by David Boyle
It was Pick who commissioned the calligrapher Edward Johnston to design the very distinctive typeface that has been used by the Underground ever since. Pick’s fanatical attention to detail saw him wandering his stations late at night, moving ticket machines a few inches to the right or left.
But it wasn’t Pick who designed the distinctive topographical Tube map. That was Harry Beck, who was inspired to draw the map in full colour when he was working on electrical diagrams. He sent it to Pick in 1931. Pick forwarded it to his publicity department who rejected it, because it didn’t show the distances between stations.
Beck kept pushing and they tested it out in 1932 and the public liked it. Beck’s name used to go on the bottom and they paid him, on a freelance basis, to update the map. That was until 1960 when, to his horror, Beck found his name had been removed and somebody else had added the route of the new Victoria Line.
Legal action followed and Beck kept on updating the map and submitting his designs until he gave up, with a sense of betrayal. He died in 1974 but, in 1997, the Underground had a change of heart and now his name is back on the map again. Because he worked on the map as a London Transport employee (though in his spare time), it is not clear whether he was ever actually paid for the original.
The third individual responsible for the atmosphere of the Underground has to be the poet and conservationist John Betjeman, with his evocation of Metroland and the days when trains were ‘rumbling under blackened girders’.
A thing may be right and beautiful and true without being lovable, though a thing cannot be lovable without being also in itself right and beautiful and true. Love is the harmony which such a thing awakes in the emotions; it is the harmony of what it feels to be. It adds the heart, as we call it, to the conscience, the sense, and the mind, to make the four great organs of being.
Frank Pick
Underground lines:
Metropolitan Line 1863
Hammersmith & City Line 1864
District Line 1868
Circle Line 1871
Northern Line 1890
Waterloo & City Line 1898
Central Line 1900
Bakerloo Line 1906
Piccadilly Line 1906
Victoria Line 1968
Jubilee Line 1979
THERE ARE THOSE who are a little sceptical of the whole idea of meat pies. They say that, if the manufacturer of the pies doesn’t know what kind of animal gave rise to the meat, then maybe the pies should be treated as slightly dodgy.
I’m sure they are right to be nervous, but nevertheless, in flagrant disregard for the origins of the meat, English meat pies have still fuelled many a cold afternoon on the football terraces, as well as evenings working late at the factory. English lunchboxes have been graced by a meat pie for centuries.
Why this indeterminate meat? Why not just say beef or ham or chicken pie? Well, the answer appears to lie in the medieval period, when the first of our ancestors gave us the meat pie – beginning as fast food for the poorer inhabitants of medieval cities.
In London, by the docks, in the twelfth century, there emerged the phenomenon of the cookshop. It was a place where, if you had no cooking facilities yourself, you could take your joint – or whatever meat you happened to have purloined that day – and they would cook it for you. What they did was wrap it in pastry, put it in the bread oven for fifteen minutes, and out it would come. And voilà! A meat pie.
The pies were also sold by hawkers in the streets, in baskets covered with a muslin cloth, the beginning of the famous ‘pieman’. Piers Plowman, creation of William Langland in the fourteenth century, remembers the street cries like this: ‘Hot pies, hot good piglets and geese, go dine, go!’
By that stage of history, the main source of meat pies was in Eastcheap. The problem with cookshops was they tended just to chuck the bones and unusable bits out into the street and were therefore a public nuisance, so they tended to be moved along as the centuries went by. They were also notoriously dodgy even then. A ruling in 1301 forbade the cookshops from buying meat any more than a day old in the summer months. You could hide no end of diseased stuff in a pie.
By Tudor and Stuart times, the pie makers became more specialised – pork pies from the north, veal and ham pies from the Midlands, steak and kidney, eel and chicken pies from the Lake District. In 1660, Samuel Pepys upbraided his wife for cooking her pies for too long in her brand-new oven, comforting himself that she’ll know ‘how to do better another time’.
Even so, pies remained something of a fare for poorer English people, or for those having a night on the town, when they could buy from the piemen or, after 1850s or so, from the pie shops. The piemen used to avoid complete bankruptcy by going round the pubs and offering to toss a coin with the customers for a pie. If the customers lost, they had to pay a penny; if they won, they got the pie for free – which, often enough, they would then use to throw at other customers.
It wasn’t quite the sad end for the great English institution of meat pies though. In the end, they are rather a good way of keeping meat for longer. They are convenient when you are travelling or away from home. They are comforting when you bite into them and the juices and steam come out. And they do after all owe part of their inspiration to the great Tudor pies, many feet across, cooked with porpoise or elk for up to eight hours.
She made her living by selling pies,
Her meat pies were a treat,
Chock full of meat and such a size
’Cos she was getting the meat from—
Mr Sweeney Todd, the Barber.
Ba Goom, he were better than a play
Sweeney Todd, the Barber
‘I’ll polish them off!’ he used to say.
R. P. Weston, ‘Sweeney Todd’
THERE IS SOMETHING about the English which prefers things to be a little broken, unpreposseing, and worn by the passage of time. It is more than the polite English preference for old things, which is a kind of English snobbery. ‘He had to buy all his furniture,’ said the Conservative politician Michael Jopling about Michael Heseltine, dismissively (as quoted by Alan Clark in his Diaries) – it is the kind of snobbery which is deeply suspicious of anything too shiny and packaged. It results in the enthusiastic commissioning of Roman or medieval ruins in country parks, and in the traditional English preference for elegies, laments and fatal departures.
The English were supposed for many centuries to be prone to melancholia, mainly because of their climate but also because beef was supposed to interfere with the digestion. That may not be the reason, but you can hear the clear note of nostalgia in Chaucer and Hamlet, in Gray’s ‘Elegy’ right back to Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur – there is a clue there: why write the whole Arthurian legend in terms of death and loss? Then, up almost to the present generation, there was George Orwell meditating on the fate of his country village in Coming Up for Air (1939).
There does also seem to be a link here with the Gothic fascination with madness and insanity. ‘It is worth attention that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours,’ wrote Bishop Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). There is the English attitude in a nutshell. Not only is life ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’, as Shakespeare put it – but to make matters worse, upstairs in the attic is our mad wife.
The writer Peter Ackroyd talks about the English landscape, the rolling, winding roads, and the stories of generation after generation, as the basis of this sense of heaviness. He conjures up a huge empty England, as it was in the days of the invaders – with little homesteads along the South Downs and a few crumbling Roman roads, and the great impenetrable forest to the north. There was the roots of English melancholy: it is ancient, and somewhat lonely out there.
But here in London streets I ken
No such helpmates, only men;
And these are not in plight to bear,
If they would, another’s care.
&
nbsp; They have enough as ’tis: I see
In many an eye that measures me
The mortal sickness of a mind
Too unhappy to be kind.
Undone with misery, all they can
Is to hate their fellow man;
And till they drop they needs must still
Look at you and wish you ill.
A. E. Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ XLI (1896)
THE ENGLISH HAVE a habit of calling their most ancient institutions ‘new’ – as in New College, Oxford, which was in fact established in 1379 – and using the word ‘old’ to indicate something traditional. This doesn’t entirely explain why there are two famous sports venues called Old Trafford, only half a mile from each other, on the outskirts of Manchester. But it is perhaps an acknowledgement that there is something older here than either football or cricket – the land involved used to belong to the old Trafford family, stretching back before the Norman Conquest.
So let’s hear it, not so much for Matt Busby or Bobby Charlton or even Shane Warne, but for Radolphus de Trafford who died in 1050 (in the reign of the former patron saint of England, Edward the Confessor) – the lineal forefather of them all.
As far as sports grounds are concerned – and we are talking about hallowed ground here – the oldest of the Old Traffords is undoubtedly the cricket ground, home of Lancashire County Cricket Club, built in 1857 on the meadows belonging to the de Trafford estate. The ground was originally only accessible via a winding footpath from the railway station. The crowds began to flock there to see W. G. Grace in the 1870s. When the Ashes Test match between England and Australia was held there in 1884, Old Trafford’s future was assured. It was also the scene in 1956 when Jim Laker managed to take nineteen wickets for just ninety runs, an achievement that has never been bettered.
Wander about 800 yards and there is the other Old Trafford, the football ground and home of Manchester United, probably the most famous football team in the world.
Manchester United used to be known as Newton Heath and suffered from a series of disastrous grounds, either on marshland or on gravel. Their final temporary stadium was in Bank Street, where fumes from the local factory cast an annoying pall over the experience of spectators. New owner John Henry Davies chose the site for their new stadium, designed it to take crowds of 100,000 and managed to get it open by 1910. The first game held was against Liverpool (Manchester United lost). It has been in use ever since – with a brief hiatus in the 1940s when it was damaged by German bombs. The stadium never quite managed to hold 100,000 fans as intended – the biggest crowd they ever managed was in March 1939 with the FA Cup semi-final between Grimsby and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Old Trafford has hosted rugby games, Olympics events and a great many other fixtures. The international following for Manchester United began to grow in the 1950s, and under the leadership of Alex Ferguson (manager 1986–2013), Old Trafford has gained a mystique that no amount of money from American sports magnates can quite dispel.
In many ways, Old Trafford has as good a claim as anywhere else to be the spiritual home of English football. Having said that, the only part of the original 1910 stadium to survive is the old players’ tunnel – and that isn’t used any more.
Biggest crowds at Old Trafford:
March 1939 (Wolverhampton Wanderers versus Grimsby Town): 76,962
March 2007 (Manchester United versus Blackburn Rovers): 76,098
IN THE ANTEDILUVIAN slime, from where the English emerged, the first pinstripe suit took shape. It was complete with a coloured silk handkerchief peeping out of the breast pocket to show character. That is the only explanation there is for the sense of history, continuity and tailored superiority that accompanies the pinstripe. It feels permanently English – had Alfred the Great risen from the dead and popped across to the Stock Exchange, that is what he would have worn.
It feels English because of the understated subtlety of it. White vertical stripes on a dark suit of blue, grey or black, sewn at the width of a pin, sometimes next to each other in pairs or triplets. Not too wide, bright or garish. It is a combination intended to imply breeding, balance and good sense.
More evidence of the antediluvian origins of this lies in the fact that nobody has much idea who first tailored the perfect pinstripe. It seems to have descended, fully developed, cut and sewn in heaven, to the windows of Hawes & Curtis and the other tailors of Jermyn Street in London.
Closer examination shows that it actually emerged with bowler hats (from the hatter Lock & Co. in St James’s) and with ironed creases in the trousers, an Edwardian innovation which is supposed to have been a mistake from drying Edward VII’s wet pantaloons after an unexpected drenching.
Some theories suggest that the first pinstripes appeared via the equally English venue of Wimbledon as Edwardian tennis gear. It was certainly all about sport to start with – borrowed from Edward VII’s relaxed sporting style – but the style came of age during the Great Depression. Edward VII’s grandson Edward VIII made them popular when he was Prince of Wales. The ubiquitous pinstripe emerged as the apotheosis of conservative style in the City of London via the prince’s Anglo-American fast set, glamourised by Hollywood thanks to a brief period on the backs of Chicago gangsters and hoodlums.
So thrilling were they when they caught on, that when Clark Gable wore a pinstripe suit on a visit to Buenos Aires in 1935, the lapels of his overcoat were torn off by overexcited female fans.
It took wartime austerity and the 1950s, with its sense of post-war inferiority, to make pinstripes what they are today. English City gents felt the need to assert some kind of superiority over their Wall Street cousins, and latched on to the pinstripe as the classic English look. They may not have been richer or more powerful, they may have presided over a national debt that could have sunk lesser islands below the waves, but they could at least have sartorial style. Call it the Avengers effect.
It was a style that emphasised effortless class, just as thin vertical stripes emphasise height and elongate the wearer. There are capacious trouser pockets, so that men can put their hands inside and effect a nonchalance.
The great age of the pinstripe was the City of London in the late 1980s, after the Big Bang deregulation. It became the uniform of effortless superiority again, of fat-cat salaries and share options, but with subtle codes attached. If the stripes were too close together, you looked naïve. If they were too wide apart, you looked boorish and brash. Just the right width and you could be put up for membership of any gentleman’s club, without further examination. As long as you also wore sock suspenders.
Giving pinstripes to the world:
Cost at auction of Winston Churchill’s pinstripe suit (2002): £32,500
Most famous sporting pinstripes: The New York Yankees
Most famous political pinstripes: Indian prime minister Narendra Modi
THE ENGLISH OBSESSION with raincoats is clearly a by-product of their fascination with the weather, but here there is bound to be some disappointment because – when it comes to rainwear – the English have always been followers and not leaders.
The word ‘mackintosh’ is a bit of a giveaway. The inventor of macks, the Glasgow surgeon James Syme, found that a product of coal tar called naphtha could melt India rubber and make it possible to use it for waterproofing. But Syme was too busy to exploit his discovery and the patent went to another Scot, a clerk turned inventor called Charles Macintosh (note the different spelling). Macintosh took out a patent for a process which glued together two layers of cloth with India rubber, making it waterproof – or at least making some progress in that direction.
It is then that the English began to get involved. Macintosh’s company merged in 1830 with its Manchester rival, Thomas Hancock. Together they got a contract to supply the British army and the rest is history, in which Queen Victoria herself seems to have played a role.
Her Highland jaunts had changed people’s attitude to the rain. If she could stride out in the Scottish
drizzle wearing her sturdy Balmoral boots, just as William Wordsworth had done in the Lake District (Wordsworth had died in 1850), then so could everybody else. Charles Macintosh had patented his waterproofing process in 1823: his waterproofs snapped in the cold, were sticky in the heat and smelled horribly of naphtha, but at least they kept the rain out. The Basingstoke draper Thomas Burberry had managed a similar effect with a very tight weave in 1835.
Burberry still exists and so does the Mackintosh company, which was taken over by Dunlop in 1925 and stumbled on for another couple of generations. It was just as it was on the verge of closing its factory in Cumbernauld when, in the 1990s, it reinvented itself as a trendy fashion brand. It is now owned by the Japanese company Yagi Tsusho.
The truth is that the English have never managed to stamp their identity on to waterproof clothing in the way you would have expected. Anorak and parka are Inuit words, and carry an implication in English these days as clothes for obsessives and geeks. Cagoule is a French term for hood.
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.
Jane Austen, in the days before rainwear
IN THE ANCIENT world, roast beef was considered indigestible. There may be be some truth in this, but the English Renaissance food writers thought otherwise, on the grounds that beef wasn’t the same everywhere. This is undoubtedly true too. Like a stopped clock, so the logic went, beef had to be palatable somewhere and it seemed sensible to suggest that this place might be England.
So much else about English cuisine has slipped into the country unawares. That explains the old ditty: ‘hops, reformation, bays and beer / Came into England one bad year.’ But beef has probably been here as long as cows, and that is quite a long time.
