Anyone who thinks that removing statues is rewriting history should ask who wrote the history in the first place.
I wrote that sentence on Facebook this morning, having already (editorial privilege) read Paul Reynolds’ excellent article, in which he discusses the very many omissions in the current teaching of history.
My own experience of history in school was dire. I hated it, not least because of the way it was taught. The teacher spent almost every lesson dictating notes which we duly wrote down in our notebooks and attempted to remember for exams. At the end of the third year in secondary school we had to choose between History or Geography, so I chose the latter. As a result I studied no history later than the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745, and because I changed schools I actually studied that twice.
So I left school with huge gaps in my knowledge of 19th and 20th century history. For example, I didn’t know anything about the origins of Liberalism in the UK until I started reading J S Mill and others for my Philosophy degree. I didn’t understand the causes of the two World Wars and hadn’t heard of the Holocaust. I was living through the independence of former British colonies but hadn’t learned the history that would have explained why they had been coloured red on the map. I was denied any understanding of the importance of prime sources, or of historical method, and I didn’t appreciate that records were always created by the literate elite.
Of course, over my life I have gradually pieced together a lot of information about that period but still wish I had had a more formal foundation. I learnt that the history of wars is always written by the victors, so is inevitably skewed. And today’s political interference in the curriculum in the UK has striking parallels with the airbrushing of history practised by autocratic regimes.
Some years ago I read The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst. It takes an incident that happened in a family home in 1913 and tracks how it was remembered and interpreted by subsequent generations. The main character is a poet who was killed in the First World War, and as time goes on he becomes an almost mythical persona, and his secret gay life is re-evaluated. It can be read as a metaphor for way in which the ‘truths’ of history evolve over time.
History is a dynamic entity. It can reveal fascinating, and sometime contradictory, perspectives on events. It can mould our perceptions of other cultures, and of subcultures within our own. It can overlay the values of today upon actions in the past. But most of all it can be used to distort and subvert the truth when the facts are believed to undermine a dominant narrative.
The choice of what aspects of history should be included in the school curriculum is so important. History provides a framework and a methodology through which children can interpret their own and other cultures, and hence it impacts on their own identities. And if we have taken anything at all from the Black Lives Matter campaign it is that now is the time to reassess what is taught.
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* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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19 Comments
Quite so. Well said, Mary.
History is being continuously rewritten, its not just that a new Present gives new answers to old questions, even the questions change. History is what we feel & think about the Past & We keep changing.
I sometimes think that we teach History the wrong way round, we should start with Here & Now & work outwards & backwards from there.
Mary,
Now that Churchill is defined as an imperialist, racist bigot do you think there is any aspect of our nation’s long history we can present to our children with pride? or are we, justifiably, the world’s pariah?
Well said, Mary.
History and geography are really the same subject.
I remember a history teacher who wanted us to remember dates. They were 1520, 1620 and 1720 without any meaningful content.
Because I had opted for science as an alternative to history and geography There was one year in which we scientists learned some of the history of sciences, including the overturning of previous theories, including the persecution of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei by the then pope, with adverse consequences for the developing science of astronomy in Italy.
There was also a series of begats in the old Testament which had been taken literally by non-mathematicians and needed to be overturned to understand the history of Egyptian pharaohs. We were not taught at school that the late Ian Paisley had worked as a missionary in Wales when others of his age were defending their country. When he said that the European Union is a Catholic conspiracy I said to David Ford, then APNI leader, that Paisley was ignoring Greece and Orthodox Christians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church.
Since then Cyprus has joined the EU, as have Romania, and Bulgaria. The Roman Catholic Church has decided to take a long term view on a separation from the Orthodox which lasted about 1,000 years and which they would like to repair, but there are institutional and structural differences as well as differences of theology, some of them caused by differences of language. Who among our current Cabinet can read the Bible in Latin or Greek as Gladstone could (according to historian Roy Jenkins).
Boris Al Johnson demonstrates a wide vocabulary in English, but he is not in a position to provide moral leadership.
Knowledge of geography came with the teaching of history for the period 1900 – 1955 without expectation of formal examination, including the need for petrol and equivalents for the Axis forces and their consequent military ambitions, for instance in Romania and Egypt.
Innocent Bystander 18th Jun ’20 – 6:02pm
The history books correctly say that Winston Churchill did not want to grant independence to India, Pakistan, etc in the late 1930s.
It happened under the Atlee government with heavy loss of life, known as partition.
Later acts of independence happened under Harold MacMillan, although he played a part in the Suez crisis.
This is a Roman historian (Horace) writing of the British Isles in the first-century AD: ” It is a savage place as are the fierce, inhospitable Britons who live there. Those near the coast in Kent may be more civilized, but in the interior they do not cultivate the land but share their wives with family members, live on milk and meat, and wear the skins of animals—behaviors so foreign to the Romans.”
Strabo writing of Hibernia (Ireland) were “Lying beyond Britain, the men there were rumored to be even more debased, who slay and eat their fathers, and sleep with their mothers and sisters. It is “the home of men who are complete savages and lead a miserable existence because of the cold; and therefore, in my opinion, the northern limit of our inhabited world is to be placed there” . The farther away from the civilizing influence of Rome, in other words, and the more mysterious and unknown the land, the more fearsome and barbaric its inhabitants”
In a dispute over tribute, the Romans flogged Boudica, warrior Queen of the Iceni tribe, and brutally raped her two daughters. Boudica took her people to war. Having burned Colchester to the ground and slaughtered the Roman citizens therein she marched on London. Cassius Dio regales the savagery of the Britons’ attack: women with their breasts hacked off and sewn into their mouths, their bodies then skewered full-length on wooden poles. The mass executions, religious sacrifices and “indescribable slaughter” echoed Tacitus’s account of the sexual and religious violence meted out to Boudica and her daughters.
The history of Roman Britain was written by Roman historians. As such we see it through their eyes. The idea of a British warrior queen battling a foreign enemy was invoked in the 16th century by Queen Elizabeth I to help legitimise her right to rule and to fight against the Spanish empire, and by Queen Victoria in the 19th century in her bid to rule an empire.
There are objective facts and then there are subjective judgement about those facts and then there is the question of which facts are selected for our consideration. One of the objects of education, in my view, is to enable people to distinguish one kind of “fact” from another. But please, lets not slip into the post modern error of assuming there is no objective reality and everything is a cultural construct.
Well Mary, nothing to tell the kids so far then. Churchill was a monster, so was Boudicca, I suppose Shakespeare is done for with the Merchant of Venice.
The Battle of Britain was won by two Po!ish pilots and a Czech with the British pilots just getting in their way, the bombing of Gerrmany a foul war crime, and everything that has gone wrong in the world was our fault and we should make sure the world knows that. No wonder the word the English use most frequently is “Sorry”.
I suppose it’s fair. To answer my own question all I can come up with to boast about is the World Cup ’66 and Robin Hood and I’m not even sure the ball was over the line anyway.
@Innocent Bystander – I don’t share your cynicism. The language we have given the world is incredibly rich, and has a much bigger vocabulary than any other language. Why? Because as a nation we have welcomed and assimilated so many other cultures and languages over the last 2000 years. I know that doesn’t sit well with our current, quite proper, concerns around imperialism and slavery, but there are other aspects to our culture that we can celebrate.
And … I have played Shylock, as it happens. Shakespeare was showing how a lifetime of discrimination and prejudice can eat into a person; he gave him that insightful speech: “Hath not a Jew eyes?”
The Conservatives, working class Labour and Brexit party voters tend to be proud of their British history and would largely be against any change. If you go down this road in a general election campaign it won’t end well. It’s the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror and Sun readers that decide how the country is run and they don’t appear to want change.
Mary,
Thank you but it was irony I was going for rather than cynicism but probably overdid the subtlety thing.
Mind you the only reason English is not a backwater language is that our vile colonial empire included North America and it doesn’t seem a huge achievement to be only remembered for a language made popular by a different country altogether.
On a positive note we have given the world Morris Dancing and HP sauce so, in time, it may forgive us for trampling on one sixth of the world’s population.
“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh ?” ….. I like the tickle bit.
As for Mr (not so) Innocent, time to get his teeth into that grand old Victorian Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem and wrote Boadicea’s speech as,
“Burst the gates, and burn the palaces, break the works of the statuary,
Take the hoary Roman head and shatter it, hold it abominable,
Cut the Roman boy to pieces in his lust and voluptuousness,
Lash the maiden into swooning, me they lash’d and humiliated,
Chop the breasts from off the mother, dash the brains of the little one out,
Up my Britons, on my chariot, on my chargers, trample them under us.”
Mary, this is an outstanding piece like Matthew Syed’s article in the Times on the same subject. You talk of school history. My convent school was totally obsessed with the Tudors (Henry VIII was a very very bad man who broke with Rome etc). I don’t think we ever got much past 1603.
Bits of much more interesting history I wish I has been taught when I was young:
That women were second class citizens until 1991 (when marital rape became illegal).
That Romany people have been in this country since the sixteenth century.
That Jewish people in this country in medieval times had to wear a yellow patch.
That half the men on the Windrush had served in the RAF during the war.
The history (European) channel offices are on the Great West Road (another legacy of Roman Britain) in Brentford, West London. I understand that producers are given an era or century to cover. You have to feel sorry for whoever gets the 14th century Europe – the 100 years war and the black death.!
While Europe was in the grip of the deadly bubonic plague, In Africa, the wealthy Mali Empire, a global leader of gold production, reached its territorial and economic height under the reign of Mansa Musa I of Mali, the wealthiest individual of the medieval times, and according to various sources, the Richest man ever in the history of the world https://www.history.com/news/who-was-the-richest-man-in-history-mansa-musa
Innocent Bystander,
Churchill was being quite serious when he said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. Appeasement has become a word associated with weakness or failure to recognise that you cannot negotiate with dictators, but it was not so before the war. This is from the Observer (2 October 1938)
“Suggestions to honour Mr Chamberlain in some tangible form for his great services to peace continue to be made in many parts of Europe. The French nation is now concentrating on how it can repay “the first artisan of peace”.
Numerous proposals for renaming streets, starting funds and erecting statues are contained in the French press, and Le Figaro states that the British prime minister should be immediately invited to Paris so that all can acclaim him. One paper suggests starting a fund so that monuments and statues might be erected to the “saviour of modern Europe” in every capital in the world. Strasbourg has overnight renamed streets: the Avenue de la Paix is now the Avenue Neville Chamberlain.
The assertion that Mr Chamberlain should receive the Nobel peace prize, says the Stockholm Tidningen [newspaper], is warmly supported in all quarters in Sweden and Norway, and England. Mahmond Pasha, the prime minister of Egypt, has telegraphed Mr Chamberlain the thanks of the Egyptian government and people for averting war. The telegram concludes: “Your name will go down in history as a statesman who saved civilisation from destruction.”
Hitler was upset by the views of Churchill and other politicians in criticising Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and in criticising Hitler and denounced Churchill as a warmonger. Churchill issued a statement to the press in 1938:
“I’m surprised that the head of a great state is attacking an ordinary British MP who isn’t even a party leader. Attacking me probably increases my influence rather than reducing it.
Hitler is wrong to say that Mr Eden, Mr Duff Copper, myself and the Labour and Liberal leaders want war with Germany. However, we do want our country to be properly defended and we also want to be able to help those we’ve promised to defend. I admire Hitler as a leader and for the way he has restored German pride. But he should be happy with his successes and should now stop demanding more. History would be very positive towards Hitler if he became a man of peace and tolerance now.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
History has its versions. I remember my history teacher at school who was in fact a Liberal, Mr Pin. In fact we would call his lessons Pinorama. I didn’t think he was that great a teacher, he would get the dates wrong, but now I recognise his methodology was ahead of his time and has become generally adopted.
Julius Caesar standing on the beach said Britons painted themselves with blue paint. When I stand in the line at the airport check-in I often see a Briton with blue paint (tattoos) so somethings haven’t changed.
David and Mary, (wasn’t that a pop group?),
Anyway many thanks but I thought Shylock’s speech shone a light on discrimination but did him no good? Didn’t he have to convert to Christianity and hand over all his wealth?
That won’t do at all. To rehabilitate Shakespeare we need to burn all those copies and rewrite it so Shylock gets a peerage and a series on the BBC. The Duke needs to be denounced and exiled over some historical #MeToo thing and the rest of the cast write a joint letter to the Times apologising for their conduct.
Joe, I found that piece an interesting read. It has been said that if Hitler had died in 1938 history would anoint him the greatest ever German.
“Henry VIII was a very very bad man”…… well he was wasn’t he. Certainly a man to avoid with any thought of matrimony.
@Ruth Bright – thank you.
@Innocent Bystander – no one comes out of things well in The Merchant (apart from Portia). Shakespeare was exploring prejudice, and quite correctly showed that the privileged (almost) always win. That doesn’t mean that he supported it. I find the Taming of the Shrew much more problematic.