Watching the English
Page 1
‘An entertaining, clever book. Read it.’—Daily Telegraph
‘What is Englishness? That is the question that social anthropologist Kate Fox set out to answer in her book Watching The English, which became an international bestseller. Now, ten years on, she has dug even deeper into our national foibles and eccentricities to update her study. The result is gloriously entertaining—and painfully accurate!’—Daily Mail
‘Inside I found all of my own observations that I had made about my fellow English folk but articulated with very sharp and witty prose.’—Vice
‘Watching the English . . . will make you laugh out loud (“Oh God. I do that!”) and cringe simultaneously (“Oh God. I do that as well.”). This is a hilarious book which just shows us for what we are . . . beautifully-observed. It is a wonderful read for both the English and those who look at us and wonder why we do what we do. Now they’ll know.’
Birmingham Post
‘Fascinating reading.’
Oxford Times
‘The book captivates at the first page. It’s fun. It’s also embarrassing. “Yes . . . yes,” the reader will constantly exclaim. “I’m always doing that”.’
Manchester Evening News
‘There’s a qualitative difference in the results, the telling detail that adds real weight. Fox brings enough wit and insight to her portrayal of the tribe to raise many a smile of recognition. She has a talent for observation, bringing a sharp and humorous eye and ear to everyday conventions, from the choreography of the English queue to the curious etiquette of weather talk.’
The Tablet
‘It’s a fascinating and insightful book, but what really sets it apart is the informal style aimed squarely at the intelligent layman.’
City Life, Manchester
‘Fascinating . . . Every aspect of English conversation and behaviour is put under the microscope. Watching the English is a thorough study which is interesting and amusing.’
Western Daily Press
‘Enjoyable good fun, with underlying seriousness – a book to dip into at random and relish for its many acute observations.’
Leicester Mercury
Also by Kate Fox
The Racing Tribe: Watching the Horsewatchers
Drinking and Public Disorder
(with Dr Peter Marsh)
This edition first published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing in the United States of America in 2014.
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
Tel: 020 3122 6000
Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Hachette Book Group
53 State Street
Boston, MA 02109, USA
Tel: (617) 523 3801
www.nicholasbrealey.com
© 2014, 2008 by Kate Fox
Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headlin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
2019181716151412345678910
eISBN: 978-1-85788-917-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fox, Kate.
Watching the English : the hidden rules of English behaviour / by Kate Fox. -- Revised and updated.
pages cm
Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.National characteristics, English. 2.England--Social life and customs--21st century.I. Title.
DA566.4.F67 2014
390.0941--dc23
2014010674
To Henry, William, Sarah and Katharine
CONTENTS
Preface to the American Edition
Foreword
Introduction – Anthropology at Home
PART ONE: CONVERSATION CODES
The Weather
Grooming-talk
Humour Rules
Linguistic Class Codes
Emerging Talk-rules: The Mobile Phone
Pub-talk
Racing Talk
Squaddie-Talk and Two Types of Rider-Talk
PART TWO: BEHAVIOUR CODES
Home Rules
Rules of the Road
Work to Rule
Rules of Play
Dress Codes
Food Rules
Rules of Sex
Rites of Passage
Conclusion: Defining Englishness
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
References
Index
PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
Since Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour was first published in the UK, I have had many letters and emails from Americans – both visitors and immigrants – about how the book has helped them understand and interact with the English.
Somewhat to my surprise, and slight anxiety, it seems that many Americans in the UK are using the book as a kind of ‘how to be English’ manual, never venturing out to a pub, an English home, or a business meeting without consulting the relevant chapters for ‘instruction’ on what to expect and how to behave. Some even go so far as to carry my book with them at all times – and one couple told me they now refer to it simply as ‘The Book’ (‘you know, like the Bible’) as in: ‘What does The Book say we should do in this situation?’ or ‘No honey, don’t you remember The Book says English people will cringe with embarrassment if you say that!’
I’ve also had quite a few letters from Americans married to English people, telling me that the book has proved invaluable in helping them understand the quirks and foibles of their English partners. Often, these poor souls had been under the impression for many years that their partners’ bizarre behaviour and strange beliefs were personal peculiarities, or even symptoms of mental illness, until my book revealed that they were ‘just being English.’ Several correspondents claim that Watching the English has saved their marriages.
Perhaps the most unlikely and amusing example of this was the young American anthropology student who came up to me after a lecture I gave at Oxford University and said, without preamble, ‘I am so grateful to you! Your book totally saved my relationship!’ ‘Gosh,’ I said, a bit taken aback by such an intimate disclosure. ‘Really? Er, how? I mean, which bit of the book did you find helpful?’ ‘The section on class differences in pea-eating,’ she replied.
I thought she must be joking, but she was entirely serious. She had been terrified of meeting her English boyfriend’s upper-middle-class parents, knowing that they were very snobbish and would look down on her as a crass, uncouth, low-class American. So when they invited her to dinner, she diligently studied and committed to memory the chapter on food rules, including the section on pea-eating, in which I explain that the upper-/upper-middle-class method of eating peas involves squashing the peas onto the convex back of your fork with your knife. This is of course a most perverse and impractical way of eating peas, but the obvious alternative – turning the fork prongs-up and scooping up the peas, as any sane person would do – is regarded as ‘common’ and frowned upon by the higher social echelons.
Fortunately for my new fan, peas were served at the dreaded dinner, and she duly ate them in the ludicrous upper-class English manner. The snobby mother could hardly contain her delight. ‘Look, dear!’ she nudged her husband and whispered, ‘Look how she’s eating her peas – she’s one of us!’ From that moment on, the parents’ initial frosty wariness miraculously thawed, and their son’s girlfriend was welcomed
into the family.
England and America are, as George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, ‘two countries divided by a common language’. This common language, and the so-called Special Relationship between our countries, lead many American visitors and immigrants to expect that we will share a common culture, attitudes, values, habits, and so on. They eventually discover that this is not the case, but the experience of ‘acculturation’ is often more frustrating for them than for other visitors and immigrants, because of these high expectations of compatibility.
Still, they mostly seem to cope and adjust rather better than I did as a child, when my family immigrated to the US. I was only about 5 or 6 at the time but already quite set in my English ways. For the entire 6 years that we lived in the US, I refused to adopt even a hint of an American accent. The New Jersey twang offended my aesthetic sensibilities (‘sounds horrid,’ was how I phrased it – ghastly little prig that I was). At my first school, I also refused point blank to pledge allegiance to the flag, as we were expected to do every morning. My objections to this were ostensibly on the grounds that I was English and therefore should not be asked to pledge allegiance to a foreign flag – but actually I just found the whole business excruciatingly embarrassing. What I was really saying was ‘I am English, I should not be asked to put my hand on my heart and make a big sentimental patriotic fuss – we don’t do that where I come from.’
As the daughter of an anthropologist, I really should have been rather better at adapting to native customs. My father was already training me to be an ethnographer, a ‘participant observer,’ but I was by nature much more of an observer than a participant. And an arrogant little observer at that. I am told that on one occasion, when I was about 7, an American friend of my parents’ bent down, tweaked my cheek and asked, in what I clearly felt was a patronizing tone, ‘So, what do you think of America, then?’ I gave the matter due frowning consideration for a moment or two before replying, ‘Well, I think it will probably be all right when it’s finished.’
My father tells this little story with great pride, fondly imagining that this was some sort of profound cultural insight on my part. I suspect, however, that I was merely being obnoxious.
My father stayed in America, and after an interlude in France and then England, my mother and 2 sisters also returned to the States – all of them eventually becoming American citizens. My sisters have in fact spent so much of their lives there that they are in many ways more American than English. I made a much better fist of being French than I did of being American (I was an adolescent by then and, like all adolescents, desperate to fit in). When I finally returned to England, at the age of 16, I was obliged to re-learn the rules of Englishness – many of which, to be honest, I found rather silly.
But ‘in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,’ I remain, like the Gilbert and Sullivan character, thoroughly English. And when my ‘American’ mother and youngest sister eventually came back to their native land, I found myself having to remind them of all the unwritten cultural rules they had forgotten. This experience was part of the inspiration for Watching the English, so I did quite often have an American reader in mind as I was writing the book.
Having said that, this is not and was never intended to be a guide book or an instruction manual. It is simply my attempt to understand and define my own native culture. It is somewhat unusual for an anthropologist’s work to be critically scrutinized by the ‘tribe’ she is writing about, and to be honest I was somewhat apprehensive about this, especially as the book is a warts-and-all portrait, which pokes fun at our daft customs and irrational beliefs.
So I was surprised when the book became a big bestseller here in the UK, selling over a quarter of a million copies so far. I think this is because it has come at a time when the English are having a bit of an identity crisis. What with the ‘loss,’ through devolution, of Scotland and Wales, debates about our membership of the European Union and concerns about globalization, we have been rather thrown back on ourselves and forced to re-examine what it really means to be English. So any book that attempts to define Englishness is bound to be popular – especially one that allows us to indulge in one of our favourite national pastimes: laughing at ourselves.
An American friend pointed out to me that ‘American readers will enjoy this book even more, as we get to laugh without wincing!’
I would like to dedicate this US edition to my ‘transatlantic’ sisters, Eleanor and Anne, with thanks for all their helpful insights and encouragement.
FOREWORD
I know this is going to sound like typical English false modesty, but I was truly surprised when Watching the English became a big bestseller – and I am still amazed by its continued popularity. The book has sold over half a million copies, been translated into many languages, received many rave reviews (as well as a few stinkers, of course) and all the usual hoohah.
Why? What can explain all this enthusiasm for a little pop-anthropology book about English behaviour?
Its success is almost entirely down to luck, no doubt, but in this case I think my good fortune may have something to do with what prompted me, ten years ago now, to write this book in the first place. I am often asked why I did it, and can only reply honestly, even though it makes me sound like a frightful geek, that it was because I didn’t fully understand Englishness and this was keeping me awake at night. I know, I should have taken this as a cue to get a life. Instead, I read every book, article and research paper I could find on the subject, but still felt puzzled and frustrated – not to mention somewhat grumpy from lack of sleep. There was only one solution: if I really wanted to understand and define the English national character, I would have to do the research and figure it out for myself.
I can only assume that an awful lot of other people are equally perplexed by the English – including hundreds of thousands of English people. They may not be puzzled to the point of severe insomnia, but at least enough to splash out on a book that might help them to understand the inhabitants of this small, soggy, enigmatic island.
Perhaps I am also lucky to have published this book at a time when we English are having a bit of an identity wobble. Nothing as dramatic as a full-blown ‘national identity crisis’, as some have called it. Both the big fuss and the earnest navel-gazing implied by the term ‘crisis’ would be unseemly and un-English, so I’m sticking with ‘wobble’. But I believe that various factors, including devolution (the ‘loss’ of Scotland and Wales), globalisation and immigration, have caused a degree of uncomfortable uncertainty about our national identity.
Oh – and it probably helped a bit that I obeyed one of the fundamental rules of Englishness, the one I call the Importance of Not Being Earnest. Earnest books about English national identity (some of them truly excellent) have not done so well, despite the wobble. Or perhaps because of it: in times of self-doubt and insecurity, the English take refuge in humour. And although this book has a fairly serious purpose, and is based on many years of solid research, I was writing to entertain the ‘intelligent general reader’, rather than to impress other anthropologists. This was no great hardship for me, as I am very English, find it hard to take things too seriously, and seem to be congenitally incapable of writing even a page without at least one or two little jokes.
Given that I had made no effort whatsoever to impress earnest academics, I was rather taken aback to find that Watching the English was being taught on the anthropology syllabus at a number of distinguished universities (and not, as I initially suspected, as a dire-warning example of how not to do anthropology). I found myself giving lectures and seminars at Oxford, Brown, University College London, Sussex, Pisa, etc. – and even the big scary Christmas Lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. At one of the universities where I lectured, the head of department told me that 50 per cent of new applicants cited my book as their inspiration for choosing to study anthropology. Fortunately, enough purist academic anthropologists still thoroughly disapprove of my li
ght-hearted books for me to retain at least some vestiges of my maverick-outsider status.
I make no apology for my continued refusal, in this new edition, to pander to this stuffy minority by trying to show off my extensive reading, command of fancy jargon, mastery of abstruse concepts, ability to obfuscate simple ones, and all the other stuff that might make the book more palatable to them. Of course, there are many areas where I have no such impressive knowledge to show off, even if I wished to do so – where I am not so much ‘dumbing down’ as just plain dumb. But I firmly believe that any anthropological insight of genuine value or interest can, and should, be expressed in terms that a non-academic can understand – and ideally even enjoy. Whether I’ve achieved anything that might qualify as an interesting insight, or expressed things clearly or amusingly, is another question, but at least I try.
And, much as I enjoy trying, when my publishers asked for a revised edition, nearly a decade after Watching the English was first published, I was initially reluctant. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I know the world may have turned upside-down and inside-out quite a bit in the past ten years, and here in England we’ve had our share of terrorist bombings, economic crises, political upheavals, the Olympics and so on – but the English haven’t changed. In this book, I was searching for the “defining characteristics of Englishness”, and these should by definition be fairly timeless or, at least, not subject to any radical change in such a short period.’
I pointed out that neither my own continuing research nor any other studies or events had led me to revise my main conclusions. Quite the opposite: my own subsequent research on English behaviour, the findings of other relevant studies, and English reactions to events over the past decade have all actually confirmed and reinforced my original ‘diagnosis’.
On the other hand, I thought, perhaps this new research evidence and these fresh observations might in themselves be of interest, both to readers of the original book and to new readers. On some aspects of Englishness, for example, I now have survey data to add weight to my original fieldwork findings. On others, I have more extensive field-research or experiments to back up early observations and hunches. A few intrepid readers have even taken it upon themselves to replicate some of my experiments, and I can report on their results. The ‘defining characteristics’ of Englishness remain essentially unchanged, but there are now some qualifications to add, some subtle nuances I hadn’t noticed before, some emerging behaviour codes that need deciphering . . .