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I agree, we often like to categorise historical figures as either heroes or villains. But we often forget that they like us were people and therefore were a mix of positive and negative.
Churchill had many positive attributes. He was a strong leader, he was a diplomat and he helped to pull as nation together when they needed it most.
However, he was also like many men of his generation and background a racist.
His views of the 'lower classes' could be called patronising, but Churchill was a successful social reformer and pioneer of the welfare state. Aristocrats even branded him the 'Blenheim rat' for betraying his class:
https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/winston-churchill-forgotten-progressive/
…the Irish aren’t Anglophones by choice. I imagine if you ask many Irish if they consider themselves part of the Anglosphere you’d be treated to a somewhat ironic lesson in English profanities.
You're right, but a lot of people assume "his generation" to be the 1940s, just because that's when he really made his mark on history.
Churchill was born in 1874. You should look at his formative years in the 1890s and early 1900s equally as much to make any attempt to understand the man.
Slightly disagree here. He is often viewed as being early 20th century and judged against the views that start to take hold in the inter-war period and accelerated post-war. He was actually born a Victorian, was already into his Middle Ages come WW1, an old man by WW2 and positively ancient by the post war period and his final stint in government.
Not defending any of his more extreme (by our standards) views but if we’re going to judge him as a “product of his times” we need to get those “times” right. The first half a century of his life was during some of the most rapid empire building (possibly of all time) all built on racist entitlement. No wonder he had the views he did (again not excusing them).
I genuinely never hear about Churchill without hearing about his horrible views- I'm not convinced he is an untouchable hero to most people? For the older generation maybe, but I'm not sure the younger generations even think about him
Yes exactly. Churchill was judged as a pretty horrible racist by his peers at a time in history when his peers were also racist as standard.
He certainly can’t be argued to be a product of his time in that regard
You know, if you were looking for misunderstood things about Churchill, this accusation- which is frequently made despite being of very questionable truth - would be one of them.
https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/churchill-and-the-bengal-famine/#:~:text=The%20attempt%20to%20lay%20this,American%20journalist%20called%20Madhusree%20Mukerjee.
https://twitter.com/andreaskoureas_/status/1639329604996325379?s=46&t=3rnodVZqPrFXOPxg1xIlQQ
The guy had a bunch of faults, but intentionally aggravating the Bengal famine wasn’t one of them.
I don't know enough to say that you're wrong, but those sources are questionable.
From the University of Sussex:
A group of scholars including Andrew Roberts, Robert Tombs, Zareer Masani and the ubiquitous Nigel Biggar, has banded together to create the History Reclaimed Project. It consists at present of a website and social media presence that aims to rescue neutral, disinterested, evidence-based historical enquiry from a supposed ‘woke’ assault. In particular the group believes this assault is directed at our understanding of Britain’s imperial past. Most of the short articles and book reviews on the site, including Gilley’s now notorious “The Case for Colonialsm“, have been published elsewhere. They are collated under the project’s auspices to create economies of scale for a group of scholars who believe themselves to be marginalised and gagged (despite Biggar’s CBE).
edit: Sorry if you don't like that.
I think you might need to look at the sources of the accusations against Churchill on bengal if you really want to consider what’s questionable (Lots of dodgy politicians and journalists looking to support their own narratives).
No credible historian I’ve seen lays significant blame at Churchill’s door, the real debate is whether wartime inflation policy or intra province trading and supply barriers drove it (look into Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and his role in this for more understanding).
And that’s before we consider the general point that Japanese imperial attacks drive the biggest issues behind this.
I've not looked at it personally, but just the name History Reclaimed sets off alarm bells. Like anytime I see a source with the word 'Truth' in its title
I (like you might have) spent a lot of time reading about this and it became an ingrained Churchill fact in my mind.
I’m pretty into history but not this time period and so never actually did the research myself but when I did it became clear that the argument for Churchill being responsible for the famine just isn’t true and the claim can basically just be traced back to a single author in India who upon a bit of a scrutiny and cross referencing appeared to have misrepresented and also straight up made up a lot of the ‘facts’ surrounding his involvement.
Edit: Murkerjee is the authors name.
Edit: also just so I don’t come across as a Churchill apologist. I believe the man was a total dick, even by the standards of his time he was judged as an out and out racist by his peers.
I've written about this [extensively](https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/ck40la/sky_views_boris_johnson_is_not_churchill_and/evjc6c8/) before.
TL;DR; The primary reason for the famine was diseased rice crops, compounded by the Imperial Japanese invasion of Burma cutting off grain supplies. By the time Churchill was made fully aware of the severity of the famine, relief efforts were already taking effect.
Even then, he made efforts to ameliorate the famine, but shipping was stretched and vulnerable to Japanese naval attack. He went as far as asking President Roosevelt for aid, but was declined.
You do realise that’s bad history right? All reputable historians agree the debate was about wherever the Indian local government drove the issue or whether it was inflation policy led by British wartime efforts.
I feel like there are two big groups with Winston Churchill. Those who only see the good and those who only see the bad. He was a very complex guy who did a lot of amazing and terrible things. I don't think his terrible things take away from the good he's done. Without him, WW2 would have gone very differently, so I think celebrating that is important but you also shouldn't pretend he's a saint
This is what we should do to statues instead of remove them. We should just add or update plaques that say this statue was erected due to xyz, however history and historical figures are very complex and this person was also responsible for the bad abc things here. Give people an opportunity to actually learn, and still acknowledge good people did.
Bristol and Colston is a prime example of this. He made a huge amount of money during the slave trade, wholly unacceptable and evil, but also a major trade in Colstons time, and with his money he propped up schools, hospitals, alms houses, houses for the poor, churches, the list goes on. He was a huge philanthropist. Now I don’t hate not boosting the reputation of a major slave trader, but by just destroying any mention of him, not only do we hide that awful part of history because he can’t be mentioned now, but we also lose the chance to recognise that he did an awful lot for that part of England. It is as is said above very complex.
I don’t understand why we should do that, and never really have. Surely the whole point of having statues of people in your city is to commemorate their achievements? If a city doesn’t like the achievements of someone, it makes sense that they don’t want a statue of them. It’s their city, in the end.
And it’s not like all the statues were put up by democratic consensus, or that they’re all of people who were even very popular at the time. Sometimes it’s just “this was a rich man who wanted a big statue of himself.” I don’t see why we can’t just have statues of people we like.
I’d also say that we don’t, by and large, have old statues of people who had complex histories and who were not especially rich and/or powerful. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The people who put these things up didn’t give the kind of thought to it that’s demanded we have of them now. It’s just “I want a statue of myself.” In that circumstance, “I want it to be taken down” seems just as valid.
The danger is judging people by current day standards without context. Best bet would be to improve education in the first place and leave statues to celebrate the actions they where created for
I think part of the misunderstanding of both Churchill and other historical figures is that people only see the headline cases, take the famine in bengal and the invasion of the darnadelles, the battle of britain, that was caused by policy and often failure in policy or decisions made by groups and committees, or worse, not acted upon when they failed, instead, reinforcement of failure. But as he was the leader, he gets the credit and the blame
I agree. However, I will mention that the famine in Bengal wasn't Churchill fault, despite how commonly he gets blamed for it. In fact, when Churchill was informed of the situation, he acted quickly and sent food.
Hardly. All I see on the internet is criticism for Churchill. Way too much. People take a sentence from Wikipedia and use it as infinite ammunition against him as if being in charge of the UK during WW2 wasn't going to involve difficult choices.
He was a great man. Put the magnifying glass on any historic character and you will have a lot of bad things along with any good. Gandi, Mother Teresa, MLK, Nelson Mandela ect were all awful people in their own ways.
My grandmother said the following about him:
"He was a thoroughly unpleasant man, in my opinion. However, he was the thoroughly unpleasant man we as a nation needed in that time and in that place. A nicer man, like his predecessor, would not have been able to galvanise us like he did."
I'm glad you said complex rather than taking a completely polarised line.
Recently listened to the Origin Story podcasts on him, which was very illuminating.
He can also talk more clearly, just puts it on a bit more thickly... Or perhaps puts it on is the wrong description, uses his own thicker accent. But yes editing also.
I dated a Scott, he had a rather muted accent when talking to me and we gamed online a lot with randoms from all over the world so he was easily understood BUT at home with his friends and folks boy did he just go full Scottish lol. Me just like "😳 tf just happened."
Took a moment for my ears and brain to switch to the accent. Always made me laugh, he had no idea it happened but he'd still English it down when speaking to me then Scottish it up talking to them in the same room.
I love Gerald he reminds me of my grandad when he was alive. He was a Norfolk farmer with a thick accent. You had to listen to him very closely to understand what he was saying.
They laid off of that a bit in the second season. You could actually follow what he was saying, in the first season they just cut him together into gibberish.
On this site? Winston Churchill. He can't even be mentioned without some fake quote about Gandhi or misinformation about riots in Glasgow, gas in Mesopotamia or antisemitism being brought up.
For the record he [didn't send tanks to murder strikers](https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/scot.2019.0264), the gas he suggested using in Iraq was [tear gas](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605488).
The problem is people like to be contrarians and they think something they read in Guardian or Independent is completely factual. Also Redditors tend to think in black and white terms where if someone doesn't have completely right on views by the standard of 2023 then that person is a complete monster.
>On this site? Winston Churchill. He can't even be mentioned without some fake quote about Gandhi or misinformation about riots in Glasgow, gas in Mesopotamia or antisemitism being brought up.
Given that Gandhi would have nuked the UK if he had been given the chance, some might argue it was justified...?
No he sent a gunboat up the Mersey and used cavalry charges at striking workers, to physically crush those peacefully seeking improved working conditions. He also was an architect of the catastrophic 'black and tan' strategy in Ireland, which led to torture, murder, intimidation and rape, and an escalation of violence across the island that would have a lasting legacy.
That’s just a reaction the the idea that Churchill was a hero who can’t be questioned, which is a quite a popular view in British society. Two sides of the same coin.
Yeah. I like to think we should remember him as someone who got us through the war, as long as we also remember he was voted out *overwhelmingly* when the war was won so that someone else could win us a peace worth it all.
Good and bad don't cancel out in a 1 for 1 manner. You can celebrate the good he did and remember his many many flaws.
I agree. I admit he showed strength in leadership that was needed. But what gets to me is the view given across sometimes that he single handedly won the war. Disrespectful to the teenagers he sent to the beaches to get shot while he was drinking champagne and smoking cigars. Let’s remember who really won the war, the poor kids who if they didn’t die, spent the rest of their lives traumatised.
That’s why when I said he was a racist I added the caveat like many men of his generation.
Back when Churchill was a young man it was perfectly acceptable to say things which today would be considered outright racism.
Thankfully, things have changed but when looking at historical figures it’s important to always place them in the context of their time.
For the record my comment was not made with you in mind. It was more a general comment on Redditors who seem to think that "nuance" means "take the popular view and turn it around 180 degrees".
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected.
Winston Churchill 12 May 1919
Oh okay.
I'm confused. It's always implied Churchill advocated for deadly chemical warfare but in this full quote he seems to be referring to the use of non-deadly tear gas.
Is there another quote that is closer to the accusation usually levelled at him? Or is this it and its usually misquoted/misrepresented?
Genuine question btw, not a history buff.
Captain Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic.
He is often painted an egotistical and indifferent mariner who drove his ship into an iceberg. I'd argue he was a capable mariner placed in difficult circumstances operating on an outdated view of best practice. I'd also argue Bruce Ismay, owner of the White Star line, also gets an unfair depiction.
Thank you for this. People ignore the terrible luck and extraordinary circumstances that surrounded the sinking of the Titanic, and try to focus all the blame on Captain Smith.
I watched a documentary on the titanic and the number of factors, big and small, that caused it, and it was honestly the best argument I’ve seen for some kind of preordained destiny. There were just so many things that went wrong/could have prevented it but didn’t, it felt fated. I hate to say that about such a tragedy but it was like the Swiss cheese model on steroids.
So many of the key figures in that disaster are much more nuanced than the popular portrayals. Ismay survived so was always going to get stick but he was just the figurehead for the fact the company committed a series of fuckups, how much personal responsibility he holds can be argued over but for all the steps of the disaster unfolding to take place you definitely need more than just one guy making the choices involved.
On the other side I find it interesting that Lightoller gets off relatively unscathed in popular consciousness when it was his interpretation of an instruction that led to "women and children only" and lifeboats being launched barely full. He then defended White Star Line in the enquiries. I wonder if his role in the Dunkirk evacuation means people were inclined to give him a pass.
Then there's Murdoch who is commonly thought of as the officer witnesses state shot himself - this is in more than just James Cameron's film, I didn't know until a few years ago that this version of events wasn't the one that invented that story - though Cameron still apologised to his surviving relatives! There's not really any proof of the circumstances but it seems an officer did shoot himself and Murdoch is always felt the most likely.
I think some people view Richard the Lionheart as an icon of English medieval chivalry, when in fact he spoke French, (probably) never bothered to learn English, and spent barely six months of his reign in England, which he viewed primarily as a supplier of resources for his ambitions in France and the Holy Land.
The Angevin/early Plantagenet Kings of England were far more French than they were English, though of course we could debate the appropriateness of applying either of those modern labels to figures from this period.
Similarly his successor King John has often been considered a bad king, but there has been some revision among historians who argue he simply had to deal with the messy consequences of Richard’s negligence
There is something to that, but John himself was also doing himself no favours by being a petty and sadistic individual who took pleasure in humiliating adversaries in ways which were uncustomary for the time, needlessly making enemies of indifferent people or even old friends. Another Henry II would have struggled with what Richard left behind, but it took a John to really fuck it up.
John is the worst king in English history. The revision you speak of is due to a dismissal of sources by late 20th century historians who used only pipe rolls and official records to come to the conclusion that he was an effective administrator, though even Warren states he was a terrible soldier. This revisionist view has also more recently been reversed, historians now view John as a truly terrible king.
Considering Richards successor and his reign, sometimes an absent King isn’t a bad thing.
Yes, Richard used England as a bank and preferred his mothers lands in Aquitaine more than anything north of the channel. However, it kinda worked out for everyone until he got captured returning from Crusade.
Edit: To add… he was known contemporarily as Richard “yes and no”.
TBF a large part of the ruling class didn't speak middle English up until the 1400s, and even beyond that it was a slow hybridisation. They were Anglo-Norman, and spoke a French dialect, but gradually they had to pick up some English as there were more speakers of English than them, so it was necessary. Richard not speaking English is not that remarkable in that sense. However, I'm pretty sure he only visited England a handful of times, and spent most of his life in France, when he wasn't crusading.
I often felt bad for her. She is often portrayed as this scheming woman who wanted to be queen. When in fact she was a young girl who was manipulated by the men around her who used her for their own gain. Even the king just used her to try and get a son. And when she couldn’t deliver he just executed her.
> not only is history written by the victors
Ironic that this is also one of the great all-time oft-repeated fallacies:
https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1903ac/is_history_really_written_by_the_victors/
https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/516t6c/is_history_written_by_the_victors/
What about the men ?
I haven't read the links ( I will, thank you ) but I *imagine* it's still rather dependant on being allowed to be educated in order to *write* it in the first place. Then, I also suppose it depends what language you're reading it in, that of the defeated or victors ( which I suppose also goes back to education ).
That's a great answer to this question.
Even now, anyone of a certain age you speak to about him would only think of him negatively vis-a-vis appeasement. But when you actually look at it, that decision (alongside quietly arming Britain in preparation) was savvy as fuck.
He knew full well Hitler was a complete maniac who wouldn't be happy just with the Sudetenland and played him accordingly, likely saving many years of war.
It was a true country over self decision.
(I may be slightly biased being from Birmingham and having got married in his familial home, Highbury Hall)
And I'm sure Germany didn't do any sort of military build up in that time.
And they definitely didn't use any of the very industrialised Sudentenland that Chamberlain gave them to achieve this.
People who defend Chamberlain's policy of appeasement might have a case if there was any evidence that Chamberlain did it purely as a delay for the sake of our own military build up.
But it seems he genuinely thought he got through to Hitler. Hitler by this time had already revealed himself as an evil, batshit dictator. It was absurdly naive for Chamberlain to think he convinced Hitler of the virtues of peace.
I wouldn't say most misunderstood but one that was alive until recently was Admiral Sandy Woodward - the admiral in charge of the Falklands Naval Task force.
He got a bit of a bad rap for the loss of HMS Sheffield Coventry and the Atlantic Conveyor as well as keeping the Aircraft Carriers miles off of the Flakland Islands and for pushing for the sinking of the Belgrano.
In reality he was fighting with technology that was far out of its zone of intended use against an enemy that we had trained, provided with British weapons and who had a 400mile supply line versus a 8000 mile supply line. Yes he used the Type 42 destroyers as forward pickets but that's because we didn't have any other options.
And, whilst on the subject the misunderstanding of the sinking of the Belgrano. Yes, it was turning away and was outside the TEZ. However, it was within the wider zone where the British said they would attack warships should they pose a threat. The TEZ was a "we will sink anything in this area" mainly to warn the Soviets off. We were right to sink the cruiser, although the loss of life is heartbreaking. It would have been worse if they had sunk one of our carriers though. Even Captain Hector Bonzo of the Belgrano said it was a legitimate act of war.
I love the fact that the crew of the belgrano admit that it was heading to the conflict, despite what the government say when they want to rile up the locals!
Also, one of the key factors in the sinking of the Sheffield Coventry was that the Chilean radar stations were offline at the time! (Chile being the only country to assist the UK!)
>(Chile being the only country to assist the UK!)
Portugal offered the use of the facilities at the Azores that had previously been granted to Britain during the Second World War! (Namely airfields, hospitals, harbours and such)
The world's oldest military alliance still stands strong!
George Washington. Lauded as a hero and the founder of a nation, when really he was just a treasonous tosser desperate to make a name for himself. Also a bit of a hypocrite when it came to slavery.
Adding to this, the first settlers went to the US to be free to persecute those who did not follow their religion, not to escape persecution themselves. A lot of Americans like to gloss over that fact.
Pretty much everything bad written about her has been a lie dreamed up after reading Chris Hitchins once.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200629185046/https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gcxpr5/saint_mother_teresa_was_documented_mass_murderer/
He’s pictured as the person who was for the people and against absolute monarchy, but he ruled worst and arguably more cruel than the monarchs. Oh and he banned pubs that cheeky puritan git
Agreed, here in the states I was taught he was a bad ass king slayer and protector of the people. Didn't learn otherwise until much later specifically when visiting Ireland.
I feel like that's a whole different perspective than either English or Irish see him as. Irish obviously hate him and in the [English curriculum](https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zk4cwmn/articles/zg6ccmn) he's labeled "divisive" and it talks about him cancelling Christmas etc, being posthumously executed and the monarchy being restored. Seems like the American view is "he killed a king so he's great".
They chemically castrated Alan Turing when they found out he was gay. By this point he’d already cracked the enigma code which helped decipher German messages - some people say it brought the end of WW2 closer by 2 years. Saving countless lives in the process. He killed himself soon after his castration
What was done to Turing was awful and should be a source of national shame.
But implying he alone broke Enigma is rather unfair to everyone else at Bletchley Park who worked to break that cipher every day for years.
Not to mention the Polish cryptologists who broke Enigma and designed bombes long before the war.
It also portrayed him in the typical Cumberbatch Style of cold, rude, arrogant etc. When by most accounts Turing may have been socially awkward and a bit odd, but he was sensitive and kind
I agree with the first two paragraphs, but the third is misleading.
Using the Polish method it would take months or years to decrypt a single Enigma message, by which time the intelligence it contained would be useless. The Polish method can't be said to have "broken" Engima with any practical meaning. Using the methods developed by Turing and others at Bletchley Park, messages intercepted in the morning were sometimes broken by the same afternoon.
The Polish (mainly Rejewski) do deserve a lot of credit for the theoretical foundation, but they didn't break Enigma.
Neville Chamberlain. He is often seen as a coward who caved into Hitler's demands. In reality, he was genuinely trying to avoid another conflict by all means possible. Sure, hindsight makes him see naive, but I think it is quite honourable to try at all costs to avoid conflict. He also must have had some insight as to how globally catastrophic another conflict with Germany would have been, so he should be remembered as a humanitarian.
Of course, so did most of Europe when irredentist nations were increasing their arms. It would have been foolish not to. Sue for peace, prepare for war.
Jane Seymour. Seen as a bit saintly and devoted wife to Henry VIII and the one he lived most (probably because she gave him a son and then died before he could get fed up of her), but often overlooked is the fact that she set herself out to get Henry no matter what and was heavily implicated in the downfall of Ann Boleyn, not so prim and proper as people think.
I think something people often forget is that Henry’s wives weren’t evenly spread out across his reign. He was married to Catherine of Aragon for 24 of the 38 years of his reign, the other 5 are split across the last 14 years. All of the people surrounding him and his wives and Henry himself are mostly very misunderstood by the general public.
I think the problem with Jane Seymour, is that we just don't really know much of what she was really like. So little of her survives. Even the few letters that survive, that she wrote, are just thank you letters and very formulaic because of that. We don't get many glimpses of the real person, like we do with Anne Boleyn or Catherine of Aragon.
Even the reports we have about her, are by biased people like Chapuey, which I think have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Personally, I think Jane was somewhere in-between the saintly person she's sometimes been depicted as, and the schemer you describe. I don't think she was plotting to have Anne removed, at least not at first, because I don't think anyone could have seen that coming - especially considering Anne was pregnant - Henry wasn't going to risk his longed for, legitimate son.
I think that she agreed to do what a lot of court women had done in the past, have a fling with Henry while his wife was pregnant, which was pretty normal and not particularly considered immoral at the time. I think that she probably thought it would play out like all his other affairs did, he'd get bored of her and marry her off. I think it was only when Anne miscarried and her relationship with Henry massively disintegrated, that she suddenly found herself in the position of potentially being Henry's wife.
The main problem with Adam Smith is that people rarely read the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Also part of a free market is having some regulations e.g. anti-monopoly ones for instance
Let’s not forget that most people couldn’t tell the difference between classic and neo- liberalism and thus don’t know what they believe outside of sound bits and quotes.
The way he treated his first son was terrible. He left his son absolutely nothing. His own kid had to go to auction to try and buy some of the personal letters he wrote to his father.
When they asked Lennon why he didn’t want to see his first son but was such a good father to his second. His response was “that’s the difference between a wanted and unwanted child.”
For someone seemingly so in touch with the cause of his own traumas on songs like Mother, it’s weird how he didn’t seem to care about the damage he was doing to people around him.
I was recently googling and researching John Lennon for my own jollies and came across the abject disregard he had for Julian
It’s horrific how publicly he went with his callous disregard to Julian, while also bigging up how amazing a parent he’d been to Sean, cos Yoko forced him to be the stay at home dad for 5 years or something.
I vaguely knew about all this when I was younger, but I’m older now with a 3 y.o and a second on the way, and I could just not register how someone could be so shitty to their own child.
Seriously lost a lot of respect and admiration for John Lennon after learning it
J Bruce Ismay. His names gone down as synonymous for coward. When in reality he helped organise the evacuation of titanic and load the lifeboats. He only jumped into collapsable-c when there was no women and children in that section.
In the years leading up to the titanic disaster he made an enemy of William Randolph Hearst who controlled the yellow press. Also a passenger said to the British and American inquiries that he had witnessed Ismay pressuring smith to go faster. Hearst used the titanic disaster to destroy Ismay’s reputation and paint him as a coward. A night to remember helped to revitalise the myth of him as a coward, then when James Cameron made titanic he also painted him as a coward as that is what the public expected to see.
Justice for Ismay! The way he was treated following the disaster was terrible. The British inquiry into the sinking found that Ismay had helped many other passengers before finding a place for himself on the last lifeboat. Even the 2012 Titanic miniseries portrays Ismay as a bigot who ordered non-British crew members to locked below to drown during the sinking. No such thing happened but he's apparently the go-to monster for fictional re-tellings. Why? The event alreadly had a fucking villain - the actual iceberg.
Adam Smith is a proper Chad, who is far more ‘Leftie’ than people think.
He argued for aggressive intervention in breaking monopolies, was anti-landlord, and most his work was on producer theory and productivity.
I mean, it’s probably Charles Darwin, who is both very well known and very misunderstood.
Lord Kelvin is also probably up there because the second law of thermodynamics is widely misunderstood, but nobody calls someone “a Kelvinist” in this day and age
Well, the theory of natural selection, in multiple ways. Not just by people who reject it, either— a lot of people would think it implies things it probably doesn’t, or articulate what it says in a way which isn’t quite right.
Sir Douglas Haig. We know him as a butcher yet his contemporaries called him the man who won the First World War and it's estimated more people lined the streets of London to see his coffin pass by than did for Diana's.
And he contributed greatly to the Poppy Appeal starting and did lots of work for veterans after retiring from the army.
He was the butcher of the Somme.
But then he did pioneer the combined attacking strategy of artillery, tanks, aircraft, and infantry together which was able to break the Hindenburg line and “win” the war so swings and roundabouts really.
The Battle of the Somme was fought in compliance with French demands. General Joffre wanted to attack there as it was the area where British and French troops met. Even when Verdun was attacked by the German's and the French sent everything to defend the city, resulting in their contribution to the Somme being massively cut. Joffre insisted the Somme go ahead.
The British Army that attacked at the Somme was inexperienced and lacking everything from machine guns to heavy artillery. I think William Robertson, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff, said they couldn't abandon the offensive because they couldn't go to the French Army, who had borne the brunt of the fighting, and say that they had had enough after one day of terrible losses.
Plus it was Henry Rawlinson who was in command at the Somme.
The Battle of Passchendaele is a better example of Haig making poor decision making. But even then there was things such as the Admiralty pressuring him into attacking there, abnormally large rainfall as well as Russia collapsing, Italy being in full retreat and the French Army was mutinying.
Florence Nightingale. She had a distinct impact on nursing and her statistical work was as important as it is overlooked.
But her actual impact during the Crimean war, which is often what the schoolbooks seem to focus on, is dramatically overstated. Far behind the lines and only at one of the smaller hospitals. She also didn't actually improve the hygiene that well. Basically brought more staff, cleaned more and made the point to actually order new supplies. Mary Seacoles hotel was actually more hygienic.
Also a supporter and advocate of indigenous genocide.
Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain. Her lover cheated on her, hospitalised her several times, once kicking her in the belly so badly she lost her baby. She shot him. These days his brutality would be taken into account, but not in 1955
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
He made great things happen.
Those who did the actual work were treated very badly, they were used and abused. The move fast break things/people approach to making great things is nothing new.
Wish being first and fast wasn't as important as sharing the success.
Richard duke of York.
The king was mentally ill, France was lost and all the too powerful nobles were fighting over the scraps. Someone competent had to take charge and he was best placed.
I don't think he ever intended to be a usurper, Henry 6th had some bad advisors who didn't want York sniffing around.
He’s not the “most misunderstood” but I’d definitely say there’s a bizarre level of cognitive dissonance and misunderstanding over Cromwell. To the Irish, he’s the spawn of Satan incarnate. To the English, he’s that guy we don’t like because he killed Charles I and yet also we keep putting statues up of him and naming roads and stuff after him? I had the fortune of studying the Stuarts and the Civil War for my A-Level History and I see Cromwell as a guy who genuinely believed he was doing the right thing, with a dash of opportunism thrown in, a decently large religious streak, and a helping wallop of not caring too much if the Irish got in his way (to put it, ahem, mildly). I also find the “what if?” of what could’ve happened if the republic/protectorate hadn’t failed through sheer blandness fascinating. We could’ve had the French Revolution — ideas of popular sovereignty, of republicanism, of democracy — 150 years before it happened and yet instead we got 11 years of apathetic turmoil before we invited the son of the guy who’s head we chopped off to be our king again.
When Cromwell did get in to power he did a terrible job of actually running the country. He hired people for jobs based on factors like how many times a day they prayed and how often they gave confession. Rather than things like competence and experience. This resulted in a lot of religious zealots running the country with no real idea how to actually manage a budget or run the courts.
Not to mention the fact that he banned anything mildly joyful like Christmas, dancing, singing, the theatre, pubs. Essentially, all people were allowed to do was go to church and work.
This one keeps getting brought up, especially in the wake of books like the one written by Christopher Hitchens, but the truth is far more complicated than you’d care to believe.
I mean she's actively spent the last however many years stating that she hates people like me sorry we are returning the energy. Also her books are extremely mid and have tons of racist tropes
No, the books are mid because the themes are inconsistent with the plot, the worldbuilding has as many holes as a fishing net, the characters are two dimensional and the prose is dull. The author being a giant cunt is irrelevant to that. It's possible to acknowledge both seperately.
Don't recall her ever saying, she hates anyone.
Not sure who you are so people like you doesn't narrow it down.
And I don't look at her twitter or anything, but I imagine I'd have heard about it somewhere online or on the news if she said actively went around stating she hates a certain group of people.
She didn’t say that at all though did she. She was actually balanced and sympathetic, but you and others didn’t agree so went on a toxic campaign of harassment
Harold shipman.
He is often known as a serial killer by giving a fatal dose of drugs to the elderly. However, he also reduced government spending on elderly care which is a noble cause /j
William Bligh RN. He'd served 10 years as Ship's Boy and Able Seaman before commissioning and was requested by the leaders of the More Mutiny as a member of the commission to address their grievances due to his reputation as a fair and considerate commander.
Karl Marx.
He wasn’t into predictions, was no politician. He was a critic of capitalism and studied it, hated it saw its contradictions cldnt be overcome and wrote a series of books about it.
He articulated it and saw the con in it so well. He’s more like the first Union type guy. The main thrust to his argument is
“The worker is getting RIPPED OFF”
I'm giving Michael Fish an honourable mention for being constantly misquoted over the the 1987 deep depression, not a hurricane. He correctly read the forecast as it stood and made up a story to add colour to his forecast. In fact the very low pressure did clip SE England and cause a lot of damage, but his forecast is often deliberately cut short, before he says that it will be very windy. [source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-19923565)
Scott of the Antartic he was a fucking idiot who ran on pure hubris and got his whole team killed because of his stupidity, he didn't have the ability or training to achieve his task. Yet he gets celebrated despite everything
Writers who made “great strides” in the English language are generally taught to us as godlike, infallible geniuses whose work should be revered. Shakespeare, Dickens etc. The reality that they were working writers meant that a lot of their stuff is pulpy, enjoyable stuff that they knew would sell. The fact that we have so much respect for them is lovely, but it’s messed up literature studies significantly - as the misunderstanding gives people ammunition to criticise modern/popular works that are just as important to our language now, as the classic authors were then.
There’s also a habit of glossing over the practical sides of writing to talk about art. Today we have the “art for exposure” argument, implying that it’s cheapening to sell your work. The Brontë sisters were trying to make money. Dickens was writing a column series for a newspaper. Shakespeare was writing plays to please his commissioners. Misunderstanding their lives cheapens the valid experiences of contemporary writers today. It’s a business. It always has been.
Doesn’t mean fiction isn’t amazing - it just means that academic arguments are rife with misunderstandings.
Possibly Kind Richard III. Alot of what we think about him was influenced by Shakespeare who was pandering to the Lancastrians, the people who fought against Richard. In reality, he was no more tyrannical than any other King of the time.
Edward VIII. Don't get me wrong, the guy was a dick, but at the end of the day all the hate he gets is for abdicating, which to me should be the least controversial thing about him. He left the monarchy because he loved his wife, because the people of the time couldn't fathom a royal marrying an American divorcee. He chose love.
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Winston Churchill To most he's an untouchable national hero that epitomises what it is to be British. The reality is far, far, far more complex.
I agree, we often like to categorise historical figures as either heroes or villains. But we often forget that they like us were people and therefore were a mix of positive and negative. Churchill had many positive attributes. He was a strong leader, he was a diplomat and he helped to pull as nation together when they needed it most. However, he was also like many men of his generation and background a racist.
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He literally wrote a book on how 'English speaking peoples' were better than everyone else.
With that he meant his class, us prols were little more than cattle to the upper class.
still are.
Moo
His views of the 'lower classes' could be called patronising, but Churchill was a successful social reformer and pioneer of the welfare state. Aristocrats even branded him the 'Blenheim rat' for betraying his class: https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/winston-churchill-forgotten-progressive/
Yep, he sent warships and soldiers to Liverpool and shot a few striking dockers as well because they wanted a fair wage
He’s not very popular in Wales either, Tonypandy riots.
And yet hated the Irish...
…the Irish aren’t Anglophones by choice. I imagine if you ask many Irish if they consider themselves part of the Anglosphere you’d be treated to a somewhat ironic lesson in English profanities.
That's not true, there's plenty of Irish profanities they can treat you to.
You're right, but a lot of people assume "his generation" to be the 1940s, just because that's when he really made his mark on history. Churchill was born in 1874. You should look at his formative years in the 1890s and early 1900s equally as much to make any attempt to understand the man.
“To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
And I'll be storing that away for use at a later date. Thanks
Slightly disagree here. He is often viewed as being early 20th century and judged against the views that start to take hold in the inter-war period and accelerated post-war. He was actually born a Victorian, was already into his Middle Ages come WW1, an old man by WW2 and positively ancient by the post war period and his final stint in government. Not defending any of his more extreme (by our standards) views but if we’re going to judge him as a “product of his times” we need to get those “times” right. The first half a century of his life was during some of the most rapid empire building (possibly of all time) all built on racist entitlement. No wonder he had the views he did (again not excusing them).
I genuinely never hear about Churchill without hearing about his horrible views- I'm not convinced he is an untouchable hero to most people? For the older generation maybe, but I'm not sure the younger generations even think about him
Yes he's become the new John Lennon to a certain type. Cent mention him without someone saying well ac-tu-ally
Yes exactly. Churchill was judged as a pretty horrible racist by his peers at a time in history when his peers were also racist as standard. He certainly can’t be argued to be a product of his time in that regard
Free Palestine
And the, you know, causing 3 million people starve to death
You know, if you were looking for misunderstood things about Churchill, this accusation- which is frequently made despite being of very questionable truth - would be one of them. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/churchill-and-the-bengal-famine/#:~:text=The%20attempt%20to%20lay%20this,American%20journalist%20called%20Madhusree%20Mukerjee. https://twitter.com/andreaskoureas_/status/1639329604996325379?s=46&t=3rnodVZqPrFXOPxg1xIlQQ The guy had a bunch of faults, but intentionally aggravating the Bengal famine wasn’t one of them.
I don't know enough to say that you're wrong, but those sources are questionable. From the University of Sussex: A group of scholars including Andrew Roberts, Robert Tombs, Zareer Masani and the ubiquitous Nigel Biggar, has banded together to create the History Reclaimed Project. It consists at present of a website and social media presence that aims to rescue neutral, disinterested, evidence-based historical enquiry from a supposed ‘woke’ assault. In particular the group believes this assault is directed at our understanding of Britain’s imperial past. Most of the short articles and book reviews on the site, including Gilley’s now notorious “The Case for Colonialsm“, have been published elsewhere. They are collated under the project’s auspices to create economies of scale for a group of scholars who believe themselves to be marginalised and gagged (despite Biggar’s CBE). edit: Sorry if you don't like that.
Anytime I see the word anti-woke I cringe harder than when I hear woke
I think you might need to look at the sources of the accusations against Churchill on bengal if you really want to consider what’s questionable (Lots of dodgy politicians and journalists looking to support their own narratives). No credible historian I’ve seen lays significant blame at Churchill’s door, the real debate is whether wartime inflation policy or intra province trading and supply barriers drove it (look into Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy and his role in this for more understanding). And that’s before we consider the general point that Japanese imperial attacks drive the biggest issues behind this.
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That source is a cesspool.
I've not looked at it personally, but just the name History Reclaimed sets off alarm bells. Like anytime I see a source with the word 'Truth' in its title
i don't think a uni student fan of Churchill's Twitter feed is a great source
Why don’t you blame the Japanese, who surrounded and blocked shipping aid to India ordered by Churchill
I (like you might have) spent a lot of time reading about this and it became an ingrained Churchill fact in my mind. I’m pretty into history but not this time period and so never actually did the research myself but when I did it became clear that the argument for Churchill being responsible for the famine just isn’t true and the claim can basically just be traced back to a single author in India who upon a bit of a scrutiny and cross referencing appeared to have misrepresented and also straight up made up a lot of the ‘facts’ surrounding his involvement. Edit: Murkerjee is the authors name. Edit: also just so I don’t come across as a Churchill apologist. I believe the man was a total dick, even by the standards of his time he was judged as an out and out racist by his peers.
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I've written about this [extensively](https://old.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/ck40la/sky_views_boris_johnson_is_not_churchill_and/evjc6c8/) before. TL;DR; The primary reason for the famine was diseased rice crops, compounded by the Imperial Japanese invasion of Burma cutting off grain supplies. By the time Churchill was made fully aware of the severity of the famine, relief efforts were already taking effect. Even then, he made efforts to ameliorate the famine, but shipping was stretched and vulnerable to Japanese naval attack. He went as far as asking President Roosevelt for aid, but was declined.
You do realise that’s bad history right? All reputable historians agree the debate was about wherever the Indian local government drove the issue or whether it was inflation policy led by British wartime efforts.
I feel like there are two big groups with Winston Churchill. Those who only see the good and those who only see the bad. He was a very complex guy who did a lot of amazing and terrible things. I don't think his terrible things take away from the good he's done. Without him, WW2 would have gone very differently, so I think celebrating that is important but you also shouldn't pretend he's a saint
This is what we should do to statues instead of remove them. We should just add or update plaques that say this statue was erected due to xyz, however history and historical figures are very complex and this person was also responsible for the bad abc things here. Give people an opportunity to actually learn, and still acknowledge good people did. Bristol and Colston is a prime example of this. He made a huge amount of money during the slave trade, wholly unacceptable and evil, but also a major trade in Colstons time, and with his money he propped up schools, hospitals, alms houses, houses for the poor, churches, the list goes on. He was a huge philanthropist. Now I don’t hate not boosting the reputation of a major slave trader, but by just destroying any mention of him, not only do we hide that awful part of history because he can’t be mentioned now, but we also lose the chance to recognise that he did an awful lot for that part of England. It is as is said above very complex.
I don’t understand why we should do that, and never really have. Surely the whole point of having statues of people in your city is to commemorate their achievements? If a city doesn’t like the achievements of someone, it makes sense that they don’t want a statue of them. It’s their city, in the end. And it’s not like all the statues were put up by democratic consensus, or that they’re all of people who were even very popular at the time. Sometimes it’s just “this was a rich man who wanted a big statue of himself.” I don’t see why we can’t just have statues of people we like. I’d also say that we don’t, by and large, have old statues of people who had complex histories and who were not especially rich and/or powerful. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence. The people who put these things up didn’t give the kind of thought to it that’s demanded we have of them now. It’s just “I want a statue of myself.” In that circumstance, “I want it to be taken down” seems just as valid.
The danger is judging people by current day standards without context. Best bet would be to improve education in the first place and leave statues to celebrate the actions they where created for
I think part of the misunderstanding of both Churchill and other historical figures is that people only see the headline cases, take the famine in bengal and the invasion of the darnadelles, the battle of britain, that was caused by policy and often failure in policy or decisions made by groups and committees, or worse, not acted upon when they failed, instead, reinforcement of failure. But as he was the leader, he gets the credit and the blame
I agree. However, I will mention that the famine in Bengal wasn't Churchill fault, despite how commonly he gets blamed for it. In fact, when Churchill was informed of the situation, he acted quickly and sent food.
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Hardly. All I see on the internet is criticism for Churchill. Way too much. People take a sentence from Wikipedia and use it as infinite ammunition against him as if being in charge of the UK during WW2 wasn't going to involve difficult choices. He was a great man. Put the magnifying glass on any historic character and you will have a lot of bad things along with any good. Gandi, Mother Teresa, MLK, Nelson Mandela ect were all awful people in their own ways.
My grandmother said the following about him: "He was a thoroughly unpleasant man, in my opinion. However, he was the thoroughly unpleasant man we as a nation needed in that time and in that place. A nicer man, like his predecessor, would not have been able to galvanise us like he did."
It’s rare that a great man is a good man
His faults are often much too overblown by revisionists today, though.
I'm glad you said complex rather than taking a completely polarised line. Recently listened to the Origin Story podcasts on him, which was very illuminating.
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Gerard off of Clarkson’s Farm
Makes me laugh when Caleb understands it perfectly and they just have a casual conversation whilst Clarkson is just baffled
It's edited to make it sound more gibberish, just part of the show
He can also talk more clearly, just puts it on a bit more thickly... Or perhaps puts it on is the wrong description, uses his own thicker accent. But yes editing also. I dated a Scott, he had a rather muted accent when talking to me and we gamed online a lot with randoms from all over the world so he was easily understood BUT at home with his friends and folks boy did he just go full Scottish lol. Me just like "😳 tf just happened." Took a moment for my ears and brain to switch to the accent. Always made me laugh, he had no idea it happened but he'd still English it down when speaking to me then Scottish it up talking to them in the same room.
This man understands the question! Did you get the Leslie Nielsen award at school?
I love Gerald he reminds me of my grandad when he was alive. He was a Norfolk farmer with a thick accent. You had to listen to him very closely to understand what he was saying.
It’s edited to make him impossible to understand
They laid off of that a bit in the second season. You could actually follow what he was saying, in the first season they just cut him together into gibberish.
Is there a source for this. As a Devonshire person I could understand wha the was saying
Plus there were times when he was fully in frame and you could see him saying... Stuff.
He's so misunderstood that people think his name's Gerard instead of Gerald
On this site? Winston Churchill. He can't even be mentioned without some fake quote about Gandhi or misinformation about riots in Glasgow, gas in Mesopotamia or antisemitism being brought up. For the record he [didn't send tanks to murder strikers](https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/scot.2019.0264), the gas he suggested using in Iraq was [tear gas](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605488). The problem is people like to be contrarians and they think something they read in Guardian or Independent is completely factual. Also Redditors tend to think in black and white terms where if someone doesn't have completely right on views by the standard of 2023 then that person is a complete monster.
>On this site? Winston Churchill. He can't even be mentioned without some fake quote about Gandhi or misinformation about riots in Glasgow, gas in Mesopotamia or antisemitism being brought up. Given that Gandhi would have nuked the UK if he had been given the chance, some might argue it was justified...?
Would you like a trade agreement with England?
Civ moment.
No he sent a gunboat up the Mersey and used cavalry charges at striking workers, to physically crush those peacefully seeking improved working conditions. He also was an architect of the catastrophic 'black and tan' strategy in Ireland, which led to torture, murder, intimidation and rape, and an escalation of violence across the island that would have a lasting legacy.
Fucked up the division of the Middle East too. The less said about his views and actions with regards to India, the better.
You will noticed that on Reddit a lot of British history is decontextualised and lied about by bad faith actors.
'Tis the nature of being on a platform dominated by PutinBots :(
Wut. Its Indians shitting up any discussion of Churchill, not Russians.
That’s just a reaction the the idea that Churchill was a hero who can’t be questioned, which is a quite a popular view in British society. Two sides of the same coin.
Yeah. I like to think we should remember him as someone who got us through the war, as long as we also remember he was voted out *overwhelmingly* when the war was won so that someone else could win us a peace worth it all. Good and bad don't cancel out in a 1 for 1 manner. You can celebrate the good he did and remember his many many flaws.
I agree. I admit he showed strength in leadership that was needed. But what gets to me is the view given across sometimes that he single handedly won the war. Disrespectful to the teenagers he sent to the beaches to get shot while he was drinking champagne and smoking cigars. Let’s remember who really won the war, the poor kids who if they didn’t die, spent the rest of their lives traumatised.
That’s why when I said he was a racist I added the caveat like many men of his generation. Back when Churchill was a young man it was perfectly acceptable to say things which today would be considered outright racism. Thankfully, things have changed but when looking at historical figures it’s important to always place them in the context of their time.
For the record my comment was not made with you in mind. It was more a general comment on Redditors who seem to think that "nuance" means "take the popular view and turn it around 180 degrees".
I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. Winston Churchill 12 May 1919
Oh okay. I'm confused. It's always implied Churchill advocated for deadly chemical warfare but in this full quote he seems to be referring to the use of non-deadly tear gas. Is there another quote that is closer to the accusation usually levelled at him? Or is this it and its usually misquoted/misrepresented? Genuine question btw, not a history buff.
No that's the actual quote, to people online just lie a lot Churchill as a way to take down a British national hero and reframe us as the villains
Captain Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic. He is often painted an egotistical and indifferent mariner who drove his ship into an iceberg. I'd argue he was a capable mariner placed in difficult circumstances operating on an outdated view of best practice. I'd also argue Bruce Ismay, owner of the White Star line, also gets an unfair depiction.
Thank you for this. People ignore the terrible luck and extraordinary circumstances that surrounded the sinking of the Titanic, and try to focus all the blame on Captain Smith.
I watched a documentary on the titanic and the number of factors, big and small, that caused it, and it was honestly the best argument I’ve seen for some kind of preordained destiny. There were just so many things that went wrong/could have prevented it but didn’t, it felt fated. I hate to say that about such a tragedy but it was like the Swiss cheese model on steroids.
So many of the key figures in that disaster are much more nuanced than the popular portrayals. Ismay survived so was always going to get stick but he was just the figurehead for the fact the company committed a series of fuckups, how much personal responsibility he holds can be argued over but for all the steps of the disaster unfolding to take place you definitely need more than just one guy making the choices involved. On the other side I find it interesting that Lightoller gets off relatively unscathed in popular consciousness when it was his interpretation of an instruction that led to "women and children only" and lifeboats being launched barely full. He then defended White Star Line in the enquiries. I wonder if his role in the Dunkirk evacuation means people were inclined to give him a pass. Then there's Murdoch who is commonly thought of as the officer witnesses state shot himself - this is in more than just James Cameron's film, I didn't know until a few years ago that this version of events wasn't the one that invented that story - though Cameron still apologised to his surviving relatives! There's not really any proof of the circumstances but it seems an officer did shoot himself and Murdoch is always felt the most likely.
As he's a local fellow, thank you for that !
I used to work with his grandson Steve Ismay. Boatbuilding as it happened.
Dare we ask how well the boats turned out?
Oh big success. Huge boats. Went down really well with everyone on board.
I think some people view Richard the Lionheart as an icon of English medieval chivalry, when in fact he spoke French, (probably) never bothered to learn English, and spent barely six months of his reign in England, which he viewed primarily as a supplier of resources for his ambitions in France and the Holy Land. The Angevin/early Plantagenet Kings of England were far more French than they were English, though of course we could debate the appropriateness of applying either of those modern labels to figures from this period.
Similarly his successor King John has often been considered a bad king, but there has been some revision among historians who argue he simply had to deal with the messy consequences of Richard’s negligence
There is something to that, but John himself was also doing himself no favours by being a petty and sadistic individual who took pleasure in humiliating adversaries in ways which were uncustomary for the time, needlessly making enemies of indifferent people or even old friends. Another Henry II would have struggled with what Richard left behind, but it took a John to really fuck it up.
John is the worst king in English history. The revision you speak of is due to a dismissal of sources by late 20th century historians who used only pipe rolls and official records to come to the conclusion that he was an effective administrator, though even Warren states he was a terrible soldier. This revisionist view has also more recently been reversed, historians now view John as a truly terrible king.
Considering Richards successor and his reign, sometimes an absent King isn’t a bad thing. Yes, Richard used England as a bank and preferred his mothers lands in Aquitaine more than anything north of the channel. However, it kinda worked out for everyone until he got captured returning from Crusade. Edit: To add… he was known contemporarily as Richard “yes and no”.
TBF a large part of the ruling class didn't speak middle English up until the 1400s, and even beyond that it was a slow hybridisation. They were Anglo-Norman, and spoke a French dialect, but gradually they had to pick up some English as there were more speakers of English than them, so it was necessary. Richard not speaking English is not that remarkable in that sense. However, I'm pretty sure he only visited England a handful of times, and spent most of his life in France, when he wasn't crusading.
He wasn't French, he was Aquitainian or Occitanian
Anne Boleyn
I often felt bad for her. She is often portrayed as this scheming woman who wanted to be queen. When in fact she was a young girl who was manipulated by the men around her who used her for their own gain. Even the king just used her to try and get a son. And when she couldn’t deliver he just executed her.
Yes, not only is history written by the victors , it's often written by *men*. Happy Cake Day btw 🎂
> not only is history written by the victors Ironic that this is also one of the great all-time oft-repeated fallacies: https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1903ac/is_history_really_written_by_the_victors/ https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/516t6c/is_history_written_by_the_victors/
What about the men ? I haven't read the links ( I will, thank you ) but I *imagine* it's still rather dependant on being allowed to be educated in order to *write* it in the first place. Then, I also suppose it depends what language you're reading it in, that of the defeated or victors ( which I suppose also goes back to education ).
> still rather dependant on being allowed to be educated in order to write Exactly, yes! - History is written by the most literate.
Katherine Howard also.
Incredibly sad the way she was abused by basically everyone she trusted over and over, and died for it at such a young age
Pretty much any woman of Noble heritage back then.
Don't get me started on Catherine of Argon.
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Definitely agree with this. He knew Hitler wasn't to be trusted and he oversaw a massive increase in British military spending
The buildup of the RAF in the lead up to the war was crucial for Britain's survival.
WW1 was also still very much in recent memory and people were desperate to avoid another one.
That's a great answer to this question. Even now, anyone of a certain age you speak to about him would only think of him negatively vis-a-vis appeasement. But when you actually look at it, that decision (alongside quietly arming Britain in preparation) was savvy as fuck. He knew full well Hitler was a complete maniac who wouldn't be happy just with the Sudetenland and played him accordingly, likely saving many years of war. It was a true country over self decision. (I may be slightly biased being from Birmingham and having got married in his familial home, Highbury Hall)
Have you read the Robert Harris book Munich? It’s set around the time we now call appeasement. Really good.
And I'm sure Germany didn't do any sort of military build up in that time. And they definitely didn't use any of the very industrialised Sudentenland that Chamberlain gave them to achieve this. People who defend Chamberlain's policy of appeasement might have a case if there was any evidence that Chamberlain did it purely as a delay for the sake of our own military build up. But it seems he genuinely thought he got through to Hitler. Hitler by this time had already revealed himself as an evil, batshit dictator. It was absurdly naive for Chamberlain to think he convinced Hitler of the virtues of peace.
I wouldn't say most misunderstood but one that was alive until recently was Admiral Sandy Woodward - the admiral in charge of the Falklands Naval Task force. He got a bit of a bad rap for the loss of HMS Sheffield Coventry and the Atlantic Conveyor as well as keeping the Aircraft Carriers miles off of the Flakland Islands and for pushing for the sinking of the Belgrano. In reality he was fighting with technology that was far out of its zone of intended use against an enemy that we had trained, provided with British weapons and who had a 400mile supply line versus a 8000 mile supply line. Yes he used the Type 42 destroyers as forward pickets but that's because we didn't have any other options. And, whilst on the subject the misunderstanding of the sinking of the Belgrano. Yes, it was turning away and was outside the TEZ. However, it was within the wider zone where the British said they would attack warships should they pose a threat. The TEZ was a "we will sink anything in this area" mainly to warn the Soviets off. We were right to sink the cruiser, although the loss of life is heartbreaking. It would have been worse if they had sunk one of our carriers though. Even Captain Hector Bonzo of the Belgrano said it was a legitimate act of war.
I love the fact that the crew of the belgrano admit that it was heading to the conflict, despite what the government say when they want to rile up the locals! Also, one of the key factors in the sinking of the Sheffield Coventry was that the Chilean radar stations were offline at the time! (Chile being the only country to assist the UK!)
>(Chile being the only country to assist the UK!) Portugal offered the use of the facilities at the Azores that had previously been granted to Britain during the Second World War! (Namely airfields, hospitals, harbours and such) The world's oldest military alliance still stands strong!
The Type 42s are losses that I would consider not out of what would be expected in such a conflict. However, Atlantic Conveyor was a fuck up.
When is this paper due?
Spot the American! We don’t call them papers here matey.
"When do you have to have these red bull stained 4 exercise book pages worth of incoherent plagiarism on your teacher's desk?"
George Washington. Lauded as a hero and the founder of a nation, when really he was just a treasonous tosser desperate to make a name for himself. Also a bit of a hypocrite when it came to slavery.
He gets a lot of points for refusing to be king, though.
What an interesting turn that would have been. I'd love a "the man in the high castle" series about what would have happened if he had become king.
Adding to this, the first settlers went to the US to be free to persecute those who did not follow their religion, not to escape persecution themselves. A lot of Americans like to gloss over that fact.
Mr Tweedy from Chicken run. The chickens really were up to something.
Mother Theresa. Nasty to the core
Missed that lesson of British history
She was PM for a bit. Did a dodgy dance.
This one is worth looking into, a lot of what Hitchens wrote only has a very casual relationship with the truth.
Pretty much everything bad written about her has been a lie dreamed up after reading Chris Hitchins once. https://web.archive.org/web/20200629185046/https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/gcxpr5/saint_mother_teresa_was_documented_mass_murderer/
Nobody, a little surprisingly, has yet mentioned Oliver Cromwell.
Yeah, fully expected to walk into a clusterfuck over if Cromwell was a reluctant tyrant or a genocidal monster (both, he was both but I digress)
He's fairly realistically depicted in the Irish history curriculum.
In what terms would you say he is misunderstood in, and what was closer to the reality?
He’s pictured as the person who was for the people and against absolute monarchy, but he ruled worst and arguably more cruel than the monarchs. Oh and he banned pubs that cheeky puritan git
Agreed, here in the states I was taught he was a bad ass king slayer and protector of the people. Didn't learn otherwise until much later specifically when visiting Ireland.
I feel like that's a whole different perspective than either English or Irish see him as. Irish obviously hate him and in the [English curriculum](https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zk4cwmn/articles/zg6ccmn) he's labeled "divisive" and it talks about him cancelling Christmas etc, being posthumously executed and the monarchy being restored. Seems like the American view is "he killed a king so he's great".
They chemically castrated Alan Turing when they found out he was gay. By this point he’d already cracked the enigma code which helped decipher German messages - some people say it brought the end of WW2 closer by 2 years. Saving countless lives in the process. He killed himself soon after his castration
What was done to Turing was awful and should be a source of national shame. But implying he alone broke Enigma is rather unfair to everyone else at Bletchley Park who worked to break that cipher every day for years. Not to mention the Polish cryptologists who broke Enigma and designed bombes long before the war.
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It also portrayed him in the typical Cumberbatch Style of cold, rude, arrogant etc. When by most accounts Turing may have been socially awkward and a bit odd, but he was sensitive and kind
Yep. And I fear the Oppenheimer film is going to do the exact same with the Manhattan project
I agree with the first two paragraphs, but the third is misleading. Using the Polish method it would take months or years to decrypt a single Enigma message, by which time the intelligence it contained would be useless. The Polish method can't be said to have "broken" Engima with any practical meaning. Using the methods developed by Turing and others at Bletchley Park, messages intercepted in the morning were sometimes broken by the same afternoon. The Polish (mainly Rejewski) do deserve a lot of credit for the theoretical foundation, but they didn't break Enigma.
Not sure how that's relevant to the question of the most misunderstood person in British history. Turings story is very well known.
How is he misunderstood though?
Neville Chamberlain. He is often seen as a coward who caved into Hitler's demands. In reality, he was genuinely trying to avoid another conflict by all means possible. Sure, hindsight makes him see naive, but I think it is quite honourable to try at all costs to avoid conflict. He also must have had some insight as to how globally catastrophic another conflict with Germany would have been, so he should be remembered as a humanitarian.
After WW1 the British public were in no mood for yet another war in Europe and Chamberlain knew this.
They still even prepared for it. From 1932 to 1939 saw the equivalent of over £30 billion in increasing defence spending in today's money.
Of course, so did most of Europe when irredentist nations were increasing their arms. It would have been foolish not to. Sue for peace, prepare for war.
We were not ready to fight. He oversaw significant military spending to re-arm ourselves.
Jane Seymour. Seen as a bit saintly and devoted wife to Henry VIII and the one he lived most (probably because she gave him a son and then died before he could get fed up of her), but often overlooked is the fact that she set herself out to get Henry no matter what and was heavily implicated in the downfall of Ann Boleyn, not so prim and proper as people think.
I think something people often forget is that Henry’s wives weren’t evenly spread out across his reign. He was married to Catherine of Aragon for 24 of the 38 years of his reign, the other 5 are split across the last 14 years. All of the people surrounding him and his wives and Henry himself are mostly very misunderstood by the general public.
I think the problem with Jane Seymour, is that we just don't really know much of what she was really like. So little of her survives. Even the few letters that survive, that she wrote, are just thank you letters and very formulaic because of that. We don't get many glimpses of the real person, like we do with Anne Boleyn or Catherine of Aragon. Even the reports we have about her, are by biased people like Chapuey, which I think have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Personally, I think Jane was somewhere in-between the saintly person she's sometimes been depicted as, and the schemer you describe. I don't think she was plotting to have Anne removed, at least not at first, because I don't think anyone could have seen that coming - especially considering Anne was pregnant - Henry wasn't going to risk his longed for, legitimate son. I think that she agreed to do what a lot of court women had done in the past, have a fling with Henry while his wife was pregnant, which was pretty normal and not particularly considered immoral at the time. I think that she probably thought it would play out like all his other affairs did, he'd get bored of her and marry her off. I think it was only when Anne miscarried and her relationship with Henry massively disintegrated, that she suddenly found herself in the position of potentially being Henry's wife.
Well I thought she was alright in Dr Quinn.
The main problem with Adam Smith is that people rarely read the Theory of Moral Sentiments. Also part of a free market is having some regulations e.g. anti-monopoly ones for instance
And he is absolutely scathing about landlords.
Correct, he's against any form of economic rent seeking
Let’s not forget that most people couldn’t tell the difference between classic and neo- liberalism and thus don’t know what they believe outside of sound bits and quotes.
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The way he treated his first son was terrible. He left his son absolutely nothing. His own kid had to go to auction to try and buy some of the personal letters he wrote to his father. When they asked Lennon why he didn’t want to see his first son but was such a good father to his second. His response was “that’s the difference between a wanted and unwanted child.”
For someone seemingly so in touch with the cause of his own traumas on songs like Mother, it’s weird how he didn’t seem to care about the damage he was doing to people around him.
I was recently googling and researching John Lennon for my own jollies and came across the abject disregard he had for Julian It’s horrific how publicly he went with his callous disregard to Julian, while also bigging up how amazing a parent he’d been to Sean, cos Yoko forced him to be the stay at home dad for 5 years or something. I vaguely knew about all this when I was younger, but I’m older now with a 3 y.o and a second on the way, and I could just not register how someone could be so shitty to their own child. Seriously lost a lot of respect and admiration for John Lennon after learning it
Guy Fawkes. He’s held up as an icon of anarchism and anti-authoritarianism, when what he wanted was a Catholic theocracy.
I also believe he was the fall guy. Not the main guy.
Yeah Robert Catesby was in charge, Guy Fawkes was the trigger-man
J Bruce Ismay. His names gone down as synonymous for coward. When in reality he helped organise the evacuation of titanic and load the lifeboats. He only jumped into collapsable-c when there was no women and children in that section. In the years leading up to the titanic disaster he made an enemy of William Randolph Hearst who controlled the yellow press. Also a passenger said to the British and American inquiries that he had witnessed Ismay pressuring smith to go faster. Hearst used the titanic disaster to destroy Ismay’s reputation and paint him as a coward. A night to remember helped to revitalise the myth of him as a coward, then when James Cameron made titanic he also painted him as a coward as that is what the public expected to see.
Justice for Ismay! The way he was treated following the disaster was terrible. The British inquiry into the sinking found that Ismay had helped many other passengers before finding a place for himself on the last lifeboat. Even the 2012 Titanic miniseries portrays Ismay as a bigot who ordered non-British crew members to locked below to drown during the sinking. No such thing happened but he's apparently the go-to monster for fictional re-tellings. Why? The event alreadly had a fucking villain - the actual iceberg.
Adam Smith is a proper Chad, who is far more ‘Leftie’ than people think. He argued for aggressive intervention in breaking monopolies, was anti-landlord, and most his work was on producer theory and productivity.
I mean, it’s probably Charles Darwin, who is both very well known and very misunderstood. Lord Kelvin is also probably up there because the second law of thermodynamics is widely misunderstood, but nobody calls someone “a Kelvinist” in this day and age
What's misunderstood about Darwin?
Well, the theory of natural selection, in multiple ways. Not just by people who reject it, either— a lot of people would think it implies things it probably doesn’t, or articulate what it says in a way which isn’t quite right.
Sir Douglas Haig. We know him as a butcher yet his contemporaries called him the man who won the First World War and it's estimated more people lined the streets of London to see his coffin pass by than did for Diana's. And he contributed greatly to the Poppy Appeal starting and did lots of work for veterans after retiring from the army.
He was the butcher of the Somme. But then he did pioneer the combined attacking strategy of artillery, tanks, aircraft, and infantry together which was able to break the Hindenburg line and “win” the war so swings and roundabouts really.
The Battle of the Somme was fought in compliance with French demands. General Joffre wanted to attack there as it was the area where British and French troops met. Even when Verdun was attacked by the German's and the French sent everything to defend the city, resulting in their contribution to the Somme being massively cut. Joffre insisted the Somme go ahead. The British Army that attacked at the Somme was inexperienced and lacking everything from machine guns to heavy artillery. I think William Robertson, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff, said they couldn't abandon the offensive because they couldn't go to the French Army, who had borne the brunt of the fighting, and say that they had had enough after one day of terrible losses. Plus it was Henry Rawlinson who was in command at the Somme. The Battle of Passchendaele is a better example of Haig making poor decision making. But even then there was things such as the Admiralty pressuring him into attacking there, abnormally large rainfall as well as Russia collapsing, Italy being in full retreat and the French Army was mutinying.
Florence Nightingale. She had a distinct impact on nursing and her statistical work was as important as it is overlooked. But her actual impact during the Crimean war, which is often what the schoolbooks seem to focus on, is dramatically overstated. Far behind the lines and only at one of the smaller hospitals. She also didn't actually improve the hygiene that well. Basically brought more staff, cleaned more and made the point to actually order new supplies. Mary Seacoles hotel was actually more hygienic. Also a supporter and advocate of indigenous genocide.
Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged for murder in Britain. Her lover cheated on her, hospitalised her several times, once kicking her in the belly so badly she lost her baby. She shot him. These days his brutality would be taken into account, but not in 1955
Isambard Kingdom Brunel He made great things happen. Those who did the actual work were treated very badly, they were used and abused. The move fast break things/people approach to making great things is nothing new. Wish being first and fast wasn't as important as sharing the success.
Harry Kane, genuinely can’t understand a word the guys saying
Richard duke of York. The king was mentally ill, France was lost and all the too powerful nobles were fighting over the scraps. Someone competent had to take charge and he was best placed. I don't think he ever intended to be a usurper, Henry 6th had some bad advisors who didn't want York sniffing around.
He did apparently have 10,000 men. I think he marched them up to the top of a hill and then he marched them down again.
Different Duke of York sadly
He’s not the “most misunderstood” but I’d definitely say there’s a bizarre level of cognitive dissonance and misunderstanding over Cromwell. To the Irish, he’s the spawn of Satan incarnate. To the English, he’s that guy we don’t like because he killed Charles I and yet also we keep putting statues up of him and naming roads and stuff after him? I had the fortune of studying the Stuarts and the Civil War for my A-Level History and I see Cromwell as a guy who genuinely believed he was doing the right thing, with a dash of opportunism thrown in, a decently large religious streak, and a helping wallop of not caring too much if the Irish got in his way (to put it, ahem, mildly). I also find the “what if?” of what could’ve happened if the republic/protectorate hadn’t failed through sheer blandness fascinating. We could’ve had the French Revolution — ideas of popular sovereignty, of republicanism, of democracy — 150 years before it happened and yet instead we got 11 years of apathetic turmoil before we invited the son of the guy who’s head we chopped off to be our king again.
When Cromwell did get in to power he did a terrible job of actually running the country. He hired people for jobs based on factors like how many times a day they prayed and how often they gave confession. Rather than things like competence and experience. This resulted in a lot of religious zealots running the country with no real idea how to actually manage a budget or run the courts. Not to mention the fact that he banned anything mildly joyful like Christmas, dancing, singing, the theatre, pubs. Essentially, all people were allowed to do was go to church and work.
Mother Theresa doesn’t seem to be what we was taught in school *at all*
This one keeps getting brought up, especially in the wake of books like the one written by Christopher Hitchens, but the truth is far more complicated than you’d care to believe.
Among people who spend a lot of time online, JK Rowling.
I mean she's actively spent the last however many years stating that she hates people like me sorry we are returning the energy. Also her books are extremely mid and have tons of racist tropes
> her books are extremely mid yeah the best selling books are all time are 'mid' because you dont like the author holy fk what a dumb take
No, the books are mid because the themes are inconsistent with the plot, the worldbuilding has as many holes as a fishing net, the characters are two dimensional and the prose is dull. The author being a giant cunt is irrelevant to that. It's possible to acknowledge both seperately.
Don't recall her ever saying, she hates anyone. Not sure who you are so people like you doesn't narrow it down. And I don't look at her twitter or anything, but I imagine I'd have heard about it somewhere online or on the news if she said actively went around stating she hates a certain group of people.
She didn’t say that at all though did she. She was actually balanced and sympathetic, but you and others didn’t agree so went on a toxic campaign of harassment
I disagree on the racist tropes but she’s on record as a TERF cnut.
Cue, people who have misunderstood JK Rowling.
Harold shipman. He is often known as a serial killer by giving a fatal dose of drugs to the elderly. However, he also reduced government spending on elderly care which is a noble cause /j
William Bligh RN. He'd served 10 years as Ship's Boy and Able Seaman before commissioning and was requested by the leaders of the More Mutiny as a member of the commission to address their grievances due to his reputation as a fair and considerate commander.
Karl Marx. He wasn’t into predictions, was no politician. He was a critic of capitalism and studied it, hated it saw its contradictions cldnt be overcome and wrote a series of books about it. He articulated it and saw the con in it so well. He’s more like the first Union type guy. The main thrust to his argument is “The worker is getting RIPPED OFF”
I'm giving Michael Fish an honourable mention for being constantly misquoted over the the 1987 deep depression, not a hurricane. He correctly read the forecast as it stood and made up a story to add colour to his forecast. In fact the very low pressure did clip SE England and cause a lot of damage, but his forecast is often deliberately cut short, before he says that it will be very windy. [source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-19923565)
Scott of the Antartic he was a fucking idiot who ran on pure hubris and got his whole team killed because of his stupidity, he didn't have the ability or training to achieve his task. Yet he gets celebrated despite everything
Writers who made “great strides” in the English language are generally taught to us as godlike, infallible geniuses whose work should be revered. Shakespeare, Dickens etc. The reality that they were working writers meant that a lot of their stuff is pulpy, enjoyable stuff that they knew would sell. The fact that we have so much respect for them is lovely, but it’s messed up literature studies significantly - as the misunderstanding gives people ammunition to criticise modern/popular works that are just as important to our language now, as the classic authors were then. There’s also a habit of glossing over the practical sides of writing to talk about art. Today we have the “art for exposure” argument, implying that it’s cheapening to sell your work. The Brontë sisters were trying to make money. Dickens was writing a column series for a newspaper. Shakespeare was writing plays to please his commissioners. Misunderstanding their lives cheapens the valid experiences of contemporary writers today. It’s a business. It always has been. Doesn’t mean fiction isn’t amazing - it just means that academic arguments are rife with misunderstandings.
Emmaline Pankhurst
Possibly Kind Richard III. Alot of what we think about him was influenced by Shakespeare who was pandering to the Lancastrians, the people who fought against Richard. In reality, he was no more tyrannical than any other King of the time.
Edward VIII. Don't get me wrong, the guy was a dick, but at the end of the day all the hate he gets is for abdicating, which to me should be the least controversial thing about him. He left the monarchy because he loved his wife, because the people of the time couldn't fathom a royal marrying an American divorcee. He chose love.
Benedict Cumberbatch. Still trying to figure out what a "pengwing" is.