The head of history at a well-known English girls’ school was wont to say that she had learned nothing at Cambridge and all her history had been set in place at the age of ten by The Children’s Encyclopaedia.
Rebecca Fraser will know exactly what she meant. Massively informed, she is as unstuffy as the rest of the Fraser historians. On page one of her introduction she mentions ‘the immortal words of 1066 and All That’.
She has written this splendid history of Britain — 800-odd pages from the arrival of the Romans to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee — because she could find nothing like it for her own children. She believes that while today’s children have the opportunity to handle esoteric historical documents they have no chronological sense; no idea, for example, how the Victorians link up with the Stuarts. Their history has been taught them in inter-continental chunks and some of them could be forgiven for believing that the Aztecs and the Ancient Egyptians once lived in Britain, too. There is now no notion of the old rules of ‘who, when, what, how’.
Though children will enjoy this book and be very grateful for it, so will everybody else. Nobody is going to get my copy. It is packed with fact but rattles along at a gallop and wherever you open it you want to read on. She doesn’t despise the old yarns, ‘dubious’ though most of them are. She feels that to have lasted so long there must be something to them. Thus we have Alfred burning the cakes (‘probably scones’) and Cnut (‘a diminutive man’) with his feet in the tide, and Boudicca the red-haired queen lying dead with her dead daughters in her arms.
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