How to Be English Read online

  In fact, although he was derided in his own lifetime, Capability Brown was destined to turn England into a kind of romantic heaven – to make it look rolling and lush, creating the blueprint for the quintessentially English garden. He was a nightmare for those committed to authenticity, but he was also highly successful – as the crowds which turn out to see his work in National Trust properties every weekend will testify even today.

  Now there, I make a comma, and there, where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.

  Capability Brown describing the language of landscape design to Hannah More at Hampton Court in 1782

  THERE WAS A time when all English boys were told Clive of India was the most important historical figure they needed to emulate. These days, hardly anyone has heard of him. In fact, Robert Clive’s life seems as if it was led purely for the edification of boys.

  He was born in Shropshire in 1725 near Market Drayton, and was soon organising a protection racket among the local shopkeepers. He was in so much trouble so regularly that his father packed him off as a clerk to the East India Company in Madras. From this inauspicious start, he managed to defeat the French in battle, become governor of Bengal and be given a peerage when he returned home as the richest man in England.

  One of the ironies of Clive’s life was that, although he was clearly English, his career was forged and took place largely somewhere else entirely – in India. It is even more ironic, perhaps, that – despite all this – Clive couldn’t stand India. ‘If I should be so far blessed as to revisit again my own country, but more especially Manchester, the centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be presented before me in one view,’ he wrote. Clive famously suffered from homesickness so badly that he tried to shoot himself twice. After one failed attempt he examined the pistol and found it was loaded and working, and thereupon decided that providence had spared his life for a reason.

  Clive made his name at the age of twenty-five, with only a book-keeper’s training, leading the successful defence during the siege of Arcot with a handful of men, and earning the epithet ‘heaven-born general’ from William Pitt the Elder. When he defeated the French and Mughals at the Battle of Plassey, he added to the East India Company’s lands an area larger than the British Isles, and laid the foundations of British rule in India. This was an extraordinary achievement, since it involved beating an army fifteen times the size of his own with the loss of just twenty men, and during the monsoon season.

  He manoeuvred the French, in far greater numbers in India at the time, reorganised the East India Company’s forces and attempted to reorganise the administration – putting down a mutiny by officers enraged at his ban on receiving gifts from Indians.

  He had not exactly been above receiving gifts himself, and when his political enemies opened an inquiry into his conduct in India, and the way he had enriched himself, he answered in a thoroughly English way: ‘I stand astonished at my own moderation,’ he said. Even so, the parliamentary inquiry decided that he had wrongly enriched himself to the tune of £235,000 from Siraj ud-Daulah’s treasury.

  Clive’s melancholia clearly continued even when he returned home, because he died at the age of only forty-nine in 1774 at his home in Berkeley Square. There was never an inquest, and the reasons for his death are disputed, but he probably killed himself, possibly by cutting his own throat with a penknife. He is buried in the church of Moreton Say in Shropshire, where he was Lord Lieutenant.

  It appears I am destined for something; I will live.

  Robert Clive, after his attempted suicide, 1743

  ‘THERE’S A BREATHLESS hush in the Close tonight – / Ten to make and the match to win,’ wrote the English poet Henry Newbolt, the part-time imperialist, about his school playing field at Clifton College in Bristol. The poem went on:

  A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

  An hour to play and the last man in.

  Newbolt was conjuring up his very first sight of his school, which he revered, with the white flannels in the summer and an elegiac sense of youth and peace. He also managed to conjure up something about England; unhurried, the summer evening in the air and the shadows lengthening, and the prospect of tea and cakes, and the sunkissed faces watching the sky – rather than watching the action on the pitch.

  Newbolt’s poem goes on to praise the schoolboy rallying the ranks in some far-off imperial adventure, when the ‘Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead’, with the phrase: ‘Play up, play up! And play the game.’ The phrase came to mean a range of slightly contradictory things, about life as it was intended to be lived among certain classes of Englishmen, or a seriousness about life and war, or just about cricket.

  Clifton Close was also the scene of another cricket moment: Arthur Collins’ famous 628 not out in a school match, the biggest score ever achieved in cricket, which reached the front page of The Times in June 1899 as it developed over five days. Collins was killed in the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, giving Newbolt’s poem added poignancy.

  It was also where the great W. G. Grace was bowled out first ball, but very sensibly ignored it on the grounds that people had come to see him bat. It was where the future English Python, John Cleese, then a schoolboy, got the great Denis Compton out twice in one innings in 1958.

  This kind of incident is especially valued in cricket, partly because it sets up a kind of David-and-Goliath struggle, which the English always like, and partly because it tests the English ability to control the emotions at their strongest. This isn’t always effective. The inventor (or possibly reviver) of overarm bowling, a Kent cricketer called John Willes, did not last long at the top of the game. His first ball for Kent against the MCC in 1822 was overarm and therefore no-ball. He jumped on his horse and rode away, never to return to the game. It was made legal under the rules of the game in 1835, an appropriately lengthy period afterwards – perhaps the greatest tradition in cricket is that nothing much happens for a very long time.

  Unusually for the contents of this book, all the evidence suggests that cricket really did originate in England, somewhere in the Home Counties at some distant date. Despite all the efforts of cricket historians, there are no clues about exactly when it began except that the young Edward II was once recorded to have played a game called creag, though whether that really was cricket is anyone’s guess.

  The first recorded cricket match actually took place in Greece on 6 May 1676, when a group of English sailors from ships called Assistance, Royal Oak and Bristol went ashore and played. The big expansion of the game took place the following century, and here at last there is a Scottish connection. The father of the founder of Lord’s cricket ground, Thomas Lord, who had been born in Thirsk, arrived in London some time in the 1770s to find fortune. He was keen to do so because his father had been a wealthy landowner, but had lost everything in 1745 when he raised a troop of cavalry to support Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion and ended up working as a labourer on one of the farms he had previously owned.

  There you have it. The authentic, poignant note of nostalgia essential to all truly English accounts of cricket.

  For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

  And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

  As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

  To and fro:

  O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

  Francis Thompson (1859–1907)

  THIS SMALL FRENCH port on the English Channel is forever associated in the English mind with one of those peculiar miracles of escape that they tend to celebrate as victories. It is always given the English spelling too, rather than the French Dunkerque, as if it was a small fishing village, perhaps in Scotland. It is, in short, a muddling kind of place – if indeed ‘Dunkirk’ is a place at all, when
it is actually a nostalgic idea.

  Winston Churchill made his famous ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech on 4 June 1940 to celebrate the escape of 338,000 British and French troops from the beaches there, but even he warned that ‘wars are not won by withdrawals’.

  But if the English could not quite snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the point about Dunkirk was that – at great loss, among the rearguard and the rescuing ships – a small defeat was snatched from impending disaster. It did look as though the entire British army, and all its tanks and equipment, would be captured or destroyed by the sudden Nazi advance, leaving the nation horribly exposed to invasion.

  What made Dunkirk possible was Hitler’s controversial Halt Order of 22 May, which stopped the advance of his tanks from crossing the defensive canals, and handed over the task of finishing off the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to Goering’s Luftwaffe. The order was sent uncoded and was picked up, so Churchill and the British government knew they might have time to build defences, pull back their troops behind the barrier and into the town, and organise some kind of rescue.

  The naval planners believed they might have been able to rescue 25,000 men. In the end, over a period of a week, and thanks to the sacrifices of the Highland Division and the French rearguard, over 800 ships of all sizes managed to take off most of the BEF and a sizeable number of French troops, most of whom were transferred to Brest to carry on what turned out to be a hopeless defence of France.

  The troops left by wading out to neck height in the waves and waiting all day, and they left minus their equipment. It was the little ships which captured the imagination, from pleasure steamers to fishing boats and cabin cruisers from the Thames – one of the yachts captained by the senior surviving officer from the Titanic, C. H. Lightholer (see Chapter 26), and many like him. It was somehow an English solution, by English heroes, and a symbol of the success of people power over an establishment which had failed so miserably either to prevent or prepare for war.

  In the generations to come, when the problems become bigger and the institutions we deal with less human, the English may still look back to Dunkirk and the little ships, and think – Ah yes, that’s what we truly are. There was something self-revelatory about Dunkirk, or at least there appeared to be to the English – the brilliant organisation, the individual flair, the popular uprising by small-boat masters, the anarchic pulling together, the snatching of consolation from disaster. It was, in the end, all very English.

  Dunkirk statistics:

  Troops evacuated from Dunkirk between 27 May and 4 June 1940: 338,226

  Number of ships of allied nations taking part: 933

  Number sunk: 236

  Number of guns left by the BEF in France: 2,472

  Number of tons of ammunition left: 76,097

  Men of the BEF captured or killed during the retreat and evacuation: 68,111

  Number of French troops taken into captivity when Dunkirk fell: 40,000

  Merchant seamen who died during the evacuation: 126

  Number of days Winston Churchill had been prime minister: 16

  THERE IS SOMETHING very English about the start of an FA Cup final, and somehow reminiscent of that waiting around that seems to go with major sporting fixtures in the UK, and everywhere else. In my childhood, it always seemed to be in a packed, heaving, raucous Wembley Stadium, with its distinctive towers from the 1923 Empire Exhibition. There always seemed to be the Royal Marines band and always some celebrity – was it Harry Secombe; was it Tony Blackburn? – who would try to conduct an unwilling crowd in the first and last verses of ‘Abide With Me’.

  The FA Cup final isn’t quite what it was. There are so many other football championships to compete for our attention, and all over the world. But there was a time when special trains carried tens of thousands of supporters of the finalists into London, to travel via the Metropolitan Line out to the stadium, arriving from before dawn on the damp paved streets of the capital. It was an era of ticket touts and terraces, beer and scarves, and brown, uncategorisable meat pies.

  ‘Abide With Me’ was a permanent fixture that began at the final between Arsenal and Cardiff City in 1927 (Welsh clubs have regularly taken part in the FA Cup, when generally speaking Scottish clubs have refused to). Communal singing used to be a major feature on the pitch before the match. In 1956, the songs included light classics like ‘She’s a Lassie from Lancashire’ and ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road’. By the late 1960s, the crowds tended to have their own chants to sing. Perhaps little would induce them to sing the kind of songs people had sung around pub pianos a generation before.

  As for the FA Cup, it dates back to the 1871–2 season, when the newly established Football Association had hit on the idea of a knockout tournament between the teams. Fifteen clubs entered, including the Scottish team Queen’s Park which managed to get through to the semi-final without having to play a match, because they were all scrapped for one reason or another – mainly because of a failure to agree a venue for the games.

  They managed a draw against Wanderers in London, but could not club together enough money to come back for a replay, so they had to withdraw. The first final took place at the Kennington Oval, know known as a cricket ground, and was won by Wanderers, a London club formed some years before by a group of former public schoolboys, which scored the only goal against Royal Engineers. And so the tradition had been born.

  These days, there are no replays, and draws are decided after extra time in a penalty shoot-out.

  Back in 1872, the trophy Wanderers won cost £20 and included a little figure of a footballer, which was why it had a nickname the ‘Little Tin Idol’. It was won for the last time in 1895 at the old Crystal Palace stadium, where FA Cup finals regularly attracted crowds of up to 100,000 to its twin railways stations. The winners that year were Aston Villa.

  Five months later, the trophy was stolen from the William Shillcock football outfitters shop in Newtown Row, Birmingham. There was a reward offered of £10, but the trophy has never been found.

  These days, the FA Cup finals are in Wembley again (after a brief period at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff), which takes the ceremony back to where the final was played from 1923 to 2000 in the old Empire Exhibition Stadium.

  The first year at Wembley (between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham) was the famous ‘White Horse Final’, called after a white police horse called Billy which pushed the over-capacity crowd off the pitch so that the match could start, forty-five minutes late. The reason for the problem was that an estimated 240,000 fans turned up for the match, squeezed inside the stadium, with another 60,000 locked outside the gates. Some say it is the biggest attendance for any non-racing sporting event in history, but this seems likely to be English hyperbole.

  But despite the changes over the years, ‘Abide With Me’ still gets sung, by assorted celebrities and opera singers, before the teams run out onto the pitch. The FA Cup remains one of the great sporting events of the English year, even if you are not too fond of football.

  Venues for FA Cup finals:

  Kennington Oval

  Crystal Palace

  Stamford Bridge

  Lillie Bridge

  Wembley Stadium

  Goodison Park

  Fallowfield Stadium

  Old Trafford

  Millennium Stadium, Cardiff

  (Replays were sometimes held elsewhere)

  THESE DAYS, FAIRIES seem to be almost the preserve of Hollywood, or maybe some leprechaun-infested corner of Tralee. Alternatively, there is a sense maybe that they are some aspect of a hidden, fearsome Transylvanian creature of the night. Yet fairies were once so much part of the English psyche that the historian Ronald Hutton has called them the ‘British religion’.

  It is hard to overestimate just how unfashionable fairies have become in the UK during the twentieth century. They had a good start thanks to the combined Edwardian talents of Arthur Rackham and J. M. Barrie. Peter Pan was first shown to rap
turous applause in 1904. In fact, there is some evidence that fairies tend to enjoy their revivals at the turn of centuries (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595/6, Coleridge’s ‘Songs of the Pixies’ 1793, the film The Fairy Tale 1997). But something about the whole Tinkerbell thing – the delicate femininity, the questionable childish sexuality – did not mix well with the century to come.

  When Arthur Conan Doyle published his Cottingley fairy photographs in 1920 – the very obvious fakes made by two little girls in Yorkshire – they had the very opposite effect on later generations to the one he intended. One look at the dancing gnome, or the obvious brassieres, was enough to turn fairies into a laughing stock. In fact, one of the girls maintained until she died that they had faked the photographs because nobody believed them when they had seen fairies.

  Seven years later, a retired naval communications pioneer, Sir Quentin Craufurd, founded the Fairy Investigation Society, designed to promote serious study. Over the years, it managed to attract a number of prominent supporters, including Walt Disney and the Battle of Britain supremo Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, whose career was not helped by his public expressions of belief. The Fairy Investigation Society went underground in the 1970s, from where it has only just emerged.

  Despite all that, something has been going on out there to bring the hopelessly unfashionable back into fashion, subtly and below the radar of the chattering classes in London. There are now whole orchestras of people describing themselves as ‘fairy musicians’. There is a magazine, published in Maryland, called Fairie, and enough new fairy websites to fill pages of Google. There is even an American attempt to re-brand Midsummer’s Day as ‘Fairy Day’. There is a globalised version of fairies under revival with a very distinctive style – dungeons and dragons by way of Botticelli – and its array of small businesses offering music, books and spells. Nor are all American either.