How to Be English

by David Boyle

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Spring

  1. Alfred the Great

  2. Allotments

  3. Apologies

  4. The Beatles

  5. Beer and ale

  6. Bell-ringing

  7. Big Ben

  8. Canterbury

  9. Cotton

  10. Daffodils

  11. The East India Company

  12. The English Hymnal

  13. Francophobia

  14. Full English

  15. Hedges

  16. Henry V

  17. Heroic failure

  18. Jokes

  19. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

  20. King James Bible

  21. Ley lines

  22. Mini

  23. Pigeon-fanciers

  24. ‘Sea fever’

  25. Semi-detached

  26. Titanic

  Summer

  27. ‘Adlestrop’

  28. Bank holidays

  29. Brighton pier

  30. Capability Brown

  31. Clive of India

  32. Cricket

  33. Dunkirk

  34. FA Cup finals

  35. Fairies

  36. Glastonbury Tor

  37. ‘Jerusalem’

  38. Morris dancing

  39. National Trust

  40. Nelson

  41. News from Nowhere

  42. Oak trees

  43. Outlaws

  44. Peasants’ Revolt

  45. Pride and Prejudice

  46. Punch and Judy

  47. Seaside

  48. Strawberries and cream

  49. ‘Where the bee sucks’

  50. Wimbledon

  51. The Wind in the Willows

  Autumn

  52. Bakewell tarts

  53. Battle of Hastings

  54. Boffins

  55. Bowler hats

  56. Byron

  57. Cardigans

  58. Charge of the Light Brigade

  59. Country churchyards

  60. Crumpets

  61. Curry

  62. Ealing comedies

  63. Fish and chips

  64. Flying Scotsman

  65. Gilbert and Sullivan

  66. Guy Fawkes

  67. Harrods

  68. ‘Heart of Oak’

  69. Individualism

  70. Jarrow March and the Pilgrimage of Grace

  71. Last Night of the Proms

  72. London Underground

  73. Meat pies

  74. Melancholy

  75. Old Trafford

  76. Pinstripe suits

  77. Raincoats

  78. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding

  79. School dinners

  80. Tabloid headlines

  81. Umbrellas

  82. Women’s Institutes

  Winter

  83. BBC

  84. Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna

  85. Cloth caps

  86. Coal

  87. Cockles and whelks

  88. Dick Whittington

  89. Drake’s Drum

  90. Ghosts

  91. Hadrian’s Wall

  92. Marmite

  93. Pantomime dames

  94. Pubs

  95. Roly-poly pudding

  96. Teatime

  97. Toad-in-the-hole

  98. The weather

  99. Wool

  100. A Christmas Carol

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  English culture is confused, muddled and often borrowed. The purpose of this book is to give the reader a complete grounding in the idiosyncrasies of the English and to pin down the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best.

  Featured in this book are such established English cultural behemoths as the Beatles, Big Ben and the Last Night of the Proms alongside less celebrated quirks such as meat pies and the working man’s haven, the allotment. Here we celebrate the bell-ringers and Morris dancers, bowler hats (‘the symbol of respectable Englishness’) and cardigans (‘symbol of staid middle-class solidarity’). We examine the brutality of Punch and Judy and our historic love of fairies, once so much a part of the English psyche that they were described as ‘the British religion’.

  At once fond and irreverent, laudatory and curious, How to Be English might just teach us how to be English once again.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Boyle is the author of a series of books about current affairs and history, including Blondel’s Song, about the imprisonment of Richard the Lionheart, Toward the Setting Sun, about the discovery of America, and Eminent Corporations, about the BBC, Barclays and other great English companies. He has carried out an independent review for the Treasury, he has stood for Parliament, worked for think-tanks and written widely in the UK media. His most recent book was Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes? (Fourth Estate).

  In memory of my wonderful grandparents

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘DINNER WAS ANNOUNCED soon after our arrival, which consisted of the following things,’ wrote Rev. James Woodforde describing his meal on 20 April 1796, in a diary which – in a very English way – describes food in great detail but barely mentions God at all. Then he takes a deep breath and sets out the table before him:

  Salmon boiled & Shrimp Sauce, some White Soup, Saddle of Mutton rosted & Cucumber &c., Lambs Fry, Tongue, Breast of Veal ragoued, rice Pudding the best part of a Rump of Beef stewed immediately after the Salmon was removed. 2nd course. A Couple of Spring Chicken, rosted Sweetbreads, Jellies, Maccaroni, frill’d Oysters, 2 small Crabs, & made Dish of Eggs … We got home about half past nine, as we went very slowly on Account of Briton’s walking, who … was very imprudent indeed, but I believe he had been making too free with Mr Mellishs Beer &c.

  There is a glimpse here, perhaps, of the soul of the English. We have a culture like a rummage sale, like a white-elephant stall, hideously divided and bizarrely coherent – and, over the last century or so, obscured by an even more varied invention known as ‘Britishness’. The British have a terrible reputation for cuisine, but the English have a different reputation: for overindulgence, and plain, gargantuan portions.

  That is the way the English used to eat, and I have a feeling they would do again, given the chance. There is a little of the overindulgent eighteenth century in all of us. Perhaps not in our genes; there are so many people here – and always have been – from other parts of the world. With the best will in the world, there is no way they can share the particular mixed English genetic heritage. Nor is it quite the English environment and weather which we all share that shapes us, because the weather has changed from the heat of the twelfth century to the frost fairs on the Thames of the eighteenth.

  No, it must be something else – some other historical imperative, some psychic beating of the traditional heart of the land – perched on the far north-west corner of Europe, peering out towards the west. Something shapes the English – it does not homogenise them, which would not be English at all – but it makes them stand out, whether they like it or not, whether they are from the backstreets of Karachi or the tiny Jewish villages of old Poland. We can’t know what that is, but we can look at the flotsam and jetsam of history that amount to the whole.

  This book that you hold in your hand tries to gather up some of those strands. As such, it is both a celebration and investigation of Englishness and an instruction manual for those who might like to be more English. It is also a guidebook for those of us who are not absolutely sure who we are.

  And the confusion is only r
easonable. The English themselves are a pretty diverse bunch and there are many different kinds of English people, even among the same social strata. Take the two great English heroes of the Napoleonic era, Nelson and Wellington (Nelson was from Norfolk, though Wellington was, strictly speaking, Irish). They only met once, in the lobby of the Colonial Office in Downing Street, shortly before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. They disliked each other on sight. Wellington said Nelson was ‘vain and silly’; Nelson didn’t survive long enough to write about his own feelings. It was only because Lord Castlereagh kept them waiting for three quarters of an hour that there was any kind of meeting of minds.

  This misunderstanding is usually explained in terms of a difference in career and timing. Nelson was at the height of his fame and Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, was not yet a national hero, and he felt ignored and patronised by the little one-eyed, one-armed admiral. But there is another way of looking at why they annoyed each other. Because although they represented the same nation, they could not have had more contrasting personalities, And because Wellington virtually invented the new ‘British’ personality, adding to the traditional English reputation for phlegm a whole new veneer that was all his own – tight-lipped, unemotional, clipped.

  ‘My God, I’ve lost my leg!’ shouted the Earl of Uxbridge, later Marquess of Anglesey, next to Wellington at Waterloo, after a cannonball carried it away at the height of battle.

  Wellington glanced down, unsurprised and unrelenting. ‘By God, sir,’ he said. ‘So you have.’

  Nelson, on the other hand, was easily a match for Wellington for his strategic genius and personal bravery, but he represented a much more old-fashioned personality – emotional, overindulgent, sentimental, lachrymose, and overwhelmingly English. Wellington was never any of those. No wonder they disliked each other to start with.

  So what is it to be English? Is it by turning a Nelsonian blind eye to authority or is it the Wellingtonian stiff upper lip? Is it a sentimental attachment to animals, is it a fondness for some of the most magnificently horrible vegetables on the planet, is it a nostalgic regard for tradition, or is it our love both of the monarchy and of the underdog? Probably it is a mixture of all these things.

  These are increasingly urgent questions. The Scots and Welsh are clear about who they are, and are aware of themselves as nations in the United Kingdom. Their demands for self-determination are, to some extent, being met. They are grown-up countries, not vassals. But who are the English? The Scots have ‘Flower of Scotland’; the Welsh have any number of songs including ‘Cwm Rhondda’ and ‘Myfanwy’ and ‘We’ll Keep a Welcome’. The Irish have their own ambiguities, it is true, but what do the English have, except a vague, polite on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand?

  This is partly because the English have always been polite. The English have always apologised for themselves wherever they go. They like pluck, fair play and cricket. Wimbledon and the Derby still have a place in their hearts, but there are peculiar ways in which they feel most comfortable not winning. They also don’t like articulating what they are, in case someone contradicts them. This is partly political correctness – the nation is so diverse, so multiracial, so contradictory – but it is more than that. They have always expressed themselves and articulated their values in deliberately ambiguous ways – and who can say they are wrong? But it does leave a bit of a gap.

  The British Empire has long since disappeared, the Union Jack may go the way of the Union, ‘Rule, Britannia’ is slightly embarrassing (as the English put it), and the very word ‘British’ seems to have given way to a crumbling ‘United Kingdom’, which we all know is not that united. The days, a century or more ago, when politicians could blithely use the term ‘English’ to include everyone on these islands, has now gone.

  There has therefore never been a more urgent moment to revive a sense of Englishness, and this book is designed to knit it back together again, contradictory bit by bit.

  There was another reason for writing the book. I was wandering down Monsal Dale in Derbyshire, the extraordinarily English beauty spot where John Ruskin campaigned against the dramatic viaduct – built, as he put it, ‘so that every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour’. The viaduct is now preserved and is part of the amazing network of long-distance footpaths that criss-cross the nation. And as I climbed down to the river below, I found myself wondering how my children would ever learn about the traditional stories and songs which are their heritage.

  They are hardly going to learn them in school. The national curriculum endlessly repeats the founding myth of the modern British state – the 1940 invasion that never was – but barely goes otherwise beyond the Tudors and an occasional whiff of the Romans. If they go to Anglican schools, they may get a few traditional hymn tunes, but that is pretty much the limit.

  So if they are going to learn anything about being English, I’m going to have to teach them myself. But what should I tell them? Should I sing them ‘Polly Oliver’, or would they have me locked up? Should I tell them about Robin Hood and the Armada? Should I tell them about Sir John Moore at Corunna and Captain Scott? Should I read them Children of the New Forest? Or are these curmudgeonly, backward-looking hangovers from the days of Downton Abbey?

  Should we still know which clothes are correct for which occasions, and why pinstripe suits exist? Should we extol St George and St George’s Day? After all, this sort of English identity can make people nervous.

  On one level, this is a manual. It is a book which you could give to a visitor from another planet, and which would given them a complete grounding in the idiosyncracies of the English. It also pins down and captures the absurdities and warmth of Englishness at its best, and why – despite everything – we are rather proud of it. In fact, this is a book that can help us learn to be English all over again. It will show us how by providing, in a way that can be dipped into or read right through, a compendium of the peculiarities and cultural tics that make us English.

  And once you set out these little English peculiarities, it is clear how much of a mongrel nation we have always been. So few of those institutions that we call our own are unambiguously English in origin – they have been borrowed from cultures all over the world, just as we have borrowed people from all over the world.

  The English have always been a tolerant nation, though it may not have seemed like that if you were a foreign merchant being chased through the backstreets of medieval London by the wild apprentices of the City. They have incorporated and assimilated, not always easily, and not always consciously, and have created a paradoxical, varied culture that seems at the same time to reach back to the past but also to change all the time.

  ‘What should they know of England who only England know?’ wrote Rudyard Kipling, urging the strangely insular English to look beyond their shores to where their fellow countrypeople struggled to live, in Calcutta or Lahore or Shanghai or Cairo or Lagos. It is true that, to learn what is most obvious about yourself, you sometimes have to listen to what foreigners say about you.

  Evelyn Waugh puts the negative in the voice of Anthony Blanche, the waspish, camp, half-English gossip of Brideshead Revisited, a character he based partly on Brian Howard and partly on Harold Acton, who had famously recited T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to the rowing toughs on Christ Church Meadow in Oxford. He warns the hero about charm:

  Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

  This book is full of English charm, so this is a reasonable warning to bear in mind. It is perhaps that the English insist on a stubborn, perhaps lazy, refusal to demand too much for themselves, their determination to live like hobbits: comfortable, bourgeois, unexciting lives – facing up to challenges and extremes which are different from those of other nationalities. But we need to defend the English a little here. Separately, the garden sheds, tree and footbal
l worship, nostalgia, and giant, stodgy puddings with custard, may not amount to much. But, taken together, they amount to a civilised way of life, which is constantly changing and yet always the same.

  So, with a view to capturing all the rich foibles, traditions and quirks of English culture and history for the next generation, before they are forgotten, I have selected the hundred entries that follow. Everyone in England would probably select different things – that is partly what makes them English – but I hope readers will forgive the personal selection, my own desert-island choices, and use it as a starting point to make their own. And then pass them on.

  Key to logos

  SOME NATIONS RENAME their high streets and airports when their dead heroes are still warm. Others use the epithet ‘great’ to describe every statesman they produce who stays the right side of the law, and some who don’t.

  For the English, it is the other way around. Only one king of England was ever called ‘the Great’ and he was born and died so long ago that it is hard to verify whether he was great or not. We don’t even know where his bones lie, though they were scattered by Puritans during the Eighteenth Century, so perhaps that is forgivable.

  It is strange that we know so little about Alfred the Great. Perhaps the only inhabitants of England who are constantly reminded of him are those who live in his former capital city of Winchester, where a prominent statue of the man, wielding a sword, dominates the entrance to the city from the south.

  Traditionally, what everyone knew about Alfred was the story of the cakes. This was a tale told by an anonymous monk writing the life of Alfred’s advisor St Neot. It explained how the king, cornered by the Vikings at Athelney, goes wandering among his people deep in thought, knocks on a swineherd’s hut and agrees to mind the stove for the wife. He was so deep in thought that he let the cakes burn, and received a heavy tongue-lashing – even perhaps a beating – without revealing who he was.

  Now this story is pretty much forgotten, yet it has something in common with many English tales. It isn’t really about the humiliation of the king, or his dutiful acceptance of chastisement. It is about the ability of an ordinary housewife to upbraid the monarch. It is about the importance of practicality over intellect – a very English idea – and also about the importance of trying again. Alfred was soundly beaten by the Danes when he was hiding in Athelney, but he was thinking about how to have another bash at them. Alfred and the Cakes is the English equivalent of Robert the Bruce and the Spider: it is a story designed to encourage you never to give up.