Fall of Eagles (1974)

History buffs, ahoy! Friday’s recommendation is Fall of Eagles (1974), the BBC’s historical drama chronicling the demise of three European monarchies, the Habsburgs (Austria-Hungary), the Hohenzollerns (Prussia/Germany), and the Romanovs (Russia), in the years leading up to the First World War. There’s a superb cast; it’s an extraordinary parade of British acting talent. I hope you enjoy it…

In the hot, languid July of 1977, a few days after Bjorn Borg beat Jimmy Connors in the Wimbledon final, I discovered my father’s copy of John Elliot’s Fall of Eagles on the Sitting Room bookshelf. The Sitting Room faced directly south. The French windows overlooked a York stone terrace, almost painful (in the sun) underfoot — which, in turn, led on to a parched lawn, a pond, an old red brick wall and the blue haze of woods. I spent many happy hours on the sofa, the faded chintz curtains (courtesy of GP & J Baker) drawn to keep out the sun, turning over the pages and looking at the black-and-white illustrations over and over again. The book is nothing special really, just a small paperback television tie-in, published by the BBC in 1974, with a Hohenzollern eagle on the front cover — but it’s now one of my most treasured possessions, slightly dogeared and creased, with the glued binding coming unstuck. I was a bookish child, and interested in history right from the start, but I’m grateful to Fall of Eagles for awakening a fascination with 19th-century European history and the First World War. An interest that is still very much with me. It’s curious how these little discoveries can change your life. Call it serendipity. I was especially haunted by a photograph of the Russian royal family sitting on a greenhouse roof during their house-imprisonment at Tobolsk in 1917.

Despite this, and thanks to the internet, it’s only relatively recently that I’ve been able to see the television series on which the book was based. Of course, back in the 1970s, the only way to see a programme a second time around was to wait, with crossed fingers, for a repeat. And that, more or less, was that. There were no VHS players. My parents didn’t get a video recorder until the mid-1980s. In any event, the original Fall of Eagles was first broadcast on Friday, 15th March, 1974, at nine twenty-five in the evening. Way past my bedtime.

Fall of Eagles is a 13-part historical drama for television, created by John Elliot, produced by Stuart Burge and narrated by Michael Hordern. The series focuses on the three European Imperial dynasties — all of which met their demise following the First World War: the Habsburgs (Austria-Hungary), the Hohenzollerns (Prussia/Germany), and the Romanovs (Russia). Although the first episode (Death Waltz) begins with the marriage of Franz Joseph of Austria to Elisabeth ‘Sisi’ of Bavaria, and the final episode, End Game, ends with the Bolsheviks withdrawing from the war, and the collapse of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918 (i.e. so that a viewer can watch the series in chronological order), every episode can more or less be viewed as a stand-alone, and it’s quite possible to dip in to the series at random, as the mood takes you.

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