This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  Much has been made of the social change of the contraceptive pill, and rightly so. Yet perhaps a bigger influence on the lives of a younger generation was National Service conscription. Conscription was a nineteenth-century Prussian idea. It did not find its way into British military thinking until 1916 when volunteers for the First World War had all but disappeared. Conscription ended in 1919, but returned under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act of 1939. It continued until 1960, with the last National Service soldiers emerging in 1962. From this we see a single change in the life of young people: two generations of boys had never been able to make their own way into adulthood. At seventeen-and-a-half, they had reported for National Service. From day one they had, as the phrase had it, learned to salute everything that moved and paint everything that did not. They learned to recognize authority at a hundred yards across a parade ground. They learned to value as well as to sometimes despise pecking orders and their places within that system. Equally, they learned to go with or beat the system. They learned teamwork. Most did not want to go. They learned that most senior officers did not want them to come. They also learned cleanliness (most came from homes with only rudimentary habits in the bathroom) and tidiness. If all this sounds too good, then it is equally so that most were only too glad to get out. Curiously, research suggests that while conscripts look back at their service as a complete waste of time, they also remember the two years or so with a certain pride. However, there was one aspect of conscript life that was common to all recruits: the haircut. Short back and sides was, until the 1950s, a common cut for most youths and young men. In the Services, there was no option but very short.

  When conscription ended at the start of the 1960s, the first youngsters in twenty years moved from teenage to adult at their own pace. The first rebellion of the 1960s was long hair. Long lank or prettily combed after the style of whatever hero or group the youngster signed up for, hair was the first defiance and the one that would overturn most of the visible values that parents had suffered or enjoyed. This is surely a trite assumption of the nature of those entering their fun years of the so-called Swinging Sixties. Yet it is a symbol of much that was to follow.

  Rock ’n’ roll, flower power and the hippy generation reflected changing society. Woodstock in 1968 and 1969 may have assumed an image for a generation that was utterly hedonistic. But it was also a generation that paradoxically protested because some sense of morality was offended. It was a generation in 1968 that knew the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was inherently wrong. The students marched against their universities throughout the Western and Latin American worlds. They paraded their causes with the fervour of all-consuming radicals through the streets of every continent: here were the civil rights movement in America; the New Left movement throughout Western Europe; the peace campaigners; the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in almost every country with students forcing campuses to close for days on end; the Warsaw protesters at the Polish Theatre (protest was not confined to the so-called free States); the German student rights protests; the total disruption by thousands of anti-war protesters at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In that same year, Friends of the Earth was founded and so was the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement. All this and very much more in one unforgettable year of protest: 1968. Unforgettable that is, to the thousands, perhaps millions of young people who took up the paving stones of the society that had produced them and hurled them in protest at authority.

  All this was seen on arguably the most powerful opinion former in post-Second World War British society – colour television. Colour television did not appear in British living rooms until 1967 on BBC2 and 1969 on BBC1 and ITV. It was the medium that would dominate the way people believed they were seeing for themselves events as they really were. There are still those who insist that colour transmissions tipped American public opinion against the war in Vietnam. In the United Kingdom, the realism and entertainment value of the new form of television from the late 1960s was such a powerful presence in daily life that sociologists could rant that it was responsible for the breakdown in society. The claim was (and remains in some influential quarters) that television numbed the mind, made conversation redundant and isolated individuals in the same room and so corrupted family life. It may tell us something about the British that animal programmes were rarely included in the programme list of insidious broadcasting.

  However dubious are the claims about influences on societies, it is always a safe assumption that the former US President Bill Clinton got it right when he said if you want to know what wins elections, tell yourself the following: it’s the economy, stupid. The British were not alone in expecting to vote for a national government on the simplification of the Clinton hypothesis: will I be better or worse off if I vote for the sitting government? Personal economies or perspectives of how others live were rarely so obvious as they became in the 1980s and 1990s. When stories circulated that the French medical system was superb, it was because people in the UK were dissatisfied with their own system or, more likely, believed anecdotal evidence while ignoring the fact that their own experiences had not always been so terrible. They were forming an opinion not from first-hand experience, but on the headline principle of ‘it was in the paper so it must be true’. Here was a sense of dissatisfaction in spite of near unprecedented riches in the society created by Thatcherism and then the seemingly uncontrollable asset-stripping of every basic rule of banking and money marketeering. So many people who could take fantastic decisions in everyday life – from political advisers in their twenties who could influence government decisions to bankers with little supervision – no longer needed the great institutions that had created almost a thousand years of British life. People by the twenty-first century no longer needed their history. They no longer needed the status of being British as had the Victorians or their early twentieth-century ancestors. The Protestant arrogance of the eighteenth century no longer had resonance and nor did the way of the Church that had created that illusion. The Church was so irrelevant to most people that fewer than 10 per cent of the population attended on the high day of Easter, one of the points in the Church calendar when congregations are measured. The banks were seen as increasingly corrupt, particularly after the events of 2008 and the making of the so-called world economic crisis. The law enforcers were feared rather than being of comfort to a population increasingly bewildered by violence. Government departments after the ‘task force’ era that followed the 1997 elections were consistently shown to be incompetent. Finally, the politicians themselves were seen to be untrustworthy. The scandal of expenses claims and ministers on the make as lobbyists would at one time have brought about enormous protests of disgust. By the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, British society simply shrugged. By then, the British appeared to have lost faith in the great institutions. The banks, the law, the Church and government itself had failed them.

  It is at this point that we should take heed that when giving such a broad view of the story of the British, we are of course Anglo-centric. In other words, we fall into the trap of lumping the nations of the British Isles together. Clearly we should not. Equally clearly, to give proper and deserved space to the histories of each of the British nations would take volumes rather than this single volume. However, having reached the crucial point in explaining the decline of the British, or Britishness, then it is a moment to set the English apart. For it is the English who are in decline.

  For the Scots and the Welsh, none of this loss of faith in the institutions particularly mattered. The Scots, for example, do not have and never have had a huge problem with their Church although the debate between the different persuasions has always been vigorous. Scottish jurisprudence is to be admired. The wrecking history of the clan is often not for the weak, but equally none can doubt the individual identity of the people north of the Scottish–English border. The Welsh have been air-brushed out of most British histories and it is easy to get the imp
ression that nothing happened in the principality after the 1284 Statute of Rhuddlan and then the abolition of Welsh civil law in the sixteenth century. In the twenty-first century, both Scotland and Wales had their devolved government, albeit on a limited scale. The importance of devolved power was the way it maintained and even enhanced national identity. It should be argued that the Scots and Welsh did not need any Westminster-designed policy and concession to tell them who they were. The English, on the other hand, were gradually losing their identity. The institutions had little influence anymore on the English persona and, more and more, the English had no idea what it meant to look up to those institutions and certainly not to be proud of what they meant and ironically, throughout the world in the former colonies, often still mean.

  Modern British history is in great part the history of the British governed at Westminster. The individuals and even the organizations such as trading houses may have been run and organized by Scots, Welsh and Irish, but the Westminster stamp is an English one. Certainly since the early nineteenth century, one of the drivers of British history was Empire. Empire gave the British nomenklatura, but did not give the average Briton a purpose – politically, militarily, and most important of all, commercially. The purpose was to rule and to make money. That is not a historically Marxist hypothesis. It is an acceptable observation. People in power do things because they are in power. People in power do things for the power and, therefore, the opportunity that power presents. The Empire did that. The huge majority of the British during the time of Empire had no power whatsoever other than that which presented itself on a tiny scale within their social and working lives. In spite of outbursts of jingoism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there is no evidence that the average Briton saw the Empire as anything more than an opportunity to do better for themselves and live in a style that would not be possible on the same remuneration at home. Nor is there any convincing evidence that the British at home saw the colonial servants as anything more than an extension of the ruling classes at home. Yet, because the Empire existed well into the twentieth century, so did the red bits in the school atlas and so did the global acceptance of English as a diplomatic and trading language. All this gave the British not so much a sense of superiority but a sense of identity.

  Identity is about understanding that others can confirm who you are. In the case of the British, we have an anomaly of identification. Others do not confirm British identity. They see Britishness as Englishness. It is as if they know how Englishness sounds and that is enough. But the English are not so sure of their own character. They may talk about the wartime spirit, salts of the earth and particularly pluckiness – a euphemism for losing. However, thanks to the English losing or discarding their history books during the formative years of education, they know little of their history. Probably. Reading history does not let a nation as mixed and as large as the English into the secret of present identity. Yet it does tell something of what forefathers looked like. When a nation loses faith in its great institutions, however, it probably has little need to know where and how those institutions originated and developed, and why they did. Consequently, it has even less interest in its identity. The danger here is that it develops an unhealthy curiosity about those in its midst who have no such difficulties with identity. The danger comes when that curiosity develops into an understanding that what identity is left in the English is being undermined by people who know who they are. Great Britain had much purpose when it had its Empire. The twentieth-century chestnut that when it lost that Empire, Great Britain did not discover a new role is only relevant in the twenty-first century. That is because Britain does not yet know where it wants to position itself in, say, the coming thirty or forty years and into the second half of the twenty-first century. The people who ran the Empire knew what they wanted for the coming half century. But then they knew who they were, and so did everyone else.

  ENDNOTES

  1. Professor Chris Stringer, Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, in Nature, 2005.

  2. This has been known since the seventeenth century largely due to the work of Johannes Kepler (1571–1630).

  3. Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British (London: Robinson, 2007), 197.

  4. The Skara Brae settlement is an exceptional example of preserved Neolithic society.

  5. Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British, 272.

  6. Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 218–19.

  7. Gildas Badonicus, a Celtic monk writing in the 540s to denounce the wickedness of his times.

  8. J. A. Giles (ed.), Six Old English Chronicles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848).

  9. See also Life of Saint Columba by Abbot Adomnán (627–704).

  10. Frank. R. Donovan (author), Sir Thomas D. Kendrick (consultant), The Vikings (New York, NY: Horizon Caravel Books, 1964), 44–5.

  11. See also the Old Norse vernacular saga poem Háttalykill, attributed to Rögnvaldr Kali Kolsson of Orkney.

  12. Florence of Worcester died in 1118. His Chronicon ex Chronicus is the earliest English chronicle from the time of the Creation. Much of the work is based on the writings of an Irish monk, Marianus Scotus (d.1082).

  13. F. T. Wainwright, ‘Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians’, in Peter Clemoes (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons; Some Aspects of their History and Culture presented to Bruce Dickins (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1959), 53–69.

  14. F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 363.

  15. W. S. Churchill, A History of the English-speaking Peoples (ed. Christopher Lee, London: Cassells, 1999).

  16. In particular, see Richard Barber, Henry Plantagenet: A Biography of Henry II of England (London: Boydell Press, 1964).

  17. P. Cleary, The Church and Usury (Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 1914); J. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan 1969); E. S. Tan, ‘An empty shell? Rethinking the Usury Laws in Medieval Europe’, Journal of Legal History, 23: 3 (December 2002), 177–96.

  18. The Chronicle of Lanercost, 1272–1346 (tr. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Bt, Glasgow: MacLehose, 1913).

  19. Geoffrey Baker, Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynbroke (ed. Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889).

  20. Geoffrey le Baker, Chronicles (ed. Herbert Bruce, Cardiff: W. Lewis, 1918); Geoffrey Baker, Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynbroke (ed. Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889).

  21. Baker, Chronicles; Baker, Chronicon.

  22. P. N. R. Zutschi, ‘The Avignon Papacy’, in M. Jones (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume VI c.1300–c.1415 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 653–73.

  23. An early reference to which we have in Voltaire’s Candide: ‘Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.’

  24. James Gairdner, Three Fifteenth-century Chronicles, with Historical Memoranda by John Stowe (London: Camden Society, 1880).

  25. Later, Earl of Monmouth. His account of Elizabeth’s death and his ride to inform James was written as late as 1627 and kept in private until Lord Cork allowed it to be published in 1759. A copy is to be found in the British Library.

  26. British monarchs would call themselves King or Queen of France until the eighteenth century even though the British sport of needling the French continued.

  27. Fidei Defensor: the title seemed incongruous inasmuch that it was given by Pope Leo X in 1521 to Henry VIII before Rome felt inclined to revise its judgement of the English King. It was a papal recognition of Henry’s book. Assertio septem sacramentorum, an unequivocal attack on Martin Luther. Parliament recognized the title in 1544 and it is retained to the present day, marked on British coins as F.D.

  28. Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Virginia.

  29. For more on this
see Karen Ordahl Kupperman (ed.), America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

  30. See D. and A. Quinn, New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, Volume 1 (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1974–9), pp. 91–120, 159 –226.

  31. The Asian and Hispanic pattern of immigration is changing the traditional view of origins in the United States.

  32. Purchas was a travel writer whose works include Purchas his Pilgrimage or Relations of the World in all Ages, which was published in 1613. The following year, Purchas became rector of St Martin’s Church, Ludgate, London.

  33. A. Brown, The Genesis of the United States (Boston, MA/New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), pp. 37–42.

  34. Ralegh was tried for treason mostly on the evidence of Lord Cobham. Both men were to be executed. They were saved and sent to the Tower, partly perhaps because the mood of the people had swung in Ralegh’s favour by reason of the way the trial was conducted and in spite of the fact that Ralegh had been one of the most detested men in Britain at the start of the trial. Ralegh was eventually executed in 1618 after failing to find El Dorado and attacking Spanish settlements.

  35. The terminology ‘instructions’ survives to this day. For example, orders to the armed services at home and abroad are issued through DCIs, defence council instructions.

  36. Baron Verulam of Verulam, later, Viscount St Albans (1561–1626). He was nephew of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and although he turned against him enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Essex.

  37. David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).