How to Be English Read online

  The fact that Alfred didn’t give up was partly what made him great. There he was, encircled with his followers on the Isle of Athelney, poking out over the waterline in the Somerset Levels, and yet he managed to gather an army, harry the Vikings and eventually defeat them – forcing his opponent Guthrum to become a Christian as part of the peace settlement.

  Alfred was born in 849 in Wantage, into a world that was under threat. The Viking raiders had emerged from the sea to attack the monastic island of Lindisfarne in 793, and from there they went on to take over most of what we now know as England. Like Winston Churchill, Alfred inherited power at the moment of complete disaster, in 870 – but fought his way back to strength.

  The Victorians loved Alfred as the symbol of the Anglo-Saxon race, which they believed was the basis of English greatness, for his wisdom and his books and translations, for founding the English navy and for building the first wharves that turned London into a port. They worshipped the Anglo-Saxons even though they had been pushed aside by a ruling class descended from Norsemen, or ‘Normans’ as they were called by then.

  Yet they loved Alfred also for overcoming adversity – not just the Vikings but continual ill health. There is some evidence that he suffered from Crohn’s disease.

  Yet, even before the Victorian middle classes got hold of his memory, Alfred was a symbol for radical generations before, as the author of what they called the Laws and Liberties of Old England, which had been bundled away into history by William the Conqueror. In fact, Alfred’s laws are a little vague, about keeping oaths and promises – and being able to write in English if you wanted to be a judge. Important in their own way, but not exactly Magna Carta.

  Ironically, given how little has been preserved in writing from this time, Alfred’s son insisted that it was important that laws should be written down so that they should not be ‘brought to naught by the assault of misty oblivion’; a fate Alfred himself has so far managed to avoid, but only just.

  Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.

  Alfred the Great

  THE ALLOTMENT MOVEMENT has become an increasingly popular part of life in England, and a political ideal that began with the Agricultural Labourers’ Strike of 1878. The idea of a small patch of land for the landless stretches back directly to the medieval commons, where ordinary people could use land to graze a cow or provide themselves with basic necessities. It certainly didn’t begin that day of the great farmworkers’ rally in Leamington during the strike, but the demonstration launched the political career of one campaigner in particular who was to make the allotments ideal central to his political life.

  It is nearly a century and a half since Jesse Collings began his bid for ‘three acres and a cow’ for anyone who wanted them. Even at the time, when the campaign reached its height in the 1880s, it seemed politically impossible to provide that amount of land to everyone. His work culminated in the 1908 Allotments and Smallholdings Act, which – for peculiar reasons – Collings actually opposed, and which gave local councils a duty to provide allotments to anyone wanting one.

  There have been bursts of enthusiasm for similar ideas in the century that followed – perhaps not for acres and cows, but for a small strip of land to grow vegetables, to feed the family or to get closer to nature. But now the demand is suddenly unquenchable. There are thought to be about 6 million people interested in having an allotment, with waiting lists as long as forty years in one London borough. It isn’t quite clear why this change of heart occurred, but it may be that the real question is why their popularity ever went away, given the success of the Dig for Victory campaign in the Second World War.

  Going Back to the Land was promoted between the wars by right-wing romantic groups like English Mistery and English Array, and by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Mosley’s enthusiastic acolyte, the novelist Henry Williamson, took it so seriously that he bought a farm in Norfolk and struggled with farming it throughout the war. His agricultural advisor Jorian Jenks – later one of the founders of the Soil Association – urged that Britain should grow all its own food, with fixed prices, low-rate loans for farmers, small-scale farming, and so on.

  These were exactly the policies brought in by the agriculture minister Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith in 1939. Dorman-Smith was a former member of English Mistery, with its opposition to tinned food and the degradation of the soil, and also the architect of Dig for Victory.

  Dig for Victory changed everything. There were 1.4 million allotments by 1943, by which time over a million tonnes of vege-tables a year were being grown in gardens, parks and on wasteland. There were radio programmes (3.5 million people tuned in to C. H. Middleton’s gardening slots), even Dig for Victory anthems. By 1970, only a generation after the end of the war, there were just 530,000 allotments left, and a fifth of those were vacant. What went wrong?

  Perhaps it was the end of rationing in 1954, and the beginning of self-service supermarkets (1950) which ushered in a new sense of plenty. Perhaps the remains of the sturdy working-class image of allotments made them seem old-fashioned. Policymakers had a housing crisis on their hands, and then a balance of payments crisis followed by an energy crisis.

  Maybe that is what went wrong for the allotments movement in the 1950s. Official policy turned against romantic enthusiasm for growing things. Whatever happened, something has now shifted back: and we appear to be going through another period of the most English brand of radicalism of them all – the idea of going Back to the Land.

  I discovered at last, that even in all that labyrinth of the new London by night, there is an unvisited hour of almost utter stillness, before the creaking carts begin to come in from the market gardens, to remind us that there is still somewhere a countryside. And in that stillness, I have sometimes fancied I heard, tiny and infinitely far away, something like a faint voice hailing and the sound of horse hoofs that return.

  William Cobbett

  THERE’S SOMETHING IN the English soul that believes apologies should always be reciprocated. It is important somehow not to be out-apologised, and it is quite possible for the English – especially the middle classes – to pre-empt apologies with agonising politeness when someone treads on their toes or runs into them in the street. Though, of course, they would be deeply offended if the person failed to apologise back.

  Where does this delicacy come from? It isn’t really that the English are any more tentative or nervous than other nations – quite the reverse. But they do hate confrontation, which the pre-emptive, polite apology is designed to avoid. And so the English grasp at opportunities to diffuse or avoid dangerous incidents which risk developing into unseemly fracas. This can give the impression to outsiders that the English are a formal nation. Actually, they can be a good deal less formal than their continental neighbours. It’s just that they don’t like the intimacy of a stand-up row. It is just so embarrassing.

  Puritanism, along with the British stiff upper lip, which appears to have been invented by the Duke of Wellington, perhaps during the long summer evenings of the Peninsular Campaign, have won out over old English spontaneity. But this was not always the case. ‘English girls are divinely pretty and they have one custom which cannot be too much admired,’ wrote Erasmus on a visit to London at the end of the fifteenth century. ‘When you go anywhere on a visit, the girls kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away. They kiss you when you return. Once you have tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you could spend your life there.’ This is not a view of London that has been passed down through history.

  An unfortunate side effect of the culture of the pre-emptive apology is that the English tend to suffer poor service or poor food in silence – not because they don’t resent it (the English moan on with the best of them in the privacy of their own kitchens), but because they don’t like to complain.

  The great English comedienne Joyce Grenfell played the u
ltimate cringe-making complaint scene as the manager of a small guest house in Brighton, in the 1953 film Genevieve. Hot baths are to be procured only between two and four o’clock in the afternoon, she explains to her arriving guests. The room is decorated in brown and opens out on to a deafening chiming clock. When the young couple storm off, the manageress is mortified and turns to the other guests with English horror.

  ‘No one’s ever complained before,’ she says.

  One old lady stares up at the disappearing couple and asks: ‘Are they Americans?’

  How to apologise in English, according to Bloomsbury International English courses:

  Sorry.

  I’m so / very / extremely / terribly sorry.

  How careless of me!

  I shouldn’t have …

  It’s all my fault.

  Please don’t be mad at me.

  I hope you can forgive me / Please forgive me.

  I cannot say / express how sorry I am.

  I apologise for … / I’d like to apologise for …

  Please accept my (sincere) apologies.

  THERE IS A strange paradox about the English global image: on the one hand it is about bucolic self-satisfaction and order (‘There’ll always be an England, while there’s a country lane’); the English are seen to exude tradition and stuffy decorum; and are portrayed in foreign films as stiff idiots or as psychopaths seeking global domination. Yet look at England: there’s an eighty per cent urban population and has been for a century. The English are forerunners in technology, from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet and are pre-eminent in advertising and youth culture.

  When the Beatles emerged from Liverpool with their first hit record in 1962, they embodied this mismatch between the image and reality of England more than anything else, before or since. There was the prime minister, an Edwardian buffer called Harold Macmillan, the changing of the guard, the old men who – as the poet John Betjeman put it – ‘never cheated, never doubted’. Then suddenly, there were these four young men with long hair, who took the hallowed American pop charts by storm, grasped the 1960s by the throat, dominating the psychedelic wave that followed and have been pasting their songs all over our memories ever since. They provided a backdrop to everyone’s lives during the late twentieth century, and way beyond England.

  The paradox goes deeper than that. John Lennon’s middle name was Winston, though he later swapped it for something more appropriate. Paul McCartney’s lyrics for ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ may have shown a delicate understanding of the England of their parents’ generation too – and the simple longing for ‘a cottage in the Isle of Wight / If it’s not too dear’ – but it was McCartney who wrote it; Lennon explained that he would ‘never write a song like that’.

  The band began as the Quarrymen and managed to test out a number of other names – the Blackjacks and Johnny and the Moondogs – before they settled on the Beatles, and Lennon’s friend and early band member Stuart Sutcliffe had his hair cut in the famous style on a trip to Hamburg with the band. They attracted the attention of local record-store owner Brian Epstein in 1962 and the recordings at Abbey Road Studio in London followed. By the autumn of 1963, hundreds of screaming fans greeted them at Heathrow Airport in the rain and Beatlemania had begun.

  The Fab Four (a phrase coined by their press officer Tony Barrow) – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – hit the American market in 1964 and it was in the USA in the summer of that year that the folk singer Bob Dylan introduced them to cannabis (their dentist secretly added LSD to their coffee the following year). It was an important cross-cultural moment. By the time the band broke up, just six years later, they had become the most famous and successful rock group in history, selling around 600 million records.

  Their cultural influence was immense, whether it was the creative flair of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) or any of their later work, but between them they seem to have laid the foundation of a fusion of English and American culture that still resonates.

  Lennon was shot dead in New York in 1980 and Harrison died of cancer in 2001, though the two surviving members of the group continue to play their part in English life – McCartney playing at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concert and Starr narrating Thomas the Tank Engine – another seminal cultural export from the English north-west.

  Beatles statistics:

  Number of Beatles albums sold worldwide: 600m

  Number of copies of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sold in the UK: 4.5m

  Number of No. 1 hits written by McCartney: 32

  Number of Beatles’ songs with a woman’s name in the title: 18

  IF MANY OF the quintessentially English elements listed in this book actually came from somewhere else, the exception is beer. The link between England and beer goes back so far that it actually pre-dates the English themselves, because it was being consumed in these islands for some centuries before the arrival of Hengist, Horsa, Cerdic or any of the other Anglo-Saxons.

  The Celts certainly brewed ale from malt, water and yeast, and the Romans – having sent Caractacus off to Rome – carried on the same tradition. In fact, we even know the name of one Roman brewer. He was called Atrectus the Brewer and he came from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, a place where surviving the winter probably required a great deal of beer-drinking.

  Since this is one tradition that really does go right back, we are forced to conclude that the link between beer and these islands really is something to do with the climate. The key point is that the climate was not, except perhaps until recent years, very good for growing grapes, which ruled out making wine. What else was there to do, in fact, than make beer? The result: they made beer in the most enormous quantities, house by house, pub by pub, and river by river.

  Strictly speaking, this wasn’t actually beer but ale: by definition it could not be beer until hops were added, and – admittedly – this was not an English innovation. In fact, you can almost hear the squalls of protest when the first hopped beer was imported from the Netherlands in the fifteenth century. There was indeed opposition to the idea, but the only regulation was that brewers were not allowed to produce both beer and ale. It had to be one or the other.

  Not only have they been at it for a long time, the English have also always drank a prodigious amount. By the late Middle Ages, this seems to have been an average of sixty to sixty-six gallons a year per head of population – men, women and children. Perhaps this was inevitable when beer was drunk at every meal and was practically the only safe liquid available.

  That was one reason why, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, campaigners like William Cobbett were sharpening their pens at the expense of tea – sapping the moral strength of the nation – and urging people to go back to drinking beer.

  One of the peculiar aspects of English life, well into the twentieth century, was the enormous quantity of beer that was drunk, especially after factory shifts – when anything up to fifteen pints might be drunk by an industrial worker escaping from the furnaces.

  It was in the twentieth century that the traditional English warm beer (actually cellar temperature), and its variations – bitter, mild, brown, India pale, and all the other London specialities, drawn from casks on tap at the bar – began to make way for the array of refrigerated international lagers produced by multinationals.

  The English never made a fuss of their beers. They had no beer festivals like the Americans. They had no Oktoberfests like the Germans. So they stood drinking by the bar without really noticing that their beer companies had been consolidated and consolidated until there was nothing left except global mush. Nor did they realise that much the same was happening to their pub chains.

  One very important innovation for the English came in 1963 with the legalisation of home brewing. At last, it meant that anyone could make their own beer again. In fact, it is here that the English have been masterminding something of a fightback for their own culture – via the mic
robreweries and the brewpubs, where they have been once more brewing their own beer, and via the Campaign for Real Ale that has popularised the insurgency.

  The Rat, meanwhile, was busy examining the label on one of the beer-bottles. ‘I perceive this to be Old Burton,’ he remarked approvingly. ‘Sensible Mole! The very thing! Now we shall be able to mull some ale. Get the things ready, Mole, while I draw the corks.’

  Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)

  THE PEAL OF church bells along a string of different permutations and combinations, known as change ringing, is distinctively English. There are church bells in other countries too, of course, but the practice of ringing them was different in England, partly because the bells were bigger, the bell towers sturdier, and the bells were able to rotate through 180 degrees. It was partly also because of the involvement of seventeenth-century mathematicians – including Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman, whose book Tintinnalogia was published in 1668 – who rescued the whole business of bell-ringing from the Puritans by pointing out the complicated maths involved.

  There have been bells all over Europe since the 1260s. They used to act as the local clock, tolling the hour when people should get up, start work, stop work and go to bed. There are still curfew bells tolled in at least three places around England, including Berwick-upon-Tweed. But it was the English who really took bells to their hearts. There are funeral bells and wedding bells and bells which sound for invasion, which is why bell-ringing was banned from 1940 to 1945. There are ghostly bells which toll from the sea, located offshore at Dunwich and Selsey. There is even a murder mystery about bell-ringing, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors (1934).