How to Be English Read online

  Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, 15 April 1802

  THERE IS AN unexpected side of the English which can tolerate absolute disorder, as long as they can win. It is true of all those wild, courageous and hare-brained schemes devised by young officers in successive world wars. It is certainly true when England play football. It is also true in their peculiar enjoyment of financial hubbub.

  So cast your mind back to the heyday of the East India Company, in the 1690s, when London’s coffee houses became the chaotic centre of news, gossip and financial speculation. After the end of the Licensing Act in 1695, coffee houses began publishing newspapers themselves, just as the newspaper proprietors began to set up a rival chain of coffee houses. The result was the cacophony of gin, and riotous wheeler-dealing, as portrayed in contemporary prints.

  Into this maelstrom strode a particularly English type, the semi-corrupt financial buccaneer. The model in this case was Sir Josiah Child, the former brewer from Portsmouth, who arrived in the financial markets, his baronetcy purchased, his pockets filled with nuggets of information, financial and otherwise, for dispensing where useful, to propel himself into a position of unparalleled corporate and financial power.

  This is how the pamphleteer Daniel Defoe described his activities:

  Does Sir Josiah sell or buy? If Sir Josiah had a mind to buy, the first thing he did was to commission his brokers to look sower, shake their heads, suggest bad news from India; and at the bottom it followed, ‘I have commission from Sir Josiah to sell out whatever I can’, and perhaps they would actually sell ten, perhaps twenty thousand pound … and initiated the crowd of jobbers into that dexterity on tricking and cheating one another, which to this day they are the greatest proficients in that this part of the world ever saw.

  Child famously managed to bribe James II with £10,000, and used his influence to turn the East India Company into a financial and military powerhouse. No more would the company be the timid supplicant to eastern potentates, and monopolistic Dutch and Portuguese trading empires. ‘John Company’ would arm itself and found its own empire in India, and defend it with force of arms. To do that, it would need full monopoly powers, which is where bribery came in.

  The East India Company has a central place in the history of the corporation, and in English financial history, with its striped red and white flag – probably the original of the Stars and Stripes. It had begun in a joint venture by London merchants, given the blessing of Elizabeth I in 1599 and called the Company of Merchant Venturers Trading with the East Indies.

  It was the East Indies and not India where they were bound, because England was still at war with Portugal and Spain and the English ships would have to circumnavigate India without landing there. And so it was that a small fleet of six ships set sail in 1601, led by the 600-ton Red Dragon, bound for the spice islands.

  The commander, James Lancaster, carried with him six letters from the Queen, with the names left blank, for the names of the foreign potentates to be filled in. They were greeted in Sumatra eighteen months later by the local ruler, who had heard recently about the defeat of the Spanish Armada and was anxious to acquaint himself with Englishmen. When they arrived back in London, there was a new king on the throne, Lancaster was knighted, and the East India Company was established.

  The company went on to rule more of the populous nations of India and beyond, with a large private army to collect taxes. The two greatest employees of the company, Clive of India and Warren Hastings, had to account for their actions to Parliament back in London, but it didn’t stop the company from growing more and more powerful. At the height of the company’s 274 years in business, it controlled nearly half of world trade, employing some of the most fertile minds of the Georgian and Victorian ages as well – including John Stuart Mill, Thomas Love Peacock and Robert Malthus. It was probably the first global corporation that ever seemed too big to fail.

  But it did fail in 1858, following the trauma of the Indian Mutiny, and its assets were nationalised to the British Crown, handing India and much of the East to the British Empire. It is now a byword for greed, imperialism, and the kind of slavery which comes from taxing people who have no income. But it is other things too: a romantic dream of the East and some explanation for the strange English yearning for the Orient.

  There was always something magic, queer, unaccountable about it [the East India Company]. Clive knew perhaps what it was, but he died mysteriously and never said what he knew. The facts can always be collected. The ledgers and Minute books are all extant and can be read. Great modern cities, Calcutta, Bombay, even Delhi, can be visited. The evidences of the company lie scattered about Europe and Asia. Yet one has an odd feeling that the Company was not exactly that, and that the attempt to make the East mercantile on the European model ended by altering Europe and leaving the East, under the surface, untouched.

  R. H. Mottram (1883–1971), novelist and former mayor of Norwich

  OCCASIONALLY IN THE course of 1903, the year of the birth of Typhoo Tea, the Daily Mirror and the Suffragettes, a small group of friends and churchmen began meeting at the vicarage of St Mary’s, in Primrose Hill in London, to talk about the terrible state of English hymns. It was hardly surprising that, after several discussions, they had decided to launch a new hymn book for the Church of England.

  They were led by Canon Percy Dearmer, a vicar and committed Christian socialist who – in the great division inside the Anglican Church – was definitely on the ‘high’ side, committed to ritual rather than too much sermonising. The problem for Dearmer and his friends was that the only thing they liked about the existing market leader in hymn books, Hymns Ancient and Modern, was its deep maroon covers, in an era when most Bibles, prayer books and hymn books were implacably black. They didn’t like its sentimentality or its Victorian air of judgement, and they disliked the implication that hymns were somehow an extension of the sermon, rather than part of the liturgy. It was time for something new.

  The result was The English Hymnal – so English that the covers were green – which has been the mainstay of Anglicanism ever since. Dearmer included Blake’s controversial hymn ‘To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love’ after much argument within the group, as well as his own hymn – the mainstay of English primary education – ‘Jesus Good Above All Other’. He also divided the hymns up according to the major events of the Christian year – a vital element of high Anglicanism – and by doing so, contributed to the almighty row that ensued when it was published on Ascension Day 1906. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, even expressed the hope that it would never be used.

  But it was, and one of the main reasons was the music. Ignoring the qualms of his friends about including Blake, Dearmer drew on the considerable skills of a well-known agnostic to take charge of the music. Ralph Vaughan Williams, later the much-loved composer of England’s favourite piece of classical music, ‘The Lark Ascending’, made The English Hymnal a labour of love. He was famous for his pioneering collection of folk music – in fact, the headquarters of the English Folk Song Society is still just around the corner from Dearmer’s parish church – and carefully wove together some of the best English hymns with some of the best traditional English music.

  ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’ was set to the folk tune called ‘Kingsfold’. There was new music too: Christina Rossetti’s ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, with music specially commissioned from Gustav Holst, was sung for the first time in Primrose Hill at Christmas 1905.

  Dearmer included new hymns from people active in social issues, like Canon Henry Scott Holland’s ‘Judge Eternal Throned in Splendour’ and G. K. Chesterton’s ‘God of Earth and Altar’. He cut out some of the objectionable lines and verses, including ‘The rich man at his castle’ from ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

  His objective had been to make his hymn book absolutely universal, and he succeeded. You can still find copies of it all over the world, from Palestine to every corner of the African continent, one of the
most enduring legacies of the empire On Which the Sun Never Set – partly a legacy of that very empire, of course. But Dearmer was being a little disingenuous: he also had an agenda. It was hardly surprising that the archbishop was upset – Dearmer wanted the church to have more ritual and liturgy, and to spread the use of the hymns as widely as possible – not as adjuncts to sermons, but as part of the changing seasons and the changing shape of the services. Not everyone approved.

  ‘I think, at last, the people are beginning to join in that hymn,’ one of Dearmer’s curates told the organist at one stage.

  ‘Oh! Then I’ll change it,’ he said, nervous of the congregation spoiling the perfect music. It was a frustrating business, but there is no doubt that Dearmer won his battle. The English Hymnal is now part of the furniture of England, and the English psyche. The culture is stiff with the phrases from his hymns, from ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ to ‘Christ is Made the Sure Foundation’. We know the words, even if we have never been inside a church in our lives.

  And all must love the human form,

  In heathen, Turk, or Jew;

  Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,

  There God is dwelling too.

  The controversial verse of William Blake’s hymn ‘To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love’ which divided the progenitors of The English Hymnal

  THEY SAY THAT good fences make good neighbours, so the English Channel has made good neighbours of the French and the English. But since the nations emerged, the two of them have managed to continue a healthy rivalry, however close they might be geographically or politically.

  It works both ways: the English make fun of French emotional logic; the French make fun of English food and stuffy English pomposity. Sometimes this rivalry reaches some worrying extremes. Sometime during the Napoleonic Wars, it isn’t quite clear when, except that the fear of a French invasion was running high, a French warship was wrecked off the beach of Hartlepool in a storm. The sole survivor who struggled ashore turned out to be a monkey, dressed as a Napoleonic sailor. The locals, convinced that this was what the mythical French looked like, hanged the money from the mast of its own wreck. Or so it is said.

  There are a number of peculiar things about this story. One is that, if the locals really thought this was what the French looked like, then it may say more about Hartlepool than it does about English attitudes towards their Gallic neighbours. The other is that, if it happened at all, there have been suggestions that this was not actually a monkey at all, but a ‘powder monkey’, in other words, a boy. That would make the monkey incident a war crime.

  Even so, the people of Hartlepool seem oblivious to this kind of darkness, and celebrate the incident by calling themselves the ‘monkey-hangers’. The local football team Hartlepool United has a mascot called H’Angus the Monkey, and the goalkeeper used to hang it from the goalmouth in key matches. When a local student called Stuart Drummond stood for election as the town’s mayor dressed as H’Angus in 2002, he was elected (and was re-elected twice more).

  The reason this rather unpleasant story continues to have resonance is that Francophobia, or a mild dislike – or at least rivalry – with the French is part of the heritage of the English. They are hardly the only nation to share this trait – even the Americans had a burst of dislike for the French in the run-up to the Iraq War – but the English revel in it. Is it because of their differences?

  Well, yes and no. Yes, the phlegmatic English, with their drizzle and execrable food, are certainly different from those excitable French. But no, the French language was partly incorporated into English thanks to the Norman invasion in 1066. Also, as well as putting up with countless English invasions during the medieval period – and a continuing English fascination for battles like Crècy, Agincourt and the Nile – there have been two moments in history (1421 and 1940) when England and France came within a whisker of merger. That was Winston Churchill’s proposal after the fall of Paris to the Nazis.

  The rivalry is also tempered by our huge admiration of the French, for their bistros and for their patisseries, and the smells of authentic shopping in every small village – for the smell of baking bread and sweat – and for their relaxed attitudes to extramarital affairs.

  Somehow the exasperation of the French and English became embodied in the person of President Charles de Gaulle, who was a rather unwelcome, and slightly humourless, arrival in London in June 1940, and who still managed to veto British membership of the European Economic Community (as it was then) in 1963 and 1967.

  There is a story told in Westminster of de Gaulle’s state visit to England in 1960, when at a formal dinner in the House of Lords the French president looked up during his meal to find himself staring at a huge painting of the Battle of Waterloo. It is said that he grabbed his plate and stormed round to the other side of the table, only to look up again and find himself staring at an enormous painting of the Battle of Trafalgar.

  That story tells you everything you need to know about Francophobia. It is more a sensitivity and rivalry between allies – and the French have been English allies now since the Crimean War – than it is outright hatred. It is less blind dislike and more grudging entente cordiale, the 1904 side effect of Edward VII’s love of the fleshpots of Paris.

  But still the English can shake their heads at extraordinary examples of French sensitivity, and the French can shake their heads in despair and remind themselves of the boneheaded English headline: FOG IN CHANNEL – CONTINENT CUT OFF.

  In former times, when war and strife

  The French invasion threaten’d life

  An’ all was armed to the knife

  The fishermen hung the monkey O!

  The fishermen with courage high,

  Seized on the monkey for a French spy;

  ‘Hang him!’ says one; ‘he’s to die’

  They did and they hung the monkey Oh!

  They tried every means to make him speak

  And tortured the monkey till loud he did speak;

  Says yen ‘that’s French’ says another ‘it’s Greek’

  For the fishermen had got drunky Oh!

  Ned Corvan, the Tyneside music-hall artist, c.1850

  THE TERM ‘THE full Monty’ has become somewhat ambiguous. One of its many meanings is a ‘full English’, which means in effect a full English breakfast – the only recognisably, unambiguously English contribution to international cuisine.

  There is something comfortably luxurious about a full English breakfast, in its complete failure to compromise with the modern standards for healthy eating or efficient throughput of guests through a given dining room. It takes ages to cook, takes ages to eat and takes months off your life with every bite, thanks to the lashings of cholesterol. It is boneheadedly, determinedly what it is – which is, let’s not beat around the bush, fried eggs, fried bread, fried mushrooms, baked beans, fried tomatoes, sausages and great wedges of bacon.

  Depending on where you are, those wedges of bacon may have shrunk somewhat as the water evaporates. There may also be a snippet of black pudding. There may be hash browns, though there is some controversy about the hash browns, which are strictly speaking an American addition.

  There is some evidence that combining these elements into one extravagant dish goes back as far as the eighteenth century, which is pushing it since modern industrial bacon was hardly developed until then (in Wiltshire, or so they claim). Before that, English breakfasts normally involved bread, meat and ale. Even in the nineteenth century, Mrs Beeton was including additions like chops and potted fish in the mix. Parson James Woodforde, who wrote more about what he ate than about the religious services he presumably presided over, barely mentions what he consumed for breakfast.

  By the twentieth century, you keep tripping over the full English. The great Edwardian house parties for the gentry and ruling classes were leisurely affairs where guests would drift down in the morning and help themselves from silver pots which were keeping the various elements of breakfast hot.
Half a century later, the full English was a pretty classless affair. Every working man by the 1950s aspired to egg and sausage in the morning, come rain or shine.

  It has even been suggested that its heyday was as recently as the 1960s, when every bed-and-breakfast outfit south of the Scottish border began offering the full English as its standard fare.

  It may not be quite as good for you as a ubiquitous continental breakfast – which these days involves little more than an efficient croissant, coffee and yoghurt – but you certainly know afterwards that you have had breakfast.

  Mrs Beeton’s full English breakfast:

  The following list of hot dishes may perhaps assist our readers in knowing what to provide for the comfortable meal called breakfast. Broiled fish, such as mackerel, whiting, herrings, dried haddocks, &c.; mutton chops and rump-steaks, broiled sheep’s kidneys, kidneys à la maître d’hôtel, sausages, plain rashers of bacon, bacon and poached eggs, ham and poached eggs, omelets, plain boiled eggs, oeufs-au-plat, poached eggs on toast, muffins, toast, marmalade, butter, &c. &c …

  Full English breakfast, as recorded bt Mrs Beeton in The Book of Household Management (1861)

  My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

  All felled, felled, are all felled;

  Of a fresh and following folded rank

  Not spared, not one

  SO SAID THE English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1879 when they felled the Binsey poplar trees along the side of Port Meadow outside Oxford. Still there beside the site of the poplars are the hedges and line of trees that marked the ancient boundary between Oxfordshire and Berkshire (the boundary is not there any more, since they reorganised such things in 1974). Hedges are celebrated, quite rightly, for their own sake as an environmental resource – though we have lost half of them since 1950 – but it is their role as boundary markers that make them especially important to the English psyche.