by David Boyle
The club moved to its present site in 1922, and the television cameras arrived in 1937. Centre Court remains the focus, especially after they built the retractable roof which takes twenty minutes to shut, ending the dodgy relationship with the weather – at least for the main matches. But it is No. 2 Court where the unexpected happens, and where John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova have all found themselves unexpectedly knocked out.
At the north end of the grounds, there is now a huge television screen, visible from a grass mound which was originally christened Henman Hill. It is now known as Murray Mound, but Andy Murray – as everyone knows – is actually Scottish.
Thanks to Wimbledon, lawn tennis has been given to the world. It remains recognisably English perhaps only in the Wimbledon tradition and in the strange atmosphere of relaxed carnival frivolity that comes over the English when Wimbledon is on our screens.
They act like they’ve got the biggest tournament in the world, and they’re right, they do.
Pete Sampras on the All England Club
THERE IS SOMETHING wonderfully redolent of the English middle classes about The Wind in the Willows, and in A. A. Milne’s stage version of it, Toad of Toad Hall. Toad is vain, delusory and obsessive, but he is apparently preferable to the yobs in the Wild Wood who take over his house for drinking and carousing. Toad, Badger, Rat and Mole cut and slash their way back and society is saved. We breathe a big sigh of relief.
Kenneth Grahame, one of the great children’s writers of the twentieth century (though he was actually born in Edinburgh), wrote the story for his son Alastair, for whom he invented the characters in a series of letters. The book was published in 1908 and was an immediate success. Grahame had left his job as Secretary of the Bank of England and went to live in Cookham in Berkshire, next to the Thames, where he had been brought up. (There are various stories about why he left the bank, which may have had something to do with a shooting incident there.)
Alastair was never well, was blind in one eye and threw himself in front of a train around his twentieth birthday. A kind of sadness, at least mild nostalgia, pervades the whole business. But there is a kind of happier sense of memory as well. When Ratty describes messing around in boats, that was pretty much what Grahame did most of the time.
Perhaps that was why he was never recorded as having met Cookham’s other great creative product at the time, the artist Stanley Spencer, whose religious fantasies also bring the river and the Thames Valley to life. Kenneth Grahame was a deeply conservative man and Stanley Spencer was in a peculiar class of his own, and a generation younger. Even so, it is a pity we know nothing about them meeting on the banks of the great river. What they have in common is this strong mystical sense of the Thames.
Christopher Robin Milne, child hero of Winnie-the-Pooh, describes how both his parents loved the book and it is clear how much Pooh and Piglet owe to Toad and Mole. We all owe something too because The Wind in the Willows is a modern fairy tale, interspersed with morality tale – plus a little bit of English nostalgic snobbery. It is a heady mix.
‘Hold hard a minute, then!’ said the Rat. He looped the painter through a ring in his landing-stage, climbed up into his hole above, and after a short interval reappeared staggering under a fat, wicker luncheon-basket.
‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to the Mole, as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.
‘What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.
‘There’s cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly; ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssand wichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater—’
Ratty explains the picnic to Mole
IN 1310, KING Edward’s II’s favourite Piers Gaveston was murdered by jealous barons. When they went through his belongings, they discovered a fork. The fact that we know this is some evidence of their rage, and just how much they believed the discovery of anything quite so continental, fashionable and downright camp as a fork seemed to justify his dispatch.
This is, of course, a strangely English idea, and there has always been a boneheaded element in the English character that believes itself to be a bastion of sanity and a check on encroaching effeminacy. That is what did for Piers Gaveston.
The story is also a reminder that, before the trend caught on in the early fourteenth century, most people had no forks. They brought their knives to the table with them and bundled stuff into their mouths with their hands. That is at least one reason that explains the favourite and traditional Anglo-Saxon concept of pies. You could hold them and put them in your mouth, and without the use of anything suspect like a fork.
But how did the great medieval savoury pie become the sweet Bakewell tart? That has very little to do with Bakewell in Derbyshire, lovely though it is, and a great deal to do with the same fashionable foreign-food trends that brought us the fork. One of the upshots of the crusades to Palestine in the 1090s was that the returning crusaders brought with them fancy eastern, originally Persian, ideas about cooking. They began adding dried fruit and spices to their pies. The pies got bigger and, once there were knives and forks, they got bigger still. They got sweeter, and soon they had merged with that great Anglo-Saxon favourite, the custard tart. And lo and behold, there was the Bakewell tart, English with extra almonds from Persia and beyond, all rolled together.
Bakewell claims to be the home of the authentic Bakewell pudding and many believe it to come originally from the Rushbottom Lane district in that town. It is said that the recipe was originally something of an accidental invention of the 1860s, the result of a misunderstanding between Mrs Graves, landlady of the White Horse Inn, and her kitchen assistant. A nobleman visiting the inn (now called the Rutland Arms) ordered a strawberry tart. Mrs Graves asked an inexperienced kitchen assistant to make one, but the assistant made a savoury pastry. The result was so successful with the guest that the recipe became recognised as a Bakewell pudding.
Mrs Wilson, wife of a tallow chandler who lived in the cottage now known as the Old Original Bakewell Pudding Shop, saw the possibility of selling the puddings commercially, managed to get hold of the recipe, and opened a business of her own. Bakewell tarts and Bakewell puddings have existed side by side ever since.
Cover a wide shallow dish with thin puff paste. Put in it a layer of jam, preferably raspberry, but any kind will do. It should be half an inch thick. Take the yolks of eight eggs and beat the whites of two. Add half a pound of melted butter and half a pound each of sugar and ground bitter almonds. Mix all well together, and pour into the pastry case over the jam. Bake for half an hour and serve nearly cold.
Recipe for Bakewell pudding by Alison Uttley, local writer, from Recipes from an Old Farmhouse (1966)
FOR GENERATIONS, THE schoolchildren of England learned their history starting with the Battle of Hastings which – as almost everyone knows – was in 1066 (14 October), some six centuries before the Great Fire of London (2–5 September 1666) and some nine centuries before the English victory in the World Cup final (30 July 1966). There we are: English history at a glance.
There was Harold II, successfully obliterating one of the twin, linked invasions which threatened his rule, and marching south to deal with the second one. He tried and failed to take William’s makeshift wooden castle near Hastings by surprise, and William kept his army awake all night, afraid of a night attack. He marched out at dawn the next morning to find the English drawn up on Senlac Hill near the modern town of Battle (the exact spot is still disputed).
Neither army was much more than 8,000 men and Harold’s force was made up almost entirely of infantry. They are popularly supposed to have been beaten after William’s knights pretended to run away and then turned on the pursuing foot soldiers. There does seem to have been a genuine panic among the Bretons, led by Alan the Red, on William’s left flank and a rumour went round his army that William had been killed. But in the ensu
ing melee, Harold was killed – popularly by a combination of an arrow in the eye and a blow from one of William’s knights. His brothers Gyrth and Leofwine died with him. All their bodies were found after the battle near the top of the hill, though there is a persistent legend that Harold survived the battle and became a monk.
Either way, William then advanced by a circuitous route on London and crowned himself king on Christmas Day. The Norman transformation of England had begun, and the language changed as a result – and it might be argued that the great divide between the defeated Saxon populace and a new Anglo-Norman aristocracy has never quite been healed.
You can still stand in the ruins of Battle Abbey, on the stone dedicated to Harold on the spot where he was supposed to have died, and look down the less challenging slopes of Senlac Hill – which have been smoothed out somewhat over the centuries – and imagine the battle that changed English history and changed the nation perhaps more fundamentally than any other event. You can, also, if you close your eyes, imagine the shouts and screams of the dying as the Saxon housecarls swung their double-headed axes so hopelessly at William’s cavalry and never rose again.
But why does English history always seem to start at 1066? Certainly it emphasised the importance of the new Franco-Norman elite, and obscured the institutions and history of the Anglo-Saxon elite who had been displaced. Maybe in those days, when the ancient liberties of King Alfred were a radical English rallying cry, it seemed safer to pretend that English history began with the invasion.
It is, in short, a small plot to stop us looking too closely at the world before the current aristocracy took up their castles and stately homes. Perhaps it didn’t suit our rulers’ purposes either to remember just what a close-run thing the Battle of Hastings was, as in so many of the decisive battles throughout English history.
‘The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow–with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Norman and Saxon’ (1911)
WHEN THE COMPUTER pioneer Alan Turing was sent to the USA in 1942 to help the Americans build their own code-breaking computers, he found something quite different from the eclectic and somewhat eccentric approach to code-breaking adopted by the English authorities. Instead of the peculiar mixture of mathematicians and crossword puzzlers, he found a group of lawyers.
Turing’s discovery does throw into sharp relief the peculiarly English approach to problem-solving, highlighted by the code-breaking efforts in the Second World War. Around him at the secret establishment at Bletchley Park were not just mathematicians, but linguists, statisticians, puzzle creators, and strange individuals, from the future novelist Angus Wilson to the future Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and the future historian Asa Briggs, all of them in their own enclosed huts, revealing nothing to the outside world and little to each other.
There were Egyptologists, bridge players, even one expert on seaweeds and mosses who had been sent there because of a misunderstanding of the biological term ‘cryptogams’, and who played a critical role working out how to dry out code books damaged by seawater. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who visited often, described the atmosphere as ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy’. One military policeman famously mistook Bletchley for a military asylum.
Turing was the archetypal English boffin, bizarrely, logically unconventional. He wore a gas mask on his bike to avoid the pollen. He famously chained his mug to a radiator and used string to hold up his trousers. He was often unshaven, or – even more peculiar in a semi-military world – was to be found knitting in a corner. He was briefly a member of the Home Guard, but got bored of it in 1942 and stopped turning up. The commander tried to frighten him with military law, only to find that on his application form, under the question ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?’, Turing had written ‘No’.
What made Bletchley Park distinctively English was its approach to being a boffin, the respect for peculiarity, the faith in the cross-disciplinary fertilisation of ideas, the idea that clever people should be free to nose around into whatever intrigued them. It was an approach that clearly pre-dated Churchill, but which clearly exemplified his own approach.
Churchill, after all, had some hint of a boffin about himself. He dreamed up the idea of a tank back in 1914. He was an influential supporter of the Mulberry harbour system of floating wharves which made it possible to offload the equipment for the D-Day armies off the Normandy coast in 1944. It was Churchill who insisted that his scientists – notably the physicist R. V. Jones – should carry on investigating navigation radio beams used by German bombers, when his scientific advisors assured him that such things did not exist.
Boffins such as Robert Watson-Watt (Scottish), or Barnes Wallis (from Derbyshire), and their successors in the development of Blue Streak and Concorde, turned what had been a term of abuse into an accolade. The origins of the word are unclear but it seems to have started with a character in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) who is described as ‘a very odd-looking fellow indeed’. Perhaps the portrayal of Q in the James Bond films as a fussy civil servant was a sign that the boffin was on the way out. The boffin’s great successor, the nerd, is, after all, a product of California rather than England.
In 2011, Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, named three technologies invented by English boffins:
Photography (strictly speaking, this was only Henry Fox Talbot’s paper-based negatives)
Computers
Television (strictly speaking, this was invented by a Scot)
BOWLER HATS USED to dominate the streets of the City of London in the middle of the twentieth century, like so many black tortoise domes on the heads of the financial middle classes. Unusually, they were invented in England too, the most appropriate place for something that became symbolic of a certain kind of respectable Englishness. Bowler hats were created in 1849 by Edward Coke, the younger brother of the Earl of Leicester.
This was a rare moment of achievement in the life of a man who made very few other ripples on the world. Coke became a Whig politician after a forgettable minor career in the army, and held the seat of Norfolk Western in the mid-nineteenth century, but a perusal of Hansard – the parliamentary record – reveals no contributions to debate at all. Still, give him his due, by inventing the bowler hat, Coke left his mark.
Coke ordered the first one from the London hatters Lock & Co., who sub-contracted the order to Thomas and William Bowler. It was designed by himself to protect the heads of his gamekeepers from low-hanging branches – their top hats kept getting knocked off. Oddly enough, there is even a date for the day Coke came to collect it – 17 December 1849. When he unwrapped it, he put it on the floor, and jumped on it. He went away satisfied.
This was a hat originally designed for servants. In fact, the odd thing about the bowler hat is that, after Coke, it became anything but respectable. It became synonymous with people involved with horses, and within decades it had been adopted across the American West. Outlaws found it de rigueur. Butch Cassidy wouldn’t have been seen dead without his bowler hat or, as he called it, his derby. The other profession that adopted it, and for similar reasons – it didn’t blow off easily – was navvies. It was British railway workers who were supposed to have introduced them to Bolivia in the 1920s, where they were widely used by local women. These were supplied to Bolivia until recently by an Italian factory.
There is a peculiar ambiguity about bowler hats. Despite their original respectability, on both sides of the Atlantic – Jack Lemmon wears a bowler hat when he reaches senior management in The Apartment – the most famous bowler hat of them all was the one that graced the head of Charlie Chaplin as his Little Tramp. Laurel and Hardy w
ore bowler hats too, perhaps to imply the same thing – hopeless aspiration.
The same peculiarly mixed messages are contained in the bowler hats worn by the tramps in Samuel Beckett’s nihilistic tramps in Waiting for Godot. Beckett said many years later that when he started thinking about the play, the only thing he knew was that both characters wore bowler hats.
As a cure for the cold, take your toddy to bed, put one bowler hat at the foot, and drink until you see two.
Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart (1887–1970), spymaster, diplomat and journalist
IF ENGLISHMEN HAVE a reputation for buttoned-up dullness, for the kind of alluring fashion sense that means they wear socks in bed, long johns and tweeds by the fire, then Byron tips the balance the other way. Byron was the model of the great English lover, his affairs passionate and numerous and involving both sexes and probably also his own half-sister, Augusta.
Byron defied the ideal for an English gent by being terrible at football and cricket (he had a club foot) – though having said that, he was in the team for the very first Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s in 1805. It was at love that he really excelled, in a kind of destructive and scandalous way, leaving the wreckage behind him – scandals which eventually forced him to leave the country, probably for fear of prosecution for sodomy. Once abroad, he ended up as an enthusiastic participant in the Greek revolution against Turkish rule, where he died of fever at the age of thirty-six.
Byron managed his legendary sexual attraction despite being born with a club foot, which he unfairly blamed on his mother.
Byron was a great lover, but he was also a great hater – one of the few parliamentary defenders of the Luddites, he was also pretty ferocious towards his fellow Romantic poets. He could not stand the poetry of Coleridge, and he referred to his famous contemporary William Wordsworth as ‘Turdsworth’.
