How to Be English

by David Boyle

  It is the spirit of Passport to Pimlico which sums up the anarchic sense of Englishness. There is Stanley Holloway, leading his small community of Londoners, filmed next to the Imperial War Museum, declaring independence from the British state – and holding off the forces of British bureaucracy with tit-for-tat passport inspections on the Underground as it rumbles under the new border. When the official loudspeaker van descends, one of the community shouts: ‘We’re sick and tired of your voice in this country – now shut up!’ There was the authentic voice of Englishness, as portrayed by the Ealing machine.

  Passport to Pimlico was a celebration of make-do-and-mend, of community spirit in adversity, and definitely of Anglo-Saxon awkwardness. And when they finalise the negotiations to bring Pimlico back into the English fold, the heavens open and it begins to rain.

  The Ealing Studios were bought originally for film-making in 1902 and films are still being made there, so that makes it the oldest continuously used studio in the world. But it was under the leadership of Michael Balcon, in the years straddling the Second World War, when they most successfully portrayed the English to themselves – and also the Scots (The Maggie and Whisky Galore!).

  But it was the comedies that particularly lodged themselves in the national psyche, often celebrations of the peculiarities of small working-class communities, with a kind of gutsy energy – full of loveable rogues who nearly get away with their crimes (The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets).

  The comedies culminated in The Ladykillers in 1955, in which a group of gangsters – including Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers – lodge with an old lady near King’s Cross Station. Despite the recognisably English tone, it was actually written by the American screenwriter William Rose, who claimed to have dreamed the whole thing and had to write it all down when he woke up.

  Stanley Holloway played in the greatest of all the comedies, The Titfield Thunderbolt, in which a small rural community take on the management of their local railway when it is closed by the brand new nationalised rail operator British Rail, and face down opposition from the corrupt bus operator.

  The film was released in 1953 and seems to have been inspired by the screenwriter T. E. B. (‘Tibby’) Clarke’s visit to see Tom Rolt two years before, then in the very earliest stages of rescuing the abandoned slate railway at Talyllyn, the first of the volunteer-run revived steam railways which have since become such a feature of British life.

  Holloway, George Relph and John Gregson were pioneers in more ways than one. During the inquiry by the inspector from the Ministry of Transport, Gregson takes to the floor in a desperate moment and shouts at the audience: ‘You realise you’re condemning our village to death? Open it up to buses and lorries and what’s it going to be like in five years’ time? Our lanes will be concrete roads, our houses will have numbers instead of names, there’ll be traffic lights and zebra crossings.’

  Of course, his prophecy came true – had already come true by 1953 – but little did Clarke know that his next-door neighbour at the time was Richard Beeching, the man who ten years later would preside over the destruction of the English branch-line network.

  By Jove, Holland, it’s a good job we’re both honest men.

  Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob, as he realises how it might be possible to steal a consignment of gold

  Top ten Ealing comedies:

  Champagne Charlie

  Hue and Cry

  Kind Hearts and Coronets

  Passport to Pimlico

  The Ladykillers

  The Lavender Hill Mob

  The Maggie

  The Man in the White Suit

  The Titfield Thunderbolt

  Whisky Galore!

  AT THE END of the very best full-length Laurel and Hardy film, Way Out West, Oliver Hardy proclaims that he is going back to the South. ‘Oh for a slice of possum and yam,’ he says.

  Stan Laurel, who – as everyone knows – was English, says that he is going back to the south too.

  ‘The south of where, sir?’ demands his friend.

  ‘The south of London,’ says Stan. ‘Good old fish and chips.’

  Perhaps American audiences couldn’t have been expected to know Ulverston in Cumbria where Laurel actually hailed from. But it so happens that the decade of Way Out West marked the high point in the rise of the English fish and chip shop. There were 35,000 of them in the British Isles in 1929. That figure has sunk considerably since, but they still use a tenth of all the potatoes eaten in the nation.

  Fish and chips had become our national dish, certainly for the working classes, and although its origins may be lost in the mists of time, these particular mists were not that long ago. Charles Dickens described fried-fish shops in Oliver Twist in 1838, when the fish came with baked potatoes or bread. Sometime in the 1860s, fish and chips first emerged as a classic combination. One possible originator was the Jewish immigrant Joseph Malinin from London’s East End, who first wrapped up fish and potatoes in old newspaper – a practice that carried on into the 1980s. Another was the Lancashire shopkeeper John Lees, working out of Mossley Market in Greater Manchester.

  The modern combination of newspaper, greasy chips, vinegar, pickled eggs, cockles and mussels seems to have emerged from various different influences at once: the chips probably from Belgium, the fried fish brought by Jewish immigrants from Spain and Portugal and spread by Italian immigrant families to England in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) George Orwell suggested that fish and chips might have averted revolution – the cheapness and comfort, especially on a dank English evening, does certainly have an extraordinary power to cheer you up.

  Wartime civilians in both world wars seemed to sense the defence implications of fish and chips, the ‘good companions’ as Winston Churchill described them. War Cabinets went to enormous lengths to make sure they were never rationed. By then, they already felt a little patriotic.

  Oldest fish and chip shop in the world:

  Yeadon near Leeds (1865)

  THE AMERICAN NOVELIST Gore Vidal was so obsessed with the forgetfulness of his fellow countrymen that he renamed the nation Amnesia. Something similar afflicts the English. It isn’t that their memories are faulty, it is just that they assume that what was true recently was always true. It is a strange English kind of conservatism.

  The English like to think that all their most beloved institutions date back sometime to the arrival of Noah on Mount Ararat, when actually most of them seem to have started around 1859–64. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, John Lewis department store, the London Underground, the Football Association, lawn tennis, you name it.

  Another beloved institution, born in 1862, was the Flying Scotsman, or as it was actually known back then, the Special Scotch Express. Two expresses started simultaneously that year from London King’s Cross and Edinburgh Waverley. They journey took ten hours, with a half-hour lunch in York.

  The real drama of the Flying Scotsman came in two explosions of competitive Races to the North, in August 1888 and August 1895 when – although the directors never admitted that there was a race – the rival managers of the west and east coast main lines struggled for the title of the fastest service. It began in 1888 when the London and North Western Railway announced at the last minute that they were re-timing the arrival of their Day Scotch Express by one hour. Crowds greeted the trains at Euston and King’s Cross when they set off and cheered the trains at Carlisle, even in the middle of the night. Reporters accompanied the trip as the services steamed through the night for Edinburgh and on to Aberdeen.

  Two things conspired to end the competition. The first was that arriving in Aberdeen at half-past four in the morning was virtually useless for everybody, and there was also a derailment at speed in 1896. The rival companies agreed to cool it.

  When the LNER Flying Scotsman train service began under that name in 1927, it was a non-stop service, and there was a corridor so that a new shift of driv
ers and firemen could take over without stopping at a station. Even then, their rivals at the London, Midland and Scottish Railway put on a new non-stop train to Glasgow leaving at the same time. The actual Flying Scotsman locomotive had tested out the feasibility of this service back in 1924 and managed to get up to a top speed of 100 mph for the first time.

  They were heady days, with a restaurant car and a barber on board for the customers. But they are gone, and since 1958 the Flying Scotsman Service has been hauled by a diesel. Anyone who wants to get from London to Edinburgh fast nowadays tends to fly. These days, the train advertised as the Flying Scotsman stops at York and Newcastle and travels at an average speed of just below 100 mph. It isn’t quite the same.

  When the English think of the Flying Scotsman service today, they tend to think of three things. The first is the idea of the journey, the string luggage shelves above the heads of the passengers, the mirrors behind the chairs in the compartments, the porters in black and making your away through the steam on the platform from the buffet, after tea and toast. The second is the Night Mail film by the Post Office, with its poem by W. H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. We also think of the 1923 locomotive (No. 4472), still in existence, and still roving across the rail network of the nation.

  For a century it has been with us. Out on the great fens, across the Plain of York, in the hill villages of the North-East and in the Border farms, people have set their clocks by it, down the long years.

  C. Hamilton Ellis, describing the endurance of the Flying Scotsman, 1968

  THERE NEVER WAS an English composer more able to conjure up a hummable tune than Arthur Sullivan. There is a class of English intellectual superiority that peers down its nose at Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, as if they fail to rise to the level you expect of Glyndebourne or the Royal Opera House, where they are very rarely if ever played (‘What, never? Well, hardly ever!’).

  But if the great age of tunes petered out in the 1960s, it began in the 1860s, and Sullivan – the son of a bandmaster who managed to master every instrument in the band by the age of eight – was at the very forefront. It wasn’t just the melodies of ‘Poor Wandering One’ or ‘The Sun Whose Rays’, it was great Victorian classics like ‘The Lost Chord’ and hymns too. He adapted the music for the hymn with the best tune of all: ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear’.

  Though he chafed at the ridiculous plots he composed to, and the time they took – he longed to write grand opera – it was Sullivan whose music keeps Gilbert’s words afloat well over a century later.

  William Schwenck Gilbert was certainly not the junior partner. He was an innovative and inventive man of the theatre, with a clear view of what his productions should look like, which he drove through with a single-minded, grumpy determination.

  Gilbert’s words and comic sense certainly stand the test of time – his patter songs like ‘I’ve got it on my list’ and ‘The Modern Major-General’ still resonate now. His brilliant lampoons of English government live on in The Mikado (though the English establishment, being what it is, suppressed a production of The Mikado in honour of the state visit of the Japanese prince in 1907 in case it gave offence).

  Gilbert was an ill-tempered tyrant with a hugely generous streak, and his argument about the costs of a carpet nearly undermined the partnership with Sullivan and the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company completely. It was a series of flops in the 1890s that finally managed that. The public eventually outgrew Gilbert and Sullivan, the scenery of the various D’Oyly Carte touring companies began to fall apart, and it took Jonathan Miller’s brilliant reimagining of The Mikado at the English National Opera in 1987 – and Mike Leigh’s portrayal in the film Topsy-Turvy in 1999 – to bring Gilbert and Sullivan back into fashion.

  Richard D’Oyly Carte and his wife Helen were a key element of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership. They formed the agreement after D’Oyly Carte’s previous business partners lost their heads during the production of HMS Pinafore, and sent thugs on stage to seize the scenery.

  But it was Sullivan’s music that ensured the brilliant, yet very peculiar, contemporary satire became a lasting contribution to English culture – the juxtaposition of fairies and the House of Lords in Iolante, or the presiding judge marrying the key witness in Trial by Jury, might not have been achievable by every composer. It was also Sullivan’s determination that he needed emotion in order to compose effectively which forced Gilbert – as far as Gilbert could ever be forced – into providing plots which might last.

  The collaboration began with Thespis in 1871, the music and lyrics of which have since been lost, right through to the disastrous Grand Duke in 1896.

  Sullivan never married and carried on a series of affairs, including with the American socialite Fanny Reynolds. He had previously carried on secret affairs simultaneously with two sisters, the daughters of the engineer John Scott Russell. Like many English gentlemen, he very much enjoyed life in Paris, loved gambling, and had a knack for some of the great English sports – and not others. ‘I have seen some bad lawn-tennis players in my time,’ said his leading man George Grossmith, ‘but I never saw anyone so bad as Arthur Sullivan.’

  Sullivan suffered recurrent ill health, and his kidney disease forced him to conduct sitting down. He died aged only fifty-eight with his opera The Emerald Isle still unfinished on his desk. Gilbert lived until 1911 when he dived into his own garden pond to rescue girls he believed were drowning (they were just larking about) and the sudden cold gave him a heart attack. It was somehow a thoroughly Gilbertian ending.

  Their influence can be felt in the lyrics of P. G. Wodehouse in his Hollywood screenwriting days, right through to the satire of Tom Lehrer. Sullivan’s songs formed the basis of the great tradition of hummable tunesmiths, including George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and maybe even Andrew Lloyd Webber. They launched the humorous career of Grossmith too, author of The Diary of a Nobody. In fact the Gilbert tradition of English satire is one which punctures the airs of the pompous and the fatuous, and continues to this day as a distinctive pillar of English life.

  In enterprise of martial kind,

  When there was any fighting,

  He led his regiment from behind

  (He found it less exciting).

  But when away his regiment ran,

  His place was at the fore, O –

  That celebrated,

  Cultivated,

  Underrated

  Noble man,

  The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

  W. S. Gilbert, The Gondoliers (1889)

  THE ENGLISH CLING to their history, and not just the nice bits. They cling obsessively to their festivals commemorating bloody defeats or capitulations (see Chapter 33). The idea of creating a kind of effigy of a man, putting him on top of a bonfire every year and letting off fireworks to celebrate his demise, is one of the most peculiar, not to say embarrassing, of our national habits.

  Fawkes was born in York in 1570 and became a Catholic under the influence of his stepfather. Like so many religious obsessives, he went abroad to fight for the cause – fighting Dutch Protestants on behalf of Spanish Catholics in the Low Countries, and travelling to Spain to try to get support for some kind of English revolution. He failed, but ran into his fellow plotter Thomas Wintour, who in turn introduced him to Robert Catesby, and so the plot to assassinate James I developed, link by link.

  Fawkes was a big man with a bushy red beard and moustache. He was recommended by a Jesuit friend of his as ‘pleasant of approach and cheerful of manner, opposed to quarrels and strife … loyal to his friends’.

  The plotters met for the first time in May 1604 in a pub called the Duck and Drake on the Strand in London. The plan was to blow up Parliament along with the king at the state opening, and to replace him with his daughter Elizabeth. There would be a simultaneous uprising in the Midlands. In the end, the business of planting the gunpowder couldn’t have been easier. They simply rented the undercroft beneath the House of Lords.

  What gave th
em away were the qualms that terrorists tend to have when they are civilised people. An anonymous letter was sent to the Catholic Lord Monteagle, urging him to stay away. He showed it to the king, the undercroft was searched and Fawkes was discovered, along with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, designed – according to the conspirators – ‘to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains’.

  He was tortured until he revealed the names of his conspirators. All were found guilty in the Lords, watched secretly by the king and his family. Fawkes was the last to die in Old Palace Yard, managing to fling himself off the scaffold and break his neck before the agonies of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

  King James himself suggested that their ‘joyful deliverance’ ought to be celebrated with bonfires every year on 5 November and the tradition soon caught on. Fireworks began about half a century later and they have continued ever since. Although the dangers of fireworks have muted the general mayhem in recent years, Bonfire Night – and the smell of burned cardboard, wet sparklers or the traditional ginger parkin – remains an essential part of English childhood.

  William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1841 novel Guy Fawkes began the rehabilitation of Fawkes as a kind of anti-hero. He is a sympathetic character in the book and, in the century and a half that followed, Guy Fawkes has developed less as a villain and more as a kind of symbol of defiance against vested interests. This may be peculiar for a man who was a terrorist, after all, committed to the victory of another nation with which England was at war; but in the end, despite all the drawing and quartering, the English are a forgiving lot. It just takes them a few centuries to discover that Fawkes was a heroic character, and to don his masks from the film V for Vendetta to demonstrate outside Parliament.