How to Be English (31 page)

ONE WINTRY MORNING
in 1864, the sentry on duty at the Bloody Tower, one of the many outposts of the Tower of London, was found to be asleep. This is a serious charge for a soldier and he was duly court-martialled. It turned out that he had an elaborate defence.

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 anaemia 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.