What use is the myth of Winston Churchill?

Prompted by the attacks on statues in summer 2020, William Mason began to question how effectively he taught his students about popular interpretations or historical ‘myths’. He designed an enquiry about the myth of Churchill to introduce his pupils to the concept of collective memory and to ways in which history is used at different times and for different purposes. Pupils analysed a series of occasions on which the myth of Churchill had been invoked, and used contextual knowledge to consider the purpose to which it had been deployed. Reflecting on where his pupils struggled, Mason devised a series of metaphors on which they could draw to characterise the ways in which the Churchill myth had been used...