by David Boyle
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up the King and Parli’ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holla boys, holla boys, let the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
And what should we do with him? Burn him!
Traditional rhyme for 5 November
IS THERE ANYTHING that remains English about Harrods department store? It has been in foreign ownership since 1985. Most of its shoppers are foreign. The former owner, Mohammed al Fayed, had peculiarities that included a dress code that meant occasionally having customers thrown out on the grounds that they were not wearing the correct clothing (thoroughly un-English).
There are two reasons for including Harrods in this book, in spite of everything. The first is its origins as a draper’s shop founded by Charles Henry Harrod in 1824, in Bermondsey Street in the poverty-stricken London borough of Southwark. By the 1840s, it was a grocer in Islington and then in Stepney in the East End. By the 1850s, it was a small shop on its present site in the Brompton Road, and was built up into the retailing monster that it became by the next generation, in the form of Charles Digby Harrod.
For some reason, it is so often the second generation which makes the innovative breakthrough in English retailing. It was not Michael Marks but his son Simon who turned Marks & Spencer into the bastion of the English middle classes, selling a quarter of all socks bought in the nation. It was not the cantankerous John Lewis but his son Spedan who turned the store chain that still bears his name into the pioneer of mutualism. Harrods was no exception.
That is the first reason, and don’t let us forget also that the Brompton Road site turned into one of the most valuable strips of real estate in the world, owned by the legacees of a salt merchant called Henry Smith who left the proceeds in perpetuity to the victims of Turkish slavers.
The second reason is that England more or less invented the department store. It is true that there is a reasonable challenge from Paris in the shape of Le Bon Marché, but the full flavour of a multi-department store was really the brainchild of William Whiteley, who launched his monument to Victorian consumerism in 1863 in Paddington, followed shortly afterwards by John Lewis the next year, who borrowed money from his sister to allow him to do so, and scraped all the plaster off the walls to give him more room to sell. Both represented an English revolution in retailing – it meant turning away from actively trying to persuade or cajole customers into buying things they didn’t want, to encouraging them to trust.
The department-store idea also took some time to bed down, but in the end it was less trouble for Mr Pooter and the other inhabitants of the new London suburbs to order all their furniture from Whiteleys or Harrods, and have it driven round, than to be snubbed by snobbish shop assistants or sneered at for not knowing precisely what they wanted.
This is a brief explanation about how Harrods became the worldwide brand it is today, priding itself on selling everything, as it used to say, ‘from a pin to an elephant’. It was Harrods which first introduced an escalator in 1898, a fearsome thing, and offered customers a glass of brandy at the top to revive them once they had risked the journey.
Still, there is no doubt that the traditional, restrained white Christmas lights still warm the heart, and there remains something spectacular about its food hall, which is perhaps why it is sometimes visited by up to 300,000 people a day.
Harrods’ peculiarities:
Most famous purchase: The original Winnie-the-Pooh (1921) Strangest purchase: A live alligator bought by Noël Coward (1951)
IT IS ONE of those tunes that were instantly recognisable a generation ago, but now – perhaps because of an ironic distaste for bombast – have rather gone out of fashion. ‘Heart of Oak’ was well known as the official march of the Royal Navy, and supported a sense that oak trees and the wooden walls of England (see Chapter 42) were somehow the quintessence of the nation. In fact, it is also the official march of the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy. The Royal Australian Navy dropped it for something more appropriate.
The words were written by the great English actor David Garrick (1717–79) and sung for the first time in 1760. The year is significant because the ‘wonderful year’ referred to in the first verse was 1759, the year of a string of military and naval victories, including James Wolfe’s successful attempt to take Quebec (see Chapter 59) – 1759 was a kind of military version of the 2012 Olympics, when everything went rather better than expected, an unusual experience for the English.
There may be another reason ‘Heart of Oak’ has gone out of fashion. The English have entered one of those occasional periods when they no longer see themselves as a primarily naval nation. The photographs of warships which used to grace the front pages of our newspapers have given way to photographs of soldiers. We have become a military nation instead.
This may be a shift in the soul of the English. It may just be a temporary blip. But military nations believe in discipline and centralised rigour and immediate obedience. Naval nations tend to be more relaxed and to believe in the flexibility and humour and individualism of a command somewhere out on the great oceans.
We will see. In the meantime, ‘Heart of Oak’ has been shoved rather under the carpet.
Come, cheer up, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,
To add something new to this wonderful year;
To honour we call, you as freemen not slaves,
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?
Heart of Oak are our ships,
Jolly Tars are our men,
We always are ready: Steady, boys, Steady!
We’ll fight and we’ll conquer again and again.
THE FIRST CENSUS in England was during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was not the first nation in the world to count its population: that was Sweden. Parliament rejected the idea in 1752, on the grounds that it was an intolerable interference in people’s privacy.
The man behind the plan was the former secretary of the Prince of Wales and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Potter, MP for St Germans – ‘a man of more than middling abilities’, according to Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘and somewhat conceited of his own parts’. He was defeated almost single-handedly by York MP William Thornton, who was the only MP voting against in the first vote, but by the time the legislation reached the House of Lords, he had so stoked up the opposition that they threw it out.
‘Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased?’ Thornton asked fellow MPs. ‘And what purpose will it answer to know where the kingdom is crowded, and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle? If this be intended, let them brand us at once; but while they treat us like oxen and sheep, let them not insult us with the name of men.’
You don’t have to agree with Thornton to admire his courage, his boneheaded English individualism, and his determination to resist the rise of the technocrats.
The English have always regarded themselves as unbiddable. They have harboured a suspicion, both about the Napoleonic tyranny of continental Europe – buttressed perhaps by a Protestant nervousness about the tyranny of the pope (Brussels and Rome have played similar roles in the minds of the English at different periods of their history) – and about the slavish obedience of the Americans, with their jaywalking fines and perfect municipal grass. The English might complain about the resulting disorder back home, but they prefer it to the alternative. They complain that their trains are late, but have never (so far) been tempted by the apparent eff
iciency of totalitarianism.
There is no doubt that the result is a muddle. No written constitution. No coherent legal codes. No coherent government either: English laws and policies are the sum total of every fudge back through time. But there is something rather wonderful, as well as infuriating, about the ramshackle business of English administration, with its amateur magistrates and its unarmed police (well, usually). It is the product of English individualism, and none the worse for that.
In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
WHAT IS IT about the north-east region of England? Yes it provided us with the Venerable Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Geordie accent and much else besides; but it has also been the source of England’s great troublemakers, and as such has shaped the culture of England around it.
The Pilgrimage of Grace is generally supposed to have started with the failure of the Lincolnshire rebellion in October 1536, and to have emerged in Yorkshire under the leadership of a London barrister from Richmondshire called Robert Aske. Enraged by the behaviour of Henry VIII, as well he might have been, and suspicious of the new religion being foisted on them – and particularly about the privatisation of the welfare structures (basically what the dissolution of the monasteries amounted to) – they took over York Minster and drove the new tenants out of the monasteries.
As many as 40,000 people marched with Aske to Selby to negotiate with the dukes, arriving from all over the north and carrying with them the supposedly miraculous five-yard banner of St Cuthbert, brought by the Durham contingent. They were all given a royal pardon and a promise that the next dissolution would wait until Parliament had met in York. Then, trustingly, Aske dismissed his followers. He ended up hanged in a cage in London, and other leaders were hanged and beheaded, or hanged, drawn and quartered.
No such punishment was meted out to the Jarrow marchers, 200 of whom set off precisely four centuries after Aske in October 1936, carrying a petition signed by 11,000 people, enraged by the closure and dissolution of their local shipbuilding company, by seventy-two per cent local unemployment, and by the closure of one of only two grocery shops. There were no beheadings when they reached London a month and nearly 300 miles later, but they were snubbed by the prime minister Stanley Baldwin and given £1 each to get home again.
As in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the marchers – who called themselves the Jarrow Crusade – were blessed by the Bishop of Jarrow before they left. Halfway down, they were attacked by the Bishop of Durham as purveyors of ‘revolutionary mob tactics’. In 1536, a previous Bishop of Durham had been forced to escape from his castle by a mob which had arrived to try to persuade him to lead the rebellion. In both cases, the prospect of the marchers arriving in London filled the authorities with apprehension. In 1936, the Special Branch gave the Cabinet a briefing which suggested that ‘selected journalists … be interviewed and given material for exposing the origin, motive and uselessness of the march’.
A revealing picture now hangs at the Geffrye Museum in London of a languid young couple at the window of a smart house in central London, looking down at the burning torches of the marchers as they arrived. There is some interest, but not much. It is an evocative portrait of the strange peculiarities of the English class system.
It was the same to-day all along the road from Ripon. The villagers of Ripley and Killinghall rushed to their doors to see the marchers pass; motorists waved as they went by; one shouted, ‘How are you sticking it?’ and a woman cried, ‘Hello, Geordies.’ And the ‘Geordies’ themselves were in great form, so that every moment I expected the band to change from ‘Annie Laurie’ and ‘Swanee River’ to ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer’. Contributions to the ‘kitty’ fell in as we went; here it was a pound there it was a penny, the penny specifically being the offering of an ecstatic little girl who ran across the road to meet us as if no one less than Bonnie Prince Charlie was at our head.
The Guardian, 13 October 1936
THE PROMS WERE created by Robert Newman, the impresario and manager of the Queen’s Hall, opposite the building that is now Broadcasting House in London. In August 1895, the young conductor Henry Wood launched the series under Newman’s direction.
Newman’s original idea for the Proms was that they should lure the middlebrow into new experiences in music. He was aware that the idea had been tried before in Covent Garden, but had only really worked at the hands of a romantic figure like the French conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien. Henry Wood was the proposed solution and Newman took him out to lunch at Pagani’s restaurant next to the old Queen’s Hall. The money needed came from a music lover, a surgeon from Upper Wimpole Street, Dr George Cathcart, who funded the experiment on condition it would include Wagner.
They were promoted originally as Robert Newman’s Promenade Concerts. When they opened on 10 August 1895, they were due to last for ten weeks, sixty performances, with admission of only one shilling and with another big idea – discounts for season tickets. They were a great success, but always controversial. Newman himself went bankrupt. His successor was forced out during the First World War because of his German name, and disputes about broadcasting with its new promoters (Chappell & Co.) beset the Proms during the 1920s. The saviour of the Proms was undoubtedly the BBC, which came to the rescue in 1927 and never let go, even when the venue was moved to Bedford to avoid the doodlebug raids.
The creator of the peculiar English institution known as the Last Night of the Proms was the televisual conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, a showman who took the Proms into the television age and out of the slightly prim control of the BBC.
It was Sargent who encouraged promenaders to take a more active part, and who tolerated the banners, balloons and funny hats, and it was Sargent who set the traditional programme of the Last Night, with Wood’s ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’ and Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1’, which first appeared on the programme to celebrate the end of the Second World War at the 1945 season. It was also Sargent who dragged himself up from his deathbed in September 1967 to be with the promenanders on the Last Night for the final time.
He did all this in the teeth of opposition from the establishment, who deeply disapproved of the antics of the crowd. ‘A music-hall rabble,’ said Lady Jessie Wood (Sir Henry’s widow) in 1947. ‘A frightening emotional orgy,’ said the controller of the BBC’s Light Programme. ‘For the first time, I realised the full extent of the dangers that attend the popularising of music,’ he wrote in 1950. ‘Plato knew what he was doing when he proposed to banish music and poetry from his republic.’
But the Last Night became known around the world, and every year from 1947 – when television cameras first appeared – the paraphernalia and bacchanalia increased. In 1952, a firework smuggled in for Tchiakovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ went off early. Sargent also had to give a pep talk to the audience about the dangers of throwing coins.
But there is something heroic about the Last Night, a wild concert with an ironic edge to it, celebrating some of the bravado of being English.
Traditional Last Night programme:
Edward Elgar: ‘Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1’ (including ‘Land of Hope and Glory’)
Henry Wood: ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs’ (including ‘Rule, Britannia’)
Hubert Parry: ‘Jerusalem’
IF LONDON IS a nation of itself, cut off from its surroundings by the great sweeping waves of the M25, then the London Underground is a world within a wor
ld. It has its own design, its own atmosphere and people behave differently down there. Perhaps they respond to the light roar of a train approaching a packed platform, or the dark dusty swirl of old newspapers as the breeze of a distant train ruffles the hairs on the back of the mice down on the track. Perhaps their own underground comes out.
The Underground itself goes back to the year 1863. The early Tube had gaslit carriages hauled by steam locomotives. The Metropolitan Railway soon teamed up with the District Railway to create the Circle Line, finished in 1884. There are now 270 stations, some of them emphatically above ground, and it is always a surprise how new the rest is. The Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines opened in 1906, and in decaying darkness rest many of the forgotten stations, their platforms boarded up, their empty lines the preserve of the rats and yeti (Dr Who) – Down Street, Aldwych, Trafalgar Square – a strange shadowy world that remains half in and half out of reality.
What really created the Underground that we know today was a joint marketing effort in the early years of the twentieth century, using the term ‘Underground’ for the first time in that context – and the decision to electrify the lines at the same time. The shadowy elements, the sense of otherness, is the result of the efforts of three men.
The first was Frank Pick, a solicitor who rose to be managing director of the Underground in 1928 and ruled London Transport until 1940. Pick was an admirer of William Morris – he used green ink in his honour – and who believed like Morris in the role of design in civilisation.
Pick set out to put this thought into action in the Underground, with a strong sense of design. He used the original roundel, which is so distinctive, commissioned the latest art-deco architecture for many stations. He was also a great commissioner of poster art, with some of the most distinctive, colourful mid-century evocations of the English countryside the product of his chequebook, advertising his Green Line buses, snaking out into the rural areas. His posters advertising the suburbs evoked the emerging Metroland before the First World War. In fact, it was his standardised advertising sizes that first drew him to the attention of his superiors.