These Isles by Brian Groom review: 'concise, stylish and scholarly'
Written in a coolly dispassionate tone, this book doesn’t follow the drumbeat of any particular theory of history and is all the better for it, writes David Robinson
This short history of Britain and Ireland begins 850,000 years ago, when the River Thames flowed into the sea in what is now northeast Norfolk. As a family walked south along the mudflats of its estuary, they left their footprints behind. There have been three types of humans since then - we’re the fourth - and any number of ways of referring to the British Isles. Brian Groom opts for the politically neutral “these isles”. Implicit in that is a wish to rebalance our collective past, moving away from the notion that British history is essentially English history by another name, with only occasional nods to Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
So although his book opens with that family of homo antecessor whose feet did indeed in ancient times walk beside the prehistoric Thames at what is now the English village of Happisburgh - the oldest human footprints outside Africa by hundreds of thousands of years, and uncovered after a storm in 2013 - it is emphatically not an Anglocentric story. Had that discovery been made elsewhere in these islands, I feel sure Groom would have led off with it too, so completely does his book live up to his inclusive intentions.
The first thing you notice is its coolly dispassionate tone. This is a book that doesn’t follow the drumbeat of any particular theory of history, whether nationalist, Marxist, or Whig. It doesn’t hang around (or, sometimes even mention) many of the usual signposts - in England’s case, the Bayeux Tapestry, Runnymede, or the Glorious Revolution - nor does it have much time for kings and queens. It doesn’t preach.
So when, for example, Groom notes that the Roman goddess Britannia was “based on Minerva, the goddess of trade and strategic warfare”, he doesn’t draw any parallels with Victorian Britain, snide or otherwise. When he mentions Keir Hardie’s career (born in Scotland, MP for West Ham South and then Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare) or, say, the Welsh birthplaces of Sir Geoffrey Howe, John Prescott and Michael Heseltine or the English one of Lloyd George, it is just part of the overall picture, not part of a thesis about Britishness. His history may emphasise the ways in which ordinary people in each part of these islands influenced each other, but he shows the strains within these relationships too.
As a journalist (a former editor of Scotland on Sunday and assistant editor of the Financial Times) Groom has a keen eye for the kind of facts that don’t square with common assumptions. Who knew, for example, that the people in the Peasants’ Revolt weren’t peasants at all, that the term “Viking” was hardly used until the 19th century, or that Queen Victoria spoke German by preference? (She was also fluent in French, Italian and Latin as well as English.) I didn’t, anyway - and it was good to have my ignorance of so much Welsh history challenged too.
Personally, I would have put more emphasis on the Second World War, even if it is already massively overrepresented in the history of these isles. But it was an existential struggle, and with 1.75 million in the Home Guard, a quarter of a million Londoners bombed out of their homes, and 6 million men in uniform, one which involved nearly all our island peoples. And had Churchill not been in power on 28 May 1940, all of our various national histories would almost certainly be substantially different.
That said, we need a history of these isles that is up-to-date, isn’t jingoistic, doesn’t regurgitate national myths, and also avoids being a chronological dirge by diving off into changes in language, literature, religion, migration, gender relations, sport, food, and much more. We also need one that isn’t 1,229 pages long (Norman Davies) or 1,408 (Simon Schama). With just 229 pages of text - wonderfully concise but still stylish and scholarly - this fits the bill perfectly.
These Isles: A People’s History of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, by Brian Groom, Harper North, £20
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