View from the Boundary: Historian Tom Holland

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The TMS Podcast on BBC Sounds hello.

This is Simon Mann and welcome to the Test Match Special podcast. In this episode we have a View from the Boundary interview with a historian, broadcaster and author who co hosts the world's most popular history podcast. In 2020, he began the Rest Is History alongside friend and colleague Dominic Sandbrook, and in the five years since they produced more than 800 episodes of the podcast, which you can also hear on BBC Sounds. It now attracts more than 11 million downloads a month and has just been named as Apple Podcast 2025 show of the Year. It's very popular here in Australia as well, where the duo have been touring a sellout show and just so happened to find themselves at the Gabba during the second test of the Ashes.

TMS at the Ashes.

So it just happened to coincide with the Ashes? No, of course it was planned to coincide.

Oh, it was an incredible coincidence. What are the odds on that? Yeah, so we we landed in Perth just in time for the first test and Here we are in Brisbane the second.

So how many shows have you done?

We've done five. So we did a couple in Sydney, including the Sydney Opera House, which was, you know, a dream come true.

How many people do you have in there?

I think it's about two and a half thousand, something like that. And then we went to Melbourne, and then we went to Adelaide, where we stayed in the. The Adelaide Oval, which, you know, cricket ground that doubles as a hotel. And then we came to Brisbane.

Where's Dominic?

Dominic is. Is, I think, heading towards Singapore as we speak. He is more of a football man than a cricket man, but he came here on the. The first day of. Of this test and came with our two wonderful producers as well, Theo and Tabby, who love cricket. So Tabby loves Joe Root, so could not have been happier to watch him get his maiden test entry here. Dominic, I think, slightly performatively dislikes cricket, but even he was forced to admit that it was a sensational first day.

Yeah. Is there something quite performative about Dominic's general performance on the podcast?

I think there is. There's quite a strong degree of. Of performing when you do a podcast. You know, we try and do serious history, but if there's an opportunity for a bit of singing or a ludicrous German accent, we. We seize that opportunity with all the gusto that we've got.

Yeah, exactly. I'm actually listening to the. The current series on Hitler. The start of. Yeah, well, 1939 and onwards. Yeah. So I'm just waiting. I got second one. I'm just waiting for the third one now with a few German accents in that.

Well, Christmas is coming, so we've done the Nazis and we've got Jack the Ripper coming up. So nothing says Jack the Ripper. And we have. The final episode of that series will be a long list of the suspects. And among the suspects I was astonished to read was WG Grace, who you think would stand out.

How does. How on earth does that happen? I think you had to give us a sneak preview of that. How on earth does WG Grace get onto the list?

Well, I think. I think basically the. The murders are so sensational and they create such public interest, and they have done ever since, you know, 1888, when they were. When they were done that. I think people don't want to believe that the murderer might just have been a nobody and an entity. They want to think that it was, you know, a major figure. So there's this kind of. I'm sure everyone listening will have vaguely Heard of the theory that it was a member of the royal family or it was the royal physician, but some, some people have pushed that even further. So WG Grace is one candidate. The Elephant Man. I think that's even matter. I mean, he really would stand out. And most bizarrely of all, Gandhi. Who you think. I mean, Gandhi's absolutely not the kind of person you'd think to go around murdering people, but he arrived in shortly before the murders began and left shortly afterwards.

And I presume you, you debunk them as the episode goes on, do you?

Yeah, so we, we'll begin with the most ludicrous ones and we end with the most likely.

Well, we'll talk about the podcast more in a moment. Let's talk about cricket to start with.

Yeah, let's talk about cricket.

This is what we normally do. I mean, there'll be lots of people wanting to hear you talk about cricket, but there, but lots of people wanted you to talk about your podcast and history as well. And because it's, I mean, an incredible success. But, but cricket, why, why do you love the game and kind of how, you know, what's your involvement with the game?

Well, I was saying Dominic was performatively dislike cricket. And I kind of recognized the symptoms because I was like that when I was a child because my father loved cricket and football. So he would, he would listen to the, you know, the radio to get the football scores all through the winter and then come the spring I, you know, I didn't need to look for swallows, but because he would bring out these black metal plates and he would paint them and then he would paint white numbers on them and these were the numbers that were going to go on the scoreboard. And he'd start going down to the cricket pitch and preparing the wicket and everything. And I would often be taken to the matches where he was playing and I just found it purgatorial. I mean, I found it so dull.

What sort of age are you talking about here?

I suppose from 6 through to 10 or 11. And my brother, my younger brother James, who also does a podcast on the Second World War, we have ways the.

Fact that he's also incredibly successful as well, isn't it?

Yeah, he is an excellent cricketer and he loved cricket from a kind of early age. So I cast myself as the guy in the family who didn't like sport and particularly didn't like cricket. And it was a kind of important part of my identity growing up as a, you know, know, in the family. And then in the summer of 1981, my mother went into hospital and my father had to look after me. And so his idea of childcare was to sit me in front of a Test match and talk me through it. And it wasn't a promising Test match. So Ian Botham, the England captain, had been sacked for getting a pair in the previous match in it began terribly. It looked like England were going to lose because I heard about both them. He'd got at, you know, he hadn't scored any runs in the previous Test match. So I kind of identified with him that I thought, you know, he can't play cricket, I like him. And then, of course, he had this incredible match and by the evening of the fourth day when he was on 145 not out and England were nine wickets down, whatever, 120 odd ahead, I was thinking, God, this is so exciting. And I said to my father, who's going to win? And he said, I've got no idea who's going to win. That's the whole point. And I couldn't quite wrap my head around the fact that something this exciting, it was possible that people wouldn't know what was going to happen. And the following day, which of course is written in the annals of cricket, one of the most famous days of Test match cricket ever, when Willis got his eight wickets and England one having followed on at the end of it, I thought, that is the most exciting thing I have ever seen. I was insane. Why?

How old were you?

I was 13. I was 13. And my father said, okay, what you got to understand is that not every Test match is like that. But of course, basically the next three Test matches were like that. And because I love both of them and he was the star in it at Edgbaston and Old Trafford, I was completely smitten. And from that point on, I mean, all that summer I started playing, I was kind of teaching myself to bowl. We rigged up a net in the garden and the garden had a kind of mad slope. And so the run up wasn't really very far and the wicket was slightly short because we couldn't squeeze it in. But by the end, I was kind of good enough to kind of play. And from that point on, I've played religiously every summer. So from when I was 13 up to now I'm 57, I'm still playing.

And what do you do?

Lightning quick.

Lightning quick.

Although I, Gideon Haig the Great, the doyen of Australian cricket writers who I met in Melbourne, he said he'd been reading my Wikipedia page and that I was described there as medium slow, which I hadn't seen that. And Gideon very kindly said, I think medium, medium. So that's the considered opinion of Australia's greatest cricket writer. So I reckon that. Is that as a fact.

Right, okay. So not lightning crit, medium, medium well.

I'm 57, so you bet.

You mentioned your brother there. So was there that sibling rivalry was. What's the age?

No, he's two and a half years younger than me, but he. I always. I mean, he's an excellent cricketer, very good bowler, but really good batsman. So I would never think to compete with him, but I.

So he's better than you, is he?

He's much better than me, yeah. He's much better than me. I. I mean, I can't really bat. I'm basically blind. I. I have the coordination of an octopus, but I do my best.

So who do you play for?

So I play now for a team called the Authors, which was originally founded by Arthur Conan Doyle and J.M. barrie. So back in the golden age of cricket, this kind of Edwardian glow hanging over it. And then obviously it went into abeyance in the First World War. And there have been various attempts to kind of resuscitate it. And the latest one happened in 2012 when I was kind of early 40s, just about. And I was thinking I should probably retire tire, because I'd been running my own team, capturing it, and it was quite stressful. There was the whole thing of people dropping out with groin strains at, you know, 11 o' clock in the morning of a match.

Anyone who's run a cricket team will know exactly what you're feeling there.

So I was thinking, maybe, maybe it's time to stop. And then the team got set up and it was set up by my friend Charlie Campbell, who's a writer but also a literary agent. And so he knew that Bloomsbury were flush with cash from Harry Potter, you know, which just was going absolutely great guns at the time. And so he pitched the revitalization of this author's team as a book. And the concept was that we would have matches at particular grounds that would be associated with particular themes to do with cricket. And each one of us who were playing would write a particular chapter. So, you know, at Hambledon there'd be one on the history of cricket, or we played at the Valley of the Rocks, and that was cricket and beauty or whatever. And I played in a team against, I think, 16 year olds. And I was going to write on age in cricket. So we were kind of quite elderly and they were all young Turks and I'd had a pretty bad first match where I. I'd taken spikes to an Astroturf wicket and it was very wet and slippery and so I was wearing trainers and it was just hopeless. And then this was the second match and again it was gray and drizzly and miserable and they whacked us all around the ground and we needed something like 80 of four overs and I was the last man in and there was that. They had this bowler who was unbelievably quick. I mean, he, he swung it, he seamed it, he could seam it. And De Bowley yorker in the same ball. I mean, he was so good. Amazes me he's not playing for England now. And I hit him for six. And it was my first and only.

Six in your whole life ever.

And what was brilliant was we had to go.

Where did it go? I think it went cut or it went back.

Back with a point which is, I would say story. And we, amazingly, we had. We had a professional sports photographer with us because it was, you know, to get illustrations for the book and he took a photograph of the 6 and I, I got back and I can just go on and on about this. I have this photograph of me hitting a six and basically reignited my determination to carry on into old age. I thought, if I can hit a six at this age, my first one, what fresh Everests are there to conquer? And so here I am just about holding on with my. My fingertips, I would guess.

Do you prefer playing or watching? Playing.

I mean, I like watching, but I love playing. It's. It's the, the constant hope that perhaps this match won't be misery and despair and maybe every five or six matches something will happen that will, you know, give you such a sense of joy and pleasure that it will warm you through all the disappointment that then inevitably follows and perhaps warm you through the winter season. And also it's, you know, it's such a sociable game and it's. Playing for the authors is such an important part of my social life that it would. It would be terrible, I think, to give it up. And as I say, a lot of us in the team are. Were quite, you know, we were in the. For our 40s when we began, so we're, we're definitely heading northwards now, but we're still playing on and we, we have some kind of totemic figures who.

Are well into their 60s, so like anyone would know.

Well, the, the. The. Our. Our first player who retired was Sebastian, folks, the great novelist who was an excellent cricketer, very good tennis player as well. His knee unfortunately went. And we had one particularly demoralizing match against Windsor, a game that forever lives in infamy where I think we only had nine players because two of the people got lost and they had sent out their first team and they, you know, 220 for two or something. And Sebastian was stationed a sweeper on the offside boundary and he literally, he was literally on one leg. I mean, it was absolutely hopeless. And I think he gave up after that. But, you know, there are others we're.

Kind of powering on and you want to play on. To what age do you think I'd.

Like to play on? For as long as I, I, you know, I get selected and I can, I can perform. So I, there have been various points where I contemplated retiring. So we went on a tour of Sri Lanka where, you know, just saying I went on a tour of Sri Lanka, I mean, I cannot tell you how improbable that would have been when I was 13.

But there's going on a tour of Sri Lanka. There's actually playing in Sri Lanka because that is the hottest place.

Yeah. And that's so mean. And everybody in Sri Lanka who plays cricket seems to be about 18, unbelievably fit. They don't seem to be any incompetent old cricketers in Sri Lanka. They've all retired. And I got no runs, no wickets, no catches. And I came back and I thought, oh, this is hopeless, I'm going to give up. I had a friend, Matt Thacker, who runs a, he runs Wisdom Cricket Monthly and a host of other sports magazines. And he said, I've got this great idea. I'm going to pair you up with a sports psychologist, a professional sports psychologist to see what, what she can do. And she was a wonderful woman called Amanda Owens, who'd worked with cricketers, with tennis players, I think with RAF pilots. So people under, you know, under incredible pressure and I was very skeptical. I thought this is like astrology or something. It's clearly not gonna, not, not worth doing. But I thought, well, I'll try anything. And so we had it at the oval. So I had an hour of sports psychology at the oval and I thought, that's quite, quite cool. But, but it didn't really do anything. And then the second session, it completely clicked. I completely got the point of it. And I had this astonishing run where I got, I had three, five wicket hauls in five games. Never had a peak like that before. But it gave me the hope that maybe out there there is some method or technique that you can use kind of asterisk taking the magic potion or something, if only so that that gives me hope. The TMS Podcast on BBC Sounds My name's Steve Bradnell, Assistant Manager at Royal Oak fc.

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The chance to set the footballing world bank to rights.

This could be a great opportunity for us to have the podcast for the BBC. Can I just say, what's a podcast? Brilliant. Great start. Well done Bob. Brilliant. We can completely show utter transparency to Royal Oak fans.

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Let's talk about the rest is history and the success of that. I mean, can you believe how successful it's been? It started what, five years ago. I mean, how did it start?

Well, it started thanks to my brother, who is a historian of the Second World War and wrote a wonderful book about the siege of Malta in the, in the war. And he got approached by former head of ITV Sport, Tony Pastor, whose parents were Maltese and so had read the book and thought that was that my brother would be maybe good to do a podcast. And he, Tony, was in a position to help with that because he was partner with Gary Lineker in a podcast called Goal Hanger and Gohanger had basically been set up to serve as handmaiden to Gary's role on Match of the Day. So that's why it was called Gohan. So they did a lot of main, I mean it was almost exclusively sport focused. So as well as football, they did a cricket one with Stuart Broad and Stephen Fry for instance. But, but my brothers, we have ways of making you talk, which he did with Al Murray, the comedian who's incredibly knowledgeable about the Second World War was the first one that was not a sporting one and it was a great success and it was launched just before the lockdown and then in the lockdown people were desperate for listening material. So it was just an amazing success. And on the back of that, Tony and his business partner Jack Davenport approached me and said, would what about doing a history podcast? And so I suggested my friend Dominic Sambrook, who's a historian of the modern, the modern world. And my focus is much more ancient history. And we very arrogantly and hubristically thought, well, let's try and do the whole sweep of history and you know, we can focus on our respective periods of specialisation and try and muddle through on the rest.

Because a lot of the time you're really at your comfort zone then, aren't you? Because you're dealing with subjects that you're not a specialist on. So how does that process work?

Well, to begin with, we did slightly cling to our comfort zones, but then we realized that actually it's much easier to do a podcast on subjects you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily an expert about, because the problem with talking about something you know loads about is that you're very reluctant to express an opinion because you're always aware that there's some counterpoint or. And it's actually easier to talk about something that you have researched with a kind of growing sense of excitement, because almost invariably when you start on a topic, you find it's much, much more interesting than you. Than you'd realize when you began it. And I think that that sense of excitement and enthusiasm, hopefully you can then carry into the podcast, because I don't think anybody listening to it would be expecting to listen. You know, they're not listening to the Reith lectures. This is not. We're not offering ourselves as world experts on every single topic. But what we are saying is that this is fascinating. We have experienced fascination for ourselves, and we want to share that fascination with the people who are listening.

Why do you think it's so successful among a younger audience? I think under 35. Yeah, half your audience under 35.

I guess it's partly because the younger you are, the more habituated you are to technology and so the ready you are to listen to podcasts, I guess. But. But I think also it's reflective of the fact that history is just infinitely fascinating, and there's no reason why, if you're 25, you shouldn't find it fascinating. I think the assumption that history is for people who are very elderly, I just don't think that the statistics from our listenership supports that. I mean, clearly people of all ages are. Are ready to find history fascinating. I'm not. Doesn't remotely surprise me. I've been fascinated by history since I was about seven.

So we know a lot, don't we, about sort of the modern era. So Dominic's era, the 20th century. I mean, you've got so many sources for that. Your era, your specialism. Is it. Is it a bit more limited? So do we. Do we really know what went on?

I think it is much easier to construct secure narratives, and we tend to focus on narrative just because we found that that's the easiest way to structure a podcast. People want to hear stories, whether that's the account of biographies or wars or crises or murders or whatever. I think it is harder to do the further back in time you go, because the source is. Do become more and more insubstantial or contested. And you have issues like Alexander the Great, who you'd think would be someone whose life is securely sourced. But the major sources are written hundreds of years after he lived, and they're full of kind of details about you know, Alexander going off to an oracle and being guided there by two talking snakes. You put that in, but were there actually talking snakes? I think it's improbable, but it's a complication that you don't have when, for instance, you're describing Dunkirk. There are no talking snakes at Dunkirk.

What's been your. Outside of your own specialty? What subject has fascinated you most or what's surprised you? Looking into a particular subject, I think.

The subject that I was most surprised to find myself gripped by was the story of the Titanic, which I, you know, I. I seen the film, I had a vague sense of it. I think everyone knows what happens, and we did it because every so often we want to do a subject that everyone will have heard of. We want to do an absolute banger. And Titanic is obviously a huge historical banger. I mean, literally, it bangs into an iceberg. But what was wonderful about that was that the narrative is beyond gripping. I mean, when you get up close to it and you're reading about how the sinking happens, the those who survive, those who don't, stories, I mean, it's so gripping. But beyond that, it provides a brilliant opportunity to do what we sometimes find hard to do, which is social history. Because the three classes that you have on Titanic, you know, you have millionaires traveling, but you also have refugees from Armenian villages who were fleeing genocides, and you have them all on this ship, and so you can tell their stories and you set them against the backdrop of this incredible drama. I found it completely, completely gripping. And we ended up. We, you know, I said to Sadie, my wife, I can't stay here. We've got to get to Belfast. We've got to go and stay in the Titanic Hotel. And this is a hotel where they. The, you know, the. The draftsman drew the plans for Titanic. We got to go and visit the incredible Titanic museum, which is opposite it. We ended up going around every monument, every pub. There's a pub with a very sinister doll that was found floating where the Titanic had sunk. And it sat there staring at you as you have your kidneys. And I got completely obsessed by it and Dominic did as well. And I think it was the. We did six episodes on it in the end, and it was.

Did you mean to start with six or was it.

No, we were planning to do kind of two, and then it became four, and then it became six. There was just so much to talk about. And it's not just the social history as well. There's the Anglo American rivalry, the sectarian divisions in Ireland because it's, it's four years before the Easter Rising. You know, you've got the First World War brewing in the background, so the sense of drama around it was incredible.

What got you into history? You talked about cricket, you talked about staying in front of the television and watching Ian Botham smack the Australians in 1981. What captured your imagination about history?

Well, I was one of those little boys who is obsessed by dinosaurs. I remember going up the lane behind my house and just wishing that there were, you know, stegosaurs or something roaming it. I mean, obviously I wouldn't have survived a minute in the Mesozoic, but I, I had this kind of sense that what happened in the past was basically more interesting and glamorous than, than the present. And I think that, that, that just evolved naturally into an interest in history. So in a sense, I mean, my first love with the Romans, and I think there's a sense in which the Romans are kind of the Tyrannosaurs of the ancient world. You know, they're the apex predator, they're glamorous, they're terrifying, but they're also safely extinct. So, you know, they're sufficiently removed that you don't actually have to feel nervous of them necessarily.

And are there more sources? I mean, there must be certain areas, certain times, there must be more source material than for others.

Yeah, so you've got a lot to go on. Yeah. So there was one particular period which is Rome was a republic and then it comes under the shadow of great autocratic figures. And one of those figures is Julius Caesar who ends up, you know, he conquers Gaul, he invades Britain and he wins all this incredible, incredible glory, all this loot. He has all these battle hardened legions behind him and his enemies in Rome are very nervous of him and so they try and destroy him by taking him. You know, their plan is to take him to court and ruin him there. And so rather than give up his command, he decides that he will, he will leave his, his provincial command and cross the, this tiny river which marks the frontier into Italy. And this river is called the Rubicon. And he crosses the Rubicon. And so hence the phrase, you know, you take a disastrous decision. You know, you insert Australia at the Gabba and you've crossed the Rubicon, you're not going to win the ashes. So Caesar crosses the Rubicon and there's a terrible civil war. The republic implodes, Caesar gets assassinated, there are more civil wars, and Caesar's great nephew, his adoptive son, emerges from from the carnage and establishes what will become an autocracy amid the rubble of what had been the Republic. And this is the man who takes on the name Augustus and establishes the rule of the Caesars. And it's such a dramatic kind of primal story.

You watched Travis Head, didn't you? Play it stadium?

Yes, I did.

The other way.

You.

What, did you equate him to the. Or equate Australia's victory to the. The Trojan walls or him to the Trojan horse?

Well, I was. Yeah, I was stretching. I was. Yeah, I was. So I was asked about that and, you know, what was it like? And the thing is, it was such an. It was amazing. Two days, completely gripping. So intense, so epic. Deeds being performed that will echo down the ages. But obviously, if you're a Trojan, you know, a bit like the Trojan War. But obviously, if you're a Trojan watching the Trojan War, the ending's terrible. I mean, you know, it's. So that's what kind of what I felt like.

Just one final thing, Tom, because the players are out and we're gonna, you know, just play the highlights.

Can I just say that, you know, I said I love both them, then I love kp, but the cricketer, I.

Love Zach Crawley, don't you.

I love Zach Crawley. Crawley, because Niche love. Yeah. I watched his. His double century against Pakistan in the lockdown, and it gave me such joy. It's kind of great shard of light amid the. The monochrome gloom of the lockdown. And I've loved him ever since. But unlike Botham and kp, he. He tends to repay that investment slightly less. But when he comes off. Oh, he comes off. So you can. I. I thought, you know, he's been selected to go to Australia and whack the Australian bowlers around. I've got to be in Perth to see him do that. Out for naught in the first over of the first innings. Out for naught in the first over the second innings. So I was so happy to be here to see him not get out for naught in the first day here. TMS at the Ashes.

Well, wonderful to hear from Tom Holland, a passionate cricket fan, and I can heartily recommend the Rest is History that you can hear on BBC Sounds. Also on Sounds. If you search Ashes, you'll find all of our cricketing content with episodes of the TMS podcast, bringing reaction, analysis and interviews right throughout the series. Thanks for listening. We'll speak to you soon.

Welcome to Tail Enders. I'm Greg James. He's Felix White.

Hello.

And that is England's greatest ever bowler, Jimmy Anderson. Hello, we finally got our brain break on BBC iPlayer. It's lovely to be here. England haven't won a test match in Australia since the 20102011 series, which is.

A long time ago.

Give us a few reasons as to why it's so difficult. The wickets are different, the ball's different, and the heat as well. The media coverage over there is so.

Much bigger than a Test series in England, for example.

And cricket over there is huge.

Plus, Australia are amazing in their own country.

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