My father was about as English as they come. Though he was born and educated in Australia, he talked like an Englishman, dressed like an Englishman, and behaved as he thought an English gentleman would. A homegrown Englishman would have seen through him in a trice but to Australians he seemed more English than the English.
He had a moustache, flying-officer model. As an avid reader of Biggles books, I thought this perfectly appropriate. He may have been flown in a Spitfire from Malta to Bletchley but if he was he didn’t tell me about it, because he would have been breaking the vow of lifelong silence imposed on all sigint personnel. An Englishman’s word is his bond, don’t y’know.
In the 1930s the archetype of the Englishman was disseminated through the movies. Stars like Robert Donat, John Mills, Dennis Price and later David Niven taught ambitious young men like my father how to handle themselves. A generation of American matinée idols aped their languid manner and their clipped speech. Daddy modelled himself on Basil Rathbone because he shared the star’s aquiline nose and hooded eyes.
My father was born in the Tasmanian town of Launceston. His father was an Ulster Scots gentleman, his mother the gentleman’s maid of all work. She was the one who was English; her father was born in Lincolnshire and her mother was the daughter of two English convicts.
As a state of mind, then, Englishness is distinct from Britishness. The man who defines himself as English doesn’t feel the need to propound the values of empire or Commonwealth; he is not a Geordie or a Scouser; he is not a Londoner, let alone a cockney or a mockney. He belongs to an altogether vaguer category that dwells unostentatiously deep in the home counties, pays its bills and minds its own business. The mentor of this type is none other than the man of the millennium, William Shakespeare, whose birthday it was yesterday.
When John of Gaunt uttered his famous speech in Richard II, describing England as a “sceptred isle” he was talking high-sounding nonsense. England was perfectly well understood to be joined by land to Scotland and Wales. Shakespeare’s audience was drawn from Londoners and from the country gentry who had regular business in London. The different parties would have had very different levels of understanding of the geography of the British Isles; what they would have shared, and what John of Gaunt was invoking, is the idea of “Merrie England”, a realm as mythical as St George and his dragon — and no less important.
Shakespeare dealt in illusion; if in the history plays he created a coherent view of England as an autonomous region, distinct from continental Europe, he also allowed the English to be mocked, as madmen, by the gravedigger in Hamlet, who is English enough himself to be played by Stanley Holloway, and as drunkards by Iago, who is less trustworthy.
Self-mockery remains an intrinsic element of Englishness. The Englishman, unlike Queen Victoria, is always prepared to be amused. His characteristic response to the unbearable is to make a joke of it. This chronic lack of seriousness baffles the rest of the world, who see it as a kind of callousness, but it is what protects the Englishman from the fanaticism inherent in tabloid culture.
Those who use the term Merrie England these days think it has something to do with medieval jousting and feasting or with the reign of Good Queen Bess. It is a false memory of England before the Norman conquest, when a foreign leisure class established itself in authority over the labouring English poor. The “core values” of Merrie England are egalitarianism and honest toil; the model citizens of Merrie England were the yeomen who farmed their own land and lived in peace with their neighbours. All our bucolic merry-makings, from the yule log to the maypole and morris dancing, are commemorations of that halcyon pre-Norman time.
Middle Earth is the latest reincarnation of the cherished fantasy of Merrie England, which is partly why The Lord of the Rings is voted the nation’s favourite work of fiction in poll after poll.
Though we might be hard pressed to identify anyone who embodies it, the English stereotype is instantly recognisable. George Santayana, the philosopher, was like other Americans in being unable to distinguish between the British and the English, nevertheless there is great perspicacity in his account: “Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather relieved if only natives will remain natives, and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being . . .”
Santayana was writing in 1922, before the British Empire fell apart, and before the “natives” and “strangers” began arriving in England in numbers. His perception should have warned us that though the Englishman wouldn’t persecute the natives and strangers who arrived on his shores, he wouldn’t welcome them either.
In the 1992 election when John Taylor stood as Conservative candidate for Cheltenham, the English forgot their manners. Taylor is a brilliant lawyer, who had served as a councillor in Solihull. He is well-spoken, a married father of two, and immaculately presented. He could hardly be more English. But Taylor is black. In the run-up to the election he endured racist abuse. The seat went to the Liberal Democrat. In 1996 Taylor had the last laugh. He was raised to the Lords, the first black member of the house.
My poor father would have been horrified. But I suspect Shakespeare would have been delighted. He too had been treated as an outsider and subjected to calumny and insult. He had also written the first English play with a black man for a hero. Throughout his work, inferiors — children, servants, fools and vagabonds — instruct their betters, implicitly calling into question the inevitability of the established order. Patience in enduring inconsistency and contradiction, an awareness of the contingency of all things, is the soul of irony; it is also what makes Englishness both so enduring and so difficult to grasp.
A longer version of this article appears in the current issue of The Spectator
