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Best of British

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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.

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