by Mark Easton
It was a massive blow to John Prescott and his supporters, some of whom turned their fire on what they called the ‘Westminster class’. Kevin Meagher, a ministerial advisor and committed regionalist wrote: ‘The civil service smirked. You could sense their Schadenfreude from 250 miles away. The Labour government never really believed in the policy; it’s as simple as that.’
It may have been a lack of Cabinet support, but the clear-cut nature of the result suggested something more: a profound distrust of bureaucrats, administrators and their political masters. Even in the north-east, with its powerful regional identity, the simple message contained in a blow-up pachyderm was enough to get people registering their opposition to the idea of an elected assembly.
Around the same time, some particularly irked traditionalists in the shires were embarking upon a counter-offensive. A group calling itself CountyWatch was promising ‘direct action’ in its fight to ‘keep alive and healthy the names and the real boundaries of our counties’. Television crews were on hand as members ripped out twelve signs that claimed to mark entry into ‘County Durham: Land of the Prince Bishops’, and then re-erected them along the historic border between Yorkshire and Durham, the River Tees. In another covert operation, a CountyWatch cell stole four ‘Welcome to Bedfordshire’ road signs from the edge of Luton (an independently administered town within the historic county) and re-erected them in front of ‘Welcome to Luton’ signs a few miles away. ‘This is absolutely crazy,’ a councillor complained.
Under the patronage of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a colourful Anglo-Russian monarchist, CountyWatch claimed to have removed, re-sited or erected eighty county boundary signs in Dorset, County Durham, Greater Manchester, Hampshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire, Somerset and Warwickshire. The campaign connected with a general anxiety that administrative change threatened to cut England off from its roots, and there was a series of parliamentary attempts to force local authorities and surveyors to respect historic boundaries when erecting traffic signs or drawing maps.
The member for the constituency of Romford was particularly exercised. ‘As I travel back after a busy week at Westminster to my home town,’ he said, ‘I enter the boundaries of Essex and Romford, but nowhere do I see a road sign welcoming me to either place. They have been written off the map by a dreadful local government culture that seems to recognise only the often made-up and artificial names of administrative boroughs or districts.’ An MP from Somerset blamed the ‘successive waves’ of local authority reformers: ‘People are not defined by the authority that collects their rubbish, but by the place in which they grew up and live.’
Efforts to win government support for the Historic Counties, Towns and Villages (Traffic Signs and Mapping) Bill got nowhere — the Labour Cabinet Office minister Gillian Merron said proposals to freeze-frame history were neither appropriate nor practical and left the debating chamber. But the bigger argument about English governance would not go away.
The coalition government of 2010 sought to banish any thought of regionalism in England to the extent that civil servants resorted to the use of an acronym when discussing the issue: TAFKAR — the areas formerly known as regions. Its localism agenda promises power to the parishes, grass-roots influence which may well give voice to people who remain deeply aggrieved at the actions of anonymous planners.
What is revealed in all of this is an important facet of the English personality. After two thousand years of administrators trying to bully the population into neatly defined blocks, England has developed a natural distrust of straight lines on a map. They prefer the quirkiness of a complicated back story, they like things to be irregular and idiosyncratic, revel in the fact that Americans cannot pronounce, never mind spell, Worcestershire. As the nation’s influence has diminished, people have wanted to reconnect with the past in all its obscurity and convolution. What’s more, the English apparently delight in putting two old-fashioned fingers up at any official with a clipboard who gets in their way.
S is for Silly Hats
Ask a foreigner to describe Britain and the picture painted is likely to be of a nation obsessed with the trappings of its past. Millions come to gawp at earnest looking men with one-and-a-half pounds of Canadian bearskin perched on their heads, or strutting about in bright red stockings and Tudor-style gold-laced tunics. Feathers and fur, sequin and serge — the effect is of a people who like nothing better than to parade in kitsch fancy dress.
But such peculiarity is treated by most of this country’s inhabitants with solemnity and profound respect. The hushed tones of a television commentator describing the State Opening of Parliament are a case in point. A bureaucratic state function that could be achieved with a simple press release is transformed into national spectacle with a bejewelled monarch, a golden carriage and a great deal of ermine. Doors are banged with sticks, men walk backwards, and ceremonial hostages are taken. No one is allowed to giggle.
Tradition is serious business. The hats are silly for a sensible reason. The homogenising force of globalisation risks turning every town into Anytown: from the architecture of a bank to the thread of a screw, standardisation and conformity drive towards a multinational, corporate modernity. So we decorate Britishness, our national identity, with strange, surprising and often plain daft souvenirs from a time gone by.
Many countries parade their identity with historical tradition that looks odd against the cellophane culture of the twenty-first century, but the British have turned anachronism into a distinguishing feature. Tourists flock to watch the Changing of the Guard because it reflects a typically British conceit — that nothing really changes at all. We present ourselves as a country steeped in the ancient and wonderful ways of our ancestors. Tradition, though, does not stand still. It is an evolving and adapting reflection of how a nation sees itself and how it wants others to see it.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm famously claimed that British traditions ‘which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented’. A committed Marxist, his assertion that many of the ceremonial trappings of nationhood hailed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dismissed as lefty propaganda by some conservatives. This scrutiny of tradition, holding it up in the light to check its provenance and authenticity, was condemned as thoroughly unpatriotic.
The Tory MP David Willetts gave a lecture at his party’s conference in 1998, accusing Hobsbawm and others of mounting an attack on conventional national identities. ‘They are quite right to show how traditions and cultural identities may emerge,’ he said, but they were wrong to suggest ‘there is some other authentic form of national identity’. In other words, the ostrich-plumed cocked hat may be a relatively recent addition to the ceremonial dress, but who cares? ‘We should simply keep calm and refuse to be shocked by these so-called disclosures,’ he told the Tory faithful.
A few years later, the Labour academic Anthony Giddens returned to the fray. In a Reith lecture for the BBC he described tradition as ‘perhaps the most basic concept of conservatism’, arguing that kings, emperors, priests and others invented rituals and ceremonies to legitimate their rule. The very term ‘tradition’, he said, was only a couple of centuries old. ‘In medieval times there was no call for such a word, precisely because tradition and custom were everywhere.’
No one denies that cultural heritage has to start somewhere and, through adaptation and time, becomes part of the warp and weft of a nation’s fabric. Take the tartan kilt. The iconic symbol of Scottish dress was almost certainly designed by an Englishman after the Act of Union in 1707. Clan tartans are thought to be an even later invention, many originating in the weaving rooms of one shop near Stirling. William Wilson & Sons of Bannockburn supplied ‘authentic’ clan patterns to tribal chieftains who wanted their names included in an historical collection being put together by the Highland Society of London in 1815.
The point, though, is not when and where the idea of men in patterned skirts first came from
, but whether the tradition reflects the character and heritage of the nation. Wearing a kilt not only hints at the belted plaid worn by highlanders in the sixteenth century, but requires a degree of bravado and hardiness that chimes with our impression of Scottishness.
Born and raised in Glasgow until the age of ten, I regularly put on the kilt as a boy and would suggest there was something else about wearing it that reflected the character of Scotland. It was a bit of a laugh. There were inevitable comments about whether I was wearing underpants, about what I kept in my sporran and how I felt dressed like a girl. But I felt I was in on the joke — the gentle teasing only made me more proud. The Scots are masters of self-mockery, as demonstrated by the ridiculous ginger Jimmy wigs they wear when supporting the country’s sports teams.
It is a similar story with English cricket fans. The self-styled Barmy Army have managed to invent a new tradition of their own: the Saturday of a domestic Test Match has become fancy dress day when supporters wear outrageous costumes and, inevitably, the silliest of hats. No other nation, I would suggest, attempts to conjure a sense of national pride by attending an international sports event dressed as Mr Blobby.
Britain’s island status may help explain our sense of otherness, our need to define ourselves by nonconformity. We have always been good at eccentricity — our dislike of straight lines, perhaps, as the previous chapter identified. The ‘crazy Brits’ have something of a reputation for it. Being slightly dotty is not cause for concern but for celebration: ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!’ The wildly eccentric nineteenth-century aristocrat Jack Mytton, for example, fed the favourites among his two thousand dogs on steak and champagne, and dressed his sixty cats in livery. His wardrobe contained one thousand hats, many of them remarkably silly. And we love him for it.
Our heroes, historical and fictional, tend to be blessed with odd mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. From Sir Winston Churchill to Dr Who, from William Blake to Sherlock Holmes — as John Timbs wrote in his nineteenth-century anthology, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities: ‘They may be odd company: yet, how often do we find eccentricity in the minds of persons of good understanding.’ We warm to those who choose to wear a deer-stalker in Baker Street or a Panama hat to go time travelling. From The Goons, through Monty Python to Little Britain, our comedic tradition also reflects a uniquely British sense of humour celebrating foible and quirk.
Perhaps post-colonial Britain feels the need to counter any suggestion of residual imperial arrogance by nurturing a reputation for modest self-deprecation. We define ourselves by our history, but to adapt a phrase from the US statesman Dean Acheson, maybe we have lost an empire and not yet found an identity. There is a tension between the blazered traditionalists in the cricket pavilion at Lord’s and the raucous beery crowd in pantomime drag, but they are both patriotic faces of the same nation. We simultaneously tip our trade-mark bowler to a glorious past and lampoon such pomposity with the Ministry of Silly Walks. Britain has become the land of clowns as well as castles.
Some see this contradiction as dangerous, that we must either embrace our past or risk losing our very identity. Immigration and globalisation, it is argued, threaten our cultural integrity, and so there is a need to celebrate our history and heritage more enthusiastically than ever. Rituals and traditions should be moulded into a compelling island story, but they must be handled with care. ‘Tradition that is drained of its content, and commercialised, becomes either heritage or kitsch — trinkets bought in the airport store,’ Anthony Giddens warned. Well, maybe — but the New Labour project he helped design regarded heritage as a key to the future peace and security of the United Kingdom no less. The government-regulated lottery has diverted billions to heritage projects, which it says provide ‘the foundation of a confident, modern society’. The old is seen as vital for the new.
But heritage has the power not only to define but to divide. One only has to go to Northern Ireland to see how traditions have evolved as expressions of separateness and sectarianism. During the late nineteenth century, Irish nationalists and British patriots manufactured customs to differentiate each from the other. Whether it was Gaelic League or Orange Lodge, communities on both sides sought ways to highlight cultural difference.
While Orangemen were parading their Protestantism in bowler hats and sashes, nationalists were seeking to establish an ‘authentic’ Irish cultural identity. The president of the Gaelic League Douglas Hyde called for the rejection of English colonial culture (‘West Britonism’, he called it) and encouraged his countrymen to recover Ireland’s language, manners, customs, music, games, place names, personal names and literature. From these culture wars flowed the bigotry and hatred that contributed to decades of violence and unhappiness.
In the 1990s, European Union funds were spent trying to reverse the process. A grants scheme promoted the development of cultural traditions which would ‘encourage cultural confidence and an acceptance of cultural diversity in Northern Ireland’. Effectively, this was cash for customs — money was on offer for those who could come up with new traditions that encouraged community cohesion.
‘Identity’, it has been said, ‘is always a modern project: an attempt of differing political and economic interests to construct their historical pasts as the representation of the “truths” of their present day practices.’
The author of that, American sociologist Jonathan Church, spent time on the Shetland Islands investigating what he called ‘confabulations of community’. Confabulation is a wonderful psychological term to describe the confusion of imagination with memory. But Dr Church used it to mean something altogether more sinister — the way in which invented traditions may be used to construct a false identity.
He had gone to Shetland to study the Hamefarin — a homecoming festival first held in 1960 and revived in 1985, which stressed the ancient Viking roots of the people of the islands. It seemed like innocent fun, but Dr Church was anxious this new tradition was closing down a more complex historical back story featuring Scottish kings, German merchants and American oil tycoons. ‘A singular gaze has become appropriated and institutionalised in the power of official memory,’ he concluded.
Traditional ritual possesses a magic, a powerful nostalgic force. Once it has entered the folklore, it is sacred — part of what is called the civil religion of a state (see ‘Q is for Queen’). Revision, as with a bible, must be conducted with great care. But the transformation of Britain’s ethnic and cultural make-up means revision is deemed necessary and urgent. In describing a modern national identity, tradition may be seen as an obstacle.
British pomp and pageantry were often created to remind people of their place — consolidating the feudal or hierarchical structures of British society. Everyone knows his or her position in the Lord Mayor’s Parade. On inspection, ceremonial may have its origins in morally dubious military and political activity. Custom and tradition are sometimes criticised as sexist, elitist, racist and worse. Certainly, their impact can appear at odds with contemporary values and ambition. Great and ancient universities have been urged to give up the Latin ceremonial, gowns and processing which, it is argued, can appear elitist and act as a barrier to social mobility. In the dying days of the twentieth century, the first female members were welcomed into the Long Room at Lord’s.
Social identities based on class, faith and politics may have been diluted, but the passions behind them cannot be dismissed. Enter the heritage industry to smooth out any dangers during transition, promoting a sanitised version of our past to encourage a placid future. I once walked through a miserably predictable shopping precinct in an old cotton town in Lancashire, where the only unexpected feature was a glass box set into the pedestrian paving. Inside was a shiny mill wheel turning very slowly. Britain’s homogeneous high streets, illuminated by the same corporate shop windows, have left many towns exploring their past in the search for distinction. Derelict buildings are being restored, traditional activities revived and neglec
ted customs embraced once again.
The problem with this strategy is that, like Lymeswold cheese (see ‘C for Cheese’), it tends to be bland and a bit dull. Each quiet revolution of the gleaming mill wheel is a feeble nod to a real revolution, driven by invention and exploitation, struggle and greed. Authenticity would demand not polish on its bearings, but blood, sweat and tears. Such rose-tinted history is perfumed with sentimentality. But to engage with truth means accepting our past, warts and all. In celebrating ancient battles, we risk opening old wounds.
Government ministers have claimed that heritage-led regeneration can cut crime, improve public health and make communities function better. Slices of heritage can act as focal points ‘around which communities will rally and revive their sense of civic pride’, argues one regeneration agency. Most politicians would accept that passing laws isn’t a terribly good way of achieving these vital social outcomes and, in the face of obvious community tension and disharmony, one can imagine the hope they have for a dose of heritage and tradition.
Success lies in finding and promoting aspects of our past which are non-divisive, but not so ‘safe’ as to render them inauthentic. Which is where the silly hats come in. Britain’s straight-faced eccentricity is regarded as a national strength, a characteristic of self-confidence and independence. Absurd relics from our past can be shaped and embellished, buffed and displayed as symbols of British assurance and autonomy. Ridiculous customs, bizarre traditions, ludicrous dress and the silliest of hats: we know that it is harder for people to laugh at us if we know how to laugh at ourselves.