Saturday 22 July, 2023, the Aspects of History pocast with Oliver Webb-Carter discussed the long running culural conundrum that keeps the Parthenon Marbles mainly divided between two great museums of the world: the Acropolis Museum, Athens and the British Museum, London.

Aspects of History's editor, Oliver welcomed Paul Cartledge, ancient historian and the author of countless books on ancient Greece with Dr Tessa Dunlop, author, biographer and presenter.

Dr Tessa Dunlop is best known for her appearances across numerous TV talk shows and history documentaries in a broadcast career that began with BBC2’s Coast. She has written three successful oral history books centred on WWII and women and one royal biography.

Tessa studied Modern History at Oxford University and has an MA/PHD from Sheffield Hallam University that focused on the British-Romanian relationship at the beginning of the twentieth century. With a passion for Romania including extensive broadcast work for BBC Radio 4/World Service and several Romanian media networks, her interest extends to the so-called ‘Balkan rubric’ and Britain’s othering of these south-east European countries and their history. That includes modern Greece and the disconnect between Britain’s professed adoration of Ancient Greece and our failure to return their most important artefacts – the Parthenon Marbles.

A relative newbie to the cause, she first became vocal on this subject in December 2023.

Oliver Webb-Carter studied Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Warwick. He worked as an archaeologist in Central America and for the Museum of London before changing career and heading to the City for nearly two decades.

He returned to his first love of history and co-founded Aspects of History in 2020, a magazine, website and podcast dedicated to history and historical fiction.

A passionate Philhellene, Oliver has travelled extensively in Greece and first wrote to the UK government in 1999 to request the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

Janet Suzman, Chair of BCRPM and Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair plus all of BCRPM's thirty members, welcome Tessa and Oliver to the committee.

Tessa Dunlop's latest book entitled 'Lest We Forget' was launched to commemorate this 80th anniversary of VE Day.

Tessa travelled the length and breadth of the UK, visiting over 100 monuments and then writing about their unique stories. During her book launch in Kentish Town, Tessa admits she could have highlighted many more.

The book, published by Harper North, is a must read. The stories of the monuments are told by many voices, stories that resonate with readers not just because Britain has such a rich history but because right now we are constantly aware of the destruction of lives in the wars being fought across the globe.

On pages128-131, The National Monument of Scotland, Carlton Hill, Edinburgh, 1822-29, explained.

The construction of this monument started seven years after the end of the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) to remember Scotland's fallen and was designed during 1823–6 by Charles Robert Cockerell and William Henry Playfair.

"Edinburgh, Britain's self-designated Athens of the North looked to Carlton Hill, as the new Acropolis, an ideal central summit for taking in Edinburgh's enlightened vistas of towns old and new. In 1822, an army of horses began hauling vast blocks of Craigleigh stone up its central grassy slope. Only the best for Scotland's capital and its glory-in-arms" writes Tessa.

"On Carlton Hill, the National Monument of Scotland remains unmissable. Today, it is almost the exclusive preserve of Edinburgh's youth, who huddle and plot on its mega-base, armed with Insta profiles, cans of Irn-Bru and stacked trainers. I join them; it is a long way up without a winch or step. Hello Edinburgh. Hello unfinished ambition. Hello humiliation - national and personal -(I had to climb back down). This brutish rump, with twelve Doric columns, is a monument to national hubris. Scotland was indeed thinking big. Or rather, the 7th Earl of Elgin was." Continues Tessa.

And indeed Lord Elgin is best known for paying men to use metal saws, chisels, hammers, pulleys to remove half of the sculptures from the Parthenon alongside other parts of the Acropolis - all destined for Scotland and his ancestral home. A fire sale saw the Parthenon (aka Elgin) Marbles bought by the then British government (1816) and deposited in the British Museum.

"The Greek War of Independence saw Greece reborn from under Ottoman control, at the same time as Elgin attempted to rebuild his sullied reputation with Edinburgh's facsimile Parthenon." 

"The project, always divisive, was never finished; its Neoclassical style derided as too English and its raison d'être long forgotten. So  much for an inscription to the fallen of Waterloo."

Book launch, Kentish Town's Owl Bookshop with Tessa in conversation with 98 year old Ruth Bourne, a  Bombe machine operative at Bletchley Park during WW ll.

Sunday 09 June and 18:15 on BBC Radio 4, Pick of the Week, with historian (& proud member of BCRPM) Tessa Dunlop. To listen to the podcast, visit: BBC Radio 4 - Pick of the Week, with Tessa Dunlop.

An extraordinary week of commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings and as a historian, Tessa has worked to reflect the best of those aired on Sunday's programme, alongside the selections of a veteran who served in the summer of 1944 and the views of a soldier from one of Britain's more recent conflicts, Afghanistan.

There is music, reflection.... including the irony of stolen artefacts being returned to the British Museum (Katie Razzal and Danish antiquities dealer Dr Ittai Gradel) and - at the insistence of Tessa’s mum - a slice of levity in the form of a duck's nether regions.

Presenter: Tessa Dunlop
Producer: Elizabeth Foster
Production Co-ordinators: Paul Holloway & Brigid Harrison-Draper