Dominic Sandbrook is a freelance writer on history and current affairs. His most recent book is White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Little, Brown, 2006). He is the regular columnist for BBC History Magazine.
The story of the first black South African football team to visit these shores, as June's issue reminds us, is not only extraordinary and inspiring, but a very fitting tale as we approach the first World Cup to be held in Africa.
It is also a welcome reminder that sporting stories, so often consigned to the back pages of the tabloids, can shed just as much light on the past as any well-worn political or economic narrative.
In many ways, the decade since the first issue of this magazine hit the shelves has been a great one for history.
Merely to glance at a list of titles published around the time of BBC History Magazine’s launch is to be reminded of the extraordinary depth of talent to be found among today’s historians.
In the spring of 2000, a keen reader might have had on his bedside Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley, Norman Davies’s The Isles, Andrew Roberts’s life of Lord Salisbury or Francis Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx.
As this month’s issue reminds us, this year marks the 350th anniversary of the Restoration of the monarchy in the colourful figure of Charles II.
Few periods of British history have more of a hold on the collective imagination, thanks to the vibrant reputation of Restoration comedies, the poetry of Dryden and Rochester and of course the hedonistic personality of the king himself.
To mark the occasion, the Royal Mint plans to issue 150,000 commemorative £5 coins. But of course the Restoration of the monarchy was never inevitable.
With the headlines full of pre-election sparring, it seems that one of the pivotal decisions of modern times is almost upon us. But despite all the patriotic rhetoric about the Mother of Parliaments, Britain’s democratic record is looking distinctly unimpressive these days, thanks to the apparently irresistible collapse of popular interest.
To read this month’s article about Oliver Cromwell is to be reminded of one of the most extraordinary individual stories in our history. “I was by birth a gentleman,” Cromwell once said, “living neither in considerable height, nor yet in obscurity.”
For all the pleasures of a life spent contemplating the past, for all the sense of discovery and escapism, history often takes us to the darkest places imaginable. Far more than any religious text, the historical record of mankind is the story of sin and suffering played out again and again.
Only the costumes and scenery change: the essential narrative of fear, cruelty, suffering and death never alters. And some events still have the power to bring even the most cynical scholars to the brink of tears, as this month’s feature on the Holocaust reminds us.
In an age when we are all supposed to be shallow consumer junkies, fixated on the future and indifferent to the past, the deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch were a salutary reminder of our national respect for history. Not even the most cynical observer could deny that the funerals in Brighton and Wells, with their muffled bells, military pallbearers and silent crowds, were intensely moving events.
If there is one word guaranteed to have a historian foaming at the mouth with rage, that word is ‘heritage’. For many, perhaps most historians, the heritage industry, with its tea towels and trinkets, belongs in the next niche along from the films of Mel Gibson in the historical hall of shame.
Seventy years on, the Second World War still stands out in the popular imagination as that rare thing: a uniquely ‘good’ war, a triumph of light over darkness, right over wrong, a war we can all commemorate without shame. From Antony Beevor’s bestselling D-Day to the vastly successful Call of Duty video-game series, our fascination with the struggle against fascism seems utterly inexhaustible.
Wiith the nation reeling with shock at the revelations of our politicians’ venality, more than a few commentators, reflecting on the sad decline of standards since the great days of Gladstone and Disraeli, have reached for John Bright’s famous lines about the Palace of Westminster as “the mother of parliaments”.
How, they wonder, could the mother of parliaments have turned into the wicked uncle, the selfish teenager, the greedy infant? How could the institution that gave democracy, liberty and freedom of speech to the world have sunk so low?
Dominic Sandbrook is a freelance writer on history and current affairs. His most recent book is White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Little, Brown, 2006). He is the regular columnist for BBC History Magazine.
Three reformers (Barnes, Garrett and Jerome) were burned for heresy and three Catholics (Abel, Powell and Fetherston) were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason at Smithfield.
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