Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Let history tell of the working people who changed our nation
AS we reach that time of year when the quality of our school teaching is analysed, I want to give a shout out to Mike Leigh.
He’s the film director who’s made a movie about the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, where sabrewaving cavalrymen surged into protestors peacefully campaigning for reform, killing 15 and injuring more than 650, making it the bloodiest political clash in British history.
The atrocity was a watershed moment, focusing attention on the fact that only 2% of Britons had the vote, and helped usher in social and electoral change.
Yet, as Leigh says, despite growing up in nearby Salford he was never taught at school about the massacre and it has never been on the national curriculum, meaning the vast majority of us may know about the six wives of a 16th-century monarch called Henry, but are ignorant of this pivotal event in our history. Which he reckons is a crying shame. I agree.
A few months ago I spotted a plaque on the wall of a derelict Liverpool pub commemorating two men shot dead in 1911 by troops Home Secretary Winston Churchill had sent to the city to break up a transport strike.
How many local kids had been taught about that in schools and how many on a national level learned about the brutal side of Churchill, I wondered. Probably none. It’s always peeved me how we celebrate our history.
Unlike, for example, the USA, which has a public holiday in honour of civil rights activist Martin Luther King and teaches its children to sing God Bless America, we tell our national tale through the narrow prism of monarchs, Eton-educated prime ministers and gallant dukes leading men to war, telling our kids to sing God Save The Queen. We rarely teach them about heroic working-class figures whose actions brought about real change to ordinary lives.
I recently narrated a film about legendary trade union leader Jack Jones who took on four of the 20th century’s greatest evils – poverty, fascism, worker exploitation and pensioner neglect – resulting in the improvement of lives of countless millions, yet few know of his work.
Charles Spencer has spoken of his children learning about the death of his sister Princess Diana “as part of British history at school.” Why?
Is learning about the vacuous life of a celebrity aristocrat more crucial to kids’ understanding of modern British history than learning about Doreen Lawrence, whose unstinting demand for a judicial inquiry into her son’s murder led to an overhaul of our race relations legislation, which created the strongest battery of anti-discrimination powers in Europe?
Or Donna-marie Mcgillion who was burnt so horrendously by the Omagh bomb she was given a 5% chance of living, yet defied the bombers without an ounce of self-pity, her stoicism helping to convince her people never to accept a return to the days of The Troubles?
Or the Hillsborough Families, who battled heroically for decades to overturn one of this country’s worst injustices without any help from above?
I’d like our schools to put these stories on the national curriculum along with the ones about coronations and empire builders.
Then state-educated kids would better understand who they are and appreciate that people from their own background can, and have, changed history.
And hopefully this would become less of a class-ridden, cap-doffing nation that teaches its people the main thing they need to know is their place.
Peterloo not being taught in schools is a crying shame