Dan Snow


Daniel Robert Snow is a British popular historian and television presenter.

Early life and education

Born in Westminster, Dan Snow is the youngest son of Peter Snow, BBC television journalist, and Canadian Ann MacMillan, managing editor emeritus of CBC's London Bureau; thus he holds dual British-Canadian citizenship. Through his mother, he is the nephew of Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan and also a great-great-grandson of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
One of his father's cousins is the Channel 4 news reporter Jon Snow and his paternal great-grandfather was Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, a British infantry general during World War I.
Snow was educated in London at Westfield Primary School now Barnes Primary and at St Paul's School where he was Captain of School and rowed for its VIII. He then went to Balliol College, Oxford, his father's alma mater, and graduated with first-class honours in Modern History. A keen rower since his secondary school days, he won the U-23 men's division at the 2000 British Indoor Rowing Championships and rowed three times in the Boat Race, winning in 2000 and losing the controversial 2001 Boat Race when President.

Career

Snow presented his first programme in October 2002 just after graduating from university, co-presenting the BBC's 60th anniversary special on the Battles of El Alamein with his father Peter. Father and son then collaborated to present an eight-part documentary series called Battlefield Britain, which aired in 2004 winning a BAFTA Craft Award for special effects. The same year Snow won a Sony award as one of the presenters on the LBC Boat Race coverage.
He has made some history programmes for the BBC. He also presents on many of the state occasions such as the 200th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar, Beating Retreat 2006, the 60th anniversary of the end of World War Two, the 90th anniversary of the Armistice in November 2008, Trooping the Colour and the Lord Mayor's Show. Snow again collaborated with his father to present BBC 2's 20th Century Battlefields and its print edition, which were both well received. The series covers battles all around the world and is presented in similar fashion to the first Battlefield Britain which was broadcast in various markets in 2006 and is available on DVD. The second series can also be viewed on the Military Channel.
In June 2008, Snow was in a three-part series called Britain's Lost World on BBC One. Along with Kate Humble and Steve Backshall, he stayed on the island of St Kilda, Scotland, to find out more about its history and wildlife. In the television programme My Family at War he explored the role of his great-grandfather General Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, who commanded the VII Corps on the first day on the Somme in World War I.
In November 2011 Snow teamed up with the Irish Army to fire a British or Canadian-made Browning Mark II .303" machinegun which he had excavated from a Spitfire that had crashed in Donegal while being flown by Bud Wolfe. Despite having lain in a peat bog for 70 years the machine gun fired without a hitch after careful cleaning and with fresh ammunition.
On 8 December 2012, Snow co-presented Rome's Lost Empire with Dr. Sarah Parcak, a space archaeologist from University of Alabama at Birmingham.
In late 2012 Snow embarked on a promotional tour for his new book Battle Castles: 500 Years of Knights and Siege Warfare, which was published in conjunction with a 6-part documentary he had presented for the History Channel. In early 2013, he presented a programme on the history of railways on BBC Two, called "Locomotion: Dan Snow's History of Railways".
In the summer of 2013 Snow was part of a team with eight others down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in period-correct boats recreating the epic trip by John Wesley Powell through uncharted territory and rapids in 1869. Other British team members accompanied by American experts were Mike Dilger and Sam Willis. The footage, narrated by Dougray Scott, became Operation Grand Canyon with Dan Snow which was broadcast on BBC Two in January 2014.
Snow has also travelled through war zones in Congo and Syria to make programmes about the historical context of those conflicts. These were shown on BBC2 in 2013. Snow has released award-winning apps, the Timeline series, which include the Number 1 selling Reference app, TimelineWW2. He attracted criticism for saying in 2012 that 'apps are simply a better vehicle than books'.
On 7 May 2015, Snow presented the online alternative election night broadcast unelection.
On 27 November 2015 Snow presented a live-streamed Periscope broadcast from the Mary Rose. Gaining exclusive access to the 'hot-box' conservation structure, Snow and his team were the first people, excluding museum staff to inspect the hull of the ship. The broadcast was featured by Periscope and at the time of writing has received in excess of one hundred thousand views. Snow's team pioneered the multi-camera live Periscope, inviting viewers to switch between live-streams.
Since hosting Dan Snow's History Hit from 2015 onwards, which won the iTunes "Best of 2016" Award, Snow has created the "History Hit Network". It features the Histories of the Unexpected, Chalke Valley History Hit and Art Detective podcasts. From 2018, it also included a subscription-based video streaming site, HistoryHit.TV, offering a selection of history documentaries, as well as commissioning their own.

Television

Radio

Awards and honours

Snow was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to history. In 2019 Snow was awarded a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from Lancaster University. Other awards and honours include:
On 27 November 2010, Snow married the criminologist and philanthropist Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor, second daughter of The 6th Duke of Westminster. Their daughter Zia was born in 2011 and their son Wolf Robert in 2014; and another daughter Orla, born after Wolf.
On 18 April 2010, Snow and a few friends took three rigid-hulled inflatable boats from Dover to Calais to help people return to Britain, after they had been stranded in France by the air travel disruption after the Icelandic eruption. When they arrived at Calais they were told by the French authorities to foutez le camp. He did manage to get 25 people back but was unable to return for more.
In August 2011, he chased a group of rioters through Notting Hill in west London before tackling and performing a citizen's arrest on a looter who was fleeing from a shoe shop.
Snow serves as President of the Council for British Archaeology and is a member of the Royal Historical Society. As an atheist and a humanist, he is a Patron of Humanists UK and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. He is also an advocate for political reform, being the Electoral Reform Society's first ambassador. He played a prominent part in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum in the UK; after he released a successful viral video, the campaign used a version of it, featuring him, as their final Referendum Broadcast.
In August 2014, Snow was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue. In June 2019, Snow wrote in a Twitter thread if Brexit happened and if the Scottish National Party won a majority of votes in Scotland, he would "get" why Scottish people would want to have a second referendum, as leaving the European Union could "put up barriers" for Scotland. He was then asked if this meant he now advise Scots to vote for independence, and he replied "No way. One thing Brexit has taught me is the utter insanity of trying to rip countries apart".
Snow is one of sixteen conveners of More United, which plans to support candidates in parliamentary elections that support their values. The movement was set-up "to stand up for our values of opportunity, tolerance, the environment, democracy, and openness" in Summer 2016.