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, dramatic memories of whale hunting in the South Atlantic in the 1950s.

The harpoon has an explosive tip on it.

And it worked a lot of the time, but certainly some of them did suffer it was a brutal game.

Plus Saddam Hussein's draining of Iraq's southern marshlands in the 1990s.

Norway's bitter referendum on joining the European Union in the

national way's bitter referendum on joining the European Union also in the 1990s

and the real man behind a fictional adventurer

A particular picture where he's wearing the gun belt and the hat and the boots, hands on his hips and his feet apart, and he does look like Indiana Jones.

That's coming up later in the podcast, but we begin this week by acknowledging the passing of another World AIDS Day which falls on December 1st each year.

The latest figures suggest that there are more than 35 million people

worldwide living with the HIV virus. These days people can survive and live

relatively normal lives for decades if they have access to the proper drugs. But in the early

years of the disease contracting the virus and developing AIDS were seen as

virtual death sentences and it's to those early days that we go first this week as we take you back

more than 30 years to the story of Terence Higgins whose death in 1982 was the first

confirmed case of HIV AIDS in Britain. It led to the creation of this country's

leading AIDS charity, the Terence Higgins Trust. Simon Watts has been speaking to the former

partner of Terence Higgins, Dr Rupert Whitaker.

In the early 1980s, the gay community in Britain began to respond to the first cases of

a new and terrifying disease.

...