‘100 Greatest Britons’ in Historical Perspective

In the last post, I noted that catalogues of national heroes, although often invoked to root a nation in its history, are heavily slanted towards the recent past. While Great Britain can be traced back to its formation in 1707, and England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales have histories stretching back into antiquity, when we think of characteristic British icons, we generally draw on figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A further example of this phenomenon is the list of the ‘100 Greatest Britons’, compiled from a public poll for a BBC TV series in 2002. This series, which I can remember watching as a teenager, received a fair amount of attention in the press at the time and prompted various spin-offs, such as the ‘100 Greatest Black Britons’ and ‘100 Worst Britons’.

The only Briton on the list from antiquity, besides the mythical King Arthur, is Boadicea. A handful of medieval figures make the cut, almost all of them kings. Non-political figures only enter in the early-modern period, with luminaries like Thomas More, Francis Drake, William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton. The majority of ‘greatest Britons’ come with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as seen in the graph below, confirming the view that national lineages slant towards the present. The figure judged to be the greatest Briton of all, Winston Churchill, was born in the late nineteenth century, in 1874.

The list is revealing not only for its bias towards the recent past, but also for its sensitivity to contemporary events. Some who made the list, such as Princess Diana (number three), the Olympic rower Steve Redgrave (number 36) and the DJ John Peel (number 43), enjoyed high popularity in 2002 but seem unlikely to be canonized for centuries to come. If the poll were repeated today, it seems reasonable to assume that many of the twentieth-century entries would change. Cultural pantheons may be skewed towards modernity, then, but those more distant figures who do feature on such lists, like Shakespeare, are also more likely to endure.