For some reason cheese rationing in WWII has really stuck with me (I flipping love cheese)
Every time I cut a chunk off for my tea, I think jesus, this is all they got for the week and I’m sprinkling it over my pasta bake
Are there any other weird school history factoids that have always stayed with you?
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I remember seeing pictures of Russians selling human flesh / dead babies as a food source in WW2, due to the famine they were experiencing.
I still remember the picture today. Horrifying.
Not really what you’re imagining but I remember thinking “god I wish I was in history class right now and not in lego club”. They used to pull me out of History every week and have me play lego. This was when I was 15 bare in mind, so it felt a bit patronising to say the least, especially because I thought the point of lego was to use your imagination but they had the sets and they wanted us to build the set exactly as it says on the box.
Divorce, beheaded, died, divorce, beheaded, survived.
King Henry the 8ths wives, I have no idea why but its just been hammered into me.
WW2 songs sang in bomb shelters.
My amazing history teacher was a bit mental, and I still think of the Reichstag Fire when I hear “Feeling Hot Hot Hot”.
Breaks
When learning about WWII we watched a programme about evacuees called Spywatch. Some of the songs from there have stayed with me!
We did Cromwell and civil war. Had a good teacher made it really interesting. The way Charles I could’ve walked away but insisted on arguing it was his god given right to be king.
Rebecca riots
Only that when we were learning about the second world war, at the time when I was a child I thought it was really really ancient history but its been bemusing as an adult to look back and realise that when I was learning about it it had been over for fewer than twenty five years and was most likely very vivid memory for my teacher.
Some of the girls in my class getting a joke plastic poo, putting brown sauce over it, wrapping it up in paper and putting in the class tutors register. He took the joke in all good fun.
The reformation with the dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VIII denying transubstantiation – I’m still waiting for that word to come up at a pub quiz!
Not school history but something I heard on QI and looked into further – the stereotype of what RAF pilots were like during the war is surprisingly far from what they were actually like.
Wartime propaganda films had pilots being played by ‘posh’ gentlemen types who spoke in Received Pronunciation, wearing cravats and calling each other ‘old boy’ and what have you. This was mainly because this was what actors were mostly like at the time, so it made sense that their characters were like that too. The Ealing films of the 40s and 50s continued the stereotype and by the 60s it was just firmly rooted.
Even today the stereotype of British Tommies around the Dunkirk period of the war is working class, possibly Cockney/Scouse/Geordie/Manc, often missing a tooth or three and with a slightly dishevelled appearance. Think of the British soldiers the Americans briefly meet in Band of Brothers, the Tommy says (referring to a captured Luger), “here you’re having a barmey if you think you’re half inching that”. Pilots on the other hand are immaculately presented, quite suave gentlemanly types from places like Surrey and Hampshire.
In reality the RAF, being the most junior of the services, didn’t get the aristocratic types (they usually joined the Navy or senior army regiments, Guards and Household cavalry etc). The RAF also placed a bit more emphasis on mechanical skills, pilots being expected to be able to at least know how their machines worked – not to say that upper middle class people couldn’t, but working class guys who had worked with their hands a lot tended to have a bit of an upper hand on it.
So pilots came from a far wider range of social classes than are depicted in popular media. This was even more pronounced in the Royal Flying Corps in WW1 (the precursor to the RAF) where a huge number of officer pilots were promoted ‘from the ranks’, with the RFC particularly interested in soldiers from the mechanical and engineering units of the army and didn’t really give a toss about their social class.
There were plenty of adventurous gentleman pilots of course – they tended to be the ones with pre-war flying experience and there’s no point getting them to drive tanks when you’re running out of pilots – but there were far far far more ‘rough and ready’ types than are depicted in film.
Legendary RAF pilot Douglas Bader alluded to this stereotype several times in reference to the film made about him, ‘Reach for the Stars’ (great film and on YouTube btw). In the film he’s depicted as suave and charming; Bader had a good laugh about this for the rest of his life as he wasn’t, by his own admission, anything remotely like that portrayal.
I loved learning about medieval Britain, with Boudicca and the Icini tribe, and the origins of people like pox doctors, Villeins and Doxy’s…love the old tapestries telling the stories.
I learned so much more history since school and continue to study it, but those are the images in my mind from school.
I found learning about WW2 boring, but I am sure we did it every single year from 4 to 16…
It’s obviously The repeal of the corn laws
When learning about rationing we watched an episode of some food related programme which had a segment on rationing. They said “in the 1940s the word minging had not yet been coined and so the British populace continued to eat spam”
That stuck with me.
LBJ, LBJ how many kids have you killed today.
when learning about the Vietnam war.
Native Americans used every part of the buffalo. The tongue was a hairbrush and the stomach a bag.
I swear for like half a term in year 8 we just learnt about gin, even eventually writing an essay on it? Not how it was made or invented though, I think something to do with how it was such a problem for the uk at the time, tea was then shipped here as a better substitute for the working classes or something like that??
My memory is very hazy of it as you can tell haha, I just remember thinking what a random thing to be learning about at the time!
Life in the trenches really stuck with me. We had a really good history teacher that wasn’t shy about painting really grim pictures about the subject
In one of the history book at school said that an injured soldier was making so much noise whilst waotong for medical care that a second injured soldier grabbed his newly amputated arm to beat the first soldier with, top get him to shut up.
Aztecs and Tenochtitlan, probably because of the sacrifice detail!
Teacher built a box with the space given to a slave during the crossing. We then had to see how long we could stand it in the space. A lot of kids tried to turn it into a contest and had to be helped out of the box. Then the teacher would talk about all the additional horrors, the chains, the sewage, the rocking of the boat, the death. Really made a difference and everyone listened to him.
By gum, this is interesting. I always loved history. Battle of Hastings… Henry the 8th and his six knives… all that…
First day of history GCSE, 1999, was about trepanning and how we know they survived because the bone showed signs of healing.
The Germans having to buy a loaf of bread with a wheelbarrow of money due to their economic issues post WWI leading to a guy called Hitler rising in popularity. Not sure what happened with him though.
That Dave cullan fingered Sharron Gilli’s behind the maths block
Why are you dipping cheese into your tea?
That barbershop’s were the first surgeons and the barber pole outside shops represent blood and bandages.
Our history teacher used to go on quite long tangents about almost any vaguely historical topic. She was a good storyteller, so pupils, both cheeky or genuinely interested would try to trigger her into a long tale.
She had this scrap book style wall of headlines and history behind her desk.
I’ll always remember the splash on ‘the Chickhead Nugget’.
Also ‘Pol Pot: An Utterly Charming Monster’ – that story really stayed with me. One of history’s, or at least 20th century’s biggest villains, was apparently a smiley, genial, warm figure, at least in person.
Lastly, I think I fainted in primary, when the teacher told us about the way the Egyptians dissected the body before mummification. Getting a cold sweat thinking about it now. I quite liked grisly, horrible history, but that one turned my stomach
That we only have divorce because Henry VIII was a slut
Most of mine is from Y3 as we had a really cool teacher. We got to watch Clash of the Titans so got to see our first on-screen tits, we went to the British Museum which cemented an interest in the classical and ancient period and vividly remember us reenacting the various events of Jason and the Argonauts. We also learned a bit of Hindu mythology that I got a teachers award for doing a drawing of the protagonist of the story (something about a man rescuing his bride from monkey demons).
Diagram of a trans-Atlantic slave trade ship is another I can vividly remember and stuff from the civil war.
The diagram of a slave ship. All those hundreds of people lying down in chains virtually on top of each other.
That the ‘three lions’ are actually leopards.
That boy-king Edward VI wasn’t a frail little boy but a psychopath in the making.
The Crimean War. Our teacher recommended reading ‘The Reason Why’ by Cecil Woodham-Smith. I did and it stayed with me.