Learning From History - Not Rewriting It.

The threatened statue above the entrance to Oriel College

In my last blog I commented upon the various explosions of moral outrage that university campusus across the western world have experienced in recent months as students went out of their way to illustrate their lack of maturity – or, as writer Clive James commented, reinforced the view that the only thing “quick about them was their ability to take offence”. In the UK the most obvious example of this has been the long and drawn out campaign to have the statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College Oxford because of his links with Britain’s imperial past and the colonisation of Africa. Today, the University has announced that they will not be removing the statue. A spokesman for the University said:  “Following careful consideration, the college’s governing body has decided that the statue should remain in place and that the college will seek to provide a clear historical context to explain why it is there...... we have received overwhelming support for keeping it... including comments from students and academics, alumni, heritage bodies, national and student polls and a further petition, as well as over 500 direct written responses to the college,”. Within that announcement there was also the inference that many large donors to the college and the wider University had indicated that should the statue be removed they would withdraw their financial backing which might ultimately total about £100 million.

It would be easy to criticise the university and suggest that in taking this stance they are merely thinking of the financial implications of bowing to pressure from the students - they don't want to lose valuable income by giving in to the students' demands. Well, as is so often the case, moral principles can easily be muddied by less worthy considerations but for me, whatever the university’s reason, they are acting correctly.

I suspect that despite his many failings Rhodes (on the right)
 will ultimately be remembered more (and maybe more kindly)
than the gentleman on the left, the leader of the
Rhodes Must Fall Campaign

Critics of the statue have argued that Rhodes’ imperialist legacy should not be celebrated. The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement said the statue was representative of Britain’s “imperial blind spot” and should be taken down. Brian Kwoba, one of the campaigners, said Rhodes was “responsible for all manner of stealing land, massacring tens of thousands of black Africans, imposing a regime of unspeakable labour exploitation in the diamond mines and devising proto-apartheid policies......... The significance of taking down the statue is simple: Cecil Rhodes is the Hitler of southern Africa. Would anyone countenance a statue of Hitler? The fact that Rhodes is still memorialised with statues, plaques and buildings demonstrates the size and strength of Britain’s imperial blind spot.”

Mmmmm! In the politically correct world that we now live in the viewpoint of the campaigners has an awful and perverse logic about it. We have learned to watch our words and be very careful of our displays of support or criticism of many aspects of everyday life.  It is rare indeed for me to read a newspaper and not read somewhere in it that some  dispute is raging about ageism or sexism or some other “ism”. Any one of us – but especially those in the public domain - can be vilified (especially in these days of social media) because of our stance on some issue or a thoughtless, or even well-intentioned, comment. Increasingly it seems the thought police are watching and listening at every door and window.

Flanders and Swann - poking gentle fun at 
themselves, society and the world 

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I read a letter in the Guardian. It followed a series of letters brought about by the continuing discussion here in the UK about whether England should have its own national anthem. As the United Kingdom has become more diversified and Scotland and Wales have gained their own regional governments the question has been increasingly asked should we English have our own anthem for use, say, when the England football team play as representing England and not the UK as a whole? Many suggestions have been made for this possible anthem – William Blake’s great poem “Jerusalem” (And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green......” set to Hubert Parry’s stirring music has been much favoured but the discussion has also brought up many flippant suggestions. In the Guardian one gentleman took me back years when he suggested the wonderful Michael Flanders and Donald Swann song “The English, the English are best.....”  Flanders and Swann were a musical comedy duo at their height in the 1950s and 60s. Flanders wrote most of the words while Swann was responsible for the music. Flanders had suffered from polio in the mid 40s and so used a wheelchair on stage while Swann sat  the piano and played. The two performed comic songs and monologues and were regulars on our old black and white TV set when I was a child. They played to packed theatres in London and many of their witty and clever monologues have become very much part of the history of theatre, music and, one might say, the English culture. They might be considered a bit twee and old fashioned now but I guess that there are few children, even today who will go through nursery, school or childhood without, at some point, coming across the marvellous Hippopotamus Song: “Mud, mud glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood....!” Their songs and monologues were entertaining, clever and full of acute observations of people, events and places; filled with wit and irony they were scathing (but never hurtful or malicious)  social commentaries. Their humour was penetrating and subtle never unpleasant or gratuitous. So when I read in the Guardian the suggestion that “The English are best....” might be a good national anthem I was immediately taken back to another time when political correctness was quite unheard of and would have been immediately quashed had anyone been pompous, arrogant or immature enough to try to display it:

The English

(Flanders & Swan)

The rottenest bits of these islands of ours

We've left in the hands of three unfriendly powers

Examine the Irishman, Welshman or Scot

You'll find he's a stinker as likely as not

The English the English the English are best

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

The Scotsman is mean as we're all well aware

He's boney and blotchy and covered with hair

He eats salty porridge, he works all the day

And hasn't got bishops to show him the way

The English the English the English are best

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

The Irishman now our contempt is beneath

He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth

He blows up policemen or so I have heard

And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third

The English are moral the English are good

And clever and modest and misunderstood

The Welshman's dishonest, he cheats when he can

He's little and dark more like monkey than man

He works underground with a lamp on his hat

And sings far too loud, far too often, and flat

The English the English the English are best

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

And crossing the channel one cannot say much

For the French or the Spanish, the Danish or Dutch

The Germans are German, the Russians are red

And the Greeks and Italians eat garlic in bed

The English are noble, the English are nice

And worth any other at double the price

And all the world over each nation's the same

They've simply no notion of playing the game

They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won

And they practice before hand which spoils all the fun

The English the English the English are best

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad

It's just that they're foreign that makes them so mad

The English are all that a nation should be

And the pride of the English are Chipper and me

The English the English the English are best

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest

A modern day Flanders and Swann couldn’t get away with it in these politically correct times – some individual or pressure group would take them to task for stereotyping or belittling some minority group or other. However, I suspect that just like those Victorian masters of gentle comedy and social commentary Gilbert and Sullivan, were Flanders and Swann to return they could easily put together some musical offering that would very effectively prick the pompous balloon of political correctness and show it up for what it usually is - unpleasant, egocentric, shallow and misguided. Sadly, youngsters and those of a politically correct disposition of the 21st century would not understand the gentle irony and self-parody that Flanders and Swann were indulging in. The Rhodes Must Fall protestors and others on university campuses would see only what they wanted to see - a part of the establishment to criticise and attack because it does not conform to their limited view of the world and how they perceive it should be.  I doubt if the BBC would now broadcast "The English are best" for fear of some minority pressure group or other taking offence, and that is a sad indictment upon our times – that we have become so wound up in our own self. As Clive James says, our quickness to take offence is the only quick thing about us. We cannot anymore laugh at ourselves or each other; we cannot accept our differences and those of others; we want to totally eliminate every small thing that doesn’t  subscribe to our view of the world, its modus operandi and indeed ourselves. We know what we like and we like what we know.

Rhodes has to be protected by netting
from mindless vandalism by these immature
and rather dim students.

So, for me, Oxford’s decision to stand by their statue is absolutely correct and the two best comments that I have read belong to the university’s chancellor, Chris Patten, who told students that if they could not embrace freedom of thought, they may “think about being educated elsewhere”. Absolutely – if you wish to enjoy the huge privileges that Oxford and other such places bestow upon you, then you accept, too, the very foundations upon which places like Oxford are built – and that means its history, its culture, its guiding principles. If you don’t like the heat get out of the kitchen. The celebrated Cambridge classicist Mary Beard put another perspective on the situation when she told the students: “The battle isn’t won by taking the statue away and pretending those people didn’t exist. It’s won by empowering those students to look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self-confident sense of unbatterability.” Absolutely – we know that Rhodes would not be honoured in the same way today; times and beliefs have changed but a mature mind (which, it seems to me, is what most of these complaining students do not have) is able to accept this and see how far we have come – not simply eliminate the past and rewrite history. You don't change history or its symbols  by destroying it. There must be no room for revisionism or destruction of those things we dislike or disagree with. We learn from the past by engaging with it, debating and understanding it – and then move forward armed with these new bits of awareness and knowledge of the world and ourselves within it. I think the word for it is "progress"!.

Stained glass window depicting Cromwell's men trying
 to rewrite history by eliminating religious artefacts
 that offended them so

If we remove the Rhodes statue, then I wonder should we demolish all the English country houses and stately homes, built by the poor and inhabited by aristocratic and self-appointed betters, lording it over us? Should we blow up all the exceptionally beautiful churches and Cathedrals, funded and built by serfs and peasants of the middle ages to help a monotheistic religion keep them down and obedient? No, of course not. We can understand their historical context and still appreciate their beauty and be moved by them, or at least discuss the political and culture situation which brought them about. Throughout history people of all faiths and beliefs have gone around ransacking the past in self-righteous anger and indignation. It still goes on – witness Isis in the middle east – and we in this country have done the same.  Go to many of our great and ancient churches and see the damage caused by Henry VIIIs ransacking of the monasteries or by Cromwell’s soldiers during the Civil War. Stained-glass windows, altar rails, statues, even communion tables were destroyed as symbols of popery and idolatry. Everything had to go. Worcester Cathedral  was described by one Roundhead soldier as 'so vile, papisticall and abonimable…that it resembles Sodom and is the very emblem of Gomorrah, and doubtless worse.’ So, the organ was torn apart, windows and statues smashed, campfires were lit inside, and the aisles and choir stalls were used as latrines. Rochester Cathedral and even Canterbury Cathedral were subject to equally terrible acts of vandalism; it was an orgy of destruction. One zealous vandal, an otherwise respectable Suffolk yeoman called William Dowsing, kept a diary of his exploits: “Swaffham Bulbeck in Cambridgeshire 1643. 4 crucifixes and Christ nailed to them and God the Father over one of them, and we brake down a 100 superstitious pictures, and 2 crosses we took off the steeple, and 2 on the church and chancel…We digged down the steps, 20 cherubins…. At Babraham in Cambridgeshire, January 5, 1644. We brake down 3 crucifixes and 60 superstitious pictures, and brake in pieces the rails.”

And much good it did him – I don’t think! The students at Oxford – many of whom are in the UK as visitors enjoying the privileges of our country and this great institution are actively benefitting from Cecil Rhodes’ legacy as Rhodes Scholars. Such has been their anger and vitriol that the statue in question has to be protected by netting. This in one of the world's great seats of learning is entirely unacceptable and from my viewpoint not only destroys any valid arguments that these immature, and frankly not very bright, young things might have but also suggests to me that their place at Oxford should be withdrawn so that other wiser, more mature and more aware youngsters might profit from the experience.  They need to learn to tolerate and understand that with which we disagree or even despise. The alternative approach appears to be the destruction of that which we dislike or disagree with and the imposition of our view, and only our view. And  if history teaches us one thing it is that this avenue potentially leads  only terror,  oppression and dictatorial dystopian societies.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions but these campaigners need to understand that our history is the recording of mankind's ongoing journey  and it is ever moving forward. We should look back at our history and learn from our mistakes not destroy, eliminate or re-write it simply because it offends our own sensibilities and outlook.