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David's Mental Meanderings
10th December 2002
Great Britons - Part 3

Who do Britons think has made more impact on Britain that Newton, Shakespeare, and Darwin? You will think I'm making this up. You will. Honest.

The people's choice as the Number Three greatest Briton of all time? Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana's major accomplishment was to take the celebrity value of royalty to a new level. Is that one of the ten greatest contributions to Britain?

Her chief proponent, who narrated the one-hour episode about her and represented her in the big final show, said that Diana should get high marks for bravery because she revealed she had an eating disorder. This is as compared to General Oliver Cromwell of the Roundheads and Horatio Lord Nelson, as well as our winner, who spent time as a cavalry officer and saw substantial combat.

But it was for her compassion that she was most highly praised. She shook hands with AIDS children. She had photo ops while wearing land mine protection mask. She was patron of many charities. Not really any more than other royals, but they were the most high profile politically correct charities her PR people could find.

You would have thought that Diana was the first royal to demonstrate compassion for the disadvantaged. What a silly idea. But to find a royal who really exercised compassion you have to look elsewhere than the Great Britons series. I must digress a moment, but that's why these are called Meanderings, after all.

If I can refer back to our Number Five Briton and if you read his play Macbeth in school, you may remember that at the end of it all Malcolm come out on top as King of Scotland. The play doesn't follow history exactly, because Macbeth's stepson Lulach became king for seven months before he was killed by Malcolm. This Malcolm was Malcolm III. This all happened in 1057-58.

By 1070, Malcolm was a widower. In that year the family of Edward Atheling, the deceased heir of Edward the Confessor, fled to Scotland. The Atheling's daughter Margaret loved Jesus and His Church and had every intention of becoming a nun. Malcolm had other plans for her. When Margaret realised what she could do for the Lord as Queen of Scotland, she accepted Malcolm's proposal.

Malcolm and Margaret ruled Scotland for 23 years. Malcolm may have been preoccupied with invading England, but Margaret converted him to Christianity and taught him to pray. She herself lived a life of constant prayer and self-discipline. Malcolm supported her in her efforts building schools and churches and established abbeys. She personally cared for pilgrims and the poor by distributing money for food with her own hands. She is often depicted holding a Gospel book and coins, representing her charity. She also prompted reform in the Church in Scotland, which had fallen into lax ways. She encouraged prayer and fasting and frequent Communion.

Her greatest success was as a Christian mother. Margaret trained her eight children in the ways of God. Her daughter Matilda married Henry I and became known as Good Queen Maud of England for her holy ways and was renowned for her humility, regularly washing the feet of lepers. Her son Ethelred became an abbot. Her three youngest sons became kings of Scotland. They followed their mother's example of godliness, expressed through humility and charity. Her youngest son, King David I, was also canonized as a saint.

St Margaret of Scotland didn't even make the top 100 - probably not even the top 1000 - but if we want to find royal examples of compassion she is a much better model than Diana.

Diana held the top spot for the week following her episode of the Great Britons series. The man on top for almost the entire rest of the time will have all of my American readers saying, "Who is Isambard Kingdom Brunel?" Though fairly well known in this country - there is even a university named for him - I was only barely familiar with him before I moved here. In fact, I find myself hardly the more informed now.

How he got in the Top Ten, I'll never know. How he held the top spot for so long is simple. His episode was first, when the interest in the series was at its highest, and his proponent, television personality and newspaper columnist Jeremy Clarkson, did a good job of presenting him to the public.

Without belabouring the point, Brunel built stuff. Mostly big stuff. Suspension bridges and entire regions of transport infrastructure were his specialty. Whilst the factories of the industrial revolution were producing goods, he made it possible to get them from point A to point B. This is important. It might even be important enough to get him in the top 100 in my opinion. He wouldn't have made my top ten, though.

Drum roll, please, Anton...

And our Number One Great Briton of all time is...

Winston Churchill.

Churchill was always a warrior. He paid his own passage to places like Egypt, just to serve in the army in the front lines and see action. His forte was definitely land-based war. After serving in the army, he returned to Britain and became a Member of Parliament. Then as First Lord of the Admiralty (roughly equivalent to the US Secretary of the Navy), Churchill was a disaster. He masterminded Britain's greatest naval defeat of the First World War, perhaps of all time. Most Americans are not familiar with it, but Britons still remember Gallipoli.

(Another thing Americans might not realise is that there are a number of political officers with the term "Lord" in their title that have nothing to do with peerage. These would include the Prime Minister's official title as First Lord of the Treasury and the Lords Commissioners, who are the Whips in the House of Commons for the party in Government.)

As penance for Gallipoli, Churchill resigned from the Government and became commander of an infantry battalion in France. By 1917, he was back in Government as Minister of Munitions. He served in various positions until ousted from the Government in 1928. As a backbench MP in the 1930s, he was often jeered for speeches against the German Fuhrer and the threat of Nazism.

There are important events in the life of any nation. Among those are events so momentous that the course of history hangs in the balance. Britain has seen three such events, each military in nature. The first was the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The second was the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The third was the Battle of Britain in 1940.

Americans have difficulty appreciating its significance. The American mainland has not seen an invading non-American force since 1815. The British of my parents' generation have. If the Allies had lost the war, Americans would not be speaking German today - though I've heard American braggadocio to this effect. If the British hadn't prevailed in the summer of 1940, they probably would be. And if Britain had fallen to Hitler, there would not have been a D-Day, or a V-E Day. As much as the US might have tried to help what would have been a British underground resistance movement, there would have been no substantial piece of real estate from which to launch an invasion.

Speaking of the pilots during the Battle of Britain, Churchill famously remarked, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." This is true. It is true of Mrs Holford's great-grandfather, who paid the ultimate price in the cockpit of a Spitfire.

It is also true that so many owed so much to one man. At the beginning of 1940, the prevailing view of the British Cabinet, including Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, was to appease Hitler. Even after Chamberlain's resignation and Churchill's appointment as PM, he had to fight a hard battle in the Cabinet to convince his Government to resist the German juggernaut. Then he led Britain through its darkest hour.

After all he'd done, the British people turned him out of office after the end of the war in 1945. The Brits are known for their short political memory, but this was bordering on collective Alzheimer's. After getting their National Health Care service under the Labour government, the Brits otherwise came to their senses. They returned him to Downing Street, where he stayed until his 80th year. He remained a Member of Parliament until 1964, the year before his death at the age of 90.

Churchill is the only non-royal in British history to have been accorded a State Funeral. The public turnout was also unprecedented. Now 37 years later the British public turned out again and named him the Greatest Briton.

Of the Top Ten, Churchill got my vote. I would include him in my own Top Ten and he would still come out near the top.

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