3. Diplomacy fails, and retaking South Georgia

Battleground

Goalhanger Podcasts

History

4.6 • 703 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With the Task Force sailing towards the South Atlantic, how close did diplomatic efforts come to ending the war before a shot had been fired? Journalist Simon Jenkins, who was well-connected in the corridors of power at the time, explains the challenges Mrs Thatcher had to overcome, before Bob Headland, of the British Antarctic survey, gives an eye-witness account of the Argentine capture of South Georgia - another south Atlantic island some 900 miles from the Falklands. The retaking of South Georgia by British forces was the first major action of the conflict. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:59.9	Apply with £100,000 annual income or £100,000 savings or investments with HSBC UK or Premier status abroad. Welcome back to episode three of Battleground, The Fortners, with me, Patrick Bishop.
1:18.1	And me, Saul David.
1:19.6	So last time we told the story of the sailing of the task force, which was a hugely dramatic event.
1:25.7	For a moment, Britain was plunged back into the Victorian era,
1:29.1	a sort of time walk with flag-waving crowds, cheering our boys on as they set off to punish some
1:35.0	impertinent foreigners. It all looked very warlike, I seem to remember, but no one in their right
1:39.9	mind actually wanted a war, and there were high hopes that diplomacy might avert the need for an invasion.
1:45.8	There had been a long and largely fruitless history of trying to settle the whole question of who
1:50.0	the islands belonged to. For 17 years, the Foreign Office and the Argentinian government
1:54.5	had been going back and forth over the same old ground trying to solve the problem.
1:59.4	At its heart was a very naughty conundrum.
2:03.0	Britain, or rather the foreign office, was very open to the idea of actually giving the islands
2:08.6	over to the Argentinians under some sort of leaseback arrangement whereby they got sovereignty,
2:15.0	but we carried on ruling the place for some indeterminate time.
2:20.5	However, they were severely hampered in this aim by the principle laid down over and over again
2:26.8	by various British foreign secretaries that nothing was going to happen unless the Falkanters
2:31.8	approved, which despite great efforts of persuasion,
2:35.5	they were showing no sign of doing it. So, of course, the Argentinian invasion had brought
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