Yesterday's Witness (1969)

' We want our teachers back: we want justice' ran the placards carried by the schoolchildren when they came out on strike in the village of Burston in Norfolk. It was 1 April 1914, but the children were not fooling: they were convinced that their much-loved teachers, TOM and ANNIE HIGDON , had been unjustly dismissed on a trumped-up charge. Their dismissal split the village. On the one side were the school managers, led by the vicar and well-to-do farmers: on the other side were the farmworkers and railwaymen of Burston, whose children were on strike. The Burston School Strike became a national issue - and the strikers won. With the help of labour organisations from all over the country the Higdons built a strike school on the village green - and continued to teach there for over 20 years.

Aug. 1, 1974, midnight

In the summer of 1948 the Empire Windrush arrived in England from Jamaica with the first Commonwealth immigrants - looking for a promised land. Three of these 500 on board for whom the promise was fulfilled-SAM KING , VIDAL DEZONIE and EUTON CHRISTIAN - tell the story of that historic voyage.

Aug. 8, 1974, midnight

When the First World War began a young Englishwoman was living in Moscow, governess to a wealthy Russian family. At once Florence Farmborough volunteered as a Red Cross nurse to work among the wounded at the front. For three years she shared the privations and sufferings of the last of the Tsar's Armies, until Imperial Russia collapsed around her and the Revolution prevailed. And all she saw she recorded with her glassplate wooden camera, on pictures probably now unique. MISS FARMBOROUGH'S story and her photographs are an extraordinary record of the end of an era, the last days of Imperial Russia and the rise of the Bolsheviks. She eventually escaped from the disintegrating war front by the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, and finally to England, where at 87 she lives among her mementoes of the tumult of history. Narrator James Cameron

Sept. 25, 1974, midnight