Glimpses of Britain. Reader - стр. 6
1966 and all what?
by Laura Clark
Daily Mail, August 5, 2004
The past seems to be something of a closed book to many young Britons. William the Conqueror, for example, may have changed the course of our history in 1066, but he remains largely a mystery man.
In a survey, almost half of 16 to 24-year-olds could not identify him as the victor of the Battle of Hastings.
Amazingly, more than one in five believed it was Alexander the Great and 13 per cent said it was Napoleon.
The BBC poll, published today, also reveals that less than half of the young Britons knew Sir Francis Drake fought in the English fleet against the Spanish Armada. One in five believed the hero of England’s victory in 1588 was Christopher Columbus. And the same number thought it was either Horatio Hornblower or Gandalf – both fictional characters.
The findings left education campaigners aghast at young people’s lack of knowledge about their nation’s past.
Ignorance, however, was not entirely confined to the younger age groups. The survey of 1,000 Britons from 16-year-olds to pensioners uncovered glaring gaps in many people’s knowledge of key historical events that shaped our history.
They may have given us our calendar, our roads, the first modern toilet and contributed to our language, but one in five Britons were unaware the Romans ever came here at all.
One in ten 16 to 24-year-olds actually thought Britain was conquered by Germany.
And despite this year’s widespread coverage of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, a third of respondents failed to answer a basic question about the Second World War.
Just 69 per cent knew the Battle of Britain took place during the 1939–45 conflict, with the figure dropping to 51 per cent among 16 to 24-year-olds.
A fifth of that age group believed it occurred during the First World War, while 12 per cent said it was fought 600 years earlier, during the Hundred Years War involving England and France.
Just half of those polled knew the name of the battle celebrated by Orangemen in Northern Ireland every July 12.
Only 18 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds correctly identified it as the Battle of the Boyne, where Catholic King James II’s troops were defeated by Protestant William III in1690.
A quarter believed the Orangemen were celebrating the battle of “Stamford Bridge” while one in ten answered the Battle of the Bulge.
An astonishing 15 per cent thought the answer was “Helmsdeep” – the fictional battle that marked the climax of The Two Towers, the second novel in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.