CHAPTER FOUR
For he might have been a Roosian,
A French, or Turk, or Proosian,
Or perhaps Ital-ian!
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!
SIR WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT (1836–1911), HMS Pinafore
Bernie Grant, the most colourful of Britain’s post-war black MPs, once found himself invited to a reception for Commonwealth parliamentarians. He had represented the tough inner-London seat of Tottenham for five years, during which time he had established a reputation for shooting from the hip which had made him one of the best-known backbenchers in Parliament. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh passed among the politicians, shaking hands. The Duke was the first to arrive in front of Grant.
‘And who are you?’ asked the Duke in his usual offhand manner.
‘I’m Bernie Grant, MP,’ he answered proudly.
To which the Duke responded, ‘And in which country is that?’
Grant took the Duke of Edinburgh’s ignorance in good part, but it was symptomatic. Even locked up in Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s consort must have occasionally looked out of the window or read the papers, and been aware that about 6 per cent of the English population isn’t white and could not in any sense be said to belong to an English, Scots or Welsh ‘race’. (Neither, of course, can he: on marrying Princess Elizabeth, Prince Philip had been required formally to renounce his claim to the Greek throne and to stop using his title from the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg.) But in a gathering of politicians from around the globe he was unable to imagine that his own adopted country could be represented by someone with a black skin. You can imagine the Duke, whose ability to make clumsy comments is legendary, telling the story against himself in the exclusively white circles of Buckingham Palace, doubtless proving that ‘they all look the same’.
To her credit, the Queen did a lot better when she was introduced, immediately volunteering, in a splendid reversal of roles, ‘You’re Bernie Grant, aren’t you? I’ve seen you on the telly.’
Grant, a one-time telephonist and trade union firebrand, had arrived in the House of Commons in 1987, through an apprenticeship in London councils and some deft behind-stairs intrigue that left a knife sticking out of the back of the man who was supposed to inherit the safe Labour seat of Tottenham. He was destined to become a hate figure for the right wing not so much because of the colour of his skin but for the fact that he identified with the black community. In the remark that will haunt him to the grave, when a group of predominantly black young men rioted on Broadwater Farm housing estate, he remarked that ‘the police got a bloody good hiding’. One of the officers, PC Keith Blakelock, had died horrifically, stabbed and hacked to death by the frenzied crowd. The comment was enough to make Grant a pariah, and his hard-left political beliefs earned him the title Barmy Bernie from the Sun.
If anyone might be expected to encapsulate the meaning of being black and British, it is Bernard Alexander Montgomery Grant, his middle two names having been given him by wartime parents who wanted to honour two British field marshals. To his parents, he was always ‘Monty’. Having become the first black council leader in Britain, Grant was determined to celebrate his arrival in Parliament in suitable style. At one of his earliest State Openings of Parliament, when the British Establishment dress up in their traditional robes and funny hats, he had made a pact with the two other black MPs that they would all wear traditional African dress. When the day dawned, in Grant’s words ‘they chickened out’, and he was left as the only male MP not wearing a suit and tie but resplendent in batakari, the brightly coloured cotton robes of West Africa. It was as explicit a statement as you could get that Britain was now a multiracial society. If some MPs looked sniffy, the Speaker, Bernard Weatherill, seemed to have no doubts. He scribbled a note and sent it down. It said, ‘Congratulations! You look splendid.’
But his successor as Speaker, the Labour MP Betty Boothroyd, was less sure-footed. Introduced to him at another reception she chatted away, plainly unaware that he was a parliamentary colleague, even a member of the same political party. Later, when Sharon, Grant’s white partner, went to the ladies’ lavatory, she found Boothroyd having a quick cigarette. ‘You didn’t know who he was, did you?’ she asked. ‘Of course I did,’ said the Speaker, ‘he’s the former High Commissioner from Sierra Leone.’
Bernie Grant’s presence in England was the consequence of empire. But none of this English identity crisis would have happened had the British Empire not disappeared. This is not the place for another piece of imperial pathology; the British have grown accustomed to looking back at their former eminence as the traveller looked at the two vast legs in the desert that were all that remained of the statue of Ozymandias, king of kings. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ declaimed the words on the pedestal, while all around, ‘the lone and level sands stretch far away’. Certainly, the decline in earthly power has been precipitous. In 1900, half the ships on the high seas were registered in Britain, and the country controlled about one third of world trade. By 1995, the share had dropped to under 5 per cent. Kings across the Continent tried to ape the British monarch by building an empire: the Belgians seized one of the few fetid corners of Africa that neither the British nor French had collared; Wilhelm II of Germany set about building a fleet to rival the Royal Navy. Even as late as 1935 Mussolini was raining bombs and poison gas down on a medieval army in Abyssinia in pursuit of an empire he thought would give Italy a moral authority equal to that of the British.
But British power and influence went beyond earthly dominion. They more or less invented much of the modern world. ‘We were all born in a world made in England and the world in which our great-grandchildren will mellow into venerable old age will be as English as the Hellenistic world was Greek, or, better, Athenian’, is the way one academic puts it.1 They developed the current forms of soccer and rugby, tennis, boxing, golf, horse-racing, mountaineering and skiing. The English created modern tourism with the Grand Tour and Thomas Cook’s first package tour. They developed the first modern luxury hotel (the Savoy with electric lights, six lifts and seventy bedrooms). Charles Babbage produced the world’s first computer in the 1820s. A Scot, John Logie Baird, was one of the inventors of television, in an attic in Hastings. He held his first public demonstration in Soho, London. Sandwiches, Christmas cards, Boy Scouts, postage stamps, modern insurance and detective novels are all products ‘Made in England’. When the Italian writer Luigi Barzini was searching for a way to demonstrate the dominance of British culture he merely noted that when, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the rest of Europe adopted funereal black as the main colour of men’s clothes, it was a form of homage.2 It recognized not merely the political and military might of the Empire and the economic clout of British steam, coal and steel, it advertised the perceived British virtues – honesty, prudence, patriotism, self-control, fair play and courage – which had made the nation great.
In their gloomier moments, the English tend to think that all that remains of their contribution to the world is a little ullage – the names of a few grand hotels – the Bristol, Cambridge, Grande Bretagne – the international codifications of time and place, fathoms and uniforms, and the fact that English is the language of the third millennium. Now, le style Anglais exists only as fashion shorthand: the sort of people you see in tailor-made tweeds tend to be affluent Germans with a background in machine-tool manufacturing. Even the schools which tried to mass-produce English gentlemen, driven by the spirit of the amateur, now preach that the only way to survive is by professionalism in a meritocratic world.
By and large, the British have handled the end of Empire well, bowing to the inevitable, running down the flag and packing their bags with relatively little fuss. But the psychological consequences for themselves have taken much longer to deal with. It would have been a great deal easier for the English to cope with had the whole enterprise not been invested with such extraordinary moral purpose.
The Empire was created by initiative, greed, courage, mass production, powerful armed forces, political scheming and self-confidence. A technologically advanced country with few natural resources needed a big trading area. And the technology made the subjugation of ‘primitive’ peoples inevitable. The image engraved on the hearts of patriots was that of General Gordon making his last stand on the steps of a fort in Khartoum, as heathen savages overwhelmed the gallant British garrison. In fact, what made Britain rule the world was better displayed at the battle of Omdurman twelve years later. Although mainly hymned for the unsuccessful charge of the 21st Lancers – in which Winston Churchill was a young officer – what determined the outcome was the fact that the British happened to have six Maxim guns. As the Dervish forces rushed the lines, the gunners had only to get the range. The casualty figures tell it all: 28 British dead for 11,000 Dervish dead. ‘It was not a battle but an execution,’ wrote an eyewitness. ‘The bodies were not in heaps – bodies hardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres and acres.’3
I do not wish to deny the courage and verve of many of the empire-builders. It is just that the history of imperialism is the alliance of self-interest and technology. But what gave the British Empire its belief in itself was the delusion that it was driven by a moral purpose, that there was a God-ordained duty to go out and colonize those places unfortunate enough not to have been born under the flag. The assumption of superiority became an article of faith. When the United States looked as if it was beginning to amass an empire by annexing the Philippines in 1898, Kipling paid the compliment of including the country among those called by destiny to ‘Take up the White Man’s burden – Send forth the best ye breed’ – to ‘serve’ peoples who were ‘half-devil and half-child’.4
The Empire gave the English the chance to feel blessed. And the greater its success, the more blessed they felt. By the end of the nineteenth century the British (for which read English) way of doing things was a model for the rest of the world. Visitors to London were bowled over by the sheer affluence of the place and often made a connection between prosperity and moral purpose. ‘As the heart is to the physical structure of man, so England is to the political and moral organization of Europe,’ gushed a Polish exile to his enslaved countrymen. ‘The wealth of England has passed into proverb; her monetary resources are unlimited; her capital in possession, invested, or floating upon the waters, is inconceivably enormous.’5 All of which tended to make the English, who naturally assumed that what was actually being described was a list of specifically English characteristics, believe that somehow all other races were just aspirant Englishmen and Englishwomen.
Long before the English had begun accumulating worldwide possessions, foreign visitors had been commenting on their idiosyncrasies. The fact of being islanders had inevitably made them different, insulated from currents that swept over the rest of Europe: by the time an intellectual typhoon that had blown over the Continent crossed the Channel, it could be no more than a directionless zephyr. Self-containment gave the English the chance to change selectively. And now they found themselves masters of the greatest empire in the world. No wonder it went to their heads. To have been born English, said Cecil Rhodes, was to have won first prize in the lottery of life. They began to believe they had some divinely ordered mission to discharge. Even those, like John Ruskin, who entertained dreams of social reform at home (at one stage he tried to create an English utopia by enrolling supporters in a guild under the cross of St George) succumbed. As he put it in an Oxford lecture in 1870:
There is a destiny now possible to us, the highest ever set before a nation, to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race, a race mingled of the best northern blood. This is what England must either do or perish; she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men … their first aim must be to advance the power of England by land and sea.6
Cecil Rhodes went further, asserting as bald, indisputable fact that ‘we happen to be the best people in the world, with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace’. It therefore followed logically that, as Rosebery was to observe in 1884, the Empire was ‘the greatest secular agency for good the world has seen’.7 Grand statements like these blithely ignored one or two simple truths about the imperial project, notably the fact that it was built not to some messianic plan but accumulated as the result of individual acts by young men who saw it as a route to adventure and riches.
Furthermore, while the young men who built the Empire may have carried all sorts of misplaced ideas about their own superiority, they were prone to the same emotional and physical needs as young men anywhere. The belief – if they held it – that they were ‘the best people in the world’ did not stop them taking their trousers off. Men who went to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company, for example, in Canada, soon began to avail themselves of the local custom of offering sexual hospitality. Many acquired local Indian ‘wives’ with whom they might have families, and for whom they would provide when they returned to England at the end of their tour of duty.8 Sir James Brooke, the man who almost singlehandedly brought Sarawak under British influence, simply by buying a boat, sailing there and getting himself made rajah, had a private secretary with a native mistress and openly declared his ambition ‘to amalgamate races’. He actively discouraged white wives accompanying their husbands in their postings. The colonial community in East Africa quickly showed the loucheness which would distinguish it into the 1930s. When Richard Meinertzhagen arrived in 1902, he found that most of his brother officers were ‘regimental rejects, heavily in debt; one drinks like a fish, one prefers boys to women and is not ashamed. On arrival here I was amazed and shocked to find that they all brought their native women into the mess’.9
Some soldiers posted to the Orient also soon decided that other rules applied once they were safely beyond the reach of English society. Posted to India in the 1830s, Captain Edward Sellon discovered that eastern courtesans
understand in perfection all the arts and wiles of love, are capable of gratifying any tastes, and in face and figure they are unsurpassed by any women in the world … It is impossible to describe the enjoyment I have experienced in the arms of these syrens. I have had English, French, German and Polish women of all grades of society since, but never, never did they bear a comparison with those salacious succulent houris.10
It is difficult, to say the least, to reconcile this account of the pleasures of imperial service with Sir Charles Dilke’s conviction that there was a natural ‘antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to coloured races’.
What seems to have happened is that the more the British Empire became a responsibility of government instead of an adventure, the more conscious the governing bureaucracy became of the need to keep the English ‘pure’. As possessions were accumulated abroad, morality was asserted at home. The evangelicalism of the early nineteenth century did much to purge English public life of the looseness of the eighteenth century, and the wave of puritanism which swept the country in the 1880s consigned the easy-going tolerance of earlier days to history. In January 1909, after a scandal in Kenya involving alleged abuse of power by a white official, Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for the Colonies, issued the circular that became known as ‘The Morals Despatch’ or ‘The Concubine Circular’. ‘Gravely improper conduct’ was the term the memo used to describe the practice of colonial officers taking local mistresses, continuing that
it is not possible for any member of the administration to countenance such practices without lowering himself in the eyes of the natives, and diminishing his authority … it is his duty to set an honourable example to all with whom he comes into contact.11
The contrast with the attitude of the French could hardly be starker. The authorities in Paris concluded that the easiest and healthiest way to deal with the problem in their West African possessions was to encourage their officials to make temporary marriages with local women. In 1902, the French Colonial Office’s Director of African Affairs (pun unintended) commended the advice of a Dr Barot to young men destined for service in the tropics. Unless capable of two years or more of celibacy, the safest thing was to marry a local woman. The arrangement protected the French officer from the ‘alcoholism or sexual debauchery unfortunately so common in hot countries’. A native wife had the additional advantage of making the white man more popular: local men did not fear he would try to steal their own. There were also reasons of realpolitik: ‘It should be remembered that most of the treaties signed with great Negro chiefs have been ratified by a white man’s marriage with one of their daughters.’ While there was no suggestion that the alliance was permanent (‘On returning to France one sends the young lady back to her family, after making her a present which will immediately assure her of a husband’), there were predictable consequences of such marriages. The French government subsidized two schools especially to cater to the resultant mixed-race children, recognizing, said the wise doctor, that ‘it is by creating mulatto races that we most easily Gallicise West Africa’.12
Lord Crewe, whose recreation was the selective breeding of shorthorn cattle, would doubtless have dismissed the advice as yet another example of the moral turpitude of the French. It was true that in India, the greatest British possession, a mixed-race Anglo-Indian class did develop, and came to be seen as a buffer between the rulers and the ‘natives’. But in general, the British élite justified the Empire to itself as a sort of religious mission. In 1912 Lord Hugh Cecil summarized Britain’s vocation in the world as ‘to undertake the government of vast, uncivilised populations and to raise them gradually to a higher level of life’.13 The obvious solution to the problem was for wives to accompany their husbands when they were posted to the outer reaches of empire: once the memsahibs were in place, the shutters went up. ‘The white woman is perhaps the real ruin of empires’ is the way one Australian put it after seeing what happened in New Guinea.14
By that stage, the English were mortally infected with the belief that they possessed some unique gift from God. As Ogden Nash wrote:
Let us pause to consider the English.
Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish,
Because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz;
That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is.
The evidence of their superiority was all around. The British Empire was the greatest in the world. It was run from England. Ergo, Englishmen were superior to other races. Had the club not been so exclusive, had the English ideal not become so closely tied up with the need to empire-build, they might have found it easier to cope with the country’s reduced status in the world. As it was, the end of the imperium seemed to suggest that there was no place for the Englishman or -woman in the world.
Michael Wharton, ‘Peter Simple’ of the Daily Telegraph, sits in the corner of the sitting room of his cottage, while outside the wind blows through the leaves of the Buckinghamshire beech trees. Forty years since he started his column, he still sends it in to the newspaper every week, not-so-secretly suspecting that it is kept on as a sort of period piece, a reassurance to the dwindling band of elderly readers who remember the paper when England was a different place. It appears, with its curious mix of news, comment and fantasy, buried away in increasingly obscure corners of the paper, like a dotty old relative given house-room by the young couple who’ve inherited the mansion. He has little sense these days of who, if anyone, reads his column. Occasional letters are forwarded from a secretary in the obelisk in London’s Docklands where the paper is now exiled. ‘They’re mainly from lunatics. They imagine I want to bring back hanging and flogging. And they hate the Irish.’
The bigots who write to him sense a kindred spirit in Peter Simple. His idea of England is the authentic whine of a lost people. A typical lamentation reads as follows:
In the past 50 years they [the people of England] have seen everything that is distinctively English suppressed and derided. They have seen all the evils that flow from the gutters of America – vile entertainment, degenerate pop music, feminism, ‘political correctness’ – infect their country.
They have seen their decent manners and customs corrupted. They have seen sexual deviance elevated in official esteem and even officially commended. They have seen parts of their country colonised by immigrants and been forbidden by law to speak freely of the consequences.
All of this they have suffered and have not spoken yet. If they are going to speak now, they have left it very late. Unlikelier things have happened in the past; but not many.15
In the flesh, this horseman of the apocalypse turns out to be more baffled than furious, with gentle and courteous manners. When we met, I asked him what he thought about multiculturalism.
‘Multiculturalism? The English people are always being told about it by politicians and bishops and the like, but it means absolutely nothing to most of them. It’s a nonsense, an idea we’ve been force-fed but no one has accepted. The English are docile and easy-going, which I suppose is why it’s happened.’
At this point, his blind old labrador walked into the room and collided with the television, which was covered by a large brown antimacassar.
The Peter Simple idea of England is, in essence, the England of Sir Arthur Bryant, the most popular of twentieth-century nationalist historians. (His lifetime output included over forty books, selling over 2 million copies.) It is only a small leap from Bryant’s idea of an England of squires, parsons, yeomen and quaint, cider-drinking yokels – all of them off-white in complexion – to the conviction that all immigration by other colours is inevitably wrong. Arthur Byrant himself acknowledged the contribution that European refugees had made to English culture. But they, of course, were off-white in colour, too. Mass immigration from other cultures was something else. In March 1963, Bryant told readers of the Illustrated London News that ‘an influx … of men and women of alien race, accentuated by strongly marked differences of pigmentation and mould of feature, as well as of habits and beliefs’ would be very undesirable.16
Few influential people paid Bryant any heed. Every autumn, the Conservative party conference would be lapped by a swell of motions from the shires demanding Something Be Done to stop immigration. And every year, the hierarchy huddled together and then ignored them. In both 1963 and 1968 the hierarchs were obliged to make concessions and to promise curbs on immigration. In 1968, the spur had been the inflammatory speech by Enoch Powell, in which he had foreseen an apocalypse: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the river Tiber foaming with much blood”.’17 The reference to the Aeneid may have been lost on most of his listeners, but what became known as ‘the rivers of blood’ speech caused outrage, and consigned Powell to the political wilderness, an example, said his followers, of the woolly-minded liberal conspiracy by the Establishment to ignore reality.
Only a fool would claim that there is not a significant section of the English population who still share Enoch Powell’s belief that the influx of large numbers of members of alien cultures has been a mistake. In their mind, the issue of immigration is the explanation for the fact that the country has gone to the dogs. Yet, by and large, race relations in Britain are not bad. Despite their country’s independence from Britain, 2 million Irish citizens living in the United Kingdom retained the right to vote, a privilege not reciprocated by the Irish government for seventy years. Many Irish citizens fought with British forces during the Second World War, a cataclysm quaintly referred to by the studiedly ‘neutral’ Irish government merely as ‘The Emergency’. But it is not, of course, the Irish that people are talking about when they refer to race relations. The Irish are white, and what bothered Bryant and Powell and the rest was the arrival of people with a different-coloured skin.
They were certainly right about its suddenness. In 1951 the total population of Caribbean and South Asian people in Britain was 80,000, most of them living in a handful of cities and ports. Twenty years later, it had reached one and a half million. Forty years on, the 1991 census put the ethnic minority population at just over 3 million. It is quite an explosion. Furthermore, rather than being spread across the United Kingdom, immigrants are concentrated in England – where ethnic minorities represent over 6 per cent of the population – and comparatively absent from Scotland and Wales. Over two thirds of the entire ethnic minority population of Britain is concentrated in the south-east of England and the West Midlands. Parts of cities like London, Leicester or Birmingham now appear to have no connection whatsoever with the England of Arthur Bryant. In these places, multiculturalism is much more than a pious utterance from bishops and politicians. It is a fact of life, in which the Church of England has been replaced by mosques or temples and the old corner grocers by halal butchers and sari shops. In Spitalfields, east London, where in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Huguenot refugees had set up a silk-weaving, 60 per cent of the population is now Bangladeshi. In parts of Bradford, over half the population comes from Pakistan. Yet these city districts are almost never entirely taken over by Asians, Africans or West Indians. There are only three local-government wards in the whole of England where fewer than one in five of the population is white (Northcote ward in Ealing, west London, has the highest concentration of non-white people, at 90 per cent).18 Nowhere in England has reached the levels of the United States, where entire tracts of cities are exclusively black.
The laws of citizenship are also relatively liberal: anyone born in Britain to legally resident parents can become a British citizen. The contrast is with Germany. By early 1997 there were 7.2 million immigrants living in Germany – 9 per cent of the population. But those who tried to formalize their status found that it took them up to fifteen years’ residence before they could even begin to apply for citizenship, and years more to obtain it. The reason is that long after Hitler brought the idea into opprobrium, German officialdom still clings to the belief that it acts on behalf of a ‘Volk’, whose nationality is a question of blood. Your family may have been living in Kazakhstan for generations, but if you have the name Schmidt or Müller, you can acquire a German passport at once:19 citizenship is genetically determined.
Generally the English can be proud of their achievements in the field of race relations. Sudden, large-scale immigration was not something that was thought through, and, without wanting to minimize the real problems that can still face members of ethnic-minority communities, the tensions could have been a great deal worse. All sorts of things have helped. The vigour of English regional accents and identities means that in one generation it is impossible to tell on the telephone the colour of a Mancunian, Liverpudlian or Brummie’s skin. The country’s exuberant youth culture is largely colour-blind. A rather English sensitivity helped: Robert Taylor, now a successful photographer, vividly remembers as an excited young chorister being invited to sing with his choir at Hereford Cathedral. As the choir was passing through the cathedral cloisters, the bishop’s wife appeared, chasing a small black dog. ‘Come here, Sambo,’ she shouted, looked up and saw a single black child in the choir. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she blurted out apologetically.
But it is still noticeable that while you will often meet a person who describes themselves as ‘black British’ or ‘Bengali British’, you rarely come across someone who says they are ‘Black English’. Bernie Grant calls himself British, because ‘it includes other oppressed peoples, like the Welsh or the Scots. It would stick in my throat to call myself English.’ Others will tell you that as immigrants they can feel British, but that to believe yourself English, you need to have been born in the country, an attitude which applies as much to white immigrants as to black or Asian ones. British seems an inclusive term: just as you can be both Scottish or Welsh and still be British, so you can be Somali British or Bangladeshi British.
Of course, racial prejudice still exists. But what is striking about so many of these immigrants is their exuberant optimism about their adopted home. It is not merely that so few plan to return to the land they left, but that so many seem so much to appreciate what they have found in England. When, in January 1998, the Daily Telegraph decided to find out how immigrants had settled in, they heard an astonishingly positive response. Dr Zaki Badawi, chairman of the Council of Imams and Mosques, felt there was no better place in the world to be a Moslem: what he loved about the country was the fact that it could laugh at itself. Surinder Gill, an Oxfordshire grocer, appreciated the fact that he found the police unbribable. Abi Rosenthal, a musicologist who fled Germany, believed that qualities of fairness and discretion made England ‘a far more civilized country than the one I’d come from’. Omnia Mazouk, a consultant paediatrician in Liverpool, thought it ‘wonderful to be in a country where merit is rewarded and there are no jobs for the boys’. Hari Shukla, a Hindu teacher who left Kenya in 1973, said that while most of Europe was now multicultural, no other European country had achieved the same degree of integration.20
It is a long way from the world of Peter Simple, many of whose readers, I suspect, have probably never met an Asian or a West Indian, apart from the proprietor of the corner shop or an occasional bus conductor. They were prepared to see black or Asian people coming to England to do the jobs that English people did not wish to do. But they didn’t expect they would come in such numbers, nor that they would bring their culture with them: what they seem to have expected were people who would have been English had they not happened not to have been born in England.
Their attitude, did they but know it, is not so far from Bernie Grant’s belief in his ‘Britishness’. The conviction lodged deep in their minds is that the Englishman or -woman is ‘free-born’ in a free society. The adopted citizen may be ‘British’, but that is something quite different. What they resent most of all is that some things have become unsayable and doubt about multiculturalism is one of them, left to be muttered in corners or grunted by thugs in tattoos and big leather boots. The tolerant beliefs of the ruling élite, who have worked to make discrimination illegal, have, by and large, triumphed. Over a Calvados in central London, the author Simon Raven was splenetic on the subject:
It’s just thoroughly unEnglish to say you can’t say some things. Free expression is part of the intellectual life of this country. We had two or three black people when I was at Cambridge, princes, that sort of thing. But they were gentlemen. In general, the English were happy to see black people, and happy to see the back of them, too.
That last sentence could have come straight from Peter Simple’s column. Yet there is something odd about Michael Wharton’s quizzical disdain for the new England that has evolved in the half-century he has been writing his column. For the dark secret about this apparently thoroughbred Englishman is that Wharton himself is half German, the descendant of Jews who did well in the Bradford wool trade. It is the same with so many who most loudly proclaim their Englishness. The journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, whose Sunday Telegraph columns thundered throughout the 1980s about the dangers to the integrity of England, had a father who rejoiced in the name of Colonel Koch de Gooreynd. Stephen Fry, who made his acting career playing the quintessential English butler, Jeeves, is half Hungarian-Jewish. The surname of that ‘most English’ of popular poets, John Betjeman, was German Dutch; the ‘quintessentially English’ architect Lutyens was descended from a Schleswig-Holstein family. Many of those Conservatives who shouted most loudly about protecting England from takeover by the European Union, like Michael Howard and Michael Portillo, came from immigrant families. Those lines about ‘remaining an Englishman’ were set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, whose mother came from an old Italian family.
It is a roundabout way of saying that the sentiments in W. S. Gilbert’s song were right when they talked about resisting the temptation to belong to other nations. Being English is a matter of choice.