Tickling the English Page 6
‘British’ is an umbrella term for everyone on the island. It’s inclusive and contemporary; it seems unburdened by aspirations of purity or questions of character. ‘British’ is the public going about their business.
‘English’, on the other hand, is where all the trouble lies. Most all of the literature on Englishness is swaddled in nostalgia and wish fulfilment. Every writer on England seems duty bound, for example, to include a list of those traits which they think characterize the country.
In his book on comedy and English identity, A National Joke, Andy Medhurst gives an excellent overview of these ‘Eng-lists’, dating back to a 1924 speech by former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin:
The corncrake on a dewy morning… The wild anemones in the woods in April, the last load at night of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comes on… and, above all, most subtle, most penetrating and most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in the Autumn evening… These are the things that make England.
Now, the first thing that people should have pointed out to Baldwin was that he seemed to have left out the England of towns and factories that most of the English were actually living in. Personally, I would also have pointed out that most of the things he eulogized weren’t especially exclusive to England. Not to labour the point, but the rest of the world has also been enjoying hay, Autumn, smoke and anemones for some time now; and the best place to enjoy corncrakes in the UK is actually the Outer Hebrides.
Nevertheless the pattern was set. George Orwell stepped up to fill the industrial void. For him England was:
The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the toand-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.
Some of which was clearly intended as a rebuke to Baldwin but still feels expressionist and sentimental, like a Lowry painting being slowly read out.
And the lists keep coming.
Andrew Stephen in the New Statesman said, ‘Hearing Mozart’s Fortieth symphony bursting out live from Cheltenham Town Hall, that’s what it means to be English.’
Jeremy Paxman in his book The English filled half a page with:
… village cricket and Elgar, Do-it-yourself, irony, breast obsession, gardening, fish and chips, quizzes and crosswords, country churches, Christopher Wren and Monty Python, bad hotels and good beer…
Even Medhurst himself can’t resist having a go:
… Coronation Street, the Radio Times, seaside piers, the Grand National, Sheringham in Norfolk on a Sunday afternoon, Mansfield in Nottinghamshire on a Friday night, ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by the Smiths…
And so on.
In literature, if you go all the way back, the first person to do this was probably Shakespeare himself, in Richard II:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea.
By the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens was joining in:
There is in the Englishman a combination of qualities, a modesty, an independence, a responsibility, a repose, combined with an absence of anything calculated to call a blush into the cheek of a young person, which one would seek in vain among the Nations of the Earth.
Latterly, John Betjemen gave his take on this eternal question:
For me, England stands for the Church of England, eccentric incumbents, oil-lit churches, Women’s Institutes, modest village inns, arguments about cow-parsley on the altar, the noise of mowing machines on Saturday afternoons, local newspapers, local auctions, the poetry of Tennyson, Crabbe, Hardy and Matthew Arnold, local talent, local concerts, a visit to the cinema, branch-line trains, light railways, leaning on gates and looking across fields: for you it may stand for something else…
Until, finally, like a breath of fresh air, Margaret Drabble changes the tone:
England’s not a bad country… It’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.
All these lists. All these bloody lists. The more of them you read, the more depressing and unfriendly the place appears. The more you’re told definitively what England is, the more barriers seem to slam in front of you.
They’re a shibboleth; a secret handshake between insiders. And if you’re not from here, and don’t like cricket and warm beer, you don’t belong.
By contrast, no one makes a list of what defines Britishness. If you’re here, on the island, you’re in.
Englishness has membership requirements, and expected standards of behaviour. And all these little entrance requirements add up to something far lesser.
‘Englishness’ is basically a golf club.
It’s a small, provincial golf club, no jeans on the tee, and no ladies in the bar, please.
All the people who wail about English identity and complain that it is constantly being eroded are like the membership secretaries of this golf club, with their insistence on a dress requirement and etiquette and teeing-off times.
And, like all golf clubs, they massively overestimate the clamour outside of people trying to get in.
As long as they keep these ridiculous lists going, the rest of the island will stick with being British.
This is part of the great personality split across this entire island. Not Celt and Anglo-Saxon, not North and South. There is a more fundamental schism, one greater battle between the two sides of the psyche.
On the one hand, we have the Pragmatics. This is the majority of the country, which gets stuff done. The NHS, the BBC, a strong multicultural society; all the institutions and achievements that mark out a successful modern nation.
On the other hand, we have the Romantics. These are the vocal minority who think things just aren’t as great as they used to be; the nostalgia peddlers; the hell-in-a-handbasket merchants. The NHS, the BBC, the disaster of multiculturalism; all the evidence of a society in decline.
Sometimes, the entire country’s views on certain topics fall completely into one camp or the other.
For example, Irish people, being in most cases only a generation or two away from the farm, tend to regard animals in a fairly practical way. They’re there to be eaten, petted or, occasionally, ridden round a track for cash.
England, which is a largely urban, industrialized nation, pining for an illusory rural past, treats the animal kingdom with an astonishing amount of sentiment. Just look how many of the classic animal stories are primarily concerned with the idea of a natural idyll under threat from modernization: Black Beauty, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, Tarka the Otter, Watership Down, even Born Free.
George Orwell was smart enough to place his fable about communism on a farm, since he knew the English reader would instinctively side against his own species. It’s the same reason that the dog is the real brains of the Wallace and Gromit operation. Gromit is also the public face of the Kennel Club’s ‘Good Citizen Dog Scheme’, the largest dog-training scheme in the United Kingdom. The scheme’s aim is to ‘promote responsible dog ownership and enhance our relationship with our pets’. It says a lot that the Kennel Club suggests that one of the main questions the course will answer is ‘How do you learn to live with your new dog?’
There’s no suggestion that a dog-training course might teach the bloody dog to live with you.
Charles Darwin didn’t cause an uproar just because he killed God; he also pointed out that all of nature, right down to the beautiful pastoral symphony of birdsong was a vicious do-or-die struggle for existence. It�
�s no wonder the Victorians were aghast: four legs good, two legs bad.
(Unless you’re a fox, of course. Reynard is the great loser in the English fairytale of the countryside. His PR has been so bad that having him torn apart by a pack of dogs has been sold as victory for heritage and romance. Poor old things. No wonder they’ve moved into the city. When city dwellers have to clear vermin, they don’t get dressed up in red velvet jackets, fill their hip flasks and make a day out of it. No one in London goes, ‘Darling, there’s a mouse in the kitchen. Fetch my tuxedo.’)
Consider also the English ability to emphasize the tragedy for animals even amidst horrendous human events – the horrified reaction to the IRA’s bombing of the Horse Guards in 1982, or the hoax bombing of the Grand National in 1997, as if somehow targeting horses was a new low, rather than of relatively limited importance given the human damage inflicted. When one of the horses that survived the Horse Guards bombing died in June 2004, he got his own story on the BBC and this tribute from his commanding officer: ‘[Yeti was] the epitome of a grand old gentleman, increasingly frail but never losing his zest for life and never, ever forgetting his manners.’ It’s as if the English have projected on to their animals the values they fear are disappearing from their own society.
The RSPCA is one of the largest charities in England and was the first charity of its kind in the world. It was founded in 1824 by a group which included anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, and became ‘Royal’ when Queen Victoria lent her authority to it in 1840. There is again here the odd juxtaposition that at the same time that England was involved in widespread barbarism in the name of Empire (Irish readers won’t need to be reminded what our priorities were in the 1840s), she was also taking time out to tell people to be nicer to animals.
These days, the RSPCA raises around £100 million a year, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) brings in about the same. In comparison, Help the Aged and Age Concern both raise about £80 million each annually. And the RSPCA and RSPB are just two of the hundreds of animal-welfare charities in existence. The Charity Choice website in the UK has records for 633 animal charities, compared to 362 for the aged, 211 for the blind, and 374 for mental health. In 2006, animal charities raised 5 per cent of the total money donated to charities in the UK, the same percentage as the combined disability charities, and a little more than half of the total brought in by the entire field of child and youth charities.
You love animals. You fund, feed, mourn and happily over-anthropomorphize animals. They are an excellent example of the Romantic side of the English personality.
Religion, on the other hand, falls into the Pragmatic. It’s not like you haven’t had turmoil; the destruction of the monasteries, Queen Mary burning three hundred Protestant martyrs, Guy Fawkes, Cromwell and the Penal Laws. These days, though, religion plays next to no real role in English life.
In an EU survey in 2006, less than half of the people surveyed in the United Kingdom said religion was important in their life, and that figure would have been even lower if it hadn’t included Northern Ireland, parts of Scotland, and the Hindi, Sikh and Muslim communities. Twice as many people said leisure time was important in their life. The English just don’t do God. Excessive religious fervour is worrying to them. This is one of the main reasons the Muslim reaction to The Satanic Verses shocked the United Kingdom, and why they find it so hard to understand the Northern Ireland question.
Perhaps Henry VIII sums up the English attitude to religion fairly well: he was happy enough with Catholicism until he hit the practical snag that it meant he couldn’t divorce. So he invented a new religion, essentially the same as Catholicism, but with him in charge. His personal religious practices and beliefs changed hardly at all.
There is a lot of this pragmatism in the British approach to religion. In 2008, the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, refused to condemn parents who pretended to be religious in order to get into better performing local faith schools. ‘I think it’s good for parents who want the best for their kids,’ said Cameron. ‘I don’t blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school. I believe in active citizens.’
Even if ‘active’ means ‘bluffing a vicar’.
I may be a long-time-lapsed Catholic, but I still find it a bit strange to be watching the fireworks on Guy Fawkes night, something that’s rarely noted elsewhere. It may be an anti-Catholic holiday, but that’s no reason to deny the kids a bonfire and some sparklers. Technically, a Catholic can’t become monarch of Britain, but even the Royals don’t seem that bothered any more. Prince Charles once said that, when he became king, he hoped to become a ‘Defender of Faith’ rather than ‘Defender of the Faith’. Does the monarchy need an Obama moment? Does anyone care?
Besides, there might not be that much faith for Charles to defend. Almost 8.6 million people in Great Britain, or 15 per cent of the population, said that they had no religion at all in the 2001 census. A further 4.4 million, or 8 per cent, chose not to fill out that question. It says a lot about the country that they had this option: the question specifying religion was the only voluntary one on the census, a clear signal that officialdom, although quite happy to ask you any number of other personal questions, knew to stop short of demanding a window into your soul.
(By way of comparison, in the 2006 Irish census, 94 per cent of the nation said they had a religion, with just 4.4 per cent saying they had no religion and 1.7 per cent refusing to answer. And this is the most secular generation in Ireland since Catholicism arrived.)
Mind you, in the 2001 census, 390,000 people (0.7 per cent of the population) put their religion down as Jedi. This means that there are more nerds in the United Kingdom than there are Sikhs, although obviously the Sikhs would win in a fight. In some ways, this is a silly story, but in another sense there is something intrinsically English about it. Freedom of religion is so taken for granted that it can be the subject of an elaborate practical joke (the vote was a response to an online campaign). The fact that the census enumerators ended up counting the number who wrote down Jedi also suggests a very real commitment to giving other people’s religious beliefs respect, even if both you and they know that it’s really a bit ridiculous. The results of this campaign were revealed in a press release from the Office of National Statistics entitled ‘390,000 Jedis There Are’.
In Scotland, only 14,038 people declared their religion as Jedi but, worryingly, another 14 described themselves as ‘Sith’. These people must be watched.
In his book Hope and Glory, the historian Peter Clarke takes issue with the idea that the history of Britain in the last century is one of decline. Instead, he says, the country’s journey in the twentieth century was replacing a misguided idea of greatness with a more rational and humane one. The British, in other words, would forsake their empire and become instead a great society.
Possibly, the price of a great society is being about fifth. Sometimes greatness lies in humility. After all, the greatest list of all time wasn’t from one of your poets.
‘England, birthplace of giants,’ it began. ‘Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana.’
These were the words of Bjorge Lillelien, Norwegian football commentator, on the occasion of their defeat of the England team in a qualifier in Oslo in 1981. He continued:
‘We have beaten them all. We have beaten them all. Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating.’
See? Some people would be thrilled to be fifth.
Chapter 6:
Only When I Laugh
Yeovil Octagon Theatre
1 man from the audit commission
1 head teacher of a primary school:
‘Ever tempted to give the kids a really solid kick up the arse?’
‘No.’
1 man who works in Tesco
1 retired naval lawyer
Yeovil is
a peaceful town, set amidst the bucolic Somerset countryside, a serenity only interrupted by the sudden roar of helicopters overhead from the nearby Westland factory. I’m telling you, it’s like the last days of Saigon here sometimes.
The last time I was here, I noticed that one shop had a large ring of security guards around it. I asked who was so important that they needed all the security. And, thrilled by the answer, I went and did the show. A week later, my agent received this brilliant email:
From: Simon Frackiewicz
Date: Mon 20 November 2006 18:44:01
Subject: Dara O Briain
Hi [Dara’s Agent],
I was hoping to pass a message of thanks to Dara following his recent stand-up show in Yeovil, Somerset. Whilst on his pre-show walkabout, he happened to pass by my company, Robert Frith Optometrists, where the local football team, Yeovil Town, was having a photoshoot to publicize our becoming their official opticians.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend his show myself, however I later learned from a number of my staff and patients that this is something Dara picked up on and mentioned several times during his show.
Being a small town, such publicity is of great value, and I simply wished to pass on my gratitude for having increased the awareness of our independent opticians.
In the event that Dara should find himself in the West Country again, I would be delighted to offer him a complimentary eye examination by way of thanks.