Yesterday in Five

On September 30, 1955, twenty-four-year-old James Dean died in a highway crash outside Cholame, California, sealing his legend with just three films. Tom Beckett tells the story of Dean's final drive in his Porsche 550 Spyder, the race at Salinas that never happened, and how one collision created an eternal American icon.

Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is for general educational and entertainment purposes only.

- September 29, 1829: the first "bobbies" walk the beat — Sir Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police Act creates London's Metropolitan Police.

- London's lawless pre-1829 world: dozing night watchmen, corrupt thief-takers, the Bow Street Runners.

- Peel's radical founding philosophy: "the police are the public and the public are the police"; legitimacy through public approval, not force.

- The deliberate civilian design: blue tailcoats and top hats (not scarlet soldiers), wooden truncheon, handcuffs, and rattle — no firearms.

- Recruit standards and the first force: 895 constables under commissioners Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne; £1 a week, seven days a week; seven-mile radius of Charing Cross (excluding the City of London).

- How headquarters' back entrance on Great Scotland Yard gave the world's most famous police force its nickname; "Peelers" and "Bobbies" after Peel himself.

"Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is for general educational and entertainment purposes only."

On September 28, 1928, Alexander Fleming walked into his London lab and found a moldy petri dish that would become penicillin. Tom Beckett tells the story of the accident that launched the antibiotic age — the decade the world ignored it, the wartime race by Florey and Chain to mass-produce it, and Fleming's eerily early warning about antibiotic resistance. Disclaimer: The content of this podcast is for general educational and entertainment purposes only.