In the 1970s, when I was at school, it was simply because we were taught nothing about it. Nothing at all. Our history syllabus ended in 1870 and didn’t touch the British Empire; I could have told you all about Bismarck and his Kulturkampf, the Ems Telegram, Garibaldi and the Risorgimento, but nothing at all about British colonisation, Cromwell in Ireland, the East India Company, the Opium Wars, let alone the slave trade and its role in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. So, like many children of my generation, I found my British history away from school, in books. I became very interested in the subject, beginning in my primary school years. This was the heyday of the Ladybird ‘Adventure from History’ books, and I began to collect them with a feverish passion. Small, hardback, vivid colours, about fifty pages each – the text and image alternating, giving both knowledge and space for imagination. Kings and Queen of England, Book One. An entire reign crystallised in a single image. King Alfred the Great standing proudly on a clifftop watching his boats sailing against the Danes, Rufus felled in the New Forest by an arrow in the back of his head, and a truly terrifying image of a shadowy figure about to murder two young princes in their bed in the Tower of London – Richard III, of course. But I preferred the longer ones, on a single subject.
There was something eternally optimistic about these stories, often emphasising the overcoming of extremely adverse circumstances. Even today, when from the perspective of adulthood it’s impossible to ignore the colonial and racist nature of these books, I still retain a kind of affection for them. Especially for those brilliant and beguiling illustrations by John Kenney. Often I’d gaze for minutes at the details of those pictures – Francis Drake telling stories of his trip to America to a ten-year-old Walter Raleigh, surrounded by artefacts he’d brought back from the voyage: a spear, a decorated mask, a pipe; Captain Cook hunched over navigation charts, surrounded by burly Russian fishermen, trying to explain whether there was a route further to the north, through to the Atlantic – the fabled ‘North-West Passage’. And that, possibly, remains a positive aspect of these books, that they made their young readers curious about the wider world, in a similar way to the Tintin books, which I loved as well, but now can be similarly critiqued on so many levels. Whatever I think today, I cannot deny that these pages were the first to thrill me into learning about history and the past.
For a few months, when I was around six or seven, I was entranced by Richard the Lionheart. Perhaps some of this attributable to the association with my most loved animal, but there was also something magnificent in his doomed quest. The attempt to reach Jerusalem. The obsessive pursuit of the crusades. The drama of his life. His capture in Vienna, trying to return to England, a king now disguised as a merchant on a donkey. But the picture I returned to, the one which mesmerised me, was the mythical meeting with Saladin – the coming together of the two enemies and cultures. Richard demonstrates his leonine strength by cutting a metal bar with a single blow of his sword. Saladin responds by slicing a silk scarf in half with his scimitar. In the picture, both men are smiling, momentarily their enmity is suspended. Both have proved themselves; there is more than one way of winning. But perhaps the most telling aspect of this page in the book is that the meeting never actually happened. It was completely compelling and real to me as a child, but had no factual basis in reality whatsoever – it was more about our need to believe it had happened; that is to say, the creating of a narrative, a myth.
Naturally, when revisiting these books as an adult, you are shocked at the propagandistic power that the author (L. du Garde Peach, MA, PhD, DLitt) and illustrator (John Kenney) wielded. The power, through their simplistic texts and vivid illustrations, to influence an entire generation of young minds in the English-speaking world, about the ‘benevolent’ role of England’s kings and queens and, later, the British Empire. One of the Ladybird books I read again and again – to the extent that even today I can still see certain pages vividly in my mind – was the one on Sir Walter Raleigh. Reading this as a seven- or eight-year-old boy, of course I had almost no critical judgement, except whether I particularly liked, or disliked, a specific illustration. Everything read at that age is taken on trust, and absorbed, just as the adventure books of Karl May and Gustav Frenssen would have been to the German children growing up a hundred years ago, who, thirty years later, occupied all the senior positions of the Third Reich. So imagine the effect of a passage like this on generations of British children – it’s taken from the Raleigh book, as he’s looking at maps with Queen Elizabeth I, surrounded by parchments and a golden globe, asking her for permission to explore in America. The queen grants this permission, and then L. du Garde Peach informs us: ‘Of course, in those days, not many people had been to North America, and it was inhabited only by a few tribes of red indians. But Raleigh saw that it was good land, the sort of country in which Englishmen could plant [sic] farms and make a good living.’
The last page of the book shows Raleigh in the Tower of London, but our narrator reminds us that ‘whenever we think of the age of Elizabeth, we think of the gallant gentleman-adventurer who founded the beginnings of the British Empire’.
A similar, entirely nationalistic, narrative is taken up in Captain Cook. One of the pictures, as Cook and his crew reach New Zealand, shows a boat of dark-skinned warriors brandishing spears and knives against sailors on a British ship. We are briefly informed that ‘Here he was attacked by some of the natives, called Maoris, and was obliged to fire on them in self-defence. Cook always treated natives well, and it was unfortunate that he was on this occasion forced to take such action.’
The cover illustration shows Cook, dressed immaculately in white breeches and a navy blue and gold jacket, watching as a sailor hoists the Union Jack up a flagpole. This episode happened, we’re informed, after Cook’s ship was grounded on the Great Barrier Reef, off the north-eastern shore of Australia. The ship was eventually repaired, and they were able to sail away:
but before leaving the northernmost cape of Australia, Captain Cook landed and hoisted the British flag. By doing this he claimed Australia for Britain, and it remains today, like Canada, a great self-governing Dominion in the British Commonwealth.
You land on a foreign shore, raise the Union Jack, and the land instantly becomes British.fn2 The end of Cook’s ‘adventures’ finds our hero in the Hawaiian islands, being treated ‘like a god’ by the Maui people, ‘but this did not prevent the natives, who were great thieves, from trying to steal anything they could from the ship’. It is this ‘unfriendly attitude of the natives’ that leads to Cook’s death, when he demands the return of a boat that they have stolen.
The Ladybird narrative of history continues: fearless, adventurous Englishmen claiming new lands for the British Empire; feckless, deceitful natives trying to steal from or attack our heroic travellers. It’s easy to laugh at such crude representations from the vantage point of adulthood, but I wonder how they shaped the minds of generations of young British children.
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I assumed that the teaching of history must have changed significantly in the last thirty years, that there would surely be a far greater emphasis today on looking honestly at Britain’s past. I decided to start by asking my two nieces – who were then seventeen and eighteen – about their experiences of learning about British history at school over the previous decade or so. I was not reassured by what I found out.