On Friday, while most of the country was settling down to watch Radiohead perform in a field in Somerset, a row was breaking out in another field in Wiltshire. To we historians this is not Glastonbury weekend but Chalke Valley weekend; time for the country’s biggest history festival. The brainchild of the second world war historian James Holland, it’s been running for seven years, drawing healthy crowds.
But when this year’s festival programme was released it didn’t take long for people to start commenting on the fact that of the 148 speakers there are only 32 women, and there is just one non-white historian. When your festival lineup includes three times more veterans of Hitler’s Wehrmacht than non-white historians, you’d have to at least wonder if your diversity and inclusion strategies are state of the art.
Like most modern rows, this one took the form of a heated Twitter spat. Out of respect for the organisers, some of whom I know, I did my best to not get involved, despite being prodded to do so. What led me to hurl my increasingly frustrated voice into the Twitter vortex was that instead of accepting that the lineup was, to say the least, unfortunate, the organisers and their supporters went on the attack. As the bosses of United Airlines are now all too aware, it’s not the original misdemeanour that causes the real damage, but the botched PR effort that follows, especially when refusing to acknowledge that mistakes have been made.
What annoyed me was what annoyed a lot of other people on Twitter – that the festival set out to blame the lack of women and non-white voices in their schedule on the TV and publishing industries. If publishers had found more non-white writers, and if TV had packed the schedules with female historians, some would have become household names, whom the festival organisers would have naturally booked. It’s a “we failed because others failed” argument. Even more dubious was the suggestion that non-white historians were not included in the lineup because they have failed to write on subjects that the Wiltshire festival-going audience could relate to. The people of Wiltshire are allegedly animated by the Nazis, the Tudors and little else.
There are some economic realities that have to be taken into account. Although the festival industry is booming, with new events being launched each year, the margins are paper-thin. No one is growing rich by getting historians to speak in tents, sadly. Festivals do need big names to fill their big tents. But these economic arguments don’t excuse the lack of inclusion. The lineup includes many historians who are little known outside of their specialisms, and there are better-known female and non-white historians who appear not to have been invited.
Yet the real problem with the chosen defence of the Chalke Valley festival is that at least the TV and publishing industries have now accepted that there is a problem. There is much more to be done, but what these industries are not doing is blaming another part of the history ecosystem.
If you are the biggest, you have the biggest responsibilities. The message the lineup of this year’s festival sends out to young would-be historians, of all races and genders, is that some of you are not wanted. That history is not for everybody or about everybody. In 2017 all of us involved in public history have to acknowledge that this is our problem.