How to Be English

by David Boyle

  The first BBC broadcast was a six o’clock news bulletin, also from Marconi House, on 14 November. In line with the government guidelines, no news was allowed that had not already been published in the newspapers. It was read twice, first quickly and then slowly with pauses, so people could take notes.

  The rest is history. History, ITMA, Blue Peter, Doctor Who and Arthur Askey.

  When I was under house arrest, it was the BBC that spoke to me – I listened.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  ‘NOT A DRUM was heard, not a funeral note …’ The line from Charles Wolfe’s poem is so familiar to generations of English schoolchildren, though perhaps less so today, that it fails to quite do its job. The rhythm is so powerful that the words no longer quite manage to conjure up the silence at dusk after the battle as the body of Sir John is laid to rest in his bloodied uniform.

  Moore himself was from Cobham in Surrey, though he was actually Scottish. An oak tree grown from an acorn from the garden of his home still stands in a small park to commemorate him in the Spanish city of Corunna. Like Nelson before him, he had the reputation of being a humanitarian maverick. In command of the Kent coast when Napoleon was expected to invade, he built the Martello Towers, cut the Royal Military Canal and recruited 340,000 militia men to defend the South Downs. He also invented the light infantry.

  In 1809, he was leading the British expeditionary force against Napoleon, defending Spain from invasion, outnumbered by the French in what was one of the longest retreats the British army has ever endured. When Moore reached the coast at Corunna, he found the rescue fleet had failed to arrive and the enemy was getting closer. He had already lost 5,000 men. This was an early version of Dunkirk, as Moore’s remaining troops held back the French long enough to get away.

  It was terrible January weather and Moore took a musketball in the shoulder, rather as Nelson had just over three years before, and spent the remainder of the battle dying in a fisherman’s house where he had been taken in. Officially, his last words were: ‘I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!’

  Like many English heroes, Moore’s official last words didn’t quite square up with his real ones. Turning to his aide-de-camp, he said: ‘Remember me to your sister, Stanhope.’ This referred to the explorer Lady Hester Stanhope, providing a hint of evidence that they might have been in love.

  Moore was buried wrapped in an army cloak next to the ramparts of the city. When the French commander Marshal Soult arrived, he ordered a memorial to be built to mark the spot.

  Corunna was another of those typically English victories snatched from the jaws of defeat – or, more accurately, an escape snatched from the jaw of annihilation. It might not have been remembered at all, outside Corunna, where Moore remains a local hero, were it not for Charles Wolfe’s poem, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna’.

  Nor was Wolfe actually English. He was from County Tyrone and a relative of the great Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone. He published the poem after graduating and it appeared in a local paper in Newry in 1817. It was promptly forgotten until, some years after Wolfe’s death, Byron found the poem and popularised it.

  Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

  From the field of his fame fresh and gory;

  We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,

  But we left him alone with his glory.

  CLOTHES HAVE ALWAYS been political in England. The New Look dresses of the late 1940s shocked public taste with their sumptuous sense of luxury. The miniskirt was a sign of liberation for women in the 1960s, just as bicycling skirts were a symbol of much the same thing for their grandmothers. The great art critic John Ruskin imagined a return to the medieval sumptuary laws which laid down which class was allowed to wear what. But the English, being an awkward race, would have none of it.

  We may be conventional in our dress, unless we are in the tropics as Noël Coward pointed out (‘Although the English are effete / They’re quite impervious to heat’), but we don’t like being told what to wear. There is something of the servant–master relationship about it, as if we were being asked to wear livery.

  The advent of cloth caps – now such a symbol, paradoxically, of both working-class and upper-middle-class life – began with one of the last of these dress codes, In 1571, during the reign of Elizabeth I, Parliament legislated to support the wool industry by boosting the consumption of wool. All men over the age of six had to wear some kind of what was then called a woollen ‘bonnet’ on Sundays and holidays. The only people who were exempted, apart from women and babies of course, were ‘persons of degree’. If ordinary people didn’t wear a cap they were fined three farthings, and those were the days when three quarters of a pence was the value of a pint of beer or a chicken

  The law stayed on the statute book for nearly three decades and, by the time it was repealed, cloth caps had become a symbol of respectability – of people prepared to keep the law, of upright citizenship and successful bourgeois trade. The Tudor bonnet was so popular that it remains part of some forms of academic dress today, so if you have been awarded a PhD at some universities, you have to wear a Tudor version of the cloth cap made out of black velvet.

  By the early twentieth century, most men still wore hats and the cloth cap was widely adopted by a range of classes, and for golfers in particular, on both sides of the Atlantic – and especially for boys, who (if they were anything like me) chafed and rebelled at the mere prospect. The old Tudor bonnet had become a symbol to say ‘I am a person of degree’. You will still see the Prince of Wales wearing one, or David Beckham, just as you will see the same thing on the head of Andy Capp or Del-Boy Trotter. It is peculiarly paradoxical, a symbol of class identity which is actually worn by almost every class.

  The cap is traditional wear for American newsboys too, though often with a button on the top, and for older men in South Korea or Irishmen in Boston. It is worn back to front in some forms of hip-hop culture and by Hollywood figures like Robert Redford, and other people who hail from California. The Canadian and American teams at recent Olympic events have been dressed in specially designed red or white flat caps.

  But above all else, it is a symbol of working-class English life in the mid-twentieth century. There is a famous photograph of the workforce returning from lunch at the shipbuilding yard of John Brown & Co. in Clydebank, filing up the gangplanks on to the hulk of the liner Queen Mary as the ship was being built in 1935, having started work again a few months before with a huge government loan to support Clydeside through the Great Depression. Not one head lacks the not-so-distinctive cloth cap.

  Pubs in Yorkshire have been ordered to ban people from wearing flat caps or other hats so troublemakers can be more easily recognised.

  Daily Telegraph, June 2008

  WHEN JAMES WATT, the Scottish pioneer, first cracked the business of making an efficient steam engine, it gave coal the status in the English economy and in English life that wool had won for itself in the Middle Ages. It underpinned not just the Industrial Revolution, but all the production and manufacturing that followed. For centuries, the coal man, with his black face and black sacks, was a familiar sight in any street, pouring the black gold down a hole in the pavement. For decades, the dirty business of coaling ships was as much a part of the seagoing life as sails in the breeze. And, of course, the miners struggled half-naked, hundreds of feet below ground, with lamps in their hats, to support the English on the ground above.

  During the twentieth century, the appearance of miners – complete with lamps on their hats – would bring a standing ovation at any radical political rally. The last stand of the miners, in the disastrous strike of 1984–5, has entered folk legend.

  It was for this reason, perhaps, that Sir Humphrey Davy, one of the inventors of the miners’ safety lamp – an honour he shares partly with George Stephenson – became practically a new saint in the English calendar in the nineteenth century.

  Coal was mentioned b
y Aristotle, so it is hardly uniquely English. There are also many different kinds of coal, all of which behave in different ways when burned. Even so, mining for coal seems to have begun in England back in the Stone Age. Archaeologists have found coal cinders in Roman camps, and we know that Newcastle was given a royal charter by Henry III to mine the stuff in 1239.

  By 1306, London’s air had become so disgusting – a great London tradition which continues to this day – that Edward I went so far as to ban sea coal. This lasted only long enough for Londoners to cut down all the trees within the vicinity of the city, and then the coal was back. It is one of the peculiar themes of English life through the ages: an overwhelming tolerance of dirt. And grime, smoke and soot – and ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee’ from Mary Poppins, a film which at least gives chimney sweeps their proper place in the scheme of things.

  ‘Get up!’ the caller calls, ‘Get up!’

  And in the dead of night,

  To win the bairns their bite and sup,

  I rise a weary wight.

  My flannel dudden donn’d, thrice o’er

  My birds are kiss’d, and then

  I with a whistle shut the door

  I may not ope again.

  Joseph Skipsey (1832–1903), the ‘Pitman Poet’

  UNTIL THE END of the Middle Ages, the patron saint of England used to be – not St George – but St Edward the Confessor, the only English king to be canonised. This was wholly undeserved: he was regarded by the church as particularly holy because of his apparent decision not to procreate, though he actually locked his wife up as a punishment for her failure to do so.

  So cast your mind back, if you will, to St Edward’s Day, 13 October 1257, when Henry III decided he would hold a Fish Day in celebration. Fish was considered holy too, as it wasn’t meat, and his household gathered together and ate 250 bream, 300 pike and 15,000 eels, collected from all over the country. These were the days when a staggering number of different fish were eaten, even porpoise (not strictly fish, but treated as one), distributed right into the English Midlands.

  Now here is the point of this slight digression: English fish – like everything else English – had a kind of class system about them. There were the fish that kings and nobles ate, like porpoise or carp, dressed in luxurious cream sauces. There were the fish the gentry ate: herring and cod and the salted fish known as stockfish, which eventually earned England so much of the gold and silver fetched from the New World. As for the poor, they tended to make do with eels or cockles, whelks and oysters.

  These were gathered on the coast, usually by women, pickled and distributed inland. Seafood of this kind remained a staple food of the poor in England into the last century. By Victorian times, the whelks were brought to London and the cities, boiled alive and then sold by itinerant salesman or on stalls, along with hot eels – sold spicy ‘as if there was gin in it’.

  One whelk-stallholder told the writer Henry Mayhew that the whelks accepted being boiled alive. ‘They never kicks as they boils,’ he said, ‘like lobsters or crabs. They takes it quiet.’ They weren’t eaten to fill you up, but as a little luxury, from jars carried round pubs, eaten with a little pepper and vinegar; the Victorian equivalent of a bag of crisps.

  Of all merry blades that ply merry trades,

  Or win the affections of pretty young maids;

  There is no one so trim or supple of limb

  As light-hearted, ruddy-faced mussel man, Jim.

  My musical sounds enliven my rounds,

  I’m known the world over, from Stepney to Bow;

  While singing aloud to a wondering crowd,

  Fresh Cockles and Mussels alive, alive O!

  J. B. Geoghagen, ‘Jim the Mussel Man’ (1876)

  THE FINAL DECADES of the nineteenth century, when the biggest demographic earthquakes in English society were under way, coincided with the rising popularity of the pantomime about Dick Whittington and his cat. Whittington is a kind of patron saint for all those millions who made the journey from the rural life and found that the city streets were not in fact paved with gold – but who managed to scrape together a living anyway.

  Whittington arrived penniless in London, his only asset – or so the story goes – a cat with a particular skill at catching mice. One thing leads to another and the cat makes Dick’s fortune with the support of a wealthy merchant, whose daughter he marries. It is a very English story, and particularly it reeks of London – where the sound of the bells in ‘Oranges and Lemons’ all seems to be about debts and the interest paid on them. These are the bells that are supposed to have drawn Whittington and his cat back to London: ‘Turn again, Whittington,’ said the Great Bell of Bow, and it made him more than a living. He was a hugely successful merchant, operating out of the Mercers’ Company, selling cloth to Europe, and – like so many in London – a financier.

  Actually, as so often, the story about Dick Whittington founding his fortune by lending out his cat, who dealt so effectively with the mice, was not originally English at all: it is based on a Persian story. The real Whittington was born sometime in the 1350s in the Forest of Dean and really was mayor of London four times, imposed on the city by Richard II to settle his dispute with the merchants. He really did marry Alice Fitzwarren, as the stories say, in 1402. He died two decades later, extremely wealthy and founding a charity that still shells out money to this day.

  There is a story that he lent Henry V most of the money he needed to invade France, then – after the great victory at Agincourt – he invited the king to dinner and ceremonially burned the debt papers in the fire next to the table.

  But what was the connection between Whittington and cats? A mummified cat was found where he was buried in the church of St Michael Paternoster Royal, but that seems to have been put there some centuries later. There is also a cat in the portrait of him in the hall of the Mercers’ Company. Maybe he just liked them. There is one other story: there was a merchant called Dick Whittington a century or so later, who was involved in one contract to import four lions from Africa into England for Henry VII. He can’t have been the same man, who died anyway in 1423, but he may have been some kind of relative. The historian David Quinn suggested that here was the origin of the legendary linking of Whittington and cats. We will never know.

  Turn again, Whittington,

  Once Lord Mayor of London!

  Turn again, Whittington,

  Twice Lord Mayor of London!

  Turn again, Whittington,

  Thrice Lord Mayor of London!

  What Bow Bells said to Dick Whittington

  TEN DAYS AFTER the Armistice in 1918, the British Grand Fleet steamed out of its safe anchorage at Scapa Flow to take the surrender of the German battle fleet. It was a misty day in the North Sea as the battleships waited for the encounter and a tense moment. The ships were cleared for action and it was widely believed that, when the moment came, the German battleships would not in fact surrender.

  As they came into view, steaming in a long grey line, they were sighted on the new battleship HMS Royal Oak, manned by men from Plymouth and flying the flags made by the ladies of Devonshire. It was at that moment, and often again over the next few hours, that those on the bridge heard the unmistakable beating of a drum.

  The Royal Oak was flagship of the First Battle Squadron. When it was clear that the German fleet was going to surrender safely, the admiral mentioned the drum. The other senior officers had heard it too and couldn’t understand it. Two searches of the ship were carried out for the mysterious drummer, who should have been at action stations. Nobody was found. The conclusion was that this had been Drake’s Drum.

  There are actually three Drake’s Drums. The first was the drum which went everywhere with Sir Francis Drake on his circumnavigation of the world, and was with him when he died off the coast of Panama in 1596. It is now kept safely somewhere in central England. The second is the exact replica made with original materials, and painted also with Drake’s family coat of arms, which is kept
in a glass case in his home at Buckland Abbey in Buckland Monachorum in Devon. The third is a little more peculiar – it is the strange sound of a drum that is supposed to beat when England is in danger, last heard – or so it is said – during the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940, and so memorably on board the Royal Oak.

  Drake’s Drum is the stuff of Edwardian romance. It is said that Drake himself urged that the drum be taken home, and if England was ever in danger, we were to beat it and summon him up from the afterlife to its defence. Sir Henry Newbolt, the doyen of Edwardian romanticism, even wrote a poem about it – and it was then set to music by Charles Stanford. In fact, the reported instances of it sounding do not seem to be always when England is in danger but when the danger’s over – when Nelson was given the freedom of the city of Plymouth and when Napoleon arrived there as a prisoner.

  Drake himself is an ambiguous character to choose as a national hero. He had derring-do in abundance, but he might be described today more like a terrorist – or a slave trader, which he undoubtedly was.

  Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

  Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low.

  If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,

  An’ drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

  Henry Newbolt, ‘Drake’s Drum’ (1897)

  ONE WINTRY MORNING in 1864, the sentry on duty at the Bloody Tower, one of the many outposts of the Tower of London, was found to be asleep. This is a serious charge for a soldier and he was duly court-martialled. It turned out that he had an elaborate defence.