History's Secret Heroes: Series 2: Charles Drew and the Blood Bank

History's Heroes

BBC

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.8 • 704 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Charles Drew, an American doctor, led the creation and use of blood banks, saving countless lives both in war and in peacetime. But while he worked around the clock to save lives, he would be dragged into a battle on a different front: the battle for civil rights and racial equality in the United States.

Helena Bonham Carter shines a light on extraordinary stories from World War Two. Join her for incredible tales of deception, acts of resistance and courage.

A BBC Studios Audio production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

Producer: Suniti Somaiya Assistant Producer: Lorna Reader Executive Producer: Paul Smith Written by Alex von Tunzelmann Commissioning editor for Radio 4: Rhian Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0	Football, a game of passion, rivalry and loyalty.
0:05.0	But decades ago, beneath the cheers and the chance,
0:09.0	lay a different kind of warfare called hooliganism.
0:13.0	On a match day, everyone was your enemy.
0:15.0	We'll uncover the brutal, bloody battles where punching below the belt was a way of life.
0:19.0	It was just a die of my him. Gangster presents hooligans.
0:22.6	They were destroying the football club.
0:24.9	The game I alone.
0:26.0	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:30.8	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:35.2	The 1st of July, 1916, the Battle of the Song.
0:40.4	British infantrymen advanced on German trenches.
0:44.4	They were met with machine gunfire.
0:47.2	57,000 men were injured or killed.
0:51.4	It was the greatest blood loss of the First World War,
0:57.0	darkening splashes on ruined masonry, white bandages staining crimson, the earth of battlefields soaked in the life force of dying men,
1:04.0	churned soil, later bringing forth blood red poppies.
1:08.0	Yet this story is not about bloodshed as tragedy.
1:12.4	It's about blood as salvation.
1:15.3	Faced with the incredible loss of blood in the First World War,
1:18.9	doctors pioneered transfusions on the battlefield.
1:23.4	It was during the Second World War, though,
	...

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