This is another resurrected draft from the past (last edited in 2020 to be precise). It was originally titled Ten Heroes, but faltered after the first three and started lookin g out of step with modern standards. I try not to upset people, so it sort of faded away.
It is presented here with a few additional notes and a new title.
I could probably list a thousand heroes, and these ten aren’t necessarily the best of the bunch. They are also mainly white, male and violent, because that was how boys were, growing up in the 1960s and 70s. We didn’t grow up wanting to work in a laboratory or sit at a desk writing computer code. We knew about scientists, because Mad Scientists were a staple character of the sort of fiction I used to read, but, I didn’t even use a computer until I was 29. I then didn’t use another one for another five years.
Number one is Edward Wilson. He was part of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. All polar explorers in those days were heroes. We see people at the Poles these days with modern fabrics, high energy rations, sat-nav and an armada of back-up vehicles. They tell you how cold it is and how hard they are finding it. Wilson and his contemporaries didn’t have all that back-up and technology. The Norwegians knew a bit about snow and dogs, and they were first to the Pole but despite this un-British efficiency (and killing their dogs to feed to the surviving dogs) they were still heroic. The British were bumbling idiots by comparison, but nearly made it despite all their disadvantages (including a leader who was most definitely not in the same class as Amundsen).
It could have been Amundsen here, or Oates, or even Shackleton. In fact, I went straight to Oates as my first pick, but then reconsidered. They would all have been worthy of the place, but Wilson’s mother bred poultry (as many fine people do) and, like me, he’s called Wilson. He was also a naturalist, a doctor and he caught TB whilst working with the poor in London. He’s a much more rounded character than Oates and that’s why he’s here.
Number two is Eric Liddell. Every list of heroes needs a rugby player. You could probably list ten rugby players who were all heroes, but that seems unfair to football. I will be listing one footballer later in the list.
Liddell is probably best known from Ian Charleston’s portrayal of him in Chariots of Fire. He refused to take part in the heats of the 100 metres because they were on Sunday and his religious principles stopped him doing that. The film wasn’t quite accurate about all the details, but that’s film for you. He raced in the 400 metres instead and won it in world record time. It’s difficult to think of a modern athlete doing that.
He was also a Scottish Rugby International with seven appearances in what was then the Five Nations Championship.
He turned his back on sporting success and returned to China, the country of his birth, to work as a Christian Missionary. You could argue that this was just the acceptable face of Colonialism and racism, if you want to put a modern interpretation on his life, but you can’t deny that he was a sincere man and that his last years, spent as a prisoner of the Japanese, were appreciated by his colleagues in the camp. One went as far as to say: ‘ It is rare indeed that a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known.’
In these days of rewriting history it is good to know that the Chinese have a statue to him, and in some of their record books he is claimed as the first Chinese Olympic medallist. As he was born in China, died in China, and spent most of his life in China, you can see their point.
There are of course. other rugby players who could have filled this slot- Edgar Mobbs for one, and James Peters for another. They were both heroes in their own way. Mobbs is a typical Great War story and Peters is England’s first black player, though much of the interest in his story is also about the clash of cultures between the two codes of rugby. For the sake of completeness I will add that the first non-white rugby union international player was Alfred Clunies-Ross, who played for Scotland in the first ever international match in 1871. Scotland won. However, being the first to do something isn’t necessarily the same as being a hero.
My third hero is Bert Trautman. This is despite him being a footballer and a foreigner. He was a decorated war hero, despite fighting on the wrong side in WW2 and he went on to sporting immortality when he carried on playing in the 1956 FA Cup Final despite breaking his neck. At this point I started to run out of steam on this project.
Part of the problem was that many of my heroes are, as previously noted, white, British and violent. And men. It felt a bit out of step to carry on so I suffered a crisis of conscience and let it drift.
This is a bit unfair on the men of the Shangani Patrol, who deserve to be more widely recognised, but Rhodes was coming in for a lot of criticism at the time and I didn’t want to get involved, particularly as it is also known as Wilson’s Last Stand. Not that too many liberal historians read the blog. Rather than fall into the trap of writing something that can be criticised as being out of step with modern sensibility I will leave it to a Matabele leader called Mjaan to have the last word.
We were fighting men of men, whose fathers were men before them. They fought and died together. Those who could have saved themselves chose to stay and remain and die with their brothers. Do not forget this. You did not think the white men were as brave as the Matabele: but now you must see that they are men indeed, to whom you are but timid girls.
Not only does this prevent me being racist, but brings sexism into the argument on how we write history.
