His list of required knowledge falls into two parts. First, there are a lot of dates, marking ‘the struggle for democracy at home and the struggle against tyranny abroad’: the Reform Bill, the Armada, the Battle of Britain, Waterloo and so forth. Then there is a requirement of culture, scientific and literary, which includes Bacon, Shakespeare, Darwin, Babbage, Gibbon, Handel, Keynes and others. Sir William, who describes English history as a ‘golden treasury,’ observes: ‘As a nation, we have the richest culture in the world and ought to rejoice in it. But we cannot rejoice in it, if we do not know it.’
One is becoming rather tired of these adjurations to stop moaning and rejoice, which have grown more frequent since Mrs Thatcher shouted her order to rejoice over the recapture of South Georgia. Still, Sir William is right: there can be neither moaning nor rejoicing over the past if we do not know it.
Several things about his approach, however, gall me. To start with, it is so Whiggish and priggish. This is the success story which made Britain the most wonderful nation on earth, the unrolling of a manifest destiny. There have been ‘follies,’ but they were just necessary contradictions in the dialectic of glory (‘silly weak tyrants like George III). Once again, English history is presented as a perfectly-landscaped garden, all the lines of sight converging from trim lawn and ornamental lake to where we stand on the ‘now’ of a country-house terrace.
This is history only in the sense that the Old Testament is history: the account of a divinely-ordained pilgrimage. But I don’t see Canaan when I look out of the window; rather, a kindly and long-suffering nation increasingly puzzled about its identity and in sore trouble. All this deafening propaganda about ‘heritage’ makes it harder rather than easier to understand the present through the past.
In Anthony Howard’s ‘Rab’, the life of R. A. Butler, there’s an account by Butler of the moment in 1941 at which Churchill told him that he was to take on education. ‘“I think everyone has to learn to defend themselves. I should not object if you could introduce a note of patriotism into the schools. Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec.” I said I would like to influence the content of education, but this was always difficult. Here he looked very earnest and said: “Of course not by instruction or order but by suggestion.” ‘
Nearly 50 years have passed, and now there will be an instruction or order to tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec. Mrs Thatcher will dictate what schools should teach, while Churchill, even in wartime, felt that he should not. But the notion of a patriotic ‘core curriculum’ has not changed much.
What is going on here? Under the pressure of New Right intellectuals, education is moving back to a ‘subject-centred,’ rather than a ‘child-centred’ emphasis. With this goes a return to elitism, towards the fostering of conventional excellence and away from the search for a schooling which is relevant and liberating for most children in the State system.
Presbyterians were once obliged to study a compilation called ‘The Sum of Saving Knowledge’. There is something Calvinist about Mr Baker’s plans too. The minority of the ‘elect,’ those chosen to be saved, will be favoured and assisted. The problem remains of what to teach the reprobate mass of no-hopers. The old ideal of cultivating the best in every child is dismissed. The only thing to teach that dismal majority who will never make it is respect.
It may well be that the standards of historical knowledge are low, and sinking. The French, a few years ago, decided that thematic, internationalist history-teaching had gone too far and introduced a new, more ‘national’ curriculum reaching from prehistory to the Nazi occupation. But this also means that, just as the world grows smaller and more and more of the citizens of Europe are non-European in origin and culture, history teaching is shrinking back into old-fashioned national myth. The reason is not hard to find. Fear of disaffection and unrest arising in an underemployed and increasingly cosmopolitan mass drives state governments to use education as a propaganda weapon, a machine for manufacturing social unity. This has little to do with either real history or real education.
The underlying idea is distressingly simple. If the proles are taught that the triumphs of kings, generals, inventors and country-house builders are ‘their’ triumphs, their heritage, then they will be reasonably obedient. But if they learn too much about European peasant risings, when the Black Death created a labour shortage, or about the Irish and Bengal famines, or about the rise of the multinational corporation, or about the struggle against male domination, they may become difficult and even seditious.
And behind all this is the return – it’s all a history of restoration – of the idea that the State can dictate what its subjects know about history. An absurd ambition, even for the best teachers. The individual’s knowledge of history, to be honest, is a rubbish–tip composed of ill–remembered lessons, what father did in the war, television documentaries with half the instalments missed, bodice–ripper historical novels, fragments of local folk–lore, the general idea of what that Frenchman seemed to be saying on the train, a dozen feature movies, what we saw of Edinburgh Castle before the wee boy got sick, several jokes about Henry VIII and that oil painting of the king lying dead on the battlefield with his face all green.
That is the argument for humility on the part of all who try to teach history. The argument for optimism is that, wonderfully enough, most people contrive to make a sort of sense out of that pile of garbage.
And helping them to make sense of it, with humility and humour, is the only sort of history–teaching that is worthwhile. State history, as political manipulation, is false sense–making. The past, after all, is by definition loss, and Walter Benjamin’s angel of history saw ‘where we perceive one chain of events … one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage on wreckage.’
George Oppen wrote a poem about a baby in her father’s arms. ‘Cell by cell the baby made herself, the cells/Made cells … What will she make of a world/Do you suppose, Max, of which she is made?’
We all make ourselves out of the past, and find our own understanding of how we derive from it. Every child does it in a different way, and can be helped to do it better and more richly. In the teaching of history, it is that – not the curriculum – which is the core.
[1987
The Lost World of Small-Town England
The other day, a young woman who works as a television researcher took me to lunch. Over the soup, she told me that her outfit had decided to do one of those ‘register-of-change’ documentaries by choosing a typical English small town and then getting its people to talk about everything that had happened to them and to their place in the past 40 years. But, she said, somehow they couldn’t find the right small town. Everywhere they looked was sort of … not what they were looking for. They found a town eventually, but it was in South Wales.
I knew what she meant. In the English cultural chromosome, the small-town gene is missing. This lack is only one of the oddities which makes England such a very peculiar, exceptional nation, so unlike its neighbours to north and south. But it is a lack which often strikes me – not least because the English are entirely unaware of it.
In a literal sense, of course there are small towns. They are the places A-roads run through on their way between cities. They have several churches, a market place, a whitewashed old hotel with a musty dining-room, a small industrial estate, a disused railway station which has become a coffee shop. They exist by the thousand, and most of them figure in Domesday Book. But, in another sense, they are ghost towns. In the English reckoning of what is splendid, or significant, or even worthy of nostalgia, the small towns scarcely rate a mention.
The best indicator of significance is fiction. English literature has farm settings, village settings, city settings and – in plenty – country-house settings. Novels which are done against the background of a small town are rare. And many of those are ‘just visiting’: the cathedral-close novel, in which the characters are boughs or twigs of the landed upper-class tree, or the university-
town novel, in which the ‘locals’ provide an indistinct cast of extras as pub-keepers or cleaning-women.
Contrast the literature of the rest of the world. In American fiction, the small-town novel is the most enduring species of all. Sherwood Anderson’s famous ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ stands for thousands, anatomies of a community built around Main Street which is presented as the essential America. In France, there is the little town where Madame Bovary and so many other characters in so many other novels live, a tiny but self-governing structure of social and political power whose tradesmen and doctors and lawyers reproduce in concentrated, provincial form the ideological arguments of the nation.
Scottish fiction tends to choose the same locus: the small burgh understood as the place where Scottishness is most intense, and often as the arena where cruel, hypocritical repressiveness (the town fathers) sets out to crush hope and tender sensuality (the town’s sensitive sons – this is a literature of patriarchal conflicts in which women are allotted pretty passive roles).
Among many examples, George Douglas’s ‘The House with the Green Shutters,’ or J. MacDougall Hay’s ‘Gillespie,’ come to mind. The softer ‘kailyard’ novels, sentimental and nostalgic, are also usually set in a small burgh, among the characters of a self-regulating community.
There is any amount of German and Italian fiction of this kind. Since the last war, some of the best Czech novels have also celebrated the sort of small, ancient town which – even more than Prague – is seen as the real carrier of Bohemian history and the national imagination. There is irony and anger about the oppressive power of such places, but an underlying loyalty and love of place as well: Jifi Grusa’s ‘Questionnaire’ is the best of such recent works.
In very different mixtures, and with different emotions, two things are being said in all this small-town literature. First, that any girl or boy of spirit will want to leave Winesburg, but will – in sentiment or in middle-aged reality – eventually return: to cut the place out of oneself is to commit a suicide of identity. Secondly, that a country exists roughly on three levels: the farm or village, the small town, the city. And of the three, it is the small town which shows the nation at its most authentic and least diluted – which is not necessarily its most engaging.
Now back to England. We know where small towns are on the map. But where are they in the consciousness? I went to the library for Raymond Williams’s ‘The Country and the City,’ a book which has formed the ideas of thousands of young people in this country, written by one of the most gifted of socialist historians. But, to my amazement, the small town does not figure at all in this great study of the inter-relation between literature and place. There is the countryside – village, farm or manor house, and there is the city. Nothing significant is noticed in between – no ‘Winesburg’, no Dorchester or Saffron Walden or Thirsk.
In analysing Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s three-volume novel about Scottish life, ‘A Scots Quair,’ Williams discusses the small farmers who occupy the first book and the urban workers who fill the third. He does not mention the second, ‘Cloud Howe,’ which is concerned with a Scottish small burgh in the Mearns – the best of the three, in my view. A strange omission for a Marxist critic. ‘A Scots Quair’ was deliberately composed in the form of the triple dialectic, moving from rural ‘substantive’ through small-town ‘contradiction’ to a rather unconvincing urban-proletarian ‘synthesis.’
And yet this omission – where England is concerned – isn’t just a mistake. Small towns do not ‘count’; no critic, angry or nostalgic, sees them as a significant focus of anything. Now, of course, local government reorganisation has removed even their self-managing identity, their mayors and petty aldermen. If there were a town of ‘Winesborough’ (pop. 5,000) in Essex, it would now be part of a bastard semi-rural authority called ‘Ypwinesfleot District Council,’ or some such pseudo-Saxon invention.
Why is England held to exist only at two levels – rural and urban – when everywhere else exists at three? As late as 1871, Raymond Williams tells us, over half the population lived in villages or towns with less than 20,000 people, and only a quarter in cities (defined at the very low level of 100,000 people plus). This points clearly to the importance of small towns in English experience in the quite recent past.
I can’t explain this. It is plainly to do with the phenomenal way that the landowning interest went on dominating the English economic and political scene through most of the Victorian period. And it is also to do with the failure of the middle class in England to develop a cultural and political perspective of their own, instead of adopting a version of the agrarian, aristocratic outlook on life.
There’s something here the English don’t want to see. Is it snobbishness about ‘trade’? Is it fear of confinement in a small community run by a clique of shopkeepers? I don’t know, but there is a real mystery about an old European nation which pretends that it consists – always has consisted – only of country folk, gentry and city-dwellers. And even though we are governed today by the daughter of a grocer and alderman from Grantham, a woman defiantly proud of small-town values, I suspect that the pretence will survive her.
[1987
Dead Houses
At Burnmouth the door hangs from a broken hinge
And the fire is out.
The windows of Shore empty sockets
And the hearth coldness
George Mackay Brown
The ruins of a stone house are a powerful image. But the different ways that people respond to it tells us a lot about them – and about the very different historical experiences of being British.
For one part of the British population, the sight of the dead house suggests general desolation. But for another part, for more British citizens than one might imagine, this ruin is not general at all. It is the photograph – the central image – of their own family history and their own past.
The people who lived in houses or cottages like that were their people. Their ancestors lived in these hills, in isolated small farms, in villages or townships. And when the final generation went out of the door for the last time, closing it uselessly behind them, they almost always did so against their will.
When we talk about ‘regional policy,’ about subsidising remote areas of Britain or areas of industrial decay and unemployment, we are remembering this past of forced migration and asking whether it must also be the future. When this Government effectively brings regional policy to an end, the State is deliberately turning its back on one of its fundamental humane duties.
The question is whether human beings have some sort of right to go on living ‘where they come from,’ and whether -within its means – a modern State ought to help them to do so.
The British, in their past, directly felt the sting of history in two main ways. One was fighting in wars. The other was leaving home, for Britain as it now exists was created by migrations. The English rural poor flocked to the cities of the Industrial Revolution. The Gaelic population of Scotland was driven from its land by eviction and poverty, to settle mostly overseas. Upland Wales lost its population to the south Welsh industries, to Liverpool, the Midlands, the Americas.
Beginning with ‘Distressed Areas’ policy in the Thirties, there has been a steady effort to transfer prosperity from the better-off regions – usually in the South and East – to the poorer – usually in the North and West.
Regional development reached an almost Soviet intensity in the last war, as both factories and labour were directed into needy areas and as the War Agricultural Policy poured resources into marginal farming. After the war, governments went on steering industry away from the South-East. Politics was about the redistribution of wealth.
And in some ways, hard to measure, it worked. Scotland, with only 5 million people, was losing the population equivalent of one medium-sized town a year in the 1960s; even before the oil boom of the 1970s, this haemorrhage was beginning to dry up. But many of the glittering new industries have since collapsed, after pa
ying wages which put local factories out of business. And the suspicion grew that lavish grants actually made little difference to a firm’s decision on where to move.
The policy began to wilt in the late 1970s, and Thatcherism has now almost killed it off. Regional and general industrial support, costing £914 million in 1982/83, will fall to £360 million in 1987/88. Regional development grants are being cut from £659 million in 1982/83 to a token £177 million for this financial year.
The enormous cuts which have castrated local government have the same effect of making it harder to help those who do not want to leave home and ‘get on their bikes.’ The coal strike’s passion showed that this was a battle not only for jobs but for communities; as pits close in one-industry villages, the miners face the choice of life on the dole at home or migration. Earlier this month the Government postponed its plan to lift rent controls on private housing, but the underlying purpose, again, was to make it easier for families to migrate in search of work.
The Government, in short, is hacking down one of the tallest and oldest trees in the political forest. And the landscape will change. For years, there has been anxious chatter about the widening gulf between North and South, about ‘two nations’ and population drift, about the peril to the unity of the United Kingdom which all this is supposed to involve. But Mrs Thatcher is not anxious.
Regional policy, for her, has been largely investment in failure, the breeding of lame ducks. It has been the costly preserving of ‘structural rigidities’ in regions where there is little private initiative and strong trade unions. Instead, she is letting things rip.
What will happen? Mrs Thatcher is the boldest lady traveller in unknown territories since Freya Stark. She has discovered, for instance, that the British working class will tolerate levels of unemployment two or three times those which were supposed to detonate Red revolution. And, without that discovery, she would not have found the nerve to break down the fence of regional policy and ride into the unexplored lands beyond it.
Games with Shadows Page 2