He is the BBC presenter who has brought a soupçon of sex appeal to history on TV with his enthusiasm and boyish charm.
And it is immediately clear why Dan Snow, now a regular on the BBC’s One Show, has won over the hearts of viewers with his passion for the past.
The former champion rower is brimming with excitement as we chat about his passion for historic battle castles, his love of railways and his need to understand the past, something of a family characteristic.
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The 34-year-old will be sharing his stories at an event set up by organisers of Stratford Literary Festival, who have put together an autumn programme bringing even more established names to the town during this month and next.
“I have spent a lot of time in Warwickshire and am going to be talking about some of the industrial history of Coventry and Birmingham,” Dan explains.
“I dug up a Spitfire machine gun made in Birmingham buried in a 1941 Spitfire crash site in an Irish peat bog in Donegal – and it still worked perfectly. We filmed it for The One Show.”
Back in 2011, Dan was in Stratford broadcasting a live archaeological dig on the site of William Shakespeare’s last home, next door to Nash’s Place. Between March 2010 and November 2012 the site at New Place was excavated in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, in an attempt to discover more about Shakespeare’s story.
“Shakespeare returned to his home and ended up becoming an affluent figure. I didn’t realise how long that house had survived, it was only recently pulled down. The excavation discovered more of him as a man. It’s extraordinary.” Dan thought it was “very cool” when researchers behind the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? programme discovered his family descended from the Earl of Southampton, a patron of Shakespeare and allegedly his lover.
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Dan belongs to one of Britain’s most distinguished broadcasting families. He is the youngest son of BBC journalist and former Newsnight presenter Peter Snow and Canadian-born Ann MacMillan, managing editor of CBC London Bureau. His father’s cousin is the Channel 4 news anchorman Jon Snow, while his aunt is the Oxford historian Margaret Macmillan.
“Our family gatherings do get heated. With everyone yelling – it’s utter chaos,” Dan says, laughing.
Understandably being the great, great grandson of former British Prime Minister Lloyd George and a First World War general, Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow, Dan developed an early fascination with history, particularly military history. This interest was fuelled by family stories.
“It’s quite fun knowing the old fella was a general. He thought trees were better then tanks,” he explains. “My great grandfather fought at Gallipoli and was almost killed there and my other Canadian great grandfather fought in the trenches at Ypres. You understand that they are not special, just people caught up in it. My Canadian grandpa was in the Second World War. He and my grandmother would tell me all these vivid, funny and bizarre stories.”
Dan and his father Peter worked together on BBC2’s Bafta-winning Battlefield Britain.
Dan graduated with a double first-class honours degree in modern history from Balliol College, Oxford. It was there that he studied military history, specialising in the First World War. He also excelled at rowing and rowed three times in the University Boat Race. He was in the winning crew in 2000 and captain in 2001.
Dan’s 2012 book, Battle Castles, tied in with a TV series on the History Channel of the same name, and explored the building of these epic structures and the bloody weapons used to defeat them. The young broadcaster has also spent time researching the history behind many local castles, including Kenilworth Castle and Warwick Castle. Earlier this year he presented Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History of Railways on BBC2 and last month Dan Snow’s History of Congo.
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He says travelling across the Congo and meeting “rape victims, rebels, bloated politicians and haunted citizens” was one of the most disturbing experiences of his career.
“We were in rebel-controlled territory. It’s very sad. It’s one of the world’s poorest and most troubled countries. You see how the world would have been many years ago – no infrastructure and no coherent government. The bloodshed, horror, anarchy and violence is a direct product of decisions and actions taken over the past five centuries,” he says.
* An Evening With Dan Snow is on November 13 at Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon, starting 7.30pm. Tickets £18.50. Ring 01789 207100 or go to .
* Pioneering evolutionary biologist, atheist and author Richard Dawkins will be in conversation with The Times columnist and broadcaster Matthew Parris at The Courtyard Theatre on December 17.