There are hapless demi-celebs out there in the I’m A Celebrity jungle putting
things with swivelly eyes and a bristly superfluity of legs into their
mouths in a desperate attempt to attract the sort of publicity that Dr
Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College, conjures merely by
expressing an opinion from the blameless Berkshire surroundings of his
educational establishment. On Monday he argued that exam league tables have
a “pernicious and corrupting” effect on education – a view which struck a
plangent note of authenticity in this house, where our family life has been
rendered hideous by the pressure to produce “acceptable” GCSE results.
On Tuesday, he was at it again. This time manners were the burden of his song.
Wellington pupils, it is reported, are being issued with a list of 12 common
courtesies, encouraging them to touch their hats to passing teachers, stand
when an adult enters a room and remove their hands from their pockets when
singing hymns or the National Anthem. (It struck me, on reading this last
injunction, that whoever gets the thankless job of England football manager
might like to ask Dr Seldon if he could persuade the lads to take the
chewing gum out of their mouths when singing the National Anthem before
international matches. Or indeed, to sing at all instead of merely
masticating.)
But I digress. Back to Wellington’s curriculum of courtesy, in formulating
which Dr Seldon seems to be a bellwether for a more general recent outbreak
of respectability. Last week David Cameron stressed
the importance to school discipline of the outward and visible signs of
smart uniforms and good manners. This Monday The Times reported that the
demand for smart school uniforms – blazers, worn with a shirt and tie,
rather than sweatshirts and hoodies – was
coming from pupils themselves.
Nor is the change of mood confined to the classroom: there is the remarkable
admission by the Tony Blair, that if you “talk about [religion] in our
system, frankly, people think you’re a nutter”. This is not, of course, and
never has been the case. The Queen, for example, makes no attempt to conceal
her religious beliefs and is not widely thought by her people to be a nutter
– at least not in the sense of being mad. If you gloss “nutter” as
“unfashionable” in the former Prime Minister’s phrase, his meaning becomes
clearer. He couldn’t admit to religious faith when in power because it would
have made him look uncool and to be uncool was, in the politics of the time,
to be unpopular. Luckily for Blair’s ability to profess his faith in public,
fashion has shifted a little since he was in office and the concepts that
were such fixed points on the moral compass of his era – edginess,
abrasiveness, outrageous individuality and coolness as the ultimate virtue –
now begin to look rather horrible: cruel, dishonest and damaging, both to
those on the sharp end of them and, in the end, to those who formulated
them.
I have fingered Dr Seldon as the bellwether of the New Respectability, but on
reflection that title ought really to go to Mrs Gaskell. The BBC’s
incoherent mishmash of an adaptation of Cranford has done me the good turn
of sending me back to the original, in which the virtues (and vices) of
respectability are delineated in a fashion much sharper and less cosy than
you might think if you’d seen only the telly version.
It is worth pausing here to remind ourselves of the excellent reasons why
respectability became unfashionable. The hypocrisy, rigidity, unkindness,
Philistinism, self-congratulation and narrow-minded-ness of the respectable
Victorian era, and the no less respectable 1950s were vile and richly
deserved the moral revulsion that sought to replace them with more liberal
and generous ideals. Mrs Gaskell herself is swift to point out the gap that
can form between the ideals of respectability and their practice: Captain
Brown, a rare male intruder into the spinsterish enclave of Cranford, is
regarded with dismay by the ladies for his eccentric habits of kindness. He
carries an old woman’s hot dinner through the streets one icy Sunday; in his
own home, he does the chores to spare his little maidservant. These things
are not respectable. Yet when trouble comes to the Brown household, it is
the most rigidly principled spinster of them all, the redoubtable Miss
Deborah who – I was going to say who abandons her respectable principles,
but that is precisely what she doesn’t do – transcends and makes glorious
the strict (but not, it turns out, inflexible or unimaginative) code of
conduct that has governed the whole of her rather circumscribed life.
No less glorious is the behaviour of Deborah’s sister, the gentle and easily
flustered Miss Matty who, (in a further curious echo of the current news) on
learning of the failure of the bank in which she is a shareholder and
investor, gathers herself up without a word of complaint and begins working
out how best she can repay from her small savings the people who have been
ruined by the bank’s collapse. The effect of her behaviour is to draw an
answering generosity from those around her. “See how a good innocent life
makes friends all around,” remarks a spectator of the phenomenon.
Sentimental Victorian nonsense, we may say when the scene makes its appearance
on our television screens. Maybe. But the paradox of Cranford is that its
genteel respectable absurdities conceal a moral core of hard-to-practise
virtues: kindness, thrift, honesty and generosity. Interesting to see if the
Seldonian and Cameronian emblems of New Respectability – the crested blazers
and hat-tipping – turn out to be the harbingers of a different kind of
morality, a Miss Mattyish blend of simplicity and rigour, or whether they
prove to be mere fashionable flourishes.
Presents you never knew you wanted
It is the season of superfluous stuff, both (to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld)
the known unwanted (socks, bath salts) and the unknown unwanted. Into the
latter category falls a remarkable object to which my colleague Jim has
kindly drawn my attention. A full-page advertisement in a Sunday newspaper
shows a young person in boots and breeches seated on what looks like a loo
with a saddle on top. “Ride your way to a slimmer, trimmer, firmer figure .
. . As seen on Richard & Judy!” exhorts the copyline for this
contraption, which comes at an “introductory price” of £399. Meanwhile, for
the kiddies, The Times reports that a stationary “Smart Cycle” on which tiny
fatties can pedal while “following routes on a computer screen” is tipped as
a Christmas bestseller. It crosses my mind that on a real horse or a real
bike you’d get fresh air, a new skill and new friends thrown in with the
purchase price. Then again, whoever saw a real horse on Richard & Judy.
Hail to the classics
I wage a constant struggle against my own tendency to accumulate stuff. But
the other day I weakened and bought for a tenner in Greenwich market an
amazing thing. It is a tiny bookcase, made of stout leather-grained blue
cardboard, with two shelves on to which are packed 20 diminutive (but
beautifully printed and quite readable) hardback volumes. The whole thing,
published by OUP in the World’s Classics series, constitutes a travelling
library of masterpieces including Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss and the
volume of Cranford that I have just been reading. It is a most elegant and
satisfying artefact. If only some enterprising publisher would issue an
updated version for a sensible price, I bet its Christmas sales would exceed
even those of the stationary kiddie bike.
Singing a national anthem for ENGLISH events might be easier if we had "Jerusalem" as our official English national anthem rather than co-opting the depressing BRITISH dirge "God Save the Queen." It's nearly impossible to get that sombre tune out with any feeling, especially since the only people who say they're British anymore are either at Last Night of the Proms or are foreigners who just snagged a british passport out of a cereal packet.
Steve Jacks, London,
I fear the Dr Seldon's list of common courtesies is not the bellwether of a new respectability, but a sign that very little changes. 18 years ago when I was at Wellington, we were being reminded of the very same things. "If you must wear baseball caps round College when out of uniform, then at least doff them to visitors and members of the common room".
I suspect Stalky & Co would find the list familiar.
I am particularly fond of a stiff letter from a previous Master, who noted with disapproval that boys had been noted removing their jackets at dinner. I still feel a twinge of guilt if I remove my jacket at a formal dinner, even if everyone else is in shirtsleeves.
An OW, London,