When history became about all of us ...... on the wireless today

If you went to school in the 1950s history lessons were almost always about the great and the good, the rich and the clever, and just maybe the not so good but usually very elegant people.

The Workhouse disc, 2020

They strutted across the page, winning battles, inventing stuff and in bouts of kindness, and enlightenment improved the lives of the less fortunate.

Looking around the classroom at my friends and thinking of their parents as well as my own I knew that amongst us there was a rich vein of history which wasn't deemed of value.

So Canute ordered the sea to retire and Maria Antoniette wanted everyone to eat cake, but the thoughts of Eric storming the Normandy beaches in 1944 or mum losing her job in the aftermath  of the Great Depression were not offered up to us. 

Nor were stories of working in factories, and in coal mines, of marching with Napoleon, Caesar and Richard the Lion Heart fighting their battles and ending up in an unnamed grave far from home.

As were the stories of woman so often written out of history or confined to walk on parts in the events of men.

All of which means that I have always wanted to write about their lives, focusing on the people who history didn't just forget but didn't even bother with in the  the first place.

And that brings me Peopled History, BBC Radio 4.*

"The historian and bestselling author of The Five and Story of a Murder, Hallie Rubenhold examines what the subject of ‘history’ is and makes the case for keeping it personal.

The baker Terentius Neo with his wife circa 79 AD

Her previous books have also included The Covent Garden Ladies which told the stories of the legion of ordinary women whose lives in the sex trade history has chosen to ignore.

History, she argues, is so much more than the brave deeds of ‘Great Men’ as Thomas Carlyle would have us believe. It is instead made up of the ordinary and the often unchronicled lives of people who lived in the houses we live in, who travelled the same streets, maybe planted the same fields and gardens.

Cousin Otto's wife and child, undated

Over five essays, Hallie makes a powerful case for the intimacy of history. Careful research can reveal the crucial hinterland to domestic objects which may be hundreds, even thousands, of years old, but this also means that the objects belonging to us or inherited from our parents and grandparents have stories to tell and a role in revealing the social history of our own and recent times.

Written and read by Hallie Rubenhold

Produced by Jill Waters

The Waters Company for BBC Radio 4"

Pictures, The Workhouse disc, 2020, found by Frances  Farrow, and The baker Terentius Neo with his wife circa 79 AD, Italian National Archaeological Museum of Naples (cat. no. 9058 ) and Lightening the dark, 1981, Cousin Otto'a wife and child, undated, from the Simpson collection

*Peopled History, BBC Radio 4, Intimate Histories by Hallie Rubenhold, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002lpdv