The Rest Is History - 70. Children’s History

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

Tom and Dominic discuss how to write history books for kids. What topics are they interested in? What will they find boring? How much detail is acceptable when writing about mass killings and violence? And why it's best to get an 8 year old to do the proof reading A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. How to avoid history. No one have ever found a way of avoiding history. It is upon us and around us all. The only thing when you look at the cunning, villainous faces in our class, you wonder if history may not soon be worse than ever. If the hist master go on enough, you begin to believe that death is really upon

you. You have something wrong with your heart which have stopped beating. Your jaw is stuck open and you cannot close it. Also, you're going blind. On the whole, it is better to put up with the hist lesson and draw beetles on the blotch quietly. The wise words of 1950s schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, or rather of his creators, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. Now, Nigel Molesworth, one of my heroes when I was a child, was not a fan of history or of history lessons or indeed of history books. But writing for children is one of the great challenges, I think, for any writer, no matter what the genre i've been doing it tom you've been writing um books for young adults young adults is basically teenagers is that right so i believe yeah so so i believe yeah so you've got you've got two books coming out this week yeah yes um

that's the first of july so you've shamelessly shoehorned this into an episode of the podcast. Well, it's an interesting... There's two things to say about this podcast. One, it is pure, shameless, naked self-promotion. And the second is it is actually a genuinely really fascinating topic that even people who have no interest in history, and indeed no children, often have very strong opinions about. How do you tell the story of the past for people in short trousers have no interest in history and indeed no children often have very strong opinions about what how do

you tell the story of the past for people you know in short trousers um dominic sandbrook being sincere yeah i am being since well that's just the sincerity and then we can get back to the self-promotion hopefully in um in a second right so i've got i've got actually got the the proofs of your two books that are coming out yes um and And they are on the Second World War and the Six Wives of Henry VIII. Yeah. So you're going straight in. Yeah. With two really obscure little loans.

Two obscure fields of history there. Because basically people complain, don't they? Nazis and Tudors. Nazis and Tudors. Hitler and Henry. And you've gone for that, presumably. That's what the kids want. Well, I think there's – so, yes, this is a series called Adventures in Time.

And, yeah, when I first talked about it with the publishers of Penguin, they sort of said, should we do the Nazis and Tudors first? And I thought, yeah, why not? I mean, you're not going to do the Industrial Revolution and the Seven Years' War as you're opening two salvos in a campaign to kind of, you know, share the joys of the past with the nation's youngsters. But they're not just being published in Britain,

so that's been quite interesting. For example, the Second World War one is also coming out in Germany. Do you have any changes for that? No, interestingly. The German publishers said, it's very English. But they said... Am I not right? I think you mentioned this to me that you initially began with Hitler in the trench losing his dog. Yes. So the opening of the Second World War one, the first chapter, I was trying to think of a way,

how on earth are you going to tell this story, the Second War, to children who haven't done the First World War, who don't know where all the countries are and all that stuff? And I thought, well, you just start with the protagonist. With the dog. You start with the dog, yeah. You start with Hitler. Like Enid Blyton.

And I start with Hitler as a boy. You know, Hitler as a boy, he goes off to fight in the First World War. His shattering experience that that that sort of poisons his mind Hitler turning to darkness as it were I mean that's quite a familiar trajectory in children's stories and it is the trajectory of Hitler's life obviously I mean we had that two episodes with Ian Kershaw didn't we and he was saying you know there's Hitler's not a monster from the beginning. He's maybe damaged or he's maybe had a traumatic childhood or whatever, but he's not a

mass murderer straight away. So taking children into that story is interesting. Right. And so you set him up with a dog. He's a guy with a lovable dog. Yeah, but the dog had to go. And I think that then your son, he was eight? Well, he was eight when he read it. Well, he was eight when he read it, yeah. He was eight when he read it. So is Hitler the hero? Yeah.

So the way this works, right, I should explain the backstory. So my son's school, they were doing evacuees as their termly topic. So they had a day when they dressed up as evacuees. And only in Britain, of course, would people do this because in any other country it would be such a traumatic experience. Whereas his school, they actually put on a thing where they sang wartime songs. It's just pre-COVID, so it was brilliant.

I loved it. But my son complained. He said, well, we don't do enough about tanks or battles. You know, the evacuee stuff is great, but I want to know about the sort of narrative of the war. at half term we took him to the imperial war museum which for people who are not british listeners it's this amazing museum in london yeah full tanks was basically a museum about the world wars and britain's experience of war in the 20th century and after and as we we went around the museum and he was

quite enthusiastic but in that way that children he started to sort of flag and not i could see he wasn't really reading all the captions and he was just tempted to start climbing on gun barrels and whatever um and i said well if you can go around without climbing on any more weaponry um when we get to the gift shop i'll get you a book on the second world war and there wasn't really there wasn't really the right kind of thing. So they were all kind of Usborne-y books with lots of pictures, or they were horrible histories, but there wasn't a really

rollicking narrative. And I said, I'm amazed that Anthony Beaver or Max Hastings or somebody hasn't done... James Holland. James Holland, exactly, hasn't done a kid's history of the Second World War. My brother has done Lady Bird books.

He's done a Lady Bird book, but those are Lady Bird books. But they're for adults, aren't they? Named for adults, exactly. And I sort of thought, well, you know, there's a whole market. Tom Holland will get in on this if I'm not careful. And I just thought you could – I mentioned it idly to my editor. You know, you could do a whole series of, you call them adventures in time,

Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, Henry VIII, the Second World War. And, you know, he said, great, do it. So I did. And I got my son to read each chapter as I wrote it and said, basically, tell me what's boring. Tell me what you don't understand. A good example is I had the phrase, in 1929, the world economy tottered

or something. He said, what's the economy? And I was like, Christ, how do you explain that? The world money system? I mean, it sounds so weak. So I had to think of another way of doing it. And Hitler and his dog was one of the key stumbling points. Because at the point where Hitler has his dog in the trenches, my son said, oh, is he the hero? And I said, no, he's going to turn out to be the villain. He said, well, he can't have a dog. I mean, the hero has a dog. The villain never has a dog.

He's right, isn't he? He was right. The dog had to go. I took the dog out. It was tipping the scales too much in Hitler's favour. So the dog had to go. I could have given the dog to Churchill I suppose but I just took the dog out

yeah, well Churchill is a black dog, yeah, it's depression well you very nobly said in your author's note, the first drafts of this book were read and edited by Arthur Sandbrook and Connolly Norman aged 8, so any mistakes are definitely their fault that's good punch them down

you've got to have someone to blame haven't you yeah yeah okay well i think that's enough self-promotion oh no what what we've got i thought we had hours to fill i i think it is but um it's interesting the lack of narrative accounts that you highlighted yeah because we grew up with narrative accounts didn't we i mean um, we've got a question from Jonathan Calder about Lady Bird history books. I mean, they were always pure narrative. So for every British listener, I would imagine, to this podcast will know what we're talking about. But for the overseas listeners, they're small books. What are they?

They're about, I've got a couple of them here. They're 50 pages long. They're little hardbacks. And they're very basic kind of narratives of, I narratives of the ones I've got with me right now, Oliver Cromwell, Warwick the Kingmaker, James I and the Gunpowder Plot. I mean, I owed so much of my understanding of history as a boy to those books. Didn't you? Were you a big Lady Bird fan?

Less so. What? To be honest. I'm stunned by that so the book the book that i really loved uh was the one that i i when i put up um a tweet asking for um questions on this topic and to illustrate it i put up um an illustration of my favorite book as a child history book which was um a history of the world by a guy called Plantagenet Somerset Frye did you ever come across him no no I you mentioned it and I'd never heard of this okay so he wasn't actually called Plantagenet he was called Peter okay he was called Plantagenet because he was a big fan of Richard III oh he's a Ricardian

okay well eccentric position when he was writing i guess yeah in the 60s and 70s um and he he was he was a brilliant guy because i i didn't know this when i um when i read it as a child but he um he was a kind of famous dandy at university he had a cape and a gold top cane um he was Thorpe. He was a founding member of the Liberal Democrats. Talking Jeremy Thorpe. So there was a Jeremy Thorpe thing going on. Yeah, there was a Jeremy Thorpe connection. And each year in the Times, he would put in, on the 15th of March,

he would put in a little note commemorating the death of Julius Caesar. What? And the reason that I liked him. Oh, and also, he won a jackpot on a TV quiz show. What was the Huey Green one? There was... W Money. W Money, yeah.

So he won lots of money on that. So he was a kind of interesting guy. But his real interest was ancient history. Okay. And the reason that I liked his history of the world was that rather than focusing on all the stuff that the Lady Bird books focused on, which was specifically British history, he majored on things like Samaria

and the New Kingdom and medieval China and all kinds of weird stuff like that and had fabulous illustrations. And basically, he focused on the Roman Empire. Yeah, who doesn't like the Romans? They were amazing. I can still, just sitting here, I can visualise them. There's one of Nero looking out at Rome on fire. There's one of the Roman soldiers looking up at Jesus on the cross.

There's a battle between the Romans and the Gauls. Absolutely loved it. There's the Sassanian king capturing the Roman emperor. Fabulous stuff. And that's really what I loved. And I thought that the Lady Bird books were a bit embarrassing. Embarrassing? Why embarrassing?

A little bit. Why were you embarrassed by the Lady Bird books? This is deranged. I felt slightly talked down to by them. I tell you what, I've picked a couple of my favourite bits out, actually. James I and the Gunpowder Plot. I like the strong views. King James was not a pleasant man.

Not only was he of ungainly appearance, he was also untrustworthy and deceitful. His lubberly, ungainly appearance, added to prejudice against the Scots, made him unwelcome. So she's very... L. Dugard Peach is the author of this. It's very down on James I. But do you know what he said about Guy Fawkes? He said, Guy Fawkes, he has Guy Fawkes being killed.

And then he says, thus died a man whose name has quite wrongly or mistakenly come to mean anyone of queer or foolish appearance. Guy or Guy Fawkes was neither. He was a brave man and a gentleman, a faithful friend to the limit of endurance, ready to die for the faith in which he believed. You must love that. Okay, well, but I think when I, because I was reading them in the 70s, I think even then they felt old fashioned. Oh, no, I think this is deranged. I think I loved the pure narrative elements of them. And I think, so that to me, I think there are two reasons

that children get interested in history. One of them is the fascination of the very unfamiliar, the sort of curiosity about the strange and exotic worlds, you know, that you just talked about with the ancient world. Completely. And the other thing is the story, is pure story. And one of the reasons I think I like the Lady Bird books was that Lady Bird didn't only do history,

they also did books about Robin Hood and King Arthur, who were my real passions when I was about five or six. And Peter and Jane. Well, they did do Peter and Jane. John and Jane. It was Peter and Jane. My dog is sick. My dog is dead.

All right, all right, Mr. Cynic. So they did that. They did the King Arthur and Robin Hood. And to me, I didn't really distinguish between the stories of King Arthur, let's say, and the story of Oliver Cromwell or James I or something. And I think to get children interested in history, it has to be about the story. There has to be a sense of narrative drama, of jeopardy, of character. Do you know what it is?

Yeah. I'm thinking about it, what I resented about the Lady Bird books. So they did one on Julius Caesar and the conquest of Britain. Julius Caesar and Roman Britain, yeah. Julius Caesar and Roman Britain. And I thought it was going to be about Julius Caesar. Yeah. And actually, a lot of it was about Roman Britain.

It was. And it was all about them building roads and things. Villas. I didn't want that. I wanted Julius Caesar. I think you can do a bit of both, though, Tom. No, I was disappointed. And I felt that I'd been sold, you dodgy goods dodgy goods i think there is quite a lot of riding

across harsh terrain in that that particular book there's not enough about stabbings in the senate chamber yes which is what you're after so you then wrote your own book on that basically basically yeah rubicon but what i remember is um that there were huge there were kind of huge narrative histories of Greece and Rome in the local library that I just I don't think they would exist now. I can't find them. No, but I think there was an appetite for them. I mean, I was

kind of really struck while writing my books and trying bits on children that maybe because they were just coerced or because I was bribing them, children generally said, who read them said they liked the story, they liked the sense of tension. I think you have to have, if you give them kids' characters, I mean, think about the appeal of Star Wars or The Hobbit

or Harry Potter to children. I mean, what they like are strong characters, well-defined. They can cope with a little bit of nuance, actually. It doesn't have to be incredibly simplistic. But a sense of urgency, a sense of pace in the narrative. I mean, actually, the weird thing is, I think, Tom, is that all those things are virtues of adult

narrative histories. So in a way, it's not that different an exercise telling history for children. Also, they like facts. Well, they like facts. Because I know I did. They can share, yeah, weird facts.

So here's a good example. Okay. In the Henry VIII book that I did, I had constant discussions with the editors about squeamish details. So about people's heads being cut off and exactly how that was done. And we had a fact there later on when Henry's enormously fat about how he has this greased tube pushed up his bottom. And he's given these enemas of like honey and all this kind of

thing to try and ease his piles and his enormous obesity. And it just makes him more bad tempered than ever. And my editor, who's not by any means a squeamish man, said, I wonder if this is a bit much for children, actually, you know, all this stuff about the enemas. And I gave this to about four or five children and said, what do you think? And they said, well, you know, this is basically the best bit in the whole book. And I think children love these kind of little,

curious kind of details. Why horrible histories? So horrible histories revolves, it's full of kind of enemas. It's all, yeah, it's enemas, enemas and execas and executions basically isn't it it's amusing ways that people amusing amusing stuff that people have done with poo yeah so horrible histories there's no narrative in horrible histories no it's a compilation of kind of curious facts and you're right i think kids like curious facts but i think they also they do like a bit of drama. And so I suppose what I tried to do was to combine those two things.

Because I remember, obviously, basically, I was only interested in ancient stuff. So I would read modern stuff, but slightly under-sufferance. And there were a series of books by a guy called Peter Connolly, who was a brilliant illustrator and a very very serious historian of of um the ancient military and he did a book called the roman army and then brilliantly the greek army and he did one on hannibal and the carthaginians and it combined um he he would do little so he'd tell the stories of various um periods of greek and roman history at the top. And then he'd give you lots and lots of facts about weaponry. And then he'd do great illustrations,

including people being stabbed with spears. And the combination for me was a complete winner. And that kind of sense of getting a lot of facts with great illustrations, I also like that. But that raises a really interesting question about violence, doesn't it, Tom? So we had a question from Lauren Markovich about this. I'll read you the whole question because there were two tweets. And it's quite an interesting one.

She says, my son was a voracious reader as a child, fascinated and insatiably curious about history. Negotiating what was appropriate for him, re-genocide, torture, warfare, etc., was challenging. I think we managed to navigate our way somehow, but there were a few calls from the school. We didn't want to sugarcoat or obfuscate, and his line of questioning was relentless. So while a parent can read their child and sort this out with some degree of success, but when you're writing history for a broader child audience, how does one approach this i mean i think okay so that's the question for you because obviously you have to include the holocaust you've written about the second world war yeah how so how do you deal with that well that was a really so the other the

other stuff in the second war i felt was kind of doable but the holocaust was a much more difficult question and i thought there were there In that, the Holocaust chapter, there had to be a whole chapter on it. And I had sort of three strategies, really. One was to... I mean, one of the great things, by the way, writing these books for a very... I mean, we're talking about children 8 to 12.

So often it's the very first time they encounter these stories. So I could tell stories without any fear that they would be kind of cliche. Well, they are cliches, but there wouldn't be any fear that children would recognize them as such because it might be the first time they've encountered them. So I said to my editor, well, should I shy away from Anne Frank? And he said, no, it's mad to not to do Anne Frank. She's the it's such a great story. So the whole chapter is framed around Anne Frank's experience. But within that, the two other things I did were,

one is to give the overview. And I think the only way to do that and to talk about Auschwitz and so on is to do it complete for children, is to just do it completely starkly. And, you know, not to indulge in the kind of pornography of violence, not to kind of tug the heartstrings unnecessarily, because that just seems exploitative and unnecessary. I think you can just tell the facts very plainly.

This is what happened. This is how many people died. You know, it's incredibly dark and evil chapter. But I don't think you need to kind of take the children into the gas chambers kind of in a sort of, in a sort of, as I say,

an exploitative way. But the other way I thought it would be an interesting thing to bring in would be it doesn't have to – I mean, obviously, it's an incredibly dark and distressing chapter of history, but there are, as it were, chinks of light within it. So I did, for example, the stories of people who saved Jews, the kind of Oskar Schindler type stories or nicholas winton the stockbroker um who who got lots of um children out to britain um but i also told them that's the one with that amazing

that's life that's life with all the people around him who turn out to be the children that he'd rescued yeah and actually so if anyone's not seen that, do, do. It's a real tearjerker. So they bring him onto the show and yeah, I won't spoil it, but you can find it on YouTube if you search for Nicholas Winton.

But the other story that I also find actually real tearjerker, and I found incredibly moving writing it, is the story about what happened in Denmark, about how basically the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population, they were hidden. There was a's Jewish population, they were hidden. There was a small population, but they were hidden by their neighbours. And then they were smuggled to Sweden in kind of fishing boats and so on. I remember going to the Holocaust Museum in maybe Washington.

I think it must have been Washington. And it was the only time I actually cried in the whole museum because the rest of the time I just felt, you know, deadened by it, overwhelmed by it, stunned by it. And that, because, and they showed one of the boats, they had one of the boats on the wall that had taken the refugees across to, across the sea. And because it was about people doing good, suddenly you felt licensed. Yeah. Yeah. I totally, suddenly you felt licensed. Yeah.

Yeah. I totally, I totally buy that. So I put that in and while I was writing it, you know, condensing this story into kind of 800 words or something and finding one or two characters who could tell it. And there's a story,

it's a student, I think his name is Wilhelm Lindt and he finds a, in the great movement of the crowd towards the quay. There's a girl who's separated from her parents, like a little girl, and she's crying. And he puts her on the handlebars of his bike, and he rides down to the quay and reunites with her parents, and they put her on the boat, and off she goes to Sweden. And it's an incredibly heartening and moving story. And he says himself, he was crying as the boat pulled away and he didn't know whether he was crying that they got so many people out

or whether he was crying with shame almost that this was happening at all. And I think, you know, those are the kinds of stories that stick in people's minds. And actually so much about getting children interested in history is through these individual moments, isn't it? Okay, well, I think we should have a break at this point. When we come back, perhaps we could look again at the issue of violence,

which I guess children, maybe particularly little boys, particularly keen on, I know that I was, and look at that question. So we'll be back in a few minutes. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news,

reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking history for children. And before the break, we were talking about, well, Dominic's written a book on Second World War, and we were talking about how do you write about something as terrible and monstrous as the Holocaust for children. But I guess one of the reasons why the Second World War is a raw subject is because it is so close. Yeah. So I mentioned the Plantagenet-Somerset Frye book, and there's a sequence in that, as I said, of the Romans fighting the Gauls. And I like that because it matched up with Asterix, which was one of Roman occupation of Gaul. And there are clearly echoes

there of the Nazi occupation of France. At the time, I had no idea that these play was being made with that. But it is also drawing on the historical experience that Gaul underwent when the Romans conquered it. And in Asterix, nobody dies. The worst that happens is that somebody might end up in a tree with stars going around the head. But of course, the reality is, according to Plutarch, Caesar killed a million Gauls and enslaved another million. And to be honest, for most of my childhood, I was completely oblivious to that. And I think that one of the reasons why I enjoyed ancient history as a child was the feeling that it was simultaneously very, very exciting and glamorous and distant and removed. And I think the same is true with dinosaurs, my fascination with dinosaurs, that they were glamorous and terrifying. And I wouldn't want to be with a Tyrannosaur, but I would never be with a Tyrannosaur because they were extinct. And in the same way, I could kind of thrill to the spectacle of these amazing drawings by Peter Connolly. He did a

fabulous illustration of Alexander crossing the Granicus and of the Spartans at Thermopylae and Battle of Salamis and so on. And it was thrilling because this was so distant that all I really had to deal with was the glamour of it. And I think that that, I don't know whether that was something that you felt ever experienced, but thinking about it, I think it really explains for me why ancient history and medieval history had a particular purchase on my imagination. And now when I write about it as an adult, why I feel it's so important to convey actually a sense of the brutality of it and the fact that people did die. It wasn't like asterisks. People suffered horribly.

I think this is an absolutely fascinating question. In some ways, we're kind of spiralling away from the issue of children's fiction because I absolutely agree with you that I think there's a kind of a strange statute of limitations almost on our sympathy or empathy or whatever. So I think it is fascinating how, you know,

an atrocity in the 20th century, even one where the death toll is not especially high, will call forth enormous reserves of kind of pity from us. But, you know, you'll read about, I don't know, Basil the Bulgar Slayer or something. But you don't read about him, do you? Killing loads of people. But you read about...

But Julius Caesar you do, or Alexander the Great. So there was a Lady Bird book on Alexander the Great. No, but I'm saying as an adult, even people do this. As an adult. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's actually that different, you see. Now, for a child, for a child even more so. A child, you'll read accounts of battles battles and um you know assassinations and things

and and because you're right it all happens at one remove and if it happened the further back it happens the less likely the more likely you are to see it as purely the stuff of a storybook and not to feel troubled by it in any way i mean that's true i think of children's stories more generally history or not i mean if you watch a Star Wars film, how many people die? You know, I mean, how many people died on the Death Star? Or, you know, in Tolkien, how many people are killed in the battles? Do you feel a great sense of... What happens to the baby orcs?

Yeah, well, exactly. I mean, do children... Children, I mean, especially little boys, I mean, people can argue about whether it's right or whatever, and that's the subject for a whole podcast series in itself. But they enjoy an awful lot of violence. I mean, you didn't really have to watch boys in their playground to know that there is that urge.

And I think it'd be weird not to, well, we live in a human world, not a perfect world. But I think there's a further kind of shifting of the kaleidoscope on that, Weird, not, well, we live in a human world, not a perfect world. But I think there's a further kind of shifting of the kaleidoscope on that, both between childhood and adulthood, but also changing perspectives from certainly when I was a child and now. And we've got two questions, one from Roman Mihar, who says, what do you think the future of children's histories will be post-woke? The older children's histories are amazing for their breadth and width, but will this survive a focus on the lives of each

disadvantaged group and their lived experience, et cetera? And then from Richard Goldstein, what do children teach adults about history? When I refer to Indians, my son retorts they're only called Indians because Columbus thought he was in India. I found myself less hostile to the revision Native American when advocated by a 14 year old and I guess that um so I was reading about the Lady Bird books in preparation for this yeah and apparently um even in uh the 1970s um for instance there's one on Walter Raleigh. And in 1957, you see him launching an attack on people in, I guess, El Dorado or whatever. The Orinoco, wasn't it? He went up, I think. And the perspective you're given in the illustration is of Raleigh. And then this

was reissued in 1980. And the perspective is that of the people seeing Raleigh come. So you're seeing Raleigh through their eyes. In the illustration or in the text? Yeah, in the illustration. Right. In the illustration. Yeah.

And I guess that one of the things that probably has changed is that... So we're going to be talking to Satnam Sanghera about the British Empire in our next episode. But one of the things that I'm sure has changed is that a lot of Imperial history was couched in terms of adventure of British adventurers, be it Raleigh, be it Captain Cook,

be it General Gordon or whoever, going off and having adventures. Yes. In exotic, far-flung places. Sort of the man who would be king style. The man who would be king. And obviously that's more complicated now. Yeah, it is. And I think that's actually a really interesting subject.

So a future book in this series, this Adventures in Time series, is going to be about the Conquistadors. And when we were talking about it, we had a big conversation about, you know, who's telling the story? Who are the heroes? Who are the, you know? And, you know, I felt, I mean, I haven't actually written it yet, so I'm just sort of jumping ahead, but I felt that the guys getting on the ships and going across has to be the start of the story

because to a child that is immediately... Did you not think, after talking to Camilla Townsend about the Aztecs, that actually the journey of the Aztecs from... Well, it is, but you don't have the sources to be able to tell it. But you kind of do. I don't think you do.

And I think the story of the Spaniards going on the ships, how many children's stories start with a voyage? I think that's a great story. But the Aztecs voyage. But I think then when they get there, you have to then give the perspective of the people to whom there's these bunch of weird bearded lunatics who pitched up from god knows where which you wouldn't have done or or it would have been much less likely

20 or 30 years ago so i think there's a way to reconcile adventure with multiple perspectives and um with a bit of nuance and and not telling it as a sort of purely moralistic adventure story. I mean, do you think, so we've got a question. Yes, from Theobald Tiger. Have to confess that H.E. Marshall, our island story, lit the spark for me. This is talking about 1955. At least she got the Canut story the right way round. I guess that's stopping the waves. A bit like Corporal Punishment, it didn't do any lasting harm, but I'd hardly recommend it today, but great illustrations. Yeah, that's funny. Actually, I mean, actually,

Our Island Story is surprisingly progressive. There's quite a lot of stuff about, there's a woman writing it. I think she was from New Zealand. I think she slightly had an outsider's perspective. Yeah, Henrietta Marshall. Kind of the mainstream. But, you know, Our Island Story is kind of shorthand for a particular way of writing children's history

that's rooted in a sense of, I guess, you know, the glories of British achievement. Yeah, I mean, I had a book that my grandparents gave me as a child. I think it used to be theirs. It was by somebody called Arthur Michael John, and it was published in, I think, I had a book that my grandparents gave me as a child. I think it used to be theirs. It was by somebody called Arthur Michael John, and it was published in, I think, 1902. And it was brilliant. I shouldn't say this, but it went through century by century.

At the end of each century, it said it had a chapter. Unfairly, it had a chapter called Great Men. And it just told you the 20 great men that you needed to know, you know. Were there any women? Never. There was never a woman. Boudicca, surely. I just told you the 20 great men that you needed to know, you know, Lord Salisbury. Never. There was never a woman. Boudicca, surely. And they really were all the sort of generals that are in Trafalgar Square.

I mean, it was – now, listen, I mean, I think history books always reflect their times. They do. But more than that, do they not reflect myths? So there's a kind of – in a sense, to make history accessible to children, you have to mythicise it to a degree. And the likelihood is that that myth will go with the grain of the broader national myth that is being propagated at the time. So our island story, the clue is in the word island. It's all about the Navy. It's all part of a continuous

narrative but now we have new myths yes i guess we do i mean actually tom we had a lot of questions about this about how do you you know stories being distorted for children and all that stuff so the lady a good example of that is the oliver cromwell we talked about this with paul lay the oliver cromwell ladybird book starts with two stories that are just not true one of them is um he's stolen by a monkey as a boy and the other is the other that charles the first visits his house and they have a fight when they are sort of eight years old or something and those are the two facts about oliver cromwell that all children should learn but they're probably uppermost in my brain. I can't get rid of them. They're like floaters.

But the thing is... I just can't flush them away. That, that, that, that. Those stories get a child interested in history. And you've got ample time to debunk them later. I mean, in the Second World War book, for example, I have a chapter about Dunkirk. Now, I could have gone in and said,

the way to tell this story is to say there were some little ships involved, but they weren't as important as the big destroyers. And I just thought, who the hell is, what child, what sane person thinks that's the way to interest a child? The way to interest a child is to say, I'll take one little ship.

It's basically the inspiration for the little ship in Dunkirk. It's a very famous story. It's a man called Charles Lightoller. He's retired. I think he's been on the Titanic. He's escaped. He's retired now. He's got this little boat that's his pride and joy.

He takes it across to Dunkirk. He fills it with all the men. They're under fire by the Germans. They escape planes shooting at them, and they get all the way back, and he unloads them. And it's just an incredibly heartening story, and it fits in with J.B. Priestley's stuff on the radio that he does a little later about the little ships.

That is, to me, the obvious way to get a nine-year-old who maybe doesn't have a colossal amount of knowledge about history or great investments in history, to get them involved. And there's plenty of time later in life to debunk, to, you know, we had Roger Clarke talking about ghosts, didn't we? And he said in that, people always prefer the bunk to the debunk. And there's room for both, I think. Okay, well, on that note, question from Mikolaj Kishka.

Mikolaj. Mikolaj, sorry, Mikolaj. Is children's history always propaganda? No, I would say, because I think propaganda, my answer to that would be that propaganda only permits of one interpretation. I mean, that's why it is propaganda. Whereas I think you can write a children's history

that has room for, that hints at disagreement or debate. So I wrote one book that's coming out before Christmas about Alexander the Great. And there's bits in that where I say, you know, some people said Alexander did this. Others said he did that. I think you have to give a sense of uncertainty from time to time. You know, some people thought Churchill was this.

Some people think Churchill was something else. And I think that makes it different from propaganda, to sort of say that the child can think, well, there are different views about this and maybe there isn't one right answer. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. But I think one thing that children do not give a damn about, and understandably, they don't give a damn

about historiography. They don't really give a damn about sources. They just want to crack on and tell the story. That's one thing that's different from writing a novel. You need to make up your mind. It's a bit like being a newspaper economist, actually. You need to make up your mind and just go for it

and tell one version of the story as much as possible. And you can have grey areas, but there's got to be a goodie. Well, just to give people a flavour from Dominic's book on Henry VIII, was he a mischievous, fun-loving little boy or a fat, greedy, brooding invalid? A sportsman, an art lover, a bully or a braggart? A strong ruler who stood up for England or a selfish tyrant who tore it apart? What's the answer? I think that that is the note on which to end, isn't it?

Leave that hanging. We're going to do an episode on Henry VIII fairly soon. You can give the answer to that. We are going to come up on that. But before we go, have you not promised one of our listeners that you will ask her a question? Oh, yes, I have. Yes, I have. Sorry.

Annie Scott. Annie, I hope you remember who it was who remembered your question. Yes. Not the person who had made the empty promise on Twitter, but the person who really cares about the evidence. Yes, I'm publicly shamed. Well, actually, the reason that I didn't ask this is because it's actually about history in schools it's a big topic but maybe we should enter the answer now so that annie gets her annie gets her and then we can come back to it later on so i think we're going to do a subject

we're going to do a whole podcast on um history and education um but annie's question is um what history should be taught in school and should teachers of other subjects put their subject into its historical context hashtag typical teacher question but i promised he paul and tom promised he'd answer and i almost didn't so what history come on tom three things that we should do in schools oh i think the history of christianity the fall of the roman republic and obviously the Persian Wars. Yeah. See, my answer would be, I think probably we should do the last years of the, well, probably the first years of the 1970s. Yes.

The last years of the 1970s and the first years of the 1980s. No, I actually am going to answer it properly. I think people should do, everybody knows who's listened to this podcast that we both think children should learn about the 17th century because it's so pivotal. I think they should also learn about...

But when you say children, what do you mean? I mean, what's the definition of a child? What age are we talking about? I think everyone knows what a child is. No, I don't. Because are you talking, you know, primary school? Well, that's a good question. First year of secondary school?

That's a really difficult question. Yeah, it's a very uh uh i think i think you're obviously you're talking about different things at different times aren't you you're talking yes smaller children that's why it's complicated it's all your attempt to try and yeah get this into a single quick answer okay so three things they should start they should do the romans yes obviously i think they should do the 17th century. Yes. And they should finish up by doing 20th century. Oh, 20th century what?

China? No, I think they should do maybe a smash with the World Wars and they should get into the Labour government of the mid-70s. The Jeremy Thorpe scandal. Yeah, the Jeremy Thorpe scandal, exactly. On the back of our colossally successful Jeremy Thorpe scandal yeah the Jeremy Thorpe scandal exactly on the back of our colossally successful Jeremy Thorpe podcast

I think people will all be children I believe even now across Britain are queuing up to buy books about Rinker well on that bombshell

great okay well I think we've sorted out now we can have a second stab now I'll let you finish the podcast well I mean I think I think that that our inability to answer that question in any way seriously shows that we do need an entire episode on history and education so we'll

we'll stack that one up um and annie uh my huge apologies for almost forgetting you please do send us more questions when that topic comes up and i promise i'll wait that time around um but you should also plug the books one more time tom uh yeah so uh it's shocking that i have to remind you know dominic's got these adventure in time six wives of henry the eighth and the second world war yeah who cares it's not as if you've never plugged your own come on i do it slightly more subtly um well listeners will be the judge of that um and yeah so uh it's it's um there's a there's a lovely the almost the best bits in it are the author's note at the end um and i think that uh anyone wondering whether to get this for their child it's the very last um

paragraph in the um the book on the six wives of Henry VIII, Dominic's dedication to his son. Above all, thank you to Arthur, who read every chapter as I wrote it, solemnly ticking every battle, every massacre and every severed head and giving me extra points for hangings, drawings and quarterings. I could not have asked for a more enthusiastic or more bloodthirsty reader who would not want to read that. Thanks ever so much. Bye-bye. See you next time. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.