An event in Brighton is recalled from four different perspectives in this programme from the Brighton History Workshop – but is it authentic history or legend?

This programme, dating from 1983 and produced by the Brighton History Workshop, focusses on an event that occurred on the 10th of May 1926 on Brighton's Lewes Road during the General Strike of that year – the so called 'Battle of Lewes Road'. However, the programme doesn't set out to create an historical account of that event, but rather it aims to show how history, and especially the documenting of historical events, are often shaped, and at times turned into mythologies, by a complex amalgam of perspectives which themselves are the product of highly subjective personal, political and cultural beliefs and influences. The programme also shows how complicated it can be to discern between primary and secondary accounts in order to create an accurate account of events as they occurred. By combining contemporary newspaper reports, personal diaries and letters alongside interviews, the programme demonstrates how even personal memories are influenced by other factors which determine the way those recollections are remembered. The four interviewees appearing in the programme are Gus de Lacy, a life-long Communist; Daisy Noakes, whose brother was a 'Special Constable'; Brighton historian Anthony Dale, who attended a private school at the time and Cliff Edwards, a former broadcaster and local historian with a particular interest in the 'Battle of Lewes Road'. Each of these interviewees give very different accounts of the event under discussion as well as giving a glimpse of what life was like in Brighton at the time. It is left to Daisy Noakes to end the programme by reflecting that history should be about ordinary working people's lives and their role in the way the world proceeds historically, rather than only looking at the lives of the powerful and the wealthy. It's Daisy's view that ordinary people are the best source of more authentic 'histories'.