The Rest Is History: 323: History's Greatest Dogs

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Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man without his vices.

This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Boson, a dog, who was born in Newfoundland May 1803 and died at Newstead, November the 18th, 1808.

So Tom Holland, those are the words written by Lord Byron's friend John Cam Hobhouse on the urn of the dog, Boson and Newstead Abbey, aren't they? Very moving tribute. Tremendously moving. And Byron wrote something himself, didn't he, about this dog?

Yeah, so inscribed on this tune, which is in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, Byron's ancestral home, you have an entire poem by Byron, which concludes with the splendid couplet.

To mark a friend's remains, these stones arise, I never knew but one, and here he lies. So man's best friend, Dominic. And that's the theme of today's episode. We've chosen the seven greatest dogs in history.

The Magnificent Seven. So Tom, I'm delighted you've chosen this because this is your topic. And what surprises me is that you're more of a cat person yourself.

No, I love dogs as well.

Do you?

Yeah, I do. But because I live in London, it's easier to have cats.

Of course.

Otherwise, you have to kind of go around with bags, scooping up poo, and it's all a bit horrid.

I'm going to betray my hand here. I'm very much a team dog.

Dominic, you astound me.

Yeah. I think if I were an animal, I probably would be a dog. Slightly rabid one, perhaps.

Yeah, astray. The kind of stray dog you might find on a Greek island.

You'd be a British bulldog, wouldn't you?

Oh, that's kind.

Actually, Boson died of rabies, which was very sad. And Byron cared nothing for the danger of getting himself and tended it wiped away the froth from Boson's jaws.

Oh, cranky.

Very, very touching. So I think this is an episode that has lots of touching moments, but also some quite sinister moments as well.

Yeah.

So quite a lot of variety. There is one very famous dog who does not feature in this.

I think it's because we have agreed that we will do an entire episode on Leica.

I hope I've pronounced that right.

Is that your Russian accent?

That's my Russian accent. The stray dog from Moscow that was the first dog in space.

Okay.

And I think that her story would be a wonderful way to talk about the beginning of the space race and cosmonauts and all that kind of thing.

Very good.

She will come later.

Well, our first dog is a contemporary of Leica's, I think.

Yes.

Part of Leica's generation, in fact.

I chose this especially for you.

Yeah.

So this is Checkers, who's already featured on the rest of history. And Checkers is the dog of Richard Nixon.

Yeah. So very much a canine friend of the show, Checkers. So Checkers, Tom, do you know what kind of dog Checkers was?

She's Spanish.

That's right, Tom. That's right. And I can safely say, people won't have noticed this distance to this podcast, but we actually had a massive hiatus then for about 10 minutes.

We did more research than we've ever done before on the rest of history.

Well, I frantically tried to work out whether Checkers was male or female, because Nixon gives a famous speech about Checkers in which she consistently refers to Checkers as it.

She's very Nixon, isn't it?

Very Nixon. But Checkers was a black-and-white cocker spaniel.

It was she.

The New York Times ran an obituary of Checkers in 1964 and said of her, she had a ferocious bark but a gentle disposition.

Very like Richard Nixon, actually, Tom.

Do all the first dogs say the presidential dog is obviously the first dog?

Yeah.

Do the first dogs normally get a bit trees in the New York Times?

No, they don't. But Checkers is a genuinely important political dog.

So to set the scene, we're in 1952, Senator Nixon, as he then was, had just been chosen by former general Dwight D. Eisenhower as his running mate on the Republican ticket.

And Nixon was a slightly controversial choice because he was a bit of a Republican hatchet man, famous for his attacks on communism and so on.

And in September 1952, so just a couple of months before the presidential election, the newspapers ran this story that they said it was a private slush fund.

So the New York Post said, secret rich men's trust fund keeps Nixon in style far beyond his means.

Now, people will remember if they listen to our Watergate podcast, Nixon was a man of very modest means, modest background and was very conscious of it.

And when he was elected Senator from California, a group of donors in Southern California, so they're sort of the network that basically had backed him into the Senate.

They got together and they created a fund to meet his political expenses.

Now, this was actually not that uncommon in those days.

So you had a small expense account as US Senator.

But if you're from California, there's a lot of flights back and forth Washington, you're only covered for one, I think a year.

So this was this fund was going to meet his air mail and his travel costs and his telephone bills and sending out newsletters and stuff.

And they raised about $18,000.

So that's the equivalent about 10 times that today.

And because Nixon was a sort of very disputatious, pugnacious person, the revelation of this fund was a gift to him.

And was a gift to his opponents and they used it to sort of say he's very sleazy and he's corrupt.

I think which was actually a bit unfair because a lot of people had these kinds of funds and Nixon genuinely was not very well off compared with a lot of politicians.

So he kind of needed it to meet his expenses.

He wasn't paying his kind of gas bill out of it.

He wasn't buying motorhomes or he wasn't.

No, he wasn't buying kind of kind of caravan type arrangements and parking in other people's drives or anything.

So there was the mounting attacks on Nixon and Eisenhower, who always really despised Nixon, actually, he's very tempted to drop Nixon from the ticket.

So the Eisenhower campaign basically bought time for a TV address and said to Nixon, this is your last chance.

You have to explain this on TV.

If the public back, you will keep you.

If they don't back you, basically you're out.

So Nixon's under immense pressure.

He goes on TV, gives this speech and he says, Pat and I are very poor.

There's a line he says, which I always like where he says, Pat doesn't have a mint coat.

She has a respectable Republican cloth coat, but I always tell her that she'd look good in anything.

Oh, brilliant.

At that point, you know, some people are weeping with, you know, lots of people are weeping.

Others projectile for me.

Exactly.

And then he has this fantastic twist where he says, now there's one other thing I have to tell you because if I don't, they will be saying this about me too.

He did get one gift.

A man down in Texas had Pat on the radio mentioned the fact that our two youngsters, he's got two girls, Julie and Trisha, would like to have a dog.

And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip, we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore.

They had a package for us.

We went down to get it.

You know what it was?

It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he sent all the way from Texas.

Black and white spotted.

And our little girl, Trisha, the six-year-old, she named it Checkers.

And you know what says Nixon?

The kids love the dog.

And I just want to say this right now that regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep it.

Oh, God bless America.

Yay for Nixon.

Yay for Checkers.

It's a true story.

So it was a Texan salesman called Lou Carroll had genuinely read an article about Pat Nixon, which he said her girls would like a dog.

And he had genuinely sent them a telegram and said, on behalf of the great state of Texas, I'd like you to have this puppy.

So the speech is watched by 60 million Americans, which I think is the largest audience at that point in history for a political speech.

Nixon says in his memoirs, the TV cameraman was crying at the end of the speech.

The switchboard is jammed with supporters.

So Nixon stays on the ticket.

His political career is saved.

Checkers were sent enough dog food to last her a year.

And they got sent leads.

They got sent dog toys.

They get sent collars.

The veteran columnist Walter Littman said, it was the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear in its history.

God, it's lucky that he died when he did.

Hasn't seen what's come later.

The amazing thing is that actually behind the checker speech, there's another dog speech, Tom.

Oh, this is actually two dogs in one.

Oh, brilliant.

Because what Nixon had done is the day before he gave that speech, he had remembered a speech that Franklin D. Roosevelt had given in 1944.

And Roosevelt was running for his unprecedented fourth term in office.

And Roosevelt had been coming under great criticism from the Republicans.

And Orson Welles of all people had suggested to Roosevelt that he mentioned his own dog who was called Fala.

And Roosevelt said in this speech, you know, the Republicans are not just content with attacking me and my wife and my sons and my family.

They also now include my little dog Fala, which was true because the Republicans had been telling this story.

That Roosevelt left his dog behind on one of the Elutian Islands and had sent a destroyer in the middle of the war to go back and pick Fala up, which was completely untrue.

But it would have been fair enough, even if it had been true.

Well, sent a destroyer.

The American people would rally behind a president's lover, his dog, wouldn't they?

Well, Scottish listeners who might have enjoyed the mention of the camper van earlier will enjoy this bit because Roosevelt gave this speech in 1944 to the Teamsters.

And he said, I don't resent my attacks on me by the Republicans.

My family don't resent them, but Fala does resent them because Fala is Scotch.

And being a Scotty, as soon as he learned that Republican fiction writers had concocted this story, his Scotch soul was furious.

He's not been the same dog since.

I have a right to resent and to object to libelous statements about my dog.

So for Nixon to rip, to sort of basically not rip off this story, but to turn it into this populist kind of morkish fable, absolutely inflamed Democrats.

So everybody would have picked up the reference.

Oh, lots of people would.

Yeah, lots of people would.

Nixon was always incredibly morkish, but it was a morkishness that absolutely resonated with a lot of middle America.

The funny thing is, Nixon actually slightly resented it being remembered for the dog because it was quite a long speech.

Yes.

So in his memoirs, he always calls it the fund speech, and he barely mentions Checkers at all.

Whereas it's remembered as the Checkers speech.

And Nixon, there's another bit of history with Nixon and dogs, Tom, because when Nixon did enter the White House, sadly, Checkers was dead.

So Checkers is the most famous political dog of all time, but never actually got to go in the White House.

So when Nixon goes in in 1969, his staff...

He didn't stuff her.

No, he didn't.

No, he didn't.

He's put her in the Oval Office.

His staff bought him a dog, an Irish red setter, whom Nixon called King Timahoe.

So there were actually three dogs at that point in the White House because Julie and Trisha still had dogs.

They had dogs called Pasha and Vicki.

But King Timahoe didn't initially take to Nixon.

So his staff had to leave trail...

They led trails of biscuits all through the White House that led to the Oval Office to Nixon's desk, and Nixon kept a tin of biscuits.

So they bonded eventually, did they?

They did bond eventually, I think.

There were some stories that his staff, in an attempt to kind of appease the dog, would throw biscuits around the Oval Office,

and they broke a clock with a dog biscuit.

I don't know.

Can you break a clock with a dog biscuit?

It would have to be quite a heavy dog biscuit, wouldn't it?

Well, it's the 70s, you know, trying to...

Yeah, I don't know.

Do they have dog biscuits in America?

Are they not dog cookies?

Yeah, do they call them dog biscuits?

I think they do call them dog biscuits.

They're just not consistent, Tom.

I don't approve of it, but there you go.

Can't be helped.

Right, Dominic.

So that's our first one.

You talked about Morkishness, and you talked about Scotland.

So listeners will probably be able to guess our second dog, which is probably Scotland's most famous dog,

absolute star of Edinburgh tourism, and that, of course, is Greyfriars Bobby.

Oh, yes.

And this is actually quite a complicated story, because...

It's a shaggy dog story, Tom.

Well, is it?

Are Sky Terriers shaggy?

I'm not sure they are.

No, well, they're shaggy, but I can bear with them with humans, I suppose.

Anyway, so Greyfriars Bobby is...

He's a Sky Terrier, very long lived, so 17 years, supposed to have lived from 1855 to 1872.

And as far as we can tell, the likeliest version of the story, certainly the earliest,

is that he belonged to a night watchman who was called John Gray,

who was working for the police, so hence the name Bobby.

Ah, nice.

See, which I'd never got before I read up on this.

And John Gray was kind of...

He was very, very on his up as working as a night watchman through the night was all he could get.

He was basically, I mean, just above the bread line.

1850s.

1860s, yeah.

1850s, yes.

So he'd come to Edinburgh from the countryside.

He dies of TB, and he's buried in Greyfriars' courtyard, which is just off the Royal Mile.

And the story goes that every night, the 14 years that Bobby has left,

he comes and sits on his master's grave to commemorate him.

That's nice.

And this becomes an absolute feature of Edinburgh life.

People come and watch him.

In due course, in 1867, an act is introduced that requires dogs to be licensed,

and there isn't anyone around who can license Greyfriars' Bobby.

So the Lord Provost of Edinburgh himself pays for Bobby's dog license, buys him a collar.

And then when Greyfriars' Bobby dies, he is buried in Greyfriars' courtyard,

next to his dead master's grave.

So it's all very, very touching.

He went there every night for 14 years.

This is the story.

This is the story.

How did he know it was his grave?

Dominic, stop asking difficult questions.

He did.

It's not by the smell, surely.

It's distinctive odour.

Anyway, people are not asking difficult questions like that.

They're completely taking it on trust.

Okay.

And by the time that he dies, the story has kind of spread far beyond Edinburgh, far beyond Scotland.

So even in London, a lady called Lady Bird at Coots,

who is the granddaughter of the founder of the bank, Coots Bank,

which I think the king is.

That's where he keeps his money, isn't it?

And Lady Bird at Coots sets up a drinking fountain topped by a statue of Bobby,

opposite the entrance to the graveyard.

And we've already mentioned Hobhouse's tribute to Boson.

Another one, the inscription on this memorial,

is a tribute to the affectionate fidelity of Greyfriars Bobby in 1858.

This faithful dog followed the remains of his master to Greyfriars Churchyard

and lingered near the spot until his death in 1872.

So there is the answer to your skeptical question.

He followed the body.

If Lady Bird at Coots believes it, who am I to disagree?

Or Tom is there a twist?

Well, so you have noticed that perhaps there is something not entirely credible about this story.

Yeah.

Over the course of the decades that follow, the story becomes basically better and better.

Of course.

So the canonical story, the story that then feeds into kind of the various films that have been made,

was the result of a story written by an American novelist and journalist called Eleanor Atkinson.

You had stowned me, Tom.

So in 1912, he wrote this up as a novel.

Right.

And has a very, very heartwarming description of Greyfriars Bobby.

He was only a little country dog,

the very youngest and smallest and shaggiest of Sky Terriers.

Shaggiest.

I told you it was a shaggy dog story.

Braid on a heathery slope of the Pendleton Hills,

with the loudest sound was the bark of a collie or the tinkle of a sheep bell.

Did you have the voice of Marilyn Monroe, Tom?

That's what early 20th century American novelists writing sentimental tales of Scottish dogs.

I see now where Richard Nixon got his inspiration from the Shagga speech.

So in this version, John Grey is actually called Old Jock.

Of course he is.

And the story in this is that he is taking Bobby to a place that did actually exist on Candlemaker Road in Edinburgh,

Trails Temperance Coffee House at one o'clock every day for lunch.

And at one o'clock in Edinburgh, as people will know who visited it, a gun on Edinburgh Castle sounds.

Yeah.

When the Old Jock or John Grey or whatever we want to call him has died,

whenever the gun goes off at one o'clock,

Grave Fries Bobby comes to lunch at Trails Temperance Coffee House.

Yeah.

And people turn up at Trails Temperance House to watch him.

And this is the version that you get in the Disney film.

And it also feeds into the Lassie film that was made.

So he's not hanging around at the grave in this story.

He is.

He's hanging around at the grave and he's going for lunch.

So he's got a busy social schedule.

Right.

Exactly.

Obviously, the question is how true is any of this?

Yeah.

Sounds agreeably true.

And eyebrows may be raised by the fact that the newspaper that first breaks the story back in 1864 is the Inverness Courier,

which is also the newspaper that first breaks the story of the Loch Ness Monster.

Oh, it's only true.

It's definitely true.

But the thing is, is that actually Bobby was still alive then.

So unlike the Loch Ness Monster, we know that Bobby did exist.

Maybe the Loch Ness Monster is alive then.

Yeah.

But nobody's seen the Loch Ness Monster.

Whereas people will regularly see this dog going for lunch.

People are going to see this dog.

Exactly.

So there is a basis of truth.

But there are clearly elements of it that isn't true.

So the story of him hearing the gun and going to the Trails Temperance Coffee House isn't true

because the firing of the gun was inaugurated after it's supposed to have done.

So essentially, on the principle of Cui Bono, who's benefiting from this,

they probably say that it's the owner of Trails Temperance Coffee House.

Oh, yes, you would.

You would.

So it may be that that entire thing began as a kind of scam originating with John Trail,

who owned it.

And the other question that skeptics have asked is, was there more than one dog?

Because as I said, Grave Fries Bobby seems to have been very long-lived

for a stray dog in Edinburgh in the mid-19th century.

So it's possible that he died and got replaced.

What's this Tom by the reed?

Was he even a dog at all?

Yeah, he's definitely a dog.

No, the huge bombshell, the massive question is, was he actually a Sky Terrier?

Okay.

Because this is the latest development that took place only last year in 2022.

And it's been proposed by Mike, the brilliantly named Mike Macbeth.

I don't know the Scottish thief.

Oh, that's unbelievable.

He's actually Canadian.

Mike Macbeth.

Yes.

That's his name.

Yeah, that's his name.

Okay, I mean, if he's listening, I hope he's not offended.

But he's not Scottish.

He's the president of the Canadian Dandy Dinment Terrier Club.

The what?

I know you were fey with Dandy Dinments.

No, I'm not.

Well, we actually had a Dandy Dinment when I was a child.

What is it?

They're very sweet terriers and they have kind of a little tuft, they're grey

and they have a little tuft.

Dandy Dinment is a dog.

Yes.

And it's named after a cow.

Sounds like a nightclub hostess from the 1950s.

No.

No, Dominic.

It sounds like what it is.

It sounds like a character from one of Walter Scott's novels.

Okay.

That's what it's named after.

He's a character who appears in Guy Manning, which is one of Scott's novels.

And they were first bred in 1842.

So every Dandy Dinment Terrier that there is in the world at the moment

can trace his ancestry back to the original Dandy Dinment,

who was called Old Ginger.

Isn't that about the claim that everybody in Britain can trace their ancestry back

to Edward III?

No.

Well, maybe it is.

But in the case of Dandy Dinment, I remember that we got a scroll of paper

showing the lineage for J.K.

Okay.

Our beloved Dandy Dinment, who I'm very happy to have a reason to mention.

And Mike Mbeth, who's president of the Canadian Dandy Dinment Terrier Club,

thinks that perhaps Greyfriars Bobby was actually Dandy Dinment.

What a bombshell.

Yeah.

Tom Golly.

So this is what he says.

There have been so many competing stories about Greyfriars Bobby

that the truth has faded like the mist on an Edinburgh morning.

But the more I researched him for our book, The Dandy Dinment Terrier,

The True Story of Scotland's Forgotten Breed,

the facts led to only one conclusion that Greyfriars Bobby had to be a Dandy Dinment.

What an extraordinary coincidence that he's the president of the Dandy Dinment Club.

But I don't think you can reasonably claim, Kenny, that Greyfriars Bobby is.

I mean, if we're talking about significance, Checkers is much more significant than Greyfriars Bobby.

Well, not if you're in the Edinburgh Tourist Board.

No, no, admittedly.

But if you're working for the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum,

True.

There's only one contender.

But Dominic, I'm recording this on the banks of the Tweed.

Okay.

The Tweed, as we locals call it.

And so Edinburgh is much closer to me than California.

We'll agree to differ on that.

I mean, I would say that Greyfriars Bobby is definitely one of the, I mean, absolutely very famous dog.

Don't you think?

It's famous, but it's not significant in the evolution of populism, as Checkers is.

Well, and talking about the evolution of populism.

Yeah.

Who's number three?

Our third dog is, so we've had one dog owned by a sinister right wing leader.

Yeah.

And then we have another.

Another dog owned by a sinister right wing leader.

Let's try to have a dog.

This is Blondie, who was owned by famous animal lover Adolf Hitler.

Tom, I can't believe you've gone there.

Blondie is your number three.

Well, Nixon called Nixon.

Hitler was a big dog lover, wasn't he?

Well, our Democrats cheer.

Because Hitler had been messing around with dogs in the trenches in World War One.

Because I, in my adventure in time, Second World War, it's a great opportunity for me to advertise my excellent children's book.

Which the Fuhrer appears as a major character.

The book begins with Hitler, and he's just a young man.

And he's in the trenches and he has a dog.

And when I read the first draft of that chapter, and I showed it to my son, he said,

You've got to cut the dog, because all children will assume that a young man with a dog.

Yes, it's the hero.

It's the hero.

Yeah.

And Hitler had a dog, which was a Jack Russell, a white Jack Russell.

Supposedly, initially the property of a British soldier, a Tommy, who had found his way into the trenches.

And Hitler adopted the dog and he caught him.

So he's stolen it.

He's stolen an Englishman's pet.

Well, Hitler called him Fuchel, which means little fox.

And he wrote, I think later, he says,

How many times I used to study my dog Fuchel?

I used to watch him as if he was a man.

It was crazy how fond I was of that beast.

And the story is that in 1917, Hitler moves down the line.

His regiment had moved to Alsace, I think.

And a railroad official offers Nixon some money for the dog.

And Nixon says, No, you can, you could offer me 200,000 marks.

I wouldn't part with him.

But then when they come to leave,

So have I called him Nixon again?

Anyway,

Oh, no,

Hitler,

terrible,

terrible.

This is terrible.

Hitler goes off and he leaves that he can't find the dog.

And he assumes the railroad official may have stolen him and he never sees the dog again.

Oh, and Tom, this is a great what if of history, isn't it?

Yes.

If Hitler had found that dog,

Maybe he'd have been a nicer person.

Maybe.

Maybe.

His demons wouldn't have been quite so murderous.

Exactly.

But he had lots of dogs, actually.

He was very into German shepherds,

which were hugely popular with the kind of nationalist right.

Absolutely.

Because they were, you know,

Aryan dogs,

that's such a thing.

Well,

so their full name is Canis lupus familiaris.

And lupus, of course,

is Wolf in Latin.

And the Nazis were very, very into dogs who were close to wolves

because wolves were seen as belonging to the primordial German forest

and embodying Aryan kind of values of ferocity and strength and things like that.

And the most famous of all the German shepherds owned by Hitler

was one that Martin Bormann,

who also loved German shepherds, gave him in 1941.

And this is Blondie.

Yeah.

He loved Blondie, didn't he?

He did.

Blondie featured a lot in Nazi propaganda.

So Hitler was always kind of shown with Blondie,

kept her by his side in his various retreats and things like that.

Yeah.

And in 1945, when he goes to the bunker,

he takes Blondie with him into the bunker

and lets her sleep on the bed,

which Ava Brown was not keen on at all.

She had dogs of her own, though.

Scottish Terriers again.

Okay.

Weirdly, it was called Stasi.

Stasi.

So what?

Strange.

Stasi is the East German...

Yeah, secret police.

There's a Graham Hancock series in this, Tom.

Yeah.

So why did they name their security service after a dog owned by Hitler's wife?

Because Blondie is not a good name for a security service.

I suppose that's true.

Yes, I suppose that's true.

Anyway, so March 1945, even as the Soviets are closing in,

Blondie has a whole litter of puppies, which is lovely of Hitler.

But then 29th of April, he knows it's all Ava.

Yeah.

He's got the cyanide.

He's not certain it's going to work.

Yeah.

And so he tries it out on Blondie.

It does work.

He's absolutely distraught when Blondie dies.

What do you think was going to happen?

I mean, that's madness.

Give a dog cyanide.

Well, I suppose part of him would have wanted it to work,

because then he'd know that he'd be able to commit suicide

and it wouldn't be captured.

Yeah.

But I guess the other half of him,

he'd be very sad at losing Blondie, who he obviously adored.

And then 30th of April, Hitler commits suicide Ava as well.

And after they're both dead, their guards get the puppies

that Blondie's just delivered and shoot them all.

Oh, my God.

And they get burned with the bodies of...

They burn the dogs as well.

Hitler and Ava.

Yeah.

Because the bodies fell into the possession of the Red Army.

That's crazy.

Well, I don't know what happened to Stasi.

It's an odd one, isn't it, choosing Hitler's dog?

Because it humanises Hitler.

I mean, actually, what my son said about having Hitler with a dog

in the children's history book was right in a way.

It's interesting how possession of an animal,

having a relationship with an animal does humanise people,

even terrible villains.

I think it's interesting that people are fascinated by Hitler

and his dogs, because we think of Hitler as inhuman,

as cold, as unfeeling, and to see him...

But isn't it a part of it?

You say inhuman.

I mean, famously, he's vegetarian, because he doesn't want to eat

the meat of dead animals.

Like you, Tom.

Like me.

Well, I'm not really.

I eat fish as well.

I don't care about fish.

I mean, the thing is, isn't it, that it's Hitler's devotion to animals

rather than to humans that is so unsettling about him?

Yeah.

In a way, it humanises him.

But in another way, it kind of just intensifies the spendthrift way

in which he destroys millions and millions of people's lives

without care.

Yeah.

I think that's actually a good point.

It probably is more unsettling than if he was...

Because if he was complete, he had no emotions at all.

He was just evil.

Yes.

Yeah, it's more unsettling.

Agreed.

Tom, we've spent so long talking about these dogs

that we're going to run out of time.

We've got four more to come.

Yeah.

God, I can't wait.

So, listen.

Join us after the break for more of history's greatest dogs.

Woof, woof.

Oh, Tom.

Welcome back to the Rest is History.

We are talking dogs with top dog lover Tom Holland.

Tom, I believe you've got an apology to make to the listeners.

Is that right?

I do have an apology to make.

So, you may have been hearing a strange creaking sound.

And that strange creaking sound comes from the chair of our friends

who I'm still up in Scotland at the moment.

We have no Wi-Fi on our side of the Tweed.

So, I cross over and I'm using theirs.

Definitely the chair, Tom.

And it's definitely the chair.

And not the ghost of your dandy Dinmont dog.

J.K.

Oh, I wish it was.

Bless him.

You've got four dogs.

You've got half an hour.

Four dogs, yes.

So, the fourth one.

So, there are a lot of kind of mystic legendary dogs.

I could have chosen Argus, who was the dog of Odysseus.

Very famous.

Do you remember the story that Odysseus has been away

the Trojan War for ten years

and then he's been wandering around the Mediterranean

for another ten years.

And he arrives back in Ithaca, disguised as a beggar,

and no one recognises him.

Except for Argus, his old dog,

who's been thrown out by the evil suitors from the palace

and is lying on a dung heap.

And as Odysseus walks by, cunningly disguised as a beggar,

he looks up, recognises him,

whimpers, licks his hand and dies.

So, very moving.

But I'm not including him because Argus didn't actually exist.

J.K.

Instead, on the whole kind of mythic legendary dog front,

I've gone for one who might have existed.

Might?

So, it's a great story.

And this dog is called Gellert.

And Gellert is supposed to have been owned by Llewellyn the Great,

who was the great Welsh prince

in the first half of the 13th century.

King of Gwyneth.

Yeah.

The last great flourishing of independent Wales

before the conquest bed with the first.

And the story goes that Llewellyn the Great,

he has a little baby boy.

The baby boy is left in a crib,

guarded by Gellert, who is his dog.

Okay.

And Llewellyn the Great goes out hunting,

leaves Gellert behind to stand guard over his son.

Llewellyn has a great day out shooting deer or whatever it is he's doing.

Comes back and he finds Gellert lying next to an empty crib

and Gellert has blood all over his jaws.

And so, Llewellyn leaps to the logical conclusion

that Gellert has eaten the baby.

And so, he draws his sword and slices off Gellert's head.

Right.

Cleans his sword, wanders into the next room,

and there he hears the cries of his baby son.

And he looks round and there is a dead wolf.

Oh, Tom.

Which had attacked the child but been killed by Gellert.

So, Gellert had actually died defending the baby boy

and that's why he had blood all over his jaws.

And Llewellyn of course is absolutely crippled with remorse

and a sense of bereavement.

Yeah.

And he buries the dog with tremendous ceremony

and the story goes that from that point on,

he never smiled again.

Crikey.

That is a sad story, isn't it?

It is a sad story.

The thing that slightly worries me about that story is

I think I've heard that story before in other contexts.

Like what?

I don't know, but it just seems to work.

You can't bring your skepticism to such a moving tale

and not be able to justify it.

That feels to me like an Icelandic saga

stroke Greek myth dog story.

No, it definitely happened to Ellen

and the proof of that is that it was written up

in a splendid poem in the 18th century by a guy

called William Robert Spencer.

He kind of hung out with the wigs,

with Charles James Fox and all the lads.

Oh yeah.

Holland House.

Prince Regent, Sheridan, Holland House,

all that kind of thing.

And he wrote a great poem about this.

Shall I read a section of it?

I think you should read the whole poem, frankly.

Because it's enormously long.

It's one of those 18th century very long poems.

Right, okay.

So this is after Llewellyn has come in

and he's full of remorse.

And he raises a tomb for Gellert

and it stands in the forest.

And here never could the spearman pass

or forester unmoved.

Here oft the tear besprinkled grass

Llewellyn sorrow proved.

And here he hung his horn and spear

and there as evening fell

in fancy's ear

he off would hear

poor Gellert's dying yell.

And till great Snowden's rocks grow old

and cease the storm to brave

the consecrated spot shall hold

the name of Gellert's grave.

Tom, I think there was a bit of a tremble

in your voice during some of that poem

because it's very moving, isn't it?

It's so moving.

Poor Gellert.

And Welsh listeners sometimes complain

that we don't do enough Welsh history.

I think that they will feel that we have more than adequately

That beautiful reading from an English poem.

Well, we're English as well.

We're paying homage to the glories

of the splendid Welsh dog.

Okay, very good.

I enjoyed that, Gellert.

I don't believe Gellert existed,

but I enjoyed the poem nonetheless.

So, give us a dog that did exist.

Well, the next dog is...

It's a picnese.

Okay.

In fact, it's the very first picnese

that was brought to Britain.

It was brought to Britain in 1861.

And it's a story that doesn't reflect

tremendously well on Britain.

Oh, Tom, do you think we do this podcast?

They're this sort of nonsense.

And when I tell you that the picnese

was given to Queen Victoria

and she named it Lutie...

Right.

You may be able to guess how and why

this dog was obtained when I remind you

that in 1860, so the year before it

arrives back in Britain,

an Anglo-French force had marched on

Beijing on Peking, as they called it then,

and sacked the old summer palace.

Oh, yeah, the burning of the summer palace.

Very great scene in Flashman.

Right.

So, you know all about it from Flashman.

So, just tell us about the sack of the summer palace.

So, it's the Second Opium War.

Yes.

Okay.

So, the summer palace was the...

It's such a terrible cliché,

but I'm going to say it anyway.

It was the jewel in the crown

of the Chinese emperor's possessions.

It's got these magnificent gardens and pavilions.

It's absolutely stuffed with treasures,

with artworks, with vases,

with all this sort of stuff.

So, it's basically...

It's the British Museum

crossed with what?

Regent's Park.

Yeah, I guess so,

and crossed with Buckingham Palace.

I suppose if you could imagine it,

all in one complex.

Yeah.

It's the Second Opium War.

The Chinese had seized the Allied negotiators,

the delegates,

and they tortured them and stuff.

It's absolutely,

superbly done the pathos of it

in George MacDonald Fraser's novel.

Because Lord Elgin,

who's the son of...

The son of...

Yes.

The Lord Elgin,

the son of Fraser's.

He basically orders the destruction of the summer palace

in retribution

for what's happened to the Allied,

the European negotiators.

And the British and French

just basically storm in.

They burn.

They smash.

They steal.

They kind of level the whole thing.

They actually...

General Gordon,

probably the preeminent friend

of the rest of his history,

he was present at the sack of the summer palace.

And he was appalled by it, wasn't he?

He was.

He saw,

as in saw,

as in painful,

to see the burning of all the artworks

and the gold ornaments being destroyed

and the things being torn down

and vases smashed.

But also people making off

for tons and tons of stuff.

Gordon said it was

a wretchedly demoralizing work

for an army.

Yeah.

And Victor Hugo,

he compared France and Britain to bandits.

So it was seen at the time

as a pretty shocking thing to have done.

And so,

that's why the idea of looting

is kind of very much in the air

and why Queen Victoria,

when she is presented with this little dog,

kind of makes a joke of it.

So it was found by a guy called

John Hart Dunn,

who was a military man,

served in the Crimean War,

very patriotic.

When he was out in China,

serving with the French,

he would make a point

whenever they captured somewhere

of running up the Union Jack

before the trickler

could be raised over concrete forts.

And so he's there

in the summer palace,

and he wrote this autobiography later,

and he described looting looty.

And he described her as a pretty little dog,

smaller than any King Charles,

a real Chinese sleeve dog.

It had silver bells around its neck,

and people say it is the most perfect little beauty

they ever saw.

And so he takes this little dog.

I mean, it has to be said,

in exactly the same way that the Chinese,

when they go on imperial adventures,

bring animals back.

Okay.

You know, like the Romans,

the Chinese had been kind of bringing animals

as evidence of their conquests,

as evidence of their triumphs,

back to their capital.

And now, basically,

John Hart Dunn is doing the same,

because he takes this picanese back to England

on the voyage home.

He has a kind of cap,

and he has the little picanese sleeping it.

And he presents it to Queen Victoria.

And Victoria, I'm afraid to say,

slightly disgraces herself,

not only by giving her the name

that she gives the dog.

This is honest.

I guess it is honest.

But she doesn't look after looty at all well.

So looty is a palace dog.

And therefore,

he's used to being fed,

delicate, you know,

perfectly cooked portions of chicken.

Delicious, soft, light rice.

But Queen Victoria feeds her on offal,

which is very declassé.

I think it's trying to build the dog up.

And looty is painted by a German student

of Edwin Lanseer,

as in monarch of the Glen.

Yeah.

Very popular painter with Queen Victoria.

But then once she's been painted,

she gets taken away to the kennels in Windsor.

And Queen Victoria basically ignores her.

And she died in 1872

and is buried in an unmarked grave.

Unmarked grave.

So I guess if you wanted,

you know, a metaphor,

if you were...

If you were straining.

If you were being harsh on the British Empire.

Yeah.

Looty would be quite a good metaphor.

OK.

Tom, can you remedy this

with a more patriotic dog?

Yes.

Good.

I absolutely can.

Splendid.

Because obviously,

we are a very patriotic podcast.

And so I didn't want to leave it on that note.

No.

So now we come to very much friend of the show,

Admiral Collingwood,

who, people who listen to our episode

of the Battle of Trafalgar,

will remember Cuthbert Collingwood,

hero of the battles of Kate St. Vincent,

Trafalgar, kind of Nelson's right-hand man,

friend, successor.

And again, I'm up here in...

Well, I've crossed the tweet.

So I was in Scotland

and now I'm in England,

in the northeast of England,

which is very much where Cuthbert Collingwood came from.

So he was born and raised in Newcastle.

Named after some Cuthbert, Tom.

It all stitches together.

Yeah.

So anyway, so he's very much a naval man.

In 1790, he is given bounce, this little puppy.

What's bounce?

Not entirely sure.

Oh, okay.

So basically a generic dog.

A generic dog.

Okay.

People who can use their imaginations.

He could be massive.

He could be tiny.

I don't think he's massive.

I don't think he's tiny.

I don't think he's massive.

I think he's kind of...

A medium dog.

He's a medium dog.

He's an average dog.

Yeah, okay.

And 1790, when Collingwood gets bounce,

he is due to go off on a trip to the Caribbean.

And so he takes bounce with him and he writes back to his wife

and says that bounce is a very good dog,

delights in the ship, swims after him whenever he goes in the boat.

So it's good to know that bounce is getting his sea legs.

Yeah.

And from that point on, whenever Collingwood goes to sea,

he takes bounce with him.

Bounce isn't entirely suited.

I mean, he's got sea legs,

but he's not entirely suited to naval engagements

because he doesn't like loud noises.

No dog does.

Dogs hate fireworks.

Exactly.

I don't know what they would make of a cannon.

Exactly.

So having loads of cannon firing.

So whenever there's a battle being fought,

bounce kind of went below decks and kind of hid beneath a blanket.

Yeah.

And after the battle, Collingwood would go and find bounce.

Bounce would be shaking and shivering under his blanket,

deep in the bowels of the ship.

And Collingwood would pick bounce up, stroke him,

and sing him a beautiful lullaby,

which was adapted from famous lines in Much Do About Nothing,

Shakespeare's Play.

And it went,

All bouncy, sigh no more, dogs were deceivers never.

Though near you put one foot on shore, trust your master ever.

Then sigh not so, but let us go where dinner's daily ready,

converting all the sounds of woe to high fiddly-ditty.

To high fiddly-ditty.

So we've had some great poetry on this episode.

We have.

That doesn't strike the martial note for me, Tom, I have to say.

But that's what's so charming about Collingwood.

Yeah, I guess so.

He's a hard man in battle, wins a lot of battles,

but loves his dog.

Yeah.

And when he's back at home, he's not at home often,

because he's off fighting Napoleon.

But when he is there, he lives in Morpeth outside Newcastle.

He goes for walks over the hills, takes bounce with him,

and wherever he goes,

he reaches into his pocket for some acorns, and he plants them,

so that they will grow into oaks,

so that, say, in 2023,

Britain will be able to chop down oaks.

And make great ships.

Make great ships.

This is the moment.

So Collingwood's oaks that he planted with bounce are still standing.

Are they?

Yes.

Oh, splendid.

You know, they're ready to be chopped down

and turn into ships of the line right now.

Excellent.

Cranky.

Very good.

So bounce is with Collingwood,

when Collingwood goes over to HMS Victory,

to Nelson's Cabin,

to discuss the battle plans before Trafalgar.

Yeah, so bounce is there.

I mean, obviously, in the battle itself,

he's below decks shivering underneath a blanket.

I mean, he probably doesn't contribute much

to the discussion, presumably.

Well, I suppose he kind of...

He probably provides inspiration to the British captains,

an example of a British dog.

Yeah, a British pluck.

The bulldog spirit.

I mean, it's not a bulldog,

but he could be a bulldog,

because we don't know what he is.

I imagine he's not a French poodle.

No, definitely not.

That would be very bad.

Not some fancy, French-ified dandy dog.

Well, although Dominic.

So after the Battle of Trafalgar,

he becomes Baron Collingwood of Calderburn

and Hethpool in the County of Northumberland,

which means, of course, that bounce has been elevated.

And Collingwood writes back to his family,

saying that he's all out of patience with bounce.

The consequential he gives himself

since he became a right-honorable dog are insufferable.

He considers it beneath his dignity

to play with commoners dogs

and truly thinks that he does them grace

when he comes to lift up his leg against them.

So that's quite sad.

Is Collingwood serious?

Or is he...

No, it's naval banter, Dominic.

Right, okay, just checking.

Four years after Trafalgar,

bounce is getting very old.

He's become rheumatic and he falls overboard and drowns.

Oh, my God.

You can't just come out with that, Tom, with no preparation.

Well, so Collingwood was distraught

and, again, wrote back and said that

what a huge loss bounce was.

I have few comforts, but he was one for he loved me.

Everybody sorrows for him.

He was wiser than many who hold their heads higher

and was grateful to those who were kind to him.

This is one of our most poignant podcasts.

Well, it gets even more poignant

because the crew on Collingwood's ship,

even though they couldn't give bounce a proper naval burial

because, obviously, he'd fallen overboard and drowned,

they make a small coffin the size of the dog,

they drape it in a union jack,

and then they give it a burial at sea.

Good for them.

That reflects very well on the Royal Navy.

And they then pull into...

They go to the Balearicars, they pull into Mallorca,

and the crew buy Collingwood a new bounce.

They dress him as a sailor with an X scarf.

He would apparently parade with the Marines.

I don't want to alienate our American listeners,

so I know I'm very keen on this,

but I don't really approve of dog-in-clothes.

No, well...

So, dressing him as a sailor, I don't approve of...

Yeah, I hear you, but the fact remains

that bounce two stayed on board ship

even after Collingwood himself had died.

Really?

And so, what happened to bounce the junior?

I don't know.

He just kind of looked at it.

He became the ship dog.

Okay.

So, that's a stirring and happy story, I think.

That is a nice story,

and you've got one more to go, Tom.

So, I still think checkers is the best dog,

but that's because I'm biased.

But bounce, I have to say, is right up there.

It's very, very close.

Okay.

But could our final dog storm through to the title?

I think you'd agree that all of these dogs

would make great films.

Yeah.

Well, in fact...

Great for us.

Bobby has been a film.

But the final dog is a dog who was in loads of films

as an actor,

and that is Rin Tin Tin.

Oh, yeah.

Very good choice.

Who was, again, a German Shepherd dog.

Yeah.

An extraordinary story.

So, Rin Tin Tin is a German Shepherd dog,

but is born in France.

Okay.

On the Western Front in 1918,

as the Allies are kind of pushing forward

and the Germans are starting to retreat.

Yeah.

And during this great push,

the Americans are rolling the German lines up,

and a guy called Corporal Lee Duncan,

who is in the US Army Air Service,

is sent forward with a group of other men

to secure a French village called Fleury,

to see if it would be a good place

to kind of set up an airstrip.

And they go there,

and they go to the German headquarters,

and they find it's been very badly damaged by bombs,

that the Germans have fled.

But there, there is a kennel.

And in the kennel, there is a German Shepherd,

and she has just given birth

to a litter of five tiny puppies.

And they're so small that they haven't even opened their eyes yet.

Duncan rescues the dogs, the mother, and the puppies,

and he brings them back to his unit.

And he gives away all the dogs,

including the mother and the puppies,

but he keeps two, a boy and a girl.

Okay.

And he calls the boy Rintintin,

and he calls the girl Nanette.

Actually, Rintintin is probably Rantantin, actually,

because these were good luck charms

that were given to American soldiers

by children in France.

So Rantantin and Nanette.

I did not know.

But Rantantin would not have been a name for a film star.

No.

So Rintintin, he becomes,

because Duncan smuggles the two puppies

aboard the troopship when they go back in 1919.

I suppose they're not puppies by then, are they?

No.

Kind of, whatever.

Adolescent.

Frisky adolescent dogs.

Frisky adolescent.

I mean, it must be tricky to keep them on the troopship.

Anyway, he smuggles them across.

They get to America.

Nanette, very sadly, I think dies in New York.

I think he gets quarantined and dies.

And so Duncan buys another dog, Nanette too.

So a bit like we've had Bounce too.

Nanette too.

He comes from California, from Los Angeles,

and he takes Rintintin and Nanette with him back to LA.

And when he gets to LA, he teaches Rintintin

all kinds of tricks.

And the particular thing that Rintintin can do

is to jump enormous heights.

And this obviously in LA, in Hollywood,

producers are always looking for kind of exciting stunts

and things that they can put into movies.

This becomes something that attracts the casting directors.

And so in 1922, Rintintin is actually cast as a wolf

in a film called The Man from Hell's River.

And he plays the wolf tremendously well.

So much so that the following year in 1923,

he gets his first lead.

And he appears in 27 movies in all.

Wow.

He is such a star that he comes to be called

the mortgage lifter by people in Hollywood.

Why?

Because he makes films that enables people

to pay off their mortgages.

That's a good name.

And actually, the guy who really,

whose career really gets a lift from Rintintin

is Darrell F. Zanuck, who is the guy who goes on

to become the head of 20th Century Fox.

So he starts his career as a screenwriter,

and he writes...

For Rintintin?

Yeah, he writes screenplays for Rintintin.

And the story is that in 1929,

when they have the first Oscars ceremony,

that Rintintin is actually...

He gets voted best actor.

And the organizers of the Oscars

don't get to have that.

And so he gets disqualified.

I think that's actually an urban myth, but...

That sounds utterly implausible.

That's great for his Bobby standards of veracity.

Gelert.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, Rintintin, he's a Hollywood star,

so he's having a great time with an Annette,

hanging out with Annette.

So hold on, Annette's not his sister.

This isn't a Ptolemy-style arrangement.

There's a slight Ptolemaic vibe there

because she's a replacement for the sister.

Okay.

But that's quite Hollywood, isn't it?

I mean, it's quite Hollywood.

I suppose so.

So they have 48 puppies.

48?

Yeah.

But how many would you have in one go?

I'm not familiar with...

I don't know.

Dog biology is, you know, a mystery to me.

They obviously very fond of each other.

They're having a lot of fun by the pool,

hanging out, keeping his Oscar.

And then he dies in August, 1932.

And weirdly, his body is sent back to France.

That is kind of strange.

It's buried in a pet cemetery outside Paris.

Oh, yeah.

The cimetière, the chien et autres animaux domestiques.

Yep.

They're very same.

I wonder what else is buried in that?

I don't know if we have any listeners who know who else,

what other famous animals might be buried in that.

But Rintintin was unbelievably famous.

So Anne Frank in her diary,

actually the second entry in her diary,

writes of saying that she longed to have a dog like Rintintin.

The thing about Rintintin is that he's very energetic.

He's an outdoors dog.

He's jumping off walls and doing stunts and things like that.

And, you know, it's so sad that Anne Frank is...

I mean, that's the kind of the pathos of it.

Yeah.

That she's locked up and...

Pining for a dog.

Pining for a dog.

Rintintin obviously predates Lassie.

I mean, Lassie was the cinematic dog

that I was most familiar with growing up.

Rintintin is the trailblazer.

Yeah.

This is a pale shadow of Rintintin, I suppose.

I don't know.

I mean, it's...

Too harsh to Lassie.

No, I think it's a bit harsh to Lassie.

If I was ranking visual dogs,

I'd put K9 first.

And then Rintintin and then Lassie.

I like a robot dog.

Yeah, I hear you.

I don't know whether Lassie has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,

because Rintintin does...

Really?

Do you want to do some live research?

Sure.

And see where the Lassie's got one.

I bet...

I mean, K9 wouldn't have one.

So K9, we should explain for non-British listeners

who are not very old, was Tom Baker's dog

in Doctor Who?

Yeah.

So it was a mechanized dog.

It's a bit like R2D2,

only it looked like a dog.

So, Tom, I have a great fact for you.

I've done my live research.

Yeah.

Not on Wikipedia as some very cruel people

sometimes allege about this podcast,

but on the Los Angeles Times.

So I've gone straight to the source.

Yeah.

And what was it saying?

There are three dogs on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Okay.

So Rintintin, I'm guessing Lassie.

So they're Lassie, Rintintin and Strongheart.

Now, do you know who Strongheart is?

No, I've never heard of Strongheart.

Strongheart was also a veteran of the First World War.

Strongheart served with the German Red Cross in World War I,

and those days actually had a very distinguished name.

Strongheart was known as Etsel von Uringen.

Goodness.

But I don't know anything else about Strongheart.

What did Strongheart do?

What were the films?

Well, I'm going to do some more live research.

Here we are.

And now I am on Wikipedia.

Etsel von Uringen, better known as Strongheart,

1917 to 1929, was a male...

Another German Shepherd, third in his class

at the Shepherd Dog Club of America, 1920,

were trained as a police dog in Berlin,

served in the Red Cross, sold to America,

and then appears in one, two, three, four, six films.

Well, that's not very impressive compared to Rintintin's...

Yeah, but makes his debut, Tom, before Rintintin.

So 1921, the silent call.

So he is Cliff Richard to Rintintin's Beatles.

Very much so.

Etsel von Uringen, I call him, is by his real name,

immense in body and hind leg formation.

In body and legs, better than either of the dogs above him.

This is at the dog show.

So a very impressive dog, Tom.

Did he ever appear with Rintintin?

No.

Imagine that.

Born in Wroclaw in Germany, later in Poland,

died in Los Angeles.

His body was not returned to Europe, unlike Rintintin,

but he was the subject of a book called Strongheart,

the Story of a Wonder Dog.

It's interesting, though, isn't it?

Because, I mean, it's a bit like Charlie Chaplin

or Boris Karloff, Europeans, going over and becoming

big Hollywood stars, that both the dogs...

We should have adopted that as the theme of this podcast.

We should have narrated down a more focused podcast

on emigrate dogs in Hollywood in the 1920s.

No, I strongly disagree.

I think that all seven of these dogs have been splendid.

And so I mentioned that Laker...

Yeah.

...we're going to do another on that.

We're also going to do another dog, Dominic,

who didn't appear, and I'm surprised you didn't pick me up on that.

Are we?

And that is Boy, who was the dog owned by Prince Rupert,

who had necromantic powers.

Well, Boy could catch bullets in his mouth.

Yes.

Am I right?

Yes, but his necromantic powers were inadequate

against Oliver Cromwell's Ironsides,

the Battle of Marston Moore.

And the reason that I left Boy off is that I'm sure

we'll be talking about him when we do our special

on the English Civil War, which we will be doing.

A 12-part epic year one day.

So, Tom, if you could choose one dog of these dogs,

which do you choose?

Oh, I think bounce.

Really?

Yeah.

You like a navel dog?

Yeah.

And a patriotic dog?

I like a patriotic dog.

Part of me would actually love to have a dog called Lootie.

I know that, if I sense me, they're very bad lights.

That's what they do.

They're very bad lights.

And I can imagine, Dominic,

that there were some of your critics to be listening to that.

They would not be surprised.

But of course, they won't be listening to this.

They'd rather boil their heads.

All right.

Well, that was a splendid...

What is it?

A kind of gamble through...

Yes, a walk.

Yeah.

We've taken you for a walk.

Through history's greatest dogs.

So, what will we be back with next week?

I don't think we will be in the animal kingdom, will we?

We will be back with the fall of Saigon.

Crikey.

So, no less of the canine theme banter and more of it.

Oh, my God!

We should warn people right now.

You do your Marlon Brando impersonation in that series, don't you?

Yes, I do.

The single most remarkable impersonation.

It's very kind.

I'm using that phrase very advisedly that you've ever done

in the history of the rest is history.

Thank you.

Even more remarkable than Marilyn Monroe, you think?

Even more remarkable than Marilyn Monroe.

So, it's a two-parter.

It's on the fall of Saigon and it's on the Vietnam syndrome

and the legacy of the end of the Vietnam War in 70s America.

So, that's something to look forward to.

Lots of treats to come after that.

Tom was a tour de force.

Thank you very much for that and we'll see you next time.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.