How to Be English (21 page)

THERE WAS SOMETHING
of Flashman about James Thomas Brudenell, Seventh Earl of Cardigan. He appears as the villain in many of George Macdonald Fraser's
Flashman
novels, but in fact Cardigan's life was stranger even than those – he was a pompous bully, a military incompetent, who narrowly avoided arrest on a technicality for fighting a duel. By an accident of history, one of the many cock-ups of the Crimean War, Cardigan was mistakenly ordered into action with his Light Brigade to charge the Russian guns head-on at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854. His connection with the incident turned him into a national hero on his return, and in particular it immortalised the woollen garments that he took to war in the Crimea.

The English have a peculiar penchant for naming everyday objects after the peculiar, usually aristocratic, individuals who originated them – the wellington boot and the sandwich spring to mind – and so it was that woollen waistcoats open at the front became known, from that day to this, as cardigans.

Within a few weeks of the rapturous reception of Lord Cardigan after he arrived back in Folkestone at the end of the war, it became clear that all was not quite as it seemed. He did seem to have led the charge, reached the guns and escaped unscathed. Then the rumours began to circulate, that he had fled the battlefield while later waves under his command were still charging, or – more likely – that he galloped back to his own lines while the charge was still progressing.

He laid a charge of criminal libel against some of his fellow officers who made the claims, though unsuccessfully, and oblivious arrogance allowed him to continue in his post as colonel-in-chief until his retirement. His arrogance as he accompanied the Prince of Wales to inspect Prussian cavalry manoeuvres in 1861 was enough to attract several challenges to duels. He died from a fall from his horse in 1868, soon after changing his mind after a lifetime resisting political reform, and speaking in favour of the Second Reform Act. This appears to have been too much for him.

Whatever the truth of Cardigan's conduct during the Battle of Balaclava, the Charge of the Light Brigade provided English culture not just with Tennyson's poem of the same name but a strange woollen peculiarity, also popular in California (Starsky and Hutch, the TV detectives, wore versions of them) which has become a symbol of staid, middle-class solidity.

There are modern cardigans, even trendy cardigans, but the basic idea remains that cardigans are what husbands wear when they lose all connection with their youth and when the last drops of sex appeal finally evaporate, and they settle down to a life of slippered respectability.

Cardigans get a bad press, but admit it – you love them!

Headline in the
Guardian,
2014

THE HOPELESSLY HEROIC
charge of the Light Brigade against the Russian guns at the Battle of Balaclava in 1854 has gone down in history as an example of English valour. After all, it's the Russian guns seized at Sebastopol that have provided the metal for the Victoria Cross ever since, the highest military decoration in the UK awarded for extreme courage in the face of the enemy. But it ought perhaps to be better remembered as an example of one of the darker sides of English life, snobbery and incompetence.

There certainly were ‘cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them' as Tennyson said there were in his famous poem. But there were 673 of the Light Brigade, not the gallant 600, and only fifteen per cent of them survived with horses intact after this incompetently ordered full-frontal attack on the Russian guns.

The problem was that the commander-in-chief Lord Raglan's original orders were ambiguous. Which guns were to be attacked? It was never made clear. The next problem was that the ambiguous orders then underwent minimal discussion between the three men who loathed each other: Cardigan, his immediate commander and brother-in-law Lord Lucan, and Captain Nolan, who delivered the message on a flimsy bit of paper, and who – when he was asked which guns the order referred to – replied with a wide sweep of his arm in the vague direction of the wrong ones.

As the cavalry streamed into the Valley of Death (Tennyson's phrase) Nolan veered across their path – perhaps because he realised they were heading in the wrong direction – but was killed shortly afterwards so we will never know.

Cardigan himself withdrew from the battlefield once he had reached the guns, without stopping to see what had happened to his remaining troops, because he was seething with rage against Nolan – for, as it seemed to him, trying to steal the honour of leading the brigade into action.

This combination of snobbery, mutual contempt and suspicion of intelligence, and a bizarre reliance on frontal assaults, seems to have occurred at various unfortunate junctures in English military history, and the Light Brigade were only the most spectacular victims of it. When he came to write about military incompetence, the former Royal Engineer turned psychologist Norman Dixon said that, instead of being a warning to incompetent generals in later conflicts, the valour of the charge turned out to be an encouragement for other futile frontal assaults, right up to the disastrous Battle of the Somme and beyond.

The trumpeter who sounded the charge, Trumpeter Lanfrey, made a recording of the sound in Park Lane in London in 1890, one of the earliest Edison recordings. The same recording includes one of Florence Nightingale, the great heroine of the Crimean War. ‘God bless our dear old comrades of Balaclava,' she said, ‘and bring them safe to shore.'

But what, My Lord, was the feeling and what the bearing of those brave men who returned to the position? Of each of these regiments there returned but a small detachment, two thirds of the men engaged having been destroyed. I think that every man who was engaged in that disastrous affair at Balaklava, and who was fortunate enough to come out of it alive, must feel that it was only by a merciful decree of Almighty Providence that he escaped from the greatest apparent certainty of death which could possibly be conceived.

Lord Cardigan's speech to the Mansion House, 1855

THERE WAS A
time when the English churchyard played the kind of role that a larder or utility room does in a modern house. It was a place for keeping things that didn't really fit anywhere else. In the medieval open-field system, all the local land was divided into strips among the people who lived in a village. Trees got in the way. That meant that the yew tree, for example – the source of the wood for the English longbow – was planted in the churchyard. The local priest was also responsible for looking after those other, rather important, elements of the local economy that were held in common: the local boar and the local bull. If people wanted their cattle impregnated, they went to the churchyard – and asked the priest.

And then again, churchyards have been – at least since the sixth century – the consecrated ground that became the home of the dead. The graves of the villagers are there, as Thomas Hardy described in ‘Friends Beyond' (‘And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now'), in a classless gathering that also included ‘Tranter Reuben'.

This provides opportunities for inscriptions, most of which are deadly dull or pious, or both, but occasionally they are fascinating or funny. Like this one said to be from Winterbourne Steepleton in Dorset:

Here lies the body

Of Margaret Bent

She kicked up her heels

And away she went.

It is this juxtaposition of life and death – the means to create new cattle and the remains of the former villagers – that gives village churchyards their peculiar power and restfulness, perhaps most of all at the traditional lychgate. This is the covered archway where the priest originally received the corpse of a parishioner for burial, just as it is the first gate that married couples go through out into the world after their wedding – which is why it is sometimes closed by local children and only opened for a fee.

Lychgates are also a traditional place for flirting, which has always been a secondary purpose for a parish churchyard, because graves were often places to be alone at night – and even in the daytime they provided opportunities. The church was where young men and women could meet perfectly respectably, eye each other up and down inside the nave, and then maybe talk as they passed out of the gate.

The same juxtaposition is there in the most famous English poem on the subject, Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard'. Gray was a Cambridge scholar and later professor who disapproved of his fellows (he called them ‘sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things'). He had been haunted by the deaths of friends and relatives, and by his friend Horace Walpole's narrow escape from highwaymen, and wrote the poem as a kind of meditation after his move to Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire. This is how he prefaced the poem to Walpole in 1750, enclosing a copy:

As I live in a place where even the ordinary tattle of the town arrives not till it is stale, and which produces no events of its own, you will not desire any excuse from me for writing so seldom, especially as of all people living I know you are the least a friend to letters spun out of one's own brains, with all the toil and constraint that accompanies sentimental productions. I have been here at Stoke a few days (where I shall continue good part of the summer); and having put an end to a thing, whose beginnings you have seen long ago. I immediately send it you. You will, I hope, look upon it in light of a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writing have wanted, and are like to want, but which this epistle I am determined shall not want.

Walpole sent it to his friends, and they passed it to others, until Gray was forced to publish it himself to prevent pirate copies going into production. It is the very essence of the gentle English art of melancholy. It also includes some of the most famous phrases in the language, including ‘kindred spirit' and the phrase that would eventually inspire Hardy: ‘Far from the madding crowd'.

Only eight years after it was published, the young general James Wolfe recalled it as he sat quietly with his men in boats below the Heights of Abraham to take the city of Quebec from the French. Wolfe was killed in the battle, but as he waited for the first light of dawn beforehand, he recited the poem from memory.

‘Gentlemen,' he said, when he reached the end. ‘I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec.'

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r

The moping owl does to the moon complain

Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.