I REMEMBER SOMETHING JUST LIKE THIS HAPPENED BEFORE

Anthony Seldon recently said we need historians in important positions in government to categorise, interpret and help us learn from what happened in the past. 

An executive steeped in the pharmaceutical industry said something similar to me about the absence of “corporate memory.” 

In both politics and in business, incoming regimes want to demolish their predecessor’s work and innovations. We live in a time of brooms zealously sweeping clean but losing lessons from which we might otherwise learn.

When I was in advertising we worked with Heinz. Their Tomato Ketchup is still without a challenger. 

They were impressively demanding but also courteous in their demands;  the ideal client. They were heavy users of market research. 

In theory no one should have known more but as people retired or left, their library of research gathered dust and they started to forget what they’d known. One weekend we assembled a team to scour part of the library, summarising what was in it and what its key conclusions and insights were. We unearthed a treasure trove of material. I realised that sustaining a corporate memory required hard work. Also that the more valuable insights lay in either understanding why something had gone right or wrong or what over time were the unchanging values and attitudes .

In this, the Queen’s Platinum Anniversary, some of those intrinsic values, memories and recipes will be recreated, Coronation Chicken, Brown Windsor Soup (although to survive this will have to be radically  new and improved,) Meat Loaf, Prawn Cocktail, Chicken Kiev and winner of the recent Mary Berry inspired cookery competition for the Platinum Pudding , Jemma Melvin’s Lemon Swiss roll and amaretti trifle (we hear this tastes utterly amazing although it takes 5 hours to create from scratch). 

But we all need a party after the traumas of Covid and this year we’ll have ‘nostalgia-thon’ and a series of street parties celebrating home cooking and old fashioned neighbourly values.

Feast are fine but how do we retain those lost memories and build a better sense of our history? And remembering too that history is not just about dates and documents but also about feelings, beliefs and prejudices.

I had a conversation with a centenarian who speaks of the learning from the Treaty of Versailles which was more punitive, indeed was so overly restrictive on Germany that after the 1930’s economic crises, its consequences led to the Second World War. 

This was followed by a half century of global economic growth, globalisation of trade and some significant skirmishes or worse in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and  across borders from time to time. Overall though “peace in our times” seemed to have been achieved. Until Thursday 24th of February this year when Russia invaded Ukraine. 

She sighed and said how many more times in our history shall we say “that’s it. No more wars.”

If more people had read Tim Marshall 7 years ago when he wrote “Prisoners of Geography” they wouldn’t have been so surprised. “Putin has not finished with Ukraine yet” he said. And to understand Putin “this student of history” read this:

“..the map that Ivan the Terrible confronted is the same one Vladimir Putin is faced with today.”

Few expected Ukraine to be so courageously enterprising (like mounting an undercover attack on Quad Bikes) or Russia to be so ponderous and inept. But why not? Remember Vietnam, remember Afghanistan, remember David and Goliath.

Let’s hope we have politicians studying the Treaty of Versailles to understand what we must not re-enact after this “war” grinds to a halt.

STOP RE-WRITING HISTORY

During the lockdown a lot’s been written about sleep. Until recently I’ve done rather a lot of it without thinking about it. But now I’m sleeping less well with uneasy dreams full of historic regret. It’s all rather bizarre. I re-live innings I played in cricket and lament that rash shot I made 50 years ago or a presentation I made which I spoilt by making a casual remark which like an ink blot interrupted the clean flow or an argument that I shouldn’t have had. I wake up feeling guilty and tired.

Talking of historic regret I see university applications for History are in marked decline. I  understand why. There’s an increasing trend shifting from analysis and balance to blame. 

The first line of L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go Between” (and later a film) was

“The past was a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

In my childhood there were no computers, calculators, hardly any TVs or household appliances. Children were regularly beaten at school and at home. Capital punishment was accepted as a norm for murder. We had amateurs and professionals in sport. Woman were second class. It was awful in retrospect but then it was just how things were. Doubtless in 50 years people will look back at 2021 and say it was terrible that so few women held top jobs and how lacking in diversity we were or will some freakish change of thinking lead us to be living in Gilead and The Handmaid’s Tale?

A Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham University, Kehinde Andrews, made himself rather unpopular with some people by describing Winston Churchill as a 'white supremacist' in a debate at Churchill College, Cambridge and saying modern Britain is 'based on racism'.  He also thinks the British Empire was 'far worse than the Nazis'.

Rather than frothing at mouth and dismissing what he’d said as nonsense, I thought he made some interesting points albeit in a slightly unfocused, hysterical way. The trouble with demagogues is I’ve never been able to take them seriously except in one respect. They set a poor example to the young in excluding the possibility of rational debate.

I found that moment in 2016 when the American Quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, first took the knee moving and extraordinary. Since then it’s become a little tiresome because it’s now become ritualistic not symbolic. 

If you don’t do it you’re accused of being “a silently complicit racist” which is rather silly. But not as silly as seeing people like Keir Starmer doing it.

The history of humankind is a mess. Should we demand reparation from Denmark, Norway and Sweden for damage the Vikings did to Britain in the 8th century? The Lindisfarne Raid of 793 was particularly nasty. Alcuin the scholar who worked with Charlemagne described how the ground was “spattered with the blood of the priests of God”. Or the French for the appalling way they treated us after the Battle of Hasting. Or the impudent Dutch for seizing the throne in 1689.

Some very nasty things happened in the past. We can’t change that. What we can do is study them and ensure we are cured of the instincts and practices that led to Lindisfarne (mind you, it might be interesting to take the Norwegians, Swedes and Danes to the European Court just to see the expressions on their faces.)

The history of the world is exciting. It’s crammed with progress;  full of good and bad things. If all we focus on are the bad things we are looking at and learning only half the story.

TAKING A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Try it. In conversation, when people  are bemoaning the uncertain world we live in, try the “not more uncertain than the Industrial Revolution” or “Ruskin would have had something about Brexit”. They’re conversation stoppers but go back nearly 2700 years and even my conversational capability grinds to a halt.

I went to the British Museum recently to see the exhibition “I am Ashurbanipal, King of the world, King of Assyria”. He ruled from 669 – 632 BC from his capital Nineveh. Nineveh was the largest city in Assyria and the world for 50 years and its location would have been where Mosul is now in Iraq on the Eastern Bank of the River Tigris.

It was apparently magnificent with 15 great gates and fascinating frescoes and sculptures. This is where the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were allegedly located. Ashurbanipal himself was not first in line as successor to the throne but was picked out as “the talent” and was trained as warrior, scholar and diplomat, shadowing his father and being made Assyrian spymaster which helped him develop an intimate knowledge of the vast Empire incorporating Cyprus, Judah, Egypt, Iraq, Syria.

He  was clearly unusually gifted and popular. Assyria became everything he boasted it was and he made Nineveh awe inspiring . What’s more he knew how to party.

“When I inaugurated the palace at Calah, I hosted for 10 days with food and drink….  altogether 69,574 invited guests…”

So what went wrong? We really don’t know. Records of him disappear… did he die of natural causes, was he assassinated? Whatever happened Assyria weakened, imploded and Nineveh by 612 BC was sacked and destroyed. (Imagine Paris being wiped off the map.) The exhibition showed work of heart-stopping  beauty and skill. It all seemed incomprehensible that this happened when Rome was still a muddy bunch of huts and London was over 600 years from being even started.

And then sometime around 610 BC with a huge plume of smoke, some screams and horrors it was gone. It was a memento mori moment. From King of the world to barely remembered.
Such exhibitions are like a rather strong medicine, purging us of our certainties and our  overweening attitude to our history.  We underestimate our perpetual conflicts with the Danes, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, the Germans and ourselves in the English Civil War in 1642 not to mention our repression of the Scots, Irish and Welsh.  Our history makes that of Ashurbanipal look almost sophisticated and civilised.

The Queen has asked us to pull our socks up and “come together”. Matthew Parris wishes she wouldn’t interfere in politics, my own problem is her plea is like asking Arsenal supporters to applaud a Tottenham goal. In the argot of today “that just aint going to  happen.” Just look at history.

The Assyrian adventure I had last week confirmed my view that Brexit will play out messily. But the historians will have such fun with it.