Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Even Aslet admits that people have been mourning the demise of this sporting ethic for at least a century – indeed, the obituaries started almost as soon as the Victorians invented the gentlemanly ‘sporting ideal’ in the first place. The English have a habit of inventing ‘traditions’ out of thin air, to suit the spirit of the times, and then almost immediately waxing mournfully nostalgic about them, as though they were a vital and now tragically dying part of our cultural heritage.

  Which brings me to football. And the modern evil of football hooliganism, of course. The subject of football hooliganism was raised by participants in all of SIRC’s discussion-groups on national identity, and chosen as a core feature of our national character by nearly 30 per cent of survey respondents. And football violence is always wheeled out as Exhibit A by those who complain that the country is going to the dogs, that we have become a nation of louts, that sport isn’t what it used to be, and so on. These complainers admittedly constitute quite a large proportion of the population, but that is an indication of our Eeyorish love of moaning and national self-flagellation, rather than evidence for the truth of our moans.

  What all the mourners and moaners fail to understand is that football violence is nothing new. You know the well-worn joke about ‘I went to a fight and a football match broke out’? Well, that’s pretty much how football started. The game of football has been associated with violence since its origins in thirteenth-century England. Medieval football matches were essentially pitched battles between the young men of rival villages and towns. They involved hundreds of ‘players’, and were often used as opportunities to settle old feuds, personal arguments and land disputes. Some forms of ‘folk-football’ existed in other countries (such as the German Knappen and the Florentine calcio in costume), but the roots of modern football are in these violent English rituals.

  The much more restrained, disciplined form of the game with which we are now familiar was the reformed pastime of the Victorians, but the violent traditions and rivalries have persisted, mainly among spectators, on the terraces and in the towns. Only two quite brief periods in English history – the inter-war years and about a decade or so following the Second World War – have been relatively free of football-related violence. Historically, these periods are the exception rather than the rule. So I’m sorry, but I cannot accept modern football hooliganism as evidence of a recent decline in sporting manners or values.

  In any case, the rule or ideal I am concerned with here is not the entire Victorian gentlemanly package, but just the basic notion of fair play, which is not necessarily incompatible with a desire to win, or with inelegant dress, or with financial gain and commercial sponsorship – or, for that matter, with violence. My colleague Peter Marsh (among others) has shown that human violence – including specifically English football-hooligan violence – is not a random free-for-all but a rule-governed affair, in which considerations of fairness may often play a part. Football violence is not as widespread, or indeed as violent, as it is cracked up to be. There is a lot of aggressive chanting and taunting, some intimidating displays and threats, and a few scuffles, but serious physical violence is actually relatively uncommon. The hooligans’ aim is to scare rival fans into running away, and then jeer at their cowardice, not to beat them to a pulp. A typical football chant (this one sung to the tune of ‘Seasons in the Sun’) encapsulates the hooligans’ mission:

  We had joy, we had fun, we had Swindon on the run

  But the joy didn’t last, cos the bastards ran too fast!

  I am not trying to whitewash or defend football hooligans here. They are loud, ill-mannered and often racist. All I am saying is that they do have their own codes of conduct, and that ‘fair play’ is very much part of the etiquette governing their aggressive and violent encounters.

  The Underdog Rule

  In 1990, the Tory MP Norman Tebbit caused much outrage and uproar when he complained that too many Asian immigrants in Britain failed what he called the ‘cricket test’ – by cheering for India or Pakistan when these countries played England at cricket, rather than cheering for England. His remarks were aimed primarily at second-generation Asian and Caribbean immigrants, whom he accused of having ‘split loyalties’, when they should be demonstrating their Britishness by supporting the England cricket team. ‘When people come to a new country, they should be prepared to immerse themselves totally and utterly in that country,’ he declared.

  The racism, ignorance and arrogance of the ‘Tebbit Test’, as it came to be known, are quite breathtaking. Was Tebbit suggesting that Asian immigrants in Britain should follow the shining example we provided as uninvited residents in their countries? And for whom would he suggest that English settlers in Australia should cheer, when England plays Australia in their adopted home? And what about Scottish and Welsh people living in England – whom should they support? Did he realise that the Scots always, on principle, cheer for whatever country is playing against England? As do many members of the cynical English intelligentsia, among whom any display of patriotism, particularly over sport, is regarded as deeply unsophisticated. Not to mention all the other English people who just find patriotic fervour somewhat embarrassing, and would feel silly and self-conscious if obliged to cheer for England. Should we all be denied full citizenship?

  But even leaving all of this aside, the ‘Tebbit Test’ would still not work as a test of Englishness. Those who are truly, culturally ‘English’ – whatever their race or country of origin – can be distinguished by their automatic, instinctive inclination to cheer for the underdog. I am by no means the first to notice this trait: the English tendency to support the underdog is one of those national stereotypes that I was determined to ‘get inside’ during my field research. I saw plenty of examples, but the one that sticks in my mind, the one that really helped me to understand the depth and complexities of the underdog rule, was the men’s final at Wimbledon in 2002.

  Tennis buffs apparently found this match rather dull, for a Wimbledon final, but I was there to watch the spectators, not the players, and I found it fascinating. The match was between the world-famous, top-seed Australian player Lleyton Hewitt, and a virtually unknown Argentine called David Nalbandian, who had never even played at Wimbledon before. The result was a predictably easy victory for the Australian champion, who beat Nalbandian 6–1, 6–3, 6–2.

  At the start of the match, all the English spectators were cheering for Nalbandian, clapping and whooping and shouting, ‘Come on, David!’ every time he scored a point or even made a good shot (or whatever it’s called in tennis), while Hewitt only got a few token, polite claps. When I asked the English spectators around me why they were supporting the Argentine – particularly given that there was no great love between England and Argentina; indeed, we had been at war not so long ago – they explained that nationality was irrelevant, that Nalbandian was the underdog, highly unlikely to win, and therefore obviously deserved their support. They seemed surprised that I should have to ask such a question, and several people even spelt out the rule for me – ‘You always support the underdog’; ‘You have to support the underdog.’ Their tone suggested that I really should already know this, that it was a fundamental law of nature.

  Fine, I thought, good, another ‘rule of Englishness’ in the bag. Feeling rather smug, I watched complacently for a bit, and was just beginning to get bored, and thinking about maybe sloping off in search of an ice-cream, when something strange happened. Hewitt did something particularly good (don’t ask me what, I don’t understand tennis) and the people around me started whooping and cheering and clapping him. ‘Eh?’ I said. ‘Hang on. I thought you were supporting Nalbandian, the underdog? Why are you now cheering for Hewitt?’ The explanations offered by the English spectators were a bit less clear-cut, but the gist was that Hewitt was, after all, playing exceptionally well, and that everyone had been cheering for Nalbandian, because he was the underdog, which meant that poor Hewitt, despite playing brilliantly, was getting little
or no support and encouragement from the crowd, which seemed rather unfair, so they felt sorry for him, out there all alone with everyone cheering his opponent, so they were cheering for him to redress the balance a bit. In other words, Hewitt, the overdog (is that a word? never mind – you know what I mean), had somehow become the underdog, the one who deserved their support.

  For a while, that is. I was now alert, shaken out of my complacency, and paying close attention to the behaviour of the spectators, so when the cheering for Hewitt dwindled, and the spectators began giving all their support to Nalbandian again, I was ready with my questions: ‘Now what? Why aren’t you cheering for Hewitt any more? Is he not playing so well?’ No, apparently he was playing even better. And that was the point. Hewitt was now clearly heading for an easy win. Nalbandian was struggling, was going to be ‘slaughtered’, had absolutely no chance – so obviously it was only fair to give him all the noisy vocal encouragement and praise, and only clap politely for the all-conquering overdog Hewitt.

  So, in the logic of English fair play, you must always support the underdog, but too much support for the underdog can be unfair on the overdog, who then becomes a sort of honorary underdog, whom you must support until balance is restored, or until the real underdog is clearly going to lose, at which point you must support the real underdog again. Simple, really. Once you know the rules. Or at least at Wimbledon it was relatively simple, as there could be no doubt as to who was the real underdog. When this is not immediately obvious, there can be difficulties, as the English dither over who is most deserving of their cheers; and further problems can arise when an English player (or team) happens to be the overdog, as fairness demands that we give at least some token support to the underdog opposition.

  A top-level English athlete (multiple Olympic gold medallist) told me that this English habit of supporting the underdog is most irritating – ‘Drives me nuts’ were his exact words – for competitors like him, who are, of course, almost always in the ‘overdog’ category. It must indeed be rather galling, when one has worked so hard to get to the top of one’s sport, to hear English supporters dutifully cheering on one’s less talented rivals.

  Football fans, the most patriotic of sports spectators, do not suffer from these fair-play anxieties at the international level, or when the local team they support is playing, but even they may be inclined to cheer for the underdog when they have no prior loyalties to either team involved in a match, particularly if the overdog-team has been too boastful about its successes, or too insultingly confident about the result of the match. Many English football fans will also doggedly support a hopeless, talentless, third-division team throughout their entire lives, never wavering in their loyalty, however badly their team performs. There is an unwritten rule that says you choose which football team to support at a very young age, and that’s it, for ever: you never switch your allegiance to another team. You can appreciate or even admire the skills and talent of, say, a top team such as Manchester United, but the team you support is still Swindon, or Stockport, or whoever – the team you have supported since you were a child. You are not obliged to support your local team: many young people from all parts of the country support Manchester United, or Chelsea, or Arsenal. The point is that once you have chosen, you stay loyal; you don’t switch from Chelsea to Arsenal just because the latter happen to be playing better, or indeed for any other reason.

  At the races, however, you will see even more extreme examples of English observance of the fair-play and underdog rules – and indeed of Englishness in general or, rather, the more pleasant aspects of Englishness. I mentioned in Racing Talk (page 151) that the unique ‘social microclimate’ of the racecourse, characterised by a rare combination of (relatively) relaxed inhibitions and exceptionally good manners, seems to bring out the best in us. At the Cheltenham Festival, which is traditionally regarded as an ‘England versus Ireland’ contest, with national pride at stake in every race, I have witnessed English racegoers fretting because it was nearly the end of the first day and the Irish still had not had a winner. ‘It would be awful if the Irish didn’t get a winner,’ these young men told me. ‘The buzz will really start as soon as we have an Irish winner – they need to celebrate, and they’ve a good chance in the next, so cross your fingers for them!’ When an Irish horse finally won, these English racegoers whooped and cheered and celebrated. All of them had just lost money, as they had backed the English favourite in the race in question. But the ‘underdog’ had won, everyone could celebrate: somehow the balance of the universe had been restored.

  Club Rules

  There is an apparent contradiction, which has puzzled a number of commentators, between the strong individualism of the English and our penchant for forming and joining clubs, between our obsession with privacy and our ‘clubbability’. Jeremy Paxman notes that the supposedly insular, individualistic, privacy-fixated English have clubs for almost everything: ‘There are clubs to go fishing, support football teams, play cards, arrange flowers, race pigeons, make jam, ride bicycles, watch birds, even for going on holiday.’ I won’t attempt a more comprehensive list – it would take up half of the book: just as every conceivable English leisure pursuit has a magazine or six, each one also has clubs, if not a National Society, with a whole network of Regional Groups and subdivisions. Usually there are two rival National Societies, with marginally different views on the activity in question, who spend most of their time happily bickering and squabbling with each other.

  Citing de Tocqueville, Paxman wonders how ‘the English manage to be simultaneously so highly singular, yet to be forever forming clubs and societies: how could the spirit of association and the spirit of exclusion be so highly developed in the same people?’ He seems to accept de Tocqueville’s pragmatic, economic explanation, that the English historically have always formed associations in order to pool resources, when they could not get what they wanted by individual effort – and he also emphasises that joining clubs is very much a matter of individual choice.

  I would argue that clubs are more about social needs than practical or economic ones, but I agree that the issue of choice is important. The English are not keen on random, unstructured, spontaneous, street-corner sociability; we are no good at this, and it makes us uneasy. We prefer to socialise in an organised, ordered manner, at specific times and places of our choosing, with rules that we can argue about, an agenda, minutes and a monthly newsletter. Above all, as with sports and games, we need to pretend that the activity of the club or society (flower-arranging, amateur dramatics, charity, breeding rabbits, whatever) is the real point of the gathering, and that social bonding is just a secondary side-effect.

  It’s that self-delusion thing again. The English constantly form clubs and societies for exactly the same reason that we have so many sports and games: we need props and facilitators to help us engage socially with our fellow humans, to overcome our social dis-ease, and we also need the illusion that we are doing something else, that we have come together for some practical purpose, to pursue a specific shared interest, to pool resources in order to achieve something we could not manage alone. The pragmatic de Tocqueville/Paxman explanation of English clubbiness is a very English one: it perfectly describes this illusion, but fails to recognise that it is an illusion – that the real purpose of all these clubs is the social contact and social bonding that we desperately need, but cannot admit to needing, not even to ourselves.

  If you are very English, you may well choose to reject my explanation. I don’t like it much myself. I would much rather believe that I joined, say, the Arab Horse Society, and attended meetings of its Chiltern Regional Group, because I had an Arab stallion and was interested in breeding and riding Arab horses and participating in shows, events and discussions with other aficionados. I would like to think that at university I joined umpteen left-wing political groups, and went on countless demonstrations and marches and CND rallies, because of my firmly held convictions and principles.101 And, indeed, thes
e were the conscious reasons. I am not saying that the English deliberately set out to trick ourselves into sociability. But if I’m ruthlessly honest with myself, I have to admit that I also liked the sense of belonging, the ease of socialising with people with whom I shared an interest or a cause – compared to the awkwardness of trying to make conversation with strangers in public places or at gatherings where the sole purpose is to gather, to be sociable, without any shared hobbies or horses or political hobby-horses to help things along.

  If you are a member of an English club or society, you may also resent my lumping them all together like this, as though there were no significant difference between the Arab Horse Society and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or between, say, a Women’s Institute meeting and that of a bikers’ club. Well, sorry, but I have to report that there is indeed very little difference. In the case of the Women’s Institute and motorbike-club meetings that I attended, the only significant difference was that the bikers spent considerably more time discussing their charity work and planning their next charity events.

  I’ve been a member of many English clubs and societies, and gate-crashed a few others in the course of my research, and they are all much of a muchness. Meetings of regional or local branches of the AHS, CND, WI, MAG (Motorcycle Action Group) and Neighbourhood Watch groups or residents’ associations all follow more or less the same pattern. They start with the usual English awkward greetings and jokes and some preliminary weather-speak. There is tea or alcohol, and sandwiches or biscuits (both if you’re lucky), a lot of gossip, a lot of ritual moaning and a lot of in-jokes. These are followed by a bit of throat-clearing and attempts to get the meeting started without seeming pompous or officious. The unwritten rules prescribe slightly self-mocking tones when using official meeting-speak terms such as ‘agenda’, ‘minutes’, ‘procedures’ and ‘chairman’, to show one is not taking the thing too seriously, and eye-rolling at the long-winded speeches of the inevitable club bore who does take it all too seriously.