How to Be English

by David Boyle

  England’s robust bell towers also played a role in signalling danger, whether it was for seeing the beacons lit to warn people of the arrival of the Armada of 1588 or the complex system of semaphore, from church tower to church tower, which could carry a signal from the Admiralty in London to Nelson’s fleet at anchor in Portsmouth Harbour in just twelve minutes.

  The year 1668, when Tintinnalogia was published, also marked the birth of an otherwise ordinary and forgotten guardsman called John Hatfield. He was a sentry at Windsor Castle in 1690, or thereabouts, when he was court-martialled for falling asleep on sentry duty on the terrace. At his trial, he vehemently denied it, and to prove he had been awake at midnight – when he was accused of being asleep – he said he had heard something very strange. Far across the countryside of the Thames Valley, he had heard Great Tom – the bell in the tower opposite Westminster Hall – chiming thirteen times. Needless to say, this story did not go down well with the court. In fact, as far as they were concerned, it tended to prove his guilt. He was condemned to death.

  Before the hanging could be carried out, over the next few days, the news of his claims reached Westminster. Several people swore that, on the night in question, they had also heard Great Tom strike thirteen. It was a peculiarity of the mechanism caused by the lifting piece holding on too long. It seemed highly unlikely that Hatfield could have heard it as far away as Windsor, but the fact that he did proved his innocence. William III pardoned him. History does not relate what happened to him later, but he died at his home in Glasshouse Yard, Aldersgate, on 18 June 1770, well into the reign of George III, at the age of 102.

  Great Tom was an ancient thirteenth-century bell, which used to be known as Edward, until the Reformation. The bell tower was demolished in 1698 and the bell sold to St Paul’s Cathedral. On the way there, it fell off its wagon at Temple Bar and cracked, was left in a shed in the cathedral for some years and was eventually recast in 1709 – in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which still exists – and hung in the bell tower of St Paul’s where it sounds the hour to this day.

  It is also used to toll for the deaths of members of the royal family, the Bishop of London, the cathedral’s dean and the lord mayor – if he dies in office – but that, as Rudyard Kipling might say, is another story.

  King Edward III made and named me

  So that by the grace of St Edward the hours may be marked

  Translation of the Latin inscription inside the Great Tom bell

  THERE IS NO more distinctive or iconic English building than the peculiar neo-Gothic clock tower that marks the boundary between the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Bridge. The tower itself looks too modern and compact somehow to be medieval, yet it soars like a cathedral above the clock face – the climax of so many films, from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Thunderball. It is instantly recognisable and not very pretty.

  This is not the view of Augustus Pugin, the pioneer of neo-Gothic, for whom the clock tower was his last great achievement, and one which drove him to exhaustion and insanity.

  The Clock Tower, as it has been called since then, was recently renamed the Elizabeth Tower after the Queen in honour of her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, but it hasn’t caught on. England is not, after all, a nation that often renames its streets and buildings in honour of the recently departed or the living.

  As everyone knows, Big Ben actually refers to the bell, which is now as familiar as the tower that houses it, because we hear it every day on the BBC before news bulletins. Its strange ding-dong-ding-dong chimes (said to have been adapted from Handel for the bells of Great St Mary’s in Cambridge) are also familiar from television satire, annoying ringtones and much else besides.

  When it was built, there was a row about the clock because nobody got round to commissioning one until the tower was 150 feet off the ground and it did not sit in its rightful place until 1859, twenty-five years after the old Palace of Westminster and parliamentary buildings had burned down.

  The bell was already up by then, but not without difficulty. When Big Ben was being tested, it cracked in 1857 and had to be recast. It was hung in 1858, tested and cracked again in 1859, and remains cracked to this day. The solution was an English compromise: a lighter hammer. The bell finally tolled again in 1863. At 315 feet in height, and with no lift, it is a bit of a climb to see inside the careful mechanism and the Victorian pennies which still keep time – a penny is said to shift the timekeeping by 0.4 seconds a day one way or the other.

  Big Ben is said to have been named after Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of the works. But there is an alternative story that Big Ben actually referred to Benjamin Caunt, a famous prizefighter, nicknamed by the workmen who had to heave the bell up and down, because of its weight.

  As well as the cracks, another problem with Big Ben is that it is built on what used to be Thorney Island, on a sandy river beach connected to a marshy tract of land between two channels of the River Tyburn. The Victoria Tower at the other end – the tallest building in the country when it was built – was actually built on quicksand. When Westminster Underground station was enlarged, the huge tunnelling equipment had to stop work when Big Ben began to list. It now leans slightly to the north-west and oscillates very slightly according to the weather, rather like the MPs in the debating chamber below.

  Big Ben is a kind of byword for English reliability, breaking down seriously only once in August 1976 – during the long hot summer that changed England forever, first bringing restaurant tables on to the London streets. It stopped again rather mysteriously, also in very hot weather, in May 2005.

  It remains the icon of Englishness, understated, bizarrely antique-looking and thoroughly reliable, its pale moon face visible through the fogs and drizzle, its pilot light at the top indicating that Parliament is sitting, Members of Parliament are wrestling with the issues of the nation and all is right with the world.

  All through this hour

  Lord, be my guide

  And by Thy power

  No foot shall slide.

  The lyrics of the chimes, as set out on the wall of the Clock Tower

  IN 1933, WINSTON Churchill’s playboy son Randolph pulled a few strings and got his old housemate John Betjeman a job on the Evening Standard gossip column. It was then edited by the former spy Robert Bruce-Lockhart and, although Betjeman was no spy, he was rather a gossip.

  Even so, he wasn’t exactly equipped for the task. One of his first missions was to interview the Hollywood film star Myrna Loy, then at the height of her fame. Unsure what to ask her, Betjeman – the future Poet Laureate – quizzed her about the subject closest to his heart. ‘Do you like perpendicular architecture?’ he asked. He managed to persuade her to say that she was ‘very interested’.

  But then there is nothing more English than the perpendicular style. It is the English version of Gothic, and it has a particular tone – gentler perhaps than the Gothic which emerged from France at the abbey church of St Denis in 1144. Strictly speaking, it is the style of Gothic that emerged in the 1360s out of the horror of the Black Death, with its yearning, vertical lines, and its long, stretching windows.

  This is the style exemplified in the soaring nave of Canterbury Cathedral, the creation of the most famous English architect of the medieval era, Henry Yevele. Of all the examples of perpendicular, Canterbury Cathedral is perhaps the best known, with its tower and flying buttresses added over the following centuries (one tower wasn’t built until 1858).

  Canterbury is English in other ways. Like so much of English history, the very stones of Canterbury Cathedral echo with a bloody history, as well as a spiritual one. Thomas Becket was murdered there, on the steps between the crypt and the choir, his brains flung around the stones by the end of a sword, by four knights who thought they were carrying out the enraged instructions of Henry II. Becket was actually the second of four archbishops of Canterbury to die violently in office (the first was Alphege, carried off by Vikings and done to death in Greenwich, in 1012).

&nb
sp; The cathedral had something of a crisis in the 1170s. Becket was murdered at the end of 1170, and was soon canonised, so providing the cathedral with extraordinary wealth over the next three and a half centuries as a centre for pilgrimage, along the Pilgrims’ Way from London and Winchester. In the mid-1170s the old cathedral choir caught fire and burned down, which meant major rebuilding. There had been churches on the spot way before the arrival of St Augustine in 597. There had been a Roman church on the same site and probably holy structures even earlier. It was only as of 1174 that the cathedral took on its new Gothic guise. The initial work was carried out by the French architect William of Sens, who first brought a hint of Gothic to these shores. But William fell from his own scaffolding and paralysed himself, naming William the Englishman as his successor.

  This William extended the building eastwards for what became the Trinity Chapel, a repository for the remains of the newly canonised St Thomas Becket. Originally the new chapel just held the top of Becket’s skull, sliced off by his assassins. After 1220, his tomb was moved there too. His feast day was also moved, from the end of December to the end of July, to make the progress less muddy for the pilgrims. After three more centuries of pilgrimages and miracles, by the reign of Henry VIII the tomb had a wooden cover which could be raised to reveal all kinds of precious stone.

  This was something that a tyrannical king like Henry could never endure and he summoned Becket to be tried for treason. Having been dead for some centuries, Becket quite reasonably failed to appear and he was tried in his absence, found guilty and twenty-six carts arrived at the cathedral to confiscate his jewels.

  An unmarked tomb was discovered in the crypt in 1888, to great excitement, and even as recently as 1990 two former Foreign Legionnaires were arrested in the cathedral in the middle of the night with a map drawn by a French archaeologist and a crowbar, intending to open the tomb of Cardinal Châtillon (died 1571), believing that Becket’s bones were in there instead.

  It is a very English mystery, and more English than it seems at first sight. The nostalgic belief in a continuing link from our own Protestant age to the old English Catholic faith – and a continuing symbol of resistance to the power of the state – is not just romantic, it is also tremendously English.

  In the meantime, the archbishops of Canterbury continue to sit, with their palace at Lambeth, as knitted into the state as it is possible to be – second in precedence only to the monarch. There have been 105 of them as I write, all boasting the peculiar, slightly simian title ‘Primate of all England’.

  The four martyred archbishops:

  Alphege (murdered by captors, 1012)

  Thomas Becket (murdered by assassins, 1170)

  Thomas Cranmer (burned, 1556)

  William Laud (beheaded, 1645)

  WHEN CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS stormed around the Caribbean, one of the reasons that he remained convinced, until his dying day, he had discovered a westerly route to China was that the so-called Indians he found on Cuba were wearing cotton shirts. They must have come from the East, from where all cotton came.

  The English were late into the exploring game; John and Sebastian Cabot, who provided the basis for the original English claim to America, were from Venice and Genoa, and escaping from debtors when they arrived in Bristol and persuaded a parsimonious Henry VII to give them a contract to seek out lands ‘unknown to all Christians’. Cotton was hardly on any English wishlists at that stage. The cotton trade was dominated by Antwerp and Venice.

  The origins of growing cotton are lost in the mists of time. It certainly took place at least 7,000 years ago in Peru and Mexico in the West and in India in the East. The soldiers of Alexander the Great began wearing cotton once his armies reached India in 326 BC. So how did the story of cotton as a global commodity become entwined with that of the English? The answer is the success of the East India Company, which began importing it in great quantities in the middle of the seventeenth century.

  By then, the English had become bored by wool, which had previously underpinned their wealth. It was too heavy, too unyielding, too English. As a result, in the eighteenth century, cotton became increasingly coveted, imported from India in those East Indiaman ships, with their red striped flags. It was light and easy to wash and you could print patterns on it. No wonder the fashionable sets loved it.

  The key dates in the story of cotton in England are 1764 when James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire, and 1771 when Richard Arkwright opened his mill in Derbyshire. From then on, cotton powered the Industrial Revolution in England as surely as coal and steam. Along the great rivers of the Midlands and the north, Blake’s satanic mills puffed and panted as men, women and children struggled with the looms to turn the imported cotton from India and America into cotton goods for export to the world. By the time Nelson sighted the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, more than forty per cent of English exports were made of cotton.

  At that time, the main source of cotton was from the Deep South of the USA, where it was produced by slaves. This is both the dark stain on England’s history, and its opposite. Yes, they traded the slaves who produced the cotton, financed by English bankers, reworked in English mills by children doing twelve-hour days in appalling heat. And yet it was England itself that abolished the slave trade and eventually vowed to stamp out slavery from the globe, and – very slowly – began to see that the economics of their factory labour was in itself a kind of slavery too.

  In fact, so dependent were they on American cotton imported from the blockaded South during the American Civil War that Britain came very close to entering the war on the side of the slave-owners of the South. It was an irony for the nation which was still congratulating itself for abolishing slavery in its empire.

  Another cruel irony was that India, which had first clothed Alexander’s troops, and sold cotton clothing to Vasco da Gama, was soon importing cotton products from factories in Lancashire.

  The English textile industry was hit hard by the American Civil War and the Union blockade. It was hit hard again by Gandhi’s boycott of English cotton goods. It was hit again as the remaining clothes retailers increasingly began to outsource their production in the twentieth century. Marks & Spencer, the clothes retailer founded by a Jewish émigré from what is now Poland, was selling one in four pairs of cotton socks in the UK by 1930. It then formed a series of strategic partnerships with textile companies, starting with Corah in Leicester. The partnerships lasted for most of the rest of the century but, by the 1990s, there were only ten big English and Scottish clothing manufacturers left, supplying two thirds of M&S clothing. But they were being squeezed hard by the company, just as food suppliers would later be squeezed so hard by the big four supermarkets. Corah, the start of Marks & Spencer’s quest for long-term relationships, was among those which were now in trouble and losing money. It was taken over by a finance company Charterhall in 1989 and then broken up.

  By the end of the century, the other suppliers had all gone. It was the end of the close English relationship with cotton. Not really a happy story after all.

  Without the firing of a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war upon us, we could bring the whole world to our feet. What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? … England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, you dare not make war on cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.

  Speech to the US Senate on why the north of the USA would never make war on the South, Henry Hammond, 1858

  IF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH is the most famous English poet, then his ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ must be our most famous poem – and he comes face to face in it, as everyone knows, with a ‘host of golden daffodils’. The poem was written around 1804 (the same year that Blake wrote ‘Jerusalem’) but refers to a specific incident, on a walk with his sister Dorothy, which has a date attached: 15 April 1802.

  It is no coincidence that this was an April poem, because the daffo
dil has always been the most exciting and most unexpected herald of spring. It is of course the national flower of Wales, but also has special significance for the English as demonstrated by the sheer diversity of its names.

  It is known as daffydowndilly, or the east lily, or fairy bells. It is was known as goose-flop in Somerset, as Lent pitcher in Devon, as Queen Anne’s flower in Norfolk, as churn in Lancashire, as well as other West Country variants like cuckoo-rise or cowslip.

  As for the poem, it was published in Wordsworth’s 1807 collection, which was roundly condemned as puerile by Lord Byron. Even Wordsworth’s great friend and fellow pioneer of Romantic poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called it mental bombast. But the English feel otherwise. All that contemporary contempt has not prevented it from becoming one of the nation’s best-loved poems.

  There is also something rather wonderful about daffodils themselves, and not just for their visual cheerfulness. It’s a little-known fact that they are traditionally used as an emetic to create vomiting – they’re mildly poisonous – and these days are a key ingredient in the drug to combat Alzheimer’s disease.

  When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.