Hitler mythical but Conan real, some believe

By CAHAL MILMO

LONDON - The Battle of Hastings never took place and Adolf Hitler is a fictional character.

Robin Hood really existed, Harold Wilson saved Britain during World War II and Conan the Barbarian is a bona fide figure from early Nordic history.

It might sound like the latest attempt by revisionist extremists to pervert the past but the reality is perhaps far more disturbing: this is how a significant chunk of the British population, confused by Hollywood and unmoved by academia, sees history.

A survey of the average adult's level of historical knowledge has uncovered "absurd and depressing" areas of ignorance about events, from battles to royal marriages, and widespread confusion between characters from cinema blockbusters and real figures from the past.

Researchers, who conducted face-to-face interviews with more than 2000 people, found that almost a third thought that the Cold War was not a real event, while 6 per cent believed that the War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells's fictional account of a Martian invasion, did take place.

Some 57 per cent thought that King Arthur existed, and 5 per cent accepted that Conan the Barbarian, the sorcerer warrior played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 1982 movie, once stalked the planet slaying his foes for real.

Almost one in two believed that William Wallace, the 13th-century Scottish resistance leader played by Mel Gibson in Braveheart, was invented for the silver screen.

The study sparked an impassioned response from historians and politicians and raised new questions about the teaching of history, particularly after it was found that 11 per cent of respondents said Hitler did not exist and 9 per cent said Winston Churchill was fictional. A further 33 per cent believed Mussolini was not a real historical figure.

Lord Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said the survey results were "utterly bewildering".

"It shows that in our schools we are not conveying sufficiently the recent past - a past in which many of us lived and so many people died. If we are to prevent the return of Hitlerism in any form in our present or future, we have to know what happened in the lifetimes of many of us."

Critics of the survey's findings laid much of the blame for the apparent lack of knowledge at the door of Hollywood and television.

Studio moguls have regularly found themselves in hot water in recent years for skewing historical events to fit audience profiles and lift profit margins.

The film U-571 sparked fury in Britain four years ago when it told the story of how American servicemen altered the course of World War II by capturing the Enigma code machine from a German U-boat.

In fact, British and Canadian sailors captured the machine in May 1941, before the US had entered the war.

The survey of 2069 adults aged 16 or over, conducted for Blenheim Palace to mark the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Blenheim, highlighted similar cases of the blurring of fiction and reality in the popular imagination.

More than 60 of those interviewed said they thought the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, featuring slavering Orcs, actually took place.

Even the more outlandish creations of television fiction are thought by some to be founded in reality. At least 20 people approached by researchers said they thought Rowan Atkinson's Edmund Blackadder and Lucy Lawless' bodice-busting Xena Warrior Princess were real historical figures.

Historian, television presenter and Shakespeare biographer Michael Wood said the "dumbing-down" trend was damaging people's knowledge of the past.

"If you don't give an audience a clear idea of how we know things, I believe this is a problem.

"Hollywood distorts history the whole time and once you get that far down the line, it's not history, it's entertainment," he said.

"History is there to give value to the present as well as to entertain. You do diminish it if you take the mickey out of it in an attempt to make it 'accessible'."

The advent of the historically challenged Briton is not restricted to knowledge gained from sitting in front of the television or munching popcorn at the cinema.

More than a quarter of the survey respondents did not know in which century the Great War took place and 57 per cent believed that the Battle of the Bulge, the Nazi counter-offensive in the Ardennes in 1945, didn't happen.

A further 53 per cent thought that the military leader who took British troops into battle at Waterloo was Horatio Nelson, and a quarter felt that the admiral's fatal triumph at the Battle of Trafalgar was fiction.

Nearly one in five believed that Harold Wilson, not Winston Churchill, occupied Downing St during World War II.

John Hoy, chief executive of Blenheim Palace, said history had become too boring.

Many people associated history with dry dates and facts.

"Once they realise that history is about people, the way we used to live and the way we live now, it becomes more relevant and more exciting."

- INDEPENDENT