Yesterday's Witness (1969)

'To come out to India as an untried Memsahib was, I think, what nowadays would be called a cultural shock. Take somebody say from Richmond and dump her down in this extraordinary country full of strange sights, smells and sounds and she could be very lonely.' Three Memsahibs, who joined their husbands in the British Raj between the wars, recall what it was like to be a woman in what was traditionally considered a man's country. A country where they were isolated from the Indian population and hedged round with imperial protocol, with little else to do other than run their homes and bring up their children. Life beyond the bungalow verandah could seem very alien and not a little frightening.

May 8, 1978, midnight

A story of the North-West Frontier in 1923, and ten turbulent days in the life of 17-year-old Molly Ellis. '... we had a long way to go before we got to the top of this mountain, but every step I took forward, I slipped back. I evidently wasn't going fast enough for my captors at all and they didn't like that, so they threatened me with a dagger - I suppose to make me hurry - but I was so tired I just didn't care. I told them to get on with it ...

May 15, 1978, midnight

In the 1880s Kipling wrote: ' Single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints.' And 50 years later, it seems, they still didn't. Life in the British Army in India in the 1930s is described in this programme by a fusilier, a drummer and a private. ' What a so-and-so country to come to, I thought. But there we are, we've just got to make the best of it.' They saw action on the Frontier, helped quell riots, went out in the midday sun ... But most of the time was spent as single men in barricks'-just standing by. And yet: Duty was a word that had a meaning for us. And we had a duty to the King Emperor: to keep the peace and to set an example.'

May 22, 1978, midnight

In India during the 20s and 30s more and more Indians rallied to the Nationalist cause. The Congress Party and the followers of Mahatma Gandhi were pledged to drive the British from India once and for all and take control of their country's political destiny. And though there were invariably riots and fighting in the streets these politicians abhorred violence. Not so a group of dedicated revolutionaries in Bengal, the British Raj's most troubled province. Since the first decade of the century two groups of terrorists were convinced that political assassination and indiscriminate bombing attacks were the only certain way to ring the curtain down on British India. Eventually the authorities got the measure of the revolutionaries; but not before policemen and civil servants had been murdered.

May 29, 1978, midnight

'It has been said that India was a man's country and I think there is a great deal in this. Basically the job that had to be done ... had to be done by men.' Three British sahibs recall their time in this man's country. An Indian civil servant, a Gurkha officer, and a Bengal pilot remember work and play in the last days of the British Raj.

June 5, 1978, midnight

' It never struck me as odd that Father Christmas should arrive on an elephant, or a camel, or a railway engine.' For Irene Green it was all part of the pleasure of growing up in India. Her father was English. He'd been a soldier - ' My mother was coffee coloured and when I was born she was very pleased I was "off-white" and had fair hair. In an Anglo-Indian family when a child is born like that they say "a fairy was at her birth" .. IRENE GREEN - now Mrs Irene Edwards - tells of the pride and prejudices of childhood in the much-maligned Anglo-Indian community and her adventurous time as a nursing sister on the North West Frontier in the early 30s.

June 12, 1978, midnight