GENERIC: We're interrupting the show with a special bulletin

from Intercontinental Radio News.

At 20 minutes to 8pm GMT, scientists at the Royal

Observatory have reported observing several explosions on

the planet Mars.

The causes of the explosions are as yet unknown, but several

satellites are thought to have been affected.

Hello everybody, thank you for attending our emergency press

conference. I'm sure several of you will already have questions

about the things that you've seen on social media and the

several near-Earth objects making their way towards our

planet.

Is that real? Guys online and in the chat? No, this is crazy! I

think something's just crashed from space!

HELEN ANTROBUS: Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall

of history? Join me for an inside view of the stories of

people, places and moments that made us.

I'm historian Helen Antrobus and lean in for a tale from time.

Back When.

No one would have believed in the last years of the 19th

century that the literary works of one author would completely

change the world of science fiction.

A prolific writer, a prophet to some, and a man who is said to

have found no real conventional social station.

H. G. Wells' stories have spanned generations and gripped

audiences around the globe.

The year is 1938, and one of those stories, The War Of The

Worlds, has just been brought to life during a radio broadcast

that for many sent shivers down the spine of those listening, as

they believed the Earth was being invaded by Martians.

Behind it all was a world caught in the tangles of extraordinary

scientific advances.

A world that, for the first time, was entering into a new

era of mass media and communication unseen at such a

scale in the centuries that preceded.

And in the middle, H. G. Wells. This is the origin story of the

father of science fiction.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: The Wells family are kind of, I guess

you'd say lower middle class, but he describes them as servant

class.

HELEN ANTROBUS: This is Mark Syson-Harvey, a curator and H.

G. Wells fan and expert. We meet Mark at Uppark, the Grand

Country House in West Sussex where our story begins.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: His mother, Sarah, had been a housemaid here

at Uppark when she was young and that's when she met Joseph, his

father, who was a gardener.

HELEN ANTROBUS: The pair worked at Uppark for a number of years

before leaving to care for Sarah's dying mother. It was

after her passing that the Wells began their family.

The youngest of four children, Herbert George Wells, was known

affectionately as Bertie.

Young Bertie grew up in a working-class family observing

the comings and goings of both his parents and the multiple

jobs they held to provide a life for their children.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: He talks about his mother being almost

obsessed with keeping up appearances.

She didn't want people to know that they didn't have servants.

It was her big secret that she did all the housework herself.

Joseph was sort of... semi-successful cricket player

as well as a gardener. He'd had a bit of a mixed career.

They ran a shop together, which was a mixture of crockery and

cricket goods. It was called Atlas House. It was a bit of a

strange place, not particularly successful.

It was a bit of an albatross really. By the time it was sold

to them, it was already not doing well. And they lived

basically their life in drudgery, running this slightly

odd and slightly unsuccessful shop.

HELEN ANTROBUS: An incident and childhood injury came next in

the journey that would define literary history.

Bertie suffered a broken leg.

Bedridden and in need of entertainment, his father would

bring him books from the local library to read, something which

he credited in later life as the initial spark for his

creativity.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: Basically, all he did was read and he got

obsessed with all these ideas.

He was not going to live his life in drudgery as he described

it. He was aspiring to something different that his parents

didn't really aspire to.

He's really quite dismissive about his mother in his

autobiography.

He says his earliest memories of her are distressed and

overworked. And then he describes his father as a

baffled, unsuccessful, stuck man butq had a cheerful disposition.

And he says, "Probably I am alive today and writing this

autobiography instead of being a worn-out, dismissed and already

dead shop assistant because my leg was broken."

HELEN ANTROBUS: But it was a second leg injury, this time for

Mr Wells Senior, that saw Bertie and his mother Sarah return to

Uppark.

With the shop collapsing and a broken femur putting an end to

Joseph's cricketing career, the family's little income was

quickly vanishing.

Sarah returned to her old employer Lady Frances, with whom

she had a good relationship and had kept in contact with.

Now back in regular employment, Sarah's attention turned towards

her youngest, Bertie, who she was desperate to set on the

right path.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: He was a difficult child. He, in fact,

describes himself as a difficult child at one point.

But his mother had apprenticed him to be a draper. That didn't

work out.

He went to a friend of the family to be a sort of teaching

assistant, age 14. That didn't work out.

So all these various routes she had for him weren't happening.

So he describes how his mother spoke to Lady Frances and got

permission for him to come and stay at Uppark temporarily while

she figured out his next move.

But a snowstorm actually happened while he was here, kept

him here for a couple of weeks, so he slotted into the below

stairs life.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Beneath the main house at Uppark are the

servants' quarters, a labyrinth of rooms and outbuildings

connected by a series of tunnels. And it's there that

Mark describes the effect that this had on a young and

inquisitive mind.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: Down in these tunnels would have been a sort

of a hub of activity, basically.

You would have had staff running back and forwards from the house

to the kitchens, maybe carrying food, going to different parts

of the property.

And the idea was to kind of keep them out of sight, really. The

aristocracy don't want to be bothered by seeing staff running

around. So these tunnels allow that access without getting in

the way.

HELEN ANTROBUS: It's here that Wells first became aware of the

separation between the classes and The life below stairs

inspires him to write what would be his first novel, The Time

Machine.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: I think you can really see how the tunnels

inspire Wells in The Time Machine. He talks at length in

that future section about what has become of the working

classes. He's incredibly unsubtle by today's standards.

The time traveller who's narrating the story essentially

says, oh, I've seen what's happened to the working classes,

and this is obviously because they were not given proper

access to above ground and what he'd seen in the 19th century

he's extrapolating.

So 800,000 years in the future the working classes have

literally become this underground race.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Published in 1895, The Time Machine was

Wells' first novel, and it was the first novel to introduce

that now classic sci-fi trope, the idea of a device that can

travel through time.

The story was a huge success and helped to rescue Wells from

poverty and started his prolific literary career.

The Time Machine was the first of, as he called them, his

scientific romances, which helped pave the way for science

fiction in the 20th century and beyond and kick-started a

Victorian craze along the way.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: At the time H. G. Wells started writing he was

one of the few people who were essentially generating a new

literary genre.

HELEN ANTROBUS: This is Sophie Wilkinson, a writer with a

passion for Victorian literature and science fiction.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: A couple of popular genres in Victorian

times were ghost stories, stories of the supernatural, and

then also you've got really gritty realism, we're talking

Charles Dickens, that sort of thing.

What is now known as science fiction kind of fell somewhere

between that, and I think it was just the right moment for it

really.

There was a huge upsurge in interest in science and

technology, belief in progress and the kind of mass production

printing and the railway meant that all these kind of ideas

were readily available to a lot of people.

Things like scientific ideas, they weren't just the pursuit of

a few privileged gentlemen, anyone could get their hands on

it.

So that creates this. I guess, a time when things like this can

be explored in literature.

HELEN ANTROBUS: The Victorian era ushered in new ways for

people to live and experience the world around them.

Suddenly, ordinary people were starting to have access to all

of the things that we find fascinating and that fills with

excitement.

The timing of Wells' work meant that, for the first time, people

could start to contextualise the world around them.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: H. G. Wells, he got a lot of critical acclaim

and sort of commercial success in his time.

I think crucially because he was a fantastic storyteller. He

talks of ordinary things, but with extraordinary happenings.

So he writes about things that people reading would understand,

but he sort of adds these kind of absolutely fantastic ideas

and runs with them.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Many of the concepts that seem so

commonplace today, such as time travel and space exploration

were first coined by Wells in his novels.

And while time travel is still yet to make an appearance, there

are some other things from our future that Wells predicted.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: Wells didn't sort of think of the future as

something unknowable. He predicted all kinds of other

technologies and advancements that did actually come to pass.

So one of them is automatic doors. There's also genetic

engineering. Wireless communication. He had an idea

for a world knowledge bank, which is essentially Wikipedia

and the internet.

He coined the term atomic bomb in 1914, and he was influential

in kind of future space travel developments.

The first liquid-fueled rocket launched in 1926 by Robert H.

Goddard. And he was inspired by reading War Of The Worlds as a

teenager and wrote to H. G. Wells saying that, you know, his

scientific path was paved by reading H. G. Wells and feeling

inspired by that.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Not just impacting the worlds of science

fiction and science fact, many of H. G. Wells' stories also

included social commentary similar to class division

portrayed in the upper and lower worlds of the Time Machine that

had been inspired by his time at Uppark.

Wells was a staunch socialist, and he used his writings to try

and help turn the world into a more equal place.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: There's some lovely quotes from his peers

about his writing. So Conrad called H. G. Wells the realist

of the fantastic, and Bertrand Russell said that Wells helped

make socialism respectable in England.

And I think as well as kind of his impact at the time, you've

got to look at sort of his lasting impact.

So on science fiction as a genre, he is known as the father

of science fiction. He was the one who coined these ideas like

time travel and that sort of thing.

But also his impact on socialism and socialist thought.

In the 1940s, George Orwell said that thinking people who were

born about the beginning of this century were in some sense

Wells' own creation.

And you just get the sense he's this highly imaginative and

really provocative thinker.

His literature and his non-fiction writing, you know,

it made people think, it made people question things. And I

think, you know, that legacy is-

You can still see that today.

HELEN ANTROBUS: It's fair to say that what had started at Uppark

has had a profound effect on the world and a whole genre of

writing.

But for Wells, the tunnels had another somewhat of a kinky

kickstart. To another side of his life.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: One sort of surprising story that happens in

the tunnels is essentially what he describes as his sexual

awakening.

After a Christmas party, he had spent most of the whole party

dancing with this maid Mary.

He doesn't know her last name, never did.

His mother did her best to stop him dancing with Mary the whole

night, but they were not having it.

The next morning, he's walking through the tunnels, out jumps

Mary, gives him a big kiss and disappears.

And he describes basically in his autobiography that this is-

This is the moment he becomes quite excited by sex. It's just

a kiss with a housemaid, but it leads to quite a colourful life.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: He was married twice, but he had a number of

long-term relationships, aside from those marriages and many,

many other brief affairs.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Wells was an advocate for free love. A

radical movement hat was beginning to gain popularity in

the hedonistic world of the late Victorian era.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: Essentially, he believed in free love and he

practiced it tirelessly.

He was known as a prophet of sexual revolution and certainly

a scoundrel.

But I suppose there is another side to this in that he always

claimed, and admittedly, we don't have his wife's voice on

this, but he claimed that it was his-

With his wife's consent that he had these affairs, and that he

believed in this kind of utopian future.

He wanted women to have sexual freedom as much as men.

HELEN ANTROBUS: With his rise in popularity, Wells achieved a

sense of early celebrity and had become a bit of a sex symbol.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: H. G. Wells' lovers included novelists like

Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, fellow Fabians such as

Amber Reeves.

Some of those went on to give birth to some of his children.

American journalists, birth control activists. He described

himself as the Don Juan among the intelligentsia in his

biography.

That is obviously his own words, so you know, we'll take that

with a pinch of salt.

But he was certainly gossiped about within literary and

socialist circles.

They were relatively small circles, I think, in many ways.

They all knew each other. They would have known each other's

business.

You know, it did get him into some trouble.

HELEN ANTROBUS: And it's this reputation that got the better

of him one day in 1908 with a scandal involving a teenage

mistress and daughter of fellow author E. Nesbitt.

SOPHIE WILKINSON: One affair was with a woman called Rosamund

Bland, who was at the time 19.

She was secretary for a branch of the Fabian Society and also

the secretly adopted daughter of Hubert and Edith Bland, and now

Edith Bland is better known as E. Nesbitt.

Rosamund and H. G. Wells had an affair. They were intercepted by

Hubert Bland at Paddington train station en route to essentially

a dirty weekend in Paris.

And Hubert punched Wells in the face repeatedly and dragged his

errant daughter home.

So yes, a lot of fuel for gossip among certain circles.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Wells' legacy is one that has shaped the modern

day and continues to do so by inspiring new novelists or

adaptations of his works.

There is one final story inspired by his time at Uppark

that has become a Hollywood blockbuster multiple times over,

become a West End musical, and has become the central

tantalising idea in our own search for extraterrestrial

life.

The War Of The Worlds was the story behind the 1938 radio

broadcast at the start of this episode, for which we made our

own Wells-inspired adaptation.

That was made possible by a chance finding in an attic room.

MARK SYSON-HARVEY: He talks in his autobiography about enjoying

walking around outside and it's one particular day where where

the weather is bad and he says he can't enjoy the park that he

goes exploring in the the attic rooms near his bedroom.

So his bedroom's sort of tucked away in the attic and he finds

this room that he says is basically full of junk and what

he starts to explore in there is he finds a box and finds a

telescope that he figures out how to put together and starts

spending his nights looking out, becoming obsessed with the

stars.

Where Uppark is situated, we're right on the top of the hill.

You can just imagine looking out the window at night time, it

must be a spectacular view.

And he talks in the autobiography about his mother

coming in in the middle of the night and essentially saying,

what on Earth are you doing?

Why aren't you asleep?

But he's captivated by the stars and beginning that obsession

with science that will dominate his life and career as well as

his writing.

HELEN ANTROBUS: Wells died on the 13th of August 1946, leaving

deep and lasting impressions on this mortal plane, but best

summarised in his obituary by long-time friend George Bernard

Shaw, who wrote, "HG was not a gentleman." "

Nobody understood better than he what gentry means, but he could

not, or would not, act the part. No conventional social station

fitted him. Nothing could abate his likeableness. There is no

end of the things I might say about him had I had space or

time."

So the next time you're watching the latest sci-fi thriller or

gazing up at the stars and planets above, imagine how

different that could have been if it hadn't have been for a

young lad with a broken leg, a series of subterranean tunnels

or a worldview dreaming of the future.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Back When. Be the

first to hear new stories by following us on your podcast app

and don't forget to join in with the episode by leaving a comment

or sending us a message.

All of the details can be found in our episode show notes.

Please be sure to check out more podcasts from the National Trust

including our brand new nature show Wild Tales.

Join Rosie Holdsworth in exploring the weird and

wonderful world around us. As we get caught in the webs of

spiders' love lives, go on the hunt for elusive leaping sharks

and much more.

Join us again next time for more tales from time. Back When.