Dan Snow's History Hit - Our Love Affair with History

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

From the great battles such as Dunkirk, historical titans such Alexander the Great and historical oddities such as Henry VIII's enemas Dan speaks to author and historian Dominic Sandbrook about what it is that sparks a passion for history. They also discuss the challenges of writing and podcasting about history and Dominic's new series of books Adventures in Time which aim to bring the past alive for twenty-first century children, allowing them to discover the thrills and spills of history within a page-turning narrative.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a fellow podcaster on the pod this time, Dominic Sandbrook, host of the brilliant The Rest of History podcast. He was, like me, a TV presenter at the BBC, but unlike me, he's also written a slew of brilliant, best-selling, highly acclaimed history books as well. He's now a podcaster as well as an author, but he's also decided to take a new tack. He's writing some history books for kids, and we both agreed, as we have kids have kids the same age that there is a kind of weird gap in the market which is a rare thing in our capitalist world of competing interests there's a sort of gap in the market for history for a certain age group we're in danger of losing kids at that particular age so after the horrible history's excitement of being young and

has been chopped off and before they can start getting to kind of adult popular history there's a gap and he's trying to fill it good luck to him in this podcast we talk about history talk about broadcasting it studying it writing it what makes good history stories to tell and engage young people interesting stuff if you wish to log on to watch the world's best history channel you can now do so anywhere in the world all you have to do is go to historyhit.tv you head over there and for a small subscription less than the cost of a cocktail every month you get access to history hit tv we've got documentaries going very well at the moment this week on the final 100 days of the first world war the series of largely forgotten victories won by the american brit British and French allies and others on the Western Front fighting the Germans in 1918. We all remember the great sort of futile sailmates

of the First World War. Very few of us talk about the succession of enormous and significant victories that ended that war 103 years ago this month. So please head over and do that. Those documentaries are great and they're doing really well. So thanks for everyone watching this and thanks for all the feedback that you've sent me about those documentaries as well. In the meantime, folks, here is the very brilliant Dominic Sandbrook. Enjoy.

Dominic, thanks so much for coming on the pod. Thank you so much, Dan. It's a pleasure to come on your pod. I have to say, I am a huge admirer of you and your podcast. I'm an admirer of your resilience, I think is the thing. Because I know it's kind of hard when you're overtaken by a younger and sprightlier podcast. He's coming out swinging.

Oh, my goodness. You've shown really impressive stamina and self-belief to keep going in the face of such fierce competition. So well done to you. You know what this reminds me of? It's like when the All Blacks do their hacker and then teams have to work out what to do. Sometimes they go and have a chat somewhere else

and sometimes they look a bit sort of… What is he going to do? Is he going to sing his national anthem? Yeah, and then you're like Keith Wood or whatever he was in Ireland, like South Africa 96 or whatever, and he's right up to them, screaming. Yeah, exactly. Just don't do what the lions did in

2005 when they threw a sort of feather or something they got alistair campbell was the uh god the press advisor to that so woodward was the coach it was an absolute shambles anyway we're getting sidetracked we are getting slightly sidetracked to be honest but um how's your lad who's your editor on this project, your consultant? Chief battle consultant. He is nine. He's called Arthur. So the story of it, there is a story. Every great series has an origin myth, right? I mean, Arthur himself is an origin myth, right?

You're obviously fond of those. Exactly. So he was doing evacuees at school in year three, and they all dressed up as evacuees, and they sang patriotic songs, which obviously as a columnist for the Daily Mail I greatly admired. And a half term, we took him to the Imperial War Museum and sort of halfway around, I said to him, basically to stop him climbing on tanks and stuff, I'll buy you a book in the gift shop. And we got to the gift shop and I couldn't quite find the right thing. And that sort of way that we historians do, I sort of thought to myself, you know what, it's weird,

there's this hole, you's weird there's this hole, you know, there's horrible histories, but that's not really stories. And I think it's so important that kids learn the great stories, the great characters, have a sense of narrative. And I just thought, why not have a go myself? And actually that's been just such an interesting and provocative kind of challenge to tell a story in a sort of sensible and responsible way, but in an exciting way for younger readers. Well, I'm glad you have done that because my daughter is 10 and we've graduated from like baby history. And I don't know, what is the bridging? Well, now I know what it is,

which is Dominic Sandbrook, but I don't think there was really a kind of, obviously the school-y stuff, but for reading for pleasure, there didn't seem to be a kind of gateway drug into adult history. i think that's right and so now there is and i enjoy your books very much they are now on the snow family um reading list and also because it is a tough age because they're very sophisticated right yeah it's older children young adult however you want to call them pre-teens and yet they're not sophisticated enough to go into like maybe some of the mass rape around the fall of berlin 1945 you know like it's so yeah you wouldn't go in on that would you and yet they're not sophisticated enough to go into like maybe some of the mass rape around the fall of Berlin in 1945 you know like it's so yeah you wouldn't go in on that would you and yet they are very much sophisticated enough to start discussing ideas around I don't know it's hard

man I mean how do you tell the story of these two gigantic conflicts for that age group here's the thing I think you tell the story you don't have to massively over complicate things by worrying too much the core of history I mean the reason that you and I, and probably lots of the listeners of this podcast get interested in history was because of story and character. You know, those are the things human beings, often quite ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, that's what gets our juices flowing. It's true of you when you wrote about the Seven Years' War, maybe not so much true of me in writing about the Harold Wilson government. I mean, those aren't really extraordinary circumstances, but you know what I mean? It's sort of human beings. And I think writing about the Harold Wilson government. I mean, those aren't really extraordinary circumstances. But you know what I mean.

It's sort of human beings. And I think that's the key to it. It's telling the stories to individuals. So the First World War, I started the First World War by talking about Gavrilo Princip. He's a boy. He's sent away by his mother from their little village, Obliai, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He's sent to Sarajevo. He reads kind of stories of Derringdew. He's a great

lover of Sherlock Holmes. School doesn't work out, bad reports, drops out, falls behind, becomes seduced by Serbian nationalism, ends up flirting with the Black Hand organization. And of course, we all know it's the story of radicalization, basically. And actually, you can tell that story to children. completely will get it they'll understand how he a boy feels miserable he's been sent away he joins a crusade and then he murders franz ferdinand an amazing set piece you know one of the great set pieces in all history one of the great turning points so right then you've got your kickoff point and then it's sort of obviously working in characters like the Kaiser and so on and so forth. I mean, I started the First World War book with the story of Tolkien. So I've got

a bloke on the Somme, young man, his friends are dying around him. He loses almost all his closest friends from school, all but one. Lots of the members of the rugby team he played in have been killed. And he's sitting there and he's daydreaming, which we know that Tolkien did. He's daydreaming about goblins, battles, this sort of late Victorian Edwardian kind of imaginative world that he has. And that's what provides the sort of genesis of his Middle-earth stories. And I thought that's the way in

because lots of them will know about the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. They'll know about goblins and wizards with swords and all this sort of stuff. So there's your story. You say, that's the way in. This is the story behind it. Let's explore what happened.

And I think telling it through individuals like that, actually, that can give children a really good hook. And actually, you know what? Academic historians will always say, well, that's not really what history is about. But we know deep down an element of common sense will tell you that is really what history is about. The closer you get to the mosaic, the more that you see that it's made up of all these individual little dots. I love the way you talk about Geoffrey Wellham in your Second World War book. I think you

brought up some amazing characters. As you're talking, I'm thinking to myself suddenly, like, it's one of the reasons that we retreated from this space is because it became a bit more tricky to write about because history has become more ambiguous. Like when I was a kid, I was raised, anachronistically, because I'm not actually five million years old, but even in the 80s, my house was full of kind of Edwardian adventure books. Yeah, mine too. G.A. Henty. Right, exactly.

So that's why you and I are slightly bizarre people. But I had a kind of weird late imperial upbringing long after the British Empire ceased to exist. I suspect certain members of our cabinet might have shared that, given some of their behaviours. But it seems to me there was a huge flowering of that kind of literature for those, particularly boys, for that age, in that period. Yeah.

And maybe as it became more difficult to write about those things, did authors retreat from it? Because when I was reading about Wolfe at Quebec or Clive in India or Wellington in the Pulitzer it was unproblematic uncontroversial so therefore what's it like now writing for young people and talking about things like empire and whether it's Slavian or Alexander Burke or whether it's allying with Stalin in your second world war book like how do you write about those things now I think the more you stress about it, the more complicated it gets. And if you're actually just matter of fact about it. So sure,

we allied with Stalin. He's a bad guy. But children are used to the idea of people allying with baddies. I mean, I sort of thought the children who read these books will be used to the Marvel films, to the world of Star Wars, to the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter. And in all of those worlds, there is shades of grey and moral ambiguity. Sometimes people do deals with baddies, people change sides. Children can completely take all that. And they can also take on board that protagonists are flawed, I think. So let's say Churchill in the Second World War. You can say right at the outset, Churchill was sometimes very badly behaved. He was a staunch imperialist. He was regarded as unreliable, a loose cannon, all of those kinds of things that we say about him now. I mean, you can absolutely

say all those things and still paint him. I think it'd be mad to write, by the way, to history, the Second World War, in which Churchill is not on the side of the light, as it were. So I think you can do all that, actually. You mentioned Alexander the Great. There's only one way to tell the story of Alexander the Great, and that's a great adventure story, which it is. And that's the way that for hundreds and thousands of years, people have told it. So I don't massively stress about it. It's definitely true that writing, let's say, the First World War, if I'd written that 20 or 30 years ago, I'd have written it more oblivious to the global dimension, I think. So right now, I'm much more conscious writing it about, let's say, Sikh soldiers. You have the story that a lot of children do at school already of Walter Tull,

the black soldier who had played football before the war and then dies in 1918 heroically, kind of leading his men. So there are lots of kinds of stories like that or stories about women serving in the war. I mean, I've got some great stories. There's a girl called Marina Yurlova. You may know the story, the Cossack girl she was called. So she basically, war is declared, Russia is fighting Germany and Austria-Hungary. Her father is, I think, a major or something like that in some sort of Cossack town. There's just a general sense of confusion and milling around. And she goes down to the station with a load of the peasants. She basically just gets on a troop train. And I don't think she ever sees her family ever again. She's 14 or 15. And she goes off. They go off to the Caucasus. She falls

asleep. She wakes up. They're there. And I think at that point, she thinks to herself, that might have been a bad move to get on that train. But she's made a bed now. She's going to lie on it. So she ends up being taken up by a regiment as a kind of mascot. She has a uniform, she sees action. Then she has this incredible journey, she ends up fighting the Russian Civil War and ends up, I think, as a dancer in America. Stories like that, which you might not have told 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, because you'd be, the experience of women might not be very much on your mind. Kids love all that kind of thing. And sure, there's always an element of ambiguity about it i think there's a tendency among a lot of historians now to be incredibly introspective and self-flagellating to kind of be policing themselves for anything vaguely cancelable

and i think if you just crack on and tell the story in a sensible but admittedly for a 21st century diverse audience but i don't think you need to be massively kind of hand-wringing about it. Let's team ahead and damn the tweets. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, I'm talking to Dominic Sandbrook. More coming up. What did Tudor men like their women to look like?

They should have broad shoulders, fleshy arms, fleshy legs and broad hips. What did 17th century Londoners think of coffee? A syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. And what did executioners wear? A lot of these guys, they were clothes horses because it's a big public spectacle. All the eyes are on you. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast,

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and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Was it fun? Because you've always written these fantastically scholarly books and engaging books about the more recent history. Did you feel rather excitable and promiscuous, just delving into ancient history and writing about D-Day? I mean, when you're writing about D-Day, it feels like you're doing a particular piece of history on it. It's wonderful. You are. Oh, D-Day or Dunkirk. So like Dunkirk, for example, I wrote that chapter and I told the story of the bloke.

Everybody listening to this podcast will know the story about the guy, Lytola, who takes his yacht over his pleasure boat and it's clearly the inspiration for the Christopher Nolan film, Dunkirk, and he loads all these men on and he's dodging stookers and all this stuff on the way there and the way back. An incredible story, perhaps to some of us adults, slightly clichéd because we know how it ends. We've seen the film.

A lot of people will kind of roll their eyes at the little ships and all this sort of thing. But as my editor, Simon Winder at Penguin, who edits lots of big history books, and he said to me, the funny thing about this, he said, I don't think I've edited many books before where the readers don't know what's going to happen. I mean, they don't know they get away at Dunkirk.

They don't know that D-Day works. And for some of them, it'll literally be the first time they encounter this story. So you can actually really revel in the drama and uncertainty of it. Those things that you and I would absolutely recognize, you're talking about G.A. Henty. When we read history for the first time, Dan, when we were 8, 9, 10, 11,

did we know that Wolfe was going to win at Quebec and then die? Did we know that Nelson was going to be shot at the end of the Battle of Trafalgar? You know, that sense of narrative drama that is so key to our love of stories, generally as human beings, that we kind of lose with history the older we get because we feel like we know it all and we've seen it all before.

Rediscovering that was such a joy. Yeah, and also you do this wonderful podcast in which you narrate great chunks of history. And the hardest thing I think is not forgetting what people don't know. Like, you know, you mentioned Lytle there and you and I are like, oh, of course, we didn't mention he was a second lieutenant on the Titanic. He was, right. Exactly. What an amazing life. Amazing life. And it's a really annoying thing when I meet listeners and they go, I really like that podcast, but by the did X happen I can't believe I didn't even say that before yeah so as you say like getting to a place we're not assuming any knowledge must be very exciting indeed and also exciting to be writing about Spitfires and Alexander the Great's heavy companion cavalry

of course those are kind of deep down the things that got us into history so it's quite nice to be allowed to kind of write about them I guess given that permission completely i was an academic historian and um if somebody ever mentioned a love of these things that was very in for a dig you know that was kind of very declassé you're kind of letting down the academic side but deep down that's why we were all in the room because we'd all fallen in love with those stories when we were 12 and actually reveling in that and being unashamed about it. So, you know, D-Day or, I mean, they don't have to be those canonical stories. So there's a story in the Second World War book, which I'd come across because I'd reviewed it for the Sunday Times, about how the Danes helped the Jews escape from Denmark. Very well-known story, particularly in Scandinavia.

So Denmark's got quite a small Jewish population the Germans have invaded they conquered Denmark before breakfast famously because the Danes think there's basically no point spilling lots of blood unnecessarily and the Danes they know that the decent German official has basically tipped them the wink the Jewish population is going to be round up the Danes hide them in their cellars and their basements and their summer houses and then basically this sort of secret signal they take them all out and they take them to the coast, to the sort of northwest coast of Denmark. And they take them just across that narrow straight to neutral Sweden in fishing boats. So it's kind of like a Dunkirk style scenario to some extent. But that story, that's not that well known in the English speaking world. And it's such a lovely kind of inspirational

story. So telling those kinds of things, it doesn't's such a lovely kind of inspirational story. So telling those kinds of things, it doesn't always have to be kind of massive blood and thunder and people with machine guns. So my son read each chapter as I wrote it, and he is very much a boy of the G.A. Henty, Dan Snow school. So he would give massive ticks in the margin when there was mention of guns. And sometimes he'd cross out the word soldiers and write in stormtroopers next to it, just kind of randomly. And then when I did the six wives of Henry VIII,

he loved all hanging, drawing and quartering. So those kinds of details. And I think having done school talks, I can safely say that he's not alone because whenever you basically mention any sort of disemboweling, the kind of eight or nine-year-old eyes light up with joy. Yeah, when I'm doing school,

my go-to is Henry VIII's body bursting in the coffin, allegedly. And if I'm losing the crowd, which I usually am when you're talking to a primary school, you throw that one down and, my God, you got them. You got them for another minute or two. Do you want a tip? Do you want another arrow in your quiver? Yes, I do. So it's Henry VIII's enemas. You know about his enemas?

No. So they'd get this silver tube and they would shove it up his bottom. And it was attached to a pig's bladder full of honey and milk. And they just squirt to clean him out because he was so badly constipated. Now we're talking. Now my editor, Simon Winder at Penguin, said to me, I think that detail is too strong for children. And I was like, Simon, your children are too grown up. You've forgotten what it's like. They love that. Well, Simon writes the most beautiful books in his own right

he's been on this podcast as well and he is not one to talk because he includes all sorts of extraordinary details I'm very glad he does there's an awful lot about sausages in his German books as I recall there's all sorts about like Gregorian chants and then he goes I'm now boring myself with this so I will move on to the next chapter anyway um so you mentioned the eighth day you're doing the whole goddamn thing you're doing human history what's the plan so i've done four i've done second world war heavenly the eighth first world war and alexander i've just this week finished cleopatra which was a fantastic i mean amazing characters in cleopatra i mean you got you've got Cleopatra, you've got Pompey, you've got Mark Antony, Octavian, you know, Julius Caesar. I've heard of them, yeah.

So I've just done Cleopatra. I'm going to be doing the Vikings. I'm going to do a Napoleon. And I'm going to do the Conquest of the Americas, though there's still some dispute about the title. I thought you were going to say there's some dispute about the historiography of the Conquest of the Americas. I was like, yes, there is, Dominic.

Yes, there is, buddy, yeah. There definitely is. So on the one hand hand the aztecs with their lovely beads and on the other hand the spanish landing and killing everybody i mean what's not to like for a children's book and then so that's the first eight and then if anybody has bought any of them there might be some more so we shall see when you're writing grown-up history to be honest i spend the few books i've done obviously compared to you but i spend a lot of time worrying about the four people in the world who know more than i do about this subject and i worry about my footnotes my end notes and my showing off and presumably that's quite different really because you've given you just go actually screw that it's quite pure you're just

going are the kids going to keep reading this goddamn exactly so there's no footnotes obviously at the end there's still that tiny little bit of the academic in me that thinks i need to say I read this book, this book, this book, this book, this book, just to sort of acknowledge my sources. But you're right, there's nothing like that. And I think what there is, it's very like doing journalism, you just have to make up your mind, what people are doing and what the story is. Now, that's obviously completely different from a very nuanced book for adults, where you're like, well, there are different versions of how Alexander died, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, kids don't want it. They just want, like, tell me the bloody story.

You know, was he poisoned or did he die of malaria or something? Make up your mind. And it's actually quite a good discipline. You just have to make up your mind. Who were the goodies, who were the baddies in the Second World War? Or are there any goodies and baddies? Was Anne Boleyn, was she a sort of conniving character or is she greatly misunderstood? And in Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling knows what her characters are like. And I think as a historian

writing for children, you also have to know what your character is like. Of course, you can suggest shades of grey. You can say some men said that Alexander was this. I think you can do that a little bit, but you can't just immerse the child reader in this great fog of dithering uncertainty. You just have to make up your mind. And that is incredibly liberating. Do you write the beginning of each book? What follows may not be true. Never. Really? Okay. The penguin tagline is the stories that are too good for fiction or something. And what's more, they're all true. Oh, right, okay. And the author's notes, I will sometimes say,

there's a bit of uncertainty about this. I may have invented some details here. So I think you have to be reasonably honest with the reader. You can't lie to them. It's a very different challenge, isn't it? But is it, though, Dan? I mean, when you wrote your Seven Years' War book. It was childlike.

It was true. No, but when you wrote it, you must have had a sense of drama. No, totally, totally. You know, ships on the seas. And the techniques that you use are just slightly diluted versions of the ones that you would use. Okay, you might dial up the melodrama in a children's book, but in a book about the Seven Years' War, let's say,

or indeed a book about Alexander, you'd want to have drama, wouldn't you? I mean, it'd be mad not to. Can't miss it. Get run over by the goddamn drama. Yeah. I'm not trying to sell your book for you. Well, I'm glad someone is. Can I ask, is the most annoying thing that you ever get asked by people, how do you get kids interested in history? I go, have you ever met kids? They bloody love history. It's the weirdest thing people say to me. I was like, what are you talking about? Kids are bonkers about history. How do you stop kids being interested in history it's a far more interesting question i think the default is to be interested in history yeah they love it and some kids are turned off it because they think it's just homework i think if you have the accent on the story i think the great thing

about history for kids and i think the great error actually is to make it narcissistic so history is all about you it's all about you sitting here in the 21st century. I think one of the great joys of history is escapism. It takes you outside your world, but it also reminds you that you're just a pretty small person in the grand scheme of things. And that there have been lots of other people before you who've trod the earth, who had wildly different belief systems, expectations, hopes, and anxieties. And yet the fascination is that in some ways they're not so different. And children love that idea that there are these people. Catherine of Aragon grew up as a little girl in the Alhambra.

She had toys, a kind of pull-along dog or something. She liked sweets, all this kind of stuff. So she's not so different and yet she's completely different and i think they're fascinated by the tension between those two things yeah it's a good point that narcissism people often ask how people should teach history i don't know because i'm not actually a teacher i've never taught history in my life but yeah my gut is to say go with passion and what i like about what you're doing is you're going you know what because alexander great and it's not because that was going to teach young people how liberal democracy grew up in the West

or how we came to have industrial capitalism, but it's because that's something you're passionate about. It's a great story. And I think teachers probably should be let off the hook. I don't think it matters enormously what they're teaching in history as long as they're teaching history, right? Is that a crazy thing?

No, I agree with you completely, Dan. And actually, where I also agree with you is I think i think most well basically all history teachers that i've ever met seem to be incredibly passionate and to do a brilliant job i don't think i've ever met a history teacher primary or secondary who was kind of jaded disaffected didn't like the subject and unenthusiastic by and large they always are full of ideas full of of enthusiasm. And I agree with you. I think, what child have you ever met that enjoyed being preached to? I mean, none. I think, of course, there are things you can try to teach through history, but it shouldn't be primarily a vehicle for kind of preachiness. I mean, enjoy ancient Egypt. Enjoy the glamour and exoticism of it. You don't have to constantly

be debunking. There's lots of time for debunking later. That's one of what I thought about Dunkirk or something. I thought, do you know what? They can have 10 years enjoying the story of the little ships, and they can have 10 years enjoying D-Day and Alexander fighting elephants and Henry VIII having his enemas and so on and so forth. And then they can have the next 50 years of people picking holes and saying, well, it's all much more complicated than that

and all the rest of it. No child wants to hear that first. They want to have the fun first and then the debunking afterwards. Yeah, I completely agree. Well, Dominic, well done. It's a great project and they're going to be well-thumbed

in the Snow household. So thank you very much for coming on. What are they all called? What's the franchise called? The franchise. I like the word franchise. The franchise is called Adventures in Time in time boom and your other franchise the podcast franchise is called the rest is history yeah you're very good in publicizing a rival podcast

i admire that leaving the rest of us in the dust ah that's not true it is true but i'm just saying it's not true just for the sake of it's very generous of you uh okay man well thanks for coming on this one. And I'll talk to you soon. Thank you. Pleasure. Cheers, Dan. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it here. This episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review,

give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in really appreciate it thank you