the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

I would not describe myself as an historian, but I do a lot of research into a variety of subjects, and I often find that the truth is hard to get to. Some things are fine, because there is enough corroborating evidence, especially when the event concerned is prominent: Dates, such as the day that someone died on, the date of a sporting event or similar, are all fairly reliable pieces of information and can be found readily enough.

However, other information is harder to pin down, and you cannot rely on written records. Biographies, and even autobiographies, are notoriously unreliable. Sometimes this is due to imperfect memory, but surely these things could be picked up by a decent sub-editor doing some fact checking? For example, I read a lot of motor racing books, and, sometimes, the subject will say something like: “I crashed out of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1968”. Well, the ’68 BGP was at Brands Hatch, but the accident referred to was at Silverstone, but in 1969. It’s only a small thing perhaps, but it is an error, and, for someone researching the subject, unless they dig deeper, they may perpetuate it.

Some people like to spin a good yarn, and if you look at appearances of personalities on talk shows, they often tell different versions of the same story. They are not being duplicitous, merely trying to entertain, but in doing so they embellish the tale in different ways. Trying to sort fact from fiction can be very difficult, and often the story that is told is not a true one, more an amalgam of several events that, twisted together, make up a good story. There is no harm in that, but it can make life difficult for the historian.

Documentaries also have a story to tell, and a limit in the time available, so telling the whole story is not possible. What gets left out skews the truth, but this assumes that the story has been throughly researched. If the researcher is working from flawed material, then the story is screwed from the start, and will perpetrate the falsehoods.

I watched a TV programme recently that mentioned Bletchley Park, and naturally the work done there in World War 2. It mentioned Alan Turing as the man who built the Bombe machine and cracked the Enigma code. Fine, but it isn’t true. Yes, he was a brilliant man, but the Bombe computer was designed and built by Post Office engineers, based on an existing decoding machine that the Polish intelligence services had been using for some years to read Enigma messages, and the Enigma code was better understood after an Enigma machine and codebooks were captured intact. So a throwaway statement in a documentary, about railways, perpetrates a fiction.

Trying to find the truth is not always easy, but does it really matter? In many ways, no. It is not likely to change many lives, and the vast majority of the population if the world couldn’t care less. For those of us with a specific interest in a topic, it does matter, and it will matter to you if you ever find yourself with a problem that the truth will get you out of.

Fact or fiction? The choice is yours.