CHAPTER ELEVEN
The English have a miraculous power of turning wine into water.
OSCAR WILDE
It is not merely that the roles of the English sexes have changed. So too has the land they live in. It is, like the rest of the world, dominated by brand names. The English wear baseball caps and jeans, eat versions of American, Asian or Italian food, drive cars made anywhere on the globe (even the grandest British car-maker, Rolls-Royce, is now owned by Germans), dance to international beats and play computer games designed in Seattle or Tokyo. In this new world neither geography nor history, religion nor politics exerts the influence it once did. And as external fashions have changed in the last half-century, so too have the internal certainties.
The Second World War, the time of Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve, was the last extended period when we could say with any confidence that the impression of England matched the reality. Even then, there were plenty of signs that the old certainties were crumbling. My father dated the country’s decline from the occasion when he came home on leave from service on the North Atlantic convoys and heard hostesses boasting of the extra bits of meat they had bought on the black market to augment meagre food rations. A country in which otherwise ‘respectable’ figures felt no shame at bilking the rules was finished. The ‘spiv’ who could get you whatever you wanted, from nylons to bacon joints, was as authentically English as the self-denying Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard figures, whose restraint was a mark of their altruism.
Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve had both been written by Noël Coward, whose ‘essential Englishness’ had been acquired, like his accent and cigarette holder, on the journey from his birth as the son of a west London piano salesman to his friendship with England’s royalty. Once peace had come, his idea of England would not last long. Within little more than a decade Coward was reduced to the indignity of railing against the ‘kitchen sink’ school of drama which had made his plays about middle-class life seem so brittle and dated. Citing the advice he claimed Churchill had given him that ‘An Englishman has an inalienable right to live wherever he chooses’, Coward fled the country for exile in Bermuda, Switzerland and Jamaica, rather than pay the taxes necessary to build the New Jerusalem.
The new stage sensation, Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s furious reaction against the fatuous place he found himself living in, was first produced in May 1956. It took as its premise that ‘there aren’t any good, brave causes left’, and drove forwards on the bitterness of Jimmy Porter at the values of the ‘Edwardian brigade’ of his wife’s posh family. As Osborne explained it in Tribune,
This is a letter of hate. It is for you, my countrymen, I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. The men with manic fingers, leading the feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death … I only hope it [his hate] will keep me going. I think it will. I think it may sustain me in the last few months. Till then, damn you, England. You’re rotting now, and quite soon you’ll disappear.1
Legions of writers have followed in Osborne’s wake, feasting on the corpse of Edwardian England. So that even those who believed, in characteristically English fashion, that the attacks were going ‘a bit too far’, nonetheless felt that to live in England was to take part in a sort of wake. Certainly, the ruling class have signally failed to come up with a new design for the twenty-first century, which is why the English have found themselves walking backwards into the future, their eyes fixed on a point some time at the turn of the twentieth century. It is time to wonder whether this mourning for the past is justified.
We could start by considering what the English have given the world.
And here is the first problem. For the greatest legacy the English have bequeathed the rest of humanity is their language. When an Icelander meets a Peruvian, each reaches for his English. Even in the Second World War, when the foundations were being laid for the Axis pact between Germany, Japan and Italy, Yosuke Matsuoka was negotiating for the Emperor in English. It is the medium of technology, science, travel and international politics. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English, four fifths of all data stored on computers is in English and the language is used by two thirds of the world’s scientists. It is the Malay of the world, easy to learn, very easy to speak badly; a little learning will take you quite a long way, which is why an estimated one quarter of the entire world population can speak the language to some degree. By the late 1990s, the British Council was predicting that at the turn of the millennium 1 billion (thousand million) people would be learning English.2
Some of these students will become highly fluent, like the Dutch Secretary General of NATO, Dr Josef Luns, who once remarked that he preferred English because ‘when I speak in my own language I feel as though I am vomiting’. But most want to learn the language as a means to an end. The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary – the Bible of the English language – keep no records on where new words originate, but it is a safe bet that of the 3,000 or so new words which enter their database each year, only a minority have been minted in England; the rest come from America, Australia or the international language of computing and science. After all, of the 650 million or so people who speak English as a first or second language, perhaps 8 per cent are English.
The moment a Frenchman opens his mouth, he declares his identity. The French speak French. The English speak a language which belongs to no one. Professor Michael Dummett, Wykeham professor of Logic at Oxford, once stood in line to buy a railway ticket in Chicago and struck up a conversation with a fellow traveller. After a time, the man said, ‘You must be from Europe.’ ‘Yes, from England,’ said Dummett. To which the Spinoza beside him replied, ‘You speak pretty good English.’ Dummett was so astonished that he found himself blurting out that he was English. It was only later that he realized that for many Americans, ‘English’ is just the name of a language spoken in America, as ‘Dutch’ is the language spoken in Holland. The paradox of language is that it is at once precious and personal to the speaker and at the same time the property of everyone. What happens to a people if they cease to own their language?
When I visited the Oxford English Dictionary, the enquiry team were dealing with the latest query to drop on their desk from a member of the public trying to keep track of their language. The writer had been shocked to hear someone talking about a piece of technical equipment as ‘the dog’s bollocks’. What, the anxious letter-writer wanted to know, did it mean? And where on earth did the expression come from?
This is the sort of challenge lexicographers like. ‘The dog’s bollocks’ does not appear in the magisterial 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, until recently the bible for defining the meaning of English words. Dog’s-head (‘a dog-faced baboon’), Dog’s Nose (‘a mixed liquor of beer and gin’) and Dog-sleep (‘feigned or pretended sleep’) are all there, together with thirty-odd other words incorporating ‘dog’. But no dog’s bollocks.
In a vast open-plan office, notable for its astonishing quiet (in an hour and a half not a single telephone rings), the Oxford lexicographers try to keep track of how the language is changing. Desktop screens flash with messages from lookouts across the English-speaking world, bringing news of new coinings. An informant has contacted them to report what she thinks is the first sighting of the expression ‘bad hair day’. It turns out to have been in a newspaper in Seattle. A correspondent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has discovered a hitherto unknown early use of ‘Maltese’, predating anything in the dictionary. A subdued excitement follows.
Many English adults could define the dog’s bollocks at once. If something is the DB, it is as good as it could be, the best of its kind, the Rolls-Royce of its type. ‘Just the ticket’, as they might have said thirty years ago. It is a mark of how fast the English language can change that it can take up a particular expression and assimilate it into common currency in months. Journalists, in particular, are forever inventing expressions, simply to see how long it is before others are using them as if they’re a long-established part of the language. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t take more than a few weeks to invent a word and find it passing into everyday usage. When the lexicographer Jonathon Green compiled a list of everyday words invented between 1960 and 1990 he drew the line at 2,700, from AC/DC (bisexual), to zonked (intoxicated).3 There is something Humpty-Dumptyish about the way the English language is used; words can mean whatever the user wants them to mean. The English seem not merely to have accepted the astonishing capacity for change of their language, but to exult in it. ‘Languages only stop changing when they’re dead,’ says Patrick Hanks happily, in the great open-plan office of the Oxford English Dictionary, before turning back to his screen to examine the latest incoming message from a scout on the outer fringes of the English-speaking world.
One of the consequences of the growth of English as a medium for the world is that attempts at prescription have been more or less abandoned. The French, who have been the main losers in the contest to develop a world language, have reacted to the viral spread of English by a form of linguistic isolationism, attempting to ban the use of foreign words, specifying the proportion of music on radio stations that must be sung in French. The English laugh at them for it, not merely because they are the historic enemy and – in this war at least – they are on the losing side, but because they fail to understand that Canute-like attempts at proprietorship are doomed. The English language has no guardians, merely people like the Oxford Dictionary who record how it has changed. When a new edition of any dictionary of the English language appears, the question asked is not whether it safeguards old usages, but how many new words it acknowledges. The authors are willing to exult in the diversity of their language, from wherever it comes.
This easy-going attitude to their language is nothing new. The first dictionary of the English language was originally begun as an attempt to replicate what the Académie Française had done for French. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie, which had emerged in 1694, after fifty-five years of labour, was intended to provide the final word on the right and wrong uses of words. There had been proposals for a similar prescriptive approach to the English language, kicking around for years – Defoe had argued for an English Academy ‘to encourage Polite Learning, to polish and refine the English tongue, and advance the so much neglected faculty of Correct Language’.4 Jonathan Swift made a similar case in 1712 in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Although Dr Samuel Johnson was beaten to the task of producing the first English dictionary in answer to the call (that honour went to the scientist, Benjamin Martin), his work remains the outstanding example of single-handed lexicography. It is to Johnson’s credit that he saw the foolishness of trying to preserve the language in aspic. As he wrote in his Preface:
When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay … The language most likely to continue long without alteration would be that of a nation raised a little, and but a little, above barbarity, secluded from strangers, and totally employed in procuring the conveniences of life.5
If Johnson had not saved the British from the idiocies of a prescriptive Académie Anglaise, someone else would have done. Verbal evolution is the mark of success, not failure. Curiously, it is America, the home of so many new coinings and usages, that provides the big market for historical dictionaries of the English language, because of the appetite for heritage. The English seem not merely to have adjusted to the fact that they no longer control their language, but positively to exult in its growth. It does not seem the behaviour of a people afraid of the future.
(The dog’s bollocks, by the way, is an expression invented by printers to describe the sign:– in newspapers. It is authentically English.)
Like its language, the new England owes something and nothing to the past. The main change is that while the old England was built on templates for a model Englishman and -woman which were laid out centuries ago, the new England is vigorous, demotic, and highly inventive. And because the English cultural tradition was based upon individualism, the possibilities of the England that is emerging from the chrysalis of the last half-century or more are almost limitless.
The important changes are not switches of government, but shifts in the Zeitgeist. When the Labour party swept to power in May 1997, it proclaimed an ambition to ‘rebrand’ Britain: after reinventing itself as New Labour, with most of its ideological baggage discarded, now would come New Britain, a country which had shrugged off the succubus of its past. Within months, much of the media was dancing to their tune. ‘RENEWED BRITANNIA’ boasted Time magazine’s cover story in October. ‘After 50 years of struggling against what often seemed impossible odds, the United Kingdom is showing an unmistakable spring in its step’, ran the copy.6 Proof of the transformation came in profiles of successful film-makers, computer-games millionaires, fashion designers, performers and currency dealers. These were people, the magazine rightly suggested, who had ignored the inhibitions of belonging to an old country mired in class inhibition and social prejudice against wealth creation, and seized the opportunity to follow their commercial instincts. One of their main assets, though none mentioned it, was that they spoke the global language. Another was the accident of geography that placed their country in a position where it could do business with Asia in the morning and North America in the afternoon; a third, the long history of trading on which the Empire was built; a fourth, another consequence of empire, a network of connections across the world and a capacity for assimilating other cultures; a fifth the comparatively high levels of training and skill in the workforce; a sixth the attractiveness of London as a base for foreign businesspeople to live because of English characteristics of lawfulness, business acumen and tolerance. We could go on. The point is that none of these was the consequence of a political decision by the new government.
The autumn following his election, Tony Blair played host to the heads of Commonwealth governments from around the world. Before they could hear his speech of welcome, they were obliged to sit in awkward silence through a video presentation celebrating the creative, commercial and scientific achievements of the new meritocratic Britain. With music from Oasis and the Spice Girls, pictures of dealing rooms, Formula One racing cars and pharmaceutical factories, the presentation battered relentlessly on the theme that Britain was now a young country. The Prime Minister’s speech, when it came, repeated the message. ‘The new Britain is a meritocracy where we break down barriers of class, religion, race and culture,’ he said. The aim was that old Conservative goal of One Nation, ‘for all the people, not a privileged few’.7
The silly slogan used for selling this new country was ‘Cool Britannia’, at which any truly cool person could only wince or shudder: when middle-aged politicians embrace youth culture they always get it wrong. The ‘Britain’ element was significant, though: no one talked of a Cool England. This was because the country was going through one of the phases in its history when an Englishman could be defined as someone who lived on an island in the North Sea governed by Scots. ‘Britain’ also has the advantage of being inclusive. You don’t need to be a white Anglo-Saxon to be British. It seems that you can be Nigerian, Moslem, Jewish, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian or Sikh British, a great deal more easily than you can be English and any of those things. Precisely because ‘Britain’ is a political invention, it allows diversity.
The supreme embodiment of the idea of Britain is the country’s royal family. The ambition of uniting the kingdom is spelled out in the lumbering list of titles of the heir to the throne: Charles is Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick and Baron Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland. The institution of monarchy belongs to the world of red tunics and bearskins, the Union flag and the Gatling gun and Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are almost the last representatives of Respectable Society. How far the country they led had changed became bruisingly clear with the sudden death of Charles’s former wife, Princess Diana, in 1997. Still subscribing to a code of behaviour which abhorred displays of emotion, monarch and consort were almost the only individuals who did not grieve her death in a sentimental way. Much of the rest of this nation of supposed stiff upper lips traipsed to the florist, bought bunches of flowers and then laid them as close as possible to any building with which this uniquely privileged young woman had been associated. Soon the gates of Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace and the family home in Northamptonshire were all but submerged under a sea of petals and plastic. They lit candles in jam jars and left them as impromptu shrines. They hung cards and photos on roadside railings and trees in the parks, accompanied by scrawled messages. DIANA WE LOVE YOU and HEAVEN HAS A NEW ANGEL were among the most coherent. And then, when the funeral came, the public lined the route of the cortège for mile after mile, throwing flowers at the coffin and, most bizarrely of all, popping the flashbulbs of their cameras for a photo for the family album.
By no stretch of the imagination could this be called ‘typical’ behaviour from a nation whose impassivity in the face of emotion had been one of the elements of self-parody with which it was most at ease. George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the hugely successful series of Flashman historical romances, was appalled to see what C. S. Forester called ‘lower deck sentimentality’ having such an airing. Who knows how many he spoke for when he asked how the British cult of the hero had become the cult of the victim. ‘Mr Blair felt proud. I felt ashamed,’ he said. ‘For grieving has become a positive virtue, and the response to tragedy, and especially to fatal crime, has become a ritual: the florists’ shops must be stripped so that tributes can be strewn at the scene, there must be tears and harrowing interviews for the cameras.’8
Diana’s death was tragic, as any sudden death in the prime of life is tragic. But was it any more tragic than that of any of the numberless thousands of young men and women whose short lives are commemorated on war memorials in every village and town in the land? Diana was beautiful, manipulative, compassionate, and had died enjoying the life of a rich nightclubber. Yet she had somehow become an underdog and you cannot exaggerate English sympathy for the underdog. This astonishingly favoured young woman had become a victim with whom the public could identify, because the House of Windsor (‘the Germans’ to the rat-pack of reporters) found itself in the position of one monarchy after another – out of touch with the people in whose name it purported to rule. What happened when she died was an outbreak of collective hysteria from a people who, through a prolonged period of peace, had got out of touch with the experience of sudden death. No one thought it odd that at her funeral Elton John should perform a reworking of the song he had originally composed as hero-worship to Marilyn Monroe, for she too was an icon for a secular age and in the end icons of that kind are interchangeable. The song sold five million copies in England. The mass of commemorative books, posters, T-shirts and crockery showed how thin was the pretence that the country was ruled by rationality and reserve.
The crowds that poured into the London parks to lay votive offerings at the impromptu shrines demonstrated how much and how little England had changed in the second half of the twentieth century. What was probably unchanged was the politeness and consideration of the crowd, who showed the sort of thoughtfulness I imagine you could have found in other large gatherings at any time this century. With the exception of the motorcycle outriders who accompanied the hearse, the police were unobtrusive. There was a quiet dignity everywhere. White Anglo-Saxons were in a strong majority, but a great variety of racial origins were represented. Women comfortably outnumbered men among the mourners. There were few enough of the rich and powerful represented; this was a genuine expression of popular emotion.
George MacDonald Fraser’s objection to the public mourning underestimates that capacity of the English for sentimentality that Charles Dickens understood so well when he killed off Little Nell, or made Tiny Tim hobble forward to wish, ‘Merry Christmas every one of us!’ Had Diana died in the days when the dominant mores in England were set by the Breed and their compliant, domesticated wives, we should have seen a very different spectacle. But the English no longer live in such a country. The purpose for which the Breed was bred no longer exists. The freeing of English womanhood from its enforced restrictions has allowed something much more electric to emerge.
It is not that Diana was a mere victim. Her funeral assumed the dimensions it did because it became a pagan rite; Diana was a sort of goddess in a godless age. At one stage, when I began thinking about this book, I briefly thought of organizing it around ideas of the English hero and came across this description of how Admiral Nelson was treated by the London crowds in 1805, when he returned after chasing the French fleet across the Atlantic and through the West Indies: ‘Wherever he appears he electrifies the cold English character,’ wrote Lady Elizabeth Foster after watching him walking the streets, ‘rapture and applause follow all his steps. Sometimes a poor woman asks to touch his coat. The very children learn to bless him as he passes, and doors and windows are crowded.’9
It could be a description of the adulation for Diana. Each had had their heads turned by the adoration heaped upon them (Nelson’s famous signal ‘England expects …’ had originally read ‘Nelson confides …’); each, for all their worshippers, had feet of clay. Each filled a need at a particular moment in their nation’s history; Nelson, a martial hero for a martial age; Diana, the patron saint of a country preoccupied with its own failure. At the end, Nelson’s coffin was carried into St Paul’s for a four-hour state funeral, flanked by six admirals in full dress uniform. Diana’s coffin was escorted to Westminster Abbey by civilian representatives of the charities with which she had been associated and the absolute minimum number of military pallbearers, for a funeral in which the trappings of formality had been reduced to the scantiest, amidst a congregation in which the focus of attention was on which film and pop stars were present. The difference between the two funerals shows how far imperial ideas of Englishness have ebbed away. What has come in their place is something altogether more personal. It is sometimes rather horrifying.
*
In the summer of 1998, soccer teams from around the world converged on France to compete for the Football World Cup. Despite some shambolic organization by the French authorities, the tournament was judged a great success, with untold millions sharing the excitement on live television. But there was, of course, ‘the English problem’. the English problem is the hooligan problem. Its most tragic expression came at the Heysel stadium, in May 1985, when a major disturbance between Liverpool and Juventus fans left nearly forty Italians dead on the pitch. The challenge for the French and British police was, put crudely, to keep the hooligans from killing somebody else. That summer, they succeeded, although not before the world had been treated to scenes of drunken English youths throwing chairs, stones and anything else unlucky enough to incur their hostility. By contrast, Scottish fans were capable of drinking vast amounts and merely sleeping off the after-effects.
What is most shocking about the violence of English hooligans is its entirely casual nature. I recall one tiny incident after the opening game of the 1996 European football championship, between England and Switzerland. The English had put on a professionally indolent performance and the Swiss held them to a 1 – 1 draw, better than they had ever expected to do at Wembley in front of over 70,000 English fans. The Swiss, who included more women and children among their supporters than you would expect to find at an English ground, were jubilant. They were good-natured and, by the standards of loutishness common among English fans, quiet and totally unthreatening. Outside the stadium they sang and danced in the streets for hours afterwards. On one kerbside, about forty of them, men, women and children, had lined up to do a Mexican Wave. A young, shaven-headed Englishman on the other side of the street eyeballed them, ran across the road, shoved his face six inches from one of the young men in the crowd, and screamed ‘Wanker!’ at him. The Swiss looked baffled. The Englishman gesticulated, moving his hand up and down. ‘You wanker!’ he screamed again, drew back his fist, punched the man in the face and walked through the crowd. His walk was casual, cocky, slow enough to invite someone to try to retaliate for their friend’s injury – he was now doubled up, with blood pouring from his nose. But none came, and the thug swaggered off down the pavement, doubtless eager to tell his friends that he’d ‘done’ one of the visiting fans.
This sort of viciousness may not be unique to the English, but no honest member of the English middle class would deny a fear of what the football mob may contain. In Turin in the late 1980s, the writer Bill Buford watched with horror as a group of bloated Manchester United football fans staggered off the aircraft that had brought them from England to watch their team play the Italian aces, Juventus. It was not even lunchtime, yet many were so drunk they could scarcely stand. The fans then colonized the town centre, sitting in their tattoos in sidewalk cafés singing ‘Fuck the Pope’ over and over again, occasionally getting up to piss in the street. And that was when they were being well behaved, and not attacking the ‘fuckin’ eyeties’ with sticks, knives or bottles.
‘Why do you English behave like this?’ an Italian asked Buford. ‘Is it because you are an island race? Is it because you don’t feel European? Is it because you lost the Empire?’10
Buford was lost for an answer. The question arose from fear and genuine bafflement. Why does a minority of the English population think that the only way to have a good time is to get disgustingly drunk – and I mean disgustingly drunk, drunk to the point where the beer and the wine and the spirits have saturated their T-shirts and they are heaving their stomach up into the street – to shout obscenely and to pick a fight? Perhaps all the reasons suggested by the puzzled Italian played a part. Certainly, you don’t expect to find plane-loads of Italians pouring into the centre of London and behaving in a similar fashion. The only honest answer that Buford could have given is that that is how part of the English population has always been. Far from being ashamed of their behaviour, they see fighting and drunkenness as part of their birthright. It is the way they proclaim their identity. A few years later, in Sardinia for the 1990 World Cup, Bill Buford watched as a mass of English football hooligans fought a pitched battle with the Italian police. Before he was clubbed senseless by furious policemen, he described a point at which the fans retreated in panic. But then
Someone shouted that we were all English. Why were we running? The English don’t run … And so it went on. Having fled in panic, some of the supporters would then remember that they were English and this was important, and they would remind the others that they too were English, and this was also important, and with renewed sense of national identity, they would come abruptly to a halt, turn around, and charge the Italian police.11
The problem is not exclusively English – Dutch and German fans have developed their own versions of the sickness in which puffy-faced young thugs proclaim their loyalty by kicking or stoning anyone who speaks a different language or wears different colours. But the truth is that the English gave the world soccer. They also gave it hooliganism.
There is nothing particularly new about the crudity and readiness to violence of English young people. In early Hanoverian times foreign visitors were as shocked by the behaviour of the mob as they were impressed by the civility of political culture. César de Saussure was so scandalized by the open drunkenness, the ‘mighty swearing’, the shirts-off wrestling (the sight of women taking part particularly shook him) and general licentiousness that he concluded that ‘the lower populace is of brutal and insolent nature, and is very quarrelsome’.12 To add a sense of superiority to this natural coarseness was very dangerous. By Victorian times the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson had noted the way in which the general arrogance of the English towards foreigners expressed itself among many young people: ‘There are multitudes of young rude English who have the self sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who, with their disdain for the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manner.’13
Every time that English soccer fans rampage through a city centre, overturning the tables of sidewalk cafés, bloodying the noses of anyone unlucky enough to be in their way, the London press and politicians agonize about what it all means. They should save their breath. Thuggery is something the English do. ‘The more blood they shed, the crueller and more ruthless they become … They’re fiery and furious, they quickly grow angry and take a long time to calm down’, was Jean Froissart’s (admittedly biased) thumbnail sketch of the character of the English troops which swept through fifteenth-century Normandy, burning and pillaging as they went. Four centuries later the Duke of Wellington remarked that his army was made up of ‘the scum of the earth – the mere scum of the earth’, and even though he did much to improve the rations and conditions, he could still lose control of it for days on end.
Football was a form of near-riot long before the rules were laid down, and if you were wise you kept well clear. The eighteenth-century French traveller who had been so uneasy about the crudity of the ordinary people of England made the mistake of walking into a game of football. ‘They will break panes of glass and smash the windows of coaches’, he wrote, ‘and also knock you down without the slightest compunction; on the contrary, they will roar with laughter.’14
‘Today’s football violence would not have surprised those taking the waters in eighteenth-century Bath – a football match then was ‘more like a battle than a game’, is the way Ian Gilmour puts it in his history of street violence, Riots, Risings and Revolution.15 The expression ‘local derby’ originated at this time, named after two parishes in the city where a game could last for days of free-for-all punch-ups. Once football became a spectator sport, violence took root in the crowd. Ever since the 1870s it has been played in England to an accompanying chorus of punches, kicks and obscenities: three authors who examined the records of the Football Association and back-issues of the Leicestershire Daily Mercury for the twenty years before the First World War discovered 254 cases of disorderliness among spectators. Even when the crowd merely threatened, it could be terrifying. An account in a gentleman’s journal of 1903 shows how, even at the height of Edwardian England, the football crowd was already fearsome: ‘Once at a famous North Country ground I saw and heard half of a crowd of 20,000 turn upon a poor referee who had done something distasteful … The spiteful yells, the torrents of abuse, the fierce brandishing of sticks and fists … made up a terrible picture of an English crowd.’16
The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside the civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder. Popular festivities could often – as on May Day 1517 in London – turn into physical attacks on supposed foreigners. A revel feast held at the village of Tockenham Wick, in September 1620, developed from the traditional cudgel-bashing in the street into a full-scale fight, when men from nearby Wootton Bassett arrived looking for trouble with the words ‘Where are the middle sort of men in Tockenham?’. A historian who recently examined what happened there discovered numerous other punch-ups in the area, like the one in 1641 when villagers from Malmesbury, led by a man ‘with a hobby-horse and bells on his legs’ turned up at the Long Newnton revel looking for a fight, which ended with several local men seriously injured. ‘’Tis no revel unless there be some fightings’ went the local saying.17 But in the end, for all the apparent anarchy, certain rules applied: the violence seems to have a ritualistic element to it and the crowd understood and accepted the limits of what was permissible. As the century went on, some of the violence acquired a more political hue: rioting was the last recourse of poor people who discovered their rights being trampled upon by entrepreneurial aristocrats determined to appropriate common land that they had previously used for grazing their livestock.
And as people drifted towards the growing cities in search of work, they lost the old village constraints. The riots of June 1780 demonstrated to the ruling class how unstable things could become. The casus belli was a demand articulated by Lord George Gordon, as president of the Protestant Association, that Parliament reinstate the laws it had recently repealed, under which Roman Catholics were penalized for their religion, notably concerning the right to acquire or inherit property. Gordon was, to put it mildly, unpredictable. (He died while serving a five-year sentence for libel in Newgate gaol, by this time having become a Jew.) Faced with the howling mob he had taken to Westminster, Parliament prevaricated. The crowd then embarked on a spree of burning, rioting and looting that lasted for days. The homes of Catholics were destroyed, their churches were burned to the ground, Newgate prison emptied and a Catholic-owned distillery in Holborn sacked, with predictable consequences: they were said to be drinking gin from the gutter. Only on the third day was a strong force of militia deployed, by which time, some estimates claim that, in financial terms, more damage was done than Paris suffered during the French Revolution.
The Gordon Riots demonstrated how unstable big English cities could be. Crowds were prepared to become very violent in pursuit either of prejudice or, as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and radical ideas from the French Revolution began to circulate, for the benefit of the disenfranchised. Once a riot had begun, it didn’t much matter what had sparked it off; there was just a binge of destruction.
Here is Ian Gilmour’s list of what happened in addition to the Gordon Riots:
In the eighteenth century, Englishmen (and Englishwomen) rioted against turnpikes, enclosures and high food prices, against Roman Catholics, the Irish and the Dissenters, against the naturalisation of Jews, the impeachment of politicians, press gangs, ‘crimp’ houses [where men were seduced or entrapped into the navy or army] and the Militia Act, against theatre prices, foreign actors, pimps, bawdy houses, surgeons, French footmen and alehouse keepers, against the gibbets on the Edgware Road and public whippings, against the imprisonment of London’s chief magistrates, against the Excise, against the Cider Tax and the Shops Tax, against workhouses and industrial employers, against the rumoured destruction of cathedral spires, even against a change in the calendar … There were riots at elections and after them, in prisons and outside them, in schools and colleges, at executions, at factories and workplaces, in the law courts at Westminster Hall, outside parliament and within the Palace of Westminster, at the office of the Bow Street magistrate, in theatres, in brothels, in a cathedral close, and in Pall Mall at the gates of St James’s Palace.18
Although he goes on to argue that the violence was rarely mindless, and usually had a specific goal (‘defensive aggression’) it sounds an awesome list. Yet if we were to look back only at the last thirty years in England we could say that English mobs have rioted against the Poll Tax, against policing methods, inside and outside football grounds, on seaside promenades and in cinemas, against fascism and out of racial prejudice, against employment laws, against the Vietnam War, at collieries and in Whitehall, against long hair and against short hair, for the right to celebrate the summer solstice, against the exportation of live animals and the importation of new technology, for union recognition, for the right to drive stolen cars, because gangs enjoy fighting, because they ran up against another gang of football supporters, and so on. Food riots, commonplace in the eighteenth century, have disappeared, but a continuous thread links the eighteenth-century attacks on cotton mills, through the ‘Captain Swing’ resistance to machinery and cheap labour in the 1830s, to the protests against Rupert Murdoch’s introduction of new printing methods at Wapping in the 1980s. The list puts into perspective the horror and disdain affected by the English when they look across the Channel and see the way in which mass disobedience, open flouting of the law and civil insurrection are condoned by feeble French governments unwilling to take on protesters. The difference between the two cultures is that while mass protests are an accepted, expected part of the political process in France, in England, street insurrection is less often to do with politics and more to do with an innate readiness to trade punches. An after-dark visit to half the market towns across the country will show how ‘a bit of a punch-up’ between drunken young men and women is as much part of a good Saturday as a kebab or a curry. ‘’Tis no revel unless there be some fightings.’
The English passion for alcohol has something to do with it, of course. In how many other major European cities does the traveller leave the rail station, as they do at Manchester or Liverpool, to take a taxi in which the driver is caged off from his passengers for his own safety and a notice warns that ‘sickness due to alcohol will incur a £20 surcharge’?
It has been like this for centuries. The story goes that before the Battle of Hastings, while the Normans spent the night in prayer, King Harold’s men sat up drinking. Medieval proverbs confirm the picture of a half-sozzled nation: ‘The Auvergner sings, the Breton writes, the Englishman drinks’, goes one. ‘The Norman sings, the German guzzles, the Englishman boozes’,19 is another. William of Malmesbury (c.1095–1143), in his Chronicle of the Kings of England, observes that at the time of the Norman Conquest, ‘drinking in particular was a universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days … They were accustomed to eat until they became surfeited and drink till they were sick’.20 When King John went to visit the King of France at Fontainebleau, in July 1201, he was given the run of the palace. After he had gone, the anonymous historian who wrote the Chronique Français des Rois de France observed that ‘The king of France and his people had a good laugh among themselves about the way the people of the English king had drunk all the bad wines, and left all the good ones’.21 In 1362 the Archbishop of Canterbury was complaining that, given the slightest opportunity, the English would binge themselves stupid, because on holy days ‘the tavern is rather worshipped than the church, gluttony and drunkness is more abundant than tears and prayers, men are busied rather with wantonness and contumely than with the leisure of contemplation’.22
Left to itself, you sometimes feel, the whole country would be permanently drunk every weekend. In the early eighteenth century there was such an abundance of cheap gin and other liquor available that it seemed society might implode: in 1742, a population one tenth the size of today’s downed 19 million gallons of industrial-strength gin – ten times as much as is drunk today. G. K. Chesterton’s affectionate, unthreatening creature, ‘the rolling English drunkard [who] made the rolling English road’,23 is the congenial expression of the phenomenon. Other times, the English were gloomy, brutish drunks. Dostoevsky’s depiction of a London pub is vivid: ‘Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly, gloomily and heavily, and everyone is strangely silent. Only curses and bloody brawls occasionally break that suspicious and oppressively sad silence … Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility … wives in no way lag behind their husbands and all get drunk together, while children crawl and run about among them.’24
In February 1915, Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the people of Bangor that ‘Drink is doing us more damage in the war than all the German submarines put together.’25 A deputation of shipbuilders who came to beg the government to introduce prohibition to improve production was told that ‘We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink; and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink.’26
The British government’s attempts to tackle the problem, by severely limiting the opening hours of pubs and restricting the sale of alcohol for drinking at home, among other measures, had the result they wanted. Convictions for drunkenness fell, and the restraint seemed to last for two or three generations. In the 1930s, Mass Observation claimed that many men in Bolton pubs drank half-pints. The privations of the Second World War accustomed another tranche of young men and women to take their drink moderately, and it was not really until the 1970s that increased prosperity and the collapse of parental authority allowed many of the English to revert to their ancestral patterns of behaviour. By the 1990s, the next generation was combining hedonistic drinking with widespread drug use.
Because the English do not consume significantly more alcohol than other European peoples, this booziness must be something to do with the way in which they drink. George Steiner once told me, ‘You’d never find Sartre in an English café for two reasons. A: No Sartre. B: No café.’ He is right. The collapse of British imperial power produced no explosion of creative thought to match that of Vienna in the dying days of the Habsburg Empire – Freud, Brahms, Mahler and Klimt and the rest – and one of the reasons may perhaps be to do with the lack of a café society. Marxism was a café phenomenon until it gained power. From Lisbon to Leningrad you can go into a café, order a glass of wine or while away hours with a single coffee. In cafés, the generations and sexes mix, time matters less. Pubs, by contrast, are male, adult, alcoholic and somehow more urgent. You do not go to pubs to engage in solitary activities like reading the newspaper (common enough in European cafés), nor to stretch the mind in a quiet game of chess. The pub is for drinking.
At first sight, this readiness to booze and fight is hard to reconcile with the reputation of the English for restraint. What was D. H. Lawrence on about when he said that ‘I don’t like England very much, but the English do seem a rather lovable people. They have such a lot of gentleness’27? What could George Orwell have been thinking of when he wrote that ‘The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the moment you set foot on English soil. It is a land where bus conductors are good-tempered and policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement’28?
The point, I think, is that all these things are relative. The vast majority of English people do not spend their time getting drunk, fighting and throwing up. Even that comparatively small number who do, tend to stick to Friday and Saturday nights. At a day-to-day level, English society retains a remarkable basic civility. Just try counting how many ‘please’ and ‘thank yous’ are involved in buying a newspaper, or register the number of occasions on which someone apologizes for bumping into you on the train. Unlike some other sophisticated societies, where police forces developed as a way of enforcing the will of the state, most of English society is not frightened by the police. The pattern of crime follows a general preference for non-violence, too: in England and Wales, robberies account for about 1 per cent of recorded crime, while burglaries run at 24 per cent.29 In the United States, while burglaries still outnumber robberies, the proportion of robberies in the crime total is four times higher.30 It is hard to resist the conclusion that the English prefer sneaky crimes to anything involving confrontation and violence. Most revealing of all are the figures for the most serious crime of all. While the number of murders has steadily increased since World War Two, England still has a quite astonishingly low rate of killings. For all the sensationalist newspaper headlines, you stand less chance of being murdered in England than in most other industrialized societies. The murder rate for England and Wales is below that for Japan, less than half the rate for France or Germany, one eighth of the rate for Scotland or Italy and twenty-six times lower than the rate for the United States.31 It is hard to resist the conclusion that for all the readiness of some of the English to drink and fight, deep down most have quite a considerable respect for one another.
What has happened is that as Respectable Society has evaporated, a tolerance has developed for older, less gentrified ways. The strict codes of manners and dress and etiquette seem, from this perspective, to have been developed by the English to protect themselves from themselves. England enters the third millennium not in a dark suit but in an exuberant variety of guises, owing everything and nothing to the past.
Take the English obsession with betting. For over 250 years, between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the government was happy to acquiesce in the taste for gambling by organizing state lotteries, the proceeds helping to fund, among other things, the wars against Napoleon and the building of the British Museum. But with national self-confidence came growing sensitivity: there was plenty of evidence that the lotteries had bad social effects,32 and Lord Liverpool’s government decreed that they must be abolished. It did not kill the taste for gambling, though, and other forms of betting rapidly took root: you could bet on the outcome of human contests like foot-racing, prize-fighting or wrestling, or on cockfighting, bull-baiting, dog-fighting or horse-racing. Such was the appetite that there were even bets laid on races between men with wooden legs. Small wonder that in Lancashire gambling was known as the poor man’s Stock Exchange.33 By the 1890s coupon gambling on the results of football matches was a regular weekly activity in many homes. Within sixty years, the new football pools, which invited gamblers to predict the outcome of soccer matches, had become the biggest privately owned gambling operation in the world.
The attitude of authority towards this phenomenon was typically hypocritical: a state-sanctioned lottery would have involved the government in endorsing what some were now calling ‘the vice of the twentieth century’ – as alcohol had been the vice of previous eras. But it was quite happy to profit as much as it could, by levying taxes on the football-pools companies and the bookies. Finally, in 1994, a Conservative party government (‘the party of the family’ and of ‘sound money’) succumbed to the lure of easy income and established another state lottery. With twice-weekly draws televised by the BBC in a blitz of vulgarity and half-truths about the social good done by gambling, it rapidly became the biggest lottery in the world. Over two thirds of the adult population regularly bought tickets, and 95 per cent had done so at some time or other. There was ample anecdotal evidence that the ready availability of scratch-cards had contributed to gambling addiction, but everyone preferred to look the other way. It was a telling sign that the Respectable Society was dead and buried.
There are plenty of other examples we could examine, from changing sexual attitudes to the fact that in 1998 a serving Foreign Secretary, the country’s supreme ambassador, could, with scarcely a murmur of disapproval, conduct an affair, divorce his wife and cohabit with his secretary in his official residence. But perhaps it is attitudes to food that show how far the country has travelled.
In 1949, Raymond Postgate, a radical journalist, classicist and social historian, grew so cross with English tolerance of bad eating that he proposed a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food. He chose as his target the sauce bottles found on the tables of every restaurant:
They were provided on the assumption that you would want to hide completely the taste of what you would be offered. Sodden, sour, slimy, sloppy, stale or saccharined – one of these six things (or all) it certainly would be, whether it was fish, flesh, vegetable or sweet. It would also be overcooked; it might be reheated. If the place was English, it would be called a teashop or caffy; if foreign it would be called a restaurant or caffy. In the second case it would be dirtier, but the food might have some taste.34
There was a reason English food was so awful: the English were not bothered enough about how it tasted to demand it be any better. When John Cleese was taken out for a meal by his parents in the 1950s, the priorities were clear-cut. His father had worked in India, Hong Kong and Canton. Yet for all the breadth of vision that the Empire gave that generation, they retained the very clearest sense of themselves. ‘You’d think it might have opened their palates,’ he told me. ‘But they were completely uninterested in food. My parents used to choose a restaurant not because of the food on offer but because the plates were hot.’
The style of restaurants patronized by this middle class reflected their approach to life. They were dark, wood-beamed, furnished with a lot of leather. They were masculine places. There was a right piece of cutlery for each stage of the meal, and a right and wrong way to use it. You drank soup out of the side of the spoon by sitting with a straight back and tilting the spoon on to your lower lip; you did not insert the spoon into your mouth. And, although the language changed from one social class to another, you showed your satisfaction at the end of the meal by words to the effect of ‘delightful meal. I’m quite full’: satisfaction was a matter of quantity. If you were offered second helpings you accepted with an apology for enjoying the food: ‘I really shouldn’t, you know, but perhaps a little.’
And yet there was always plenty to celebrate about English food. Historically, English cooking, for the privileged few, at least, could have held its own with any in Europe. Richard II is said to have employed 2,000 cooks to manage his entertaining. Edward III’s son, the Duke of Clarence, threw a banquet for 10,000 with thirty courses, while Henry V celebrated his coronation by having the conduit of Palace Yard run with claret. No creature was too great or small to escape the dinner plate. Cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, deer and boar are unremarkable enough (although not – as frequently happened at medieval banquets – in the same meal). But then there were the fowl: chickens, swans, peacocks – often served in their feathers – pheasants, partridges, pigeons, larks, mallard, geese, woodcock, thrushes, curlews, snipe, quail, bitterns, to say nothing of cygnets, herons and finches. There were fish, from salmon and herring to tench and eels, shellfish from crabs to whelks, all finished off with custards and purées, curds, fritters, cakes and tarts.
Even in the midst of the food rationing which accompanied the Second World War, George Orwell was able to produce a list of delicacies that were nearly unobtainable abroad. He included kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets, Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings, potatoes roasted under the joint, minted new potatoes, bread, horseradish, mint and apple sauce, numerous pickles, Oxford marmalade, marrow jam and bramble jelly, Stilton and Wensleydale cheeses and Cox’s orange pippins.35 We could all add to it. But the English failed to see food as an art form. The word ‘restaurant’ is French and the reason menus appear in French is that the English language never developed the vocabulary to describe cooking properly. The commanding heights of English cuisine have been occupied by French chefs.
The ideal Englishman and -woman had not, in the immortal words, been put on earth to enjoy themselves. Throughout English history the élite has told the rest of the country that too much interest in food is somehow immoral. The seventeenth-century Puritans, with their firm belief that plain food was God’s food, cast a long shadow. Once the Industrial Revolution had drawn workers into the towns, knowledge of country cooking died. Certainly it ranked very low in the priorities of empire-builders. ‘Roast beef and mutton are all they have which is good’, said the German poet Heinrich Heine after a visit early in the nineteenth century. ‘Heaven keep every Christian from their gravies … And heaven guard everyone from their naïve vegetables, which, boiled away in water, are brought to the table just as God made them.’36
Among the metropolitan élite it has become fashionable to claim that everything has changed since then and that the English have lost their indifference to food. London, it was being confidently asserted, is the gastronomic capital of the world, food the new rock-’n’-roll. We shall see. While it is true that the country now has an abundance of first-class restaurants, they tend to be concentrated in London and a handful of cities outside, and to be high-price. If you want to eat well in Birmingham or Manchester, you are best advised to head for Chinatown or the Bangladeshi district.
It would be hard to exaggerate the benefit for English cooking of the arrival of a sizeable immigrant community. Although most English people still seem to cite fish and chips as the quintessential English food, the number of fish-and-chip shops in Britain has almost halved: at one time there were 15,000 of them, a figure which has now fallen to 8,500. Testament to the astonishing rise in popularity of food from other cultures is that there are as many Chinese and other oriental restaurants in Britain, and a further 7,300 Indian food outlets. John Koon, the man who invented the Chinese takeaway, built his fortune and career on the discovery that while the English might not know what beansprouts were, they could tell the difference between the letters A and B. His Cathay Restaurant, near Piccadilly Circus, would never have taken off had he not found a way of making the exotic mundane through Set Menus. As Chinese food gained in popularity after World War Two, he was invited to open a kitchen in Billy Butlin’s holiday camps, then catering to the British taste for holidays en masse. Here, he solved the problem of resistance to funny foreign food by inventing the revolting combination of chicken chop suey and chips. Customers loved it.
The point is not that the general standard of food in England is now superb; it is not. For the majority of people, eating out is to consume fat-filled fast food, and to eat in, to be a victim of something prepackaged in industrial quantities in a factory somewhere. But attitudes to food have changed. Every decade serves up a new confection of television chefs who can expect to get very rich from their cookery courses. The kitchen, rather than the drawing room, sitting room or parlour, has become the centre of the house and you are no longer thought degenerate if you confess a liking for good food. It is part of a wholesale broader change.
The patterns from which the model Englishman and English-woman were to be cut have been torn up. In their place is something else, as yet not fully formed. The old hierarchies are finished, and as they crumbled, we have seen energy unleashed in fashion and music. Who can explain why England produced many of the world’s greatest bands, while France thought Johnny Halliday was cool? Perhaps it was something to do with the unendurable tedium of the English suburbs or the miserably changeable weather. But the super-abundance of street tribes, mods and rockers, punks, technos and travellers, indie-kids and raggamuffins, and further tribes within tribes, based on different tastes and looks and views, all express a basic belief in the liberty of the individual. Style is no longer homogeneous and it no longer takes its tone from the top: the reason British designers are so sought-after by the fashion industry is that they belong to the same creative culture as those who drive the thriving music scene.
It used to be said of the great Sussex and England batsman Ranjitsinghji (the first man to make 3,000 runs in a season), that he was the person who ‘put India on the map for the ordinary Englishman’. But he belonged to a small and very privileged class who, in their speech and manners were Englishmen. The arrival of substantial numbers of immigrants from other cultures has forced the English to break out of their complacency, to re-examine themselves, and to recognize and exult in diversity. They may not yet have entirely shaken off a sense that their country lost its way. They have not entirely lost their suspicion of ‘abroad’, either. How could they, for it is the fruit of millennia of island life? Every schoolchild on an exchange visit to France, Germany or Holland has grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents whose only experience of the Continent was as a place their country sent them to fight. Over 1 million of them never returned.
But they live in a country that, for all its Lilliputian political spats, is firmly based in a tradition of personal liberty, that still believes in fair play, that is tolerant, easy-going and slow to anger. They live in a culture where the supposition is that the individual may do as he or she likes, providing it is not banned by law, instead of the reverse, which is true of much of the rest of the world: in Germany there are even laws about when you may beat your carpets or wash your car. They live in a civilization where words matter, that gives them some of the most vigorous theatre in the world, more newspapers and a higher overall standard of television than anywhere else in the world. They have a capital city with a greater variety of entertainment on offer than any other city in the world. They have some of the finest domestic and church architecture on earth. They remain a highly inventive, entrepreneurial people. They have the finest choral music and the greatest diversity of musical performance in Europe. They have some of the loveliest countryside in the world, not an acre of it untouched by the care of previous generations. They have, in Oxford, Cambridge and many other institutions in London, Manchester and elsewhere, some of the finest minds and intellectual traditions of the world.
And yet they remain convinced they’re finished. That is their charm.
William and Valerie Plowden are moving out of the house their family has occupied for the last 800 years. It is a squat, half-timbered manor house squirrelled away in the blue remembered hills of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. There is no sign to Plowden Hall, there are no open days, no pots of National Trust jam on sale, no teas served by sturdy ladies in tweed skirts. On the drive, immature, tailless pheasants scuttle out of the way as you pass. In the drowsy fields, sheep and cattle wander aimlessly. A gardener is clipping the edges of the lawn outside the big house. Hidden away from the rest of the world, the loudest sound is the slicing of his shears. No cars, no trains, no aircraft.
The Plowden family have been ‘seated’ here at least since the twelfth century, when one of their ancestors fought at the Crusader siege of Acre. It is only twenty miles or so to Ironbridge and the valley where, 200 years ago, industrial iron-smelting was discovered and the world’s first cast-iron bridge built, held together by the dovetail and mortise-and-tenon joints of earlier technology. The carnival has moved on from there, too, and the Severn valley, once black with the smoke of foundries, has fallen back to turbid sleepiness. The Plowden family have seen it all, over the years. And still they are here, the Plowden family, living at Plowden Hall, in the village of Plowden, in a land of quiet contentment.
Theirs is not a particularly heroic story. There was a Plowden who became a prominent lawyer under Elizabeth I, another who commanded the Second Foot Guards at the battle of the Boyne, one who made a small fortune with the East India Company, another who died at school from ‘eating a surfeit of cherries’, an admiral lost in action on the North Atlantic convoys, but no Prime Ministers or philosophers. Their life revolves around farming, half-a-dozen black labradors, hunting, shooting and fishing. It is not the sort of life that brings your name to the attention of editors of Who’s Who: public service is restricted to sitting on the bench of magistrates and occasionally turning out as High Sheriff when the Queen visits the county. For the rest, it is Farmers Weekly, Horse and Hound and the Shooting Times.
The received wisdom about this type of English family is that they have been consigned to history, destroyed by the First World War, death duties, taxation, Lloyd’s and congenital incompetence at handling their affairs. The image is of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, ancestral piles abandoned by families unable to meet the demands of modern life. Like all images, it is partly true. But among those who have survived, it is utterly wrong. William Plowden was twenty, on army service, when his father died, leaving him Plowden Hall. There seemed little chance of hanging on to the family home and he began trying to find a tenant who would rent the Hall. But no one was prepared to take it on. So he resigned his commission, went to Oxford, ‘discovered my brain wouldn’t function’, and took himself off to the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester. When he took on the estate, he had 450 acres ‘in hand’. Within a few years, he was running 2,000 acres. Now, the estate employs a manager, twelve people on the farm, another five in the woods, a full-time mason, a carpenter, gamekeeper, odd-job man and gardener.
Plowden and his wife are moving out of the ancestral home for a farm on the estate, so that their son can move in. Assuming William Plowden lives another seven years, Plowden Hall will pass to another generation of Plowdens, free of tax. He hands on a thriving business that gives the lie to the claim that time is up for all these old families who embody a traditional idea of Englishness.
These families were the core of rural English society, unemotional, practical, professedly ‘non-political’ but deeply conservative, quiet, kindly, unintellectual. Ask him what he thinks of the state of England now and you get terse answers about standards slipping: ‘We built six affordable houses in the village for people on low incomes. Five out of the six are occupied by couples who aren’t married.’ But it is when you see his car that you realize what really bothers him. He has been down to the local printers and had his own stickers printed in Day-Glo orange. They read
SOD THE EU HOME RULE FOR BRITAIN
‘Sooner or later,’ he says, ‘the Common Market is going to collapse. I don’t see how you can run a country with two systems of law – our own national law and then all these laws from people in Brussels which override our laws. The sooner it ends, the better.’ In the rolling hills of Shropshire, the heart of England still beats. It is driving around with a sticker in the back window telling the rest of Europe to sod off.
You can see his point. What are the badges of nationality? The English lost control of their language long ago. And if the European single currency, the Euro, is a success, the British pound, symbol of nation and empire, will be consigned to history. The question that then arises is what the English would have that they could feel was uniquely their own. In their everyday lives, the English metropolitan élite now has more in common with Parisians or New Yorkers than it does with rural or suburban England. And so many of the other outward signals of Englishness, from clothing to language, are now universal property.
Dr David Starkey once ended a lamentation bemoaning the lack of celebrations for St George’s Day saying that ‘England itself has ceased to be a mere country and become a place of the mind … England, indeed, has become a sort of vile antithesis of a nation; we are similar to our neighbours and differ from each other.’37 There will doubtless be more jeremiads in similar vein. They are of a piece with the obsession with decline that has poisoned the country’s idea of itself since the war. But all nations are places of the mind: the idea of a country is what informs its laws, its politics and its art. When French politicians talk about ‘La France’ they do not mean what they see around them but an idea of the national destiny. What is America without the American Dream? It is true that you cannot spend fifty years listening to people anatomize your decline and not be affected by it. Yet, for all claims that the country is ‘finished’, the attitudes of mind that made the English culture what it is – individualism, pragmatism, love of words and, above all, that glorious, fundamental cussedness – are unchanged.
The England that the rest of the world knows is the England of the British Empire. Like a pair of newly-weds in a sabotaged car, every people sets off into the future clattering behind it the tin-cans of its history. But to most of the English, their history is just that, history. The contrast is with Scotland or Ireland, where every self-respecting adult considers themselves to belong to an unbroken tradition stretching back to the wearing of woad: oppressed peoples remember their history. One-time oppressors forget it. The English now have nothing in common with the tradition they see celebrated in the red-white-and-blue. Look at the Last Night of the Proms. How many of those joyous, nerdish faces belting out ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ believe a word of it? ‘Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set’? Come on.
The rebels of the 1960s will soon be grandparents, their gestures of protest quietly accommodated, their places taken by wave after wave of other anarchistic inventors. The norms of the 1940s are dead and buried and they have not been replaced by new norms. No one has seen a stiff upper lip for years. Shorn of any sense of clear national purpose, each post-war generation has turned out more self-obsessed and selfish than the last. There is no longer even any consensus on questions like dress, let alone any prescriptive rules.
Yet Starkey’s complaint may actually point to a strength in the English. Might it not be that individuality, firmly rooted in a sense of individual rights, is preferable to the conformity that occurred when the great boys’ schools were turning out thousands of as-near-as-possible-identical young men to run an empire that no longer exists? Once such a master-class existed, everyone else knew their place in the pecking order. The stage Englishman had his elements of nobility, but to an extent, it was built on hypocrisy. The new generation are refining their own identity, an identity based not on the past but on their own needs. In a world of accelerating communications, shrinking distances, global products and ever-larger trading blocks, the most vital sense of national identity is the individual awareness of the country of the mind.
The English are simultaneously rediscovering the past that was buried when ‘Britain’ was created, and inventing a new future. The red-white-and-blue is no longer relevant and they are returning to the green of England. The new nationalism is less likely to be based on flags and anthems. It is modest, individualistic, ironic, solipsistic, concerned as much with cities and regions as with counties and countries. It is based on values that are so deeply embedded in the culture as to be almost unconscious. In an age of decaying nation states it might be the nationalism of the future.