With a little help from our friends

Blenheim, 1704: Marlborough’s Greatest Victory
by James Falkner
Pen & Sword Military, £10.99, pp. 144, ISBN 184415050X

By rights the battle of Blenheim in 1704 ought to be as well known as Waterloo. It was just as momentous, just as exciting, just as victory-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-defeat. In fact you could argue — as Winston Churchill did — that it was the event which opened for Britain ‘the gateways of the modern world’. So how come all most of us remember about it today is that it was won by John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough and that it had a palace in Woodstock named after it?

One reason may be that since it involved neither Stalin nor the Nazis and since its hero was a toffy Englishman (his father, Sir Winston, was a Royalist cavalry officer), it will not have been taught in our schools for many years. But the main reason, perhaps, is that it happened in the awkward post-Middle Ages and post-Civil War but pre-Victorian period of British history on which most of us tend to be rather shaky.