How to Be English (8 page)

When Laurence Olivier played Henry in his 1944 film, borrowing the Irish army as extras (they were paid more if they brought their own horse), he injected a splash of colour and excitement into English culture to coincide with D-Day, helped along by William Walton's classic score. Together they roused a war-torn nation, and ushered in a sense of colourful Englishness which carries on to this day.

And when all is said and done, there may be a little bit of some of us in England, now a-bed, who still ‘think themselves accursed they were not here, / And hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day'.

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:

Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge

Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!'

Henry V, sounding the charge at Harfleur

‘
HAD WE LIVED,
I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.'

That is the familiar final diary entry of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, found by his frozen body, written in a tent in an Antarctic blizzard. Somehow the words seem to sum up the English obsession with heroic failure. Roald Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole; Ernest Shackleton succeeded in bringing all his men back from the Antarctic catastrophe alive. Yet it is Scott's failure to do either that somehow endeared him to the English.

The last sentence also reveals another English obsession: somehow holding together enough money to get by. It was Nelson's last wish for his family as well. And whilst some nations might shower their heroes and their loved ones with wealth, Nelson's partner Emma Hamilton died impoverished in her Calais lodgings in 1815.

Scott emphasised the point just before he died, in a final note written on 29 March 1912. Two weeks later, the luxury transatlantic liner
Titanic
hit an iceberg and sank with the loss of 2,224 passengers and crew: two of the greatest heroic failures in history, and just a few days apart.

But there are lighter sides to the English flair for heroic failure as seen in the case of Georgian actor Robert Coates, who used his fortune to finance plays in which he played major Shakespearean roles – especially Romeo – and brought the house down night after night with his disastrous performances.

During his first performance as Romeo, he got out his snuffbox on stage and offered some to the occupants of a box above him. During the death scene, he was careful to use his own hat as a pillow and a handkerchief to dust the stage where he was about to fall dead. On another occasion, he dropped a diamond buckle as he headed offstage and crawled around, interrupting the performance looking for it.

His performances were so funny that audience members were regularly treated for laughing too much. He was so impressed by the response to Romeo's death on one occasion that he repeated it, and would have done it again had not Juliet risen from the dead to stop him.

Coates was of English extraction, though he was actually born in the West Indies, and he was to die in a road accident outside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – but you can see something of the admiration of incompetence endures to this day. How else are we to explain the popularity of Eddie ‘The Eagle' Edwards, the heroic English ski-jumper at the 1988 Winter Olympics?

Edwards continued in the same vein afterwards, releasing a record in Finnish, though he didn't actually speak the language. An example to us all.

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill articulates the gentle English art of failing

IS IT POSSIBLE
to pin down English humour and define it? It may only be possible to say that it appears to be part of the national character. This is not just what J. B. Priestley used to call ‘humorous realism' – the ability to find very ordinary things and people funny, which goes back to Geoffrey Chaucer at least – but also the ability to find yourself rather funny too.

Which other nation could have poked so much fun at themselves during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony? But then again, it was a British opening ceremony, where the artistic genius was actually Scottish. The English certainly take a particular enjoyment at their own peculiarities, even their own failures, that other countries lack almost completely. American office workers might struggle to publicly admit to ‘an example of when they failed', but English counterparts remember their disasters as badges of honour.

This enjoyment of their own peculiarities seems to date back as long as the English have existed. ‘I passed many hours with him on the 17th,' wrote James Boswell (a Scot) of Samuel Johnson, ‘of which I find all my memorial is, “much laughing”. It should seem he had that day been in a humour for jocularitie and merriment, and upon such occasions I never knew a man laugh more heartily.' Yet there was Boswell, not much later, describing his friend's ‘perpetual gloom'. The two – humour and gloom – seem quite close companions, as perhaps they always are in great comedy, amongst the English.

Perhaps the clearest view of English humour is available by comparing it more closely to American humour. English jokes in this respect seem to be based on exaggeration – they are whimsical, flights of fancy, imagining the world distorted, pushing those peculiarities to their logical conclusion. It is the exaggeration of an English joke that becomes, at some point, farcical nonsense: and from Lewis Carroll to Monty Python, the English have excelled at humorous nonsense (as opposed to serious nonsense in the Theatre of the Absurd, where the French clearly have the upper hand).

From Gilray to Giles cartoons, the root of English humour is exaggeration to the point of caricature. The way it is exaggerated may change – we don't find the humour of W. S. Gilbert, Dan Leno, Arthur Askey or
ITMA
funny in the way their our grandparents might have done – but that is just the nature of passing time. The basis remains the same, and the greatest English humorists – Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, P. G. Wodehouse, Stan Laurel or Charlie Chaplin – do still keep their ability to make people laugh, whether it is in the novel, the newspaper, the music hall or the comedy club, and there are certainly comedians to choose from in every generation.

This is what the great eighteenth-century essayist William Hazlitt said on the subject:

The French cannot, however, be persuaded of the excellence of our comic stage, nor of the store we set by it. When they ask what amusements we have, it is plain they can never have heard of Mrs Jordan, nor King, nor Banniser, nor Suett, nor Munden, nor Lewis, nor little Simmons, nor Dodd, and Parsons, and Emergy and Miss Pope, and Miss Farren, and all those who even in my time have gladdened a nation and made life's business like a summer dream.

All these names who once strutted the boards of London are now forgotten, but their places are taken by others like them. There is perhaps a basic laziness about the English, an acceptance of life as it is, which makes us yearn for someone to make work feel like a summer dream – then we can forget ourselves for a moment, unbutton our buttoned-up coats, and just be a little less serious.

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: ‘Ugh, that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen!' The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: ‘The driver just insulted me!' The man says: ‘You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I'll hold your monkey for you.'

Voted funniest English joke in a poll of 36,000 people in 2010

NATIONALITY GETS TO
be a bit of a problem when it comes to King Arthur and his knights. If he existed, which he almost certainly did as the leader of the Romano-British kingdoms against the marauding Saxons, then he wasn't exactly English. Welsh, perhaps; Cornish, possibly. Roman, almost by default – his uncle was supposed to be the Roman general Ambrosius Aurelianus.

When it comes to his knights, the English claim on him becomes even more shaky. Sir Gawain definitely sounds Welsh. Sir Lancelot first appeared in French literature. Worse, the battles Arthur fought in recorded history – Wallop, Mount Badon – were almost certainly against the rampaging and still pagan English, not on their side at all.

This caused consternation among the authors of Edwardian boys' adventure stories, who were determined that heroes should be on the side of the Anglo-Saxons, but were also disconcerted that this meant he would have been fighting the Christians.

The first mention of King Arthur in any chronicle was in around 820, at least two centuries after his battles, and one of the candidates for the original Arthur – a king called Riothamus – was actually from Brittany.

What we can say about the great romantic tale of the British Isles, as the historian John Morris points out, is that ‘Arthur' was suddenly and briefly a popular name for chieftains after this period, and that the great events probably took place on what is now English soil. Arthur's castle of Camelot may not have been ‘many-towered', as Alfred Tennyson suggested, but the best-known site for it is South Cadbury, a vast windswept hill fort in Somerset. His round table – a medieval fake – is celebrated in Winchester, later the Anglo-Saxon capital of Wessex.

Then again,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
is one of the first stories in Middle English to survive. Gawain manages to resist cowardice and sexual temptation to keep his promised encounter with an axe-wielding green giant.

It was the Victorians who really took all that sacrificial chivalry of the Arthurian legends to their hearts, churning out great sombre poems (Tennyson, etc.) and even more sombre paintings (Burne-Jones, etc.), to encourage similar behaviour in the next generation.

Obediently, the Scott Antarctic expedition, and the upper-crust passengers on the
Titanic
– not to mention the officers at Mons and the Somme – went calmly to their deaths, thinking of Galahad, Tristram, Percival and all the others, vowing to be perfect knights.

HIC JACET ARTHURUS REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS (Here lies Arthur, the king that was and the king that is to be)

Tomb inscription in Thomas Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur