A bit of unknown history of the Greenwich Observatory

[Adam Fairhead]

Members may be interested in this programme from last Thursday at 10pm (Free Thinking) on Radio 3
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001vtrx

On the afternoon of February 15 1894, a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin was killed on the slope beneath the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park when the bomb he was carrying detonated accidentally. His intentions have always been unclear, but at the time it was generally assumed that his aim was to blow up the scientific institution, site of the Prime Meridian, in the name of revolutionary anarchism.

[David Arditti]

Yes, the basis of Conrad’s novel ‘The Secret Agent’, in which the author imagines an elaborate background plot to this event, linked to the Russians (who seem to be permanent bogey-men of espionage and terror in the British imagination).

[Author]

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