river where it's sunny and warm and in here where you're in the shadow.
2:42 Matt Forde? Yeah.
2:43 Alice Levine? Of the tower.
2:44 Matt Forde? It's not like checking into a Premier Inn where there's helpful staff and you know you've got a great breakfast in the morning and a good night guarantee. I don't think even Lenny Henry would get forty winks here.
2:53 Alice Levine? We're being ushered into bloody Tower, I don't know how to read that.
2:56 Matt Forde? Oh wow, look at this. God, it's beautiful. Do people live here? There's like a little mini village. Wow. Do you know what it reminds me a bit of? Chester.
3:07 Matt Forde? You know Chester City Centre, they've got that lovely, um, sort of Tudor frontage.
3:11 Alice Levine? I've seen Hollyoaks if that's what you mean, yeah.
3:13 Matt Forde? Yeah. My god.
3:15 Alice Levine? This is sort of like almshouses around a central green, beautiful manicured lawns, little benches. That's our guy, Dr Alden Gregory.
3:26 Matt Forde? Yeah, it looks like it. He's waving and smiling, so hopefully that is, that's our guy, otherwise we should stop smiling and waving, I guess. Shall we say hello?
3:35 Alice Levine? Alden, hi, I'm Alice.
3:36 Speaker 02 Hi Alice, nice to meet you.
3:37 Matt Forde? Hi Alden, I'm Matt.
3:38 Speaker 02 Hi Matt, nice to meet you too.
3:39 Alice Levine? Now Alden, you know this space very well. Matt and I were walking mouths open, agog. It's absolutely spectacular.
3:48 Speaker 02 It is. I mean, I've been here working at the Tower of London for 10 years now and I still come here mouth agog every time.
3:53 Alice Levine? So you're curator of the buildings, so you decided where they would be and what they would house, I presume, way back when?
4:00 Speaker 02 If only I had that power. Yeah, I'm curator of historic buildings here, so I help look after the, the historic buildings that we have on site, but also research them as a historian too.
4:09 Matt Forde? Do people still live in those houses there?
4:11 Speaker 02 Some of them, yeah. The house directly in front of you, which is this wonderful timber-framed house called the King's House, which we're gonna go inside in a second for a real treat. That's lived in by the constable of the Tower of London still. So yeah, there's, there's about 130 odd people that live on site here at the tower. It's, it's still an active community, just as it has been for most of its history.
4:29 Matt Forde? But who gets to live in the houses?
4:31 Speaker 02 Mostly members of our yeoman warder body, so the famous beefeaters. Historically though, the King's House was lived in by the Lieutenant of the Tower. And in 1605, which I know you're very interested in, the Lieutenant of the Tower was the man who was running this place on a day-to-day basis. You know, he's the man who is responsible for the garrisons of the Tower and also, of course, the man who's responsible for looking after the prisoners, making sure they're securely kept and crucially of all, interrogating them.
4:58 Alice Levine? We just heard some screams, which were actually from schoolchildren, not people being tortured, we presume. Is that the only similarity? Is this how it would have looked in James I's day?
5:09 Speaker 02 I think there are things here that would have been very familiar. So behind you is the iconic White Tower. That's the big castle tower at the centre of the Tower of London with its distinctive domed roof. That was 500 years old when Guy Fawkes was here in 1605. So I think, you know, if Guy Fawkes was here with us today, he would recognise some of the things he was seeing. But this is still a living site. It's been adapted through lots of its history, so we've got Georgian buildings and Victorian buildings around us too.
5:40 Alice Levine? You can call them new builds if you want. Those Georgian new builds.
5:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
5:43 Matt Forde? Holden, please. Takes in the same footsteps as Guy Fawkes.
5:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, follow me. In 1605, you have to imagine that Guy Fawkes is walking in through a garden here. The Lieutenant lived here with a whole household of people, maybe 11. Guy Fawkes is brought into this house to be interrogated.
6:02 Alice Levine? You can't imagine it because it just looks so lovely and like I'd be straight on right move to see how much it costs.
6:07 Speaker 02 You know, the Tower of London is not only a state prison in the early 17th century, it's also an important industrial site. It's where a lot of the coinage in the country is produced in the mint in the outer ward. It's a space that still has a royal palace in it, although the royal palace was very rarely used by James I's day, only really for coronations. It's a space that has arms and armour warehouses, storerooms, places to manufacture guns, a whole stock of ordinance. So this is a kind of multifaceted site in the 17th century.
6:40 Matt Forde? Sort of holistic patriotic solution, really. It's got everything. The king can live here, the coins can be made, people who don't like the king can be tortured and killed here.
6:47 Speaker 02 Absolutely. All of the mechanisms of state. So if you want to follow me into the King's House, we're going to have a look around.
6:53 Matt Forde? Great.
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8:14 Alice Levine? Okay, so Alden, where are we now? This is not what I expected.
8:16 Speaker 02 The room that we're in now was created just after the Gunpowder Plot in 1607, 1608. So it's a top-floor room in the building we were looking at from outside. And it's a room that was created specifically to interrogate prisoners in. Now, it's changed a little bit since Guy Fawkes was here. You have to imagine the way the floor that we're stood on. And think of this as a great big, two-story, open space, a great hall, effectively, with at the one end, a great big stone church-like window. And at the other, windows overlooking Tower Green and the interior of the Tower of London. So Guy Fawkes himself has been within this space.
9:00 Alice Levine? And do we know much about how long he spent in this room and how long that interrogation lasted?
9:06 Speaker 02 Well, we know he was brought backwards and forwards between this room where he was interrogated, his prison cell. We don't know where that was, at the Tower of London. I think it's sort of easier to imagine that the Tower might have had a kind of central prison somewhere. That's not how the Tower worked. The Tower had lots of little prison cells dotted all around it, a lot of them in the houses of the yeoman warders who acted as their jailers. But for a prisoner like Guy Fawkes, you know, he was almost certainly thrown into a pretty horrible, dank cell somewhere, a bit of straw on the floor, not much more than that. And he's brought between that cell and this room to be interrogated.
9:49 Speaker 02 Because in those first couple of days after he's discovered in the cellar under Westminster, there's still a lot of uncertainty about what's going on.
9:59 Matt Forde? Do we know the nature of that interrogation, the sorts of questions he'd have been asked?
10:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, so in this space, he is... This is the verbal interrogation happens in here. This is like the police interview cell. What is your real name? Who are your accomplices? What were you planning? And of course, we know that he holds out for quite a long time. He gives his name as John Johnson, not as Guy Fawkes. He doesn't start to reveal the names of his accomplices for about 48 hours after he's arrested. And the people interrogating him are pretty impressed with his resolve. But the authorities quite quickly then resort to torture to get the information out of him. And again, he's taken out of this room. This is not the space in which he's tortured.
10:46 Speaker 02 And he's marched to another space at the Tower. We don't quite know where the torture chamber, for want of a better word, was. But he's taken to another space and he's tortured in order to... Persuade him to reveal the truth of what's going on.
11:02 Matt Forde? And would they in those days have had a good cop, bad cop kind of? It feels like maybe this was the nice bit. And maybe then in here, they'd have probably been quite pleasant to him, or maybe I'm just being naive.
11:12 Speaker 02 No, I think you're absolutely right. There's a whole process they go through. So the first part of that process is to basically warn the prisoner what's going to happen and say, you know, if you don't cooperate with us, we will torture you. And then the next bit is to start showing them the instruments of torture again in order to scare them out of being tortured. And only at a last resort does torture happen physically. So I think there would have been a whole process happening in this space of reasoning with Guy Fawkes, of trying to persuade him to give over the information that the interrogators were looking for without having to resort to torture.
11:50 Alice Levine? Without being too gruesome, what would some of the methods of the day have been?
11:55 Speaker 02 The torture that happened at the Tower was ordered by James I himself. And in his warrant permitting the torture, he says, the gentler tortures are to be used first, and then by degrees to the worst. So the gentler tortures, I think, are probably things like initially starvation, possibly being held in a very small room in which you can't stand up called little ease for long periods of time. And then ranging through from needles under the fingernails to hanging by your wrists from manacles. And then the worst form of torture that happens at the Tower is being racked. So literally stretched on a machine that holds your feet and your arms in place and pulls your body.
12:40 Alice Levine? It's important to hear that because when you say torture, particularly with something that happened so long ago, it's sort of easy to sanitize what that actually means. And the fact that you started with the gentle stuff, which was not being able to stand up in a room that's too small for you, and starvation, I was already wincing.
12:59 Speaker 02 There is actually a description of someone being tortured at the Tower. A man called John Gerard, who was here as a prisoner in 1597. He was a Jesuit priest. He became implicated himself in the gunpowder plot. He was the priest who administered the sacrament after the plotters had taken their oath. He was one of our famous escapees of the tower, but before escaping, he'd been tortured. And he afterwards wrote a description of it. He was hung from his wrists by manacles, so suspended from the ceiling. And he writes in his own memoir, "But I could hardly utter the words. Such a gripping pain came over me. It was worst in my chest and belly, my hands and arms.
13:44 Speaker 02 All the blood in my body seemed to rush up into my arms and hands. And I thought the blood was oozing out from the ends of my fingers and the pores of my skin.
13:53 Speaker 02 But it was only a sensation caused by my flesh swelling above the irons holding them. It was pain so intense that I thought I could not possibly endure it."
14:02 Speaker 02 It's pretty grim, what happens here. You know, this is the worst mechanism of the state, the worst they can do.
14:10 Matt Forde? How did the priest escape?
14:12 Speaker 02 Ah, I mean, it's a cunning escape. So John Gerard, the priest, was kept a prisoner in the Salt Tower, which is one of the towers on the inner curtain wall. But he had a certain amount of freedom within the tower and he was able to visit friends who were held prisoners in other towers. And one of his friends was held a prisoner in the Cradle Tower, which is on the outer curtain wall and overlooking the moat and the wharf. Gerard was also able to get access to lemons and oranges. And that enabled him to create secret notes, basically a form of invisible ink, using orange and lemon juice, which meant he could pass letters out to his friends outside the Tower of London.
14:55 Speaker 02 And between them, they arranged this amazing escape where where they basically strung a rope from the roof of the Cradle Tower, across the moat, down to the wharf, and had a boat waiting for him on the River Thames. And despite having been hung from manacles, you know, a torture that probably did quite significant damage to his shoulders and arms, he was still able to shimmy down the rope, across the moat, onto the wharf and escape. It's an extraordinary story.
15:22 Alice Levine? And have beautiful penmanship using lemons and oranges.
15:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:26 Matt Forde? Was he recaptured?
15:28 Speaker 02 No, no, he got away with it.
15:30 Alice Levine? If it was a lazier attempt, then you'd be like, scoop him up, but that is incredible.
15:35 Speaker 02 It's impressive.
15:37 Matt Forde? And was there much of a discussion about the use of soft power? You know, you think about how the British state deals with terrorists now. There's deterrent measures, there are legal routes, but there's also a sense of using soft power, of persuasion, of perhaps giving communities some of what they might want. Was James the First open to any of that?
15:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I think that's what the gunpowder plotters initially had hoped for. When James the First takes the throne, I think they believed that he might be a bit more lenient towards the Catholic community in England. I mean, I think it's worth saying that even Catholics in England in 1605 are very divided in how to improve their situation. The thirteen gunpowder plot conspirators are radical Catholics, you know, they're taking the ultimate course. But there are plenty of Catholics in this country that just want to work with the state, that just want to celebrate their Catholicism sort of quietly and privately, that think
16:38 Speaker 02 that a kind of more diplomatic route is the better way to get a better settlement for English Catholics. So the gunpowder plotters were quite extreme in that sense, you know, and a lot of the people that get implicated in the plot, even the Jesuits who are very closely associated with the gunpowder plotters, actually say, no, this has gone too far, this is, you know, this is beyond the pale. But I think also, looking at it from the other side, and you ask about sort of soft power, the Tower of London is really the ultimate symbol of sort of soft power and of persuasion, because this place is designed and promoted to be grim and foreboding.
17:23 Speaker 02 Guy Fawkes, when he's arrested and is told he's being taken to the Tower, he knows exactly what happens at the Tower. People knew that torture was happening here, that people were imprisoned here. And I think the state uses that to its advantage. There's a moment in the early 17th century where where the names of bits of the tower start to change. So the garden tower becomes the bloody tower. The water gate under St. Thomas's Tower becomes traitor's gate. You know, there's a kind of state propaganda going on here. I think that the tower is kind of central to that. It's being used to promote this idea that if you if you do commit treason, if you do rebel against the state, then you'll end up somewhere where the worst possible things could happen to you.
18:04 Alice Levine? You touched on the idea that the tower was a kind of symbol of what the state could enforce and could inflict. Generally, what was the nature of people's feelings about torture in the in the general public? You know, were people afraid of it? Did people approve of it?
18:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's certainly a debate about torture at the time. I mean, this is a period in history where where violence and violence within the judicial system was quite common and accepted. So, you know, punishments might involve everything from from being whipped or being put in the stocks and the pillory, all the way through to to the worst punishments, the capital punishments and execution. And many of these things were done publicly. So so there was a an acceptance, I think, of violence within the judicial system. And then similarly, there was a lot of debate about whether evidence gathered by torture could be relied upon.
19:10 Speaker 02 Because it was well understood, as it still is today, that that someone undergoing torture is likely to say what their interrogators want to hear, rather than necessarily reveal the truth.
19:23 Matt Forde? So the conspirators weren't executed here at the Tower of London. Is that unusual?
19:28 Speaker 02 No, the conspirators remained in prison here for several months. And then in January 1606, were taken through the streets of London. They were dragged through the streets of London, four of them to St. Paul's Church Yard and four of them to Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster. Very few people have actually been executed inside the walls of the Tower of London over the course of its whole history. Most people were taken out onto Tower Hill and executed publicly outside of the Tower. But it's not unusual for people to be executed close to the site of their crimes. So I think Guy Fawkes is taken to Westminster along with three other conspirators because that is the site of the crime.
20:12 Speaker 02 I think it also affords maximum publicity and maximum visibility for what's going on. You know, they're dragged behind horses through the streets of London to their execution sites, so the whole city of London can come out and see what's happening. Taking them out of the Tower in that way makes this a very, very public execution and again provides that warning to the rest of the Catholic community or other people in this country who are considering treasonous acts, that if they do, they're likely to end up being hanged, drawn and quartered like the gunpowder plot conspirators.
20:48 Alice Levine? And how did the celebrations and the traditions around the 5th of November start? And how were they used politically?
20:57 Speaker 02 Within days, James I was ordering people to light bonfires in celebration for his salvation effectively. Bonfires are often lit around the country in this period to celebrate all sorts of events. So in this period, it's not unusual for bonfires to be lit in the streets to celebrate great events or moments in the year like May Day. But what is very interesting is that the commemoration and the celebration of the failure of the gunpowder plot actually quite quickly gets written into law. So James in early 1606 creates a law requiring that the 5th of November is celebrated each
21:40 Speaker 02 year with sermons in churches and with public celebrations. And actually, that law stayed on the statute book until 1859, believe it or not. And it's why people like Guy Fawkes, who might otherwise have been forgotten by history, actually end up becoming a sort of folk hero in history because every year there's this repeated commemoration of what has happened in 1605, so it becomes lodged in the kind of public consciousness.
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23:53 Speaker 02 So we've come downstairs from the council chamber, and we're stood in front of this amazing, solid oak door. And we're going to go in to the room behind it. I think this is going to give you a real impression of what it was like to be a prisoner at the Tower of London. Let me unlock the door.
24:13 Speaker 02 And follow me in.
24:17 Speaker 02 So as we come down the steps, we're coming into a space known as the Bell Tower. We're also walking back in time here.
24:25 Alice Levine? Oh, gosh.
24:26 Speaker 02 The King's House, the Lieutenant's House, where we've been, was built in the 1530s, in the early 1540s. This space was built in the 1190s, so it's eight or nine hundred years old. The 1190s is the reign of Richard the Lionheart or King John, so we've gone right back into the Middle Ages. But I brought you in here because it's a very special space. It's a space that is associated with the imprisonment of Sir Thomas More, who was here in 1534 to 1535 for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as the head of the English Church when England breaks with Rome.
25:10 Speaker 02 So it's this moment, this moment of reformation in this country, that actually sets the path towards the gunpowder plot in 1605. But I think you get the sense here of what a prison at the Tower of London might have looked like.
25:26 Alice Levine? You would have got a real false sense of security had you been interrogated upstairs and then brought down here. It's like we're in a completely different part of the whole complex, isn't it, really?
25:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, this is such a, even today, this is such an atmospheric and evocative space. I think if you were brought in here as a prisoner, you would understand the severity of where you were and what was going on.
25:50 Alice Levine? It's a very sunny day today, and it's shadowy, there's not much sunlight in here. You do really feel like you're in a kind of cocoon or a cell, I suppose, depending on which one you regard it as.
26:03 Speaker 02 You do, and there is a real atmosphere in here. And I think that, you know, all of those prison cells that Guy Fawkes and the other surviving members of the conspiracy occupied probably also all had this sort of atmosphere when they were thrown into them. Many of the prison cells at the Tower of London have the graffiti left by prisoners on their walls. And in fact... Even today, there's graffiti in the Tower of London left by members of the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy. So this sense of sort of gloom, of despair, is literally written into the walls of the Tower of London.
26:41 Matt Forde? And how many prisoners would you have at any one point in this cell?
26:45 Speaker 02 I think that prisoners are generally kept on their own. In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, when Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland, is being transported to the Tower, so on about the 26th, 27th of November 1605, there are letters going backwards and forwards from Lieutenant Wade to the Privy Council saying, "We don't actually have enough prison cells. You know, I'm having to move people around in order to make space for the Earl of North umberland's incarceration." In that letter, he specifically says, "We don't think the cell that Guy Fawkes is kept in is suitable for the Earl of Northumberland," presumably because Guy Fawkes was being kept
27:30 Speaker 02 in a pretty dank, horrible, small cell in the Earl of Northumberland, and aristocrat, you know, bizarrely deserved something much grander and more space for his prison. But I think, you know, in that aftermath of the discovery of the conspiracy, the Tower's prison cells do begin to swell, and they are struggling to accommodate all the prisoners that they need to here.
27:55 Matt Forde? Where would they have slept? Would they have just slept on like the stone floor or those stone ledgers? Would they be given any sort of mattress or cushion?
28:02 Speaker 02 I think when John Gerard is brought here as a prisoner in 1597, he talks about being put into the Salt Tower, and really it's furnished with a bit of straw on the floor and a straw mattress, I think is all he has. But prisoners are able to bring their own furniture in, or have furniture bought in for them by their friends outside. So...
28:23 Speaker 02 If you have the money, or if you have the right friends, they'll bring you a bed that you can sleep on. But even if you're found innocent in the end and you escape the prison, you escape the Tower of your life, the bed stays behind. It stays here as a perk for the lieutenant. And I suspect the lieutenant of the Tower is constantly selling beds and making a little bit of money on the side from selling second-hand prisoners' beds on. It's strange to think about now.
28:47 Alice Levine? I didn't like to say, but this is much bigger than a lot of one-bed flats in London. So, I mean, as much as you are telling me straw mattress, I'd have to sleep on a bale of hay, I think I could do it. Yeah, the windows aren't big, but neither windows in new builds, you know, like it's it's got a nice feel, original features, vaulted ceiling, lovely.
29:08 Matt Forde? Guy Fawkes is not the only British scandal character to end up in the Tower of London. Ronnie Cray was one of the last people locked up in these walls. Some of those well-known criminals in British history have been here. How does it make you feel knowing who set foot in these buildings?
29:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, it still sends a bit of a shiver down the spine. The Tower has had this very long history of being a place of incarceration. You know, we think about the famous prisoners like Amber Lynn and Catherine Howard, who lost their life here as well. But in more recent times, there were 12 executions at the Tower of London during the 20th century. 11 during the First World War, 11 spies during the First World War, one German spy during the Second World War. The house we've been in was used as a prison for Rudolf Hess, Hitler's right-hand man, in 1941, after he'd flown to England supposedly to offer a peace treaty between the Allied Forces and Nazi Germany.
30:09 Speaker 02 He was brought to the Tower of London and kept in this very house for about a week. And you mentioned the Cray Twins. I mean, they were prisoners of the Tower of London in 1952. They were not state prisoners, it's not for their other crimes for which they're well-known. But they were kept prisoners here because they'd been called up by the Royal Fusiliers, who have their battalion headquarters at the Tower of London, and... They'd tried to avoid their national service and in the process of trying to avoid their national service had punched a soldier in the face. So they were here as military prisoners effectively. But you have even in 20th century prisoners kept here who are accused of treason.
30:50 Speaker 02 People like Sir Roger Casement in 1916, who's involved in the Easter Rising in Ireland, an Irish nationalist. Scandalously executed himself and the state uses his homosexuality as a way to justify his execution. So this place has a very long history of imprisonment and a very long history of scandals.
31:15 Alice Levine? Alden, thank you so much. This was our first ever British scandal school trip and we've absolutely loved it.
31:22 Matt Forde? Yes, I want to go to the gift shop and buy a multicoloured rubber, please.
31:25 Alice Levine? Absolutely, and I would like to stay here for the rest of my days, I think.
31:29 Matt Forde? Well, with the crimes you've committed, I'm sure it's possible.
31:31 Alice Levine? Alden will be back.
31:32 Speaker 02 You're always welcome.
31:38 Alice Levine? That was so brilliant. Thank you so much to Dr Alden Gregory for joining us. Matt, what do we have next time?
31:43 Matt Forde? Well, we're going to be back in the safety of the studio, but you do need to pack a suitcase because I'm taking you to Heathrow Airport in the 1980s.
31:52 Alice Levine? Oh baby, thank you so much. The good old days, back when you could light up on a plane and you could eat your food with real cutlery. So is the scandal the fact that you could just walk willy-nilly into the cockpit back then?
32:03 Matt Forde? No, legitimate safety measures will never be a scandal. This is the story of one of the largest robberies in history. Twenty-six million pounds worth of gold, diamonds and cash from a warehouse.
32:15 Alice Levine? Loose change. We do love a heist though.
32:18 Matt Forde? We do, and it's the aftermath of this one that will have you on the edge of your seat. I'm going to be telling you about the money laundering, murder and international crime rings that go with stolen gold bullions.
32:29 Alice Levine? Oh my god, thank you so much for the reminder. Must check my gold bullion reserves.
32:33 Matt Forde? I check mine last night, still none. See you next week for the Brink's Matt Heist.
32:39 Alice Levine? From Wondery and Sammerson Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, Guy Fawkes.
32:45 Matt Forde? British Scandal is hosted by me, Matt Ford.
32:47 Alice Levine? And me, Alice Levine. For Sammerson, our producer is Chica Ayers. Our assistant producer is Redsey Bernard. Our senior producers are Joe Sykes and Dasha Lisitsina. For Wondery, our series producer is Theodora Luedis and our managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Louis.
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Next The Brink's-Mat Heist | Daylight Robbery | 1 Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated