How to Be English (15 page)

The song has always gone beyond that, representing a yearning that is both patriotic and also spiritual, a combination that some nationalities sometimes find strange. But then the English have always needed not just to win, but to have been right – and to combine their radicalism with a deep, nostalgic conservatism.

King George V, a deeply conservative man in almost every other respect, said he preferred the song to ‘God Save the King'.

Bring me my bow of burning gold

Bring me my arrows of desire

Bring me my spear: O, clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

William Blake, 1804

WHEN YOU WATCH
Morris dancers, their bells jingling, their weird instruments wailing, and their heavy footsteps thundering past you, you might reasonably imagine that this was a typically English scene, a great peasant tradition and an ancient series of steps. The thought of men in white, dancing with handkerchiefs, is certainly strange enough to be English. So is the continuing friendly disputes between rival Morris organisations – like the Morris Federation or the Morris Ring – about whether men should dance alone, or women should dance alone, or both should dance together.

In fact, like many traditions which seem to be cornerstones of English life, nobody really knows the origins of Morris dancing. There is some evidence that it arrived in England sometime during the Renaissance, via Italian dancers. There is other evidence that the word originally derived from ‘Moorish', at a time when Moorish decorations were suddenly fashionable. It may therefore be that, even if the Morris dancers were dramatising an English tradition, the bells on their ankles used to make them seem exotically foreign. The truth is that nobody really knows, but English peasants were adept at Morris dancing by the time that Oliver Cromwell arrived to disapprove in the 1640s.

There are two key dates in the development of Morris dancing. The first is 1448, which marks the first recorded Morris dancer in England. The second is much more precise. It is Boxing Day 1899, when the young musician Cecil Sharp first saw Morris dancers in action in Headington in Oxford, and it changed his life. Sharp was thrilled by the rhythm and learned a great deal from the musician William Kimber who was accompanying the dancers. Thinking about the experience later, he decided he would start collecting these dances, and set about doing so.

It was the great age of the folklore collector. Young men with pasty faces were soon swarming through the rural areas of England collecting stories, and – thanks to Sharp – songs and dances. Sharp cut his collecting teeth in the villages of Somerset, just as Ralph Vaughan Williams was collecting tunes in Norfolk, Sussex and Surrey. Sharp founded the Folk Dance Society in 1911 and was already publishing his songbooks for schools, carefully removing all the bawdy double entendres. The education system might shun anything of the kind these days, but the combined efforts of Cecil Sharp and Lord Baden-Powell around the Scouting camp fire, inserted English folk songs back into the national consciousness.

The real revival of Morris dancing came in the 1960s, when hundreds of new troops of dancers began to emerge, developing their own traditions, loosely based on those in their area, and occasionally given depth by the memories of the oldest generation who could just remember dancing in their youth.

A Morris-dance typology:

Cotswold Morris, dances from Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire with hankies and sticks

North-West Morris, developing out of mill life a century ago

Border Morris, emerging from the Welsh borders and often danced with blackened faces

Molly Dancing, mainly from Cambridgeshire

Rapper Dancing, from Northumberland with long poles

Longsword Dancing, from Durham Yorkshire with long metal ‘swords'

IS THERE ANYTHING
that feels as English as the National Trust? There is something overwhelming about the combination of the friendly chintz patterned cushions, the locally made honey, the tea shops manned by unpaid volunteers, the implacably white faces, the combination of green populism and old-fashioned snobbery.

There are many ways in which the Trust is a kind of sleeping English government-in-waiting. It is already equipped with an economic policy, and more members than all the UK political parties combined. All it lacks is a foreign policy, and that can't be long in coming. The National Trust is, in short, a power in the land, and very much more than the home for retired English gentlefolk that it has sometimes been made out to be. It also seems to be discovering some of its radical roots.

The radicalism was, in some ways, the inheritance of the origins of the National Trust. It was the child of an alliance between two great reformers, the art and social critic John Ruskin and the housing pioneer Octavia Hill. Ruskin bought up a series of slums in Marylebone and handed them to Octavia Hill to manage in a humane way – she appointed a group of sympathetic but strong-minded women as rent collectors and set about knowing all her tenants and cajoling them into a responsible, thrifty existence.

The Trust itself emerged out of a long-running argument about preserving the Lake District from quarry railways. It was born on 12 January 1895, at a meeting of Hill, the Commons Preservation Society solicitor Sir Robert Hunter, and the hymn-writer Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley. In 1907, it even achieved its very own Act of Parliament, with statutory powers to hold land and buildings in trust in perpetuity. Now, more than a century later, the Trust owns 1.5 per cent of the land area of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, managed via a decision-making structure based on the regions – it is a pioneer in government in that respect too.

The Trust's first property was the Alfriston Clergy House in Sussex, but its main purpose was protecting landscape, especially in the Lake District where the creator of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter, was an early donor and enthusiast. It was the death duties imposed by Clement Attlee's Labour government after 1945 which finally did for the landed classes, and meant that huge numbers of stately homes and fine buildings – and the paintings and decoration inside – ended up in the care of the National Trust.

As a bastion of Englishness, the Trust has its political meltdowns about once a decade. In 1967, the row that led to regionalisation was really over the question of whether it was too focused on stately homes. Then there was the controversial decision to hand over protected land to the Ministry of Defence. Then there was the hunting debate from 1999. It is, in short, all very English.

But perhaps the real Englishness of the Trust is revealed in its 61,000 volunteers, who give up a portion of every week to tell people about ancient rooms, or guide them in car parks, or help with gardening or a range of other tasks. The National Trust is a monument to many things, but also the way that voluntarism lodges in the English soul.

You can also tell something about the concerns of the English by looking at the statistics for the most visited National Trust sites: Stourhead and Cliveden are currently running in the top three, both of them beautiful homes with even more beautiful, extensive and informal gardens attached. The Trust reveals us as a gardening nation, a nation obsessed with the divide between town and country that gardens represent. And none the worse for that.

When I am gone, I hope my friends will not try to carry out any special system, or to follow blindly in the track which I have trodden. New circumstances require various efforts, and it is the spirit, not the dead form, that should be perpetuated … We shall leave them a few houses, purified and improved, a few new and better ones built, a certain amount of thoughtful and loving management, a few open spaces.

Octavia Hill, 1898

ON 1 AUGUST
1798, in a sticky Mediterranean dusk, Horatio Nelson's Mediterranean fleet finally tracked down their French opponents at anchor in Aboukir Bay on the Egyptian coast. Nelson was determined to bring them to action, even in the gathering gloom. The English gun crews were crouching by their cannon while the French heaved their heavy armaments on to the seaward side where they expected their opponents to strike. The Battle of the Nile was about to begin.

The English commander had prepared for this battle by setting out clear rules of engagement, discussed with his captains evening after evening around his table on the
Vanguard
. The broad plan was to lay themselves alongside part of the French line and overwhelm it; the details would have to take care of themselves as circumstances arose, and he trusted his captains to interpret the plan effectively.

Nelson was no disciplinarian, and he had already gained a reputation for disobeying orders during the Battle of St Vincent. He steered out of line because he saw the chance to cut off a group of Spanish ships from the rest, and managed to capture them. His captains knew this was his style and knew that what he expected of them was not slavish obedience to detail, but enthusiastic commitment to the objective.

These regular dinners were the beginning of the trusting collegiate atmosphere Nelson managed to instill among his commanders, which gave rise to the idea of a ‘band of brothers', a phrase stolen at the time from Shakespeare's
Henry V
. They were the basis of the adulation with which the English revered Nelson for the next century or so.

His victory at Trafalgar was organised on the same basis. When he unveiled his plan to the captains, some wept at the bold simplicity of it. Nelson was of course killed at the height of the battle, with the words ‘Kiss me, Hardy,' addressed to his flag captain, among his final phrases. When the English personality gave way to the stiff upper lip, there was embarrassment about this. Could the great hero have been so unmanly? Could he not have said ‘kismet', a Hindi and Arabic word meaning fate? The answer is: almost certainly not. Never underestimate English sentimentality.

‘But there is one little admiral,' wrote the Edwardian Henry Newbolt, the patriotic author of various poems linking cricket with Gatling guns, ‘We're all of us his brothers and his sons, and he's worth – oh he's worth at the very least, double all your tons and all your guns.'

Newbolt's song was written at the end of a century of total sea power, secured for England by Nelson's overwhelming victory at Trafalgar. It is a song that has embarrassing moments for audiences today, with its heroic bombast and naïve lyrics (‘there are queer things that only come to sailormen'). But it ends with this verse:

I've been with him when hope sank under us –

He hardly seemed a mortal like the rest,

I could swear that he had stars upon his uniform,

And one sleeve pinned across his breast.

There was the Nelsonian symbol, and it was a symbol of English heroism even in his own lifetime, though he was lachrymose, overindulgent, adulterous – not at all the British stiff upper lip – and not very tall. He was certainly a ‘little admiral'.