Reflections: Keeping the Story in History

Reflections: Keeping the Story in History

By James Fox-Smith

One of my most vivid childhood memories is sitting up in bed listening to my grandfather’s heavy tread on the stairs, coming to read me a bedtime story. The bedroom is tiny, with a steeply slanted ceiling and two single beds set on either side of a little window that peeps out under the eaves. My sister, who must be about five, is wedged into the other bed with a collection of teddy bears. It’s dark outside, stormy and cold—maybe even cold enough to snow, a thrilling possibility for a couple of kids come all the way from Australia to visit their English grandparents at Christmastime. There’s a book on the covers: a heavy, hardback volume filled with stories of kings and queens from across the arc of history and named—what else?—Kings and Queens. When Grandpa comes in, smelling of port and pipe tobacco, he’ll lower himself onto the little bed and ask who it’ll be tonight: Genghis Kahn? Alexander the Great? Eleanor of Aquitaine? Mary, Queen of Scots? After vacillating between Alfred the Great and Montezuma, King of the Aztecs, I settle on Alfred. But it doesn’t really matter because whichever story I choose will be a roller-coaster ride of battle, intrigue, betrayal, and probably a disembowelment or two. As Grandpa’s tobacco-stained thumb turns the pages and, in his Home Counties English accent, he begins to read, the walls and slanted ceiling of the little attic room fade to black, to be replaced by knights, castle keeps, and invading hordes in horned helmets. Once again, we are in the hands of a master storyteller—one who, literally, wrote the book on such things. My grandfather, R. J. Unstead, wrote history books for children. Between 1955, when his first book Looking at History came out and proceeded to sell eight million copies, until 1983’s A History of the World, he wrote more than forty. By the late seventies there was likely a copy of an R. J. Unstead history book in every library in Britain, and probably in most kids’ bedrooms, too. There were plenty in Australia and other corners of the Commonwealth as well, although how widely circulated they were in the United States I am not sure because they were written from a very English perspective. Why were they so popular? Under titles like From Cavemen to Vikings, The Story of Britain, and Invaded Island, Grandpa introduced young readers to the broad arc of human history by telling stories of its defining figures—the men and women whose quests for survival, knowledge, discovery, conquest, power, wealth, and influence shaped the world and resonate down through the ages. A former schoolteacher, Grandpa knew a thing or two about how to capture, then keep, the attention of a school-aged child: pick a larger-than-life character (Marie Antoinette, Akhnaten of Egypt), and tell the story of his or her life against a backdrop bristling with as many battles, enemies, castles, and Viking-filled longboats as he could wring from the historical record. Then, fill the picture out with colorful observations about life as it might have been lived in whichever milieu the story was set. So, whether you happened to be reading about Saxon England or Mongol China, you knew there’d be enough details about golden hoards, beheadings, vengeful gods, weird medical treatments, and medieval toilets to keep even the most book-averse ten-year-old transfixed. Whether Grandpa’s lifetime of historical research had genuinely made him an authority on the minutiae of day-to-day life in fourteenth century Mexico is debatable. But if you do have to learn about King Henry VIII in history class, reading that he was described by a Venetian ambassador at the time as “… the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on: above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg;” does help keep the pages turning. The result: by the time of his death in 1988, books by R. J. Unstead had sold more than twenty million copies, and for two generations of kids at least, history had become a thrilling thing that they couldn’t get enough of.

All this has been rattling about in my head since my wife stumbled across a recent article about my grandfather online. The funny thing about that—and indeed the point of the article—is that for an author whose books made him a household name for generations, there is not much online about R. J. Unstead at all. His books are out of print of course, but as the piece’s author, an English historian and writer named Dominic Sandbrook, posits, the main reason there’s little online to mark R. J. Unstead as a “serious” author, is that he wrote for children. There’s also the fact that, by the time of my grandfather’s death in 1988, the sun had well and truly set upon the British empire that had been the backdrop to his coming-of-age and had formed his understanding of the world. Consequently, the conservative, resolutely Anglo-centric lens through which his books tended to regard it, had fallen from favor. He had come to be seen, Sandbrook writes, as the ‘Unacceptable Face of History.’ The last time I saw my grandfather was in 1985. I was fifteen—oblivious to battles brewing over the way history gets taught in British educational settings and past the age for bedtime stories anyway. He had stopped smoking a pipe by then and sales of his last book A History of the World had been disappointing, but he still told a hell of a story. The last night of that visit I sat on the floor of their living room while he told story after story about his experiences in France, Italy, and Egypt during World War II. Just like his history books for children, Grandpa’s war stories were a minefield littered with facts and small observations—about the food or the music, the bawdy limericks and the soldiers’ songs—that not only made his stories fun to hear, but allowed me to imagine I was seeing, hearing, and smelling those places with him. Perhaps his way of telling history had fallen from favor but the storyteller still had it, and his listeners and readers were infinitely the richer for it. “History is written by the victors,” said Walter Benjamin. Perhaps that summarizes the arc of my grandfather’s career: from the post-war ‘fifties, when the British felt that the patriotism and moral values that had delivered them from the jaws of Nazi populism were now propelling the country into an optimistic new future; to the eighties, when economic recession, social unrest, and a deeper reckoning with the evils of empire had drawn a darker cloud over the whole notion of “Rule Britannia.” The set had changed, so is it any wonder an actor still reading the same lines seemed out of place? I suppose that in every country and every culture, people fight over who gets to decide what the “right” history is. And that the balance of power in that fight shifts from generation to generation. A version of that same fight is being fought in this country right now too of course, and patriotic people on either side of the debate recognize that the way their country’s history is understood, is at stake. I wonder what my grandfather, who was a certainly a patriot, would have made of it. As a historian, he certainly understood that the way history is interpreted changes over time, depending on who is doing the interpreting and what their lived experience has been. Late in his career he wrote (and Dominic Sandbrook quoted), “At a time when it is fashionable in some quarters to belittle England’s achievements in the past and to doubt her place in the future, I have tried to show that whereas England has often acted foolishly or badly, her history shows the persistence of ideals which good men have lived by since Alfred’s day.” There’s a lesson in there somewhere, for anyone willing to hear it.