Book on the Staffordshire Hoard

Just in time for Christmas, the British Museum’s book on the Staffordshire Hoard is now available, priced at £4, of which £1 goes to the acquisition fund. As we have already noted, it’s a pretty impressive production given the timescale, beautifully illustrated and authortitative. It’s available from Stafford Library, Shire Hall Gallery, Stafford, Lichfield Library, Tamworth Library, Stafford and Lichfield Record Offices, Tamworth Castle and Tamworth Information Centre. For those outside The West Midlands (or, indeed, those within) it can be ordered from the British Museum via the excellent Staffordshire Hoard website here http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/

TV History in the Cultural Ghetto

Tristram Hunt was today dragged into the dispute over Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain, discussing the issue of history on television with Marr’s vociferous critic Charles Moore on Radio 4’s Today programme.

The package began with three excerpts: from Kenneth Clark’s 1969 TV series Civilisation (all clipped tones and cultural certainties); Laurence Olivier, raising the art of narration to its zenith in Thames TV’s The World at War; then Andrew Marr talking about posh, possibly very cruel, people in hats.

Moore gave the impression of a man who simply doesn’t like television, regarding it as an intrusion (sometimes I know how he feels) into his Trollopian, High Tory world. Tristram Hunt is a fan of TV: since the debacle of his series on the Civil War (which Moore, then the Daily Telegraph’s editor, urged the BBC to pull halfway through its run), Hunt has proved himself to be an inspired public historian (if you want proof, read his excellent column in this week’s Guardian).

But I have to disagree with him on one thing. He talked of his recent experience watching Andrew Marr’s series with a class of 14-year-olds in Walthamstow, north-east London. Despite its silly stunts and simplicities, they find it boring. I suspect that some children find everything boring. From this single experience, Hunt concluded that to grab the attention of ‘inner city’ youngsters one would be inclined to make ever more whizz-bang TV, with fast edits, crude simplicities and trite modern-day parallels. At least that is what Hunt’s logic dictates.

But I simply don’t believe that to be the case. Inner city youngsters are just as capable of understanding proper history as anyone else, but it is quite unlikely that they have ever been exposed to it, certainly not on television in the way that an ‘inner city’ youngster of my generation was.

As I remember (and I watched every episode when it was originally shown, with great anticipation) The World at War was shown prime time on ITV. It was superbly written by proper historians, brilliantly narrated (by Olivier) and edited, by Jeremy Isaacs. Civilisation, similarly, and such programmes – and there were many others – appeared on BBC1, mingled with light entertainment, sport and news.

That is no longer the case. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity is tucked away on the cultural ghetto of BBC4 (and will probably eventually appear, late night, on BBC2). A bright, curious working-class teenager is unlikely to come across it by happenstance after an episode of Eastenders (though it is considerably more uplifting).

OK, one might say, what kind of teenager will be interested in MacCulloch’s programme other than those families who have BBC4 and Radio 4 as default channels. Fair enough. But the BBC has just thrown away a remarkable opportunity to attract a great number of youngsters to engage in serious history.

Its series, A History of the World in 100 Objects launches early next year. It’s a brilliant premise: each programme takes as its subject an object from the BM’s vast collection – a flint hammer from stone age Africa; an Aztec serpent; the statue of an Indian god or the Roman Emperor Hadrian; a relic from the Industrial Revolution – and its fascinating story is told.

What a visual treat, what wonderful stories, perfect for all the family, they will follow or precede Eastenders on a daily basis. Or rather they won’t. The stories of these visually remarkable objects will be told on – Radio 4. These stories, it seems, are too good for the proles who also pay the licence fee. Which suggests that the BBC no longer speaks or even seeks to speak to one nation, but two. There is BBC4, Radio 4 and (the utterly superb) Radio 3 for the educated and aspirational. And there is BBC1 and, increasingly, BBC2 for the rest. Or shall we call it ‘BBC2, D’. It is a shocking betrayal of the BBC’s historical role to inform, educate and entertain, and they will pay a heavy price in the long run.

From A.J.P. Taylor’s mesmerising lectures in front of a black backdrop to technicolour Civilisation and the ground-breaking World At War, Taylor Downing looks at the early days of history on television in Screen Saviours: History in Television

Ben Macintyre on the Rosetta Stone

Ben Macintyre comments today in the Times on the saga of the Rosetta Stone's disputed ownership:

Instead of debating ownership and trying to impose modern notions of political sovereignty on ancient cultural patrimony, the argument should be about how to bring the world’s cultural riches to the widest possible audience, regardless of where they physically reside.

Happy to observe we are in agreement over yesterday's post!

The Pre-Budget Report and the Return of the Rosetta Stone

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling delivers his Pre-Budget Report today, a precarious high-wire act as he seeks to cut Britain’s massive deficit while maintaining essential public spending, all with an eye on the imminent general election. In his last report in November, the Chancellor forecast public borrowing to be 57 per cent of GDP in 2013. He got it wrong, as so many have done, his figures overtaken by the size of the current economic crisis. Last month public borrowing was already at 59.3 per cent and rising.

As historians will point out, the last 60 years or so has been the age of state expansion. In 1910, at what seemed like the imperial zenith, the British state’s public borrowing was around 10 per cent of GDP, and opposition to the growth of the state had been espoused by the likes of Ruskin, Morris and Cobbett as much as by Samuel Smiles. The figure rose to 20 per cent after the costly calamity of the First World War and, after the sea change of 1945, reached around half of GDP.

That figure may soon reach 100 per cent. What does a developed country such as Britain do other than borrow to retain its first world lifestyles? It can milk the successful financial sector in all its guises, just as Germany milks its car manufacturers, both economies over dependent on their most profitable sectors. But that is not a long-term solution: in the UK’s case it has already led the banks to adopt Byzantine methods of creating money that is not really there. Both of Britain’s major political parties know that deep down, which is why both are flailing and both are failing to offer a serious solution to Britain’s problems. Who ever won an election promising to manage decline?

One fruit of Britain’s prosperous imperial past is the British Museum, still free to the world as its charter insists (though some future Chancellor might seek amendments there). It’s been taken to task (again) by Dr Zahi Hawass, the ever entertaining Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. In London, to promote his new book, he has called (again) for the return to Egypt of the Rosetta Stone, currently on display in the BM’s Enlightenment Rooms. The 1.1m high stele made in 196 BC was the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics, as it also has inscribed upon it parallel texts in Greek. Discovered in July 1799 by Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard, an engineer serving with Napoleon’s army in Egypt, it came into British possession as part of the Treaty of Alexandria of 1801, arriving at the BM the following year. Hawass wants it back in Egypt though, gracefully, he is prepared to accept it on temporary loan.

Personally, I think I buy the BM’s defence of its possession of the Stone and all its other artefacts, including the Elgin Marbles, for it places them in a genuinely global context of myriad civilizations and, being in London, a genuine world city, allows millions of visitors from all around the world to see them – for free. The fact that it has done so for 250 years must count for something too. But, in the interests of fairness, here is Christopher Hitchens putting the opposite case: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/07/conversation-hitchens-cuno-debate-the-fate-of-the-parthenon-marbles.html

Moore V Marr

Charles Moore has endured heroically all of Andrew Marr’s BBC TV series The Making of Modern Britain and passes judgment on it in the Telegraph today. Moore is a practiced contrarian who has it in for the BBC, but he does make valid points. Marr’s series is predictable in its establishment views, lacks the mischievousness of the best television histories (think of AJP Taylor) and the visual gimmicks are embarrassing (dodgy Home Guard uniforms, silly bathing suits etc). An opportunity missed.

Simon Jenkins on the V&A's new galleries

Simon Jenkins, recipient of last year’s History Today Trustees Award, writes today on the V&A’s new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries in The Guardian. He sees the new, vast space as a starting point, a ‘taster’ before one sets out exploring the glories in situ of European culture for which there is no substitute.

Banning the building of minarets and Turkish membership of the EU

All kinds of issues, all rooted in history, emerge from the controversial Swiss vote to ban further building of minarets in that strange but deeply democratic country.

It is plainly the kind of popular judgment the European Union was created to deny and is an indication of a widespread European view towards Islam, even in its rather liberal Turkish guise (most of Switzerland’s Muslims come from Turkey and the once Ottoman possessions of the former Yugoslavia). The judgment is likely to push Turkish popular opinion against the European Union, as a fascinating recent article in the Wall Street Journal pointed out (though it should also be said that the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s comment that minarets are the ‘our bayonets’ was not helpful).

France has been especially hostile towards the idea of Turkish membership of the EU. Yet, it is not widely known that in the 1530s the Most Christian King of France Francis I allied with the Turk against the Very Catholic King of Spain Charles I. More typical of European attitudes towards Turkey was James IV (r.1488-1513) of Scotland’s appeal to western rulers to unite against the Ottomans, an attempt to heal European divisions caused by the ‘Warrior Pope’ Julius II, who had formed the so-called Holy League in an attempt to quell French ambitions. Perhaps Alex Salmond has been reading his history books and eyes a similar role of European peacebroker for his ‘independent’ Scotland.