The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
History? It’s time to rewrite it
The way we teach children about the past is all wrong. Here is how to fix it
It is almost half a century since, as an impressionable little boy, I first encountered the Ladybird history books. As older readers will remember, most were written by the magnificently named L du Garde Peach, and covered everything from the Romans to Nelson. But my favourite was probably the story of Oliver Cromwell, with its cavalry charges and parliamentary showdowns, its glowering Puritans, “always going about with gloomy faces”, and its “very gay and colourful” Cavaliers.
Like all good children’s books, the Cromwell edition gets off to a cracking start. On the first page, a baby Oliver is kidnapped by a monkey, who carries him to the roof. “It is impossible,” says the author, “to imagine what England might have been like today if the monkey had dropped him.” It’s a great story, and has always stuck in my mind. So perhaps we should gloss over the fact that it’s almost certainly apocryphal.
True, false, simplified or exaggerated, the Ladybird books kindled a love of history that has never faded. When I did the English Civil War at A-level, that business with Cromwell and the monkey was lurking somewhere at the back of my imagination. As a professional historian, I’ve forgotten most of the facts in my books on Britain since the 1950s, but I still remember that monkey. And even a few weeks ago, recording a podcast interview with the Cromwellian scholar Paul Lay, I couldn’t resist asking him if there was some tiny grain of truth in it.
That, of course, is what children’s stories do, fictional or factual. They take root in your imagination, so cherished that you don’t want to let them go, so tenacious that there’s no budging them anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day, long after I’ve forgotten the names of my closest relatives, I’ll still remember that a monkey stole the baby Cromwell – even though it didn’t.
I realise, of course, that not everybody is as history-crazed as me. Even so, it’s depressing to contemplate the ways in which British children in 2021 have been cut off from the past. According to a recent survey of 1,000 children under the age of 14, four out of 10 have no idea what the Battle of Britain was, with one in 10 thinking it was an EnglandScotland football match. More than half don’t know that the Romans spoke Latin, almost half don’t know who Cleopatra was and a third think Sherlock Holmes was a real person.
And there’s worse. A few years ago, a lecturer at Cardiff polled hundreds of undergraduates and found that only 17 per cent knew that the Duke of Wellington led the British Army at Waterloo, while only 12 per
cent – yes, 12 per cent! – could name a single 19th-century prime minister. So much for Gladstone and Disraeli.
What has gone wrong? One obvious problem is that history disappears from England’s national curriculum when children reach 14. And even before that point, many secondary-school children spend just 40 minutes a week studying history. No wonder some complain that they weren’t taught about, say, the British Empire or our relationship with Ireland: it’s not a question of bias; it’s simply a question of time.
More broadly, though, history has rarely felt more embattled. In the past decade, undergraduate history numbers have fallen by a fifth. And whenever our history appears in the national conversation, it’s as a punchbag for political activists, obsessed with a fantastical, almost inhuman ideal of moralistic purity. Statues are daubed with graffiti, dead writers shamed, memorials removed, country houses “recontextualised” – the only imaginable context, of course, being one of Britain’s supposed colonial guilt. The overwhelming atmosphere is one of venomous intolerance and self-flagellating moralism. Almost never do you get the slightest hint that history might actually be fun.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past couple of years, while writing my new series of history books for children, Adventures in Time. To me it seems obvious that if you fail to give youngsters a shared national story, they’re unlikely to develop much sense of collective belonging. A healthy society depends upon a healthy knowledge of history. If you show people that they’re part of something bigger – Edmund Burke’s famous “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born” – they’ll behave accordingly. But if you don’t, they won’t.
And there’s a more mundane, even more fundamental reason why children should know about history. To use that f-word again, it’s tremendously good fun. After all, who can resist the heroism of Trafalgar, the tragedy of the trenches, the romance of Cleopatra or the courage of Alexander the Great? When I was a small boy, I didn’t read that Oliver Cromwell book because I craved instruction in how to handle sources and assess bias, or because I was desperate for “transferable skills” that might serve me well in my future career – to quote the justifications that are often given by educational bureaucrats. I read it because I thought I would enjoy it. And that’s the point of reading, isn’t it?
At the heart of Adventures in Time is another simple word: “story”. I had the idea for the series after a family trip to the Imperial War Museum, when I was looking for a Second World War book for my eight-year-old son, Arthur. There were one or two children’s books on the war, of course, but none of them was quite right. There was a picture book, a textbook and a compilation of gruesome facts. But there wasn’t a traditional rollicking narrative: Churchill and Hitler, Monty and Rommel, Dunkirk, D-Day and the Battle of Britain.
And that set me thinking. What fascinated me about history as a child wasn’t just its technicolour exoticism, the weird religions and ludicrous hats. It was the sheer momentum of events, the thrilling uncertainty that people love in, say, the fantasy novels of George RR Martin. And even as we were leaving the museum, I was thinking about how that would work in a history book for children.
After all, a nine-year-old girl doesn’t know that the British are going to be rescued at Dunkirk, does she? Nor does she know that the Japanese are going to attack Pearl Harbor – or that Henry VIII is going to fall in love with Anne Boleyn. For her, history is one enormous cliffhanger. Everything is possible. Anything could happen next.
So as I sat down to write the first two books in the series – the imaginatively entitled The Second World War and The Six Wives of Henry VIII – I tried to emphasise that sense of narrative uncertainty. There are lots of extraordinary characters, of course: not just Churchill and Henry VIII, but a young lad from Leicester stuck in a Japanese PoW camp, a girl who has religious visions in 16thcentury Kent, even a glamorous French spy code-named The Hedgehog. I cannot claim any credit for them, since they really existed and I was careful to stick to the facts. But I tried to ensure that every paragraph would leave the reader wanting to know what happened next. After all, it works for JK Rowling.
None of this, by the way, means that I think history is just fun. But for children, at least, fun must come first. Hook them with a great story and the rest will take care of itself. A Britain of young historians will surely be wiser, less hysterical and less narcissistic. It will be more conscious of its own good fortune in living where and when we do. It will be more united, more conscious of the sacrifices that our predecessors made for our freedom. And it might have more affection for our heritage and more humility when judging our predecessors.
That’s the plan, anyway. But the last thing any book should do is to lecture children. Just as novels open a window into an extraordinary world that never existed, so factual books should allow children to feel the thrill of soaring into the sky in a Spitfire; the pathos of Anne Boleyn on her way to the scaffold. These stories shouldn’t feel like homework. They’re something far, far more exciting: they’re history.
For nineyear-olds, history is one giant cliffhanger. Anything could happen