Mark Hone

It is unfortunate that the most recent attempt to make a reasonably accurate 'big historical story' film was a commercial and critical flop: 'Alexander'. This had Oxford Classical Historian Robin Lane Fox as adviser (and participant in one of the battle scenes!) All is not doom and gloom, however. Excellent and accurate historical films are appearing from the collaboration between HBO and BBC. 'Conspiracy' and 'Band of Brothers' were both closely based on historical source material and tell complex stories. Roman Polanski's superb recent film 'The Pianist' is extremely faithful to the autobiographical account on which it is based, and paints a vivid picture of the Warsaw Ghetto.

One of my pupils is doing an A-Level Personal study on this topic, focussing on comparisons between particular films on the same topic-e.g 'Longest Day' and 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Tora, Tora, Tora' and 'Pearl Harbor'. I would contend that there was a genre of war films in the 1960's and early 1970's such as 'Longest Day' and 'Battle of Britain' which did tell the 'big story' in a broadly accurate way. Although you can always pick holes in individual details, 'Longest Day' for example does actually give the audience some understanding of why D-Day happened, what it was all about and the basic sequence of events. It was also the highest grossing black and white film of all time! That genre pretty much died out after 'A Bridge Too Far' in 1976. Sadly modern film-makers don't seem to believe that audiences have sufficient attention-span or intelligence to make films like that any more.

I shall download the information and try running it with some of my History students. Unfortunately I have finished 'Empire and Slavery' with Year 9 for this academic year, but will select some guinea-pigs to try it out.

The Gestalt version had been re-written for PC and worked on Windows XP, unlike a lot of my old software, which has been rendered useless overnight! Was the NStar version for PC?

I bought it several years ago-so long ago in fact that I can't even recall how much it cost or in what circumstances I ordered it. It was possibly from a flyer sent to school. It was definitely the same as the Tressel version which I recall seeing when it first came out. A Google search for Gestalt Software yielded nothing relevant. Of course I can't now look at the program itself to see if they acknowledged any copyright.

I have been using the old Tressell 'Attack on the Somme' simulation for several years, latterly in the CD-ROM version published by Gestalt Software. Unfortunately the disk has become 'corrupted', in the jargon, and is now beyond the powers of our school IT technicians to restore. Does anyone know where I can obtain a copy?

I am Mark Hone, the Head of History and Politics at Bury Grammar School, Lancashire. I have been a teacher for 15 years. I am always keen to learn about new resources and teaching styles for use in the classroom (and outside). I have considerable experience in planning and guiding school trips with an historical/political basis, including a school battlefields tour, now in its twelfth year with a different itinerary each time, and sixth-form visits to London, Paris and Dublin.