Teaching History at a Secondary School

Teaching History

“The best way to teach is to be chaotic and confusing” Professor Richard Feynman

In April 2016 I was invited to give a talk about history teaching to our local PROBUS group. My career had been in a secondary school, with pupils aged between 10 and 18. They were an even more distinguished group of retired senior professionals than I had realised. I discovered this after the talk, over lunch. However, I had taken the task seriously and had done my best for them. This is what I wrote – though I do not say I spoke exactly the words on the page.

* * * * *

A friend of mine, knowing how fond I am of Venice, lent me a novel called “Miss Garnett’s Angel”. It tells of one who is spiritually and emotionally dead who is brought back to vibrant humanity by the light and the art and the atmosphere of that lovely city, bride of the sea. In order to start the story the novelist must create a character who is flat, boring, without purpose in life. Who else but a teacher of history?

I must admit that I found it hard to enjoy the novel after such an opening.

However, I do not condemn the novelist too much. In one of the Little Grey Rabbit stories that I enjoyed as a child there is one in which Wise Owl’s tree house is blown down in a storm. Grey Rabbit and her friends are rescuing his scattered possessions. Hare gathers up his books. One lies in a puddle but remains completely dry. It is a history book. Hare says of something: “It’s as dull as this history book” and chucks it back in the puddle where it remains, quite dry.

The point is that this perception of history as dull is a common part of our culture, and comes, presumably, from a misunderstanding of what history is, and, it must be admitted, from too many teachers, lessons and textbooks who are misled by this misunderstanding into going about things the wrong way.

In the course of my career I sometimes had to explain to headmasters, and often to parents, that learning more facts off a longer list would not make children better at history, even if it might get them more marks in some tests and exams. I gather from things said by some politicians and some journalists that this wrong view of history is still pretty strong. Teachers in what one might call rival disciplines, such as Modern Studies, sometimes caricature history as merely the learning of factual notes. It does make it sound a very dull subject!

One of the reasons why this is all a dreadful misunderstanding is because learning facts about the past is not the main thing that historians do. There are surprisingly few “facts” about the past about which there is a sufficient consensus to have them taught as absolute fact to be memorised. The many arguments about the causes of the First World War that took place in 2014 were not just between historians on one side and politicians and journalists on the other. They also took place within the academic community. One might consider the Highland Clearances, the Norman Conquest and the causes of the American Civil War as other areas where there is not a consensus. What causes or results is a pupil to memorise?

Take one specific example. When I started teaching, in 1973, the Soviet Union was one of the two world super-powers. It was a success in its own terms. It had played a supreme part in the defeat of Nazism. It had been the first to achieve manned space flight.

Then in 1989 its empire collapsed and soon the USSR itself ceased to exist. I think it is the only time I neglected lesson preparation and marking for the sake of watching news after news. (By the time Barrack Obama was standing for election I was also teaching Politics, so watching the news counted as preparation.) Suddenly the whole of the history of the Russian Empire since Peter the Great changed. It was no longer about the creation of a great power, where school books emphasised the things that made for reform and progress and development (even if some other things were pretty dreadful). It became the story of a temporary experiment that went wrong, and all the weaknesses and problems that could be seen in the old Empire became more prominent.

Imagine a production of “Macbeth” which ends with Macbeth entering carrying MacDuff’s head and the “boy Malcolm” is rapidly disposed of. This would not alter merely the ending of the play, but the whole play. So it is with history. The ends of our stories keep changing, and so the whole story changes, not just the ending. What are these “facts” that should be learned?

[At the end of the talk a question was asked about whether the “facts” in History classes sometimes reflected chauvinism. I answered cautiously, because I did not wish to get into a political wrangle. However two points made in reply included: (1) When I was learning about the Spanish Armada as a child almost everything available had been written by people who had been involved in Britain resisting invasion in 1940. This was bound to have coloured their approach. In fact all the history that is written and taught is affected by the circumstances of the time. The important thing is to make pupils aware of this. (2) History teachers generally do not like it when politicians decree what must be in the syllabus. I understand that this point has affected the English National Curriculum. It certainly affected Higher History here in Scotland, where the SNP Government insisted that Paper 2 should be all Scottish History. In case anyone thinks I am biased against Scottish History I must declare that I have taught it, written books about it and am employed by the SQA to examine it. But I still do not like politicians telling us what history to teach]

Here’s another problem. It concerns the limitations of thought and language. We are far too inclined to think and to talk in generalisations. Consider the following sentence:

“In the middle of the fifth century the Roman Empire collapsed under pressure from barbarian hordes.”

So far so good. Learn it. It’s true. But hang on a minute. It may be a sort of truth, but it is almost utterly worthless. What is this “middle of the fifth century?” If I said “in the middle of the twentieth century” you would know that this might be before or after the invention of the atom bomb, before or after Mao came to power in China, before or after the defeat of Hitler, before or after Indian independence, before or after any of us were born, come to that. If I said that in 456 AD Romulus Augustulus was killed by Odovacer, king of the Rugians the extra detail would help. But it would help very little, unless we knew enough about the fifth century for 456 to mean something.

But wait another minute. “The Roman Empire”? In 456AD there were two Roman Empires, and the Eastern Empire, capital city Byzantium, was in all sorts of ways stronger, richer, more civilised – more everything – than the Empire of the West. The Eastern Empire kept going, with many difficulties to be sure, for another thousand years. It was the Roman Empire in the West that collapsed. A very different thing.

The Eastern Empire, incidentally, included the great Library at Alexandria. Later this was burned by the Vandals, an act which gave their name a subsidiary meaning which we now take for granted, even if we couldn’t tell a Vandal from an Ostrogoth. There is a delightful reminiscence by George Orwell: when he learned of this destruction at his prep school he felt nothing but pleasure. There was that much less Greek literature to translate.

I digress. “Chaos and confusion”. I did warn you. Let’s get back to my sentence. “Collapsed under pressure from…” Wait a minute. That’s a metaphor from civil engineering or something. One imagines a dam bursting or a tower collapsing. It tells us nothing at all about how the Roman Empire in the West collapsed or what the barbarians did.

I’m going to digress again. We’ll get to the end of this sentence in the end, if we’re lucky. My sister, slightly older than me, was a successful academic scientist throughout her career. On retirement she did an MA course in Lake District Studies at Lancaster University and has become a serious historian of Lake District affairs. Because she has a scientific education, training and career she has brought a critical outsider’s eye to the career of historian. Leaving aside the tendency to pass judgement on insufficient evidence, and a desperate search for “significance” where none exists, she has been very critical of the tradition of rhetoric in history.

At school and undergraduate level the exam essay, written from memory, usually in an hour or less, remains the mainstay of the subject. This literary form, the exam essay, was developed during the nineteenth century specifically as a training in rhetoric. At the public schools and the ancient universities, pupils and students were trained to become advocates and ministers of religion and diplomats and politicians, careers for which rhetoric was a crucial ingredient. The ability to synthesise masses of material from books and tables into a brief, relevant, coherent whole was also a valuable skill for those in public life.

As far as I was concerned teaching writing was as important as teaching reading. One very happy episode was when the deputy rector found that our juniors had one fewer English lesson per week than was normal, and one more History lesson. He suggested that we should give up one lesson to English. It was a proud moment when the Head of English said “No. They teach writing so well – especially non-fiction – that they use the time well. Let them keep the lesson”.

The essay remains the bedrock of history education below degree level, and that is fair enough. After all, the history teacher does not expect most of his pupils to become post-graduate historians any more than the piano teacher expects pupils to become professional players. But it has given skill with words, plausibility, fluency, subtle ambiguity, persuasiveness and so on more importance than simple conclusions based on evidence. The historian whose purpose is to sell history books to the general public still finds these useful qualities. But – and it is a very big qualification – all too often words can be used to hide a lack of evidence or a lack of simple conclusions. “Collapsed under pressure from”, forsooth.

Let us return to our sentence. “In the middle of the fifth century” (feeble) “the Roman Empire” (rubbish) “collapsed under pressure from” (meaningless metaphor) “the barbarian invasions”. Blimey! What on earth were they? Barbarians, indeed. I wonder if the person who wrote the word “barbarians” knows an Ostrogoth from a Vandal or a Pict from a Scot. What about the Gothic leaders who were educated within the Roman Empire and sought to become part of it? What about the Attila’s Huns, drinking fermented mares’ milk and charging irresistibly across Europe?

By the way, I must have another digression here. Since I left university, DNA studies have become part of the everyday life of the historian, especially where written documents give out, as they do in the fifth century. They have discovered that they are no help in telling which parts of Britain were settled by Saxons and which by Norsemen. These raiding peoples all came by sea from the Baltic regions and their DNA is jumbled together. But in Brittany a village has been found where the DNA is wildly different from the neighbours. The people look Breton – they are Breton. But their DNA is wildly different.

There is some documentary evidence that a group of Huns, from somewhere east of the Pripet Marshes, did not return home but settled. Perhaps they have been found.

Incidentally, this story illustrates another feature of the history lesson. The teacher should use whatever snippets of interest come to hand. I do not have footnoteable authority for this DNA story, but I do have it from the conversation of an Oxford don – a medievalist – after a few gin-and-vermouths.

This talk must not turn into a lecture on the barbarians, but a moment’s thought shows us that if Picts and Lombards and Franks and Visigoths and Scots and Britons and Jutes – to name but a few – are lumped together the resulting generalisation is certainly meaningless, factually useless, and probably insulting.

The main point of the talk so far is to illustrate two aspects of history teaching that are not always understood. One is that there is not a clear consensus about the past which we can make children learn off by heart. The other is that one thing we must teach in all schools is the importance of reading critically.

I just want to stay with this lack of consensus a moment before moving on. This year is the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. I saw a post on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, put by a professional historian: “Was the Somme a German victory or an Allied victory?” If you want to be good at history you have to think about the past, not just remember it.

However, I cannot stress enough that I am not saying historians do not need to know stuff, and a lot of it.

I have often asserted that spelling is the least important aspect of written English – compared with word choice, sentence structure, punctuation and so on. This has lead many of my critics to say “He doesn’t think spelling matters” – when I never said anything of the sort. So note well, I have not said knowledge is not important for the study of history.

Good historians know masses of history. If you saw the grand final of University Challenge the other week you will have noticed that five of the eight students taking part were historians. I am very much a school-teacher historian; but I did, about thirty years ago, attend some post-graduate public lectures and discussions that were offered at Edinburgh University. It was clear in the questions that the learned academics there expected to argue about particular documents and precise calendar dates entirely from memory. And for the school pupil there are exams.

As a teacher one had to devise ways of helping pupils commit material to memory. Memory has, of course, a lot to do with interest. Pupils would say “I can’t remember this. There’s so much to learn” and then one would find they knew the names of all the goalkeepers in the Premier League. I remember chatting about this to a friend at my prep school – this would be the late 1950s in North London. I believe one of his younger cousins has become famous as an author. He said: “I like it when there’s a history learning prep. Then I think ‘A 1! No prep!’”. He and I were so interested in the history classes that we just remembered the stuff without having to learn it from notes.. I found it quite hard to change my ways when I got older and this prep school technique no longer worked.

When I was starting out in teaching I commented to an experienced colleague how even our ablest pupils seemed to remember nothing of what they had done as juniors, whereas I could. “Ah” he said, “but you became a history teacher.”

This dear friend, now passed away, had received his army training in the last year of the Second World War. During one dull lecture on hygiene he and his fellow officer cadets were dozing quietly when a camouflaged figure with blackened faced leapt in, lobbed a couple of thunder flashes and a smoke grenade amongst the pupils and sprayed the room with Tommy Gun fire. When the young men crept out from under the desks they found the Medical Officer standing with arms folded. “That woke you buggers up at the back”, he drawled.

My own father, an English teacher, happened one autumn to be teaching “Henry V”. On St Crispin’s day he let off a Roman Candle.

The army has got pretty good at teaching rote learning. I must have been fifteen in the CCF when I learned how to give a fire order: “GRIT. Group; Range; Indication; Type of Fire!!” The following week we learned the duties of a sentry: Dir Ex Pos Nam Pro Par Sig Pas Dir.

My only success with this mnemonic lark came with Disraeli’s Second Ministry.

There used to be a feeble exam called O-level. It was supposed to be a two-year course, but not only did we cover it in one year, as a matter of course, I used to be given characters who had decided to take the subject up in the Sixth Form and get them through O-level in one term. One dead certainty was the domestic reforms of Disraeli’s Second Ministry. Let me run through them for you:

Artisans’ Dwelling Act

Rivers Pollution Act

Sale of Food and Drugs Act

Employers and Workingmen Act

Factory Act

Agricultural Enclosures Act

Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act

Education Act

Public Health Act

Merchant Shipping Act

I am rather pleased with that. If you arrange them in that order the initial letters of the acts spell out “Arse-face PM”. I don’t remember any pupils failing once I had worked this out, and several got As. Like I said, O-level History was a feeble exam.

As far as possible I tried to have my pupils remember material as my friend and I had done at prep-school. With so much immersion in class – readings, questions, discussion, lectures, exercises of various sorts – that the material became internalised. In the end, of course, there was nothing for it but for them to give time to learning; but I hope memory was always linked to researching or using the material.

One of the very big ways that school history has changed since I started is that syllabi are now strictly limited and clearly defined. When I started, the A-level History syllabus was one page in a small booklet. I was set to teach a paper called “Outlines of European History” and only by studying past papers could you guess what might come up. A good candidate could revise hard seven topics and two would come up. A chancer could skim through three topics and they would all come up. One year I recall half the questions in our chosen 200 years were about France, there was one on Russia, one on Spain and one on Italy. Now there is a clearly defined syllabus, in a booklet of its own, and candidates are expected to have studied all of it, but nothing else. So revision memory-work can be precisely directed.

Last Saturday we had the first examiners’ meeting of the year for Advanced Higher History. We were taking a selection of last years’ dissertations and discussing them so as to confirm our agreed standards before the markers are presented with twenty-five new dissertations to mark in three days, and we hover about standardising them. The criteria for awarding marks have been refined and developed over fifteen years – you can find them on-line - and the two key qualities are analysis and thoroughness, which is more or less what I have said so far: power of thought and quantity of stuff. In the dissertations thoroughness does not depend on memory, but they also have to do a three-hour exam. Incidentally, the quantity of stuff has to be relevant, and it has to contribute to the analysis if the candidate is going to reach good marks.

I am very glad to say that I ended the meeting feeling uplifted by the superb quality of much of the work that is done by final-year pupils in schools.

I was having a conversation at school, twenty years ago, about memory and debate with one of my colleagues, a modern linguist. He had trouble seeing my point. For him there was so much grammar and vocabulary to learn that it occupied almost all the school years, except for maybe some debate about literature in the final year.

The example I used to explain how history was different was the death of Harold at the Battle of Hastings. Everyone knows that he was killed with an arrow in the eye. You can learn it from umpteen books. But even a ten-year old can look at the only piece of evidence for this we have – the Bayeux Tapestry. The words “Harold Rex Interfectus Est” are the caption for one frame. The word “Harold” is written over a Saxon soldier clutching an arrow that has pieced his eye. The words “Interfectus Est” are over a Saxon soldier being cut down by a Norman mounted knight with a sword. Which is Harold? I spent a long time debating this with our Primary Sevens – the youngest pupils I taught – for history is not “What happened in the past” but “The debate about what happened in the past”.

I have just deliberately used the phrase “Everyone knows that”… One of the most important jobs of the historian, and so of the school history teachers, is to examine and question myths. Sometimes a myth can be true: “Hitler was awful”. But it can be believed as a myth or it can be believed as a matter of judgement, based on knowledge and understanding.

In practice most myths turn out to be either completely untrue, or, more often, turn out to be simplified, selective, half-truths, un-nuanced and untested. My six-year old grandson loves Star Wars fights, whether with light sabres or Lego models. These play-fights are always goodies against baddies. And the baddies (that’s grandpa) always lose. Most common discourse - journalistic, over a drink in a pub, by politicians – is conducted by trading over-simplified myths. One of the things a historian should always do is say: “Hang on a minute. There’s a bit more to it than this.” Or “It wasn’t quite like that”.

No historian I imagine – certainly not a school teacher – is so arrogant as to suppose he can correct all myths. It is a matter of a way of thinking, not of always knowing the right answer.

I used to say that there were two things I wanted all my pupils to remember: one was that Vikings did not have horns in their helmets. The other was that the Battle of Culloden was not fought between Scotland and England.

Myths which now appear almost weekly in our media today include deification of Winston Churchill and an assumption that Appeasement caused the Second World War. There is so much more to be said on both topics. For that matter I wonder how many people who have very strong opinions about Mrs Pankhurst and the Suffragettes know that the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly in favour of votes for women three years before the First World War. Or those people who think of Napoleon as a good strategist forget the utterly ridiculous attempt to conquer Egypt without first gaining command of the sea.

In history we do not believe everything we are told, and we do not subscribe to “everybody knows that..” . The past is to be investigated and debated, even at school.

Since I was at school, and since I started teaching, the huge change in the examination system has been the number of marks now awarded, and questions set, that require critical use of primary sources, and of the rival interpretations of modern historians. The various exam boards vary in how these are examined, and on the amount of weight given to them. But I never encountered them till I went to university, whereas now they are part of Higher, of GCSE, of A-level and of Advanced Higher. The main point of exams is not to arrange children in order and to give them certificates, but to see that they have worthwhile courses in preparing for the exams. So now, in order to cope with modern exams, they have to learn to weigh up interpretations and evaluate and read critically. Usually when there is some news in the press about a new exam system it means that the balance of marks between the various elements has been changed. Up until about 1980 we did nothing but essays, on various topics – and I guess you did too. Essays are still a big part of history – quite right too - but now there are long dissertations, comparison questions about primary sources, the critical balancing of rival interpretations and so on. As I say, different boards go about things differently. I would say that the best pupils at Advanced Higher go into far greater depth, whereas the best pupils at A-level do more critical work on sources. They are both good courses.

In the class room there have been three changes in technology that have revolutionised history teaching since I began.

One is the photocopier. I think I need not develop that point. How did we manage for two-thousand years without it?

The second was the video recorder. We had one in each history classroom by 1995. I recall the deputy rector complaining about teachers showing their classes a lot of videos once the exams were over. I replied: “Well, I’m all right then. I show them a lot before exams too.” He protested. “Look here”, says I, “you are a scientist. The video for me is like a practical for you. Which is better? Me telling them about the long-bow or them seeing one being fired on TV? Which is better? Me telling them Hitler was a successful public speaker or me showing a film of him making a speech?” He is a good friend of mine, and got the point.

The third was the personal computer. I remember the first one coming into the school, bought by a Maths teacher out of his own money. But for my last three years I had an interactive smart whiteboard and could summon the internet at will. Telling S1 about Drake’s expedition to the West Indies, we could go there courtesy of Google Earth. Telling P7 the story of Caedmon, the Northumbrian poet; well, I googled “Caedmon” and in less than a minute we were listening to a voice reading one of his poems in the original Anglo-Saxon. I know that you-tube has now replaced the VCR.

One of my department was away for a year. We needed a substitute. There arrived a young man called Mark, who handed in his PhD – on Maitland of Lethington – the day before his first term began. He turned out to be an excellent scholar, a wonderful personality and a born teacher. “You can’t let him go” I was told. So the timetable was re-organised and he stayed even when the absentee returned. I think we all had to teach one set of English, so as to make up the timetable arithmetic.

After a few years with us he went off to be Head of History at Charterhouse, and then a housemaster there. He became a Headmaster before he was forty. Then he was killed in a car crash.

After that I insisted in my department, as a memorial to Mark Loughlin, that there should never be a boring lesson. The others responded well. It took me a while to learn this – there need never be a boring lesson in History. There is no such thing as “This information is boring but you’ve got to learn it.”

There is so much I have not had time to talk about. School trips to Prague, and China and the Ypres Salient. History Society Youth Hostel weekends in the Borders. The Arts Foundation Course, where we took Fifth Year types to concerts and plays and art exhibitions. But the bedrock was what went on in the classroom, and in the pupils’ own time.

I have not, perhaps, lived up to Feynman’s ideal of chaos and confusion, but I have tried to leave more questions than I have answers. If senior pupils asked me how to get better at History exams the answer was “Practice”. But if they asked how to get better at History – which is not quite the same thing – the answer was “Read and think”.

The elderly teacher ground down by a lifetime of going over the same old stuff with unresponsive pupils is the stuff of fiction. You may have seen “The Browning Version” by Terrence Rattigan. The depressed teacher in that is called Harris, come to think of it.

If all history meant was learning more notes, I would never have stuck it out. In fact history is an ever-changing, thought-provoking, life-enhancing subject. By the end of my career I though I had the best job in Scotland, and I am very grateful to you for letting me talk a little about it.

The Early Stewart Kings. Suggestions for reading.

Yesterday I received a tweet asking me to recommend books on James I, James II and James III, the Stewart kings of Scotland in the late Middle Ages. My friend had been inspired, like many others, by the “James Plays” by Rona Munro, which have recently caused quite a sensation in Scotland.

(I'd better admit straight away that I have not seen them. My car accident laid me up just when they were on in the Festival. I'm more or less better now, thanks)

Since I have never taught, nor studied in detail, this period, I have just been to the Library to check. There is no doubt that the serious enquirer who has the time and the energy should get hold of the three relevant volumes in the series “The Stewart Kings of Scotland”. They can be found in the Scottish Room of the Edinburgh public library, catalogued at XDA 783.

The declared aim of this series is: "to bring the rich potential heritage of late medieval and early modern Scotland before as wide a reading public as possible, with specialist authors writing for the general reader as well as for the student or academic”. There is: “James I” by Michael Brown; James II” by Christine McGladdery; and “James III” by Norman Macdougall”. I think their idea of “the reading public” is a bit exalted. They are serious works for the seriously interested. But I doubt if you will do better.

Be warned, though. Writing biographies of these monarchs is not like writing about Queen Victoria, or David Lloyd George, or Field Marshall Montgomery.  Far too little can be found out. I opened the book on James I at random five times, and I found speculative words on every one of the five pages: “probably”, “doubtless”, appears as”, “it seems that” and “apparently”. The opening paragraph of the Preface to the life of James III includes: “The known facts suggest that he enjoyed a measure of success”. This does not make these books less good history than works where there is a mass of evidence, but it does make a different sort of biography.

When the “James Plays” were on, and I was stretched on a couch, I did read about the early Stewart kings in the many general books of Scottish History that I possess. They were all good in different ways. Two that I would suggest are: “The New Penguin History of Scotland” - the section on Medieval Scotland is by David Ditchburn and Alastair J Macdonald; and “Tales of a Grandfather “ by Walter Scott. This does not, of course, have the advantage of recent research, but my goodness he tells a good story. The Penguin book, by the way, is very heavy to lift.

My friend asked about James IV too. I do know a bit about him. The series on the Stewart Kings continues with “James IV” by Norman Macdougall. The desperate shortage of sources no longer applies and the book is packed with fascinating information. It does require time and energy, though. It is a serious academic account.

If you are short of time and energy I cannot avoid giving the link to my own short e-book on James IV. 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/James-IV-Scotlands-Renaissance-Lectures-ebook/dp/B00EUAEVCO/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=065M7DNC5NVWS8WGF4KS

It is about the right length for a long commute and it really is aimed at “the general reader”.

I hope this is helpful.

"The Bedrock: Poems on Themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland"

“The Bedrock: Poems on themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland” by Henry Marsh

I have posted reviews of Henry Marsh's poems before. His latest collection, “The Bedrock: Poems on Themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland” is heartily recommended.

He was asked to write poems to go with the panels of the Great Tapestry. There are twenty-seven here. “The Bedrock” (published by Maclean Dubois) only costs £5.00. I would like to say it is available from all good bookshops, but you may have to order a copy. Possibly it is easiest to buy them from the Tapestry website which is http://www.shop.scotlandstapestry.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=67 . I know Blackwells in Edinburgh stock them.

His method has been to take one of the panels and then to immerse himself in the history before letting his original and powerful imagination go to work. This “immersion” has included visits to the places – Flodden for example - as well as reading on the subject. The result is a wonderful series of lights shone on Scottish history from unexpected angles. I have no hesitation, as a historian, in saying that these poems add extra levels of meaning and understanding, even if one has a reasonable level of conventional historical knowledge

He has a most warm and effective way with words. The filthy, de-humanising horror of the Black Death, the zeal of the Covenanters, the shape of the Forth Bridge, the dignity in poverty of the Hungry Thirties are all conjured up for us. So is the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson:

                                                                     “….that soul

                                  was forged in an Edinburgh smiddy”

Likewise the original genius of James Clerk Maxwell who:

                                                                       “…gave us

                         a glimpse of that fundamental beauty

                         on which all beauty builds.”

The poems range from the earliest times to the modern age. In the first he imagines a mother, 8,000BC, telling her child stories of how they came north:

                                                    “Your grandfather would tell

                                             how we came from a land beyond

                                             the sunrise.”

Near the end of the book he remembers

                                                      “… the hustling Archie Gemmill,

                                               now sailing like a swan

                                               past three defenders.”

Some of you will remember that too. Argentina 1978.

If you care about Scottish history, if you enjoy contemporary Scottish poetry, if you have seen the Great Tapestry, do get hold of this little book.

Wall displays in a history class-room

Yesterday there was a tweet asking for ideas for what to put on a history teacher's class-room wall. So this seems a good moment for me to try and remember what worked for me, and what did not.

Perhaps I should start by admitting that when I was a pupil there was almost nothing on the walls that I now remember, except when one admired teacher put up various jokey headlines and adverts that included his name or initials. Also I began my career in a room which had no useful display space. However, in due course I reached a large room (Scottish Enlightenment, Regency, big windows, south facing: wasn't I lucky!) with pin-boards on the back wall ready for use. Sometimes the displays were less than wall-paper, but some things worked, perhaps, so here goes.

For sheer colour and vibrancy I once bought a load of old calendars (which can usually be picked up very cheap from about February) and got my form-class to use a class-teacher period to use them to cover every inch of space on the boards. This got a good deal of reaction from other classes and led to some intelligent conversations.

Occasionally with pupils of about 13 I would set an exercise of wall-chart making. In the end I found this was best done in pairs, not because it produced better charts, but because the process of collaboration was in itself valuable. The intelligent conversations (again) about a worthwhile project were part of education. There would be a central theme (The Reformation, the Napoleonic Wars or whatever) but each chart would be on a different subject, chosen by lot. There would be fairly strict rules about size (A3 paper provided) and a rule that there had to be a mixture of pictures and writing. Once the charts were all posted on the wall I would make a work-sheet and have a lesson in which each pupil took the worksheet on a circular tour round the charts, all starting in a different place. This not only perhaps increased their awareness of history, but also achieved that difficult objective of getting children to see and appreciate the work of their fellows.

The day after that remarkable Conservative MP vote which led to Mrs Thatcher's resignation as Prime Minister, I happened to notice in the newsagents that the headlines were all different. They even disagreed on the facts. On impulse I bought all the papers, and went back to school to put up their front pages as a display that spoke for itself. This led to more debate and discussion than anything else I remember and I wish I had done it more often. However, it did require an event of similar type, the time to get the display up within 48 hours, the chance of noticing the papers, and the chance of having enough cash-in-pocket to buy them all on impulse. But it is recommended.

As far as pictures are concerned the work of great artists (in reproduction) is always worth displaying. Since this was also where I spent my working day I was happy to spend a little money on it (the wall was in front of me all the time; behind the pupils). And one can never tell if a great work of art may strike some chord in a viewer which may bear fruit in the future. In a recent TV documentary I heard Prince Charles make that point about growing up in Buckingham Palace.

When I bought a reproduction of the Bayeaux Tapestry in Jorvik I was surprised to find that it was too long to fit between the main door of the room and the door to the Department Resources. But it was still worth the drawing-pin effort. This latter is not to be taken lightly, by the way. Many a day my finger ends were sore because I had been taking down a display.

What was on the front of the room, in the pupil's view all the time? Well, over the years I moved from a black-board to a white board to a video-screen to an interactive computer screen in various combinations. In retrospect I liked the black-board best. But there always remained, high up, a magnificent map of Europe which I had been given by my predecessor. Hardly a day passed when one did not wish to point to the Baltic, or Gallipoli, or Cork, or Lombardy.

Wall displays were quite a low priority in my teaching and sometimes the same weary collection of images would outstay their welcome. But the above stories are all true, and might give some ideas.

An Introduction to Edinburgh history

This morning I gave a short talk on the history of Edinburgh, at the request of a friend. For various domestic reasons (nobody’s fault) there was little preparation time. I discovered, on arrival, that my audience would be a small number of highly educated and interested Chinese visitors. I did my best.

This is more or less what I said. The talk was not written beforehand, though I had worked out the structure. It occurs to me that it might be of more general interest.

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Good morning and welcome. I am a history teacher, born and brought up in London, who moved here forty years ago. My family and I like it so much that we have settled here. I have been asked to introduce the history of the city in twenty minutes. This means that I shall leave out far more than I include. So there is no point bothering about that. Also, I should make it clear that there is nothing official about this presentation. It is a personal view.

I reckon that it is useful for the visitor to think of four Edinburghs.

One is the Old Town. You will know from the map of Scotland that Edinburgh on the east coast and Glasgow on the west are very close together. Between the two is a trench of flattish land, with big hills to north and south. The geological collapse of this trench, millions of years ago, was accompanied by some volcanic activity, so that round here we have a lot of small but steep-sided hills. There is the Castle Rock, of course. Also Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill, the Bass Rock and so on. These rocky hills were ideal for defence, and it says something about life all those centuries ago that defence was more important than water. People settled on the Castle Rock because they felt safer. From the Rock the glaciers of the Ice Age left a slope running away east, down to where Holyrood Palace is now, and this became the Old Town, with its wall.

The second Edinburgh is the eighteenth century expansion. At last, in the 1750s, there was no likelihood of invasion from England and no likelihood of civil war and so people of vision began to think of building outside the city wall. Because of all those steep little hills this was quite an engineering challenge, and you will see lots of signs of earth-moving and levelling and the building of bridges. There used to be a lake, the Nor’ Loch, where Princes Street Gardens are now; that had to go. They built on the South Side, where George Square is now. They built the First New Town, and then the Second New Town. These two are often run together and called The New Town. I think this is a mistake. The First New Town, Princes Street, George Street and Queen Street, was built to be as different as possible from the Old Town. As a result the streets had to be straight and wide, the houses had to be low, and there was to be no decoration. One famous citizen of the time, Henry Cockburn, said of the New Town “What a site nature gave us for our New Town. What meanness in its execution!” But then the Second New Town, below Queen Street Gardens, was built with a different sort of plan. Great architects were encouraged to build streets and buildings of grandeur and beauty. Today the First New Town has been rebuilt and rebuilt, with modern shops and hotels. The Second New Town is strictly protected by planning regulations and is preserved as a great architectural site.

The third Edinburgh is the great modern expansion that started in about 1850 and is still going on. Tourists don’t come to see it, but it is where most of us live. It involved hundreds of thousands of people, and a great deal of fresh water and sewage and new parks, and shopping centres and housing schemes. However, thanks to geography Edinburgh cannot have a huge urban sprawl. The hills to the south and the sea to the north are never far away. Also, you will notice as you look around that sometimes the nineteenth and twentieth century development has been allowed to change the Old and New Towns.

The fourth Edinburgh is too often forgotten. This is Edinburgh by the sea. Most great cities in Scotland developed partly as ports, built on the sea for trade. Edinburgh was built for defence, on a rock. But a port developed, at Leith, and when Robert I – that’s Robert the Bruce – gave Edinburgh a new charter, he gave Leith to the city. Leithers did not all approve of this and in the 1830s, when Britain’s cities were reshaped by burgh reform, Leith became a separate burgh. But the lawyers of Edinburgh are a powerful lot – consider how recently they managed to get Scotland’s parliament in this city, not in Glasgow – and in 1929 they managed once again to have Leith brought under the government of Edinburgh. So Edinburgh is a sea-side city, and trade, fishing and so on are part of its history. So is relaxing by the sea, at Portobello or Cramond.

I have described four different bits that make up Edinburgh. I would now like to use a few dates to help fix the history. There is no need to remember them precisely

In the 1130s that great king David I decided that the people who lived below the Castle should be a chartered burgh, with a provost and baillies, a privileged market and so on. He was the founder of Edinburgh, if anyone is. He also set up the abbey, Holyrood Abbey, at the other end of the hill that leads down from the Castle.

In the 1320s Robert the Bruce had finally driven the English invaders out of Scotland, which included recapturing Edinburgh Castle in 1314 when Thomas Randolph led a small party in the dark to climb the rock. This was when he refounded the city, and issued it with a new charter. [Question: Yes, this is the story that you can see some of in the film “Braveheart”]

In the 1560s there was the revolution that led to Mary Queen of Scots being driven out and Scotland becoming Protestant. The most important person in this was John Knox. It is very hard to know now which Scots lords were genuinely Protestant and which saw the Reformation as a chance to get money, land and power; probably a bit of both. As far as Edinburgh was concerned it meant that the monks were thrown out of Holyrood Abbey and the city council got control of the whole Royal Mile, and of the land that had formerly been run by the Canons of Holyrood Abbey.

In 1603 there was one of those accidents of marriage, birth and death that can happen with royal families. The King of Scotland, James VI, became James I of England as well. For ages the English royal family had schemed for this to happen the other way round, and it never did. That’s by the way. The point is that with the same person as king of both countries there was hope that the interminable wars between the two would cease. It did not work out quite like that. There were still too many wars and civil wars for over a hundred years. [Question: Yes. Just as in Hong Kong and China you have one government and two systems, so it was in England and Scotland.]

In 1707 the two countries officially joined to become one country, the United Kingdom. Historians have been arguing ever since whether this was a good thing or not. I doubt if they will ever agree. But those who say it was an English take-over of Scotland are definitely wrong. Yes England was and is bigger, richer and stronger than Scotland, so was always likely to be the dominant partner. But it was a partnership. The main concern of the English government in 1707 was to make sure that Scotland did not become an ally in war of France. In return for that guarantee they were quite happy for Scotland to keep its own legal system, its own education system and its own church. Even today, when Elizabeth II is in England she is head of the church, as Elizabeth I established centuries ago. In Scotland she has no special position in the church, and when she stays in Holyrood or Balmoral she visits the local parish church more or less as an ordinary person, and plays no part in running the church here.

Finally, between 1794 and 1815 there were the great wars against Napoleon’s France. There are often forgotten. But they involved everyone and went on a long time, at a very important period in Edinburgh’s history. On Calton Hill you can see great monuments to Waterloo, to Admiral Nelson, to the dead in the French wars. Henry Cockburn, whom I have mentioned, spent many nights as a volunteer guarding the Martello Tower that was built for defence in Leith. There was a real fear of French invasion at the very time when the Second New Town was being planned and the city was still enjoying being called The Athens of the North.

This is to be a short talk. But before I stop I would like to suggest three things that have affected the character of the city.

One is its closeness to England. This has been for bad and for good. For all those centuries of war it was far too close to be safe from invading armies, supported by the powerful English navy. Far too often Edinburgh was a war zone, with gunfire in the streets, and explosions, and the clash of weapons and cobble stone slippery with blood. There are many cities in the world that are war-zones today. Edinburgh was too often like that. Sometimes it was English invasion; sometimes it was civil wars. But then for the last three hundred years Edinburgh has not been some remote provincial city beyond the sea or beyond the mountains. It was easy for people and books and ideas to come and go to everyone’s benefit. During the Napoleonic Wars, which I mentioned, there could be no Grand Tour of Europe for enterprising young men; it was to Edinburgh they came, and the University flourished.

A second is that the city has managed, for many reasons, to become the leading place for Scotland’s professional life. This is where the new parliament was set up. This is where the General Assembly of the Kirk meets. Edinburgh solicitors can call themselves “Writers to the Signet” and put WS after their names. This can be very irritating to Glasgow, which is certainly bigger, and probably a lot richer; but this flourishing professional life certainly is part of Edinburgh’s character. It has – as has Glasgow – several universities and teaching hospitals.

A third feature that seems to me to give character to Edinburgh’s history is a certain democratic way of thinking. I am not talking of politics. Until the 1830s reforms Edinburgh’s two Members of Parliament were chosen by 33 people. But in the Old Town everyone lived close, often on top of each other on the same stair in the same building, so that the rich, the middling sort and the poor would meet every day and know each other. There are plenty of stories of the eighteenth century, when the Scottish Enlightenment was flourishing, of gatherings in pubs where great men of power, learned philosophers of international reputation, ordinary city professionals, and any local who could afford to stand a round, would drink and talk and argue together. Some attempt was made to keep this in the New Town, with richer streets and poorer streets side by side. Now I’m afraid much of this has been lost and in Edinburgh there are “good areas” and “bad areas”, as there are in most big cities. But something of this democratic spirit remains.

I have gone on far too long. I hope you enjoy your visit to Edinburgh, and I do hope it includes a walk down the Royal Mile. We have mentioned the Scottish Enlightenment. You will see a statue of David Hume, the innovative philosopher. You will see a statue of Adam Smith, who invented the science of economics. Go into St Giles and see the memorial window to Robert Burns, a great poet. Further down, see a statue of Robert Fergusson, who died far too young, but whom Burns so much admired. And at the bottom of the hill go to Dynamic Earth and learn about James Hutton, the father of modern geology. He was the first, at least in Europe, to look at the way rock strata lay on each other – on Arthur’s Seat particularly – and start to reconstruct how they might have been formed not thousands but millions of years ago.

In fairness it should be noted that they were not all sons of Edinburgh. Burns came from Ayrshire, and Adam Smith was born in Kirkaldy and did much of his work in Glasgow. The great engineer and developer of steam power, James Watt, is of the west of Scotland, and the philosopher Thomas Reid, whose “Common Sense” lies behind those famous sentences “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “It is a truth universally acknowledged”, was at Aberdeen. The Scottish Enlightenment was not just an Edinburgh phenomenon. Nevertheless, I have been very lucky to settle here for so long, and I am sure you will enjoy your visit.

I have been allowed to add a little advertisement. Since I retired I have done some writing, and I’ll mention three of my pieces here, in case you would like to know more. They are available on Amazon Kindle.

“Getting to Know Edinburgh” http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_10?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=getting%20to%20know%20edinburgh&sprefix=Getting+to%2Cdigital-text%2C391

“An Introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment” http://www.amazon.co.uk/Introduction-Scottish-Enlightenment-Lectures-History-ebook/dp/B0097ROZ0S/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0BG00Z1AC21VP8RHNMSM

“Bonnie Dundee and the First Jacobite Rebellion” http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jacobite-Rebellion-Lectures-Scottish-History-ebook/dp/B0097SO8N6/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1C5B6SF66NXD2RMMNAPT

Introducing "Getting to know Edinburgh"

Nipping off to the shops as early spring sun made Edinburgh magical. I thought “I must write about this”. So I did, and a guide book gradually took shape. The publication date kept being postponed. It involved a lot of research, and a lot of walking, and a traffic accident. But it is finished at last. It has been fascinating to do.

My method has been to do the walks and then write about them, always from memory, resorting to research only to plug the gaps. This may have led to some errors in the history, but at least it is original, not copied. I have, of course, left out as much as I have included, but there is more than enough here for a week’s holiday, or entertainment on a train journey. The last task was to take a photo for the cover.

In case any one is interested in buying the book here is the link to it.

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Getting-Know-Edinburgh-George-Harris-ebook/dp/B00PH9NW0E/ref=pd_rhf_gw_p_img_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=03YNRJWSV5JGEB53C78P
 

 I have added the introduction and the contents page to this post. I hope you think it looks more, not less attractive. One of the first people to read it said he liked it because it was “witty”. What a nice comment.

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To the Reader

In 2014 I began my forty-first year as a resident of Edinburgh (always the South Side). We arrived in an old black Riley, up the A7, so that I could take up a post teaching history. Edward Heath was Prime Minister, and was in big trouble with the Trades Unions. No schools owned computers – they were far too big and expensive (the computers, not the schools) – and some of the city’s milk was delivered by horse and cart. It was professionally necessary, as well as a pleasure, to learn more and more about the history of the city, the character of the city, the buildings of the city, the ways through and round the city.

I imagine you, with your e-reader, staying for a few days and wanting them to be as fulfilling and purposeful as possible. Hence this book. It is the book I would like if I were here on holiday for a week: not too long; not infused with cynical nostalgia about how good it used to be before vulgar trippers like you came along; and not packed with information I shall never want about shopping, restaurants, times of trains and so on. (I can find shops for myself, thanks, and train times change.) It only has stuff that interests me, but I am sure our interests overlap. There is a lot of history, a lot of museums, a lot of art galleries, and a lot of tramping the streets.

Edinburgh is fairly well provided with information boards, wall plaques and so on. I have referred to a few of them, but on the whole I assume that if you can read this, you can read them too, and have avoided duplication. Since this is an e-book I have also included links to the official web-sites of the main sites. These are informative and will be kept up to date.

I have been here forty years. I am going to indulge in some total immersion in all the best this great city has to offer, and I am going to share it with you in a series of tours. Friends and critics who know Edinburgh will no doubt point out important sites and sights that I have left out. To them I say “Write your own book!” To visitors I will say without apology that this is not, and is not meant to be, a work of reference. Do not be disappointed that this is not what it does not pretend to be. Do get yourself a work-of-reference guide as well and visit the Tourist Information Centre above Waverley Station.. This book of mine makes much of my particular interests – history, fine art, literature, and town and country walks.

You do not, of course, have to follow my routes in order, or even follow them at all (though if you do you will end the week with a mind enlarged and calf muscles in trim from much walking). I like to think of you reading this on the train as you journey here, and then picking out bits day by day. But perhaps you will follow it from beginning to end; if so, you deserve a medal. One word of warning. Publication of this book was delayed when I walked in front of a moving car and was lucky to escape permanent injury. Do take care on road crossings.

There is no end to the other books you could buy; there are plenty of book shops in Edinburgh, not to mention the various museum and gallery shops. You can enjoy browsing, and spending money. I am just going to mention five, which you may not find on the shelves, but are worth looking for.

One is “Edinburgh” by David Daiches. I see that at this moment I could buy a used copy on-line for £3.49. It is written in a pleasant style and is particularly strong on literary associations.

The second is “Memorials of His Time” by Henry Cockburn. It seems to be available at a range of prices, depending on edition. It is one of the best history books ever written, and describes the city from the 1780s to the 1820s. This covers one of the most intensely exciting times in Edinburgh’s history, though on the night when there was supposed to be a riot of Paisley weavers and Cockburn rather sheepishly enrolled as a special constable, “the whole city was a silent as the grave, or even as Peebles.”. Expect to find some quotations appearing here and there in this guide.

The third is “Edinburgh: An Illustrated Architectural Guide” by Charles McKean, which not only contains more factual information per ounce than any other pocket-sized book I can think of, it also has hundreds of photos. It is not, at the moment, cheaply available, but it is worth the money.

The fourth is “The Capital of the |Mind: How Edinburgh changed the World” by James Buchan. This comprehensive and fascinating look at the eighteenth century, the phenomenon known as the Scottish Enlightenment, is fairly recently published, and readily available.

Finally there is “Layers of Edinburgh” by Eleanor Harris. This is an illustrated historical map of the Old Town. The author is a serious artist and a serious historian and the result is everything you want to know on one sheet of A3 paper. The drawings and colour make it a perfect souvenir. You will find it here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/67310796/layers-of-edinburgh-an-illustrated

I will also mention a Facebook page: Lost Edinburgh. The huge and growing collection of old photographs is fascinating.

For getting around I recommend the Lothian bus service. If you expect to make more than two journeys in a day, ask for a day ticket. Because I am very old I have a free bus pass – one of my best perks. By the time this book is finished the trams will be running, but I do not think their route will help you much.

In this guide I use the points of the compass very frequently. If you remember that the Royal Mile and Princes Street run East – West, that the Firth of Forth is to the North and that the Pentland Hills are to the South you are unlikely to go far wrong.

Getting to know Edinburgh: Contents

Introduction: To the Reader

Note that there are descriptions of many things to see as you walk between each of the main sites that do not have a separate sub-heading. These come after a sub-heading and before you arrive at the main site listed.

Note also that I have included links to web-sites for many of the main attractions.

1. Route One:

• Calton Hill
• The National Gallery
• The Writers’ Museum
• Lawnmarket

2. Route Two: 

• Greyfriars
• The National Museum
• The High Street
• The High Kirk of Saint Giles

 3. Route Three:

• Holyrood Palace
• Canongate Kirk
• The Museum of Edinburgh
• The People’s Story Museum
• Canongate – Netherbow – High Street

4. Route Four:

• Ramsay Garden
• Princes Street Gardens
• The Castle

5. Route Five:

• The First New Town,
• The Second New Town
• The Portrait Gallery

6. Route Six:

• Lothian Road,
• The Canal
• Toll Cross and Portsburgh
• The Grassmarket
• The Cowgate and the Flodden Wall

7. Route Seven:

• Morningside
• Bruntsfield
• The Meadows

8. Route Eight:

• Canonmills
• The Water of Leith
• The Botanical Gardens
• The Gallery of Modern Art

9. Route Nine:

• Salisbury Crags
• Dynamic Earth 
• The Scottish Parliament

10. A few suggestions for other things to do

• A seaside resort
• An open-top bus trip
• A mountain walk
• Edinburgh Zoo
• The Royal Yacht
• A boat trip
• An urban farm
• Saughton Rose Garden
• The Sea-life Centre
• A day in Glasgow
• Blackford Hill

Creationtide explained

During September I have been using the Twitter hashtag #Creationtide. This is an article explaining what it meant that I wrote for our church magazine at St John's, Edinburgh, reprinted by kind permission of the editor. This is the link to the magazine: http://www.stjohns-edinburgh.org.uk/get-involved/cornerstone-magazine.html

I have been asked to explain Creationtide. This in my capacity as Convenor of the Green Ginger Group, which exists to force the decision-makers of St John's to consider environmental issues every time they face a choice. Some churches, I have noticed, call it Creationtime.

One strand in Western thinking, frequently the dominant strand in Christianity, has been to regard Creation as a pyramid with the human race at the top. Everything exists to help the human race. The value of everything is measured by it usefulness to the human race. It is possible to derive this wrong interpretation from a misreading of the Book of Genesis. It received a considerable boost in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for the science of those days sometimes seemed to be about humanity establishing control over Creation.

This was never the only strand of thinking. In the wonderful last section of Book of Job, for example, the complete independence of God's Creation from human convenience is asserted. This is one of the messages to be found in the story of Jonah, which we studied in Lent. And the twenty-first century scientist, like the modern ecologist and the modern theologian, is more likely to see the value of every item of Creation for its own sake, the unknowable vastness and complexity of Creation, the inter-relationship of all the pieces and so on. It was not an accident that our theme in 2013 brought forth respectful praise of midges and ticks as well as of pretty, lovable animals.

Scientists now are in broad agreement that the human race (and much life on Earth) is experiencing a massive ecological crisis, facing mass extinctions caused by pollution, climate change and so on. We have to improve our relationship with Creation, and get rid of short-term selfishness.

Creationtide, devised in 1989 is adopted by more and more churches all over the world. It is September 1 to October 4^th , climaxing in Harvest Festival and in the Feast of St Francis. All the resources of the church are used to get us to think responsibly about Creation. More knowledge, less selfish attitudes, mutual respect, wonder and changed behaviour are all part of it.

Every year at St John's we have a theme to focus our studies. This year it is the rocks of which the earth is made. By the time you read this Creationtide will be well advanced. Do take advantage of this inspiring season, to be part of making things better.