What My Grandfather Taught Me About Teaching Historical Enquiry
As Remembrance Sunday approaches, classrooms, families and communities often pause to honour stories of courage, service and sacrifice. This year, for me, that reflection has been deeply personal.
Recently, I delivered a talk at The Hold, Ipswich Archives, about my grandfather, Stanley Rose, a gunner in the 67th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery, captured at Tobruk in 1942 and held as a prisoner of war in Stalag IV-B.
What started as a family question became a research journey — and ultimately, a powerful model for how we teach historical enquiry.
Please watch my talk (which my father kindly recorded) below:
The space between memory and evidence
Growing up, our family knowledge of Stanley’s wartime experience came from two fragile threads:
A handwritten note my grandmother kept, summarising what she knew
Fragments of conversations my father once had with former comrades of my grandfather — men who recognised his regiment, remembered the desert, or recalled the camp, and filled in small details the family had never heard before
There were no long retellings. No stories offered or pressed for. No neat narrative to inherit.
Only snippets, impressions, and silence.
That silence became the starting point.
Because this is where real historical enquiry begins:
What can we prove from the evidence we have?
What questions does it raise?
What might be true, but cannot be confirmed?
And how do we honour a story without inventing what is missing?
These are the same questions we ask students when teaching history well.
From fragments to facts
Using that note and those remembered conversations as clues, I began tracing archival records through:
the International Committee of the Red Cross
wartime service records
POW camp transfer lists
regimental histories
geographical movement across war fronts
A timeline slowly formed, from Suffolk, to the Western Desert, to capture at Tobruk, to Italy, then by overcrowded train to Stalag IV-B in Germany after the 1943 Italian armistice.
His POW number, 224787, transformed him from a remembered man into a documented one.
Walking the ground history left behind
Last year, I travelled to the site of Stalag IV-B in Mühlberg.
There is no museum.
No reconstructed barracks.
No guided tour.
Instead, there are quiet fields partitioned by hedgerows, brick outlines of former huts, the remains of camp latrines, a scattering of memorials, and the weight of absence. Nearby lies a cemetery — not for the Allied POWs, but for the thousands of German prisoners who later died there in Soviet custody, a layered testament to the long shadow of that place.
Standing there, I realised something central to both remembrance and history teaching:
History does not always speak loudly. Sometimes it speaks through gaps, traces, and quiet landscapes.
Why this matters in the classroom
The value of this journey is not simply in retelling a family story.
It is in modelling how history is uncovered, not inherited.
This is the work we want children to do:
Interrogate a primary source
Test reliability and limitation
Distinguish evidence from inference
Build a narrative that respects truth without embellishment
See individuals inside vast historical events
Because history is not just information to absorb. It is a discipline of curiosity, patience, and respect.
A simple lesson rooted in real enquiry
(A classroom or 1:1 activity, ages 9–14)
Starting point
Show one source (for example, a handwritten recollection).
Ask students to split a page into two columns:
What this provesWhat we think might be true but can’t prove
Investigative phase
Provide three source types:
A family account or testimony
An official document
A map showing movement
Ask students to:
Extract 3 facts from each source
Write 2 questions each source raises
Identify 1 limitation per source
Plot movement chronologically on a blank map
Writing prompt
“From the evidence, we can say that…”
(no invented details - inference must be clearly labelled)
Reflection
Why do individual stories matter when studying events involving millions?
What I learned
My grandfather rarely spoke of the war.
But in reconstructing his silence, I found the blueprint for how history should be taught:
Not as a list of answers,
but as a process of discovery.
On this 10th of November, as we prepare for Remembrance, his story reminds me that commemoration is not only about looking back, it is also about equipping the next generation to ask, question, evidence and understand.
Because remembrance is not passive.
It is enquiry.
It is attention.
It is care.