Join us for an evening of history brought to life ...
WE’RE all fascinated by history which is why the Chalke Valley History Festival has become such a huge annual event, attracting thousands of visitors and the country’s top historians and speakers. This year, for the first time, we are inviting you to an exclusive evening at the Daily Mail’s head office in Kensington, West London, with three experts from the forthcoming festival. You’ll meet Normandy veteran David Render, talking about his book, Tank Action; Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets; and Tracy Borman, expert on the Tudors and Thomas Cromwell. The two-hour event, which costs £25 including drinks, starts at 6.30pm on Tuesday, April 26. Here, historian DOMINIC SANDBROOK explains why history is important to us all.
AT THE beginning of June 1944, David Render was 19, a young man with his life ahead of him. Having graduated from Sandhurst, he was told to accompany a consignment of tanks to Portsmouth, where they were loaded onto a landing craft.
When the job was finished, young David asked a sailor for directions to get off the ship. ‘Look out of the porthole,’ the man said. Mr Render did so — and realised that they were already at sea. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked. The sailor stared back at him. ‘Normandy, of course,’ he said.
So began Mr Render’s experience of D-Day, one of the bloodiest, most tragic and most glorious episodes in the crusade against Hitler’s Nazi tyranny.
During the battle for Normandy, he had two tanks blown from under him and watched countless young men dying just a few feet away. But he survived.
Today, in his early 90s, Mr Render represents a living link with one of the most exciting chapters in British history.
And that’s the point — history is more than the recitation of dry facts and figures; it is a mosaic made up of the experiences of millions of ordinary people — sometimes exciting, sometimes moving, sometimes humdrum, sometimes horrifying, but never less than riveting.
Too often, we think of history as something that happened to other people long ago, but, of course, everything is history.
One day historians will rub their eyes with wonder that we spent our weekends at shopping malls and football matches. Our own political obsessions will strike them as bizarre and outlandish.
We will be as foreign to them as the Anglo-Saxons are to us; weird, backward figures from the dawn of time, and yet recognisably human, subject to the same pressures and anxieties experienced by generations down the ages.
Sometimes, when I give talks to youngsters about the importance of history, I’m asked why it matters. It’s not, alas, a surprising question.
We live in an age addicted to novelty. To be new, or to be young, is to be virtuous; to be old-fashioned is somehow to be suspect. What is more, many of today’s students openly sneer at the values of the past. Elevating themselves onto a moral and cultural pedestal, they dismiss their predecessors as racist, sexist dinosaurs, unfit even for discussion — let alone for commemoration — in a 21st-century society.
At Oxford, a minority of students have noisily campaigned for the removal of a statue of the Victorian empire-builder Cecil Rhodes.
All of this represents not an ‘engagement’ with history, as the protesters often insist, but a rejection of it. Instead of taking the past on its own terms, they prefer to judge their predecessors by the standards of the 21st century, casting themselves as hanging judges in the court of historical opinion.
In fact, the importance of history is not that it reinforces our own values, but that it challenges them.
There is tremendous intellectual excitement in history, of course — not just the thrill of reading about the assassination of Julius Caesar or the battle of Waterloo, but the more cerebral pleasure of understanding why the Reformation happened, how the Industrial Revolution came to Britain, or why we speak English rather than French.
Above all, though, I think history gives us a sense of perspective and humility.
Casting an eye over the great sweep of human history, you realise how lucky we all are to have been born into a world with antibiotics and anaesthetics, central heating and cheap flights.
But as you contemplate the generations who have come before us, the men and women who lived and died on this little corner of Earth, it is hard not to feel a tremendous sense of your own insignificance.
And in an age when so many of us have become slaves to narcissism, we need that perspective more than ever.