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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.

The figures, released to mark the start tomorrow of BBC2’s Battlefield Britain series on landmark conflicts, prompted calls for history to be made more prominent in the school curriculum.

Nick Seaton, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “The survey clearly shows that our state education system has got a lot to answer for.

A grounding in national history is essential for all young people in order to understand the present. This is extremely shocking. Last month, education watchdog Ofsted said secondary schools spent too little time teaching teenagers about the British Empire and too much on Nazi Germany.

Time spent on the Empire as a topic could amount to one lesson a year for 11 to 14-year-olds and almost nothing for GCSE pupils.”

Peter Snow, who presents Battlefield Britain with his son Dan, said: “It’s at once a shock and a challenge that so many people can be so wrong about some of the key moments in Britain’s past.”