How to Be English

by David Boyle

  He claimed that, in the early hours of that morning, he had been confronted outside by a terrifying apparition in white, seen clearly through the mist as a bonnet without a head inside, moving slowly towards him. He challenged the ghost three times and, when it still continued to approach, he lunged at it with his bayonet. There had been a strange flash and fire spread up his rifle, after which he passed out.

  It looked like an embroidered excuse and the verdict looked a clear-cut one of guilty. But a number of soldiers, and one officer, came forward and gave evidence that they had seen something very similar – a white spirit in a headless bonnet – seen from the window at the Bloody Tower. A historian gave evidence that the guardroom had been immediately below the room where Anne Boleyn had spent her final night on earth, before being beheaded by a special swordsman brought from France for the task in 1536. The sleeping soldier was cleared of all charges.

  England is not a very superstitious country. In fact, the English have traditionally looked down their noses at most superstitions, from walking under ladders to the kind of religious mumbo-jumbo they held in such horror in the Roman Catholic Church. Yet for some reason, belief in ghosts is very widespread in England – and so are the ghosts. The nation appears to be packed with grey ladies, blue ladies, sad-looking monks and weeping widows. There are playful ghosts and whole casts of actor ghosts, especially in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where the ghost tends to appear to herald a runaway hit.

  There is a particular English habit of seeing the ghosts of people at the point of their death, which the Victorians and Edwardians particularly specialised in – previous generations would not have known about the moment of death, after all. Vice Admiral Sir George Tryon appeared at a dinner party in his own house in Eaton Square the moment he sank beneath the waves off the coast of Lebanon, along with his flagship HMS Victoria in 1893.

  The Tower of London is, in fact, particularly ghostly. There may even be more ghosts there than the living, going right back to 1241 when a priest first saw the ghost of Thomas Becket. Henry VIII himself has been bayoneted by a guard as well, and relatively recently. The white headless bonnet was last seen in 1933.

  Is it that the English are particularly credulous? I don’t believe so. Apart from All Hallows’ Eve, they have no day of the dead as other cultures do. No, the explanation, if there is one, is that England was one of the most westerly countries in the known world, and the utmost west used to be known as the resting place of the dead. It just so happened that the English made their homes there.

  When the great ghost-story writer M. R. James, author of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ and other eerie tales, carried out a survey of how many of the English population had actually seen a ghost, it turned out that ten per cent claimed they had.

  The dark and stormy nights that are such a feature of English life demand some kind of supernatural story, and the English have supplied them – originally via middle-class Victorian magazines like Blackwood’s and others, and then thanks to Lord Halifax, who collected them from friends. Consequently, the ghost industry just keeps on growing. Sadly, the most haunted house in England, said to have been Borley Rectory in Essex, no longer stands. It was demolished in 1944.

  Most haunted three places in England:

  Tatton Old Hall, Cheshire

  Ye Olde King’s Head, Chester

  Drakelow Tunnels, Kidderminster

  According to Yvette Fielding, Radio Times, 2014

  THE ANCIENT WALL that snakes across northern England from Wallsend to the Solway Firth has become an overwhelmingly English phenomenon, our very own answer to the Great Wall of China. But it is, almost by definition, a foreign import. The seventy-mile structure was ordered by the emperor Hadrian as a northern limit to the Roman Empire, and he seems to have inspected its progress on a visit in 122. Hadrian himself was hardly English either. In fact, he came from somewhere near Seville and was a huge admirer of Greek culture.

  Those Roman troops posted to one of the frontier forts, who stared out from the battlements looking north, freezing with the snow on their bare legs, shivering as they peered into the blackness, were mostly not from here either. Maybe they became so from habit, like so many others in the centuries that followed.

  But the strange thing about Hadrian’s Wall, which seems to have been painted white when it was first built – in order to awe the watching tribes of the far north with its decorative simplicity – is that it seems to have been rather a comfortable place. Recent archaeology reveals that it was very unlike a frontier for most of its history. There were farms on either side of the wall, and a burgeoning Romano-British economy of hangers-on around it. Some of the farms had fields on the other side. It was not actually the limit to civilisation that the English might like to believe. It was rather a cosmopolitan party. At least, it was the kind of party you get when people come from all corners of the known world to organise an armed customs post in the middle of, well, somewhere.

  Some evidence of the party emerges from messages inviting people to birthday parties discovered at Vindolanda fort, and written just after the fort was built as a preliminary for building the wall. They reveal a little of what it must have been like:

  Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings. I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa.

  A RECENT STUDY found that the number of times the word ‘Marmite’ has been used in the press, when it is used as a metaphor for things which everyone either loves or hates, has shot up in an extraordinary way over the past decade. This is a testament to the marketing genius of Marmite, which used the commonplace idea that everyone either loves or hates Marmite as part of its marketing in 1996.

  The stolid English, who actually agree on most things, need to boast about something they disagree about which is safe and actually pretty non-controversial. There will be no United Nations Security Council meetings of people who disagree about Marmite, after all. Marmite is the answer.

  It is part of a package which includes the yellow lids, the broad bulbous pots, the brown stain on the toast, which now add up to something that feels overwhelmingly English. Actually, as so often, what seems obviously English is really nothing of the kind.

  The discovery that brewer’s yeast could be bottled and eaten was made originally by a German scientist called Justus von Liebig. The name Marmite was taken from the French word for large cooking pot, of the kind that still graces their labels. It is true that the product itself began in England, in Burton upon Trent in 1902 – the same year as the first teddy bear and the first borstal – but is now owned by the Anglo-Dutch food conglomerate Unilever, which has held the purse strings since 2000. Marmite had been bought decades before by the even more obviously English brand Bovril, whose marketing genius had come up with the slogan ‘It prevents that sinking feeling’ in 1920 (what sinking feeling, you ask?)

  But the link with brewing gives Marmite an English edge. The yeast was originally provided by the brewers Bass, and it was so successful that a second factory was opened in 1907 at Vauxhall in south London.

  The growth of Marmite was given a huge boost by two major twentieth-century events. The first was the First World War, which happened to coincide with the discovery that Marmite was rather a good way of treating vitamin B deficiency. It was therefore issued to troops on the Western Front and instantly became a symbol of nostalgia for those days of trench camaraderie. It was also issued to German prisoners of war during the Second World War (whether they liked it or hated it).

  The second event was the discovery by the English scientist Lucy Wills, who discovered that Marmite could be used to treat ana
emia among mill workers in Bombay, and it was therefore used to help tackle the famine a few years later in Sri Lanka.

  It was these vitamins and additives, folic acid and vitamin B, that has also caused controversy more recently, especially when the Danish government refused to license it and Marmite was withdrawn from sale in Denmark. The outraged English press said that it had been banned, which wasn’t quite accurate, but it was clearly a blow to national pride.

  The opposite appeared to be happening in New Zealand around the time of the Christchurch earthquake in 2012 when the local factory was forced to shut down causing a national Marmite shortage. One report suggested that pots were changing hands at anything up to 800 New Zealand dollars.

  Yet there is something comfortably English about Marmite – in the same category as scrambled eggs and bacon and Bakewell tarts – comfortable, reassuring, wintry and warm.

  It was pretty good. It’s just one of those things – you get out of the country and it’s all you can think about.

  Paul Ridout, a backpacker kidnapped in India by Kashmiri separatists, describing his first Marmite on toast after his release, from the Guardian, 1994

  THE ENGLISH ADORE cross-dressing. It is a repeated theme in Shakespeare plays, where it is never entirely clear what gender the person before you is going to turn into. It is there in traditional comedies like Charley’s Aunt (1892) and it is there, Christmas after Christmas, in the bizarre phenomenon of the pantomime dame.

  Of course, there is nothing very English about pantomimes, which derive from masked dramas in classical times, but the English have made them their own. The role of the pantomime dame – either high camp (John Inman) or butch (Les Dawson) – seems to have been pioneered by the great clown Joseph Grimaldi, who also popularised clowning so successfully that his name ‘Joey’ became – for a few generations – the word for clown. He clowned so spectacularly that it seems to have led to his physical collapse, alcoholism and early death.

  Grimaldi was born in London, though his Italian grandfather came to London via France from Italy, having been imprisoned in the Bastille for offending Parisian tastes.

  It was Grimaldi who invented the famous English catchphrase ‘Here we are again!’ It was he who first turned to the audience with a mischievous eye and said: ‘Shall I?’ Grimaldi, incidentally, was also responsible for the most disastrous pantomime in English theatrical history. He had taken the part of Grimaldicat in the 1818 Easter pantomime Puss in Boots. It closed after just one night. Grimaldi was booed off the stage after he pretended to eat a mouse on stage, and caused two women in the audience to fight.

  But then it was appropriate that these traditions should have been brought here by Italians, because of the unbroken dramatic tradition stretching back to Roman mimes, followed by the characters of Renaissance theatre – Harlequin and Pantaloon, Pierrot and Columbine. In fact, when Francis Bacon talked about the tradition, he called it pantomimi.

  Pantomimes in England date back to Boxing Day 1717, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, where the curtain raised on the first English panto, Harlequin Executed. It was the brainchild of the impresario John Rich, whose father has been forced out of Drury Lane and exhausted by rebuilding a new theatre around the corner, and decided to take them on with a ‘new Italian mimic scene (never performed before) between a Scaramouch, a Harlequin, a Country Farmer, his Wife and others’. Rich played the Harlequin himself, and we can imagine that the farmer’s wife provided the basis for what eventually became the dame.

  There is a conspiracy theory about this, which suggests that – under the influence of Rich – the Harlequin was the main pantomime character. Under the influence of Grimaldi, a century later, it was the Clown, but after Grimaldi’s death in 1837 there was rather a shortage of clowns. There was therefore a need to find some other kind of comic turn. Thus the pantomime dame was born.

  The conspiracy theory is only partly true because Grimaldi pioneered the dame himself, and – after his death – it took at least another generation for pantomime dames to emerge in their full glory. The first dame of modern times was James Rogers, who took the part of Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Strand Theatre in 1861.

  Widow Twankey is usually portrayed as the manager of a Chinese laundry, which allows endless opportunities to laugh at people’s underclothes (a major English pastime). This was a role that Grimaldi himself had invented back in 1813, but it took half a century for it to emerge in all its ferocity.

  Dan Leno, the famous Victorian comic, took the role of Widow Twankey in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1890, playing opposite Marie Lloyd as principal boy, and pantomime dames have never been the same since. The camp element was introduced by the cabaret artist Douglas Byng, who pioneered the part playing Eliza in Dick Whittington at the New Theatre in Oxford in 1924, and carried on for about half a century. He used the slogan ‘Bawdy but British’ and sang songs like ‘Sex Appeal Sarah’, ‘Milly the Messy Old Mermaid’ and ‘The Lass who Leaned against the Tower of Pisa’.

  So here you are, old Douglas, a derelict at last.

  Before your eyes what visions rise of your vermilion past.

  Mad revelry beneath the stars, hot clasping by the lake.

  You need not sigh, you can’t deny, you’ve had your bit of cake.

  Douglas Byng’s epitaph, which he wrote himself, before he died in Brighton at the age of ninety-three

  THE OLDEST LEGAL code in existence, written by King Hammurabi in Babylon around 1750 BC, included a condemnation about overpriced, watered-down beer. In fact, the one universal opinion in the history of brewing is that the beer isn’t as good as it was.

  This implies that pubs are especially English in more ways than one. They are havens of contemplative companionship, but the basic conservatism of beer-drinking – beer drinkers are always dreaming of a better yesterday – puts pubs on the front line of two very English disputes. These are between the doyens of Merrie England and the two forces dedicated to ruining their good time – the puritans and the profiteers.

  Nor should we assume that the puritan approach just comes from the forces of control and narrow-mindedness that English culture seems to revel in. Landlords are some of the biggest reactionaries ever invented. ‘Shall I tell you why not?’ a landlord told me recently when I asked for green tea. ‘Because we’re a pub.’

  Fair enough, perhaps. The great English busybodies objected to the idea that, throughout the Middle Ages, anyone could open a pub under English law, so – if it was disorderly – Henry VII gave magistrates the power to close them down. The stage was set for the peculiar licensing system we have today which dates back ironically to the days of Bloody Mary, so that ‘none after the first day of May next coming, shall be admitted or suffered to keep any common Ale-house or Tippling-house, but such as shall thereunto be admitted and allowed in open Sessions of the peace, or else by two Justices of the Peace’. You can hear, in those words of Renaissance legalese, the authentic voice of English bureaucracy.

  There is an argument that the forces of control were redoubled by the arrival of James I from Scotland in 1603. It was certainly a concern under the Stuarts, but it was the Long Parliament of the 1640s – firmly under the control of the People – that first saw taxes on beer, ‘for their own good’ according to one of the Victorian treatises on the subject.

  Merrie England hit back, and there were riots over attempts to control gin-houses in the 1730s and the first limits to opening hours for pubs in the 1860s (oddly enough, arrests for being drunk and disorderly doubled after the first restrictions). But the puritans took the opportunity of the First World War to take decisive action on pubs, because they were worried about drinking affecting the working habits of munitions workers. As a result, the Defence of the Realm Act in 1914 allowed the government to set pub opening hours. The following year, they were set at 12 noon to 2.40 p.m. for lunch, and 6.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m. for supper.

  But even that failed to undermine the pubs. In fact, the ritual of ‘last orders�
�� and ‘Time, gentlemen, please!’ went into the language – at least until it was swept away in 2005.

  In the end, it appears to be the other battle which is finally corroding the pubs. The iron grip which the breweries held over the pub trade was loosened in the 1980s, only to be replaced by the monopolistic grip of the pub companies, which overvalued the properties in the boom years, got into unrepayable debt, and have been trying to extract it from their customers and their poor licensees ever since. Hence the darkened, shuttered pubs, especially in the cities. By 1823, there had been getting on for 49,000 pubs in England and Wales, or one for every 260 people. Now it is more like one for every 1,000 people.

  But then the puritans were not completely wrong either. There is some disturbing link between the English and alcohol, which has been recognised across Europe at least since the twelfth century – where a surviving guidebook describes each nationality: the English, they say, are always drunk – and have ‘tails’.

  What the tails meant is anyone’s guess, but the drunkenness remains. Perhaps it doesn’t matter compared to the tankard and the open fire, and the traditional companionship of pub life, and the old pub signs creaking in the wind outside – witness to 1,000 years of history (one historian, Samuel Wildman, argued that the sign of the ‘Black Horse’ went back to King Arthur’s day).

  There remains something about an authentic English pub – if you can find them after wading through the fake beams and horse brasses, the books and pictures bought in bulk from house clearances. They are still deeply conservative places, as witnessed by the story told in 1972 by the writer Ben Davis about watching a woman eating lunch without having bought a drink. ‘Can I have a glass of water then?’ she said. ‘What do you want?’ said the landlord. ‘A fucking wash or something?’