Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
Star witness: how the Royal Observatory transformed our understanding of astronomy and time
From the moment it was founded 350 years ago, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich drove our understanding of astronomy, navigation and time. Louise Devoy explores eight milestones in the history of this pioneering scientific institution
The big bang moment 1675: Charles II sparks a star-gazing revolution In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britain, Charles II took a major step to ensure his realm’s position at the head of the pack. On 4 March 1675, the king signed a royal warrant appointing John Flamsteed as the first “astronomical observator”, tasked with “perfecting the art of navigation”. Flamsteed’s specific objective was to devise a method by which sailors could establish their longitude (east–west position) at sea – which involved measuring the positions of celestial bodies – and of knowing the time at a ship’s local position. And Flamsteed would get to carry out this vital research from the surroundings of the country’s first state-funded, purpose-built scientific institution: the Royal Observatory. It was urgent work, because England’s great rival, France, had stolen a march: Louis XIV had established an observatory in Paris nearly a decade earlier. Flamsteed was, in effect, playing catch-up. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T809MT-CMYKWeb-Ready-7606aa3.jpg" width="2663" height="1775" alt="an illustration showing a large crowd looking at several artefacts including a globe, a map, and a satellite dish" title="King Louis XIV visits the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1671. The creation of an observatory in the French capital had left England playing catch-up (Image by Alamy)" /> The size of the task facing the astronomer clearly wasn’t lost on Charles II, for the king appointed none other than the celebrated architect Christopher Wren to design the observatory. Wren’s chosen site was the hilltop ruins of Greenwich Castle – and it was here that the foundation stone was laid on 10 August 1675. With its lofty windows, royal portraits and accurate pendulum clocks, the octagonal ‘star chamber’, completed in 1676, was grand in appearance. Unfortunately, it was also unsuitable for mapping the stars, as it was 13.5° askew from the meridian, an imaginary north-south line connecting the poles. So Wren designed another building nearby. This one would last for the remainder of Flamsteed’s tenure, before being demolished, rebuilt and extended as the Meridian Observatory. As for Flamsteed, he went on to conceive Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), by which he produced an average (‘mean’) 24-hour day that could be tracked using a mechanical clock year round. And that would have ramifications across the planet. Read more | A brief history of astronomy Dressed for success 1767: How a man in a padded suit transformed the art of navigation No one could accuse Nevil Maskelyne of not being dedicated to his job. In the dead of night across the mid-1760s, the fifth Astronomer Royal could be found staring up at the sky for hour upon hour, while straining his ears to hear the beats of a nearby clock. Dressed in an extravagant padded suit made from wool, silk and linen, Maskelyne was prepared for all that a British winter could throw at him. Not even perishing temperatures could stand in the way of the task in hand: to devise a ‘lunar distance method’ to calculate longitude at sea. This technique required mariners to measure the angular distance between the moon and a specific star, then compare it to Greenwich time. And they all used data gleaned from Maskelyne’s meticulous study of the movement of the stars. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/1767-L4962-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-30917ec.jpg" width="1709" height="1139" alt="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne wore this wool, silk and linen suit to ward off the perishing cold while studying the stars (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> This was, however, far from a one-man endeavour. Maskelyne was joined on his freezing vigils by his assistant, David Kinnebrook, and enlisted a network of mathematicians – dubbed ‘computers’ – to work remotely on calculating the predicted position of the moon over the year ahead. The Astronomer Royal even had a team of ‘comparers’ check the computers’ work (which paid off when two of them were found to be copying one another’s work). All this enabled Maskelyne to produce the Nautical Almanac, the first edition of which was made available on 6 January 1767. It quickly became an essential tool in navigation, reducing the time taken to make longitude calculations from hours to minutes. Updated annually, the Almanac became a required element of navigators’ training, and set the trend for mariners to calculate their position relative to Greenwich. High standards 1833: A curious metal sphere regulates clocks It can be seen from miles around – and with good reason. Sitting atop the Royal Observatory is a large red, metal ball that rises to the top of a mast at the same time every day, and drops a few minutes later. For those who haven’t set eyes on it before, it makes for a strange sight. But what is it there for? To answer that question, we need to rewind to 1764 when John Harrison, the celebrated English clockmaker, sent his fourth marine timekeeper, later known as ‘H4’, on a trial voyage to Barbados. The clock performed exceptionally well, losing a mere 39.2 seconds over 47 days at sea. To Harrison’s delight, it proved that such devices could provide mariners accurate reference times for calculating longitude. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/dreamstimexxl73355384-CMYKWeb-Ready-1ba1cb2.jpg" width="6567" height="4378" alt="A photograph of a large red brick building, with a domed roof on the right. There is a tower with a red ball on the top. Behind the building there is a purple and orange cloudy sunset" title="The time ball was installed on the turret of Flamsteed House at the Royal Observatory in 1833. It dropped at 1pm each day, enabling mariners to check their on-board chronometers (Image by Dreamstime)" /> Other clockmakers developed Harrison’s innovative ideas into a standard design that was cheaper and easier to reproduce. By the 1820s, the ‘marine chronometer’ was being used on both commercial and Royal Navy ships. But these chronometers only worked if they were telling the correct time when ships left port. That’s where the Greenwich ‘time ball’ came in. A time ball is a large spherical device that drops at a predetermined time of day, enabling mariners to set their clocks by it. The first modern example of this technology was erected in Portsmouth in 1829. Greenwich’s, however, would be the most famous. It was installed in 1833 on Flamsteed House, at the heart of the Observatory, providing maximum visibility from the Thames. Ever since, it has risen halfway up the mast at 12.55pm, climbed to the top at 12.58pm and then dropped at precisely 1pm GMT. Soon time balls were appearing at harbours and observatories around the globe, meaning that mariners could check their chronometers against accurate clocks, even during the longest of voyages. Timetable drama 1852: Greenwich rides to the railways' rescue Take a stroll down Corn Street in the heart of Bristol and you’ll come across a clock mounted to the wall of the city’s old corn exchange. There’s nothing unusual about that, you may think. But take a closer look and you’ll notice that this elegant 1820s timepiece has two hands for minutes: a red one for GMT and a black one for local Bristol time. The clock is a curious snapshot of a bygone age, and also a marker of a technological conundrum that the Royal Observatory played a central role in solving. The mid-19th century was very much the age of the railways – by the 1840s tracks were snaking across the country. This was all well and good. But when, in 1847, the railway companies decided to coordinate their timetables across Britain using GMT, they ran into a problem. Back then, Britain’s cities relied on local times set by sundials, varying by as much as 30 minutes between west and east. So how could the railway companies ensure that these times were perfectly aligned? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-170477153-CMYKWeb-Ready-b814769.jpg" width="2589" height="1726" alt="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" title="With its three hands, the clock on Bristol’s Corn Exchange offers a snapshot of an age when Britain’s cities relied on a variety of local times (Image by Getty Images)" /> Enter George Biddell Airy, the seventh Astronomer Royal. Airy reasoned that a new technology – that of sending impulses via telegraph wires to a series of synchronised dials – could provide a solution. And so he ordered a new timepiece – the Shepherd Motor Clock – to be installed at the Royal Observatory. From 1852, the clock began sending daily time signals to railway stations across London and Kent, along with hourly signals to the Electric Telegraph Company on London’s Strand for national distribution. Train travel would never be the same again and, by 1880, GMT had been embraced as Britain’s legal Civil Time. Read more | Art, culture and science in the Restoration period A moment in the sun 1874: Greenwich leads the race to record the transit of Venus For astronomers everywhere, 9 December 1874 was like Christmas come early. Star gazers counted down the days to this landmark date, while George Biddell Airy ordered expeditions to Egypt, New Zealand and the Indian Ocean to observe the amazing event unfolding overhead. That event was a transit of Venus, a rare astronomical phenomenon in which the planet appears to cross the Sun as a slow-moving black dot. This was the first time that the transit had occurred since 1769, and the first such event since the invention of photography in the 1820s. Little wonder astronomers were excited. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/T4323-001-CMYKWeb-Ready-44133fe.jpg" width="5686" height="3790" alt="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" title="An observation hut is set up in Greenwich ahead of the transit of Venus in 1874. This astronomical phenomenon enabled star-gazers to accurately calculate the Sun-Earth distance (Image by Royal Museum Greenwich)" /> And their excitement was justified. By timing the transit’s key moments as seen from different locations on Earth, star gazers can measure the Sun–Earth distance, known as the ‘astronomical unit’. This yardstick (just under 93 million miles) is still used by scientists today. Ahead of the 1874 transit, Airy ordered special telescopes known as photoheliographs to project the Sun’s disc onto glass plates. However, his teams struggled with the kit, and the photoheliographs failed to capture the transit with any great accuracy. Despite those issues, the transit of Venus inspired a renewed interest in sun studies. Greenwich assistant EW Maunder started to compile a daily record of sunspot observations. In 1904, Maunder and his wife, Annie, assembled 30 years of sunspot data into the ‘butterfly diagram’ that still underpins our understanding of the Sun’s 11-year magnetic cycle. A degree of certainty 1884: The world aligns itself to Greenwich John Flamsteed had been dead for more than a century. Yet, on 13 October 1884, his great brainchild, Greenwich Mean Time, truly went global. On that day, delegates at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC voted in favour of making Greenwich the world’s prime meridian, or 0° longitude. The decision was influenced by a combination of technological supremacy and pragmatism. Greenwich was one of only four observatories with a suitably accurate telescope – the Airy Transit Circle Telescope – to define a meridian. And more than 70 per cent of shipping companies by tonnage already relied on the Greenwich meridian. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2YXWWWX-CMYKWeb-Ready-602ff19.jpg" width="3242" height="2161" alt="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" title="Delegates at the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed to use the Greenwich meridian as 0° longitude (Image by Alamy)" /> The delegates also agreed that the Universal Day – a 24-hour period to be used as a common reference to record events around the world – should begin at midnight GMT on the Greenwich meridian. This would hardly have come as a surprise: a year earlier, railroads in the US had already agreed to use standard time zones based on hourly meridians from Greenwich. The delegates assembled in the American capital that October day voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Universal Day, and countries started to define their own standard time zones as hourly intervals before or after Greenwich. The result was the familiar time-zone system we use today. Seeing double 1893: The Royal Observatory makes its biggest statement yet Was Greenwich under threat? The International Meridian Conference of 1884 might have confirmed the Royal Observatory’s primacy in the world of astronomy. But, within a year, the eighth Astronomer Royal, William Christie, was voicing his concerns that the principal telescope at Greenwich was being overtaken by newer, better instruments at rival observatories across Europe and North America. Determined to keep Greenwich out in front of the chasing pack, Christie persuaded the Admiralty to fund a new instrument, and that 28-inch diameter lens telescope – still the largest of its type in Britain – came into use in 1893. Most other telescopes at Greenwich were designed to be fixed into position to ensure the accurate measurement of the stars for timekeeping and navigation. The Great Equatorial Telescope – named after its mount, which kept the instrument moving parallel to the Earth’s equator – was part of a new generation designed for astrophotography. With a clockwork drive that kept the instrument moving in sync with the stars from east to west, it could be used to take photos with very long exposures stretching to several hours, capturing impressive views of faint gas clouds (nebulae). However, astronomers struggled to configure the heavy glass lens for photography, and so the telescope was reassigned to the study of double stars. By measuring the changing angle between an orbiting pair of stars, the astronomers could now calculate the mass of these distant suns. All that came to an end in 1971 when the Great Equatorial Telescope was finally retired. However, you can still see this extraordinary instrument – housed in its distinctive onion-shaped dome – at Greenwich today. Read more | A brief history of daylight saving time Pip pip hooray 1924: GMT is piped into homes across Britain If we want to know the time in 2025, all we have to do is check the phone in our pocket, or glance at the digital watch on our wrists. Across most of the 20th century, of course, that wasn’t an option. If Britons sought an accurate time-check that they could, quite literally, set their clocks and watches by, then they had to turn on their radios and listen out for the familiar strains of the ‘six pips’. The six pips first entered the public consciousness on 5 February 1924, when the ninth Astronomer Royal, Frank Dyson (below), announced a collaboration with the BBC. The Royal Observatory would start sending electrical impulses down a telephone wire to the newly created broadcaster. These would then be converted into a series of six audio alerts – or ‘pips’ – that would go out on the radio on the hour, every hour. But while some technologies were underscoring Greenwich’s enduring relevance, others were undermining it. In the 1930s, scientists developed clocks based on the natural vibration of quartz crystals; then, a decade later, the first atomic timekeepers began to appear. Both offered reliability and accuracy that the system of measuring time by the stars couldn’t match. This wasn’t the only threat to the Royal Observatory’s pre-eminence in the 20th century. As the march of industry impacted visibility across London’s skies, so Greenwich’s suitability for the practice of astrophysics declined. Soon it became clear that the Observatory would have to move. And it did so twice – first to East Sussex in 1957; then to Cambridge in 1990. Eight years later, it shut altogether. Time had finally caught up with the great old scientific institution. But its huge contribution to the fields of astronomy, timekeeping and navigation cannot be doubted – as the many thousands of people who visit the Royal Observatory museum that now occupies the famous Greenwich complex will no doubt testify. John Flamsteed would surely be proud. Dr Louise Devoy is senior curator at the Royal Observatory and author of Royal Observatory Greenwich: A History in Objects (October, 2025) This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
“If the culture wars ended, historians would be delighted”: the state of history in 2025
The new president of the Royal Historical Society, Lucy Noakes, talks to Matt Elton about the issues facing history in Britain in 2025 – and why they will matter to the country in the years ahead.
Matt Elton: You became president of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) in November 2024 – at what, I think it’s fair to say, is an interesting moment for Britain’s relationship with its past. Before looking at some of the challenges you face, can you tell us a bit about what the RHS does? Lucy Noakes: We exist to support historians and to promote history as a subject and as a wider topic of interest among the public. We run public events throughout the year – lectures, talks and discussions – that can be joined in person and via our website. And we have a range of different grants and awards that we hand out to history practitioners at all stages of their careers. But increasingly central to our work is advocating for historians and history. That’s something that the founders of the RHS in the mid-19th century could surely not have imagined. To do this, we work with a range of other bodies – for example, the Historical Association, which represents teachers and the teaching of history in schools and sixth-form colleges. When I spoke to your predecessor, Emma Griffin, in 2023, she identified university history funding and access to higher education in Britain as key areas of work for the RHS. Is that still the case, and how big is the problem in 2025? I’m sorry to say it has only got worse. Since I became president, we have started working with two departments facing significant cuts to their programmes and, potentially, to staffing. We’ve also been in touch, informally, with two other departments that have asked for our support in the face of threats of cutting down degree programmes. Last year, the RHS published The Value of History, a report on the state of history in British universities. It’s based on feedback from our members and fellows, rather than a quantitative survey of history in those institutions. But what it reveals is that, of the 66 departments from which people respond- ed to the survey, 39 had seen cuts in what they’d been able to offer since 2020. Read more | Is history under threat at the UK's universities? An interview with former RHS President Emma Griffin Some of that has been the result of redundancies and well-publicised cuts to programmes, but other impacts are more hidden: staff retiring or leaving and not being replaced, for instance, or departments being merged into larger ones. Overall, the situation seems to be worse in institutions that became universities after 1992 [when former polytechnics were first able to gain university status], many of which have smaller numbers of staff and students, and sometimes – though not always – have shorter traditions of teaching history. But it’s also increasingly impacting more established universities, including those in the Russell Group [a self-selected group of 24 institutions], where in some cases entire history programmes are now at risk. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-1233105349-cmyk-120a164.jpg" width="1581" height="1053" alt="Protesters in Oxford call for the removal of a statue of colonial statesman Ceil Rhodes in 2021. The 'culture wars' have stymied critical thinking in history, says Lucy Noakes. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Protesters in Oxford call for the removal of a statue of colonial statesman Ceil Rhodes in 2021. The 'culture wars' have stymied critical thinking in history, says Lucy Noakes. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Tellingly, the British Academy, which represents humanities and social sciences, published a study last year that identified ‘cold spots’ in the provision of Shape [Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts for People and the Economy] subjects – places where students would have to travel at least 60km to access their chosen subject at a higher education institution. As more and more students now live at home because of the costs of going to university, it’s becoming harder for some to access programmes in humanities, history and languages than it would have been a decade or so ago. It’s important to stress that history remains very popular among students. In 2024, more than 47,000 people took history A-level in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and more than 10,000 took history Highers in Scotland. In 2023 – the most recent year for which we have statistics – about 40,000 students were taking under- graduate and masters’ programmes with ‘history’ in the course titles. What are some of the reasons given by universities for these cuts? It depends on which university you ask. Some of the larger Russell Group institutions – Cardiff, Durham and Newcastle, for instance – cite changes to legislation preventing overseas students from bringing family with them to the UK. [The Labour government announced in August 2024 that it did not plan to lift these restrictions, which were imposed by the previous Conservative administration earlier that year.] Other, smaller institutions are finding that the numbers of undergraduates from the UK are falling because some of the larger, Russell Group institutions are making it easier for students to access their courses. School pupils are sometimes told – wrongly, in my view – that there’s little point spending their money on going to a non-Russell Group university, which leaves courses at smaller institutions struggling. And, of course, all of this is underpinned by the changes to the funding model introduced in 2010 by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government. Among the changes, university fees shot up almost overnight from around £3,000 to £6,000 and, in some cases, up to £9,000. That’s a huge burden for most students to carry – and yet, because universities’ income has not kept pace with inflation, universities have a smaller and smaller funding pot to draw on. What can be done to address the issue? I honestly think that the current model for British universities is broken. I think there needs to be a willingness among politicians and policymakers to work with university representatives on a profound rethink of how we fund and organise higher education. It might not be popular with some universities, but one thing that could be done is reintroduce the cap on student numbers for specific degree programmes at individual institutions – a restriction that was withdrawn in 2015. But it’s a complex situation, and a lot of work needs to be done. Have there been any changes since the Labour government came to power last summer? Not as many as we would have hoped – and absolutely no movement on the kind of structural changes that, in my opinion, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that British universities need. There’s no way that universities are going to be able to continue acting as ‘soft power’ cultural ambassadors for Britain if they’re starved of funds in the way that they have been and continue to be. Having said that, there have been two changes that are, in my view, welcome. First, the door of government now feels less closed to universities and to humanities subjects, which I hope will give us more opportunity to work with policymakers. Second, the announcement that the ‘era of culture wars’ of the past few years is over [promised by new culture secretary Lisa Nandy after Labour’s election win in July 2024] was very welcome for historians. As any history student knows, the way we think about the past is not fixed. It’s always evolving, always changing, and I think that process was adversely affected by the ‘culture wars’. It had become increasingly difficult to carry out any kind of critical thinking about history, which is a large part of what we do. I work on the experience of the two world wars, and sometimes run an undergraduate module at the University of Essex, exploring the memory of the Second World War. The students really enjoy this approach, and it leads on to thinking about how those memories were mobilised during the Covid-19 pandemic and in debates during the run-up to the 2016 Brexit vote. However, I think that such topics had become unhelpfully politicised – and that placed historians in a no-win situation. Read more | Coronavirus: what might we learn from pandemics in the past? What would you like politicians to understand about history? I’d really like them to understand that history is a process, not something that stands still – and that critiquing existing ideas is at the very heart of historical practice. History is a living profession. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/502533cmyk-deb905e.jpg" width="1579" height="1052" alt="Jarvis Cocker joins Simon Schama at the BFI archives for the BBC's 'Story of Us' TV series. Lucy Noakes laments the demise of history documentaries as "appointment television" in the streaming age. (Photo by BBC)" title="Jarvis Cocker joins Simon Schama at the BFI archives for the BBC's 'Story of Us' TV series. Lucy Noakes laments the demise of history documentaries as "appointment television" in the streaming age. (Photo by BBC)" /> Politicians have often promoted the importance of STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] subjects in recent years. What are the arguments for studying history? Our Value of History report looked at a range of data for outcomes for students on different programmes. What we found was that graduates from history programmes performed really well both in terms of their earnings and in going into what’s called ‘graduate employment’ when compared with a range of other disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and non-vocational STEM subjects. A few years ago, here at the University of Essex, we had a great student in his 60s on our history MA programme. He had recently stepped back from the computing company that he’d founded several decades ago, and which had made him a lot of money. He came and talked to our students to explain to them that, though he had employed computer engineers to do the technical work, most of his staff were former humanities students. That was because, he argued, such students – and particularly history students – come out of their degrees with the ability to read and synthesise a large mass of material, pull out and interrogate arguments, communicate clearly and work to tight deadlines. History gives them what are often called ‘core transferable skills’, which are very attractive to employers. In a world of fake news and AI-generated content, do you think those skills are more vital now than ever? I think they are. One of the core skills we teach our students is critical thinking – that to make an argument, you need to be able to support it with evidence. I would really hope that any history student seeing a story posted on social media as fact, but which is actually opinion and which doesn’t link to verifiable facts, would be able to see that for what it is rather than just taking it as read. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? Taking a wider view, what’s your take on the current state of public history in the UK more generally? I’m struck by the continued huge public appetite for history. People love listening to podcasts and watching television programmes such as The Mirror and the Light, based on the last of Hilary Mantel’s fantastic novels about Thomas Cromwell. Read more | Thomas Cromwell on screen: is Wolf Hall the best depiction of the Tudor statesman? There’s the popularity of memoirs such as Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad [2023], which interweaves the story of his own family with the history of Europe in the mid-20th century. And I really enjoyed the recent BBC TV series Simon Schama’s Story of Us – but I was struck by the fact that 20 or 30 years ago, in the pre-streaming age, it would have been appointment television. It was a fantastic set of history documentaries, and I would urge anybody with an interest in contemporary and recent modern British history to watch it. But there were only three parts, and I think that maybe 20 years ago this would have been commissioned as a big tentpole series that would have been watched by many more people. It’s difficult in an age of streaming, but I would like to see more investment in history on television. I would also like to see a wider understanding of the fact that, without historians and historical research, there just wouldn’t be any of this public history that we celebrate so much. This research is often published initially in academic monographs or journals that aren’t necessarily going to be read by the wider public. It is only when they are read by figures who communicate well with the wider public that they reach a wider audience. Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that here’s also a huge appetite among members of the public for researching history themselves. You can see that in the popularity of genealogical services and tools to help people research their own family histories and position themselves in the past. I became particularly aware of this during First World War centenary events between 2014 and 2018, when thousands and thousands of community groups, history groups and heritage groups across Britain, often receiving funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, produced fantastic and really valuable work. Read more | Opinion: “The First World War centenary has been a lost opportunity” Do universities have a role in this? Engagement with public history is really popular among undergraduate students. Often, but not exclusively, it’s post-1992 universities and newer universities that have been proactive in organising opportunities for students to work outside the classroom at historical and heritage organisations, helping to produce resources for public history. Many people may not be aware of this work that universities often do with local communities and organisations to explore public history, which has real benefits for those communities. People involved learn transferable skills. They learn how to access and explore an archive. They gain confidence. They learn how to write up research. They might learn how to create a website or to put together a podcast. And this kind of public history engagement work is also threatened by cuts to history in universities. What would you like the RHS to achieve in the next two years? My wishlist would be topped by history thriving in the UK. That’s got to start with investment in British universities, a rethink- ing of the funding structure, and a recognition of the value of history and the humanities. If we grasp that history is really popular with the public as well as with prospective students, we can start to reinvigorate history more widely across our national culture. Lucy Noakes is president of the Royal Historical Society, and Rab Butler professor of modern history at the University of Essex. This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Week three quiz: education and school in Victorian Britain
Test your knowledge on what school and education was like in Victorian Britain with our quiz...
Watch our video lecture with Ruth Goodman on what education and school was like in Victorian Britain – and test your knowledge below with our quiz! View Riddle on the source website
Schools of hard knocks: Georgian and Victorian public schools
Public schools in the 18th and 19th centuries exposed pupils to rampant violence and a 'curriculum' that left them sorely unprepared for the demands of modern life, says David Turner
William Conybeare, the kindly headmaster who welcomed boys through the gates of the newly opened Liverpool Collegiate Institution in 1843, lived with a very physical reminder of the fact that Britain’s public schools needed reform. He monitored the establishment of the day-school, which provided a relatively humane education marked by a minimum of corporal punishment, through only one eye. The other had been lost in a dispute with fellow pupils at Westminster School, a place where, he remembered with some bitterness, Sundays had been marked by a total absence of productive activity. As a result, “we had nothing to do, and employed the idle time in reading novels or in quarrelling”. Sometimes, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this low-level organised violence turned into something more organised and ambitious. In 1797, for instance, the boys of Rugby School took staff prisoner at sword-point. The Riot Act was read by the local authorities and a force of soldiers, special constables and farmers armed with horsewhips mustered. Winchester’s Great Rebellion of 1818, meanwhile, ended soon after the warden, the overall head of the school, was held hostage in his rooms overnight by boys armed with axes. Read more | The school leaving age: what can we learn from history? Even when the schools didn’t erupt into outright violence, the education left much to be desired. It had declined since the early centuries of the public schools – starting with the foundation of Winchester College in 1382 – when it had generally been of a very high quality. Part of the problem was that there were so few teachers to educate the pupils. Teachers cost money – and, as headmasters could pocket much of the surplus revenue from running schools, they were anxious to keep costs down. A pupil at Eton College in the early 19th century later recalled that he was only called up to have his work assessed twice a term. This is not surprising, since the headmaster, John Keate, taught up to 190 boys at a time. This personal incentive for cost-cutting also explained why living conditions were so bad. At Harrow, for instance, Joseph Drury perfected the process of squeezing as much out of the school as possible. His method was to take as many pupils as he could into the school – since he personally received a fee for each one – stuff the maximum possible number into his own house as boarders, and spend as little as he could on what had become slum accommodation. During his 20-year tenure as headmaster he earned the modern equivalent of approximately £8.5m. To make matters worse, the schools taught little aside from ‘the classics’, making the curriculum extremely narrow. “At St Paul’s School we teach nothing but the classics, nothing but Latin and Greek,” John Sleath, high master of St Paul’s School from 1814 to 1837, told parents. “If you want your boy to learn anything else you must have him taught at home, and for that purpose we give him three half-holidays a week.” Read more | The history of school uniforms Violent character This could not go on for much longer. Fathers who had been to public school were deciding to shun the same institutions when it came to their own sons’ education. Speaking of his old school, 18th-century prime minister William Pitt the Elder declared that he had “hardly known a boy whose spirit had not been broken at Eton; and that while a public school might be an excellent thing for a youth of hot and violent character, it was not the place for a tender or docile disposition”. He responded to his own education by having Pitt the Younger, who would one day follow his father as prime minister, educated at home. Members of the elite also worried that the education their children were receiving was irrelevant. Baden Powell, an Oxford professor (and father of Scouting pioneer Robert Baden-Powell), said in 1832: “Scientific knowledge is rapidly spreading among all classes except the higher, and the consequence must be, that that class will not long remain the higher.” So the public schools decided to modernise. One of the most important reformers was Thomas Arnold, whose awakening to the faults of the public school system came early: he was attacked on his first night as he knelt to pray at his bed at Winchester College by other boys who took a dim view of such religious display. After becoming headmaster of Rugby School in 1828 he decided to revamp the troubled prefect system, strengthening prefects’ power but keeping a close eye on them: four were invited to dine with him and his family every week. Another important change was the introduction of organised sport. When George Cotton became headmaster of Marlborough College in 1852 following a full-scale rebellion (involving fireworks) that disgraced his predecessor, he decided to encourage the unofficial sporting activities that already existed, to help boys let off steam. Cotton and other heads also improved the syllabus. Boys were still able to concentrate on Greek and Latin, if they opted for the ‘classical side’ of the school. However, many schools introduced a parallel ‘modern side’. At Cheltenham College, this ‘side’ retained the usual Latin and maths but added French, German, history, geography, drawing, experimental science and Hindustani – the last of which was particularly useful for future civil servants in India. Their darkest hour had passed, but it would still take more than a century for everyday public school life to reach anything like what we would now regard as satisfactory. Decades later, in the 1920s, the maths master ‘teaching’ the author Roald Dahl was still able to adopt a very unorthodox approach at Repton School. “He was meant to teach us mathematics, but in truth he taught us nothing at all and that was the way he meant it to be,” Dahl wrote. As late as 1961, Winchester College’s most senior doctor wrote that “records of weight and heights carefully kept over the past seven years” showed how “the new approach to feeding has undoubtedly benefited the present generation of boys, who are better fed and bigger than their predecessors”. They had, in other words, been under-nourished until that point: a strange state of affairs for sons of the upper classes attending one of the country’s most elite public schools. The process of improvement sped up in the second half of the 20th century due to the goad of competition from the rapidly expanding state education system. But progress has brought its own pressures. In 2014, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission published figures showing the proportion of the elite who had attended public school. It included 7 in 10 senior judges, and more than half of the permanent secretaries, senior diplomats and leading media figures. The success of public schools in vaulting students into positions of power has led to increasing criticism, the tone of which has often changed from ‘they’re no good’ to ‘they’re not fair’. Dealing with the criticism will require significant change, but the experience of the past few centuries shows that public schools have gradually become rather good at adapting themselves to meet the requirements necessary for survival in each new age. David Turner is the former education correspondent for the Financial Times This article was first published in the June 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools
Many Victorian gaols provided schooling for their inmates, decades before it was mandated in wider society. So what, asks Rosalind Crone, drove this great educational crusade?
On 26 February 1848, 19-year-old Thomas Sumpter appeared in the dock at Berkshire Assizes, accused – and quickly convicted – of stealing a sheep. Nothing unusual in that, given the times: livestock theft was hardly uncommon in the first half of the 19th century. What was more curious was the apparent motive behind Sumpter’s offence. Having been recently released from Reading Gaol, he committed the crime with the express intent of ensuring his prompt return to the prison where he had been memorising sections of the Bible. He’d been receiving lessons in reading, and he didn’t want to stop. Sumpter was one of three convicts who had been given early release from Reading Gaol in autumn 1845, following an unprecedented decision by the local authorities. Having been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment, each had served six to eight months – and in that time had become poster boys for the success of a new regime at the prison. To aid rehabilitation, education was prioritised over labour: prisoners spent large amounts of time learning to read and write, as well as memorising passages from the Bible. Having each committed to memory the whole of the New Testament up to Ephesians, at the time of their release the three men were lauded as star pupils whose characters had been transformed. That ‘transformation’, though, proved short-lived. All three soon re-offended, including Sumpter. Word spread about both the system and the unfortunate relapses, and the prison became known as the Read-Read-Reading Gaol. This account is somewhat at odds with our idea of the Victorian prison as a place of ‘hard labour, hard board and hard fare’. Yet in the 1840s, when there was no universal elementary education and many working-class children were denied the opportunity to attend school, many prisons in England and Wales had schools in which inmates learned reading, writing and sometimes more besides. And despite the scandals sparked by those three ‘transformed’ inmates, prison schools were here to stay. Smelly vessels The first recognisable prison schools appeared in the unlikeliest of places: on board prison hulks. These decommissioned naval ships were used to hold men (and sometimes boys) who had been convicted of serious offences but whose transportation to the penal colonies had been delayed or prevented. Moored in rivers and harbours, these damp and often smelly vessels were routinely described as “schools of vice”. Drinking, gambling and fighting were rife. It is extraordinary, then, that on 1 January 1812, Thomas Price, chaplain for the Zealand hulk at Sheerness, reported that a school had been established in the ship and, as a result, that “some of the ignorant are beginning to read”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/GettyImages-90775486web-e23d815.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An etching of a prison hulk, resting on a mud or sand bank during low tide." title="The 19th-century penal system had various categories, including harshly regimented first-stage prisons such as Pentonville (visitors’ order book, shown right), slightly more relaxed second-stage prisons and, for serious offenders, the dreaded prison hulks. (Etching by Edward William Cooke via Getty Images)" /> Soon after, schools began to appear in land-based prisons, too. In 1814–15, the keeper of Warwick County Gaol set up a monitorial school for juvenile prisoners. From 1816, convicts at Millbank Penitentiary would gather in groups of 16 in the corridors between their cells, where they were taught reading, writing and arithmetic by the most educated among their number. By 1821, there were schools teaching basic literacy in at least 24 prisons and hulks in England and Wales, with more in Scotland and Ireland. Their appearance was a consequence of perceived rising crime rates and the increasing use of prisons as places of punishment, not just secure custody, where convicted criminals would serve sentences of incarceration. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/BAL386205web-97217e5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving, showing a churchman lecturing to a group of inmates inside a ship." title="A churchman lectures inmates on a prison hulk at Woolwich in a 19th-century engraving. During the day, desks and blackboards were brought into the chapel to turn it into a school. (Image from The Stapleton Collection via Bridgeman Images)" /> This was accompanied by a greater emphasis on reformation, or what we would now call rehabilitation: the idea that prisoners should be returned to society as law-abiding, productive subjects. Instruction in reading and writing, reformers hoped, would civilise and discipline a prisoner, support his or her evangelisation and, in some cases, help to secure employment. Listen | British prisons: everything you wanted to know A religious core These developments reflected those of the wider movement for mass education. In early 19th-century England and Wales, there was no national system of elementary schooling, and attempts to legislate for one routinely failed. Though MPs agreed that any state-funded education should have a moral (ie religious) core, they could not agree on who – effectively, which church – should provide it. That failure, combined with the strength of penal reformers’ commitment to rehabilitation and the growing number of prison schools, led to a remarkable event. In summer 1823, MPs passed new legislation: a Gaols Act, which aimed to improve conditions and impose some uniformity on regimes in local prisons for inmates on remand and serving short sentences. Among other directives, it decreed that “provision shall be made in all prisons for the instruction of prisoners of both sexes in reading and writing”. The legislation heralded the birth of state-funded education in England and Wales, pre-dating the establishment of universal elementary education for children by almost 50 years. From 1823, the number of prison schools continued to increase. By the late 1840s, every convict prison and hulk, as well as the majority of local prisons, had some sort of education scheme for prisoners. In the late 1860s, the proportion of local prisons with schools reached 90 per cent. Most early prison schools were ad hoc initiatives. Prisoners were supplied with books, and sometimes pens and paper, then told to get on with it themselves. The authorities often relied on prisoners, philanthropic visitors or family members to teach for free or a small fee. In 1836, the chaplain at Devon County Gaol explained that he selected schoolmasters from among those convicted of smuggling because they “conduct themselves better than other classes of prisoners”. At Ely Gaol, the governor’s 11-year-old daughter taught the female prisoners. Efforts were made to fill learning spaces with suitable fixtures. On the Defence prison hulk, slanting black desks with inkstand holes were arranged in the body of the chapel each morning. Blackboards were common, and lessons were often supported by textbooks published by school societies. At London’s Holloway Prison, journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew watched a class of female prisoners cluster “around a map of England... [they] appeared to take great interest in their geography lesson”. Read more | Timeline: a history of prisons in Britain Soon, however, new systems of prison discipline ushered in more formal approaches. Prisoners’ lives were increasingly managed via timetables dictating hours for sleep, meals, labour and lessons. After the 1839 Prison Act, the adoption of the so-called ‘silent’ and ‘separate’ systems – which prohibited contact between prisoners – put an end to peer learning. Many classrooms became silent, and in some separate prisons, such as Pentonville and Lewes County Gaol, partitions were placed between pupils. These were soon covered in graffiti as the increasingly literate prisoners found new ways to communicate with each other. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/WandsworthwebHoCadultschoolchapelcmyk-9dd5651.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving showing a man standing before a theatre-style seating, filled with men with partitions between them." title="In the ‘separate’ system, prisoners were isolated from each other, even during lessons – as shown here at the Surrey House of Correction (known today as Wandsworth Prison) in the late 1850s. (Engraving from Heritage Image Partnership Ltd via Alamy)" /> When visiting the school at Coldbath Fields, London, Henry Mayhew found that “all was silent as in a dumb asylum, the only sound being the rustling of copy books”. One pupil, “a lad with ruddy skin... [and] a defect in his speech”, was instructed to read aloud from his book. “‘Whatsoever is wight that shall ye weceive’, [he said]. “‘Do try to pronounce your ‘r’s’ better,’ said the master, kindly; and thereupon there was a shuffling of feet from the other pupils, as if the only method of laughing under the silent system was with the shoes.” At the same time, volunteers were replaced with paid teachers under the direct control of the prison chaplain and governor. In convict prisons and large local prisons, qualified schoolmasters and schoolmistresses were recruited, but in smaller institutions the roles of teacher and warder were combined to save money, often retrospectively. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/11/AE5J55web-94e28c7.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white engraving showing three rows of girls with dresses and white caps, sitting and working at desks, looked over by some women." title="The school for girls imprisoned at Tothill Fields in the late 1850s. A dedicated schoolmistress was employed to teach that institution’s large female population; in other prisons, the matron took lessons. (Engraving from Chronicle, via Alamy)" /> In 1858, Samuel Parker, former schoolmaster at Newgate Gaol, won an action against his employers for unreasonable dismissal after he complained about the new duties imposed on him. “A schoolmaster would be degraded in the eyes of his pupils,” the judge explained, “if, in addition... he officiated as turnkey and was compelled to clean out [water] closets.” Embracing opportunities Qualified teachers and, from 1835, prison inspections encouraged the expansion of the curriculum, with rote learning exposed as a futile exercise. “I have learned all the Galatians through by heart, and am now upon the Ephesians,” Prisoner 4429, a seven-time veteran of Reading Gaol, told the inspector, “[but] I cannot say I understand it.” While instruction in writing and arithmetic became increasingly common, in some prisons lessons in history and geography were offered to vary and deepen learning. “The school is our strength,” declared the chaplain at Shepton Mallet Gaol. “When prisoners begin to read, they begin to think.” Many prisoners embraced the opportunity to learn. Attending school excused them from labour, while mastering the skill of reading provided relief from boredom, and writing offered the chance to communicate with others outside (and sometimes inside) the prison. But progress was dependent on time, and the majority of prisoners spent no more than three months behind bars. Often the learning acquired in prisons was lost amid the hard reality of the outside world. During the 1850s and 1860s the penal aspects of incarceration intensified, fuelled by growing disillusionment with efforts to rehabilitate prisoners, the replacement of transportation by imprisonment, and the perception that prisons were too comfortable. Prison schools persisted, but provision was reshaped by a new emphasis on punishment and deterrence, and curricula were streamlined to focus only on basic competence in reading, writing and arithmetic. “High teaching is wholly eschewed,” explained the chaplain at Millbank, “not only because there would not be time for it, but as inconsistent with the proprieties of a prison, and not at all necessary with reference to the well-doing of the prisoners [on release].” Stages of learning From 1853, convicts at Pentonville and Millbank serving long sentences spent their first nine months in separate confinement. Keen to increase the pain of isolation, in 1863–64 prison administrators introduced a system of cellular instruction. In each ward, one hour each week was set aside for education, during which prisoners would study alone in their cells. Those who were eligible would receive 10 to 15 minutes’ instruction from the schoolmaster or mistress. At second-stage convict prisons, where some association was permitted, classes continued but lessons were limited to just one evening each week. “The mere attempt to read cannot interest a man fatigued by labour and bowed down with shame,” complained the chaplain at Portsmouth. According to a former prisoner at Dartmoor, “by the time a dozen words of one syllable have been spelt, and often before a single line in the copybook has been filled, the bell rings... and the prisoners return to their cells about as wise as they left them”. The nationalisation of local prisons in 1877 provided an opportunity to review education for short-sentence prisoners. Although the work of the commissioners ensured that a school existed in every prison, provision was reduced to the bare minimum: 15 minutes of individual tuition in cells twice a week for prisoners aged under 40 with sentences exceeding four months. “It is an inherent difficulty,” wrote a senior civil servant. “A place of short-term imprisonment cannot be made a place of education.” Read more | Charles Dickens: prison reformer, scourge of capitalists, champion of the poor The advent of universal (1870) and compulsory (1880) elementary education for children in England and Wales gave prison administrators hope that prison schools could be abolished within a generation. But the reasons for illiteracy and innumeracy within the prison population were, and still are, varied and complex. At the same time, the idea of education as a panacea – a cure-all for society’s problems and an antidote to criminality – remains seductive. Educational and penal policy combined in the 19th century to embed education deep within the penal regime and, as a result, prison schools continued through the 20th century and into the 21st. However, the difficulties of accommodating education within an environment in which punishment and deterrence routinely take priority persist. As a result, 200 years after they first appeared, there are still serious limits on what prison schools can achieve. This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Class warfare: a day in the life of a Victorian schoolchild
Victorian schools could be ideological battlegrounds, where harassed teachers did their best against a backdrop of grinding poverty. Ellie Cawthorne and Susannah Wright study an era's education
The 4th of May 1899 was not a good day for the head-teacher of St Mark’s School in Leicester. Less than two weeks into her job, she recorded in her school logbook an incident that had begun with the caning of a boy for lying and disobedience. Revolting against his punishment, the boy had started “flinging himself about”, before kicking her and even threatening her with “a clasp knife open in his hand”. To make matters worse, the child’s mother had arrived at the school to castigate the head-teacher in “abusive and threatening language” before demanding that magistrates investigate the school’s conduct. While incidents like this led to lengthy logbook entries, most school days in Victorian Britain were not so dramatic. But daily life in the elementary school classroom was often a battleground between idealistic educationalists, governmental interlopers, struggling parents and hard-pressed teachers. Not to mention the children. Over the course of the 19th century, a patchwork of school systems operated across the country, and the experience of learning in one classroom could be very different from the next. Those who could afford the small fee might attend local parish or church schools. Another alternative, for those willing to embrace a more informal approach to education, were privately run ‘dame schools’ that operated out of local teachers’ homes. From 1833 onwards, child labourers were supposed to receive schooling from their employers under the Factory Act, while those found homeless or begging might be sent to tough industrial schools to learn a trade. Another option for those unable to fund their own education was schools established by charitable organisations. Most notable were the so-called ‘ragged schools’, formed in 1844 to offer free education to Britain’s poorest children. By the 1870s, there were around 350 such institutions across the country, which (in the words of Charles Dickens) “stretch[ed] out a hand” to those children “too ragged, wretched, filthy and forlorn to enter any other place”. For many of these children, just making it to school each morning was an achievement in itself. “I generally find the same parents frequently keep their children away from school on the most trivial and frivolous excuses,” stated the headmaster of Willow Street School, Leicester, in 1883. However, for many poor families, truancy was far from ‘frivolous’ – it was an economic necessity. A child attending school often meant the household losing an income. Records show that girls were more likely to miss school than their brothers – in families that couldn’t cope, they would be the first to be hauled back home to help out. Truancy levels also rocketed when seasonal work was available. Birmingham’s Floodgate Street School recorded a rise in absences over the Christmas period, when several students were found hawking “Xmas novelties” on the streets rather than in the classroom. Not having winter boots to walk to school in was another often-cited reason for absence. By 1880, however, the Elementary Education Act had made school attendance compulsory, meaning that specially appointed officers could slap parents with fines and even threaten them with prosecution. As such, attendance and punctuality became central components of ‘good behaviour’ – in 1892, the pupils of Floodgate Street who weren’t out peddling festive wares were rewarded for their good attendance with a trip to see the whale skeleton at Curzon Hall. Those who did make it to the school gates each morning were not necessarily ready to learn. Many children were on the ‘half-time system’, which allowed them to fit schooling in alongside work. This relentless schedule undoubtedly took its toll on young learners – teachers frequently recorded concerns about children arriving already exhausted after a long shift at work. Humanist FJ Gould (the self-described “most restless teacher in London”) recalled the boys at his school in Limehouse turning up “poor, ill-nourished and frequently shoeless”. National pride Bells marking the beginning of the school day rang at different times across Britain. With evening and weekend sessions employed to fit in alongside working hours, there was no universal starting time. At Hampton Industrial School in Middlesex in 1862, students arrived from 9am, ready for lessons in scripture to begin at 9.15am sharp. At the National Society’s Central Boys’ School in London, the school day started when the “doors shut at nine o’clock”. According to an 1845 timetable, each morning there began with “prayers and singing”, swiftly followed by “catechism with analysis and scripture proofs”. Religion was a key element of every school day. Expectations of biblical knowledge were high – unattainably so, critics thought. FJ Gould bemoaned having to interrogate “half-starved” children on complex theological questions, while Dickens criticised ragged schools for “presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception”. Religious wellbeing was not the only moral instruction children were expected to take away from their lessons. As fears spread that urbanisation and industrialisation were breaking down the social bonds of Britain's communities, schools were seen as a way to re-civilise the next generation, teaching them lessons of cleanliness and discipline that they could carry back to their homes. 'Readers' intended to aid literacy contained patriotic and imperialistic messages. One of the books found most frequently in elementary classrooms was HO Arnold-Forster's The Citizen Reader. First published in 1885, it extolled to children "the duties owed by British citizens to their country, their countrymen and themselves", warning that those "who really love their country, and are truly proud of its great history, will be particularly careful not to do anything by which it may be dishonoured". The classrooms in which these lessons took place varied as much as the schools themselves. In the early 19th-century, many schools were run on a monitorial system – in which all children were massed in one large hall, to be taught in small groups by older pupils. By the middle of the century, classrooms as we might recognise them had begun to emerge. Classes of up to 40 pupils were not uncommon, and sizes could stretch to 80 during staff shortages. As there were no set ages for entering and leaving the education system, classes would be organised according to ability, rather than age, in a system known as ‘standards’. If possible, girls and boys would be separated (gendered entrances were a common architectural feature in purpose-built schools), but resources often simply didn’t extend far enough. When it came to health and safety, many classrooms would not have won over Ofsted. Inspectors commented on overcrowding, poor heating and a lack of ventilation. In 1843, Charles Dickens visited Field Lane Ragged School in Clerkenwell, and found "two or three miserable rooms upstairs in a miserable house… The close low chamber, in which the boys were crowded, was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost insupportable." What Dickens saw that day left such an impression on him that he wrote an appeal in The Daily News for better school funding. Community centres By 12pm, pupils at the Central Boys’ School and Hampton Industrial School were ready for lunch. With schools generally placed in the centre of communities, pupils would usually be given a long lunch break (up to two hours) in order to head home for food. Although free lunches were not provided on a national scale until the early 20th century, food would sometimes be donated by charitable organisations, or even teachers themselves. This demonstrated the important welfare role that a school could play in a poor community. Social reformer Charles Booth declared that “each school stands up from its playground like a church in God’s acre ringing its bell”. When the girls of Hampton Industrial School returned to the classroom after their lunch break, a monotonous afternoon stretched out ahead of them – devoted entirely to needlework. Vocational subjects were mainstays of industrial schools. These would often be divided according to gender – while girls studied sewing and later cooking, boys might be offered commercially orientated drawing, or woodwork. At the National Society’s Central Boys’ School, afternoon lessons resumed at 2pm, and had a more academic bent, including “reading miscellaneous books”, “writing on slates”, and “arithmetic from blackboard”. Alongside religious studies, the ‘three Rs’ were the backbone of most school programmes. While idealistic reformers preached the benefits of literacy and numeracy for personal development, other theories were swirling beneath the desire to educate the next generation. From the mid-19th century, much of the discussion around elementary schooling focused not on opportunities for children, but on Britain’s industrial capacity. Commentators fretted that European competitors were gaining the upper hand, and one way of countering the threat was to produce a better-skilled workforce. In 1870, industrialist WE Forster introduced the Education Act in parliament by declaring: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity.” The act extended funding for school building and aimed to guarantee school places for all children aged between five and thirteen. All of these lofty governmental ambitions had a direct impact on life in the classroom. From 1862, government grants were offered for each child who passed an inspection in reading, writing and arithmetic. In this 'payment by results' system, schools could receive an extra eight shillings per child who passed – a financial reward that had a direct impact on teacher salaries. Critics accused the new system of fostering a frenzied culture of exam obsession, as well as over emphasising the three Rs. Parliament debated the 'overpressure controversy', and medics were called in to assess the physical and mental state of overstretched pupils. Writing to The Schoolmaster newspaper in 1880, FJ Gould admitted: "When one of my backward boys died of bronchitis a few weeks back I felt a measure of relief, for his death would make one failure the less." He later reflected: “The test was applied to all children alike – clever, average or crass. Hence the teachers worried, bullied, caned and ‘kept in’ after school hours. Scholars and teachers were miserable. To the souls of millions of children, this system brought a slavery as grim as the bodily slavery introduced by the industrial revolution of the 18th century.” One method of raising classroom standards was to enforce stricter discipline. The stereotype of corporal punishment in the Victorian school is all too familiar. Take the hypocritical schoolmaster Mr Brocklehurst in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, advocating his teachers to "punish her [Jane's] body to save her soul", or Nicholas Nickleby's sadistic Mr Squeers, who relentlessly persecutes the boys under his charge before receiving a highly cathartic comeuppance. Yet while physical punishment of children was both legal and widely accepted at home and even in the street, these literary depictions of schools terrorised by merciless cane-wielding masters were not universally accurate. In fact, overuse of corporal punishment was seen as a sign of failing to maintain classroom control. One headmaster in 1887 wrote that a staff member who was over-zealous with the cane had "great obstacles to overcome in class", and from the 1890s, it became standard practice to record all punishments in a book, to be checked by inspectors. Teachers noted that the most effective forms of punishment were often non-physical, especially those that involved an element of 'naming and shaming' – whether that meant a child wearing a dunce's hat or a sign around their neck. Fascination and boredom By the 1890s, reforms to the restrictive ‘payment by results’ system meant that those wishing to broaden the minds of their young charges could increasingly afford to venture into subjects such as geography, science and history. Much like today, whether these lessons would inspire fascination or boredom was largely down to the teacher. While inspectors criticised a master at Slater Street School in Leicester for delivering lessons “taken from the syllabus with little lively instruction”, others like FJ Gould attempted to inspire their pupils with storytelling and excursions to museums and galleries. Lessons at the Central Boys’ School reached an end at 4.45pm. After more prayers and singing, books and slates were collected and the boys sent on their way. By the time they left the public school system for good, pupils aged 12 (the minimum leaving age from 1899) and above were expected to reach the ‘fourth level’ – requiring them to write dictated phrases with fewer than three spelling mistakes, read with fluency and expression, recite eight lines of poetry and answer maths problems. For many children, however, it was not the academic lessons that stayed with them the most. As Arthur Goffin, a typesetter’s son born in 1879, recalled: “We were taught direction and guidance, and acquired soundness, contentment, control and stability... [Our teacher] had always something beyond the textbook for us, and drove his lessons home by unforgettable anecdotes and stories... I can recall so many things [my teachers] said which I realised in later life have helped me in different ways.” Ellie Cawthorne is staff writer on BBC History Magazine. Dr Susannah Wright is a senior lecturer in education studies at Oxford Brookes. This article was first published in the March 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Victorian schools: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Rosalind Crone answers your questions on education in 19th-century Britain – from dame schools to the dunce's hat
The 19th century witnessed a revolution in Britain's schools, with the rolling out of compulsory mass education, and thousands more children learning how to read and write. But how tough was the discipline? How widespread was truancy? And did teachers get any formal training? Speaking to Spencer Mizen, historian Rosalind Crone lifts the lid on Victorian schooling.
Michael Wood on the rise of Britain's universities
"Amid the torrent of fake news, a critical mind is our greatest resource," writes historian Michael Wood
In my home town of Manchester, the university celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2024, with a host of events and talks including our annual Manchester Histories festival. It provided an opportunity to think about the story of the university itself. The idea of the university, as we understand it today, evolved in western Europe – in Bologna, Paris and Oxford. There were predecessors elsewhere in the world; the historian George Makdisi saw the Islamic university in 11th–12th century Spain as a direct inspiration. But, everywhere, higher education was developed to support power. Whether teaching in Latin, Arabic or Chinese, universities trained scholars, scribes and theologians to sustain the ideologies of the state. What we might call the democratic revolution in education in Britain began in the 16th century with the spread of the grammar school. Perhaps as many as 160 were opened in Elizabeth I’s reign alone, helping create what the historian Lawrence Stone thought the most literate society that had yet existed in history. In the civil wars of the 17th century, the young men in the parliamentary armies were book readers, and for the first time in history the printing press became part of an army’s baggage train. Though the English revolution failed, that impetus continued. In the 18th century, religious non-conformists, who had been at the heart of radicalism, were barred from university. But across Britain, in the many private academies (in places such as Kibworth in Leicestershire) curricula of amazing width were taught with mechanics, algebra, physics, anatomy and even modern history. Read more | The Georgian guide to university life Out of these movements, in the 19th century a different idea of the university arose for the first time in history. The impulse was essentially practical and democratic. The modern university arose in the industrial revolution as the hold of the ruling class on our intellectual and cultural life began to loosen. And Manchester was one of the earliest – if not the earliest – of modern British civic universities. The time and place were no accident. Manchester was the shock city of the age. In the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 (when cavalry brutally attacked a crowd of protesters demanding political reform), change was in the air; people were demanding better representation – and universal education. Read more | The Peterloo Massacre: what did it achieve? That’s how Manchester University began. It was founded (first as the Mechanics Institute, later the Institute of Science and Technology) by the chemist John Dalton and a group of Manchester industrialists and businessmen, who believed that workers’ education, especially in science, was crucial to the nation’s fortunes. Among the early backers was Charles Beyer, the German-born railway engineer and philanthropist, who helped found an engineering chair and endowed a professorship in applied mathematics. That same year of 1824 saw the foundation of the Royal School of Medicine and Surgery, which became part of Owens College in 1872. By then the redbrick civic university movement was in full swing, and Owens College became the Victoria University of Manchester by royal charter in 1880. These two institutions – the Institute of Science and Technology and the Victoria University – represented the two faces of education: science and the humanities. They closely cooperated through the 20th century – though it was only in 2004 that they came together to become today’s University of Manchester. Back in 1824, the founders – Dalton, Beyer, Owens – were far sighted people who believed that we all have the right to a good education; that educated citizens make the best state; and that democracy depends on the informed consent of the governed – and that is all the more true now amid the daily torrent of false truths on social media. A critical mind surely is our greatest resource. Read more | Is history under threat at the UK’s universities? So here’s to a great anniversary. I for one joined in, with the spirits looking down: Dalton and Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Wittgenstein, Alan Turing, Norman Foster, Peter Maxwell Davies, Anthony Burgess, and my personal favourite, WG ‘Max’ Sebald. Not to mention my dad, who did his external degree in pharmacy at Manchester in the 1930s. Let Manchester stand for all Britain’s great redbrick universities, which do so much for the common good in these difficult times. Long may they continue to thrive. This column first appeared in the February 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
War and pieces: 5 games from history that were about much more than fun
Far from idle pursuits, games have transformed the way societies have made sense of life and death, order and conflict for centuries. Kelly Clancy picks five examples that reveal how playtime has often been a serious business
Games are among our most enduring cultural technologies. They persist, in part, because they’re a way for our brains to serve themselves pleasure for free. The Greek historian Herodotus, for instance, wrote about the Lydian people, who reportedly suffered an 18-year famine. He claimed they alternated between eating food one day and playing games the next – play, in other words, lessened the sting of hunger. But games aren’t just fun: they are also essential education. Animals play to practise for the serious demands of adulthood: kittens chase yarn to drill hunting skills, and young kangaroos rough-house to prepare to box their way up the social hierarchy as adults. Read more | Ancient board games: which ones did people play for fun in the past? With the invention of games, humans brought play into the realm of thought, because games exercise various mental functions. Games are especially crucial for developing social skills. Plato believed they were the foundation of civic education, arguing that children who learned to follow game rules would grow up to be law-abiding citizens. And Plato wasn’t alone: scholars across history have lauded games for a range of educational virtues. As a result, people often endowed games with cultural principles they hoped to transmit to future generations. Games are messages from the past, and can reveal the values and beliefs of the people who play them. Senet, ancient Egypt The ancient board game that served as a map for players to pass to the afterlife Senet – likely the ancestor of backgammon – is one of the world’s oldest known board games. It originated in ancient Egypt in around 3100 BC as mammoths still roamed Siberia’s Wrangel Island, hieroglyphic writing was just emerging, and camels were first being domesticated. Senet means ‘passing’, possibly referring to the game’s race-like mechanic: players vied to be the first to move all their pieces across the board by casting sticks or knuckle bones. In the earliest known record of trash talk, a senet player depicted in the tomb of Pepyankh in Egypt brags: “You speak as one weak of tongue, for passing is mine.” Though its origins were secular, senet came, over time, to serve as a map for the soul’s journey after death. It makes several appearances in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of magic spells inscribed inside coffins to help souls successfully navigate the netherworld. Read more | Guidebook to the Ancient Egyptian afterlife Certain squares on the board became associated with landmarks and obstacles in the afterlife. Landing on square 27, denoted with the hieroglyphic for the ‘waters of chaos’, sent players back to 15, ‘the house of rebirth’. Before exiting the board, pieces had to land on 26, ‘the house of happiness’ – the mummification chamber. Mummification was thought to help souls recognise their corpses, the doorway to the afterlife. Although it was prohibitively expensive for many Egyptians, personal senet boards, found buried in many graves, were another way a soul might recognise its former body. As such, senet democratised access to the immortal realm, serving as an accessible map of life after death. The Mesoamerican ballgame, the Americas A dangerous, sometimes fatal, ball game that may have helped rulers avoid conflict More of a family of games than an individual sport, the Mesoamerican ballgame – as it’s widely known – likely arose around 3,700 years ago in what’s now Mexico. It remained vital for millennia among the Olmec, Maya and Aztec people. Some experts suggest it helped maintain and cohere those cultures because they used it as a proxy for war. Players from opposing teams worked to keep a heavy rubber ball in the air, sometimes using sticks but most often using their hips. Points were scored by bringing the ball to the opposite end of the court, and lost if it hit the ground twice before it could be returned to the other team. A player automatically won the game for their team if they put the ball through one of the prohibitively tall hoops that lined the court. The ball weighed up to four kilograms, so players were frequently bruised and bloodied despite wearing heavy padding. Spanish accounts note players dying after the ball hit them in the head or stomach. Injuries weren’t the only danger: in some cases, play involved ritual sacrifice, and losing teams were decapitated. Read more | Q&A: Why and how did the Aztecs practise human sacrifice? In the Mayan creation myth Popul Vuh, human heroes play against the gods of the underworld, signifying the battle between life and death. However, the game had more than symbolic significance. Players were often important political figures, and their gaming victories may have legitimised their rise to power. Ancient Olmec art is best known for its colossal basalt heads, which are thought to be portraits of kings equipped in the regalia of ball players. Remarkably, the game may have been partly responsible for the rise and maintenance of these complex societies because it offered leaders a more peaceful way to settle disputes than costly and destructive wars. Ball courts were particularly prevalent in hotly contested areas with many border disputes. Other pre-Columbian American games, like chunkey and lacrosse, are also thought to have been peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Indeed, some scholars argue that lacrosse was vital for maintaining peace among the Six Nations of the Iroquois. Chess, India An Indian stroke of genius honed the minds of medieval princes and early computers alike Chess is the most popular board game in history, originating in sixth-century India as a battle simulation game. In its earliest incarnation, it was known as chaturanga, or ‘four-limbed’, referring to four ancient divisions of the Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry. As the game percolated west, these pieces became the pawns, knights, bishops, and rooks familiar to European players. What was once a vizier piece came to be replaced by a more dynamic queen, influenced by the rise of powerful queens in Europe. Persian players would exclaim Shāh Māt (‘the king is helpless’), which, adopted into English, became ‘checkmate’. Chess is the first known game in which different pieces possess different powers, like the military regiments on which they were modelled. Writers have long celebrated chess for honing its players’ strategic skills and clarifying their thinking. Read more | From chess to hula hoops: the top 10 toys from history The game featured heavily in ‘mirrors for princes’, a genre of books on manners popular in India, Persia and Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Playing chess was like looking into a mirror, revealing players’ strengths and weaknesses to themselves. The 10th-century Abbasid scholar al-Masudi detailed how chess was used to train military strategy and mathematics. In fact, chess is so heavily associated with intellect that early computer pioneers took it up as a training ground for developing artificial intelligence. In 1950, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, claimed that chess was an ideal problem for computers because it was discrete, and “generally considered to require ‘thinking’ for skilful play”. In their quest to teach machines to play chess and other games, researchers pioneered countless computing innovations and laid the groundwork for the striking capabilities of today’s machine learning systems. The philosopher’s game, Europe The medieval mathematical board game that reflected shifting views of the universe Beginning around the 11th century, rithmomachia, or ‘the philosopher’s game’, became central to higher education in Europe. The game was thought to represent, in aesthetic form, the formal number theory of Greek polymath Pythagoras. It was a favourite pastime of monks, because church leaders believed it had an enlightening quality. Ovid hailed it as “the leaf, flower and fruit of Arithmetic, and its glory, laud and honour”. Thomas More had the virtuous citizens of his 16th-century book Utopia play the edifying game of rithmomachia instead of morally corrosive games such as dice. Rithmomachia is similar to chess, and its different pieces move according to distinct rules. Like chess, players vie to capture opponent’s pieces. Unlike chess, each rithmomachia piece is inscribed with a number that dictates where and how pieces must be positioned to capture other pieces. For a ‘proper’ victory, the winner must arrange several of their pieces on their opponent’s side of the board in a mathematical progression – 2-4-8, for example. Pythagoras, who founded a mathematics cult that held a grip on European scholarship for more than a thousand years, proclaimed that “all is number”. Unfortunately, Pythagoras did not believe in all numbers: he instead held that rational numbers – whole numbers such as 1, 2, 3, and simple fractions such as 1/2 – were the foundation of the universe. Read more | Digital revolution: the evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals His cult so esteemed rational numbers that they tried to cover up the existence of irrational numbers (non-repeating decimals, including pi) – reportedly assassinating the Greek philosopher Hippasus, who had stumbled on their existence. This myopic focus on rational numbers set back European scholarship by hundreds of years. Yet by the 17th century, new techniques borrowed from India and Persia had reinvigorated European mathematics, and rithmomachia’s popularity waned as Pythagoras’s ideas fell out of favour. Kriegsspiel, Europe The war games that allowed strategists to devise miniature melees to plot a conflict’s outcome Kriegsspiel, or ‘war game’, changed the face of modern Europe. Starting in the 18th century, German military strategists tinkered with chess – which was itself an abstraction of war – to create a more realistic military planning tool. Inspired by the success of the scientific method in so many other fields at the time, they hoped to recast war as a science. Using the game they devised, Kriegsspiel, new strategies could be tested and workshopped. Designers first expanded the chess board to thousands of squares, colour-coded to represent different terrains. Eventually, as map-making technology improved, the game was played on scaled maps of actual battlefields, which allowed officers to plan their real campaigns in minute detail. Each turn represented two minutes of warfare, and wooden block troops were constrained to move a realistic distance in that time. Umpires consulted casualty tables based on actual battle data to predict each simulated action’s effects. Dice throws randomised the damage from each ersatz attack. The result was a remarkably accurate prediction engine, which German officers used to cohere the first German empire in the late 19th century. General Karl Kraft, one of the most eminent strategists of that era, wrote: “The ability to quickly arrive at decisions and the cheerful assumption of responsibility which characterised our officers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was in no small measure due to the war games.” Read more | La débâcle! The aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War General Helmuth von Moltke, meanwhile, used Kriegsspiel to rethink traditional wisdom, too: its bird’s-eye view, for instance, inspired him to abandon column-and-line troop formations, which made soldiers easy targets, in favour of unstructured formations. Today, most major militaries still use some form of game simulation in their training and planning. The pacifist writer HG Wells published a simple tabletop war game, called Little Wars, in 1913 in the hope that playing at war and witnessing its horrors in miniature would inoculate people against it. Little Wars gave rise to a new family of tabletop war games, eventually evolving into Dungeons and Dragons and countless popular role-playing video games. War games have also informed modern policy. Every outcome of Proud Prophet, a nuclear war simulation game played by top US officials in 1983, was so harrowing that the exercise convinced the Ronald Reagan administration to open arms control negotiations with the Soviets. Read more | 8 of the best historical board games for history lovers Kelly Clancy is a neuroscientist, physicist and author of Playing with Reality: How Games Shape Our World (Allen Lane, 2024) This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
From a medieval massacre sparked by a tavern brawl to the horrors of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the history of student protesting is littered with instances of violent clashes. Matt Elton hears from historians Rana Mitter and Hannah Skoda about the lineage of protest through the centuries, considering the causes driving such groups to action and why they have sparked such ferocious responses…
Matt Elton: Without going into any of the present-day politics, which historical instances of student protest do you think are particularly revealing about its wider impact, and do you think such parallels are helpful? Hannah Skoda: I've been thinking about just how active students have been over many, many centuries. I'm a medievalist in Oxford, and in 1355 the city was the location of one of the period’s most famous student protests. It’s known as the St Scholastica's Day Massacre, because things did not end well for the students. It was a horrible episode in which some students claimed their drinks had been watered down by a tavern-keeper in an ale house on what’s now Cornmarket Street. These students were so angry that they whacked the tavern-keeper over the head with a beer mug. He punched them back, and then the whole thing escalated into a massive fight, with the townspeople bringing in extra people from the countryside to join in. On the podcast | History Behind the Headlines: student protests down the centuries The whole episode went on for several days, and the level of violence was horrific. According to some accounts, the townspeople scalped some of the students. It was really nasty. But what’s striking is that it started from a sense of self-interest from these students: they were concerned about protecting their privileges as students. Because when you unpack it a bit further, you find that it wasn’t just about the watered-down drink. The students were concerned about two related issues: the assize, which was who had control over the economic weights and measures used for commercial transactions in the city, and their jurisdictional privileges, which exempted students from the usual kinds of jurisdiction [meaning they were supposedly only subject to ecclesiastical courts, and restricted the ways in which they could be punished]. So the riot started because the students were keen to defend their own interests, and the townspeople were trying to defend themselves against people they saw as encroaching on the autonomy and wellbeing of the town. All of this strikes me as very different from the sense of social justice that has seemed to propel so much student protest in the 20th and 21st centuries. One point of comparison that plays slightly more in favour of these medieval students, who I’ve just painted as completely self-centred and brutal, was that they had a really strong sense of the place of the university in the kingdom as a whole. There was an awareness that what happened in Oxford (and, by the 13th century, Cambridge) was going to affect the rest of the kingdom. There were endless letters from the university to the king or his counsellors arguing that they needed to assure the wellbeing of the university because the wellbeing of the whole nation depended on it. So this sense that students have a really powerful voice is there from an early stage – but I wonder how recent the social justice dimension is, and would be really interested to hear more from Rana about 20th-century student protest. Rana Mitter: I'm going to talk about one particular date with relevance across multiple years, and that’s 4 May. If you’re Chinese, you don’t even need to say the year, because 4 May 1919 was the date of probably the most famous student demonstration in the nation’s history. It was a relatively small student demonstration of about 3,000 people who had gathered outside the Forbidden City, the old Imperial Palace, which then as now is at the heart of Beijing, the Chinese capital. They were outraged by something happening thousands of miles away in Europe, because the spring of 1919 saw the culmination of talks that resulted in the signing of the Versailles peace treaty. Although we tend to think of the end of the First World War as a European issue, China was also involved because it had sent approximately 100,000 workers to dig trenches for the Allies on the western front. As a result, it expected that various former German colonies on Chinese soil would be handed back to China. But because of various pieces of international skulduggery, that didn't happen, and they were instead handed over to the Japanese. And these young Chinese students from some of the great universities of China were outraged by this, so they gathered in the centre of Beijing to demonstrate. This was a cause that was, in a sense, bigger than themselves: it was nothing to do particularly with their studies or their terms and conditions as students. They felt – and this in some ways is a very typical Chinese thing – that if they, as the very privileged, elite, educated youth of China, didn’t speak out against what they thought was a national disgrace, then they weren't doing their job as students, as intellectuals, or as thinkers. And that demonstration was the beginning of a much wider range of demonstrations by students throughout the 20th century. The most famous example of that happened exactly 70 years later, on 4 May 1989, in what was then Tiananmen Square – in that same location in front of the Forbidden City. At the height of the protest, more than a million students and workers gathered to demand reform and democracy from the Chinese Communist Party. The event is, of course, famous because of the tragedy of what happened a month later, on 4 June, when Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader, sent in troops to mow down and shoot hundreds, probably thousands, of demonstrators at the end of that Beijing spring. RM: I want to talk more about 4 May as a date in a moment, but before that I want to ask a slightly simplistic question. The role of students has evolved rapidly even within the modern era – so if we head back as far as the medieval era, what was their role then? Who were they, and how did they fit into society? HS: The big difference – in Europe at least – was between the northern universities, which on the whole trained people for the church, and the southern universities, which focused more on law and medicine. Students in northern universities also tended to be very young: they came to Oxford, Cambridge and Paris when they were only about 14, so they really were extremely immature. I think that probably gives us a bit of an insight into some of the stuff that went on! It was a different situation in the southern universities, because the people training to become doctors or lawyers started university when they were considerably older. There’s a powerful argument among several historians that student protests in southern European universities in the Middle Ages were much more explicitly political and tended to deal with wider causes than those in the northern universities because of this age difference. RM: The issue of age also links to that date I mentioned, 4 May, in a different year: 1970. That was the date of one of the most horrific incidents involving students that the western world has ever seen: the shooting dead of four students at Kent State University in Ohio. Some people of a certain age like me might remember that there's a very fine, very moving song by the singer Neil Young called Ohio. Members of the National Guard – who, of course, were very young themselves – were told that student demonstrations were taking place on the university’s campus. They moved in to try and keep things quiet, but were panicked and made a horrific misjudgement and started firing thinking that they were being provoked. And four students were shot dead. There's a famous, horrific photo of one young woman screaming in horror as she kneels by the body of one of those students. The incident was seared into the public memory in the United States for years, and is still well-remembered today. That memory provides an interesting comparison with the Chinese case, too. Famously, you still can’t talk in China about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests even now. It's an absolutely hidden, taboo subject – although, of course, plenty of Chinese students find out all about it when they leave China. The Kent State shooting, on the other hand, became a key moment in the US thinking about itself, and the way it treated its children. On the podcast | History Behind the Headlines: China spies, medieval tourism and more What made the deaths have so much impact was not just the horror of the killing themselves but also the fact that everyone involved was so young – not just the students themselves but also the National Guardsmen. This was set against the backdrop of the trauma of the wider Vietnam War, too, because men were still being drafted to fight. That lasted from the late 1940s until 1973, so one of the things most associated with youth, particularly for young men in their late teens and early 20s, was life and death. That’s very different from the situation for so many college-age students now, when there’s a chance to have a good time, make your political voices known, and maybe even learn something along the way. So the student demonstration in which these horrible events happened is linked to that wider social turmoil – and the fact it happened during the middle of the Vietnam War is something that really made people think about the position of young people in society. HS: I’m also interested in the sense of solidarity and resonances between protests in different universities, and across time, because I think you quite often get a sense that students are following in a lineage of protest. Part of that must be to do with age – a sense of all being at a similar life-stage, and therefore having similar interests – but I also wonder whether some of it is to do with the ways in which ‘the authorities’ deal with student protest. I’m thinking about the student protests in Prague 1989, which began as a commemoration of the breaking up of student protests by the Nazis in 1939 and then provoked a backlash of their own, for instance. There’s a really interesting sense of echoes, resonances and amplifications across time, as students engage with what other students have done in different times and places. RM: I think that's right. There’s also a strong memory among my colleagues here of 1968 being an iconic year in terms of student demonstrations. Some of that sense of solidarity is due to communications, and visual images: the fact that TV was around in the 1960s made a big difference, for instance. Students in Paris could see students in Berkeley [California]; students in Berkeley had an idea that people in Germany were putting their viewpoints forward. That all became part of a transnational network of student activism, demonstration, and so on. There’s some element of that today, but certainly you might say that the 1960s was the first period in which you had this networking across boundaries. Hear more from this conversation in our History Behind the Headlines series, in which Rana Mitter and Hannah Skoda offer perspectives on the historical events and perspectives behind the news.