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The Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia are at the centre of one of the most controversial territorial disputes involving Britain, Mauritius, and the United States.

In this podcast episode, The History Chap (Chris Green) explores the history of the British Indian Ocean Territory, the removal of the Chagossian people, and the strategic importance of the American military base on Diego Garcia.

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Chris Green is The History Chap; telling stories that brings the past to life.

The story of Philip Neame, the only man to be awarded both the Victoria Cross and an Olympic gold medal.

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Adrian Carton de Wairt - the Soldier they couldn't kill

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He won the Victoria Cross in the trenches of the First World War.
He won Olympic gold at the 1924 Paris Games.

To this day, no one else has ever achieved both.

This is the extraordinary story of Sir Philip Neame VC — soldier, sportsman, prisoner of war, and member of one of Kent's most famous brewing families.

Born near Faversham in 1888, Philip Neame grew up in the family behind Shepherd Neame, Britain's oldest brewer.

Educated at Cheltenham College, he trained at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers. When war broke out in 1914, he was serving at Gibraltar but was quickly recalled to join the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. Within weeks of arriving in France, the young sapper found himself in the thick of fighting at Neuve Chapelle, where a desperate situation with faulty grenades and improvised fuses led to an astonishing act of bravery that earned him the Victoria Cross — one of 628 awarded during the entire war.
He was just 26 years old.

Neame served throughout the First World War, was awarded the DSO, mentioned in dispatches ten times, and in 1920 was among the 75 VC holders who formed the guard of honour at the burial of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey.

But his story was only getting started. At the 1924 Paris Olympics — the games immortalised in Chariots of Fire — Neame was part of the British shooting team that won gold in the Running Deer Double Shot event, beating Norway by a single point in a dramatic finale.

It was a triumph largely forgotten in the shadow of Abrahams and Liddell, yet Neame's unique double of Victoria Cross and Olympic gold has never been matched in the century since.

Transferring to the Indian Army, Neame survived being mauled by a tiger, married the nurse who saved him, and returned to Woolwich as its last ever Commandant before the Second World War intervened.

Sent to North Africa as a lieutenant general, he was captured during Rommel's first offensive in Libya alongside fellow general Richard O'Connor — making them among the most senior British officers taken prisoner in the entire war. Held at the Castello di Vincigliata near Florence, a medieval fortress turned special POW camp, Neame used his engineering skills to design the escape tunnel through which two New Zealand brigadiers made it all the way to Switzerland.

He himself escaped in September 1943 during the chaos of the Italian Armistice, eventually reaching Allied lines and meeting Churchill in North Africa before arriving home on Christmas Day.

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Chris Green is The History Chap; telling stories that brings the past to life.

Flogging was the principle punishment in the British Army for nearly 200 years.

Even the Duke of Wellington was a supporter.

So how harsh was it? And, why (and when) did it end?

Listen to my episode about the Officer Purchase System.

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For nearly 200 years, flogging was the disciplinary backbone of the British Army.

From the passage of the Mutiny Act in 1689 to its abolition in 1881, corporal punishment shaped the experience of every soldier who wore the redcoat.

The men who fought at Blenheim under Marlborough, who held the line at Waterloo under the Duke of Wellington, who endured the Peninsular and Crimean Wars, who fought in the American Revolutionary War — all were products of a system in which the lash was the primary instrument of military discipline.

Fans of Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Rifles will know this world. Richard Sharpe was sentenced to 2,000 lashes; Sergeant Harper bore the scars of sixty he didn't deserve. Cornwell wasn't exaggerating. During the Napoleonic Wars, British Army courts martial routinely handed down sentences of 500 lashes — and a thousand was not unheard of. Offences ranged from desertion and mutiny to the breathtakingly trivial: being deficient of a razor earned 200 lashes; improper use of barrack bedding, 400.

In this video, I trace the full story of flogging in the British Army. It begins with a legal rabbit hole — the Mutiny Act of 1689, passed after the Royal Scots mutinied at Ipswich and the government discovered it had no legal power to punish them.

From there, I explore the brutal mechanics of the punishment itself: the cat o' nine tails, the regimental ceremony, the drummers and farriers who delivered the lashes, and the men who endured them.

I cover the key turning points — the scandal of Private Frederick White's death at Hounslow in 1846, the Duke of Wellington's response as Commander-in-Chief, and the long parliamentary campaign that finally ended with abolition under the Childers Reforms of 1881.

Despite Private Hook being warned in the film "Zulu" that stealing Dr Witt's brandy was a flogging offence, by the time of Rorke's Drift the practice was already dying.

But the story doesn't end in 1881. Corporal punishment continued in military prisons until 1907, and the replacement — Field Punishment Number One, which soldiers called "crucifixion" — wasn't abolished until 1923.

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