©Bryan Phillips Jun 2024 

A recent article by Ruth Goodman in Who Do You Think You are? July 2024 p20 asks why the educational curriculum for history is full of Hitler, Napoleon, and Britain’s kings and queens. Where are the ordinary people? 

Perhaps we should be studying how the things that did change lives arose. How did clean water, electric light, antibiotics, surgery, paper, money, concrete, tea, coffee, metals come to be invented and distributed?

All family historians and local historians know that the vast majority of people had a real struggle just to get through life and, if lucky, have some children. Every one of us has a very long line of ordinary people as ancestors who have met with difficulties and overcome them, from slums, to poor health, malnutrition, prison, injustice, slavery, war and many other vicissitudes. How did they cope? What did they do – migrate, delay childbirth, work from dawn to dusk?

Take Milton Abbas as an example. We know that three kings visited here – Athelstan in 934, George III in 1789 and Edward VII in 1909. What impact did they have on our lives? Certainly the most recent two made very little positive contribution to our society. In fact, it could be argued that we would have been much better off without them! Perhaps wealth would have been more evenly distributed throughout history with better wages allowing our agricultural labourers to have better nutrition and avoid the workhouse and handouts from the Overseers which our records show.. Perhaps also the lords of our manor should have made sure their workers had a supply of clean water which would have avoided the diseases such as typhus that we know afflicted the tenants in Hilton in 1848, or better housing to avoid the severe overcrowding we know was the case in local villages. Certainly the study of local and family history shows how important child survival and rearing and the caring roles in society are.

A broader history curriculum with a wider selection of voices might help us improve society which is surely the aim of such education.

One current GCSE curriculum is here. This does include an option ‘Britain: Health and the people: c1000 to the present day.’

Tell us what you think here.