June 8th Historical Truth and Benny Hill

I’ve just finished a Zoom lesson with Sammie on the Wars of the Roses, the period of history I find most difficult to follow. Of late, however, it’s taken a higher profile because of historical books by Philippa Gregory and Richard III’s recent appearance in a Leicester Car Park. A simple Key Stage 3 presentation has helped me at last to get a grip on this messy and divisive period in our history. In brief it seems we had a ruler who was mentally inconsistent and totally out of his depths and who was heavily influenced by an unpopular councillor whom he hung on to even when everyone else thought he should go. Then we had another monarch who achieved power by dirty tricks, a lot of lies and a determination to get out of Europe (aka Wars with the French). Now you can see why I’m beginning to recognise what’s going on.

A danger when interpreting the Wars of the Roses is that much of our presumed knowledge comes from Shakespeare’s version of events. In order to corroborate the Tudor claim to the throne, Elizabeth after all being his patron, it was tactful to vilify Richard III. Until now Sammie’s considerable, but sometimes distorted knowledge of history has been enriched by ‘Horrible Histories’, but the reliability of historical sources, such as documentary evidence must always be scrutinised. It’s significant that various governments have wanted the history curriculum to concentrate on ‘facts’ rather than learning how to look critically at source material. The ‘facts’ of course being how they support the ideology of that particular government.

Scrutinising potential source material for future historians was exactly what I was doing this morning when I was idling away a few minutes deleting files from my phone. What kept appearing as I scrolled away were all of those videos and pictorial jokes which, over the last three months have been charting the progress of this critical period of history. They started, if you remember with comic scenarios involving loo rolls and then progressed through orders to lockdown, spoofs of Boris’s speeches and so on up to satires on Dominic Cummings, over-crowded beach resorts and thence to the present day. President Trump is widely featured but is not likely to be using the data when commissioning some future retrospective of his presidency.

Someday someone, maybe for a KS 3 or 4 Assignment, will be sifting through all this as documentary evidence of how we survived the Covid-19, much the same way as children look at old newsreel and newspaper articles on the Blitz. Of course they will have to consider the reliability of the source material. As we view it and have a chuckle we already know most of it is fictionalised. Will children think Trump really was orange and really said what he is shown as saying? As if anyone could really have said anything so stupid! Will they think Matt Lucas really is Boris Johnson? We already know that the technology exists to create entirely fabricated images and indeed a recent TV thriller revolved around the ability to falsify faces and actions on CCTV footage. Because they are spontaneous and accessible, Face Book and Twitter are already being mined by researchers to explore ordinary people’s reactions to social situations and are likely to be evidence for students in the future. Will future generations be warned not to give credence to anything they read in Daily Mail archive, for instance? After considering a back-issue of the Sun will they understand that as the Coronavirus was spreading what was happening on Love Island was not the reason the nation had insufficient stocks of PPE.

There were lots of other pictures on my phone charting the progress of these long-drawn-out weeks. A considerable number of pictures of the garden moved from bare soil to crowded scenes of fox-gloves and lupines jostling together; from pots with a few seedlings to pots dripping with lobelia and trailing geraniums. The hanging-baskets which caused so much initial frustration recorded in my blog now cascade with petunias. Scenes of woodland with shadows fleeting through the leafless boughs have become fully foliaged; the much photographed bluebells faded into garlic which faded into rampant undergrowth. Deirdre appears throughout the timeline and any changes cannot be reported. Birds I once watched gathering nesting material are now sitting on the fence feeding their young. Nature, remorseless in its progress, has edged from cold spring into (today) cold summer.

Journals, diaries, memoires, reminiscences and letters have in the past provided a record of how ordinary people experienced major historical events. I had hoped that my Blog would be reliable source material for the future historian, calibrating the emotional and intellectual landscape of 12 weeks of lockdown. Pepys, as well as recording which servant maids he “was in hopes to have a bout with,” during the plague also comments on international affairs. Ironically on the day the government is introducing quarantine,

The plague, it seems, grows more and more at Amsterdam; and we are going upon making of all ships coming from thence and Hambrough, or any other infected places, to perform their Quarantine (for thirty days as Sir Rd. Browne expressed it in the order of the Council, contrary to the import of the word, though in the general acceptation it signifies now the thing, not the time spent in doing it) in Holehaven, a thing never done by us before.

A reliable historical record of Samuel Pepys in this vein is provided by Benny Hill* in a verse that has remained intact in my mind since the era of black and white TV, when more worthy rhymes have been forgotten:

A shy young maid has took a room down at the village inn,

Her bedside light is Oh so bright and her curtains Oh so thin,

ASt nine o’clock she goes to her room, at half past nine she sleeps,

Lord Clarendon walks quickly on but naughty Samuel Pepys.

It does scan remarkably well.

As it turns out my blog avoids lustful intentions, no doubt forfeiting a number of readers as a result and is more a record of how the weather affected my temper, how well I slept, what mood I was in, who and what was annoying me and what was occurring on my bird table. However, if the scholar of the future when considering a PhD topic wants to try, “Problems encountered whilst trying to fit a 12 inch hanging basket liner with a 14 inch basket during the Covid-19 of 2020,” then all the source material is here and can be trusted.

*A rather louche comedian on TV from the late 50s through to the late 80s, who strangely remained popular in Germany long after that date!