Largest history festival in the UK criticized for being white and male

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. ...