Viking helmets, a Zapata moustache, and some fierce looking chariots …… the silly story

Now I grew up with horrible Vikings wearing wings on their helmets, Celtic war chariots driving into massed ranks of Roman soldiers, and more recently artistic reconstructions of Iceni warriors and marauding Danes with impressive Zapata moustaches.

None of which are historically accurate, although to be fair when some of them were drawn and reproduced in the history books I read in the 1950s they may have been based on accepted historical knowledge.

Others of course were pure tosh, arising from a vivid imagination and in the case of the chariot sequence in the film Ben Hur, old fashioned nail biting drama.

But then, when did historical accuracy count more than spectacle?

Of course, in the case of chariots and swords on wheels, Hollywood chose to believe that all ancient armies wouldn’t look the part without such vicious accompaniments.

And at the same time packaged up and distributed an image of the American West, which had been set in stone in the early twentieth century with the first cowboy films with Tom Mix and others.

As the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said,  "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."*

Leaving me just to reflect on that other way of reproducing scenes from the past where the artist is influenced by the present.

And here I am thinking of a collection of pictures drawn to illustrate The Making of the British which was a series published in the Observer Magazine.**

There were ten parts, and as you do I kept them all, but sadly I can no long remember when they were published, but I am thinking the late 1960s.

One shows Queen Boudicca, surrounded by an army of Iceni warriors and another of a Viking posing with sword in hand, and what they have in common is that pretty much all of them were sporting fine Zapata moustaches which were fashionable at the time.

And it reminds me of one of my favourite observations of the future, written by Thomas Hobbs in 1650, who wrote “No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet.  But of conceptions of the past, we make a future.”***

Which of course is equally applicable to those who attempt to depict the past, by drawing on the present.

I would love to have included the pictures, but fear I might fall foul of copyright.

So I won’t, but instead just comment that the rest of the Vikings were wearing helmets with wings or horns, while in another picture of a cross section of Saxon men, and all nine were indeed men, a fair few of them had very fashionable sixties haircuts.

The Observer followed up the series, with The New British, the British and the Sea, and The British and America, all three of which were published between 1973 and 1975.

But despite their historical sweep, there appeared no reference to those who came to live in Britain from the Commonwealth or the Common Market.

To be fair I am missing a few parts of the later series, but I suspect the Windrush generation, those from the Indian subcontinent, along with those from Africa and the European six were not included.

It may be that the Observer returned to the concept in the succeeding decades and addressed the omission, but by then we no longer took the paper..

So, not for the first time the story started on a silly note and closed in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

Leaving me just to point out to all those who crave historical accuracy, that the picture showing units of the 7th and 10th Legions engaging Celtic forces during Julius Caesar's first invasion of Britain is equally wrong.

The armour and helmets worn by the Roman legionaries date from roughly a century later.

Location; the past

Picture; drawings  by J.C.B. Knight, from People in History, Volume one, From Caractacus to Alfred 1955 and Looking at History, 1956, R.J. Unstead, Riders of the Range, Eagle, Vol 10 No. 22, May 30th 1959

* The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962 directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and James Stewart.

**Hobbs, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 1650

*** The Making of the British, Observer Magazine, “A history – 10 parts – of the restless people whose coming together made Britain, and forged our national character”. The Observer followed it up with The New British, 1973, the British and the Sea, 1974 and The British and America, 1975