Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  What you do with your pet can also be a class indicator. Generally, only the middle-middles and below go in for dog shows, cat shows and obedience tests, and only these classes would put a sticker in the back window of their car proclaiming their passion for a particular breed of dog or warning other motorists that their vehicle may contain ‘Show Cats in Transit’. The upper classes regard showing dogs and cats as rather vulgar, but showing horses and ponies is fine. There is no logic to any of this.

  Middle-middles and below are also more likely to dress up their dogs and cats in coloured collars, bows and other tweenesses – and if you see a dog with its name in inverted commas on its collar, the animal’s owners are almost certainly no higher than middle-middle. Upper-middle and upper-class dogs usually just wear plain brown leather collars. Only a certain type of rather insecure working-class male goes in for big, scary, aggressive-looking guard dogs (or bull terriers) with big, scary, studded, black collars.

  English pet-owners are highly unlikely to admit that their pet is a status signal, or that their choice of pet is in any way class-related. They will insist that they like Labradors (or springer spaniels, or whatever) because of the breed’s kind temperament. If you want to get them to reveal their hidden class anxieties, or if you just like causing trouble, you can try the canine equivalent of the Mondeo and Mercedes tests: put on your most innocent face, and tell a Labrador-owner, ‘Oh, I’d have seen you more as an Alsatian [or poodle, or chihuahua] sort of person.’

  If you are of a more kind and affable disposition, note that the quickest way to an English person’s heart, no matter what their class, is through their pet. Always praise people’s pets, and when you speak to our animals directly (which you should do as much as possible) remember that you are addressing our inner child. If you are a visitor eager to make friends with the natives, try to acquire or borrow a dog to act as a passport to conversation and as a chaperone.

  PROPS AND FACILITATORS – PUBLIC/SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

  If you do not have a dog, you will need to find another kind of passport to social contact. Which brings me neatly to the second type of English approach to leisure mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: the public/social pursuits and pastimes – sports, games, pubs, clubs and so on. All of these relate directly to our second main method of dealing with our social dis-ease: the ‘ingenious use of props and facilitators’ method.

  Rules of the Game

  It is no accident that almost all of the most popular sports and games played around the world today originated in England. Football, baseball, rugby and tennis were all invented here, and even when we did not actually invent a sport or game, the English were usually the first to lay down a proper, official set of rules for it (hockey, horseracing, polo, swimming, rowing, boxing – and even skiing, for heaven’s sake). And that’s not counting all the rather less athletic games and pastimes such as darts, pool, billiards, cards, cribbage and skittles. And let’s not forget hunting, shooting and fishing. We didn’t create or codify all of these, of course, but sports and games are widely recognised as an essential part of our culture, our heritage and our legacy – one cannot talk about Englishness without talking about sports and games.

  Testosterone Rules

  A number of students of Englishness have tried to explain the English obsession with games. Most of these commentators attempt to find historical explanations. Jeremy Paxman wonders whether the development of this obsession might have had something to do with ‘safety and prosperity and the availability of leisure time’ or perhaps ‘the fact that duelling was frowned upon earlier than in the rest of Europe meant there was a need to find alternative challenges’. Hmm, well, maybe. He comes closer with the observation that our great boys’ boarding schools had to ‘find ways of exercising the hormonally challenged’. But this is what I would call a ‘cross-cultural universal’, a valid reason for any human society to develop sports and games, and indeed one of the reasons every human society has done so. We all have testosterone-fuelled adolescent and post-adolescent males to deal with, and we all deal with them by trying to channel their potentially destructive aggression and other disruptive tendencies into relatively harmless sports and games.

  The universal testosterone problem cannot in itself explain why the English in particular should have developed so many of these pastimes, although I would argue that the young English male, being socially uneasy as well as hormonally challenged, has perhaps a more pressing need for such channelling. And the rest of us also need some means of overcoming our social inhibitions and dis-ease. The real reasons for the English love of games are perhaps best explained through an example from my research.

  The ‘Props and Facilitators’ Method

  It was during my study on pub etiquette that I began to understand the importance of games. In conversations with tourists, I found that, to foreign visitors, many English pubs seem more like children’s playgrounds than adult drinking-places. One American tourist I interviewed expressed his bewilderment at the number and variety of games in a local pub: ‘Look at this place! You’ve got a dartboard, a bar-billiards table, four different board games, and card games and dominoes and some weird thing with a box and a bunch of little sticks – and then you tell me this pub has a football team and a cricket team and quiz nights . . . You call this a bar? At home we’d call it a kindergarten!’ Fortunately for me, this scornful tourist had only noticed about a dozen or so typical pub games, and had not heard of all the more obscure regional eccentricities such as Aunt Sally, wellie-throwing, shove ha’penny, marrow-dangling, conger-cuddling and Wetton Toe Wrestling. Another equally puzzled but marginally more polite visitor asked, ‘What is it with you English? Why do you have to play all these silly games? Why can’t you just go to a bar and drink and talk like the rest of the world?’

  Somewhat defensively, I explained that the rest of the world is not as socially inhibited and inept as the English. We do not find it easy to initiate friendly conversation with strangers, or to develop closer relationships with fellow pubgoers. We need help. We need props. We need excuses to make contact. We need toys and sports and games that get us involved with each other.

  What works in the microcosm of the pub also works in English society as a whole. More so, in fact. If we need games and sports even in the special social microclimate of the pub, where the usual restraints are relaxed somewhat, and it is acceptable to strike up a conversation with a stranger, we clearly have an even greater need for such props and facilitators outside this sociable environment.

  The Self-delusion Rule

  But sports and games do not only provide the props we need to initiate and sustain social contact, they also prescribe the nature of that contact. This is not ‘random’ sociability, but sociability hedged about with a lot of rules and regulations, ritual and etiquette, both official and unofficial. The English are capable of engaging socially with each other, but we need clear and precise guidelines on what to do, what to say, and exactly when and how to do and say it. Games ritualise our social interactions, giving them a reassuring structure and sense of order. By focusing on the detail of the game’s rules and rituals, we can pretend that the game itself is really the point, and the social contact a mere incidental side-effect.

  In fact, it is the other way round: games are a means to an end, the end being the kind of sociable interaction and social bonding that other cultures seem to achieve without all this fuss, subterfuge and self-delusion. The English are human; we are social animals just like all other humans, but we have to trick ourselves into social interaction and bonding by disguising it as something else, such as a game of football, cricket, tennis, rugby, darts, pool, dominoes, cards, Scrabble, charades, wellie-throwing or toe-wrestling.

  Closet Patriotism and Effervescent Exceptions

  I have already mentioned that the English are mostly a nation of ‘closet patriots’ – we may feel proud of our country but, apart from a tiny minority, we are normally too inhibited and sque
amishly embarrassed, perhaps too cynical, to make a big gushy flag-waving fuss about it. Except over sport: big sporting events such as the London 2012 Olympic Games provide an antidote to our social dis-ease, a temporary remission from our usual Eeyorishness – an excuse to shed some of our inhibitions and be a bit more emotive and demonstrative.

  The 2012 Olympics were like a carnival or tribal festival, a period of ‘cultural remission’, ‘legitimised deviance’ and ‘festive inversion’, where some of the usual social norms and unwritten rules are temporarily suspended and we behave in ways we wouldn’t normally – dancing in the streets, waving national flags, shouting, cheering and indulging in other wildly disinhibited acts such as maybe even talking to strangers.

  Sport can also have a unifying effect, to which even the socially inhibited English are not immune. At big sporting events, spectators experience a special sort of communal energy. Anthropologists have a bunch of jargon words for this – Durkheim called it ‘collective effervescence’, Victor Turner called it ‘communitas’ – a sort of special crowd-energy that has a bonding and unifying effect. Some psychologists use the terms ‘limbic resonance’, ‘emotional contagion’ or ‘mood contagion’ to describe this effect. To put it very simply, when others around us are clapping, dancing, laughing and cheering, the mirror neurons in our brains are activated and mimic these actions, and there is a link between these neurons and the limbic system, so our emotions are activated as well: we feel happy and connected. (This even works to some extent for those only watching on television: ‘laugh tracks’ on comedy programmes provide people alone at home with the sense that others around them are laughing, and this is probably all about limbic resonance. The same applies to television viewers watching the cheering crowds at the Olympics.) These effects are common to all nations, of course, but only the English need the huge drug-like collective ‘high’ of a sporting event as big as the Olympics to get strangers on trains to exchange a few friendly words with each other.

  And, of course, it didn’t last. As I predicted in some radio interviews just before the London Olympics, there was a brief outbreak of un-English sociability on public transport during the Games, but we very quickly reverted to our usual contact-avoidance, hiding behind our newspapers, tablets and laptops, and only breaking the taboo on talking to strangers when there is a delay or disruption to grumble about. It has been said that if moaning were an Olympic sport, the English would win all the gold medals. But looking on the bright side, we should remember that moaning – or, rather, our special kind of humorous mock-moaning – is probably the primary form of social bonding in this country, way ahead of sport and much more reliably effective. Olympic effervescence is ephemeral, but we can always rely on the delayed and cancelled trains that allow us to indulge in a more traditional, comfortable form of social bonding: exchanging the same old familiar grumpy jokes about ‘the wrong sort of leaves’ and saying, ‘Typical!’ a lot.

  Games Etiquette

  Each of our many games and sports has its rules – not just the official rules of the game itself, which the English like to be as complex as possible, but an equally complex set of unofficial, unwritten rules governing the comportment and social interactions of the players and spectators. Again, pub games are a good example. Even in this sociable microclimate, our diffidence and reluctance to intrude on other people means that we are more comfortable when there are established ‘rules of introduction’ to follow. Knowing the etiquette, the correct form of address, gives us the courage to take the initiative. Even if we are feeling in need of company, we are unlikely to approach a stranger who is sitting at a table with his pint, or with his mates, but if they are playing pool or darts or bar-billiards, there is not only a valid excuse to make an approach, but also a set formula to follow, which makes the whole process much less daunting.

  For pool and bar-billiards players, the formula is straightforward. You simply approach a player and ask, ‘Is it winner stays on?’ This traditional opening is both an enquiry about the local rules on turn-taking, which may vary from region to region and even from pub to pub, and an invitation to play the winner of the current game. The reply may be ‘Yeah, coins down,’ or ‘That’s right – name on the board.’ This is both an acceptance of your invitation, and an instruction on the pub’s system for securing the table, which may be by placing your coins on the corner of the table, or writing your name on a nearby chalkboard. Either way, it is understood that you will pay for the game, so there is no need for any embarrassing breach of the money-talk taboo. If the reply to your original question is simply ‘Yes,’ you may ask, ‘Is it coins down?’ or ‘Is it names on the board?’

  Having completed the correct introductions, you may now stand around and watch the current game, gradually joining in the banter as you wait your turn. Further enquiries about local rules are the most acceptable way of initiating conversation. These usually begin with the same somewhat impersonal ‘Is it . . .’ as in ‘Is it two shots on the black?’ or ‘Is it stick pocket or any pocket?’ rather than using anything so intimate as a personal pronoun. Once you are accepted as a player, the unwritten etiquette also allows you to make appropriate comments on the game. Well, actually there is only one entirely safe and appropriate comment you can make, particularly among male players, and this is to say, ‘Shot,’ when a player makes a particularly good shot. Perhaps to compensate, this one word is pronounced in a drawn-out fashion, as though it had at least two syllables: ‘Sho-ot.’ Other players may also tease and taunt each other over bad shots (the same drawn-out ‘sho-ot’ can be used ironically in this context), but newcomers wisely tend to avoid making any derogatory remarks until they are better acquainted.

  Sex Differences and the ‘Three-emotions Rule’

  There are some sex differences in the codes of conduct governing pub games, and indeed many sports and games played in other contexts. As a rule of thumb, males are supposed to adopt a strong, stiff-upper-lip, manly approach to the game, both as players and as spectators. It is not done to jump about and exclaim over one’s own or another player’s luck or skill. In darts, for example, swearing at one’s mistakes, and making sarcastic comments on those of one’s opponents is allowed, but clapping one’s hands in glee upon scoring a double-twenty, and excessive laughter on failing to hit the board at all, are regarded as ‘girly’ and inappropriate.

  The usual ‘three-emotions rule’ applies. English males are allowed to express three emotions: surprise, providing it is conveyed by shouting or swearing; anger, also communicated in expletives; and elation/triumph, displayed in the same manner. For the untrained eye and ear, it can be difficult to distinguish between the three permitted emotions, but English males have no trouble grasping the nuances. Female players and spectators are allowed a much wider range of acceptable emotions, and a much more extensive vocabulary with which to express them. This often seems to happen – that one sex is required to be ‘more English’ than the other, in a certain context. Here, males are subject to more restrictions than females, but in other contexts – such as, say, the giving and receiving of compliments – the unwritten rules place more complex constraints on female behaviour. It may all balance out, but my suspicion is that, overall, the rules of Englishness are probably a bit harder on males than on females.

  The Fair-play Rule

  The English concern with fair play is, as we have seen, an underlying theme in almost all aspects of our life and culture, and in the context of sports and games, fair play is still – despite the rantings of the doom-mongers – an ideal to which we cling, even if we do not always manage to live up to it.

  At the top national and international level, sport has become, for the English as for all other nations, a rather more cut-throat business, and there seems to be more focus on winning and on the exploits of individual superstar ‘personalities’ (a misnomer if ever there was one) than on high-minded notions of team spirit and sportsmanship. Until, that is, there is some accusation of cheating, unfairnes
s, loutishness or unsporting behaviour, whereupon we all seethe with righteous indignation – or cringe with shame and embarrassment, and tell each other that the country is going to the dogs. Both reactions suggest that the sporting ethic, which the English are often credited with inventing, is still very important to us.

  In Anyone for England?, one of the many premature obituaries for English national identity, Clive Aslet bemoans the loss of all these gentlemanly ideals, claiming that even cricket, ‘the game synonymous with the sporting ideal, has changed beyond recognition in terms of the spirit in which it is played’. But, apart from the rather unseemly row between Ian Botham and Imran Khan in 1996, the worst sin of which he accuses the England team is that the players ‘make little effort to cultivate an image of gentlemanliness through their dress’. He objects to the baseball caps, stubble, T-shirts and shorts worn by off-duty cricketers. He refers to the ‘ungentlemanly tactics’ of national players, without giving any examples, and then is ‘shocked to learn from cricketing friends’ that these are even being adopted at village-cricket level. Intimidating ‘war-paint’ and helmets, as seen in televised international matches, are sometimes worn; opposing batsmen, it seems, are no longer always clapped to the crease; and the Woodmancote team, from Hampshire, was expelled from the National Village Cricket Knock-out Tournament for being ‘too professional’. The first two of these examples do not strike me as particularly shocking, and the third seems to indicate that, if anything, the old values of amateurism and fair play are very much alive and well in village cricket.