Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Being English, I had always rather taken it for granted that this avoidance of money-talk was normal, that everyone found it easier to discuss the taboo subject in writing, but my well-travelled informants were adamant that this is a peculiarly English problem. ‘I never get this anywhere else in Europe,’ said one. ‘Everywhere else you can be up-front about money. They’re not ashamed or embarrassed about it; you just talk normally, they don’t try to skirt round it or feel they have to apologise or make a joke out of it – that’s it, with the English you always get that sort of nervous laughter, someone always tries to make a joke out of it.’

  The joking is, of course, another coping mechanism, our favourite way of dealing with anything we find frightening or uncomfortable or embarrassing. Even high-powered City bankers and brokers – people who have to talk about money all day long – are affected by the money-talk taboo. One merchant banker told me that some types of dealing and negotiating are OK because ‘it’s not real money’, but that when negotiating over his own fees he suffers from the same squeamish discomfort as everyone else. Other City financiers echoed this, and explained that, like everyone else, money-men cope with embarrassment about money-talk by joking. When things go wrong, one of them told me, ‘You’ll say, “So, are we still on your Christmas-card list?”’

  ‘What about the image we all have of bankers bragging about their huge bonuses?’ I asked. ‘Sorry, touchy subject, I know, but would that be an exception to the taboo?’

  My informants grimaced and embarked on long-winded explanations, the gist of which was that boasts about bonuses, like all ‘personal’ money-talk, must be heavily disguised as either humorous banter or mock-moaning.

  To be honest, I am somewhat puzzled by the money-talk taboo, despite my own instinctive adherence to it. Introspection does not really help me to figure out the origins of the English squeamishness about money-talk at work. Our distaste for money-talk in everyday social life is well established: you never ask what someone earns, or disclose your own income; you never ask what price someone paid for anything, or announce the cost of any of your own possessions. In social contexts, there is a sort of ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo in that it can be explained, to some extent, with reference to other basic ‘rules of Englishness’ to do with modesty, privacy, polite egalitarianism and other forms of hypocrisy. But to extend the money-talk taboo to the world of work and business seems, to put it mildly, perverse. Surely this should be an exception to the rule – the one arena in which, for obvious practical reasons, we set aside or suspend our prissy distaste and ‘talk turkey’, like everyone else. But, then, that would be expecting the English to behave rationally.

  While I’m being ruthlessly honest, I have to admit that saying there is an ‘internal logic’ to the money-talk taboo is a bit of a cop-out. Yes, the taboo is clearly related, in a ‘grammatical’ sort of way, to the rules of privacy, modesty and polite egalitarianism, but this is how anthropologists always try to explain the more outlandishly irrational beliefs or grotesque practices of the tribes and societies they study. A belief or practice may seem irrational (or in some cases downright stupid or cruel), but, we argue, it makes sense in relation to other elements of the cultural system of beliefs and practices and values of the tribe or community in question. Using this clever little trick, we can find an ‘internal logic’ for all sorts of daft and apparently unintelligible notions and customs, from witchcraft and rain-dances to female circumcision. And, yes, it does help to make them more intelligible, and it is important to understand why people do these things. But it doesn’t make them any less daft.

  Not that I’m putting the English money-talk taboo on a par with female circumcision: I’m just saying that sometimes anthropologists should come clean and acknowledge that a particular native belief or practice is pretty bloody weird, and perhaps not entirely in the natives’ own best interest. At least in this case I can’t be accused of being ethnocentric or colonial or patronising (anthropological equivalents of blasphemy, for which one can be excommunicated) as the daft taboo I am denigrating is an unwritten rule of my own native culture, and one that I blindly and slavishly obey.

  The Income-talk Taboo

  The taboo on asking what someone earns, or disclosing one’s own income, is possibly the strictest of all English money-talk taboos. I recently observed a perfect example of this, while chatting with a couple of new English acquaintances – two young male students (let’s call them George and Mark) – over a cup of tea at a neighbour’s flat. One of the young men, George, mentioned that he had lived for a while in America as a child, so naturally I asked him about any cultural differences he might have noticed. He talked about being shocked by how willing Americans are to ask people what they earn, and to reveal their own incomes.

  Two minutes later, the conversation moved on a bit, and George mentioned that on their return from America, his father had changed careers and become a schoolteacher. Here is the dialogue that ensued:

  MARK (speaking very clearly, with a straight face): Oh, so what did he earn?

  GEORGE (sounding slightly confused): What did I learn?

  MARK (enunciating even more clearly): No. I asked, What Did He Earn?

  GEORGE (even more puzzled): Oh, sorry – what did he learn?

  At this point, Mark, my neighbour and I burst out laughing. ‘Oh, that is so English!’ I giggled. ‘The question is so utterly unthinkable here that you can’t even hear it – you assume Mark must be asking something else. Even I thought I must have misheard him the first time. It was only when he repeated the question that I realised he was playing a joke on you!’

  George finally twigged, joined in the laughter and said, ‘But I still didn’t get it! Even though we’d only just been discussing how Americans do this. That was so strange. It never even occurred to me that he could possibly be asking that question. My brain must have translated it into something more acceptable.’

  We chatted a bit more about the money-talk taboo, then moved on to other topics. George never did answer the question about his father’s salary, of course. No one expected him to: it was a question that could only ever have been asked as a joke.

  It is worth noting that this ultra-embarrassing question was not even about the current income of anyone in the room: it was a question about a father’s schoolteacher salary, many years ago. And yet still so unimaginable that our English ears couldn’t even hear it.

  Variations and the Yorkshire Inversion

  The money-talk taboo is a distinctively English behaviour code, but it is not universally observed. There are significant variations: southerners are generally more uncomfortable with money-talk than northerners, and the middle and upper classes tend to be more squeamish about it than the working classes. Indeed, middle- and upper-class children are often brought up to regard talking about money as ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’.

  In the world of business, observance of the taboo increases with seniority: whatever their individual class or regional origins, higher-ranking people in English companies are more likely to be squeamish about money-talk. Those from working-class and/or northern backgrounds may start out with little or no ‘natural’ embarrassment about money-talk, but as they rise through the ranks they learn to be awkward and uncomfortable, to make apologetic jokes, to procrastinate and avoid the issue.

  There are, however, pockets of stronger resistance to the money-talk taboo, particularly in Yorkshire, a county that prides itself on being forthright, blunt and plain-spoken, especially on matters that mincing, hesitant southerners find embarrassing, such as money. To illustrate this no-nonsense, no-frills attitude, Yorkshiremen jokingly describe a standard conversation between a Yorkshire travelling salesman and a Yorkshire shopkeeper as follows:

  SALESMAN (entering shop): ‘Owt?’

  SHOPKEEPER: ‘Nowt.’82

  SALESMAN leaves.

  This is a caricature, of course – most Yorkshire people are probably no more blunt than any other northern
ers – but it is a caricature with which a great many people from this area identify, and some actively do their best to live up to it. Far from beating about the bush, dithering and euphemising about money in the usual English manner, the proud-to-be-Yorkshire businessman will take a perverse pleasure in blatantly flouting the money-talk taboo – saying, directly and without jokes or preamble, ‘Right, and what’s all that going to cost me, then?’

  But this is not an exception that invalidates or even questions the rule. It is a deliberate, dramatic inversion of the rule – something that can only occur where a rule is well established and understood. It is the flip side of the same coin, not a different and separate coin. Blunt Yorkshiremen know that they are turning the rules upside-down: they do it on purpose; they make jokes about it; they take pride in their maverick, iconoclastic status within English culture. In most other cultures, their directness about money would pass without notice: it would simply be normal behaviour. In England, it is remarked upon, joked about, recognised as an aberration.

  It is also worth noting that despite the un-English bluntness of the salesman/shopkeeper scenario described above, the travelling salesman still politely refrains from any pushy insistence on actually selling anything to the shopkeeper. That would be unseemly – far too brash and un-English, even for an extreme caricature of a brash and un-English Yorkshireman.

  Class and the Vestigial Trade-prejudice Rule

  Without attempting to defend or justify the money-talk taboo, I can see that there might be historical explanations for this peculiar practice, as well as the rather circular ‘grammatical’ ones. I mentioned earlier that we still suffer from vestigial traces of a prejudice against ‘trade’, left over from the days when the aristocracy and landed gentry – and, indeed, anyone wishing to call himself a gentleman – lived off the rents from their land and estates, and did not engage in anything so vulgar as the making and selling of goods. Trade was low-class, and those who made their fortune by commerce were always quick to purchase a country estate and attempt to conceal all evidence of their former undesirable ‘connections’. In other words, the upper-class prejudice against trade was in fact shared by the lower social ranks, including those who were themselves engaged in trade.

  Every English school pupil’s essay on Jane Austen notes that while she pokes fun at the snobbish prejudices against trade of her time, she does not seriously question them – but schoolchildren are not told that residual, subconscious traces of the same snobberies are still implicit in English attitudes towards work and behaviour in the workplace. These prejudices are strongest among the upper classes, the upper-middle professional classes (that’s ‘professional’ in the old sense, meaning those belonging to one of the traditionally respectable professions, such as the law, medicine, the Church or the military) and the intelligentsia or chattering classes.

  These classes have a particularly ingrained distaste for the ‘bourgeois businessman’, but the stigmatisation of anyone involved in ‘sales’ is widespread. Even the makes of car associated with either wealthy businessmen (Mercedes) or sales representatives (Mondeo) are sneered at by the socially insecure of all classes – and remember the near-universal contempt for another breed of salesman, the estate agent.

  These examples indicate that the English prejudice against trade, as well as being eroded (though not eradicated), has shifted slightly since Austen’s time, in that the making of goods has become significantly more acceptable than the selling of them. Although, of course, the two are often inextricably connected, it seems to be the pushy, undignified, money-focused selling of things that we find most distasteful, and most untrustworthy. There is an unwritten rule – a truth universally acknowledged, even – to the effect that anyone selling anything is not to be trusted. Distrust of salesmen is clearly not a uniquely English trait, but our suspicion and scepticism, and above all our contemptuous distaste, seem to be more acute and more deep-seated than other cultures’. The English are less litigious than the Americans when we feel cheated or dissatisfied with what we are sold (despite some shifts towards greater litigiousness, our tendency is still to complain indignantly to each other, rather than tackling the source of our discontent) but our more marked mistrust and dislike of salesmen means that we tend to be less gullible in the first place.

  In other cultures, salesmen may not be trusted, but they are somehow socially accepted in a way that they are not among the English. In other parts of the world, selling things is regarded as a legitimate way of earning a living, and successful businessmen who have made their fortune by doing so are accorded a degree of respect. In England, money will buy you a lot of things, including access to power and influence, but it will not buy you any respect – quite the opposite, in fact: there seems to be almost as much of a taboo on making money as there is on talking about it. When the English describe someone as ‘rich’ or ‘wealthy’, we almost always do so with a slight sneer, and those who can be so described will rarely use these terms of themselves: they will admit, reluctantly, to being ‘quite well off, I suppose’. We may well be, as Orwell said, the most class-ridden country under the sun, but I think it is safe to say that in no other country is social class so completely independent of material wealth. And social acceptability in the wider sense is, if anything, inversely related to financial prosperity – there may be some surface sycophancy, but ‘fat cats’ are objects of contempt and derision, if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. If you do have the misfortune to be financially successful, it is bad manners to draw attention to the fact. You must play down your success, and appear ashamed of your wealth.

  It has been said that the main difference between the English system of social status based on class (that is, birth) and the American ‘meritocracy’ is that under the latter, because the rich and powerful believe that they deserve their wealth and power, they are more complacent, while under the former they tend to have a greater sense of social responsibility, more compassion towards those less privileged than themselves. I’m grossly oversimplifying the arguments – whole books have been written on this83 – but it may be that the English embarrassment about money and lack of respect for business success have something to do with this tradition.

  Having said that, it is clear that much of all this English squeamishness about money is sheer hypocrisy. The English are no less naturally ambitious, greedy, selfish or avaricious than any other nation – we just have more and stricter rules requiring us to hide, deny and repress these tendencies. Our modesty rules and rules of polite egalitarianism – which I believe are the ‘grammatical laws’ or ‘cultural DNA’ behind the money-talk taboo and the prejudice against business success – are a veneer, an exercise in collective self-delusion. The modesty we display is generally false, and our apparent reluctance to emphasise status differences conceals an acute consciousness of these differences. But, hey, at least we value these virtuous qualities, and obey the rules despite their often deleterious effect on our business dealings.

  THE MODERATION RULE

  The phrase ‘work hard, play hard’ became popular in England in the 1980s, and you will still quite often hear people use it to describe their exciting lifestyle and their dynamic approach to work and leisure. They are almost always lying. The English, on the whole, do not ‘work hard and play hard’: we do both, and most other things, in moderation. Of course, ‘work moderately, play moderately’ does not have quite the same ring to it, but I’m afraid it is a far more accurate description of typical English work and leisure habits. We work fairly diligently, and have a modest amount of fun in our free time.

  I will not be thanked for this rather dull portrait, so I should make it clear that it is not just an impression or subjective judgement: these are the findings not only of SIRC’s own quite extensive research on work habits and attitudes, but also of every other study I could find on this subject. Neither are these rather staid, conventional, conservative habits confined to the middle-aged or middle-class. Con
trary to popular opinion, the ‘youth of today’ are not feckless, irresponsible, thrill-seeking hedonists. If anything, both our own research and other surveys and studies have found that the young of all classes are more sensible, industrious, moderate and cautious than their parents’ generation. I find this rather worrying, as it suggests that unless our younger generation grows out of these middle-aged attitudes as they get older (which seems somewhat unlikely) the English will as a nation become even more ploddingly moderate than we are now.

  If you think I’m exaggerating either the extent or the dangers of English youthful moderation, a few examples from the SIRC research might help to convince you:

  Safe, Sensible, Bourgeois Aspirations

  In our survey, when asked where they would like to be in ten years’ time, nearly three quarters (72 per cent) of young people chose the safe, sensible options of being ‘settled down’ or ‘successful at work’, compared with just 38 per cent of the older generation. Only 20 per cent of 16–24-year-olds chose the more adventurous option of ‘travelling the world/living abroad’, compared with 28 per cent of 45–54-year-olds. The older age group was also twice as likely as the youngsters to want to be ‘footloose and fancy-free’. In discussion groups and informal interviews, when we asked about their aspirations in life, almost all young working people wanted to be ‘financially secure and stable’. Home ownership was a long-term goal.