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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