The Amazing Adventures of Winston Churchill

It may be fashionable to sneer at dumb Americans, but it seems something is amiss in British education too. It is producing the sort of intellectual midgetry that, were it able to read, would file this book in the fiction section:

A classical schoolmaster might have responded: “This is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put,” and launch into a pedantic discussion about whether that quotation is both accurate and correctly attributed.

It would hardly occur to him to take the error seriously, and point out that Winston Spencer Churchill, a storied figure who was once voted the greatest Briton ever and to whom an improbable wealth of fictional feats and witticisms were attributed, was no storybook character.

Yet this is what 23% of Britons believe. And how do you think they might classify the following?

You guessed it. A staggering 58% would look for this character on the history or biography shelf, knowing full well that Sherlock Holmes and his dear Dr Watson inhabited 221B Baker Street in the late 19th century.

These are among the dispiriting results of a survey of 3 000 Britons, commissioned by UKTV Gold.

Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, was dismissed as fiction by a quarter of respondents. Presumably they think the Crimean War was just a setting for a Tennyson poem. After all, who’s so stupid they think a real fellow named Cardigan would charge a real place called Balaclava? Duh!

Almost half thought Richard Cœur de Lion (King Richard I of England, Richard the Lionheart) was a fictional knight and monarch, famous as a character in the fantasy stories of the Crusades.

Unlike King Arthur, who was real, say two thirds of Britons. Everyone knows he lived at Camelot, had a sword named Excalibur, and used to sit at a round table with Queen Guinevere, giving knightley orders to his buddies Gawain and Galahad and her buddy Lancelot.
James Bigglesworth, the ace pilot and hero of the British Empire affectionately known as “Biggles”, was history, according to a third of survey victims. Ninety-eight paperbacks’ worth of genuine history every kid should learn.

Robin Hood? Real, lived in Sherwood Forest, robbed the rich to give to the poor, say half of Britons. The Mona Lisa? A historical figure, a third of them think. Eleanor Rigby? Yup, she’s real too, reckon almost half of the respondents.

Reports UKTV Gold: “Over three quarters of the nation (77%) admitted to no longer reading history books, or watching historical programmes on television (61%).”

You don’t say?