Hi everybody, welcome, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hisc. Of a lot of unusual pods this week,

we had scratching Fanny on the podcast yesterday. The ghost used to appear in Cok Lane in London,

don't at me, this is the truth, it's history, I can't help it. Scratching Fanny obviously

as the ghost did not in fact exist, but it was a hoax perpetrated on the good people of London

and Britain in the 18th century. You can hear more about that and lots of other hoaxes on yesterday's

podcast. And then of course we had the wonderful Margaret McKenzie, the lady who sadly

has just passed away who died shortly after recording the podcast talking about the first world

war camps on Salisbury plain and a lifetime of research into them. It's been quite the week

on the History Hitt podcast, the world's best history podcast. Today we're going to be hearing

from one of our other sibling podcasts, it's the warfare podcast this time for mercury historians.

And it talks about appropriately in this time of remembrance, it talks about the end of the

first world war, about a million citizens of the British Empire have been lost and

of those about half lay in unknown graves. Families waited for weeks, months, for years,

they hoped against hope that they might have been imprisoned, a case of mistaken identity perhaps,

they would be released from enemy prison of war camps, or they waited to hear whether their

body would be found and they would have a place to go and mourn the loss of a loved one. As you

can hear in this podcast an extraordinary effort was undertaken to try and make sense of what it

occurred. Huge armies of volunteer investigators conducted five million interviews,

hopefully trying to find answers from around half a million families. Robert Sackfield West

appears on their warfare podcast talking to James and brings us these stories of people looking

for brothers, sons, husbands, friends. And how in some ways the search continues right to this day.

Robert's brilliant book The Searchers, the quest for the loss of the first world war is out now,

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