How to Be English (27 page)

IN THE ANTEDILUVIAN
slime, from where the English emerged, the first pinstripe suit took shape. It was complete with a coloured silk handkerchief peeping out of the breast pocket to show character. That is the only explanation there is for the sense of history, continuity and tailored superiority that accompanies the pinstripe. It feels permanently English – had Alfred the Great risen from the dead and popped across to the Stock Exchange, that is what he would have worn.

It feels English because of the understated subtlety of it. White vertical stripes on a dark suit of blue, grey or black, sewn at the width of a pin, sometimes next to each other in pairs or triplets. Not too wide, bright or garish. It is a combination intended to imply breeding, balance and good sense.

More evidence of the antediluvian origins of this lies in the fact that nobody has much idea who first tailored the perfect pinstripe. It seems to have descended, fully developed, cut and sewn in heaven, to the windows of Hawes & Curtis and the other tailors of Jermyn Street in London.

Closer examination shows that it actually emerged with bowler hats (from the hatter Lock & Co. in St James's) and with ironed creases in the trousers, an Edwardian innovation which is supposed to have been a mistake from drying Edward VII's wet pantaloons after an unexpected drenching.

Some theories suggest that the first pinstripes appeared via the equally English venue of Wimbledon as Edwardian tennis gear. It was certainly all about sport to start with – borrowed from Edward VII's relaxed sporting style – but the style came of age during the Great Depression. Edward VII's grandson Edward VIII made them popular when he was Prince of Wales. The ubiquitous pinstripe emerged as the apotheosis of conservative style in the City of London via the prince's Anglo-American fast set, glamourised by Hollywood thanks to a brief period on the backs of Chicago gangsters and hoodlums.

So thrilling were they when they caught on, that when Clark Gable wore a pinstripe suit on a visit to Buenos Aires in 1935, the lapels of his overcoat were torn off by overexcited female fans.

It took wartime austerity and the 1950s, with its sense of post-war inferiority, to make pinstripes what they are today. English City gents felt the need to assert some kind of superiority over their Wall Street cousins, and latched on to the pinstripe as the classic English look. They may not have been richer or more powerful, they may have presided over a national debt that could have sunk lesser islands below the waves, but they could at least have sartorial style. Call it the
Avengers
effect.

It was a style that emphasised effortless class, just as thin vertical stripes emphasise height and elongate the wearer. There are capacious trouser pockets, so that men can put their hands inside and effect a nonchalance.

The great age of the pinstripe was the City of London in the late 1980s, after the Big Bang deregulation. It became the uniform of effortless superiority again, of fat-cat salaries and share options, but with subtle codes attached. If the stripes were too close together, you looked naïve. If they were too wide apart, you looked boorish and brash. Just the right width and you could be put up for membership of any gentleman's club, without further examination. As long as you also wore sock suspenders.

Giving pinstripes to the world:

Cost at auction of Winston Churchill's pinstripe suit (2002): £32,500

Most famous sporting pinstripes: The New York Yankees

Most famous political pinstripes: Indian prime minister Narendra Modi

THE ENGLISH OBSESSION
with raincoats is clearly a by-product of their fascination with the weather, but here there is bound to be some disappointment because – when it comes to rainwear – the English have always been followers and not leaders.

The word ‘mackintosh' is a bit of a giveaway. The inventor of macks, the Glasgow surgeon James Syme, found that a product of coal tar called naphtha could melt India rubber and make it possible to use it for waterproofing. But Syme was too busy to exploit his discovery and the patent went to another Scot, a clerk turned inventor called Charles Macintosh (note the different spelling). Macintosh took out a patent for a process which glued together two layers of cloth with India rubber, making it waterproof – or at least making some progress in that direction.

It is then that the English began to get involved. Macintosh's company merged in 1830 with its Manchester rival, Thomas Hancock. Together they got a contract to supply the British army and the rest is history, in which Queen Victoria herself seems to have played a role.

Her Highland jaunts had changed people's attitude to the rain. If she could stride out in the Scottish drizzle wearing her sturdy Balmoral boots, just as William Wordsworth had done in the Lake District (Wordsworth had died in 1850), then so could everybody else. Charles Macintosh had patented his waterproofing process in 1823: his waterproofs snapped in the cold, were sticky in the heat and smelled horribly of naphtha, but at least they kept the rain out. The Basingstoke draper Thomas Burberry had managed a similar effect with a very tight weave in 1835.

Burberry still exists and so does the Mackintosh company, which was taken over by Dunlop in 1925 and stumbled on for another couple of generations. It was just as it was on the verge of closing its factory in Cumbernauld when, in the 1990s, it reinvented itself as a trendy fashion brand. It is now owned by the Japanese company Yagi Tsusho.

The truth is that the English have never managed to stamp their identity on to waterproof clothing in the way you would have expected. Anorak and parka are Inuit words, and carry an implication in English these days as clothes for obsessives and geeks. Cagoule is a French term for hood.

What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.

Jane Austen, in the days before rainwear

IN THE ANCIENT
world, roast beef was considered indigestible. There may be be some truth in this, but the English Renaissance food writers thought otherwise, on the grounds that beef wasn't the same everywhere. This is undoubtedly true too. Like a stopped clock, so the logic went, beef had to be palatable somewhere and it seemed sensible to suggest that this place might be England.

So much else about English cuisine has slipped into the country unawares. That explains the old ditty: ‘hops, reformation, bays and beer / Came into England one bad year.' But beef has probably been here as long as cows, and that is quite a long time.

Yorkshire pudding is different. It was the cooks in the north of England who developed the idea of putting some wheat flour into the pan of dripping while the joints were bubbling away. The result was rather flatter than today's Yorkshire pudding – these days, they have to be at least four inches tall to qualify.

That explains the original name: ‘dripping pudding'. It took the London cookery writer Hannah Glasse (1708–70) to reinvent this as ‘Yorkshire pudding', in her famous but anonymous 1747 book
The Art of Cookery.
She spent her declining years in a debtors' prison, but managed to write another book which provided her with enough earnings to pay for her release. Ten years before, William Kenrick published what is perhaps the first effective recipe.

Make a good batter as for pancakes; put in a hot toss-pan over the fire with a bit of butter to fry the bottom a little then put the pan and butter under a shoulder of mutton, instead of a dripping pan, keeping frequently shaking it by the handle and it will be light and savoury, and fit to take up when your mutton is enough; then turn it in a dish and serve it hot.

Recipe for dripping pudding in William Kenrick,
The Whole Duty of a Woman
(1737)

IF ENGLISH FOOD
has had a poor reputation over the generations, then the absolute nadir – apart of course from the gruel meted out to Oliver Twist – is the experience of school dinners. English cabbage or carrots tended to be boiled to the point of indigestibility, and once the school-dinner ladies got their hands on vegetables, they really did have all flavour and most of the colour surgically removed.

Grown men have been known to cry at the memory of imminent tapioca pudding, or of sitting before it while it reached ambient temperatures, waiting for some solution that might possibly make it edible, while the school day passed by, with the remains of the peas and mash trodden into the school's lino.

‘You will stay there until you eat it' is a phrase that carries within it the most appalling tolerance of the most dreadful creations known to culinary science. Of course you shouldn't eat it.

Those skimpy, translucent slices of meat, that sickly gravy, a few potatoes boiled to death. The mere thought of it can carry you back there, to the primary school at 1 p.m. on a Thursday, and the memory carries those of us from that generation of Englishness back through the decades to the smell of dying cabbage that used to impregnate the floors.

But don't let us forget that there is another side to school dinners before the government, in their infinite wisdom, decided to close the school kitchens and replace them with pre-cooked turkey twizlers trucked in from 200 miles away by a big contractor, which may as well have been Rentokil. At least we used to get a square meal at lunchtimes.

And there is another element to English school dinners that has an almost erotic feel to it – the school puddings. Ah yes, the huge great lumps of them, steaming on the plate under a thick, yellow layer of custard, great wads of suet and stodge, in chocolate, jam or currants, carrying a whiff of comfort so powerful that people still long for them years later. Especially on the endless evenings of an English winter.

Maybe English food is like its religion – and perhaps also its love-making. It is staggeringly, outrageously, middle-of-the-road. But perhaps in this sheer ordinariness, in the very drabness of its passion, there is something comforting too.

Bean soup and bread, followed by treacle pudding

Toad in the hole, potatoes and bread

Mutton stew and suet pudding

Fish and potato pie, followed by baked raisin pudding

School dinner menus, 1906