In 1961, the 264 inhabitants of the world's most remote inhabited island, Tristan da Cunha, were evacuated when a volcano erupted. They were brought to Britain where they became the objects of intense media and medical scrutiny. Having lived for six generations cut off in the middle of the south Atlantic, their speech, customs and manners seemed other-worldly in sixties Britain. In this programme, Jolyon Jenkins opens the Colonial Office files to discover that the British government had no intention of letting them go back home, and deliberately fobbed them off when they insisted on returning in 1963. But he also discovers, talking to surviving Tristans and those who knew them, that some did not want to go home and were pressured by island elders into presenting a united front. Show less