Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week the sinking of the Belgrano by a British

submarine in the Falklands conflict as remembered by an Argentine survivor.

At first we thought we'd been attacked from the air.

It was the way the ship moved, up and down, as if the

attack had come from above, and the floor felt like it was giving way underneath me, and then

all the lights went out and we were in darkness.

Plus, a significant cultural moment from the history of US television

when Ellen DeGeneres came out as gay.

There were death threats.

There was so much hate mail that was sent. They didn't want us to see it because it was so disturbing.

And the first day that we were shooting, we got a bomb threat.

We'll also remember the British First World War poet Rupert Brooke and meet the African man who

travelled to Greenland to live with the Inuit in the 1960s.

I was the first black man they had ever seen. As soon as they saw me, the children were so afraid.

Well sure that I came to eat them.

That's an amazing story and it's coming up later in the podcast. But we begin

with an episode from British military history which seems almost to be a

forgotten bridge between a bygone era and the modern world. And it's an episode rich in

symbolism and controversy. We're going back to the late 1940s and the start of

the Malayan emergency, a long struggle against a communist rebellion in Malaya, which became a model for counterinsurgency.

Alex Last reports.

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