Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  Britain Etc.

  Mark Easton

  Mark Easton’s Britain Etc. looks at the UK through its relationship to 26 subjects — one for each letter of the alphabet. From Alcohol, Beat Bobbies, Cheese and Dogs through Immigration, Justice, Knives and Murder to the Queen, Umbrellas, Vegetables and the Zzzz of a well-deserved rest, the book's meticulously researched but accessible essays map the back-story of contemporary Britain. With each lettered chapter, the reader is invited to look at the United Kingdom in a new way: standing back to see our small islands in a global or historical context, and then diving down to scrutinise vital details that may be overlooked. Taken together, the essays reveal a Britain that cannot be seen through the prism of daily news or current affairs. A park, a wedding, a beggar and a carrot all take on new significance once you have read Britain Etc. As the UK welcomes millions of visitors to its shores for the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, this is a book that offers insight into the psyche of Britain; a nation's obsessions, prejudices, values and idiosyncrasies. What sort of place is it, what are the natives like, and how did we get to where we are?

  Mark Easton

  BRITAIN Etc.

  The Way We Live and How We Got There

  To Antonia

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book grew in the crannies. It has been an interstitial project, squeezed into the tiny spaces between my (full-time) job and my (full-time) family. So, it simply could not have been written without the support and forbearance of my colleagues, my children and, above all, my wife.

  Particular thanks go to Andrew Gordon who planted the seed, Jo Whitford who helped harvest and box the crop and Mike Jones who steered the cart to market. I am hugely grateful to Mike O’Connor, Malcolm Balen, John Kampfner, John Humphrys, Brian Higgs, among many others, who gave sane advice and welcome encouragement along the way. I must also mention my late father, Stephen Easton, whose genius as a bookman guided me even in his last days.

  My children — Flora, Eliza, Annis and Ed — deserve recognition for generously putting up with my alphabetical obsessions as well as denial of access to the home computer. But greatest thanks go to my wife Antonia who was ally, advisor and inspiration. She helped me find the space to write and, just as importantly, told me when it was time to stop.

  INTRODUCTION

  As I write, Britain finds itself under the international spotlight: the London Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee are extravagant and ostentatious shows in which the United Kingdom is placed centre stage. The world is watching us, studying our ways and trying to make sense of our culture and our values.

  The British themselves, meanwhile, are in a period of uneasy self-reflection. Institutional scandals have rocked the pillars of our state: Parliament, the City, police and press. There is bewilderment at rioting and looting that, over the course of a few days and nights in the summer of 2011, forced us to confront some troubling truths. After decades of getting inexorably richer, the squeeze of belt-tightening austerity is straining the threads holding our society together.

  This is not a bad time, then, to consider contemporary Britain: what kind of place is it? Since first joining my local paper in 1978, I have attempted to answer that question by peering through a standard lens — the familiar perspective of daily news and current affairs. But so often this blinkered view confounds rather than clarifies. The picture is neither wide enough nor detailed enough to grasp the real story. As the electronics salesman might put it, we need a 3D HD 55" plasma screen and we are watching on a 12" cathode ray tube telly. So, in thinking how to write this book, I sought inspiration from two pioneering British lens-masters who made it possible for people to see the world in new and wonderful ways.

  The first I found at a Palo Alto ranch in June 1878, a wild-bearded man in a wide-brimmed hat. Under a bright Californian sky, crowds watched as Eadweard Muybridge took a series of photographs that, for the first time, revealed the mysteries of equine motion. The speed of a galloping horse was too fast for the naked eye to see precisely how the animal moved. Only by slowing the action down to a series of stop-motion frames, captured by a line of triggered cameras, was Muybridge able to answer the much-debated question as to whether all four hooves were ever airborne at the same time. (Answer: yes, but tucked under, not outstretched as many artists had assumed.)

  The second of my photographic guides I discovered in his garden three decades later, behind a suburban home in north London. Percy Smith was working on a film that also allowed people to see the world in a new way. When The Birth of a Flower was shown to British cinemagoers in 1910, it is reported the audience broke into riotous applause. Smith’s use of time-lapse photography achieved the opposite of Muybridge, accelerating the action of days into a few seconds. Plants bloomed before astonished eyes: hyacinths, lilies and roses. One journalist described the result as ‘the highest achievement yet obtained in the combined efforts of science, art and enterprise’.

  What would contemporary Britain look like through Muybridge’s or Smith’s lenses? Instead of just hyacinths or horses, I resolved to apply their techniques to numerous and varied aspects of British life: the time-lapse sweep through history and the stop-motion analysis of the crucial detail.

  The alphabet would structure my journey but serendipity and curiosity would decide direction. The idea was not to stick to well-worn paths but to search for a better understanding of Britain wherever impulse led. So, yes, A was for alcohol — a stiff whisky to start me off. But my wandering inspired me to examine my homeland’s relationship with foreigners and computers and vegetables and drugs and dogs and youth and silly hats and beggars and toilets and cheese, and more.

  Some subjects may appear almost frivolous, but each strand of the national fabric I chose to follow revealed something unexpected, fascinating and profound. At times, the detail prompted me to laugh aloud; at others almost to despair. When woven together, the threads formed a coherent canvas, a portrait of contemporary Britain simultaneously inspiring and troubling. In the background, a weather-beaten landscape shaped by the glacial and seismic forces of history; in the foreground, a diverse crowd moving, eating, kissing, arguing, laughing, working, drinking, worrying, studying and wearing silly hats.

  After more than thirty years chronicling Britain’s story for newspapers, radio and television, I thought I had a handle on what the place is like. But my travels have allowed me, as Eadweard and Percy promised, to see the country in a new way, to go beyond the standard-lens view of news and current affairs. It is a picture of Britain etc.

  A is for Alcohol

  When I first arrived in Fleet Street in the early 1980s as a starry-eyed young radio journalist, my initiation began with a colleague leading me to the pub. It was barely opening time as we walked into the King and Keys. There, amid the smoky gloom, I was introduced to one of the newspaper world’s most celebrated figures, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, Bill Deedes. The great man sized me up. ‘You will have a malt whisky, dear boy,’ he said. I started to splutter something about how it was only eleven in the morning, but he quickly closed the discussion by adding, ‘a large one.’

  It would be years before I fully understood the gesture: I was being blooded for an industry where alcohol was as much a part of the process as ink and paper. But it was also an indication of something apparently incredible: that Britain’s drink problems should not be blamed on drink.

  In those days every Fleet Street title had its pub: the Telegraph occupied the King and Keys; the now defunct News of the World drank at ‘The Tip’ (The Tipperary); the Daily Express was resident at ‘The Poppins’ (The Popinjay); the Mirror pub was known as ‘The Stab In the Back’ (The White Hart). Drinking was ritual and tribal. Tales of drunken fights and indiscretions were sew
n into the colourful tapestry of Grub Street legend, inebriated misadventures to be reverentially recounted and embellished. Pickled hacks could be found propping up many of the bars, victims treated with the respect of war veterans.

  Newspaper people drank around the clock; magistrates had been persuaded to adjust local licensing hours so that city workers could enjoy a glass or two of ale at any time of the day or night. The social wreckage from alcohol was strewn all over Fleet Street — broken marriages, stunted careers and inflamed livers. The British press were pioneers of 24-hour opening and regarded themselves as experts on its potential consequences years before the 2001 General Election, when Tony Blair wooed young voters with a promise on a beer mat: ‘cdnt give a XXXX 4 lst ordrs? Vote labour on thrsdy 4 xtra time.’

  By that point, of course, the Fleet Street presses had been dismantled, staff had scattered across the capital and a sandwich in front of a computer terminal had replaced the once traditional liquid lunch. Small wonder, perhaps, that journalists were so sceptical about Labour’s idea to introduce a family-friendly cafe-style drinking culture to Britain.

  The government’s argument was that our obvious problems with alcohol stemmed, in part, from outdated and austere licensing laws. Ministers pointed to southern Europe where a relaxed attitude resulted, it was said, in a more mature relationship with drink. Instead of booze being consumed between strict opening and closing times behind frosted glass, they proposed new light-touch legislation promoting freedom, choice and ‘the further development within communities of our rich culture of live music, dancing and theatre’.

  Almost without exception, the press thought the idea was bonkers. Far from replacing drunkenness and social disorder with community dance and drama, they predicted 24-hour opening would mean 24-hour mayhem. Our towns and city centres, already resembling war zones on Friday and Saturday nights, would become permanent no-go areas.

  Britain’s relationship with alcohol, critics argued, was built upon a northern European beer-drinking tradition entirely at odds with the habits of the wine-sipping south. Just look at what happens, it was pointed out, when UK tourists arrive in Spain, France and Italy to experience their foreign ways. Entire television series had been commissioned solely to document the shameful alcohol-soaked fallout from this culture clash. The conclusion was obvious: it might be fine for Rome but it could never work in Romford.

  There is, though, a huge hole in this argument — the common but mistaken belief that alcohol causes violence. Indeed, experts argue that it is this misconception, the assumption that drinking is responsible for aggression and antisocial behaviour, that is the true root of our problems.

  Early evidence that boozy Britain’s lager louts and bingeing yobs might not be the monstrous creations of the evil drink can be traced to flower-strewn California in 1969. Two social scientists at UCLA, Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton, were looking at how people from different cultures react when they drink. They argued that, if alcohol itself is responsible for drunken behaviour, there should be little variation between cultures. To their surprise, they discovered wide differences. In some societies drinking made people passive; in others they became aggressive. What was more, if the cultural belief was that alcohol made people less inhibited they did indeed become noisy and extrovert. If the cultural belief was that drinking made you quiet and depressed, drinkers reacted that way instead.

  MacAndrew and Edgerton’s book, Drunken Comportment, introduced readers to the Urubu Indians of Brazil — ferocious headhunters when sober, but partial to a song and a dance with their enemies when drunk. Then there was the morose and sombre Aritama tribe of northern Colombia, who grew more so on rum, their favourite drink. ‘All conversation stops,’ the authors found, ‘and gloominess sets in.’

  The conclusion was that the way people behave when drunk is determined ‘not by alcohol’s toxic assault upon the seat of moral judgement’, but by how their society responds to drunkenness. The book closes with a homily: ‘Since societies, like individuals, get the sorts of drunken comportment that they allow, they deserve what they get.’ Britain’s drink problems, it was suggested, were not the fault of drink but of Britain.

  Drunken Comportment inspired dozens of sociologists and anthropologists to get legless with different tribes and cultures around the world. Scientists who went boozing with the Bolivian Camba found that they regularly consume huge quantities of almost pure alcohol to the point of falling over. The tribe successfully demonstrated to the research team that they have absolutely no concept of moderate or responsible drinking. And yet alcoholism and antisocial or violent behaviour are completely unknown to them.

  Another intrepid team of academics headed for Cuba, where traditional standards of behaviour require drinkers to down large amounts of alcohol but hold their own in fast-flowing conversations. The researchers hung about in Cuban bars and recorded how customers rarely slurred their speech or fell off their chairs despite being very drunk.

  Research demonstrated that it was a similar story at Danish dinner parties, Georgian ritual feasts, the drinking contests of Laos and (until the Europeans arrived) the cactus-wine ceremonies of the Papago of Mexico. In all these situations, people drank until they were completely plastered, but in none was there the kind of violence and antisocial behaviour familiar to the residents of a British market town on a Friday night.

  The link between alcohol and aggression did not exist in the majority of societies investigated. Behaviour varied even within contemporary Western culture. One piece of research observed what happened when northern European tourists went drinking in a southern European setting. At one restaurant table, a Scandinavian would be drinking a bottle of wine; at the next, a Spaniard or an Italian would consume an identical bottle. In most cases, the experts noted a striking difference: the northern visitors showed classic signs of intoxication, while the locals seemed unaffected.

  Scientists attempted to replicate these field observations in the laboratory. In the early 1970s, psychologists at Washington State University somehow managed to recruit young male undergraduates for a series of experiments involving free alcohol. On arrival in a simulated bar room in the basement of the department, half the eager guinea pigs were given what they thought was vodka and tonic while the rest were told they were drinking only tonic water. What they didn’t know was that the half of those who thought they were drinking vodka received only tonic, and the half of those who were told they had a glass of tonic were actually drinking alcohol. The concentrations and quantities of alcohol served were at the brink of what people may detect, so that even the most experienced drinker would be unlikely to spot any deception.

  The students were then put through a series of tests to measure how drunk they felt and observe their behaviour. Subjects who drank tonic water but thought it was alcohol showed most of the ‘classic’ symptoms of intoxication, while those who drank alcohol but thought it was tonic water did not. Similar results were later recorded in tests for aggression and sexual arousal.

  The evidence was compelling. The way people behave when they are drunk is largely determined by the way their society expects them to behave. It is less a chemical and more a cultural phenomenon.

  The startling idea that there is nothing inevitable about the link between drink and disorder reached Britain in the mid-1990s and began to filter into Whitehall thinking. The Home Office Drugs Prevention Office advised ministers that, while most violent crime was committed by people who are drunk, ‘there is room to argue that this is a culturally mediated effect rather than a necessary effect of alcohol.’

  This finding probably raised no more than an eyebrow among the few Members of Parliament who read the report, but it should have posed profound questions for policy. What was it about British culture that caused drunks to become aggressive and unpleasant while their counterparts in other countries just fell asleep?

  Social scientists had been pondering the same question and came up with a theory. Alcohol, it was sugges
ted, gives drinkers a time out from normal sober behaviour, permission to behave in ways that would otherwise be unacceptable. There are still social limits on how and how far a drunk may stray, but these limits vary between cultures. In some societies, notably in northern Europe and North America, alcohol is imbued with a malevolent power to lead people into sin. Its effects are often likened to possession by evil spirits, echoing the ‘demon drink’ warnings of the nineteenth-century temperance preachers.

  Anthropologists draw a distinction between what they call temperance and non-temperance cultures, suggesting a link between people’s behaviour and their belief that alcohol contains some dark diabolical force. In 1889, the English journalist George Sims, an advocate of the temperance movement, wrote about the appalling living conditions that drove the poor to alcohol. ‘The drink dulls every sense of shame,’ he said, ‘and reduces them to the level of brutes.’ A century later, heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne recorded these lyrics on his album No Rest For The Wicked:

  I’ll watch you lose control,

  Consume your very soul.

  I’ll introduce myself today,

  I’m the demon alcohol.

  In Britain, a country that has long questioned the moral status of alcohol, drinking has traditionally taken place in enclosed bars, with opaque windows and solid doors often adorned with details of the strict licence operating within. Cross the threshold and the rules change. In southern Europe, drink enjoys a very different status — unremarkable and morally neutral. Bars are open and drinking is highly visible, spilling into and merging with everyday life. As one academic study of drinking habits in Madrid put it, ‘the consumption of alcohol is [as] integrated into common behaviours as sleeping or eating.’