The Charge of the Light Brigade

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Charge of the Light - an event of no military significance that has become iconic in the British historical imagination. On November 14th 1854 The Times newspaper reported on a minor cavalry skirmish in the Crimean War: “They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war… At the distance of 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame through which hissed the deadly balls. Their flight was marked by instant gaps in our ranks, by dead men and horses, by steeds flying wounded or riderless across the plain”.This is the debacle of the Charge of the Light Brigade, which made little difference to the Crimean War yet has become deeply embedded in British culture. It helped to provoke the resignation of a Prime Minister and it profoundly changed British attitudes to war and to the soldiers who fought in them. It also brought censorship to bear on previously uncensored war reporting and inspired Alfred, Lord Tennyson to sit down and write “All in the Valley of Death rode the six hundred”.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Mike Broers 3 episodes
  Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall
• Trudi Tate No other episodes
  Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge
• Saul David 4 episodes
  Visiting Professor of Military History at the University of Hull

Related episodes

• The Peterloo Massacre
  
  15 Dec, 2005 940 History of Europe
• Agincourt
  
  16 Sep, 2004 940 History of Europe
• Wilfred Owen
  
  27 Oct, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Trial of Charles I
  
  4 Jun, 2009 940 History of Europe
• The Battle of Valmy
  
  16 Jan, 2025 940 History of Europe
• The Fighting Temeraire
  
  10 Nov, 2016 750 Painting
• The Holy Grail
  
  15 May, 2003 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• The Great Exhibition of 1851
  
  27 Apr, 2006 940 History of Europe
• Seventeenth Century Print Culture
  
  26 Jan, 2006 000 Computer science, knowledge and systems
• The Tudor State
  
  26 Oct, 2000 940 History of Europe

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b008md8x

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008md8x

Auto-category: 940 (History of Europe)