Best of British

[Entsuropi]

this is probably only of interest to british (unsurprisingly). the question is : who is the greatest briton?  the list is as follows

Isambard Kingdom Brunel {railway guy}
Winston Churchill {war leader, historian, politician guy}
Oliver Cromwell {civil war guy, bad guy}
Charles Darwin {biologist guy}
Diana, Princess of Wales {royal woman guy}
Queen Elizabeth I {virgin queen guy}
John Lennon {singer guy}
Horatio Nelson {admiral, war hero guy}
Sir Isaac Newton {physicist guy}
William Shakespeare {boring guy}

who gets your vote, and why?
oh and if any non brits wanna join in, just do a search on google for anyone you dont know, or just vote for lennon. i know you want to.

[House of Mustard]

Greatest in what sense?  Most influential?

[Fellfrosch]

No offense to anyone, but including Diana and John Lennon on that list seems pretty silly--and this is coming from an unrestrained Beatles maniac. I just don't think they've done half as much as some of the others.

It's a very tough call among most of the others, though I haven't heard of the railway guy so I can't comment on him. Churchill and Elizabeth were both incredible, and Darwin and Newton contributed a lot to our understanding of the world. Despite his label of boring guy, however, I'm going to go with Shakespeare on this one. Few people in any country, let alone England, have done as much as Shakespeare to influence the way we think and act and communicate. His accomplishments are practically unbelievable, though I'm sure some people see him only as a grade school annoyance. In the end it comes down to this--our language and culture would be utterly different without Shakespeare, and I don't know if you can say that about anyone else on the list (well, maybe Elizabeth and Cromwell, but not to the same extent).

[House of Mustard]

I agree entirely about Diana and Lennon.  Diana was more of a charitably minded celebrity than a truly influential person, and Lennon has greatly influenced culture, but only for a brief period of time.  No one can reasonably argue that Lennon has had even a tenth of the cultural influence Shakespeare had.

That said, my vote goes to Isambard Brunel.  Without his influence in the engineering of transportation, the face of the industrial revolution would be radically different.  Imagine the settlement of the western USA without the railroad.  Imagine the Mississippi without steamships.  His work on bridges helped cross both Europe and Asia.

Shakespeare may have made more changes to the grammer world but, in my mind, connecting the nations of the world in preparation for the 20th century was much more important.

[Entsuropi]

i have to disagree about the sentiment that shakespeare has changed the way we act and think. how has he? im not arguing about changes to language mind you.

brunel i know very little about, despite having done a large section of my history GCSE about how railways came in. we just didnt do him.

cromwell gets my vote i think, simply because hes such an interesting guy. anybody who dared to have a king executed, and was post-humously hung and quartered (said kings son was a bit bitter i think) has got to be interesting. although if Charles 1st, the king he got rid of was on the list hed get my vote on the same grounds. not a very smart guy, but interesting all the same.

on a side note, its interesting that Nelson, who defeated the french armarda in 1805, preventing a invasion of britain (taking a fatal wound in the process) gets on the list while the Duke of wellington, who actually defeated Napoleon (sp?) at the battle of waterloo, fails to. evidently we brits like a guy who dies in the process line of fire. either that or the column he has in trafalgar square in london has an effect.

[Slant]

My personal favorite is Churchill, but the most important ones on the list are Darwin and Newton.  Sheesh, a list of the most important Brits and Benny Hill doesn't even make the cut.

[House of Mustard]

I have to argue with you Slant.  Not to start a philosophical discussion or anything, but I don't think Newton and Darwin are all that important.  They came up with ideas and theories, but never really did anything.  Gravity is a solid undisputed fact and evolution (Darwin's version) is almost universally accepted as fact.  Evolution and gravity exist whether or not anyone figures them out.  If Newton hadn't figured it out, someone else would have sooner or later.

On the other hand, people like Churchill and Brunel and Shakespeare did things that only they could do.  Granted, if Churchill wasn't PM during WWII, the allies probably still could have won and if Shakespeare didn't write plays, there would be some other master playwright we would study in high school.  The difference is that they did important things at important times.  Certainly trains would have eventually crisscrossed the world, but Brunel made it happen at a critical time.

As a side note, I'm not a fan of Churchill.  I think he did a lot of good things, but a whole pile of idiotic ones as well.  He was obsessed with preserving the British Empire to the point of nearly breaking up the Allies.  and outside of the war, he was practically worthless.

I'm not so sure about Benny Hill, but what about Rowan Atkinson?

[Slant]

Rowan Atkinson was a strong contender up until he agreed to be in Scooby Doo.

[House of Mustard]

Oh.  I didn't know that.  He's right out.

[Mr_Pleasington]

In retrospect it's funny that the two people that pretty much no one wanted on the list (Lennon and Di) were the ones that made it.  Kind of silly since it's far too soon to see if they will have any long standing impact on Britain.

My vote, and I'm bucking the trend here, Charles Darwin gets my vote.  I'm horribly biased though, being a biology degree holder and all.

'Ole Chuck gets a really bad rap as most of the people give him all the baggage that comes along with evolution.  Darwin did not come up with evolution, in fact, evolution was never even mentioned in Origin of Species (at least not in the context we take it if it was).  What Darwin contributed was the theory of natural selection, the basis which underlies evolution.  It's beautiful, it's elegant, and it is the window through which we view all of modern biology.  Religious fanatics have tarnished the legacy of this great man, and his theories don't even directly conflict with Creationism...in my opinion they make a stronger case for a supreme being, if anything.  Errrrr...rant over.

Also interesting to note is that if Darwin wouldn't have come along and published OoS, a man by the name of Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist and big game hunter, would have been given the credit (and baggage) or the theory of Natural Selection.  Both Darwin and Wallace came up with the theory at about the same time and even had correspondence about the subject...Darwin just beat him to the punch (and rather underhandedly, I might add).

It's actually a bit worrisome that the human race is no longer under the constraints of natural selection, but instead under social selection...but that's a whole 'nother rant.

While Darwin is pretty high on my "cool" list, my biology superheroes are Watson and Crick, the gentlemen who discovered the structure of DNA and revolutionized genetics.  Crick was British...he should be on the list

[House of Mustard]

I have to argue with you Pleasington, but it's pretty much the same argument I made against Slant.

You yourself admit that if Darwin had been a little bit slower, somebody else would have beaten him to the punch.  

My thinking is that, since Natural Selection is a law of nature, and since Darwin didn't invent it, he just was the first to figure it out, he can't be the most influential Britton.

If it wasn't for Oliver Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution (the reults of which greatly influenced America's founding fathers) may not have been so Glorious.  If it wasn't for Brunel, the colonization of the corners of the world would have been greatly slowed.  They were the right people at the right time and they changed the face of history.

Darwin figured out some really neat things, but they would have been figured out eventually.

[Mr_Pleasington]

Mustard, I see your point, but if what you say holds true then you rob virtually every scientist who'd come along of any of their thunder.  Plus, I don't think that "someone else would have figured it out" holds true most of the time.  In some cases, certainly, but in others it was only the right person in the right place.  Look at how microwaves and penicillin were discovered...completely by accident.  If someone else had been there to observe the phenomenon, they might have merely ignored it or not drawn any meaningful conclusions.  If someone beside Cromwell had taken the reigns, things woudn't have been as "glorious."  It's the same thing.

Darwin and Wallace are a special case.  It's rare that theories like that develop concurrently (Calculus is the only other thing I can can think of that developed this way).  Plus, Natural Selection is a theory, not a natural law, in that by its nature it can never be proven, only supported or disproven.  

Plus, your argument works against you just as easily.  Even without Brunel, colonization would have eventually happened, just at a slower rate.  

I agree with you that greatness requires the right person in the right place at the right time, but it applies universally.  

[House of Mustard]

Okay.  I admit that there are many scientists that are more important in the grand scheme of things than Brunel was or even Shakespeare.  But Newton and Darwin aren't.

Darwin:  Because someone else came up with it at the same time.

Newton:  Because it didn't immeadiatly affect anything.  He was not the "right man at the right time."  He died thinking that some experiments he did with light were his greatest acheivment.  Anyone else could have come along and figured out gravity and things would be pretty much the same.

As far as Brunel, my point is that he needed to be there at that specific time.  He pushed and developed railroads at a time when they were vitally important.  Here's an example:  Most historians believe that the Civil War was won because of the vast industrialization of the north compared to the south.  Imagine if both sides were on equal footing, industrially speaking.
Or, what if the Orient Express wasn't there to join western europe with the middle east?  What would things be like in Turkey and Israel today if they hadn't been dominated for a century by britain and france?

Brunel changed the world single handedly, whether for good or bad.  If he hadn't been there, there would have certainly been other railroad industrialists, but would they have had the same drive and inspiration?

The same argument works for Shakespeare - what other plays from the 1600's are even performed, let alone shaped a language?

[Mr_Pleasington]

Like I said before, Mustard, you do raise interesting points here.  However, it seems that you and I have different criteria for what makes one great.  

Well met!

[House of Mustard]

True.  Several lists like this have popped up on the forum about the greatest this and the worst that, but no criteria is ever given.  I guess that's so the lists will incite argument.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know who Horatio Nelson is?  I have a vague idea , but I'm too lazy to look it up.