We are all human. Image: Pixfiction / Shutterstock
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Nobody has changed history more than Terry Deary. Our understanding of history at least, which in the end is more important to what might actually have happened decades, centuries or millennia ago. Deary is behind the multi-million selling Horrible Histories series, which was adapted into a wildly popular (with both kids and adults) TV show and has inspired generations to take an interest in the past in a way that sheds light on the present and where we might be headed.
He has just published a book for grown-ups, A History of Britain in Ten Enemies, and he certainly wasn’t kidding about history being horrible. History is complicated, messy and more often than not, we were responsible for a lot of the most horrible parts. So when our sense of national identity is based on shoogly foundations, and the present often seems as horrible as any previous period, understanding ourselves has never been more important.
Big Issue: Are kids’ books limiting because history is more horrible than you can possibly imagine?
Terry Deary: History isn’t horrible. It’s human beings that are horrible, whether they live today or lived a century or a hundred lifetimes ago. Children’s books can look at the dangerous and cruel times, the dirty and the disgusting, the foul food and terrible toilets. But with adults a book can look at the motives and the beliefs that allowed evil people to flourish. There’s nowt so queer as folk. And their stories can be laugh-out-loud funny.
The book profiles countries we’ve had entanglements with over the centuries, but are we really our own worst enemy?
Pacifists bemoan the horrors of war but it seems people enjoy having someone to hate. They demonise someone who is has a different birthplace, religion, ethnicity or culture. The ‘patriotism’ of supporting the sports team of your homeland is fine; but when it spills over into nationalism it leads to hatred and violence. The nationalist believes that if someone is ‘different’ then they are ‘inferior’ and less human. It’s all in the mind.
We all know the British empire got up to some rotten things but it doesn’t really impact much of our thinking today. How have we as a country been able to come to terms with our past actions?
Some people look back with shame at the pasts of their ancestors. But many others seek to excuse, explain and justify the unforgiveable. Many are deniers; they want to erase the distasteful episodes from the history curriculum. Who is taught about what happened to the 20,000 Tasmanians who inhabited the island when Captain Cook arrived? Sixty years later the last one died. Exterminated more efficiently than by Daleks. The examples of whitewashed history are just too numerous to mention.
Illustration from Horrible Histories: Terrible Tudors
A lot of the enemies you write about are invaders who came and left some of their party behind to propagate. Is that what British people really are?
The British people are mongrels. In the dog world it’s the ‘pedigree’ creatures that are frail and endangered. Meanwhile it’s the mongrels – with fresh injections of new blood – that are noted for their resilience and longevity. Nationalists aspire to stress their British pedigree when in fact they should celebrate immigrants rather than join up with other knuckleheads to attack them.
A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is black comedy at its darkest because these incidents happened to real people. The laughter should be uncomfortable. But it also aims to cut through the years of sanitising the past we thought we knew. Elizabeth I wasn’t the Gloriana who ruled over a ‘Golden Age’; she was a monstrous ego who used the Armada as an excuse to preserve herself. And Shakespeare – great poet though he was – became her propogandist. Ten Enemies tries to draw back the veil of lies that obscure the truth about the past; to erase the rose-coloured tint from the glasses.
And some of our most celebrated iconic structures like castles and cathedrals turn out to really be symbols of local populations being subjugated. Any favourite examples?
Durham Cathedral is admired but the use of the building as a lethal prisoner of war camp for Scottish enemies is overlooked because it is not on-brand. Churches and castles are symbols of our oppressors. Admire the architecture if you must, but remember their meaning.
In similar books from the perspective of other countries, how often would Britain appear as an enemy?
It would appear in most national histories depending on when they were written and who wrote them. A thousand years ago the Romans wrote the history of their invasion and portrayed the Britons as savages. Today a certain president Putin may have a similarly jaundiced view of Britain to his Russian people in his book, A History of Russia in Ten Enemies.
Terry Deary
What do you think is a good definition of ‘Commonwealth’ – as it’s probably not that ‘wealth’ was ‘common’?
A crumbling institution that was of its time, and that time is no more. It’s the Church of England of international relations. Crumble on, don’t ask me to shore you up.
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With Commonwealth countries pushing for reparations, what could a possible satisfactory outcome be given the debts owed are probably impossible to ever pay?
The human victims of the Commonwealth are long past caring. The guilty ancestors of the perpetrators may well want to offer reparations. But is that an attempt to right the wrongs committed hundreds of years ago? Or just an attempt to assuage their own guilt… to let them sleep easier at night? Are theyproposing reparations to help the ruined nations… or to help themselves?
Has history always been a front on the culture wars, with debate today increasingly toxified to push a certain agenda?
Back to the Romans. They wrote their histories to distort the uncomfortable truths and big-up the Roman way of life. They didn’t bother to record the lives of one-third of the population – the enslaved – because they didn’t matter, did they? Come to think of it that’s true of most chronicles from the past – monarchs and warriors dominate as if they had their own press officer. George Santayana had it right when he said, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there. History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
Is there any figure from British history that is unproblematic and worth celebrating?
See above. The most important people in history are Mr and Mrs Peasant. They have quietly and courageously persevered against all odds to make the world we have today. We owe them. Westminster Abbey celebrates The Unknown Warrior but where is the monument to The Unknown Peasant? Unless you count the weathered and neglected tombstones in our graveyards.
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Are we more of a goodie than a baddie today than we were in the past?
Enemies in the past have united and defined the nation’s image of itself. The most recent example was the Falklands War. But that was over 40 years ago. Without an external and menacing enemy, too many people strive to find an alternative – they need to ‘invent’ an enemy. “That family over there are immigrants. Let’s hate them.” When is someone going to explain that we shouldn’t be looking for our differences. We should be looking for what we have in common. Donald Trump has caps with MAGA on them – Make America Great Again. We should be wearing caps that read WAAH. We. Are. All. Human.
Who will be our enemies of the future?
The most important day in history is ‘tomorrow’. If we don’t learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made, then why bother studying it? Until the schooling system teaches our future citizens that the philosophy of WAAH is the way forward there will always be enemies.
It’s fast approaching that most wonderful time of the year. Tell us something horrible about Christmas.
Good King Wenceslas? In 949 AD Wenceslas spread Christianity through Bohemia. This annoyed his pagan mother and his brother who met him at a church door and chopped Wenceslas to pieces. Wence was only 22 years old. He didn’t do a lot of gathering winter’s fuel after that.
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