How to Be English

by David Boyle

  These are not the dark fairies you might read about in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. This is more like a glittery and diaphanous branch of the New Age. We are talking optimistic, light-bearing fairies, bringing the natural world to life. ‘A man can’t always do as he likes,’ said John Ruskin in his Slade lecture ‘Fairyland’ in 1893, ‘but he can always fancy what he likes.’ For Ruskin, fairies were an antidote to grim reality. In a dull concrete world, which seems determined to engulf what remains of those woods and forests, some of us do long for a bit of magic.

  But maybe we shouldn’t wish for these things too fervently. You only have to read the descriptions in Cornish newspapers of the 1840s, of families battering or burning their children because they believed they were changelings – enchanted blocks of wood put there by fairies who had stolen the real child away – to realise that English fairies were not a source of delight; they were a source of terror. They were troublesome, amoral, capricious and dangerous and deep in the landscape, and people used to keep them at bay if they possibly could. If they ever found themselves amongst them, they were very careful not to dance with them or eat with them, for fear they would wake up a century hence.

  Despite this, the modern English soul tends to follow Rudyard Kipling in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), aware that the fairies are very ancient, aware that perhaps they should not have ‘broken the hills’ quite so enthusiastically, but sensing also that their fairies are in some way a repository of a magical English tapestry of history. They are also careful not to recite A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times on Old Midsummer’s Day (24 June).

  ‘Oh,’ cried Lizzie, ‘Laura, Laura,

  You should not peep at goblin men.’

  Lizzie cover’d up her eyes,

  Cover’d close lest they should look;

  Laura rear’d her glossy head,

  And whisper’d like the restless brook:

  ‘Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,

  Down the glen tramp little men.’

  From ‘Goblin Market’, Christina Rossetti (1830–94)

  FOR GENERATIONS, THE English averted their eyes from the peculiarities of Glastonbury Tor, the strange island crowned by the tower of St Michael’s Church, jutting out of the Somerset Levels. It was too weird to be quite polite. It was also the site of the hanging, drawing and quartering of Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and people tended just to leave it at that.

  It has never been quite clear what the new spirit was that gripped the English in the 1960s, but it has made Glastonbury – with its half-forgotten, ruined abbey – the capital city of the New Age. Not quite the New Jerusalem, but a gentle English, mythic version of it. Partly this was a renewed fascination with King Arthur and the mythology of the nation, partly a reaction against the chimera of technological progress, partly a growing interest in non-mainstream spirituality. Whatever it was, from the calm of Chalice Well to the last vegetarian tea shop, Glastonbury is now the pulsating heart of something else. It is also the presiding genius of the annual, world-famous Glastonbury Festival.

  The tor is at the centre of two important legends. The first is that this is where Joseph of Arimathea landed when he bought the crown of thorns and the Holy Grail – the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper – to these shores, and where legend has it he also brought Jesus as a boy (see Chapter 37). It is here where he buried his staff or the crown of thorns itself, and it grew into the Glastonbury Thorn, said to flower twice a year at Christmas and Easter, which eventually fell victim to a Puritan fanatic in the seventeenth century.

  That is the first legend. The second is that Glastonbury Tor marks the entrance to the world of Faerie, the Avalon where King Arthur was taken to be healed of his wounds and where his coffin and bones were found by monks in 1170, and buried in state by Edward I a century later. This is the source of the idea of the ‘Once and Future King’ (Rex quondam, rexque futurus), because that was the inscription said to have been found in Arthur’s tomb.

  There are other legends. One idea, introduced by the mystic writer Katharine Maltwood, is that the Tor is the heart of a giant zodiac built into the hedgerows over the Glastonbury area. The slight difficulty is that the area surrounding the Tor was under water, and navigable, during the period Maltwood said it was etched out.

  Either way, Glastonbury itself has begun to come back to life over the past generation, thanks to very English individuals like Wellesley Tudor Pole, the founder of Chalice Well Gardens, and the man Winston Churchill asked to organise a psychic barrier against the invading Nazis in 1940. There is a mind-expanding quality to the place, and clues about the true nature of England if we could but discern them. But this may be an over-romantic view – there are certainly those among the English who would happily build a bypass to the A303 slap through the middle.

  There is on the confines of western Britain a certain royal island, called in the ancient speech Glastonia, marked out by broad boundaries, girt round with waters rich in fish and with still-flowing rivers, fitted for many uses of human indigence, and dedicated to the most sacred of deities.

  St Augustine of Canterbury

  WILLIAM BLAKE WAS an English mystic, a misunderstood poet and a maverick artist. He also claimed a privileged ability to glimpse other worlds. He saw an angel in a tree in Peckham Rye, of all places. He saw his brother’s soul leaving his body on his deathbed, clapping its hands with joy. He was haunted by peculiar apparitions, like the ghost of a flea. And he also believed he conversed at night with the great, dead poets and artists of England.

  The year 1804 marked a series of breakthroughs in industrial Britain, such as Richard Trevithick’s first steam locomotive and gas lighting at the Lyceum Theatre in London. Sometime that year – we don’t know when – there he was, sitting in his cramped room in South Molton Street near Oxford Street in London, now the haunt of fashion houses and hairdressers with extraordinary prices, penning the words for the poem we know as ‘Jerusalem’.

  The poem included its famous admonition to build ‘Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land’. Unsure what to do with it, he slipped it some years later into the long poem ‘Milton’ that he believed he had taken down in dictation, not just from Milton himself, but from a range of other giants from beyond the grave, at the rate of up to thirty lines at a time, ‘even against my will’.

  It was an exhausting and painful process, and he found himself forced to scribble pages of fantasy in the middle of the night, time after time, while his wife Catherine got up and sat with him motionless to support him in his own mental fight.

  Where do you see these people, asked one acquaintance a little sceptically? ‘Here, madam,’ said Blake, tapping his forehead.

  ‘Jerusalem’ has become one of the best-known poems in the English language, transformed into a soaring patriotic anthem with music by Sir Hubert Parry. It is still sung by socialists and conservatives alike, partly because the words are obscure enough to satisfy everybody, partly because the tune is stirring enough to have emerged as an alternative national anthem. So patriotic, in fact, that it was banned recently from St Paul’s Cathedral on the grounds that it is too nationalistic, which wasn’t really what Blake meant.

  The poem which begins ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ refers to a legend that Jesus himself had come to England as a boy. Like Milton, Blake thought that God had reserved England for special work for the world, to lead the world out of rationalism to a new age of imagination and truth. His next long poem was also called ‘Jerusalem’ and he had another go at it:

  And now our time returns again:

  Our souls exult, & London’s towers

  Receive the Lamb of God to dwell

  In England’s green & pleasant bowers.

  Blake was almost incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The Poet Laureate Robert Southey called him ‘a decided madman’. It wasn’t for another century that ‘Jerusalem’, and its attack on the ‘dark satanic mills’ would be dusted down and rehabilita
ted for a new use – to inspire people to dedicate the war effort, during the First World War, to something more high-minded.

  The song was borrowed by the Christian socialist campaigner Stewart Headlam and used across the front of his journal Church Reformer, and it was this which brought what was otherwise rather an obscure verse to people’s attention. From there, it came to be noticed by the high-minded movement Fight for Right, launched by the explorer Sir Francis Younghusband in 1915. The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges was searching for some kind of song to be sung at their rally at Queen’s Hall in London on 28 March the following year, where he was giving the opening address, and sent the words of ‘Jerusalem’ to his friend Sir Hubert Parry. Parry wrote the music in one day (10 March 1916) and gave it to the organist Walford Davies, who was conducting the choirs at the same rally. Parry pointed speechlessly to the notes of ‘O, clouds unfold!’ as somehow expressing something that was hugely important to him. The tune brought the house down.

  Fight for Right unravelled in 1917 in in-fighting between the jingoists and the idealists, but one of the people at the rally a year before had been the pioneer feminist Millicent Fawcett. She wanted a song for her rally in 1918 to celebrate women finally winning the vote, and even persuaded Parry to conduct it (a few weeks before he died). It has been associated with women’s causes, and the Women’s Institute in particular, ever since.

  The song has always gone beyond that, representing a yearning that is both patriotic and also spiritual, a combination that some nationalities sometimes find strange. But then the English have always needed not just to win, but to have been right – and to combine their radicalism with a deep, nostalgic conservatism.

  King George V, a deeply conservative man in almost every other respect, said he preferred the song to ‘God Save the King’.

  Bring me my bow of burning gold

  Bring me my arrows of desire

  Bring me my spear: O, clouds unfold!

  Bring me my chariot of fire!

  I will not cease from mental fight,

  Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green and pleasant land.

  William Blake, 1804

  WHEN YOU WATCH Morris dancers, their bells jingling, their weird instruments wailing, and their heavy footsteps thundering past you, you might reasonably imagine that this was a typically English scene, a great peasant tradition and an ancient series of steps. The thought of men in white, dancing with handkerchiefs, is certainly strange enough to be English. So is the continuing friendly disputes between rival Morris organisations – like the Morris Federation or the Morris Ring – about whether men should dance alone, or women should dance alone, or both should dance together.

  In fact, like many traditions which seem to be cornerstones of English life, nobody really knows the origins of Morris dancing. There is some evidence that it arrived in England sometime during the Renaissance, via Italian dancers. There is other evidence that the word originally derived from ‘Moorish’, at a time when Moorish decorations were suddenly fashionable. It may therefore be that, even if the Morris dancers were dramatising an English tradition, the bells on their ankles used to make them seem exotically foreign. The truth is that nobody really knows, but English peasants were adept at Morris dancing by the time that Oliver Cromwell arrived to disapprove in the 1640s.

  There are two key dates in the development of Morris dancing. The first is 1448, which marks the first recorded Morris dancer in England. The second is much more precise. It is Boxing Day 1899, when the young musician Cecil Sharp first saw Morris dancers in action in Headington in Oxford, and it changed his life. Sharp was thrilled by the rhythm and learned a great deal from the musician William Kimber who was accompanying the dancers. Thinking about the experience later, he decided he would start collecting these dances, and set about doing so.

  It was the great age of the folklore collector. Young men with pasty faces were soon swarming through the rural areas of England collecting stories, and – thanks to Sharp – songs and dances. Sharp cut his collecting teeth in the villages of Somerset, just as Ralph Vaughan Williams was collecting tunes in Norfolk, Sussex and Surrey. Sharp founded the Folk Dance Society in 1911 and was already publishing his songbooks for schools, carefully removing all the bawdy double entendres. The education system might shun anything of the kind these days, but the combined efforts of Cecil Sharp and Lord Baden-Powell around the Scouting camp fire, inserted English folk songs back into the national consciousness.

  The real revival of Morris dancing came in the 1960s, when hundreds of new troops of dancers began to emerge, developing their own traditions, loosely based on those in their area, and occasionally given depth by the memories of the oldest generation who could just remember dancing in their youth.

  A Morris-dance typology:

  Cotswold Morris, dances from Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire with hankies and sticks

  North-West Morris, developing out of mill life a century ago

  Border Morris, emerging from the Welsh borders and often danced with blackened faces

  Molly Dancing, mainly from Cambridgeshire

  Rapper Dancing, from Northumberland with long poles

  Longsword Dancing, from Durham Yorkshire with long metal ‘swords’

  IS THERE ANYTHING that feels as English as the National Trust? There is something overwhelming about the combination of the friendly chintz patterned cushions, the locally made honey, the tea shops manned by unpaid volunteers, the implacably white faces, the combination of green populism and old-fashioned snobbery.

  There are many ways in which the Trust is a kind of sleeping English government-in-waiting. It is already equipped with an economic policy, and more members than all the UK political parties combined. All it lacks is a foreign policy, and that can’t be long in coming. The National Trust is, in short, a power in the land, and very much more than the home for retired English gentlefolk that it has sometimes been made out to be. It also seems to be discovering some of its radical roots.

  The radicalism was, in some ways, the inheritance of the origins of the National Trust. It was the child of an alliance between two great reformers, the art and social critic John Ruskin and the housing pioneer Octavia Hill. Ruskin bought up a series of slums in Marylebone and handed them to Octavia Hill to manage in a humane way – she appointed a group of sympathetic but strong-minded women as rent collectors and set about knowing all her tenants and cajoling them into a responsible, thrifty existence.

  The Trust itself emerged out of a long-running argument about preserving the Lake District from quarry railways. It was born on 12 January 1895, at a meeting of Hill, the Commons Preservation Society solicitor Sir Robert Hunter, and the hymn-writer Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley. In 1907, it even achieved its very own Act of Parliament, with statutory powers to hold land and buildings in trust in perpetuity. Now, more than a century later, the Trust owns 1.5 per cent of the land area of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, managed via a decision-making structure based on the regions – it is a pioneer in government in that respect too.

  The Trust’s first property was the Alfriston Clergy House in Sussex, but its main purpose was protecting landscape, especially in the Lake District where the creator of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter, was an early donor and enthusiast. It was the death duties imposed by Clement Attlee’s Labour government after 1945 which finally did for the landed classes, and meant that huge numbers of stately homes and fine buildings – and the paintings and decoration inside – ended up in the care of the National Trust.

  As a bastion of Englishness, the Trust has its political meltdowns about once a decade. In 1967, the row that led to regionalisation was really over the question of whether it was too focused on stately homes. Then there was the controversial decision to hand over protected land to the Ministry of Defence. Then there was the hunting debate from 1999. It is, in short, all very English.

  But perhaps the re
al Englishness of the Trust is revealed in its 61,000 volunteers, who give up a portion of every week to tell people about ancient rooms, or guide them in car parks, or help with gardening or a range of other tasks. The National Trust is a monument to many things, but also the way that voluntarism lodges in the English soul.

  You can also tell something about the concerns of the English by looking at the statistics for the most visited National Trust sites: Stourhead and Cliveden are currently running in the top three, both of them beautiful homes with even more beautiful, extensive and informal gardens attached. The Trust reveals us as a gardening nation, a nation obsessed with the divide between town and country that gardens represent. And none the worse for that.

  When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. New circumstances require various efforts, and it is the spirit, not the dead form, that should be perpetuated … We shall leave them a few houses, purified and improved, a few new and better ones built, a certain amount of thoughtful and loving management, a few open spaces.

  Octavia Hill, 1898

  ON 1 AUGUST 1798, in a sticky Mediterranean dusk, Horatio Nelson’s Mediterranean fleet finally tracked down their French opponents at anchor in Aboukir Bay on the Egyptian coast. Nelson was determined to bring them to action, even in the gathering gloom. The English gun crews were crouching by their cannon while the French heaved their heavy armaments on to the seaward side where they expected their opponents to strike. The Battle of the Nile was about to begin.