Controlling the past

George Orwell in his novel 1984 wrote 'He who controls the past, controls the future,' adding also 'he who controls the present controls the past.' Orwell wrote it as a warning, the problem is many of the powers that be seem to have taken it as an instruction manual in how to run the state.
Mail.

Civil servants used government computers to update Wikipedia pages downplaying killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, Lee Rigby and Damilola Taylor
Electrician was shot dead by police officer at Stockwell tube station in 2005
Investigation finds Wikipedia page on death edited by government computer
Suggestion he was on drugs added, and immigration information removed
Pages on Lee Rigby and Damilola Taylor also altered to downplay deaths
De Menezes family spokesman calls page edits 'low and callous'
Cabinet Office says any breaches of civil service code 'will be dealt with'
In June a civil servant was sacked for posting offensive comments about Hillsborough disaster on Wikipedia.
According to a Channel 4 News investigation, users of government computers added inaccurate suggestions that the 27-year-old may have been on drugs, deleted information about his immigration status, and removed a section on his death from a page about the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Changes were also made to pages on the deaths of Lee Rigby and schoolboy Damilola Taylor from government computers which downplayed their deaths, the investigation found.
The updates were made from computers using the government's secure intranet service, which is used by the civil service and police officers.

Now it may be simple malice or a desire to present things in the best possible light by individuals, though personally I suspect otherwise and believe the dead hand of the state is trawling through certain things and making sure that any controversy is removed before the public can read it. Not that it will always be politicians, but Acpo the company run by the chief inspectors of the police have also got an agenda via common purpose which is wildly at variance with what the public want. Others may such as in the case of Lee Rigby want to make sure islam and muslims names aren't dragged through the mud which may be the work of individual muslims, though knowing the states love affair with islam it may very well not be as witness the support they give to various groups who promote it and spew hate against those who oppose it.
Either way, it does appear that government and state computers are being used to rewrite history and downplay certain events and Wikipedia is the natural area to start as unfortunately it's the first port of call by many looking for evidence or knowledge and sadly it's also the last too. People tend to be lazy and will use a product to the exclusion of others such as Google and Wikipedia and the state has cottoned on to this hence their attempts to block Google reporting on their mistakes and rewrite Wikipedia to gloss over the past.
I suspect Orwell had it wrong in 1984, he meant 2084 and the problem we have is we'll never really know unless we remain vigilant.

Shouldn't we be remembering its end?

The first world war was a tragedy, the flower of a generation was sacrificed in a war in which the tactics of a previous generation were used to ill effect against machine guns and trench warfare. The term lions led by donkeys came about when the foolishness and arrogance of the generals was questioned but not the courage of the men they were supposed to lead to victory not ignominious death.
Yesterday the news was full of 'celebrations' of remembrance for the start of the conflict, last night a lot of public buildings were in darkness save for a single candle in commemoration. Yet what we were commemorating was the end result of politicians meddling in what they termed the great game, whereby they tied this country into a series of treaties that made war of some kind inevitable. The flower of a generation, bright, patriotic and willing to give their all for king and country were mown down because of a series of treaties meant that the killing of an archduke in Serbia by a Serbian nationalist drew a response from Austia-Hungary and started unravelling a whole web of treaties in which eventually the Austrian ally of Germany invaded of Belgium because France was allied with Serbia drew us into the conflict.
In essence for all we're being told that we're remembering the courage of the men, were also commemorating a massive failure by politicians, one they are likely enough to repeat, after all world war two was a direct result of politicians botching up the negotiations at the end of world war one.
No, we should not be getting into bread and circuses for the start of WW1, we have a perfectly good Remembrance Day in November to remember the brave.
The start of WW1 was a tragedy made flesh by the idiocy of politicians, that is what we should remember.

Delusions of grandeur

There are some out there who simply do not get Britain's place in the world, they have this weird idea of Empire and Commonwealth that fits an ideal but bears no resemblance to the present. History is cyclable, nations rise and fall and new smarter or more aggressive nations take their place as powers. One hundred years is but the blink of an eye in history, yet Britain has moved from a world spanning empire to where we are now...
Mail.

Britain’s role as a world power could end if Scotland becomes independent, the man leading the fight to save the UK has warned.
Former Chancellor Alistair Darling, head of the campaign to stop Scotland breaking away, says other nations would seize the chance to punish what was left of a depleted Britain. And Britain would face the triple humiliation of being stripped of its status as a global, economic and European power.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, Mr Darling said he was confident Scots will vote ‘No’ in September’s independence referendum.
He claims ‘tawdry’ Scottish Nationalist Party leader Alex Salmond is using ‘bullying’ tactics to silence opponents because he knows he faces defeat.

Britain is not a world power, we have some influence to be true, but our days as a real power ended in 1956 during the Suez crisis though the clues were there more or less from WW1. Now it may just be that Alistair Darling an utter failure as a Chancellor of the Exchequer is simply trying scare stories to get the Scots to remain as part of the United Kingdom but he really shouldn't play fast and loose with facts. The loss of Scotland will not be a major issue in the place of the rest of the UK's position in the world, they're only a nation of around five million and occupy a part of the UK that's by and large mostly useless. Their economy relies in part of civil servants in various departments and the naval base at Faslane. They have oil to be sure, but I rather suspect that they won't be able to do what they want with it in a similar manner to what Norway does owing to having to rebuild much of their economy from the ground up when the civil service jobs and the naval base move south because the UK government is not going to farm jobs out to foreign countries...
The UK itself is now tied to the corrupt and useless EU another pseudo alliance with delusions of grandeur, so the national powers we have are constantly undermined by EU diktats over-riding UK laws and powers. So no, we aren't a world power, we aren't a power at all as we've handed over sovereignty to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and so Darling's claim is mere grandstanding. Scotland's leaving will neither strengthen us nor make us weaker, though it may save the UK that's left a bit of money.
One day perhaps the British will ally to form a country and an empire to be a power in the world, but don't get your hopes up, just remember Rome, Persia, Austro-Hungary, Spain, to mention but a few, all empires and all now with zero power and influence.

Judging the past by modern standards

Loving history as I do I'm always pretty careful not to allow my modern day sentiments to interfere with my opinions of what was said and done in the past. People were different, they thought differently, they even acted differently to situations where the modern response would be something else entirely. Yet as ever there are those who want to make mountains out of molehills...
Telegraph.

A letter written by the future Edward VIII that exposes him as racist and sexist has come to light.
The Prince of Wales, who later abdicated to marry an American divorcee, wrote to his then mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, while he was on a Caribbean cruise.
He visited Barbados in 1920, aged 25, but wrote that he found the “coloured population” to be “revolting”.
He also wrote of dancing with women, all of whem his insisted were young and vetted by his friend, Louis Mountbatten, and described one lady as an “American bit”.
The Prince, whose name before he was King was David, included the diatribe in a love letter to his then mistress, Freda Dudley Ward, in which he complained about how much he was missing her.

Granted history has already judged him a weak character, but the letter actually proves that he was typical of his class at the time. I doubt he was overtly racist nor that he wanted a return to slavery. What he was exhibiting was the paternalistic attitude of the rulers of the Empire to those they ruled. They saw primitives in most cases and judged them accordingly. As for his attitude towards women, again typical of a lot of men, it was very much a male dominated society and women in a lot of cases were mere decoration.
Someone once described the past as a foreign country and that's how we should treat it, different mores, customs and attitudes to life and society. Things sometimes awful things happened for a reason, massacres, chauvinism even outward racism (by our standards) were often commonplace because people thought differently and viewed the world differently.
So Edward VIII was probably an unpleasant man, but, he was not so different from a lot of men at that time and we should judge accordingly, not try to make headlines out of it.

Tradition is not fact

One of the reasons for the Protestant reformation was the various abuses of power, mainly indulgences but by no means all by the Roman Catholic church. Eventually this culminated in Luther nailing his 95 theses to the doors of the Diet of Worms in 1521 in direct opposition to the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither holy nor Roman) and the Pope, thus setting off a split in the Christian church which along with the Orthodox split of the nature of the Holy Spirit has never fully healed. The main thing about Luther's reformation is that he challenged the right to sell forgiveness for cash which was an accepted tradition of the then Roman Catholic church. That it was never mentioned in the bible was neither here nor there to the existing powers, it was a tradition therefore it was their right to do so.
Currently there are massive complaints about 'Islam, the untold story' on channel 4, with almost 600 complaints in already and steadily mounting as Islamic tradition comes into direct conflict with historical fact...
Mail.

Channel 4 is at the centre of a storm over a programme it broadcast on the history of Islam.
Islam: The Untold Story has triggered nearly 550 complaints to both the television regulator Ofcom and Channel 4 itself.
It has also sparked a bitter war of words on Twitter involving leading historians and Islamic scholars.
Since it was screened last week, presenter Tom Holland, a historian with a double first from Cambridge, has been subjected to a torrent of abusive tweets, some of which have included physical threats.
He is accused of distorting the history of Islam by claiming the Koran makes little or no reference to the religious city of Mecca.
One Twitter user accused Mr Holland of trying to destroy Islamic history while another called him a ‘fool’ for suggesting Islam is a ‘made-up religion’.
The Islamic Education and Research Academy has published a lengthy paper denouncing the programme. But historians have rallied to Mr Holland’s defence.
Dan Snow, who has presented history shows for the BBC with his father Peter, described the programme as ‘a triumph’, tweeting: ‘Dear angry, mad people – it is conceivable that you know more than the world’s leading scholars, but very unlikely.’
The Academy claims the programme’s assertion that there are no historical records detailing the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad is flawed.
‘Holland appears to have turned a blind eye to rich Islamic historical tradition,’ says the Academy. 

The problem for the Islamics of course is that tradition is not facts, there is no proof other than the infamous 'we said so' and 'we've always done this' arguments to back up their assertions, particularly when they are skewered on some uncomfortable 'evidence' that they haven't, didn't and appear to have made it up as they went along. Nor are Muslims very comfortable with what is known historically about Mohammed the so called perfect man. It must be difficult to say the least to debate the known assertions about his 6 year old child bride (consummated at age 9) his double dealings, murder, rape of captured enemy women, nor the contradictions in his lifestyle compared to some of the dictates in the quran. After all it does state the number of wives a muslim is allowed (4), Mo having of course 11 or 13 of them depending on just where you get your facts from, most of them being added on after his conquest of Medina. Nor do a lot of the other historical tales of what is known about Mohammed sit easily on the mantle of a so called holy man and prophet. Nor indeed is there much evidence that the Islamic obsession with Mecca is based on factual evidence either, if as Islamic scholars claim, as there no mention anywhere in non-Muslim sources of a city called Mecca in the place where the current city of Mecca exists.
It seems Ofcom will be drawn into the row, it remains to be seen whether the complaints about facts vs tradition will sway the adjudicators. We can but hope the historians will win (and survive the experience) muslims of a certain stripe are not well known for their easy going attitude to criticism at any time, way, shape or form.
Which is why inevitably there will be a showdown...

Bansturbation

I'm not quite sure just what it is that makes people want to dress up in Nazi uniforms, other than the fact that they look way cooler than the rest of the WW2 regalia of the allies and others. I think it might have to do with the fact that they were designed by Hugo Boss whereas the rest all look like they were designed by the committee that designed the camel.
Still I do understand why certain Jewish groups would get upset when people do, though I don't believe they should attempt to stop it, merely avoid it. However I'm at a loss as to why anyone else would object, though naturally there are elements on the left who object to anything...
Mail.

War enthusiasts cause outrage after parading through streets in Nazi uniforms and flying swastika flags from their cars

• The incident happened at the Yanks festival in Uppermill near Manchester
• War enthusiasts donned Nazi uniforms and drove through in cars with Nazi flags attached
• Jewish and anti-fascism groups brand it offensive

A row has broken out after war enthusiasts took to the streets in Nazi uniforms and flying swastikas from their cars.
Jewish leaders and anti-fascism campaigners have berated festival-goers near Saddleworth, Greater Manchester, who went through the centre of the village of Uppermill proudly carrying the Nazi symbol.
Hundreds attended the Yanks festival last weekend, with many thrilled to dress up and re-create the 1940s for a few days.
But organisers say they cannot stop people wearing Nazi insignia on a public street and insist their own strict code of conduct bans them.
Although they said anyone spotted with anything Nazi-related trying to get into their event at Saddleworth School was asked to remove it.
But campaign group Unite Against Fascism called for the public to protest and said it was unacceptable.

Now, first off people ought to realise that there were two sides to WW2 (and any number of alliances) and that pretending the opposing side doesn't exist is just a tad silly, that includes all aspects of the opposing side too.
Also no-one is making the Jewish groups actually go there and witness the event, which is simply a historical re-enactment on a grand scale.
As for Unite Against Fascism, these are the people who would ban free speech, freedom of expression, frequently turn out when various groups whom they don't approve of legally protest and attempt to violently prevent this. So when looking at the UAF and comparing it to fascism, you'd be wondering just who exactly the fascists are, not that easy to tell them apart.
To most people, this is just a bit of fun, yes they realise just how terrible the Nazi's were, however seeing some people wandering around in Nazi uniforms is not going to turn them into Nazi's, no matter how hard the idiots on the left believe it might. I rather suspect that this is simply something that those groups who hate any form of freedom of expression love as it gives them a bit of free publicity.
A lot of people particularly those of an authoritarian bent seem to forget that freedom if it means anything should allow for views and opinions opposed to your own, including historical ones.

Something to hide?

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised when a freedom of information request to see the 2003 Iraqi war cabinet papers was approved. I guess I should have known better, after all, there are a lot of suspicions about what just went on, who said what and just who was misleading who. So, it being par for the course, the Attorney General has stepped in to block the request at the last minute...
Mail.

Secret Cabinet papers on the decision to invade Iraq could be kept from the public for three decades.
The crucial minutes of ministerial meetings in 2003 were approved for release under Freedom of Information laws but blocked at the last minute by the Attorney General.
Dominic Grieve’s ruling yesterday is a repeat of the decision made by Jack Straw in 2009 over the same papers.
Sir Menzies Campbell said he was disappointed by the outcome.
‘The original decision to go to war against Iraq is still shrouded in controversy with many people arguing that it was the single most significant foreign policy decision since Suez in 1956,’ said the former Liberal Democrat leader.
‘In the interests of transparency I believe that these minutes should be revealed to the public, not least because there are very substantial questions about the extent to which the Cabinet was informed about the proposal to go to war with the US against Saddam Hussein or even had the opportunity to debate them.’ 

I doubt this will stop the speculation, most people are convinced the government was/is hiding something, possibly it's the speculation that there were no weapons of mass destruction, though the likelihood is they ended up in Syria, to the simple fact we were ordered too by the USA, though again it's probably more prosaic than that in that the decisions involved probably make the government look bad, or that certain politicians are still covering each others backs. Why this would affect the current government, God alone knows, you'd think that an opportunity to stab Labour in the back would have been an open goal, given how currently unpopular they are. Still we are talking Cameron here, the man who threw away an election, perhaps he doesn't want to be judged later in the court of public opinion.
I've no doubt that there will be specific leaks of the papers over the next 30 or so years, governments are like that, perhaps there will be the odd exclusive, no doubt served up by the BBC to present things in the best possible light. Whatever happens though, all this decision will do is confirm the suspicion in many peoples eyes that the government (or more specifically the political classes) have something really bad to hide.

 

Denormalising history

Such is the venom of the righteous to attempt to denormalise what are pleasurable activities that they appear to be going back in history to accuse the Captain of the Titanic of causing the ship to sink because he'd been drinking...
Express.

THE captain of the Titanic may have been under the influence of alcohol when the liner hit an iceberg and sank, an unearthed document suggests.
Captain Edward Smith was apparently seen drinking in the ship’s saloon bar before the collision. The history books record the skipper was woken in his cabin at the time of the impact before taking the brave decision to go down with the ship.
But the previously unseen account by survivor Emily Richards blames Captain Smith, 62, for the tragedy.
The allegation was made in a letter she wrote on board the rescue ship Carpathia two days after the sinking in April 2012. Mrs Richards, 24, and her two young sons were rescued but her brother George, 23, was one of the 1,522 people who died.
Mrs Richards, of Penzance, wrote: “The boat struck an iceberg at 11 o’clock on Sunday night. The captain was down in the saloon drinking and gave charge to someone else to steer the ship. It was the captain’s fault.”

I mean seriously come on, did the woman expect the captain to be steering the ship 24/7? That, plus what anyone does off duty so long as it doesn't affect their performance whilst on duty means that like anyone else whether at sea or not can choose to have a drink when they are not at work. It's a bit like accusing me of causing a crane fault at work when I'm on my days off or between shifts, it really doesn't make sense. Though I suspect it will be taken as evidence on the evils of alcohol; by certain pressure groups and used to advance their cause.
The real reason the Titanic sank (other than hitting an iceberg) is that the men on watch had no binoculars as for some reason they weren't requisitioned on board for the first trip, that meant owing to time limitations steering a very large ocean liner out of the path of the iceberg was a case of too little too late, though perhaps if they'd hit it head on the ship might not have sank either.
I expect this letter was part of the blame game that went on at the time, people look for reasons and then they look for scapegoats.
Doesn't mean now though that it wont be used as a further excuse to make a legal pastime more expensive and more prohibited...

Getting your history wrong

People (well men) are randy by nature, whilst a woman will try to find a reason to have sex because of the consequences, men usually need only to find a place. In the past, the more money and power you had, the easier it was to have a mistress and one of the forms of birth control such as it was for the nobility was to marry your mistress off to one of your fellow courtiers/men at arms who in order to increase their influence, were quite happy (for a given degree of happy) to tolerate this. it meant that any children were not born bastards and if or when the relationship ended the woman involved had a settled secure place.
No it wasn't perfect and yes there were problems with it, but it's something that was common enough with male monarchs throughout the centuries, power (wealth) and sex often going hand in hand.
Which is why this story in the Mail made me sigh in exasperation, I don't know if it's just the Mail being ignorant or the historian putting modern thinking on a historical situation. Either way they're wrong.
Mail.

King Henry VIII had a secret daughter who should have taken the throne before Elizabeth I, new research has revealed.
Elizabeth Tailboys was the Tudor monarch's illegitimate lovechild who would have changed the course of English history had the King acknowledged her as his at the time.
By rights she should have taken the throne on the death of Queen Mary in 1558, making her the true Elizabeth I and not Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn.

Leaving aside the laws of primogeniture and the occasional royal meddling in which the King was given the power to designate his successor legitimacy tended to be the key to which the royal line was maintained. Henry might have acknowledged his son Henry Fitzroy and possibly even planned to marry him off to his daughter Ann (Catherine of Aragon's daughter) but, acknowledged is not the same as legitimate and would have caused major problems (schism) had he not died young probably from the same affliction as his legitimate brothers Arthur and Edward. Male succession aside though, female offspring did not get the same treatment, Ann and Elizabeth, Henry's daughters only maintained power whilst there were no men in their lives. Ann's marriage to the King of Spain was not popular and it's likely she would have been overthrown had the King ever tried to land on English shores to take charge, the later defeat of the Spanish Armada stems from this marriage when Philip of Spain tried to assert his right as King of England by way of his previous marriage to Mary.
There was never any possibility of another Queen Elizabeth ascending to the throne, acknowledgement or not, the very fact Henry did not acknowledge her probably saved her life, look at what happened to Lady Jane Grey after Edward died.
First law of a disputed succession, kill all your rivals, save an immediate heir, Had Mary had a son, (both) Elizabeth's days would have been numbered, an illegitimate Elizabeth's for certain.
I'm pretty much certain a historian would know all this, so I suspect it's just the Mail playing fast and loose with facts again.

History a forgotten subject

I love history, I love reading up on various aspects of both world, English and local history I find it endlessly fascinating and will occasionally indulge in what ifs as in what might have happened if things had gone differently. But history is also important if we are to remember who we are and how we got here which is why the latest figures on the number of schools who failed to enter a single pupil in GCSE history are so disturbing.
Telegraph.

More than 150 comprehensives failed to enter a single pupil in GCSE history exams last year amid fears the subject is becoming limited to private and grammar schools.
In Knowsley, a Merseyside local authority, just 11 out of 2,000 pupils took A-levels in the subject, with only four passing their exams.
The figures in a report published today suggest that pupils in areas like Knowsley are 46 times less likely to gain A-level history than more affluent places like Cambridge, where 665 out of 6,038 candidates sat the exam, 557 of whom passed.
Ministers are increasingly concerned about the pupils' level of historical knowledge when they leave school, with a recent study showing half of English 18 to 24 year olds do not know Nelson masterminded the British victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The report was produced by Chris Skidmore, a Conservative MP on the Commons All-Party Group on History.
It shows that fewer than 30 per cent of 16 year old state school pupils took GCSE History exams last year, while the figures in grammar and private schools were 55 and 48 per cent respectively.
In more than half of all state secondary schools, fewer than a quarter of eligible pupils take the exam, the report said.

I had the feeling that the socialist stranglehold in the teaching sector along with the previous governments wholesale dumbing down of education standards was quite deliberate when coupled with its multicultural and diversity driven agenda in order to destroy the English as a people. After all if we didn't know where we came from or why, then we could be moulded (in theory) to believe what they wanted. Not that the current government with its pseudo socialist Lib Dem minority has done much to reverse the trend until now and it may actually be too late to repair the damage for a generation or two at least and there's always the chance that people might be foolish enough to re-elect Labour again at some stage, after all the bribes to certain sectors of the populace were big enough. That coupled with simple spite and a calculating manipulation of the media always seems to put the Tories on the back foot and the liberal/socialist agenda over the last decade is still being slavishly followed by the current government, rather than by hacking away root and branch at the malaise caused by socialisms poisonous doctrines and removing its placemen from positions of power.
We forget who we are at our peril, it may be too late for the current generation, but it might not be too late to stop it for the next one.
We can but hope.

Knowing your roots

I love history, be it local or national, even international and I'm an avid watcher of various documentaries about history and often get wrong or told to shut up by my good lady when I start to contradict the presenter. I'm even at the stage now of being told in advance of any film or programme to just keep quiet and enjoy it rather than nit pick the fallacisms in dress, weapons, facts and what really happened. I guess I'm quite the bore to the family, on the otherhand I tell them I'm not interested in who's having who in Corrieastendhollyoaks or whatever they're watching. All part of family life in castle QM and possibly a few other families, though I really wouldn't know, it's just a guess.
One of the things I did discover today though is that England is unique, sadly we're unique in being the only country in Europe that stops teaching history at 14, rather than 16.

Telegraph.

Children’s understanding of the past is being undermined by poor history teaching and crowded timetables, Government inspectors warned today.

Ofsted said history suffered in many primary schools because of weak subject knowledge among staff and the use of “disconnected topics” in lessons.

At secondary level, growing numbers of pupils are now exposed to just two years of compulsory history classes instead of the recommended three.

In a damning conclusion, the watchdog warned that England was the only country in Europe where schoolchildren were allowed to stop studying history at the age of 13.
History teaching was good in around three-quarters of primary schools, Ofsted said, but teachers “found it difficult to establish a clear mental map of the past for pupils”.
The report told of one primary school curriculum that skipped from the Romans and Ancient Egypt to the Tudors and then the Victorians in subsequent years.

 Keeping the narrative going is something that schools even back in my days weren't so good at, though I don't recall learning about ancient Egyptians in history, we did cover them somewhat in RE though and I do remember something about papyrus too. We learned a bit about Rome though, again mostly due to the fact that we lived next to the Roman Wall and that the Romans were in England for 400 years and built a lot of roads, smacked down Boadicea (before Boudicca became de rigeur) built a wall to keep the barbarians out, then left. We then did a little bit about knights and Robin Hood, also some Scots guy and a spider before a massive jump through to the Tudors, mostly concentrating on the Elizabethan age and the Spanish Armada, quick trip into the Stuarts and the English civil war (though not why, simply a look at puritans, roundheads and cavaliers) and that was primary history over and done with.
Secondary history was a complete shambles, we studied from the most boring book imaginable, "A social and economic history of Britain" a book so utterly unique that it managed to erase all mention of the Napoleonic wars along with the Bill of Rights, and focussed instead on child poverty and the Chartist Movement, though it did mention the Peterloo massacre and the Tollpuddle Martyrs, looking back it was a socialist re-editing of history to remove the fun and the interesting bits along with any sense of glory and national pride.
Yet history if taught properly and accurately is vital to our society as it binds us together and gives us a sense of belonging, no wonder socialists hate the subject, imperialism and nationalism being a couple of their bogeymen. 
I guess I was lucky my love for history wasn't erased at school, though I suspect a bit of that was down to my family being interested in it along with a liking for historical cinema of the epic variety. Films like Spartacus, El Cid etc all combining with an inquisitive mind to make me go looking through dusty tomes at the local library, not that their selection was that great, but it was still better than what was available at school.
These days it's so much easier with the internet available yet still teachers struggle with the curriculum and history, mostly it's down to trying to cram too much in, it should be simplified and some stuff removed. But history of our nation should be made both interesting and compulsory up to 16, not random bits, but a narrative stream to show how we came to be. 

Preserving the past

I love history, granted it's not everyone's cup of tea, but something that fascinates me. I'm pretty much interested in everything, however it's mostly English history that fascinates and intrigues me, all the way back to the distant and occasionally not so distant past. Which is why I was delighted (for once) that Medway council decided to part with some of my cash and restore the Medway Queen.

BBC.

                                             

A paddle steamer famous for its exploits in saving more than 7,000 Allied troops during the Dunkirk evacuations of 1940 is to return to the River Medway.

Medway Council has secured £900,000 to bring back the Medway Queen from dockyards in Bristol next year.

The 1924 vessel made seven crossings, rescuing more than 7,000 men from the beaches of France.

Councillor Jane Chitty, cabinet member for economic growth, said the ship was part of Kent's naval heritage.

Restoration work on the ship's hull began in Bristol last April with money from a £1.86m Heritage Lottery Grant.

Medway Council applied to the European Regional Development Fund for a grant to complete the restoration and bring the ship home.

'Naval heritage'

The Heroes 2C project is being carried out in partnership with the Medway Queen Preservation Society and MidKent College.

Ahead of the ship's arrival, college students have been using their skills in woodwork and engineering to restore parts such as handrails and lamps.

During its final crossing in 1940, the Medway Queen was badly damaged and limped home on a single paddle.

The ship was refitted at Chatham Dockyard and served out the war as a training vessel.

It returned to paddle steaming on the Thames and Medway after the war and was decommissioned in 1963.

It's history projects like this that will help eventually to restore English pride in past achievements, not the watered down anti-English so called imperialistic history that socialist English hating teachers have foisted down on our kids today. History should be a wonderful subject enthusiastically taught to our kids showing (yes warts and all) where the people of this land came from, what they did and why we are.It's lack of this knowledge and ignorance of our roots that has enabled past governments to push through legislation against the Magna Carta and Bill of Rights as well as hand away sovereignty to a foreign oppressor.
If we lose our past, we lose our future.

Rewriting history, for convenience sake.

History is important to me, particularly the history of Britain or more specifically the history of the English, it should be important to everyone as it tells us who we are and how we got here.
Over the last 50 years though the nature of history has changed, or rather the teaching of it has. Gone now are the interesting bits, the battles, the heroes even the way life was lived. In came social and economic history which whilst of interest to some, was pretty much guaranteed to put kids off studying the past. It was deliberate I'm sure, removing the Magna Carta and the Bill of rights from being taught as well as the titanic struggles against European superpowers of the day (mostly France, occasionally Spain a couple of times Germany) So our kids no longer have a sense of who they are and why we should be who we are. The same no doubt applies in Wales and Scotland, although they are still allowed to be proud to be Welsh and Scottish respectively.

Telegraph.

History of England starts at 1700, says university

Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700.

It was claimed that the move by Sussex University risked jeopardising the nation’s understanding of the subject and “entrenching the ignorance of the present”.

Under plans, research and in-depth teaching into periods such as the Tudors, the Middle-Ages, Norman Britain, the Viking invasion and the Anglo-Saxons will be scrapped, along with the Civil Wars. 

The university will also end research into the history of continental Europe pre-1900, affecting the study of the Napoleonic wars and the Roman Empire.

The university said it was “reshaping” its curriculum and research following a £3m cut in Government funding.

Last week, universities across the country were told their budgets were to be slashed by £449 million next year, including a £215m reduction in teaching funding, with threats of further cuts in the future.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, has claimed that institutions can use the opportunity to focus resources on their strongest areas.

But in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 17 leading historians said the move was short-sighted and risked undermining the public’s understanding of the past.

“To cut everything but the most modern puts in peril the public function of history, entrenching the arrogance of the present and making a mockery of the claim by the

minister behind these cuts that 'we also wish to keep this country civilised',” said the letter.

The academics, who all trained at Sussex, said that the decision to sever ties with European history before 1900 was a particularly retrograde step.

“For a university which has long prided itself on its European links to abandon the serious study of such pivotal areas of modern history as the French Revolution will mean depriving Sussex graduates of the mental furniture of educated Europeans,” said the letter. “The university risks damaging its reputation as a centre of knowledge for European culture and history more widely.”

The letter to the Telegraph was signed by historians from universities including Nottingham, Southampton, Trinity College Dublin, Michigan, Sydney University and the University of London Institute in Paris.

 The title is a bit of a misnomer, English history more or less ended in 1701 with the Act of Settlement, followed up in 1707 with the Act of Union. It then became British history. So for all England had history from 300 years ago, it was all tied up in Empire and expansion and was the history of the Union.
Since devolution however the strains are beginning to show, the Scots showing the way, even choosing a national anthem containing the words "To be a nation again" and so there is a chance of England and English history beginning to flower again providing we can remove the social liberal taint from education.
We need to be showing our kids the history of our lands and not just the gung ho heroic stuff, but the bad stuff as well, where mistakes were made but also the basic rights that were obtained from them. Many people think the Magna Carta granted rights to the English (assuming they even know what it is) but it didn't, it confirmed those rights, we already had rights and it was the then King (read todays government) who was trying to override those rights. Since 1997 more and more of our rights have been stripped away by this perfidious government, had our kids had a decent education in history it would have been so much harder for the government to do this. But people just do not know what they are losing, they say "done nothing wrong, nothing to fear" despite the mounting evidence that we do actually have something to fear from the political classes and their desire for power and control over us.


The English need to be looking at our history, reinforcing our rights and removing any and all government from the EU down who trample over our ancient hard won rights.
Freedom has to be fought for, be vigilantly guarded, we have sleepwalked into tyranny and it all started when we lost our history and had it replaced by mind numbing dullness from social engineers of the left.

 

English Heroes, R.......Evolutionary England

On this day the oddly titled  "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" was published, (A later edition was simply titled "The Origin of Species") Iit was a groundbreaking scientific work by English naturalist Charles Darwin.
Darwin's theory argued that organisms gradually evolve through a process he called "natural selection." In natural selection, organisms with genetic variations that suit their environment tend to propagate more descendants than organisms of the same species that lack the variation, thus influencing the overall genetic makeup of the species.

Despite the best efforts of religionists around the world, Darwin's methodology continues to be taught as an accurate guide to the evolutionary development of life on Earth. "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" sold out on its first printing yet was condemned by orthodox Christians as heresy.
Yet to me Darwin was one of the greatest scientific minds in human history, he did for biology what Albert Einstein did for physics and the Bank of England honour him on the £10 note.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland £10 note with Charles Darwin upon it.

Down House where Darwin lived, studied and finally published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" is quite close to where I live, it's near Biggin Hill airdrome. And the country walks that Darwin took are all part of an English Heritage site and worth the time to wander through, particularly in the spring and summer.

Yet Darwin almost didn't publish his work, he'd had it mostly written up for 21 years before it finally got to a publisher and into print. The delays are attributed to the controversy Darwin knew he would stir up and yet he continued to work upon it, refining it to the point where criticism would be difficult from the scientific community. For when writing his book, Darwin carefully laid out the arguments against his theory. Rather than setting up a straw man he could easily knock down, he stated the opposing view with care. He then answered the arguments not with sarcasm, but with evidence. Darwin had long made a habit of paying attention to inconvenient facts, and this helped him anticipate his critics.

A great man and a great English hero.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Charles Darwin
On the Origin of Species

By the time of Darwin's death in 1882, his theory of evolution was generally accepted. In honour of his scientific work, he was buried in Westminster Abbey beside kings, queens, and other illustrious figures from English history. Subsequent developments in genetics and molecular biology have led to modifications in accepted evolutionary theory, but Darwin's ideas remain central to the field.

Apologising for the past

There was a British State policy that ran from 1920 and did not stop until 1967, it involved the enforced immigation of children. It was known as the Child Migrants Programme and ended just 40 years ago - poor children were sent to a "better life" in Australia, Canada and elsewhere.
But many were abused and ended up in institutions or as labourers on farms.

As the Telegraph puts it .

In what Ed Balls, the children secretary, described as "stain on our society" the child migrant programmes saw poor, orphaned and illegitimate children sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until as recently as the late 1960s, often without the knowledge of their families.

Many ended up in institutions, many suffered abuse and neglect and many others were used as "slave labour" on farms.

Now after years of campaigning from pressure groups, Gordon Brown has agreed to meet with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology next year.

Mr Balls said the apology would be "symbolically very important".

"I think it is important that we say to the children who are now adults and older people and to their offspring that this is something that we look back on in shame," he said.

"It would never happen today. But I think it is right that as a society when we look back and see things which we now know were morally wrong, that we are willing to say we're sorry."

The government has estimated that a total of 150,000 British children may have been shipped abroad under a variety of programs that operated between the early 19th century and 1967.

Normally I'm not one for apologising about the past, I see no reason to apologise for slavery that was abolished in Britain by the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Though not entirely dealt with until the The Slavery Abolition Act 1833. But this is because all those involved are dead and apologising to their descendents for all it might make some sort of fuzzy feelgood sensation to the politically correct crowd is a complete waste of time as the descendents were never enslaved in the first place.

However, some of the children involved in this criminal act of government policy are very much still alive and I believe deserve an apology, for what was done to them as well as what happened after.

What really does rankle of course is the fact that it was the Australians who apologised first and so forced the UK governments hand.

Harold Haig, the secretary of the International Child Migrants Association, said he was appalled that the Australian apology has come before any British apology.

"Gordon Brown should hang his head in shame," he said.

"He is allowing the country that we were deported to to apologise before the country where we were born. It is an absolute disgrace. He should hang his head in shame."

Not just Gordon Brown of course, in this he's just on the spot because he's the current PM, but this policy was carried out under the governments of...

• David Lloyds George   1916 – 1922 Liberal Party
• Andrew Bonar Law   1922 – 1923 Tory Party
• Stanley Baldwin    1923 – 1924 Tory Party
• Ramsey MacDonald   1924 – 1924 Labour Party
  
• Stanley Baldwin    1924 – 1929 Tory Party
• Ramsey MacDonald   1929 – 1931 Labour Party
• Ramsey MacDonald   1931 – 1935 National Labour Party
• Stanley Baldwin    1935 – 1937 Tory Party
• Neville Chamberlain   1937 – 1940 Tory Party
• Winston Churchill   1940 – 1945 Tory Party
• Clement Attlee    1945 – 1951 Labour Party
• Winston Churchill   1951 – 1955 Tory Party
• Sir Anthony Eden   1955 – 1957 Tory Party
• Harold Macmillan   1957 – 1963 Tory Party
• Alec Douglas-Home   1963 – 1964 Tory Party
• Harold Wilson    1964 – 1970 Labour Party

None are left alive to apologise for this shameful policy, however the governments after, all had the opportunity to apologise.

• Edward Heath    1970 – 1974 Tory Party
• Harold Wilson    1974 – 1976 Labour Party
• James Callaghan    1976 – 1979 Labour Party
• Margaret Thatcher   1979 – 1990 Tory Party
• John Major     1990 – 1997 Tory Party
• Tony Blair     1997 – 2007 Labour Party

 But no, it's been left to Jonah Brown to apologise for something that should have been done decades ago, brushed under the carpet and forgotten, these people deserve an apology for what was done to them and the effects that they still so painfully feel today in some cases.
Sometimes governments do shameful things as official policy, I'm pretty sure when this was first proposed though it was looked upon as a good idea, a new start for these kids, however the checks and balances were not put in place, they were essentially dumped and forgotten, that's what the crime was and for that the government should apologise, should have apologised years ago.

Cry God! For Harry, St George and England!

Saint Crispin's Day Speech
from Henry V by William Shakespeare

---

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Oh yes and it's also the anniversary of the Charge of the Light Brigade too.



When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made,
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

England expects that every man will do his duty

Trafalgar day today.

 

A willing foe and sea room. Aye and Damnation to the French!

Distorting the facts

People often distort historical fact to suit their beliefs. Often mixing legend into fact as well as glossing over certain unpalatable happenstances.

The political class often mix and match historical fact with modern nuances to look their best in the eyes of the public.

Leading historians said politicians, public relations companies and even the Royal Family were guilty of peddling “historical myths” to promote campaigns.

Academics from leading universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and Nottingham warned that misrepresenting the past could blur public understanding of important events.

Professor Pat Thane, from the Centre for Contemporary British History, at the University of London, also warned that “bad history can lead to bad policy analysis and bad policy”.
Writing in Times Higher Education magazine on Thursday, historians criticised a series of claims made in recent years, including those from the Prince of Wales that Henry VIII “instigated the very first piece of green legislation in this country”.
In a recent lecture, the Prince said: “What was instinctively understood by many in King Henry’s time was the importance of working with the grain of nature to maintain balance between keeping the Earth’s natural capital intact and sustaining humanity on its renewable income.”
But Dr John Langton, research fellow in geography at St John’s College, Oxford, said it was a “very partisan account”.
He acknowledged that the King created a 10,000 acre forest at Hampton Court in 1539 but insisted it was just so he could hunt deer. Regular laws were passed in medieval times to protect forests for hunting, but “none could be described as green legislation”, he said.
Historians also criticised recent pronouncements by politicians on subjects including social mobility in the 1950s and 60s, the spread of democracy in the Middle East, the importance of marriage in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the creation of a Conservative “star chamber” to vet ministerial spending.

Part of the problem is the way history is/was taught to us, there's an awful lot of it so it tends to be compacted to almost uselessness in the eyes of kids, particularly if the concentration is on the boring bits of social change.

In my days as far as I can remember it went like this.

Cavemen, mostly to do with hunting for skins and cave painting, oh and flint.
Morphing into people who built artificial islands on lakes (Don't ask)
Morphing into Roman Britain, slight mention of Boadicea and the Roman Wall, but that's about it.
Morphing into Vikings sacking Lindisfarne, but little mention of the Viking Kingdoms, nor oddly enough of Alfred the Great, or Cnut.
Morphing into 1066 when the French last mounted a successful invasion (They didn't, the Normans were a Viking Kingdom)
Massive leap forward to Tudor times (I remember echoes of the Burghers of Calais, but little else)
Dissolution of the Monasteries, followed by Elizabethan times and the Spanish Armada, Drake, Raleigh, etc.
Stuart times, bit about a war and Cromwell, young prince and an oak tree. Nothing about Ireland nor the Commonwealth, bit about Puritans going abroad.
We also learned a bit about medicine and grave robbing.
After this I got to secondary school and went into a "Social and Economic History of Britain" the infamous book that does not mention Napoleon, nor Wellington, but does mention the Corn Laws and social deprivation. Oh it did mention the Chartists and the Enclosure acts too. It did mention slavery and Wilberforce, but failed to mention that Britain outlawed it during a fight for its survival.

Thus is interest in history killed off in the UK. This is how they distort the truth, manipulate us by our past and get away with it. Yes there are some of us out there who have a passion for history, who have taken the time to escape the trap to study what really happened and discovered to our joy what a wonderful land we live in and how rich our history is.

This is what is denied to us by those who use our history to justify a certain belief, to prove how the past justifies the present, history needs to be taught in an interesting way (thank God for Horrible Histories) but it also needs to be taught in a truthful way with regard to context. Trying to put modern sensibilities over a 17th century civil war regarding religion simply does not work, nor can it be compared to the Arab Israel hostilities as one of my teachers tried to do.

The problem is that the truth may be out there, but the lies are in peoples heads, because they've been encouraged not to ask nor check for themselves.

Education, Edukashun, learnin stuff

Ye Gods where to start.

History textbook tells pupils USA first landed on moon in 1979

An official history textbook used by thousands of GCSE pupils contains embarrassing errors, including the assertion that the United States won the race to the moon in 1979.

The new book, written by examiners, also tells pupils that John F Kennedy was president of America in 1960.

Entitled History: The Making of the Modern World, the textbook for a new Edexcel GCSE history exam, the inaccuracies have been slammed by historians and teachers.

"You have got to get these things right," said Sean Lang, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridgeshire, and honorary secretary of the Historical Association. "The whole issue of exam boards putting out official exam text books that students then buy is highly suspect as it is, but if they are going to do it, you expect it to be right.

"Children take what they see in print as gospel. These books have enormous authority and the facts have to be right."

Nick Gibb, the shadow children's minister, said: "The decline and fall of history continues under Labour. Fewer than one in three children now takes the subject at GCSE and it's little wonder when even the syllabus contains basic historical errors."

The history of the modern world exam will be taken for the first time by pupils next June. Many schools will use the text book in class and pupils can buy it from bookshops.

It states on page 96 that "The 1960 Paris Conference, between Khrushchev and new President John F. Kennedy, was a disaster". However, Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president in 1960 and JFK was not inaugurated until January 1961.

On page 125 it says that the US "won the race to the moon in 1979". The Apollo 11 moon landing was actually in July 1969.

The book also says that during the cold war the hot line between the US president and Soviet premier was a "telegraph" system rather than a teleprinter.

A spokesman for the Edexcel exam board said: "All our books are thoroughly checked during the development process but unfortunately occasional mistakes happen. We would like to take this opportunity to apologise to teachers and pupils for the errors. We take errors such as these very seriously and we will correct them at the earliest opportunity."

Occasional mistake? Big glaring errors is more like it!

Our education system has been messed around too much by liberal leftism without handicapping the kids further with wrong facts, I mean these are major errors, how many minor ones might have slipped through in past publications? How many teachers would actually know? It's not like they teach history properly anyway, they've turned one of the most interesting subjects into one of the most boring by concentrating on social history rather than events. Don't believe me? Then try and get hold of a book called "A Social History of Britain" It's the one used by most schools in the 1970's. Try and find a mention of the Napoleonic wars, you know the one that lasted for 25 years, laid waste vast territories with terrible suffering inflicted on the civilian populations of the time. with proportionately more people dying than in the First or Second world wars and lasting 4 times longer than either? I can assure you it's there, wedged in as an adjunct to the corn laws, just in passing, completely misses Pitt, Wellington or even Napoleon Bonaparte.

The teachers have brought up a generation to be disinterested in history as boring. Most kids get their history from films, thinking that Braveheart is real, or that the Americans captured an enigma machine first in U571. Hell for all I know they may even believe that the Lord of the Rings trilogy is ancient history. (Yes I know I'm generalising and not all kids are like this)

But I really do despair at times for the future of England's kids, they're being allowed to run feral, taught to ignore the past and falling into a social democratic nightmare with an unelected elite to control them.

Rewriting history?

One of my favourite hobby horses is the teaching of history in English schools; frankly it’s risible, quite apart from the fact that it is so blatantly twisted against anything English, or for that matter, "British". The state seems to believe that our history is so shameful we should not teach it to our children and some sort of multicultural mishmash should be put in its stead so our kids can be taught about everyone else's history and how noble and good they were as they struggled to overcome our evil doings.

The political classes obviously have a serious problem. They cannot see the facts for the ideology they wish to push. They refuse to recognise that, until well into the 19th Century British subjects were being regularly seized and enslaved by the pirates who operated freely under the flag of Islam from North Africa. Anybody ever wonder why the French attacked Algeria and annexed it? No, thought not, mainly it was to stop the raiding of the coast of the South of France and the disruption of trade in the Mediterranean originating from the various Bey's of this that and the next controlling the coasts of Algiers, Tunisia, Libya and the rest. In 1836 a British Fleet assisted in an assault on Algiers for just that reason, Algiers based raiders had seized one too many merchant ships under British Flag.

OK, so we turned the trans Atlantic slave trade into a factory style process - that is one of the features of the English, usually slow to get off the starting block on anything, we simply don't know when to stop. Ask the residents of Hamburg, Dresden or one or two other German cities. Take a look at the same morons now in charge of education and you will see the same thing at work. They have spent so long campaigning for their "cause" that they can't see it has gone far enough and that it should now come to a gentle halt and consolidate what they have - not strive for more.

However, one of the more stupid assertions made by the "beat Britain for its slave trade" is that the Army or the Navy was engaged in capturing slaves in West Africa. If these morons knew their history instead of their prejudice they would know that the slaves were rounded up by locals who sold them to the Arab traders to their North as well. It was the Royal Navy and the Army that put a stop to the tribal wars that fuelled this from 1820 onwards, not an exercise in getting more slaves but in bringing peace to a region that had never had it! On the East Coast of Africa the slave trade continued in Arab Dhows well into the 20th Century, although, again, it was the Royal Navy that was hard at work to suppress it. Trouble was, being the other side of Africa and not affecting British shipping or people (except occasionally!) it was of little interest to the same bunch of wankers who now want our history suppressed. There is still slavery practised in the Islamic states, but you won't find that in any "multi-cultural" history.

It does worry me a lot that even today most of our kids either know so little of what really happened, or get their history directly from movies (Braveheart anyone) As a nation we can't really understand who we are until we know how we got here. This also goes right back to the claiming of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as British, because they aren't, they're English and have nothing to do with Britain as a whole despite the ludicrous claims of our current Prime Minister.