by David Boyle
It was the bankers they hated, aspiring to recreate the ancient equality of Anglo-Saxon rule. Those were the slogans shouted by the peasants, innkeepers, clergymen and farmers who burst into London on 13 June 1381, tearing down John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace in the Strand, hunting down lawyers and Flemish traders. Those storming through Aldgate and across the Thames shouted the slogan ‘with Richard and the true commons’.
This needs some investigation. Similar rebellions on the Continent were carried out by semi-terrorists, and it may be that there was a distinction between radicalism in England and continental Europe, at least in southern Europe, where revolutionaries owed their ideas to the so-called Manichean heresy. The English gentry did not pine – as the continental gentry so often did – for urban living. They settled in the countryside. When the countryside rose up against the town, as it did in England too, this was not necessarily the poor against the rich – it was the powerless against the powerful, those who grew vegetables against those who grew money. Even the records of those punished for their involvement in the Peasants’ Revolt include a number of well-to-do country types, yeomen farmers, clergymen and tradesmen.
The intellectual descendant of the revolutionaries of 1381, and of Wat Tyler – stabbed by the mayor of London in Smithfield where he was then executed – was William Morris (see Chapter 41). In 1886, he imagined dreaming his way back to the revolt, and meeting John Ball himself in a church in the middle of the night, and talking about the past and future. And afterwards, he said that he ‘pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name’.
This is typically melancholic, but it is also wise, in a distinctively English way. That is the way change happens in England, round and round. It is in some ways the ultimate English antidote to revolutionary change.
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
John Ball
‘IT IS A truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ So begins Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, considered by many to be England’s greatest novel. The constant film adaptations, TV series and novel sequels seem to fuel our obsession still further. Perhaps this affection was sparked to some extent by Andrew Davies’ hugely successful BBC adaptation (1995) with Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Mr Darcy.
Jane Austen herself was on the reserved side and might be taken aback by the current Austen-mania. She was born into a large and slightly impoverished rectory at Steventon in Hampshire, and lived her life surrounded by hordes of largely impoverished younger cousins. The plight of English women from the minor landed gentry dependent on marriage for financial security, and the intricate economics and interplay between the social divisions were some of her major themes.
Austen died in 1817 and her grave in the nave of Winchester Cathedral mentions her name but not the novels that made her world famous after her death. She published only six – Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818, posthumous), and Persuasion (1818, posthumous) – most anonymously (attributed as ‘By a Lady’), and struggled with Pride and Prejudice for years under the title First Impressions.
She did acquire a fashionable following in the royal family, and there was some favourable comment by reviewers, of which two in particular helped make her reputation – Sir Walter Scott, the great Scottish novelist, and Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin, a man who had shocked polite society by preaching to Queen Victoria with his leg resting on the top of the pulpit.
As everyone English knows, Pride and Prejudice concerns the adventures of a young lady called Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five sisters, her hysterical mother and her laid-back, rather cynical lazy father. It describes how she thoroughly misjudges Mr Darcy, through a series of misunderstandings, especially after his disastrous first, rather snobbish, proposal of marriage – thinking him haughty and cruel. By the end of the book, however, she finds he is quite the reverse – much to the horror of his relative Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
What Jane Austen achieves is an extremely funny novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat, yet centres not on an exotic adventure but on the very ordinary business of finding someone to love. Her enemies, as always, are snobbery, money and pretension.
Jane Austen died at the age of forty-one, and never married.
That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.
Mr Bennet discourages his daughter Mary from playing the piano again
THAT’S THE WAY to do it! Even these days, when Punch and Judy shows are comparatively rare, and even strings of sausages are a bit of a surprise, we understand where that injunction comes from. We also know it is spoken with a strange, raucous nasal voice, and with gusto and self-satisfaction, the very essence of the phrase ‘as pleased as Punch’.
There is something about Punch and Judy shows, with their casual murders and multiple brutalities, which English children seem to love – not to mention the policeman, the crocodile and the sausages. With its striped red and white booths, it almost smells of ice cream, jelly and the seaside.
But, like many English institutions, the origin of Mr Punch is actually Italian. He derives from the commedia dell’arte and the Italian Renaissance, a direct descendant of the character Pulcinella, and he owes as much to the presence of itinerant Italian players in the sixteenth century in London as to anything else. Samuel Pepys saw his first Punch and Judy show, thanks to an Italian called Pietro Gimonde, in Covent Garden on 9 May 1662. He described it as ‘an Italian puppet show’.
And at that stage, and throughout the raucous eighteenth century, Punch and Judy was indeed a marionette show. It was only in Victorian England that Punch became a glove puppet, which allowed him to wield his stick with even more ferocity. He also shifted his audience from adults to children. In fact, the more knockabout Punch became, the more he shifted to audiences who really appreciate that kind of humour.
At the same time, he also tended to lose some of his really dark fellow characters, like the Hangman and the Devil. Toby the Dog, who used to be played by a real dog in the original performances, has also tended to bow out.
The plot is variable and barely exists anyway beyond a number of encounters between Mr Punch and the law, and sometimes supernatural forces too. He is as outrageous as Don Giovanni, as violent as Dick Turpin, but he always wins through. No wonder he was as pleased as Punch. He fits neatly into the category of English rogues, with bizarre seventeenth-century dress and, perhaps also, a strong Italian accent.
Judy. Where’s the baby?
Punch. (In a melancholy tone.) I have had a misfortune; the child was so terrible cross, I throwed it out of the winder. (Lemontation of Judy for the loss of her dear child. She goes into asterisks, and then excites and fetches a cudgel, and commences beating Punch over the head.)
Punch. Don’t be cross, my dear: I didn’t go to do it.
Judy. I’ll pay yer for throwing the child out of the winder. (She keeps on giving him knocks of the head, but Punch snatches the stick away and commences an attack upon his wife, and beats her severely.)
Judy. I’ll go to the constable, and have you locked up.
From Henry Mayhew’s collected script (1851)
IMAGINE THE SCENE. We are on the seafront at a famous seaside resort, under a partially covered bus shelter, peering out at the sea. The inexorable waves are breaking on the shingle before us, but the distance is obscured by the mist, and the drizzle from it is splashing into our faces.
We hold our hands underneath our packages of warm fish and chips, sprinkled with salt and vinegar, to stave off the cold. It isn’t supposed to be like this in August, we say to ou
rselves, outraged and yet patiently accepting.
In front of us, on the stones, some hardy souls are wrapped against the wind in colourless anoraks up to their throats, protected from the worst of the weather by joyful-looking windbreaks flapping incessantly as they try to fly free of the stakes hammered deep into the sand.
Is that someone swimming, we ask, surprised, reaching for the first taste of the warm chips and the taste of salt on the tongue. It isn’t. But we are having fun, aren’t we. Aren’t we?
I don’t know if we were or not, but we could have consoled ourselves that we were having a traditional English experience, recognisable to our parents and their parents before them and probably – notwithstanding global warming – our children and their children after them.
The English penchant for the seaside began relatively late, when a doctor called Richard Russell published a tract called A Dissertation concerning the Use of Sea-water in Disease of the Glands. It was 1750, and the idea of water being health-giving had caused crowds to descend on the various spa towns in the high season. Russell diverted some of them to the seaside, and got a head start himself by moving to the small Sussex village of Brighthelmstone.
It was a prescient move. Within a generation, Brighton – as it was called by then – was booming. By 1820 it had a Royal Pavilion and a population of 24,000. And accelerating the growth of seaside resorts were the Napoleonic Wars, which meant that the well-to-do had to holiday at home rather than on the rather risky Continent.
Then steamships became synonymous with seasides. Ferries took 95,000 people from London to Margate and back in 1830. Then it was the train. Then it was motor coaches, turbocharged by the special excursion ticket prices between the wars and by the advent of paid holidays. Later still, it was the motorscooter, when no bank holiday was complete without some kind of riot in Brighton between mods and rockers.
The seaside world has seriously declined in recent decades, thanks to foreign holidays and package tours to Lanzarotte. The old landladies died out, the Fawlty Towers hotels went the way of Fawlty Towers, the piers caught fire or fell to bits, the old pier-end comedians turned their toes up. The old resorts became more divided in class terms – Blackpool and Margate were working class, Brighton and Southport middle class. Lyme Regis and a handful of others have verged on something else, with Italian salads with pancetta available on the beaches of Dorset at steep prices.
And in its way, this was very English too. But the peeling bus shelters and tacky nightclubs, and that seaside stench of decay, was perhaps the underside of England we prefer to ignore.
You think Margate more lively. So is a Cheshire cheese, full of mites, more lively than a sound one; but that very liveliness only proves its rottenness. I remember, too, that Margate, though full of company, was generally filled with such company as people who were nice in the choice of their company were rather fearful of keeping company with. The hoy went to London every week, loaded with mackerel and herrings, and returned loaded with company. The cheapness of the conveyance made it equally commodious for dead fish and lively company. So, perhaps, your solitude at Ramsgate may turn out another advantage.
William Cowper (1731–1800)
SOMETIME BETWEEN 1859 and 1865, when England was undergoing the most rapid change in history, a Birmingham solicitor called Harry Gem and his Spanish friend Augurio Perera combined the best of rackets and the best of pelota – a Spanish ball game – to create tennis. They played it on a croquet lawn at Edgbaston. When they moved to Leamington Spa in 1872, they took the game with them and founded the first tennis club in the world. The following year, a Welsh major, Walter Wingfield, patented a similar game borrowing the rules of real tennis, which he called Sphairistike (from the Greek adjective meaning ‘relating to ball games’), which became known as ‘Sticky’.
The development of tennis, and especially Wimbledon (see Chapter 50), seems to have gone hand in hand with the development of the peculiarly English delicacy of strawberries and cream. It tastes not just of a green, pollen-filled English summer but of deuce and the thwack of ball on racket. The Wimbledon tournament manages to get through more than twenty-three tonnes of strawberries and 7,000 litres of cream.
The connection between strawberries and cream and tennis seems to stretch back to Thomas Wolsey, the cardinal who built Hampton Court, the Tudor venue for real tennis. It was he who made the original pairing, serving them from the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Strawberries and cream did not save Wolsey from the displeasure of Henry VIII, who got his hands on Hampton Court. But from the very first Wimbledon tournament in 1877, strawberries and cream were what they served.
Prices of strawberries and cream portions at Wimbledon:
1990, £1.60
1995, £1.75
2000, £1.80
2005, £2.00
2010, £2.50
2014, £2.50
THERE HAS ALWAYS been a very English kind of magic surrounding Shakespeare, and all sorts of superstitions. It has resulted in actors fearing to quote Macbeth too enthusiastically, especially in theatres, and to refer to it by euphemisms as the Scottish Play or the Bard’s Play. Rudyard Kipling imagined three children ‘breaking the hills’ and reviving the fairy Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, from wherever he was resting, just by performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Midsummer’s Day. Shakespeare’s witches’ spell in Macbeth is supposed to have been borrowed from contemporary witches.
And then there is The Tempest.
This involves a magician called Prospero and the ‘airy spirit’ Ariel he conjures up to help him. It is Ariel in Act V who sings the song ‘Where the bee sucks’, perhaps the most English and the most memorable of all Shakespeare’s songs – especially when it is set to music, as it has been by many composers, but specifically by Thomas Arne – who also wrote the music for the bombastic ‘Rule, Britannia’.
Where the bee sucks – with its descriptions of lying under cowslips – ought to be a kind of pastoral national anthem.
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
SOMETHING HAPPENS TO the English, and perhaps especially the English middle classes, in that period between June and July that is most heady with excitement, when low summer shifts to high summer. They start reaching for their picnic hampers and feeling a little sporty. And when it isn’t the Henley Regatta, when the middle classes parade with blazers, Leander ties and white trousers which used to fit them in their youth, it has to be Wimbledon that captures the imagination. In fact, it dominates the way the English frame their memories of an English summertime, watching the hopeless struggles of the English players at teatime, or drinking Pimm’s in the afternoon sunshine to the gentle sound of THUMP, THUMP, Thirty forty.
The very word ‘Wimbledon’ conjures up a spirit of luxurious hopelessness, as successions of American women or Central European men slug it out on Centre Court in white, sending the English challenger packing.
There is something erotic in an English way about the first appearance of sun on a tennis court, when – ‘oh, weakness of joy’, as John Betjeman described Miss Joan Hunter Dunn – the gentlemen eye the ladies and vice versa.
Wearing white is de rigueur. It is actually in the rules, and the rules of Wimbledon are pretty strict. There are regular spats about them; in fact my great-grandfather – the sports journalist and croquet champion Bonham Carter Evelegh – walked out of his job as chief umpire over a flagrant defiance of the rules on the size of tennis balls. Wimbledon remains a caricature of itself when it comes to decorum. Even in the 1970s, they were still listing the women’s champion Chris Evert on the scoreboards as ‘Mrs J. M. Lloyd’. In the 1980s, they were calming the court antics of John McEnroe by calling him ‘Mr’.
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Of course, there have always been games like tennis. The aristocracy would play real tennis, and you can still see the venue at Hampton Court, though it is more akin to archaic squash. If any one nation invented tennis scoring it was probably the French; Charles VIII died from a bang to the head at Amboise Castle in 1498 after watching a medieval tennis match, and the tennis scoring system borrows partly from the French and partly, it seems, from the ancient Sumerians.
The Sumerian civilisation, in ancient Babylon about 3,300 BC – even before Stonehenge – was ruled day to day by a caste of accountant-priests, a fearsome combination of roles that included blessing and counting. For them, the key magical number – the equivalent to our hundred – was sixty. Everything counted up to sixty, came in bundles of sixty or in fractions of sixty, which appears to be the basis of the strange tennis scoring system: the score implies that sixty is the score after forty. Chivalric slang used the word ‘egg’ – or ‘l’oeuf’ in French – to mean ‘nothing’. That’s why the word ‘love’, which sounds just like it – a chivalric joke – is used to mean ‘no points’. The French don’t appreciate the joke. They use the word ‘zero’ in tennis.
By the 1870s the All England Croquet Club was up and running in Worple Road in Wimbledon. It subsequently changed its name and purpose to include tennis, and passed the motion to launch the first lawn tennis championship. Wimbledon was born in July 1877 and 200 spectators came to see the first ever Wimbledon champion, rackets player Spencer Gore, thrash his opponent W. C. Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4. They paid a shilling each for the privilege.
