How to Be English (28 page)

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,

thank God! the British journalist.

But, seeing what the man will do

unbribed, there's no occasion to.

SO WROTE HUMBERT
Wolfe, the British civil servant and poet of German–Italian descent, in 1930. He was referring in part to one of the strange paradoxes of English life – the bizarre division between the scribblers and propagandists and the exuberance of what we now know as the tabloid press, and the deep disapproval that they attract.

It is a paradox that goes back at least to 1662, and the first prosecution under the notorious Licensing Act, when John Twyn refused to give the name of the author of an anti-Royalist pamphlet he had published and was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. It was a fearsome punishment for publishing poor writing, and the tradition continued in earnest through 1961 and the Vassall spy case, when two journalists were jailed by a tribunal set up by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan for refusing to name their sources.

The more refined English have gargled with different words about this monster in their midst, threatening to reveal everything about them to the hoi polloi. Sometimes they call it ‘the gutter press'. Sometimes it is the ‘penny dreadfuls'. ‘Tabloids' is just the latest word and the latest incarnation. The tabloids have invented a language all of their own, very exciting and simple, and created along with it a new kind of newspaper layout such as the one produced by Hugh Cudlipp at the
Daily Mirror
in the 1960s, and developed by Larry Lamb after his boss Rupert Murdoch snapped up the
Sun
in 1969.

It was energetic, raucous and it took up a lot of space. ‘What's that doing?' asked Murdoch after his first edition rolled off the press, indicating the white space around the headlines.

‘That's artistic white.'

‘Well, I don't know how artistic it is but I do know it's cost a lot of trees.'

Tabloids also aspire to political power, as English popular journalism has always done, since Lord Northcliffe unveiled the
Daily Mail
in 1900. Lord Beaverbrook (a Canadian) managed to grasp quite a bit during both world wars, and Cecil King's Mirror Group Newspapers even advocated taking power by force after his headline ‘Enough is enough!', aimed at Harold Wilson in 1968 (he was told off by Lord Mountbatten). Murdoch (an Australian and then an American) hardly needed to take power by force, since every politician with ambition was coming to him on bended knee, seeking advancement.

But it is the phenomenon of the tabloid headline that somehow sums it all up. ‘Gotcha' wrote
Sun
editor Kelvin MacKenzie across the front page when the Argentine cruiser
General Belgrano
was sunk in 1982. The paper lost its nerve in later editions and changed the headline to ‘Did 2,000 Argies die?' Hardly better, so perhaps it isn't surprising that ‘Gotcha' makes repeat appearances in the paper's history.

The whole point of these headlines is that they should be in poor taste. One
Sun
headline in 1990 ran: ‘158 degrees: four-week twins roasted to death by electric blanket'.

The American writer Tom Wolfe included an English reporter, Peter Fallow, in his blockbuster novel
The Bonfire of the Vanities
(1987). Fallow was supposed to be working as a stringer in New York – a man of long lunchtimes and even longer hangovers. It was such a typical caricature that all the English members of the press in New York assumed that Fallow had been modelled on them. But the key point is that, to make it believable, Wolfe had to create an
English
pressman.

The tabloid style worked well in the USA for a time – see Jack Lemmon and Walther Matthau in
The Front Page
(1974) – but it doesn't amount to the breathtaking deviance of an English tabloid newspaper.

The reporters have occasionally hit back against their critics. The press corps at the Old Bailey at one stage sued for libel when a piece of prose described them collectively as ‘beer-sodden hacks'. There certainly has been a traditional link between English reporting and alcoholism. The press veterans in the days when Fleet Street was Fleet Street would turn up to work, put their jacket on the back of their chair – to imply they were somewhere in the building, maybe studying at the cuttings library – and then head straight out to the pub. These days, perhaps not only Fleet Street, but also the Fleet Street bar El Vino, are not quite what they were.

On the other hand, the great divide between a po-faced establishment and a wildly excitable press corps, has something to do with the class war. As Larry Lamb said: ‘I have worn throughout my life a substantial chip on my shoulder, on the grounds that I am not educated and I should have been.'

It was a revealing comment. The press corps managed to maintain a powerful, articulate and persuasive challenge to the establishment on behalf of the University of Life. It has certainly been rude, occasionally offensive, possibly even seditious. But it has at least kept them up to some kind of mark.

Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.

Claud Cockburn (though he denied it)

LIFE IN THE
City of London has never been exactly dull, but in the days of George II it was particularly colourful, and the most colourful figure of all was Jonas Hanway. Hanway always dressed as if he was on his way to a ball, with silk hose and silver-buckled shoes, carrying a large bag and wearing a broad-brimmed hat with lace trimmings, and a small sword with a golden hilt. For thirty years, he also carried a small Persian umbrella.

This used to enrage the coachmen, who believed it made him look French, and because they never liked new fashions – and because the traditional way of avoiding the rain in London, in those days, was to call a sedan chair. A generation after Hanway, another umbrella pioneer called John Macdonald used to be greeted with cries of ‘Frenchman! Why don't you call a coach?'

It wasn't that Hanway invented umbrellas, which go back to ancient China around 1100
BC
. But he was the first to dare to carry one in London, and did so regardless of the abuse as he travelled the streets from his home in the Strand and then in Red Lion Square to his office in Bishopsgate. Paris fashions had already suggested that using parasols to keep the rain off might be wise, but the idea at the heart of the fashion – that weather is very uncertain – definitely suited the English.

Hanway was one of the great English social reformers, and traders. His contemporary Samuel Johnson said that ‘he acquired some reputation by travelling abroad, but lost it all by travelling at home'.

Hanway was born at sea in 1712, though his parents lived in Portsmouth. He was disappointed in love in Portugal as a young man, and as a result remained unmarried for the rest of his life – which he spent as a City trader dealing first with St Petersburg, which involved his capture by the Swedes in the Baltic (they were at war with Russia at the time), and then travelling with a Tartar boy and some soldiers across the Caspian Sea with a consignment of cloth to trade with Persia. He wrote more than seventy books, including his pamphlets inveighing against the wasteful and unhealthy English habit of drinking tea.

Hanway is remembered almost entirely for championing the cause of the umbrella, when he ought to be remembered for being the first genuine social entrepreneur. He tackled schemes to prevent infanticide, and to take orphan children out of workhouses and send them to live in people's homes. He founded the Magdalen Asylum for retired prostitutes, and the Marine Society to train impoverished young chimney sweeps for a life at sea.

Which brings us back to umbrellas, which in Hanway's day and afterwards were cumbersome, damp oily things (his were made of Persian silk, of course) held together by whale bone with very long handles. It wasn't long before the logic of wielding an umbrella in London became clear. But unless they were coloured black to start with, the smoky rain would very soon stain them that colour.

So it is partly dirt, and partly doubt about the weather, that made the black umbrella such a symbol of English life. And it became a paradoxical symbol as well, especially for those tough-minded English people who believed it was polite to keep your umbrella furled, whatever the weather.

The modern Jonas Hanway was Major Digby Tatham-Warter of the Parachute Regiment, who led his men against Nazi tanks during the fruitless battle for Arnhem, wearing a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella, with which he disabled an enemy tank. He claimed he carried it because he could never remember the password and an umbrella would reveal him unambiguously as English. It is said that, at the height of the battle – during which he was captured and escaped with the help of the Dutch resistance – he was asked whether the umbrella was much help. ‘But, my goodness,' he replied. ‘What if it rains?'

Virtue in humble life: containing reflections on relative duties, particularly those of masters and servants. Thoughts on the passions, prejudices, and tempers of mankind, drawn from real characters. Fables applicable to the subjects. Various anecdotes of the living and the dead in two hundred and nine conversations between a father and his daughter, amidst rural scenes, intended as an amusing and instructive library to persons of certain conditions and proper for all families seeking domestic peace and Christian piety, with a manual of devotion.

A book title by Jonas Hanway, 1777

THERE IS SOMETHING
insufferably respectable about the Women's Institute, where the English middle classes – at least the female of the species, in tweed skirts – gather to discuss jam-making and other gentle, rural pursuits. This is of course, wholly unfair – did not the members of the Rylstone WI in Yorkshire strip off in a fundraising calendar in 1999? Did not the WI have the temerity to boo Tony Blair when he was prime minister? They did but, equally, the idea that the WI is wholeheartedly English to its very bones is not quite accurate. It actually began in Canada.

To be precise, it began in 1897 in Stoney Creek, Ontario, the brainchild of Adelaide Hoodless, who believed the idea would involve women when their menfolk were involved with the Farmers' Institute. There has always been a rural edge to the WI. Even when it arrived in the UK, the first branch wasn't in England at all. It was in Llanfairpwllgwyngyll in Anglesey in 1915, when the intention was to encourage more women to get involved in food production.

It was during the darkest days of the Second World War, when luxuries were extremely scarce, that WIs took on the role of making jam. They collected the fruit, often from hedgerows, and the government provided the tinning machines. It was a big responsibility and they rose to the challenge.

There are now over 200,000 members of WIs in England and Wales, and the organisation has become a ferocious campaigning force, at the same time as it is revitalising rural arts and crafts. It is one of the wooden walls of England. It even has ‘Jerusalem' (see Chapter 37) as its anthem, inherited from the non-militant suffragist movement.

In recent years, there has been a trend for much younger women to launch their own urban WIs and it has given the movement a new lease of life. Sami Score founded the Iron Maidens WI in Liscard in Merseyside in 2012, including tattoos and various piercings. Most WIs are about self-sufficiency and mutual support, which in the English mind are rather peculiarly linked.

Ralph Vaughan Williams cantata, composed for the WI in 1952, included the following traditional English folk tunes:

‘To the Ploughboy'

‘May Song'

‘To the Green Meadow'

‘An Acre of Land'

‘The Sprig of Thyme'

‘Lark in the Morning'

‘The Cuckoo'

‘Wassail Song'