How to Be English Read online

  Perhaps the apotheosis of the English style of place-making was in Ebenezer Howard’s pioneering garden cities, in Letchworth and Welwyn, the pioneers of the rather less English new towns. Letchworth also developed a style all of its own, thanks to Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker and their Arts and Crafts cottage styles. It provided the English contribution to town planning, just as Howard intended.

  His other scheme, which was to make sure that the land values were vested in the community, has attracted the disapproval of successive governments. English governments have always been a little suspicious of making people economically independent, in case they never work again. They are not that keen on everyone having their own garden either, yet the semi-detached was designed on precisely that basis.

  Howard was a shorthand writer from the House of Commons and, when the great and the good adopted his first garden-city plan, they rather looked down their noses at him as they set up their committees to urge the government to build it. Instead, Howard set off on his bicycle, found the site for Letchworth and set to work. If you wait for the government to do it, he said, ‘you will be as old as Methuselah’. That is as good a statement of English political philosophy as anyone ever made.

  Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

  Runs the red electric train,

  With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

  Daintily alights Elaine;

  Hurries down the concrete station

  With a frown of concentration,

  Out into the outskirt’s edges

  Where a few surviving hedges

  Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.

  John Betjeman, ‘Middlesex’

  THERE WE ARE in the middle of the north Atlantic, surrounded by small, floating pieces of ice, the ocean floor two miles down beneath the great, green, freezing ocean. The lifeboats have gone and the ship is sinking and the only other ship within sight is not responding to signals. What do you do and how do you behave?

  That is the question at the heart of the English version of the Titanic story. It is a question of stiff upper lips and gentlemanly farewells in your dinner jacket, listening to the quiet, restrained sound of the orchestra playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ wafting over the icy air.

  But Titanic is not just an English story. It was a ship built in Northern Ireland, managed by a struggling shipping line owned by an American banker, carrying passengers who certainly included the English but also Americans and, locked into the third-class dining room, a large number of Irish emigrants. The heroic story (see Chapter 17) – part of the English myth of fair play, good behaviour and women-and-children-first – is overwhelmingly one of the English upper and middle classes. It is part of their great romance with ice: just as Captain Scott’s frozen body lay in the Antarctic, here was another block of ice getting revenge on those who presumed to set sail in an unsinkable ship.

  The various film versions are not all English either. The original version, commissioned by Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, emphasised that this was the last gasp of a plutocratic class. The American version with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio (1997) portrayed an ossified, hypocritical society about to collapse under its own contradictions, with the help of a small collision.

  Only the Kenneth More version, A Night to Remember, maintains the English myth. It is poignant, heroic, tragic and terribly English as, one by one, the overwhelmingly heroic characters – perhaps not the chairman of the White Star Line, who jumped ship with the women and children – realise what is about to happen. They smoke their last cigars, occasionally resorting to firing a revolver in the air – there is no suicide as there was in James Cameron’s film version. Though even A Night to Remember was based on a book by the American writer Walter Lord, so it may be more about an outsider’s view of Englishness than anything truly home-grown.

  Of all the great disasters at sea, each one remembered for its heroism in a different way, why does Titanic capture people’s imagination? The answer is partly that the combination of melancholy inevitability and tragic self-sacrifice supports the English self-image. English souls beat with a twinge of excitement at the idea of going down with the ship, especially when it is clearly a symbolic disaster for a whole generation, the very class that found itself sacrificing life and limb on the front line of the trenches only twenty-eight months later.

  The disaster has also become part of the peculiar relationship between the English and the sea, as if they were chained to a fearsome and tempestuous lover. We revel with horror at Captain Smith going down with his ship. We cheer on Captain Rostron steaming through the night at top speed on the Carpathia, to find the sea full of frozen corpses. We warm to Lightholer, the senior surviving officer, who went on to sail his small yacht over to Dunkirk to fetch the retreating soldiers off the beaches in 1940. ‘We have strewn our best to the waves’ unrest / To the shark and the sheering gull,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, who – though not English himself – caught the essence of the relationship. ‘If blood be the price of admiralty, by God we have paid in full.’

  Nearer, my God, to Thee,

  Nearer to Thee!

  E’en though it be a cross

  That raiseth me,

  Still all my song shall be

  Nearer, my God, to Thee.

  Sarah Flower Adams (1805–48)

  ‘LITERALLY FOR THIS,’ said Edward Thomas, soil in his hand, to explain why he had joined up to fight on the Western Front. He was killed on Easter Monday 1917 by a shell, as he smoked his pipe. It was in this kind of mood that he began to write poems celebrating English life, and his most famous poem seems to start in mid-conversation: ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop’.

  He explained something of his feelings about his native land in his essay ‘This England’, referring to himself in the Quantocks when he experienced the sense of ‘home’. ‘His train stopped at a station which was quite silent, and only an old man got in, bent, gnarled and gross, a Caliban; but somehow he fitted in with the darkness and the quietness and the smell of burning wood, and it was all something I loved being part of.’

  Thomas presented this as a kind of spiritual experience, aware suddenly of ‘all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’. But we know a little more than this about it because of his diary entry immediately before the First World War, on 28 June 1914, about his train journey from London to Dymock, via the Oxford to Worcester Express, which included the phrase: ‘Then we stopped at Adlestrop.’

  The poem itself was written in winter, on 8 January 1915 in fact, in the middle of an extraordinary surge of creativity – he wrote thirty-three poems between December 1914 and early February 1915, still writing under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway and pretending he wasn’t actually doing it.

  The problem was that Thomas was struggling with his conscience. He had been an insightful poetry critic for most of his writing career, siding usually with the Georgians – the young poetry movement represented by his friends. He had recently found that he could write poems himself. In the few short years left to him, he had written enough to carve out a proud section in the Oxford Book of English Verse. But his real struggle was about whether to enlist.

  His nation was at war, and though he was old enough to avoid comment for not being in uniform, he didn’t want to think of himself as afraid. He was agonising about whether to join his great friend Robert Frost in America or whether that might be seen, primarily by himself, as a form of escape from the Western Front. In the end, Thomas opted for uniformed life. The rest we know.

  ‘Adelstrop’ was published three weeks after he died, in the New Statesman. His admirer the composer Ivor Gurney said it was ‘nebulously, intangibly beautiful’. This is true, and it is still hard to put a finger on its charm except perhaps that it conjures up that final summer of peace, a quiet moment in more than one way, and its absolutely simplicity has a innocence about it – and about England – that still makes it compelling a century later.

  Yes, I remember Adl
estrop –

  The name, because one afternoon

  Of heat the express-train drew up there

  Unwontedly. It was late June.

  The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

  No one left and no one came

  On the bare platform. What I saw

  Was Adlestrop – only the name

  BANK HOLIDAYS ARE English saints’ days. Other European nations gave their people breaks from work to enjoy the sunshine. Even the Bank of England used to close on thirty-three religious festivals a year until 1834. After that, the English had to invent bank holidays to give themselves the occasional day off – to enjoy the drizzle, the sandy, soggy sandwiches and the experience of close proximity to everyone else having ‘fun’.

  Amazingly, the idea was not invented by the founders of England – by St Augustine or King Alfred – but by a Victorian scientist-politician who was looking for ways to encourage the English to evolve a little bit faster.

  Sir John Lubbock had been flung into the world of scientific inquiry because he lived next door to Charles Darwin. When his father’s bank ran into difficulties, and school fees became impossible, Darwin became his tutor and Lubbock became an early advocate of the theory of evolution.

  But he was also a politician, and he believed that evolution had a special meaning for society: it meant that societies would evolve too. People would educate themselves. They would rise above the struggle for survival. The trouble was, their employers kept their noses to the grindstone six days a week, so self-education was endlessly delayed. What could be done?

  Like his father, Lubbock was also a banker. As a politician, he knew he could not force employers to give people the day off. But, as a banker, he knew that, if the banks closed their doors, then so would the nation’s businesses – and the day off would have been achieved. Hence his decision to draft a new law which closed the banks on four days a year (Easter Monday, Whit Monday, Boxing Day and the first Monday in August) so that people would have the time to rest and maybe read a bit – Lubbock was a doyen of the Working Men’s College and a great lister of all the books people should read.

  Christmas Day was already a day off in England, so he never included that. Nor did he include New Year’s Day, which wasn’t designated a bank holiday in England until 1974.

  At one stroke, the nation was transformed. The first Monday in August 1871, after the Bank Holidays Act became law, saw extraordinary scenes at the London railway terminals as the crowds overwhelmed the trains available to take them to the seaside. ‘The passengers were packed on decks and paddleboxes like herrings in a barrel, and so great was the hunger of the crowd on board one of the vessels that the steward declared himself to be “eaten out” in ten minutes after the vessel left Thames Haven,’ said the News of the World.

  Margate Jetty was simply blocked so far as to be impassable, whilst thousands of excursionists who came down by rail wandered along the cliffs. How many may have gone down is impossible to say. The people arrived at Cannon Street and Charing Cross for Ramsgate at 8am and it was 10 o’clock before the surprised but active officials of the South Eastern could accommodate all their customers.

  Nothing was ever quite the same again, though the queues at railway stations have given away to exhausting queues around the M25 as people struggle to get away on a Friday afternoon for their extended weekends. Lovers escape by car. People propose to each other on bank holidays. People ignore the weather in their determination to have fun – and, often, they never forget it.

  Harold Wilson later misused the whole idea during the sterling crisis of 1968 and proclaimed an extra bank holiday to avoid the value of sterling sinking through the floor, forcing the resignation of his foreign secretary as a result. Bank holidays can be dangerous weapons. Three years later, exactly a century after Lubbock’s law, it was repealed and replaced with a new piece of legislation, the name of which is too long to detain us here. Bank holidays continue.

  Lubbock himself died in 1913 and was buried in a wood near his home in the High Elms estate in Bromley. On the August bank holiday after that, his widow happened upon a family having their picnic on or near the grave. She flew into a rage and had his body moved into the churchyard at Farnborough in Kent, where he still lies. Had he been aware of it, you can’t help feeling that Lubbock himself might have been rather pleased.

  The original bank holidays under the 1871 Act of Parliament:

  New Year’s Day (Scotland)

  Good Friday (Scotland)

  Easter Monday

  Whit Monday

  First Monday in May (Scotland)

  First Monday in August

  Boxing Day (England and Wales)

  St Stephen’s Day (Ireland)

  Christmas Day (Scotland, but already a traditional holiday in England)

  IT IS CALLED Brighton Pier these days, but in its heyday it was always the Palace Pier, the last great pier to be built of a whole succession of English piers – the crowning glory of the English seaside resort. Many, if not most, have burned down, including Brighton’s West Pier. There seems to be something particularly inflammable about English piers, but Brighton Pier carries on.

  It is more than 1,700 feet in length and took more than a decade to build, opening in May 1899 before its famous Palace Pier Theatre had been completed. Halfway through its building work, in 1896, the old chain pier next door was swept away by a huge storm. Partly because of the pier, Brighton retains something of its louche reputation. It has managed to hold on to some of the sense of the glory days of the English seaside resort. It still combines an enjoyable seaside respectability with a hint of forbidden Parisian glamour. People would raise eyebrows if a Victorian gentleman said he was going to Brighton for the weekend. And the pier and its restaurants, smoking rooms and arcades, was the very heart of this temple dedicated to a particular side of Mammon – a very English, salty version of Las Vegas.

  It was also the theatre, perched at the end of the pier, which was the great pinnacle of Brighton’s appeal during the twentieth century. Here, from 1902 onwards, the greatest actors and music-hall stars would strut their stuff, with a summer celebrity season and a month of Christmas pantomime. Here you might rub shoulders with Arthur Askey, Tommy Trinder, Gracie Fields, Gillie Potter and (in the generation before) Little Tich, and (a generation later) Dick Emery and Morecambe and Wise, glimpsing them in their greasepaint slipping back to their digs opposite the Brighton Hippodrome. Or struggling into a taxi in their costumes to catch the last train back to London for the night.

  The theatre was requisitioned by the army during the Dunkirk crisis in 1940, just as the audience was gathering for a performance. As soon as the audience had been refunded their money, the pier was blown up to prevent it being used as a hostile landing. The pier theatre did not reopen until 1946. It closed again in the 1970s and was removed in pieces in 1986 and stored ready to be rebuilt by the developers, who subsequently mislaid it, so that may be that for the theatre (this is a habit of developers and local authorities: Merton Borough Council stored stones for the medieval gateway of Merton Abbey safely, to make way for the new Sainsbury’s Savacentre, and then – by a terrible error – used it as hard core).

  Today, the pier is a shadow of its former self, a symbol of seaside culture and its decay, which is – in itself – terribly English.

  The beautiful thing about Brighton is that you can buy your lover a pair of knickers at Victoria Station and have them off again at the Grand Hotel in less than two hours.

  Keith Waterhouse

  THE ENGLISH MAY live in cities (eighty per cent of them live in urban spaces), but they hanker for the countryside.

  There is a rural idyll beating in the heart of the English, a hankering for a golden age that never quite was. Though they live with kerbstones and bus stops and street lights, they condemn townsfolk – as Rupert Brooke condemned the people of Cambridge as ‘urban, squat and full of guile’ – and feel deep down that they belong elsewhere.
/>   Perhaps it is the frustrated gardener that inhabits every English soul. Perhaps it is the grandiose desire to direct the landscape around them. Perhaps it is because inside all of us there is a desire to emulate Capability Brown – to sit on a chair pointing to the far horizon, ordering: ‘Perhaps a lake there, and a rolling hillside with sheep on the right’.

  You can certainly be snobbish about his approach, and Capability Brown’s critics were even during his lifetime, fulminating against the formula of belt of woodland, using the contours of the land, clumps of trees to drape their shadows across the grass, with a watery element somewhere – a stream, lake or moat, bridged by some rustic or classical bridge, semi-submerged.

  You could deride it, but it worked.

  The future landscape designer Lancelot Brown was born in the village of Kirkharle in 1716. He is said to have gathered the famous nickname by his habit of talking about the ‘capability’ of sites. But it was his own capability that really stands out, starting from a farmhouse in Northumberland, working as a gardener’s boy, to becoming the lord of the manor of Fenstanton, the designer of around 170 parks, and famously turning down work in Ireland because he had not yet ‘finished England’.

  His first landscaping work seems to have been at Kiddington Hall, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Then he happened to be recommended to Lord Cobham who asked his nurseryman if he could think of anyone who might help him landscape Stowe. So there he was, the assistant to the pioneer of naturalistic gardening, William Kent.

  Brown also had a thriving architectural practice, remodelling country houses, which he handed on to Henry Holland, who in turn handed it to his pupil Sir John Soane.

  Capability Brown was rooted in the English architectural tradition, and his style was deliberately picturesque. He famously dammed the small stream in the grounds of Blenheim Palace and half-flooded the new bridge that he built across the resulting lake. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge said that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could see heaven before he improved it (Cambridge actually survived him by twenty years).