Identity of England

Citation preview

Identity of

E N G LA N D

‘All history is the history of thought’ (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 1946)

Identity of

E N G LA N D

Robert Colls

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Robert Colls 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2002 First published in paperback 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–924519–3 ISBN 0–19–926994–7 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Ashford Colour Press Limited, Gosport, Hampshire

For Rosie Shephard

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A C K N OW LE D G E M E N TS

There are many people who have helped in the making of this book but I have a special debt to Ruth Parr, who commissioned it, and to Richard Holt, who forced it through to completion. At times, they believed in the book more than I did. Ruth got behind the book right from the first draft. She knew her own mind and was willing to trust mine. She is the sort of editor historians pray for. Dick, on the other hand, made me do extra training. As a historian of sport, it was appropriate that he made me hit the bag just one more time. I can see now, though I couldn’t see it always then, that he was right. At a crucial stage he understood the book better. I would also like to give special thanks to Keith Wrightson, who encouraged me and who reminded me that if English identity didn’t end in England, neither did modern history start in 1963. In addition, I want to thank the following colleagues who read every word and made valuable suggestions: Ron Greenall, who has been a generous critic for over twenty years; Mark Rawlinson, who said it was his ‘book of the year’ (in April); Roey Sweet, who advised on the literature; Stephen Yeo, whose tutorials continued to invigorate; and Jean Shaw, who as usual did more than type a difficult manuscript. Then there are those who over the years have helped me to think directly about England and their England, possibly without knowing how much: first, my parents, Robert Colls and Margaret Colls, and then Jim Blance, Monique Clarke, Graham Colls, Mike Cronin, Dick Ellis, Nick Everett, Pete Golding, Stephen Harding, David Hargreaves, Ibrahim Hewitt, Ashok Jetwha, Bill Lancaster, Michel Mallet, Pascale Mallet, Bill Myers, Fatmah Qaddoura, Tony Ramsey, David Reeder, Davinder Sandhu, Punam Sandhu, Alan Shephard, Margaret Shephard, Shirley Siriwardena, Mahendra Solanki, Philip Sturgess, Steve Wagg, Ann Watson, Rob Watson, and students on the BA Humanities degree third-year module at Vaughan College and Ruskin. I thank my friends and critics for all their help and influences. Needless to say, however, the book’s faults are mine. Finally I would like to thank the staff of the Library of the University of Leicester for their unfailing helpfulness and true professionalism; the

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librarian of the University of Mississippi for bending the rules and allowing me open access to the Goldstein Collection; and to Kay Rogers and Jeff New at Oxford University Press, for overseeing the production of this book with good humour and startling efficiency. My wife Rosie and my children Amy and Rebecca have had to live with this book, on and off, for about ten years. They’ll be glad to get it out of the house. Me too. But thanks, kids, all the same. Robert Colls Department of Economic and Social History University of Leicester December 2001.

C O N T E N TS

List of Illustrations List of Maps

Introduction

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B U I LD I N G T H E NAT I O N 1. The Law Becomes You 2. Uniting the Kingdoms 3. Constituting the Modern Nation

13 34 50

EXT E N D I N G T H E STAT E 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Modern Gentlemanly Progress The Nation Over Itself Colonials Women and Workers Loyalties

69 80 93 108 124

P O ST-I M P E R I A L R E F O R M AT I O N 9. Forward March Halted 10. Imagined Nation 11. Reconstituting the Nation

Bridgehead

143 162 177 199

B U I LD I N G T H E H O M E LA N D 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

England as A Garden Wasteland Island Natives Journeys

203 212 225 245 258

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A B S O R B I N G T H E P EO P LE 17. 18. 19. 20.

Celts National Properties Common People Left-over People

275 289 300 312

E N G LA N D N O W 21. Anarchy in the UK? 22. Thinking With England

337 356

Conclusion

377

Select Bibliography

382

Map

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Index

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L I ST O F I L LU ST RAT I O N S

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

(Between pp. 212–213) Fishermen, Newhaven, Sussex 1844. Victoria and Albert Museum. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Bristol 1857. Robert Howlett, Victoria and Albert Museum. Dorothy Taylor, Runswick Bay, North Yorkshire 1880. Frank Sutcliffe, Sutcliffe Gallery. Cavalry Guides, India 1890. British Library. Christabel Pankhurst, Knightsbridge 1909. Christina Broom, Museum of London. King George V and Queen Mary, Durbar, Delhi 1911. Hulton Getty. Durham Light Infantry, Veldhoek, Belgium 1916. Imperial War Museum. Staffordshire Brigade, having taken St Quentin Canal, France 1918. Imperial War Museum. Cotton men, Alderly Edge, Cheshire 1920. With thanks to Mrs J. Sweet. IRA men, Dublin 1922. Hulton Getty. Upper Lambourne, Berkshire 1926. Rivetters, Tyneside 1928. South Tyneside Public Libraries. Preston, Lancashire 1930. Aerofilms. Weymouth, 1930. Air Raid Precaution wardens, Buxton, Derbyshire 1940. With thanks to Mrs J. Sweet. Drillers, Tyne Dock Engineering Company, South Shields 1942. Royal Marines, Normandy, 6 June 1944. Imperial War Museum. Public house, London 1949. Hulton Getty. Harton Colliery sports day 1955. Salford 1962. Shirley Baker. Salford 1962. Shirley Baker. Salford 1964. Shirley Baker. ‘Lax’ team, St Helen’s and St Katherine’s, Abingdon, Berkshire 1966. Henley Regatta 1967. Manchester 1968. Shirley Baker.

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26. Mods, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire 1968. Terry Spencer, Museum of London. 27. Victoria Station, London 1969. Tony Ray-Jones, National Museum of Photography, Film and TV. 28. Buckingham Palace 1971. Aerofilms. 29. Hereford Cattle Market 1978. Ian Berry, Magnum Photos. 30. Brixton, London 1978. Ian Berry, Magnum Photos. 31. Whitby, North Yorkshire 1978. Ian Berry, Magnum Photos. 32. Queen’s Silver Jubilee street party preparations, Fulham 1978. Ian Berry, Magnum Photos. 33. Sunday market, Cheshire Street, London 1991. Keith Cardwell, Museum of London. Thanks to Ruf Trade and British Lion Music for permission to include words by Jarvis Cocker (p. 300) and Alan Price (p. 312).

L I ST O F M A P S 1. United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

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Introduction

On the day that Germany took back the Rhineland, in March 1936, George Orwell recalled standing at a public bar in the north of England. Anxious about the threat, he remarked that the German army had crossed the Rhine. ‘Parley-voo’, someone replied, in the words of the old soldiers’ song. Orwell didn’t appreciate the joke. He was baffled by these flat, unresponsive people. What did they think? What did they feel? That same evening, back in the pub, he chanced upon what he saw as the other side of the English character. Now the whole bar was up and in full cry, singing: For you can’t do that ’ere, No, you can’t do that there, ’ere; Anywhere else you can do that there, But you can’t do that there ’ere!

Orwell reflected once more on these ordinary people who, no matter how little they knew or cared about other places, knew that ’ere, ’ere in England, you just can’t do that there ’ere. In the afternoon they had appeared oblivious to the Nazi threat. That evening, in a silly song, Orwell saw them as a nation in touch with itself. Anyone who has ever wondered about the English will understand Orwell’s feelings on that day. Now you see them. Now you don’t. I had intended to introduce this book by comparing Orwell’s account of the English with my own impressions today.⁄ In The English People, written in 1944, Orwell identified eight national characteristics. He said that the English were not interested in the arts, that they had a capacity for gentleness, ⁄ He wrote two monumental essays on this subject: ‘The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius’ (written Aug.–Oct. 1940, published Feb. 1941), in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. ii (Harmondsworth, 1970); and ‘The English People’ (finished May 1944, published 1947), ibid. vol. iii.

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that they respected the law, that they were suspicious of foreigners, that they loved animals up to the point of hypocrisy, itself a sixth characteristic, that they were riddled with class divisions, and that they enjoyed games, especially football. Almost as an afterthought, a ninth characteristic appeared in Orwell’s list: he said they were having fewer children. Orwell was an astute observer, but I found that trying to compare his English with mine was an impossible exercise. How, for instance, could ‘gentleness’ be measured in 1944, a year when England resembled an armed camp? And if it is true that the English of today are the same people who will hold open a door, say ‘please’, ‘cheers’, and ‘thank you’, and do not vote for extremist political parties, few could claim now—as Orwell could claim then—that gun crime is largely unknown. Perhaps the English still do not like to learn foreign languages, but they now eat foreign food and no longer regard ‘such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust’. Of all his propositions, only the lower birth rate is indubitably testable and comparable. For the rest, the exercise is intriguing but impossible. Compared to us, Orwell’s people can look very similar or very different depending on where and how hard one cares to look. In the life of nations, so much depends on how the past is lined up with the present. Orwell’s English and the English of today cannot be compared as if they are two specimens in a box. They can only be explained through a line connecting how they thought about themselves then with how we think about ourselves, and them, now. Over a much longer time sequence and through more complex patterns of connection, this is what the book tries to do.

Why Do We Need This Book? This book is about how the English have thought about themselves. Occasionally, it is about how others have thought about the English. It attends to the history of England, and the history of ideas about England. But a book written by an Englishman published in England on the theme of English identity might be perceived as dealing in things we know already. Certainly, much of what follows will be recognizable to anyone who has lived here for some time. Parliament and the rural landscape, for example, are part of the common round even if one has never been to Westminster or explored the countryside. Parliamentary government is so

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embedded in how England has been described that it is hard to think of it as a force acting on our identity. More likely it is seen as part of our identity rather than something actively shaping us. Similarly with talk of green and pleasant landscapes. It might seem, therefore, that this is a book that tries to unpick the obvious. In a sense this is true, but when dealing with intangible forces such as national identity, it is their very obviousness that makes them matter. At the heart of that obviousness in England is the authority and durability of the state. For over a thousand years state institutions have been absolutely critical to the identity of England. Kings and their agents built a central state which not only taxed and coined, made war, and left records, but also claimed to be based on laws common to the kingdom. If the English nation was made anywhere, it was made here, at the centre, in London, and across the axes of law and law-enforcement that ran out across the country right up to the military-juridical edge. Whether or not the people had any say in making them, rulers always reminded the English that the laws were the people’s laws. A very distinctive state managed to grow and survive over a very long period of time, though of course it was not ordained that it should, and in different places it grew at different rates. By 1801 it could claim to be a British state representing not only four nationalities in a single parliament, but also an increasing number of peoples across the world. For all its tendencies to pull to the centre, this was a multi-dimensional state that couldn’t stop building at the edge. At the same time, it was also a state which had presided over the two inaugural revolutions of the modern world: the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century, and the commercial and industrial revolution of the eighteenth. These developments gave the British a decisive say in the world balance of moral and material power. If constitutionalism provided England with the language of ‘liberty’, a modern economy provided the guns and the money. And, what is more, this state worked. It was, on the whole, a competent state able to manage its resources, defend its borders, govern its people, effect public works. Like all states, of course, it represented a concentration of power and a huge capacity for violence. Even so, it was distinguishable from many of its rivals in the way it was able to stay roughly congruous with the passions and prejudices of its people. Those people, in turn, were not inclined to see themselves simply as the state’s creatures. The identity of England never rested solely on what

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statesmen said. From early times, there is evidence of the country demanding the right of reply. Sometimes, though not very often, this could sprout as a version of popular sovereignty. That both state and nation could each claim sovereignty called forth a political rhetoric of remarkable adaptability: the state was elite, but the people were born free; parliament and the courts made the laws, but the people’s ancient laws and liberties were intact; everyone was subject to the constitution, but it was not one you could inspect. Paradox allowed for a national identity of strength and suppleness. Only the history of the constitution tied both sides together. Yet constitutional issues were secondary to the fact that this was a state that worked. So well did it work, that oppositional parties such as the Chartists or the labour movement never succeeded in thinking beyond it. They wanted to extend the state and to control it, not to change it. In England the state came first, and the rest, whatever we call them— ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘land’, ‘country’, ‘territory’, ‘identity’—came second. So close has this institution been to the identification of our lives and who we are, from birth to death, that to see it as anything other than obvious, natural, or given, is very hard. All this, however, is beginning to change. The changes began in the 1940s, but realization they had happened took another forty years to sink in. First, there was the transformation of what used to be called ‘Britain’s place in the world’. No longer a world military power, no longer an imperial power, no longer a manufacturing power, no longer an island power, the British have been increasingly driven back on their own resources (of which identity is a part). Membership of the European Union since 1973 has rendered them not even a sovereign power. At home, fundamental shifts in contemporary patterns of work, family, authority, household, residence, region, communication, and ethnic and religious composition have combined to produce the most rapid and comprehensive change of modern times. Moreover, for over thirty of the past fifty years there has been low-grade civil war in Northern Ireland, with major constitutional implications for the devolution of political power to Belfast, and to Scotland and Wales as well. In 1999 the House of Lords ceased to be an hereditary chamber for the first time since, well, the beginning. Anyone born in England between 1945 and 1955 was brought up with the myths of the Anglo-British imperial state embedded in their lives. The world was the backdrop, much of it British, while in the foreground was

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Great Britain, a state beyond question, a moral force undoubtedly, the main focus of how lives were lived. Most identities seemed secure. Almost nothing was known about ‘abroad’, apart from soldier’s tales. Then, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, there was a gradual realization that the British world didn’t have to be like this and wasn’t going to be for very much longer. In the 1980s, for all her alleged conservatism, Mrs Thatcher knew that change was the order of the day. Myths of longevity and continuity were replaced by myths of what was ‘new’ and ‘improved’. Everything stood ready to be ‘restructured’, and by the 1990s the British knew that they weren’t what they were any more. National identity was unravelling with astonishing speed, almost in vulgar Marxist fashion as the means of production changed under it. Indeed, one of the difficulties of writing this book has been the rapid decay in old ways of seeing the world. Our deepest structures of identity—to do with the idea of coming from a particular place and being a particular kind of person with roots and aptitudes and characteristics—for so long driven deep into the ground of our being, are decaying now from within. It is only a matter of time before they become unserviceable. In the light of these changes, from about twenty years ago historians and critics started asking the national question again, though with greater urgency over the last ten. Brockliss, Eastwood, Alibhai-Brown, Campbell, Colley, Collini, Connolly, Dodd, Corrigan, Sayer, Davies, Foster, Gilroy, Grant, Stringer, Hastings, Kearney, Kidd, Langford, Light, Marr, Nairn, Parekh, Paxman, Pittock, Samuel, Schama, Schwarz, Scruton, and Williams, among others, and each in their own way, have all addressed the history and meaning of the Anglo-British state.¤ Some have come at it ¤ Laurence Brockliss and David Eastwood (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles c.1750–c.1850 (Manchester, 1997); Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain (London, 2000); James Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London, 2001); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London, 1992); Stefan Collini, English Pasts (Oxford, 1999); Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London, 1986); S. J. Connolly, Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland since 1500: Integration and Diversity (Dublin, 1999); Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985); Norman Davies, The Isles (London, 1999); R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993); Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987); Alex Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995); Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997); Hugh Kearney, The British Isles (Cambridge, 1995); Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism (Cambridge, 1999); Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford, 2000);

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predominantly from the point of view of high politics, others from the point of view of low culture, or class, or race, or religion, or territory, or gender, or at the level of the history of ideas. Some have concentrated on the political centre, others have worked at the margins. Some have chosen to take the long view, others the short. Davies’s is a blistering tour de force over two-and-a-half millennia. Light’s is an exquisite study of four writers and a couple of decades. Colley’s starts with the Act of Union in 1707 and ends with the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. It has been the most influential and deserves to be. In the light of all these works, four things may be said about this one. First, it addresses the identity of England all the way through, and not just as one theme among others. Second, it mixes the history of events with the history of ideas about those events: it believes that national identity must correspond to, and make sense of, the real world; it does not believe that it can be ‘invented’ or ‘constructed’ according to convenience. Third, it follows its subject up to present times. Finally, it comes after and not before the works listed above. All historians stand on the shoulders of those who went first. ‘England’ is always up for debate, of course, but in recent years the debate has become critical. Because of this the revival of interest in national history is to be welcomed. Identities are changing rapidly but knowledge of history is abysmally low, particularly among the young.‹ To some, it might still seem that I am unpicking what is obvious, natural, and given, but I do not think it will seem that way for long. It is my contention that we are living through a period of incomprehension, in pre-contractual times. The English stand now in need of a reassessment of who they are. This book is an account of who they were, with present needs in mind. As the conditions for our survival are being worked out, I hope Identity of England explains something of our history and allows the best and most useful parts of that history to be carried forward into the future. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London, 1991); Andrew Marr, The Day Britain Died (London, 2000); Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain (London, 1981) and After Britain (London, 2001); Bhikhu Parekh, The Future of Multi Ethnic Britain (London, 2000); Jeremy Paxman, The English: Portrait of a People (London, 1998); Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester 1999); Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998); Simon Schama, A History of Britain (BBC TV 2000–2); Bill Schwarz, The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History (London, 1996); Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (London, 2001); Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales? (Harmondsworth, 1985). ‹ Guardian, 8 May 1999, 28 Oct. 2000.

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How To Read This Book In light of this interactive way of seeing the past and the present, this book could not be conceived in the usual way. A history of national identity that began at the beginning and advanced steadily up to the present could not have dealt with all that cutting across time and space which identity-making involves. Not all English identity was made in England at the same time, but many identities are in play at any one time. Similarly, too simple a distinction between history and myth could not have explained how national identity draws on both as forms of truth. A history written solely from the point of view of those at the top could not see the whole picture, because there was always far more to being English than those at the top could know. As for those at the bottom, identity was never simply imposed upon them from above. There were times when it may have been imposed, but it was never simply imposed. Ordinary people have to be allowed their capacity for nation-building too. So, this history has not been written in what some might see as the normal way. It does not have a strict chronological sequence, though it does try to have a sense of direction. It does not offer some identities as true and others as false, though that is not to say that it considers all identities to be of equal worth. It does not write only from the point of view of the powerful, though it recognizes their disproportionate influence. Nor does it try to judge. Nations have often been written about as if they were on trial. They are born; they rise and fall; they are shown to have been principled or unprincipled, or to have performed particularly well or badly. I have not approached this book in this fashion. Trying to estimate the moral principle of the majority is difficult enough without trying to judge it—at least in any ‘holier than thou’ sort of way—because the past was different from now. Equally, nations do not perform according to some clear measure of success, in the way that businesses make profits or armies win battles. Nations survive. That is virtually their only criterion of success and, of course, survival is never guaranteed. Identity of England does not invite its readers into a courtroom where England will be judged nor, indeed, to a funeral where it will be mourned, but to an art gallery, to be shown startling portraits of great diversity and likeness.

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How This Book is Organized The book has two parts with three sections in each (the gallery has two wings with three rooms in each). The first part is about national identity as a political ideology to do with the relationship between the state and the nation(s) it represents. The second part is about national identity as a more personal and emotional idea, centred on the relationship of the people with the land. Both parts have eleven chapters. Chapter 1 starts with the origins of the English nation in the laws and territories and language of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It is concerned with the creation of the myth of a uniquely ancient and English freedom and how, from the seventeenth century on, parliament took up that myth. Chapter 2 follows the growth of the English state with the making of a British state in the incremental Union of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Here, the key relationship was with the Scots, though the critical one turned out to be with the Irish. Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which the nation has been represented in modern times as a ‘whole’ entity— through a political constitution, and through the growing power of mass communications. Both systems put the representation of the many in the hands of the few. These first three chapters appear under the sectional heading: ‘Building the Nation’. After building the nation, ‘Extending the State’. The next five chapters show how the British state grew to include previously excluded or subordinated groups at home, while at the same time extending its dominion abroad. Both extensions had an interactive impact on national identity. Chapter 4 considers Walter Bagehot’s plan for the survival of the modern state’s key political figure, the English gentleman. Many gentlemen tended to stay rich and even dignified, as it was Bagehot’s intention they should, but most ceased to count, except perhaps in their own estimation. Chapter 5 reflects in turn on middle-class political representation, first in ideas and then in personnel. It tries to show how the call for democracy led to the growth of secrecy and centralization, while a tendency to trust to the discretionary powers of the state led to complacency about its constitution. Chapter 6 examines the state’s relationship with the empire. It was a relationship minutely graded according to rank and status, but crudely drawn as well, mainly according to race. Whether or not the Irish were part of the empire is open to question. Self-government in Ireland came into operation between 1920 and 1922, in one form and another, but as far as British

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politics was concerned, the country remained what it had always been, a special case. Chapter 7 looks at two groups whose Englishness was hardly in doubt but who were thought in need of careful monitoring nevertheless. Working-class organizations had to struggle for admission to Westminster and other national institutions, including the labour market, but a sense of alienation is rare. Women’s relationships with the state were always ambiguous. Even with the granting of political equality in a formal sense, women were not supposed to be interested in public life. Whatever changed in women’s relationships with the state, it was an institution that was gendered already. Chapter 8 looks at black and Asian immigration into a post-imperial country on the look-out for ‘invaders’. Quite suddenly, colonial encounters were happening in England. The last section of part one, ‘Post-Imperial Reformation’, contains three chapters dealing with the period since 1945. Chapter 9 shows the rapid decline in the belief in British progress and the rhetoric of national discipline that stemmed from that belief. Chapter 10 looks at the key post-war interrelationships of class, gender, and race and reconsiders their joint and mutual history as a precondition to the next chapter, Chapter 11, which picks up on the various national groups dealt with in the middle section and considers their current and future options. A short interleaving section follows. Bridgehead introduces part two of the book by putting the case for the difference in identities associated with a political machine, the state, and those associated with a more organic and affective idea of England, vested in a sense of homeland. Chapter 12 sets out the basic idea: land and people enjoying an intimate, natural relationship. England is a garden, its climate is temperate, its people are mild. Chapter 13 goes back to nineteenth-century views of the land as in spiritual crisis, while Chapter 14 deals with attempts to resolve that crisis and relocate the land as a place of meaning and affection. By 1900 England was a place never more signed, sealed, and accounted for. Chapter 15 looks at changing attitudes to those who were deemed to live in the more essential England, and the ethnological theories that established their ancient title to it. English ‘natives’ such as these were discoverable in the poorer and more marginal places, and Chapter 16 seeks them out. These five chapters appear under the sectional heading: ‘Building the Homeland’. The next four chapters move in their emphasis from places to peoples, and how they too were absorbed into the national identity. Chapter 17 extends the journeying into Celtic lands. Celtic natives were important to

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the emotional geography of the Union. Chapter 18 shows how what were seen as the traditional characteristics of the English people were absorbed in a way that was frankly modernist in its basic impulse to lend structure to what seemed to be dissolving. Plebeian virtues were celebrated as appropriately dense and ‘national’, and Chapter 19 examines the levels of censorship and interpretation that accompanied this. Chapter 20 looks at what happened to this more inclusive awareness of England during the 1930s depression. ‘Regionalism’ emerged after the war as part of the national economic plan and as a key part of the welfare state. These four chapters come under the sectional heading: ‘Absorbing the People’. ‘England Now’ covers the very recent past. Chapter 21 traces not only the changes, but also changes in the ways of thinking about change itself. Over the past thirty years there has been an emphasis on ‘decentring’ and ‘dispersal’—ideas which run counter to nation-building as it has developed in the modern era. The last chapter, ‘Thinking with England’, looks at those who have tried to think about modern dilemmas within an English idiom. Finally, in the Conclusion, there are some suggestions as to the future.

Building the Nation

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1 The Law Becomes You

The origins of the English nation lie in the making of a powerful state which recognized at an early stage the legitimate interests of the English people. The people were encouraged to obey a law that was said to be their law. The state, on the other hand, was occasionally reminded that what applied to the people, applied also to it. By the middle of the seventeenth century, after a civil war fought and won on just these grounds, ideas about the law and the people had the force and standing of a popular nationalist ideology, an ideology that was absorbed into the mainstream identity of modern England.

Freeborn In 1066 William of Normandy came not to conquer English kingship but to claim his place in its line of succession. He took charge of ‘the best organised monarchy in all Europe’.⁄ In Normandy William’s authority was personal, but in England it rested on an old and nationally recognizable system of government. Building on the great Saxon codifications of customary law, written in English, beginning with Aethelbert in the early seventh century and reaching high points under Alfred (871–99) and Cnut (1016–35), the English kings had developed the means of rudimentary written record as early as the eighth century and centralized law-making, tax-gathering, and coinage by the ninth. Law-making and tax-gathering were connected activities. When Alfred gathered his laws together he recognized them as standing ⁄ R. C. Van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge, 1973), 9.

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in a line of succession stretching from Aethelbert of Kent to Ine of Wessex (‘my kinsman’) to Offa of Mercia. Patrick Wormald reckons that by the tenth century the law was internally consistent, politically coherent, and intruding on the lives of the people, ‘to an extent that had no Anglo Saxon precedent’.¤ Loyn tells us also that at this time ‘a high proportion of the land was held by charter’, and ‘the well taxed English . . . produce[d] the most advanced currency’.‹ Campbell reminds us that, under Cnut, a single currency issue ran to 40 million coins. By the eleventh century most of the English shires and boroughs were in place as effective administrative units, with courts big enough and inclusive enough to involve ‘the active participation of thousands of men of relatively low wealth and status’.› An English church, with bishoprics stretching from Lindisfarne in the north to Winchester in the south, had been in place long before that, as had strong co-operation and intermarriage between English kingdoms, as had the Witan, or counsel of the wise, gathered at royal behest, mainly in the south of the kingdom. When Alfred treated with the Danes in 878 he did so not as a West Saxon royal, ‘but as leader of “all the Witan of the English people” ’.fi Between 909 and 920 Alfred’s son Edward beat the Danes and brought the southern ‘Danelaw’ into the dominant West Saxon English kingdom. ‘From 954 onwards the English were in control.’fl Domesday (1086), with its record of 45,000 land-holdings and 14,000 named places, demonstrates not only the wealth of William’s conquered kingdom, but the remarkable sweep of its instruments of government. Norman and Angevin rulers built their state on Anglo-Saxon foundations. Itinerant justices were on the road by the eleventh century, a royal secretariat and a common law was clearly operating from at least the twelfth, and justices of the peace, quarter sessions, and intermittent parliamentary gatherings were in session from the thirteenth. From the 1250s state proclamations started to be written in English. In 1279 the Quo Warranto survey was big enough and confident enough to try and settle all land claims, forever. In the fourteenth century ‘a house of commons’ was established, and in the sixteenth century it was clear that parliamentary statutes were being used as an executive arm of central government. By the time of the Tudor revolutions in church and government, the English state had, in its own ¤ ‹ › fl

Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law, vol, 1 (Oxford, 1999), 106, 483. H. R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England 500–1087 (London, 1984), 107, 122. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State, pp. 32, xxv. fi Wormald, English Law, 286. Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 40.

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eyes at least, one law, one church, one language, one king’s peace, and an imperial authority which, in Lord Chancellor Thomas More’s words, dared ‘legislate against the world’.‡ The English state was sovereign, but the king who made it so was not himself the state. Every state institution added to the power of the monarchy but at the same time subtracted authority from the monarch’s personal office.° As James I put it in 1616: ‘In all well settled monarchies where law is established formerly and orderly . . . there judgement is deferred from the king to his subordinate magistrates; not that the king takes it from himselfe, but gives unto them.’· The Tudor state was a political administration, not an absolutism, with politicians ranged across the great offices of Chancery, Treasury, Court, Privy Council, Church, and Law. In an age of politics, aristocrats started divesting themselves of armour and investing themselves in unfortified country houses. Most important to the build-up of this powerful, overarching state was the common law. Law as common to all subjects was one of the ‘two great rhetorics’⁄‚ of medieval and early modern authority. The other centred naturally enough on the monarch himself, owner of all he surveyed and enforcer of the law, in common, for all. But given the great age of English state institutions, many dating from before the Conquest, it was always difficult for an incoming medieval monarch to start from a position of absolute personal authority. Royal power fixed the common law’s boundaries and enforced its judgements, it is true, but, right from the first law-books—Glanvill’s in 1189 and Bracton’s in 1220—it was made clear that the law did not belong to the king. It belonged, in the rhetoric at least, to the English people. Parliament also grew out of the centralized power of the king, but it too did not regard itself as the king’s possession. Barons insisted on their right to parler, and laid down written limitations on King John in Magna Carta (1215; in law 1225). One of those limitations was the land and trade and personal liberty of the English people themselves, or at any rate the half of them who were free. The final clause of the great charter had King John signing to all due ‘distrain and distress’ on his own office should the Crown break into ‡ Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, 53. ° Even if that institution had itself originated with that office. Lovell attaches great importance to the institutional development of the state as an impersonal force: Colin Rhys Lovell, English Constitutional and Legal History (New York, 1962) p. xi, chs. 1–4. · Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England c.1556–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), 21. ⁄‚ Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, 38.

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those interests and privileges (including those of the ‘English church’). Of course, in practice Magna Carta represented the requirements of the rich and powerful and their ability to defend those requirements, by force if need be, but as its liberties were woven into law and the presumption of law, their significance widened to include the nation as a whole. The next generation of barons forced conciliar government on King Henry in 1258 and 1259 (Provisions of Oxford and Westminster), and they did so again after the battle of Lewes in 1264. Simon de Montfort, victor of Lewes, declared that all members of the realm’s governing council should be English. All three Edwards (1272–1377) centralized the state, but the more they gathered royal authority in, the more they gave it out. They had to raise revenue and felt they could not raise revenue except by bargaining with parliament. They had to proceed by consent and felt they could not proceed without parliamentary verification. Edward II defeated the barons at Boroughbridge in 1322, then called for a parliament to ratify the victory. Five years later the barons defeated Edward and did the same. In 1485 Henry Tudor settled matters on Bosworth field beyond any military shadow of a doubt, but he still needed, or felt he needed, a parliament to say so.⁄⁄ All that which gave kings their authority inclined to give law and parliament authority too. And all that gave law and parliament authority inclined to give local law and local government authority. Parliamentary rhetoric bestowed identity on the localities, and when the localities spoke of parliament it was in terms of obedience and collusion. By the eighteenth century, the towns would look to Parliament to uphold those historic rights and privileges which constituted their civic as well as their national identity. Parliament’s role here was not to interfere but to ratify.⁄¤ In time, with some notable breaks and a lot of mutual learning, both sides came to believe they needed each other. As medieval common law developed, thus sending existing courts into decline (feudal, church, mercantile), or demotion (county and hundred), so it had to devise more elaborate forms of law based on the state’s direct intervention in the provinces.⁄‹ Henry II (1154–89) built his state on writs, ⁄⁄ As the struggle for power swung from royal authority to baronial council, parliament came to be seen as separable from each: Lovell, English Constitutional and Legal History, 181. ⁄¤ Rosemary Sweet, ‘Local Identities and a National Parliament’, conference paper, National Identities and Parliaments 1660–1860, UCL, Mar. 2001. ⁄‹ Before common-law authority, a variety of courts and laws operated in different places by different jurisdictions (shire, hundred, manor, town, merchant, church), and in certain places, particularly in northern England, there were autonomous jurisdictions known as ‘liberties’: S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London, 1981), 19.

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circuits, and sittings, or ‘assizes’, where local assemblies met royal officers. By 1170 an elite of judges, ‘justiciars’, and ‘justices in eyre’ were on the move through the country. By 1220 the dart-stream of royal writs was so heavy that it required its own registrar. And, just as the king’s men rode out to the people, so the people journeyed in; that is, as jurors or litigants or pleaders or petitioners they journeyed into the orbit of state business. Among the first markers of English regionalism were the six circuits of the law as devised by Henry II. Soon, members of the house of common(er)s would join those on legal business, journeying up to London and down again and reporting back both ways. Between 1307 and 1422 members for the shires and boroughs of the realm were summoned to no fewer than 118 parliaments, an average of more than one a year. It is clear that regular forms of consent were in the making, a two-way process enhancing the authority of both sides. Since the time of the Conqueror, the medieval English state had grown not only in size and reach but also in its capacity to speak and be spoken to. Common law and parliament grew out of the monarchical state to find their own spheres of interest. There were said to be Saxon precedents for this in Witan and elected kingship, institutions that were never wholly forgotten. By the fourteenth century the common law was becoming autonomous with its own academic schools, legal texts, and courts, and claiming to rely for the greater part of the king’s peace on the customs and practices of the people.⁄› While it was true that without the monarch the common law had no final authority, it was also true that without the common law the monarch had no jurisdiction. Given their professional concern for the true alignment of past with present, case on case, judgement on judgement, it was natural that one day lawyers would come to be interested in writing histories. By the middle of the fourteenth century nearly all the requirements for an English national identity were in place. At the heart of it was a central state ⁄› By the fourteenth century it would appear that common law was indeed ‘common’. It applied to all though it was not available to all. It was settled from an agreed year, 1189, set as the beginning of ‘legal time’ and custom. Its primary task was to sort and synthesize all that was brought before it out of the great hinterland of custom and practice in which it operated. There were three central courts: Kings Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas. Alongside these common courts there was a fourth, Parliament, with its own ‘commons’. By 1307, common law’s ‘practitioners could speak of a complete system, worthy of study for its own sake’: George W. Keeton, The Norman Conquest and the Common Law (London, 1966), 210. The idea of the king’s peace moved from applying to certain people in certain places on certain days, to all people in all places, everyday. There was no grand plan: F. W. Maitland, The Forms of Action at Common Law (1909, Cambridge, 1948), 11.

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that carried a strong sense of its own historical worth—a sense of self that nevertheless acknowledged ‘Ingland the nacion’ and the laws and precedents of that nation. Later, in the seventeenth century, some of this will be garnered up with Magna Carta to make the claim that the English people were ‘freeborn’. But much else stemmed from this mutual recognition of state and nation, including a distinctive sense of territory and ethnicity, an English church, a set of national fables, and a clear common language and feeling that certain things could be said only in that language—like Robert of Gloucester’s manuscript (1300–25) on ‘Hou Inglond first began’, and how it was ‘a wel god lond’.⁄fi We have to be careful, of course, to look out for falsehoods in this first flowering of English national identity. The English people were never as ‘free’, nor as incorporated, nor as ancient, nor as united as some of their representations claimed. Anglo-Saxon England had been a slave society, and under feudalism, indeed, most English people were very far from free. Right into the modern period, they carried identities richer and far more varied than just being English. They were Christians first, with affiliations to eternity. King Alfred’s great law-book was encrusted with biblical and Christian reference.⁄fl Around 9,000 parishes gathered the nation in and the parish continued as a key unit of local identity. Later, an English Bible and Prayer Book would speak to a Protestant people, and being Protestant and knowing your Bible was also supposed to be bigger than being English (or, by then, British). Well into the eighteenth century, scholarly opinion identified the British as of the line of Japheth, son of Noah, brother of Shem and Ham, creators of all the nations of the world as recorded by Moses author of the Book of Genesis— an identity much older than England.⁄‡ In everyday life, meanwhile, there were local manors and manorial duties and entitlements and all the identities that went with that; and neighbourhoods and families with close and distant kin; and counties with sure signs of shire loyalty, especially among the gentry. On the far edges of the kingdom, in the frontier lordships where the king’s writ did not run, the Marcher lordships struggled for jurisdiction. The ancient kingdom of Northumbria, for instance, ‘survived into the

⁄fi Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), 71–107. ⁄fl H. R. Loyn, ‘The Church and the Law in Early Anglo-Saxon England’, Vaughan Paper, 37 (Leicester 1995), 3. ⁄‡ Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism, (Cambridge 1999), ch 3.

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medieval English state as a land honeycombed with palatinates and liberties’. At the bottom of society the people were craftsmen and labourers, with mentalities of skill and servitude. Yet, for all these other identities, they were English as well. Indeed, they were coming to be seen as English above all, with an ‘Inglis tong’ which was ‘comun’.⁄° The idea of the nation as embodied in common law and represented in parliament offered the people the idea of themselves as a life apart. Moreover, as the great feudal magnates were increasingly unable to speak for the growing number of waged workers who were no longer their tenants and who were on the move, parliament took the strain. Limited parliamentary sittings gave way to huge, if irregular, assemblies of knights and burgesses representing the shires and boroughs. In 1295 Edward I’s parliament assembled over 400 members. The great Tudor monarchs had a taste for their own personal authority but, at the same time, they accepted that power had to be shared if revenues were to be raised and if laws were to be observed. They came to understand the necessity for parliament. Not without pain, they learned to live without a standing army, without a monopoly church and without arbitrary taxation. Though they did not have to busy themselves too much with the thoughts and feelings of their subjects, Tudor monarchs did have to concern themselves, in Professor Bendix’s words, with ‘the balancing of contingencies upon which the legitimacy of a political order exists’.⁄· In Polydore Vergil’s account of English History (1534), kings and lords are positioned in the centre of the drama while ‘Parlyament’, and what he called a ‘commonwelth’, wait patiently in the wings. Down among the stalls stand a fearsome ‘people’, ever ready to clamber out and do mayhem. This was Vergil’s sixteenth-century three-class version of the English nation. Even so, ordinary rich men like John Hales of Coventry could still see themselves as part of that nation and feel responsible for what happened to it. Speaking in 1549 about the damage of enclosure on social stability, Hales put himself in the same boat as his king. He did ‘not recken my selfe a mere straunger to this mattier; no more than a man that weare in a shippe, which weare in daunger of wracke, might saye, that because he is not (percase) the maister ⁄° Turville-Petre, England the Nation: by 1290 ‘the association between language and nation was well established’ (p. 9); Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1995), chs. 1 and 2; F. Musgrove, The North of England (Oxford, 1990), p. 57. ⁄· Reinhard Bendix, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New Brunswick, 1996), 23.

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or pilote of the same, the daunger thereof did nothinge perteyne unto him’.¤‚ It is worth remembering that in 1649 Charles I was beheaded by men who, like Hales, could not leave their country’s affairs to others. Charles’s offence was treason. If one presumes that a king would find it difficult to betray himself, then sovereignty must have lain not with him but with the nation. The English civil war was fought over how to establish, then contain, this stunning fact. Whereas the Tudors had broadly tolerated the sharing, or the delaying, of their ordinary sovereignty, the Stuarts found it difficult and tipped the balance against themselves. Up to the 1640s the monarch ruled mainly by decree, with no Habeas Corpus Act, no independent judiciary, no free press, no free speech, and a weak and often intimidated House of Commons.¤⁄ In the English civil war, the nation as identified by law and parliament was ranged against the state as identified by King Charles. The nation prevailed. As John Milton told what he called the ‘filthy barbarian’ in 1651: ‘To sum up the whole truth, Parliament is the supreme council of the nation, constituted and appointed by an absolutely free people . . .’¤¤ We see, therefore, that although it can be said that the state called the nation into being,¤‹ right from their ancient origins the English state and the English nation were reckoned to be close. Campbell reckons that the AngloSaxon state included a substantial political class, and even ‘a considerable element of constitutionalism’.¤› Medieval monarchs found it increasingly difficult to do without reference to parliaments and their consent, even though parliaments, once assembled, were not always compliant. Equally, it seems to have been as difficult for parliaments, even republican parliaments, to imagine life without monarchs. In 1657 a Grand Committee of MPs beseeched Oliver Cromwell, regicide and lord protector, to let them make him king. They claimed that a coronation was the only the way to preserve the identity of England. They said Cromwell’s chosen title, ‘Protector’, was ¤‚ Sir Henry Ellis (ed.), Three Books of Polydore Vergil’s English History (1534; London, 1844), 159, 191; John Hales, A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1581; Cambridge, 1893), 10. ¤⁄ Davies, The Isles, 483. ¤¤ John Milton, Angli. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651), in F. A. Patterson, The Works of John Milton (New York, 1932), vii. 459. ¤‹ Hastings appears to believe that there can be national identity before statehood and, in the English case, sometimes avers that the nation preceded the kingdom: Construction of Nationhood, 48. ¤› Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 19, 15.

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not known to the English in their law, while the title of ‘King’ most certainly was and would be welcomed by them. Sir Charles Wolsely told Cromwell that if he ‘should refuse this title the Parliament present you with, you do not only deny yourself the honour they put upon you, but you deny the nation’. In the event, Cromwell refused. ‘It’ (the crown), he said, ‘is blotted out. It is a thing cast out by act of parliament.’¤fi Not for the first time, what it was to be a ‘freeborn’ Englishman was open to debate. In spite of all the upheavals of the seventeenth century—with wars and revolutions across three kingdoms—it was clear that the idea of a monarchy was close to the idea of a parliament. Both claimed long histories and both exaggerated how continuous and how long those histories were. Moreover, the civil war had shown how difficult it was to surrender one without jeopardizing the other.¤fl Monarchical and parliamentary claims were close, mutual even, but the real point of the English civil war was that they were also separable and, if necessary, violently so. Twice in the seventeenth century the English dispatched one king and found another, but at no time did they give up on the idea that state sovereignty should be one, even if at the same time divisible into more than one—just as parliament desired it. For Montesquieu, writing in 1748, this simultaneous affirmation of the singularity and divisibility of sovereignty was nothing less than the hallmark of English political genius. Executive, legislature, and judiciary were very close, mutual even, but they were also separable and answerable. ‘In Turky,’ he reckoned, ‘where these three powers are united in the Sultan’s person’, there was oppression. In England, on the other hand, where these three powers were separated out and the king’s person was incidental, there was law, security of property, and liberty.¤‡ One of these three powers was always there to keep an eye on the other two, while in the idea of the nation, something apart from the state was always there to keep an eye on all three. It was out of these fundamental separations that, in the eighteenth century, the political economists conceived their category of a ‘civil society’—a world of private persons and property, apart from the state. Although in real life the space between what was ‘civil’ and what was ‘state’ was never as great

¤fi Roy Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell (Stroud, 1997), 83–4. ¤fl John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1994), 21. ¤‡ Charles-Louis de Secondat, Comte de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws (1750; English trans. Berkeley, 1977), 202.

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as the political economists imagined it to be,¤° nevertheless it was critical enough to allow for the growing idea of the British, or English, constitution as a unique instrument of liberty. At the same time, this eighteenth-century state was growing richer and stronger.¤· Between 1660 and 1694, that is, between the Exchequer taking control of all revenues and the inception of the Bank of England, the English state engineered a financial revolution big enough to give it the means to tax and borrow on a scale sufficient to win wars, control seas, and make or break empires. The Hanoverian state had eight times more revenue at its disposal than had the Stuarts; Lord Liverpool’s government thirty-six times more.‹‚ This extraordinary new financial power joined with the older common-law language of the freeborn Englishman and a post-1688 polity devolved to the gentry after the royal disasters of the 1630s, to make for an aggressive eighteenth-century British constitutionalism defined by its propensity to dole out ‘Liberty’: British ‘Liberty’ as the proper objective of an anti-Papist parliament, as defined by the 1689 Declaration of Rights and a 1701 Act of Settlement; British ‘Liberty’ as the means and end of a burgeoning world trade system which included slavery; British ‘Liberty’ as the upholding of local privileges, charters, settlements, and other ways of building towns and making money; and British ‘Liberty’ as guaranteed by the British army and the Royal Navy as well as English laws, private property, and a certain plebeian taste for riot in defence of their own piece of it. From 1707 these pugnacious ideas were gradually adopted as the hallmarks of the British state, usually in opposition to the French. British liberty could mean many things. It did not always mean, and it did not usually mean, what Enlightenment philosophes thought it meant. It could be as much to do with privileges and monopolies as with freedoms. It could be upheld by a radical mob or Church and King rioters. During the French

¤° ‘. . . the attempt to define a private sphere independent of the state and thus to redefine the state itself ’: David Held, States and Societies (Oxford, 1983), 3. Hindle makes the case that popular legalism and wide participation in the offices of state made for a ‘public sphere’ in the seventeenth century: State and Social Change, 235. ¤· Joanna Innes, ‘A Four nations Approach’, in S. J. Connolly (ed.), Kingdoms United? Great Britain and Ireland Since 1500 (Dublin, 1999), 185. ‹‚ P. K. O’Brien and P. A. Hunt, ‘The Rise of a Fiscal State in England 1485–1815’, Historical Research, 66: 160 ( June 1993), 134, 155.

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wars, the Staffordshire toby jug stood for English liberty (in contrast to the French version): happy men in a land of foaming tankards and full bellies.‹⁄

Laws and Customs The case for the freeborn Englishman went deeper and wider than the case for the supremacy of parliament. Parliament, after all, was only virtual representation. At the hustings, most people were not entitled to vote. Common-law doctrine, on the other hand, held that the law embodied nothing less than the historic nature of the English people. Indeed, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century it was regarded as the most essential and the most intimate bond between the nation and their state.‹¤ Lawyers and judges were not officers of the state, but the law was an arm of government and a central part of its legitimacy. Officers of state, on the other hand, from parish constables at the bottom to lords lieutenant at the top and magistrates in the middle, were also law officers. Sixteenthand seventeenth-century England was bounded and unified by their administration of the law. Moreover, their varied offices were deep in the social strata they drew upon, and broad in the loyalty they commanded. Alison Wall estimates that over ten years, over 90,000 relatively humble men would do voluntary service as constables in England’s 9,060 parishes: ‘The English were remarkably obedient to authority, national and local.’‹‹ What was said of the law came to be said also of the nation. So near were they, they thought the same. Judges did not make the law; having discovered it, they only spoke it. ‘Judex est lex loquens’, said Judge Coke in the seventeenth century, and Judge Mansfield backed him in the eighteenth: ‘The common law of England . . . is only common reason or usage.’‹› And because the English judiciary could not reconstruct from ‹⁄ ‘ “Plain English” . . . was a kind of tautology’: Paul Langford, Englishness Identified (Oxford, 2000), 90. ‹¤ David Lemmings, Professors of the Law: Barristers and English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), 1. ‹‹ Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England 1525–1640 (London, 2000), 185. See also: Hindle, The State and Social Change, 30; Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000), 38. ‹› Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford, 1986), 9. The contrast was usually with a continental absolutism which had made the law its own tyrannical instrument. Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), MP 1589–1628, Solicitor-General 1592, Speaker of the House of Commons 1593, Attorney-General 1594, Chief Justice Common Pleas 1606, Chief Justice King’s

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first principles (there could be no first principles in a law which took as its first precedent the original experiences of a people), when the law needed altering their best recourse was to take a useful bit of pre-existing law and build on that. The useless bits were left to rot, like relics. According to the constitutional lawyers, these built-up ‘legal fictions’ prevented illconceived change from the top, while keeping everyone in touch with lived experience—true maker of the law—from below. Building on everything, discarding nothing, lawyers claimed that law and nation had formed and informed each other from the start: even before lawyers. A theory of continuous representation, it bound the people so close to the law that it was hardly possible to tell them apart. During protracted seventeenth-century conflicts between parliamentary and king’s counsels, common law achieved immense political authority. Sir Edward Coke and the other parliamentary lawyers opposed what they saw as a creeping royal absolutism, and used the law to stop it. In so doing, Coke gave common law its ‘classic formulation’, denying all non-English influences, including that of the Conqueror.‹fi Coke and his friends affirmed common law as the people’s law and raised it above all other authority, including the king’s. They also affirmed how the first law-books had begun with the primordial ‘fact’ that English law was spun directly out of English practice, not any one man’s writing.‹fl As Sir John Davies put it in 1612, the nation was ‘like a silk worm that formeth all her web out of her self onely’, and it would seem that this was not just yet another ‘invention of tradition’ Bench 1613, leading player in the Petition of Right 1628, author of the Institutes of the Laws of England from that year. One cannot overrate the part he played in facing down the Crown and reinventing the meaning of law as visceral to the English nation, though ‘in ways that now seem blatantly inaccurate and anachronistic’: Stephen D. White, Sir Edward Coke and the Grievances of the Commonwealth (Manchester, 1979), 16. William Murray, first earl of Mansfield (1705–93), MP, Lord Chief Justice 1756, reputation as the greatest judge of the century. ‹fi J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957; Cambridge, 1987), 31. Pocock explains the parliamentary line on William: that he didn’t conquer, he confirmed; or if he did conquer, he retracted; or if he didn’t retract, his successors did; or if they haven’t yet, the English people will make them. The view changed in the eighteenth century with awareness of Sir Henry Spelman’s (1564?–1641) discoveries that William had brought feudal law into the English legal bloodstream: ibid. ch. 5. Van Caenegem thinks most common law was ‘essentially feudal land law’, ‘not English at all’ (English Common Law, 76, 110), but along with Keeton he agrees that its development was distinctively English (p. 98): Keeton, The Norman Conquest, 9. ‹fl G. E. Woodbine (ed.), Bracton on the Laws and Customs of England, vol. 2 (written 1235–59; pub. 1569; Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 19. Glanvill’s (1187–9) was written to also impose authority on what was local and diverse.

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to suit a contemporary purpose.‹‡ Right from the first, Anglo-Saxon kings were apparently careful not to make their law appear innovatory but already established; not made out of statements of principle, but out of injury and consequence; not in Latin, but in everyday English. In fact, as Patrick Wormald concluded, pre-Conquest English law, being ‘fundamentally oral in character’, was not written down all that much. By the eighth century, ‘law-making in writing had gone “live” ’.‹° Armed with all significant legal tradition and all discernible historical experience as they saw it, the seventeenth-century parliamentary lawyers thought they had nothing less than the whole of English history on their side. Who were the Stuarts compared to that? They pulled King Charles up for every slip and, when their chance came, they pulled him down for treason. When Charles said that he was ‘pleased graciously’ to allow liberty and property in the light of Magna Carta, Chief Justice Coke objected to the word ‘graciously’. When the new constitutional settlement with William and Mary was made, in 1689, it was made according to ‘the fundamental principles’ of a constitution which was held to flow from ‘the true, and ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom’.‹· The only reasoning that parliamentary lawyers really believed in was the reasoning of the whole nation over time, distilled into law, and ‘gotten by long study, observation, and experience’—all of it their own. The reasoning ‘of every man’s naturall reason’, they said, was insufficient.›‚ The most brilliant interpreter of these parliamentary theses was Sir Matthew Hale. Hale argued that, like the nation, the law could change yet stay the same. Like a vessel at sea, no matter what wrecks it might encounter and running repairs it might require, it would always belong to those who manned it. His favourite metaphor was the journey of the ship of the Argonauts. Some of the earlier parliamentary pamphleteers had drawn the distinction between an English practice of passing on legal wisdoms based on the pure oral transmissions of the people themselves, and Roman or Continental law, based on written record. Hale rejected this. He accepted that things in writing could find their way into oral transmission just as things in oral transmission could find their way into writing. Both these ‹‡ Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 34. ‹° Wormald, English Law, 95, 105, 480–2. ‹· White, Sir Edward Coke, 254; Philip Allott, ‘The Courts and Parliament: Who Whom?’, in Michael Arnheim (ed.), Common Law (Aldershot, 1994), 167. ›‚ Coke, in Michael Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurisprudence 1760–1850 (Oxford, 1991), 7.

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points gave great flexibility and, at the same time, great intimacy to the relationship between the English and their law-makers, a relationship presented by Hale as one of perpetual give and take, building and balancing between oral and textual, past and present, people’s custom and judge’s law. Behind all this interaction Hale saw a rationale, a hidden hand perhaps. Those just born entered into a pact with the living. England was their fate, not their privilege: for it [the common law] is not only a very just and excellent law in it self, but it is singularly accommodated to the Frame of the English Government, and to the Disposition of the English Nation, and such as by a long Experience and Use is as it were incorporated into their very Temperament, and, in a Manner, become the Complection and Constitution of the English Commonwealth.›⁄

Hale’s disquisition on statecraft was central to Burke and Blackstone’s thinking later in the eighteenth century. Blackstone’s first Vinerian lecture, at Oxford in 1758, observed the laws of England as having been at liberty to develop because they were unwritten in any single code. The result, he said, was a whole and unconstrained engagement with the English people. Through immemorial usage, common practice, and shared experience—not abstract reasoning—the people and their laws were united, or if they were not they should be.›¤ Burke was the acknowledged master of English law in the House of Commons.›‹ His English nation, evolving organically while reasoning historically, stood four-square with Hale’s and Blackstone’s. This idea of the nation, it has to be said, was extremely convenient for those who could afford the lawyers and rely upon the antiquarians to provide the interpretations. For all practical purposes, this nation existed only in the present. Because the future was unknown, one could only trust that portion to Providence. And while alignment with the past was vital, only the educated could say how vital, because there was no original against ›⁄ Sir Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England (1739; Chicago, 1971), 30. Sir Matthew Hale (1609–76), Chief Justice Common Pleas 1654, Chief Justice King’s Bench 1671. ›¤ Roman law led to despotism; English law to liberty, and knowing that, said Blackstone, ‘is the proper accomplishment of every gentleman and scholar’. He went on to write his four-volume Commentaries (1765–9) with this in mind: Sir William Blackstone, The Sovereignty of the Law: Selections from Blackstone’s Commentaries (London, 1973), 4–12. Sir William Blackstone (1723–80), first Vinerian Professor of Law, Oxford; MP 1761–70; Chief Justice Common Pleas 1770. ›‹ ‘I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals’: Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Michigan, 1965), 109.

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which to measure the changes.›› Therefore, so long as the past stayed plausible, the future unknowable, the present flexible, and the people’s corporate origins unfathomable—this was a country which seemed able to take any amount of deviation or distortion and still remain ‘England’. Free to love old England yet free to change her more or less just as they pleased—what more could a ruling class want? But not only them. Cobbett the radical was also attracted to the idea that the true England belonged to its people, even if there was no material sign of it.›fi For Cobbett, and other nineteenth-century radical patriots like him, the original will of the people lay waiting to be found again beneath a lot of old ‘shoi hoi’—legal casebooks, bad history, and tinpot heraldry. Cobbett wanted that popular will back on the streets forcing the laws. He took common-law rhetoric at face value and turned it back on its masters: what was Revolution, but ‘good Whig doctrine’? What was Oppression, save in the judgement of the people? What was Resistance, but as ‘established by the laws and usages of England’? What were Rights, indeed, except those as established by the English people in their history? In fact, what was English History except as established entirely by Mr William Cobbett? ‘When I am asked about what books a young man or young woman ought to read, I always answer, let him or her read all the books I have written. This does, it will doubtless be said, smell of the shop. No matter.’ Good old Will! Plain Englishman through and through, he wanted great alteration and reform to England, yet he always claimed he wanted nothing new: that is, he wanted nothing that the people had not wanted before and did not want now: I say, therefore, upon this point what judge blackstone says: the right to resist oppression always exists, but that those who compose the nation at any given time must be left to judge for themselves when oppression has arrived at a pitch to justify the exercise of such right. (Political Register, 20 June 1818)›fl

Radicals like Cobbett (though not radicals like Paine)›‡ could stand with Tories on the importance of ancient charters and settlements, just as they ›› Blackstone, Commentaries, iv; Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism, 96. ›fi Yet preserved in Magna Carta, ‘the great bulwark betwixt the power of the crown and the liberties of the subject’: Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, vol. i, 1066–1625 (London, 1806), 9. ›fl William Cobbett, Life of Andrew Jackson (London, 1834); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), 624–5. ›‡ In the war between Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2) one can see a fundamental division between an identity embedded in history

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could stand with Whigs on the restitution of old Saxon rights and the abolition of those ‘principal grievances’ as ‘introduced by the Normans’. Indeed, even those radicals whom their enemies called Jacobins stood for a constitution which took them for Englishmen and not some lesser (French) persons.›° The bonding of the English with their common law could make conservatives into radicals and radicals into conservatives. In the nineteenth century, national identity shifted from English common law and British liberty to ‘British Constitution’ and Empire.›· This too could turn conservatives into radicals and vice versa, and this too was said to be a people’s story. In all these matters, we must be careful to distinguish popular patriotism from laws and customs. Patriotism talked of the nation, in aggregate, over great swathes of time. Laws and customs, on the other hand, always began with the particulars: certain persons who at certain times and in certain places did this and did that. Laws and customs preferred to reason case on case, setting definitions by ‘when?’ rather than by ‘what?’fi‚ Popular custom was equally rooted in time and place, for when time and place was uncertain, so too was the custom. Hence the importance of parish rituals, town ceremonials, or crowd activities. You had to beat the bounds of custom. Keeping it up usually meant keeping it yours. Custom, then, was law as applied by a community or its representatives, to a particular place, sometimes at a particular time. The right to custom was defended on the same grounds as the right to law, that is, a shared practice from time immemorial or over two generations. Carter’s Lex Custumaria (1696) stressed this unity of law and custom: ‘When a reasonable Act once done is found to be good, and beneficial to the People, and agreeable to their nature and disposition, then do they use it and practise it again and again and so by often itiration and multiplication of the Act, it becomes a custom: and being continued without interruption time out of mind, it obtaineth the force of law.’fi⁄ The same could be said of a good Act of Parliament. A good Act and a good custom shared the same virtue—popular acceptance. When people defended their customs and practices, they and one based on reason. Paine contemplates the end of the past and a break with culture; Burke sees in this not liberty but alienation. ›° ‘We were men while they were slaves’: Address of London Corresponding Society (1793), in Thompson, The Making, 91; Blackstone, Commentaries, iv. 227. ›· James Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitution (Cambridge, 1996), Introduction. fi‚ Lobban, English Jurisprudence, 11. fi⁄ E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993), 97.

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often did so as if that was in itself a defence of their old selves.fi¤ Without our assent, they seemed to be saying, your law would surely unravel.fi‹ In 1912 Pollock, great expert on common law, defended the economy of the eighteenth-century poor in almost exactly the same terms as the eighteenth century poor had done for themselves. Chapter 7 of his The Genius of the Common Law defended workers’ liberties to practise their crafts and defend their trades. Pollock criticized the misuse of the word ‘free’ to describe a market loaded against the skills and competences of the poor, and thought that in some respects and against some market dogmas, ‘our law might . . . be called socialist’.fi› For him, genuine markets were defined from below by free buyers and sellers haggling, not from above by elites fixing it. Pollock’s chapter was entitled: ‘Perils of the Market Place.’ Writing the year before Pollock, John and Barbara Hammond recognized what perils the market place had inflicted on England. Their social history, The Village Labourer, began with the observation that forms of common ownership had once existed—including rights, customs, and recognitions of fair dealing. They wrote of the ‘disappearance of the old English village society’ and the entitlements that had gone with that. Once upon a time, they said, the commoner’s child had been born with a rough sort of spoon in her mouth. But the spoon, that is, the commons and the tenancy, had been taken away and sold to strangers.fifi Common forms and customary rights had been turned into things to be bought and sold. Volume 2 of Blackstone’s Commentaries was called ‘Of the Rights of Things’. Cobbett was the last great writer to see all this law as his birthright.fifl Dressed as a yeoman farmer from the time of Blackstone, he declared himself to be the opponent of all false abstractions and the friend of all good old solid (English) cases.fi‡ He claimed never to be in need of foreign example. Not ‘philosophik’, not scholarly, not particularly articulate, not in a smooth fi¤ e.g. The Bullard’s Frolicks; or, All Alive at Stamford (Stamford, J. Drakard, 1802). See also Rosemary Sweet, ‘Freemen and Independence in English Borough Politics 1770–1830’, Past and Present, 161 (1998). fi‹ Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), 74. fi› Sir Frederick Pollock, The Genius of the Common Law (New York, 1912), 95–101, at 54. See E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971). fifi J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; London, 1978), 62, 248. fifl Roger Scruton tries to rekindle the embers, though he is no Cobbett: England: An Elegy. fi‡ See Peter Mandler, ‘ “In the Olden Time”: Romantic History and English National Identity’, in L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities (Manchester, 1997).

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way, or new-fangled, and not open to outside assessment or to anyone else’s authority but his own, based as his authority was on details, and cases, like the common law itself, Cobbett was free to grow as he pleased. Or so he reckoned. During the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, when industrialization and class struggle was putting all these national myths to the test, and corrupting the magistracy in the process,fi° Chartism was the last great movement to believe that England really did belong to its people. There is some notion of this in Dickens’s writings. His ‘people’ are sympathetically rooted in English place and feeling; they face life’s troubles not much helped by their modern betters, the Murdstones and the Steerforths. But after 1848, a year when the powers of the central state had been unequivocally ranged against them, Chartists stopped believing that the voice of the law could be their voice too. Or at least they stopped proclaiming it.fi· Thereafter, English radicalism had to find a new song to sing. It would turn from laws and customs to anthems of labour.fl‚

Caution Not everyone in eighteenth-century England believed that the law becomes you. In 1776 Jeremy Bentham’s Fragment on Government offered an anonymous critique of Blackstone’s famous Commentaries. Bentham unpeeled the rhetoric. He said that in law-courts and chambers common law existed not as the dynamic will of the people but as a mountainous heap of yellowing paper. Far from being embodied within, the English people found themselves buried beneath. Totally unintelligible, the people neither understood it, nor owned it, nor profited by it. It was the product of ‘Judge & Co’. Bentham also called it ‘dog law’, because like dogs, the poor could not know they had done wrong until their masters kicked them for it. Common law fi° A major theme in the Hammonds was the conscription of the magistracy into the war on the poor and that ‘web of prudence’ which had part protected them: Village Labourer (1911), Town Labourer (1917; 1978), 137, and Skilled Labourer (1919). fi· John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987), 202. fl‚ Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), ch. 6. Sheffield ‘Democrat’ councillors in 1851 advocated a system of local government by ‘ward-motes’: C. A. Williams, ‘The Sheffield Democratic Critique’, in Robert Colls and Richard Rodger (eds.), Civil Society and Citizenship. Governance in Modern Britain (Aldershot, 2003).

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was ‘a labrynth without a clew’ or, as John Austin put it later, an ‘empire of chaos and darkness’. And out of its darkness had grown the excrescences of criminal law. English law-lords had two rules only: ‘never . . . move a finger until your passions are inflamed, nor ever . . . look further than your nose’. ‘The country squire who has had his turnips stolen, goes to work and gets a bloody law against stealing turnips. It exceeds the utmost stretch of his comprehension to conceive that the next year the same catastrophe may happen to his potatoes.’ So much for reasoning case by case. Of these laws and fictions, Bentham railed that most people had little use and no knowledge. Common law was the best opinion money could buy, and it often did so. Criminal law, on the other hand, amounted to little more than a system of reprisal-raids upon the poor. In the fight for liberty, whatever English law had done in the past, it was not doing it now. Bentham’s was not the only voice.fl⁄ The idea of common law as the prime expression of the English people declined throughout the later eighteenth century and was finished by the early nineteenth, except in the form adapted by radicals. There had been a time when the law had been accessible, and used, especially by small landed proprietors. There had been a time, indeed, when lawyers lived their lives and practised their profession closer to the people.fl¤ Not in the time of Bentham. Fewer people were willing to use common law, including commercial interests who distrusted its tardiness, and lesser folk who distrusted its high fees—supposing a link. At the same time, more lawyers wanted to be gentlemen and, through a political system that worked by patronage, they could be. The magistrates’ bench was

fl⁄ Postema, Bentham, 264. Bentham’s utility principle cut its teeth on what it saw as commonlaw chaos. Neo-Benthamite attacks won reforms from the 1850s. Once the law had been reordered, however, Dicey and others reverted to the old organicism, nowhere more so than concerning the English legal codification of India, which he called ‘The distinctive identity of the English nation’. See Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991), 262, 284, 287. During the 1970s the Warwick school of socio-legal history followed Bentham’s rationalist criticisms, to some extent. But they also followed Blackstone’s and Cobbett’s English celebrations to about the same extent: Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), and E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 1975). fl¤ Lemmings, Professors of the Law, 319. Court business peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and the ‘law became constitutive of the state’: Hindle, State and Social Change, 13, 31; J. A. Sharpe, ‘The People and the Law’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1985).

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increasingly rich and reactionary. Cobbett included it as part of the state decrepitude he called ‘Old Corruption’.fl‹ A final tale of caution. In 1620, in that great and defining century for the cause of English law and liberty, the copyholders of the parish of Whickham in County Durham made a submission to the chancery court of the Palatinate. Their submission was against the lessees, or coal-owners, who were carrying on their business under the terms of a 1578 lease secured from the bishop of Durham by Queen Elizabeth, who had, in turn, sold on her lease to a group of Tyneside financiers. The poor copyholders testified to a terrible period in their lives when 150 pits and broken pits, rutted roads, smashed drains, polluted springs, and filthy slag-heaps had laid waste to their parish—and they fought their case on those estimable English grounds of law, custom, and a complex view of free common possession. They explained how they had ‘all theire being onely by custom’, while the coal-owners, on the other hand, ‘never had and as he verilie thinketh oughte to have absolute power to way all copiholders grounds’. In spite of all their troubles, and in spite of all the legal tradition upholding their case, the copyholders lost. Entirely in the hands of those who leased its coal, Whickham parish was now at liberty to become the epicentre of the great northern coalfield and eye of the industrial storm that was to come.fl› This case is worth mentioning because, away from the legal case books, we have to remember that it was a long walk from the law library to the sixacre field or the ten-fathom seam. Whickham was sitting on thick coal deposits down to 300 feet. With free drainage north, west, and east, a navigable river, and a freebooting lease forced by a queen and verified by a court, there was no way Whickham’s coal-owners were going to be denied their English liberty to make money, even if it was at the expense of someone else’s English liberty to live by law and custom.flfi Under such circumstances, whatever the rights and wrongs, the copyholders and their little local courts were consigned to history, while the lessees won their claim and

fl‹ Lemmings, Professors of the Law, 95, 275–82, 309. fl› David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991), 122. flfi In other places, law and custom fared better in their legal battles with capitalist proprietors: Andy Wood, ‘Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free Miners and Their Law c.1500–1800’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (eds.), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (London, 1996).

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they and their greater, grander courts were ushered into the future. By the 1690s, ‘the institutions of the manor were now all but defunct’.flfl The English people were encouraged to see their own hand in the state and its laws. Events in 1620 Whickham suggest that this was increasingly contrary to appearances. Even so, it did mean that in times of political discord a countervailing rhetoric of ‘nation’ could be invoked against the state. This was formalized by the Whig political class after 1688, when the separation of state and nation was built into the separation of constitutional powers. The rhetoric of a nation apart remained deep and popular, attaching itself to all forms of political loyalty and opposition alike. Whigs, Tories, and radicals all used it, and were in turn used by it. It was, indeed, the chief presumption of the Freeborn Englishman. Although it is impossible to know to what extent this ideology of a separable and independent nation made the eighteenth-century state more secure, or more popular, or flexible, it certainly made it more distinctive in a world of absolutisms, not least the absolutism just across the Channel. The idea that the law becomes you served England well—not in Whickham perhaps, and not always in other real places and situations, but mainly in the abstract, in the talk, and in the signs and symbols of nationhood. flfl Levine and Wrightson, Whickham, 150.

2 Uniting the Kingdoms

The uniting of the kingdoms began in 1603. In that year James VI of Scotland and the House of Stuart became James I of England, single monarch of two kingdoms. In 1707, by Act of Union, a more complete unification of England and Scotland began. The new state was called the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain’ and its people were the British. James I had aired the idea of a Britannic name for his two kingdoms a hundred years before, and the idea of ‘Britain’ went back as far as the Saxons, but in 1707 it was secured by statute. In 1801 Ireland was bound to the United Kingdom by another Act of Union to form the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’. After the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921, this state became the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, which it has remained. English Acts of parliament annexed Wales between 1534 and 1542. Only in the twentieth century did anyone call them Acts of Union. Union in 1707 followed half a century of civil and religious turmoil in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Central to Union’s success was a political mixture of English restraint and Scottish realism, although these qualities were not much evident in Ireland. The Union state brooked no rivals, but neither did it try to eradicate its constituent nationalities. The Catholic Irish were gravely misruled, but there was never any doubt that they were Irish, after some early hope that they might be induced to become Protestant. Without a national state to focus their separate ambitions, English, Scottish, and Welsh nationalities were strangely non-political.

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Union State There was nothing inevitable about Union in these islands, although as their dominion increased, the English were always impelled towards it. If ‘it’ could be said to have a history before ‘it’ existed, then the history of Union began in the twelfth century with English incursions into Ireland, long before the hegemony of the English south in mainland Britain. Difficult as it is to imagine, there was a time when all eyes did not look to London, yet once a British state was constructed on the basis of southern English wealth and ambition, between 1707 and 1945, this state defeated most of its enemies, confounded all of its rivals, and managed to stay more or less congruous with its nation except for the Catholic Irish in Ireland, whom it finally lost. Northumbria was probably the first united kingdom, but England was next.⁄ Saxon kingdoms tended to gravitate together in clusters, pulling towards regional overlords. Usually there was one regional overlord, or king, who claimed dominion over all the rest. In 899 it was Alfred of Wessex and then his son Edward as, under pressure from the Danish invasions, the English came together. In 1066 it was Harold II—Harold Godwineson, earl of Wessex and king of England. William of Normandy took control of Harold’s kingdom, which he hammered into submission. Campbell is very clear: ‘England was by then a nation state.’¤ Soon, within a hundred years or so, Norman lords would become conscious of their English identity. Scotland was the second united kingdom, strong enough in 1136 and 1141 to play away and inflict severe defeats on the English in England. By the mid-thirteenth century this eastern-based kingdom of four ethnic peoples (Picts, Scots, Britons, Angles) had pacified its own western reaches and was capable of reaching deeper still into England. By the mid-fourteenth century Scotland was strong enough to have dispelled in the minds of English kings any idea of conquest, at least north of the Forth. In Ireland there were a number of pastoral kingdoms, kingships, and higher kingships, as well as the great former Viking enclaves of Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and Cork. From the twelfth century Norman raiders enjoyed occasional forays into the Irish interior, but by the fourteenth ⁄ Campbell argues for a seventh-century Northumbrian British empire: Anglo-Saxon State, 51. ¤ James Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, in, Grant and Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom?, 31.

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century they had fallen back into an armed camp around Dublin, out of which they made their claim for kingship. Beyond the Pale, the great Irish lords of Ormond, Desmond, and Kildare waxed and waned, sometimes friends and sometimes not friends. In fact, it was the Norman-Welsh who were Ireland’s first ‘English’ invaders. As marcher lords, they had a talent for violence. Where the king’s writ did not run, theirs did, usually in blood. The dominions of the native Welsh princes were lost to Edward I in 1284, and from 1301 a singular ‘prince of Wales’ took their place. A string of impregnable fortresses rather cut him off from his people. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all four countries went through a number of political crises. First, the two kingdoms which did have a reformation, England and Scotland, did so through different kinds of Protestantism, while the multiple kingdom to the west which did not have a reformation, Ireland, lost control of its own affairs. The result was the persistence of a very stubborn English counter-reformatory Catholicism in the south of Ireland, which led in turn to the importation of a very virulent Scottish Protestantism in the north of Ireland in order to check it, which it failed to do, serving instead only to intensify Catholic fears in Ireland, which in turn found their way back into Protestant fears in Scotland. In England, the established Protestantism (if that is what it was) of the Church of England was episcopalian. In Scotland, the established Protestantism of the Church of Scotland was presbyterian. From 1637 Charles I, monarch of both kingdoms, tried to make his presbyterian Church of Scotland more like his episcopalian Church of England. This led to rebellion and war. Apart from church government, there were other religious differences between these two nominally Protestant countries. In particular, John Knox’s iron Calvinism was quite unlike the Church of England’s distinctly more pliable code, and this theological difference combined with a history of equally complex military and diplomatic manoeuvring between the two kingdoms. The English inflicted crushing military defeats on the Scots at Flodden (1513) and Solway Moss (1542). Soon after, there was the so-called ‘rough wooing’ of the infant Mary, with English incursions into Scotland in 1544, 1545, and 1547—as usual, devastating but without final result. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign (1558), the English state intrigued against Scottish Roman Catholicism on the side of a Scottish Protestantism which it did not trust and barely understood.

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These frictions found their way into Wales and Ireland. Neither country enjoyed what could be called a ‘Reformation’, in spite of the best efforts of Jesus College, Oxford (founded 1571), and Trinity College, Dublin (founded 1592), to foment one. After the forfeiture and execution of the last great Welsh prince, Rhys ap Gruffyd, in 1531, Wales was absorbed in Tudor dynastic interests and bound to England by parliamentary Acts. Ireland also had its forfeitures and executions, most famously that of Earl Thomas of Kildare in 1537. Four years later Henry VIII made himself king of Ireland, by Act ‘of Kingly Title’, but the title did at least confirm Ireland’s status as a kingdom in English eyes—albeit one subordinate to their own. No longer able to trust the ‘Old English’ of the Pale, that is, those Catholics who had shown the greatest resistance to Reformation overtures, it was in this phase that the English state started to build a better-staffed and more endowed Church of Ireland from the 1580s, and, from the early 1600s, to encourage the planting of committed Presbyterians. In Ulster especially, they dug in. By the Union of Crowns in 1603 the English secured their kingship, and both Scots and English thought they could secure their borders, which they did, by transplantation and force, in much the same way in north Cumberland and Northumberland as in the Highlands and the West Indies.‹ James’s succession to the English throne had been arranged since 1586. In many ways, James I was an excellent English idea. After the death of the childless Elizabeth, he saved them from civil commotion and he kept to the succession arrangement he had made with her, even though he had good reason not to. Moreover, he was a Scot who was pleased to live in London, a Protestant who was not a Presbyterian, and a man who saw the need for prudence when dealing with English prejudices. Whatever his failings, he kept his kingdoms together, and apart, and in peace. Charles I succeeded James in 1625. Unlike his father, Charles did not respect the small but clear distance between the English sense of themselves and their state. Believing that sovereign and subject were ‘clean different things’, he did not understand that when push came to shove it was the law that was sovereign, not him. In other words, when it came to the English he did not understand how much the law had become them. Nor could he leave alone unfinished religious business and he tried to force the Presbyterian Scots to have bishops. The result was three national-civil-religious wars

‹ Braddick, State Formation, 373–7.

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lasting for nearly twenty years, leading to Charles’ execution and the fall of the House of Stuart. Unwilling to accept government by bishops, and believing that Charles and his archbishop were ready to impose it, Scottish Presbyterians swore a ‘Covenant’ and defeated the royal armies in 1639 and 1640. This pushed the English parliament into repeated efforts to control their king, whom they blamed for the unrest. Attempts at curtailing his powers of taxation and military command had a long and disputatious history, but in 1641 a Catholic rebellion in Ireland brought matters to a head. Charles was driven out of London and forced to raise his royal standard, first at Nottingham and then at Oxford, which he made his capital. Against him were English parliamentarians from the south and Scottish Covenanters from the north. Both sides feared royal absolutism more than they feared each other. Irish Catholics, meanwhile, feared them all. In July 1644 Leslie’s Scottish army turned the tide of war by defeating the royalists at Marston Moor, just west of York. Cromwell’s New Model Army finished the job the following summer, routing the king’s army at Naseby and Langport. Though beaten in the field, Charles never ceased trying to play king. He surrendered to the Scots in 1646, but then tried to exploit their uneasy alliance with those English puritans whose traditions were Independent rather than Presbyterian. In 1648 these two groups were at war again, this time with each other. The following year Cromwell made Charles pay for his intrigues with his head. In 1650 Charles II became a Covenanter too, signing and pledging himself to a Presbyterian Scotland. Crowned king of Scotland for his troubles, by the Union of Crowns, Charles II claimed to be king of England as well. At this point, a Scottish-Presbyterian-Stuart version of uniting the kingdoms was at odds with an English-Independent-republican version—or at least with Cromwell’s version of that version, which amounted to the same thing. Cromwell prevailed. For a time, that is, from Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland and defeat of Scotland up to his death—somewhere between 1652 and 1658—the four nations of these islands were beaten into component parts of a single British Republic, with a written constitution and a Union flag showing two quarters for the cross of St George, a harp for Ireland, and a lion for Scotland. The army sat on the lid. Beneath the lid there was fiendish complexity. A truly revolutionary six years, at no time before or since in the modern history of these islands did national identities so stand at the crossroads. This was the English chance to build as Americans were to build.

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The chance wasn’t taken. Cromwell died in 1658, and two years later the English parliament did what the Scottish parliament had done ten years before and took back the House of Stuart. In 1689 it was the turn of the Scots to follow the English when their parliament accepted the supplanting of James II by Protestant Willem van Oranje, William III, and Mary his queen, first daughter of James II. This new constitutional settlement and sudden switching of dynasties (a ‘Glorious Revolution’) brought the call for Williamite oaths of allegiance which put terrible pressures on Stuart Scotland. Just the same, a Presbyterian Church of Scotland was quickly reestablished (disestablished 1660) and, after a difficult decade and on a rising tide of Scottish self-confidence, in 1705 the estates parliament in Edinburgh declared that the choice of successor to the Scottish crown had nothing to do with English opinion and was its business alone. With Queen Anne (second daughter of James II) childless, and Stuart supporters (‘Jacobites’) of her putative brother James Edward Stuart waiting in the wings, this declaration alarmed an English parliament by now thoroughly accustomed to getting its own way. Here, getting its own way had meant writing James and all Catholics out of the line of succession by Act of Settlement (1701), and did mean getting the Scottish parliament to agree to the succession of the House of Hanover on the death of Anne. Military resistance was impossible—the Scots had a force of only 3,000 men and two frigates›—but it was unlikely as well, for the Scottish parliament and its ministers were not brave hearts. On 12 May 1707, amidst much tumult, with Anne as its queen, the state of Great Britain was established by Act of Union. Scotland retained key features of national identity, including the vital institutions of church (‘kirk’), education, and law, as well as a coherent civil society, but in general the countries and their economies merged. Scottish parliamentarians had voted to abolish themselves and move south. Representing one-quarter of the combined population of the new British state, the canny Scots members obtained one-tenth of the Westminster seats, which was proportionate to national revenue. As with other acts of enclosure, it was value of property, not number of people, that determined representation. Great Britain was begun. Britons waited to be forged. If the English had not been able to take Scotland, by arms, from London, then in 1707 Scottish MPs had been persuaded to come to London and be taken. › ‘What force or guile could not subdue . . . Is wrought now by a coward few’, Robert Burns, ‘Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation’, Poems and Songs, ed. J. Kinsley (London, 1958).

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Union with Scotland proved to be the model for union with Ireland, an unfortunate choice given the very real differences between them.fi Having been relieved of his crown in England and Scotland (1688), James turned up in Ireland (1690) to rally his cause. In this he was supported by his patron Louis XIV of France, but opposed by nearly everyone else in Europe, including the pope. After his defeat on the banks of the River Boyne, Irish Catholics were not forgiven for siding with James. The presbyterian Irish, on the other hand, won the day by siding with William. So symbolic did ‘the Boyne’ become to future Ulstermen, and so hard did they bang their drum ever after, most British people believed the place to be in Ulster. Eighteenth-century Ireland looked more like a home-grown colony than part of a united kingdom. It retained an established church and a Dublin parliament, but not for Catholics; and it retained Irish powers, but not without British authorization. The Declaratory Act of 1720 confirmed ‘Poyning’s Law’ (1494), which stated that the kingdom and parliaments of Ireland were subordinate to those of England. Ireland became a British colonial laboratory. However, at least the bloodshed had ceased and, once restrictions were lifted during the American wars, Catholic Irishmen became keen recruits to British regiments. As with the Scottish Highlanders, they were escaping poverty. Acceptance in the army was followed by various relief Acts, mainly for propertied Irish Catholics (1778–92). These measures involved voting, office-holding, jury service, education, and army commissions. By 1795, and in spite of a government-funded seminary and enough relief measures to mean that propertied Catholics enjoyed formal equality in political life, they were still denied the right to sit in a Dublin parliament which, in the 1760s and 1780s, had been given some regularity of assembly and a measure of legislative independence. One historian tells us that by the 1740s it had learned to live with Poyning and get some of its own way,fl but a hand-picked Protestant placeman’s parliament it remained. Still, it was this Protestant Irish parliament, grouped around Henry Grattan’s ‘Patriots’, which first raised the national consciousness of modern Ireland. In 1782, with things going badly in the American colonies, it forced concessions out of London with the veiled threat of an 80,000-strong Protestant militia, raised to protect Great Britain, it is true, but ready and armed regardless. The Declaratory Act was repealed. fi Mike Cronin, A History of Ireland (Basingstoke, 2001), 88. fl D. W. Hayton, ‘Irishmen, Scotsmen and Parliamentary Processes 1689–1740’, conference paper, UCL (March 2001), 18–21.

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After the concessions came rebellion, and after rebellion came the stick. During the 1790s revolutionary ‘United Irishmen’ emerged in Dublin and Belfast. In 1796 the French failed to keep their promise to invade at Bantry Bay, but two years later a full-scale rebellion broke out both north and south. About 20,000 rebels were killed and the Irish parliament was abolished. Pilloried as a house that could not put itself in order, in 1801 the tight clasp of full British Union was applied. Opposition was bought off. At Westminster there were to be 100 Irish members, twenty-eight Irish peers, and four Irish bishops—all Protestant. In spite of formal representation, the viceroy would continue to sit and dispense his patronage from Dublin Castle, a model for colonial government in other territories. Pitt, the prime minister, promised Catholic emancipation but it never came. Irish Treasury and Exchequer were abolished in 1816. From 1801 to 1921 the Union State was all present and correct and sitting in London. Since 1603 it had comprised at least four nationalities, three kingdoms, three dynasties, three major streams of Protestantism, and a substantial nation of Catholics, as well as two mainlands, nearly a decade of republicanism, twenty years of civil wars, and a great deal of schism and conflict. Out of all this turbulence emerged the smooth, upwardly curving line of what came to be seen in nineteenth-century retrospect as ‘Whig’ progress. Given the old enmity and strife, this was an achievement in itself.

Great British Arch Union rested on the keystone relationship of England and Scotland. At the centre of that relationship lay the unconquerability of one and the invincibility of the other. In this stand-off, much can be learned, including what came to be seen as a British political tradition of complicity and restraint. English armies were usually more able to defeat Scottish armies, but subjugating the Scottish people was another matter entirely. David Hume, a convinced Unionist, saw this early on. Hume’s History (1761) reported how, after having won great victories and opening the forts of Edinburgh and Stirling, Edward I had been baffled by the prospect of the Highlands. He could only call up ‘a strong reinforcement of Welsh and Irish who, being accustomed to a desultory kind of war, were the best fitted to pursue the fugitive Scots into the recesses of their lakes and mountains’.‡ ‡ David Hume, The History of England (1754–61; 1-vol. abridged edn., Chicago, 1975), 66.

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Distance determines perspective. With the demise of the Northumbrian empire in the eighth century, the centre of Anglo-Saxon overlordship moved to the far south to revive again in the kingdom of Wessex. Out of Alfred’s Wessex, England grew. Soon after that, a Scottish realm began to take control in the far north over the Forth and along east of the Grampians. Out of this the kingdom of Alba, ‘Scotland’ grew in the thirteenth century. Other long-run perspectives followed. Anglo-Norman logistics were not good enough for commanders to feel able, or willing, to risk so much in trying to take all of Scotland from so far south; and in any case, taking the view from London, southwards not northwards was the direction to take. Angevin lands were rich. From the point of view of Poitou or Gascony, Scotland could look a very hard place indeed. Moreover, if the English state had eyes for France, the Scottish state did not only have eyes for England. A rival Gaelic-Norse highland and island west preoccupied as much of its time as did the prospect of an northward invading Anglo-Norman south. On the borders there was considerable overlap. Alan of Galloway was a constable of Scotland as well as a knight of England.° The English dominated the Union, yet they were not interested—or they were not interested enough—in turning Celts into little Englanders. It was, of course, true that the English wanted their own way, but part of that meant letting Celts be Celts.· For the Scottish elite, as we shall see, their place in a British configuration which had more or less dumped a royal Stuart for a man called Georg Ludwig von Braunschweig-Luneburg, or George I, was altogether more difficult. Nevertheless, once Jacobitism was dead, the Scottish political class took their place and learned new identities. Learning how to be Scottish in London, British in Edinburgh, and a sort of English gentleman everywhere else was good training in imperial preference. No British monarch visited Scotland (or Ireland, or Wales) until George IV in 1822, and he only the once. In Catholic Ireland, after 1690 there were penalties and prejudices and inducements to turn Protestant and get farms, but no one seriously believed—least of all the Church of Ireland—that the English were about to mission the land. Being British ultimately involved having a nationality without a nation to belong to. It was, therefore, an awkward idea.⁄‚ Yet the antiquarians were ° Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom, 88. R. A. Houston carries these border overlaps into the modern period: Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity (Cambridge, 1985). · Kidd, ‘Constructing the Pre-Romantic Celt’, in British Identities Before Nationalism. ⁄‚ Davies, The Isles, 835.

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very interested in it, and they did for seventeenth-century ‘Britain’ what the common lawyers did for seventeenth-century England: they gave it meaning, they sketched its history and, with the map-makers, they drew its boundaries.⁄⁄ Beneath the great British arch, it was national feelings, not British ones, which provided the heart and soul of identity.⁄¤ Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and English identities were left alone so long as they were not thought threatening. At first they attracted the older British antiquarianism, but in the eighteenth century they attracted a distinctively Celtic antiquarianism which, in the nineteenth century, would be pressed to serve the nationalist cause.⁄‹ English heart and soul was the most uncertain quantity. So near did it lie to the centre of power, it was probably best not to encourage it.⁄› Two connecting wires ran through the British state. The first wire was ‘being British’ and because this was not particularly ethnic, it was the nearest the United Kingdom got to a concept of citizenship. Being Scottish or English, Welsh or Irish was the other, and here ran powerful emotional attachments. It was vitally important to the United Kingdom not to get the wires crossed. The project itself was built piecemeal, and was not perfect, nor planned, nor was it always clear what sort of nationality was preferred, and it was always breaking down—particularly so in Ireland, where the wires were inherently crossed. But for over 200 years it was, very nearly, the workable solution to the complex politics of these islands. It is sometimes assumed that if it stops short of independent statehood national identity is weak, or misconceived, or even stupid.⁄fi Even if it could be shown to have been misconceived, the British state was hardly weak and its various nationalities were hardly stupid. The United Kingdom demonstrated that there was more than one way of being national, even in the same nation. Being British certainly took a while to learn.⁄fl In Wales, at first, eighteenth-century British identities were barely discernible. The Welsh ⁄⁄ William Camden’s Britannia (1586, English trans. 1610) set new standards of scholarship: Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), 32. ⁄¤ But English ideas dominated: Michael Bentley, ‘The British State and its Historiography’, in W. Blockmans and J.-P. Genet, Visions sur le développement des états européens (Rome, 1993), 153–4. ⁄‹ Murray G. H. Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester, 1999), chs. 2, 3. ⁄› ‘Danish and Saxon monuments are not worth more than the monuments of the Hottentots’ (Horace Walpole): Rosemary Sweet, ‘Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 134: 2 (2001), 193. ⁄fi Tom Nairn writes like this but then has to explain the British state’s longevity and success, which he does less well, if at all: After Britain (London, 2001), 56, 223. ⁄fl Davies, The Isles, p. xxxviii.

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elite came together to form no national or even parliamentary interest. These few hundred gentry families showed little desire to be anything other than Welsh in land and English in manners: ‘Only among the families of farmers and peasants were enchanting names such as Angharad, Cynwrig . . . and Llywarch preserved.’⁄‡ Later in the eighteenth century a cultural revival began, based on a late-Reformation printing boom (Welsh Prayer Book, 1567; Welsh Bible, 1588), and some scholarly interest in the Welsh language and archaeology. Interest was in an ancient and original Welsh Britishness. Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica appeared in 1707, Evans’s History in 1716, Rhydderch’s Dictionary in 1725, and from 1751 the exiled gentlemen of the London Cymmrodorion Society had somewhere to take their Welshness. From 1770 the Gwyneddigion Society served the more democratic instincts of the Morris brothers and their circle. Iolo Morganwg’s unique contribution to Welsh identity in the 1790s has been well attested. On these gwerin foundations, Victorian chapel Liberals built their little Welshness in the manner of a modern, democratic nation.⁄° In Scotland, at first the Act of Union was widely unpopular. London was two weeks’ journey-time away. There were only forty-five MPs. The Scottish electorate was smaller even than the Welsh. The religious divisions looked terrible, with all forms in contention, while the Stuarts still had prime royal claim, with widespread support. Moreover, the English were seen as ungrateful—‘We are the instruments of their peace and enriching.’ It is not surprising, therefore, that at first eighteenth-century Scottish Unionists did not have many Scottish friends. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik defended Union (and his part in it) by appealing to the highest principles of Scottish patriotism. Yet it remains the case that he personally did well out of Union, securing a life of ease, and even by his own account, on taking its first fateful step the Scottish parliament was out of line with the Scottish people. When Clerk came to write his History of Union he did so without many readers, for it was written in Latin. And when he had finished writing it, and the Young Pretender and his army came riding by, Clerk had to hide three volumes down ‘a coal hole’ where they were ‘spoiled with black water’.⁄· If one is searching for startling eighteenth-century British success ⁄‡ Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales 1642–1780 (Oxford, 1987), 219. ⁄° P. Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View: The Hunt for a Welsh Past in the Romantic Period’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983), 95–8. ⁄· Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh, 1985), 52–3. Sir John Clerk, History of the Union of Scotland and England (1750; Edinburgh, 1993), 6.

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stories, they will not be found in ordinary lives. By 1815 British success can be judged on its own terms alone—survival of the state.¤‚ Hanoverianism looked secure. France was defeated. Revolution had been avoided. The economy was dynamic, if fitful. A new empire was in the making. Nineteenth-century Scottish politicians made this Unionism their own. Scottish Tories forgot their Jacobite past and mixed a new version of Scottish history with a loyalty to Loyalty itself. Scottish Liberalism flourished and provided some of the best Unionists in the land—Gladstone for Midlothian, Morley for Montrose, Asquith for East Fife, Churchill for Dundee. In 1906 half of Scottish MPs were Englishmen. Scottish radicals were no exception to the pull from the south. From Edinburgh Review reviewers to Labour Party socialists, they all followed their ambition by taking the British road to Westminster. Scottish imperialists of the Milner camp talked of a British Empire, not an English one, still less a Scottish one. Glasgow built a new Scottishness out of municipal and imperial pride.¤⁄ Being British, indeed, was common sense, and much of it the common sense of a Scotsman at that.¤¤ Working-class Scotland had little time for the kilt. Its people lived and worked little differently from people in other parts of industrial Britain. There were cultural differences, but for most of the year they were small. ‘Oor Wullie’ and his pals lived in Dundee, but they were drawn by the same artist who did the English ‘Lord Snooty and his pals’, and no one asked any questions of residence. Fat Bob gave Wullie a cricket bat, of all things, for his birthday.¤‹ From the Scott Memorial in Princes Street and shortbread-biscuit tins to the Sunday Post and Beano, the Scottish people were a Unionist people. They found their heroes in British contexts, a Gordon or a Livingstone or a John Buchan, and rewrote their identity from there. English politicians, by contrast, had much less to say about a British Union. They talked more of an English Constitution, which they supposed ¤‚ Frank O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth Century: 1688–1832 (London, 1997). ¤⁄ John MacKenzie, ‘Second City of Empire’, in F. Driver and D. Gilbert, Imperial Cities (Manchester, 1999), ch. 12. ¤¤ ‘. . . its teachings have settled down into the common sense of the nation’, Walter Bagehot, ‘The Basic Postulates of Political Economy’ (1876) on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: quotation from Donald Winch; ‘for most of the post 1707 epoch, the Union functioned with the cooperation and enthusiasm of the Scottish people’: Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism (London, 1994), 35. ¤‹ Sunday Post, 28 Jan. 1940. Ian Jack, ‘Where does Lord Snooty live?’, Guardian, 29 Nov. 1997. See also Andrew Gamble, Britain in Decline (New York, 1994), 45.

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to be the more important part. Nineteenth-century English constitutionalism was essentially a story of the triumph of liberty over tyranny, a story extended by English beneficence to Scots and others.¤› The Scots could have very little to say about historic constitutions. A parliament which had abolished itself hardly merited much comment. Jacobitism, on the other hand, was not Scottish history, but it served. Being ‘for Charlie’ in 1745 could mean a range of things above and beyond clan loyalty.¤fi It could, for instance, be Presbyterian as well as Episcopalian. It could be Lowland as well as Highland. It could be rich as well as poor. It could hail from any part of Scotland and, what is more, it could be hailed as British as well as Scottish, because all three Stuart kings had offered a British dimension to their kingship and both Pretenders had marched on England to prove it. Above all, there was no doubt that the Stuart claim was lawful. Hanoverians were way down the line of succession. English Acts of Settlement (1701) and Union (1707) had squeezed Germans in and Scots out. But if the Stuarts had a case, it has to be said that it was a hopeless case outside Scotland. As the last faction to stand for an independent Scotland, the Jacobite princes of 1715 and 1745 had an evens chance of success north of the border. But not south. Once they marched into England at the head of armies which looked like Highland armies (and which trumpeted themselves as Highland armies), both Pretenders were finished. Even as Highlanders marched south, was not their clan system a relic? Their agriculture famished? Their language uncouth? Their claymores futile? Highland armies might be brave but, pitched as they were against ‘the military Wunderkind of the age’, they were going to have to be.¤fl The British fiscal-military state was not going to let 5,000 lightly armed troops defeat it on its own territory. The Jacobites’ only hope was a rising of the English people. This too looked highly unlikely. There was too much to risk, too little to gain. Like peoples everywhere, the English people’s relationships with the military were all bad,¤‡ but if the Jacobite armies did not quite represent the worst of their kind, their trail through England was far more likely to generate fear than support. After the battle of Culloden outside Inverness in April 1746, the vanquished Charles Edward Stuart was ¤› In Scottish schools: Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism 1880–1918 (Manchester, 1994), 49–61. ¤fi Murray G. H. Pittock, The Myth of the Jacobite Clans (Edinburgh, 1995). ¤fl Brewer, The Sinews of Power, p. xiii. ¤‡ Point well made by Brewer, ibid. pp.45–8.

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hounded out of the Highlands and lived to plot a little bit more then die, the last of a lost cause. His supporters fared much worse. The Highlands were militarised. Jacobites and the rest were tracked down and cleared out. What had been a rebellion for England had been a civil war in Scotland. After 1746, Union in Britain could only survive if Scotland could heal its wounds. Part of the healing involved amputating the Scottish past. Jacobitism’s political and social significance was cut clean away. At the same time, the human kultur of a clan-folk was saved as a pure Scottish remnant which could be used again. Sir Walter Scott was the undoubted master of all this, although there were others, including the so-called ‘kailyard’ tradition of writers later in the nineteenth century.¤° While Scottish intellectuals busied themselves in explaining the future of modernity and Unionism to the English, Scott addressed his own people. He laid down the basis of a Scottish nationalism without a Scottish state, and he did so, in the manner of all nineteenth-century nationalists, by reconciling opposites and investing primary moral value in the people, who endure, and not in the state, which does not. Scott showed how Scots could be Celts as well as Britons, presbyterians as well as episcopalians, learned antiquaries as well as Highland lads. He showed, in other words, how they could be ancient and modern at the same time. Like him. In his first novel, Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, published in 1814, he added a ‘Postscript Which Should Have Been A Preface’: ‘This [Highland] race has now almost entirely vanished from the land, and with it, doubtless, much absurd political prejudice; but also, many living examples of disinherited attachment to the principles of loyalty which they received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour.’¤· In a century where ‘property’ was the measure of human progress, eighteenth-century England and Scotland amassed a great deal of progress. On the English side, the Navigation Acts from 1651 were naked in their aggressive pursuit of trade and treasure. Within a hundred years England was a great trading nation and commanded a roving sea power second to none. In the economy, there were signs of quickening which would later be called an agricultural and then an industrial revolution. On the Scottish side, revolutions in commerce, transport, and finance bound the economy together and connected it to England’s. It was convenient to attribute this to Union. At least the timing looked right, and the best arguments for ¤° Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1981), 161. ¤· Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814; London, 1898), 648.

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Union had always been commercial.‹‚ The Scottish economy benefited from wider markets and favourable duties. The Calico Act of 1721 was the first major Scottish victory in a London parliament. Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Tour through Scotland starts off with the reflection ‘that they are where we were’, but by the end there is no doubt that he thinks Scotland will Improve.‹⁄ Scotland in the 1690s had experienced famine and huge regional falls in population, but within two generations, whatever foul acts were being perpetrated up in the glens, Glasgow was a bursting mercantile city and Edinburgh new town was on its way to architectural glory, ‘as a celebration of British patriotism’.‹¤ Scotland was not only amassing progress, it was amassing progress of the right freehold sort. In these thriving commercial and university post-Jacobitinical cities, with the hills visible from street-corners, new ways of looking at society emerged. Adam Smith taught the long view, a way of looking at history that was far more interested in population growth or capital stock than in the comings and goings of kings and queens.‹‹ Scottish work on historical stages, social contexts, rational procedures, cross-cultural comparisons, and whole political economies—in other words, the basis of modern social science—explained England to the English far better than the English could explain it to themselves. As did the reading of English literature, at first a Scottish university course in belles lettres or the power ‘of a graceful and elegant manner’.‹› Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Sir Walter Scott all laid the cultural ground-rules for Union, while in the next century Scottish and Scottish descended intellectuals dominated the argument for and against. If Macaulay and both Mills spoke for ‘progress’, Carlyle and Ruskin warned against, but the wonder of it was not that Scottish intellectuals believed in Union, but that they attributed so much of its progress to England and so little of it to

‹‚ On the the English state’s growing revenue and expenditure: O’Brien and Hunt, ‘The Rise of the Fiscal State in England 1485–1815’, and chapters by Canny, Appleby, and Braddick in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire [henceforth OHBE], vol. i, The Origins of Empire, (Oxford, 1998). ‹⁄ Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6; Harmondsworth, 1978), 560. ‹¤ O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century, 315. ‹‹ Donald Winch, ‘A great deal of ruin in a nation’, in P. Clarke and C. Trebilcock, Understanding Decline (Cambridge, 1997), 32. ‹› Robert Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge, 1998), 15.

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Scotland.‹fi Why was there so little of Scotland, given Scotland’s ancient state, its long (if invented) royal line, its claim on civilization from Ionan Christianity to political economy? England made the Union, but Scotland made it work. By 1900 the British were a remarkably stable formation. They were riddled with difference, of course, largely along lines of class and nationality, but even so, what divided them was far less important than what united them. The idea of a divided people, or a disunited kingdom, is not one which a historically informed view of the subject can sustain.‹fl Only in Ireland might this be challenged, yet even there no clear-cut anti-British majority existed. English–Scottish relations remained the strongest link in the chain. Both sides had learned from each other. In order to project, both sides had taught themselves how to hold back. Right up to 1939, Scottish sentiment was to be found right at the Celtic edge, on Eriksay, with the Jacobites, but modern Scottish power was to be found at the centre, in the present, with the British.‹‡

‹fi Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an AngloBritish Identity 1689–c.1830 (Cambridge, 1993); id., ‘North Britishness and the Nature of EighteenthCentury British Patriotisms’, Historical Journal, 39: 2 (1996), 368. ‹fl See Samuel, Island Stories, 50. ‹‡ GPO Film Unit, The Islanders (1939), dir. Maurice Harvey. Charles Edward Stuart first raised his standard on Eriksay.

3 Constituting the Modern Nation

Given their great diversity, nations have a propensity to fragment. On closer inspection they can look shapeless—nothing but a mass of individuals. It is the job of states to counter these tendencies and build the impression of wholeness. For liberal states, the tendency to fragment and the building of national wholeness have to balance. Having looked at aspects of the development of the English state and nation in Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter will leave the history for a while and take a slightly more theoretical view of how the modern English were represented as a whole, first through their political constitution and second through the agencies of mass communication. It has to be said at the outset that in the constitution they were hardly represented at all, while the response to the agencies of mass communication, particularly the response of the political elite and intelligentsia, always involved fear and loathing at anything to do with the representation of ‘the masses’. Both forms of representation—constitution and communication—could be said to be liberal as well as modern, and both came to dominate the public sphere, but in England both forms preferred the representation of the many to remain in the hands of the few.

Walter Bagehot Having a constitution is the main way in which a modern state represents itself, and constitutional states usually define their powers by vesting final wholeness, or sovereignty, in the nation. However, as we have seen, the

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British have taken pride in not being a nation like other modern nations, and in not having a ‘constitution’ like other constitutions.⁄ The British constitution grew piecemeal to serve a state that was both ‘asymmetrical’ and ‘highly centralized’ at the same time.¤ The Celtic nations were allowed a degree of cultural expression which eventually turned into political expression.‹ In this respect the English nation had tolerance thrust upon it, for it was recognized early that if the English were allowed to dominate beyond their natural weight, in politics or culture, say, the kingdom would not be united for long.› As a political and cultural force, Englishness had to be kept elitist, while in its popular form it had to be effaced. So, after the demise of their popular and robust common-law freeborn identity in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the English had to make do with a rather elitist version of constitutional growth for their history and a rather mysterious constitutional device called ‘Crown-in-Parliament’ for their representation. During this period the liberal journalist and commentator Walter Bagehot reconceived the English constitution. Writing in 1867, he divided it into two parts: the ‘dignified part’, that is, strictly, monarchy and Lords; and the ‘efficient part’, that which he saw as the growing power of middleclass politicians operating through cabinet government. Bagehot put the two parts together to form a strategy for survival. The strategy was so influential that ‘Bagehot’ could be said to have operated as a major constitutional convention in his own right ever since. Where was the English nation in his English constitution? Writing in a year of some anxiety, when the state was about to double the electorate with the enfranchisement of nearly a million male workers, Bagehot regarded most of his fellow countrymen as a threat. In order to counter the threat, he advocated middle-class government through a concentration of political power which he was happy to call ‘efficient’, and aristocratic cultural leadership which he was happy to call ‘dignified’. While the show went on and the ⁄ But see Robert Hazell (ed.), Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years (Oxford, 1999). ¤ Ibid. 231. ‹ In 1999 consitutional expression in a Scottish parliament and a Welsh assembly. The Northern Irish had Stormont from 1920; there was a Scottish Office from 1892 (cabinet seat 1895), and a Welsh Office and cabinet seat from 1964. › In 1801 England and Wales had roughly 9.1 m people to Scotland and Ireland’s 6.8 m; in 1851 it was 18 m to 9.4 m; in 1911, 36 m to 9.2 m: Davies, The Isles, 651, 803–8.

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select few got on with the affairs of state, Bagehot reckoned that the masses would look on, gawp, and defer: The English constitution in its palpable form is this—the mass of the people yield obedience to the select few, and when you see this select few, you perceive that though not of the lowest class, nor of an unrespectable class, they are yet of a heavy sensible class—the last people in the world to whom, if they were drawn up in a row, an immense nation would ever give an exclusive preference. In fact, the mass of the English people yield a deference rather to something else than to their rulers. They defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society.fi

Bagehot’s constitution was designed to let the few in, keep the majority out, and find a new role for the uppers. As a strategy for rule, it was almost colonial. From the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 to the second Reform Act in 1867—with repeal of Test and Corporation, Catholic Emancipation, Great Reform, Municipal Reform, and all sorts of enabling reform in between—for over forty years British constitutionalists had been concerned about the rise of democracy and the opening up of the state. They warned that unless the middle classes took heed, their reforms would be leapfrogged by a proletarian revolution whose consequences would be deeply unpleasant. In 1825 Blackwood’s Magazine could consider sober middle-class journals like the Penny Magazine and proletarian journals like the Crisis as ‘of a family’, and see the smack of revolution in their mutual taste for ‘rooting up laws and systems by wholesale’. According to Blackwood’s, the proletariat was on the brink of secession: ‘ The working class are, in regard to connexion and control, separating themselves from the rest of the community and establishing a state of things the most unnatural and portentous.’fl Encouraged by the new industrial society to see themselves as a contracting rather than a confessional people, what if one day the proletariat should decide that their contract with the state was broken? Surely, Blackwood’s argued, that ‘in regard to connexion and control’ there were things more important than contracts? In the end, the ill omens of working-class secession proved unfounded. There was no revolution, even though Karl Marx and a lot of other people thought there would be. The government kept its grip. The relationship between state and nation was reconstituted, but piecemeal, at a snail’s pace. fi Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (1867; London, 1963), 248. fl Blackwood’s Magazine, 18 July 1825, in G. W. Crompton (ed.), Trade Unions in the Victorian Age (Farnborough, 1973), i, 26.

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As every schoolchild used to know, five out of the six Chartist demands were granted, but not to Chartists. By the 1880s the British state had weathered the democratic storm. It held its lead and Bagehot, the insider, had realized how. Bagehot contrived to show how, in a constitution, the will of the few could be made to look like the will of the many. The key to this was the popularity of the monarch. When he talked about a ‘dignified part’, Bagehot was identifying a recent trend towards the personification of the nation in the monarch.‡ There had been odd breaks in the trend, notably with the universally reviled George IV and the retirement of Queen Victoria after the death of her husband in 1861, but, by cloaking the unseemliness of modern government behind a lot of theatrical show, Bagehot explained how the middle-class few could rule the working-class many in the name of the royal we. The dignified part would vest national wholeness in the monarch, while the efficient part would vest it in parliament. The official form of words joins them up as ‘Crown-in-Parliament’. This was, and is, the English constitutional way of seeing the nation whole. ‘Crown-in-Parliament’, then, was and is the nearest the English get to recognition of their final constitutional authority, or ‘sovereignty’. But how near is that? In 1885 the constitutional lawyer A. V. Dicey defined sovereignty as ‘the right to make or unmake any law whatever’.° Who has that right? According to Dicey, parliament has it—but what did he mean by ‘any law whatever’?· Law in Britain exists first as legal judgements made by judges in the monarch’s courts (yet which are independent of the monarch); second, as statute laws made in parliament, the highest court in the realm, with the monarch’s assent (though not the monarch’s involvement); third, as a plethora of regulations derived from statute laws (yet which are not themselves laws); and finally, as a series of conventions based on practices which also are not themselves constitutional laws (yet are crucial to the interpretation of those laws), one of which is the monarchy itself. These are the legal judgements, public statutes, regulations, and inside conventions which are ‡ Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III’, Past and Present, 102 (1984); David Cannadine, ‘The British Monarchy c.1820–1977’, in E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (ed.)s, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). ° A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885; London, 1964), 40. · ‘No constitutional textbook now seeks to uphold the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty as expounded by Dicey; but in the minds of politicians the doctrine lives on’: Hazell, Constitutional Futures, 236.

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said to make up the law and the constitution.⁄‚ But there is still no clear view of where final authority lies, and no view whatsoever of the nation. What about for practical purposes? Can it be said that for everyday purposes the law and the constitution make up a coherent body of thought which knows in practice where authority lies and thus recognizes the nation in so doing? The answer is that they do and they do not. They do not cohere insofar as they have been built up piecemeal over hundreds of years and have never been codified into a single document. They do cohere for practical purposes insofar as they stand as ideas to be interpreted in a way that befits the idea of the nation as a ‘constitutional monarchy’ (as interpreted by constitutional monarchists).⁄⁄ Unfortunately, the cornerstone of that idea, the monarchy, has no clear constitutional place. Like the nation it is supposed to personify, and like the prerogatives it holds, it is simply ‘there’ and always has been. We can see, therefore, that that bundle of laws, practices and ideas which the English call a constitution has always been aware of the nation as a force ‘down below’, as it were, but has never identified it constitutionally, nor established its precise relationship to the state. Up until 1981, not even nationality was defined at law. Instead, the constitution has been far more interested in giving politicians the freedom to rule with the minimum of interference.⁄¤ In that sense the British constitution is more a representational system than a democratic one, and in that sense also it perfectly befitted a Union state which did not encourage popular nationalism. At the dawn of modern government, in 1868, Lord Salisbury outlined the plan: The plan which I prefer is frankly to acknowledge that the nation is our Master, though the House of Commons is not, and to yield our own opinions only when the judgement of the nation has been challenged at the polls and decidedly expressed. This doctrine, it seems to me, has the advantage of being: (1) Theoretically sound. (2) Popular. (3) Safe against agitations, and (4) So rarely applicable as practically to place little fetter upon our independence.⁄‹

⁄‚ John Alder, Constitutional and Administrative Law (Basingstoke, 1989), 41. ⁄⁄ ‘We have to piece it together ourselves’, ibid. 3. Coleridge laid great importance on the Constitution as an idea arising out of an idea (of state): S. T. Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State according to the idea of each (1830; London, 1972) 9. ⁄¤ Robert Colls, ‘The Constitution of the English’, History Workshop, 46 (Autumn 1998). ⁄‹ Gary W. Cox, The Efficient Secret. The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1987), 140.

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In Salisbury’s game-plan, therefore, the House of Commons was of little account, while the nation was to be dealt a hand but only allowed to play it at general elections which were rare enough to give governments virtually autonomy in-between times. The nation’s place was taken by a symbolic monarchy which spoke to it far more than it spoke for it. In 1932 George V became the first media-King.⁄› For most practical purposes, therefore, the English constitution rests on interpretation, and can be most things to most people depending upon how hard they care to look. Bagehot’s constitution was designed to ensure that they were not inclined to look too hard.⁄fi Neither quite patrician nor democratic, neither quite unwritten nor written, the English constitutional monarchy is neither quite constitutional nor monarchical. Like the Bellman’s map in The Hunting of the Snark, the constitution can look like ‘A perfect and absolute blank’, even though ‘the crew were much pleased when they found it to be | A map they could all understand’.⁄fl Most importantly, the constitution is nothing until it is interpreted, and it is interpreted only by those who keep it blank.⁄‡ And yet, the exclusion of the constitutional nation is not the whole story. Given the successes of the British state, how could it be? Alongside Crownin-Parliament there is another ‘nation’: one that could not be tidied away in complex constitutional arrangements.

Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine A ‘national’ has been understood to be a member of a state since 1887.⁄° Yet, as we have seen in Chapter 1, there were meanings attached to being English which went far deeper than the state. For Burke, writing in the eighteenth century, it was scarcely possible to think of a political constitution as separable from the people whom it constituted. In the beginning there was ‘civil society’. Out of that society came conventions, and out of the conventions came laws and customs which incorporated men by disciplining them. ‘The ⁄› Kenneth Rose, King George V (London, 1983), 229, 394. ⁄fi Collini quotes Guizot: ‘If we open an English book of history, jurisprudence, or any similar subject, we seldom find in it the real foundation, the ultimate reason of things’ (English Pasts, 134). ⁄fl Lewis Carroll, The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London, 1939), 683. ⁄‡ Ross McKibbin talks about the de-politicization of English middle-class manners: Classes and Cultures. England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998) 96–7. ⁄° Royal Institute of International Affairs, Nationalism (London, 1939), p. xvii.

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idea of a people is the idea of a corporation.’ Because the law becomes you, Burke held this incorporation as something unspeakably precious. To break it would be to invite the complete unravelling of all that made a nation a nation: . . . they are no longer a people; they have no longer a corporate existence; they have no longer a legal, coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognized abroad. They are a number of vague loose individuals and nothing more. With them all is to begin again. Alas! they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into . . . a true politick personality.⁄·

According to Burke, therefore, the best constitutions are sociological rather than political, and are indistinguishable from the people they represent. Over time, they make each other. In their more exalted moments, generation on generation, Burke’s English were not unlike the orthodox church—‘the whole communion of the faithful existing in eternity’. True constitutions, therefore, ought not to be broken lightly; they ‘ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee’. Instead, they come to resemble the prejudices of their people just as the people come to resemble the peculiarities of their constitution, which was part of their law: . . . made by what is ten thousand times better than choice . . . made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time. It is a vestment, which accommodates itself to the body . . . The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.¤‚

Burke’s political philosophy, and the English jurisprudence which preceded it and influenced it, was a very powerful and elegant way of seeing the nation in its entirety, because it incorporated everything there was and everything that had been. It didn’t matter, then, that the people were not formally represented in the constitution. Why should they be? The very fabric was theirs. They only had to beware of those who might try to pass off inferior stuff, or those who might want to unravel it and start again.¤⁄ ⁄· Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Harmondsworth, 1978), 150–2; Appeal to the Old Whigs from the New (1791), in Russell Kirk (ed.), The Portable Conservative Reader (Harmondsworth, 1982), 40–1. ¤‚ Clive Foss and Paul Magdalino, The Making of the Past: Rome and Byzantium (Oxford, 1977), 108. Burke, Reflections, 194; Speech on the Reform of the Representation in the House of Commons (1782), in The Works of the Rt. Hon Edmund Burke (London, 1869), vi. 147. ¤⁄ Sir Maurice Amos, The English Constitution (London, 1934), 8.

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This sociological way of seeing the nation¤¤ came far more to resemble the minds of English conservatives than it ever did the minds of the people—actual minds which, it has to be said, never interested conservatives overmuch. Among them, Sir Ivor Jennings reckoned that in the end ‘liberty is the consequence of an attitude of mind rather than precise rules’, and that in their constitution the English attitude of mind was fully represented. Sir Maurice Amos’s English Constitution first appeared in 1934 in a ‘Heritage Series’, along with studies of the landscape, the inn, the public school, cricket, and other good English ideas. In essence, Amos reckoned the English were what they were, which was what they were told they were, which was identical with the manner in which they were governed: ideas ‘characteristic of the English mind’, he said, were at one with ideas about the constitution, ‘or what is felt to be the Constitution’.¤‹ This was little more than tautology, but in the Burkeite account the important point is that some original way of seeing the nation whole had to come first, before the state, otherwise who made the state, and what did they make it for? In his argument with Burke, Thomas Paine was insistent on this point. Sovereignty existed ‘in the whole’, and was ‘resident in the nation’, Paine said, and the trouble with historicists like Burke was that they were not historical enough. They did not go back to the very beginning. In the beginning there was just Man and his Maker. No rulers there. All the contrivances of rulers, therefore, as well as all the privileges they claimed, only followed after the fact. The people came first and deserved a constitution which recognized as much. For Paine, there was one simple question. Where was this constitution? Could Mr Burke produce the English constitution he so much believed in? No, he could not. And if he could not, then there was no constitution, and no precious covenants between state and nation or, in his terms, between the people and their laws, either, and no incorporation. Paine could only conclude that the nation had been deceived into thinking it had a relationship with the state when in fact it had not. Mr Burke could only produce a ‘Pantomime of hush’, a constitution of ‘this, that, and t’other’ which rulers made up as they went along. Paine saw through Bagehot before Bagehot was born.¤› ¤¤ ‘. . . holistic, organic, sensuous, recollective’: Terry Eagleton, Idea of Culture (Oxford, 2000), 11. ¤‹ Sir Ivor Jennings, The British Constitution (London, 1971), 205; Amos, Constitution, 26–7. ¤› Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1791–2; Harmondsworth, 1977), 62, 87–9, 92–3, 94, 98, 162, 163. So did John Bright and Karl Marx precede Bagehot, in 1847 and 1855 respectively: Saville, 1848, 7, 229.

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Thomas Paine depicted the English people as having been denied their right to constitutional representation and much else besides. But if they had no constitution in the present and had had none before that, at any rate since the coming of William the Conqueror, and if they could not get back to the very beginning to see their original condition, how could they know who they were?

Mass Imagining It is difficult to overestimate the impact of a cheap and readable print on national imagining. Some historians have traced the rise of modern nationalism as coincident with this development.¤fi On an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented regularity, print capitalism, first with books and then with newspapers, enabled readers to see their individual lives as in line with millions of other lives. States and borders loaned shape and substance to this ‘imagined community’. British newspapers did not become national organs until the late nineteenth century. Steam presses came in from the 1820s, and rotary presses— printing both sides of the reel, and folding—from the 1880s. In 1855 stamp duty was abolished. From the 1870s the school-boards ensured that most of the population was at least literate. By the 1890s ‘hot metal’ linotype and a fast night-mail out of London were improving the quality of print and its distribution. Since the 1850s every British city had been within a day’s railjourney from London. Following the revolution in print came the revolution in mass illustration, in Britain, a particularly brilliant one.¤fl Engraving (penny plain, twopence aquatint) brought art images to the widest public ever. Colour printing, photography, and photomechanical devices followed, allowing image to match text, thereby strengthening the impact of both. In 1902, with the completion of the trans-Pacific Vancouver–Fiji– Australasia link, the Empire was finally connected by cable.¤‡ ¤fi Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). ¤fl Henry Blackburn, The Art of Illustration (London, 1894); Martin Hardie, English Coloured Books (1906; Bath, 1973): with the work of Caldecott, Greenaway, Greiffenhagen, Crane, Beardsley, Partridge, Rackham and Brangwyn, at the turn of the century English illustration reached its zenith. ¤‡ Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (London, 1982), 259.

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Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail was the first mass British newspaper. Launched on 4 May 1896, price one halfpenny, it sold 400,000 copies a day, more than any paper before it. Then came the Daily Mirror. Between its first selection of news on the principle of best photographs in March 1904, and the moment when it ‘spat the plum from its mouth’ and went downmarket in November 1934,¤° the Mirror made complete the revolution in putting mass image to mass text. To compare a late nineteenth-century postcard with an early nineteenth-century woodcut, then the postcard with a massproduced Mirror half-tone stereotype front page, is to see a revolution in the means of showing the world whole to a whole world, six days a week. The moving visual image, with internet and other mass technologies, is a revolution which continues, but by the 1930s, with the press in full spate, the wireless booming, the advertising industry beginning to understand its appeal, the cinema in its heyday, and television on the way, the power for representing the nation was immense.¤· Like the constitutional way of seeing the nation whole, it was a power of the few over the many. The state was interested in the new mass imagining, and kept a lookout for troublemakers. The British Broadcasting Company, of course, had good reason to be attentive and grateful to statesmen because it depended upon them for its existence. Radio was considered far too influential a medium to be left to supply and demand, so the company was given a state-licensed monopoly. On the recommendations of the Sykes Report, it was decided to make the BBC ‘a public utility service’ incorporated by royal charter. Under Sir John Reith (general manager BBC, 1922–6, director-general 1927–38), this public service adopted the manners of Bagehot’s political class: announcers wore dinner jackets, spoke authoritatively, and stayed in the background. In 1930 it started to broadcast from transmitters powerful enough to reach the whole country, and the ‘National Programme’ was born. Reith believed in the impartiality of the BBC, and did much to defend it, but it was the sort of impartiality which, in the middle of the General Strike, allowed him to take the prime minister home and from there write Baldwin’s speech to the nation: ‘I am a man of peace; I am longing for and ¤° Keith Waterhouse, Daily Mirror Style (London, 1981), 9. Mellor also cites 1934 as a key moment in the history of British photojournalism: David Mellor, Modern British Photography (London, 1980), 18. ¤· ‘The English were a people of the book. Even more they were a people of the press’; ‘The cinema was the most important medium of popular culture in the period, and the English went to the cinema more than any other people’: McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 419, 503.

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praying for peace; but I will not compromise the dignity of the British constitution.’ Needless to say, the General Council of the Trades Union Congress did not benefit equally from the general manager’s attentions.‹‚ From the press, too, the state thought it had little to fear. To interfere with the freedom of the newspaper companies would have been legally and morally difficult anyway, so it relied instead on ‘good sense’ and influence. With the cinema, the state intervened early. The Cinematograph Act was passed in 1909 and the Board of Film Censors was set up in 1912, with a draconian code drawn up seven years later. The Moyne Committee reported in 1936 with clear views on ‘the spread of national culture, and in presenting national ideas and customs to the world’. Film-makers were encouraged to present the British as a people who based their lives on personal restraint and constitutional duty.‹⁄ For kinds of film-making considered to be more real, or factual, and claiming to be representative of the British people as they actually lived their lives, there was the ‘documentary’. Yet, when the great documentarist John Grierson announced his intention ‘to command, and cumulatively command, the mind of a generation’,‹¤ it is as well to remember that he spent his best years working for state agencies. From 1928 he worked for the Empire Marketing Board, from 1932 for the General Post Office, and from 1940 for the Crown Film Unit. The Empire Marketing Board had been founded to project Englishness to the world. Bagehot’s constitution prevailed, and the efficient secret of class government was hidden by a lot of national dignity: Monarchy, Parliament, Judiciary, Shakespeare, Dickens, Fair Play, Quality, and the Authorized Version.‹‹ ‘Auntie’ BBC would soon claim her place in the national family because, of all the resources of national imagining, she was coming to stand supreme. In 1932, between bidding ‘Good Night’ one week and ‘Good Evening’ the next, the author S. P. B. Mais received more letters after a single radio broadcast than he had received in over twenty years and after writing forty books.‹› His topic had been ‘ This Unknown Island’. Very quickly, the BBC found the British by speaking for them across the world and by speaking to them as a knowable and valued community. ‹‚ Ian McIntyre, The Expense of Glory. A Life of John Reith (London, 1994), 130, 144. ‹⁄ Jeffrey Richards, Films and British National Identity (Manchester, 1997), 12, 16. On controls and committees: J. Richards and A. Aldgate, Best of British. Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (Oxford, 1983). ‹¤ R. M. Barsam, Nonfiction Film (London, 1974), 42. ‹‹ Ibid. 40. ‹› S. P. B. Mais, This Unknown Island (1932; London, 1936), p. ix.

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The trust that was placed in the BBC must rank as one of the state’s greatest achievements. It strove to be the mirror of the nation, and the nation accepted it. For all its snobbery and core Englishness (‘London Calling’), it saw the British as a whole.‹fi And for all its metropolitan airs and graces, it did try to get out of the capital, to play British folk as well as English classical music, to watch the Cup Final as well as the Boat Race, to be in ‘MuchBinding-in-the-Marsh’ and not just up west ‘In Town Tonight’. Many recognized the BBC’s achievement, particularly so when they recalled the deep unease which mass imagining had at first induced. The arrival of a commercial competitor after 1955 provoked ‘some of the most bitter Parliamentary debates of the post-war years’.‹fl

Rational or Irrational? Ever since the early nineteenth-century evangelical revival, English society had been familiar with the possibilities of mass imagining. Wordsworth and Coleridge both believed in its power to reconceive reality, and they put its transformative power at the centre of all understanding. Or to put it another way, they showed how powerful ideas could impact on whole identities. Ideas which in the 1790s had marked a revolutionary break, by the 1850s had become the accepted hallmark of ‘literariness’ itself.‹‡ In the 1860s the term Romantic was coined. In John Henry Newman’s ‘illative sense’—‘by which we are enabled to make an imaginative leap from scattered and disparate parts to an intuition of the whole’‹°—one can note the sharpness of Marx’s observation that the Romantic movement, in its call for the essential wholeness of the human spirit, was the ‘legitimate antithesis’ of industrial capitalism in its call for the division of labour.‹· The cult of the imagination was at the heart of English Romanticism, and only became a political problem when it shifted from the individual mind (seen as rational) to the ‘mind’ of the masses, which was seen as conflicted and ignorant. There was nothing new in this. The ancient difference between the sacred and the profane had always rested upon it, but the ‹fi ‘. . . quite fundamental to twentieth-century character formation’: Samuel, Island Stories, 176. ‹fl Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (Harmondsworth, 1987), 358. ‹‡ Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford, 1981), 7; Stephen Prickett (ed.), The Romantics (London, 1981), 143–56. ‹° Prickett, Romantics, 157. ‹· Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1939; Harmondsworth, 1977), 162.

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French Revolution had shown the English in particular how serious a problem it could be. Liberals were always ready to celebrate the freeing of human imaginative capacities, so long as those faculties were resident in the reasoning individual.›‚ The masses, the mob, the crowd, were a different proposition. How could they be expected to make decent choices if their minds were not their own? How could their feelings be trusted if they were prey to irrational forces? Mill recognized this early, in 1848, year of European revolutions: ‘The poor have come out of the leading strings . . . The prospect of the future depends on the degree in which they can be made rational beings.’›⁄ In 1867, another year of putative crisis, Matthew Arnold’s prospect of anarchy lay in the ruling class’s inability to see the need to make the poor rational.›¤ It was in this same year that Bagehot offered his English Constitution: accept the mass’s vulgarity, play on their irrationality, but for God’s sake keep them calm.›‹ After this, the idea of ‘modernity’ itself was based on an obligation to save oneself from the masses (and the masses from themselves).›› The mass capitalist press was widely seen as irresponsible. It was devoted to the masses, indeed, it helped to invent them, but there was not much sign that it was interested in making them rational. In history, it was seen as having broken a once ‘Great Tradition’ in English taste by subtracting the good from the popular. Popular taste, therefore, had been debased, and the nation with it. F. R. Leavis, the leading theoretician of this point of view, had begun his research in the 1920s into the ‘Relationship of Journalism to Literature’. Twenty years before him J. A. Hobson had seen the power of the press as one of the key issues of the day. In 1908 Graham Wallas had identified ‘the rationalist fallacy’ in politics, the fallacy that supposed the people were rational, when all around an irresponsible newspaper industry was doing its worst. Norman Angell in 1926 feared that the political agenda was slipping from individual citizens to newspaper tycoons, who ‘intensify and fix’ the most sensationalist aspects of ‘the public mind’. The Royal Institute of International Affairs, in 1938, postulated a link between the modern state

›‚ Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London, 1902 edn.), i. 499. ›⁄ J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London, 1857), ii. 332–3. ›¤ Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; Cambridge, 1979), 75. ›‹ Bagehot, English Constitution, 250. ›› Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and Durkheim’s distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘mechanical’ solidarities, can be understood in these terms.

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and the erosion of reason.›fi In modern times the authentic nation looked lost. In Hobson’s opinion, the Boer War had provided the first great opportunity to flood it with the ‘black slime’ of malice and disinformation.›fl The Great War saw the state hire experts in the manipulation of public opinion. In February 1918 Lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook became director of propaganda and minister of information respectively. Harmsworth’s Daily Mail had warmongered for over twenty years. Max Aitken, later Beaverbrook, was a man who had been behind every major monopoly in Canada before coming to England in 1910. He had bought the Daily Express as an instrument of his personal political ambition.›‡ Old- and new-style liberals alike worried about monopolies of the mind and feared for individual reason.›° Some looked at the nation and saw only a coagulated, increasingly homogeneous mass.›· And in the 1930s they looked at the state, the fascist state in particular, and saw only manipulation and dread.fi‚ There were also non-liberal, or illiberal, points of view. On both the left and the right in Britain there were those who took the line that if mass imagining could deliver the nation from its old and alienating individualism, then so much the better. A new and iridescent British Imperialism, or a new and iridescent World Communism, might do it. Democratic elections, after all, were merely the arithmetic of momentary individual wills.fi⁄ If the nation did not want to end up rootless, like those denizens of suburban London—‘a community without traditions, without self respect, without ›fi William Walsh, F. R. Leavis (London, 1980), 97–101; J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London, 1901), 9–10, 109–11; Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (1908; London, 1948), p. viii; Norman Angell, The Public Mind (London, 1926), 135–43; RIIA, Nationalism, 202. ›fl Hobson, Psychology, p.139. ›‡ C. J. Hambo, Newspaper Lords in British Politics (London, 1958), 9, 22; Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (1927; Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 20. ›° Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus The State (Edinburgh, 1885), 107; L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (1911; Oxford, 1979). 68. See also the constitutional lawyer A. V. Dicey’s influential Lectures on the Relation Bbetween Law and Public Opinion (1905; London, 1940) as the route to tyranny. ›· Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c.1848–c.1918 (Cambridge, 1989), 216. fi‚ Karl Mannheim, Man and Society (1935; London, 1944), 3–24. Mannheim looked at his native Germany. In Italy, Mosca, Pareto, and Gramsci all developed theories of elite/class authority based upon the manipulation of mass attitudes: S. E. Finer (ed.), Sociological Writings (London, 1966), 192–3. fi⁄ Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (1899; London, 1965), 104–6, 302. G. Lowes Dickinson saw the fall of Athens in terms of individualistic fragmentation: The Greek View of Life (1896; London, 1941), 127.

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ideals’—then it was up to the state to express its whole will.fi¤ Good example might come from the proletariat or from the aristocracy, patriots who were reckoned to know the value of solidarity. Englishmen should stand before England in the way they stand before a work of art—ready to be transformed, ready to see the whole, ready to be victims of their imagination.fi‹ Up to 1939, whichever way the masses moved, whether towards degeneration or regeneration, they were always lumped together as victims and likely to be objects of somebody’s disgust.fi› All this changed during the war. In 1945 the British state and nation had never been more united. Few saw this as the result of state propaganda and manipulation, even though there had been enough of both. The BBC was thought trustworthy. It had got rid of its more excessive snobbery during the war, and would prove more forward-looking after it. Its programmemakers would go on to produce some of the most powerful and convincing representations of the nation available. Cinema in 1945 was seen as mainly fantasy and, apart from too many American films, not a problem. The press was seen as an industry where supply met demand. Newspaper contents were said to reflect what the people actually liked, as well as what they actually were like. So the 1949 Royal Commission on the Press concluded that the public got the press it deserved, even if the press did not quite meet ‘the requirements of society’.fifi The Royal Commission may have been content with the prevailing situation, but other people, including newspaper-owners and advertisers, were not nearly so innocent. After 1945 new ways of knowing the masses were speedily taken up by commercial interests. It was a short road from ‘Mass Observation’ in the 1930s, to war propaganda in the 1940s, to mass marketing in the 1950s: the psychological and statistical principles were known . . . on which would be based the massive post-war expansion into almost every corner of life, of attitude measurement, opinion sampling, ‘consumer profiling’ for product design and sales promotion, including the selling of politicians and programmes; but their probable uses and consequence, especially their social impact, had still to be examined and understood.fifl fi¤ Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, The History of English Patriotism (London, 1913), ii. 596. fi‹ Ibid. i. p. xxxiv. fi› John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939 (London, 1992). fifi Which were not elaborated upon: Royal Commission on the Press, 1947–9. Report. Cmnd.7700 (London, HMSO, 1949), 149, 177. fifl Ralph Glasser, Gorbals Boy at Oxford (London, 1988), 173.

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By the 1950s the people of ‘the smart, busy, commercial culture’, whose products gave Raymond Williams ‘violent headaches whenever I passed through London and saw underground advertisements and evening newspapers’, certainly understood their own social impact and charged accordingly.fi‡ Further royal commissions on the press, in 1962 and 1977, were not nearly so complacent. They addressed the question of ownership, concentrated by then into three massive capitalist corporations. Later, when advertisers’ deliberate manipulation of latent meaningsfi° and ‘public relations’ both came to be part and parcel of getting elected to a parliament which was itself the licensor, source, and subject of its own news, then old misgivings about the rationalist fallacy reappeared.fi· Citizens’ panels and ‘focus groups’, big-business opinion research, massmedia manipulation, and those who ‘spin’ at the heart of government, are now all accepted political conventions. The resources of mass imagining continue to expand. Global information empires continue to grow, while their technology and ownership continue to converge.fl‚ However much the English have chosen to see themselves as an authentic people with a mind of their own, it is clear that mass communication has moved from being a complex influence on political relationships to being a political relationship in its own right.fl⁄ It might be the primary one. Everything this book tries to say about the identity of modern England must be seen in this light. fi‡ Raymond Williams, Culture is Ordinary (1958; London, 1990), 12. fi° Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London, 1978), 77, 162–3. fi· Peter Golding et al. (eds.), Communicating Politics (Leicester, 1986). In 1980 a UNESCO report on world communications systems warned ‘that a nation whose mass media are under foreign domination cannot claim to be a nation’: quoted in H. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London, 1990), 60. fl‚ Peter Golding, ‘ICT and the Sociology of the Future’, Sociology, 34 (2000), 179. fl⁄ Colin Lacey and David Longman, The Press as Public Educator (Luton, 1997). Simon Jenkins gives the problem perfunctory treatment in The Market for Glory (London, 1986), 223–6.

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Extending the State

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4 Modern Gentlemanly Progress

‘Modernity’ can be defined as having to do with the inclusion and representation of the mass of the people in the everyday life of the state. Political constitutionalism was one form of this; mass communication was another. In England both expressed themselves through the idea of ‘progress’. Progress began first as a liberal idea to do with the gradual extension of state institutions to previously excluded groups, achieved in England without revolution and with everything under control. The ‘Settlement’ of 1688 was regarded as the historic starting-point for this English progress, but the enfranchisement of middle-class men and the redrawing of parliamentary constituencies in the ‘Great Reform Act’ of 1832 to include the burgeoning towns and industrial districts was the grand model for all sorts of reformed institutions, from the House of Commons at the top to local voluntary clubs, societies, and businesses at the bottom. By the early twentieth century, all orderly constitutional progress of this kind was known as the English way. Central to the English way was the English gentleman. The ‘gentleman’ had been around for a long time, but he survived these nineteenth-century reforms and adapted to them. In the new, more extended state, his was a reformed character that was considered best able to connect the classes and keep the nation in touch with its old essential self. English liberalism collected all these strands together—parliamentary reform, class cohesion, personal manliness, the national story—and turned them into a popular political philosophy. The gentleman became the central figure in this, just as he was in Bagehot’s plan to save the patrician state and its institutions.

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Bourgeois Revolution Liberalism discovered how English it was in dialogue with the historians. Macaulay’s History of England (1848–55), Froude’s History of England (1856–70), Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest (1867–79), and Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England (1873–78) all established the ‘abiding spirit of liberty’ in English history.⁄ In their history, the Victorian middle classes came to see themselves as a liberating force.¤ Over those who had gone before them, they claimed a broader representation, a deeper purse, a bigger output, and a higher principle.‹ The bourgeois revolution in, say, cricket or the theatre, or music, or ballroom dancing, was seen as just as progressive and just as liberating as the revolution in, say, politics or trade or the civil service. In the history of the bourgeois revolution there were many ‘1832’s. To take a late and rather unusual example, what was called the ‘modern English style’ of dancing started with a meeting in 1920 of 200 dance-teachers at the Grafton Galleries in London, where they decided to supress anarchic, jazz-inspired ‘free form’, and evolve ‘that modern technique which has made the English style paramount over three fifths of the globe’. So they disallowed freak steps, dips, lifts, side steps, and right-angled pauses, and they called on their constituents (dancers) to keep their feet parallel, their knees together, their hips straight, and their steps regular. The dance-teachers of England reasoned that in this reformed way, which was their way, far more people could partake in, and far more people could enjoy, modern dancing without danger to themselves or to others.› In the same way, a reformed English theatre, no less than a reformed English ballroom or a reformed English parliament, would learn to extend its subjects and modernize its repertoire while adopting a progressive concern for the majority.fi Cricket also followed the parliamentary way, only this time both ⁄ J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), 3. David Hume’s History of England (1754–62) was the palimpsest for future national histories, though heavily adumbrated: Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830–70 (Oxford, 2000), ch. 2. ¤ ‘No one now dares to talk of bridling the people’: Buckle, History, 503. ‹ Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London, 1987), 30. › Philip J. S. Richardson, The History of English Ballroom Dancing (London, 1945), 47. fi Raymond Williams, ‘Theatre as a Political Form’, in E. Timms and P. Collier (eds.), Visions and Blueprints (Manchester, 1988), 309. For revolutions in the civil service and music: Henry Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy (London, 1969), and Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain: The Romantic Age 1800–1914 (London, 1981).

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institutions changed their ancien régimes at around the same time. From the 1860s, the Marylebone Cricket Club re-established its national authority by resisting the claims of wage-earning cricketers, reconstituting the patronage of gentlemen cricketers, and widening and redrawing its constituencies by turning the old irregular ‘counties’ into modern clubs with constitutions. In other words, something like what Bagehot had prescribed for politics was achieved for cricket by the MCC. The gentleman amateur (with his initials in front of his name on the scorecard) dignified the game; the professional player (initials placed after) made it more efficient.fl Gentlemen stroked with the bat, but players sweated with the ball. As in the story of English parliamentary reform, so in the story of the MCC it was said that its traditions had been upheld (even if in reality they had been swept aside), while its status as ‘the national game’ was ready to take hold (even if it was played and controlled by minorities). And there were bourgeois revolutions in golf and racing, amateur rowing, tennis, football, athletics, and boxing as well. Indeed, it was mainly through its sporting and parliamentary gentlemen heroes that nineteenth-century England became known to the world.‡ By the early years of the twentieth century the English middle classes may have had misgivings about the future, but only because they did not have all the control they desired. Whatever the activity, whatever the association, whatever the reform, progress was theirs because it was defined as theirs.° Even Marxists agreed, and waited for the bourgeois revolution to falter.

Free To Grow Progress was almost exclusively understood as a history of English constitutional growth. Few doubted that, from some vague period in the past, either with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 or before it (rarely after it), the constitution had been free to grow organically as the nation’s natural expression.· Kay-Shuttleworth in 1873 saw it as containing ‘within itself the fl Christopher Brookes, English Cricket (London, 1978), 127. In horse-racing, the Jockey Club played the reforming part: Paul Johnson, A History of the English People (London, 1985), 292. ‡ Theodore Herzl envisaged all boys in the Jewish state learning to play cricket: Ian Boruma, Voltaire’s Coconuts (London, 1999), 193. ° H. C. Barnard, Were Those the Days? A Victorian Education (London, 1970), 1. · See e.g. S. R. Gardiner, A Student’s History of England, vol. 3, 1689–1885 (London, 1892), for favouring of constitutional history. It was only after 1841 that the House of Commons emerged as the key institution: Clark, English Society, 15–22.

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germs of extensive enjoyment of political privilege’. Dicey in 1885 saw it as the fruit of instinct, ‘much as bees construct a honeycomb’. Adams in 1920 saw its history as one of ‘continuous growth’. Amos in 1934 saw it as ‘something like the human body’. Shears in 1937 saw it as ‘not the invention of any one man but the natural growth among a free people’. Butterfield in 1944 likened it to ‘the life of organic creatures’, and Enoch Powell did the same— ‘almost as mysterious as that of life in the individual organism’. In 1954 Sir Reginald Coupland thought parliament and nation had been ‘born together’.⁄‚ Some dated first germination from Alfred’s reign, some from the first parliaments in the English language, some from the Great Reform Act of 1832, but most from the ‘Settlement’ of 1688. Whatever its exact age, national organic progress was to be found in the history of the constitution. English history, Professor Butterfield affirmed, was a ‘part of the landscape . . . like our country lanes or our November mists’.⁄⁄ And in this history English law had grown unforced, developing and being developed by a free English personality. J. R. Green found that living personality imperishable, quite different from the artificiality of the state.⁄¤ Parliament, then, was a natural force free to grow and ever ready in its history to check unnatural, non-English growths. 1066 and all that was a problem in this regard, but after the Conqueror parliament came to the fore again by stepping out of the mists of Saxon freedom to check the monarchy (1215 and 1265: Magna Carta and de Montfort’s parliament), help shed the papacy (1533: Cranmer and Henry VIII), then shed the crown (1649 and 1688: Charles I and James II), only to restore it, chastized, at least twice (1660 and 1689: Charles II and William and Mary), just as it restored the Church (1661–78: Acts of Establishment and Test), before moving on in the nineteenth century to shed one class in order to find three (1832, 1867, 1884: Reform Acts), and in the twentieth century to shed one gender in order to ⁄‚ Kay-Shuttleworth, in David Reeder (ed.), Educating our Masters (Leicester, 1980), 89–90; Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 3; G. B. Adams, Constitutional History of England (London, 1920), preface; Amos, Constitution, 7; W. S. Shears, This England (London, 1937), 46; Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge, 1944), 113–14; Angus Maude and J. Enoch Powell, Biography of a Nation (1955; London, 1970), 8; Sir Reginald Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (London, 1954), 8. Recent versions of the natural relationship stress how states and nations look rather than how they actually are: R. Bellamy and D. Castiglione (eds.), Political Studies, 44 (1996), 455. ⁄⁄ Butterfield, The Englishman, 2. John Stuart Mill was unsympathetic to organic interpretation: Considerations on Representative Government (London, 1861), 2–3. ⁄¤ Alice S. Green, in J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (1874; London, 1907), p. xi.

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find two (1918 and 1928: votes for women). In English constitutional history state and nation grew as one, with expert parliamentary pruning as and when required. Because most of this history was considered fully formed by 1707, Celts hardly got a look in. But metaphors, long persisted in, are liable to grow heavy and unwieldy. The organic metaphor that insisted that England could only be ‘England’, and nothing else, needed a history which could explain everything—everything, that is, which had happened and was likely to happen. Historians like Freeman were confident they could do it.⁄‹ Writing in 1872, he produced a history that swivelled to meet everything he thought the English had been or might be. This included a belief in democracy, election, and due legal process on the one hand, and a belief in monarchy, hereditary principle, and unwritten understandings on the other: ‘We have not gone back but have gone forward . . . we have gone forward by going back.’⁄› Being everything, the English were a people of the contract, free to alter things as they liked, but they were also an essential people, whose destiny was to grow into more of what they were already. Understanding English constitutional history, then, depended upon a strong tolerance for contradiction. One way of dealing with this contradictoriness was to farm out the ‘essential’ or ‘destiny’ parts to histories of abroad (mainly the Empire), while retaining the free contracting parts for histories of home (mainly England). This was the way of generations of school history texts—underplaying what was chaotic and accidental and heroic in British empire-building, and overplaying what was settled and contracted-for in English nation-building.⁄fi Another way of dealing with contradiction was to accept it for what it was and celebrate it as an English eccentricity.⁄fl English constitutional history served as the most powerful integrationist myth. Unlike the constitution, it was easy to grasp with room for everybody. And there seemed to be no twist or turn that constitutional history could not cope with and integrate: even revolutions. Maitland was very clear, for instance, that 1688 had been a revolution, but refrained from censuring it on the grounds that, in the long run, it had been benign. It was the ⁄‹ Edward A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution (1872; London, 1890), p. x. ⁄› Ibid. 96, 40–41, 118, 145, 155. ⁄fi C. S. S. Higham, Pioneers of Progress 1750–1920 (London, 1934); John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians’, English Historical Review, 112 (1997), 641. ⁄fl Q. Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (West Drayton, 1947), 46, 77.

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long run which mattered, because ‘constitutional history should . . . be a history not of struggles, but of results’.⁄‡ Where constitutional history led, other histories followed. There was a time when that which was not constitutional history was hardly seen as history at all. In the 1920s there were worries about schoolteachers being unable to find some decent trace of constitutional history in the colonies, or in the dominions, or in the ‘dreary colliery and industrial districts’.⁄° After 1945 new kinds of history writing began to appear, but they too followed the constitutional way: short run bad, long run good. Tudor revolutions in government, Georgian revolutions in industry, Victorian revolutions in towns, modern revolutions in planning were all absorbed in the Maitland manner—painful at the time, beneficial in the long run.⁄· Constitutional growth patterns were mainstream. This was the history of the extending liberal state that integrated all that the English had been, were, and could be. If everyone was now included as part of a natural process, the next question, very properly, is how did the gentleman remain superior?

Moral Lead Soon after the Reform Act of 1832, in a series of far-sighted essays, Edward Bulwer-Lytton addressed the identity of England. He welcomed the emergence of the middle classes—‘The English of the present day are not the English of twenty years ago’—but he thought that a moral lead was required, and that only the aristocracy could offer that lead.¤‚ From 1688 the English state had belonged to them. Between 1688 and 1701 it was they who set out the terms and conditions of monarchy. In 1689 the Bill of Rights justified their revolution and laid down its principles. Then followed Acts for regular parliaments (1694), civil list (1697), and succession (1701). After the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, they tried to

⁄‡ J. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge, 1908), 285, 537; Strathearn Gordon, Our Parliament (London, 1952), 39. ⁄° J. J. Findlay, History and its Place in Education (London, 1923), 65–6. ⁄· David Cannadine, ‘British History: Past, Present,—and Future?’ Past and Present, 116 (1987), 172–3. ¤‚ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English (1833; Chicago, 1970), 19–20, 371, 403.

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superimpose an English version of events which did not fit the Scottish experience. The ‘English Civil War’ had been a three-cornered contest and, for those Scots who fell at Killiecrankie or Dunkeld, the ‘bloodless revolution’ of 1688 had been less than bloodless. But in the end, the Scottish aristocracy came round. Between the succession of the Hanoverians in 1714 and the final defeat of the Jacobites in 1746, the Settlement of 1688 was allowed to settle. On his long march south, Charles Edward Stuart did not gather the support he expected. The royal prerogatives he claimed were his had been taken away and given to ministers. The Crown was now ‘inParliament’, and unlikely to get out. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the British aristocracy reached their zenith. As ‘Lords of the earth . . . stars of the firmament’ and ‘makers of history’ they knew their place.¤⁄ There were many varieties of aristocrat, from peers at the top to non-noble gentry at the bottom, but Burke’s Peerage ranked them all. Down on the farm, of course, they were all entitled to play the little monarch. At the top, 15,000 families were ‘extraordinarily cohesive’, ‘the most classlike class’, ‘the most cohesive, the most self aware, the most sharply defined’ part of the nation. Between 1660 and 1800, 44 per cent of all legislation concerned their estates. They stood for the nation.¤¤ Defence of their own liberty and property they construed as defence of the liberty and property of the poor as well. Defence of their own privileges they came to associate with a defence of all privileges. In 1915 one commentator defined England as a land of privileges, not ‘rights’.¤‹ Although they did not know it at the time, the aristocracy at its zenith did not have long to go. They declined and fell, from the 1830s through to the 1930s, and on their way down they accepted the extension of the state. Landowners remained strongly represented in government—in 1868 over 400 MPs came from families owning over 2,000 acres—but they had to learn a new way of being English. They came to accept, though not always graciously, that aristocratic political privilege, if not aristocratic wealth and influence, could and should be extended to all, and in that they came to see the state as a sort of gentleman’s club to which the nation could find special ¤⁄ David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, 1990), 15. ¤¤ Norman Gash, Aristocracy and People (London, 1979), 350; Davies, The Isles, 619; Clark, English Society, 91. Percentage (wide definition) on land legislation comes from Julian Hoppit, ‘The Landed Interest and the National Interest’, UCL, 5. ¤‹ Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England (London, 1915), 60.

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entry by paying its taxes.¤› Agreement to amend ‘club’ rules and extend club membership was the most important political compromise of the nineteenth century. It steadied the bourgeois revolution, and central to it stood the figure of the English gentleman. In 1791 Thomas Paine had made fun of the gentleman. Titles? ‘Every nickname is a title.’ Primogeniture? ‘Aristocracy has never more than one child.’ Hereditary Rule? ‘Ridiculous as an hereditary poet laureate.’¤fi Even so, just for once, Paine missed his mark. The English gentleman was too versatile a creature to be hit by Paine’s brickbats. For English aristocrats were an open elite, not cordoned-off by legal privilege, not averse to making money, and not always over-proud as to who they made it with. Yet if theirs was an open society, there was a great deal of jostling at the door, and those who wanted to get in had to know where the importance of money stopped and where the importance of manners began. For a very long time the gentry had mixed their genes with the money of the simply rich. Smollett noted in 1771 how ‘Every upstart of fortune . . . presents himself at Bath’, where Beau Nash’s ‘Code’ of 1707 was intended to encourage social mixing by laying rank (temporarily) aside. Goldsmith said of Nash that, ‘once admitted into the circle of the Beau Monde, he then laid claim to all the privileges by which it is distinguished’. Nevertheless, Nash’s famous Bath Code had to be laced with an irony making it clear that this was not real social mixing, but a game of social mixing. As rule Number 5 said: ‘. . . no Gentleman [should] give his Ticket for the Balls to any but Gentlewomen—N.B. Unless he has none of his Acquaintance.’ Thackeray, in 1847, noted how the stiff-necked aristocrat, for all his prejudices, was not prejudiced against daughters with money. He saw Mr Pump, the ‘Great City Snob’, in Lombard Street. Pump had a fancy for marriage into the aristocracy, represented by old Stiffneck: I like to see old stiffneck obliged to bow down his head and swallow his infernal pride, and drink the cup of humiliation poured out by pump and aldgate’s butler. ‘pump and aldgate’, says he, ‘your grandfather was a bricklayer, and his hod is still kept in the bank. Your pedigree begins in a workhouse; mine can be dated from all the royal palaces of Europe’. ¤› J. V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986), 404–33, 470–1; H. J. Laski, ‘The Personnel of the English Cabinet 1801–1924’, American Political Science Review, 22 (1928); Colin Crouch, ‘Sharing Public Space’, in John A. Hall (ed.), States in History (Oxford, 1986), 180. For the eighteenth century Paul Langford explores the extending of the state to new forms and understandings of property: Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). ¤fi Paine, Rights of Man, 99, 102, 104–5.

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But there could be no such thing as a pure aristocratic pedigree. Such a thing could only have begun with the Conquest in 1066, and even then, no class was more nouveau riche than William’s Norman knights. Because the male line was always failing, biological purity was unlikely. There had had to be transfusions of new blood, or at any rate, new money. How far an eighteenth-century gent could travel down the rent rolls, yet still remain a gent, was a matter of fine degree. The point was that gentlemanliness was a form of cultural capital transferable across the whole of society. It was the bridge connecting all polite classes. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters instructed his illegitimate son to know the difference between who he was and who he appeared to be. It was all a game of performance and concealment and ‘Chesterfieldism’ was popular enough with those on the way up to be despised by those on the way down. For in an open society, wealth and the mere appearance of wealth could be difficult to disentangle. If serious money was short, then there were ways of appearing to have it. A good landscaper could broaden your acres, just as a good tailor could broaden your shoulders—or, indeed, a good servant your authority or a good story your pedigree. Gentlemanliness found its niche at every level, from the titled at one end to ‘mashers’ and ‘swells’ at the other. Paine was wrong. The gentleman might be shallow, but in an open society his versatile manner was worth keeping.¤fl The Victorians took gentlemanliness and turned it into ‘manliness’. The old aristocratic style came to be seen as an affectation. Probably Francophile, it lacked sincerity.¤‡ The new gentleman, by contrast, could be recognized not so much by the cut of his cloth as the bearing of his soul, but this too was something of a performance and a concealment.¤° Victorian public schools turned concealment into a hardening masculine ethic, and ¤fl Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), quoted in E P Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965), in The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978), 43; ‘the Famous Code’: Lewis Melville, Bath Under Beau Nash—And After (London, 1926), 55; Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Life of Nash’, in The Bee and Other Essays (London, 1914), 317. W. M. Thackeray, The Book of Snobs, ed. J. Sutherland (1847; St Lucia, 1978), 35–6. Norman nouveaux, famously explored in Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1962). On ‘the relative lack of legal, cultural or psychological obstacles to the assimilation of newcomers’, Laurence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1986), 240. On Lord Chesterfield: S. M. Brewer, Design for a Gentleman (London, 1963), 197. On the gilded vice of ‘Chesterfieldism’: Langford, Public Life, 541. ¤‡ Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (London, 1987), 34–47, 151–3, 244. ¤° Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London, 1981), 143.

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that into their core curriculum. English classical theatre too would come to thrive on the manly power of holding something back as the means of projecting something more. And when the gentleman was homosexual, the margin between concealment and projection was all the more nuanced, all the more English perhaps. Close to gentlemanliness was gentility. In a way, gentility was the woman’s version. The genteel woman also had to know the difference between who she was and who she appeared to be. She too had to know the value of keeping up appearances. An audience of just one servant was enough, a sign to the world over the doorstep. In the sense that Bulwer-Lytton’s upper class in 1833 did not have to ‘do’, just ‘be’—or at least perform—one can see links with Bagehot’s ‘dignified part’ which followed the next parliamentary reform crisis in 1867. As aldermen and mayors honouring busy towns, as the great and the good decorating the civic universities, county boards, and trusts, or as colonial governors adding plumage to Empire, gentlemen performed for the constitution. During the 1930s they made a point of having a lot of glamorous ‘fun’, and telling the press about it. The aristocratic ideal stayed exemplary. Being ‘posh’ stayed ‘cool’ right into the 1960s.¤· Gentlemanliness as a moral lead was extended to all, but aristocratic hauteur was never intended to be lifelike. The nineteenth-century gentleman’s new role was on a public pedestal, like the pure, grave, and slightly largerthan-life statues he left to the national memory.‹‚ Being larger than life always produced that little bit more. As gentleman farmer rather than just plain farmer, he would yield a bit of breeding as well as profit. As gentleman magistrate, he would show mercy as well as justice. As an officer and a gentleman, he would stand apart, keep the line, go beyond: ‘A gentleman . . . is a thing of parts and no magnitude: one should be a gentleman, and much more.’‹⁄ As we have seen, there was a long-standing amateur-gentlemanly tradition in the English administration of the state.‹¤ ¤· Cannadine, Decline and Fall, ch. 12; Martin Amis, Experience (London, 2000), 17–18. ‹‚ Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (New Haven, 1982), ch. 6; Robert Colls, ‘Remembering George Stephenson’, in Colls and Bill Lancaster (eds.), Newcastle upon Tyne: A Modern History (Chichester, 2001). ‹⁄ On the rural influence: F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), 345. On military elan: John Keegan, The Face of Battle (Harmondsworth, 1987), 194. On good breeding: J. R. Walton, ‘Pedigree and National Herd Cattle 1750–1950’, Agricultural History Review, 34 (1986). On being a gentleman: Christopher Hussey, The Book of Bath (Bath, 1925), 67. ‹¤ D. L. Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain Since 1485 (London, 1969), 315.

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Bulwer-Lytton said of the aristocracy that ‘the sum of their sentiments . . . is Fashion’, and it was here that they could be imitated. In his daily round, the gentleman dressed down. Effortlessness was the mark of a good amateur. In his public round, he would dress up. Duty demanded it. Between the first Singer sewing-machine in 1850 and Burton’s first ready-made suits in 1900, mass fashion became possible. Very soon the gentleman’s battered field kit of Norfolk jacket, tweed cap, and brogues became the common man’s sports jacket, flat cap, and brown boots. In such a way, what was effortless for gentlemen became what was casual for ordinary blokes. Similarly, the naval officer’s reefer jacket, sporting cap, and club tie eventually became school blazer and accessories for millions of boys and girls.‹‹ In 1905 Egerton summed it up: ‘Our governing classes have given to us a heritage of priceless worth . . . our unprivileged have grown up into the stature of a higher manliness.’‹› Aristotle celebrated the life of the country gentleman as the highest which humanity could impart. By the mid-twentieth century that life remained, and it remained quintessentially an English life. So little effort. So much dignity. Such tranquil acres. But they were no longer in power, and they were no longer the nation. ‹‹ Bulwer-Lytton, England, 108; Prudence Glynn, In Fashion (London, 1978), 131–2; Penelope Byrde, The Male Image (London, 1974), 154. Royal and naval themes: Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (London, 1981), 41. ‹› Hakluyt Egerton, Patriotism (London, 1905), 255.

5 The Nation Over Itself

There would be room for all in the modern progressive state, but not all in the same way. Relations with the state varied according to who you were, and the next three chapters deal with the variations. First, the middle class. Burke said that English rights were ‘in a sort of middle, incapable of definition’, while Bagehot said that those rights would be defended by a broad swathe of sensible middle-class opinion across the middle. Middle way, middle ground, middle brow, Middle England, Middlemarch— progress was unthinkable without the middle class.⁄ As we have seen, everyone agreed that they were the new political class between aristocracy and workers, and that representative constitutional monarchy was their middle way of defining where power actually lay. However, such was their trust in constitutionalism, and such was their personal identification with it, that the modern British state was able to develop into one of the most centralized and secretive in the democratic world.

Middle-Class Englishness Moderate in all things, avoiding a ‘scene’, trimming extremes, sidling carefully between its own passions, the nation came to be seen, and to see itself, as a temperate people well in control. No newspaper was more virulent in ⁄ Burke, Reflections, 153; Robert Blake (ed.) The English World (London, 1982), 30, 89–92. Aristotle identified Hellenic strength as residing in ‘a mid position’—‘Hence it continues to be free, to have the best political institutions and to be capable of ruling others’: The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, 1967), book vii, pp. 269–70.

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its jingoism than the Daily Mail, yet that newspaper also saw itself as modern enough to speak on behalf of all the moderate, good-to-middlin’ folks with their ideal homes, their Kodak cameras, their sweet peas and village signs. In the twentieth century, little lists of modest pleasures, from Marmite sandwiches to drystone walls, became one way of talking about the English.¤ Middle-class Englishness did not confine itself to one aspect of Englishness. It laid claim to the national average, which is to say, it laid claim to the whole.‹ In 1947 Quintin Hogg said that the Conservative Party was just an expression of that average.› Two years later, Lewis and Maude’s classic work, The English Middle Classes, rehearsed a whole range of middle positions, all of them capable of carrying the nation: among them, balance, reason, composure, equanimity, compromise. They quoted Galsworthy’s Jolyon Forsyte, ‘They are half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the 3% half, the half that counts’,fi but no one made it plainer than Penguin’s blurb-writer: This book deals with the present conditions and the prospects of the middle classes, from whom most of the nation’s brains, leadership, and organizing ability are derived. It examines their contributions to British history, the way in which they conserve the traditions and culture of the nation, and the immense part their conscience and humanity have played in building the Welfare State, whose maintenance is now costing them such acute economic distress.

Lewis and Maude’s history was class history posing as national history. They denied that the middle class ever had been an elite, and they affirmed that it was ‘the only section of the community which is as yet deeply conscious of its relationship with the whole’. There were good arguments in favour of this to do with the eighteenth-century making of a public sphere in towns. So much English constitutionalism had been apprenticed here—in the clubs and societies, in the annual general meetings, street processions, and congregation of an emergent class. But if it was a sphere which carried on its business in public, it was also a sphere which sought, self-consciously, to pursue its own interests. Because in Lewis and Maude’s eyes middle-class interests were national interests, pursuit of one could not be distinguished ¤ F. A. McKenzie, The Mystery of the Daily Mail 1896–1921 (London, 1921), 9, 95, 117. Two recent lists: Bill Bryson, Notes From A Small Island (London, 1995), 282; Paxman, The English, 22–3. ‹ ‘. . . every Englishman is an average Englishman: it’s a national characteristic’: E. M. Delafield, The British Character, by Pont (London, 1938), 7. › Hogg, Conservatism, 10. fi Lewis and Maude, English Middle Classes, 70.

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from pursuit of the other. Over the long term, the whole nation had benefited from their ‘ability to set off, within themselves’ qualities which in other classes would have become extremes, or obsessions—such as moneymaking, or gentility, or political power.fl The virtues of the English constitution were reckoned to be the same virtues which the middle-class Englishman found in his own person. In 1931 G. J. Renier, a Dutch academic living in London, asked whether the English were human? His answer was precise. By the English he did not mean the working class, and he did not mean women, and he did not mean the other British. He meant the silent, unintellectual, conventional, and reserved middle-class Englishman.‡ Renier’s Englishman and Bagehot’s English constitution were alike in three ways. First, just as the English constitution was not written, so Renier’s Englishman was a man of few words. Understatement was his hallmark, a set of impassive gestures which served only to accentuate the lack of control in others around him. When Trevor Howard said goodbye in the film Brief Encounter, all that was unsaid did not need to be said.° A more wordy man, a written constitution indeed, might break. Secondly, just as the English constitution had grown as a response to practical, not theoretical problems, so Renier’s Englishman was not given to useless theorizing. The English didn’t have to think about government, because they had cases and conventions that would do their thinking for them. Moreover, this commonlaw taste for real persons and actual cases meant that, at law, the English state acted as a set of private persons and not as a corporation. It went to law as a person and, for all practical purposes, it could not think of itself as anything other than a person.· Here was a state which did not govern itself by theories and abstractions, any more than Burke said a sensible man would. Thirdly, and finally, just as the English constitution was concealed, so the middle-class Englishman was secretive. Had not English painting once been considered deficient because it lacked a sufficiently fl Lewis and Maude, English Middle Classes, 72. On the public sphere see: Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989) and Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2000). ‡ G. J. Renier, The English: Are They Human? (1931; London, 1956), 18. ° Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard played two middle-class people in love in David Lean’s 1945 film: ‘The dialogue of Noel Coward and David Lean’s Brief Encounter has no waste words’: Roger Manvell, Film, (Harmondsworth, 1946), 69–70. · Tony Prosser, ‘Understanding the British constitution’, Political Studies, 44 (1996), 473.

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expressive English character as a subject to paint?⁄‚ Was not university English literature based upon a canon of great works whose selection was part of a code known only to those in the know? Was not the civil service elite called ‘mandarins’?—an excessively formal body who, given English views of ‘the Orient’, saw themselves as professionally inscrutable, like their feelings and their rituals. Only the initiated could know these things.⁄⁄ Only the unfathomable could be truly ironic. Only an English landscape could be called ‘evasive’.⁄¤ Only an English sport could be called ‘inscrutable’.⁄‹ As Renier said, English middle-class conventions were designed to keep outsiders out and hold the world at bay.⁄› John Ruskin’s typical Englishman of the 1820s was the aristocratic man-ofthe-people type, ‘with an expansive, healthy, benevolent eagerness of simplicity in his face’. In contrast, George Orwell’s Englishman of the 1920s was a man who ‘wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it’. In South Africa, Asians were judged too excitable to be compared to Englishmen. The ‘true negro’, as a practical man who knew how to control his feelings, came closer. Being usually in command of something, or someone, Englishmen abroad knew the pressure of performance. In order to control others, one had first to control oneself. In order to do that, character-training helped. Cricket was preferred. The upper lip had to stay stiff, the bat had to stay straight, the grip had to stay secret. When American troops arrived in force in Britain after 1942, they were advised on how to understand their hosts. Washington’s advice was not to be misled by appearances, either in the true nature of this ancient (yet modern) British state, or in the true nature of this very formal (yet ‘plenty tough’) Englishman. Man and constitution the Americans lumped together: how they actually were was not the same as how they appeared to be.⁄fi ⁄‚ John Barrell, ‘Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Englishness of English Art’, in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 155. ⁄⁄ ‘Like the British Constitution, cricket was not made: it has “grown” ’: Neville Cardus, English Cricket (London, 1945), 7. Eight out of T. S. Eliot’s thirteen English cultural creations were sporting, but amazingly he omitted cricket: Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (London, 1948), 31. ⁄¤ David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), 30. ⁄‹ Brookes, English Cricket, 2. ⁄› Renier, The English, 171. Or, ‘diffused in a miasma of commonplace prejudices and taboos’— Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23 (1964), 40. ⁄fi John Ruskin, Praeterita (1885–9; Oxford, 1989), 77; George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ (1936), in Collected Essays, i. 269; Mary Kingsley (1899), in Rich, Race and Empire, 32; Great Britain (Washington DC, War Department, 1942), 2–3. McKibbin says that between 1919 and 1950 there were about 450,000 freemasons in England, or about 20% of mainly middle and upper middleclass men: Classes and Cultures, 89.

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No doubt Renier had espied the performance in his university’s senior common room. But smaller clubs fed into better clubs, and they into the most select club in London, parliament. In 1890 the constitutional historian Freeman recognized parliament as the club that was ‘stealthy’ in its dealings, hiding its business by means ‘unwritten and conventional’ ‘in a manner silent and direct’. In the opinion of another constitutional expert, ‘usual channels’, ‘intangible relationships’, ‘private interviews’, and hidden ‘personalities’ made it impossible for those on the outside to know the true processes of government.⁄fl Rudyard Kipling saw how nods and winks constituted the real rules: For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, They arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate. Being void of self expression, they confide their views to none; But sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.⁄‡

And when murder was done it took an outsider to crack the code and reveal the truth. From his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot arrived in order to uncover middle-class dissembling in the silence of their own reading heads. Like his successor Miss Marple, Poirot was somewhat detached, highly cerebral, and utterly dependent for his solutions upon conventions. But after 1945 conventions loosened. They had started to loosen, for women as well as for men, during the inter-war years. The economy had been remarkably kind to the middle classes, kind enough certainly to afford them a ‘modern’ ‘democratic’ attitude and a salary to match.⁄° The new professionals, too, added to a growing self-confidence. Science and technology, management and education offered good prospects and a mortgage and a pension. After 1945, if the British state was going to be judged, it would not be in terms of dominion and debutantes but in terms of work, welfare, and science, areas in which it did exceptionally well. The national agenda changed.⁄· Life was going to get better, and soon there would be a huge expansion in personal liberties. ⁄fl Freeman, English Constitution, 115, 121, 124; Jennings, Constitution, 91, 113. ⁄‡ Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Puzzler’, in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (London, 1946), 533. ⁄° Twice as big as the working-class wage, and regular and creditworthy besides: McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 71. ⁄· Lord Beveridge spelled it out—jobs, pensions, productivity, public expenditure, industrial relations, inflation: Sunday Times, 21 Feb. 1954.

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Such was middle-class confidence and prosperity that one of those liberties involved laughing at themselves, in particular at their Englishness.¤‚ Pre-war suburbs, minor public schools, and colonial verandas were all fair game. ‘The Goons’ stepped up in May 1951 to rap on the doors of pompous persons (‘He’s fallen in di water’), and Tony Hancock didn’t need half-anhour to size up the lesser ironies of East Cheam. Then, in 1956, a year for all kinds of revelations, came Jimmy Porter. On that dismal Midlands Sunday in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Porter asked for no more silences, no more codes and conventions, including those concerning women, and no more understatement. He was fearfully articulate. It was time to be honest and say things that couldn’t be said.¤⁄ For once in a modern English play, it was what the protagonist did say that mattered. The play came to be seen as a watershed in what it was possible to say and to be, on stage and off it, against or in spite of ‘the Establishment’—a concept minted in 1951, but made popular in 1955 to mean all that was latent rather than up-front in the English exercise of authority.¤¤ In the 1950s Jimmy Porter rebelled against club rules. In the 1960s fashion designers and rock groups also rebelled against their betters, though not without ironic reference to being British. In the 1970s Monty Python turned rebellion into anarchy. Exploring the outer limits of the middle-class persona, these five young Englishmen (and one American), from backgrounds they saw as stultifying, ridiculed the repressed figures of the old English world. Civil servants, MPs, policemen, salesmen, bank managers, landladies, shopkeepers, professors, generals, doctors, the pompous and the innocuous, all felt the beating wings of Python madness, went mad themselves, blew themselves up in one final act of self-subversion. The show was celebrated as a form of Oxbridge humour that only the English could like. In Basil Fawlty everyone recognized the repression, but when his upper lip curled, the secret was out and leaping.¤‹ ¤‚ Up to 1951 ‘. . . the historian is struck by the fear of spontaneity and loss of control’: McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 522. ¤⁄ Raymond Williams, ‘Recent English Drama’, in Boris Ford (ed.), The Modern Age (Harmondsworth, 1973), 536; G. K. Hunter, ‘English Drama 1900–60’, in Bernard Bergonzi (ed.), The Twentieth Century (London, 1970), 327. ¤¤ First used in this sense by the historian A. J. P. Taylor in 1951: Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1995), 214, 427. Eighteenth-century use of the term referred solely to the Church of England. ¤‹ Monty Python appeared on BBC Television from 1969 to 1973; Fawlty Towers from 1975 to 1979. John Cleese, a former Python, played Fawlty.

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Life in England after Porter and Python seemed freer, as indeed it was. But the new freedom did not appear to touch the central recesses of the state, which was another world.

Centralized and Secretive For Mill, the key to the legitimacy of a state lay in having a ‘sufficiently popular constitution’. Note: this constitution did not have to be democratic.¤› Constitutionalism itself was the means to power, and if need be, said Mill, ‘any amount of power’: ‘a government of sufficiently popular constitution might be trusted with any amount of power over the nation, since its power would only be that of the nation over itself.’ Mill’s On Liberty addressed the principles for checking the powers of the state. He thought that England’s history had inculcated in its people the healthy ‘habit of looking on the government as representing an opposite interest’, and he was reasonably optimistic about the people’s propensity for clipping the government’s ‘beak and claws’, as he put it, when the time came. That was in 1859. But in the next century the English people lost their habit of seeing the state as in occasional need of a good clipping. Instead, and on the basis of Mill’s maxim of ‘that of the nation over itself ’, the British state came to be seen as inherently at one with its people.¤fi While investing themselves with increasing amounts of power, governments clothed themselves in increasing amounts of constitutionalism. Lord Salisbury outlined this strategy at the turn of the century: ‘the forces which make up [the constitution], as well as the principles bound up with [it] . . . are immensely powerful, and sufficient in themselves to win adherence to any party that is able . . . to place itself at their disposal.’¤fl Parliamentary authoritarianism has been growing for a very long time.¤‡ Governments always want more authority.¤° Past form does not suggest that they can be trusted to check ¤› J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy (London, 1857), ii. 534–5. ¤fi J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859; Harmondsworth, 1985), 60, 67. In 1982 a Gallup poll showed that only 8% thought ordinary people had a lot of influence on how the country was run, while in 1984 75% thought they had ‘a great deal of freedom’: Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out, 128, 133. ¤fl Blake, Conservative Party, 362. On constitutionalism, Ian Harden and Norman Lewis, The Noble Lie: The British Constitution and the Rule of Law (London, 1987), 8, 33, 73. ¤‡ B. Sedgemore, The Secret Constitution (London, 1980), 44; ‘parliamentary sovereignty has become the sovereignty of the executive’: Hazell, Constitutional Futures, 234. ¤° James Callaghan, in James Michael, The Politics of Secrecy (Harmondsworth, 1982), 8.

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themselves, and of course, their unswerving constitutionalism does not suggest to them that they should.¤· What about MPs? Have they been a check on government? The idea of the Member of Parliament as a person of independent mind has been in decline since about the time that Mill was confident about the British people’s ability to clip government powers.‹‚ At considerable risk to their career, a few brave souls have stood out, but party machines have come to demand their loyalty so that elected governments might steer legislative programmes. Prime ministers insist upon loyalty, and exercise extensive patronage to make sure they get it. At the same time, they have also come to rely on private secretariats, press officers, kitchen cabinets, inside policy units, outside policy units, and, until very recently, secret committees.‹⁄ Scrutinizing information is a key part of an MP’s job, yet ordinary members have no right to government information and are often refused it on grounds of cost. (They have even been refused information on how often information is withheld on grounds of cost, on grounds of cost.) They sit for just over half the year. They cannot properly examine budgetary decisions. They cannot know what money is earmarked for certain weapons projects. They cannot monitor agreements made in secret. They find it difficult to match the technical expertise, or jargon, of high-ranking civil servants or scientists. They cannot be a party to foreign-policy treaties done in the name of royal prerogative. They cannot keep track of all the quasi-legal regulations of departments of state. They cannot turn to the courts to assist in their review of ministerial discretion so long as ministers act intra vires— under the constitution, a very broad brief. Their only open and direct call on the prime minister is the weekly performance of question time. In the business of political decision-making, it is hard not to conclude that the House of Commons has long since joined Bagehot’s dignified parts.‹¤ In their

¤· P. Townshend , ‘The State and Political Violence’, in Green and Whiting, Boundaries of the State, 296; David Bonner, Emergency Powers in Peacetime (London, 1985), 7, 16. ‹‚ Cox, Efficient Secret, 3–5, 169. ‹⁄ Cabinet secret committees have steered nuclear weapons policy. Attlee’s GEN 163 took the decision to build the atomic bomb; Callaghan’s committee embarked on a new warhead for Polaris (contrary to Labour’s 1974 election pledge); Thatcher’s MISC 7 decided to buy Trident. An inquiry in September 1987 could not discover how many committees there were, let alone what they did: Observer, 11 Oct. 1987. ‹¤ Maurice Frankel, ‘Parliamentary Accountability’’, in N. Lewis (ed.), Happy and Glorious: The Constitution in Transition (Buckingham, 1990), 32–40.

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comparative lack of adequate secretarial and research facilities, members are denied even a modicum of dignity. Only prefects get the perks and fags. If central government can expect little effective opposition from MPs because most members lack either the will or the resources to apply it, this is obviously not the case with a news media able to call upon huge amounts of both. Yet it is difficult to know anything about the state’s relationship with the news media (or any large business, for that matter) other than what both sides choose to admit. Either way, it is difficult to know the point at which intimidation by one becomes ‘influence’ on the other. It is no secret, for instance, that the ‘D-Notice Committee’ exists to warn off the press when called upon to do so, that Prime Minister Eden tried to force the BBC to broadcast blatant propaganda during the Suez crisis in 1956, that BBC trainees were vetted by MI5 during the 1960s and 1970s, that ‘left-wing’ journalists were blacklisted by the Corporation over the same period, that the government tried to bully the media during the Falklands campaign in 1983—but reliable information is obviously patchy.‹‹ In the circumstances, historians can only listen to insiders who spill the beans or trust in proper historians of the intelligence services, one of whom said in 1985 that ‘Britain is about as secretive as a state can be and still qualify as a democracy’.‹› In 1889 the growing power of the central state was aided and abetted by an Official Secrets Act.‹fi In their important 1911 amendment to this Act, the Liberal government of the day tried to throw a blanket of secrecy over all state officials. In matters of government information, their intention was to fuse together state and nation as one entity controlled by them.‹fl Up until 1989 this Act was so wide-reaching that even these few words of explanation might have been seen as breaking the law. At the trial of Clive Ponting in 1985 the judge was correct in his reading of the Act. Mr Ponting was a senior civil servant who had disclosed documents about ministerial intentions to withhold from Mr Tam Dalyell MP information regarding the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser Belgrano during the Falklands campaign. He had felt that his higher loyalty was to parliament, not the government. Mr Justice McCowan, on the other hand, pointed out that at law Mr Ponting’s duty was ‹‹ Guardian, 28 Dec. 1987; Independent, 22 Dec. 1987; Observer, 18 Aug. 1985. For secret service involvement in post-war news agencies: Observer, 20 Dec. 1981. ‹› Christopher Andrew, Secret Service (London, 1985) p. xv; Michael, Politics of Secrecy, 9. ‹fi Act to re-enact the Official Secrets Act, 1889, ch. 28, Geo V 1911. ‹fl Departmental Committee on Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 (Franks Report), vol. i, Cmnd Paper 5104, Parliamentary Papers, 1971–2, xxxvii, p. 26.

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to the relevant government minister, and to no one and no thing else.‹‡ In the minister, all a civil servant’s loyalty should reside. Ponting’s defence counsel tried to split what he called ‘state interests’ (he meant national interests) from government interests, but under the Act, and contrary to deepest English political traditions, state and nation were seen as the same thing. Under the Act, it would have been interesting to know how the judge would have advised had Ponting leaked information relating, say, to a ministerial plot against the Crown.‹° Fortunately, this was not the case. In his Law of the Constitution (1885), Dicey set himself the task of establishing the principles behind the practice of government. His first principle was the sovereignty of parliament, his second, the rule of law, and his third, the force of convention, where he showed how the personal will of the monarch had been gradually transformed into parliamentary prerogatives carried out by ministers, called ‘conventions’. The important point is that these conventions ran counter to the rule of law: ‘[The rule of law] means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power, and excludes the existence of arbitrariness, of prerogative, or even of wide discretionary authority on the part of the government.’‹· Conventions are internal understandings. ‹‡ David Leigh, ‘Judge gives key ruling in Ponting case’, Observer, 10 Feb. 1985. The refusal of the jury to convict Ponting because of the unsatisfactory nature of Section 2’s sweeping powers, and other cases, led to the amending Official Secrets Act of 1989 (1989 c. 6). But this Act still made no allowance for the disclosure of information ‘in the public interest’. Instead, it repealed Section 2 of the 1911 Act and replaced it with a more tightly defined—but still very wide ranging—list of what constitutes official information, disclosure of which remains subject to the criminal law. In 1998 the government introduced a public interest-type Act to protect employees from ‘detriment’ should they report wrongdoings by their employers. This applies to a great many types of persons and disclosures except those working for the security services or other sensitive state bodies (Public Interest Disclosure Act, c. 23 1998, s. 11(3) ). It also precludes the breaking of the existing law—as, for instance, the Official Secrets Act. In July 2000 the Appeal Court threw out attempts by state prosecutors to force the Guardian and Observer newspapers to hand over information to do with former MI6 officer David Shayler’s disclosures. This ruling changed the balance of interpretation as applied in the Ponting case, calling on the freedom of the press to protect public-interest disclosure unless there were ‘compelling reasons of national security’. Lord Justice Judge drew on English common law tradition and Dicey to uphold this interpretation. In 2000 the first British Freedom of Information Act was introduced. In it, there is a general and presumed right of access, with periodic government prods at public authorities to remember its desirability. But there is also plenty of room for exemption and discretion. ‹° Northern Irish Unionists have claimed that their first loyalty is to Crown over Parliament, and it would be treason not to resist Parliament in certain circumstances. ‹· Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 202. The rule of law was one of two features which Dicey said had ‘at all times since the Norman Conquest characterised the political institutions of England’. The

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Exactly who breathes upon internal understandings in order to turn them into conventions has not been generally known, although quite clearly ministers and very senior civil servants are important. What is known is that ‘laws have a way of bending and melting as they approach the core of state power’, and conventions at that core can be made up in a moment and are fundamental to how political power is used.›‚ Those most eager to infiltrate the state have usually understood the opportunities that lay with conventions at the core. Writing to fellow Fabian Edward Pease in October 1886, Sidney Webb observed that ‘Nothing in England is done without the consent of a small intellectual yet practical class in London not 2,000 in number. We alone could get at that class.’›⁄ From the 1920s, Soviet intelligence applied their own brand of Fabian strategy. The NKVD recruited its British spies from Oxbridge. At first, British secret-service recruiters distrusted those whom they thought might be too clever, or too articulate, to make good intelligence officers. But the Soviets realized that Oxbridge college life was as intimate as it was isolated, and teeming with secrets. Cut off from the rest of society, single sex, rigidly ruled, and abounding in all manner of personal and group loyalties, Oxford and Cambridge provided a silent training for spies from both camps. Spies who had every chance of promotion within the state, and were willing to lie low until they achieved it, were called ‘moles’. The Soviet Union’s best intelligence owed much to the homogeneity of the ‘varsity set’, while the British intelligence community in the 1920s was a ‘very, very incestuous circle, an elite network’ of those who had gone to school together.›¤ Out of the same social world both sides tried to pluck their agents. Sometimes recruits believed in Soviet Marxist progress because they could no longer believe in English Liberal or British Imperial progress.

other was ‘the omnipotence or undisputed supremacy throughout the whole country of the central government’ (p. 183). ›‚ Townshend, Boundaries of the State, 278. For examples of conventions: Peter Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring (London, 1995), 29, 34, 90. Only judicial review can test whether an excess in the use of ministerial power has occurred: B. Smythe and C. T. Emery, Judicial Review: Legal Limits of Official Power (London, 1986), 74–80. The Scott Report of 1996 shone a bright light into so much secrecy and obtuseness: Rt. Hon. Sir R. Scott, Report on the Inquiry into the Export of Defence Equipment (HMSO, 15 Feb. 1996, 115), vol. i, and a few examples from many: pp. 159–61, 418, 427. ›⁄ Corrigan and Sayer, Great Arch, 172. ›¤ Gill Bennett, Foreign Office chief historian, Guardian, 4 Feb. 1999.

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Sometimes it was difficult to tell an agent from a double agent, or a double agent from a hero.›‹ In a highly centralized and secretive state, whose democratic legitimacy nevertheless rested on its finding room for everybody, the conditions for a security state to grow on the inside were clearly favourable. From its inception, the British intelligence services bypassed the plodding procedures of constabulary and CID. They made up their own special branches—M05, M02(i), M0(t), and the like. They claimed royal prerogative for their illegal actions. They were more influenced by an unaccountable popular press than they cared to admit and they were probably closer to the core of state power than that core ever realized.›› In 1927 MI5 began its infiltration of the Labour Party. In 1961 one wing of that party used MI5 to survey the other wing. In the 1960s and 1970s Labour governments appear to have experienced close, unhappy, and as yet unexplained relationships with the secret services. In the 1960s MI5 was used against the National Union of Seamen, and in the 1970s and 1980s against the National Union of Mineworkers. In the 1980s MI5 worked with Conservative politicians to discredit the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Code D519), and again in 1987 to reveal left bias in the media (‘Policy Research Associates’).›fi For the right people, the rules could be bent. MI5 knew that Anthony Blunt had been a member of the Communist Party while at Cambridge during the 1930s. After expulsion from intelligence training in 1939, he was allowed back into military intelligence soon after and into MI5 soon after that. In 1951, after the flight to Moscow of the double agents Burgess and Maclean, American CIA pressure forced the Soviet agent Kim Philby to ›‹ Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason (London, 1982), 17; Jenny Rees, Looking for Mr Nobody (London, 1994), 274–5; Andrew, Secret Service, 408; Nigel West, MI5 British Security Service Operations 1909–1945 (London, 1981), 338; Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence (London, 1986), 60–63, 78–9, 111, 145. E. H. Carr, who was not a spy, and Guy Burgess, who was, both transferred their belief in progress from British history to Russian history: Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity (London, 1999), 78–9; Boyle, Climate, 87. See also Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (London, 1980), 110–55. ›› Nicholas Hiley, ‘The Failure of British Counter-Espionage against Germany 1907–1914’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 835–62. The Maxwell-Fyfe directive of 1952 confirmed them as defenders of the realm, but in 1957 Lord Birkett’s report on the secret interception of communications upheld the 1765 judgement of Lord Chief Justice Camden that royal prerogative was no law. ›fi Observer, 17 May 1987. For MI5 vetting of the Ponting jury, Observer, 10 Feb. 1985; for MI5 involvement in plots against the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, Observer, 24 Jan. 1988; for MI5 targeting of left-wingers, Guardian, 6 Sept. 1988, 11 September 2001; for MI5 disinformation and ‘dirty tricks’ in Northern Ireland, Guardian, 31 Jan. 1990.

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retire from MI6, but he was allowed back in 1956 under the cover of foreign correspondent for the Observer, the very newspaper which did so much to reveal secret-service lawlessness during the 1980s. In the year of Burgess and Maclean’s escape to Moscow the FBI knew about their connections with Anthony Blunt, yet the Bureau was not allowed to interview him.›fl Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, was not interviewed until 1964, and even then his treachery was kept hidden. The mask was not allowed to slip. The inner state was everywhere and nowhere. It could neither confirm nor deny its existence.›‡ ›fl Andrew, Secret Service, 460, 496; The Times, 22 Sept. 1988. ›‡ The Security Services Act (1989 c. 5) made them legal: ‘Before the passing of this Act, MI5 . . . had no clear legal basis’—most of its operations falling under Crown prerogative. In 1998 an allparty Committee was set up to scrutinize their workings, but curiously, it was entirely dependent on the security services for its information: Guardian, 22 Oct. 1998.

6 Colonials

The crown colonies were administered by the imperial state but not considered a part of that state, except ceremonially. The ‘white’ dominions were self-governing and considered close, close enough to be admitted to the counsels of state. India, in all its wealth and vastness, was a special case, an Empire on its own, as was Ireland, though for different reasons. Martial law was used in the colonies and in Ireland.⁄ Ireland was not a colony, yet it was treated like one in law-making, in policing, in viceregal models of imperial government, and in levels of poverty and despair not countenanced elsewhere in the British Isles.¤

The Irish The Anglo-British state imposed its view of Union on the other three countries. The historic dignity it afforded the Welsh, Scots, and Irish peoples can be measured according to how much those peoples came to accept, and comply with, its overarching dominance. Important dates in Anglo-Celtic

⁄ Martial law was used in Ireland in 1798, 1803, 1916, and 1920. Temporary coercive legislation was necessary at other times. Northern Ireland was effectively in a state of permanent emergency after the 1922 Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act was made permanent in 1933: Charles Townshend, ‘Martial Law: Legal and Administrative Problems of Civil Emergency in Britain and the Empire, 1800–1940’, Historical Journal, 25: 1 (Mar. 1982), 168. ¤ David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in A. Porter (ed.), OHBE, vol. iii, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), ch. 22. See also Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire (Oxford, 2000).

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relations can be produced—1494, 1541, 1690, 1707, 1747, 1783, 1801‹—and they can be used to demonstrate moments of constitution or subjugation, depending on point of view, but simple bipolarities will never explain the long and complex history of interrelationship in these islands. British anxiety arose when the Irish, Scottish, or Welsh appeared to aspire to statehood, but for a while these aspirations were governed by an idea of interrelationship called ‘home rule’. Home rule as a self-consciously Celtic movement first appeared in the 1880s. Being ‘Celtic’ in the modern sense was closely connected to it,› and in Ireland and Wales its devolutionary impulse was coincident with the long fall of the landed class. At its simplest, home rule propounded the view that the United Kingdom comprised four ‘British’ nationalities, with the English as central and the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish as deserving some kind of political power in their own right. The first two Home Rule Bills for Ireland failed (1886 and 1893), but the third passed (1914), even if its course was overtaken by the war. However, it was always likely that home rule was bound to fail anyway, first because of the growing presence of an out-and-out republican movement, from the Young Irelanders in the 1840s, the Fenian Brotherhood in the 1860s, to the Republican Brotherhood and Irish Volunteers at the turn of the century; and second because the two main home rule negotiators, the Irish parliamentary party and the British Liberals, never fully trusted the compromise which home rule would have involved. For both of them, home rule added up to how much at any one time the other side was prepared to give. It was, therefore, always uncertain. Then, between 1916 and 1918, that is to say between the ‘Easter Rising’ of the nationalist militias against the British army in Dublin and the crisis over the introduction of military conscription in Ireland two years later, Irish national identity passed beyond devolution and into a mass identity of a purer, more Anglophobic kind. But the nationalist Irish were not the only ones to jettison home rule. It was always doubtful that the English would have agreed ‹ The selection of dates is Maitland’s: 1494, Henry VII declares English statutes to hold for Ireland (Poyning’s Law); 1541, Henry VIII declared king of Ireland; after 1690, ‘severest laws’ against Catholic Irish; 1707, Act of Union of England and Scotland; 1747, statute whereby in parliamentary Acts ‘England’ is deemed to include Wales; 1783, Irish (Protestant) parliament with more independence; 1801, Act of Union with Ireland : F W Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge, 1908), 330–40. › Simon James, The Atlantic Celts (London, 1999). Before 1770 being ‘Celtic’ was not regarded as being different from being ‘Anglo-Saxon’: according to Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism, 187.

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to its federalist implications anyway, and the Ulster Unionists only wanted home rule (their own) as a way of wrecking the united Ireland variety.fi After 1921, it was said by one English constitutional expert that home rule ‘was dead as soon as Englishmen understood what it meant’, and that there had never been a possibility of the ‘abandonment of [England’s] ancient institutions and the adoption of such a complicated, unfamiliar, un-English form of government’.fl In the end, the only people who received home rule, the Ulster Unionists, did not want it. Subsequently, its history came to be described as ‘tedious’.‡ Even if home rule had been implemented ‘all round’, its devolutionary strategy was designed to ensure that the British state remained English led. As Enoch Powell remarked, a power devolved is a power retained. In the event, power did not need to be devolved on Cardiff or Edinburgh in order to retain it in London.° So successful was the British state, that any question that those cities might wish to take control as state-capitals was generally inconceivable. For a long time, life without the English was simply unimaginable.· Except, of course, in Ireland. From the viewpoint of the Irish, Catholic and Presbyterian alike, actually existing British identity, such as it was, never really worked. Irish land and Irish rent directly concerned the gentry, a good proportion of whom were absent from their estates. This meant that in Ireland property problems were always inclined to be police problems, just as land questions were always inclined to be homeland questions, especially after the terrible famines of 1845–7 and the mass emigrations which followed. By the 1870s, with grass roots nationalist agitation in the countryside and some Fenian bomb scares, a clear British response was necessary. While it was held that the Irish could cross the sea to join the bourgeois revolution in Britain (they were not entirely intractable), the harder question was, could the bourgeois revolution cross the sea to join the Irish in Ireland? This was Gladstone’s mission. The prime minister wanted to fi In 1913 they pressed for a nine-county opt-out. fl Sir Reginald Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (London, 1954) 331, 330. ‡ Ibid. 334. The Scottish Nationalist Party receive one paragraph (pp. 404–5). ° Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1981), 110. In 1968 the issue of identity and devolution seemed dead for Scotland and Wales: J. P. Mackintosh, The Devolution of Power (London, 1968), 185. · Rosalind Mitchison described nineteenth-century attempts at writing Scottish history as ‘peculiarly childish and fictitious’: in Mitchison (ed.) The Roots of Nationalism (Edinburgh, 1980), 139.

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extend the state to reach all of Ireland, not just her landlords and bishops. In order to do so, he tempered the old coercion with new constitutional and economic measures. He disestablished a Church of Ireland (1869) weakened already by Catholic emancipation (1829) and the reduction of its bishoprics (1833). He then went on to initiate land reform and purchase, expand the electorate to a size worthy of the name, and twice he tried to introduce home rule, in 1886 and 1893. When he found a nationalist ally in Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish parliamentary party from 1880, it looked as though he might succeed at the third attempt. ‘Parnellism’ and the hope it held out for a complete Ireland as part of a devolved British state, was as much Gladstone’s achievement as Parnell’s. The remarkable thing was not so much that it failed, but that it so very nearly succeeded. The extent to which Gladstonian Liberals tried to absorb Ireland was truly astonishing.⁄‚ There were past sins to forgive and new histories to swallow, but, it was argued, home rule would broaden Irish society and make it more prosperous, while at the same time securing those same benefits of progress as were yielded to other Celts who had had the good sense to join with the English and properly constitute their affairs. Unfortunately, the price of progress was Anglo-British dominance. One either had it, or did not have it. The state’s view was that the Irish should have it. Under Parnell’s, and then under Redmond’s home rule movement, the Irish accepted this but bargained over how much dominance and left open for how long it should last. When they looked beyond it, they looked to white imperialist federal models in Canada and Australia, not Unionist ones in Britain.⁄⁄ The problem with British progress was that it was so obviously onesided. Writing in 1861 on Representative Government, J. S. Mill argued that if a more powerful nation-state could offer a smaller nation the benefits of progress, then it had just claim on the smaller nation: ‘the dignity and prestige of French power [was more beneficial for the Breton] than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.’⁄¤ The same remark also applied to the Irish: ⁄‚ e.g. P. J. MacDonell, Essays in Liberalism (London, 1897), 260. ⁄⁄ David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in Porter, OHBE iii. 507–8. ⁄¤ J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government (London, n.d.), 364.

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When the nationality which succeeds in overpowering the other is both the most numerous and the most improved; and especially if the subdued nationality is small . . . then, if it is governed with any tolerable justice . . . the smaller nationality is gradually reconciled . . . If all Irishmen have not yet arrived at the same disposition towards England, it is partly because they are sufficiently numerous to be capable of constituting a respectable nationality by themselves; but principally, until of late years, they had been so atrociously governed . . .⁄‹

Mill’s argument on the greater claim of the most numerous nation could apply to Ireland but was hardly suitable for India. His one caveat concerned whether pain for progress could spoil the progress itself. But Macaulay, and Bagehot, and Hobhouse all took the constitutional line:⁄› there may be ruptures and hurts along the way, but in the long run they would serve a greater good which included the Irish good. Pain, then, was something done unto Ireland in the hope that in the long run it would fall prey to some British progress. Various cruelties were imaginable. Thomas Carlyle could look at potatoes and see pumpkins, or at Irish ‘Paddies’ and see Jamaican ‘Quashies’. They all looked the same to him. In 1851 the London News offered the sardonic suggestion that all the Irish might be drowned in mid-Atlantic. After all, they had almost starved there.⁄fi The problem with nation-states is that they seek to deny subjugated peoples the self-determination that they claim for themselves. The problem for subjugated peoples is that subjugating states do not see the problem. Writing in 1871, Charles Darwin noted that civilization was inherent in a nation’s capacity for constituting itself as a state. In natural selection, those who could live securely with each other by so constituting themselves would survive, while those who could not, would not. Darwin’s The Descent of Man was also a British constitutional text. He did not name the Irish as such, but for the English he certainly knew the man to whom he should refer: ‘Obedience, as Mr Bagehot has well shown, is of the highest value, for any form of government is better than none. Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected.’⁄fl At the heart of the ‘Irish question’, then, was the view that the English could cohere sufficiently to form a state while the Irish could not. The Celts, ⁄‹ Ibid. 365. ⁄› Burrow, Liberal Descent, 41; N. St John-Stevas (ed.), The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot (London, 1974), iii. 81–2. ⁄fi London News, 30 Aug. 1851; Thomas Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets (London, 1858), 25. ⁄fl Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1874. Chicago, 1974), 125, 127.

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notwithstanding their many human qualities, some of them combustible, were simply incapable of statehood.⁄‡ As late as 1919, when 40,000 British troops were holding down an Irish revolution, parliament could still talk about keeping that ‘troublesome child’ in order.⁄° Ireland was a sorry story of war and partition. When the colonies wanted their independence, Ireland was held up as the path not to take.⁄· Yet from the 1880s up to very late, perhaps as late as 1913, there had been a chance that a reconfigured British state could save the situation. This became difficult after the raising of antagonistic volunteer forces north and south in 1914, and impossible once the nationalists won the general election in 1918 and slithered into war with the British army the following year. A twenty-sixcounty ‘Irish Free State’ was negotiated by treaty in 1921, but resolved only by an Irish civil war between treaty and anti-treaty forces the following year. Meanwhile, the old constitutional woes moved north to fester in a sixcounty British territory called, by law, ‘Northern Ireland’ (Government of Ireland Act 1920). This devolved province, with its parliament at Stormont, represented the last throw of home rule foisted on a Protestant people whose Unionism taught them to be suspicious of devolution but whose Irishness taught them to look to themselves, alone if need be. The British state’s capacity for liberalizing the Northern Irish state, for bringing it in and extending it, always looked doubtful. Very quickly, the Unionists dismantled arrangements for proportional representation and recruited paramilitary special forces. For fifty years this ‘Ulster’ kept on saying ‘No’ because it was caught between the prospect of a Catholic Irish majority to the south, whom it feared, and the liberal English elite, at Westminster, whom it distrusted. Northern Ireland was given some of the powers of a state without any of the responsibilities of a nation-state. Just as Irish nationalists used to pass on to the British the problem of Ireland’s congruity with all its people, and continued to do so for as long as Ireland was not itself a nation-state, so after 1921 Northern Irish Unionists were able to do the same. This was a state, but never a nation-state, because it never had to worry about congruity. Its ⁄‡ Like ‘the natives of Hindostan’, they were seen as ‘fickle, excitable, volatile, easily misguided, credulous and apt to disgrace themselves’: The Times, 30 June 1857. ⁄° Parliamentary Debates. House of Commons, PP 116, 1919, c. 1881. ⁄· Keir, Constitutional History, 439, 539. The Irish were, however, role models for the insurgents—Republicans for Egypt and Unionists for white Rhodesia: W. R. Louis, Introduction and ‘Dissolution of British Empire’, in J. M. Brown and W. R. Louis (eds.), OHBE, vol. iv, The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 13, 338.

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rulers were indifferent to a large Catholic minority comprising about onethird of the province. They surrendered nothing except statecraft, which they happily handed over to Westminster. Northern Ireland existed for nearly fifty years as a shrunken state. Its people were left to fend for themselves in an ever-narrowing ground.

Blacks In 1902 J. A. Hobson numbered British Asiatic and African dependencies and protectorates at over 354 million people, living in lands covering about 6 million square miles. Most of these peoples found themselves subject to the British state through a great variety of modes of administration. The British nation, on the other hand, knew very little about these countries except in terms of the foods they produced. Cadbury’s chocolate, Assam tea, Jamaican ‘Navy’ rum, and lovely bunches of coconuts and bananas were all vaguely understood as coming from that strangest of places—‘abroad’. In terms of identity, India was seen as alien, Africa was seen as shapeless, and all of them, more or less, were seen as far-flung.¤‚ They were united only under the Crown. Their borders were threatened and breached all the time. The British worried incessantly about holding them, but when their people came to ask for control of their own affairs, they were told they would have to wait.¤⁄ The British invested a lot of their own identity in denying the identity of others.¤¤ It was not the same for the white peoples of the Empire. In the eighteenth century the North American colonists had felt themselves neglected by a newly minted British identity which didn’t include them, and, in the end, went their own way. It took a second North American rebellion, in Canada (1837–8), to make the British learn the lesson and avoid repeating the same mistake in the nineteenth century. Following Lord Durham’s influential 1839 report on Canada, gradual self-government, starting in Nova Scotia in 1848, Australia and New Zealand in the 1850s, and in the Cape and Natal in 1872 and 1893, ‘dominion’ status was eventually conferred on those ¤‚ In Whitehall four major offices of state (Colonial, India, Foreign, and Home) were responsible. ¤⁄ It was assumed that they would choose the British model: RIIA, Nationalism, 151–2; J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (1902; London, 1961), 20. ¤¤ The Empire also had a positive impact on British identities: John M. MacKenzie, ‘Empire and Metropolitan Cultures’, in Porter, OHBE iii.

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colonies ‘settled by men of British race and tradition inheriting or acquiring representative institutions’: Canada in 1867, a federal Australia in 1901, New Zealand in 1907, a Union of South Africa in 1910.¤‹ With the partial exception of South Africa, the constitutional principles of 1688¤› were supposed to have been transported across the seas. The closer to the English a settler people were thought to be, the greater the independence afforded them.¤fi Native American, Inuit, Maori, Aborigine, and Xhosa, among others who lived in these settled lands, were merely accidents of nature, well outside of considerations such as these. So magnetic was the discourse of an English ‘mother country’ and her children across the seas, it appeared even to move land masses. As if the white dominions formed one coherent bloc, it became a cliché to refer to the other colonies and protectorates as ‘scattered’.¤fl There had been a time when it had been possible to argue that the colonies were virtually represented at Westminster through their status as ‘interests’ of Britain, spoken for by MPs speaking on behalf of the ‘West India Committee’, the East India Company lobby, and so on. A very vicarious process no doubt, but one, nevertheless, which involved a huge amount of parliamentary petitioning—from Roman Catholics in Grenada to exconvicts in New South Wales. After the constituency reforms of 1832 it was much more difficult to place MPs in this way.¤‡ The alternative was colonial parliaments sitting at home and securing their own constitutional progress.¤° This idea, together with indirect methods of colonial rule through indigenous political structures, put far less emphasis on British ¤‹ In 1926 the dominions took the right to determine their own foreign policy. In 1945 India, Pakistan, and Ceylon entered the white club as dominions, but in 1950 India called itself a ‘Republic’ inside the Commonwealth. In 1952 Canada called itself a ‘realm’. On the naming: R. Palme Dutt, The Crisis of Britain and The British Empire (New York, 1953), 41. The quotation on ‘men of British race’ comes from Keir, Constitutional History, 434. ¤› Though the Durham Report had recommended to Canada the powers of 1649: A. Zimmern, The Third British Empire (Oxford, 1926), 25. ¤fi Jack Greene, ‘Empire and Identity’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), OHBE, vol. ii, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 229. ¤fl Or, as a 1901 school text put it—‘one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers, ten thousand islands’: R. Hyman, ‘The British Empire in the Edwardian Era’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 48. ¤‡ Miles Taylor, ‘Colonial Representation at Westminster’, conference paper, UCL (Mar. 2001), 5. ¤° ‘. . . a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’: Macaulay’s Education Minute 1835, quoted in Peter Burroughs, ‘Imperial Institutions’, in Porter, OHBE iii. 181.

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authority and force.¤· Diplomacy and cordiality were more to the fore, but as the century wore on this way of administering was increasingly dogged by a sharper view of race and a more hierarchical view of Empire.‹‚ Ordinary colonials were increasingly likely to be seen as undifferentiated ‘wogs’, or at any rate primitives way down the race ladder who had to be firmly handled on the spot. The 1865 crisis in Jamaica brought these two conflicting lines of thought—the Empire as progressive and the Empire as hierarchical—into the open. Governor Eyre’s declaration of martial law and his execution of the Morant Bay rebels was an extreme example of the tensions implicit in everyday colonial relationships where the British were heavily outnumbered. Carlyle ridiculed Governor Eyre’s progressive critics, like Mill, who wanted a just and improving Empire that cared for all its people. All law, and therefore all justice, Carlyle said, was preceded by brute force, and it was no use whingeing when law broke down and force had to be used.‹⁄ Or would Mill rather run with the rebels? As Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon knew that justice was not always in his gift: ‘I spent many anxious hours in dealing with cases of racial injustice. But it counted as dust in the balance when I was unable to make political concessions for which I held—and possibly I was not wrong—that the country was not yet ripe.’‹¤ Ripeness lay in the eye of the beholder. After the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’ the beholding class was mainly British soldiers and statesmen intent on having their own way. During the rebellion the naked truth was revealed: the British relied on Indians. ‘Why, we could not even strike our tents without these men tomorrow! We are dependent on them, even the common soldier. . .’ After the Mutiny, all changed: this was no longer the India that served us, but The India We Served.‹‹ The British proposed that Indians never would be ‘ripe’, at least not for a long time to come, and their models of Indian history and anthropology supported the proposition. From 1750 to 1950 they saw India as by turns anarchic (in need of order), traditional (in need of liberalizing), feudal (in need of progress), and conspiratorial (in ¤· R. Hyam, ‘Bureaucracy and Trusteeship’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv; and J. W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in ibid. 234. ‹‚ David Cannadine sees ceremonial hierarchy as in some way diminishing race consciousness: Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London, 2001), 4–8. ‹⁄ Thomas Carlyle, ‘Shooting Niagra’, Macmillans Magazine, 16 (Aug. 1867), 324. ‹¤ Lewis D. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination (Connecticut, 1983), 161. ‹‹ William Howard Russell, The Times, 4 June 1858; Sir Walter Lawrence, The India We Served (London, 1928).

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need of a firm hand). From a British point of view, an Empire so in need could not represent itself and must be carried.‹› This was the ‘White Man’s Burden’—300,000 Indian subjects for every senior officer. After the Mutiny, the East India Company was wound up and the Indian Civil Service took its place. Now was the time to make the reasons for being there sound less commercial and more permanent. Like Findlayson’s bridge,‹fi the Raj was here to stay. Its best men were pukka. They were charged with understanding the impossible and ruling it, but not living it. Clubs, compounds, and cantonments were built. Concubines were discouraged. ‘Smiles went out of fashion . . .’‹fl The single most important factor . . . was the difficulty of understanding India. It was so alien, so diverse, so immense. A district officer might know a little about his district; no one could know it all. There were more than two hundred languages and more than two thousand castes. The Indo-Aryan languages of the north had nothing in common with the Dravidian languages of the south; Hindi was closer to English than to Tamil. A caste might contain a hundred people or a hundred million: it might be based on occupation or taboos; it might regulate its members’ lives in minute detail, or it might be a meaningless abstraction. Baden Powell’s survey of the different agrarian systems ran to half a million words; a census of agriculture would have produced scores of distinct ‘farming types’. Everything ran to extremes: terrain, economy, culture. Drought-stricken deserts merged into waterlogged deltas; stone-age tribesmen trickled into huge industrial complexes . . . India has been spared the invasion of constitutionalism . . . In great extremities the eloquent tongues fell silent.‹‡

‹› Restricted Indian councils were formed in 1893. From 1919 London was committed to Indianization and the councils’ elective element was extended. Provincial elective legislatures with defined competences were set up in 1935. By the time of independence in 1947 half the Indian civil service was Indian. By contrast, in 1945 there was no African in colonial east or central Africa above the rank of minor clerk: Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, OHBE iv. 235. On the four views of India: Bernard S. Cohen, An Anthropologist Among the Historians (Delhi, 1996), 208–22. ‹fi ‘. . . raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka—permanent’: Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Bridge Builders’, in The Day’s Work (London, 1937), 3. ‹fl Denis Kincaid, British Social Life in India 1608–1937 (London, 1938), 186, 234. ‹‡ Quotes are from Clive Dewey, Anglo Indian Attitudes (London, 1993), 4, and J. A. Froude, quoted in Burrow, Liberal Descent, 238. On how much money the British raised and spent: C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1995), 116, and D. K. Fieldhouse, ‘Metropolitan Economies’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 111–12.

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The eloquence that fell silent was all Raj.‹° Between Henry Nelson O’Neil’s academy painting Eastward Ho! (1857), showing the troops going out, and his Home Again (1858), showing the troops coming back, there was little that was Asian in the middle. The British went out thinking they had nothing to learn, but once there India’s personal presence was overwhelming. It whispered in the subconscious. It snaked underfoot in native crafts and customs. It stared out from a darkness which always had to be outfaced. The club, of course, as a place where everyone knew, even if they couldn’t always say, was cool relief from the pressures. It was difficult to have real personal knowing. Sahibs had to be sahibs and that was that. Indeed, there was nothing worse than Indians who tried to break the silence. In matters of state, India was a silence of great weight. It could not buoy England up: it must never be allowed to drag England down.‹· India’s otherness was that of an utterly alien culture, yet it was a culture credited with a history and a shape of its own. By contrast, and devoid of any recognized pre-colonial status, Africa was out of history, a blank. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the naval guns fire aimlessly into the land mass. Africa destroyed the brain, the cogito.›‚ ‘Africans’ had no history that was of any use, and only limited shape and meaning. In their dark continent all was a continuous gabbling present, and probably always had been. What Africans did have were ‘native customs’—indigenous ways of dealing with each other, best left alone. Local chiefs and ‘elders’ would tell field officers what local customs were, and their job was to facilitate. If they couldn’t tell them, it might be necessary to use a field officer’s imagination.›⁄ But mostly chiefs and elders could tell them, because a people like the English who understood the value of their own common law were quick to see a native’s. As with India, there had been a time when being native had not ruled out It’s Oh to meet an Army man, Set up, and trimmed and taut, Who does not spout hashed libraries Or think the next man’s thought And walks as though he owned himself And hogs his bristles short. ‹° Kipling, quoted in Wurgaft, Imperial Imagination, 119. ‹· Sir John Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883; London, 1897), 204, 354. Of school history texts ‘there can be no doubt that Seeley was the most important’: J. M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester, 1985), 179. ›‚ Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness (New York, 1996), 170. ›⁄ Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 384.

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being progressive. Sierra Leone’s early nineteenth-century Saro Yoruba Methodists, for example, had much closer and more subtle ties with the British than late-century Asante or Ndebele were to have. But the failure of Empire modernizers like Chamberlain to win the political argument at home, and the failure of companies like the Royal Niger to win the commercial argument in Africa, meant that by the end of the century the concept of indirect rule over what was increasingly seen as an irrevocably customary society had won the day. Lugard’s methods in Nigeria (1897–1906, 1912–19) were made the model.›¤ Indirect rule made for complex colonial trade-offs in attitude, but, for the rest, whatever else Africa had that was culturally valuable was considered to have come through the British or not at all. The Classics had taught whites how to reflect upon their own civilization, but the African foundations of that civilization had long since been purged. On the farm verandas of Rhodesia the talk was of the land, or the animals, or family and friends, or of an England left behind. Of the Africans, the blacks, the ‘munts’, the ‘kaffirs’, there was not much talk, and what there was was kitchen kaffir—‘a mixture of Afrikaans, Shona and Ndebele, everything in the imperative’, though ‘it could have its gentler moments’.›‹ When Africans came by way of Caribbean slavery to live in England, they too were at first denied authentic claim to culture. Coming from a background of crown colony rule, they were unused to democracy. Coming from a history of plantations and plantation owners, they were unused to civilized rule. Haiti was held up as the example of what happens when blacks governed themselves. Their only redeemables were bits of English, considered broken from the original. Their way of speaking was said to be ‘careless’, ‘slovenly’, ‘babyish’.›› ›¤ T. C. McCaskie, ‘Cultural Encounters’, 666–72; E. H. Green, ‘Political Economy of Empire’, in Porter, OHBE iii. 347; Burroughs, ‘Imperial Institutions’, ibid. 196. ›‹ Doris Lessing, Under My Skin (London, 1994), 113–14. Martin Bernal argues that Romantic nationalism in eighteenth-century Europe broke the older paradigm of an ancient Mediterranean world and replaced it with an Aryan model which severed the Egyptian-African and PhoenicianSemitic influences on Classical civilization: Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1 (London, 1987), 439, 225, 319–22. Bernal’s argument has proved contentious but J. S. Mill, for one, would have been on his side: ‘The Negro Question’, Fraser’s Magazine, 41 (Jan. 1850), signed ‘D’—‘It was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization’ (p. 93). ›› Birmingham branch of the Association of Teachers of English (1970): Times Educational Supplement, 7 June 1970. Two histories written at the beginning of major immigration to England: W. L. Burn, The British West Indies (London, 1951), 113 and passim; and Sir Alan Burns, History of the British West Indies (London, 1954), 471–2, 634–9 and passim. On Haiti, one example from many: Carlyle, ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’, 22.

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Perceptions of Africa as without a proper history or culture lay deep. Perceptions of the Caribbean as without knowledge of the softer lines of humanity lay as deep. Once in those places, you were liable to go mad, or bad.›fi Other Africans, this time Afrikaners, were also shut out. English liberals looked on them with only relatively less apprehension than they looked on blacks. If blacks had made ‘no progress for centuries’, these Dutch-descended farmers, ‘severed from Europe and its influences two hundred years ago’, were ‘ignorant and backward’, speaking ‘a debased dialect’ which ‘practically disqualified’ them from ‘literary composition’.›fl The farmers’ response was Afrikanerdom, a nationalism which produced its first history, Die Geskiedenis van ous Land in die Taal van ous Volk, ‘The History of our Country in the Language of our People’, in 1877. Afrikanerdom cut its teeth on British tutelage and continued to do so after the Boer War right up to the declaration of apartheid in 1948. The bittereinders (‘bitter-enders’: those who refused to surrender) did not go away after the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902. The British won the war, but the hensoppers (‘hands-uppers’: those who did surrender) lost the peace. One by one, British symbols were demoted or removed—the language, the flag, the histories, the national anthem, the military decorations, the national holidays, the monarch and Commonwealth.›‡ When apartheid was finally declared, it was Anglophobic as well as racist. The Sharpeville massacre in March 1960 followed one month after the British prime minister’s ‘winds of change’ speech warning of the decolonization to come.›° ›fi MIND found African-Caribbeans ‘grossly overrepresented’ under the detaining sections of the 1983 Mental Health Act: Community Care, 28 Sept. 1989; David Gillborn, ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Education (London, 1990), 19. On the West Indian as ‘the most sensitive and neurotic member of the coloured community’, Robert Kee, ‘Is There A British Colour Bar?’ Picture Post, 2 July 1949. ›fl James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa (1897), quoted in Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, 1985), 93, 94. ›‡ Thompson, ibid. 31, 33–42. The Broederbond secret society devoted to the Afrikaner nation was founded in 1918. Afrikaans became coequal with English under the 1925 Constitution. The British red ensign with Union coat of arms was replaced in 1926 with the Netherlands driekleur (1572–1650) and Transvaal, Free State, and Union Jack insertions. At the Great Trek celebrations in 1938, ‘Die Stem ran Said Africa’ replaced ‘God Save the King’. In 1948 Malan’s Nationalist government removed British symbols, holidays, and decorations. South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961. Up to the 1930s, ‘race’ as a South African issue referred to tensions between the ‘Anglos’ and the Afrikaners. ›° At Sharpeville, south-west of Johannesburg, police fired on demonstrators protesting against the pass laws. Sixty-seven were killed and nearly 200 were wounded.

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To the British state, as to South African liberals, apartheid proved the point about yet another primitive African people unable to grasp even the simplest principles. Surely states should at least appear to be minimally congruent with the nation they claim to represent? How stupid could a political class be? Not only had they hived off the franchise for their own exclusive use, they had encouraged an antagonistic heterogeneity by violently segregating the nation into racial camps and homelands. The white Republic of South Africa was the impossible state.›· The British took a high line, but the main cornerstones of segregation— the Mines and Works Act of 1911, the Native Land Act of 1913, the Native Affairs Act of 1920, and the Native Urban Areas Act of 1923—had been put in place years before the Afrikaner Nationalists had taken power.fi‚ Afrikanerdom, meanwhile, fell back into its own camp. Liberal institutions, it said, did not fit South Africa. Blacks were lower, childish, a ‘babel of tongues’. Afrikan language and literature was hard, like its people, who did not speak the eloquent prose of an English courtroom. Theirs were epic tales of jagged doings. Sayings, warnings, customs. ‘White Africans too are somehow Bantu: People. Bantu.’fi⁄ Once home in ‘Blighty’, itself taken from an Indian word for homeland, anything beyond British waters meant little. In the London theatre Thailand mistakenly appeared in a song as part of the Empire,fi¤ but one more little country far away was not unlikely because what most of the nation knew of its colonies was either nothing at all, or was all domestic and drawn to scale. The scale was pictorial and exhibition-gauge. Photographs were cropped and mute. Imperial exhibitions promised to ‘reproduce in miniature the entire resources of the British Empire.’ The visitor would be able to walk the Empire from end to end, through model villages with their little people ‘not yet ripe’ for government.fi‹ These people formed a backdrop for imperial daydreams. In 1935 Sanders of the River was screened to packed British cinemas. Here, Africa was a studio set, news footage, documentary clips, a thumping beat. Africans were Cardiff dockers, and the American actor Paul Robeson. Robeson the warrior sang the praises of ›· Özdemir A. Özgür, Apartheid (New York, 1982), 24–36; Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge, 1986), 63, 76. Margaret Bullinger, a Cape liberal, thought ‘that the country . . . could not entrust its future to a party the outlook of which was . . . so tribal’: From Union to Apartheid: A Trek to Isolation (Folkestone, 1969), 222–3. fi‚ John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (Cambridge, 1982), 78–82, 215–19. fi⁄ Sarah Gertrude Millin, White Africans Are Also People (London, 1966), 119, 87, 43. fi¤ ‘Aladdin’: MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 57. fi‹ Ibid. 108.

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Sanders the brave, a colonial officer in baggy shorts. The film opened with a map to show you where Africa was, and a legend to remind you who you were: Africa—tens of millions of natives, each tribe under its own chieftain, guarded and protected by a handful of white men, whose work is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency.fi› fi› Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Algate, Best of British (Oxford, 1983), 16.

7 Women and Workers

Women’s and working-class relationships with the state were more ambiguous. In themselves, both classes comprised majorities of the English people,⁄ and they were commonly understood to be of the English race, born and resident in their own country. No one doubted their role as vital makers and defenders of England. Why then the ambiguity?

The Workers John Bright said that ‘The nation in every country dwells in the cottage’, for ‘palaces, baronial castles’, and such like do not make a nation.¤ When he said this, in 1858, cottage-dwellers were not entitled to vote. Some twenty years before, the Dorset agricultural labourer and ‘Tolpuddle martyr’ George Loveless had reflected upon the outcast status of the cottager and had demanded for him ‘a voice in, and [the opportunity to] form a part of the British nation’. Loveless, a man who had stood farmer’s watch against incendiaries with his brother in 1832, was transported, more for his independent cast of mind than for his trade union oath-taking. Given the chance to repent and be redeemed by saying sorry to the bench, he had refused. The magistrate told him: ‘It is your own fault, you are suffering for your own stubbornness.’‹ ⁄ For the female majority 1801–1939: B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1962), 8–10. McKibbin estimates ‘the working classes’ as comprising 78% and 72% of the English people in 1921 and 1951 respectively: Classes and Cultures, 106. ¤ Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock (eds.) The Liberal Tradition (London, 1956), 90. ‹ George Loveless, The Victims of Whiggery (London, 1837), 31.

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Even so, the hope of an even greater redemption was built into Loveless and men and women like him. He and three of the six Tolpuddle martyrs were Methodists, their stubbornness forged in a movement whose preachers carried Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1559) in their knapsacks.› Max Weber would come to call it an ‘ethic’, or a power within, but believers called it the love of God, the means of grace. This God and his people were talkers, largely in the language of the Church of England (King James Bible 1611, Book of Common Prayer 1662). As a chosen people they were fearless, or at any rate not afraid, not to be cowed by the likes of farmers and magistrates. With the words that breathed over them, and in the movements which they built to hold and sustain the breath, they built their identity. In the names of those movements one can see the necessity, as well as the principle, of unity. Samuel Smiles thought that many English people ‘are often found to be barely a day’s march short of actual want’,fi and a Victorian array of working-class unions and societies, leagues and guilds, congresses, federations, and connections bound them together to help each other when the need arose. These associations of redemption were forming in English towns and villages, but for the preachers, what they represented was never just English. Coalfields they transformed into Canaan or Kedron. Mill-towns were as in Galilee. Workers enrobed themselves as Israelites. Trade unions were ‘founded on Scripture’, and those who opposed them were like Gehazi, or Achan, or Judas, or wolves of the tribe of Benjamin. So many Zion and Bethesda chapels sat black and squat in industrial landscapes, which they then proceeded to transform by words and music in the imagery of Bible and hymnal. Seen twice, first as a place of mills and pits but then again, and face to face, as a place known to God and where Jesus was alive and walking towards you, chapel life theologized England into another land—a place of deserts and lakes, gardens and hilltops, and terrible struggles with wickedness. The class battles that were waged there were English alright, in straggly little villages like Tolpuddle, but Jerusalem was only just over the hill and never far away.fl › ‘Wherein is discoursed the bloody murderings of God’s saints . . .’: Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. J. Pratt (London, Religious Tract Society, n.d.). fi Samuel Smiles, Self Help (1859; London, 1996), 178. fl For the geographies of new dissent: K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems. (Cambridge, 2000), chs. 4, 9. For a closer account of the religious impulse: Robert Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield (Manchester, 1987), pt. 2.

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Loveless and those like him never ceased to answer back, to stand their ground, to insist upon the proper constitution of their class in their own land. But Nonconformist chapel England was not the real land; it was more a fault in the land. The real England, Anglican Conservative England, was more to the south, with all its spired strongholds below a line from the Dee to the Wash. Here, in Surrey and Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire, Kent, East Anglia, and Devon, pushing up into the south and west Midlands, the geography of Anglicanism and Conservatism remained close.‡ Nonconformity, like the franchise, was a concession one England granted to the other; and it had to be earned. Workers were first given the franchise in 1867 (men only), and in 1872 trade unions were allowed to operate as lawful associations. But only on sufferance. Property values were used to calibrate the size and respectability of the electorate, and trade unionists never enjoyed the right to strike within the law, but rather the occasional privilege, or ‘immunity’ as it was called, to stand outside it. On sufferances such as these, the labour movement was given its place and the labourer’s cottage joined the gentleman’s castle as proper English dwelling-places. Indeed, the Leicester travel agent Thomas Cook made it his business to take the cottage to the castle, considering it a special feature of England that such day-trips were permissible. ‘Liberality on the part of the aristocracy ’, Cook said, had opened up their homes, as it would extend their state, to the people, ‘to produce a good moral effect in binding together in one harmonious chain the different sections of society’. Cook thought that this opening up of the stately homes of England should never be taken for granted: ‘It is very seldom indeed that the privileges extended to visitors of the mansions of the nobility are abused . . . there have been just causes of complaint at Belvoir Castle: some large parties have behaved indecorously, and they have to some extent prejudiced the visits of other large companies. Conduct of this sort is abominable . . . A word to the wise is enough.’° And so it was. Workers’ privileges were conditional upon their good behaviour. After the shocks and revolutionary credos of the early nineteenth century, in mid-century they found themselves bound over. ‡ And remained so into the 1990s: Snell and Ell, Rival Jerusalems, 77. ° Laws on savings (1861), life insurance (1846–55), and limited liability (1861, 1869) all disadvantaged working-class people: Paul Johnson, Class Law in Victorian England (LSE, 1992). On trade union immunities and exemptions 1871–1980: K. W. Wedderburn, ‘Industrial Relations and the Courts’, Industrial Law Journal, 9 (1980), 70, 93. Thomas Cook, Hand Book of Belvoir Castle (1848), in Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England (Cambridge, 1990), 89–90.

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Never in much doubt about knowing their class place, workers developed a view of political relationships which moved along the parallel lines of the dominant class on one side, and themselves, the oppositional class, on the other, each class edging its way forward into a hopeful national future. Labour’s long march to progress was seen as roughly in the same direction as the richer class, but slower, and lower, and on the other side of the tracks. The class march began early, and certainly pre-dated the language of class. Tom Paine had said that only democracy could hold state and nation together, and the ‘members unlimited’ Corresponding Societies of the 1790s took him at his word.· Henry Hunt’s great ‘platform’ of 1819 rejected older, more restricted versions of poor people’s politics—the petition, the mob, the club, the secret cell—and embraced a democratic version of English constitutionalism applied now to all the people. So did Loveless’s Methodism. So did O’Connor’s Chartism. So did Bright’s Liberalism. So did Hyndman’s Marxism, which would come to democratize ‘the England of whose past we are all proud and of whose future all are confident’.⁄‚ So did Hardie’s Labour Party. So did John Mitchell’s Cooperative Wholesale Society, with its One Big Commonwealth. So did Ernie Bevin’s Transport and General Workers, with its One Big Union. Labour governments always took the economy far more seriously than they took the constitution, which they hardly considered at all.⁄⁄ This was The People talking. Long represented as strangers in their own land, now they were finding their own way home. When in 1884 the male franchise was widened once again, many hoped that the workers’ platform would keep on widening into a ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’, or a ‘Labour’ polity, or a ‘New Life’ socialism, or some other more final and complete form of representation of the English people. These late nineteenth-century platforms presented the most compelling form of oppositional Englishness.⁄¤ But note: most radicals and socialists kept their faith in English constitutionalism. A · Tom Paine, Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (1776; London, 1841), 16. ⁄‚ H. M. Hyndman, England For All (1881; Brighton, 1973), 6; John Belcham, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform’, Social History, 6: 1 (Jan. 1981), 5–9. Chartism carried strong four-nation themes. ⁄⁄ Bill Lancaster and Paddy Maguire, Towards the Cooperative Commonwealth (Manchester, 1996); Stephen Yeo, Who Was J. T. W. Mitchell? (Manchester, 1995); K. Coates and T. Topham, The Making of the Labour Movement (Nottingham, 1994); David Rubinstein, ‘Socialism and the Labour Party’, in D. Martin and D. Rubinstein, Ideology and the Labour Movement (London, 1979), 250. ⁄¤ Stephen Yeo, ‘Socialism, the State, and some Oppositional Englishness’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds.), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London, 1986).

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sense of estrangement is rare. If, for instance, Keats feared Tyranny, he trusted also that the English people would continue to take grand kicks at despots, as he supposed they had always done.⁄‹ And when, some sixty years later, the agricultural trade unionist Joseph Arch took his seat in the House of Commons as the member for North-West Norfolk, representative of the labourer’s cottage and the Prince of Wales’ Sandringham together, he might be forgiven for believing that progress had done its work and his class had finally been admitted to the heart of the nation.⁄› Indeed, class consciousness and patriotism were the two most observed features of English life. Given the longevity of the English state and the idea of a relationship with it, this is perhaps hardly surprising. The miners were as notorious for their patriotism as for their class consciousness. One of their leaders thought in 1921 that there was ‘no test of our national life’ in which national character is more revealed than in a strike or lock-out.⁄fi Looking both ways at once, to its class as well as to its country, the proletariat was never quite able to fulfil the hope others placed in it. If the Marxist revolution did not happen, the left intelligentsia said it must have been because the workers were too patriotic or stupid (‘false consciousness’) to see the truth.⁄fl If, on the other hand, the workers did not fully take their place in the nation, the right intelligentsia said it must have been because they, or their leaders, were too left-wing, or greedy to know their duty.⁄‡ Modern class relations were founded on the division of labour—a splitting of the labour process into smaller and more simplified tasks. In the market, division of labour never could give ‘Labour’ an equal and counterveiling power to ‘Capital’. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) offered a theory of wealth-creation based on ever-finer divisions of labour and ever-freer market competition. In 1803 market competition was driving West Country clothiers out of their trade, and they petitioned against Dr Smith’s ‘favourite theory’ accordingly. The freer the markets the further the division and the factory, in its time the end-point in that division, was something Dr Smith knew too well:

⁄‹ Robert Gittings (ed.), Letters of John Keats (Oxford, 1970), 312. ⁄› Joseph Arch, Joseph Arch: The Story of His Life (London, 1898), 357. ⁄fi Jack Lawson, Peter Lee (London, 1936), 232; Linda Colley, ‘Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830’, Past and Present, 113 (Nov. 1986), 100. ⁄fl Anderson, ‘Present Crisis’, 42–6. ⁄‡ Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), 175.

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The man whose life is spent performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention . . . He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Your mind restlessly alert, because there’s no guarantee that the next car will be the same as the last . . . But still a blank—you keep trying to blot out what’s happening. ‘When I’m here my mind’s a blank. I make it go blank.’ They all say that.⁄°

The further away one was from the market and the division of labour it promoted, the more independent and rounded a person was supposed to be. So the gentry made no secret of their disdain for markets, at least in their personal life, just as middle-class professionals put a lot of effort into controlling those markets and keeping their labour ‘whole’. A gentleman did not have to work for a living in the same way that a worker did, and was said to enjoy a fullness of character and personality accordingly. His obituary in the local newspaper usually confirmed it. Another kind of division was also used to describe the people, the division of the country into a working north and a cultured south. This was an old idea invested with new meaning during the Industrial Revolution. The ‘north’ was seen as a more strenuous and pushy place, as indeed it had to be. Its accent was seen as hard, broad, thick, or flat, like its people; and its houses were seen as ‘back-to-back’, as in ‘backs to the wall’. A certain hardheadedness prevailed, a northern quality attributed to masters and men alike. In Hindle Wakes (1912), Fanny and Mary live in Cotton Street and work at the cotton mill. They are either at work, or they are not at work. There is no other life to lead, no other life imaginable. The skilled trades saw work as richly regional and, the Lancashire cotton industry apart, the trades were predominantly male.⁄· Industrial work was reckoned to require men’s effort. There was an important side to this which could verge on selfrespect, national dignity even, but when it came to matters away from the physical act of working, economic matters, for example, workers were seen as having no real knowledge. They could earn no more than what a ‘wage fund’ dictated. They could bargain for no more than what rates of interest, ⁄° Anon., Considerations upon a Bill now before Parliament (London, 1803), 7–8, 47. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), quoted in A. Giddens and D. Held, Classes, Power and Conflict (London, 1982), 391; Hugh Beynon, Working for Ford (Harmondsworth, 1984), 119. ⁄· Joyce, Visions of the People, 133. Hindle Wakes was a play written by W. S. Houghton for Manchester Repertory Theatre (1912).

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investment, and profit allowed. They were caught fast by their own sexuality into producing more children than the economy could bear.¤‚ Workers then, were seen as incapable of understanding anything outside of their own backyard. In a 1921 Punch cartoon, ‘The Miner’, having foolishly assaulted ‘The Owner’ over a matter of wages, now had to fight the professional, ‘economic law’, who no doubt would inflict a beating.¤⁄ Five years later the General Strike took these matters to the brink. There was huge popular support for the strike, just as there was significant middleclass resistance to it, not only in opinion. After nine days the Trades Union Congress backed off, leaving the Miners’ Federation to face the mob from the suburbs. In Punch’s terms, the British working class would pay for the victory of ‘Economic Law’ over ‘The Miner’. Over the next fifteen years only one story of national progress was permitted, and it was not the workers’. The industrial division of labour served to represent male workers as intellectually and emotionally inept. For over a hundred years it was ‘axiomatic’ that in literature or painting ‘the life of the poor could be represented only by images of them at work’.¤¤ Working-class thinking was seen as the prerogative of the ‘agitator’ only. Only in certain places—the job, the football field, the ring—was it possible to dignify the muscle if not the punch, but never the brain.¤‹ Even well-meaning celebrations of worker dignity, like John Ford’s film The Proud Valley or socialist agitprop theatre, were bodies without brains, histories without mind. In Ford’s film, the Welsh valleys’ greatest political achievement of the modern era, the miners’ union lodge, was censored. To suggest solidarity a male voice choir was used instead. ‘Solidarity’ is itself a word of concrete things, a coming together of blockheads.¤› So, for Man see Worker. For Hodge see Ninny. For agricultural labourer see swain, peasant, boor, churl, bog-trotter, yokel, chawbacon, clodhopper,

¤‚ H. Southall and D. Gilbert, ‘Marriage and Economic Distress in England and Wales 1839–1914’, Economic History Review, 49: 1 (1996). On the failure of northern novelists to denote ‘a fully realized identity’: Ian A. Bell (ed.), Peripheral Visions (Cardiff, 1995), 3. On real men—‘We aren’t real men’, The Story of a London Clerk (1909), in G. Crossick, The Lower Middle Class in Britain (London, 1977), 101. ¤⁄ Mike Emmison and Alec McHoul, ‘Drawing on the Economy’, Cultural Studies, 1: 1 (1987), 101. ¤¤ John Barrell, The Dark Sside of the Landscape (Cambridge, 1985), 92. ¤‹ Thomas Burke, The Real East End (London, 1932), 34–5. ¤› Peter Stead, ‘Wales in the Movies’, in Tony Curtis (ed.), Wales (Bridgend, 1986), 171.

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hayseed, hick, bumpkin, lumpkin, village idiot, Eddie Grundy.¤fi The British state may have given the classes equal voting rights, but in real life they were apart and rarely danced together.¤fl

The Women In 1913 Mrs Osler, president of Birmingham Women’s Suffrage Society, saw their campaign as the last phase in a hundred-year campaign to extend the state. She declared that middle-class men, ‘by threatening to rise in rebellion’, had obtained their vote ‘and thereby took an important step in the transference of representation from property to person’. The history of women had been one of incorporation into the person of the husband. Now it was as persons in their own right, she affirmed, that women made their bid. Equal votes would count persons as equals.¤‡ The state was entirely male. Women were not equal because, put bluntly, how they looked came before who they were. This was true also for IrishedIrish, worked-workers, and blackened-blacks, but it was especially true for women, the gazed-upon class.¤° The social perception of bodies is an area of study usually consigned to art and aesthetics, yet the fact remains that at the same time that women were fighting to be recognized as persons, the ‘new woman’ was also taking steps to control her body, reconstitute her appearance, and register her presence in public life. If she remained gazed-upon, she was insistent that what men saw was no longer to be determined by what men imagined. And given what men imagined, there was a lot to do. The representation of women in the early twentieth-century art market, for instance, ranged from the inflated to the infatuated. The new woman had to walk a gallery of nudes, by turns blanched, tubercular, cadaverous, boneless, flaccid, voluptuous, prone, narcissistic, and malignant.¤· ¤fi K. D. M. Snell, ‘Deferential Bitterness’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500 (London, 1992), 162–5. ¤fl ‘. . . in the so-called pure modern democracy . . . only the families coming under approximately the same tax class dance with one another’: Max Weber, quoted in Lewis A. Coser and Bernard Rosenberg (eds.), Sociological Theory (New York, 1976), 317–18. ¤‡ C. A. Osler, Why Women Need the Vote (Birmingham, n.d. [1913?] ), 5. ¤° There appears to have been some recognition in the way women’s societies were to the fore in the anti-slavery campaign: Simon Smith, British Imperialism 1750–1970 (Cambridge, 1998), 41–3. ¤· Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford, 1988), 31. For gazed-upon women the classic text is John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London, 1979).

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The inclusion of women in the modern liberal state was possible, indeed inevitable, so long as it was not the same kind of inclusion that appertained to men. Before suffrage, the identity of women rested on institutions entirely defined by masculine authority—the household, the business, the church, and especially, the state. After female suffrage was granted in 1918 and 1928, now that they were in, and claiming equality, the different-ness of women had to be more finely graded. In effect, the English constitutional attitude to women was analogous to, but not the same as, the constitutional attitude to male workers and colonized people. Like the workers, women were seen as different from those who ran the state; but unlike the workers, women were not seen as an oppositional force, at least not in principle. Like the blacks, women were seen as apart rather than oppositional, but unlike the blacks, women could not be seen as alien. After all, these were English women who lived cheek by cheek with English men. Therefore, neither the route of historic opposition offered to workers, nor the set-apart policy offered to blacks, was appropriate for women. Women were seen as different and apart, but their differentness was not historical and their apartness was not racial. What was it then? What made them different? It was said to be ‘natural’, and some in the women’s movement took their position from there. The modern history of population growth is generally a history of increased fertility. In the long term, increased fertility moved the identity of women more in the direction of family life, self-effacement, and the home. Anything else, particularly the world of waged work, had to be carefully considered. In the better jobs market, the ‘marriage bar’ usually decided it and married women had to leave.‹‚ But in the casual labour market, certain kinds of work were considered inappropriate for women. It was best that they didn’t work, but if they did, it was better that the work was state-regulated. Father knew best.‹⁄ However, when waged and casual work was done in the home, in other words, when women were invisible and exploited at the same time, then for their own protection they had to be brought out. ‹‚ E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (London, 1981), 417; Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class (Cambridge, 1992), 43. The Beveridge Report of 1942 expected married women not to work: N. Timmins, The Five Giants (London, 1996), 55. ‹⁄ The 1842 Mines Act and the 1844 Factory Act grouped women with children as unfree agents in the labour market: Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London, 1978), 25.

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In 1906 the London Daily News sponsored a Sweated Industries Exhibition, with trade union and Liberal and Labour Party support. Grouped in work units at twenty-four stalls, depicting domestic scenes ranging from buttonhole making (1d large, Sd small) to fringing shawls (plaids at 4Sd), the women workers of the East End were shown to the kind hearts of the West. ‘The attention of visitors is directed to the fact that the workers are forbidden to accept any gratuities.’ Visitors were invited to observe women workers who should not have been there at all. How invisible could a girl be? In jewel-case making, ‘a hot hand is said to be fatal, as it spoils the costly velvet or satin.’ In nail-making, ‘it looks sadly out of place to see women and girls working the hand bellows to blow up the forge’.‹¤ If Wembley in 1924 could invite visitors to traverse the Empire in a day, so Langham Place in 1906 invited them to explore Exploitation in an evening. Most importantly, these were exhibitions, not workers’ meetings. The oppositional class route open to male workers was closed to women workers. Once hidden from view, sweated labour was now briefly visible, only to be regulated and rendered invisible again.‹‹ Away from work and its regulation, women’s identities were still supposed to be self-effacing. The Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) began from a prayer union where some young women met together in private and simply prayed for the welfare of other young women (who might have been doing the same). The psychological rationale of women’s literature centred on the middle-class woman as isolated and helpless. Even those tens of thousands of robust middle-class women who worked voluntarily for the improvement of towns and cities found themselves entirely disregarded once ‘town planning’ and ‘health and housing’ became professional matters. The view of the engineers, architects, and planners was that women were at their best in the background, keeping the thing going, while they the professionals worked out how to solve town problems in a strategic way.‹› Working-class women, too, learned how to evade their selves as a way of holding things together, this time families, where ‘keeping a grip’ and ‘not letting yourself go’ were clichés of resource. The woman was the centre of all ‹¤ Richard Mudie-Smith, Sweated Industries (London, 1906), 89, 52, 75. ‹‹ Some trade-unionists preferred the previously despised factory system as one way of ensuring visibility: W. A. Appleton on the menders, drawers, clippers and scollopers of Nottingham lace, ibid. 60–1. ‹› Sally Mitchell, ‘Women’s Recreational Reading’, Victorian Studies, 21 (1977); Helen Meller, ‘Women and Citizenship’, in Colls and Rodger, Civil Society and Citizenship.

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family life, yet she was the least (but therefore the most) noticed.‹fi Mothers were held up as models of self-effacement. Froebel claimed that the best teachers of young children should be as ‘a mother made conscious’: like the upper-class mother, rather elevating; like the working-class mother, selfsacrificing.‹fl Little wonder then, that for the anti-suffrage campaigners the ideal woman was behind-the-scenes: mother or wife, unknown philanthropist or political hostess. Little wonder that in the nation’s imagination, ‘Woman’ was the incarnation of translucent, translunary things.‹‡ Feminists came forward to demand their place in the nation, and pushed against the walls of an already expanding state to find it. At first, the fight against self-effacement was Liberal-led. From a classical liberal conception of private wishes and personal competences, women as individuals asked ‘for neither favour nor privileges’ over men, just equal opportunities.‹° From a new Liberal conception of public welfare and regulation, however, women as women pressed for the feminization of the state.‹· How could Liberals, old or new, deny them? How could they refuse to see women as part of the march of progress? For those Liberal politicians who refused to see, the women’s movement reserved its most exquisite hatred.›‚ Mrs Fawcett and her National Union regarded Liberals such as Asquith, Harcourt, Rosebery, Gladstone, and Lloyd George as all but forfeiting the name. Others decided not to wait upon the men. The Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union was founded in Manchester in 1903 with trade union and Labour links, but gradually it found its own way. For a while, the Liberal constitutionalists of the National Union worked alongside their more militant sisters of the WSPU. By 1909–10, though, it was clear that the constitutionalists could not condone the tactics of the militants. In a manner that was deliberately on the offensive, the militants (‘suffragettes’) brought women onto the streets. They argued that they had brought the ‹fi Richard Hoggart, A Local Habitation (London, 1988), 46; M. I. Balfour and J. C. Drury, Motherhood in the Special Areas of Durham and Tyneside (London, 1935), 10. So strong was her role in family life, in that sphere it might be husband or son in law who did the self-effacing. ‹fl Carolyn Steadman, ‘Historical Development of a Primary School Pedagogy’, History Workshop, 20 (1985), 149–63. In 1914 70% of elementary schoolteachers were women. ‹‡ Jane Mackay and Pat Thane, ‘The Englishwoman’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, 191–229. ‹° Osler, Why Women Need the Vote, 18. ‹· Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1986), 7. ›‚ Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (London, 1978), 19.

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fight out of the drawing-room, but in fact they had brought the drawingroom into the fight. For much of the time both the National Union and the WSPU sought to use the old English constitutional repertoire of platform, march, rally, banner, speech. These were the historic forms of liberalism, and as such they were within the bounds of what women could do legitimately to represent their cause. The best milliners and dressmakers were enlisted. With sash, epaulette, badge, and armband, WSPU in green for hope, white for purity, and purple for dignity, women walked straight, bedizened with a power of their own.›⁄ Militants went further. They took their most potent weapon, the female body, and used it to carry out ‘unnatural’ and therefore, in the context of gender, revolutionary acts. They flung themselves into shocking situations—loud and insistent heckling, picketing, street confrontations, civil disobedience, rail chaining, starvation, arrests, flagrant deeds of public bravura. Done in a moment and relayed by photograph to the press and the national imagination immediately and forever, these acts meant that the representation of women was no longer entirely being framed by male ways of seeing. The state duly obliged by battering its own most natural and fragile vessel, the female body. The sensationalist press duly obliged by reporting in terms of raids, sieges, and women taken prisoner. These were the actions of self-absorbed women. On other fronts, in health and medicine for instance, the female body was increasingly seen as a natural regenerator. A new awareness of the body as the site of viral conflict and the female body as the generator of the nation’s children helped make women as women visible again. Some influential men strove to turn this body-conscious femininity to their own ends—through a renewed stress on domesticity or, very differently, through avant-garde fancies of sexual liberation. Nevertheless, feminists were not slow to seize upon the idea of the natural vitality of ‘Woman’ as part of their cause.›¤ Not all women would have gone so far as Christabel Pankhurst’s 1913 charge that three-quarters of all men were infected with gonorrhoea, but awareness of the importance of women’s health to the national health was rising fast and found its way into ›⁄ Louise Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign (London, 1987), 294. ›¤ Frank Mort, ‘Health and Hygiene’, in J. Beckett and D. Cherry (eds.), The Edwardian Era (London, 1987), 31; Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (London, 1986), 104; Iain McCalman, ‘Unrespectable Radicalism’, Past and Present, 104 (1984); Naomi Segal, ‘Sexual Politics and the Avante Garde’, in Timms and Collier, Visions and Blueprints.

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measures of social reform.›‹ Just as the ‘anti’-suffragists based their case on what they said were the deviant qualities of the female body (in menstruation, pregnancy, and breast-feeding), so the feminists based their case on the female body’s restorative powers. And the needs of the state in welfare and war inclined to their argument.›› Not surprisingly, perhaps, it was in medicine that women scored their first professional victories.›fi Soon after, middle-class women would start limiting their childbearing in order to protect their health and reach out to modest personal freedoms. In youth, the freedoms were perhaps wider: the freedom to dress ‘rationally’, ride bicycles, go as you please, sport your legs, dance and kick and gyrate in ways previously encountered only in clubs and bordellos. In the new generation of girls’ private schools pupils were, among other things, instructed to whack balls and run fast. Between 1900 and 1930 there was a revolution in the look and evaluation of women by women. They came out. From marching, waving, noisy suffragists to aproned munitions workers, to fast-running lacrosse players, to sequined ‘flappers’, goggled pilots, booted hikers, and enrobed graduates, bodies made visible and accountable and necessary were persons again. Through a liberal constitutional tradition—Wollstonecraft, Taylor, Mill, the Pankhursts—feminists won their quarrel with the state from the inside. The war, women’s part in the war, and the threat of renewed feminist agitation after the war, clinched that quarrel from the outside. In 1918 women aged 30 and over were enfranchised. In 1928 women registered as voters on the same terms as men.

Gendered Already As well as enfranchising women, the 1918 Act also disenfranchised those men who were said to have acted like women, or not like men. In an amendment to the Bill, all those who had taken no part in combat on conscientious grounds lost their right to vote for five years.›fl By dishonouring their sex, they were said to have dishonoured their nation. ›‹ Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop, 5 (1978). ›› Harrison, Separate Spheres, 60–7. ›fi Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first licensed female doctor in 1865. Florence Nightingale opened the school of nursing at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, in 1860. ›fl John Rae, Conscience and Politics: The British Government and the Conscientious Objector to Military service 1916–1919 (London, 1970), 222, 234–35.

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During the war, 16,000 conscientious objectors were found to be ‘pansies’, ‘pasty faces’, ‘effeminate’. While Brighton seafront was getting used to the spectacle of hundreds of limbless young soldiers lurching around on crutches, Admiral Penrose Fitzgerald’s ‘Order of the White Feather’ was launched from a Folkstone bandstand. By humiliating men marked out as ‘not men’, the women who were encouraged to give white feathers to those not in uniform were in fact being encouraged to humiliate an image of themselves. As Beatrice Webb remarked of the pacifists, ‘the intellectual pietist, slender in figure, delicate in feature and complexion, benevolent in expression, was the dominant type’. In 1916 the WSPU renamed its journal Britannia.›‡ The call to arms in 1914 met with a huge show of voluntary recruitment, two-and-a-half million men in sixteen months. Although the war’s thirst was never to be slaked, the first rush to the colours was unprecedented. The lads were keen, and for the masculine networks—old boys, former pupils, workmates, all ‘pals’ together—there can be no doubt that the inculcation of a sporting code in a mass, gendered, and conscripted schooling was an important factor.›° For a long time prior to the introduction of state schooling in 1870, sport had been associated with manliness. John Wilson of Cumberland, for example, the ‘straightforward’ Tory gentleman poet and athlete, was an early nineteenth-century ‘cocker, a racer, a six-bottler, a twenty-four-tumblerer, an out and outer’.›· But this was a kind of sporting achievement different from what was inculcated in the schools. Victorian schooling turned the gambling and highly egotistic gentleman ‘Fancy’ into disciplined team-players. Pugilists and jockeys remained popular within the gentlemanly code, even when their act was cleaned up with rules and regulations, but they were joined late in the century by footballers and cricketers. Teams and leagues offered players the chance of real, responsible manhood.fi‚

›‡ Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning (London, 1977), 57; Beatrice Webb, quoted in the Observer 19 Apr. 1987. The mutilation was the worst in British history: Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, 1996), 32–7. ›° W. J. Reader, ‘At duty’s call’: A Study in Obsolete Patriotism (Manchester, 1988), 111. ›· Norman Nicholson, The Lakers (London, 1955), 143. fi‚ Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 578; Richard Holt (ed.), European Heroes (London, 1996), 52. Even highly individual tasks, such as the new Victorian sport of mountaineering, were team ventures: Richard Holt and Tony Mason, Sport in Britain 1945–2000 (Oxford, 2000), 124.

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In 1864 the Clarendon Commission on public schools had seen boys’ games as representative of the school in the first place and, through the school and its quiddities, representative of much else besides. Great public schools such as Uppingham built their reputation on games. Some of this playing-field ethic managed to seep into the better end of girls’ schooling, yet in general the more one went down the class ladder the less girls’ games were thought to matter. This was not the case for boys.fi⁄ Girls’ games were seen as individual, informal, whimsical; while boys’ games were teamed, representative, serious.fi¤ Wherever team games were played for anything but money indeed, they were seen as an effective lesson in leadership and duty. Right into the 1950s, school sport, public or grammar, was seen as important to local communities, and enjoyed wide newspaper coverage. Winning really was of secondary importance. What mattered was what was happening on the inside. Getting hurt helped. For the old street games, usually kept alive by girls—‘mere senseless, endless repetition’—there was only indifference.fi‹ Especially, there was cricket. No mere game, this was the identity of England in flannels. Declared the national game by the rather ‘upper’ Badminton Magazine in 1888, revised as such in 1893, and fully authorized in 1920, cricket was ‘national’ because all the classes played it, though rarely in the same team.fi› Cricket was the first team sport to have national rules, and its new institutions were thought important to English manliness. Redolent of the aristocratic code, but constitutionally reformed in the 1860s so that there was room for all, cricket was one of those coded gestures which made men Englishmen. In New Zealand, South Africa, and Wales it was rugby, in the north of England it was association football, but in the real England it was cricket. ‘What cricketers looked like was important.’fifi ‘Do you play?’ At public school, the boys who didn’t were treated as lesser breeds. The elite, on the other hand, those who made prefect, enjoyed fags, administered the rod, and organized the dorm, were the ones who wore braid on their blazers. For C. B. Fry, the only life worth living was to be a fi⁄ Ferdynand Zweig, The British Worker (Harmondsworth, 1952), 124. fi¤ James Walvin, ‘Children’s Pleasures’, in J. K. Walton and J. Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain 1780–1939 (Manchester, 1983), 229–30. fi‹ Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor (London, 1875), 43–4. fi› Asa Briggs (ed.), Essays in the History of Publishing (London, 1974), 200–1. fifi Richard Holt, ‘The Batsman as Gentleman’, in G. Cubbit and A. Warren (eds.) Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives (Manchester, 2000), 225–40. Price Collier, England and the English From an American Point of View (London, 1912), 145, 196.

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Repton man, an Englishman, and an England cricketer, probably in that order. Sport conferred privileges. For Henry Green and his non-cricketing school pals, their only recourse in such a tightly meshed web of masculine privilege was to adopt what they saw as ‘feminine wiles’. Acting out what might be seen as a vicarious version of the women’s suffrage campaign, these boys veered from the self-effacing to the ‘sly’, they behaved ‘for effect’, and screamed and shrieked and stunned to silence a masculine tradition which had tried to silence them.fifl When Green went up to Oxford the game went on. Yes, he had his little lie ready. No, he couldn’t play. He had a weak heart. Bookish or artistic men, or ‘aesthetes’, would surely prove doubtful comrades. The Badminton Magazine lined up manly writing against unmanly writing. Punch lined up cricket against unnatural sex.fi‡ Army recruits were screened as much for their heterosexuality as for their health, even though the Great War’s two most famous heroes, Rupert Brooke and T. E. Lawrence, were aesthetes who leapt into the fighting. Anxious about their own sexuality, they came to war as a way of making amends. Along with the new woman, the new, self-consciously masculine man can be seen to have provoked Victorian manliness to impossible levels of mastery. The desire for war was a possible result. Brooke certainly preferred the manly prospect of death by fighting than the womanly one of death by old age. The bedpans of a feminized welfare state were not for him. First he would kill a Prussian. Then: ‘Not a bad place and time to die, Belgium, 1915? . . . Better than coughing out a civilian soul amid bed clothes and disinfectant and gulping nieces in 1950.’fi° Whatever the right to vote had brought women by 1928, it did not make them equal in the state, because the state was male-gendered already. Parliamentarians said that the enfranchisement of women made the congruity of state and nation complete. This was not so. When Virginia Woolf was prohibited, as a woman, from using Oxford University Library, she observed that while it was unpleasant to be locked out, ‘it is worse perhaps to be locked in’.fi· The next wave of feminists would not be Members of Parliament, nor would they want to be. fifl Henry Green, Pack My Bag (London, 1979), 113. The autobiography was written in 1938–9; C. B. Fry, Life Worth Living (London, 1939), 47. fi‡ Briggs, Social History, 281. To E. M. Forster public schoolboys were sent into a world ‘with well developed bodies . . . and undeveloped hearts’: ‘Notes on the English Character’ (1920), in Abinger Harvest (London, 1965), 13. fi° John Drinkwater, Patriotism in Literature (London, 1924), 65; John Tosh, ‘What Should Historians Do With Masculinity?’, History Workshop, 38 (Autumn 1994), 190–4. fi· Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; St Albans, 1982), 24.

8 Loyalties

In September 1939 the British government declared war on Hitler’s Germany. At first things went badly, and between the fall of France in June 1940 and the German invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, the British stood alone. A time of deepest danger, it was also a moment of high national identification with the state and its call for victory at all costs. After over a century of careful calibrations as to who should and who should not be admitted, and on what terms, in 1940 the British state moved rapidly towards the people. No one was in much doubt about the danger. In May 1940 Churchill became prime minister. In June the British Expeditionary Force was hauled out of France. In July Luftwaffe fighters came, and in September the bombers. George Orwell believed that if only those few months could be survived, ‘the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one of the great turning points in English history’. The prime minister, meanwhile, raised the stakes to the very highest level. Churchill’s policy was to fight, not to deal. This was his only policy, and he laid it over cabinet and commons and country. Orwell and Churchill both knew that never before had the nation felt so close to the state. Certainly, as the war was endured, never again would the people nurse such high hopes of what that unity might achieve.⁄ Only a year before, embroiled in a war and without the wherewithal to fight it, the British state had appeared weak and on trial for its errors.¤ A decade of depression, matched by the spread of totalitarian governments across Europe, ⁄ George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), in Collected Essays, ii. 104; Winston Churchill, speech of 18 June 1940, Into Battle (London, 1941), 234. ¤ Gideon Clark, Democracy in the Dock (London, 1939), 163, 174.

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had halted the march of progress. Now that liberal Europe had appeased and died, had liberal England appeased and died with it?‹ Only a genuinely democratic upsurge could ensure survival. Could the people do it?

People’s War On 7 September 1940 enemy bombers struck at targets in Woolwich Arsenal, Beckton gasworks, Millwall docks, Limehouse, Rotherhithe, Tower Bridge, and West Ham power station. Over the next twelve months 190,000 bombs rained down on British cities, seriously injuring 50,000 and killing 43,000, including 5,460 children. Streets and homes were ‘front line’. Not until the end of 1942 did the enemy kill more British soldiers than civilians. Yet measured against the state’s original estimate of national morale, which was low, the bombing was borne with some courage and a lot of resource. Only 9 per cent of the targeted population could find room in public shelters. Over half crouched in their homes. Cinemas became unofficial centres of shelter and community. In night-time London, the Underground was comandeered by the people for the people. The November ‘Inner Station Conference of Tube Shelterers’ showed the government the way. Throughout the Blitz, in the public shelters, in the Underground stations, in the rest centres, in the safe houses, and in the darkened, shattered streets, through the agencies of Air Raid Precaution, Home Guard, Fire Service, Ambulance and Observer Corps, as well as by simply getting themselves to work the next day, the British people showed they could take it, and in that they were at one with their government. For the first time in sixty years, the East End of London was a proper (and arty) English place to be.› Myths had appeared soon after the bombing began.fi In June 1940 Churchill had warned the nation that this would be ‘their finest hour’. In fact, the hour lasted for over a year—from the bravery of the few in the air to the endurance of the many on the ground—and continued to glow in a kind of half-light until the war ended. J. B. Priestley said that in the inferno democracy was repossessed. ‹ William L. Shirer, Berlin Diaries (London, 1941). George Dangerfield’s classic work, The Strange Death of Liberal England, was first published in 1936. › Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, 1971), 188–26; Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford, 2000), on the surreal shapes of bombed-out buildings (p. 86). fi Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939–45 (London, 1979), 37.

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The state was grateful. It realized that victory could be won only if its relationship with the nation was made to appear absolute. Progress was back, in such a spate that it could be mistaken for socialism. Even The Times (‘The reactionaries, which means roughly the people who read The Times’— Orwell in 1941) was prompted to revise the national identity for socialistsounding purposes: If we speak of democracy we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege . . . The European house cannot be put in order unless we put our own house in order first.fl

Churchill took over with the oppositional nation, represented by the Labour Party, right behind him. The Conservatives had preferred Lord Halifax. Throughout the war, public support for Churchill was very high. In February 1945, with Labour 18 per cent ahead in the polls, 85 per cent supported him, only 3 per cent less than in July 1940. Just as Lloyd George had had to reach out beyond his party in 1916, so Churchill had to reach out beyond his after 1940. From the outset, and believing that it ‘was given to me to express what was in the hearts of the British people’,‡ the prime minister set about buckling the idea of the nation firmly to the history of the state. Ranging across the full sweep of an island territory, from seas and hills to streets and fields, and tilting his interpretations this way and that—rightwards into the essences of dominion, destiny, and blood, and leftwards into law, liberty, contracts and rights—his speeches were ruthless in their search for unity. Into every home in the land the wireless speeches poured forth all the national mythologies in one river of words. Ever careful to revere the past and its traditions, Churchill could nevertheless deny that this was a war ‘of chieftains or of princes’ rather than a modern war ‘of peoples and of causes’.° Ever sensitive to the personification of the nation in the monarch, Churchill could nevertheless invoke Londoners’ tough-fibred parliamentarism during fl George Orwell, Partisan Review (Mar.–Apr. 1941), in Collected Essays, ii. 163. The Times, 1 July 1940. In May 1940 The Times had taken the left-leaning and pro-Soviet historian E. H. Carr as its leader writer: Haslam, Vices of Integrity, 86. ‡ Blake, Conservative Party, 247–8, and Robert J. Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out 1937–87 (Basingstoke, 1989), 11, 14. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. iv, Finest Hour 1939–1941 (London, 1983), 941. ° Churchill, speech of 14 July 1940, Into Battle, 251.

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the civil war. He took English constitutionalism and British imperialism to their highest point, and committed the people to both. In his own long career the prime minister had shown how to switch from one set of national histories to another, from Liberal radical to Tory bulldog. Dominant or oppositional, individualist or collectivist, Burke or Paine or Bagehot, Churchill knew all sides. Not many radical Liberals could or would have advocated workers’ welfare insurance by comparing it to an army rearguard action in the colonial badlands, but Churchill had.· Rhetorical agility served the old class warrior well as he sought out the people again. In December 1940 he remarked that he was finding it ‘difficult to think politically or socially—in classes—any more. There is a kind of warmth pervading England.’⁄‚ The Directorate of Army Information went way beyond Times editorials or Churchillian rhetoric. Their ‘British Way and Purpose’ booklets posed ‘our’ ‘big idea’ against that of the fascists. Citizen of Britain, for instance, recognized that after the ‘tragedy of the last twenty years’ the old democratic platitudes were not enough.⁄⁄ It was necessary to rekindle energy and movement, and in the big ideas of democracy, egality, and welfare there would be all the thrust and expansiveness the British people could imagine. For the workers: strong trade unions, full employment, decent homes, generous social services, a fair education. For the women: more welfare, more jobs, state facilities, even a tacit questioning of gender roles. For the colonized: a free if rather patronizing Commonwealth. Under the chapter headed ‘The Unfulfilled Promise. Another Chance’, the army underlined the new dynamic: every man should have the chance to make the best of himself, and if ‘we follow this idea wherever it takes us, we shall let ourselves in for several startling changes—in the distribution of employment and wealth, in the provision of education and other social services, and in the creation of new opportunities for adventure and public service . . .’⁄¤ A. D. Lindsay, historian of the Levellers, called this British army the most discursive since that of 1647. Richard Hoggart remembered the groundswell of cheap, progressive left-wing learning, starting with the Left Book Club and Penguins but

· Winston S. Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem (London, 1909), 83–4. ⁄‚ Gilbert, Finest Hour, 941. ⁄⁄ Army Directorate of Education, The British Way and Purpose (1942–4; consolidated edn. 1944); A. D. K. Owen, Citizen of Britain (Nov. 1942), 14. ⁄¤ Army Directorate, Way and Purpose, 50, 219, 55, 65, 353–418, 463–4, 17.

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finding its biggest constituency in the Army Bureau of Current Affairs: all, in his view, agents of a Labour victory in 1945.⁄‹ Civics lessons were mainly on the radio or at the cinema. Along with other astonishing changes in national life—a leftish Church of England, a feministic Women’s Institute, a nearly popular Council for high art and music—the BBC went quite democratic. The ‘Forces Programme’ was loved, and became the ‘Light Programme’ when the war was over. The mad comedy show ITMA (‘It’s That Man Again’) also carried on, as did left documentary-makers like Philip Donnellan, who found in BBC radio and television a greater chance to work in the way they wanted to work.⁄› After ‘ten years . . . studying the British character . . . for film purposes’, film documentary came into its own.⁄fi It claimed to show the nation as it really was. ‘As it was’ was united, but because everyone knew that in everyday living it really could not be so united—indeed, industrial relations had probably worsened—the message had to be low key. In any case, understatement was the documentary’s defining quality. It took a constitutional English reticence and applied it to working-class English life. Between 1941 and 1944 an estimated 25 million people saw Ministry of Information documentaries in circumstances, as the ministry put it, of ‘non theatrical distribution’, in workshops, factories, canteens, welfares, village halls, and the like.⁄fl Watching films in matter-of-fact places such as these complemented the positivism of the documentary.⁄‡ These were stories of everyday people, with faces you might see anywhere. What they showed was how it was, or at least how the nation could be once the war was over. All sorts of audiences felt them to be acceptable distillations of their own experience, and identified accordingly.⁄° ⁄‹ Roger Fieldhouse (ed.), The Political Education of Servants of the State (Manchester, 1988), 105; Richard Hoggart, Observer, 18 May 1986. Others are not so convinced; Fieldhouse is equivocal (p. 120) while K. O. Morgan thinks it ‘probably a simple myth’: Labour in Power 1945–1951 (Oxford, 1984), 23. ⁄› Obituary, Guardian, 1 Mar. 1999. On changes to the national life: chapters by Kent, Nicholas, Haggith, Andrews, and Weight, in Richard Weight and Abigail Beach (eds.), Right To Belong (London, 1998). ⁄fi Michael Balcon, Twenty Years of British Film 1925–1945 (London, 1947), 82. ⁄fl Ernest Betts, The Film Business (London, 1973), 181; Eric Rhode, A History of the Cinema (London, 1976), 370–84; Helen Forman, ‘The Non-Theatrical Distribution of Films by the MoI’, in N. Pronay and D. W. Spring (eds.), Propaganda, Politics and Film 1918–45 (London, 1982), 223–6. ⁄‡ ‘Positivism, and the camera and sociology grew up together’: John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (Cambridge, 1989), 99. ⁄° Forman, ‘Non-Theatrical Distribution’, 230.

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The greatest war documentaries were directed by Humphrey Jennings for the Crown Film Unit. Apparently, Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1941) was applauded, a rare event in British cinemas. Jennings stressed the collective defence of the country and transmitted a strong impression of the best of what was being defended, from Blake and Browning to Flanagan and Allen. In this film there was never a doubt that in this war the people had paid their dues. Full citizenship was now theirs by right.⁄· At times, the proximity of Jennings’s populist view with that of the state’s official view was remarkable. The official story of civil defence (1942) reads like a film treatment for Fires Were Started (1943), another Jennings masterpiece.¤‚ The war changed Jennings too. The Cambridge intellectual who, in the 1930s, had worked for Mass Observation was at last learning from the people, ‘and not just looking at them’. As he wrote to his wife: It has now become 14 hours a day—living in Stepney the whole time—really have never worked so hard at anything or I think thrown myself into anything so completely. Whatever the results it is definitely an advance in film making for me—really beginning to understand people and making friends with them and not just looking at them and lecturing or pitying them. Another general effect of the war.¤⁄

George Orwell was another middle-class socialist who found new hope in the wartime English people. In the summer of 1940 he believed that an English socialist revolution was possible.¤¤ In 1941 his The Lion and the Unicorn was published, said by his biographer to be the only book ever written which saw revolutionary possibilities in the English national character.¤‹ Orwell made two points which were crucial to what happened after 1945. First, his trust that the liberal progressive state, under new management and extended to its greatest possibilities, would be able to meet the people’s needs—through state ownership of basic industries, through abolition of hereditary privilege, and through taxation of grossly unequal incomes. Second, Orwell’s concept of the ‘revolution’ as a home-grown affair. It would not be a repudiation of actually existing Englishness but an ⁄· For the applause, Forman, ibid.; for Jennings, Roy Armes, A Critical History of the British Cinema (London, 1978), 153–8, and Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, ‘Representing the Nation: British Documentary Film 1930–45’, Screen, 26 (Jan.–Febr. 1985). ¤‚ Ministry of Information, Front Line 1940–41 (London, 1942). ‘Front Line shows once subversive sentiments becoming official’: Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 185. ¤⁄ Mary-Lou Jennings (ed.), Humphrey Jennings (London, 1982), 31. ¤¤ Orwell, Partisan Review (Mar.–Apr. 1941), in Collected Essays, ii. 67. ¤‹ Bernard Crick, George Orwell (Harmondsworth, 1982), 380.

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extension of it. England to herself could rest but true, if only she could lop off aristocratic bungling, capitalist greed, and all those functionaries Bagehot had deemed the dignified parts but whom Orwell termed parlour creeps, arse-lickers, and backstairs crawlers.¤› It is difficult to demonstrate a direct causal connection between ‘war socialism’ and Labour’s election victory in 1945. But right from the off, the war had been pitched as a People’s War.¤fi Churchill’s national coalition had then proceeded to fight the war by collectivist means, with important posts going to Labour politicians and trade-unionists. In addition, Keynes had been influential in the Treasury and Beveridge’s national insurance schemes had gone public in 1942. Then there had been the (broadly) levelling experiences of the forces, conscription, rationing, evacuation. Ernest Bevin wrote to Attlee saying that victory in such a war should have removed ‘the inferiority complex amongst our people’, and as in war so in peace, the 1945 Labour government managed to blend public ownership and provison with an unquestioning attitude to the constitution. Labour was far more a British party than the Conservatives, and Attlee and Bevin came close to achieving the incorporation of a British party and trade unions into that liberal English constitutionalism—a key ambition of the party’s leadership since 1925.¤fl In that sense if in no other, Attlee was the last liberal prime minister, the last one to believe in the old version of national progress. In 1947 some could find in the English crowd a safety and equanimity forged in the wartime queue.¤‡ From now on, if the nation queued, the state would serve.

Away Wars For a very long time British wars had been away wars, campaigns waged well away from the national territory. For this happy state of affairs, the ¤› Bernard Crick, George Orwell (Harmondsworth, 1982), 137. ¤fi ‘The people should be told this is a civilians’ war, or a People’s War, and therefore that they are to be taken into the Government’s confidence as never before . . .’: Ministry of Information memo, Sept. 1939: Rawlinson, British Writing, 142. Revisionist interpretations of the ‘People’s War’ include H. L. Smith, Britain and the Second World War (Manchester, 1996) and N. Tiratsoo et al., England Arise (Manchester, 1995). ¤fl Morgan, Labour in Power, 503. The letter from Bevin is in Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (London, 1960), ii. 381. On bringing Labour into the mainstream: Herbert Tracey (ed.) The Book of the Labour Party.(London, 1925), i. 30, 32; Peter Weiler, Ernest Bevin (Manchester, 1993), 189. ¤‡ Barker, Character of England, 562.

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British had the Royal Navy to thank. It was not being an island that had delivered Britain from war and incursion (being an island hadn’t done Ireland much good), it was the fleet and its assumption of former Spanish waterways after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Some would equally praise Union after 1707, but whatever the reason the British state, delivered from perpetual war, was not unduly dependent on its military. From 1689 parliament made it clear that unsuitable monarchs, large standing armies, and cruel and unusual forms of torture and taxation were all of a piece. Armies and absolutists went together, it said. Parliament promised to keep watch and ward. Although it is true that after 1707–13 the British state grew enormously in military and fiscal capability, in comparison with its European rivals it was remarkably free from venality. As John Brewer has shown, this ‘military-fiscal state’ was powerful but contained. Because it saw the military as an instrument of policy, not an end in itself, this was a state that could grow for war and shrink for peace. This was a state, therefore, whose soldiers were usually abroad, picking up bad habits no doubt, but whose navy was very definitely the senior service.¤° Military strategists talk of the ‘critical’ and the ‘flight’ distance of battle: being inside the critical distance means it is difficult to get away, or disengage, from the fighting; being inside the flight distance means it is easier.¤· It might be equally useful to talk of critical and flight distances in a British political context. As has been remarked, naval guns afforded the supreme flight distance, and the ‘blue water’ school, which believed in the invincibility of the Royal Navy, was committed to a full ocean’s breadth between what was done abroad and its consequences at home. So long as Britannia ruled the waves it was possible to get away, or disengage, from foreign threats and failures. As the First Sea Lord opined in 1909: ‘We have got a Fleet so invincible that even if things are not quite as well with the Navy as they might be, there is no appreciable danger and we can all of us sleep comfortably in our beds, knowing that the worst that could possibly happen to us would be some trouble in India or on the Continent, which, however disagreeable, could never touch our hearths and homes.’‹‚ When the test finally came in ¤° Brewer, Sinews of Power, pp. xiii–xix, and passim: ‘The sinews of War are infinite money’ (Cicero). ¤· John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1978), 54, 166–8. ‹‚ Lord Fisher, in J. H. Grainger, Patriotisms. Britain 1900–1939 (London, 1986), 276. On liberalism, the navy, ‘flight distance’ and pacifism—issues substantially re-evaluated by the government between 1908 and 1910: Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy (Winchester, Mass., 1986).

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1916’ at the battle of Jutland between Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, it had been 111 years since the navy had been in full-scale engagement with the enemy.‹⁄ Nineteenth-century British land conflicts were also nearly always well inside the political flight distance. Policing the colonies was small-scale enough usually to offer plenty of room for flight unless very serious mistakes had been made, and anyway, colonial politics rarely made much impact at home. Great European wars were different, of course, yet between 1815 and 1914 there were too few of them to matter, and even then British credit, wrapped around by the reach and punch of the Royal Navy, always served to maintain distance. How much could India matter to the politics of a state thousands of miles away whose forces had lost only eighteen ‘Europeans’ in one of the key battles for conquest? How anxious could a sea power get whose greatest victory, at Trafalgar, had involved only twenty-seven ships of the line? Even in the 1930s, the view was that if it came to the worst, navy and air force would do the heavy stuff while the army would get on with patrolling the colonies. In India, the army had always been more a gendarmerie than a continental field force, while much of the rest had been achieved by ‘bluff, false optimism and reactive pragmatism’.‹¤ Certainly, in the key conflicts of the modern world British military involvement was glancing, and not even contemplated without much bigger partners—the French in 1914–16 and the Americans in 1944–5. In the great British battles that had been decisive, Waterloo or Normandy, the British had been influential but lesser partners. In the battles that had been massive and shocking, at the Somme or the third battle of Ypres, say, they had not been decisive. When the battle had been critical, as in 1940, the British had faced unconvinced invaders, and military intelligence had known by October that that was the case.‹‹ British and Commonwealth military disasters, such as the surrender of 85,000 men to the Japanese at Singapore in 1942,‹› have to be measured against the records of other combatants, such ‹⁄ Michael Lewis, The History of the British Navy (Harmondsworth, 1957), 236. ‹¤ Anthony Clayton, The British Empire as a Superpower, 1919–39 (Basingstoke, 1986), 2; J. F. C. Fuller, The Decisive Battles of the Western World (1954; London, 1987), ii. 15–16, 9. ‹‹ ‘Enigma’ had decoded German communications and by 24 Oct. 1940 the cabinet believed that invasion had been postponed: Gilbert, Finest Hour, 869. ‹› ‘Only in war, most clearly during the Second World War, did the Empire approach the otherwise mythical status of a formidable, efficient and effective power system’: K. Jeffery, ‘The Second World War’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 306. This was not the view expressed in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–61).

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as German and Soviet losses on the roads to Stalingrad and Berlin, which were measurable in millions. For a very long time the British state had come to expect sharp victories and relatively few casualties. The Victorians spent around 3 per cent of GNP on their armed forces, a remarkably low figure. Coming out of the war in 1918 no longer a creditor nation, the British believed now that their best security lay in international diplomacy. Defence expectations reverted to Victorian proportions, 5.5 per cent of GNP by 1937.‹fi The distancing of war and the evil thereof was a great national privilege, and absolutely fundamental to the identity of England. At the same time, it is also the case that away wars and flight-distance politics can be the stuff of self-deception. One strand of self-deception spun along racial lines.

Invaders and Neighbours Nineteenth-century archaeology presented invasion as the central fact of national history.‹fl Until the Norman Conquest, so the theory went, England had been a troubled land. Coming in plundering waves, Saxons, Danes, and Normans had all been invaders who had eventually calmed down to become proto-English. Once settled, and absorbed into itself, the nation began the long march of progress. Although some did use the invader thesis to demonstrate the eventual polyglot composition of the English race, the thesis nevertheless offered an identity based on a composite ‘Anglo-Saxon’ white racial type. Up to 1914 the thesis was reinforced by British isolation from big land wars, the apparent invincibility of the navy, and only a cursory regard for the race claims of Celts. Itself the invader of other lands, Anglo-Saxonism emerged in the nineteenth century as the hard-pushed defender of its own: But now the English-speaking people have conquered India, almost the whole of North America, the greater part of Polynesia with Australasia, and most of the opened parts of Africa . . . the race force of the Anglo Saxons will not, however, of themselves preserve the British Empire . . . it is difficult to view without anxiety the military situation of an Empire so little compact, and so difficult in consequence to defend. ‹fi Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London, 1988), 319. For different interpretations of measurements of military expenditure: Paul Kennedy and Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘Debate— The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism 1846–1914’, Past and Present, 125 (Nov. 1989). ‹fl Briggs, Social History, 7–9.

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I spent most of the years of my life under the certainty of war, the conviction that my country must pass through the trial of a great war; the necessary efforts of training for it the force and the thoughts and the character.‹‡

Unthreatened at home but with so much empire to defend elsewhere, frontiers were erected in the mind. Late Victorian historians moved national identity away from the long history of law and parliament towards the raceculture of the Anglo Saxon people.‹° With Sir John Seeley’s best-selling The Expansion of England in 1883, raceculture moved out across the world. According to him, the core of national history lay in the expansion of English dominion from 1588. Sir John and his acolytes argued that in race, and in the culture which race naturally engendered, the American colonies had never really been lost, only loaned to a kindred state operating from within the same linguistic and biological frontiers. A special relationship indeed, yet, as was usual in these matters, it meant little or nothing to Americans. Indeed, the time was not far off when Americans would set their face against the British Empire and seek its demise. Seeley’s impact was largely domestic. His chosen opponents were the English liberal constitutionalists. He wanted to redraw their histories in order to shift the balance of national identity back to the race-culture of the people and away from the law-and-parliament machinations of elites. For him, expansion, not settlement, was the watchword; 1588, not 1688, was the beginning; and the English People, not aristocratic Whigs, were the force. For some Anglo-Saxonists, the English People found their true expression in the history of the state. Others, usually Liberals, picked up the people’s cause against state foolishness, or incompetence, or tyranny. Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, for instance, made a straight play between the people’s interest (welfare and warships) and that part of state interests, the Lords, not yet weaned from their unearned increments. A constitutional crisis followed, which brought with it a barrage of criticism against the Lords. For a moment, it looked as though the People were to have their final showdown with the Peers: ‘[The House of Lords is] . . . one sided, hereditary, unpurged, unrepresentative, irresponsible, absentee . . . ‹‡ Sir Charles Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London, 1890), 2, 698; Sir Henry Newbolt, quoted in Grainger, Patriotisms, 74. ‹° Burrow, Liberal Descent, on Stubbs, Green, Freeman, and Froude. A link was established between biology and language: Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo Saxons”?’ Journal of British Studies, 24 (Oct. 1985).

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all its anomalies, all its absurdities, and all its personal bias . . .have darkened the pages of the history of England.’‹· Class struggle always had the propensity to join race struggle. The Seeleyite theory of empire, along with socialism, was the only genuinely popular representation of the English people which offered the working class a creative and determining presence. Carlyle had contrasted the tough old English who had invaded Jamaica with the rich white trash living there now. Darwin too had reserved his special praise for those adventurous enough, and fit enough, to pierce the ‘deadly barrier’ of climate and settle new lands.›‚ Well, if biologies rather than constitutions were what mattered in English history, did not the workers have bodies too? And were their bodies not in the majority? And was not their race force—more insular, less cosmopolitan—purer than that of their betters? And if the nation was really a family, why the need for so much inequality? Did not all the family get to eat? Did not all the tribe need to live? Did not all the race have to be healthy?›⁄ By the time of the coronation of George V in 1911, the British Empire was talked about as if it was a People’s Empire.›¤ These were self-deception, but no one can doubt the impact they made, creating a deep reservoir of nativism, officially endorsed. Race-class rhetoric was embraced by all sides: Radical Liberals looking for a welfare state, Imperialist Tories looking for a more powerful state, Manual Labourites looking for a better deal, Biologized Feminists looking for a better chance. Across the whole spectrum of race-class struggle one can detect the most unlikely allegiances. Joseph Chamberlain never ceased to revere John Bright, while Oswald Mosley honoured Chamberlain (as would Enoch Powell). To varying degrees, all these politicians operated on the outside, on the ‘people’s’ side against the invader or the usurper. Dilke’s warnings about the invader—Yellow, Black, Alien—could translate into a High Victorian fascism and eventually, somewhere along the race-class line, professors met blackshirts. For H. E. Egerton, Professor of Colonial History and Fellow of All Souls, the expansion of England was due to the very men Mosley’s ‹· Churchill, Liberalism, 132. ›‚ Carlyle, ‘Nigger Question’, 24. Darwin, Descent of Man, 125, 137–8. ›⁄ The tribe is ‘a descent group which constitutes a political community’ with a tendency towards equality and statelessness: Patricia Crane, ‘The Tribe and the State’, in John A. Hall, States in History (Oxford, 1986), 48–51. ›¤ ‘. . . the product of the inner character of millions’: The Times, 23 June 1911, in Davies, The Isles, 740.

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gutter fascism would seek to assuage: ordinary men, common men, disappointed men.›‹ The biological frontiers of this empire of the mind were long and tortuous. They ran from across the mountains of Afghanistan through to the darkest streets of London. A new race of degenerates lived over the frontier.›› Most dangerous were the boys. Psychological theories identified the period between boyhood and manhood as ‘adolescence’—yet another frontier.›fi The move into maturity, across adolescence, and into a right and proper manhood was the move into civilization. Delinquency, on the other hand, was the very failure to move. Academics saw in delinquent adolescents a jungle tribe. Explorers saw in African pygmies a gang of delinquent adolescents.›fl Englishness went native. Boys had to be saved from themselves, and in order to hold the line, brigades and troops were mustered: I, thou and he, look out! We, ye and they, look out! Though you didn’t or you wouldn’t Or you hadn’t or you couldn’t; You jolly well must look out! For the rustle that isn’t a rat, For the splash that isn’t a trout, For the boulder that may be a hat (Chorus) All Patrols look out!

A prospect emerged of British boys as a disciplined urban tribe, scouting for invaders without and skirmishing with psychological enemies within. These were the mind-soldier boys, ready to face the darkness. By the early years of the twentieth century an estimated three-fifths of them had been in ›‹ ‘Why Should Anyone Still Follow Mosley?’ Picture Post, 1 May 1948; Roland Quinault, ‘John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain’, Historical Journal, 28 (Sept. 1985); Charles H. Pearson, National Life and Character (London, 1893), 84–5; Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain (London, 1977), 151–2; H. E. Egerton, A Short History of British Colonial Policy (London, 1918), 524–7; Anon., Mosley: The Facts (London, 1957), 88–91. For Churchill, language was the key organizing category: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (London, 1956), vol. i, p. viii. Kipling saw himself as the tribal bard: Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York, 1971), 69. ›› The degeneracy of London’s East End looked worse against the regeneration of the West: Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds.), Imperial Cities (Manchester, 1999), chs. 1, 2, 3. ›fi ‘. . . the adolescent is neo-atavistic’: G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (New York, 1904), p. xviii. ›fl Capt. Guy Burrows, The Land of the Pigmies (London, 1898), 182–96; J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism (Harmondsworth, 1986), 111. The theme became popular in imaginative literature, as in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954).

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uniform. They had been prepared.›‡ Boys not so prepared had crossed back over the frontier. They had reversed themselves. They were not boys but ‘yobs’. Mass immigration from the colonies and former colonies began in the late 1940s. We have seen that one of the army’s big ideas had been a Commonwealth enjoying the benefits of liberal progress—‘you would think this a great thing for a humble African’—and the debates preceding the Nationality Act of 1948 continued in this vein. Did not the parent have responsibilities to its children? The Act granted interchangeable nationality to ‘British subjects’ and ‘Commonwealth citizens’. Colonial peoples had always been considered British subjects: having been born within the monarch’s dominions, they had come within the magic of the Crown. Labour’s Act reaffirmed this, and with it the right to settle in Britain. Insofar as up till now national identity had been mainly a homespun affair,›° then it could be safely assumed that Anglo-Saxonism was for home consumption only, or that its effects could be safely (safely for Britain) exported abroad. But once black and Asian people started to arrive in numbers, looking for work and settlement, then there were bound to be difficulties. Many years before, when the whole imperialist enterprise was still within flight-distance politics, Cobden had quoted the price of self-deception. Imperial acts, he warned, ‘are so far off; their proceedings are done at too great a distance that you don’t feel them or see them, or know your responsibility; but they will find you out, and find out your children’.›· First victims of deception were the white working class and the immigrant people who came to live alongside. Misconception and prejudice did prevail and was bound to prevail. Under the 1948 Act, the state had honoured its ties with the imperial nation. That imperial nation however, was no nation, and was soon to discover, as many had discovered before, that the meaning and acceptability of nationhood could not be handed over with vote and passport. On arrival, and almost before Pathé News took its first condescending pictures, immigrant beliefs about Englishness, about liberal Englishness ›‡ Rudyard Kipling, ‘Boy Scouts’ Patrol Song’ (1913), in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (London, 1946), 273–4; Patrick A. Dunae, ‘Boys’ Literature and the Idea of Empire 1870–1914’, Victorian Studies, 24 (Autumn 1980); Allen Warren, ‘Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Great Britain, 1900–1920’, English Historical Review (April 1986); John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements 1883–1940 (London, 1977), 54–7. ›° John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory (London, 1995), 425. ›· Richard Cobden at Rochdale, 24 Nov. 1863, in, Bullock and Shock, Liberal Tradition, 102.

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indeed, were quickly confused. Confused? As well they might have been. They could never find anyone who was prejudiced. Since I come ’ere I never met a single English person who ’ad any colour prejudice. Once, I walked the whole length of a street looking for a room, and everyone told me that he or she ’ad no prejudice against coloured people. It was the neighbour who was stupid. If we could only find the ‘neighbour’ we could solve the entire problem. But to find ’im is the trouble! Neighbours are the worst people to live beside in this country.fi‚

At the same time, beliefs about Empire had never been anything but confused. Imperial territory was seen indiscriminately, yet there was fine discrimination in a hierarchy of skin colours. The British saw themselves as empire-builders, yet most of them knew next to nothing about what had been built.fi⁄ For many British people, it is not difficult to see how mass immigration reactivated the invader thesis. Coming so soon after a ‘finest hour’ in a People’s War, the thesis had never really been dormant. Moreover, for over sixty years Anglo-Saxonism had taught that the people were liable to be cheated, then deserted, by their elites. It was claimed that immigrants had arrived with the connivance of those elites, with their paper laws and political tricks. Once again, class struggle found a race problem to bite on. Elites were blamed and innocents were offended: ‘You are unwanted. You are here because some higher order official let you stay, not because I want you . . . You should have been stopped before you arrived, you should be sent back even if you have been here for a while. You only create problems . . . But don’t take it personally; I have no quarrel with you as a person. It’s immigration I cannot tolerate.’fi¤ One should never underestimate the liberalism of England, across all classes, but beyond the pale the boys were about. On the streets the boys could make life hard for the newcomers. In defence of their masculinity, their neighbourhood, their identity (their skin), the boys rehearsed their history lessons. ‘The Union Jack’, proclaimed Bulldog, youth newspaper of fi‚ A. G. Bennett in 1959, quoted in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1985), 375. ‘. . . you may be refused because you are coloured. You must expect to meet this in Britain’: How to Adjust Yourself in Britain (Ministry of Labour, Migration Advisory Service 1954). I am grateful to my colleague Cynthia Brown for this reference. fi⁄ Survey by The Times, 22 June 1949; over half of those interviewed were unable to name a single British colony. fi¤ T. J. Cottle, quoted in Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (London, 1990), 218.

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the National Front, ‘is our flag not theirs. Not the rich’s.’ And when Enoch Powell stepped into the fray, as he did in 1968, he claimed he was on the people’s side. Not the government’s. As for the boys, they did not care that they were now called yobs. What could posh geezers know of their identity? What could liberals know of their loyalties?

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Post-Imperial Reformation

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9 Forward March Halted

The years after 1945 saw an erosion of the old common-sense belief in British progress. This was largely because the view that the British had of themselves at home and abroad became no longer tenable. Abroad, they were no longer an imperial power. At home, not being an imperial power had significant consequences, which took a while to learn. Although they enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, welfare, apparent satisfaction, and considerable growth in personal liberties, nuclear threat and relative economic and military decline, muddled their confidence in history. Between 1958 and 1961 ‘decline’, as a peculiarly British characteristic, embedded itself right at the centre of party politics, where it remained, dominating every political issue and general election from 1964 onwards. At the same time, the Empire was got rid of very quickly—in about twenty years.⁄ Whatever one thought about it, this looked like scuttling. In roughly the same period, pushing on into the 1970s, the idea of a ‘multicultural’ or ‘multiracial’ England was introduced. Most people born before, say, 1950 found it difficult to conceive of England as anything other than an exclusively white country, yet here it was, changing its colour. Coming so soon after the loss of Empire, multiculturalism could look like the loss of the national culture and the selfdetermination that was supposed to go with it. ‘Race’ became a major domestic issue, and one that, as a key indicator of social policy, looked set only to grow. ‘Union’, meanwhile, particularly with respect to the north of Ireland, became a political issue again from the late 1960s, and the break-up of Britain began to seem likely. ⁄ W. R. Louis, ‘Dissolution of the British Empire’, and J. M. Brown, ‘Epilogue’, OHBE iv. 340 and 707.

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The English had lived for nearly all of their modern history in a state of perpetual expansion and success. They had come to see themselves as winners and master builders. They talked of ‘this country’ being the best in the world, and in the post-war years they had more genuine reasons for doing so than ever before. But at the same time they stopped expanding, indeed they shrank back, and according to the pundits they stopped succeeding. It was harder for the English, because in 1945 they hadn’t actually lost anything, including their self-respect. On the contrary, there was plenty to be pleased with at home, while the American alliance kept up the image of world power abroad. The erosion of belief in progress and the imperial identity that went with it, therefore, didn’t happen immediately and it didn’t happen simply. But it did happen, and some of the reasons for it will be explained in this chapter.

End of History? Post-war Britain employed more professional historians than ever before, yet the confidence that history moved in patterns that were not only desirable but also discernable, sagged. First and foremost, the war ended with American atrocities over Japan and, in great secret, the British state developed its own atomic weapon, which it tested in 1952. ‘The Bomb’ was seen as a watershed in human history. In Britain, the blue-water school of Royal Navy supremacy sank without trace, and a blue-skies Royal Air Force school did not rise up to replace it.¤ The skies were open to attacks that could not be resisted or survived. Everyone believed in nuclear weapons, even if they weren’t sure what they were: When a nuclear weapon explodes an immense amount of energy is released almost instantaneously and the contents are transformed into a rapidly expanding white hot ball of gas at a temperature as high as that on the sun. From this ‘fire ball’ (see Plate 1, page 20), a pulse of intense light and heat is radiated in all directions. The materials in the fireball are also a source of radioactivity in various forms. As the fireball expands and cools, a powerful blast wave develops. As it cools still further, it ¤ The Royal Navy lost parity with the US Navy in the mid-1930s, and in 1940 it declared itself incapable of defending eastern waters. In 1967 the neo-imperial strategy of a string of British naval bases across the world was abandoned. After 1918 the best strategists argued for a combination of air and tank mobility to do what the navy had traditionally done—keep British manpower out of major continental commitments: David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane (Basingstoke, 1991), 42–5.

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shoots upwards to a height of many thousands of feet, billowing out at the top to give the appearance of a huge mushroom or cauliflower on its stalk (see Plate 2, page 21).‹

The thing on a stalk, along with the dread it inspired, was purely doctrinal. To non-believers, it marked the end of all history at the turn of a key and after a four-minute wait. To believers, it held the Russians at the Berlin gate while the Americans ran the last race for progress.› Either way, if British progress still had a distance to run it would only be as far as the Pentagon allowed. As the prime minister Clement Attlee said in March 1946, the British were no longer a power ‘looking Eastwards through the Mediterranean’, but rather the ‘easterly extension of a strategic arc the centre of which is the American continent’.fi The identity of England was now forever nuclear. The freedom of states to act rests on their ability to make independent choices (sovereignty), and on their ability to act on those choices (autonomy). Neither sovereignty nor autonomy are absolute quantities, but once upon a time, when the world was young and you were British, there appeared to be little difference between them. The British felt free to act as they pleased, and took what they could. When those days departed, they found themselves ground between their own presumption of sovereignty and mounting limits to their autonomy. This was nowhere more apparent than in the economy. Two of the oldest national myths celebrated free trade and industrial enterprise. In the years after 1945 it became impossible to associate free trade and industrial enterprise with the British economy, even at the level of myth. An alternative set of decline myths took their place,fl and a school of economic historians emerged who specialized in the study of British business failure. One of their theories blamed English constitutionalism for the failure, though they did not call it that. Gentlemanly capitalists, they said, had kept their distance from industrial manufacturing,‡ while English belief ‹ Manual of Civil Defence, Nuclear Weapons (HMSO, 1956), 2. › ‘Western Man finds his newest home and best hope in the USA’: Life’s Picture History of Western Man (Life, 1951), cover caption. fi A. Clayton, ‘Imperial Defence and Security’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 294. Throughout the post-1945 period a significant minority of British people believed in unilateral nuclear disarmament, or neutrality: Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out, 41, 61, 130. fl Jim Tomlinson, ‘Inventing “Decline” ’, Economic History Review, 49 (1996), 754. ‡ M. J. Daunton, ‘ “Gentlemanly Capitalism” and British Industry 1820–1914’, Past and Present, 122 (Feb. 1989).

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in the continuity of things had dampened business innovation. Once upon a time English constitutionalism was praised for every success. Now it was blamed for most failures and, given its century-old association with English sport, it is no surprise to find that what was said of English failure in business was said also of failure in test matches. Where were the risk-takers these days? With the big picture fading, historians became more specialized but at the same time more anxious about their failure to engage with the public.° Professor Marwick began his Penguin history of post-war Britain on a clanging note of uncertainty—‘ “How It Was.” “What Went Wrong?” or “Decline and Rebirth?” ’—and went on to catalogue the dissonance.· Once into the 1970s, he was able to fast-forward the long fall into crisis, from oil rationing and coal strikes through to IRA terrorism and harsher police methods, culminating in 1979 in a ‘Winter of Discontent’. Certainly Marwick was not the first historian to record the forward march halted. Fifty years before, Sir Lewis Namier had cut in two the march of English progress by writing histories of England severing the eighteenth century from the nineteenth. Jonathan Clark followed in the 1980s with open season served on those who had built their academic reputations on the idea of continuity.⁄‚ Namier and Clark were of the right, but confidence in clear historical direction had long been collapsing on the left. In 1963 Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class reasserted the primacy of human agency in history over ‘historical forces’, while in 1969 J. H. Plumb’s Death of the Past announced the death of the great traditions of historical progress—Whig, Marxist, and Christian. In 1980 Robert Nisbet’s History of the Idea of Progress lamented its demise in circumstances of ‘disbelief, doubt, disillusionment, and despair’, and looked to the Soviets as the idea’s last pathetic refuge. Only unabashed Marxists, it would appear, retained their faith in the forward march.⁄⁄

° R. H. C. Davis, ‘The Content of History’, History, 66 (Oct. 1981); Keith Robbins, ‘History, The Historical Association and the “National Past” ’, ibid; David Cannadine, ‘British History: Past, Present—and Future?’, Past and Present, 116 (1987). · A. Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth, 1982). ⁄‚ Clark, English Society, 1–14; Joanna Innes, ‘Jonathan Clark, Social History and England’s “Ancien Regime” ’, Past and Present, 115 (May 1987). ⁄⁄ Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 259. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London, 1969); Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (London, 1980), 318.

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Where could a new story of British forward movement be found? Certainly not in imperial themes, which had done such sterling service in the past. And certainly not in the post-war economic settlement, a deal made between industry, labour, and the state to foster better management. By the mid-1970s the coming view was that this settlement had failed.⁄¤ Nor could a new story be sustained in a utopian language of free markets. For a time, somewhere between 1976 and 1986, ‘markets’ were the big story, and battles were waged over how best to measure their size and movement. Only the platitudinous, however, appeared to think that bigger market share could bring more national direction. By the late 1980s the British state was being asked to choose between a single European market and its inexorable consequence, monetary union, or British sovereignty and whatever interpretation one might care to give that concept. Because few appeared wholly convinced by one case or the other, Mrs Thatcher (who was) had to go, which she did in 1990. Pragmatic newspaper editorials opined, ‘Currency plays no part in national identity’, and cautious politicians placed their bets each way.⁄‹ A. J. P. Taylor’s wartime quip, ‘What is wrong with Germany is that there is too much of it’, found a new ‘Euro-sceptic’ voice.⁄› On the left, doubters gathered at the grave of dialectical materialism. Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man (1979) was construed as a Marxist professor who continued to believe in clear historical Progress with a capital ‘P’, but only at the expense of his own integrity. Tony Benn MP talked in 1983 of the high hopes that had accompanied Labour’s 1964 election victory: ‘further advances were certain.’⁄fi But he then had to explain their nonappearance, and did so with the old parallel-lines theory of British class struggle. Like two trams stuck in the groove and heading side by side into an underground tunnel, there the contending classes would collide in crisis, ruckus and then a new way up and out and forward again. This had not happened, yet, but Mr Benn assured his audience that it was going to. They were in crisis, but heading for Progress. Only in a dialectical way, of course. ⁄¤ Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, 294, 392; Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 1986), 241. ⁄‹ A subtext to the anti-European/pro-sovereignty stance is the way in which EU law provides easier means of immigration into Britain than does British law. On the 1990 Schengen Agreement: Ann Dummett, in Hazell, Constitutional Futures, 225. ⁄› Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor, 152. ⁄fi Tony Benn, Trade Unionism: A Strategy for the Nineteen Eighties (Leicester University Students’ Union, 1983), 5. Bradbury’s History Man begins with a quotation from Günter Grass— ‘Who’s Hegel?’

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The difficulty for all historicists, right or left, was that history without a clear direction suddenly appeared pointless. Whether ‘the working class’ or ‘British Sovereignty’, each had been given a role to play; but you cannot have a role when the drama is over. In 1985, after two consecutive Conservative election victories and a war in the Falklands fought and won to popular acclaim, socialists were forced to admit that ‘whatever the Left in Britain is today, we cannot claim to be tribunes of the people’. At the very least, one might have thought that a Socialist Society might have been able to say what a socialist strategy would look like, but in 1989 it could not. With a third Conservative election victory in the bag, and with all the conviction of a drowning man, the Socialist Society took upon itself the task of what it called Negotiating the Rapids. Its message was to understand the current, hang on, and hope.⁄fl In that same year, the rapids hit Niagara. The entire Soviet bloc fell down, and the Marxist left theory of ‘revolution postponed’, with its vocabulary of falterings and wrong turnings—long strained over the past forty years— became absurd. Leninism was dead, and certainly not mourned, except in a few old sects who still believed its time would come when History ordained that it should.⁄‡ The ‘New Left’, on the other hand, celebrated the propensity of working-class people to make their own history.⁄° But if the people had done it before, it was hard to see how they were doing it now. The New Left had a readership, but no movement. Professor Hobsbawm found it hard to give up the progressive faith. What was the revolutionary objective condition of World Communism? In ‘a detour, not a blind alley’. Did the Soviet Revolution have to take the path it did? ‘In Russia, Yes.’ What had MarxismLeninism achieved? It had taken ‘essentially backward populations and educat[ed] them and creat[ed] a modern social structure out of them’.⁄· In 1990 the history professor also had to hold on as Marxism crumbled and the rapids swept along to a point where World Bank economists and Pentagon strategists felt hubristic enough to start talking of ‘the end of History’. In doing so, Professor Fukuyama confirmed Sellar and Yeatman’s famous quip ⁄fl The Socialist Society, Negotiating The Rapids: Socialist Politics for the 1990s (London, 1989), 10; History Workshop Journal, 20 (1985), 3–4. ⁄‡ Guardian, 18 Dec. 1989: appreciation of Gerry Healy. ⁄° ‘Whether Marxist, Marxisant, Whig or liberal . . .’, ‘For the best part of a generation . . . this interpretation . . . carried almost everything before it’: David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven, 1998), 7. He exaggerates. ⁄· Hobsbawm in the Independent on Sunday, 4 Feb. 1990.

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that ‘America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a .’ (full stop).¤‚ As for the British political parties, where could they go now that the forward march had been halted? Conservatives found a short respite in a vision of markets, but Labour, founded as it had been on a view of class and reconceived in the 1950s on the basis of a post-war settlement rebutted in four general elections from 1979, at first found it harder to readjust.¤⁄ Labour now had to face up to life without the workers, and without proper classes, it was hard for socialist intellectuals to see proper causes anymore. Jeremy Seabrook found the best of his history firmly behind him. He wrote of a working class that was frail; a subculture of old people in flat caps and suede booties.¤¤

Who’s Who? With the road into the future looking less clear, the present took on broader, more open perspectives. Across this more open present, the various groups in society had to find their spaces and their right relationships, one with another and all with the state. Progress in the post-war years came to be seen as applying less to a forward-moving nation-state with top-down relationships between upper and lower classes, and more to comparative exercises between various social groups in a flatter, or ‘de-centred’, society. Vertical hierarchies and concentrations were out; horizontal social spaces and information networks were in. There had been a time when the British had laid out seventy-seven official rankings in a ‘warrant of procedure’ to be observed when dealing with imperial administrators in India.¤‹ Now India was independent, and in England everything was going open plan, low-slung, and laid back— from office design and furniture, to university campuses and airports. At the same time, a steady flow of legislation enhanced the personal liberties ¤‚ W. C. Sellar and R J Yeatman, 1066 And All That (1930; Harmondsworth, 1963), 123. ‘If we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own . . . History itself might be at an end’: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992), 51. ¤⁄ No one was more reconceiving in the 1950s or rebutted in the 1980s than C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), 93–4, 60, 95. ¤¤ Jeremy Seabrook, What Went Wrong? Working People and the Ideals of the Labour Movement (London, 1978), 244. ¤‹ Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 43.

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(enlarged the social space) of most people. Just about the whole nation benefited.¤› With Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God (1963), even the Almighty got liberalized: which is to say, as the comparative number of possible relationships with Him multiplied, He had his personal liberties enhanced (His spiritual space enlarged). The discourse, therefore, moved from the poles of historical time to the boundaries of social space, and it looked as though the study of sociology would replace the study of history. The question was no longer what would the classes do, but how many there were, what did they value, and how multifarious were their ‘cultures’?¤fi Culture was ordinary. Culture was everywhere and plural, and it was cultures indeed, which, in the post-war years, came most to express the nation and make it up. Seen in terms of what was different between them, the cultures were expected to negotiate with the state ‘apparatus’ of a hugely extended public sector.¤fl The solid-block, vertically structured majority nation (and indeed the solid-block anything) was invited to forget itself. Fluid and diverse yet self-defining and complete, ‘cultures’, or ‘communities’, or ‘fields’, replaced older social scientific ideas about objectively preformed or statistically homogeneous sectors. While the oldest and most resonant social sector, ‘class’, weakened as a way of thinking about society, the newest cultural field, ‘ethnicity’, flourished.¤‡ Ethnicity was knowable only as culture, while in a period of rapid economic transformation ‘class’ was harder to recognize as an occupation or even as a statistic. Rich and poor remained, of course, indeed the gap between them grew, but the demise of the language of class made poverty difficult to talk about. The old class language of ‘Equality’ was dropped for a new cultural ¤› 1948 Children Act; 1949 Legal Aid and Advice Act; 1959 Mental Health Act; 1960 acquittal of Penguin Books for obscenity; 1960 Committee on Children and Young Persons; 1963 Robbins Report on higher education, Newsome Report on secondary education, 1967 Plowden on primary education; 1965 abolition of capital punishment; 1966 Race Relations Act and Race Relations Board; 1967 Abortion Act and Family Planning Act; 1967 Sexual Offences Act; 1969 Representation of the People Act; 1969 Divorce Reform Act; 1970 Matrimonial Property Act, Equal Pay Act; 1975 Sex Discrimination Act; 1978 Consumer Safety Act. ¤fi J. A. Banks, ‘From Universal History to Historical Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 40 (1990); Frank Parkin, ‘Social Stratification’, in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (eds.), A History of Sociological Analysis (London, 1978), 603. ¤fl Roger Middleton, ‘The Size and Scope of the Public Sector’, in Green and Whiting, Boundaries of the State, 144–5. ¤‡ There is almost no mention of it in Ferdynand Zweig’s otherwise prescient The British Worker, 53, 163.

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language of ‘equalities’ between cultures/communities/fields. In a society such as this there was a much greater freedom of expression and communication, but it was less clear what sort of society it was. Who was who was becoming much more difficult to identify. In the ethnic field, ‘subcultural’ was dropped for ‘multicultural’ in a nation now suddenly multiplied in the number and awareness of its parallel cultures, its comparisons of parallel cultures, and its sense of the differences of identity between parallel cultures. Although only a minority went to church, most English people saw their country as Christian. As recently as 1940, the English churches had claimed their central place in national life.¤° By the 1980s a large and sustainable Muslim presence, the result of immigration, not conversion, was beginning to overtake the historic Protestant denominations whose numbers had been in free fall for much of the century. It was predicted that by 2002 there would be more worshipping Muslims than Anglicans and, what is more, this was an Islam ‘becoming more British with every passing year’. ‘The most significant single event in our religious history since the Reformation’ had happened in such a short time that it was confusing to everyone, Christians and Muslims alike.¤· Adding to the confusion, demographers had started to define groups as ‘ethnic’ without any apparent appreciation of what the word might mean, while social scientists were challenging the presumption of ‘race’ as a biological category—a category which many people assumed was the basis of ‘ethnicity’ in the first place.‹‚ Lawyers defined race, as in the 1976 Race Relations Act, with reference to a rather inflexible view of culture, while educationalists defined culture with reference to a rather inflexible view of race.‹⁄ Educationalists, aware of serious under-achievement among African-Caribbean children, used race and culture as almost interchangeable concepts.‹¤ ¤° McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 222, 272–8. ¤· T. J. Winter, ‘Islam in England’, Q-News (May 1998); Musharaf Hussain, ‘The Quranic approach to preserving identity’, Q-News (Dec. 2000). Those identifying with the Church of England fell from 40% in 1983 to 27% in 1999: Roger Jowell et al. (eds.), British Social Attitudes (London, NCSR, 2000), table 6.2. ‹‚ The 1989 census test intended to ask respondents whether they were white, black, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, or of any other ethnic group. ‹⁄ Michael Banton, Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 1986; Report of Working Party on Multicultural Education (Leicestershire LEA, 1984), 9. ‹¤ Roy Carr-Hill and Harbajan Chadha-Boreham, ‘Education’, in Ashok Bhat, Roy Carr-Hill and Sushel Ohri (eds.), Britain’s Black Population (Aldershot, 1988), 152.

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The huge and decisive power of mass communications to transmit images made the naming of communities a problem in itself.‹‹ Lord Scarman called this power ‘awesome’ and referred to its impact on ethnic minorities. In 1991 the census reported an ethnic minority population of 3,117,000, or 5.6 per cent of the whole. This is estimated to rise to 4 million, or 7.1 per cent, of the population of Great Britain by 2001, although the figure for England is higher. The major groups in 1991 were ‘Black’ (1.7 per cent of the whole), ‘South Asian’ (2.7 per cent), and Chinese (1.2 per cent). In numbers these people were a minority but they only existed in numbers insofar as they had been grouped according to typologies.‹› It is by no means clear that ‘ethnic minorities’ is always a helpful name. In Leicester, those ‘minorities’ will soon make theirs the first majority Asian city in Europe—and with a British ethnic minority growth of population fifteen times greater than that of the white population (1993–8), it is clear that Leicester will not be the last English city to turn its minorities into majorities.‹fi But numbers are organized by typologies and typologies have a habit of coming to depend on each other. When they do, categories can harden into a shorthand of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, and so on, living off each other for their force of meaning. In the 1960s immigrant communities in England had tried to take control of how they were seen.‹fl This was essentially an exercise in self-learning: at first, black and Asian people had to learn how to be ‘black’ or ‘Asian’.‹‡ But such was the anthropological-colonial background of race-relations assumptions,‹° and such was the post-war culture of cultural pluralism, that ‹‹ ‘. . . a source of considerable conceptual and political muddle’: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Runnymede Trust, 2000). Even within a single argument within a single book, editors and contributors could not agree on a naming policy: S. Sharma et al., DisOrienting Rhythms (London, 1996), 11. ‹› David Coleman and John Salt, Ethnicity in the 1991 Census (London, HMSO, Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys 1996), i. 116–17, Martin Bulmer, ‘The Ethnic Group Question in the 1991 Census of Population’, 36. The Runnymede Trust has been concerned with the power of the popular press to influence typologies: Paul Gordon and David Rosenberg, Daily Racism (RT, 1989) and Robin Richardson (ed.), Islamaphobia (RT, 1997). ‹fi Office for National Statistics, Population Trends, 105 (2001). For the prospect of a British ‘ethnic minority’ national majority: The Times, 21 Sept. 2001. ‹fl Derek Humphry and Gus John, Because They’re Black (Harmondsworth, 1971), 171–2. See also: Winston James, ‘The Making of Black Identities’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism, ii. 230. ‹‡ ‘I never called myself black because no one in the Caribbean did then’: Stuart Hall, Guardian 8 July 2000. ‹° Rich, Race and Empire, 169–72.

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there was always a tendency to see race and culture as interchangeable concepts, representing what one academic saw as ‘systematic totalities’.‹· Others saw ‘whiteness’ in the same way—an ethnicity acting in contradistinction to and (for all sorts of historical and contemporary reasons) in competition with another ethnicity, which was ‘black’ or ‘Asian’.›‚ When dealing with these people, ‘whites’ were ‘white’, but when dealing with ‘whites’, ‘whites’ could be any number of complexions. We enter here the land of inverted commas. A language of multiple cultures, once hopeful of ensuring mutual respect, began to turn into a language of claim and counter-claim. As ‘race’ became synonymous with ‘culture’, ‘multiracial’ became synonymous with ‘multicultural’, and ‘multicultural’ could become the site for any culture, or cultural leadership, or those who act in the name of any culture, white or black or Asian, that saw itself as embattled and didn’t want to change.›⁄ Where there were a number of migrant communities, the tensions were complex.›¤ The simple shorthand of black and white has become inadequate to the task of identifying all the cultures, or indeed all their propensities to be different. Indians from north and south, African Asians and subcontinental Asians, AfricanCaribbeans and Africans, not to mention new-wave immigrants from eastern Europe and Africa, nationalist and religious parties, or the older differences of class and gender—the scope for fragmentation is enormous.

Time for Discipline All of this was happening down on the streets, in not so many words. Telling people apart and holding them in their place was always important to those on the political right, who felt jostled. For them, admitting to a multicultural society was not the same thing as admitting to the multicultural nation. They feared that a multilayered nation could not guarantee security or stability and in these things they regarded liberals as the principal enemy.›‹ They saw a ‹· Quoted in Philip Roys, ‘Social Services’, in Carr-Hill and Chadha-Boreham, Black Population, 217; John Monaghan and Peter Just, Social and Cultural Anthropology (Oxford, 2000), 51. ›‚ Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London, 1997). ›⁄ Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’, 39. ›¤ Edward Royle, Modern Britain. A Social History 1750–1997 (London, 1997), 80. ›‹ Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (London, 1980), 19. And not just on the right: Geoff Mulgan probed an outworn liberalism in Connexity (London, 1997).

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post-war growth in personal liberties without a corresponding growth in social discipline. Pop music was a particular target. As hippies dropped out and punks sucked in, and pop fashion strode along a catwalk of transient and contradictory styles—from Reggae and Rap to ‘Oi’, and from black leather to pins and studs and feminism—in conservative eyes it was difficult to see a future for a society which could not take a coherent or a self-restraining view of itself, as indeed it was difficult to see a future for conservatism in a society of incommensurables.›› Where was the sense of duty? Where was the discipline? Where was the core tradition? Whereas liberals had welcomed the expansion of personal freedoms, right conservatives saw only nihilism and self indulgence (Marxists—‘bourgeois individualism’ and ‘oblique repression’). Had not the ancients warned as much? Edmund Burke, speaking on the eve of the French Revolution in 1790, had warned that once the genie of rights was out of the bottle, then the authority of the state was forever ‘at issue’. Lord Eldon, speaking in the midst of the Reform Bill crisis of 1831, had made it clear that the constitution should continue to be subjected to tests, tests that would guarantee security. One hundred and forty years later, with the pouring forth of aggressive and conflicting claims on the state, the view looked bleak. Paul Johnson saw only impotence and humiliation. Nevil Johnson saw a ‘moral vacuum’. Keith Middlemas saw ‘a recalcitrant, demanding public’.›fi The Salisbury Review declared for a new ‘rhetoric of order’, while senior civil servants worried about their capacity to govern the ungovernable.›fl During the 1970s Conservative intellectuals privately discussed what they saw as the breakdown of authority, and surprisingly perhaps, they did so in Marxian-Gramscian terms. ‘Class struggle’ and ‘hegemonic blocs’ became their words too. They decided that ‘workerism’ had gone too far. War was secretly declared. As The Times confessed during the miners’ strike of 1984, ‘there is a war on. There has always been such a war for the hearts and minds of the British people, at least since 1969.’›‡ It ›› Iain Chambers, Urban Rhythms (Basingstoke, 1985), 198–201; Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, 54. ›fi Johnson, English People, 5; Nevil Johnson, In Search of the Constitution (Oxford, 1977), 17–19; Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. 2, Threats to the Postwar Settlement, Britain 1961–74 (Basingstoke, 1990), 11, 10; It is worth comparing these anxieties with Sir Ivor Jennings’s relaxed view of national harmony in 1966: Constitution, 8. ›fl Observer, 16 Mar. 1986; Salisbury Review, 1 (Autumn 1982), 38. ›‡ The Times, 20 June 1984. If there was a war, Peregrine Worsthorne must have been a brigadier at least: ‘Punks make me sick [and] Guardian women are another source of intense disgust’: Sunday Telegraph, 19 Oct. 1986.

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was time for a bit of discipline, and although Mrs Thatcher did not seek to discipline all who stood between her and her office, she did seek to clear the way of any opposition. She attacked the old corporate establishment, in broadcasting, banking, law, Whitehall, and the Conservative Party, and she attacked the arm’s-length principle for the humbler institutions, in local government, the church, the arts, the schools and universities.›° Those outside her patronage, particularly those of independent resource, fared worst of all. Ian MacGregor, chairman of the Coal Board, was appointed to clear an obstruction called the National Union of Mineworkers. After warm-up encounters with other trade unions at British Leyland and British Steel, in 1984 he was ready to break the most dignified and powerful association of the British working class. Not since 1926 had so much depended on a labour dispute. ‘Association’, whether of workers or capitalists, was not something Mr MacGregor admired, but he was paid to bust the workers. Nor did he admire ‘administration’—in his opinion a cosy arrangement for the benefit of civil servants and politicians. MacGregor believed trade-union delegates and nationalized industry administrators were dual conspirators, and had been since the 1940s.›· What the chairman wanted in ‘the coal business’, as he put it, was what the prime minister wanted in the constitution: a clear space between him and his people, with no intermediaries, and all acting as private persons with high levels of mobility doing what they were told. Against him stood a very different tradition. When it came to community and family, the miners did not see themselves as mobile—not by choice, at any rate. And when it came to the coal business, they did not see themselves as private persons. How could they? They depended on each other in extreme conditions. The market injunction ‘freedom to choose’ was something you might do in a supermarket; otherwise, a miner’s life wasn’t really like that. Mutuality was inscribed in their rule-book. The Coal Board knew that the only way to destroy male comradeship and its female equivalent, ‘community’, apart from penury, was to reduce a union of mineworkers into a dis-union of private persons. The Coal Board’s area directors (‘field commanders’, according to MacGregor) worked with pit managers to locate every striker and his family. Maps were unfurled, households were identified, pins were ›° Donald Shell, ‘The British Constitution in 1988’, Parliamentary Affairs, 42 (1989), 287–301; Ian Gilmour, Dancing With Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (London, 1992), ch. viii. ›· Ian MacGregor, The Enemy Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike, 1984–85 (Glasgow, 1987), 144, 17, 68.

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arrayed: orange where there was a chance of breaking rank, green where there was a known wish to break rank, blue where rank had already been broken. Families were written to, cajoled, bribed, visited, counselled about their freedom to choose. The NUM had been one of the architects of the post-war settlement. The Thatcher government’s final wrecking of that settlement, could have been criticized as detrimental to the whole country. The union might have spoken in regional dialects, but it could also have made its voice national. Images of labour, industry, self-help, and community values—these were all still deeply embedded in how the British saw themselves. The union could have widened its case, but in the event, the case only narrowed. At its emotional core, in the pit villages, the union was proud and their president positioned himself at that core, refusing to stand apart. It was difficult to see where else he might have stood. Moreover, when it came to the price of Yorkshire coal against Nottinghamshire coal, or Australian or Polish coal, the world proletarian mission was nowhere to be seen. The miners’ strike of 1984–5 was the last great battle of the Industrial Revolution. When it stopped the idea of the forward march of ‘Labour’ stopped with it.

Break-Up of Britain? In 1979 and not for the first time, The Times despaired of Irishmen ever being able to behave like Englishmen: ‘the difference so stubbornly insisted upon in Ulster concerns the most fundamental of all political issues: allegiance, national identity, the legitimacy of the State, matters which Englishmen had settled for themselves by the end of the seventeenth century.’fi‚ Although the editorial saw the problem of settlement from an English side only, The Times was right, these were indeed fundamental issues. Northern Irish unsettlement, like Irish un-settlement before it, undermined the legitimacy of the British state.fi⁄ As long as it could tolerate its borders to be insecure and its monopoly of violence to be challenged, that state was less than whole— unless, of course, the place where these things happened was cut off, in the mind at any rate, from the whole. fi‚ The Times, 21 Nov. 1979. fi⁄ Richard Rose, ‘Is the UK a State?’, in P. Madgwick and R. Rose, The Territorial Dimension in UK Politics (London, 1982), 106–209.

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The Northern Ireland that was brought into being in 1920 had two communities, one a broadly Catholic minority, the other a broadly Protestant majority, and two poles of national identity, one in Dublin and one in London. As we have seen, the English view of Union allowed for national identities so long as they didn’t interfere in politics. But this was not the view from Stormont, seat of Protestant Unionist government. Right from the start, Catholics were shown whose state it was. Northern Ireland could not have existed without partition, and partition was the work of Britain and Irish republican representatives as agreed in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, and ratified by the Dail in Dublin one month later. Coming together in a military emergency to make agreement, the British and Irish states then withdrew in confusion to stand apart. In 1937, in articles 2 and 3 of its new constitution, and in spite of what had been agreed in 1921, the Irish state laid claim to the whole of Ireland.fi¤ The British, on the other hand, stayed on in the north. The violence returned in 1968–9. At the opposite extremes were a few hundred hard-line Unionist families and a few hundred hard Nationalist families.fi‹ These were among the most committed working-class cadres in Europe.fi› Each side celebrated a religious-political tradition going back to at least the seventeenth century, and both multiplied their kinship networks as they continued to conspire and be conspired against. For the Unionists, the cry was ‘No Surrender’. The Nationalist response was also: ar na ballai.fifi Away from the hard men, and moving more into the middle, identities were more malleable. Those nearest the middle saw the need for a new settlement and political devolution, and in the end they turned out to be the majority. Those nearer the extremes leaned on their own side in order to squeeze the other—the ‘Troops Out’ campaigners in the Labour Party, the diehards in the Unionist camp, the diehards in the Republican. In 1981, with the election of the hunger-striker Bobby Sands to parliament as MP for Fermanagh South, Sinn Fein learned that it could build a successful political fi¤ For successive acts of ‘self definition against Britain’, but covert mutual help as well: R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972 (London, 1989), 516, 566, and Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies (Oxford, 1999). fi‹ K. Toolis, Rebel Hearts (London, 1995); S. Bruce, The Red Hand (Oxford, 1992). fi› The IRA were more capable and political: Tim Pat Coogan, The Troubles (London, 1995), 82. fifi The IRA abstained from (partitioned) politics until 1986. When the Provisional IRA was formed in December 1969 Sean MacStiofan’s first move was to go and get the authority of Tom Maguire, last surviving Republican member of the non-partitioned Dail Eirann: Patrick Bishop and Eamon Mallie, The Provisional IRA (London, 1989), 138.

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machine. Lastly, there was the side that believed that the British army could do the job and seal the Union, with or without agreement. Across all positions, except the last, the language of democracy was applied to widen one group’s options, usually at another group’s expense. So much for the sides; what about the place? Northern Ireland was a special case, but less and less it was a place apart. The IRA had seen to that. British troops went in in August 1968 in order to protect Catholic civilrights protestors, but once in they were quickly drawn into a shooting war with the IRA and a public-order war with everyone else. Between the introduction of internment in August 1971 and the suspension of Stormont in March 1972 the situation turned critical and remained so until the end of the century. Twenty-five years of low-intensity warfare added to the centralization and secrecy of the British state.fifl Judges, police officers, and soldiers did not always act justly, and sometimes they acted unlawfully when dealing with Irish people who were and who were not terrorists.fi‡ With direct rule from London and a system of jurisdiction and special powers different from those elsewhere in Britain, Northern Ireland became what Ireland always had been—a parliamentary colony. From its foundation in 1922, the Royal Ulster Constabulary was different from other forces in the British Isles.fi° Union, particularly in the form of the Act of Union 1801, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the Constabulary Act (Northern Ireland) 1922, the Civil Authorities, Special Powers, Acts (Northern Ireland) 1922–3, and the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973, required a security apparatus that befited a colony. The IRA expected nothing less, and fought what they saw as a war of colonial liberation. Unionists resented it, but couldn’t think their way out of it because for most of the time the security apparatus was their apparatus. At the diplomatic level, Dublin distrusted London, Belfast distrusted Dublin and London, and An Phoblact-Republican News distrusted them all. Down old Ulster plantation way, where people were blown to bits, it seemed not so much forward march halted as forward march never begun. fifl Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London, 1987), 289. For the public’s loss of confidence in the legal system: S. C. Greer, Supergrasses (Oxford, 1995), 208–12. fi‡ David Bonner, ‘UK Response to Terrorism’, in F. Reinares, European Democracies Facing Terrorism (Dartmouth, 2001), 40–8. fi° Clive Walker, ‘Police and Community in Northern Ireland’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 41 (Summer 1990), 106. On IRA recognition of everyone else’s illegality but its own: O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, p. 37.

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Nationality? The historic view of British nationality was that it involved some sort of personal bonding between subject and monarch. This bonding happened either ‘naturally’ or ius soli, that is, by being born in the monarch’s dominions, whether at home or abroad. Or for those in foreign countries, it could be declared to have happened by oath of allegiance in a process of legal naturalization. Passports for nationals were issued only from 1858. It was not until 1870 that the possibility that persons might wish to renounce their nationality was formally recognized.fi· For all British subjects, including those of Ireland and the colonies, the difference between being ‘nationals’ and being ‘citizens’ was blurred. Anyway, the question rarely arose. Largescale immigration followed the Famine from the late 1840s, but there had always been Irish settlement in Britain and there could be no doubt about their right to do so. Then, in the twentieth century, large-scale immigration from a troubled and shifting world shocked the nationality issue into life.fl‚ Jews came at the turn of the century, as aliens, but although black and Asian immigrants came from the 1940s, as British subjects, there was no constitutional place for them.fl⁄ The law of the constitution offered no definition of nationality (the concept of ‘British national’ was unknown) and very little sense of nation, even for the indigenous British. At the beginning, the call was to assimilate or go. If colonial or ex-colonial people wanted to live in England, said Mr Hogg in 1947, ‘Full absorption is the condition of entry’.fl¤ The 1948 fi· Home Office, History of Passports (1989). fl‚ The 1906 Aliens Act was passed to deter destitute Jewish immigrants. Between 1836 and 1906 entry and naturalization had been easy. Two further Aliens Acts were passed in 1919 and 1920 giving the secretary of state great powers, powers not generously used in the case of Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s: Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–48 (Cambridge, 2000). None of these Alien Acts applied to Empire or Commonwealth subjects, and 1962 was the first instance of general restrictions on their entry: Vaughan Bevan, The Development of British Immigration Law (London, 1986), 68, 58, 72–3, 74–5, 79. Those born in the Irish Republic were not subjects but received the benefits regardless. About 1 million settled in Britain between 1945 and 1961: K. Paul, ‘Black Britons’, in Weight and Beach, Right to Belong, 229. fl⁄ The first census information stems from 1861, but numbers remain difficult to compute and are often contradictory between books. Sponza and Holmes warn against assuming too much about popular perceptions of immigrants: Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Leicester, 1988), 119; Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society 1871–1971 (Basingstoke, 1988), 148. For an overview: James Walvin, Passage to Britain: Immigration in British History and Politics (Harmondsworth, 1984). fl¤ Hogg, Conservatism, 299–300.

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Nationality Act tried to render those who had formerly lived in the Empire, on settlement, full citizens of Britain. ‘British subject’ and ‘Commonwealth citizen’ became interchangeable categories, even though citizenship remained undefined. After a year’s residence, British nationality could be claimed. This assumption of absorption, and interchangeability, came from the days when the British state could still think that what had been decided in parliament could be wrung from the world. However, living in a country requires more than legal entitlement to do so. Black and Asian immigration was opposed by most of the indigenous white nation.fl‹ Labour politicians in particular found themselves at odds with their constituencies, and were forced to limit what they saw as the damage.fl› From a 1948 high point in its belief that it could order and absorb anyone or anything, at least at home, the British state during the 1960s shuffled towards controlled entry on the grounds that it was conducive to assimilation.flfi The first move came in 1962 with entry quotas and vouchers. The second came in 1968, with more quotas and the test of ancestral links. Third, in 1971, came ‘patriality’ and ‘nonpatriality’. Fourth, in 1981, came the abandonment of the ius soli concept with moves towards blood-right or ius sanguinis—as well as obfuscation and the need to ‘resort to professional assistance for understanding’ the law.flfl While it is true that over the period from the 1950s to the 1990s the vocabulary changed—from’ absorption’ to ‘assimilation’ to ‘adaptation’ to ‘integration’ and all the rest—the words meant just what the home secretary wanted them to mean. It is true that multiculturalism came as an attempt to move away from the language of assimilation, but that particular device, as we have seen, contained inherent confusions of its own. The confusion over fl‹ The Institute of Race Relations tried to offer reassurance. What it sought to play down indicates the major areas of prejudice and fear. These include, the rate of ‘coloured’ immigration, the birth rate, employment opportunities, social-security fraud, the use of languages in schools, and disease: IRR, Colour and Immigration in the United Kingdom (London 1968). In a 1968 Gallup poll, 75% of those interviewed said they agreed with Enoch Powell’s recent speech against immigration: Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out, 87–8. fl› Richard Crossman in 1972, quoted in Vaughan Bevan, Immigration Law, 81. flfi There was doubt about absorption. A memo of July 1950 from the Ministry of Labour, the Colonial Office, the Home Office, and the Ministry of Transport advised against any attempt at physical segregation, which was accepted by a cabinet committee on 24 July: Rich, Race and Empire, 163–8. flfl Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1968), Immigration Act (1971), British Nationality Act (1981). On obfuscation in the 1981 Act: Bevan, Immigration Law, 137.

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who people were when they arrived, and who they should try to become once disembarked was made worse, first by the high anxiety attendant on seeing these issues simply as ‘race’ issues; second, by a mad jumble of various and overlapping entry and settlement rights, as conferred by British, European, Anglo-Irish, and international law—rights by marriage, asylum, labour permits, special cases, visas, and the like—which denied the possibility of any consistent immigration policy; and third, by the degradation of five of the six types of citizenship under the 1981 Act which, though called a British Nationality Act, still refused to define what a ‘British national’ was.fl‡ It might be supposed that assimilation was and is entirely reasonable. It might be said that all states should require a central ethnie and the expectation of assimilation of newcomers into it. However, before asking assimilation ‘of whom?’ it is perhaps worth asking assimilation ‘into what’? fl‡ In the British way of reception nothing is offered to immigrants by way of identity and nothing is expected by way of citizenship. When the Home Office floated the idea that a working knowledge of English might be necessary for those applying for citizenship, the chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants called it ‘linguistic colonialism’: Guardian, 18 Aug. 2001. Types of citizenship under the 1981 Act are, in order of importance: British Citizenship, British Dependent Territories Citizenship, British Overseas Citizenship, British National (Overseas) Person, British Subject without Citizenship, and British Protected Person. Only the first, granting citizenship by birth (if parents are citizens, or settled at time of birth, or registered after ten years’ residence) or by patriality, means much. The home secretary has sweeping powers.

10 Imagined Nation

Our life in India, our very work more or less rests on illusion. I had the illusion, wherever I was, that I was infallible and invulnerable in my dealings with Indians. How else could I have dealt with angry mobs, with cholera-stricken masses, and with processions of religious fanatics? It was not conceit, Heaven knows: it was not the prestige of the British Raj, but it was the illusion which is in the very air of India. They expressed something of the idea when they called us the ‘Heaven born’ and the idea is really make believe—mutual make believe. (Walter Lawrence, The India We Served, 1929)

If the nation is really an imagined nation, then neither seas nor continents can get in its way. The Empire brought England into a relationship with much of the world, and that world was influential on how England saw itself. There was more to the identity of England, therefore, than England. The English had the major say in who and what constituted their dominion, but that in turn had major consequences for who and what they thought they were. Being English involved intercourse with the world. Hints to Travellers even advised it.⁄

Icons Some of the most English of English icons were not pure-born. Heroes, for instance, were often caught in flagrante with the cultures of other peoples. ⁄ Nison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 66.

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The Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War was famous as a display of English heroism, but they were heroes, for the most part, dressed as Polish or Hungarian light cavalrymen. In the South African War, BadenPowell found his heroism with and against the Boer, just as Jan Christian Smuts found his with and against the British. Smuts commanded Boer forces in Cape Colony, but ended up with the Order of Merit (1947) and the freedom of a dozen British towns. Baden-Powell learned how to scout in South Africa and brought his reputation home to Brownsea Island, site of the first Boy Scout camp in Poole Harbour in 1907. T. E. Lawrence found his heroism with and against Arabs. He made a point of declaring just how close he had been to his boys; too close, in fact. Lawrence turned Bedouin nomadic movement into military strategy and based his reputation in arms on that. In the Hejaz desert he had used Arab hit-and-run tactics against the Turks; in Palestine another English hero, Orde Wingate, would use these tactics against the Arabs. Across the world, Zouave and Zulu, Dervish and Gurkha, Sikh and Bedouin, Boer and Cossack were translated into the British military imagination. The Royal Navy mustered its classic traditions in the Caribbean, not the North Sea.¤ In the Caribbean, too, the Englishness of another icon can be reimagined. This region, no less than Lancashire or Birmingham, can be seen as a heartland of the Industrial Revolution, with its sugar and fruit and bauxite and—in the words of one economic historian—with its ‘backward linkages, forward linkages and final demand linkages’. Caribbean plantations, no less than Lancashire mills were experimental stations in the disciplining of labour, while Caribbean independence movements, no less than English radical ones, emerged out of strong trade unions.‹ Resistance to the Industrial Revolution, whether it be in the struggles of Durham pitmen or Leeds factory operatives, was framed with the sugar plantation in mind, in terms of ‘whip-hands’ and ‘slavery’, just as the fight against slavery, in the campaigns of the Evangelicals, was framed with the freeborn Englishman in ¤ T. S. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress (Oxford, 1999), 1–2; Allen Warren, ‘Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Great Britain, 1900–1920’, English Historical Review (Apr. 1986), 385; T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London, 1935), 189; B. Liddell Hart, T. E. Lawrence (London, 1934), 203, 207. See Angus Calder’s introduction to Seven Pillars (Ware, 1997 edn.), xviii. On the Royal Naval traditions, Burns, British West Indies, 6. ‹ Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies 1623–1775 (Baltimore, 1973), 16.

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mind: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’› It was all down to ways of seeing. Seen objectively, the British Americas were black settlements, and being ‘African’ was learned there, not in Africa. Seen objectively, India, not London, was the training-ground for the modern state and the modern economy. Both its army and civil service were recruited more on merit rather than patronage. The Army of India was a hardened fighting force long before the army back home, and it was its campaigning on the Punjab–Waziristan frontier that decided upon khaki as the colour of the British Army. ‘Khaki’ is Urdu for ‘dusty’. In India the civil service built institutions that did not fail. It was in consideration of the ‘East India Trade’ that some of the first lessons of market competition were taught. In a humorous vein, it could be said that it was in Bengal, not London, that the British brought their own constitution to rational perfection: despotism under the law. In the Punjab, Dalhousie created ‘a model, modern state’. When India wanted its own constitution, among other examples, it learned from the gaps in English jurisprudence. When the English wanted their Commonwealth to carry on, it was India’s decision to join which made this possible (though London continued to pay the bills).fi From sweet tooth to sweet summer scents, the Empire has been around for a long time. Nothing could be more suburban than rhododendrons, but Kew used Cornwall to develop the Himalayan varieties.fl Nothing could be nicer than a cup of tea, but only the water and milk were English. As for the sugar, there were sugar interests, West Indian sugar interests, and Liverpool West Indian sugar interests.‡ But these are just instances.° The invasion of the English mind was far › A Voice from the Coal Mines (South Shields, 1825), 34; Richard Oastler, Eight Letters to the Duke of Wellington (London, 1835), 80. On the making of English identities through Jamaican experiences, 1830–65, see: Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class, chs. 9, 10 and Langford, Englishness Identified, 30–1. Rhetoric apart, plantation labour was not at all like the labour of English ‘factory slaves’: B. C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World 1492–1992 (Cambridge, 1992), 181. fi Philip D. Morgan, ‘The Black Experience in the British Empire 1680–1810’, in, Marshall, OHBE ii. 477. On the Indianization of British military uniforms: Abler, Hinterland Warriors, ch. 7. On India and the modern state: Bayly, Indian Society,1, 84; Rajat Kanta Ray, ‘Indian Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy 1765–1818’, in, Marshall, OHBE ii. 525. On markets: Considerations on the East India Trade; Wherein all the Objections to the Trade . . . Are Fully Answer’d (London, 1701). On the constitution: K. L. Grover, Constitution Versus Parliament (Allahabad, 1976) 14–42. On the Commonwealth: Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. p. xi. fl Samuel, Island Stories, 126. ‡ Joshua Civin, ‘Constructing Imperial Identity Through Liverpool Petition Struggles’, conference paper, UCL, March 2001. ° Said’s book is full of what he calls ‘contrapuntal readings’: Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993).

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more extensive than that. If we want to answer ‘assimilation into what?’, a closer survey is required.

Class, Gender, Place Consider ‘class’, called the English disease. The perception of class was more cosmopolitan than might at first be thought. There had been race-poverty theories of both the English urban poor and the Irish rural poor from at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Booth’s ‘residuum’ and Marx’s ‘lumpen’ classes, like the colonized peoples, both shared an incorrigible backwardness in the face of progress. When, in the 1920s, George Orwell had to sit and suffer the opinions of ‘the club’ in Burma, he would know later (if he didn’t know it then) that these opinions were as ignorant of the working-class English as they were of the peasant Burmese. No white man can sit on his heels like an Oriental, it was declared, yet on their heels was an ‘attitude, incidentally, in which coal miners sit when they eat their dinners in the pit.’· If not squatting, then how about fighting? By the 1980s a perception of criminality, once associated with Teddy Boys (‘pallid things’, according to The Times in 1958), had come to be associated with young blacks.⁄‚ Violence had changed its colour, but not its class. And who were the Teds? ‘Cockneys’ some of them, and in the imagined nation the typical Cockney character was a (sort of proletarian) Londoner mixed with a (sort of Jewish) small-time entrepreneur. Out of a common labour market and the rich pickings of an extravagant city, one representation translated into the other.⁄⁄ ‘Doing the business’ with an eye on the deal, the ironic yet garrulous Cockney was as Jewish as he was English, and as English as the Blackburn East African businessman was Asian. Which was, not entirely. In Blackburn in the 1980s, rich Asians deployed snobbish tactics on whites and Gujarati settlers alike: ‘usurpationary closure’ on whites, ‘exclusionary closure’ on poor Asians.⁄¤ · Time and Tide, 30 Mar. 1940, quoted in Crick, George Orwell, 163. ⁄‚ 1976 ‘saw the definition of blacks as a low crime group turned around 180 degrees’: Gilroy, Ain’t No Black, 92. ⁄⁄ On the common labour market: David Feldman, ‘Jewish Immigrants and the English Working Class 1880–1914’, lecture at University of Leicester, 20 Jan. 1989. ⁄¤ Frank Parkin, in Vaughan Robinson, Transients, Settlers, and Refugees: Asians in Britain (Oxford, 1986), 99–102, 195, 201.

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Paki-bashing was not confined to England; Pakistan was quite good at it too. The ruling class there believed that their feckless émigré poor had found in England the racism they so richly deserved, while in England, the east–west circuit was made complete when white workers complained about Asians in the same terms that middle-class people used to complain about them.⁄‹ After class, consider gender. During the 1960s Pete Townsend of ‘The Who’ rock band draped the (multinational) Union Jack around his shoulders to identify ‘Mod’ boys as a peculiarly English phenomenon, but their music was black-inspired (as their suits and scooters were Italian). The ‘Skins’ of the 1970s were white to their bootstraps, but found strength through ‘Oi’, a sound learned from the ‘sparse structures’ of Reggae chords.⁄› Palest of all, ‘Punks’ of both sexes reacted to Caribbean struggles with all the spontaneous dispossessed energy of white Rastafarians (or so the sociologists reckoned).⁄fi By the 1990s, some part of being young and being English was about being black. In the imagined Empire, genders could change. To be ‘Indian’ was to be gendered, but which gender? The Raj depicted some Indians as more masculine than others. Muslims, Marathas, Rajputs, and Sikhs, for example, were worthy of respect and officially designated as martial races. In the Punjab, the standard representation was Muslims for policemen, Hindus for civil servants, and Sikhs for soldiers. The Maharajah Ranjit Singh had fought his wars against the British (1845–6, 1848–9) with a professional army, and Sikh loyalty to the British after those wars, and during the Mutiny, brought its rewards, including a privileged quota within the Army of India. To the British, all Sikhs were warriors now. Bengali elites, by contrast, fostered their martial tradition out of antipathies to a Raj which employed them, it was true, but which, in the way it employed them, had also come to regard them as effete (too studious, too sedentary). In their take-up of physical training, Bengali elites were in fact striving to change the gender of their own self-estimation.⁄fl In certain ways—public school ways, perhaps—their physical fitness brought British approval. In other ways— ⁄‹ Hanif Kureishi, New Statesman and Society, 21 July 1989. ⁄› Chambers, Urban Rhythms, 76, 151, 162. ⁄fi David Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes, 1985), 39. ⁄fl Kuushwant Singh, History of the Sikhs, vol. 2, 1839–1914 (Oxford, 1987), 111–12. John Rosselli, ‘The Self-image of Effeteness’, Past and Present, 86 (Feb. 1980), 121–6. On British views of caste, despotism, and dreamy, feminine mentalities: Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1994).

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nationalist ways—the British could only disapprove. The British themselves saw India as androgynous, and adjusted their own tone to fit the sort of Indians they thought they were dealing with. Manliness therefore was defined by the job in hand. After the Mutiny the job changed. Containment was the prime consideration now and, no matter how many human adjustments were necessary at the lower administrative levels, across a certain line Britons had to be masterful and Indians had to be mastered. Out of this basic interrelationship other traits followed: the British were direct as Indians were shadowy—that is, not known personally; the British were trustworthy as Indians were shifty—that is, took orders; the British were hard-working as Indians were lethargic—that is, awaited orders; the British were adult as Indians were childish, that is—not responsible for government; the British were disciplined as India was sensuous—that is, stood the heat and did as she was bid; Britain was scientific as India was classified and surveyed and brought to order—that is, brought to book. The Raj dealt only in essentials; it was too small and India was too vast to allow any other way. When Orwell the Burma policeman took aim to shoot an elephant which had run amuck in the market place, he did so against his will. He hadn’t the time, still less the opportunity, to explain himself to the crowd. He had to deal in essentials as defined from London.⁄‡ ‘East’ was Far, Near, and Middle only as measured from Greenwich. England could be androgynous too, and interactions could equally work the other way. True Englishness also had a feminine self. Matthew Arnold’s view of Jewishness, or ‘Hebraism’ as he put it, for example, was as an active masculine force. Governed by rigid adherence to law, ‘strictness of conscience’, and ‘conduct and obedience’, Arnold thought that Hebraism had found its English translation in Puritanism. This force he contrasted with the altogether finer and somewhat softer force of English ‘Hellenism’, wherein true culture lay.⁄° ‘Six Oxford Men’ saw it differently. For them, Englishness was a masculine innocent in danger of being ‘debauched’ by Disraeli’s Oriental Jewishness—a cruel, feline agent, ‘vulgar through and through’.⁄· ⁄‡ My rehearsal of the East–West dialectic comes out of Edward Said’s pioneering study Orientalism (London, 1985), and it is, of course, an ideal type. For timely criticism of Said’s followers’ ‘disturbingly ahistorical forms’: John M. Mackenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995). ⁄° Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 132, 131, p129–30. ⁄· P. J. MacDonell, Essays in Liberalism, 253.

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Lord Cromer’s Englishness was also manly, but what type of manliness was defined in hot competition with the French for an Oriental Beauty.¤‚ Between Hellenism and Hebraism moved an English world. Performance abroad was often the yardstick for performance at home. When sahib triumphed, he had learned it in the Empire. When sahib failed, he had learned it in the Empire. It was said that the fussiness of the London suburban housewife was the fussiness of the memsahib brought home.¤⁄ In politics, anxieties about the impotency of democracy at Westminster could always find vent in stories about the potency of army and civil service in the colonies. Anxieties about democracy in an independent India found the same expression. Retired majors in both countries were eager to come out and stand up for the myth of colonial potency, a goad and a test and an imaginative counterpoint to parliamentary fumbling in Delhi and London. Celts, too, were measured either against a British imperial project where Anglo-Saxons were down-the-middle reliable, or against a British domestic scene where they were to the English as the wife was to the husband— biddable.¤¤ Hinterlands and frontiers were seen as excitable places. They needed steadying from the centre. In Kipling’s novel Kim, the boy-spy who is Irish metamorphizes many things when on the margins of the Empire— including his gender—but is held steady on the inside by military men who direct his operations from the centre. These men think clearly and logically in the English language (as does Kim when he has to).¤‹ Consider place. England, not just her people, was imagined through imperial eyes. General Booth imagined London as ‘Darkest England’, and recruited his Salvation Army to save it. His East End was as dark as Africa, and the ‘more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy appears’. Publicans were ‘ivory traders’, lack of sanitation was an ‘African swamp’. Very quickly, East London swelled up as a darkened mass, a terra incognita, even though for the Jewish residents of Bethnal Green at least, it was home, and ‘people spoke of Warsaw, Kishinev, Kiev, Kharkov . . . as if they were neighbouring suburbs’.¤› But there were positive ways to imagine ¤‚ Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (1908), quoted in Said, Orientalism, 211–12. ¤⁄ Wurgaft, Imperial Imagination, 85–6, 126. During the 1920s and 1930s writers such as H. V. Morton, J. B. Priestley, and George Orwell commonly identified suburbs with emasculation. ¤¤ Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image, 65. ¤‹ Ben Knights, Writing Masculinities (Basingstoke, 1999), 5, 111. ¤› General Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890), 12–14, 31; F. S. Schwarzbach, ‘’Terra Incognita’’, Prose Studies, 5 May 1982. For Bethnal Green, Emanuel Litvinoff, Journey Through a Small Planet (Harmondsworth, 1979), 25.

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English places too. It was in contrast to a sweltering India that upland Yorkshire seemed healthy, a place to recuperate in, and it was in contrast to an enslaved East that the hills of the North rejoiced.¤fi The Garden City movement advocated fresh, open suburbs in contrast with darkest Whitechapel, and though from garden village Letchworth to garden city Delhi might seem like a long haul, Edward Lutyens’, new Indian capital— proposed in 1911 and inaugurated in 1931—finally made it. Down in Tunbridge Wells, Mrs Cobb painted pictures of the Transvaal through the thin and reedy lights of Kent.¤fl Brighter than Kent but not so brutal as the Transvaal, with its cricket and cool tempers, Barbadian tourist information sounded like Tunbridge in its Sunday best.¤‡ French Martiniquians called Jamaicans ‘Les Anglais’.

Rates of Exchange In the whole of Kipling’s works, the only complete Hindi sentences are to be found in Soldiers Three (1890).¤° Of these eleven sentences ten are imperative, and nine of those are orders. No matter how much one might wish to show the richly interactive nature of the imagined nation, one has to pull back from seeing the rates of exchange as equal. English gentlemen provided the dominant ways of seeing: it was their evaluations that prevailed.¤· Oxford styled itself the ‘Imperial University’, but what little Oxford could know of India was far more than what India could know of Oxford.‹‚ Even when it was not dons but convicts, there was still an imperial pecking order. The Tolpuddle martyr George Loveless arrived in Tasmania to witness the slaughter of Aboriginal peoples, but whatever the degradation of his position, it was not so degraded as theirs.‹⁄ And when, far away from home, the Indian Army Corps fought at Neuve Chappelle in 1916, some of its soldiers imagined that they saw there the terrible Kuru Kshetra from the Mahabharata. This was ¤fi Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911; London, 1950), 25; Church Hymnary, 372, and Halil Inaleik, The Ottoman Empire (London, 1973), 52, 173. ¤fl Richard Cobb, Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (London, 1983), 145. ¤‡ Observer, 31 Jan. 1988. ¤° Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London, 1991), 77. ¤· Terence Ranger, ‘Colonial Africa’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 215–20. ‹‚ Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire (Basingstoke, 1986), 179–81, 302. India’s ‘Oxford’ is more likely to be Cowley. Over a million ‘Hindustan Ambassadors’, replicas of the ‘Morris Oxford’ motor car, have been built since 1957. ‹⁄ George Loveless, The Victims of Whiggery (London, 1838), 31, 11.

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cultural exchange alright, yet it was hardly their fight: they were there for British purposes. Indian dead lay in Flanders Field (in earth forever Pathan?), and Indian wounded were taken to Brighton Pavilion, Indo-Saracenic and specially reserved for sons of the Orient.‹¤ English arbitration prevailed. Like the Colonial Office itself, the Empire was ‘a hierarchy of unequal exchanges’.‹‹ The East India Company ruled a population sixteen times greater and a land mass eighteen times greater than that of Britain. But what was just ‘trade’ to the Company was Inquilab! to native Indian manufactures—‘How can I describe the desolation of Delhi?’ asked the poet Sauda. In the 1860s English trade meant ‘Free Trade’, but in the 1940s it was English cotton manufacturers who were lobbying for protection. Trade meant what Manchester wanted it to mean when Manchester wanted to mean it.‹› Similarly with ‘temperance’—seen as an excellent thing for workers in England, but not for workers in Ceylon where nationalist politicians used an anti-drink platform to criticize the colonial administration.‹fi So with migration. In the post-war years heavy emigration of skilled black people out of the Caribbean and heavy immigration of white tourists into it—transient, yet permanent in their aggregate impact—seriously distorted the economy and society of the islands. High-rise luxury looked down on low-rise poverty. Adverts asked locals to smile for the tourists.‹fl Nowhere was the British state’s power to evaluate and decide more clearly demonstrated than in Palestine. Here, the principal rates of exchange were those of Englishness and Zionism. English perceptions of Arabs and Jews exchanged with Zionist perceptions of the English, but English perceptions dominated. Arab perceptions hardly counted. In 1896 Theodore Herzl’s book Der Judenstaat had called for a ‘land without a people’ for a ‹¤ Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indians in Britain 1700-1947 (London, 1986), 125–34. While the British army could see Indian soldiers as a threat to English women, Indian nationalists could see Muslims as a threat to Hindu women: Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Gender in the British Empire’, Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 387, 391–3. ‹‹ Shula Marks, ‘Southern Africa’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 547. ‘Almost the entire routine of the Colonial Office consisted in the circulation of paper among its officers in strict hierarchical sequence’: Ronald Hyam, ‘Bureaucracy and Trusteeship’, ibid. 259. ‹› Ray, ‘Indian Society’, in Marshall, OHBE ii. 508; W. A. Green and J. P. Deasy, ‘Unifying Themes in the History of British India, 1757–1857, Albion, 17 (Spring 1985), 17; Ian Inkster, ‘The “Manchester School” in Yorkshire’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 23 (July–Sept. 1986), 314; John Singleton, ‘Lancashire’s Last Stand: Declining Employment in the British Cotton Industry, 1950–1970’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 39 (Feb. 1986). ‹fi K. M. De Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (Delhi, 1984), 376. ‹fl Richardson, Caribbean in the Wider World, 111–25, 143.

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‘people without a land’. In 1917 the British foreign secretary A. J. Balfour declared in favour of ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.‹‡ In 1920 this communication formed the basis for a League of Nations British mandate over the territory. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Jewish immigrants were able to buy land from poor Palestinians as well as from absentee Palestinian landlords. They were supported in this by the British mandate remaining within the spirit of the Balfour declaration. By the late 1930s Zionist land-buying was extending into areas more suitable for military than for agricultural purposes.‹° What about the Palestinian Arabs? By what consideration could the British promise Palestinian land to a third party? At the heart of this was British evaluation of other peoples, and its power to draw lines demarcating when a people became a nation and when a nation deserved to have a state. In doing so, the British grossly underestimated the huge Arab majority in Palestine. In their gallery of imagined nations, Arabs were only loosely settled. When they went on to administer Palestine under the mandate, the British did so with a Zionist sympathy reflected in an Arnoldian respect for ‘Hebraism’, especially prevalent among Nonconformist and Low Church colonial officials, which balanced a pro-Arab strain among other, higherclass, colonial officials. And finally, at the crunch, the British distinguished between the ‘true’ Arab, who was a Bedouin, pure bred and a fighter, and the Palestinian Arab who was a fellahin, degenerate and indifferent to his future. Lawrence of Arabia had entered the imagined nation. His Arabs were the real ones.‹· The true Arab movement really existed outside Palestine. The movement led by Prince Faisel . . . was not unlike the Zionist movement. It contained real Arabs who were real men. The Arabs in trans-Jordania were fine people. The west of the Jordan people were not Arabs, but only Arabic-speaking. Zionists should recognize in the Arab movement, originally centred in the Hejaz, but now moving north, a fellow movement with fine ideals which had for its aim the rehabilitation of the Arab nation . . .›‚ ‹‡ Kohn, Nationalism, 75. ‹° Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 35–114. ‹· Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle (London, 1979), 17, 19; Bernard Wasserstein, The British in Palestine (London, 1978), 10–12, 13. Palestinians had obviously changed somewhat since the English had chosen one to be their patron saint: E. C. Williams, ‘Mural Paintings of St George in England’, Journal of British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, 12 (1949). ›‚ Wiliam Ormsby-Gore, cabinet secretariat, to the Zionist Political Committee, Aug. 1918: in Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers 1917–1922 (London, 1972), 33, 32.

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The Balfour Declaration had been penned by Leopold Amery, son of Hungarian Jewish parents, born in India, educated at Harrow and Balliol, a committed Zionist and the Empire’s most ‘indefatiguable champion’.›⁄ In Chaim Weizmann, Zionism found another leader who was charmed by English perceptions of themselves, and in Sir Lewis Namier, Weizmann found a friend who contributed massively to those perceptions. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Namier’s histories were a compelling force in English scholarship. Namier’s England was seen through (Namierowski’s) Zionist eyes. In what he saw as the enviable stability of the eighteenth-century state, in its rule of law and congruity of state and nation, he found hope for his people. In the landed interest he may have found hope for himself.›¤ When in 1930 British Zionists came to fear that British statesmen were losing their sympathy for a Jewish homeland, a deputation visited Malcolm MacDonald, son of the prime minister and future colonial secretary. Not for the first time or for the last, Oxbridge provided the link between state and inner-state: Weizmann and his friends came to see me through Lewis Namier, who had been one of my tutors at Oxford, and I took the matter up with my father. He arranged for a Cabinet committee under Arthur Henderson to review the matter and in the end Webb [the colonial secretary] was persuaded to modify his policy. The Zionists were very grateful. They believed that I was on their side.›‹

Before they were offered Palestine, in 1903 the Zionist Congress had been offered a bit of Uganda. No doubt this was another ‘small niche’ that another people who were not a nation would not begrudge.›› Right up to the formation of the Israeli state in 1947, the myth prevailed that Palestine was not inhabited in the way other territories were inhabited.›fi Of course the English were not alone in seeing the world refracted through their evaluation of themselves, but for those in the imperial cities and the English-language zone they were uniquely able to influence that ›⁄ Louis, Introduction, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 19. ›¤ Linda Colley, ‘The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (Oct. 1986), 359–65. Namier came from a Polish-Jewish family of landowners in Galicia and was disinherited by his father: Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor, 94. ›‹ Bethell, Palestine Triangle, 24; Michael J. Cohen, Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate. The Making of British Policy, 1936–45 (London, 1978), 187. ›› In 1920 Balfour said that he hoped the Arabs would ‘not grudge that small niche’ of Palestine: Bethell, Palestine Triangle, 19. ›fi Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist–Arab Conflict 1881–1999 (London, 2000).

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world. Evelyn Waugh found in Kenya a debate between what he characterized as ‘Montessori-School’ civil servants and ‘feudal’ farmers.›fl James Mill’s History of British India (1817) can be read as a critique of both British society and Indian society. British scholarship revitalized Indian faiths by raising and standardizing the great religious texts, and in so doing provided the ‘foundation for the intellectual renewal of an amorphous contemporary Hinduism’ and a way of seeing Muslims as a distinctively different people. The British took information-gathering very seriously and were astute enough to recognize that they ruled first and last by the quality of their intelligence; so many ‘Arabists’, ‘Africanists’, ‘Orientalists’, and ‘Indianists’ were on the payroll. British histories of Moghul India provided the history, and the apologia for their own presence there.›‡ The Moghul ruler Akbar the Great (1556–1605) was portrayed as a beneficent ‘Viceroy’, his greatness ‘manifest in his system of civil administration’.›° Raj ceremonial took Moghul overlordship and translated it into a rich Victorian Gothic designed by a minor Pre-Raphaelite.›· And true feudalism needed peasants. Arabs were not true peasants, but Indians might be and they would surely flourish in a land-ownership scheme of the sort implemented for the true Irish in the western counties.fi‚

Acts of Recognition What had to be assimilated was never quite clear. When colonial officers returned home on leave, the England they returned to and the England they had lived-out, so to speak, abroad, never quite got on. When immigrants came to settle, it was a similar story. The England they had been taught was ›fl Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (London, 1960), 45. ›‡ Green and Deasy, ‘Unifying Themes’, 26–7; J. S. Grewal, Muslim Rule in India (Calcutta, 1970), 1, 167, 171; Susan Bayly, ‘Evolution of Colonial Cultures’, in Porter, OHBE ii. 462–5. On intelligence systems: C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information (Cambridge, 1997). ›° Romesh C. Dutt, The Civilization of India (London, 1901), 110. The proportion of space given to Akbar in V. A. Smith’s Oxford History of India (1919), book vi, ‘is quite remarkable’: Grewal, Muslim Rule, 186. ›· Cohn, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 199. The designer was Lockridge Kipling, Director of Lahore School of Art, and father of Rudyard. fi‚ And advocated for the true English in the eastern ones: H. Rider Haggard, A Farmer’s Year (1898–9; London, 1987), 338–9. The Irish land-purchase Acts sought to stabilize Irish peasant society by state-aided purchase. The 1901 Punjab Alienation of Land Act debarred moneylenders from buying land that was rapidly increasing in value.

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something of a stranger to the England they found. And if what had to be assimilated was never quite clear, nor was it entirely ‘English’. Some part of it had been assimilated already. All of these identities involved acts of recognition. If identities are not fixed and absolute, neither are they just anything people want them to be.fi⁄ People can be many things in many different circumstances, but at some point they have to decide who they are in sum. In making that decision, and accepting the making of an identity that goes with it, they are helped by three forces. First, the state, which has a strong interest in identifying persons as well as the institutional stamina to insist upon its categories of identity over very long periods of time. Second, political processes, which force choices upon people, even though those who are forced to choose, and in so doing simplify their identity, do not always consider themselves to be in command of all the cultural information they might require at the time of choosing.fi¤ (Are they ever?) Third, people’s own practical need for recognition, and all the collective influence and pleasure that goes with that. Not that recognition was always possible. What of the Indian who wanted to be English but, in trying to be so, was despised for not being properly English or properly Indian? What of the Dutch-descended Afrikan, who did not want to be British but was despised for that as well? If the Jewish immigrant of the 1880s (said to be a man of rational economic calculation) was despised for his industry, how was it that the Caribbean immigrant of the 1950s (said to be a man of no calculation) was equally despised for his lack of it?fi‹ How could these people win? In Ceylon, D. S. Senanayake, an admirer of English constitutional order, led his country’s independence in 1947 without strife or bloodshed, but was still criticized by his own people as not a true nationalist. As the Ceylon Morning Leader said in 1908, having learnt its English constitutional lessons well: ‘Even in England the people did not earn their enviable privileges by sitting quiet.’fi› And what of the black African elites, who were hardly offered the opportunity to be either English in Africa or African in England?fifi Some of ‘our Africans’ coped better than fi⁄ Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London, 2000), 6. fi¤ ‘Our problem has been that Britain has never understood itself’: Report of Commission on Multi Ethnic Britain, www. fi‹ ‘Sir, I know it all—all! Norman Conquest, Magna Charta, Runnymeade, Reformation, Tudors, Stuarts, Mr Milton and Mr Burke’: Kipling, Pagett MP, quoted in Wurgaft, Imperial Imagination, 141. The non-economic West Indian starts with Smith: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 488–9. fi› De Silva, Sri Lanka, 379. fifi Basil Davidson, Africa in Modern History (London, 1978), 21, 96.

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others, apparently. Kwame Nkrumah learned the importance of party from British communists and English conservatives alike. He turned the bourgeois United Gold Coast Convention into a disciplined and effective Convention People’s Party. Through conservatives like Reginald Saloway, the governor Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, and Arthur Creech Jones, secretary of state for the colonies, he swallowed the lessons which these men had learned from Namier on the need to remove the Crown’s influence by filling the space it leaves with political parties.fifl Idi Amin, on the other hand, was schooled in the traditions of tribe and regiment. For him, these were most excellent British inventions. Amin willingly provided the parody of British sergeant-major and African chieftain rolled into one. President Kaunda found solace in Arthur Mee’s Book for Boys.fi‡ Gandhi soon realized the impossibility of an independent India while trying to assimilate and balance on the basis of such unequal rates of exchange.fi° He said that ‘no contribution made to a conqueror can be truly described as voluntary’, and threw off, therefore, his English liberalism, the lounge suit, the honours, the language in order to reach down deep into the life of the Indian peasantry. In this regard Gandhi was a great Ruskinian, even though John Ruskin had been an imperialist. Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1860) declared that the life of the peasant and the craftsman was ‘the life worth living’, and Gandhi marked it well, later translating the book into Gujarati. He then went on to cultivate links between the peasantry and the lawyers, the landlords, and the urban political networks. He raised Bharat Mata, ‘Mother India’, up from its Sanskrit, Vedic, and Aryan cultures, and he probed the Raj’s authority through satyagraha, ‘holding fast to the truth’: walk, don’t march; sit, don’t stand; pray, don’t obey. He told the British to withdraw because, deep down, he knew enough about them to know that they knew it was their duty. When he heard the call for full assimilation, Gandhi, the barrister of Lincoln’s Inn, knew a leading question when he heard one.fi· fifl J. D. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa (London, 1988), 118–20. fi‡ Ranger, ‘Colonial Africa’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 248, 225–7. fi° Taya Zinkin, India (London, 1965), 62. Pandit Nehru, Gandhi’s disciple, said in 1922 that he had been ‘as much prejudiced in favour of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be’ (ibid. 89). fi· The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, called together by Allan Octavian Hume—formerly of the Bengal Civil Service, CB for services during the Mutiny, and co-author of standard work on Indian game birds. Hume had been inspired by the pressure-group politics of the Manchester-based Anti Corn-Law League and the nationalist model of the Irish Home Rule

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In their perceptions of class, gender, and place, and in their long history of representing themselves with and against others, it was clear that some part of how the English imagined themselves was, in a way, black and Arab and Jewish and Asian. Not that any of this can be measured in parts. The English, and those who came to settle, were who they were, and where they were, only by the patterns and accidents of history. That was all any of them could claim. History was (and is) the first act of recognition. movement: Jim Masselos, Nationalism on the Indian Subcontinent (Melbourne, 1972), 63–5. Indian biographies of Gandhi tend to the hagiographical, e.g. J. S. Sharma, The National Biographical Dictionary of India (New Delhi, 1972), 90. For Gandhi’s tactics against the British and his love of Ruskin: Mahatma Gandhi, My Appeal to the British (New York, 1942), 17, 55; M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography (1927; Ahmedabad, 1976), 224, 239.

11 Reconstituting the Nation

This chapter picks up identities where they left off in and around 1945 (Chapters 4 to 8), and traces their relationship with state and nation up to the present. Current and future possibilities are reviewed as options.

Gentlemanly Options By the 1950s, identification of the state with the landed gentleman had virtually ceased. Landedness was no longer the main qualification for a peerage, and hadn’t been for a century. Lord Hesketh in 1935 was the last newly created peer to live mainly off rent. In 1948 peers lost their privilege to be tried by their peers. In 1958 the Life Peerage Act brought in non-hereditary peers, women as well as men. In 1999 hereditary peers lost their seats in the second chamber. At the same time, ‘the secret rules of upper class-ness’ had been fading.⁄ The old understatement and sportsmanship might have retained some of their uses, but there was not much sign of those qualities among the country’s new sporting or moneymaking heroes. In politics, conventional wisdoms learnt from certain kinds of masculine experience—school, college, and club—were gradually replaced by think-tank publications and consultancy reports. Opinion and information which had once upon a time just emerged out of garden fêtes and luncheons, was increasingly the subject of jobbing research, and by the 1990s a gentlemanliness once so embedded in ⁄ McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 17, 2.

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politics that it was not seen as politics, just gentlemanliness, had been all but written off. The idea was to replace constitutional conventions by audits, performance indicators, and managerial mechanisms—a never-ending belt of devolved rational procedures designed to maximize output and manufacture consent. During the 1980s these basically American techniques were borrowed from corporate business and applied to public-sector as well as non-government organizations. Because one aspect of the nineteenthcentury gentlemanly ethic—with an emphasis on citizenship and centralized services—had found its way into the civil service, and then into social policy, the adoption of devolved corporate techniques disqualified the gentlemanly ethic as much as it discounted the centralized services.¤ Publicservice idealism was under suspicion; and masters degrees in Business Administration were the new way forward. The MBA lived in England but increasingly saw his life as a portfolio of life-stage scenarios networked to his individual fulfilment—in the jargon. In 1994 a judge was brought in to inquire into the death of the gentlemanly ethic, or ‘standards in public life’ as it was termed. Pieced together by nineteenth-century and older gentlemanly codes, now nearly defunct, the constitution was in trouble and Lord Nolan was asked to show the reason why. Nolan’s parliamentary committee would not comment on whether or not they thought standards had declined over the past 150 years. Instead, they based their inquiries on the conduct of state business and the prevailing confusion ‘over what is and what is not acceptable behaviour’. What had once been learned through networks in code, they said, was no longer being learned, or was no longer there to be learned. Some witnesses to the committee expressed sympathy for those gentlemen who, standing on their honour, refused to be inspected. Equally, they thought that their time had passed. As one former permanent secretary told Nolan, although he supported a written code of ethics for civil servants, ‘of course, we did not need it in my generation because “we had it inside us” ’. The view was that a new type of parliamentarian sat on the green leather benches. Unlike the Conservative minister Mr John Profumo who, when caught out in a sexual scandal in 1963, ‘just went’, the new lot waited for the umpire’s finger. Nolan

¤ Jose Harris, ‘Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940’, Past and Present, 135 (May 1992). Christopher Hood sees it as a war between ‘managerialists’ and ‘constitutionalists’: ‘Public Service Managerialism’, Political Quarterly, 72: 3 (2001), 507.

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recommended written codes for the conduct of state business, and a commissioner to uphold them.‹ Whatever options lie before those who control the state now that the old gentleman has gone but the new gentleman has yet to take shape, they will have to understand that the committees and commissions following on from Nolan, and the new constitutional legislation passed between 1997 and 1999, will make honour less a question of discretion and more a matter of obligation.› The sporting metaphors used by witnesses to Nolan are interesting. There had been a time when the gentleman was defined by his love of sport. In the nineteenth century the middle classes turned that love into a form of national service. In the later twentieth century, however, ‘sport’ as an identity moved from character to success, variously defined but increasingly monetary. The activities themselves were pursuits in the most minute divisions of labour—a hundredth of a second here, a fraction of a distance there. This was not a gentleman’s world. It was time for him to move on, or adapt.

Post-Colonial Options By the end of the twentieth century black and Asian people were aware that their relationship with the state was a serious matter.fi Although there were significant and gratifying exceptions, their levels of poverty and unemployment were high and their loyalty was among the most questioned. And they had some reason to believe that the criminal justice system, the social services, and even schools and colleges had worked against them. It was said that they viewed government statistics with suspicion.fl On the streets in 1989, Asian people were fifty times, and African-Caribbean people were ‹ Lord Nolan, Standards in Public Life: First Report of the Committee, vol. i, Report (London, HMSO, May 1995), 3; vol. ii Transcripts of Oral Evidence, paras. 43, 311, 1696, 1699. › Hazell, Constitutional Futures (1999), ch. 2; the New Dictionary of National Biography is looking beyond gentlemen born in England for its entries: Brian Harrison, New DNB Newsletter, 6 (June 2001). fi The legal framework of this relationship includes laws on the slaughter of animals (1974), religious exemptions (1976), race relations (1976), nationality and settlement (1981), the prohibition of female circumcision (1985), education (1988) and various rulings as to marital age, divorce, and bigamy. fl Michael Day, Trevor Hall, and Courtenay Griffiths, Black People and the Criminal Justice System (London, 1989).

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thirty-six times, more liable to suffer racial attacks than white people. This was ‘a matter of fact and not opinion’, said the Home Office, and it had to admit that the ethnic minorities were beginning ‘to lose confidence in the institutions of British society’.‡ On the other hand, by the mid-1990s there were signs of a successful challenge against some of those institutions, particularly against the Metropolitan Police, where the case of Stephen Lawrence became a watershed in the administration of policing and criminal justice in England. In spite of the difficulties, and in part because of them, it is nevertheless true that for very diverse peoples from three continents, eight major countries, and four major religions, it was only in an English context that it was possible to talk of a ‘black’ or ‘Asian’ point of view. At the same time, it was increasingly clear that, as time went by, simple race typologies could not last. What are the options? First, the straight option is no option. ‘Assimilate or go’ means go, and always has done because it puts what assimilation means entirely in the hands of whites. Assimilate or betray, the option put before the writer Salman Rushdie on 14 February 1989, means assimilate.° In a grim world of fixed cultures, including the fixed cultures of a multicultural ‘multiple centrist’ society, being for or against is presented as the only option.· Imperialism put it at the heart of whiteness, ‘anti-racist’ ideology puts it at the heart of whiteness and blackness, apart, while corporate advertising puts it at the heart of ‘cool’, where black and white is arranged to heighten an aggressively marketed transgressive difference.⁄‚ Straight options such as these make it harder for people to be complex, to be either/or, to drop out or overlap or mix or innovate, or simply to choose the identity they might wish to have in order to better understand, or adorn, or widen, their experience.⁄⁄ Which is another way of saying that straight options make it harder to be human. At the racist end, colour is made to sound unavoidable. At the ‘anti-racist’ end, colour is made to sound

‡ Inter-Departmental Group, The Response to Racial Attacks (Home Office, 1989) I, i, 2.31. ° For the case against Rushdie, based on dignity and respect but not freedom of expression: M. M. Ahsan and A. R. Kidwai (eds.), Sacrilege Versus Civility (Leicester, Islamic Foundation, 1991). 9 For the disastrous road to ‘multiple centrisms’: Mosefi Kete Asante in debate with Diane Ravitch, ‘Multiculturalism: An Exchange’, American Scholar, 60 (Spring 1991), 267–76. ⁄‚ Paul Gilroy, Small Acts. (London, 1993), 4–5, and Between Camps, 21, 148. ⁄⁄ On how the straight option can narrow black experience in schools: Tony Sewell, ‘Identifying the Pastoral Needs of African Caribbean Students’ (University of Leeds, unpublished paper, Oct. 2000).

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unavoidable: ‘Until racial justice is achieved every white person in Britain falls into one or other of these two racist categories: (1) Racist. (2) AntiRacist Racist.’⁄¤ Some choice. If straight options are no options, then one way of recognizing other options is on the level of historic interaction. The genetic difference between what have been called races is, we are told, biologically insignificant.⁄‹ What appears to matter more is the self and the ability to draw on history and culture in order to discover that self, and other selves, and the interactions between them. But there are two difficulties in releasing these kinds of option. First, there’s not much interactive history/culture about. For black and Asian people in England, all that it can connote in terms of identity and belonging has not been much in evidence. So starved have they been of a sense of home and history, that many have been driven to look elsewhere for it.⁄› The second problem is that heavily interactionist interpretations of culture can lead not so much to whole knowledge of the self as to knowledge of just the manifestations of the variety of selves a person can take up—manifestations which can be taken up and performed. As one study of nine young men shows, this ‘performativity’, so called, can never be held to account, can never mean much beyond the moment. The men claimed to move in and out of various ‘identities’—Jamaican, Caribbean, African, British—but they were never identities so much as self ‘representations’, and of course the men felt no particular loyalty to any of them.⁄fi Or this is what they said. They might not have meant it; they might have been performing. Another kind of interactionism can seize upon any kind of difference as an ‘other’ to be reacted against. This is called ‘alterity’, which seems to hold that what groups have in common is intrinsically less interesting, and less formative, than what holds them apart.⁄fl But interactionism does not have to be antagonistic, nor do groups or nations (any more than persons) only

⁄¤ Leicester City Council, Racism Awareness—White Employees, 8–10 Nov. 1989. ‘Anti-racist’ agitation heightens the race difference: Peter Braham et al. (eds.), Racism and Antiracism (London, 1995), ch. 11. ⁄‹ J. S. Jones, ‘How Different Are Human Races?’ Nature, 293 (1981). ⁄› Like Gary Younge in his No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey through the American South (London, 2000). ⁄fi Claire E. Alexander, The Art of Being Black. The Creation of Black British Youth Identities (Oxford, 1996), with a Foreword on ‘performativity’ by Stuart Hall, 151, 173, 195. ⁄fl For sharp criticism of English ‘half-baked ideas about multiculturalism’, articles by Rimi B. Chatterjee and Sarmila Bose, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 19 and 21 Oct. 1997.

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identify by reference to the identities of others. They have their own pasts to consider and compare too, and in deciding who they are in the present, past identities can figure just as strongly as ‘other’ identities. For example, the British Christian tradition, unlike a number of other European Christian traditions, has no historic antagonism against Islam. Whether this past feature will lead to a mutually beneficial dialogue in the present will depend, in turn, on how British Muslims and British Christians decide to align their pasts and presents in the light of each other. Obviously there is much potential common ground. On matters ranging from theology to pornography and blasphemy, from the pleasures of the family to the sins of materialism, Muslims and Christians, one suspects, could stand somewhere together. Within the identities of Islam itself there are more post-imperial Reformations and options going on than one might imagine. The victory of Ibn Taymiya’s Wahhabi theology, as taught in the seminaries of Madina or Riyadh, over the classic liberal Ghazalian theological traditions of the Azhar university in Cairo would be disastrous for civil society in Britain. British Muslims would become Muslims in Britain and, living with the Infidel, it would close their options down to two: belief or apostasy.⁄‡ Wherever migrant and migrant-descended peoples have come from, with all their history and association, their identity is being made in England. At the very least, finding the face of this England is going to demand levels of tolerance and understanding higher, perhaps, than the nation has been taught to expect. This is common sense. One cannot suppose that it translates easily into party-political programmes or ‘post-colonial studies’. On the positive side, it is the case that young blacks and Asians want to feel British and are showing patience towards British institutions. In 1999 only 6 per cent were not optimistic about their futures, while 86 per cent were generally happy about their lives.⁄° As for whites not more than one third, of any class, thought in 2000 that you had to be white to be English.⁄·

⁄‡ Winter, ‘Islam in England’, Q News. At the time of writing (December 2001) the war in Afghanistan will have a bearing on this. ⁄° Runnymede Bulletin, 320 (Dec. 1999), 13–15. ⁄· Jowell, British Social Attitudes, table 3.9. Over 30% of black men and women and Asian men are with a white partner: www.Guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive, Nov. 2000.

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Women’s Options Female enfranchisement was granted in 1918 and 1928, and in the ten years in between six important statutes improved the liberties of women.¤‚ For millions of women voters after 1928, therefore, first option was to use their new electoral power to change the state. On balance, it was an option they refused.¤⁄ Prior to franchise, feminists and their opponents had both warned that women would vote as a bloc. Much of the campaigning was conducted on this premiss. Mrs Fawcett told her audience not to ‘give up one jot or tittle of your womanliness’, for it was a force ‘terribly wanted in politics’.¤¤ In the event, women did not vote together to change the state. Instead, English feminism took a sub-political profile. There was less emphasis on politics and more on personal achievement—in mothering, infant welfare and birth control, and in modern middle-class ways of being a competent and fulfilled woman. Alison Light makes a powerful case for this conservative feminism as an important strand of inter-war Englishness—‘at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private’.¤‹ The nation fought the Second World War with its ordinary decencies intact, and there can be no doubt that after the war the idea that the central state could be a ‘welfare state’ owed much to this conservative feminist influence. It was not, however, a life or a view of a life which could be regarded as open to working-class women. The middle-class suburbs were worlds away from the gossipy neighbourhoods of the older inner parts of town. In one short walk to the shops, Mrs Landon of Bethnal Green met fifteen people to talk to; lives like hers were neither domesticated nor private.¤› Later, the post-war council estates would threaten to cut women like Mrs Landon off from these very gregarious networks. Nonetheless, whatever their class, ¤‚ Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919; Criminal Law Amendment Act 1922, raising age of consent to 16; Married Women’s (Maintenance) Act 1922, some help during separation; Matrimonial Causes Act 1923, allowing divorce on grounds of adultery of husband; Guardianship of Infants Act 1924; Widows Orphans and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act 1928. ¤⁄ Between 1918 and 2000 only 240 women were elected to Parliament, half of them in 1997: www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/fs05. ¤¤ Holton, Feminism and Democracy, 15. ¤‹ Alison Light, Forever England (London, 1991), 8. ¤› Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957; Harmondsworth, 1967), 105–7; Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-class Nneighbourhoods 1880–1960 (Aldershot, 1997).

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women continued to be seen as mothers and homemakers, and were still encouraged to be self-effacing.¤fi Although it is true that by the 1930s there were more women going out to work than ever before,¤fl even so, in many sectors the marriage bar stayed up, and even when it came down the woman’s second job of children and home did not go away.¤‡ During the war, waged work was suddenly a duty (‘women dropped their colanders and ran’),¤° and by 1943 46 per cent of women between 18 and 40 years were engaged in national service of some kind. Old occupational patriarchies were ‘flushed out’,¤· and though after the war women’s work options closed again, it was not to pre-war tolerances. The marriage bar was gone for good, family sizes continued to fall,‹‚ and by 1983 the number of married women in waged work rose to encompass nearly half the labour force. Women were formally granted equal pay and opportunity on the same terms as men in 1975.‹⁄ All of the major economic and social trends of post-war Britain centred directly on the experience of women. The huge increase in flexible and parttime work, equally huge rises in the divorce rate and the number of illegitimate births, and the press for greater personal liberty all made women’s relationship with the state critical. Yet they remained on the outside.‹¤ Women’s last formally acknowledged relationship with the state as women had been as ‘mothers’—either old-fashioned mothers as bearers of the race and nation, or modern ones, parenting properly. Now that that special relationship is no longer formally acknowledged, by women or the state,‹‹ and ¤fi In the calorific scale in health and nutrition, for instance, ‘as a fraction of an “equivalent man” ’: G. D. H. Cole and M. I. Cole, The Condition of Britain (London, 1937), 114. Averil D. Sanderson Furniss, ‘The Citizenship of Women’, in Tracey, Labour Party, ii. 245, 253; Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (New York, 1997), 173–6. ¤fl Albeit in gendered jobs—‘light’, ‘simplified’: Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War (London, 1989), 10. ¤‡ Sylvia Walby, Patriarchy at Work (Cambridge, 1986), 156–201. ¤° Virginia Graham, The Story of WVS (HMSO, 1959), 5. ¤· Summerfield, Women Workers, 4. ‹‚ Richard Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State (London, 1963), 88–103. ‹⁄ Equal Pay Act passed in 1970 (main issue: identifying the difference due to gender and finding strictly comparable cases); Employment Protection Act passed in 1975 (main issues: pregnancy, maternity pay, return to work); Sex Discrimination Act 1975 (main issues: discrimination against persons). ‹¤ Jane Lewis, Women in Britain Since 1945 (Oxford, 1992), 10, 120. ‹‹ Though some of the assumptions behind it remain: Jane Lewis (ed.), Women’s Experience of Home and Family 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1986), 6; Ann Oakley, Sociology of Housework (Bath, 1974), 29. In 2001 the Office of National Statistics estimated that only 51% of women aged 18–49 years were in married relationships: Guardian, 12 Dec. 2001.

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given that a new one has not emerged to replace it, it is difficult to talk about womanliness as a distinctive variable of English national identity. It was often said that being a woman went deeper than country.‹› In that sense, ‘women’ offer the biggest diaspora. The first national Women’s Conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford, in February 1970. Four hundred women demanded from the state parity with men and help with the children—equal pay, equal education, free contraception, abortion on demand, and twenty-four hour nurseries. But Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, published the same year, featured on its cover a discarded woman’s torso. Clearly this was notice of a very different kind of women’s movement.‹fi Not for Greer the narrow options of whether to work at home or work at work; not for her all this waiting on the state. This was women’s lib now, and the girls were stepping out.‹fl On 27 August 1981 thirty-six women set out from Cardiff for the United States Air Force base at Greenham Common, Berkshire. After ten days marching they arrived at the perimeter fence and called for a debate with the government on the question of ninety-two ‘Cruise’ nuclear missiles bound for the base. When they didn’t get a debate, they made camp and stayed for seven years, long enough to become England’s most powerful and persistent symbol of confrontation with the state. In 1982 they declared the protest as women-only, calling on women to ‘embrace the base’, which they did, in their tens of thousands, inventing new ways of showing the nuclear horror back on itself in mirrors, in mocking and keening, with baby clothes pinned to the fence.‹‡ In the coalfields too, women went into direct confrontation with the state. Throughout the 1984–5 miners’ strike, women’s support groups were in the thick of it—in fund-raising, picketing, and demonstrating, and in dealing with local retailers and running round-the-clock communal ‹› Identity as ‘surprisingly elusive’: Jane MacKay and Pat Thane, ‘The Englishwoman’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, 191. Liddington and Jane Lewis found feminist expectations of the state similarly elusive: Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London, 1989), 1–10; Lewis, Women in Britain, 120. ‹fi Different in its ‘aims, objectives, strategy, rhetoric and style’: Caine, English Feminism, 223. Light is insightful on the loss of domestic servants in middle-class households and ‘how consistently a part of what makes a middle-class identity has been the assumption that there is something essentially stultifying and degrading in domesticity’: Forever England, 218. ‹fl Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women (London, 1997), 354; Alexandra Pringle, ‘Chelsea Girl’, Very Heaven, 38; Judith Okely, ‘Girls and their bodies’, New Society, 7 Dec. 1978. ‹‡ Liddington, Road to Greenham, 249–53.

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kitchens and child-care. As the women of Grimethorpe said: ‘our sole idea was to take care of our village.’ The Daily Mirror’s industrial editor recounted that in the past it had been editorial practice to send journalists to find strikers’ wives, who would invariably denounce the strike. Not this time.‹° These women knew themselves to be in direct conflict with the British state, but the font of their identity was local and familial. Women like Iris Preston, on her scooter, could help support the pitmen of Brookhouse, Thoresby, and Ollerton but at the same time feel she was growing into a whole world of women stretching from Belfast in the north to Greenham in the south. In this sense, the woman’s road from the local to the universal was short.‹· Fundamental changes in the meaning of sexuality alongside equally fundamental changes in patterns of family and work are transforming how women constitute themselves.›‚ English women were at the heart of the first Industrial Revolution, and it was the first generation of women economic historians who recognized that and the complexities and ambiguities it brought.›⁄ But when it is a question of their national identity, or their connections with the state,›¤ women as women seem to be out of focus, aligned somewhere else, thinking of options at once greater and smaller than nation or state.

Class Options The English working class spoke first in the language of dissent. They saw the new industrial society as antithetical to their freeborn privileges. During the 1840s, Chartism in particular articulated a sense of severance. Little wonder that many of its leaders were Irish.›‹ In time, however, the workers were seen as settling down to a way of life as fixed and ordered as ‹° Geoffrey Goodman, The Miners’ Strike (London, 1985), 162. ‹· Raphael Samuel, B. Bloomfield, and G. Boanas, Enemy Within: Pit Villages and the Miners’ Strike (London, 1986), 42. ›‚ Lynne Segal, Why Feminism? (Cambridge, 1999). ›⁄ Maxine Berg, ‘What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?’, History Workshop, 35 (Spring 1993); ‘The First Women Economic Historians’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 45 (1992). ›¤ Jane Lewis, Women in Britain, 120. ›‹ Rachel O’Higgins, ‘Irish Influence in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present, 20 (1961). For the importance of the Irish Coercion Act of 1833 in the growth of Chartism: Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (Aldershot, 1986), 19–20.

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the terraced rows they were beginning to inhabit.›› From the 1860s it is rare to find examples of them being denied their Englishness. As the class and the mass, they could not be any other. To have denied them would have been to deny the modern world. They had to be found full admission to state and nation. Cost of admission was respectability.›fi ‘Roughness’ was the optional alternative, but that had never debarred a man from his nationality. In times of war, with fighting to be done, roughness was the workers’ special contribution. And in times of peace, roughness only made respectability the keener. Either way, workers worked and, like their work, they were a kinetic force. It was believed that working-class values could be found by simply going round England and, as it were, breathing in: the grittiness of factory winds; the close pack of pubs and football matches; the warmth of the family circle, by the fireside, or at Blackpool, ‘wriggling . . . bare toes in the sand . . . working of depressions for buttocks’. Rude seaside postcards, in a sense, said it all. Too heavy to lift and too broad to budge, the workers were here to stay.›fl And ‘here’, most often, was The North. Up to the 1960s, the experience of ‘class’ was squarely identified as proletarian, masculine, northern.›‡ With trade union legality granted in 1875 and underwritten in 1906, and with the vote given, in principle at least, by 1884, the labour movement was ready to grow at all levels.›° Second mates on the ship of state (the rough ones were on the lower deck, and swabbing it), ‘ordinary’, ‘decent’, ‘rank and file’ respectable workers had a place as long as they knew their place. The class organization of national politics (a Labour Party born to oppose), national work (hand not brain), national wealth (source of it all), and national geography (northern and honorary northern)—all shaped this very singular English identity. Ross McKibbin has called it ‘a kind of folk-Marxism’.

›› Sidney Pollard, ‘Nineteenth-century Cooperation’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History (London, 1967). ›fi Robert Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976), 139. ›fl Bevis Hillier, The Style of the Century 1900–1980 (London, 1990), 126; ‘A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic postcards is the woman with the stuck-out behind . . . a plump ‘voluptuous’ figure . . .’, George Orwell, ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ (Horizon, 1942) in Orwell and Angus, Collected Essays, ii. 188. ›‡ Mary Eagleton and David Pierce, Attitudes to Class in the English Novel (London, 1979), 130–2. ›° Ross McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain?’ in The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1990), 26–32.

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Without our graft, they were saying, in effect, ‘society would not exist’. White-collar workers did nothing but sit on their well-tailored backsides.›· Although this was a genuinely alternative version of English identity, only too readily verified by lived experience, the men who built the labour movement were not much attracted by ideas—folk or Marxist. They preferred practical results, and finding it difficult to achieve practical results beyond their immediate class base, their politics were largely reactive. This had not always been the case. Before 1914 for example, the Cooperative movement had been astonishingly optimistic about its potential to break out, but that optimism had died in the inter-war years. Up to 1940, other working-class movements never got near to it. In 1945 the Labour Party and the trade unions had just one short-lived opportunity to build in their own way, beyond their class base; an opportunity which they took. It was in these oppositional qualities of working-class life that the radical tradition in English letters found its ‘other’ nation. Chesterton found his in Flanders field, in 1917: a mob or a crowd when viewed as part of the nation, an iron proletarian army when viewed as a whole. Anderson found his other nation in Marxist dialectics, in 1964: a ‘hegemonized’ bloc when viewed as a part of the nation, ‘a distinct hermetic culture’ when viewed as a whole.fi‚ In the face of so much dense mass, it was hard to imagine options. Yet, consider for a moment Mr Irving Berlin. Born Israel Baline in 1888, this Siberian Jewish Russian emigrant was brought up on the Lower East Side, New York. Starting work as a singing waiter at Nigger Mike’s restaurant, Chinatown, Berlin became one of the world’s great songwriters and one of the United States’ greatest patriots. His first song was ‘Marie from Sunny Italy’, his most famous song was ‘God Bless America’. In 1927 Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’ was made famous in the movies by Mr Al Jolson, another Jewish Russian emigrant American patriot, who blacked-up as a minstrel and who called himself the world’s greatest entertainer. Both men were massively popular in England. During the war Prime Minister Churchill mistook a meeting with Irving Berlin, whom he had never heard of, for a meeting with Isaiah Berlin, whom he had. From that late nineteenth-century moment when their national representation as workers was settled, another side of plebeian culture opted for a way of being that was bigger and wider than work. Mostly it came from ›· McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 139. fi‚ G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (London, 1917), 237; Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, 23 (1964), 42.

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the Americas.fi⁄ The dance-hall and the cinema were historic arenas for a flair and internationalism that shocked those who thought of workers as just practical. Whether in daring tangos from Buenos Aires or exuberant jive and tap from Harlem, these pleasures were enjoyed for their danger, perhaps for their subversion. Ballroom dancing managed to stem the American tide, but only by creating a timeless (c.1930–50) niche called ‘Modern English Style’.fi¤ In general, working-class imitation of Americans was the sincerest form of flattery. When rock ’n roll and blues and country arrived from the 1950s, the middle and upper classes believed that the nation’s morals were in danger.fi‹ Jazz was suspect because it was the music of blacks and because it was rumoured to be the music of intellectuals as well. Folk could be suspect because it nursed an unhealthy interest in the tribulations of the poor. Boogie and ‘stride’ were just too, well, strident. Not that the flair and the internationalism was solely for Saturday nights. On Sunday mornings too, in the poor and perhaps immigrant parts of town, congregations could swing to songs of praise not readily found in Hymns Ancient and Modern. Gospel religion, like African-American music, was tactile. It had long thrived on a transatlantic theological connection which enjoyed physical involvement, abandon, if necessary.fi› The guardians of England were not amused. An American connection, especially a black, Jewish, or poor-white American connection, was not at all the kind of ‘special relationship’ they had in mind. During the 1940s the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts had been pleased at the good reception their classical concerts had received in the factories. With middlebrow roots in popular cinema and radio, the music was well known (if not by name) to its canteen audiences.fifi After the war the Arts Council, CEMA’s successor, was founded to carry on with the middlebrow in order to show the Americans that what Britain had lost as a world power fi⁄ There was a long-standing special relationship between English plebeian radicalism and American republicanism. See e.g. William Cobbett, Life of Andrew Jackson (London, 1834). fi¤ Richardson, English Ballroom Dancing, 114. fi‹ Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 237–8; in 1959 it was remarked that ‘‘not far short of 90% of all teenage spending is conditioned by working-class taste and value’’: Chambers, Urban Rhythms, 27. fi› Chambers, Urban Rhythms, 11–12; John Kent, Holding the Fort: Studies in Victorian Revivalism (London, 1978), chs. 1 and 2. fifi There was another middlebrow classical canon derived from brass-band and choral traditions (McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 416, 387–90) but on snobbery towards the bands, see letter from Mr David Buckle to London Review of Books, 10 May 2001.

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it had not lost as an arbiter of taste.fifl Blaming the Yanks as a bad influence was common. Juvenile delinquency was associated with American trilbies and the sordid world of the fairground.fi‡ In the 1950s Richard Hoggart’s study of working-class culture lost its fine judgement only once, when it came to the influence of the American milk bar.fi° Pundits of left and right were equally fond of contrasting English common sense (usually said to derive from a solid, practical, and symmetrical class structure) with American ‘neurosis, criminality and demoralization’ attributable to ‘competitiveness . . . inspired by intense mobility strivings’.fi· For as long as it dared, the BBC kept American pop music and body-jigging off the air.fl‚ At the centre of all this was the freedom of people in England to move outside the usual representation of their class, whether gentlemanly reserved or proletarian mute. It was supposed that cloth caps and headscarves were what real workers wore. The zoot suit, by contrast, was not what they wore, because it was American in its origins and it took ready wit and ready money to wear it.fl⁄ What was ‘flash’ was shallow. Alongside these post-war changes in class options, there were changes at the workplace. Class structure had always been built on occupation—a view of work as basic to human identity. Only the uppers had rejected work as identity, because they could afford to do so. The middle classes preferred to talk about their ‘profession’. When they referred to ‘their work’, they meant it in a rather sacral way. Industrial workers, on the other hand, understood what class structure was built on because it was built on them. Industrial class structure started breaking up from the 1970s. Even in its northern heartlands, organized male labour became only one segment of the workforce. By the 1990s more people worked in occupations that resembled, but only resembled, the professions. The old proletarian slog for big money gave way to white blouses and a hundred salary grades, although there was far more money all round. The government reclassified class accordingly, with the sociologists advising and the categories increasing. For Marx, writing in 1848, only two classes mattered. In 1921 the registrar fifl Minihan, Nationalization of Culture, 230. fi‡ London Diocesan Temperance Society, Fun Fairs and Delinquency (London, 1942), 5–6. fi° Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957. Harmondsworth, 1966), 248. fi· Dennis Wrong, ‘The Functional Theory of Stratification’ (1959), in Lewis A. Coser and Bernard Rosenberg, Sociological Theory (New York, 1976), 330. fl‚ The BBC was out of step with popular taste, as was anti-American politics: Wybrow, Britain Speaks Out, 2, 6, 14, 85, 110. fl⁄ Steve Chibnall, ‘Whistle and Zoot’, History Workshop, 20 (1985).

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general made it six. By 1999 there were seventeen official categories of class,fl¤ and far more talk of ‘culture’, talk which, as we have seen, had a tendency to proliferate.fl‹ Class still matters, but it means less because, after some 200 years, the discourse has largely died. Poverty, inequality, the terms and conditions of labour, the unequal distribution of income, wealth and risk, all remain fundamental experiences, but how people line up in their attitudes to these things is less clear than it used to be.fl› ‘Labour’, as the class that works, still stands as an identity, but it is now far more an option than a fate and, along with Capital, it’s now a global option.

Northern Irish Options In 1991 the United Kingdom submitted a report to the European Directorate-General for regional policy. Its subject was Northern Ireland, and its opening words noted that the place was ‘peripheral both to the Community and to the United Kingdom’.flfi Here was evidence, if evidence was needed, that the British state was prepared to give up on what and where and who it used to be. On 15 December 1993 the prime minister, John Major, declared that the British government had ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’,flfl and on that day, in principle at any rate, Northern Ireland was turned loose. Just over a year later, after months of ceasefire, the prime minister got round to the constitution. In return for the Republic’s promise to remove its own constitutional claim on Northern Irish territory, as well as its acceptance that in any future referendum a Northern Irish majority should be just that, without reference to the island of Ireland as a whole, the British government let it be known that, constitutionally, Northern Ireland had been a disaster. In order to create ‘new relationships’, the framework document said, it was ‘now time to lay aside, with dignity and forbearance, the mistakes of the past’ and to ‘. . . acknowledge that in Northern Ireland, unlike the situation which prevails elsewhere throughout both islands, there is a fl¤ ‘Analytical and Operational Categories and Sub-categories of National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification’: www.statistics.gov.uk/nsbase fl‹ David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven, 1998), 188. fl› Jowell, British Social Attitudes, 56. flfi The European Regional Development Fund (Commission, DG Regional Policy, 1991), 13. flfl The Times, 16 Dec. 1993.

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fundamental absence of consensus about constitutional issues’.fl‡ ‘Peace’ between the IRA and the Unionist paramilitaries was based, and would be based, on two old nationalisms yet to be reconciled. Anglo-Irish disinterest, by way of contrast, was based, and would be based, on two new national identities yet to find shape. Linda Colley has reminded us that from 1707 to 1837 the British were taught to be British by a state which built its superiority on Industry and Empire, Prosperity and Providence, and Protestantism: ‘It had to be learnt; and men and women needed to see some advantage in learning it.’fl° It is a while since these advantages have applied. The Scots and the Welsh left old Britain in 1998 to attend to their own (limited) assemblies. British industry has been failing for so long that its ‘decline’, or fear of its decline, is almost part of the constitution. British imperialism has been dead and gone for long enough. British prosperity is not what it was, like its beef. British belief in providence departed at about the same time as did their belief in progress and empire. Church-going Protestantism accounts for just over 10 per cent of the population. ‘No Popery’ could never again be used as a stick to beat Catholics, at home, abroad, or in the European Union. Outside of Northern Ireland, the old British swagger of an Orange band is a curiosity only—along with Bible, bowler, sash, and all the other trappings. Only there do these late Protestant-British symbols continue to mean anything, and even there less than Unionists claim they do. As for Sinn Fein, their Irishness was learned in the hard-knocks school of contradistinction to all that Protestant Britishness. The flight into Gaelic Ireland was part of that, but nowadays Gaelic-Catholic properties are deserting Ireland as fast as British Protestant ones are deserting Britain. Sinn Fein ideology certainly runs on yesterday’s relationships. Their ceasefires showed that with the weakening of both their positive (Gaelic-Catholic) and negative (Protestant-British) force fields, they had to recognize that in the medium term their support could not attract beyond current levels, and that in the long term it could only diminish. The cultural theorist Edward Said has said that, in a world of mixed cultural borrowings, ‘No one today is purely one thing’. For Northern Ireland, unhinged as it is from Britain and from Ireland, Said’s aphorism seems both prescient and useless. All places, particularly Said’s own city of New York, enjoy a number of cultural identities, but for many purposes, and not just fl‡ The Times, 23 Feb. 1995.

fl° Colley, Britons, 295.

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electoral ones, those identities usually remain capable of agreeing to be ‘one thing’—they are New Yorkers, and when they say so they mean more than the territory. For sure, the agreed identity is neither pure nor for ever, yet all political formations of any size must recognize their common circumstance or die.fl· At any level, identity in common is rarely pre-formed. Instead, it is made in the doing and the deciding, drawing on a world of alternatives which, in the end, have to decide how much of ‘one thing’ they want to be. Insofar as Irish identities are historically constructed phenomena—imagined communities, if you like‡‚—then there are grounds for sharing the history. Insofar as Britain and Ireland are states committed to the suspension of their territorial claims, then there are grounds for sharing the land. In other words, Northern Ireland will depend more than ever on the extent to which British and Irish politics can manage to see themselves and their interests as ‘one thing’. Between 1985 and 1991 both states began to recognize this. In a 1985 joint statement they acknowledged that Northern Ireland’s options were inseparable from their own options. In 1991 they saw that their joint initiative had failed because Unionists and Nationalists alike were able to take opposing views of sovereignty based upon the rival claims of two sovereign states.‡⁄ Both states would have to rescind their territorial claims and move towards some sort of ‘one thing’ joint sovereignty.‡¤ After that, two points were clear. First, there could be no outright military victory. Wars of insurgency feed off basic conflicts of loyalty. Military blows by the British army served only to intensify the loyalty of the Nationalists, all the more so when kinship, neighbourhood, and politics were so densely interwoven. The security forces must have asked themselves a thousand times that, if Operations ‘Safe Harbour’ and ‘Thornbush’ could not seal Belfast, or even districts of Belfast, how many more Hagler Kochs and Walther PPKs would they need to seal the whole of the six counties? Only a wall across the border could have done the job, but no such wall could be built. Giving up the military option meant the ultimate withdrawal of British troops. At the same time, the IRA fl· Said, Culture and Imperialism, 336. ‡‚ Bearing in mind that ‘it is slightly dangerous’ to suppose ‘that what is imagined can be readily imagined away’: Steve Bruce, The Edge of Union (Oxford, 1994), p. vi. On the historiography, see Howe, Ireland and Empire, Ch 6. ‡⁄ The Times, 4 July 1991. ‡¤ If the IRA forced the withdrawal of the British, then London’s problem in Northern Ireland would switch to being Dublin’s problem in the north of Ireland: Bonner, ‘UK’s Approach to Terrorism’.

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had been rethinking its own position. A outright military victory was far more untenable for them than for the British army and, within their own councils, the view was put that at some point Sinn Fein would have to make the peace. During the 1980s Sinn Fein had adopted the twin ‘ballot and bullet’ policy—as proud a piece of political hypocrisy as even Northern Ireland could produce. During the early 1990s, however, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness began to win the secret argument that, as the bullet would have to be dropped sometime, it might as well be now. When the IRA declared their ceasefires in August 1994 and July 1997 these acts were not seen by anyone, least of all by the British, as military defeats (though they might have been).‡‹ At the same time, no one believed that the British had won either. In fact, it was Adams and McGuinness who had ‘won’.‡› Nevertheless, the ceasefire was strictly provisional and the IRA’s retention of its weapons and command structure remained easily the most formidable threat to the security of Northern Ireland and northern Ireland. Second, as well as there being little chance of outright military victory, it became clear also that direct rule from London had no future because it only intensified what had been wrong from the start. For since the creation of Northern Ireland in the 1920s, only bodies outside the province carried the burden of state-nation congruity within it. When it came to the representation of the other side, for nearly eighty years Unionists and Nationalists alike had been able to look elsewhere. By suspending their sovereignty claims, the British and Irish states served notice that this would not be allowed to continue. Everyone had to start representing again. What had been done before in secret would have to be done again in the open.‡fi The July 1997 ceasefire led to open talks in September. Unionists agreed to something less than full Union, pro tem; so did Nationalists. It was agreed that Sinn Fein could take its place in the new assembly without any surrender of IRA arms. In May 1998 this joint agreement was put to the Irish people and won a large majority across all Ireland (71 per cent Northern Ireland, 94 per cent Republic). The Irish people voted for a new state and a more complete nationhood, and the political parties had to line up their ‡‹ David McKittrick, Independent on Sunday, 11 Feb. 1996. ‡› David McKittrick, ibid. 5 Dec. 1999. Both men are identified as members of the IRA’s sevenman Army Council: Martin McGartland, Fifty Dead Men Walking (London, 1998), 217–19. It was reported that McGuinness was made IRA chief of staff on 27 Sept. 2001: The Observer, 7 Oct. 2001. ‡fi On 7 July 1972 Provisional IRA leaders MacStiofan, O’Connaill, McGuinness, Twomey, Adams, and Bell met William Whitelaw in a private house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. The RAF flew them to London: Bishop and Mallie, IRA, 231–3.

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view of the options according to that future condition and not according to past ones. Nevertheless, there were and are still private armies capable of wrecking it. Their hard men do not think much of day-to-day politics: they are more at ease with destinies, epochs, historical forces, all that. As the Northern Ireland Assembly began to get used to government, Sinn Fein had to decide whose guns it approved of: those of the new state it represented or of the private armies on the outside? Once, when asked what banks should do with those who owed them so much that the solvency of the bank depended on it, Keynes replied that they should be invited to join the board. Sinn Fein was now on the board. When the IRA agreed to a significant decommissioning of their armoury in October 2001, most sides believed that for the first time in a long time Anglo-Irish solvency might be possible. No other part of the United Kingdom, and certainly no English region, has ever been offered a constitutional arrangement more solvent than Northern Ireland’s. With proportional representation and other powersharing safeguards, including the concept of ‘consociation’, it could be a democratic model for minorities.‡fl With various forums—north and south, civic and cultural—it shows a readiness to build political institutions into the people and not over them. And with a policing service that does the same, whatever it is called, the Northern Ireland Policing Board could provide yet another model for the rest of the country.‡‡ With a clear statement that the Assembly exists ‘on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities’, and the assertion of an Irish-British right ‘to identify themselves . . . as they may so choose’, the arrangement is loose enough to allow for the post-Imperial/ante-European identities to come. In the more plural world approaching, what happens in Northern Ireland is no longer peripheral and might prove central.

Scottish and Welsh Options In the same year of the Northern Ireland Act, historic Acts for the devolution of the Union in Scotland and Wales were passed.‡° They too have ‡fl Brendan O’Leary, ‘The Protection of Human Rights Under the Belfast Agreement’, Political Quarterly, 72 (July–Sept. 2001). ‡‡ Report of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (the Patten Report), A New Beginning: Policing in Northern Ireland (London, HMSO, 1999). ‡° Government of Wales Act, 1998; Scotland Act, 1998.

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opened up constitutional options. As with Northern Ireland, the constitutional arrangements for Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales,‡· are superior to anything offered the English: a parliament closer to its people, charged to think of Scottish answers for Scottish problems, with proportionality, significant if secondary responsibilities, more influence, a bigger public purse, a sharper political profile. In order to accommodate these arrangements, the Labour and Conservative parties in Scotland and Wales are having to revise their strategies as well as their ideologies, and they will have to learn how to distance themselves from the centralized and secretive centre that is Westminster, just as that centre will have to learn how to be happy and fulfilled while they do so. All camps will have to think again about what sort of Union they want. So will the nationalists. With rights of Northern Irish self-determination based on referenda, not Crown-in-Parliament, it is impossible to believe that the Scottish and Welsh nationalists will not claim the same, at some point.°‚ If Scotland goes, Britain breaks up. Union developed on the understanding that the four nationalities that made it were not supposed to cross the wire of nation with the wire of state. This failed in Ireland, just as it succeeded so demonstrably in Scotland, England, and Wales. However, given the great centralization of the British state, no Scottish parliament, not even a Unionist one, is going to miss the opportunity of using the Edinburgh parliament against the London one. Politicians being what they are, the wires look ready to be crossed. With joint and conditional sovereignty on the cards in Northern Ireland and national political struggle more likely between Edinburgh, London, and Cardiff, the political options of these islands look set to widen dramatically. Under these circumstances, the English will be forced to come out and identify themselves. Can they do it? Can they be young again? Constitutionally, it seems they might. There are, for instance, signs of more light being shone on the practice of power. Judges and auditors may not be role models for youthfulness, but they look set to expand their involvement in judicial review (already a growth area), human rights ‡· The Welsh Assembly is entirely dependent on the block grant: Hazell, Constitutional Futures, 35. °‚ Bagehot was clear that it should be parliaments who decide; Taswell-Langmead thought referenda ‘alien to the spirit . . . of the constitution’; Dicey was more eqiuivocal for special cases: English Constitution, 219–20; English Constitutional History (London, 1946), 616; Law of the Constitution, 83–5, 430–1. Referenda were held in Scotland and Wales in 1997, on the issue of devolution, not self-determination.

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(European Convention, signed up to in 1998), and various forms of quasistate appointment and commission (precedents around Nolan). The House of Lords is being dismantled, and there could be greater opportunities for constitutional accountability in what replaces it. Most interestingly, the process of political devolution for Scotland and Wales might propel devolution to the English regions, which would even up the relative responsibilities of English, with Scottish and Welsh, MPs.°⁄ If this can be achieved and the English Regional Development Associations (1998) can be allowed to evolve into democratic regional assemblies, with Scottish-style powers, then the English could be on their way back.°¤ Not only would their politics be reconstituted, they themselves would be. Although for much of Part One of this book it has been convenient to talk of the people in terms of group-identities, this is in fact a writer’s shorthand which does not befit the unfinishedness of lived experience. All options overlap, and can permutate. How they will develop, to what degree, and under what circumstances, is of course unknowable. It might be said that being English is the consistent factor, but, as we have seen, that too is subject to change—for the gentlemen, looking surely for a new code of distinction; for whites, who have had to revoke one aspect of English identity now quite simply unimaginable; for blacks and Asians, who also have to resuppose who they are; for women and the classes, both now quite suddenly different in the national imagination; and for the Irish, particularly the Ulster Unionists, whose old view of Union with the British is fast disappearing.

°⁄ John Tomaney and Michelle Mitchell, Empowering the English Regions (London, Charter 88, 1999). °¤ But for a sceptical view: Robert Colls, ‘Our Friends in the South: Bad Day in Newcastle’, Political Quarterly, 71: 4 (Oct.–Dec. 2000).

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Bridgehead From State and Nation to Land and People

Paul Carter tells us that when Captain Cook made landfall in Australia in 1770, he had discovered a land he could not imagine.⁄ To English eyes it was an alien shore waiting to be discovered in a million acts of getting to know, and name, and map, all that empty space which lay inland. As an early pioneer remarked: ‘We go by Analogy and judge what we have seen and read before.’ While the British state administered these settlements as colonies, the settlers took physical and emotional hold of the land itself. The identity of what was at first called ‘Botany Bay’ but one day would be called ‘Australia’ rested, therefore, not just on the instruments of the state but also on the feelings and experiences of a people.¤ In the second part of this book we move from the identity of the state and nation to the identity of the land and people. Our subject remains the same, but the focus shifts. It shifts from political identities which may be perceived as harder, more rational, and definitive, to geographical identities which may be perceived as looser, more personal, and affective. This is not to suppose that political and geographical concerns can be easily separated. The simultaneous extension and centralization of the state is probably the most ⁄ Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (Chicago, 1987), p. xxiv. ¤ ‘Territory . . . is not to be regarded as an empty plot: territory . . . connotes population, ethnic groupings, loyalty patterns, national aspirations, a part of humanity, or, if one is tolerant of the metaphor, an organism’: Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (1966), quoted in Ann Dummett, Citizenship and Nationality (London, 1976), 58.

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compelling, if paradoxical, fact of English modernity. But this is a geographical fact too. Until the extension of the state in the nineteenth century, ‘the nation’ had rarely been seen as anything other than the most trusted and favoured sections of society. The rest of the people were regarded, that is, if they were regarded at all, only in a secondary way. They worked on the land and in the workshops and households and they were expected to obey their masters, but only very rarely were they seen as the nation’s true expression. By the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1801, however, the political nation became more complicated, and from the 1820s national identity was gradually extended co-equally to include more or less all of those who lived within the state’s borders. All of these people were subjects of the Crown first, and English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish second, but in theory they were equal in meaning and they were equal in votes. Central state authority now had to come to terms with all of the people, all of the time, right up to the edge. Equally, all of the people, most of the time, right in from the edge, had to come to terms with the central state.‹ In short, those who were at the top and located mainly in London and other cores of wealth and authority, had to come to terms with those who were beneath, and peripheral, and diverse. This wasn’t democracy, but it did mark representation of a kind. ‘England’ now had to command the affection of everyone. Crude economic and social inequalities now had to accord with the idea of there being one people. Crude regional inequalities now had to accord with the idea of there being one land. Emotionally, the new dispensation said that there had to be room for everybody. Where the people dwelled, and how they dwelled, became fundamental questions. And not just in England, and the United Kingdom. There was an Empire out there as well. ‹ ‘A nation-state is a conceptual community in a way in which traditional states were not’: A. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1985), ii. 219.

Building the Homeland

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12 England As A Garden

On 24 July 1985 Mr Brian Gresham was moved to write to The Times. He quoted from the Antrobus Village News: ‘Post Box 126 near the corner of Knutsford Road and Pole Lane. A pair of blue tits made their home there this Spring and raised a family. They have now flown away and letters can once again be posted. The Arley postmen, Fred, Bob and Jim, would like to say Thank You to everyone for their cooperation.’ Mr Gresham saw in this ‘the true spirit of England’. He set it against so many ‘stories of violence and strife’ that filled the national newspapers.⁄ The true spirit of this little, local, gentler England has always been ready to do its duty. Its people have been reckoned to enjoy an intimacy with their land and with each other not normally found in the harsher facts of national life. The other true spirit of England has usually been found in deeds of state and nation-building of the sort covered in Part One. Both true spirits have needed to be reconciled, of course, and they have been, by explaining that the state-and-nation spirit is the England on the ‘outside’, dealing with the world; while the gentler land-and-people spirit is England on the ‘inside’, most at home when dealing with itself. As Gilbert Murray put it: ‘At home, England is Greek. In the Empire, she is Roman.’¤ Writing in 1901, Michael Sadler posed these two opposing spirits as ‘a duality’ which was ‘the essential characteristic of the English mind’.‹ In one way, having a pair of true spirits when it might be thought that one would be sufficient was just another version of the English constitution’s propensity ⁄ The Times, 25 July 1985. ¤ Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire (Basingstoke, 1986), 32. ‹ David Reeder (ed.), Educating our Masters (Leicester, 1980), 237.

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for being all things to all men. But it was also another way of referring to the idea that what ran beneath the state and held it together as a nation was a quality far deeper and more authentic than the state itself. There always has to be a reason for glory, and the English found it in the idea of a land and people living together softly and naturally: ‘England is London, says one, England is Parliament says another, England is the Empire says still another; but if I be not much mistaken, this stretch of green fields, these hills and valleys, these hedges and fruit trees, this soft landscape is the England men love.’› It is in this mixing and comparing of hard political and soft geographical that modern Englishness was identified.

Garden Metaphor In 1918 the philosopher L. T. Hobhouse recalled sitting in his Highgate garden, reading Hegel and witnessing a bombing raid by three German aircraft. In the dedication to his book The Metaphysical Theory of the State, Hobhouse reminded his son, Lt. R. O. Hobhouse of the Royal Flying Corps, that he was fighting against ‘the Hegelian theory of the god-state’.fi For Hobhouse, peace was an English garden. War, on the other hand, was Hegel’s bombing machines. In 1940 the god-state bombing machines returned. Picnicking in his garden, this time at Sissinghurst in Kent, Harold Nicolson compared the battle in the air with the tranquillity beneath.fl For the gentry who lived surrounded by their own parks and woods, the garden metaphor seemed to be speaking only of them. They shared a personal interest in the natural world. Estates were their gardens, and what happened there—huntin’, fishin’, an’ shootin’—were the hallmarks of landedness. But their estates were not only great tracts of sport and leisure. They were designed also to have a certain aspect. With their lawns folding out onto open land and their little private paths meandering up to personal points of view, the estate gardens of the gentry were said to symbolize English liberties.‡ › Price Collier, England and the English from an American Point of View (London, 1912), 265. fi L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (1918; London, 1960), 6. fl Patrick Wright, Visions of Britain (BBC2, Oct. 1988). RAF Fighter Command changed its image during these few months; the technocratic airman was transformed into a brave boy doing what came naturally: Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War, ch. 2. ‡ Though one wonders what people would have made of Lord Cobham’s Stowe, with its Grecian valley, Imperial closet, and Egyptian pyramid: Ian Boruma, Voltaire’s Coconuts (London, 1999), 85.

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Outside the garden all was open and free; inside the garden and different from continental gardens, there was no central axis, no single point of domination, no radiating lines of surveillance. English country houses, meanwhile, just grew there. Jane Austen’s heroine ‘had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste’. Even Casterbridge workhouse benefited from nature’s hand: ‘masses of ivy grew up . . . till the place looked like an abbey.’ At any rate, this slow, natural blending was the English constitutional ideal. Simon Pugh calls Horace Walpole’s 1771 History of the Modern Taste in Gardening ‘a key Whig history’,° and during the revolutionary wars with France, Humphrey Repton scaled down his designs to a proportion more befitting an war against despotism. In 1838 Loudon, in The Suburban Gardener, said that the French despotic style was geometrical. By contrast, the English style was considered natural.· Loudon was writing for a Victorian public keen to apply landed principles to their suburban villas. As little as £300 per year was all they required.⁄‚ Elevation, surface, exposure, aspect, soil, location, drainage— all were covered by builders’ pattern books in the 1840s, and it was from these genteel beginnings that the patch gardens of urban England came to engage with the mighty landed tradition. In the 1870s Disraeli built the new Toryism on this link—later to take form as a ‘modern property-owning democracy’. Against it stood the demagogue and the mob—the unrooted leading the uprooted.⁄⁄ So the garden grew. For the modern middle class, their garden gate stood for security. For the working class, their allotments were very public, very sociable, and very useful. Gardening represented a stake in the land. Kipling’s England was a garden whose glory was achieved by those whose backs were bent weeding it, not by those who simply admired it, while up in Yorkshire, far away from the parboiled mind of India, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s secret gardening was recuperative of the spirit. In war, gardens ° Simon Pugh, Garden—Nature—Language (Manchester, 1988), 72 n. 11; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1818; London, 1980), 198; Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (1874; London, 1968), 300. · J. C. Loudon, The Suburban Gardener, and Villa Companion (1838; London, 1982), 162, 166. ⁄‚ Ibid.—for ‘The Instruction of Those Who Know Little of Gardening and Rural Affairs, and more particularly for the use of Ladies’. Loudon called the English style ‘gardenesque’. For background to Victorian flower and vegetable aesthetes: Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (Harmondsworth, 1984), 192–241. ⁄⁄ Disraeli’s Crystal Palace speech, 24 June 1872: Ian Gilmour, Inside Right (London, 1978), 79.

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sprouted everywhere, inviting a whole patriotic literature about what was practical, instinctual, and free.⁄¤ After the war, page 1 line 1 of Ernest Barker’s 1947 compilation of English national character has an early but unspecified Englishman lying face-down on English soil, with grass, violets, and rock roses closest to his eyes. This was a surreal opening for a book which never doubted, but also which never explained, why English character should have sprung from the earth. The people clearly had no choice. Like their land, they could not be other than what they were. They could never be bullied by the ‘man-made state’, said the authors.⁄‹ So long as hiking mill-girls loved the Lake District and allotment-holders were proud of their cabbages, why worry? The English knew their land and that was enough. Garden metaphors are cousins to all the natural and organic metaphors that were used to describe the English and their constitution, and they have all enjoyed a wide variety of historic applications. Elgar’s Malvern Hills, or Hardy’s Wessex, or EuroTunnel’s Kent—as musical, literary, and engineering constructs—have all been invoked to bring forth the meaning implanted in one foot of English soil. Equally, one foot of English soil, properly understood, has been used to conjure up a whole suite of Elgar’s music, or a whole shelf of Hardy’s works, or all the horror of French railways laid end to end.⁄› Priestley in 1929 represented the English mind as an English landscape, rather temperate and hazy, with mists, and impossible to know by any straight, rational path. The mental life of the English was shaded. Their humour(s) were blurred and kindly.⁄fi So the garden metaphor grew. Trees deserve a book to themselves. English hearts, English ideas, English dynasties, English legs, at different times and in different places, have all been regarded as strong as oaks. The oak was a slow grower—a tree that declared confidence in the continuity of

⁄¤ Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Glory of the Garden’, Twenty Poems (London, 1930); Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911; London, 1950). Indian corruption and vice as ‘corrosive agents’ was an old fear: H. V. Bowen, ‘British India 1765–1813’, in Marshall, OHBE ii. 531. Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, The New Patriotism and the Old (London, 1943), 136. ⁄‹ Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes, ‘Land and People’, in Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), 54. ⁄› Alastair Morton, co-chair of EuroTunnel, Guardian, 27 Nov. 1987. ⁄fi J. B. Priestley, English Humour (London, 1929), 8–9. William Hazlitt in 1814 described English painting as ‘general masses . . . strong effects’: Robert Wark (ed.), Discourses on Art. Sir Joshua Reynolds (New Haven, 1975), 329.

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things. In Hardy’s novel, Gabriel Oak was well named.⁄fl Larch, on the other hand, was depicted as a dendrological parvenu—soft, fast-growing, turning a quick profit.⁄‡ In the eighteenth century, while oaks were used to depict the rich, grasses and weeds were used to depict the poor.⁄° In 1834, Blackwoods Magazine posed the tree-like nature of old England against the mechanical models of the new age. Trees were organic, and able to withstand the elements; steam-engines, by contrast, were rickety and much given to revolutions.⁄·

Climate Metaphor As early as the fifteenth century, north–south differences in English character were blamed on differences in climate,¤‚ and Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois (1748) made a deal of it, but it was from the middle of the nineteenth century that climate came to be considered as one of the major determinants of national character. From the 1890s, history and geography were taught in schools as complementary subjects. Generations of children had to write essays on the influence of a temperate climate on the national character. It would have been against the spirit of the thing to have concluded other than that England’s climate had shaped the best possible people for the best possible land. English geography was the envy of the world. Entire weather patterns and political systems were aggregated and then used to explain each other. The (temperate) weather pattern the English enjoyed was used to explain a (liberal) political system. Equally, extreme ⁄fl Hearts of Oak were to be found in Royal Navy men and ships; ideas like oak in Stanley Baldwin, speech to Bewdley Unionist Association, 10 Apr. 1937, in Service Of Our Lives (London, 1937), 101; dynasties like oak in Edmund Burke, ‘A Letter to the Duke of Richmond’ (1772), in W. L. Guttsman (ed.), The English Ruling Class (London, 1969), 21; as a royal tree in Thomas, Natural World, 209–18. Gabriel Oak is in Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). His liberal qualities might be compared with his antagonist, the Sergeant’s, Tory ones. See also: Stephen Daniels, ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in Later Georgian England’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, 1988). ⁄‡ Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, Property and Landscape (London, 1987), 196–7. ⁄° Weeds from the Lichfield Botanical Society’s ‘hierarchy of vegetables’: Thomas, Natural World, 66. ⁄· Blackwoods Magazine, 35 (1834), 332. ¤‚ ‘Men of the South beeth esier and more mylde; and men of the North be more unstable, more cruel and more uneasy’: William Caxton, in Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (Harmondsworth, 1987), 116.

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weather patterns were used to explain extreme political systems. For a time, Australia was the furthest extreme. It was antipodean: impossibly vast, unimaginably alien. Lieutenant Governor Robert Ross complained in 1789 that in Australia ‘nature is reversed’.¤⁄ West Indian slavery, meanwhile, was associated with a blazing sun and an African temperament, while two centuries of Russophobia came to associate frozen wastes with serfs. Associations such as these proved long-lived. During the 1950s and 1960s the failure of former colonial peoples to implement English constitutional arrangements, and the failure of Eastern-bloc Communism to be other than bleak, were political clichés. C. S. Lewis’s Cold War chronicles featured an icy-white godless state, Narnia, and its transformation into a green and pleasant Christian land.¤¤ There was more than metaphor in all this. In 1925 the geographer Rudmose Brown declared the 38° parallel as the northern limit for American ‘Negro labour’. As the migration of southern blacks to Chicago showed, this was nonsense, but climatic determinism confirmed the theory. Three years later another geographer, this time an English one, offered the ‘three bears’ version of climatic determinism. There were Eskimos for Cold Lands, Negroes for Hot Grasslands, Pygmies for Hot Forest lands, and people like him for ‘Our Own Lands of Great Britain and Ireland . . . where it is neither too hot nor too cold, and where it is neither too wet nor too dry. Such lands are called Temperate Lands.’¤‹ A temperate climate was used to explain so much of what was seen as natural and soft about England.¤› When Emma Woodhouse looked on Abbey-Mill Farm, she found ‘a sweet view . . . English verdure, English culture, English comfort seen under a sun bright without being oppressive’. In 1935 the broadcaster C. E. M. Joad found in the climate the warming spirit of England—soft, hazy, gentle. In 1947 George Orwell found in a moderate climate and pleasant landscape ¤⁄ Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia (London, 1987), 95, 2. ¤¤ Of slavery, ‘we are free from those extremities of weather which gave them birth’, Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 19 May 1711, in Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 12. C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was published in 1950. Gilbert Adair remarked that ‘the concepts of Marxism and snow have become inseparable’ in Myths and Memories (London, 1986), 121, although the English coal-owner Gerald Crich’s demise in the snow (Women in Love, 1921) suggests that D. H. Lawrence had other connotations in mind. ¤‹ R. N. Rudmose Brown, The Principles of Economic Geography (London, 1925), 96; E. C. T. Horniblow, Our Own Lands (London, 1928), 9–10. ¤› ‘Appeasement’ in the 1930s was said to have come out of a ‘climate’: L. Lewis, A Climate for Appeasement (New York, 1991).

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one reason for the mildness of English class relationships. In such ways English weather took on a twentieth-century psychology, while the English people took on a mild changeableness which rarely broke into storm.¤fi Though few places were more variable and diverse in their weather than Britain,¤fl ‘normal’ and ‘occasional’ came to be regarded as the pattern. Here was the barometer of a true liberal civilization.

Constitutional Geography In 1911 the American geographer Ellen Semple published her Influences of Geographic Environment. A huge, detailed application of Friedrich Ratzel’s ‘anthropo-geographic’ theories, Semple’s work followed him in his belief that geography was the primary determinant of all social and political systems. Ratzel had laid down the basic principles of geopolitical analysis. For him, the compounding of nation and state with land and people was not a cultural discourse, or a complex metaphor, but a real material process: ‘When a state has taken advantage of all its natural conditions, the land becomes a constituent part of the state, modifying the people which inhabit it, modified by them in turn, till the connection between the two becomes so strong by reciprocal interaction, that the people cannot be understood apart from their land.’¤‡ According to this, the most advanced societies were governed by the most advanced states, and the most advanced societies were also the most settled. For the English: so far so natural. Their state was certainly advanced and, in 1911, getting more interventionist by the day. What is more, their density of settlement was extraordinarily high. Inside Ratzel’s contact zones—that is to say, zones where the human propensity to change the environment reached its upper limit—basic physical alternatives operated. How would the English live? By land or sea? On islands or continents? On hills or plains? In isolation or through migration? Given a theory ¤fi Emma Woodhouse is the eponymous heroine of Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). But, ‘I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen’: Charlotte Bronte, in B. C. Southam, Jane Austen (London, 1968), 126. Joad is in N. P. Macdonald (ed.), What is Patriotism? (London, 1935), 150; Orwell, The English People, 27; Archie Gordon, ‘The Country Cottage’, in Patrick Abercrombie, The Book of the Modern House (London, 1939), 26; Vaughan Cornish, The Beauties of Scenery (London, 1944), 76. ¤fl Only sunbathers from the 1920s seemed to have recognized this: Samuel, Island Stories, 10. Robin Stirling, The Weather of Britain (London, 1982), 15, 113, 182. ¤‡ Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (London, 1911), 60.

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of binary opposites, one would suppose that the English would have evolved in one direction or the other. The supposition would be wrong. Semple’s analysis allowed the English to have it both ways, for their alternatives were flexible enough to have developed naturally, as the need arose. For example, Ratzel had indicated that the land and the sea presented alternative opportunities for evolutionary development. A niggardly land would push the people right up to the sea to contemplate their future; while a generous land would avoid this, and let them eat. Semple deduced that the English had been pushed to the sea as well as pulled to the land. Until the agricultural and industrial revolutions had released the productivity of the land, surplus English people had taken to their boats. In modern times, however, the English had expanded their wealth and population, concentrating on urban settlement while at the same time retaining their maritime instinct. They enjoyed, therefore, all the independent-mindedness of an island people, yet their nearness to a great land mass had energized their minds also. In a similar vein, the theory went that hill people were normally dominated by natural imperatives, but plains people were not. Hills and mountains fatigued and overwhelmed their inhabitants and made them insular, but on the plains, where life was kinder, the people had evolved more creatively, and openly. Once again, Semple’s English found themselves betwixt and between, throwing in their lot with neither environment. They were both a hill people and a plains people, just as they were both a landed people and a seagoing people. Their hills and plains were too close to have acted as binary alternatives, so they lived happily on both. The English were an insular people, it was true, bearing strong uniformities of Teutonic cranial type, it was said, and yet this had not dulled their itch to explore new lands. A ‘deep-seated local conservatism’ characterized this ‘world-colonizing nation’.¤° They couldn’t be tied down— either in their geography or in their constitution. Their extremes were fixed at the border, at the edge, where a hard face was shown; but temperateness, in all its latitudinous changeability, lived comfortably on the inside. The English, then, were a people of the mean. Not even their virtues could define them. Their temperate climate was celebrated and their love of the constitution was legendary, but neither could add up to who they were. Everything was open to interpretation. The only absolute about them was that there was no absolute. Their political freedom, therefore, was ‘hard to ¤° Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (London, 1911), 15, 16, 169, 113, 19, 421, 413.

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define’ and, like their vernacular architecture, they were ‘unconscious of it’. As to the weather, ‘we can never tell what is going to happen next’, just ‘one long series of exceptions to its own traditional rule’, changeable yet permanent, like their art and like their constitution.¤· And when it came to England’s hills, this time in the 1973 Shell Guide, these hills were identifiable not by their height but by their multiple points of view. No absolutist high peaks here. England’s hills were democratic hills. Everyone lived close enough to enjoy them and anyone could climb them.‹‚ Like the liberal state, the National Park had enfranchised the citizen and given variety, balance, rights: threats to the park (or the state) came only from the masses, tramping ignorantly, or from extremists, who did not understand temperateness.‹⁄ This was the English version of the natural life. Like Orwell’s people, or Bagehot’s constitution, and like ‘so much that is unobtrusive in England’, it may take a second glance but, once revealed, it has always seemed to be there, hovering beneath the surface. The state was high up and far away, but the land was always local. All the people were entitled to its spirit and none of them should be denied access to its privileges. This rather fine and egalitarian vision, it has to be said, was very much a twentieth-century urban achievement. During the nineteenth century the promise of a natural life—any natural life—looked doomed forever, and any suggestion that the land belonged to everyone would have brought only guffaws. People migrated to the cities and gladly forgot the countryside. Industrial and urban development threw everyone into more crowded ways of living. Little town gardens went up to compensate, but the pollution rained down. ¤· R. L. Gales, The Vanished Country Folk (London, 1914), 171, 191, 210, 9. On art and climate: Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (London, 1956), 13–15. On the weather: Monica Redlich, The Pattern of England (Copenhagen, 1945), 32. ‹‚ Jack Longland, ‘Mountain, Hill and Moorland’, in id. (ed.), The Shell Guide to England (London, 1973), 67–70. ‹⁄ Keir, Constitutional History of Modern Britain, 568. For constitutional hills, see articles in The Times about Snowdonia and the Peak: 5, 7 Sept. 1992.

13 Wasteland

Everywhere it is evident that the tendency to inequality, which is the necessary result of material progress where land is monopolized, cannot go much further without carrying our civilization into that downward path which is so easy to enter and so hard to abandon. (Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 1883)

Just before the outbreak of war in 1914, Richard Hannay, hero of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), sets out to save his country. Decamping from London, Hannay heads north for the Galloway hills, where he recovers his spirit, escapes his pursuers, and keeps his secret. When it is time to return south and tell the government what he knows, he makes for the Berkshire home of Sir Walter Bullivant. In contrast to Hannay and Sir Walter, men who love their land and live by it, England’s enemies are a deadly mixture of spies, saboteurs, and those without a homeland—anarchists, capitalists, perhaps Jews. The ringleaders are finally tracked down to ‘Trafalgar Lodge’, one in a line of villas overlooking the Kentish cliffs and thirty-nine steps away from a fast boat to Germany. Trafalgar Lodge is suburban middle-class redbrick, with tennis court, garden, a couple of servants, and all the paraphernalia of solid living. Like a hunter on the veldt, Hannay stalks his prey absorbed in an English homeland until finally he is ready to commit, and confront. Waiting for the door to open, our colonial hero is nervous. Toffs and working-class blokes he can get along with, but ‘what fellows like me don’t understand is the great comfortable middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t understand their conventions, and he is as shy of them as

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of a black mamba. When a trim parlour maid opened the door, I could hardly find my voice.’1

Spiritual Crisis Buchan’s identification of London with spiritual decline, Scotland with adventure, and Berkshire with great servants of the state, is to be compared with his depiction of suburban life as rootless, homeless, and not what it seems. Living off money and status but lacking true substance, ‘villadom’ was seen by many as a sort of urban disease. With its ‘plague centre at Hampstead’, here was a frenetic people desperate to escape the monotony of their lives.2 Early twentieth-century patriots saw the suburban rim as alien, in spirit at any rate, and although by the 1920s Charles Neville’s infamous development at Peacehaven would have served as the embodiment of Buchan’s Kentish villas, it was a rim that was seen as overwhelmingly metropolitan. Camberwell to Clapham, Herne Hill to Holloway, and from Leyton to Brixton all around the edge, ‘miles and miles of little red houses in little silent streets’, swept clean of poverty, but ‘the soul is still empty’.3 London entered the twentieth century as the world’s greatest city but England’s greatest problem.4 Its inner housing was perceived as the social issue of the day. A moral panic broke out in 1883 with the publication of Andrew Mearns’s penny pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. This ‘Inquiry into the condition of the Abject Poor’ made housing and poverty inseparable policy issues. In 1889 Charles Booth’s investigations revealed that about one-third of 900,000 east Londoners lived in conditions of primary poverty, and in the following year William Booth’s In Darkest England and the Way Out purported to show London how to deal with it. The General and his Salvation Army had a taste for publicity, and their timing was faultless. ‘Homeless and Hungry’ was the broadest of Booth’s circles of darkness enveloping the London poor. ‘The whole of the three circles is ⁄ John Buchan, The Thirty Nine Steps (1915; London, 1965), 179. ¤ ‘Such a culture is plainly opposed to patriotism’: Esmé Wingfield-Stratford, The History of English Patriotism, 2 vols. (London, 1913), ii. 598, 603. ‹ C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909), 70, 80. Peacehaven became a byword for blight: Sue Farrant, ‘London by the Sea’, Journal of Contemporary History, 22 (1987). › P. L. Garside, ‘London and the Home Counties’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), Cambridge Social History of Britain, vol. i, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 1990), 494.

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sodden with Drink.’ Meanwhile, the rural counties were depicted as bleeding their healthy populations into metropolitan darkness. No one could staunch the flow, and no one (the General excepted) was confident they could save them once they were in.5 At St Paul’s, heart of the Empire, moneychangers thronged near the temple, while in the jerry-built terraces, oldstyle landlords had given up while new-style landlords didn’t care for anything but their rents. Expanding yet degenerating, grotesquely rich at the top, pitifully poor at the bottom, and mixing extremes of human difference in the middle with incestuous suburban sameness at an ever-expanding edge, London was in crisis.6 The crisis was seen as spiritual as well as material, to do with morals as well as monopolists. In modern art, impressionists and pointillists blurred and fragmented the old civic certainties. In modern novels, protagonists ran from ‘a hideously bourgeois world’ to discover ‘what to be, where to go, what to do’. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) took them forward to the Eloi, a beautiful but hyper-tense metropolitan people who had been saved from the Morlocks by their money alone. With decadence in the West End and atavism in the East, so much of what came to be called the late Victorian revolt can be attributed to metropolitan neuroses. Beatrice Webb’s first apprenticeship, she tells us, was in the class consciousness of (her own) sin. Her work for Booth’s investigations into the London poor she saw as the redeeming years of her life.7 Something had been sapped. Politicians and generals worried about urban physiques: government investigations were initiated, ‘New Town’ types examined, the Condition of England questioned. Whatever it was that was wasting away—whether the genius of the people or the ethos of the nation or the spirit of the folk—‘cosmopolitanism’ was held to blame.8 In dance, negro and Latin styles had infected old English; in song, it was music fi A. S. Wohl (ed.), The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (Leicester, 1970); Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People (London, 1889), vol. i; William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890), 24. fl C. H. Chomley and R. L. Outhwaite, The Essential Reform: Land Values Taxation (London, 1909). ‡ On the new monopolists: Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor (London, 1875), 33, and Henry George, Progress and Poverty (London, 1883), 233. On the novel, Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 156. On degeneration, Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge, 1989), 158–9. On Beatrice Webb and other converts, Stephen Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism in Britain 1883–1896’, History Workshop, 4 (1977), 10; Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship—2 (1926; Harmondsworth, 1938), 306. ° William Graham Sumner, Folkways (1906; New York, 1960), 79.

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halls and the Americans; in morals, as usual, it was the French. Was not the family vulnerable, fertility declining, health deteriorating, social solidarity collapsing? On the pavements it was reckoned that children had even forgotten how to play. In Bermondsey, a Children’s Guild of Play was started.9

Material Crisis Spiritual crisis over the city was joined by a crisis of confidence in the engine of progress itself. Business historians date a great depression in the economy lasting from the 1870s to the 1890s, but the feeling of depression which accompanied it lasted much longer—well into the 1950s. Was industrial capitalism desirable as an English way of life? T. S. Ashton recalled in 1948 how he had spent most of his life as an academic, reading student essays which told modern English history as a tale of blood, sweat and tears. ‘Economic forces, it would appear, are by nature malevolent.’10 At the turn of the twentieth century, and then again from the 1920s into the 1930s, so many ‘conditions’ and ‘ investigations’ of the people poured their statistics into a deep pool of national anxiety. As David Cannadine concluded in his study of writing about the Industrial Revolution: ‘For the majority of people, it seemed, the Industrial Revolution had not worked.’11 For most of the first half of the twentieth century it was a story of economic uncertainty. By the early 1950s a theory of booms and slumps had come to dominate the critique. There were differences about how long and how steep and for how many, but most agreed that the business cycle offered a bumpy ride for all but the best-padded. Anxieties about industrial capitalism were not new. In the 1830s and 1840s they had taken the form of campaigns against what was called the Factory System. In those campaigns Lord Shaftesbury had concentrated his ire on the plight of the women and children. He claimed factory women worked an average of fifteen hours a day, thus debarring them from being · Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (London, 1986), 71. Anti-cosmopolitanism was anti-elitist and could go either left or right or, as with Cecil Sharp, both ways: The Country Dance Book (1909–21; London, 1934), 9. On family life: Charles H. Pearson, National Life and Character (London, 1893), 258, 162. ⁄‚ T. S. Ashton, in Brian Inglis, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1972), 18–19. ⁄⁄ David Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880–1980’, Past and Present, 103 (1984), 134.

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adequate wives, good mothers, or even anatomically correct human beings. All this had brought an ‘unnatural change’, ‘a perversion . . . of nature’ which was seeping through into society at large.12 By the century’s end, however, the factory was familiar, both in the landscape and as a place to work. It could no longer seen as an alien force operating across a scatter of manufacturing districts. So instead, attacks on the factory broadened into attacks on industrialization itself. It had torn the English from their land, it had created unstable markets in land and labour, it had led to permanent disruption. London’s congestion demonstrated the incompatibility of markets in land and markets in labour: what one wanted, the other could not provide. How could the people be left to settle when economic forces were so convulsive? No wonder the people were leaving the land, and even England itself. For the first time, emigration came to be seen as a national project rather than just something people did on their own account.13 While the hardworking English were being forced to migrate, Sidney Webb turned on the ‘speculators’, ‘jobbers’, rent ‘farmers’, and ‘sharks’, while J. A. Hobson predicted a new financial aristocracy living entirely off African and Asian as well as English tribute. He called it ‘parasitism’. In the rich feeding-troughs of the French Riviera, parts of Italy, Switzerland, and the South of England, the parasites fed. Serving them was a new class of retainers. Hobson thought that men and women of the agricultural southern counties would have to choose: bend the knee or get out.14 Joseph Arch, the agricultural labourers’ leader, had decided early on that if he loved his homeland less it was because he loved his countrymen more. It was better for a man to be landed in Canada than landless in England. Arch didn’t need any lessons from economists on the workings of a land and labour market which looked set to drive his class, but not any other class, into exile. Once, when he had been recruiting for the union in Oxfordshire, the local vicar had sent his curate ‘to riot a little bit’. The curate challenged the trade unionist to remember the laws of supply and demand. Arch challenged ⁄¤ Ten Hours Factory Bill (London, 1844), in K. E. Carpenter (ed.), Prelude to Victory of The Ten Hours Movement (New York, 1972), 21–5. ⁄‹ Between 1853 and 1920 an estimated 9.7 million English, Welsh, and Scots emigrated, mainly to the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: P. J. Cain, ‘Economics and Empire’, Porter, OHBE iii.46. ⁄› J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (1902; London, 1961), 364; Sidney Webb, Fabian ‘London Programme’ (1891), Richard Dennis, ‘Modern London’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. iii, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 126.

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the crowd to remember the trust fund for the families of poor curates. Without it, they’d surely go begging or migrating. Markets? Labour markets? Whose labour markets? ‘Bring your labour into the market on the same laws of supply and demand, and see how you fare; we can get plenty like you at 9s per week . . . Would it not be a wonderful thing to see half a dozen curates going through this village . . . with their pulpits on their back, asking for a job?’15 Economists liked to talk in terms of free competition. But unbridled competition between equal units in an entirely private market would have destroyed all that held capitalism together in a legal and social context. ‘Limited liability’ was acceptable for capitalists but not for workers: or, to put it another way, what limited liability in law for private persons, was not acceptable for society as a whole. With limited liability for society as a whole in mind, ‘social’ entered the national vocabulary, and did so as an acknowledgement that the people required some sort of legal and social context, even if market forces apparently did not. At this point, the economists reached the limit of their usefulness.16 That quintessentially social being, ‘the man in the street’, entered the nation in the 1890s as the voice of someone, somewhere (perhaps in Clapham, but on an omnibus), who could not normally be relied upon to conform to the laws of supply and demand.17

For or Against Progress? Of course, the image of England as a land in crisis was only a partial view, or perhaps it can best be seen as a complementary view. Most anti-suburban prejudice was pre-1914, and even then it did not necessarily reflect the feelings of those who actually lived there.18 A torrent of inter-war suburban ⁄fi Arch, Joseph Arch, 228. ⁄fl ‘There is, indeed, evidence that labourers in low-wage areas in the [agricultural] south may have been earning less than the minimum amount needed to keep themselves and their families at full physical efficiency, even as late as 1910. It does not follow however, that it would have profited farmers to pay such workers more . . . the effort supplied by labour may have been inelastic with respect to the wage rate’: R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain Since 1700, vol. ii, 1860–1939 (Cambridge, 1981), 161–2. ⁄‡ On the ‘social’: Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds.) Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914 (Sussex, 1981), chs. 5, 10. Fading belief in economic laws saw a return of organic ones: Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science (London, 1996), 191. ⁄° H. W. Nevinson, Rough Islanders: Or the Natives of England (London, 1930), 97.

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home-ownership corrected many prejudices, although it was still fashionable among the fashionable to find suburban England loathsome, darling. During the 1930s the residents of Denehurst Gardens had better things to do, like dig the garden, than rail against their solidly built houses or fast electric trains. In fact, inter-war suburban housing was a market success. Helped by tax relief on their mortgages, low rates of interest, plentiful lenders, steady jobs, and an urban desire live somewhere ‘countrified’, the middle classes started buying their own homes.19 By 1939 over 60 per cent of them were doing so, and they would not regret it. They liked their airy modern houses and they made money on them.20 They certainly were not going to accept that there was anything un-English about where they lived. On the contrary. They, more than anyone, needed protection from the speculative developers and, on balance, they made sure they got it. In its soul, suburbia was garden ruralist and, intellectuals apart, it wasn’t long before those wellswept avenues and striped green lawns came to be seen as the heart of England itself. Indeed, the myth of the ‘invincible’ suburbs was happening as they were being built. Not many seriously believed that urban crisis was a real threat to the general sway of progress. But the idea of urban degeneration was there like an incubus in the national imagination, and it could be invoked for any minor crisis—any little ripple of concern that England wasn’t up to the job of being England. The result was an enduring ambivalence about the desirability of urban living which, when pressed, usually fell back into a lamentation about the loss of the natural life. Progress, therefore, in spite of being what England did best, was also what England feared most. London, for example, was always big enough and rich enough to present an awesome confirmation of, as well as generalized exception to, anyone’s sense of progress, while to the north, all those immensely progressive technoindustrial regions seemed to smoulder away on the edge of things, outside the capital, outside ‘England’, threatening its true nature. Perhaps. The result was an English impasse between embracing progress on the one hand and fearing all that it brought with it on the other. It was at this point of impasse that radicals and socialists thrived, because for them there was no ambivalence. In pit villages like Ashington, Northumberland, for instance, no one could deny that life was hard and the ⁄· Julia Parker and Caroline Mirrlees, ‘Housing’, in A. H. Halsey (ed.), British Social Trends Since 1900 (Basingstoke, 1988), tables 10.30, 10.18. ¤‚ McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 73.

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land was wasted, yet equally, production was high and community life rich. When miners discussed the relative merits of a Queen Mary or a King Edward, they were not talking monarchs but potatoes, three out of thirteen varieties of potato raised on local allotments, a scene of land and people working together in the muck and shadow of the pit.21 Marxisant socialists, market radicals, and welfare liberals alike had to come to terms with both points of progress: sharks’ and jobbers’ industrial capitalist progress on the one hand, and the people’s industrial capitalist progress on the other. They had to accept, in other words, that industrial capitalism hadn’t been all bad. Genuine conservatives, on the other hand, including conservative socialists, found progress much more wanting because they could never bring themselves to accept urban industrial England for what it was. For them, the real England was rural, and of the time before the present. Most things contemporary, therefore, conservatives considered ugly or threatening. When, for example, the historian Arthur Bryant delivered his radio lectures on the national character in 1934, modern achievements simply passed him by. He saw only grime and exploitation overlaying the beauties of the time before. He lamented the wasting of the land in a rush for money. The ‘extermination of the freeholding peasant’, he announced, was ‘probably the greatest social tragedy in our history.’22

English Land Question Claims like this had been made all through the nineteenth century. Enclosure, or the privatization of land once used or managed in common, came to be seen as the root cause of the wasteland. With great ruthlessness, the people had been separated from their land and pushed into large labour markets. Those markets, in turn, had wielded the labour power to make the Industrial Revolution, to build and fill the cities, to change the nature of England, and in so doing to lay ‘the foundation of the future social problem’.23 It might seem a long way from the enclosure of George Bourne’s village, south of Farnham in 1861, to Richard Hannay’s musings on the ¤⁄ Linda McCullough Thew, The Pit Village and the Store (London, 1985), 22. Field Marshal Smuts once told Queen Mary to her face that she was ‘the big potato’: Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 118. ¤¤ Arthur Bryant, The National Character (London, 1934), 30. ¤‹ Chomley and Outhwaite, Land Values, 46; L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (1911; Oxford, 1979), 14.

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treachery of villadom in 1915, but those who worried about such things saw the connection only too well. From rural landlessness to metropolitan congestion to suburban sprawl, the problem was the same: rootlessness, division, the betrayal of the land, the loss of the folk. Hoskins reckoned that the best memories and sharpest identities had belonged to the tenants who had had land.24 Quite literally, they had a land to remember. George Bourne reckoned that enclosure had forced these people into urban and industrial relationships they did not want and could not sustain. In learning how to be workers, they had forgotten how to be English: ‘The enclosure was brought to pass; the keystone was knocked out of the arch . . . They are no longer a separate set, unclassified, but a grade has been assigned to them . . . “Inferiority” has come into their lives.’25 The Hammonds commenced their social history of England in 1911 with the claim that between 1688 and 1832 the land had been repossessed.26 Some 4,000 Parliamentary Acts had made private some six-and-a-half million acres of common and waste. Once dispossessed, they said, villagers were more inclined to say ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’, to crouch and to seem small. Losing common rights to the land and having to defer for access to it meant that now only landlords were able to define what land meant. What land meant was improvement, and improvement had to be private. While in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America English settlers had taken native land because they said it was too little occupied, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England English landlords took native land because they said it was too much occupied. Natives in both places tended to take a different view. They faced private regimes set up to keep them off, fence them out, fence them in.27 ¤› W. G. Hoskins, ‘Leicestershire Yeoman Families and their Pedigrees’, Transactions Leicestershire Archaeological Society, 23: 1 (1946; repr. 1974), 5. ¤fi George Bourne, Change in the Village (1912; London, 1966), 111. The writer’s real name was George Sturt. His village was The Bourn, once part of Farnham Common. ¤fl J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; London, 1924), 2. ¤‡ Paul Langford compares these incursions with simultaneous attempts to bite into church property and alienate it into private property: Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), 17–27, 68. John Locke, secretary to the Lords Proprietor of Carolina 1668–71, developed out of Roman law the influential notion that unoccupied lands belonged to all, until put to use, and applied it to settlers’ perceptions of Amerindians as in a state of nature: A. Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.) OHBE, vol. i, The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998), 42–50. In 1992 an Australian High Court judgement overturned ‘terra nullius’ at time of settlement, affirming ‘native title’: W. D. McIntyre, ‘Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 691.

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Up to the 1830s there was a Tory view of landscape, in opposition and in contradistinction to a Whig view. Tory landscapes were populated. They were estates. They still had their poor, of course, but because these landscapes were ecclesiological, with spires, they retained a place for the devout poor beneath. There was a good deal of romantic medievalism in all this, but at least in its conception of the English village, the poor were not cast out. In contrast, Whig landscapes were depopulated; enclosure had done its work. William Wordsworth and John Clare drew early attention to the despotic uniformity of an open enclosed landscape, as did Cobbett, who fulminated on how that which gentlemen had defined as ‘waste’ was in fact a land of thirty cottages, thirty gardens, 125 bee-holdings, and fifteen cows, sixty pigs, 500 heads of poultry, and 100 playing children who had once grazed there. For the Hammonds, there had ‘probably been no change in Europe in the last two centuries comparable to this in importance’.28 Whatever the pros and cons of modern enclosure in a business sense, or indeed in a wages sense, those generations who lived through it knew the social cost. As migration increased and living-in declined, so family cohesion was unravelled, sexual proprieties were undermined, and social controls diminished. Access to the land of the alternative economy became increasingly difficult. All round, destitution increased, poor relief tightened, especially after 1834, and what Snell calls ‘a particular quality of social relationship’ was lost. Most importantly for the urban crisis to come, there was a causal link between this loosening of local ties and that quadrupling of population which happened after 1801. The nineteenth century ‘saw the virtual extinction of rights to land among the rural poor’.29 New rural customs based on begging (‘Mumming’) joined older rural customs based on dancing (the Morris).30 Where had the patrimony gone? ‘Stolen!’ said Lloyd George in 1913. ‘Landlord Parliaments have annexed Naboth’s vineyard!’ Land entered ¤° Hammonds, Village Labourer, 2; see also: J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993). On saying ‘Ma’am’: M. K. Ashby, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe, 1859–1919 (1961; London, 1974), 46. For criticisms of Whig landscape: Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven, 1994), ch. 2. Cobbett’s waste was Horton Heath, from the Political Register, in Williamson and Bellamy, Property and Landscape, 115. ¤· K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1987), 8. ‹‚ Between 1660 and 1800 mummers replaced Morris-men: Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford, 1996), 422. Not all mumming was that old, however. Allendale tar-barrelling and mumming originated in 1858 in a Methodist watch-night service. Professor Hutton comments that Allendale people continue to think their custom is prehistoric in origin. Allendale people, on the other hand, know they do not live in the Cheviots (p. 43).

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twentieth-century politics regarded as the major English monopoly.31 Moreover, it was clear that the state had been its key agent. From the middle of the seventeenth century on, there is a distinct shift in attitude. Having once been against enclosure as a destabilizing force, the state moved to abolish customary feudal tenures and to encourage legal written ones. In the next century gentlemen’s private Bills were given easy enough passage (78 per cent success rate)32 through a gentleman’s parliament and, in 1801, a Model Clauses Act was introduced to hurry the business through.33 In 1836 a general Act permitted no parliamentary reference to an enclosure whatsoever if the consent of two-thirds of the interest had been granted. By 1845 a second general Act could note the virtual extinction of the yeoman class and the wholesale loss of village greens. In the middle of the nineteenth century, just at the point where the residual usefulness of the common land was about to be revalued, it had all but gone. The 1845 Act offered allotments as a gesture, but it was only that: out of 590,000 acres enclosed up to 1875, only 0.4 per cent was set aside for allotments.34

Country Enclosed England had ended up in fewer pockets, but how few? The 1861 census showed 30,766 landowners. This figure was far fewer than had been expected, but it was certainly flawed. When John Bateman picked up the better figures of the Poor Law Union Assessment Committee gathered between 1862 and 1874 and published them, refined and focused, as the Return of Owners of Land in 1875, his findings made compelling reading. Bateman’s The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1876) showed a broad swathe of about 43,000 medium landowners, and his compilations ‹⁄ Lloyd George, speech at Bedford, 11 Oct. 1913, in Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock (eds.), The Liberal Tradition (London, 1956), 221. Radical wings of the other parties agreed: Sir William Earnshaw Cooper, The Murder of Agriculture (Letchworth, 1908), and F. E. Green, A New Agricultural Policy (London, 1921), 128. ‹¤ Julian Hoppit, ‘The Landed Interest and the National Interest’, paper given to conference, ‘National Identities and Parliaments 1660–1860’, UCL, Mar. 2001, p. 9. ‹‹ Before that, ‘The poorest cottager was always free to oppose a Parliamentary enclosure bill. All he had to do was learn to read, hire an expensive lawyer, spend a few weeks in London and be prepared to face the wrath of the powerful men in his village’: Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (London, 1968), 223. ‹› Snell, Annals, 190, n. 100.

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revealed the acreage and the land value, as well as the houses, clubs, regiments, and colleges, of all those owning 3,000 acres and more. From his summary tables, Barbara English has shown that 1,363 persons owned 41 per cent of England.35 Bateman’s findings were shocking, and accurate. In a way, he did for the rich what Charles Booth was to do for the poor: he offered a percentage figure that rapidly found its way into the national imagination. For the English Land Question was the Aristocratic Land Question too and, although the size and significance of their landedness was about to go into sixty years of decline, Bateman stuck. A sense of late nineteenth-century rural crisis festered alongside the more dramatic urban one.36 Enclosure had always been about the endorsement of private property, its rights and its management. Whatever productivity-gains enclosers were able to affirm, they never missed their chance to praise enclosure’s greater convenience, ‘less incumbrance’, closer control.37 And whatever hardships enclosure inflicted on the rural poor, reformers never forgot the legal fairness of the transaction—enclosure commissioners swore their contractual faithfulness ‘to Equity and good conscience . . . without favour . . . or Prejudice’.38 But it was the private nature of these acts which national identities found hard to bear. For land-use defined a people in the most fundamental sense. As the nineteenth century progressed—with Irish, Scottish, and Welsh politics turning land questions into homeland questions—what became intolerable was the sheer effrontery of turning the country into a land of trespass. In the villages, poaching seemed virtually the only reply left open. There was more to poaching than eating. There was also ‘the idea of a legitimate prey, the right to make some folk disgorge, the suggestion of a just reprisal . . . There is a satisfaction in carrying the war right into the enemy’s country.’39 ‹fi Barbara English, ‘Bateman Revisited: Great English Landowners of 1883’, conference paper, ‘Anciennes et Nouvelles Aristocracies’, University of Toulouse-le-Mirail, Sept. 1994. ‹fl A very long depression in agricultural prices and rents lasted from the 1870s into the 1940s. Between 1918 and 1922, it has been estimated that as much as 25% of land changed hands: Williamson and Bellamy, Property and Landscape, 209. ‹‡ William Pitt, A General View of the Agriculture of the County of Leicester (London, 1809), 73; Rev. J. Curtis, A Topographical History of the County of Leicester (London and Ashby de la Zouch, 1831), p. xl. ‹° Oakham Enclosure Award, Crown Inn, 27 Dec. 1823: Leicestershire Record Office, DE 1381/521a. ‹· Harry Hopkins, The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain (London, 1985), 295; C. Holdenby, The Folk of the Furrow (London, 1913), 26.

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In the twentieth century land became the forgotten war of English politics. This was remarkable. Land as a kind of property different from any other, land as the guarantor of liberties, as the basis of patriotism, as the means of life, as the embodiment of self, were all ideas which had pervaded English politics since at least the army’s Putney Debates of 1647. Private ownership of common land as a theft and an insolence dominated early radicalism. Between Thomas Spence’s 1775 lecture to Newcastle Philosophical Society and William Cobbett’s 1830 Advice to Young Men, radicalism rarely lost sight of the connection between land and Englishness.40 During the 1880s, when the United States government was selling land to private buyers, English radicals were amazed. How could the Americans auction the foundations of their own republic?41 Socialism was identified with the urban proletariat, but not long before that Walter Crane’s workers of the world were landed figures, in smocks, with bushels and billhooks. The wheatsheaf was the symbol of the Cooperative Wholesale Society. Chartist Land Planners, Freehold Landers, Building Society Shareholders, Allotment Diggers, Arts and Crafters, Industrial Democrats and Guilds people, Open Spacers and Footpathers, National Trusters, Green Belters, Vernacularists, Garden City Citizens, Youth Hostellers, Ramblers, Preservationists, Bicyclists, Planners, and Organicists all, up to 1945, shared the idea in common of the good land. Without the sight-screen of a rooted community, the origins of sociology or social history as academic subjects cannot be explained. The land was wasted because the people had been unearthed. ›‚ Malcolm Chase, ‘Thomas Spence’, Bulletin of North East Labour History, 21 (1987); William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men (1830; Oxford, 1980), 316. ›⁄ H. M. Hyndman, England For All: The Text Book of Democracy (1881; Brighton, 1973), 9–22; W. E. Adams, Our American Cousins (1883; Lampeter, 1992), 325.

14 Island

I have eaten your bread and salt. I have drunk your water and wine. The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives ye led were mine. Was there aught that I did not share In vigil or toil or ease,— One joy or woe that I did not know, Dear hearts across the seas? (Rudyard Kipling, Prelude to Departmental Ditties, 1885)

The nineteenth century saw sustained efforts by the state to identify the places and peoples of England. This was a response partly to the hugely expanding population, partly to the new urban and industrial concentrations of that population, and partly a product of the state’s growing confidence in its own competence, linked to its increasingly centralized point of view. There were four areas of achievement—in sense of place as an administered unit, in sense of landscape and history, in sense of Britain as a fortress to be defended, and in feelings of hearth and home. Being an island intensified all these sensibilities.

Sense of Place Parish and Poor Law remained. For most people, they were there at the beginning and could well be there at the end.

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The ancient counties remained as well, but found new life in the Local Government Act of 1888 (as did the parishes in the Local Government Act of 1894). The county became a physical location again, rather than an elite group.⁄ County councils and county schools, and county cricket and county constabularies and ancient-looking county buildings, all started to appear. Even county histories, last bastion of the toffs, began to be written with the people left in.¤ Ben Pickard’s National Miners’ Union (1888) federated county by county, and put pictures of collieries on its banners. Places had always been associated with trades, of course, but now many of those trades had county or regional badges. As had the army, reformed by Cardwell in the 1870s on county regimental lines with deliberate local affiliations. Haldane’s volunteers followed (1907) as a ‘Territorial Force’, based on the same regiments and affiliations. Cyclists ventured out into a landscape where the greens and browns of Bartholomew’s County Map predominated over the grey mass of the towns, and where in the typesetting England was defined by her counties: ‘lancashire’ completely dominates ‘Manchester’.‹ Cities and boroughs, meanwhile, were expanding at such a rate of mass and enterprise that they were forced to reinvent themselves. On the straighter, cleaner, better-lit streets, town-dwellers were far more regulated and their whereabouts far less porous than ever before. As places which, from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, had began to clear the stench and filth and contagion which had threatened their very circulation, late Victorian towns and cities were very proud of their civic achievements, and keen to be honoured. Public areas and institutions—museum, archives, library, gallery, newspaper, grammar school, football club, railway station, registry office, town-hall square—were all designed to show people who they were and where they lived. In this, they had an extremely rich antiquarian tradition to draw on.› Victorian identity-builders plundered the citations of the Georgians. Victorian aldermen, meanwhile, invested time ⁄ ‘The county was a group of people rather than a physical location’: Langford, Propertied Englishman, 383. ¤ W. G. Hoskins, English Local History (Leicester, 1966), 9; C. Phythian-Adams, Local History and Folklore (London, Standing Conference Local History, 1975). ‹ Bartholomew’s New Reduced Survey: For Tourists and Cyclists (Edinburgh, 1914?); J. G. Bartholomew, Historical Atlas of Europe (London, 1910?), 54–7. John Langton, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of England’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 9 (1984), 157–64. On ‘the territorial system as . . . a homely and sentimental attachment’: Lancashire Fusiliers Annual (Bury, 1904), 5. I am grateful to R. L. Greenall for this reference. › Rosemary Sweet, ‘Antiquaries and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century England’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 34: 2 (2001).

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and effort in building a sense of place. Institutional reports and receptions, rituals and regalia, never ceased to remind people that they were citizens with a proud past to look forward to. House-building and slum-clearance under the 1890 Act, large-scale private business investment, and major municipal capital projects of all kinds served to deepen awareness of the new by demolishing the old.fi The reassertion of the wealth and influence of trusts, endowments, and charitable institutions did the same, while managing to retain a strong sense of civic continuity and public good as well. A new railway cut, pedestrian bridge, or level crossing—with map and timetable—suddenly reshaped a town and redefined its coherence. A new grammar school did the same, but with far more fanfare and symbolism. Topographical books began to appear from the 1830s. They differed from their antecedents in that they were keener to draw local boundaries and quantify the contents. Older Histories and Antiquities had largely devoted themselves to ratifying the local dynasties and where they lived: sumptuous engravings of county houses and parish churches went verso and recto with genealogy and acreage. The new topographies, on the other hand, were dedicated to utility, and were offered for public sale rather than private subscription. Weighing all the uses of a place—good lime here, navigable river there—they took their readers way beyond squire and vicar. Some, like Thomas Cook’s 1843 shilling Guide to Leicester, were for tradesmen, ‘to give an idea of Leicester as it is’, and new guides in general tended to have a wider sense of what that idea should be. White’s Histories, Gazeteers and Directories raised a borough’s historic profile, as did the Act of 1845 which allowed the larger boroughs to raise money on the rates to build museums, extended to libraries in 1850.fl By the 1870s the commercial directories carried an immense amount of geographical and historical information. Householders found themselves located down their own streets, but also on a broad highway of national history since the Romans. The directories offered a digest of local progress first (from schools to police stations), and a resumé of national progress second (from Druids to Protestants). A summary of regional communications vital to the commercial traveller was always included, usually accompanied by a table of vital statistics on modern growth and reform (clock-towers and sewers). Finally, the directories usually recorded the natural history and fi Richard Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 1. fl Thomas Cook, A Guide to Leicester (Leicester, 1843), 5; William White & Co., A History, Gazeteer and Directory of the Counties of Leicestershire and Rutland (London, 1846).

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geology of the area, and the surrounding geography of wold and downland, fen and vale, in which all this urban British achievement had its being. The new art of photography quickly replaced engraving. Picnickers were photographed lounging by local ruins, ladies in bonnets were caught floating past new municipal parks, navvies were lined up leaning on their shovels. By the end of the century, publications such as William Andrews’s ‘Bygone’ series had taken topography into a new phase, and so many Bygones, Past Times, Legends, and Olden Times brought the antiquarian tradition full circle. History was back, in the certainty that everyone was now included.‡ Topography represented the most popular form of historical knowledge and in the board schools (from 1870) a captive audience of millions was ready and waiting. Hundreds of Glimpses of the local past were published for schoolchildren and migrants, the very people thought to be most unsure of their civic responsibilities. The Victoria County History, founded in 1900, sought to standardize all this historical interest. Tracking counties from earliest times to the present, this National Historical Survey retained the broad base of the topographies but imposed a standard approach in order to establish what it called ‘definite authority’ and ‘coherent form’.° Above all, central government was keen to establish definite authority and coherent form. At home and abroad, the state’s desire accurately to identify its people contributed to new forms of empirical knowledge. The growing need to calculate weight, direction, and volume, for instance, called forth the science of measurement. Weights and measures were standardized in Britain in 1824 and 1878 (‘Imperial’).· The standardization of mapping had begun in the sixteenth century, when it took on the perspective of the individual, just as clocks had set a perspective of standard time as the ‘space’ through which the individual travelled. In these momentous fixings of time and space, Europe was caught, and caught the world. Queen Elizabeth bestrode a map-like depiction of her kingdom, and her century saw the county as the first accurately mapped and printed imagined ‡ William Andrews, Bygone Leicestershire (Leicester, 1892), 242. There was roughly equal treatment given to history and folklore. Andrews had completed similar volumes on Lincolnshire, Essex, Lancashire, Northamptonshire, Derbyshire, London, two on York and two on the Church. ° The History’s Advisory Council comprised over twenty men as well as the general editor, William Page, record agent and legal antiquary. The histories were written by teams of county specialists. · Davies, The Isles, 680.

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community—starting with Norfolk in 1574.⁄‚ But first exercises in highly accurate, small-scale, geodetic mapping were mainly colonial. Although the phrase was not used until 1810, and not officially designated to the office controlling the Irish Survey until 1827, the first ‘Ordnance Survey’ maps were military, made of post-rebellion Scotland, in the Highlands, between 1747 and 1755. India was next, surveyed in Bengal and Bihar between 1764 and 1767, and then Ireland, from 1827 to 1837. England itself was surveyed only piecemeal, again at first with security in mind. Beginning with Kent and the Channel Ports in 1783, the English survey was not finished until 1911. By then Britain was ‘the best mapped country in the world’.⁄⁄ The best surveyors knew that true authority ran deep as well as broad. In India, the British were taking control of a dynamic, diverse society during a period of intense upheaval, not least the upheaval they themselves had brought. In such circumstances, intelligence-gathering was a major resource. British intelligence turned itself into scholarly knowledge. James Tod’s The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1832), and many works like it, would serve British rulers and Indian dynasties alike.⁄¤ Similarly in Ireland, where Lt. Thomas Larcom of the Irish Survey instructed his men to research the history, archaeology, language, and literature of the parishes they surveyed. Larcom wanted to restore to Ireland its proper place-names, and he went to great scholarly lengths to do it. The first and only published results appeared in 1837: 350 pages devoted to a single Irish parish, that of Templemore, Londonderry.⁄‹ The whole Irish survey cost the state £820,000 and laid the basis of Irish polity for the next hundred years, but it was not until 1892 that the Dorrington Committee called for the same sensitivity that had been applied to Irish mapping to be applied to that of Scotland and Wales. ⁄‚ All counties completed by 1579. Commissioned for military purposes, county maps continued to set new standards of accuracy until the Ordnance Survey: Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J. P. Kain, English Maps (London, British Library, 1999), ch. 3. ⁄⁄ Ibid. 222; Tim Owen and Elaine Pilbeam, Ordnance Survey (London, HMSO, 1992), 83. ⁄¤ C. A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1995), 158; id., Empire and Information (Cambridge, 1997). ⁄‹ There had been ‘Englishing’ of Celtic place-names and personal names to suit the identifying procedures of the British state in census, taxation, and registration: Davies, The Isles, 654. In the colonies, the survey and composition of lands and peoples had been more arbitrary: R. Hyam, ‘British Empire in the Edwardian Era’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 60–1, and Edward MacLysaght, Irish Families: Their Names, Arms and Origins (Dublin, 1957). On the OS, Col. Sir Charles Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (Chatham, 1926), 132–7.

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By 1900, above and below ground, the kingdom was networked and supplied, and for every sewerage system or telegraphic line there were men who knew the cartography. Even the humble enclosure award can be read cumulatively as a uniquely detailed, ground-level record of some 7 million English acres. By the 1840s the Tithe Commutation Act cadastral survey (1837) had rendered ‘an exact depiction’ of three-quarters of the country.⁄› Grouped by counties and boroughs, with even its smallest fields named and positioned, nineteenth-century England came to account for itself on the grand scale. Every place, every name, every distance, to a variety of scales and for a variety of purposes, was known. In the north, the Ordnance decreed that the word was ‘dene’ for a major valley near the coast, but ‘gill’ for a minor one to the side, while ‘burn’, not ‘beck’, was the proper word for a stream in the dene.⁄fi In London, Ordnance maps had enabled the most detailed surveys of poverty and disease. John Snow’s 1855 map of the Broad Street area identified the source of the cholera outbreak to a single pump. Charles Booth’s 1902 map of the East End colour-coded every street. From the 5 foot-tothe-mile London survey of 1848 to the first 1 inch-to-the-mile tourist map of Snowdon in 1920, maps supplied the state and its agencies with a total image and vocabulary of what it was they governed. Once in the people’s hands, OS maps conferred a kind of geographical citizenship, a flattened-out, decentred, whole-people,Whole Island of Great Britain view of themselves and others.⁄fl No uppers and lowers there. All the land and all that was on it was coloured and coded in the same way. British roads were coded and standardized in 1919. The circumference of London was divided into six divisions numbered 1 to 6, starting middle-top A1. According to size, and clockwise in order, lesser prefixes branched out. All people enjoyed the right to read these maps and use these roads. The hiker’s map in particular seemed to offer possession, if not ownership. Walking the country, and looking upon it, and learning about it, and naming it, became mass pleasures. The first census was carried out in 1801, but it was not until 1840, when census responsibilities were transferred to the Office of Registrar-General, ⁄› Enclosure providing the other quarter: Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, 134. Manorial estate surveys from the seventeenth century were exact scale drawings recording all resources and tenancies, quite different from medieval listings. Like maps of enclosure, roads, and canals, they were instruments of improvement; 25% of maps printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1736–80, were for canal and waterways alone. ⁄fi Bill Griffiths, North East Dialect. Survey and Word List (Newcastle, 1999), 10. ⁄fl T. N. Bowers, ‘Great Britain Imagined’, Prose Studies 16 (Dec. 1993).

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that the national inventory became comprehensive. It had always been understood that enumeration was a sensitive undertaking. To suppose, in a Malthusian age, that the population of Ireland was booming, or to suppose in a Chadwickian age that Shoreditch was the equal of Bath, was, to say the least, contentious.⁄‡ Births, marriages, and deaths were state-registered in 1837, but it was mainly through the census that the state was able to say what was what and who was who.⁄° For example, that railway navvies should not be regarded as ‘civil engineers’ was not, in itself, a complex redefinition. But in order to be able to say it, and many other things like it, the state ordained that the entire land should be divided into registration districts, that each district should be under district registrars, and that they in turn be under superintendent registrars controlling some 35,000 enumerators, who worked in subdivided enumeration districts responsible for information down to twenty-five inhabited houses and up to no more than 200 inhabited houses. By law, householders were now responsible, and questions about households were expanded and refined according to age, kinship, birthplace, occupation, disability, nationality, education, and place of worship. In 1841 the emphasis shifted from family occupation to individual occupation, with twelve separate orders and sub-orders of categorization. In 1911 industrial abstracts were added to the existing seventeen-part occupational list, and a five-class scheme based on occupations, but moderated by reference to levels of infant mortality, was added as well. Such detail. In 1841 the state that knew the exact contours of Bengal knew also that on census day 5,016 British persons had been travelling by train. In 1911 the registrar-general told the people which class they belonged to. Whether they had known it or not, the English people were now either upper or middle, or lower middle, or skilled working, or part-skilled working, or unskilled working class, and their checkers had even checked the death rate of their children to test the proposition. An ‘annuitant’ was now lower middle class. ‘Living off interests’ was now middle middle class. If, by 1911, the Ordnance Survey had completely mapped English land, the registrar-general had completely counted, sorted, and ranked English people. ⁄‡ Census Reports of Great Britain 1801–1931 (London, HMSO, 1951). For census history: M. Drake, ‘The Census 1801–91’, in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-century Society (London, 1972). ⁄° Surnames emerged between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, but their historian is not convinced that they were encouraged for purposes of state: Richard McKinley, A History of British Surnames (London, 1990), 32–4. C. M. Matthews attributes family name holding to copyhold tenures, and points out that the poll tax of 1381 listed payers by surname: English Surnames (London, 1966).

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How did these people speak? That, too, became a matter for others to pronounce upon. English pronunciation fell into civil war. The victor was a way of speaking called Received Pronunciation. Received from those who ranked their own pronunciation highest, victory, however, did not get as far as teaching the rest of the people how to speak like what they did. When, in the 1920s, the BBC took pains to sound its vowels properly, it knew that it was broadcasting to a people in a voice that was not their own. Received Pronunciation won the speech war, but controlled so little of the territory. People listened to it, understood it, and accepted it, but very, very few of them spoke it. It was English as a second language, and the schools tended to teach it as such. Its lone victory lay in establishing rank order—a victory for southern aristocratic dialects. Beginning in the 1430s as Chancery Standard (the written documents derived from courtly talk), and developing through the sixteenth century as the standard for poetic or high-flown speech, proper pronunciation was assisted by Dr Johnson’s four-volume dictionary (1755), which equated correct spelling with correct pronunciation—so that ‘our language may be fixed’.⁄· By the 1820s the English upper classes were beginning to make their mark through a way of speaking that to most other people was simply a drawl. Schools inspectors in the 1840s revealed that working-class children spoke almost unintelligibly (to them). With the flowering of the reformed public schools and universities from the 1860s, all schooling, even private schooling, found itself struggling beneath a standard by which it could and would be judged. In 1909 The Pronunciation of English was clear that: ‘For the purposes of the present book it is necessary to set up a standard, and the standard selected is the pronunciation which appears to be most usually employed by Southern English persons who have been educated at the great public boarding schools.’¤‚ Speech carried with it elaborate codes of tone, gesture, and nuance which could trace English people to within a few miles of their etymological home. On one side were the Henry Higginses, the people who knew and were known for knowing. On the other side were the Elizas, flower-sellers, dialect-speakers and worse. Dialect, lacking the authority of print, became the subject of ‘guffawism’,¤⁄ whilst received ⁄· M. F. Wakelin, English Dialects (London, 1972), 26–8. ¤‚ Daniel Jones, The Pronunciation of English (1909; Cambridge, 1934), 1. ¤⁄ Though this was changing: Alexander J. Ellis, English Dialects—Their Sounds and Homes (London, English Dialect Society, 1890), 171–2. Shaw’s Pygmalion, with Eliza Doolittle the Cockney and Higgins the phonetician, was first performed in London in 1916.

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pronunciation was authorized by a hierarchy of printed texts, canonized in the Oxford English Dictionary (1884–1928). No less than English land, English speech was enclosed. It became as much a means of keeping people out as of bringing people in. Even the prelingually deaf, who could hardly speak at all, let alone speak properly, were marked with dialect. For them, Received Pronunciation was lipreading. Signing came to seem improper, less than full, ‘a sort of broken English on the hands’.¤¤ Hands, after all, were what workers used. At every level, the naming and ranking of England depended upon those who were able to bring order. The Dictionary of National Biography (from 1882) was a directory of distinguished persons, 96 per cent of whom were men. They were in the directory because they were distinguished and they were distinguished because they were in the directory. Parliamentary constituencies and local municipalities were deemed to be such, and allowed representation as such, only when the state had decided that they were proper places held together by proper authority. All those societies for the preservation of something that was appropriate to someone else—from museums and galleries in 1845 to commons, footpaths, and open spaces in 1865, to the whole of rural England in 1926—made far-reaching judgements about what was worth listing, grading, protecting, distinguishing, representing. People were named, collections were catalogued, boundaries were drawn, roads were numbered, streets were signed, monuments were positioned—all with some sort of authority in mind. London Transport’s Underground map of 1931 served its purpose but it was not a true-to-scale representation of London. Places were measured and name-plated and people were shown the way, but there had to be more to England than life on the grid.

The Look of the Land For the land had a look too, and here map, census, and dictionary were joined by the view. For almost the whole of the century, major public buildings had to look historic. Gothic for churches and schools, Queen Anne for townhalls, Corinthian for banks, Romanesque for baths, Renaissance for railway stations—in any number of real and reinvented shapes and spaces, the English were accused of ‘an unreasoning idolatry for styles that flourished ¤¤ Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (New York, 1990), 78.

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(and waned) centuries ago’.¤‹ Central London was rebuilt as a setting for state ceremonial. Parliament Square was refashioned, the Mall widened, Buckingham Palace refronted, Admiralty Arch imposed, Whitehall rendered massive, solid, imperious. The strength of the Bank of England was promised on its notes, with an architecture to match. Modern terraces and semis went up replete with Tudor-Bethan fascia boards, one inch thick, nailed to the wall, black on white, ‘quasi-rural . . . irretrievably suburban’.¤› Lutyens designed cottages for the twentieth-century rich reminiscent of seventeenth-century yeomen’s mansions, all herringbone brick, pitched roofs, eaves and tiles and doors you could drive a hay-cart through. Unwin designed mansions for the poor reminiscent of seventeenth-century poor man’s cottages, in which there was ‘a simple dignity’ made whole by being terraced or, more rarely, quadrangled in the college or almshouse style. Modernism hardly got a look in.¤fi Historicism is not to be confused with appreciation of history itself. The Victorians demolished many genuinely historic buildings as slums. If no single style dominated what replaced those buildings, nevertheless they spoke pretty clearly, for John Ruskin taught architects how to speak and aesthetes how to listen. As early as 1870, the Royal Institute of British Architects had recognized Ruskin’s master-classes in rhetoric.¤fl Professional journals, too, joined in the new discourse of ‘texture’, ‘mood’, and ‘line’—a literariness of space. Not that Ruskin spoke for any old building. He let fly at gimcrack builders and he was not unmindful of how cheap and tacky historicism could be, but through him British architects learned their manners.¤‡ Pugin, Barry, Scott, Street, and Butterfield all found spiritual unity in European architectural traditions. Webb, Shaw, Morris, George, and Newton all found it in domestic vernacular traditions, whilst Clough Williams-Ellis found his spiritual unity in Italianate redemptions of Welsh ¤‹ John Belcher, Essentials in Architecture (London, 1907), 3. ¤› McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 76. ¤fi T. G. Jackson, Reason in Architecture (London, 1906), 161–2; Raymond Unwin, Cottage Plans and Common Sense, Fabian Tract 109 (London, 1908), 15. Modernism came with the department store in creamy Art Deco: G. Rees, St Michael: A History of Marks and Spencer (London, 1969), 79, 85; Bill Lancaster, The Department Store (London, 1995). ¤fl The [Royal] Institute of Architects had begun in 1791, strongly committed to Greco-classical. RIBA’s Transactions saw Ruskin in 1870 as ‘the High Priest of a faith which directly identifies Architecture with Poetry’: Michael Brooks, ‘Describing Buildings: John Ruskin and NineteenthCentury Architectural Prose’, Prose Studies, 3 (1980), 241. ¤‡ Kristine Ottesen Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture (Madison, 1973), 170; Martin S Briggs, The Architect in History (Oxford, 1927), 373–8.

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hillsides. But for all of them the message was essentially the same—architecture as a dramatic performance unifying land and people. The best English architecture was said to express the national personality. Nikolaus Pevsner, eventually regarded as the next-best talker after Ruskin, if drier, found in English buildings that selfsame versatility that was found in other English institutions. The Englishness of the perpendicular line was matched, apparently, only by the Englishness of the horizontal: as in politics as in climate as in architecture—a characteristically English compromise between one thing and another. Pevsner found perfect expression of this in Lincoln Cathedral and at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire.¤° Institutions needed new histories. The Bradford Geographical Exhibition of 1887 looked to someone to do for Yorkshire what Sir Walter Scott had done for Scotland. Oxford University, too, wanted a modern history where the brilliance of youth did not detract from old men’s wisdoms. Architecture screened the cult from prying eyes.¤· Even the garden-city planners, though hygienicists and utilitarians to the letter, needed a reusable past.‹‚ Their plans were based on what they thought the old English village had been, and their key architectural reference was the peasant cottage. Letchworth (1903) was the model, but it contained not a single public house.‹⁄ English history increasingly became identified with a certain look of the land. People were invited to view territory as ‘landscape’—a right and a wrong way of looking. Strangely, English landscape painters had found their golden age during the heaviest years of parliamentary enclosure. Their invitation to view the countryside turned the countryside into just a view.‹¤ Those who did the painting and those who did the viewing, therefore, repossessed not the land but the meaning of the land. ‘Emparking’ was a fine word for a kind of enclosure that turned land into landscape by clearing out all those who lived there. This was usually followed by a painting: a view, therefore, of that which had been turned into a view already. Books on ¤° Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art, 81–110. Murdo MacDonald finds the essence of Celtic art in interlacing ‘linear patterns’: Scottish Art (London, 2000), 14 ¤· M. Tait, Yorkshire . . . Elaborated from a Prize Essay (Leeds, 1888), p. iv. Oxford’s myths are in R. N. Soffer, ‘Authority in the University’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge, 1992). ‹‚ S Martin Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Working Class’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1980), 500. ‹⁄ A. H. Gardner, Outline of English Architecture (London, 1947), 93. ‹¤ ‘In landscape-painting, England stands pre-eminent’: E. Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English (1833; Chicago, 1970), 346; H. J. Massingham (ed.), The English Countryside (London, 1939), 34.

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emparking appeared from the 1780s. Instructions on how to dot buildings, cross streams, and phase views became standard.‹‹ John Clare knew that his village lacked that aesthetic unity which Ruskin would come to spiritualize as the essence of architecture. He knew that in dislocated, straggling, poor places like Helpstone there would be ‘nothing in it of character for the “better sort” ’ who wanted a view. All the books about rural England which followed in the wake of enclosure and were simultaneous with the agricultural depression of 1870–1940 knew the same: that if the land was to be valued in meaning as well as in money, then it had to look pretty. As pretty as a picture, in fact.‹› Although there had been some slender protective legislation before 1914,‹fi it was during the 1920s and 1930s that suburban England stepped in to curb its own growth and save the look of the land. Battle was joined in the south-east, where the developers threatened most. Major battle honours were: the East Kent Regional Plan of 1925; the saving of Stonehenge, by appeal, after the ‘Stonehenge Café’ had sprung up next to it in 1927; the Norbury Park and the Surrey County Council Act of 1931; the South Downs Preservation Bill of 1934, as led (but spoiled too) by the county councils of East and West Sussex; and the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Population from 1937, prompted by concern over the growth of Greater London. The fight to preserve the look of the countryside was suburb-led: front-line, so to speak. Pressure of population in towns and the preservation of the countryside were seen as related issues, and town and country planning, therefore, grew together, with major Acts in 1932 and 1947 and important interim legislation in 1935 (Restriction of Ribbon Development Act) and 1938 (Green Belt, London and Home Counties Act). Hiking, climbing, and scenery, after all, were first and foremost urban freedoms, and after the war it took an urban party to guarantee them.‹fl But this was about England for the English. What about England for the world? ‹‹ Gillian Darley, The Idea of the Village (London, 1976), 6–13. ‹› Thomas Hennell, The Old Farm (1934; London, 1984), Preface; Mark Storey, The Poetry of John Clare (London, 1974), 26. ‹fi Ancient Monuments Act 1882, extended 1913; Housing and Town Planning Act 1909. ‹fl National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949. This, and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, came out of an inter-war movement that saw rural preservation in terms of legislation and planning. In ecological terms, the period was one of mass house-building, agricultural depression, the disintegration of existing patterns of ownership, and the preservation of a certain sort of ruralism. Its historian is John Sheail, whose Rural Conservation in Inter-war Britain (Oxford, 1991) I have drawn on here.

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Islanders Modern geography discovered itself in a nineteenth-century Europe embroiled in wars of national unification. Given that what was unified had never been unified before, modern geography’s key theme was not so much unity as unity-in-diversity. In Britain, modern geography grew with this (very appropriate for the Union) and also with the number of colonies. The Royal Geographical Society’s Hints To Travellers expanded through eleven editions, from thirty-one pages in 1854 to 900 by 1935. From the outset, modern geographers learned from the modern historians, whose major task, like that of the nationalist politicians and the Ruskinian architects, was putting together disparate elements to form a whole. Old geography had tabulated the facts and the figures, but the new geography took those facts and figures and made them one. In 1926 the great French geographer Vidal de la Blache defined ‘terrestrial unity’ as the dominant idea in all geographical progress.‹‡ Cartography would provide accurate delineations, while geography would infuse them with a sense of wholeness. The council of the Royal Geographical Society defined its work as ‘a compendious treatment of all the predominant conditions of a country’‹°—something which, in the round, was also called the personality of place. The geographic ‘personality’ of a place tended to overlap with the historical ‘character’ of a people. To find them, territories and peoples were scrutinized for their levels of integration. The higher the level of integration, the more natural the region; the more natural the region, the more successful the nation-state on which it was, or should be, based.‹· True regions and true nations, therefore, were complementary formations: ‘stows’ were defined by the geographers as regions immediately observable to the untrained eye; ‘tracts’, on the other hand, were larger and took more effort

‹‡ P. Vidal de la Blache, Principles of Human Geography ed E Martonne (1926; London, 1950), 6. ‹° T. W. Freeman, History of Modern British Geography (London, 1980), 11, 35, 52. ‘Unity in diversity’ had its radical and anarchist supporters too, such as Count Peter Kropotkin, who sought ‘to represent it as a harmonious whole’: D. R. Stoddart, Geography, Ideology, and Social Concern (Oxford, 1981), 145. ‹· De la Blache’s États et Nations de l’Europe (1891) showed that none of those states ‘could be regarded as natural regions’: T. W. Freeman, A Hundred Years of Geography (London, 1965), 92. For the British geographers A. J. Herbertson, Marion Newbigin, and J. F. Unstead, and their debt to De la Blache: P. E. James and G. J. Martin, All Possible Worlds (New York, 1981), 199–210.

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to see. If a true land and its true people were there to be seen, it was the geographer’s task to make the effort. Unfortunately, there was less in this than met the eye. No two places are identical. No single place is homogeneous. Before a geographic personality could be revealed, therefore, geographers needed more than whole sight. They needed whole imagination as well, for without it they would see only the diversity and difference of detail. But if they had it in them, if they had ‘something of the poet and the painter’ in them, then they would be able to see.›‚ The most influential British modern geographer was Halford Mackinder. Mackinder came out of university extra-mural teaching and saw himself as involved in work of national importance. In an extempore address to the Royal Artillery College at Woolwich in 1911, he took geography way beyond verifiable facts: ‘Geography is the imaginative understanding of the great regions . . . the power of visualizing . . . the power of extending . . . the power of looking . . . the power of seeing into it with the mind’s eye . . . You take to pieces the country and you reconstruct it in your imagination.’›⁄ Mackinder’s country was Britain, but his mind’s eye was all his own. He and the new generation of geographers saw in the revealed, or imagined, personalities of lands and peoples nothing much more than their own national prejudices. Ellen Semple, for instance, writing way down in Louisville, Kentucky, and applying her mind’s eye to Africa, described it as ‘a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert’. Cyril Fox, writing about the personality of Britain in 1933 and taking a Unionist stance, saw the west of Ireland as the least cultured part and London and the south-east as the most. Ulster, miraculously, he saw as British. The excavation of hooped and collared Bronze Age urns proved it.›¤ In the schools, Mercator’s Projection dominated the way of visualizing Britain in the world, with England as spatial centre and Greenwich as standard mean time (1884). Sir John Seeley saw English history as a maritime voyage out from that centre, building empires from the Elizabethans onwards.›‹ Mackinder took these various projections and extended them forward and back to situate Britain the Island. He argued that, after Columbus, Britain the Island had moved from the world’s edge (painted in Celtic ›‚ Sir Francis Younghusband’s 1920 presidential address to the Royal Geographical Society, in E. W. Gilbert, British Pioneers in Geography (Newton Abbot, 1972), 231. ›⁄ Ibid. 152–3. ›¤ Semple, Geographic Environment, 393; Cyril Fox, The Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1933), 35. ›‹ J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1883; London, 1897), 142.

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tones—‘dark rocks . . . bird haunted skerries’) to the world’s centre. An Island naturally protected to the east by the North Sea, to the west by the ‘Oceanic Border’, and to the south-west and due north by great, deep, marine antechambers—all plumbed and charted by Admiralty hydrographers by 1856—Mackinder saw Britain as having been able to exploit her pivotal world position without falling prey to invaders. Only in the narrow Dover Straits had she been vulnerable. But England had defended that channel, and indeed used it to take the best of European culture whilst repelling the worst of continental despotism.›› Mackinder’s geography was influential not only because he confirmed the naturalness of the Island region, but also because he had projected his geographer’s imagination forward. A new age was dawning, where global power would rest not on the seas and whosoever controlled the seas, but on land masses, and in particular on the central European land mass. Whoever controlled that, he said, controlled the rest. This was the Heartland Thesis, first delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904 and a major piece of British strategic thinking well into the Cold War.›fi Mackinder believed that the European heartland should never become a British battlefield. Foreign nations would have to fight it out there. However, there was no denying that the heartland was close. If France should fall then only the Channel drew the line. It was in this mood that the idea of Island-fortress Britain entered the new century. Was the navy equal to the task? With this view of Britain in the world, the sea became the furthest extreme of British territory. It was their most intimate, and their most objective, defining characteristic. An older tradition had seen the seas as part of the realm, sea-girt, arising ‘from out the azure main’, but that was Britannia sailing abroad, not the British fast in home waters. New stories about ‘an island race’ emerged—half-maritime, half-rural. Although the vast majority of the population was neither, the blue-green Island-fortress idea came to order their every other modern location. The navy steaming in the Channel became the crucial symbol. Jack Tar had long been a favourite, gallant figure of the Victorian stage. Yet Jack had not normally been a national character. In fact, in the long tradition ›› Sir Halford J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas (1902; Oxford, 1930), 15; Delano-Smith and Kain, English Maps, ch. 7. ›fi P. J. Taylor, ‘Geographical world orders’, in id. (ed.), Political Geography of the Twentieth Century (London, 1993); J. T. Coppock and W. R. D. Sewell, Spatial Dimensions of Public Policy (Oxford, 1976), 61.

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of maritime painting he was neglected. Ships and captains were the heroes, and great sweeping seascapes the playground, while Jack had existed as a fantastical, sentimental, plebeian sort of low life. Known by his masters as a fornicator and a brawler, he was more famous for his returns and his farewells than for his seamanship: ‘The poets have not loved him . . . they have dismissed him . . .’›fl Between British Island and Continental Heartland, between, indeed, a temperate people and a military machine, came to stand the sailor as English man o’ war. The poets stooped now to peer below decks, into his life, his customs, his history, his songs and sayings. Masefield’s modern poets, Binyon, Bridges, Newbolt, and Scott, began to recover him.›‡ The 1880s had seen a number of naval mishaps. In particular, Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee review had been a fiasco. Unseaworthy ships and young crews had led to accidents and collisions. Soon, a modern German fleet would start nosing out of its heartland into the North Sea. Taking up the challenge, Kipling tried to realign the modern fleet with Nelson’s by displaying the armour and tradition of twelve battleships and eighteen cruisers in home waters. While the squadron patrolled the seas, Kipling reminded the nation that out there on the waves and down among the gunrooms there were men like him, which was to say, men like them. Up on deck, that ‘leisurely, rolling slow march of the overlords of all the seas’ was their march too. Kipling knew the look of Britain from those seas. With this description, he launched a thousand photographs: ‘A modern man-of-war photographed in severe profile is not engaging, but you should see her with the life hot in her, headon across a heavy swell. The ram-bow draws upward and outward in a stately sweep . . . it hangs dripping an instant, then, quietly, and cleanly as a ›fl John Masefield (ed.), A Sailor’s Garland (London, 1908), p. x. The Sailor’s Farewell transfer featured on thousands of cheap jugs: ‘Sweet oh sweet is that sensation | Where two hearts in union meet | But the pain of separation | Mingles with the sweet.’. See Geoffrey Quilley, ‘The Image of the Sea and the Identity of the Maritime Nation in Eighteenth-century British Art’, in G. Cubitt (ed.), Imagining Nations (Manchester, 1998). ›‡ Masefield, Sailor’s Garland, p. xx. See also: Frank Rinder, Naval Songs (London, 1899)— ‘Listen to the lusty cheers that welcome the appearance of the “boys” at the Military Tournament’ (p. xv); Commander C. N. Robinson, The British Tar in Fact and Fiction (London, 1909)— ‘No one has yet produced an adequate and wholly satisfactory work on the subject’ (p. x); Robert Frothingham (ed.), Songs of the Sea and Sailors’ Chanteys (Cambridge, 1924); Commander W. N. T. Beckett, A Few Naval Customs (Portsmouth, 1931); John Winton, Hurrah For yhe Life of a Sailor! (London, 1977), ch. 3. Robert Blatchford’s autobiography described life at the Bower Theatre in London in the 1850s: ‘They demanded ghosts and pirates, smugglers and slave-drivers, Jack Tars and brigands’: My Eighty Years (London, 1931), 19.

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tempered knife, slices into the hollow of the swell, down and down . . .’›° The new geography relocated Britain in her time, at the end of a dying maritime era, and in her place, next to a flexing land mass which was to be the world’s next heartland. The Island was still at the centre and only the navy could keep it there. Modern geographers not only repositioned the Island in the sea, they also reimagined what kind of island it was. De la Blache and Longnon had talked about an essential France—France as genres de vie, first created by the natural interplay of land and people, then covered with the filth and grime of industrialization.›· Before actual corrosion set in, it was crucial that France should recover its true personality from out of its deep history.fi‚ In Britain, the new generation of geographers—Geddes, Herbertson, Stamp, Fleure, Fawcett—eagerly applied these ideas.fi⁄ Beneath the wasteland lay a homeland which, if it did not constitute all the island of Britain (Britain was, after all, as diverse as France) it could at least be unified into a matching set of natural regions. Fleure and Fawcett took the idea and turned it into regionalism, a new force in twentieth-century British thinking, even if not one that was based on obvious spatial lines.fi¤ Once again, it was Mackinder who laid the ground rules. He said there were at least two natural regions in the Island—England, and the rest of Britain. In England, the primary subdivision was the south-east, where, in the beginning, seven counties had formed the original England before going on to take the great southern and midland plain as the Island core. The geographer’s imagination had to scrub away centuries of grime to get back to a time before the Industrial Revolution when the natural unity of this English core was plain for all to see: remember what England was in those days—the North a desert; Wales a wild man’s land; England, for all practical purposes, the rich agricultural plain of the Midlands, East and South. London was not so far from the centre of that . . . a ›° Rudyard Kipling, A Fleet in Being (London, 1899), 84. ›· Auguste Longnon studied Roman Gaul and astonished contemporary France at the stability of its geography: Paul Claval, ‘The Historical Dimension of French Geography’, Journal of Historical Geography, 10 (1984), 230, 232. fi‚ For the influence of the geographers, de la Blache and Ratzel in particular, on the new wave of French economic and social historians clustered round the journal Annales: Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 13–37. fi⁄ Arild Holt-Jensen, Geography. History and Concepts (London, 1988), 34–6, 41–3. fi¤ On the difficulties: Jon Stobart, ‘Regions, Localities, and Industrialisation’, Environment and Planning, 33 (2001).

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nation of farmers of 2,000,000, inhabiting one plain, in the midst of one market town (London) with this great tidal river coming up to it for trade. It was the simplest thing to establish a Parliament here—one King, one Parliament, one plain, one city, and merely villages elsewhere, one uniform nation. There is a simplicity about our history for that reason, and the hero of that history is this Parliament, which has evolved through these centuries, but which is now being ruined because of the tributary streams from Scotland and Ireland which have brought complexity to what was once so simple.fi‹

At Home Once the natural regions had been uncovered in this way, and locked into national thinking under pressure of threat to the Island, then it is not difficult to see how the homes of the aristocracy, which were concentrated in that southern core, might be transformed into national treasures. They became the stately homes of England. Designed to keep others out, so that even within their walls servants could serve and melt away, aristocratic houses were presented now as if they had been built for everyone. The lie of their land, too, became just how all English land should look, while primogeniture and entail had kept it whole, perfect for long rides. The National Trust eventually became devoted.fi› In their titles, their owners shared England’s names, and naming, as Freud reminded us, is a component of personality. They were the only people who could make land and people match: beautiful views, unquestioned authority, faithful retainers in a landscape.fifi Indoors, between butler and scullery-maid existed rank but not, it was hoped, ‘clarss’. Industry was far away. The sixth Duke of Devonshire enjoyed his coal-mines but didn’t want them near his house. A model of a working mine in the state dining room sufficed.fifl Outside, all was as green and pleasant as a natural region should be. The stone was local, the bridge was angled to suit the view, the drive and river matched the land’s contours. fi‹ Parliamentary Debates, Federal Devolution. Creation of Subordinate Legislatures, House of Commons, 116, 1919, 1929. Mackinder was a Unionist MP for Glasgow at this stage in his career. Winston Churchill followed Mackinder in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, writing his first drafts in the late 1930s: vol. i, The Birth of Britain (London, 1956), p. viii, 100. fi› Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London, 1987), ch. 3. Six southern counties hold 66% of listed buildings. See Roy Strong et al., The Destruction of the Country House (London, 1974), 7. fifi Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (Harmondsworth, 1980), 307. fifl Duchess of Devonshire, The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth (London, 1987), 134.

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Beneath them, not quite town and not quite country, lived the middle class. In time their suburban drives would mellow into an English look. Most deliberatively, they chose to live apart. An 1838 building manual devoted ten pages to suburban chimneys—first break against town stink. ‘Villadom’ was carefully calibrated as to size and naturalness, from meanest 12 foot ⫻ 12 foot in a terrace, with back garden, right up to unrestricted size and detached, with park.fi‡ The cut-down villa was the nearest most urban middle-class families came to gentrification. Lacking the country house’s generous lateral spaces, its narrow ups and downs were alive with people who brushed past each other on the stairs. Upstairs–downstairs distinctions were more rigid here because they had to be.fi° As for the sons and daughters of villadom who broke free, went to university, or joined the avant-garde, they were the ones who most loathed what they remembered as cramped suburban privations. To them, ‘bourgeois’ was just another word for repression. Beneath the tall thin villa lay the portly ‘semi’. Abercrombie saw it in 1939 as ‘a specialized British product’, ‘perhaps the least satisfactory building unit in the world’.fi· Semis, too, were finely calibrated according to space and location. After 1918, local authority council housing took its design principles from the notion that the English poor lived in cottages. At first in rows but then more in pairs, the typical council house represented a cross between cottage and semi. Because they were the dwellings of a subservient class, neither the middle classes nor the building societies could countenance them as suitable properties. Hence the semi-detached villa, where, although everything was nearly as tight as in a council house, touches of gentility were retained: the hall with hat-stand, and drawing-room with French windows-to-lawn. You needed a weekly income of £3 8s 9d to afford such a house.fl‚ Owner-occupation was strictly middle-class. Up to the 1950s, the look of England was dominated by terraced housing. Most of it was extremely compact in the heart of towns and cities, close by the workplace, bordered by roads and railways, bound together by the lives of women and children. The terrace was rented, crowded, built according to ‘best’, ‘good’, or ‘common’, and sized in a line by property deeds and by-law regulations. The meanest streets had no grass, hedge, or wall. The best fi‡ Loudon, Suburban Gardener, 48–58, 36. fi° Light, Forever England, 27. fi· Abercrombie, Modern House, p. xix. fl‚ M. Swenarton and S. Taylor, ‘The Scale and Nature of the Growth of Owner-Occupation in Britain between the Wars’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 38 (1985), 384.

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streets had step-down versions of each, with a passage, but not a hall, facing out onto the street, and perhaps a narrow bay window and tiny grass patch at the front and a lean-to at the back.fl⁄ Working-class people lived near, near enough to damage their health. Not much privacy was possible. When they went on holiday to the seaside they put their tents up in close order.fl¤ The terraced look rolled austerity and modernism into one. With its plain slate, straight lines, and bare furnishings, the pawnbroker was not the only one to know how minimalist these people could be.fl‹ Nevertheless, home had to have its front room for Sundays, its shining fire to dry the washing, and its slightly larger bedroom for the proletarian double bed. Island Britain was a place which knew its place. fl⁄ Stefan Muthesius, The English Terraced House (New Haven, 1982). fl¤ The percentage of English and Welsh families living at more than two persons per room fell from 5.6 (understated) in 1901 to 1.2 in 1951. On Tyneside, a quarter of families lived at more than two per room in 1921. In 1947 nearly 70% of dwellings had been built before 1919; by 1967 the figure had fallen to just under 39%: Parker and Mirrlees, in Halsey, Social Trends, tables 10.4 and 10.10; James Hadfield, Health in the Industrial North East 1919–1939 (Withernsea, 1980), 28–9. For beach tents: John K. Walton, ‘The Demand for Working-Class Seaside Holidays in Victorian England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 34 (1981). fl‹ Gordon Allen, The Cheap Cottage and Small House (1912; London, 1919), 52. The architects’ department of London County Council showed some Arts and Crafts idealism in their early estates at Totterdown Fields (1901), White Hart Lane (1903), Norbury (1904), and Old Oak (1909).

15 Natives

. . . a variety of one species often assumes some of the characters of an allied species, or reverts to some of the characters of an early progenitor. (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859)

The people were shown their place. Showing them how to dwell in it, however, was more difficult.

Survivals in Culture In 1871 the ethnographer E. B. Tylor laid out the rudiments of a new approach to the study of human life. First, he said, one had to look systematically across the world at ways of life which could be compared one with another. Second, one had to place those ways of life—their beliefs and practices and artefacts—according to the stage of civilization they were judged to have reached. Drawing on Darwin, Tylor organized global beliefs and practices and artefacts into ‘species’. Same examples of these species, the bow and arrow, say, or the flattening of children’s skulls in early infancy, were found in different cultures across the world. In general, all ways of life, or cultures, were in states of development, though at different rates of progression. Tylor’s main point, and one of the most influential ideas of modern times, was that some ‘species’ of belief, or practice, or artefact, remained stuck in their original or earlier stages of development even though the rest of the culture had moved on. He dubbed these species ‘survivals in culture’ and described their condition as one of ‘arrested development’. By studying

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survivals in culture, Tylor believed that ethnographers could delve into what was essential in the human condition. As beliefs or practices, survivals were not fully understood by those who performed them because (as in Darwin) species did not need personal knowledge of evolution in order to evolve. Survivals in culture were simply ‘carried on by force of habit’, enduring even when the culture no longer knew why they were there or what they were there for. A proper reading of these survivals could lead the ethnographer into a people’s deepest meanings: ‘Survival in culture, placing all along the course of advancing civilization way-marks full of meaning to those who can decipher their signs, even now sets up in our midst primaeval monuments of barbaric thought and life. Its investigation tells strongly in favour of the view that the European may find among the Greenlanders or Maoris many a trait for reconstructing the picture of his own primitive ancestors.’⁄ The Folklore Society was founded in 1878,and from its ranks came some of Tylor’s most committed disciples. Writing in 1892, George Laurence Gomme, the society’s president, followed Tylor all the way down his lines of cultural advance. He labelled the stages of development as if they were cultural layers: savage to barbaric, barbaric to lower class, lower class to ruling class, ruling class to national. Highest stage of all was Aryan.¤ Gomme, it has to be said, was the kind of archaeologist who did his digging in the study. Drawing on Sir W. Elliot’s article in the Journal of the Ethnological Society,‹ for instance, Gomme excavated May Morning festivals in Holne, Devon, and compared them with what Elliot thought he had observed at village goddess festivals in southern India. The result was a common practice, or a species, to do with eating meat for good luck, where the lived understanding of the Indian custom was used to explain the lost understanding of the Devon survival. In this way, ethnologists excavated and compared the native cultures of peoples and explained the inexplicable to their own satisfaction. Gomme followed Tylor, and Victorian folklorists followed Gomme in elaborating a grand theory of survival in culture. Andrew Lang made explicit what had long been implicit—that biological race was the major determinant of the speed and complexity of the line of cultural advance. Edwin ⁄ Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871; London, 1903), i. 21. ¤ G. L. Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore (London, 1892), 14–15. ‹ The Ethnological Society was founded in 1843 and the word ‘ethnology’ (1842) meant the science of races and peoples. This meaning overlapped considerably with ‘ethnography’ (1834), as preferred by Tylor.

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Hartland shifted the emphasis from mental and material species to spiritual species. James Frazer has been credited with founding modern anthropology on the basis of a survivalist-inspired reading of classical mythology. As a child, a nursemaid had taken Frazer to a fairground to see ‘The Wild Man of Borneo’. That was the sum of his anthropological fieldwork. Sitting in his library of 30,000 volumes and turning his lexicographer’s mind to cultural species and the comparison of cultural species, Frazer produced his twelve volume The Golden Bough (1890–1915), a mountain of cross-cultural examples which became one of the major works of the century.› In Frazer, Tylorian theory mixed with anthropology and literature; in Émile Durkheim it mixed with sociology; in Margaret Cole it mixed with Marxism; in T. A. Joyce it mixed with museumology; in Cecil Sharp it mixed with music and dance, and in R. R. Marrett it mixed with psychology. Durkheim and Cole each proposed theories of staged human development up to modern capitalism, complete with survivals and arrested developments. Joyce posited the value of museum artefacts in rendering the meaning of text-free cultures, where he saw ‘text’ as the sign of state-church mediation, while ‘text-free’, on the other hand, was as an unmediated survival from the original. Because origin was equated with nature, the unmediated was highly prized. Sharp, with the composer Sir Hubert Parry, proved folk song as a text-free culture and probably the most significant one. Marrett recommended the ‘stratigraphical method’ as a way of understanding the native mind and thus saving ‘the emotional life of [modern] people from being starved or perverted’. Sigmund Freud drew on Tylor and Frazer to identify ‘some points of agreement between the mental lives of savages and neurotics’. Bronislaw Malinowski, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Robert Graves, and D. H. Lawrence all acknowledged Frazer’s influence.fi In 1896, when Tylor was made Professor › Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth (London, 1885) and Modern Mythology (London, 1897); Edwin Sidney Hartland, Folklore: What Is It and What Is the Good of It? (London, 1904), 5–7, 28. After reading Tylor, and being invited to write the contributions on ‘Taboo’ and ‘Totemism’ for the 1888 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Frazer changed direction. He was rich enough not to have to work. Downie says he knew little of the world outside his Cambridge study door; Stocking tells the nursemaid story: R. Angus Downie, Frazer and the Golden Bough (London, 1970), 26, 16–21, 57–61; George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951 (London, 1996), 127. Freud’s Totem and Taboo seems to me a survivalist text. fi Tiryakiau, ‘Durkheim’, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet, A History of Sociological Analysis (London, 1979), 200–1; Margaret Cole, An Introduction to World History (Labour Research Department, n.d. [1930s] ), 42; T. A. Joyce, British Museum: Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections (Oxford, 1910), 42; Ralph Vaughan Williams, in Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Song (1907;

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of Anthropology at Oxford, there were hardly more than a dozen professional ethnologists in the country, but the idea of primitive culture and its survival was everywhere.fl

Cultural Underground That survivals were there for the finding gave their practitioners enormous, if unwitting, authority. They were seen as the guardians of a cultural resistance, who had survived by being turned away from the civilizing process. For those who felt that the real England had been covered in grime and industry, here was the beginning of an answer. As Gomme explained: ‘All that the peasantry practise, believe, and relate on the strength of immemorial custom’ is ‘sanctioned by unbroken succession from one generation to another.’‡ The rural poor, or some of them, were considered to stand before all the wiles of modern living with their secrets intact. They had kept the flame. They might be few in number, and poor, but they were still out there, in the villages, in the dimly lit dwellings, and it wasn’t possible to be more English than them. For the first time in English history, lack of property might be seen as an advantage in life. To ideas such as these the French geographers and historians had brought the concept of the longue durée—a concept which trusted more to the physical readings of the land than to the court durée textual readings of church and state and modernity. In 1949 Fernand Braudel contrasted the longue (‘almost imperceptible . . . ever-recurring’) with the court (‘l’histoire evenementielle’, ‘brief, rapid, nervous . . . the most exciting’). Braudel was the theory’s most sophisticated historian, but for a long time before him popular writers of English history as different as J. R. Green and G. K. Chesterton took comfort from the long-durational underground resilience of the native English over their more ephemeral and richer modern cousins. Green tried to give voice to these, the real makers of English history, a people without Belmont, Ca., 1965), p. vii; R. R. Marrett, Psychology and Folk-Lore (London, 1920), 100, 2. Marrett’s fieldwork was five hours spent with some pygmies in London and an afternoon watching Aboriginal dancing in Australia (Collini, English Pasts, 284). The quotation is the subtitle of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913; London, 1950), 26–9. fl Adam Kuper sees their ‘primitive’ as simply an inversion of the ‘modern’: The Invention of Primitive Society (London, 1988), ch. 1. ‡ Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, 26, 6.

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much say but with a more enduring presence than the institutions which ruled them. Chesterton gave them a famous epigram—a people who had never spoken yet. At all levels and from both political wings, the idea spread that the real English had been dispossessed and buried beneath a lot of time and grime and writing.° In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) the idea of the cultural underground found its most extraordinary modern polemic. It is through the poor and outcast of Airstrip One that the last vestiges of the old English nation survive, albeit incoherently and unwittingly. Big Brother is the state in all its monstrous literacy, and it aspires to control the minds of the people. By 2050 all texts would be controlled and Newspeak would be ready to say it all. Whatever could survive, could survive only in voice and memory. ‘If there is hope’, wrote Winston Smith, Orwell’s hero, ‘it lies in the proles.’ The proles were characterized by acts of singing. Singing, like sex, is natural, and The Party does neither. Although the words of the songs are not their own, the proletarian love of melody and their full-throated memory of it survives and is indomitable.· Though many of these ideas went on after Tylor, we have to note also that many existed before him. It was a time when the poor seemed ‘to obtrude themselves upon everyone’s attitude’,⁄‚ said the Monthly Magazine in 1798, and gentlemen went to investigate ways of life which, even then, drew a distinction between a polite metropolitan culture which was not to be trusted at its word, and an unlettered, plebeian culture which was. Authenticity grew by distance from London. In 1777 John Brand investigated customs he saw as surviving in the north but not in the south, survivals from a time that was fast disappearing. With Scotland in mind, Brand had surveyed northern customs as things left over from a primitive age.⁄⁄ Local clergymen were vital collectors of survivals, and indeed, in their methods of antiquarian collection, these men produced county histories that were parodies of what came to be considered the folk memory: not the work of any one author, but ° Augustus Jessopp, England’s Peasantry (London, 1914), 21–8. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949; London, 1972), i. 20–1; Anthony Brundage, The People’s Historian (Westport, Conn., 1994), 67; G. K. Chesterton, A Short History of England (London, 1917), 171. · George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949; Harmondsworth, 1973), 59. ⁄‚ Preface to John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, enlarged from the original by Henry Bourne (1777; London, 1849), vol. i, revised and rewritten by Sir Henry Ellis. ⁄⁄ Ibid. p. xiv. For English antiquaries’ early understanding of survivals in culture: Parry, The Trophies of Time, 12.

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composites based on the points of view of scores of locals who had been sent the proof sheets.⁄¤ Romantic writers came to idealize the folk remnant as a species of humanity not contaminated by a culture they saw as excessively false and out of touch. It was, indeed, their hallmark, and Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys, and others all played their part in popularizing an instinctualism not to be found amongst the more cultivated members of society. By 1846 this view of the people was reconfigured as ‘folk-lore’. Scholarly gentlemen started to collect the people’s customs and practices again, although only after the people themselves had been unable to defend them from the heaviest waves of urbanization and industrial development.⁄‹ The first major retrieval was probably the Christmas carol, safeguarded by the people then saved, collected, and edited on their behalf by High Church revivalists—Sandys in 1833, Neale in 1853, Stainer in 1865. Certain carols were seen as authentic and eminently collectible, whereas other carols were seen as merely popular—a cultural distinction which would see long service. ‘Traditional’, for instance, was neither authentic nor popular but well liked and worthy. The ‘First Nowell’ was categorized as that.⁄› More salvage operations duly followed. During the 1860s one can sense a new middle-class evaluation of the dialect, for instance, with printed dialect poetry appearing first in Lancashire and then in the north-east.⁄fi Wright’s 1857 Dictionary firmly placed dialect as an underground Old English saved by the people from two linguistic invasions, one French, the other Latin. In 1855, and some forty years before the foundation of the Folk Song Society, the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries showed willing to preserve ancient melodies, also seen as survivals. Soon after, the Durham Athenaeum warned that there was no time to lose in saving local legends, ⁄¤ Rosemary Sweet, ‘John Nichols and his Circle’, Transactions Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 74 (2000), 10. ⁄‹ William Hone is an interesting figure between these two phases, moving from radical publisher and parodist, 1817–21, to straightforward collecting as in his Every Day Book (1825–26), Table Book (1827), Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1828), and the Year Book (1831): Frederick W. Hackwood, William Hone (London, 1912). E. P. Thompson reworked ‘survivalism’ by historicizing the practices it valued: Customs in Common, 2 and passim. ⁄› Frank Howes, Folk Music of Britain, and Beyond (London, 1969), 190. ⁄fi C. F. Forshaw, Holroyd’s Collection of Yorkshire Ballads (London, 1892) and John Harland, Ballads and Songs of Lancashire (London, 1865). See: Brian Hollingworth (ed.), Songs of the People: Lancashire Dialect Poetry of the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1977), and Patrick Joyce, who took the subject to new levels in Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914 (Cambridge, 1991).

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in the steps of Sir Walter Scott, perhaps.⁄fl It was thought at the time that Scottish clan tartans had been preserved for a thousand years up to the chiefs’ readoption of them in the seventeenth century.⁄‡ Tylor, then, tapped into an older sentiment, gave it method and Darwin, and added the British Empire as a field of cross- cultural study. As for Tylor’s distinct stages of history, the political economists had long been familiar with the idea of stages of development and may be said to have invented it. Marx wrote in this tradition, and Macaulay had written about Anglo-Irish relations as staged cultural differences long before Tylor and a little before Darwin. Darwin, of course, had shown the full force of survival for a natural world that now included the human world as well. Indeed, the Victorian perception of time saw it in terms of thick layers through which one could penetrate in order to get in touch with the past. Whether the layers were languages, customs, sense impressions, rocks and fossils, biological species, stages of civilization, or levels of psychic consciousness and subconsciousness, they were there to be tunnelled. Gomme thought the whole of English civilization could best be understood by taking a few comparative clippings from the paths of time. Dr Jekyll, it will be recalled, travelled back through his own time to find Mr Hyde, savage—and made his cultural comparisons accordingly.⁄° Science fiction, so called, was usually little more than Whig history with wings. It time-travelled its way forward and back.

Native Sons Survival places were not only behind the times, they were also out of the way. Left to themselves, they had come to be themselves: places where land and people had reconciled their differences to dwell as one. Survival places were seen as a kind of quadrat for the cultural and ecological harmony of a region. The miners and fishermen of Devon, Cornwall, and Northumberland were as far away from London as the English could get, and were usually ⁄fl Thomas Wright, Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English (London, 1857), 2 vols., Preface; J. Collingwood Bruce and John Stokoe, Northumbrian Minstrelsy (Newcastle, Society of Antiquaries, 1882), p. viii. The president of the Athenaeum made his appeal in 1861: William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1866; London, 1879), p. viii. ⁄‡ J. R. Planché, British Costume (London, 1846), 335. ⁄° G. L. Gomme, Folk-Lore Relics of Early Village Life (London, 1883), 7; R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886).

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described in the same terms as their environment—hard, simple, natural.⁄· Unless one understands the influence of folklore in the representation of people such as these, it is difficult to understand why coalminers, for instance, by far the most organized and articulate corps of Victorian labour, could appear in the same chapters as hare pies, wild brags, and dumb customs.¤‚ Eager for natives and natives lands, Victorian landscape-painters went to the more remote far north and far west.¤⁄ On the very rare occasion that the folk painted themselves, folk art was considered to be both more real and less real than fine art. Pitmen painters were said to paint directly from experience—untutored, unmediated, ‘text-free’, but naive as well. Outsiders came to look at them and their place and their art and pronounced them perfectly integrated.¤¤ They had survived in culture, and they hardly knew how. If miners and fishermen were the most dramatic survivors, sailors, agricultural labourers, and craftsmen also had their claim to be native sons. Sailors worked at British extremes. Called by line and shout, haul and stamp, sailors’ shanties were presented as nothing less than native chants. Agricultural labourers worked at another extreme, in a ‘primaeval occupation’. Their arts were so ingrained in the land, it was said that they could not be put into words.¤‹ Their wages remained the lowest and their conditions of labour among the poorest. Right up to the 1950s they were represented as hidden, silent, curious. As Holdenby put it in 1913: ‘Countrymen when they get old do not have bent backs in order to be picturesque.’¤› Craftsmen were to be found in the village, that most essential of English places, and their crafts were also seen as unlettered and inexplicable, though still the foundation of all higher arts. Flintworkers, slate-quarriers, lime-burners, stonewallers, thatchers, potters, were all men who knew England because they worked directly with what England was: labour was basic; art was

⁄· A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, Cornish Seafarers (London, 1934), 139. There were older ideas behind this: ‘uncultivated land meant uncultivated men . . .’ (Thomas, Natural World, 15). ¤‚ For a late example: Christina Hole, English Folklore (London, 1945), 40. ¤⁄ Great Victorian Painters (London, Arts Council, 1978). ¤¤ William Feaver, Pitmen Painters (London, 1988), 46, 84, 130. ¤‹ ‘They call me Hanging Johnny! | Away-i-oh! | They call me Hanging Johnny. | So hang, boys, hang’: Masefield, Sailor’s Garland, 300–28; H. Rider Haggard, A Farmer’s Year: Being His Common Place Book For 1898 (1899; London, 1987), p. xv, 66. ¤› Holdenby, Folk of the Furrow, 99; E. W. Martin, The Secret People: English Village Life After 1750 (London, 1955), 27.

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merely refined.¤fi Even the steelworkers, long denied native title because associated with modern industry, finally got it in 1937. Like peasants, they lived close to Nature, apparently.¤fl In 1935 the honorary secretary of the Folk Song Society asked ‘who the folk were?’, and his answer followed the usual survival-in-culture idea but with one difference. Along with the labouring class—that is, along with the simplest and most unlettered class—he included the children. Alice Bertha Gomme had been the first to typify children’s games as survivals in culture, in 1894. Although the words of the games had changed, she claimed that their form had survived. Therefore the children remembered what their parents had forgot. They too had kept old England’s secrets. Circle or ‘ring’ games enacted old village amities, while ‘line’ games enacted old village conflicts. ‘Stag’ was a boys’ game, to do with taking prisoners. Girls were not supposed to do such things.¤‡ The Opies’ Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959) interviewed some 5,000 children drawn from seventy schools. Children were still represented as the lost folk. Their underground culture was represented by the Opies as ‘virile’, ‘rich’, ‘authoritative’, and only progressive, child-centred schools could render it for the nation.¤° Teacher-training courses in the 1960s worried about the contamination of the mass media in the same way that Victorian folklorists and ethnographers had worried about texts. For how long could northern kids continue to say ‘fuggy’ for ‘first’ (as they had done since at least 1609) while radio and television did their worst? Capitalism and the state, old foes of native culture, were the enemies again, and there was some anti-American feeling too, but at least education lecturer Frank Rutherford was optimistic. Children would resist in the same way that the folk had resisted. Television would not overwhelm their lore and language, but ‘laid under tribute, by the secret society of childhood, which, with its laws and customs, its games, poetry and music more or less intact, is likely to survive a long while yet.’¤· ¤fi W. R. Lethaby, Home and Country Arts (London, 1923), 10, 16–17; Walter Johnson, FolkMemory, or the Continuity of British Archaeology (1908; New York, 1971), 15–17. ¤fl Edmund Vale, North Country (London, 1937), 24. ¤‡ Iolo A. Williams, English Folk-Song and Dance (London, 1935), 3; Alice Bertha Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1894; New York, 1964), ii. 475, 479. Of Jamaican children’s ring games seen as ‘living archives . . . germ of a definitive civilization’: Rex Nettleford, Caribbean Cultural Identity (Los Angeles, 1979), 183. ¤° Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford, 1959), pp. ix, viii, 2. See also Reginald Nettel, Folk-Dancing (London, 1962), 9. ¤· The Opies talk about ‘fuggy’ on p. 138. Frank Rutherford, All The Way to Pennywell (Durham, University Institute of Education, 1971).

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The trouble was that neither the folk nor the children were capable of understanding their own selves.‹‚ Who they were, and what they thought, always appeared to require outsiders to explain. Puck of Pook’s Hill was another of Kipling’s musings on the folk and the children. Long regarded as a children’s fable, few children ever enjoyed this book on their own. Rather, it was intended for those with children to tell: to tell them, as Dan and Una were told by old Hobden the Hedger, that England belonged to them if only they understood who they were and where they came from: ‘ “Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England”, began Puck, in a sing song voice.’ Kipling’s historic Englishmen, in all their bobbed hair and tapered shoes, pointed the way for children’s literature as a branch of history.‹⁄ When in search of native sons, origin was nature. This was as true for adults looking back upon their childhood as it was true for peoples looking back upon their histories. Body and speech were the most original properties, and scholars strung out both on family trees of descent. Dialect speech researchers headed straight for the furthest places and the oldest inhabitants. The English Dialect Society (founded 1872) served as the pioneer corps for the new science of linguistics. During the 1880s it had 600 members and a few thousand helpers up and down the country collecting words. In 1905 Volume 1 of the English Dialect Dictionary was published.‹¤ Alexander Ellis declared dialect as ‘a genuine organic formation’, handed down from mother to child, generation on generation, ‘without any reference to books’.‹‹ Old West Riding mill-workers were represented not as a modern people who had lived through an Industrial Revolution, but as a volk with Old Norse on their tongue. To dialecticians and neo-grammarians, Noo ah’s kom heeam ageean was not wrong, but a correct form of the Norse original. It was Received Pronunciation that was wrong, which is to say, deviant.‹› When Cotswold villagers talked, it was said they spoke close to the Saxon. When Percy ‹‚ Leicestershire folk had trailed dead cats, fought over hare pie, and pretended to flog boys, but it was not theirs to reason why: ‘inexplicable unless they are regarded as survivals’: Alice Dryden, Memorials of Old Leicestershire (London, 1911), 190–1, 199. ‹⁄ Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906; London, 1951), 13. ‹¤ Elizabeth Mary Wright, The Story of Joseph Wright (London, 1934), 96–7. ‹‹ Alexander J Ellis, English Dialects—Their Sounds and Homes (London, English Dialect Societh, 1890), 2. Ellis was twice president of the Philological Society. ‹› Revd M. C. F. Morris, Yorkshire Folk-Talk (London, 1892), 14. The German Volk principle clustered around speech, custom and ‘ecology’ long before it attracted racial attributes: A. D. Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1979), 69. Ellis, English Dialects, 2. On nineteenth-century ‘Neogrammarians’ : Introduction, Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds.), The Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1987).

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Grainger wrote his musical scores, he invented Saxon words true to his blueeyed English, wanting ‘no outland words’, no words from an Italian academy or an effete soirée. This man, whose mother had washed his hair in hydrogen peroxide to keep it blonde, wanted true, racial, masculine words. So ‘jogtrottingly’ and ‘louden lots’ joined bumpingly Grainger’s musical vocabulary (if no one else’s).‹fi Of all the elements of native Englishness, language was held to be the deepest.‹fl As if they were earthworks, dialects were excavated and words were held up to indicate origin. Survival places like Devon and West Wales held the oldest rocks just as they held the oldest dialects. Geological epochs were named after them, fossils and old words were collected side by side, their buildings also were ‘vernacular’. In 1912 the British lost the race to the furthest extreme, at the South Pole, but they won the race to the oldest origins, in a Sussex gravel pit. Piltdown Man, first Englishman and Eoanthropus dawsoni, was unearthed to make the link between Frenchdiscovered Cro-Magnon and German-discovered Neanderthal. It was a pity he couldn’t speak.‹‡ Given the emphasis on speech as route to origin and thus to nature, it was strange that the finest exemplars of nature were held to be men of few words. The strongest survival regions were usually gendered masculine. Other places—artificial, mannered, wordy—were gendered feminine. Cockney London was the last place to look for real English men, for there lived ‘voluble, excitable’ men, with ‘little ballast’, living off a small-scale, flexible, consumer and service-based feminine economy.‹° Halford Mackinder thought that, by contrast, true natives were to be found in the manufacturing north—too strenuous for flowery speeches, too masterful to do others’ bidding. James Froude, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, found his true English natives in the white Empire—a land taken by men who were doers, not talkers. Until they, or their native spirit, returned, the ‹fi John Bird, Percy Grainger (London, 1976), 44, 141; Major Gambier-Parry, The Spirit of the Old Folk (London, 1913), p. ix. ‹fl Stopford A. Brooke, English Literature from AD 670 to AD 1832 (London, 1905), 4. ‹‡ Exposed as a fraud in 1953. ‹° Richard Dennis, ‘Modern London’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 3, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), 121; C. F. G. Masterman, ‘Heart of the Empire’, in Sutcliffe, Metropolis, 7–8. In ch. 4 of his Condition of England, Masterman very deliberately connects London, mobs, suffragettes, cheap words, and modern instability. In folk studies, women were usually investigated with a bias towards things like gossip: Claire R. Farver, Women and Folklore (Austin, 1975) and Marina Warner, ‘Speaking with Double Tongue’, in Porter, Myths of the English.

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bow of Ulysses would remain unstrung. Meanwhile, England was in the hands of a parliamentary talking-shop.‹· Whatever the North of England was, it was not that. Talkers were futile, like their vain, womanly, suburban lives. Doers were honoured and, if they could speak at all, they would probably have agreed.›‚ For one way of putting words together was regarded as serious and masterful, while the other way was slack and foolish. One way was speech, while the other way was mere gossip. Novels of the north could be identified by their down-to-earth, masculine craft. Novels from the south could not.›⁄ Books about miners turned all this regional gendering into an art. Miners were blocks of manhood, apparently unable to speak, though annoyingly they would not let others speak on their behalf.›¤

Re-evaluation In spite of its profound cultural conservatism, not to say condescension, the return of the native did have two positive effects. First, certain kinds of poor people came to be valued and even, in a way, honoured. Having suffered the grinding transformations of industrialization, where both factory master and political economist had tried to alter their nature into more pliable material, third- and fourth-generation workers found themselves not just themselves again, but profoundly so. Edward Thomas’s brother recalled that Edward had wanted to write ‘as near akin as possible to the talk of a Surrey peasant’. His Lob, or Jack, was English Everyman who lived beyond the bounds, spoke proverbs, and knew, through the Dialect Society, 1,300 words for a fool. D. H. Lawrence saw the fake side of all this honouring of working people (Egbert in ‘England, My England’), but he could still imbue his Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire miners with its strength. F. R. Leavis, in turn, found in Lawrence, and George Eliot, and Bunyan, and Sturt the voice of ‘an artisanal and yeoman culture existing below the level of Culture with a capital C’, and wanted to build a new English humanity on it.›‹ ‹· J. A. Froude, The English in The West Indies or, the Bow of Ulysses (London, 1888), 14. ›‚ Nevinson, Rough Islanders, 88–91. The 1930s saw attempts to masculinize English folk dancing even though the majority of the Society’s members were women: Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village (Manchester, 1993), 163–76. ›⁄ Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London, 1941), 45. ›¤ E. R. Manley, Meet The Miner (Lofthouse, 1947), 6, 87. Regional gendering had something to do with what later became known as ‘realism’: Hoggart, A Local Habitation, 113. ›‹ David Gervais, Literary Englands (Cambridge, 1993), 36, 94, 149.

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However ignorantly the native English were regarded, by the early years of the twentieth century the pamphleteers had given up their war on poor people’s mentalities, the linguists and naturalists had taken a second look, and the economists had stopped reducing everything to numbers.›› No longer could the Poor be seen as just a subdivision of the problem of Poverty. No longer could agricultural labourers be seen as just animals ‘and . . . nothing more’.›fi The political class was ready to talk at last about welfare. The idea of a cultural underground fed into that broader vision of the People as expounded by Patrick Joyce. Here the People, as a detached but zestful force in English constitutional history, was joined by the Native as an ordinary man of some integrity, best known through his voice, which was likely enough northern. In popular culture, and through the joint activities of a radical provincial press and burgeoning labour movement, a more populist, native, democratic, identity of England emerged. In places like John Bright’s Rochdale or Joseph Cowen’s Newcastle upon Tyne, this constituted a formidable alliance. It wasn’t just or primarily interested in national identity, but it was clear about one thing: a better England lay with the men, not the masters.›fl ›› For a less positive view of the shift in perception—Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) valued least those manual occupations which John Gray’s Lecture on Human Happiness (1825) had valued most (Janes Yeo, Contest for Social Science, 207). ›fi J. F. C. Harrison, Early Victorian Britain 1832–51 (London, 1979), 63. ›fl Joyce, Visions of the People: ‘What was not the true England, in all dialect literature, was London’ (p. 293). For a northern vision of ‘The People’, 1820s to 1880s, see Robert Colls, The Collier’s Rant: Song and Culture in the Industrial Village (London, 1977).

16 Journeys

These mountain valleys are in fact far less affected by modern musical influences than the most remote and secluded English village, where there is always a Parsonage or Manor House, or both, to link it to the outside world. (Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J Sharp, English Folk Songs From the Southern Appalachians, 1917)

On 31 July 1916 Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles heard Mrs Mary Sands of Allanstand, North Carolina, sing ‘Pretty Nancy of Yarmouth’. Journeying through the Appalachians, they were collecting ballads regarded by Sharp as authentic survivals in culture. They had journeyed to the furthest English edge, believing they had moved to the deepest English centre. Going out was really going in. Sharp saw North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee as lands free from enclosure, industrialization, urban blight, mass print, and class struggle. He described the land and people of Laurel County, for instance, as ‘isolated’, ‘strong’, ‘spare’, ‘wholesome’, ‘a community in which singing was as common and almost as universal a practice as speaking’. In a mountain place shut off from modernity, the English music-teacher found his natives and warmed to a life where ‘no one is on the make’. By the end of his journey he had collected 122 folk songs and 323 melodies. Here was treasure the musical conservatoires did not have.

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Sharp had journeyed 3,000 miles to find his trysting-place with England.⁄ Few collectors could afford to journey so far, yet all journeys in search of survivals had to be somehow away, out to a periphery. Not that everyone travelled in search of something. Most joined a historical holiday habit which a previous generation of survivalists had helped fashion. For most excursionists, charabanc trips into the country to arrive at a ruined abbey were quite enough. The well informed, of course, had more serious things in mind.

To Dartmoor, and Other Far Places Few survivalists regarded the House of Lords as a case of culturally arrested development, ignorant of its meaning or purpose, because survival journeys had to be in the direction of the native poor, not the native rich, and away from London. In the west, Sharp and Kennedy found songs and dances just as the Revd Baring-Gould found lore and melodies. The rector had bagged 300 songs on Dartmoor alone: 1895, for him, was ‘the supreme moment’. In northeast England and in Yorkshire, Sharp learned sword dances which he saw as survivals from their pure Scandinavian origins. Gomme, meanwhile, reckoned that Redesdale in Northumberland was one of the purest survival places in Britain. He warned fellow travellers not to be put off by its bleakness.¤ Travellers did not have to go far, for every core had its periphery and every periphery had its trysting-place.‹ In a day-trip up from the suburbs, for instance, true natives could be discovered in parts of Surrey, and even the Royal County of Berkshire had its peripheral survival places close to the imperial core, but ‘not so remote either’. Eric Benfield had been a Dorset stonemason. When he leaned against the side of a Purbeck quarry he said he felt secure again. Benfield knew that a true English native had to be on the edge of somewhere: ‘I have never felt inclined to lay claim to some Scottish or Irish descent, as so many people do. I do not remember many people claiming to be purely English, and Southern English at that, yet for myself ⁄ Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York, 1917), pp. viii–ix. ¤ Gomme, Ethnology, 185; Douglas Kennedy, England’s Dances (London, 1949), 103; Revd S. Baring-Gould and Revd H .Fleetwood Sheppard, Songs and Ballads of The West: A Collection Made from the Mouths of the People (London, 1895), p. ix; Cecil J. Sharp, The Sword Dances of Northern England, parts I, II, III (1911; London, 1951), 35. ‹ ‘Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’, 1885, in The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (London, 1928), 871–2. Hardy was a member of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club.

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I do not see anything against being an Englishman born at the very edge of the south coast.’› From the Purbeck Hills, E. M. Forster offered the greens and whites of Dorset as a vision of all England. The land belonged only to those who had seen her. The travel writer S. P. B. Mais arranged with Southern Railways for a special night train to take forty excursionists, along with supper and breakfast car, for a walk along the South Downs to witness sunrise on Chactonbury Ring. In the event, 1,440 people showed up, but the sunrise didn’t. Not that it mattered. The pleasure of trysting was more in the looking than in the seeing. When it came to journeying into England profond, ‘self hypnotism must be practised’, and ‘soon becomes a habit’.fi Journeying, then, took on the significance of a pilgrimage, and to go in search of rural natives became a powerful literary tradition, adding extra dimensions to the journeys into Unknown England of the town investigators. In 1888 W. A. S. Hewins looked upon his native country to find whole sight. As a student of economics, Hewins harboured grave doubts about its abstraction from real life. As a way of dealing with this, he read the Romantic poets and went out to teach university extra-mural classes. Then he saw the land as a whole and realized what his life stood for: ‘I cannot describe the impression all this made upon me . . . We were part of it . . . After my visit to Weston Subedge and the Vale of Evesham, I settled down to economic work with a far more definite idea of what it meant.’fl In the twinkling of an eye, Hewins had told himself a story. That story, in turn, became an emotion he would pass on to others. The propensity of places to be identified with can be seen as depending on the strength and frequency of encounters such as Hewins’s. Moments of fusion of past and present, they relocated their co-ordinates.‡ Some places relocated themselves better than others. Their ability to do so was, first, a matter of the quality of the natural and built features, and the available means of interpreting those features; second, a matter of regional intellectual institutions and how and why they were revived (or not); and third, a matter of real or metaphorical distance from London, which set the co-ordinates and meas› Eric Benfield, Southern English (London, 1942), 145; Richard Harman, (ed.), Countryside Mood (London, 1943), 81; L. S[almon]., Untravelled Berkshire (London, 1909), 2. fi H. A. Vachell, This Was England (London, 1937), 29; E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910; Harmondsworth, 1975), 171; Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend (1940; New York, 1963), 275–6. fl W. A. S. Hewins, Apologia of an Imperialist, 2 vols.(London, 1929), i. 21–2. ‡ Tony Nicholson, ‘Making Communities and Regions in the Modern World’, North-East England History Institute Conference, Gateshead, 2 Oct. 1999.

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ured all other points of view. When travellers said that some places had ‘no character’, or were ‘full’ of it, this is what they meant. In 1919 the geographer Fawcett provided some regional theory to back regional sense impressions.° For over 300 years travel writing had been the medium of biblical and archaeological knowledge, but now it was fundamental to all the new academic disciplines. In arts and social science, and as advance guard to so much modern history, geography, ethnography, sociology, and anthropology, travel writing intensified the historical encounter between traveller and place. To J. R. Green, Ebbsfleet, where his feet and the first English feet had trod, was nothing less than sacred ground. To Kipling, it was Pevensey Bay. To George Tweddell, up in Middlesborough, it was the High Tees. To Minna Keal, it was just about anywhere hilly and invigorating. To Wilson Armistead, it was the Lake District with its fund of tales ‘for the excursions of a playful imagination’.· Serious travellers went to stand in ethnographic time (which was no time), in order to be entranced by their own reveries. Some, like Kipling, did not have to travel far. His Sussex home, Batemans, a manor house in 300 private acres, was big enough to dream in. England’s greatest walker was less privileged than that, but after taking his first Lake District holiday in 1930, he knew where his best and most isolated reveries could be found. In 1938 Wainwright walked straight up to the Roman Wall and saw the garrison being reinforced and the cavalry coming over the hill: ‘This was not imagination. It was all real.’⁄‚ Whole sight, reveries, stories, fables, fantasies—it is clear that journeys did not have to be real journeys so much as imagined ones. In so many works of adventure, exploration, documentary, science fiction, and biography, frontiers were crossed, deepest selves revealed, several worlds and times penetrated, but all on the same plane. One of the most revealing of English journeys became the crossing from south to north or, putting it in other ways, from service to manufacture, from rural to industrial, from feminine to masculine, from middle class to working class. Lifting north, after all, was built into a social structure that tilted an overwhelming proportion of its money and education south. In 1912 about half of the English middle class lived in a London and Home Counties region which held over a fifth ° C. B. Fawcett, Provinces of England (1919; London, 1960). · Wilson Armistead, Tales and Legends of the English Lakes (London, 1891), p. v. On Minna Keal, Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting’, Island Stories (London, 1998), 140. ⁄‚ A. L. Wainwright, A Pennine Journey (Harmondsworth, 1987), 95. Earlier Roman-Wallers showed no personal involvement, e.g. John Wallis, The Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland, 2 vols. (London, 1769), i. 8.

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of the national population. The Folklore Society was really the London Folklore Society. In the travel books, hikers invariably caught the night train home and south.⁄⁄ Many of the shorter survival journeys were little more than trips out of London to a Surrey village, or a Suffolk beach, or Epping Forest if the day was short.⁄¤ It has to be said, however, that these were not often the destinations of working-class Londoners, who preferred Southend and, in any case, even at home were the wrong class in the wrong place. Cockney London lacked distance from London to enjoy native allure: its landscape was messy and polluted, its population was neither rural nor far away and too dense to permit reveries. Cockneys, therefore, could not yet be subjects of whole sight, nor the objects of it. When they were looked at at home, it was usually as a problem. When they went into the country, it was usually as a problem. When they ventured into other parts of London, it was usually as a problem. If Cockneys had a folk singer, it was said to be Marie Lloyd. If they had a language, like her perhaps, it was merely ‘a modern corruption without legitimate credentials’. In 1932 Thomas Burke tried to redeem London’s East End, but he knew the difficulties. It took the Blitz to turn East Enders into natives.⁄‹ In search of England there were no simple cores and no perfect peripheries. Even the meanest core had its periphery and the richest periphery might be someone else’s core.⁄› We are dealing with overlapping force-fields of Englishness, activated one by another. The Revd Baring-Gould, for instance, preferred clear highs and lows of difference. A High Churchman who wrote seventeen volumes on the Lives of the Saints as well as numerous works on folklore and folk song, he married Grace Taylor, a Yorkshire mill-girl. Then, ⁄⁄ Massingham, English Countryside, 165. W. D. Rubinstein, ‘Education and the Social Origins of British Elites 1880–1970’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), 199; Richard M. Dorson, Folklore and Fakelore (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 109. ⁄¤ Hakluyt Egerton, Patriotism (London, 1905), 11–12. Forster saw London’s railway stations as gates ‘out into adventure and sunshine’ and ‘to them, alas! we return’: Howards End, 27. ⁄‹ Thomas Burke, The Real East End (London, 1932), 163; Report on the Teaching of English in London Elementary Schools (1909), in William Matthews, Cockney Past and Present (1938; Detroit, 1970), 98, 157. It appears that working-class London was on its way towards some sort of acceptable ‘folksiness’ before 1940. Lupino Lane’s Me and My Girl opened at the Victoria Palace in 1937 and ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’ was his star turn: ‘The point of the show is essentially the contrast between the natural behaviour of the Lambethians and the affectation of the upper class’: Tom Harrison and Charles Madge, Britain by Mass Observation (1939; London, 1986), 157. ⁄› For Hankey Park, Salford, March 1930: Prologue, Love on the Dole (GB film, dir. John Baxter, 1941).

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after ten years as rector of East Mersea in Essex, in 1880 he moved to Lew Trenchard in Devon, where he was squire as well as rector. He loved far-reach industrial Yorkshire and near-native rural Devon, each in their own way, but he could never get to grips with metropolitan Essex. He concluded that its people had London clay in their souls.⁄fi If they did, not everyone seemed to notice. Other pilgrims found their force-fields near the capital. George Bourne found his on the edge of Surrey, on ‘the borders of the shaggy waste-land’. H. J. Massingham found his at Midhurst Common in Sussex, a heath sufficiently old to be worth something. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape artists moved to just about anywhere old, meaning somewhere unspoiled and free from people who might break the reverie. Heaths figured prominently, as did coasts, moors, marshes, broads, and forests. At the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions these were the most popular landscapes. The fishing settlements of Whitby, Walberswick, Cullercoats, and Newlyn had more artists drawing fishermen than fishermen drawing fish. Or so it must have seemed. Unlike portraitures, these figures in a landscape didn’t stare back. Whole sight was a quality taken from them, not given to them.⁄fl The seeing was one way only, and for those in search of whole sight, looking down was a favourite vantage. Hikers marched up to look down as a matter of course, but Christopher Holdenby, Oxford man and fruit farmer, was the type of Englishman obsessed with climbing peaks only to be able to dive down deep into his own feelings about natives. He saw some cottages. He turned to a friend: ‘This is the mystery of the country I want to penetrate. Listen— look down at it. I want to know the meaning of it and to be right down there at the bottom of it. I want to see into those cottages and know the secret of their silence and the seclusion of their inmates.’⁄‡ The coalminer had all the characteristics of the pure native, except the acquiescing silence. His world was cramped, dark, and for everyone except him, hidden. For those who believed in the survival power of native cultures driven underground, journeying to the coalfields was high temptation. But first you had to find your miner. ‘Down the Mine’ had been something of a travel genre in the mid-nineteenth century, but in the late-century Tylorian ⁄fi S. Baring-Gould, Further Reminiscences 1864–1894 (1925; Detroit, 1967), 38, 111–12. ⁄fl George Bourne, The Bettesworth Book: Talks with a Surrey Peasant (London, 1911), 11. Massingham, English Countryside, 167; Peter Howard, ‘Painters’ Preferred Places’, Journal of Historical Geography, 11 (1985), 146. ⁄‡ Holdenby, Folk of the Furrow, 21.

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period it lapsed. The modern industrial colliery was too daunting a place for survivalists to visit, and anyway, miners and their organizations were not without their own means of expression.⁄° But failing the miners, there were other underground analogies to follow. George Bourne once contrasted young men strolling the streets of Cambridge ready for tennis, with young men labouring low to lay sewers. English vigour lay with the labourers who, he assured us, were men unimpaired by learning.⁄· The journeying impulse was usually out to the edge rather than underground, but in the most outward places, like the Shetlands, it is as well to remember that past a certain point a centrifugal impulse out from one core could become a centripetal impulse in towards another. For example, as the British state seemed distant and uncaring, so, by degrees, the Shetlands were perceived as Nordic rather than British.¤‚

Whole-Sight Travellers In the nineteenth century millions of people crossed continents and oceans by rail and ship. In the ports, human survivals in culture from the ends of the world were encountered daily. The huddling masses came in all their survival tatters. In the towns, meanwhile, new means of transport were able to take people out and back again in time for work the next morning. It would be a mistake to think that all these journeys were ‘middle class’, either in personnel or in the pleasures they sought. Trains and buses were revolutionary travelling machines. What is more, they were cheap. With their assistance, Shanks’s pony was capable of getting further than she’d ever done. For cyclists, fells and dales were less than a day’s ride out from most industrial conurbations. Manchester became a centre for fell-walkers, Glasgow for mountain-climbers, and the first mass tourism became a bed-and-breakfast kind of journey. Heavy Victorian topographies melded into slim Edwardian ‘travel guides’, with their illustrated places of interest and adverts for stout shoes, brown rucksacks, and home-cooking. ⁄° Trying to deal with these different identities: The Stars Look Down (GB film, dir.Carol Reed, 1939). ⁄· Bourne, Bettesworth Book, 8–9. ¤‚ J. R. Baldwin (ed.), Scandinavian Shetland (Edinburgh, Scottish Society for Northern Studies, 1978).

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Behind every inter-war hiker and youth-hosteller there were those who, for over a hundred years, had tramped in search of the picturesque. Hikers and hostellers were altogether more democratic figures than they had been, but they all went in search of whole sight. Views of ruined castles were preferably craggy and irregular, like the instincts that had sought them out in the first place, and all these things were given historic meaning by the lit and phils, the archaeological and architectural societies, the art and naturalhistory societies, the history guilds and painter’s circles, who all imposed order and wholeness on outdoor perception.¤⁄ In nineteenth-century popular histories there was a painterly quality about illustrated ‘moments’ from England’s past, moments which invited outdoor reverie, and which, indeed, prefigured it. Mid- to late-century popular histories were not only flagrantly picturesque, they were also edging towards a treatment of past events, and the ‘look’ of past events, which would later come to be called ‘social history’. In great visual detail they ditched and walled and peopled and clothed old England. Readers were invited to tour, or at least read on.¤¤ Stout shoes, then, were made for more than walking. With guidebook, map, and binoculars, they were instruments of a whole sight, once beheld never forgotten. What tourists toured in the 1930s was derived from what serious trampers thought they had discovered in the 1890s—whether scholars in search of a few collectibles or amateurs in search of a moment’s reverie. In the earlier period, scholars and amateurs alike had tended to recruit from the same associations and from the same social elites. By 1890 Durham and Northumberland archaeologists and their fellow travellers thought they had studied and toured every useful site in the two counties.¤‹ The bull-nosed Morris drove up to poke its snout into every dingly dell. H. V. Morton’s classic imagined car journey, In Search of England, was the best-selling interwar travel book. First published in 1927 and going through twenty-three editions by 1936, Morton was at the wheel to show the reader England as a near perfect modern example of survival in culture. Conceived ¤⁄ See C. E. M. Joad, The Untutored Townsman’s Invasion of the Country (London, 1946). ¤¤ Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830–70 (Oxford, 2000), 16–17. Charles Knight’s eight-volume illustrated Popular History of England (1855–62) is the kind of history she has in mind. ¤‹ Levine typifies the earlier regional intelligentsias as Oxbridge-Anglican-professionals gathered around print and publishing ventures, archaeology, antiquarianism, natural history, and the lit. and phils.: Philippa Levine, Amateur and Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838–1886 (Cambridge, 1986), 9–20, 62.

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in arid Palestine (‘I would go home’),¤› Morton’s journey began in a London he claimed was unknowable and made its first stop by a bowlturner’s workshop in Berkshire. After a brief reverie by the old English craftsman, Morton strolled over to the church harvest home. Thereafter, and for the rest of the journey, his England exists essentially as common fields and common people rooted and ordered and growing. No society. He ends at the edge, in the Cornish church garden of St Just and St Anthony in Roseland. The vicar is 80 years old, lives by the hand of nature, and tends a graveyard where the local people lie stacked one on top of the other for want of space. They are all boxed in. In life or death, they know no other. Their last big event was 1066, says Morton.¤fi Once or twice, when he did encounter the other England of the Industrial North, he had to point out a more real, deeper, native North that lay beneath it, like a template.¤fl Most people journeyed by book. The stories they were told were not reflective of England, as they thought them to be, but constitutive of it. The Wessex of ‘Wellbridge’ and ‘Flintcomb Ash’, for example, corresponded exactly to how Hardy had represented Tess’s feelings when ‘she’ had been ‘there’. Hardy’s Wessex, therefore, was whole-sight England imbued with Tess and Tess with it. It could be entered in a single reading, but if you wanted to see the real thing, as it were, it was better to get up at dawn to avoid the real people who might break the dream.¤‡

Approaching Natives British anthropology came of age in the 1920s with fieldwork,¤° but the concept of survivals hung on, especially as applied to exotic lands and ¤› Going ‘abroad’ was the other journey out: Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York, 1980), 23. ¤fi H. V. Morton, In Search of England (London, 1936), 279. ¤fl Brian Winston, Claiming the Real (London, BFI, 1995), 38. ¤‡ Hermann Lea, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (London, 1925), 52. ¤° It began to think less in evolutionary terms and more in terms of ‘present and ongoing functions’. With this, the old Tylorian idea of arrested development—previously comfortable with a British colonial policy of indirect rule—had to make room for a much more interventionist administration trying to shore up the system, such as the agrarian measures in India, Egypt, and Palestine. In the West Indies, ‘respect for “native custom” ’ was seen as an excuse for reactionary policies: John W. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in Brown and Louis, OHBE iv. 246–8; W. M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies (London, 1936), 129.

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far distant peoples. In the Hejaz Desert, for instance, where the purest shimmered into the barest, past and present fused into a permanent nowness where everything was a survival. The Desert’s most famous Englishman, of a sort, was T. E. Lawrence, whose travel account, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a work of emptiness posing as wholeness inscribed by maps. Lawrence, Welsh-born son of an English mother and an Irish father struggling to be a gentleman in the suburbs of north Oxford, found something of himself in this emptiness and whole-sight wholeness, at the edge, among the ‘pure’ survivor Bedouin, as he saw them, where he could dramatize himself. The Bedouin he distinguished from the hopeless fellahin.¤· Kipling’s sense of himself was just as revealing. Here was a man born in India who thought the entire Mahabharat was not worth a good primer in sanitary engineering.‹‚ Yet Kipling was tried and tested by an Asian wholesight wholeness he found deeply seductive. His Plain Tales from the Hills are full of deceptions whereby Englishmen cross-dress their way into what is forbidden. Journeying like this was dangerous, and not always innocent. Whether in contact with Arabs in the desert or Indians in the Punjab (or Jews in Whitechapel, for that matter), if the traveller lost control and ‘wentover’, the journey could take on grimmer aspects.‹⁄ In Australia and New Zealand, Canada and southern Africa, it was always possible to see frontier Britishness as purer and more original than the decadent variety at home. Britain even sent its lost children there. Australians like Robert Menzies could dream of their native-island-homeland from a weatherboard house in Jeparit, Victoria. The Aboriginals were not even toyed with. Seen as a pre-cultural life form, they could not be joined, not even in the imagination. But their land, the so-called ‘Bush’, could be joined, and set in sharp contrast with a Sydney–Melbourne suburbia regarded by its more adventurous residents as decadently metropolitan-English. This is how The Bush was constructed in the suburbs. A place of Australian whole-sight wholeness based on aboriginal traces, suburban frustration, and a tint of French Impressionism, The

¤· Desmond Stewart, T. E. Lawrence (London, 1986), 176. Seven Pillars was privately printed in 1926 and published in 1935. ‹‚ In a letter to W. C. Crofts, Feb. 1886, in Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. i, 1872–89, (London, 1990), 121. I am grateful to one of my students, Sarvani Chakravorti, for this reference. ‹⁄ Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘The Jew’ in English Literature and Society (Cambridge, 1993), 65.

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Bush was a white periphery found in a black interior—a place of ‘sunlight, wattle . . . mateship and egalitarianism’.‹¤ In West Africa and the West Indies, too, there was black and white journeying. For whites, Africa was a ‘wild idea’ that could be stalked only by going there and experiencing it for oneself, text-free: ‘I do not say do not read Ethnology.’‹‹ Student teachers in Accra, meanwhile, were encouraged to go out and save their own Folk Tales before the rubber and cocoa businesses cleared them as it had cleared the local ecology. Jamaican Proverbs and Sayings, and southern Indian Folk Songs, like their English equivalents, also had to be saved, and for much the same reasons.‹› By long experience, English natives had learned to keep quiet. Poor people knew all about being questioned. Religionists, school-board men, policemen, poor-law officials, charity workers, and means-test types all had their questions, and much in a poor person’s life could depend on the answer. The Charity Organization Society turned questioning into a profession, called it ‘case work’, and kept records. Octavia Hill said that her London tenants had a ‘terror of being questioned’, but in the cowman’s refusals to answer his interlocutor—‘Ay ay’, ‘May be’, and ‘Likely enough’— we can see guile rather than fear: ‘I could speak, but I knew how to keep my mouth shut and my teeth locked up tight. Teeth-locking was a trade I had learned early . . . A man with the weight of many masters on him learns how to be dumb, and deaf, and blind, at a very early hour in the morning.’‹fi Folklorists with questions to ask also learned how to keep their distance. They could afford to take their time because, by and large, they were not after the rent. What they were after is harder to say. For the most part, they were superior people, but they were not people who wanted to have authority over the poor. Very loosely, they were an intelligentsia—those writers, ‹¤ On Menzies and Canadian, South African, and Ulster counterparts: Bill Schwarz, ‘Politics and Rhetoric in the Age of Mass Culture, History Workshop, 46 (Autumn 1998), 141–8. Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London, 1982), 120, 132. On ‘the Bush’: Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney, 1981), 97. ‘Abbos’ were kept out of that playground of Australian matey manliness—test cricket: The Cricketer (Dec. 1997). ‹‹ Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (London, 1897), 430–5. ‹› W. H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair, West African Folk-Tales (London, 1917), 13; Izett Anderson and Frank Cundall, Jamaica Proverbs and Sayings (1910; Shannon, 1972), 10; Sankar Sen Gupta and K. D. Upadhyaya, Studies in Indian Folk Culture (Calcutta, 1964), 54; Walter Jekyll (ed.), Jamaican Song and Story (London, Folk-Lore Society, 1907), 285. ‹fi Hill, London Poor, 118–19; on the cowman, Holdenby, Folk of the Furrow, 24; on teeth-locking, Arch, Joseph Arch, 147.

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journalists, aesthetes, scholars, and public moralists who, prior to the expansion of higher education, formed the various regional communities of belief of nineteenth- and twentieth-century England.‹fl They did not seek the money or the obedience of the poor, but rather the experience of some part of being poor itself. In time, their methods—apparent neutrality, close observation, distance—got theorized into social scientific ‘positivism’. Natural history had pioneered the objectivity of the observer over the observed and, when applying this to the human species, observers still needed their hides. Percy Grainger claimed he hid under an old woman’s bed to catch her singing to herself that which she would not sing to him. Henry Williamson listened attentively to the Carter family next door, in Georgeham, Devon. On the Aran Isles, J. M. Synge heard the native tongue of his neighbours through cracked floorboards. In the late 1930s Tom Harrison and Charles Madge’s Mass Observation turned spectating into a science, also with records.‹‡ Should the natives be friendly, there were always the handbooks and guidebooks.‹° It was safer to be resident, or bed-and-breakfast, but failing that researchers were told to make for the pub. Once seated, they were advised to begin perhaps by commenting on the weather, or asking for a light. This might lead to conversation on Lucifer matches, then fires, then objections to fires at certain times of the year, and onto the desired aim, folklore about the origin of fire. Approaches to British natives and colonial natives were remarkably similar because both parties were held to share similar characteristics. They lacked intellect; so researchers should not ask too many questions. They lived an oral culture; so researchers should get close (but not too close). They were suspicious; so researchers were told not to overawe them, or reveal the contents of their notebooks. When encounters did happen, they were fraught with difficulty and sometimes not without farce. Some made mock of the gaffes implicit in seeking wholeness from a peasant who was expected to his swap his heritage for a glass of beer. Encounters were a performance on both sides. Most ‹fl Collini, English Pasts, ch. 16. ‹‡ Bird, Grainger, 105; Thomas Slattery, Percy Grainger (Evanston, Ill., 1974), 47; W. J. Keith, The Rural Tradition (Toronto, 1974), 227, 207. ‹° C. S. Burne, The Handbook of Folklore (London, Folk-Lore Society, 1913), 6–15. T. E. Lawrence drew up twenty-seven ‘articles’ for British Intelligence when dealing with Arabs. They are not unlike the folklore handbook: Arab Bulletin, 20 Aug. 1917, in Stephen E. Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson, Images of Lawrence (London, 1988), 113.

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importantly, the performance could pervert what the collectors thought they had collected and what the seers thought they had seen.‹· Whole sight was one-way only. It shone from the investigator upon the investigated. Once caught, and made whole for the moment, and then taken away as a collectible, the object of investigation was then left alone in its own incompleteness. And there it remained. So much writing about that which was supposed to be whole paradoxically described lands and peoples on their own terms as a miscellany. Wholeness wasn’t out there for the taking; it had to be conjured up from the outside out of so many ‘Scraps of Village Life’, ‘Odds and Ends of Berkshire Lore’, ‘Chats’ and ‘Peeps’ and ‘Notes and Queries’, ‘Sketches’ and ‘Gleanings’.›‚ The distillation of a people’s wisdom lay in their proverbs; not whole sentences, just pithy cuttings.›⁄ Equally, the land itself was broken into pieces: islands were good but archipelagoes were better.›¤ So many ‘Corners’ and ‘Nooks and Corners’, ‘Highways and Byways’: in the Lakes, W. T. Palmer’s More Odd Corners (not entire hills), and Rambles and Scrambles (not complete walks), took the reader beyond, off the track, round the corner, into what left to itself could not be itself.›‹ In order to render this incompleteness whole but at the same time deny the literariness (or textuality) of what was making it whole, the writing was often offered in the first person. Authority, therefore, appeared to lie in a person, not a text. Before the chapter ended, as it were, the teller would personally hope to get the reader to Keswick. The teller would speak directly to the reader, prepare her feelings, test his expectancy, remind them of their duty to old England. First person was usually complemented by present ‹· Russell M. Garnier, Annals of the British Peasantry (London, 1895), 434; J. A. Hammerton (ed.), Mr Punch in the Highlands (London, 1910); Vic Gammon, ‘Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey 1843–1914’, History Workshop, 10 (1980), 65. ›‚ A few examples from many: L.S., Untravelled Berkshire, chs. 9, 15, 17; John Timbs, Nooks and Corners of English Life Past and Present (London, 1867); Clara L. Mateaux, Around and About Old England (London, 1877), and her other books, Home Chats and Peeps Abroad; Julia Boyd, Bewick Gleanings (1886; Newcastle upon Tyne, 1973); Hastings M. Neville, A Corner in the North (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1909); G. L. Spain, Jottings from a Corner of the Moors (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1910); W. Gregory Harris, West Country Volk: Sketches (London, 1923). The story of the London clerk who inherits a Cumbrian farm is described as just ‘a bundle of fellside stuff’: A. W. Rumney, The Dalesman (Kendal, 1936). In this regard, my colleague Roey Sweet has pointed me to the antiquarian tradition of laying out the material in the expectation that the reader will make it whole. ›⁄ T. D. MacDonald, Gaelic Proverbs and Proverbial Sayings (Stirling, 1926), 68. ›¤ F. Fraser Darling, Island Farm (London, 1943)—Tigh an Quay, Isle of Tanera, Ross and Cromarty; Kevin Crossley-Holland, Pieces of Land—Journeys to Eight Islands (London, 1972). ›‹ William T. Palmer, More Odd Corners in English Lakeland: Rambles, Scrambles, Climbs and Sport (London, 1944).

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tense. Told this way, everyone still seemed to be doing it. Thiselton Dyer’s English Folk-lore presented the survivors, Whitby sailors and the like, and cast them in three time-zones. There were survival customs, lingering on as scraps, here and there. Then there were customs loosely observed in the present (in the ‘in some parts of the county it is believed that’ variety). And then there were customs fully in the present tense, implying that in 1878 Lancashire lads and lasses routinely walked round in circles squeezing apple pips to find out where their lovers lived.›› The great French geographerhistorians, De La Blache, Michelet, Braudel, knew their pays on foot, and tasted it, and drank it in. They could write as if they walked and they walked as if through a text. They knew that the only way to establish the personality of a place was by establishing their own person within it.

Natives Approaching When the half naked and tattooed bodies of the East End gathered up their socks and left the beach resorts and village greens of Essex, normal service was quickly resumed—both in Clacton and in Hackney. But when workingclass people made the class journey out with more serious intentions to learn and understand, and with time to reflect, the consequences were for life. Sheila Rowbotham called adult students like these ‘Travellers in a Strange Country’,›fi and described Oxford summer lawns as the terrain where two idealisms met. The dons, in search of a more real (native) reality, believed that working-class people might have it, and reached out accordingly. The students, in search of a less real (educated) reality than that dictated by their proletarian lives, believed that Oxford dons knew the secret of it and, in turn, reached in to them. Neither side was quite able to live up to the expectations of the other. Joseph Wright made the most remarkable of these double journeys: donkey-boy in a Bradford mill aged 7, Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford by 1901. But Wright was a professor of dialect, not dialectics. Later, working-class scholarship boys and girls would take a university path that, for all its elitism, was nevertheless their most open road to the other side. ›› Revd T. F. Thiselton Dyer, English Folk-lore (London, 1878), 20. ›fi Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Travellers in a Strange Country: Working-Class Students at Oxford 1873–1910’, History Workshop, 12 (1981).

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So strange were the journeys, many taking the path to privilege came to believe that the lives they had given up and left behind were better. How could workers live with an educated class who had fallen in love with the idea, but only the idea, of being a worker? If miners and seafarers were the truest English natives, then South Shields, which had them in abundance, must have been the heart of old England: ‘[Miners] too, like the fishermen, have the incalculable advantage of variety and adventure . . . courage . . . caste . . . language . . . if the various kinds of manual workers were to march through London, the miners would receive the loudest applause next to the seamen.’›fl ›fl Nevinson, Rough Islanders, 147–8.

Absorbing the People

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17 Celts

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth; Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, The hills of the Highlands for ever I love. (Robert Burns, My Heart’s in the Highlands)

British Flame Celtic lands offered more promising journeys. Here were people whom even the state saw as peripheral. Indeed, seeing them as Celts at all was a view from the top, and not at all a view at first shared by the Celts themselves. Once over the border, however, and moving through a shaggy landscape which looked the part, English travellers could begin to breathe-in the difference. In Wales, the Cambrian Wall was conceived as protector of the west and northern Welsh, whose customs, crafts, language, and race marked them out not only from the English, but also from those other English-speaking Welsh to the east and south. Geographers argued that west Wales had preserved its natural identity while that other Wales had all but lost it in an avalanche of coal and steel, English speech and English ways. It was to be hoped that the west would serve as ‘a fount whence may well up streams of inspiration’ for tired hearts. In Ireland too, there were the Irish and there were the western Irish, the peasant people of Kerry and Wicklow, Connemara and the Aran and Blasket Isles.⁄ From a land of ⁄ Linda Colley sees ‘Celtic’ consciousness as stemming from nineteenth-century nationalism (Britons, 8), but with differences between. Pyrs Gruffudd discusses the role of geographers in the

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song and fable and sea-dashed rocks, these people would invigorate the rest. In Scotland the journeying was always westward and upward, into the Highlands and Islands, in whose secret glens lay the promise of redemption. While English travellers enjoyed the view, nationalists journeying in their own homeland found it a more intense and demanding exercise. First, they shared the idea of origin as nature. Of all the inhabitants of these islands, it was held that the ‘primal poetic impulse’ of the Celtic peasantry had best defended the native flame. Caractacus had resisted right up to the British edge, and so too, in a way, had they. Believing otherwise would have put one in the ‘Teutonic’ camp—the other school of racial thought in nineteenthcentury England, which looked to an Anglo-Saxon rather than to a British line for core ethnic origin in these islands. British as British mythology was the older school, which looked to the Celts who, though defeated and pushed west by invaders, were victorious in the longer, deeper, and more hidden affairs of the heart: ‘all the time . . . [British Mythology] had long been secretly leavening English ideas and ideals, none the less potently because disguised under forms which could be readily appreciated. Popular fancy had rehabilitated the old gods, long banned by the priest’s bell, book, and candle, under various disguises.’¤ Second, there was the shared idea of distance from central state and church as providing the best conditions for survival. Celtic lands, after all, were as far away as the British could get. In 1701 Wales had been referred to as ‘the fag-end of Creation’, but this was not how the moderns saw it. The great geographer of modern Ireland, Estyn Evans, thanked his French masters for teaching him the geographical principles of whole sight, but he admitted he only actually saw at ‘the tattered ends of Europe’, far away, in a land of ‘personal expression’, ‘where one man is as good as the rest and all are

Cambrian idea, particularly H. J. Fleure, Emrys Bowen, Cyril Fox, George Stapledon and Iorwerth Peate: ‘Anthropology and Agriculture’, in M. Heffernan and P. Gruffudd (eds.), Essays in the Human Geography of Inter-War Britain (Loughborough University, 1988), 87. In 1898 W. B. Yeats had told J. M. Synge to get out of Paris and head for the Aran Islands as ‘a way of extending the passions’. Synge was ‘doubly blest, for he came to know not only a place, but a nation’: Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (Cork, 1966), 55, 236. ¤ Charles Squire, The Mythology of the British Islands (London, 1910), 6, 5. Caratacus was a British king who had resisted the Roman invasion of ad 43. Anglo-Saxonism had itself began by cutting across the idea of a native British identity, in the early seventeenth-century works of Richard Verstegan: Parry, Trophies of Time, 51.

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independent of capital’.‹ If tattered ends were not extreme enough, then there was always the rugged uplands of the north and west, closer to nature somehow, and inviting judgement on final things.› At the furthest extreme, Celticism could drop off the edge into a pit of irrationalism. In 1892 the Society for Psychical Research added second sight to whole sight among the natural native gifts, and went to the Outer Hebrides to find it.fi Third, Celtic tales like English tales also preferred the first person, the present tense, and solemn reverie. Before the 1840s, the Scottish Highlands and Islands had been generally despised as places to visit. Thereafter, and gathering more attention as more crofters were evicted, they became the ground of a new Scottish imagining. Despicable as the clearances were from a human point of view, they provided Scottish and Gaelic revivalists with a perfect case for native Scottishness. These few thousand crofters could be seen as Scotland’s own survivals in culture, and the pity of it was—as they were herded out, na caoraich mora, the big sheep, were herded in. The Highlands and Islands became special Scottish places, fit for reverie.fl Alasdair Alpin MacGregor’s books followed the late recognition of the crofters to span forty years of (first-person) wanderings into far Hebridean corners. The reader tramps by MacGregor’s side to Hawnaway, like the Hejaz, ageless, empty, and forever. His stories were told from the hearth. If there were dark mounds and icy waters on the outside, on the inside there was peat smoke, warm whisky, and a good man—John MacPherson, ‘The Coddie’: Jacobite, Roman Catholic, storyteller, Gaelic speaker, songman, and life and soul of a haunted history.‡ Represented as the least changed, most original people of Europe, it was claimed that Celts were still in touch with their ancestral voices. It was not ‹ E. Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland (Cambridge, 1973), 83; Robin Morton, Folksongs Sung in Ulster (Cork, 1970), 7; Ned Ward, quoted in Jenkins, Modern Wales, 87. › See William Dyce’s Christ as the Man of Sorrows (1860), in Murdo Macdonald, Scottish Art (London, 2000), 98. fi John L. Campbell and Trevor H. Hall, Strange Things (London, 1968). Montague Summers, The Werewolf (London, 1933), 191–2. fl Now the Highlands ‘may become the fairy ground for romance and poetry, or subject of experiment for the professors of speculation’: Sir Walter Scott, Manners, Customs, and History of the Highlanders of Scotland (Glasgow, 1893), 13, 112. On revivalist links to the opposition to eviction: Alexander MacKenzie, History of the Highland Clearances (1883; Edinburgh, 1999) and James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community (Edinburgh, 2000), 186, 193–4, 219–20. ‡ Alasdair Alpin MacGregor: Behold the Hebrides! or Wayfaring in the Western Isles (London, 1925); The Haunted Isles, or Life in the Hebrides. (London, 1933), 296; The Enchanted Isles (London, 1967). ‘The Coddie’ appears in the second volume, although he was only 57 years old on its date of publication.

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necessary to speak Gaelic, Erse, or Welsh in order to appreciate the beauty of those voices, for beauty was in the beholding. Mrs Kennedy-Fraser produced five famous collections of Hebridean-Gaelic fishing songs, but she was not a native speaker. Donald MacCormick’s collection of waulking, or fulling, songs, was taken from South Uist in 1893, but it was not translated until forty-five years later. Three miles off the west Irish coast, the Blasket Islands never held more than 130 people after 1921, and the last four families were evacuated in 1953. Most famous during its fading years, between 1933 and 1939 this tiny community of the Gaeltacht was the subject of no fewer than three full autobiographies.° Extremes were always the most promising locations, but in the Celtic case they were as likely to be political as geographic. From the jails of Kilmainham, Mountjoy, and Cushendal came the authentic voice of republican martyrdom. And the Marxism of industrial South Wales, no less than the republicanism of agricultural Ireland, had to come to terms with a vision of what it was to be Celtic at the edge. Dai Francis was remembered in Onllwyn Miners’ Hall not only as a trade-unionist and socialist but as Dai o’r Onllwyn, People’s Remembrancer, folk-Marxist, Bard, y gwir yn erbyn y byd—‘the truth against the world’ on the edge of the world. Whatever a true Welsh communist like Dai could be, he had to have the gwerin, the people, at his shoulder.· While industrial south Wales raced to socialism with a speed that would have impressed even Lenin, the other Wales, Welsh Wales, poured forth a literature of dragons and faeries and Arthur, who had been crowned at Caerlon. Out of 412 pages of Wirt Sikes’s 1881 volume on south Wales, only four gave references to coal-mining, all of them to do with underground superstition.⁄‚ As if a Welsh miner’s life was not extreme enough, the British flame put a goblin in his pit and red dragons on his mountains. ° Donald A. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life (Glasgow, 1935), 10; J. L. Campbell (ed.), Hebridean Folksongs. A Collection of Waulking Songs Made by Donald MacCormick in Kilphedir in South Uist in the Year 1893 (Oxford, 1969), 29–30. The Blaskets’ biographies are: Muiris O’Suileabhain’s Twenty Years A’Growing (1933), Tomas O’Criomhthain’s The Islandman (1937), and Peig Sayers’s An Old Woman’s Reflections (1939). · Colm O’Lochlainn (ed.), Irish Street Ballads (New York, 1960); Martin Shannon (ed.), Ballads From the Jails and Streets of Ireland (Dublin, 1966); James N. Healy, Ballads From the Pubs of Ireland (Cork, 1968). Gwyn A. Williams, on Dai Francis: Llafur, 3: 3 (1982), 7. ⁄‚ Wirt Sikes, British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions (Boston, 1881); T. A. Lewis MP, on the distinction between a Welsh national culture (‘not surpassed in these islands’) and a south Wales of industrial unrest stemming ‘very largely from outside’: ‘Federal Devolution’, Parliamentary Papers, 1919, 2083–4.

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Nearer Britain Such was the force of the Celtic revival, it became increasingly difficult for the English to look at their own land without a backward glance over the border. In 1904 Henry Jenner’s lecture ‘Cornwall. A Celtic Nation’ led the reimagining of Cornishness through the Celtic Cornish Society, founded in 1901. During the inter-war period other Cornish societies followed, each based on the affinity of land and language. A Gorseth Kernow was initiated in 1928, and the artists’ colonies at Newlyn and St Ives provided the pictures. Daphne Du Maurier found in old Cornwall ‘a place from which she could reject modernity’.⁄⁄ Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, meanwhile, all found themselves the focus of similar attention and their spirit all the richer for a little neck-stretching towards the Scottish Border, the Irish Sea, or the Welsh Marches. In this mode, being English was to have been nearly broken on the wheel of industry. They needed to be restored to mental health in a land ‘wherein imagination may fly her boldest flight’. Not in industrial England. But in Tintagel perhaps, where ‘almost anything may happen’, or in the lands of music and dance. In 1935 the English Folk Song and Dance Society held their annual festival in the Albert Hall, with Dr Ralph Vaughan Williams on the rostrum.⁄¤ Out of thirteen performances only three were straight English. The rest were from a British periphery which stretched from Durham, Northumberland, and the Border in the east, to Cornwall and across to Anglesey, the Isle of Man, Ulster, and the Hebrides in the west. Flight was nearly always away from a fading inner core out towards a gleaming prospect of sight. John Stuart Blackie gave up his professorship of Greek to devote himself to Highland literature and language. Blackie was a key figure behind the creation of the first chair of Celtic at Edinburgh. In the 1930s Margaret Leigh gave up her university lectureship in Latin for ⁄⁄ Dr Norris and Dr Stokes produced various grammars and translations between 1851 and 1872, and Robert Hunt’s 1865 Popular Romance of the West of England was important, but Jenner prompted the scholarly revival with his Handbook of the Cornish Language (London, 1904). On Du Maurier, Light, Forever England, 203. On Cornish romance in general, Ella Westland, ‘Cornwall and romantic fiction’, in Bell, Peripheral Visions, 154–9. ⁄¤ Northumberland—Jean Lang, A Land of Romance (1910; London, 1930) and J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt, Scott and His Influence (Aberdeen, Assoc. of Scottish Literary Studies, 1983); Lake District—A. G. Bradley, Highways and Byways in the Lake District (London, 1901), 5; being English—Armistead, Tales and Legends, pp. vii–viii; Tintagel—Enys Tregarthen, Piskey Folk (New York, 1940), 1; Vaughan Williams, English Folk-Song and Dance, 199.

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Highland farming and writing about Highland farming. She had loathed what she saw as the futility of Oxford. She embraced living as superior to literature.⁄‹ What these people thought they were journeying to was a nearer Britain, not a greater one.⁄› Because the native British were said to have remembered their race culture, it was reckoned that they knew how to dwell. It was claimed, for instance, that the Highland Celts had no word for individual tenantry, only tuath—the common claim and common memory of husbandmen.⁄fi And although the first nineteenth-century national revivalists in Wales had been Anglican clergy, from the 1850s these scholarly men had been pushed aside for a new wave of dissenting Welsh Protestants, more than ready to take over the old stuff of Eisteddfod and Gorsedd and bind it into chapel life. Coincident with this went a refusal to accept the Anglo-Saxon race as the original or indeed the living spirit of Britain.⁄fl But what did the true, living Celt look like? Tall and fair, or squat and round-headed? Industrial South Wales seemed to have too many of the latter but, as in all these things, it could be explained.⁄‡ When linked to nationalism, the claim for a superior Celtic race culture could lead to a sort of High Victorian racism. The pure Irish beauty of Miss Hibernia, for instance, came to replace the simian stoop of Paddy O’Caliban, Irish thug. Parnell used both images: Paddy to browbeat Westminster politicians; Miss Hibernia to charm them.⁄° Like the English version, Celtic survivalism was based on intellectual traditions older than Victorian ethnography. James Macpherson’s 1760s fabrications claimed to have discovered Ossian, a Celtic Homer whose works ⁄‹ John Stuart Blackie, The Language and Literature of The Scottish Highlands (Edinburgh, 1876); Margaret Leigh, Highland Homespun (1936; London, 1974), 59–60. ⁄› H. V. Morton followed his England success with his warmer In Search of Scotland (London, 1930). ⁄fi MacDonald, Gaelic Proverbs, 119. W. F. Skene’s three-volume Celtic Scotland (1880) restored the idea of Celtic communism and peasant proprietorship: Pittock, Celtic Identity, 76. Inherent claim was built into the Crofters’ Act of 1886. ⁄fl On Y Ddraig Coch, the red British dragon: Marie Trevelyan, Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales (London, 1909), 165–6. On the cultural history: P. Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. On spurious racial deductions: Grant Allen, ‘Are We Englishmen?’, Fortnightly Review (1880), in M. D. Biddiss (ed.), Images of Race (Leicester, 1979). ⁄‡ H. J. Fleure, The Races of England and Wales (London, 1923), 109, 105. ⁄° D. Cairns and S. Richards, Writing Ireland (Manchester, 1988), 50; Denise McHugh, ‘Englishness, Irishness and the late Victorian Media 1880–86’, unpublished MA dissertation, 1993, University of Leicester.

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showed that the Western Highlands were indisputably Caledonian. Not Gaelic, nor Irish, but Caledonian Scottish, and by the 1770s Unionist Scotland was ready to re-incorporate this Ossian into a new Scottish patriotism: ‘O Caledonia! stern and wild, | Meet muse for a poetic child!’ In 1772 Ossian found his classical painter, Alexander Runciman. Four years later the Highland Society was founded in London, and in 1820 the Celtic Society was founded in Edinburgh. Two years after that, George IV, preposterously bedecked as a clan chief, made a state visit to the city. In fact, long before Victorian ethnography, the reinvention of Celtic Scotland was built into Scottish Unionism. Tartans had adorned the new Highland policing regiments formed after Culloden, but the idea of tartan setts for each clan came late—lavishly and doubtfully laid out by James Logan in 1843 and the Allen Brothers in 1844.⁄· When the English folk movement¤‚ set about its work at the end of the nineteenth century, it had to contend with a pan-Scottish folk tradition much older than its own. In the Aberdeen–Banff area, for instance, the ballads of Anna Gordon had been collected as early as 1783. Anna in turn had learned them before 1759, making her collection one of the oldest in existence. Having to face up to the greater folk reputation of the Scots, Cecil Sharp and the other English experts were not sure what to think.¤⁄ Not that it mattered. The making of modern Celtic identity was not in English hands: it was already big business, and nowhere more so than in the land that didn’t give a dime for what the English thought. Lest they forgot where they came from, pookas, leprechauns, banshees and a sort of childlike innocence were Irish-American best-sellers.¤¤

Betwixt and Between: Matthew Arnold Arnold’s Study of Celtic Literature appeared in 1867, just before Tylor’s theory, just on the crest of the first modern Irish revival, and just in the middle of a ⁄· H. Trevor-Roper, ‘Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. ¤‚ Close to Arts and Crafts, an English national revival with Irish dimensions—spotted by Raphael Samuel: Island Stories, 64–8. ¤⁄ David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London, 1972), 62; Sharp, English Folk Song, 69–70. ¤¤ D. R. McAnally, Irish Wonders (Boston, 1888). The market persists—‘America is ready to believe in Ireland’, R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London, 2001), 171 and ch. 10 ‘Selling Irish Childhoods: Frank McCourt and Gerry Adams’.

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great deal of English anti-Irish feeling. As with his Culture and Anarchy, Arnold’s Study came out of a newspaper debate with an English political class which, he thought, must be saved from its own philistinism. In particular, he thought that this class’s intelligence ‘must be suppled and reduced by culture’. ‘Suppled’ is the word. Arnold wanted to tenderize Anglo-Celtic feelings. He wanted to rethink the Union: ‘No service England can render the Celts by giving you a share in her many good qualities, can surpass that which the Celts can at this moment render England, by communicating to us some of theirs.’ The Times thundered back. England was sufficient to herself. She needed no Eisteddfods, let alone Paddy and his Fenian boys. Core unto core, essence unto essence, England had nothing to learn from the periphery. All European achievement was Teutonic. All European nonsense was Celtic. ‘The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the Earth the better.’¤‹ Arnold defended his charming lyrical Celts from The Times, but not without reservations, and it was in the reservations that, in a way, he damned them. Celtic excellence, he said, lay in the little things, in the quick of their humanity, in their culture. Celtic failure, on the other hand, lay in the big things, in stable government, in the offices of state, in great art. Celtic duty was to humanize the Union by sentimentalizing it. This did not mean that England could relinquish its duty to lead. If Celts could not find their own expression on broad canvases or high culture, or by means of powerful states, it was because their temperament simply would not allow it. ‘Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal conditions of high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had.’¤›

Scotland’s Predicaments Arnold was addressing the Welsh, probably was thinking of the Irish, and appears to have forgotten the Scots. He ought not to have forgotten the Scots, because right from the start the whole project of learning how to be British depended on Scottish complicity. The 1707 Act of Union preempted Stuart claims to the throne by proclaiming a succession which, under the Act of Settlement passed six years before, had to be Church of ¤‹ Matthew Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature (1867. London, 1905), p. xii.

¤› Ibid. 86.

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England and approved by parliament. When Queen Anne died childless in 1714, parliament rejected over fifty people closer to her in line of succession in order to approve Hanoverian George. British Union, therefore, defined itself against many Stuart-supporting legal-minded Scots, and put tremendous pressure on an established Scottish presbyterian elite to prevail over a Scottish episcopalist elite. If the British state was to succeed, Scots would have to fight each other, vanquish the wrong side, heal their wounds, and realign with their English partners. This they did. The winning side needed little encouragement, it is true, because for them Union brought little that was not gain, yet they succeeded in these things nonetheless. Part of their success involved identifying rebel Jacobites exclusively with the Highland clans. This was untrue, but it was a move that consigned the enemy to that which the victors could depict as doomed. Thereafter, Scotland’s road was a Unionist road. It led to Adam Smith, not Charles Edward Stuart, and by taking this path, though it did not look this way from a rebel’s point of view, Matthew Arnold’s rational qualities of ‘balance’, ‘measure’, and ‘patience’ were just as Scottish as they were English. In London and the Empire, educated Scots found positions for their talents. They would have been surprised to learn that the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh lacked the rational qualities of Oxford and Cambridge.¤fi Even so, Celtic nationalism owed more than it dared admit to Arnold and the English cultural survivalists. Scottish nationalists seized on little local qualities as evidence of their superior humanity. Scottish Unionists, meanwhile, sat uneasily between the benefits of Union with the English on the one hand, and the romantic dream of a resurrection of Celtic Scotland on the other. For when it came to Scotland standing alone, Unionism wasn’t very exciting. The ‘Wee Free’ Calvinists may have grown strong in the Highlands, but their theology was not the stuff dreams were made on. How could one be authentically Scottish and loyally Unionist at the same time? One scholar has described Scotland’s predicaments in the language of mental illness.¤fl ¤fi On Union-Scottish matters: Colley, Britons, 11–50, 111–32, 159–63, and Pittock, Myth of the Jacobite Clans, 89–90 and passim. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France were heavily influenced by Lord George Gordon’s part in the ‘Gordon’ Riots of 1780, where Burke saw the horrible spectre of a bloody British revolution: Iain McCalman, ‘Prophesying Revolution’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds.), Living and Learning (Aldershot, 1996), 54. Stanley Baldwin made an after-dinner habit of speaking on Celtic suppling of English dullness: On England (London, 1926), 250, 241, 248. ¤fl Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London, 1981), ch. 3.

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Ireland’s Predicaments Irish Unionists were also caught betwixt and between. Loyalty to 1689, Crown, and Bible was an ideology far more concerned with what the Irish were not than with what they were, or could be. So Ulster usually said ‘No’. Like Daniel, they stood alone. The Orange province had to find its own equivalent to Celtic humanity, and did so at a critically late stage. As late as 1912, William Peake ‘was often struck while attending social gatherings in connection with the Orange Order at the absence of Orange and Protestant sentiment in poetry and song’. In order to supple the feelings of the lodge, therefore, popular songs were required. ‘Papa, Who Are the Orangemen?’ he asked. ‘Legions of good men and true, my boy’, and the sash their fathers wore was ‘old but it’s beautiful’. ‘Fine’ was made to rhyme with ‘Boyne’.¤‡ As for the Catholic Irish, they too were caught between Union and their own Irishness. English journeying west into Ireland was a minority affair, more a matter of ideas than people. Irish journeying east into England and Scotland, by contrast, was a fact of life for hundreds of thousands who knew only too well the ports of entry and the migratory chains running deep into industrial Britain. Famine and emigration are the two great facts of modern Irish history. The Famine was a moral and physical catastrophe of a different order from any other in the British Isles. There was nothing that the Victorian ethnographers could tell these people about ‘survival in culture’. And yet, it is a certain fact that those Catholic Irish who settled in Britain were easier about Union than those Ulster Unionists who built their political identity upon it. Irish settlers in Britain lived precariously between the benefits of migration and the business of earning those benefits in the rough economies of Glasgow and Dundee, Liverpool, Manchester, and London. In 1861 the Irish-born population in Britain peaked at 602,000, some 3 per cent of the population as a whole, although this figure tells us nothing about their concentrations. What their sense of national identity was remains uncertain. The main difficulty lies in sorting out the treatment they received for being Irish from the treatment they received for being Catholic and poor. That the Irish were victims of poverty and prejudice is not in doubt. However, that they were victimized on grounds of ethnicity and religion is in some doubt. It is true that, until the Jewish influx later in the century, no group laboured ¤‡ William Peake, A Collection of Orange and Protestant Songs (Belfast, 1913?).

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under such an accumulation of un-British characteristics. But accounts depicting them as a ‘ghetto’ people—a reserve army of labour and violence—are less than the whole story. Similarly, some of the Irish nationalist histories which depicted them as hated in the way that Carlyle hated them, that is, because of their racial inferiority, were only half-truths. For if the Catholic Irish were seen as stupid and feckless, so were the English poor. And if they were distrusted for their religion, so were many English Nonconformists. It was, of course, easy to mark them out by nationality as a threat to the Union. But others, like Arnold, welcomed them with open arms into the Union and, as we have seen, sought to use Celtic myths to strengthen it. This welcome could, and did, extend under Gladstone to the politics of home rule. Equally, if the Irish were dismissed for their inability to build large, stable institutions, most importantly states, so too were most English people. Indeed, the only large, stable institution that the Irish possessed, the Roman Catholic Church (redrawn and episcopalized in England after 1850), had a purchase on Englishness which, for many a good AngloCatholic at least, was fundamental. Finally, Irish reasons for migration were no different from English or Scottish or Welsh reasons for migration; nor was their taste for army life. Poverty was the underlying reason, and the Irish poor were the poorest of all. In the main, the Irish in Britain voted for a British Labour Party and came to dominate some of its strongholds. It is perhaps fair to say that the Irish in Britain integrated better than the odds suggested. In doing so, qualities of balance, measure, and patience were clearly not in short supply. As for the Irish republican revolutionaries, as well as alienated from the British state, they were also déclassé. Few of them were proletarians, and even fewer were from that peasant ‘stock’ so nurtured by Irish nationalist ideology. They have been described as liking their history simple, folksy, and spiritual, and somewhere along the line they realized that the British state was their spiritual tormentor. Michael Collins, IRA commander and first prime minister in the Dáil Éireann, realized what his Irishness stood for in, of all places, Shepherd’s Bush: ‘Once, years ago, a crowd of us were going along the Shepherd’s Bush Road when out of a lane came a chap with a donkey— just the sort of donkey and just the sort of cart they have at home. He came out quite suddenly and we all cheered him. Nobody who had not been an exile will understand me, that I stand for that.’ As a young man, Collins passed his Post Office exams, took the boat, and spent nine years working in London. It is there, not in County Cork, that we find him cheering a donkey

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cart. Revolutionary republicanism translated Ireland’s predicaments into a Gaelic hagiography. In 1916, on the eve of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the revolutionary Thomas MacDonagh said: ‘I am going to live things that I have before imagined.’¤°

Expressing Yourself True Celts were not supposed to speak English. Or, if they did, it had to be spoken unwillingly or not very well. Not speaking English was part of the case for independent nationhood. On the other hand, it pretty much diminished people’s capacity to function. In Wales, nationalism was a minority sentiment based mainly on land and language. The founder of Plaid Cymru took Arnold’s little Celtic humanity and put it with Fleure’s geographic west-Walian survivalism to discover a true Welshness on the other side of the Cambrian Mountains. John Saunders Lewis was born in Liverpool, married an Irishwoman, and converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1937 he was imprisoned for arson at an airbase under construction at Penyberth. He believed that in the real Wales, where Welsh was spoken, hill-farming should be revived and for ‘the sake of the moral and physical health of its people, South Wales must be deindustrialized’.¤· Land and language he saw as deeply related issues.‹‚ Estyn Evans saw Northern Ireland as a natural, yet divided, region. Like the entry into Belfast Lough, there was no denying the contradictoriness of its nature—the grim black basalt of Antrim on one side and the warm red towns and lush green fields of County Down on the other. Its climate, too, was mild, but split with a ‘capricious element’. So far, so natural. Yet without the arts of self-expression that accompanied the great arts of state, it was said that Ulstermen had not been able to produce great works. Evans agreed that little human crafts the Northern Irish had in abundance (ballads, stories, ¤° Pittock, Celtic Identity, 82. Much of this comes from my reading of R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch. Connections in Irish and English History (London, 1993), and pp. 300–1, 288. Also: Sheridan Gilley and Roger Swift (eds.), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), 1–36, and The Irish in Britain 1815–1939 (London, Historical Association, 1990). ¤· Sir Reginald Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (London, 1954), 375. ‹‚ In 1900 around half the population spoke Welsh: Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (London, 1977), 31. Between the Royal Commission’s condemnation of the language in 1846 and the creation of a Welsh department in the Ministry of Education in 1907 there was a fundamental and positive shift in attitudes.

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bands), but major works (architecture, painting, orchestra, theatre) they had not. Evans’s 1951 judgement was delivered again in 1971.‹⁄ A people so rich in the little things of life needed a Folk Museum. Catholics like Seamus Heaney knew Protestant Ulster as a taciturn place, a land of ‘password, handgrip, wink and nod’. In contrast, Paddy was a man who spoke to excess. At its condescending best, the joke against Paddy mocked his dumb innocence; at its worst, it smeared him as a brute.‹¤ The nationalist answer was to claim the exact opposite. The Irish gift for words, for perfect clarity and eloquence, was claimed as exemplary. And if the Irish voice was too rare and too fine a sound to figure in the written records of the state, then there were other forms of expression. Through the five-tone original Celtic scale, for instance, music historians were told they could get to ‘the true inwardness of Irish history’ in ways that other historians, historians of the printed text, for instance, could not.‹‹ Scotland was not riven by language. Yet the Scots were still depicted as small of voice. They were a nation of craftsmen, not great artists. Their products were represented as honest and useful, no more. As with the Irish and the Welsh, there was no significant Scottish art or architecture. Instead, there were folk products, the glories of the Edinburgh teapot, and a vernacular way of building which (like Billy Connolly’s wellies) had learned how to keep out the wind and keep in the warmth. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Scottish Modernism notwithstanding, Celtic genius was judged too fickle to have designed great buildings.‹› It was in this context of Celtic inadequacy that the Celtic literary revival happened. It wasn’t difficult to incorporate the Isle of Man into a Celtic revival. Cast as a survival people, the Manx were rich in proverb, dialect, and ballad. Up in the hills in 1891, Hall Caine found a 90-year old bard: ‘Untaught, narrow, self centred, bred on his byre . . . he was a true Manxman, and I’m proud of him . . . It is not the cultured Manxman . . . that makes the Manx nation ‹⁄ E. Estyn Evans, Northern Ireland (London, 1951), 45, 21, 61; Michael Longley (ed.), Causeway. The Arts in Ulster (Belfast, 1971), 7–8 and passim. ‹¤ ‘The famous | Northern reticence, the tight gag of place | And times . . .’: Seamus Heaney, ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’, in New Selected Poems (London, 1990), 79. For brutishness: D. W. Barrett, Life and Work Among The Navvies (London, SPCK, 1884), 31–2. ‹‹ Redfern Mason, The Song Lore of Ireland (New York, 1911), 59–60, Foreword, ‹› Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Cloud Howe (1933; London, 1976), where Chris Guthrie lives in a Pictish survival place; Ian Finlay, Scottish Crafts (London, 1948), 13. By 1978 Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, completed 1909, was ‘widely recognized as the first building in the modern style’: Jackie Cooper (ed.), Mackintosh Architecture (London, 1978), 10.

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valuable to study. Our race is what it is by virtue of the Manxman who has led no life outside Man, and so has kept alive our language, our customs, our laws and our patriarchal Constitution.’‹fi Here was a native Celtic people who had a constitution and their own little state, the ancient Tynwald parliament. Having such, small and folksy as they were, the Manx were flattered as containing the best of both worlds: they were Celts in their capacity to dwell, and survive, and be native; and they were like the English by nature—a ‘middlin’ ’, moderate, practical, deliberative and ‘wellbalanced’ sort of people, with a constitution to match.‹fl ‹fi Hall Caine, The Little Manx Nation (London, 1891), 6. ‹fl W. H. Gill, Manx National Songs (London, 1896), p. viii.

18 National Properties

Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget; For we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet. (G. K. Chesterton, The Secret People, 1915)

Much of what has been described so far—the impulse out from cores to peripheries where time and space were said to have stood still—was a response to modern disruptions. Across the whole nineteenth-century world, capitalism was uprooting established relationships. The science of political economy was premissed on the perpetual movement of labour and capital according to market movements. Railways and steamships had helped it happen. Solidarities were in flux, identities fracturing, time and space compressing. Structure itself looked in danger of dissolution. Modernism and nationalism were joint expressions of this turmoil, and both ideologies were increasingly looked to for stable, underlying meanings which could explain the turmoil then control it. After the terrible disruptions of the Great War and the refugee crisis which followed it, all European politics moved against ‘bourgeois individualism’ and in the direction of what it saw as the more enduring and corporate properties of the nation.⁄ The twentieth century’s question was: in what form (in art as well as politics) could society find deeper, more enduring levels of meaning?¤

⁄ Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (London, 1998), p. 63 and chs. 1, 2, 4. ¤ David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1990), 30.

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Eight English Properties The idea of ‘the folk’ supplied nineteenth-century nationalism with its core meaning. No matter how difficult the surface relationships between an elite state and a mass nation, nationalists believed that the idea of the folk could reconstitute both at their deepest level. Once the folk were properly understood, and brought into the light of day, then, national properties and therefore national purposes would become clear. So folklorists can be seen joining with modernists in their search for what was elemental, basic, structural. In 1928 Benn’s Sixpenny Library declared folklore as the science of basic elements (in a complex world).‹ At the same time, the modernist repertoire of basic form and essential line expressed the same minimalist spirit. European lands and peoples came to be represented by their artists, as well as by their politicians, in the starkest terms. Painters had been advised to paint quickly, en plein air, in their own coin de terre. In Van Gogh’s last years he was painting frantically to capture these simple truths. The peasant was at ‘the very heart of modern art’, he said, and the painter’s duty was to get beneath appearances and get at the essential, and essentialized, meaning: to show, in Van Gogh’s example, the gesture rather than the hand. He had heard it said of Millet, peint avec de la terre, and that is what he would do.› As did, in his own way, the photographer Bill Brandt. Brandt’s English land and people he reduced to pure line. In a series of female nudes as landscapes and landscapes that were denuded, it is hard to tell earth from body because they rest and curve as one.fi This was land and people expressed through their most basic property, that of line; but in all sorts of other ways English identity came to be expressed in basics. The first property was language. There were two languages, the surface, and the real which structured the surface. Surface language was mainly written, and therefore standardized. When spoken, it took its cue from literature. Real language, on the other hand, was spoken only, chiefly in dialect, and had managed to live its own authentic life away from the academy. It was held that only the greatest of English academicians had dared to probe beneath the surface. Professor Morley had divined true English character ‹ Wright, English Folklore, 6–7. › Jan Hulsker, The Complete Van Gogh (Oxford, 1980), 182, 174. fi Bill Brandt, Shadow of Light (London, 1977): consider his ‘Maiden Castle, Dorset’, 1945 (p. 108) and ‘Marlborough Downs, Wiltshire’, 1948 (p. 109) with his female nudes (pp. 141–4).

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beneath a lot of literary texts, just as Professor Skeat had unearthed Piers Plowman beneath a lot of Anglo-Saxon grammar. According to this view, it was not the dialect-speaker who mispronounced but the speaker of standard English who, poor chap, was hampered by rules of politeness. Standing against dialect, indeed, was all the surface ephemera of polite society, its honours and laws: everything, in fact, which was derivative and lacking authenticity. Standing with dialect, on the other hand, was all that was natural and enduring—the people’s sounds, their earliest nurturings, heartfelt emotions, certain rudimentary things.fl Dialect research also did justice to the proverb as a form of knowledge, and confirmed that the all-time master of the English language had been a plain-spoken Warwickshire lad. It was through a Swedish editor, not an English one, that the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names‡ was able to define what England was when first it was named. Before that time, craftsmen and women had worked with England as she was, named or not. Stone, clay, wood, thatch, metal, soil, water, and wool found their own natural form through their own natural limits. To the craftsman, a lifetime learning those limits yielded form, and form yielded function. The coble, for instance, was not just a small boat built of local substances matching local waters; it was uniquely English in its form. In these matters of form, function, and substance, nothing could be more elemental than the work of potters. As they kneaded and wedged and shaped to centre and threw the clay, potters were handling a substance that had begun as moorland granite, to be softened and decomposed by time—washed by rains into riverbeds which flooded across valley flats—before being sifted for stone and worked by knowing hands. Processes like this stripped the individual potter and pressed her back, back into the land itself: ‘By this time one’s body is becoming deeply aware of the clay, and other awarenesses are falling away. One seems to have gone down into something unformed, primeval, and almost given up oneself to it.’° Craftspeople, and women working in the home, were said to understand the essential England fl R. W. Chambers, Concerning Certain Great Teachers of the English Language (London, 1923), 6, 14; E. M. Wright, Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore (Oxford, 1913), 126. ‡ For plain Will Shakespeare, Wright, Rustic Speech, 10; Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (Oxford, 1936). On the new power of English language and literature to define national properties: Collini, Public Moralists, 347–67; Brian Doyle, ‘The Invention of English’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, 99. ° J. E. G. McKee, The English Coble (London, 1978), p. iv; S. M. Robertson, Craft and Contemporary Culture (London, 1961), 19.

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because they held it in their hands. Without the stoneware dish, the twist loaf, the herringbone weave, or the five-tone, five-note strike of a churchbell peal, England would lose its heart. Only the crafts tried to build in harmony with what England actually was, and from this point of view real architecture was a craft, not a profession. Philip Webb was reckoned to have shown the way. Rejecting abstract design, he had removed all ornament and intrusion from his buildings to produce simple strength out of elemental properties. More famous architects such as Lutyens followed on, and when Mackintosh was finally recognized as a great modernist, it was in terms of his truth to materials and to Scotland, not his architectural training.· Admirable as they were, buildings such as these men designed were only for the rich. Nevertheless, the discourse of national properties changed national taste. From Art and Crafts ideas about rebuilding the nation through instinctually satisfying but extremely expensive work, through to 1930s stripped Modernism and its wartime adaptation, ‘Utility’, on to 1940s Design Council and 1950s Design Centre, both devoted to clarity as authenticity, up to Terence Conran’s Habitat concept from 1964, with its impression of solid work and pared-down design, in the end the nation was able to buy its crafts on the cheap. The modern English garden, meanwhile, took its inspiration from an amateur landscape gardener called Gertrude Jekyll whose 200 gardens, four books, and occasional partnership with the architect Lutyens transformed how the English thought about their green patches. Jekyll’s gardens overflowed with big, beautiful flowers spilling out over narrow green borders and drystone rockeries. She found her inspiration, she said, in the roadside gardens of poor cottagers (laid out front-rank for landlord inspection), who had shown her their hollyhocks, larkspur, delphinium, and primroses. They had taught her about hardies; no bedding-out. And they had dared to mix fruit and vegetables with crazy paths through foxgloves and snapdragons; no wide-set, deadening geometry.⁄‚ At times, Gertrude Jekyll’s gardens are like the folk at Newlyn Fair—turbulent, colourful, prolific. One had only to step out of the garden and into the scullery for a fourth English property. The founders of the English Folk Cookery Association saw the English as a people who had never cooked yet, or at least only privately, · W. R. Lethaby, Home and Country Arts (London, 1923), 32; Norman Wymer, English Town Crafts (London, 1949), 123–4; W. R. Lethaby, Philip Webb and His Work (Oxford, 1935), 122; Freda Derrick, Country Craftsmen (London, 1945), 34; Cooper, Mackintosh Architecture, 10. ⁄‚ Betty Massingham, Miss Jekyll (Newton Abbot, 1973), 102.

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and between themselves. In all its secrets of pies and puddings, sly cakes and devilled bones, ‘England does not know her wealth’. Cookery books were bad taste, tinned food might be foreign, and fancy recipes had to be written down.⁄⁄ Text-free cookery was what was required, so real English cooking was home cooking. Even the cafés claimed to do it. Like so much else that was deemed authentically English—from law to language—it was best learned from hand to mouth, with no intermediaries. The English village was a fifth national property. Real villages were secluded, and hidden away. Of Muker in North Yorkshire, it was said that life there was ‘hardly touched by the main streams of civilization’. Well away from State and Church, and living directly in the time-honoured way, English villagers were said to have survived in their culture. At Luccombe, on Exmoor, it was reckoned that the parson, the teacher, and the two retired gentlewomen only lived there; they were not part of the real community. Finally, authentic villages were those that had stood long enough to merge land and people together. The soft, mellow oolitic limestone of the Cotswolds, and the grey, forbidding carboniferous limestone of the North, were said to show the human properties as well as the geological ones.⁄¤ And if the villager resembled the land, so the cottager resembled the cottage.⁄‹ Both were small and vulnerable. English dance had grown also with the people, free from artifice or invention. Dances in print were suspect, but Morris dancing was prized because it was believed that for over 300 years no book had ever described its steps. Whereas Cecil Sharp had founded his English Folk-Dance Society with the assistance of the (bookish) young ladies of London South-West Polytechnic, Mary Neal taught working-class London girls how to dance with only a little help from the Headington Morris. Never a book in sight. Within thirty minutes, Neal observed, the skipping figures and clashing staves of Old England were alive again. It was as though they had never been lost: ‘Though unfamiliar and unforeseen, it was of England, and came, even though it was centuries upon the way, to kinsfolk . . .’⁄› As with folk-singing, folk-dancing had no place for individualists; they would emerge briefly ⁄⁄ Florence White, Good Things in England (1932; London, 1940), 9. ⁄¤ Edmund Cooper, Muker (Clapham, 1948), p. xv; W. J. Turner and Mass Observation, Exmoor Village (London, 1947), 19; Victor Bonham-Carter, The English Village (Harmondsworth, 1952), 104; Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, English Villages in Pictures (London, 1951), 53. ⁄‹ Harry Batsford and Charles Fry, The English Cottage (1938; London, 1944), 39, 101. ⁄› Frank Kidson and Mary Neal, English Folk-Song and Dance (Cambridge, 1915), 98, 125, 163.

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from out of the line only to fall back into the single moving shape of the dance. Ralph Vaughan Williams said that the music students of his generation had thrown off a musical inferiority complex foisted by European academics, only to be dazzled by the humble English folk song. Song was ‘nothing less than speech charged with emotion’: the instincts of the people made beautiful. Once English composers recognized the folk song as their kin, then England could be graced with a national music again.⁄fi Like song, English humour was not too clever or sophisticated. It had been nurtured by the people themselves and found its best expression in simple jesting. If the folk song was open to everyone, so was drollery.⁄fl Tylor had admitted that while advanced peoples might be clever and sophisticated, they did not have a monopoly on human virtue. Indeed, with the advance of civilization, ‘Courage, honesty, generosity are virtues which may suffer . . .’ By the 1930s, so prevalent was the association of the folk with what was natural and right, and such was the association of the folk with the poor and the uneducated, that to be ‘middle class’ in attitude was less than appealing, especially to the young.⁄‡

Figure in a Landscape National properties were offered as structural properties, close to the people, below the surface. They showed the English as decent and humane, involved in the little, local things of life. This was, in a sense, the AngloSaxon version of Celticism—the ordinary English living their lives apart from the state and sometimes in opposition to it. But the trouble with little local properties such as these was they had to be made available to nationalists, modernists, and other theorists. One theory of national properties saw them as part of a great collective memory rolling subliminally beneath the state. Out of this unconscious, nation-states could call up their deepest knowledge, but, like survivals in culture, it had no sense of its self. This made it a ‘race’ or a ‘folk’ or a ‘national’ memory, open to expert interpretation only. For social scientists like Gustave Le Bon, it constituted the psychology of the mass. For Freud, in ⁄fi Vaughan Williams National Music, 82, 19, 31. ⁄fl For Priestley the national clown was Sir Toby Belch, not Mr Punch: English Humour, 5, 58. ⁄‡ Lewis and Maude, English Middle Classes, 52. Quote from Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 29.

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anti-Semitic Vienna, it constituted a primeval force of extraordinary credulity. For nationalists of all nations, the urge was always to reduce and to simplify it until, in the end, the people stood revealed not as an unconscious force or a subliminal memory or even a list of properties, but as one, essential figure—one peasant as the face and body of all peasants, one worker as the face and body of all workers, one soldier as the body of all soldiers.⁄° Or of none. In the search for a form which could stand for all and forever, nationalism joined with classicism, and in the essential figure in a landscape that was the result, the life portrayed was not figurative but monumental. Inter-war Fascist and Communist art specialized in these human monuments, but they served as powerful national metaphors in many countries.⁄· In England there were various contenders, but few were as powerfully canvassed as ‘Hodge’. Hodge, the archetypal agricultural labourer, was of course a nineteenth-century joke, the butt of his betters who for long enough had mocked him as a simpleton. Richard Jefferies, however, was quick to take him as the centre of national identity.¤‚ Hodge stands with a bill on a pole. He is grey and brown, like the wintry landscape he stands in. One man, one body, one people, Hodge is a natural feature of the land. When he dies in the workhouse, he would rather have died like a natural thing, crawling away to fade and fold back into the earth that made him: Watch the man there—he skims off the tough thorn as though it were straw. He notes not the beauty of the beech above him, nor the sun, nor the sky; but on the other hand, when the sky is hidden, the sun gone, and the beautiful beech torn by raving winds neither does he heed that. Rain and tempest affect him not; the glaring heat of summer, the bitter frost of winter are alike to him. He is built up like an oak.¤⁄

⁄° On Armistice Day, 1920, the coffin of the Unknown Warrior was laid in Westminster Abbey: Manchester Guardian, 12 Nov. 1920, in Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 249. ⁄· Walter Johnson, Folk-Memory, Or the Continuity of British Archaeology (1908; New York, 1971), 13; Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London, 1896); Paul Connerton, ‘Freud and the Crowd’, in Timms and Collier, Visions and Blueprints, 196. Dennis Potter saw the monumental figure in the Forest of Dean in 1962, in some miners waiting for a bus: The Changing Forest (1962; London, 1996), 37. ¤‚ The native returns as a national figure at the moment that his employer, ‘Farmer’ John Bull, is on his way to becoming a Tory bigot: Miles Taylor, ‘John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England 1712–1929’, Past and Present, 134 (Feb. 1992). ¤⁄ Richard Jefferies, Hodge and His Masters (1880; London, 1937), 222.

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Yet it was odd that the essential English figure could not normally be found in what was offered as the essential English landscape. H. J. Massingham described himself as ‘a purist in chalk’. Flowing clean, chalk land was apparently changeless, certainly perfect, and offered as absolutely English in its avoidance of division and distortion. But people it had not. Up on the Downs, in West Ilsley or East Hendred perhaps, English nationalism and English modernism found common cause on its bare hills.¤¤ The classicism of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935–42) offered such a purity in the form of austerity,¤‹ while Philip Larkin’s ‘clarity over obscurity’ would come to be praised in precisely the same terms as chalk: they both denoted the clear and unadorned powers of English understatement.¤› Even the petrol companies recognized chalk’s bare properties and made their posters modernist. For a time southern chalk had no rivals and its credentials were strong: it had allowed the earliest human settlement in England, and it had defined the island by permitting the sea to flood the channel.¤fi Auden, however, would later come to rebuke it as ‘not the sweet home that it looks | Nor its peace the historical calm of a site | Where something was settled once and for all.’ His preference was for limestone, an underground and northern landscape made for ‘we the inconstant ones’.¤fl

Cordons In the discovery of modern national properties, the idea of survival in culture as a structural property hidden beneath the surface continued to lead the way. Unfortunately for those who had national or race purity in mind, cultural species could cross continents and oceans. Survival in culture theory could unite the minds, say, of the Suffolk ploughman and the Punjabi peasant, because both could be found sharing the same species. In texts, too, there was sharing and transmutation. In Rhys-David’s 1880 translation of the birth-tales of the Buddha, the Játakas, among the oldest tales in literature, and his later translations of the Hindu versions of Bidpai or ¤¤ H. J. Massingham, English Downland (London, 1936), 56; William Beach Thomas, The English Landscape (London, 1938), 29. ¤‹ Steve Ellis, The English Eliot (London, 1990), 142. ¤› Stephen Regan, Philip Larkin (Basingstoke, 1992), 13. ¤fi Richard Fortey, The Hidden Landscape (London, 1993), 217. ¤fl W. H. Auden, ‘In Praise of Limestone’ (1948), and Alan Myers, ‘W. H. Auden and the North’, Northern Review, 2 (1995).

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Panchatantra, he suggested that a good deal of English folk- and fairy-tale derived from India. The Three Little Pigs story derived from the Lambikin stories of the Punjab. The Sea Maiden story derived from the Charmed Ring fable of Goa. Over hundreds of years these ancient tales had moved through Asia Minor and into Europe. Red Riding Hood and Cinderella had had to cross French translations before arriving in the English. This was a point of view not entirely welcomed by those keen on pure and essential nationalism, and to say the least, it was interesting for them to be told by Joseph Jacobs that in their stories (no less than in their games like Ludo), English ‘children owe[d] their earliest laughter to Hindu wags’. In much the same way, W. H. Barker showed the relationship of African Anansi tales, strong also in the West Indies, to the Just So stories popularized by Kipling in 1902.¤‡ Universal cross-cultural comparisons were not just child’s play. They could be seriously political too, with sharp implications for the state’s administration of its British and colonial subjects. Take the village as a valuable national property. In 1883 George Lawrence Gomme argued that the primary condition for the retention of English folk culture was the preservation of the village community. Historians had long claimed that English liberty had found its original expression in the communality of the ancient Teutonic village, traces of which still remained in Germany and Scandinavia. But Sir Henry Maine found the same traces surviving in the communal practices of Indian villages.¤° With the cessation of Indian land reform after the rebellions of 1857, and the British switch to shoring up, not breaking down, traditional tenures and village solidarities, English conservatives had to face up to the question of why what was good for Indian villages was not equally good for English villages. And if the village was as essential to English solidarity as it was to Indian, why was the mahalwari (village-wise) system of North-West Province not suitable for East Anglia?¤· Why, indeed, should market forces be restrained for one folk ¤‡ Joseph Jacobs (ed.), Indian Fairy Tales (London, 1912), 234; Barker and Sinclair, West African Folk-Tales, 20–1. ¤° Gomme, Folk-Lore Relics, 12–14; Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West (1871; London, 1881), 62. ¤· Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries. Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930 (London, 1972), 13–14; Inden identifies the peasant village as one of four ‘determinate natures’ the British wished on India: Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1994), 3–15; Clive Dewey, ‘Images of the village community’, Modern Asian Studies, 6 (1972), 298, 293.

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abroad but not the other at home? The history of enclosure and the destruction of the English village community came to be looked at in a new light. If English survivals were clearly throwbacks to other times and places, it was also clear that interpreters of the folk had to be very careful how they were thrown, and where they were thrown back to. English folk songs, for instance, were ‘evolved by the many’, and that indeed was why they were called folk songs. But the many were deemed always to have existed as ‘a purifying and refining influence’ and, even when there was direct evidence to the contrary, they could not be seen for what they actually were.‹‚ Similarly, English Morris dancing was old and difficult to explain by name, but its face-blacking origins had to be Scandinavian. They could not possibly be ‘Moorish’.‹⁄ And if a pure English tongue was explicable through dialect, dialect had to be cordoned off from slang. For slang was the speech of those who had no homeland or didn’t deserve one—vagrants and gypsies, chaunters, patterers, and other low types.‹¤ When English connections with primitive peoples were impossible to deny, common cause could be explained either through an Aryanism which, long ago and far away, had once included a pre-lapsarian India, or it could be made to sound degrading, like the retired army major who claimed to see in ‘The Lambeth Walk’ traces of those ‘ecstatic groans, sweating and stinking to the beat of the darabuka’ he had witnessed in the Sudan.‹‹ English national properties, therefore, when in the hands of the theorists, reflected a national predilection for what was plain, home grown, and equable. As to origin, form, or line, they could not be tampered with. The English did not need foreign advice on their politics, any more than they needed sunshine on their weather or piquant sauces on their beef. At the same time, English national properties also were obliged to reflect the English in the world and leading it. So a proper English breakfast still ‹‚ Sharp, English Folk Song, pp. xxiv–xxv. Frank Kidson, the Leeds collector and founding member of the Folk Song Society, believed that many collectors were finding orally that which had already existed in print: Gordon Tyrrell, ‘The Nineteenth Century Broadside Ballad in Popular Culture’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Leicester, 1993, pp. 39–44. ‹⁄ Sharp, Sword Dances, 11–12, 35. ‹¤ J. C. Hotten, The Slang Dictionary (1887; Wakefield, 1972), with a Preface by J. D. A. Widdowson; ‘A London Antiquary’ (J. C. Hotten), A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words (London, 1860), 3–4. ‹‹ The belief in Sanscrit as a key language in the development of a ‘family’ of Indo-EuropeanAryan languages, and the idea of a ‘Caucasian’ race derived from Central Asia, led to a certain scholarly passion for India, seeing it as ‘exotic and familiar, if not ancestral’: Bernal, Black Athena, i. 229. On the retired major: Harrison and Madge, Britain, 170–1.

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included the chota-hazri (coffee, two bananas, hot tub, and mango), and the world authority on curry was Colonel Kenny Herbert.‹› The folk were portrayed as having evolved their properties over many generations. By definition, nothing that had finally evolved could be shocking or challenging. Folk Englishness, therefore, found itself rubbed down to the smoothness of its lowest common cultural denominator, which was: things as they were. And when things as they were were not things as they should be, then there was always the time when they had been so, or the hope that they could be so again.‹fi Many twentieth-century patriots of left and right thought habitually in these terms. Returning to the true properties of the people was their deepest political belief. In 1937 Sir Oswald Mosley looked back to the Tudor English, a people whose spirit, he believed, would rise from the ashes. He looked forward to Adolf Hitler, a man who was ever mindful to walk to the dais from out of the crowd, from out of the pure, simple, singular strength of the people, a figure in a landscape.‹fl ‹› White, Practical Cookery, 178. ‹fi After the demise of liberal progressivism, things were never as they should have been and ‘decline’ became built into the political system. ‹fl Sir Oswald Mosley, Mosley: The Facts (London, 1957), speeches of 1937 and 1938, pp. 90–1; George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York, 1975), 202.

19 Common People

Sing along with the common people Sing along and it might just get you thru. (Jarvis Cocker, 1995)

Deemed incapable of knowing beyond their own immediate lives, worthy as those lives were, ‘the folk’ could not be ‘the nation’. Instinct and experience they had in abundance. Understanding they had not. They were a vital force, but they could not reach that self-consciousness whereby modern nations recognized themselves. The modern nation needed the properties of the folk, it was true, but only as interpreted in ways the folk themselves could not grasp.⁄ The folk, therefore, was itself an interpretation. Once acts of interpretation had been made, and national properties duly identified, and the discourse of modern Englishness established, then the common people could melt back into that anonymity from whence they came. At one level they were useful; at another level they were used.

Interpreters Folk interpreters made two key points. First, they said that common people’s customs were practised without understanding. Second, they said ⁄ Tylor respected ‘survivals’; feared ‘degradations’ (urban); and marked out ‘savageries’ (overseas) ‘for destruction’. Meanwhile he connected them all: ‘Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization’: Primitive Culture, ii. 453, i. 17.

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that there had been a time, prior to industrialization perhaps, when those practices were orally transmitted through the whole community and were therefore more or less English pure. Consider, for example, the grand Whit Parade at Hinckley, Leicestershire, described in 1787 by the Gentleman’s Magazine and reprinted in 1896 by the folklorist Gomme. A booming textile town celebrated its own plebeian trades or, more accurately, the plebeian trades celebrated themselves. Of the procession—led by a baron and baroness, c.1066, on white chargers, followed by town banner, streamers, tradesmen with flags and ‘allusions’, Bishop Blaise, shepherds and woolcombers and townspeople—was it not most strange to infer, as survivalists inferred, that these people did not understand the significance of their processing? Why, then, a revival? Why, then, all that allusion? Why bother at all? It was here that the survivalists were vague with their history. If it was difficult for them to claim that the people did not know what they were doing at some time past, as at Hinckley in 1787, the question must be asked, at precisely what time did the people come not to know why they were doing it? If it was during industrialization, then Gomme would have had to claim that the Hinckley trades did not know, or were in the process of forgetting, their own customs. Clearly unlikely. If it was during industrialization and the simultaneous move away from pure, text-free oral cultures to literate and printed ones, then the survivalists would have to show the existence up to modern times of a pure, text-free, popular oral culture. Very difficult. In any case, interpreters of the folk were always uncomfortable with popular culture of any kind, and never did their history well enough to show one. The Statute Hiring at Polesworth in Leicestershire, described in 1790, only three years after the Hinckley Parade, gathered together 3,000 farm servants and was the biggest in the country. Ballad-singers were there, naturally, but any nineteenth- or twentieth-century folk survivalist intent on discovering English purity in their wares would have had to find another time and another place to examine. Their dissipated printed ‘trash’, it appears, was of the sort ‘which is everywhere, at present, dealt out’.¤ Interpreters of the folk, then, inclined to a history of their own choosing, an England with the people put in but their agency left out.‹ Cottagers counted for less than the cottages they lived in, and were just as mute. The ¤ William Marshall, The Rural Economy of the Midland Counties, 2 vols. (London, 1790), i. 20–1; G. L. Gomme, The Gentleman’s Magazine Library: English Topography, Part vii (London, 1896), 25. ‹ In 1893 F. W. Maitland launched a devastating attack on Gomme’s scholarship from which it did not recover: ‘The Survival of Archaic Communities’, Law Quarterly Review, 9 (1893), 211.

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English village was usually represented devoid of villagers, or at any rate devoid of those who might spoil the scene. Gazing children or old folk by the cottage door might be allowed into the photographer’s frame; flushed young men in the saloon bar, never. In the fields, while some workers worked, others merged silently into the landscape. Village yokels said nowt much. Dialect speakers needed translating, though not for themselves. In the south, it was explained that a bread-and-dripping diet had made the rural poor spindly, and without a voice, living in villages that were silent. In the north, for all their marching boots, L. S. Lowry’s townscapes echoed that silence. Lowry’s figures moved in crowds, but they still remained silent spindle-shanks who craned forward to look and to hear. By the 1920s all aesthetes had come to prefer their England empty as well as silent. From the National Federation of Women’s Institutes to the Road Beautifying Association, the conservation-minded, along with their good intentions to save the land, preferred it empty as well. Shell’s posters declared the open road. Petrol stations looked best without petrol. Roads looked best without cars. There was a side to ruralism which wanted the hikers and the bikers, the trackers and the shackers, to take their sweaty bodies elsewhere. To a lot of English people, if not to Professor Joad who wrote it, all these things sounded like a good day out: And then there are the hordes of hikers cackling insanely in the woods, or singing raucous songs as they walk arm in arm at midnight down the quiet village street. There are people, wherever there is water, upon sea shores or upon river banks, lying in every attitude of undressed and inelegant squalor, grilling themselves, for all the world as if they were steaks, in the sun. There are tents in meadows and girls in pyjamas dancing beside them to the strains of the gramophone . . . there are fat girls in shorts, youths in gaudy ties and plus-fours, and a roadhouse round every corner and a café on top of every hill for their accommodation . . . Above all and most hated of all, there are the motorists.›

Assumptions about ‘the masses’, who were excitable, merged into assumptions about ‘the folk’, who were ignorant. The public moralists who did the interpreting were, of course, by contrast, serious and rational.fi Le › On villages: Edward Bawden and Noel Carrington, Life in an English Village (Harmondsworth, 1949); on photography: John Tagg, The Burden of Representation (Basingstoke, 1988), 11, 154; on southern poor: Gales, Vanished Country Folk, 34; on aesthetes: D. Hardy and C. Ward, Arcadia. The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape (London, 1984), 2, 4, and C. E. M. Joad, in Clough Williams-Ellis, Britain and the Beast (London, 1937), 72–3. fi Collini, Public Moralists, 274–6.

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Bon had subtitled his book ‘A Study of the Popular Mind’, but the wonder of it was that he considered the crowd had a mind to study. Eleanor Hull loved the Morris dance, yet could still claim that country-folk thought in a ‘twilight dance of psychological midges’.fl Common people were not the same sort of English as those who came to do the interpreting. As was usual in these matters, meaning was not to be found out there, so to speak, in the raw pleasure of it, but on the inside, in the interpreting. Any number of carefully revived folksy performances—from maypoles and summer pageants to cheese-rolling, tar-barrelling, and clog-dancing—attested to it.‡ Cecil Sharp’s role as interpreter of English folk dance is well known. Sharp was not the sort of man who thought that folk culture could come from modern times or from the untutored. Mary Neal, on the other hand, with her socialist emphasis on the urban proletariat as ‘the new Folk’, was a very different folk interpreter. Yet, like all those who believed in proletarian vanguards, Neal still wanted her workers correct. In her Esperance Clubs, for example, no Cockney was to be spoken, and she didn’t ‘think we ought to depend for our songs and dances upon niggers’.° The comrades wanted their workers ethnically correct as well. The Second International at Paris in 1889 declared May Day as a proletarian festival out of European folk traditions. Attempts in the 1920s to include jazz were rejected.· Left and right vied to do the interpreting. The left based their interpretation on authentic speech, practical criticism, direct experience, if not textfree then at least free text—cinema without scripts, documentary without artifice, theatre without rehearsal, poetry without poets. British Communism found the concept of an underground culture to its taste. Those on the right were temperamentally more inclined to the folk idea, while those on the far right based their interpretations on uncovering the people’s racial secrets. During the Industrial Revolution, or so the story went, the moneyed interests had turned a green and pleasant England into a dark sweatshop. Redemption lay buried with the English people, whose first unconscious secrets were biological-racial: the race memory of ‘all instincts, customs, habits and laws . . . laboriously worked out and acquired in the limitless immemorial past’. The common people had held on. They had hardly known what they were doing, but they had held on: ‘By good mating—that fl Le Bon, The Crowd, 54; Eleanor Hull, Folklore of the British Isles (London, 1928), p. vii. ‡ Homer Sykes, Once a Year: Some Traditional British Customs (London, 1977); Wright, Rustic Speech, 265. ° Boyes, Imagined Village, 81, 74. · Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 171.

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is to say, mating between people with consistent or similar memories—the memories of these common experiences can be conserved and strengthened and the characteristics intensified . . .’ In 1937 Henry Williamson wrote the Foreword to a revised version of Richard Jefferies’s Hodge and His Masters. He implored his readers to rebuild the nation around the race secrets of rural people, and complained bitterly about the tourists, the phoney tea shops, the litter, and the traffic. None of this stopped him blasting through north Devon on a Norton Brooklands Special.⁄‚ In 1929 a Royal Commission on National Museums and Galleries called for four national folk museums, naming the English case as the most urgent. Nothing happened.⁄⁄ Yet the idea of a national identity based on the structural properties of the people was everywhere. Much of the writing of the period, from travel and geography to regional, political, and most social commentary, including all the Condition of England writing, can be seen in this light.⁄¤

Doubters There were two main sources of doubt: if the native people were hidden and their properties unconscious, how could they be penetrated from the outside? And if they could be so penetrated, who did the selecting? Chief doubter was the most famous ruralist of them all. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex was certainly a survival place, enclosed in its own time and knowledge, but could it be known from the outside? Was it available to external acts of interpretation? Hardy seemed to doubt it. Wessex, he seemed to be saying, could be understood only on the inside or not at all. Once instinctual knowledge was transferred-out at the hands of outsiders into the hands of outsiders, it would perish just as Tess had perished. Sensing this and at the same time writing about it, put Hardy in an impossible position. This is how John Barrell explains it in reference to the natives of Egdon Heath: ⁄‚ Timms and Collier, Visions and Blueprints, introductory, and chapters by Davies and Heinemann; Boyes, Imagined Village, chs. 6 and 7; William Sanderson, Statecraft (London, 1932), 45, 50; Jefferies, Hodge, Foreword. ⁄⁄ Hartland, Folklore, 36–7; J. E. Smythe, ‘The Educational Role of Museums and Field Centres in England From 1884’, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Sheffield, 1966, p. 78. The army tried to get county regiments to sing county folk songs: Christopher Stone (ed.), War Songs (Oxford, 1908), p. ix. ⁄¤ See Edward Thomas, The Country (London, 1913), 22–3. He knew that these matters went deeper than geography: The South Country (London, 1932), 11.

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He [the narrator] must appear capable of knowing what the heathfolk know, and what the reader knows, and of representing the local in the language of the novel without appropriating it to the general . . . but not only must these languages coexist . . . the transitions from one language to the other must enable the reader to cross over from the sort of knowledge he has to the sort of knowledge he has not, and which, I have suggested, he cannot have.⁄‹

As a doubter Hardy was in a class of his own, but there were other critics. Empiricists were very uncomfortable with national property renditions of village life. Fabian Tract 118 told the alternative history of the English village—whipped since 1815 into a chain gang, tied by the cottage, tortured by the workhouse, deserted by the Church, bullied by the farmer. No wonder people were leaving it in droves. Maude Davies investigated rural poverty, centred in the village of Corsley, Wiltshire. In 1909 she found that 220, or one-eighth, of households lived in primary poverty, holding two-fifths of village children. Another kind of doubter was the ruralist writer F. G. Heath. Prompted by the Agriculture Commissioners’ reports of 1868–70, and Joseph Arch’s agricultural labourers’ trade union which formed soon after, Heath made his own way west in 1872. A fashionable ‘country writer’ and author of works such as Fern Paradise, Heath was more able than most to refute what had been said about the English village. He spoke of old country sports, but only those pursued in fields where the labourer was either a hireling or a trespasser. He spoke of traditional country fare, but only the bread and the bacon. He spoke of a country dress where hand-me-downs and Blanket Loan Clubs were the true national costume.⁄› It isn’t difficult to challenge the selection of English properties. It was immigrant Jewish craftsmen who made furniture the English actually wanted—period pastiche—in the East End, while native Arts and Craftsmen made the furniture which the English should have wanted but didn’t, and couldn’t afford anyway, in the Cotswolds.⁄fi Likewise, the real English pub was supposed to be found in thatchy southern villages like Moulsford or Clifton Hampden, but a much better claim could have been made by ⁄‹ John Barrell, ‘Geographies of Hardy’s Wessex’, Journal of Historical Geography, 8 (1982), 357. ⁄› D. C. Pedder, The Secret of Rural Depopulation, Fabian Tract 118 (London, 1904); Maude F. Davies, Life in an English Village (London, 1909), 285; Francis George Heath, Peasant Life in the West of England (London, 1883), 344, 308, 295. On the Revolt of the Field in Norfolk as a watershed in labourers’ self perceptions: Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men (London, 1985), chs. 1–4. ⁄fi William I. Massil, Immigrant Furniture Workers in London (London, 1997), 6.

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Birmingham. There, the magistrates’ scheme of surrendered licenses in the city led to an inter-war renaissance of the pub in the suburb. Mitchell and Butler’s, and Davenport’s big, architect-designed premises, with their gardens and bar meals and children’s areas, were prototypes for what was to come. The brick-built Brookhill Tavern, not the Beetle and Wedge, nice as it was, was where most English people enjoyed their ale.⁄fl To deny the beauty of the folk song would be as fatuous as denying the cosy pleasures of the village local, but it has to be said that inflated interpretations of these things tended to deny the experiences of millions of other English people. England’s 40,000 amateur wind bands, for instance, or Yorkshire’s 240 brass bands, were part of a culture whose bandsmen were no less English and whose music was no less musical than Folk Society warblers. And although Cecil Sharp did have some success in getting his sort of country dancing introduced into elementary schools, it would be hard to suppose that English children preferred it to the palais glide, the hokey-cokey, or the cakewalk.⁄‡ The common culture of the English people in the twentieth century lay not in folk culture, still less in literature, but in American ‘sweet’ jazz and ballad, in middlebrow European classical (learned in band and choral traditions and on the wireless), and in association football, homegrown and as close as you could get: the way into one side of Leicester City’s ground was through a row of terraced houses with turnstiles in the middle.⁄° How common people actually lived was not how they were deemed to live as national properties. The summer months brought infant sickness and diarrhoea, not dancing on the village green.⁄·

National Corporate And yet, all this bringing-in and interpreting of the properties of the common people can be seen as part of the growing representation of the whole ⁄fl Burke’s best pubs, or ‘inns’, were in Marlow, Streatley, Benson, Clifton Hampden, Pangbourne, and Moulsford; the worst were in the midlands and the north: Thomas Burke, The English Inn (London, 1930), 61–70, 159. For Birmingham, Basil Oliver, The Renaissance of the English Public House (London, 1947). ⁄‡ Douglas Kennedy, England’s Dances, 20–1. Dave Russell, ‘Popular Musical Culture’, in J. K. Walton and J. Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain (Manchester, 1983). ⁄° McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 516. On family history, with its oral transmission and passing on of things rather than texts: M. Abbott, Family Ties: English Families 1540–1920 (London, 1993). ⁄· N. Williams and G. Mooney, ‘Infant Mortality in Cities’, Continuity and Change, 9: 2 (Aug. 1994), 207.

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land and all its people. In class terms, it represented a middle-class move away from individualism and market economics towards a sense of the national corporate. By the end of the nineteenth century the middle classes had come to see themselves as the political nation. This involved not only a rejection of the old regime, but also dissatisfaction with their own early critique of that regime—a critique no longer serviceable for a class which now had to represent all the nation, not just itself. By the 1880s we can see the beginning of a three-speed middle-class rebuilding of English political and cultural thought. First, and most decisively, there was dissatisfaction with aristocratic political privilege, seen as inadequate for the modern world (Bagehot showed how the adaptations could be made). Certain kinds of relationship and address de haut en bas were no longer acceptable. Secondly, there was dissatisfaction with market individualism as an adequate expression of the nation, and an adequate mechanism for how that nation might live with itself. The lives of the poor had to be made less nasty. The minds of the poor had to be made more amenable.¤‚ Thirdly, and over the longer term most persistently, there was a coming to terms with the idea of the nation as a corporate body with corporate interests and interdependencies. This not only included the common people but also, to a degree, it honoured them as well. This is to put it bluntly. No class has ever been so hegemonic and no political thought has ever been so clear cut as these three points might suggest. And there were significant exceptions. On the other hand, it is possible to discern a clear transition in mid- to late-century representations of land and people. Consider areas as different as sport, orchestral music, literature, and the relief of the poor. In sport, the transition to the national corporate is very clear and uncomplicated. In about forty years, that is, roughly, from the 1830s to the 1870s, the middle classes went from rejection of sport (or indifference to it) to a whole-hearted embracing of it as the true expression of the English people. The old sporting instincts of gentry and ‘Fancy’—hunting, boxing, racing—had been washed in blood and bets; the new sporting flannels of the urban bourgeoisie, on the other hand, were seen as lilywhite and manly. The new man played for character and love of the game.¤⁄ In the case of music, literature, and poverty, the new representation is more complex ¤‚ Collini, English Pasts, 110. ¤⁄ Richard Holt calls amateurism ‘the new moral philosophy’: Sport and the British (Oxford, 1990), 113.

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but no less decisive. The English ‘musical renaissance’ from the 1880s on was based on middle-class reinterpretations of the music-of-the-people, as well as rejection of their own previous musical taste which they began to see as philistine, utilitarian, and ‘lying like a dead weight on English culture’.¤¤ Exactly the same thing might be said of literature, seen as a highly valued body of special works. Matthew Arnold had drawn attention to the old middle-class philistinism towards literature in the 1860s. But by the turn of the century ‘English Literature’ was a university subject, plucked out of the hands of upper-class dilettantes and Grub Street hacks alike, and soon to be the possession of serious academics who would recognize it as having something to do with the properties of the English people as a whole.¤‹ In the same way, social policies from the 1880s on were based on middle-class interpretations of the properties-of-the-people, as well as rejection of their own previous social reforms that they began to see as philistine, utilitarian, and encased in the Report of the Poor Law Commissioners and the amending Act of 1834. Fifty years after the Act’s introduction of workhouse regimes based on market principles, the common people were seen as deserving better. The nation was seen as deserving better. The whole Condition of England question, in fact, was first a re-evaluation and then a rejection of market individualism.¤› From now on the new Englishness was national-corporate. But did that make it common?

Selecting From the Mass In 1926 D. H. Lawrence wrote to Rolf Gardiner expressing some of the disconnectedness shared by many intellectuals of his generation. As his friend Lady Ottoline Morrell remembered meeting miners on the road, and wishing she could have shared ‘their good solid tea’, so Lawrence wanted more than he felt middle-class England could give him. He said that it ‘just stop[s] some part of me from working’. He told Gardiner that he ‘should like to come to Yorkshire . . . should like even to try to dance a sword-dance with ironstone miners above Whitby . . . should love to be ¤¤ Nicholas Temperley (ed.), Music in Britain. The Romantic Age 1800–1914 (London, 1981), 22. For Elgar’s part: Jeremy Crump, ‘The Reception of Elgar 1898–1935’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness. ¤‹ Brian Doyle, ‘The Invention of English’, in Colls and Dodd, Englishness, 93. ¤› Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State (London, 1978), chs. 5, 6, 7.

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connected with something . . .’¤fi What that something was is hard to say. Lawrence was certain, however, that although it had to do with the common people, it could be taken only on his terms, not theirs. One must ‘think beyond them, know beyond them’.¤fl The old, hard-faced, ‘bourgeois’ individualism Lawrence rejected. He came to associate that with his mother. Common instinct and common people he tried to embrace, and perpetrated that on the memory of his father.¤‡ Yet Lawrence and the other interpreters didn’t want to be common people. They didn’t want to be tied down in little properties, eking out their crafts and customs.¤° They wanted only to be able to apprehend the experience of being common people, but at the same time know that they were apprehending the experience while looking forward to the next one. Lawrence stayed with these contradictions all his life, and worked with them. For him, there were no easy translations. On the other hand, the folklorist A. R. Wright saw the work of the artist as a straightforward national duty: to take from the folk the raw material of the nation, as it were, and then translate it into finer stuff: ‘The natural people, the folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual.’¤· Of course, in most cases selecting from the mass was just personal and idiosyncratic: Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister, said he wanted calloused hands.‹‚ But seen in a national corporate way, nearly all the new pleasures described in this chapter involved some level of indentification with ordinary people. At its simplest, this could mean less snobbery and more respect: Jack Hobbs was a cricketing hero; it didn’t matter that his parents were college servants. Or it could mean using common people’s alleged virtues to sell common people’s alleged pleasures: like Jack Tar on a packet ¤fi Lady Ottoline Morrell, in Paul Delaney, D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare (Hassocks, 1979), 48. Lawrence to Gardiner, in Richard Aldington (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: Selected Letters (1950; Harmondsworth, 1978), 158. Gardiner had founded the ‘Travelling Morrice’ two years before, devoted to re-reviving the Sharpian revival and getting back to ‘the people’ as Gardiner and his friends saw them. Some of those friends were fascists: Boyes, Imagined Village, 154–8. ¤fl Delaney, Lawrence’s Nightmare, 181, in a letter of Dec. 1915. ¤‡ Lawrence revised his father into a man of culture and best survival instincts: John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence. The Early Years 1885–1912 (Cambridge, 1991), 500–2. ¤° Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence. Language and Being (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 3. ¤· A. R. Wright, English Folklore (London, 1928), 6–7. ‹‚ Priestley, English Humour, p. viii.

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of Player’s or a Highlander on a box of porrage oats. In other, more complex ways, it involved taking some of the attributes of the people and translating them into middle-class attributes as well. Peasant survival instinct, for example, could translate into ‘steadiness’; or muteness into ‘reserve’; or doggedness into ‘deliberateness’, or gameness into ‘sportsmanship’. In 1931 Renier’s real English were middle-class men. The adjectives he used to describe them might, fifty years before, have been describing Hodge in his field, but now he was talking of university dons in their common room: ‘the unintellectual, restricted, stubborn, steady, pragmatic, silent and reliable English’, he called them.‹⁄ Welsh dons, meanwhile, gladly built their university on the supposed attributes of the folk.‹¤ Alison Light has taken this new regard for ordinariness and applied it to what she sees as an inter-war feminization of national identity. After 1918 the stentorian masculine hero was no longer acceptable. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians came to bury at least three of them. In its place, Light sees Englishness as falling into the hands of middle-class women, whose everydayness was more appropriate to the times. But one can also see in these middle-class women a mingling with the attributes of the folk. They represented themselves as practical, artless, and ordinary.‹‹ George Orwell, too, cast his English People (1947) as a folk translation. The aristos he cut adrift as aliens. The middle classes he accepted as broadly competent and constitutionally minded, but in need, as their language and feelings were in need, of reinvigoration from below. And down below, Orwell’s working class was never less than folk in coal-dust.‹› Middle-class Englishness took what was common but only if it was sensible. Serious apparel was in the vernacular, in natural textures and British colours—pipe shag, grey flannel, green tweed, brown brogues. Arthur Bryant’s typical Englishman came home to his slippers through a garden gate. W. S. Shears’s real England rooted and fruited in the shires, which were bourgeois places too. The English constitution was said to resemble an ‹⁄ G. J. Renier, The English: Are They Human? (1931; London, 1956), 18. This reference is used also on p. 82 of this book. Friedrich Engels translated the qualities of English common soldiers onto the Iron Duke himself—‘And he knows his army, its self-willed, defensive doggedness, which every Englishman brings with him from the boxing ring’: Ashton, Little Germany, 67. ‹¤ Cadwaladr Davies and W. Lewis Jones, The University of Wales and Its Constituent Colleges (London, 1905), pp. xii–xiii, 212. ‹‹ Light, Forever England, 11, 16–18. ‹› Prior to going to Wigan in 1936, Orwell had never seen a smoking factory or a colliery chimney: Crick, George Orwell, 283.

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English folk song, being ‘not the invention of any one man, but the natural growth among a free people’.‹fi In 1941 the broadcaster Wilfred Pickles was invited to join John Snagge’s London newsreaders, to give the news that northern, regional inflection which both the government and BBC had called for. He dared to say ‘gud neet’ at the end of his broadcast. The enemy could not have been expected to understand such English subtleties. For here was a BBC version of an inferior accent spoken by a common and provincial people which was, nevertheless, necessary and desirable and trusted.‹fl It took a ‘People’s War’ to bring Pickles’s little local humanity in, but before that the verse-recitation movement had created a manner of public speaking that couldn’t be middleclass posh and couldn’t be working-class flawed either. The result? The disembodied, canting voice of the English poetry reading.‹‡ As for the Nazis, for their English voice, they made the worst choice possible—William Joyce, a man with the voice of a ‘bored and affected . . . stage nobleman’. Joyce, or ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ as the British called him, was a propaganda disaster, inspiring only contempt.‹° After the war, Pickles’ most popular radio show ‘Have A Go’, developed out of his wartime ‘Billy Welcome’ shows, where he travelled the regions. Pickles pushed the BBC in the direction of the people. His roving microphone was always quick to pick up a bit of cheek in what he saw as the secret lives of ordinary folk (‘ ’Ello, are yer coortin’?’). He said he distrusted the studio set and their stagey sophistication. He talked about a chromium world in the same way that Richard Hoggart was to write about a candyfloss world a few years later. In 1951 Wilfred Pickles knew that, as much as everyone had gained from a new common Englishness, and he was a key voice in its translation, there was still more to be done: Walking under the glare of the neon signs and the dazzle from the cinemas, pin table saloons and those chromium corridors where young men in broad jackets and loud ties sip coffees with their Americanized girl friends, I thought for a moment of the men down the pit at Brodsworth and Atherton. They would be on the night shift now in that black underworld that is so much cleaner than London’s.‹· ‹fi Bryant, National Character, 15–16; W. S. Shears, This England (London, 1937), 46. There were, of course, powerful oral traditions in the philosophy and practice of English common law: J. H. Baker, The Third University of England (London, Selden Society, 1990). ‹fl Wilfred Pickles, Between You and Me (London, 1949), 93. ‹‡ Mark Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism (Madison, Wisc., 2001), 55, 83. ‹° Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Forces Slang (London, 1948), 92. ‹· Wilfred Pickles, Sometime . . . Never (London, 1951), 52.

20 Left-over People

Left-over people, how will they cope? (Alan Price, ‘Between Today and Yesterday’, 1974)

In 1951 places like Brodsworth and Atherton were still capable of binding the nation in. In the imagined nation, London needed places like them far more than places like them needed London. But very soon, in about twenty years in fact, this national relationship would begin to dissolve. Brodsworth and Atherton would come to seem not so solid. Regional industries had been in trouble in the 1930s but had been saved by the war. Regional planning was set up after the war, ready for the upward turn of the business cycle, but when, from 1970, regional industries began to go into decline a second time, the planning was not equal to the problem, and in some respects may have made it worse by distorting and demeaning what a ‘region’ stood for. During the 1930s those who worked and lived by heavy industry looked like left-over people. This description was visited on them again fifty years later. This chapter is about the catastrophic loss of confidence in a homeland that, once upon a time, had had a certain centre (London), a definite edge (the regions), and a not entirely disrespectful relationship between them. We begin with the miners, left-over people who, more than any other group, came to express the regional problem. To understand this new thinking we have to go back to the inter-war depression, and before that to the First World War.

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The Common Touch 1914–1945 During the 1930s it seemed as if the country was losing its old manufacturing shape, and with that its strength. Places once considered strong were laid low. The periphery was in trouble and the shock was great, great enough to elect two National Governments. In particular, there was a surge of concern for the ‘mining districts’. No one could deny the miners’ economic importance or indeed their numbers—a million men. The 1926 General Strike had been their fight, and the working class had shown their support for that particular version of the class war. Moreover, as we have seen, before 1914 the mining community had been partially interpreted as a survival people, and that had raised their dignity in middle-class eyes. Once memories of 1926 began to fade and the depression began to deepen, that dignity returned. The Miner came to replace Hodge as the essential figure in the landscape. Coal-mining was regarded as traditional, and worthy of respect even if, like the agricultural labourer, the coalminer didn’t always get that respect in practice. For some commentators on the left, stark black colliery headgear, dark heaps, and close brown terraced housing represented a sort of spiritual home. Here pulsed an instinctual people, ready to give heart. This was not necessarily how the miners saw it. To them, their industry was part of the modern world, and their institutions the same. They put pictures of high-production pits on the front of their banners and ‘Planning’ on the back. Quite correctly, they saw their labour movement as being in the van of progress, genuinely innovative whether in voting, shopping, or modern mining.⁄ But whichever way they were looked at—survival or modern— hunger-marching seemed a poor reward. With the depression, the mining districts came to be seen as pieces in danger of splitting from the main. A school geography book in 1928 referred to the ‘Lands of Coal and Work’ as naturally associated places.¤ By the 1930s Glamorgan’s mining villages were repositories of national shame, the Rhondda doomed, Tyneside ruined. ‘Jarrow and the rest’ were seen as ‘diseased cells in the body of England’.‹ In places such as these, the moral authority of Victorian industry looked lost and the native significance of the ⁄ Norman Emery, Banners of the Durham Coalfield (Stroud, 1998). ¤ E. C. T. Horniblow, Our Own Lands (London, 1928), map, p. 107. ‹ Beach Thomas, English Landscape, 144; Edmund Vale, North Country (London, 1937), 56; Storm Jameson, in Macdonald, Patriotism, 123, 131.

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periphery looked wasted. Unemployment statistics measured the loss. Although investigators reported rock-solid community resilience, with most things going on as before,› such was the strong identification of land with people that broken lands were seen as holding only broken people: ‘Theoretically, the simplest plan is to evacuate the whole territory.’fi Whereas travel writers had once found in the regions strength ready to bind England in, inter-war commentators went looking for peripheral weaknesses ready to break. How they might break, and where, was not clear.fl Advisors, therefore, either fell back, back into Kent or the Cotswolds or some other garden heart, or stood at the edge and warned of the danger.‡ It was decided that the distressed regions needed ‘hardening’, and to help them do so the Industrial Transference Board was set up. Between 1929 and 1938 187,214 unemployed men passed through its instructional centres. The Ministry of Labour saw its work with the unemployed as the reconditioning of ‘human material’.° With the coming of war in 1939 common people’s qualities suddenly mattered again. There was no more talk of hardening. The East End of London braved the Blitz. The regional novel was raised to the national canon. Ruralists called for the land to be restored to the nation, and war artists went in search of the common touch. Quite quickly, England emerged out of inter-war division to take whole shape again: a royal heart, a common territory, a big sky, a coastal bulwark with a hard-working regional people fast inside and ready to fight. By the summer of 1940, all this was official.· › In Crook and the Rhondda, Men without Work: A Report made to the Pilgrim Trust (London, 1938), 273. fi Thomas Sharp, A Derelict Area: A Study of the South-West Durham Coalfield (London, 1935), 44. The most important study was the Reports of Investigations into the Industrial Conditions in Certain Depressed Areas (London, HMSO, 1934). These areas became Special Areas under the 1934 Act. Location theory was something classical economics had left to other disciplines; its only measure was unemployment, ‘Almost the only norm’: S. R. Dennison, The Location of Industry and the Depressed Areas (London, 1939), 2, 106–7. fl There were variations: John Baxendale, ‘J. B. Priestley, Englishness and the People’, History Workshop, 51 (2001). ‡ It was a strange reversal of conventional images when a ‘strong’ Surrey heeded the call of a ‘weak’ Jarrow: Matthew Perry, ‘The Limits of Philanthropy’, North East History, 33 (2000). ° Dave Colledge and John Field, ‘Account of a British Labour Camp in the 1930s’, History Workshop, 15 (Spring 1983), 156. · Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London, 1941), 43–5; on the land, H. J. Massingham (ed.), England and the Farmer (London, 1941), 13, 5–8; on artists, Meirion and Susie Harries, The War Artists (London, 1983), 161, 192; on working-class London, A. C. Ward, A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain (New York, 1943), 39.

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A generation back, the Great War had been fought out with far less conviction. Over 700,000 British had been killed and the same number disabled. For H. G. Wells, during these years nationalism had strutted as a ‘painted harlot’, while for G. K. Chesterton, only when the English people had entered the field with a will to get it done was the war finally finished. According to both men, there were no honest medals for those at the top. Those in the trenches had known the truth longer, of course, and the war poets had been first to grieve, but for most men it was a very private and ordinary grief, not at all bombastic.⁄‚ Party politics they left alone. The war had begun romantically with a language to match, but by the end irony was Tommy Atkins’s response to the ‘Great Fuck-Up’.⁄⁄ This was joined later by memory of a ‘lost generation’.⁄¤ The lost generation usually meant public schoolboys, but the other dead were remembered too, whatever their age and schooling. These were the first left-over people. Every town and village carved their names and swore to their memory: other ranks as well as officers, back home in name at least, sharing the same stone plinth.⁄‹ After 1918 there was a shift in national sensibilities. Shakespeare, not the generals, was representative of England: he was ‘the grandest thing we have yet done’,⁄› where the ‘we’ represented a marked change of attitude towards a man whose works before the war had been subjected to expurgation. After 1918 the Bard’s reputation never waned.⁄fi One of the fondest tests of interwar patriotism was a sort of balloon debate: which is the most valuable? The English people’s little local humanity or the British state’s great global conquests? ‘Shakespeare or India?’ was the essential question, and one that hardly needed an answer.⁄fl During the 1920s ordinariness found its part in private lives that were ‘increasingly agreeable’.⁄‡ Modesty had always been a ⁄‚ Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 126; H. G. Wells, British Nationalism and the League of Nations (London, 1918), 12; Cate Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning (London, 1977), 56, 66–7; J. H. Grainger, Patriotisms (London, 1986), 112–22. ⁄⁄ Ted Bogacz, ‘Language, Poetry and Antimodernism’, Journal of Modern History, 58 (1986), 648; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1977), 179–81. ⁄¤ Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (London, 1980), 112. ⁄‹ They couldn’t share the same diseases: Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 77, 112. ⁄› The remark was Carlyle’s: A. M. Royden, in Macdonald, Patriotism, 63. ⁄fi Asa Briggs (ed.), Essays in the History of Publishing (London, 1974), 94; Fred Inglis, Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1993), 31. ⁄fl On the swing from wealth to ordinariness: Priestley, English Humour, 180; Barker, Character of England, 350; John Drinkwater, Patriotism in Literature (London, 1924), 143; Arthur Bryant, The National Character (London, 1934), 29. ⁄‡ Taylor, English History, 317.

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necessary feature of middle-class existence, and suburban life modernized it. The semi-detached villa had the lot, including bathroom and garage, and everything in miniature.⁄° When the ideal family in the ideal home sat round the wireless and brooded on their contentment, that which seemed to make them happiest was everyday and domestic. Virginia Woolf called for a room of her own and, one supposes, a garden, indoor toilet, and hot water besides. These things, and the freedoms they bestowed, were in reach of the many. Not many supposed that wars and great empires were a prerequisite to des res with mod cons.⁄· Modern Englishness rested now unambiguously on the little things. Everyone could share an armful of English violets. Everyone did share in the human nature of being English and, in that, shared Shakespeare too. The common touch became part of what it was to be modern, as celebrated, for instance, in Longman’s English Heritage Series.¤‚ It was in this mood that the miners won their sympathy and, when it came to it, the idea of a People’s War took hold.¤⁄

Regional Planning Labour came to power in 1945 on a programme of national unity, and set about forging that unity from the centre. Regional government was dropped the moment the war ended. ‘Regionalism’ replaced it. Nationalization and welfare were to be the new levers of unity, and a battery of centralized regional powers was put in place alongside. These powers were much less effective than the system they replaced. Nevertheless, they were unprecedented in peacetime. Attlee’s government had inherited from the depression a view of certain industrial places as derelict and other places as potentially derelict. All through the 1930s the Industrial Transference Board had propagated the idea of a structural surplus of labour concentrated in the regions.¤¤ In 1927

⁄° Ivor Brown, The Heart of England (1935. London, 1951), 54. ⁄· Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. ¤‚ Which included volumes on folk-song and dance, humour, wildlife, inns, and country towns. ¤⁄ ‘all . . . that is more truly native centres around things which . . . are not official . . . the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside, the nice cup of tea’: Orwell, ‘Lion and the Unicorn’, 78. ¤¤ John Field, ‘Unemployment, Training and Manpower Policy in Inter-War Britain’, British Journal of Education and Work, 2: i (1989), 43.

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the president of the Board of Trade estimated a surplus of up to 200,000 miners. Although it did not look that way in 1945, when the need for coal was urgent, the idea of stagnant pools of labour in certain regional backwaters remained an essential part of Whitehall thinking. As well, the Special Areas Acts from 1934 onwards, although limited in their practical effects, had left a residue of thinking about the deserving (Special Areas) and the undeserving (London-linked) places in which to locate business, a way of thinking backed by Sir Montague Barlow’s Royal Commission on industrial distribution which reported in 1940. In 1945 the state was possessed, therefore, of a category of thought about a particular sort of settlement where there was population and investment, and another sort of settlement where it was ‘difficult to see an economic future’. A key aspect of government thinking was how to move capital from one settlement to the other.¤‹ Between 1945 and 1949 the state armed itself with ‘one of the most comprehensive bodies of regional and environmental planning legislation in the world’.¤› Distribution of Industry Acts were passed in 1945 and 1949, and they were accompanied by a New Towns Act in 1946, a Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, and the continuation of (wartime) Board of Trade licences to direct the location of private capital. In addition there were the newly nationalized industries, especially the National Coal Board, which wielded gigantic regional power, and an ongoing process of private business merger inherited from the 1930s which, Labour believed, would assist its economic planning. Planning was seen as very important. In 1944 Barbara Wooton said in a Fabian pamphlet that, ‘where there is no planning, there cannot be freedom’, and Labour, in pursuit of Beveridge’s five great freedoms, appeared to believe it.¤fi The trouble was that neither Labour, nor the Conservative governments which followed after 1951, chose to plan in ways that dealt with the economy as a dynamic market of competing businesses. The British way of planning saw it not so much as an activity related to business, as the physical control ¤‹ Dennison, Location of Industry, 164; R. C. Davison, The Unemployed (London, 1929), 259–60. Between 1921 and 1931 the north-east lost 200,000, or 8% of its population, to migration: D. J. Rowe, ‘The North-East’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain (Cambridge, 1990), 431. ¤› G. Manners et al., Regional Development in Britain (London, 1972), 7. ¤fi Fabian Society, Can Planning be Democratic? (London, 1944), 40. Herbert Morrison noted that ‘centralisation, nurtured in peace and forced in war [is] something to be extricated intact’ (ibid. 2, 9). On inter-war mergers: Lewis Johnman, ‘The Large Manufacturing Companies of 1935’, Business History, 28 (April 1986), 231.

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of land use. Planning in this sense had its origins in demography, in density of housing, and in the preservation of places of natural beauty—not in productivity, investment, and return to capital. When Barlow’s Royal Commission reported on the distribution of the industrial population, it called for greater dispersal, extra discretionary powers for the state to generate dispersal, and more land-use surveys to direct it. It was not interested in the cut and thrust of business performance. Indeed, it saw the dynamic aspects of the economy as something apart, something to be prepared for, like rain or storm, perhaps, but not something one could do anything about and not part of their brief.¤fl In Britain there was good cause to be mindful of land-use planning. Nineteenth-century population pressures had produced the worst urban conditions of modern times. Town population increase between 1801 and 1831 was greater than the total British population in 1801. As Professor Rodger points out, the present-day equivalent would be to add 60 million people to British towns and cities over the next thirty years, and ‘to do so without any planning regulations, building bylaws, or controls in relation to sewage, drains, water supply or other environmental considerations’, as well as ‘placing the largest ever building programme in the hands of any individuals who might wish to call themselves builders’.¤‡ There were good reasons for urban planning in the nineteenth century, and there continued to be good reasons for it in the twentieth, but when from the 1960s the regional economies started to falter and the central state tried to intervene on an ever-increasing scale, the British way of planning made that intervention more a matter of physical space than factor advantage. There was a lot of emphasis on getting capital to take the subsidy and relocate; less on getting capital to be innovative and efficient. The regions were not even seen as economic formations in their own right. Classical economics had little time for such an idea: in perfect market conditions, location disequilibrium would even out. Regions were seen then as homelands in miniature; they were hardly seen as economies, and they were not seen at all in terms of the value of output as produced by units of labour and capital (otherwise known as firms). ¤fl Sheail, Rural Conservation, chs. 5, 6, 7, 8. Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, Report (London, HMSO, 1940), Cmd 6153, p. 145. Barlow’s report was the informational basis of planning policies after 1945. ¤‡ Richard Rodger, ‘Slums and Suburbs’, draft paper, University of Leicester (Jan. 2000), 4.

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In the 1940s ministers as different in their politics as Reith, Dalton, and Beveridge had all advocated a more integrated approach to the economy. As minister of works, Reith knew that better dispersal of industry across the whole country would require the bringing together of land, labour, and capital resources in a combined plan. Dalton too, at the Board of Trade, recognized a planning that went beyond land utilization and Keynesian demand management. Beveridge was the most radical of them all. He advocated a minister of national finance and a National Investment Board to link up physical planning with supply-side economics.¤° In the event, they were all more or less defeated. The 1944 White Paper committed British governments to ‘high and stable’ levels of employment, even though no one had any real idea how that could be achieved. The White Paper did confirm, however, a sharp division between responsibility for the location of industry, given to the Board of Trade, and responsibility for land use, given to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. The Treasury controlled the purse-strings. Neither ministry much bothered itself too much about the productivity of actual firms. They busied themselves pushing units around the board. In the years after 1945 the Board of Trade regarded a region as an employment weak spot to be built up by capital units encouraged from London.¤· During the 1950s, when demand for British products was strong and foreign competition was weak, this policy sufficed. From the 1960s, however, when serious international competition entered the field, the shoring up of the regions came to seem interminable.

Statistical Corners In 1949 the Northern Industrial Group, a body of business interests formed out of the former North-East Development Board, published a review and a prognosis. Their chief researcher was a professor of geography. Their most important witness was a geologist from the National Coal Board, who ¤° D. W. Parsons, The Political Economy of British Regional Policy (London, 1986), 69–80. The 1965 National Plan was a rare government document in that it interpreted planning issues beyond land use. ¤· ‘. . . unrelated to any economic gain that might accrue from it’’: National Economic Development Council (1963), quoted in D. Maclennan and J. B. Parr, Regional Policy (Oxford, 1979), 14.

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assured them that County Durham had good coal reserves for another hundred years. At that time there was hardly a competitor in sight and northern labour was cheap: the industrialists would put their confidence in that.‹‚ Similarly, Durham’s 1951 County Development Plan, as required under the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, was concerned with the ‘manner in which they proposed that land . . . should be used’. Future employment trends the council planners took from out of the air or, more precisely, from extrapolations based on how much the National Coal Board and other big employers were willing to tell them. ‘Coal is fundamental’, the planners concluded: ‘Without coal, Durham would not be a major industrial County.’‹⁄ In fact, the NCB was the county’s real ruler. County planners had to leave the serious economic data to the Board while they were left to organize what remained, which was mainly spatial and demographic. Heavily influenced by Barlow’s 1940 demographic predictions and a certain 1930s aesthetic of dereliction—modern art notwithstanding‹¤—the planners decided to move 290,743 Durham people out of the coalfield. Making arithmetical calculations regarding jobs lost here against jobs found there, they decided that they needed a sum total of 57,300 male and 5,000 female new jobs. Following NCB advice, and bearing in mind the old Special Areas notion of places with and without a future, they neatly divided the coalfield into zones: A, B, C, and D. D was the worst.‹‹ There, there would be no future. People would be moved into planned towns, where they would be left to remember a community life which even the Development Plan was forced to admit they would find hard to re-establish. In spite of their clear regional interest, government policies remained centralized. There was no more talk of political devolution. Nationalization, national health, and national assistance were Labour’s central projects, and the Conservative governments of the 1950s more or less adhered to this. It was hoped that the nation could be held together by a combination of regional policy (designed to absorb surplus labour), Keynesian policy (designed to maintain general level of demand), and welfare. At the same time, the type and quality of economic information available to the state ‹‚ Northern Industrial Group, North-East Coast: Industrial Facilities (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1949) p.129. ‹⁄ William A. Geenty, County Development Plan, 1951 (Billingham, 1951), 15. ‹¤ ‘Vorticists’ tried to aestheticize industrial dereliction: David Corbett, ‘One Nation Heritage’, Conference, University of York, 30 Jan. 1998. ‹‹ Geenty, Development Plan, 77–8.

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increased. Comparative international statistics on Gross National Product, Labour Productivity, Prices and Incomes, and Share of World Trade all became figures regularly available. Party politicians started using the figures and talking about ‘growth’, ‘inflation’, and ‘the standard of living’—concepts relatively new to the national imagination, and once again, none of them of much practical use when it came to actual firms in the market-place.‹› Meanwhile, ‘the economy’—a set of comparative statistics—was performing way beyond what the state was willing, or able, to control. By the time that the statistics began to tell against the economy, that is, by the mid- to late 1960s, it was probably too late for the regions. The economy’s deficiencies were most apparent in those heavy and primary industries geographically concentrated for factor advantage. These industries found themselves driven into statistical corners of poor performance and constant criticism. In turn, as world competition began to bite, the statistical corners were associated with aesthetic images taken from the depression. ‘Depression’, indeed, returned as a key cultural descriptor. By the 1970s the regional corners were seen not so much as containers of the problem but as problems in themselves—‘problem regions’, in fact.‹fi

Unemployment Fear of unemployment had always been the driving-force behind central government initiatives in the regions. As it reappeared from the late 1950s on and stayed put in the regions, so location came to define what unemployment was. Like certain kinds of flora and fauna, it was to be found mainly at the edge. Geography’s concept of the natural region tended to think in terms of territories as essentially undifferentiated places. As development money was poured in according to place rather than potential, this was a view that was to prove disastrous. Region was only one of a number of variables in the making of urban economies, and ‘the regional effect cannot be statistically demonstrated’.‹fl Huge sums were invested in chemicals and oil ‹› Jim Tomlinson, ‘Inventing “Decline” ’, Economic History Review, 49: 4 (1996), 735–45. ‹fi But national economic performance always determined the success of regional policy: W. Nam, G. Nerb, and H. Russ, An Empirical Assessment of Factors Shaping Regional Competitiveness in Problem Regions (Commission of the European Communities, 1990), 3. The authors interviewed 10,000 European firms. ‹fl David Reeder and Richard Rodger, ‘Industrialization and the City Economy’, in Daunton (ed.) Cambridge Urban History of Britain, iii. 563.

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in the 1970s, for instance, for no better reason than where they were located.‹‡ That neither of these industries produced many jobs, or required any assistance, was somehow disregarded. Although government policy since 1940 had studiously avoided the nomenclature of ‘depressed’ and ‘derelict’, forty years of special pleading had made the regions problem places in everybody else’s eyes.‹° They were called Special Areas from 1934 to 1939, Development Areas from 1945 to 1961, Development Districts from 1961 to 1966, and Development Areas again thereafter—with interleaving Special Development Areas introduced in 1967 and Intermediate Areas in 1970. The Scottish and Welsh Development Agencies got their national titles in 1971. Labour governments in the 1960s increased aid to these areas between tenand twelvefold.‹· The state’s capacity to draw the regions into a discourse of decline proved overwhelming. In 1966 20 per cent of the population lived in Development Areas. In 1971 50 per cent of the population lived in Development and Special Development Areas. As the geo-statistical corners expanded, the maps started to look alarming. Half of the country was shaded in need of development, and on its northern flank the shading was edging in from the north towards Birmingham and Nottingham.›‚ The peripheries had once stood for strength. Now they waited for relief. A New Poor Law was in the making. Moreover, it was becoming clear that there was no way of judging the aggregate success of regional policies, and therefore no way of accurately measuring costs against results. This put the regions even more out on a limb. In 1971 the North-East Development Council began its Report on the defensive: ‘No one can decide the exact effects of any regional policy at any time upon a particular area. Neither the data nor an adequate theoretical framework . . . exist . . . It is not possible to trace a causal relationship between measures and changes . . .’›⁄ The Council went on to list the out-relief. Local ‹‡ Paul N. Balchin, Regional Policy in Britain (London, 1990), 71. ‹° Dennison in 1939 had drawn attention to the psychological impact of language on entrepreneurs: Location of Industry, 102. ‹· J. D. McCallum, ‘British Regional Policy’, in Maclennan and Parr, Regional Policy, 18; Balchin, Regional Policy in Britain, 97. ›‚ McCallum, ‘British Regional Policy’, 23–7. Even after major cut-backs 97% of people in the north-east in 1984 lived in assisted areas compared to 35% nationally: R. J. Buswell et al., in Peter Damesick and Peter Wood, Regional Problems, Problem Regions and Public Policy in the UK (Oxford, 1987), 168. ›⁄ North-East Development Council, The North in the Sixties (NEDC, 1971), 1.

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employment acts, investment grants, training grants, and regional unemployment premiums had been the main conduits, but much of their report was concerned with making the case that the North-East region was of the deserving and not the undeserving poor. All regions made that case. But if all recipients were deserving and unemployment continued to grow, said the 1973 Trade and Industry subcommittee, then there must be something wrong: ‘Much has been spent and much may well have been wasted. Regional policy has been empiricism run mad, a game of hit and miss, played with more enthusiasm than success.’›¤ Condemnations began to mount. In the 1970s regional planning, based on spatial methods, with new jobs as virtually the only measure of achievement, began to be seen as a failure. The policy was untestable and unrelated either to the market’s actual wants or business’s actual needs. Nor had it resulted in reversing unemployment trends, reviving basic industries, initiating self-sustained growth, or arresting out-migration.›‹ Most damning of all for those in Westminster and Whitehall, planning had floated a new local-government regionalism on a sea of public funds which they saw as having led to grotesque schemes of redevelopment, self-aggrandisement, and a bit of corruption on the side.›› The time was approaching when the regions would be lopped off. Regional aid was coming to be seen as having involved billions of pounds and a myriad of committees, but having failed to produce enough competitive and sustainable firms, or to lift the regions in their own or in the country’s self-estimation.

Regionalism: Success or Failure? In 1940 Barlow had addressed the problem of industrial location. With a serious north–south drift and a density of settlement higher even than Belgium’s, he saw this as an especially English problem. Like the Special ›¤ Quoted in McCallum, ‘British Regional Policy’, 24. ›‹ J. T. Coppock and W. R. D. Sewell, Spatial Dimensions of Public Policy (Oxford, 1976), 53–6; D. Cullingford and S. Openshaw, Deprived Places or Deprived People? (University of Newcastle, CURDS, 1977), 2–5; there is no ‘very convincing theory of regional development’, Christopher Law, British Regional Development Since World War I (London, 1981), 23, 15. ›› ‘. . . there was no conception of a North East region and my first task was to set about creating this’, George Chetwynd, director of NEDC, quoted in Parsons, Regional Policy, 183. Chetwynd claimed rather too much for himself.

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Area commissioners before him, he recommended a policy of dispersal based on exemptions and inducements. In any contestation over where, capital has most of the power. In its relations with workers this has always been the case. Labour mobility is low and capital mobility is high. When push comes to shove, capital can always threaten to pull the plug and move elsewhere, and often does so. Keen to reduce unemployment by the easiest and most rapid methods, easier and more rapid certainly than long-term strategies for indigenous sustainable companies, state inducements favoured the ‘branch plant’. This proved to be a plant with shallow roots. Not part of corporate headquarters, not technologically advanced, not dealing with research and development, not integrated with the rest of the regional economy in a way likely to promote good business practice across that economy, not independent and therefore not forced to think ahead or even, for that matter, think at all—the branch plant was prone to closure in times of recession when long-term shifts in demand finally caught up with it. Only very rarely did branch plants close because of where they were based. They closed in the main because they were too small, too isolated, too old in their product line, and too cut off from corporate decision-making.›fi In the market, ‘factor advantage’ is relatively fixed, but ‘competitive advantage’ is flexible and dynamic, depending as it does on technologicalindustrial clusters where ‘the local company remains the true home base by retaining effective strategic, creative and technical control’.›fl The state’s grace-and-favour policy to big outside companies to base their branch plants in the regions while allowing traditional techno-industrial business clusters to go to the wall, proved antithetical to the long-term interests of all parties. Moreover, British financial institutions are almost entirely separate from the companies who do the manufacturing. In the regions, they are not only separate from the companies, they are separate from the regions themselves, and have been so since the bank mergers of the 1890s when the provincial banks were swallowed up and taken to London.›‡ Because manufacturing companies raise capital through a system that disperses share-ownership across a wide range of external institutions, they are particularly vulnerable ›fi Stephen Fothergill and Nigel Guy, Retreat from the Regions (London, 1990), 157 and passim. ›fl Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (London, 1990), 19. ›‡ Lynn Hollen Lees, ‘Urban Networks’, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, vol. iii.

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to takeover. Professor Porter has drawn international comparisons with a British way of finance where Institutional investors have become dominant. Unlike Germany, Japan and Switzerland, however, they have not viewed themselves as permanent investors. There are no universal banks to play the dual role of debt and equity holders . . . With institutional equity holders primarily concerned with share price appreciation and dividends, the result is heavy trading, intense concern by managements with share prices, a persistent tendency towards harvesting, and an explosion of acquisitions and takeovers.›°

According to Will Hutton, British financial markets have led to an erratic way of doing business, and certainly not one that has improved the prospects of either managers or workers in manufacturing industry, who needed backers who were prepared to take the long view. As Colin Mayer remarked: ‘ The fundamental deficiency of the United Kingdom economy’ was ‘a systematic failure to commit.’›· The regional economy, then, was seen as set apart from the national economy, just as that economy was seen as set apart from finance, and finance from manufacturing. Except in 1961, when under the Local Employment Act the state competed with private finance in the provision of loans, there has been little attempt to bring finance capital into line with manufacturing capital, and both into line with national needs and opportunities. The National Plan of 1965 and the Department of Economic Affairs in 1966 did make noises about doing these things, but that was as far as it went. In any case, the level of economic activity in development areas always depended upon the level of investment in the economy as a whole. With or without regional aid, the most important influence on the level of investment spending was ‘the level of national economic activity’ in general.fi‚ In decisions about where to develop and invest, capital has always enjoyed most of the power and, in Britain, finance capital has long enjoyed most of that power. Manufacturing, wherever it is located, has had a serious problem with the delivery of finance. Return-to-capital targets are high. Institutional ownership is relatively uncommitted. The export of capital ›° Porter, Competitive Advantage of Nations, 503. ›· Will Hutton, The State We’re In (London, 1995), 158. Youssef Cassis lends support with his ‘Management and Strategy in the English Joint Stock Banks 1890–1914, Business History, 27 (Nov. 1985). fi‚ B. Ashcroft and J. Taylor, ‘Effect of Regional Policy on the Movement of Industry’, in Maclennan and Parr, Regional Policy, 61; NEDC, The North, 90.

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abroad is among the highest in Europe. For a long time, non-productive investments have offered inflated rival opportunities.fi⁄ The relative decline of British economic growth and its falling share of manufacturing trade, productivity, and portion of gross domestic product devoted to domestic investment have all been long-standing and interrelated problems. And they have been national problems before they have been regional problems (although they have impacted heavily on regional manufacturing). In short, when it comes to economic activity, ‘the regions’ have been the longestrunning category error in British economic history. What is more, in those areas where its influence on location was direct and unquestioned, the state failed to act consistently. One can go back to the 1920s to see how an overvalued pound hit exporting industries disproportionately hard and immediately contributed to what came to be called the regional problem.fi¤ During the 1930s, policies changed somewhat. Stemming from the 1931 report of the Committee on Finance and Industry, the government started to encourage the banks to invest in needy businesses. Bank rate at a little over 2 per cent helped. During the war certain sectors of manufacturing industry did well, and this would not have happened without state instruction to favour production. After the war full employment and national welfare policies hauled the regions back to national standards on a scale unthinkable during the depression. In spite of long-term regional failure, post-war government intentions were good and in the short term there was some success. The worst excesses of the market were restrained, and it is probable, though by no means testable, that regional inequalities would have been worse without central intervention. Acts came and went, and the amount of assistance and its method of obtainment changed, but the instruments and the objective remained the same, if blunt—the reduction of regional unemployment by exemption and inducement, as recommended by Barlow. From 1945 to 1947 there was control over industrial location through licenses, and thereafter up to the 1970s, with development certificates for industrial units over a certain square-footage. In 1965 office-development permits went some way towards controlling the location of office space, especially in London, and these were strengthened in 1974. Next to licenses, certificates, and permits, the other main instruments were loans, grants, and fi⁄ Hutton, State We’re In, 157. fi¤ M. E. F. Jones, ‘The Regional Impact of an Overvalued Pound in the 1920s’, Economic History Review, 2nd se., 38 (Aug. 1985), 401.

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tax-breaks for companies investing in development areas. In 1967 the Regional Employment Premium subsidized new employees in manufacturing, a programme that ended up channelling more money into the regions than any other, though without much sensitivity or regard for which businesses took it. In 1975 the Industry Act recognized the problem, with the National Enterprise Board and its offer of money in return for planning agreements. The expert view is that it is probable that these measures brought jobs, and saved jobs, for a while. The first two years of the Distribution of Industry Act almost certainly avoided a regional jobs crisis, and between 1945 and 1947 the development areas gained their greatest-ever share of national industrial investment—51.3 per cent of the total for 10 per cent of the population.fi‹ Economists have estimated job gains over the post-war period at something in the order of 500,000 jobs between 1945 and 1965, and 630,000 between 1960 and 1981.fi› Manners estimated that 20 per cent of north-east and 30 per cent of Welsh manufacturing jobs between 1958 and 1972 were the result of regional policy, although one can never be sure because competitive market advantage is dynamic. Law estimated that during the 1960s this policy determined the move into assisted areas of sixty to eighty businesses a year.fifi Unfortunately, and bearing in mind the difficulties associated with insensitive instrumentation for testing performance, it was often the case that aid programmes found themselves struggling against other government policies and programmes. Nationalized plants, for instance, were closed one by one, and what was left was privatized, thus removing an important component of regional industry and a central plank of government regional policy. Even in their heyday, the nationalized industries did not always act in the best interests of regional economies. There is evidence that both British Steel and the National Coal Board opposed the introduction of new industries in areas where those industries might have competed for labour.fifl There was also the governments’ clear southern bias after 1979,

fi‹ McCallum, ‘British Regional Policy’, 8–9. fi› Balchin, Regional Policy in Britain, 70. fifi Manners, Regional Development, 55; Law, Regional Development since World War I, 190. fifl Fred Robinson and David Sadler, Consett after The Closure (University Durham Geography Dept., 1984), 28. N. S. Segal has suggested also that these major industries were not a locus for good business practice: ‘Regional Economic Growth’, in MacLennan and Parr, Regional Policy, 214.

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linked after 1983 to the Conservative Party’s own electoral advantage. A wide range of state economic developments—from the Channel tunnel decision and a third airport for London, to Ministry of Defence research and contracting, tax benefits, levels of public funding, and the gargantuan growth in financial services after deregulation—all favoured London and the south when, the Chunnel apart, they could have favoured other places or been handled in ways which did not drain and hamper those other places. In 1998 the governor of the Bank of England agreed to the proposition that unemployment in the north was the price paid to curb inflation in the south or, to put it another way, the government favoured a richer south over a poorer north.fi‡ Yet it would be wrong to describe location policy as a total failure. If there was failure to win there was also failure to lose, and in the day-to-day lives of the poor and the unemployed, an inconsistent and not very well-thoughtout mixture of welfare and regionalism allowed them to live. It is true that National Insurance was never real insurance because it depended on how much the government of the day was willing to allow—always a political calculation. It is true as well that the left-over, doled-out economy was lowgrade, and not the sort of economy which sensible economists had in mind when they talked about market advantage. Nevertheless that economy did, and does, manage to hold life together for many millions of people. The chance of cheaper goods and services, the fundamental ones, like health and housing, state-subsidised, have made for basic conditions of decency, and a batch of transfer payments, particularly pensions and benefits, have offered a minimum security. A local trade in barter and exchange, including undeclared cash transactions, has encouraged enterprise. Modest wages in parttime and casual, branch-plant and semi-skilled jobs, have provided the readies. All these things have allowed the poor to live. In 1937 George Orwell remarked on how fish and chips and tinned salmon, cheap suits, chocolates, and the pictures ‘have between them averted revolution’. (He omitted to mention cigarettes). It was an exaggeration, but it was another way of saying that most poor people, most of the time, managed to live in ways that were neither entirely desperate nor entirely humiliating. After 1945 the state waded in, the European economy boomed, and few tried to deny Macmillan’s 1957 charge that the country had never

fi‡ Guardian, 22 Oct. 1998.

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had it so good.fi° Whatever the shortcomings over ‘the long run’, or from that favourite vantage-point, ‘the economy as a whole’, welfare-regionalism saved the poor from hitting rock-bottom. This meant that communities struggled on from one generation to the next. For Orwell, marriage on the dole was a sign of hope, not of irresponsibility. Families survived then and families survive now. Not the perfect families of the advertisers, and not perhaps the sort of family life desired by those who have to live it, but a mixed bag of family relationships which permit that degree of emotional and material continuity vital to community life. Older family groups helped younger ones with child-care and windfalls, and the young came to help the old in turn. This span of help could be bankrupted for £50 or smashed by illness, but in general it held and holds, and it would not do so without the modest redistributive agencies of the state. For all its poverty of thought and imagination, remembering that in the 1980s the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, the welfare-regional state saved left-over people from falling below a line which no one cared to define, but everyone cared to avoid.fi·

The Problem of London The problem of location was not only a regional problem. For Barlow and the Special Area commissioners in the 1930s, before all other considerations, the problem of location was the problem of London. This has not changed, and may have got worse. English regional cities offer no countervailing force to the capital. London brooks no rivals.fl‚ English regional character is denied parity, or denies itself. This applies especially to the counties adjacent to London. Like ‘the Cockney’ before them, there is said to be something fundamentally lacking in ‘Essex’ man and woman. In 1950 Harold Laski characterized the location of industry as ‘in essence a technical . . . question’.fl⁄ He failed to realize that a regional policy fi° George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; Harmondsworth, 1989), 83. After modest narrowing after 1945, income inequality increased sharply during the 1980s: John Hills and A. B. Atkinson, in Hills (ed.), New Inequalities (Cambridge, 1996), 4–5, 23, 43. fi· In 1948 Nye Bevan reassured the Durham Miners’ Gala that the nation’s health was ‘now under the supervision of a common miner’: The Times, 26 July 1948. fl‚ W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750–1990 (London, 1994)— London ‘has always comprised the axis of Britain’s elite structure’ (p. 156): Barlow, Report on the Industrial Population, 3–8. fl⁄ Parsons, Regional Policy, 103.

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commanded by a central state which was itself resident in a ‘region’—albeit a uniquely favoured region which did not call itself that—pulled against the very places the policy was designed to assist. London and the south constitute the biggest and richest market with the best communications in Britain. A European Community Report of 1982 put market accessibility as an economic advantage accounting for between 40 per cent and 80 per cent of UK regional economic differential. All European Community investigations into regional disparity have pointed to the advantages London and the south have enjoyed for so long that they see them as natural. These include middle-class concentration of educational privilege for those who can afford to pay, or know how to manipulate the system; good research facilities; high-quality professional services and business information; and superior cultural resources.fl¤ Some of this might be in the eye of the beholder, but the point is that much market advantage was itself structured by the state, and most of the state was located in the south. Unemployment has always been lowest there; the location of corporate headquarters has always been highest. Financial power, too, has always been centred in London, along with Tokyo and New York, one of only three ‘alpha’ cities in this regard.fl‹ Indeed, London constitutes such a great and growing concentration of state power that proximity to it remains the richest picking of all. The greater the concentration, the lower the democratic threshold; and it is axiomatic that corruption will grease its way up the pole. Conservative governments from 1979 to 1990 deliberately fuelled a southern-led financial and fiscal boom, but all governments have proved either unwilling or incapable of reversing southern dominance.fl› As Sir Alec Cairncross pointed out,flfi a near-permanent hierarchy of unemployment figures since 1934 must show a corresponding hierarchy in locational choice. As a psychological factor in public and private policy-making, the influence of distance from London is unknowable. Nevertheless, structures of attitude and reference, electoral calculation, patronage networks, and fl¤ David Keeble, Peter L. Owens, and Chris Thompson, Centrality, Peripherality and EEC Regional Development (Commission of the European Communities Directorate, 1982), 32; Commission, Directorate General for Regional Policy, Europe 2000—Outlook for the Development of the Community’s Territory (Commission, DG Regional Policy, 1991),10. fl‹ Law, Regional Development since World War I, 76, 159; Norman Lewis, Inner City Regeneration (Buckingham, 1992), 5, 42. fl› Balchin, Regional Policy in Britain, 79. flfi Alec Cairncross, Foreword, Maclennan and Parr, Regional Policy.

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cultural prejudices in the boardroom and civil service are ‘crucial and possibly dominant non-quantifiable influences’.flfl The Conservative Party dropped spatial politics in favour of Londonnational politics after the Irish settlement in 1922. Labour dropped it during the 1930s, when central planning was seen as the answer, not the politics of Bradford, Manchester, or Glasgow in Bradford, Manchester, or Glasgow.fl‡ In Britain, devolution was always debated in terms of its convenience to Westminster rather than in terms of its benefit to anywhere else. Once both major parties decided on Westminster and Westminster alone, then there was little likelihood that regional objectives would not be centralized. During the 1980s and 1990s these objectives included the deconstruction of local government as an effective, or even honourable, form of governance.fl° Labour came to power in 1974 with big ideas for an economy in crisis. Special Development Areas (introduced under the previous administration) were extended, and stood inside the Development Areas as black spots on the map. Intermediate Areas were also extended, spreading now right across all regions north of the Wash. The Scots and the Welsh had their own Development Agencies, covering—everywhere. The National Enterprise Board stood ready to assist where partnerships could be formed, in or out of assisted areas. Then, in 1976, having marched Development so far up the hill, the government marched it down again, and in a hurry, removing at a stroke the Regional Employment Premium and halving (by 1979) the level of regional aid. Yet over 40 per cent of the country was still mapped as in need and in receipt of assistance.fl· Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 ideologically opposed to spatial subsidy. By 1984 she had cut regional aid down to one-eighth of 1 per cent of flfl B. W. E. Alford, British Economic Performance 1945–1975 (Basingstoke, 1991), 19. In 1987, 50% to 60% of those below Wash to Avon voted Conservative; 40% to 49.9% below Humber to Cheshire; 35% to 39.9% below Whitby to Barrow, and Berwick to Dumfries; 20% to 34.9% Scots and Welsh: R. Hudson and A. M. Williams, Divided Britain (Chichester, 1995), 228–30, 245. fl‡ J. Bulpitt, ‘Conservatism, Unionism and the Problem of Territorial Management’, in Peter Madgwick and Richard Rose (eds.), The Territorial Dimension in United Kingdom Politics (London, 1982). fl° B. W. Hogwood, ‘The Regional Dimension of Industrial Policy’, ibid. 38; John Mawson and David Miller, Agencies in Regional and Local Development (University of Birmingham, CURS, 1983), 42. During the 1980s and 1990s the metropolitan counties were abolished, the Greater London Council was abolished, local government rates were capped, their subsidies cut, their planning powers reduced, their house-building stopped, their housing stock diminished or transferred, their local education role cut, and their transport deregulated. fl· Balchin, Regional Policy in Britain, 97. Regional aid fell from 0.7% GDP to 0.3%.

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GDP,‡‚ and ended the system of permits and certificates which had sought to relocate private-sector investment. More than this, two long and deep recessions at each end of the 1980s, with a mad financial-property boom in the middle, cut regional policy, as policy, to ribbons. In just six years, between 1978 and 1984, Tyneside alone lost 43 per cent of its manufacturing jobs. For the first time in a long time, the north was ahead of the game and on its way to becoming a post-industrial and post-modern economy. But what a game it was. By the end of the 1990s the United Kingdom produced three times more manufacturing output than in 1948, but with half the workforce and treble the capital stock.‡⁄ Intent on driving through a new economy based on commerce, information, and services, the Thatcher government ditched a forty-year consensus on full employment as a central policy objective, ended subsidies to non-favoured sectors, and privatized the regionally concentrated nationalized industries—a process which involved massive diminutions in plants and workforces and, in the case of the coal, steel, and shipbuilding industries, their absolute demise in areas where they had been since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In place of planning and municipal control, under the 1980 Planning and Land Act there were Urban Development Corporations, Enterprise Zones, and vast property fortunes beyond democratic audit. The flagship was London’s Docklands, the largest example of urban redevelopment in the world. In place of regional planning, therefore, there was a plethora of inner-city and specifically designated initiatives dispersed across the old development areas, which remained as they were, obliged to sell themselves as cheap-labour zones. Since the 1920s the national economic map was made up of regions, coloured by their levels of unemployment, defined in relation to London and the national average. That map was crude, but it had clear shape. After 1980 that shape was replaced by a diverse range of uncoordinated projects driven by a multiplicity of public-private agencies.‡¤ It was difficult to understand the initiatives or attribute them. It was even more difficult to ‡‚ Balchin, Regional Policy in Britain, 74. ‡⁄ J. Haskell and Y. Heden, ‘Its train or pain for the unskilled’, Independent on Sunday, 31 Aug. 1997; Fred Robinson (ed.), Post-Industrial Tyneside (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1988), 22. ‡¤ P. J. Damesick, ‘Spatial Economic Policy’, in Damesick and Wood, Regional Problems, 53; Lewis, Inner City Regeneration, 43. The Cabinet Office, ‘Performance and Innovation Unit’, repeated these same criticisms in 2001: David Marquand and John Tomaney, ’Regional Government and Sustainability’, New Economy (8 Mar. 2001), 37.

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judge what their aims might be, because all gauged their success by a market idea which had no clear measure of what it wanted to achieve. One might have reasonably expected the celebration of market functions to have led to a reduction in the size of the state, but this did not happen, except in one respect. A discourse of ‘privatization’ and ‘market’ as forces not entirely of the centre, nor in the centre, yet structured by the centre, came to replace the discourse of the ‘geographical region’ (the area away from the centre). With this new way of talking and thinking about the nation, the periphery ceased to be just geographical. At the same time, as the central state lost confidence in its power to order things (a confidence it had in the days of nationalization), and the metropolis felt less responsible for the rest of the country, the old national shape began to dissolve. This truly odd condition prevails. The left-over people have been misplaced; no one is sure how to talk about them anymore. Once seen as supplying the very shape and character of the nation, in the 1940s the regions moved from being parts of a divided nation in trouble to being parts of a united nation at war, and then in the 1980s from being places in need of assistance to being zones far out on the margin‡‹—though being far out on the margin of an abstract and uncertain variable is an uncertain position. Some hoped to turn marginality into a new political identity based on regional government. The moves towards devolution after 1998, in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, greatly encouraged them. Others are willing to gamble on a European regional dimension that would change the map, if not the nature, of the ‘regional problem’. All these proponents, however, share a common dilemma. The old country is fading fast. If the edges are going, or gone, where is England now? ‡‹ Two works welcomed the reassertion of southern English dominance: Paul Johnson, A History of the English People (London, 1985), 427, and Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750–1990, 24, 43, 162.

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England Now

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21 Anarchy in the UK?

. . . a nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregation; but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day . . . (Edmund Burke, speech On the Reform of the Representation in the House of Commons, 1782) Not one of our memories is left intact. (Terry, in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? BBC TV, 1973)

The second part of this book has been concerned with the side of national identity that is attuned to the people and their sense of belonging. This is the natural England, commonly expressed in a long history of analogy to the land and the people’s unique relationship with the land. The Industrial Revolution represented the greatest historical crisis in that relationship. This resulted in huge efforts to rebuild a sense of belonging, and the idea of survivals in culture, even though it was not, strictly speaking, a new idea, seemed to offer a way back to the fundamentals of that belonging. There were some surprising results. That the most powerful English survivals could be found on the periphery, or abroad, usually in the hands of the poor, was interesting, as was the clear identification of the mass of the English people with the sort of little local properties usually possessed by Scots, Welsh, and Irish and other ‘little’ peoples. Properties such as these played a role in stabilizing the concept of the British nationalities during the period of great global change up to 1914 and after. During the 1930s, however, native survival places were dealt a mortal blow. Unemployment and ‘depression’ hit them the hardest. There was talk of emasculation, and evacuation.

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After 1945 major efforts to help these regions failed to correct the imbalance between them and the centre, and in some ways may have worsened it. Unprecedented economic and cultural change since 1950 has brought greater prosperity and personal liberty, it is true, but it seems set to unravel not just the old national relationship, but the very idea of a national relationship itself.

Maps UK The British had grown used to seeing their country as centred on a unique and prolific capital, London, with England and the British Isles around it, and dominions, colonies, and possessions around them. On the face of it, this was a very simple world. England was best and at the centre. Everywhere else was a far-flung function of that. Marlow’s story of his journey out into the heart of darkness began, appropriately enough, on a boat’s deck on the Thames: ‘What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth?’⁄ After 1945 the world centre grew two heads. Out of all the main European states, only the United Kingdom emerged from war without shame or discredit, but, deep down, the British knew that since 1942 they had relied on the Americans. To disguise their dependency, a ‘special’ diplomatic relationship was canvassed, and in the years that followed whatever was conceded to the Americans by way of colonies did not damage the UK’s picture of itself as one world core in special relationship with another. Up until the 1960s, albeit with some shocking revelations along the way, the big picture persisted. The UK was still a world power, and most roads continued to lead to London. However, if old England remained set in a silver sea, the UK increasingly found itself perched at the top left-hand corner of a new European map. As members of the European Economic Community from 1973, the British were drawn into a different set of relationships. These relationships were basically spatial and economic, though they had political ramifications. In particular, new cores were apparent, and the UK was not one of them. All studies showed a dense concentration of power at a Franco-German centre,

⁄ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth, 1983), 29.

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a so-called Golden Triangle with corners at Lille, Hamburg, and Stuttgart.¤ The most powerful British economic concentration, the south-east of England, constituted only one outlying point of that triangle. Western Europe was mapped according to the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of economic potential expressed in millions of ‘European Units of Account per Kilometre’, and with potential indicated as contour lines of increasing density, the maps revealed a remorseless shift of economic highs away from Britain towards build-ups in and around a high-pressure Benelux core.‹ All member states had new tracings laid over them. ‘High Accessibility Corridors’ and ‘Central Axial Belts’ ran across ancient borders and natural features alike. In a burgeoning market, economic activity redrew the map as goods, services, people, and investments flowed up and down newly carved channels: the Blue Banana, bending its way from Thames to Rhine to Lombardy; the Sun Belt, shining along a Mediterranean corridor from Barcelona to Valencia; and the Coffin, an old name with a new purpose, a London–Birmingham box inside a national motorway ‘H’.› These shapes were not only different, they were confusing in what they signified. A high level of unemployment, for instance, could no longer be assumed to signify economic weakness on the periphery, as it used to do. On the contrary, high unemployment could just as well signify that combination of high and repeated technological investment which core areas so amply demonstrated. In new European configurations, therefore, signs of weakness could be interpreted as signs of strength. While in 1991 ‘Greater London’ was fourth top out of 179 European Community regions in terms of per-capita GDP, it was also one of the worst regions for unemployment.fi In the same year, under ‘Objective II’ (‘regions affected by industrial decline’), the UK was the major beneficiary of the European Regional ¤ ‘After World War II, the idea of Europe developed about and around Germany . . .’: Simon Serfaty, Understanding Europe (London, 1992), 22. This is worth comparing with the British view of themselves in 1945: ‘power in the world will rest with three great confederations—the United States, the Soviet Union, the British Commonwealth’: W. Beveridge, The Price of Peace (London, 1945), 87. ‹ Keeble, Owens, and Thompson, Centrality, Peripherality and EEC Regional Development, p. i and figs. 3.2–3.6, pp. 198–200. › Geoffrey Parker, A Political Geography of Community Europe (London, 1983), figs. 3.1, 3.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 9.1. The ‘H’ design had first been suggested in 1938: Institution of Civil Engineers, Twenty Years of British Motorways, Conference Proceedings, 27–8 Feb. 1980, 5. fi European Commission, Competitiveness and Cohesion: Trends in the Regions (Commission, Regional Policies, 1994); Keeble et al., Centrality, p. iii; David Keeble, John Offord, and Sheila Walker, Peripheral Regions (Commission, DG Regional Policy, 1988), 104.

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Development Fund. But despite the ecu 1.289 billion allotted, few British knew what an ‘ecu’ was worth, still less did they know what the acronym meant. Unable to tell a retex from a rechar, in spite of nuts, it seemed they would not be able to distinguish an ‘integrated’ region from a stricken one. In Brussels-speak, integration did not even mean national unity, for a single market without frontiers would integrate in its own way, regardless of national shapes.fl Already in 1997 bankers were watching Europe market by market and, ‘national frontiers having become an abstraction’, monetary union looked set for 2002.‡ At the same time as unemployment was losing its geopolitical significance, former patterns of regional poverty and wealth were beginning to look distinctly odd. Northern English ex-coal towns vied with southern ex-seaside resorts as the places getting poorer. Places getting richer showed no clear shape—an urban-rural dotted mixture of ‘freestanding areas’.° Freestanding from what? Economists began to doubt the usefulness of a regional policy and geographers began to doubt the very existence of regions themselves. They stressed the simple, but by no means easy, point that the basis of geography did not lie in the physical world, but in complex, reciprocal relationships between what humans observed and what they actually saw. Professor Freeman called the concept of the natural region ‘crude, or at least elementary’, while Professor Davies had the courage of his confusions to quote Wittgenstein: ‘Whatever we see could be other than it is.’·

Dispersals UK It wasn’t just the bureaucrats who were changing the shape of things to come. The demolishers were at hand. From the 1970s on, an established picture of English landscape was rubbed out, and there was more to this than changing how the land looked. Staple industries such as steel and textiles fl With growing regional disparities within the EC and major disparities outside it, the Directorate General could still welcome what it called growing global ‘integration’: Europe 2000 (Commission, DG Regional Policy, 1991), 5. NUTS came out of the EC Statistical Office—‘The Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics’. ‡ Banque Bruxelles Lambert, as reported in the Guardian, 31 Dec. 1997. ° Anne E. Green, The Geography of Poverty and Wealth (Warwick University and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1994), pp. 98–9, xi. · Freeman, Hundred Years, 129; W. K. D. Davies, The Conceptual Revolution in Geography (London, 1972), 9; Stoddart, Geography, Ideology, 23.

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had stood in regions long enough to assume strong natural associations. Industrial divisions of labour, including sexual divisions of labour (which in Lancashire and Yorkshire had at first appeared immodest and unnatural), had overcome initial hostility in the early nineteenth century to appear in late-century as acceptable and even comfortable reflections of who the people were. L. S. Lowry, the painter of industrial Lancashire, liked to pretend that his painting, like its subject, was not understood and slow to be recognized. But this was not the case. As early as 1919 Lowry and his pictures were known and respected in the region: it was accepted that wide industrial townscapes declared what Lancashire stood for.⁄‚ When the staple northern industries began to splutter from the 1970s, very deep meanings choked with them.⁄⁄ Buildings that for years had given habitude to landscape were brought down without a second glance. Elegant mill chimneys, dramatic colliery headgear, sun-bright shipyard cranes, all hit the ground in clouds of masonry, and with them fell a whole visual culture. Where ships’ hulls had once swerved across the skyline, there was now only sky. Lodges and institutes, formerly places of association and learning, became derelict. The bands ceased to march. Banners were furled. Methodist chapels, emotional heartlands of the Industrial Revolution, became carpet stores. Pine pews were ripped out and sold as antiques. A landscape was humiliated, piecemeal.⁄¤ When the people who lived in these areas looked around to see where they lived, they needed to see more than just ‘individual momentary aggregation’. In the north, they needed a memory left intact. In the south, for a long time the English middle classes had understood the truth of the market and had built their staple values on that truth. Which is to say, they knew that when undergirded by their own institutions, the market could be a useful distributor of social and economic goods as well as an impersonal, and therefore a convenient, instrument for disciplining those whom they called ‘the less well off ’. As professionals, they rigorously controlled their own labour market. As civil servants and career people, they understood that their own technical competences, when made to shine by a ⁄‚ Shelley Rohde, L. S. Lowry (Salford, 1999), 97–102, 344. ⁄⁄ Jack Ramsay, Made in Huddersfield. The Post-Industrial Pennine Landscape (Huddersfield, 1989); Hugh Freeman (ed.), Mental Health and the Environment (London, 1984), 13. In British geographical studies, there had been a strong tradition which stressed the material unity of ‘environment–function–organism’, matched by Freeman’s model of ‘environment–nervous system–health’ (p. 24): Arild Holt-Jensen, Geography (London, 1982), 27–9. ⁄¤ Survival in culture went on, in this case in south Wales: George Ewart Evans, Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay (1956.; London, 1975), 208.

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decent set of social skills, could guide their upward mobility. As business people, they were protected in the event of market failure, to a degree, by limited liability, and encouraged in market success by a high level of consumer demand made possible by easy credit and the regional welfare policies of the state. As citizens of that state, they benefited from its integrated regional welfare schemes more than any other class. Even suburbia had finally learned how to knit together. At first the suburban estates had been speculative, redbrick, and isolated. In the Lancet in 1938 Dr Taylor had identified what he called ‘suburban neurosis’.⁄‹ But in time, all that social security which underpinned middle-class life managed to turn so many ‘Drives’ and ‘Avenues’ into strongholds of those modest pleasures and mild ambitions for which the friends of John Betjeman and Barbara Pym gave thanks.⁄› During the 1980s much of this was spurned, by the political class at any rate. While demolition and closure put the old working-class north up for sale, privatization and marketization put the old middle-class south up for grabs. And, insofar as they understood it, most of the English middle class, in the south, appeared to support it. In the reforming Thatcher governments of 1979, 1983, and 1987 a social class historically associated with security and caution supported a party within a party which had ditched its ‘One Nation’ stance for an ideology of competition and risk. These governments appeared to believe that the commercial market was a natural force imbued with harmonious and irresistible qualities.⁄fi Thatcher’s opponents within the party said it wasn’t Conservative, but what was that? No one was sure any more. While right of centre intellectuals called Thatcherism a ‘Maoism of the Right’, and Marxists (of all people) wrestled with the ‘diversity, differentiation and fragmentation’ that Thatcherism had brought in its wake, the Sunday Telegraph saw it as little short of anarchy.⁄fl Thatcherism found its fullest expression in the deregulated finance markets of the City of London. The City thinks with a clock covering all global time-zones. Meaningful time and space in the Stock Exchange sense extends not one moment beyond a transaction. London, Paris, Tokyo, and ⁄‹ Arthur M. Edwards, The Design of Suburbia (London, 1981), 127; Paul Oliver, Ian Davis, and Ian Bentley, Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and Its Enemies (London, 1982), 194. ⁄› ‘Before the spell begins to fail . . .’: John Betjeman, ’Church of England Thoughts’; and, for example, Barbara Pym’s Marcia, Letty, Edwin, and Norman, in Quartet in Autumn (1977). ⁄fi John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusion of Global Capitalism (London, 1998), ch. 2. ⁄fl Sunday Telegraph, 21 Mar. 1993; John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake (London, 1995), 87; Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, New Times (London, 1989), 11.

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New York are a ring of instantaneous electronic messages. Insofar as the ring has a memory, it is expressed in numbers. Operating a system of dispersal—between borrowers and savers, owners and producers, brokers and brokered—the City makes its money across what is dispersed, and as information technology brings buyers and sellers closer to perfect information access, the rate of global dispersal and acquisition can only intensify. Acquisitions Monthly estimated that in 1995 nearly £1 billion would be earned in fees by company buy-outs worth £69 billion, or 10 per cent of the value of all shares on the Stock Exchange. Those who had most to gain from buyouts—the bankers, the lawyers, the predatory companies and pension schemers—did not represent the same interests as the people who worked in what was being bought out. Buy-outs during the 1990s led to high levels of business instability, and at their heart was the footloose ‘share’.⁄‡ In 1921 R. H. Tawney identified the share’s separation from the assets it owned: Of all types of property it is the commonest and the most convenient. It is a title to property stripped of almost all the encumbrances by which property used often to be accompanied. It yields an income and can be disposed of at will. It makes its owner heir to the wealth of countries to which he has never travelled and a partner in enterprises of which he hardly knows the name . . . it took nearly 300 years for the share to develop the characteristic attributes which lend its peculiar attractiveness today. Its disentanglement from the crude contribution sometimes in money, sometimes in goods, to a common undertaking, in which it originated, took place with extraordinary slowness, and it was only in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the process was completed.⁄°

Outside the currency markets and away from the share-price screens, down on the streets, dispersal threatened English towns and cities as intelligible space. The Victorians had managed to save their cities. Drawing on the analogy of human health, they conceived that the free circulation of people and their products would make urban living reasonable again. By the end of the nineteenth century it could be fairly claimed that they had succeeded. On the streets, police constables advised knots of people to ‘move along’, and not only the constabulary; an army of engineers and inspectors, aided by a nether world of pipes and drains and sewers, pushed and flushed the town along. Towns and cities were greatly expanded, but moving freely, and people were healthier, and better housed with many more services and ⁄‡ On the early history: P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 39 (Nov. 1986), 501–25. ⁄° R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (1921; London, 1964), 60–1.

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amenities. Municipal elected government worked, and had kept progress in line with coherence. From the 1920s, however, the pattern of urban living began to change. The idea moved from integrated circulation to outward dispersal. Planners began to emphasize the need for urban zoning in order to control congregation, possibly tumult. Places of work began to be separated from areas of residence. The growing size of factories and trading estates pushed industry out of the old urban ‘middle ring’ to the outer rim, with renewed ribbon development and arterial roads to match. The classes began to live further apart, as massive council estates began to be built in one direction and speculative suburban ‘developments’ in another. In money and investment, bank mergers in the 1890s had begun the process of dispersing finance away from the regions to London, while local authorities grew to rely ever more heavily on central government funding, not the rates. During the 1920s and 1930s, in many towns, civic culture was ‘an ideology under siege’.⁄· Then, after six years of war, British cities suffered thirty years of redevelopment that destroyed existing environments on a scale and at a speed unsurpassed in their modern history. Architects and planners joined with big contractors and local politicians to get rid of what they thought was flawed, and to beckon in what they saw as ‘modern’ and ‘go-ahead’.¤‚ With the ‘tower-block’, dispersal reached new heights: those who lived in them had not only been moved out, they had been turned up. ‘Le Corbusier’, the assumed name of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, a Swiss architect, was highly influential on this generation of moderns.¤⁄ Corbusier’s modernism found its high point in the tower-block. At first it seemed right to build high: old fears about city congestion and suburban sprawl mixed with a severe and immediate post-war housing need, a steep rise in the birth rate, and a genuine commitment by local authorities to sweep away ‘the slums’.¤¤ During the 1950s and 1960s successive governments adopted a sliding scale of housing subsidies: the higher the flats, the ⁄· Reeder and Rodger, ‘Industrialization and the City Economy’, 585. ¤‚ D. Burtenshaw, M. Bateman, and G. J. Ashworth, The City in West Europe (Chichester, 1981), 159; Architectural Review, Manplan 7, 148 (July 1970), 19. ¤⁄ Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Oxford, 1989), 219–22. ¤¤ ‘Slum’ was part of the progressive lexicon, as in Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s I Lived in a Slum (London, 1936). On shortages: John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (London, 1986), 221–2, 279–85. A total of about 4 million new houses were built 1919–39, mostly (around 70%) private; a total of about 2.5 million new houses were built 1945–57, mostly (around 75%) municipal. Between 1945 and 1990 some 6% of land was taken by urban development, an equivalent to a Greater London every ten years: Geoffrey Sinclair, The Lost Land: Land Use Change in England 1945–90 (London, CPRE, 1992), 60.

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higher the subsidies. By 1967 high rise comprised 350,000 households. Unfortunately, the landlords and architects assumed levels of community between tenants which were either unrealistic, or could not cope with the difficulties of living vertically. In the words of one London planner, there were too few lifts, too many children, and too little management.¤‹ Older people found themselves cut off, young mothers found themselves shut-in, and kids had nowhere near to roam, though roam they did. Between the horizontal slabs and the vertical blocks, adjacent areas were left for dead— no go, no use, blank spaces which those who knew them learned to avoid. Where the vertical blocks appeared, the most powerful feature of English social life and the prime unit of urban belonging was rebuffed. The residential street offered continuity and connection, while shopping streets offered a ‘moving chaos’¤› of buying and selling, meeting and talking, which dispersal in the air or out to the town edge eventually destroyed. Yet, contrary to impressions, there was never any need for high rise. They didn’t save on land, they didn’t cost less, and they weren’t quicker to build. Although few on the waiting list refused the chance of a flat, tower-blocks quickly entered urban wisdom as stigmatized places.¤fi Never accounting for more than 10 per cent of municipal tenancies, it was more what they symbolized that mattered. Sculptures in a landscape, they symbolized the loss of the common touch. The scale and rapidity of urban change demanded some explanation, but none was forthcoming. People needed houses and the houses needed dispersing and that was that.¤fl The central problem of the big post-war municipal housing estates (a form of housing unique to Britain) was not the houses themselves, which were generally well built, nor was it the planning, which was generally necessary; it was their failure to identify with their environment as a whole, and the crime and vandalism that often accompanied such failure.¤‡ People sensed deep change as they experienced town-centre congestion, or decay, depending on what form of redevelopment it was, during the day, followed by dispersal to estates in the evening. At night, the ¤‹ Mr K. Campbell, Greater London Council, in Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 225. See also M. Glendinning and S. Muthesius, Tower Block (New Haven, 1994). ¤› M. Berman, quoted in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, iii. 836. ¤fi Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain 1945–1975 (Oxford, 1981), 53–103. ¤fl ‘Whatever we do, we do in the face of 130,000 people—not 15 cows’: Chair of Northants Development Corporation 1971, quoted in Cynthia Brown, Northampton (Chichester, 1990), 184. ¤‡ Miles Glendinning and David Page, Clone City (Edinburgh, 1999), 82.

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young returned either to a city centre or to an out-of-town venue virtually without residents and virtually without restraint.¤° Inter-generational experiences were increasingly dispersed across different zones of time and space. What the estates had replaced had not been entirely pleasant either, but few had felt that they didn’t belong there. In fact, the problem with the old terraced housing was the obligation to belong. During the 1950s something like 80,000 terraced houses were cleared every year. One housing expert called for the immediate clearance of a further 3 million. Any other policy, he opined, was ‘almost unthinkable’.¤· Becontree and one or two other places apart, before the war council-house building had tended to be small-scale and discreet. After the war the fashion was for whole new towns, whole new estates, and the decamping of economic activity to the business parks.‹‚ These schemes, along with, ‘peripheralization’, ‘spatial fragmentation’, the hollowing-out and redevelopment of traditional town centres, and the sweeping away of familiar industrial locations, meant that many of the tangible facts of urban life were removed. As the general editor of the Cambridge Urban History put it, in little over thirty years was eroded from English life ‘much of the ancient palimpsest, the mixture of public and private buildings, high streets and back lanes, which has given [towns] for so long a sense of place, of physical coherence and individual community identity’.‹⁄ For a nation that swore in its constitution by continuity and lineage, this was a bitter pill. Older people found themselves in a land bearing little evidence that they had ever lived there. The house in which they were born, the back lane where they had pushed prams, the hall where they had danced, and the streets where they had run, were gone or were going to be gone. England’s most famous sociology book, first published in 1957, called for careful urban renewal, not sweeping clearance. This was what the people themselves wanted: ‘the majority wish to stay in the East End.’‹¤ It is hardly surprising that working-class community looked in danger of demolition. True, some of this concern depended upon finely tuned retrospectives about the good old days when everybody had pulled together et ¤° For British exceptionalism in this regard: Housing (May 2001), 31. ¤· Stanley Alderson, Housing, Penguin Special, quoted in Raphael Samuel, Past and Present in Contemporary Culture: Theatres of Memory, vol. 1 (London, 1994), 153–4. ‹‚ Stevenage was first of a number of new towns. ‹⁄ Peter Clark, in Daunton, Cambridge Urban History, vol. iii, p. xix. ‹¤ Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957; Harmondsworth, 1967), 187.

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cetera, yet those who did the remembering were not stupid. Not all community memory was fond fancy. Wartime evacuees had surprised their controllers by an eagerness to get back to the ‘slums’. Young mothers in their 1950s council houses, though delivered of pastel-coloured bathrooms and neat front gardens, still suffered from New Town Blues (‘sub-clinical neurosis syndrome’)—the result of a general lack of communal contact. When inner-city renewal policies were finally adopted, ‘community’ served, impossibly one may think, both as the instrument and the objective.‹‹ The 1970s and 1980s were a difficult time for renewal. The abolition of the six metropolitan counties and the Greater London Council in 1985, together with tenants’ right to buy council properties and the stripping down of local-government powers, particularly in housing and planning, dispersed policy to such an extent that inner-city renewal, never an easy task in itself, only met with scattered and incomplete success. By the end of the 1980s many of those self-communing streets that had sustained workingclass life for so long were considered to be exhausted, and the way of life associated with them was charged now with patriarchy and bigotry.‹› In 1995 the biggest literary prize in UK non-fiction went to a writer who laid the charge of alien at the doorstep of the mining village.‹fi But it wasn’t just him. Coalfield regeneration projects were warned not to count on community in the way that community had once counted on itself: ‘Interventions to support regeneration, especially through business development, had to acknowledge that these were former coalfield areas and reliance could and should not be placed . . . on the learning, work and community behaviour patterns that once prevailed.’‹fl

Properties UK For a long time the nation had been understood in terms of its properties, a process that allotted basic characteristics to lands and peoples according to their origin and nature. As we have seen, the idea of survival in culture ‹‹ P. Golding and A. Sills, ‘Community Against Itself’, Community Work and Communication, 20 (1983), 181. ‹› Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960 (London, 1994). ‹fi Mark Hudson, Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village (London, 1994). ‹fl Dept. of Environment, Transport, Regions, Regeneration Research Summary, 33 (2000), key finding 4.

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dominated the discourse: ‘uniformities’ of culture happened in different places at different times and plotting their occurrence yielded basic information about different peoples. Some peoples were thought more advanced in their properties than others. Properties were of the defining kind. There were always doubts about this, particularly about the way in which cultural practices were decanted out of one context and verified as the same or uniform in another.‹‡ So much depended upon the categorization of sameness. Still, the system underpinned a whole structure of thinking about national identities. It was in the 1920s that anthropologists began to reject the idea of properties, as fieldwork replaced armchair scholarship. The first anthropological fieldwork had been in the 1890s. Expeditions to Senegal, Angola, and the Torres Strait Islands had all expressed doubts. At around the same time, the historical scholarship underpinning survival in culture was severely challenged.‹° The British fieldworkers A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski studied their subjects directly with special reference to function. By doing so, Malinowski kicked away the cultural evolutionary ladder, ‘virtually collapsing the distance’ between what was seen as civilized and what was seen as savage.‹· The American Franz Boas was another anthropologist who studied so-called primitive forms with reference to function and not with reference to anything inherent. In France, Mannoni’s path-breaking work, Psychologie de la colonisation (1950), completely rejected race properties in favour of complex cultural-psychological interaction. For Mannoni, the identity of the colonized was a matter of how they had to live and who they had to live with. Mannoni’s ‘negro’, therefore, started as ‘the white man’s fear of himself ’. One year later, Colson and Gluckman’s study of tribes in Rhodesia–Nyasaland rejected the linear model of primitive-to-modern for an Africa which was startlingly contemporaneous, contingent, and pluralistic. The Lozi and their territory were formed in relationship to the Kololo

‹‡ e.g. ‘it is possible to make an examination of the forms of the tale which will be as exact as the morphology of organic formations’: V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928; Austin, Tex., n.d.), Foreword. ‹° Maitland, ‘Archaic Communities’, Law Quarterly Review (1893). In her expeditions of 1893–5 Mary Kingsley grew sceptical about ‘ticketing information’—her phrase for second-hand theorizing: Travels in West Africa, 6–7. The assistant keeper at the British Museum expressed serious doubts about survivalism in 1919: Joyce, Ethnographical Collections, 10–11, 41–2. ‹· Stocking, After Tylor, 292. Collini sees in the synchronic methods of Malinowski and Namier[owski] a move against Whiggish or ‘English’ methods: English Pasts, 280.

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and their territory. The forms of life they made were relative, circumstantial, and functional. The very idea of the ‘primitive’ was on its way out.›‚ Properties ceased to be the defining idiom. They continued to be used descriptively and loosely, as they are now, but the discourse moved from properties to solid form, like social ‘systems’ or ‘structures’, and then from solid form to soluble form, with its ‘mediations’ and ‘negotiations’. In turn, the analysis moved from the clear identification of fundamental properties, to one which constantly sought to re-position, or leave ‘open’, what was seen as inherently inconstant or unstable. By the 1990s two key national relationships were held to be in this position of flux.

Two Relationships and a Language As we have seen, the north-and-south difference could stand for the difference between industrial and rural, core and peripheral, and for class divisions as well. Although the old meanings persist, erratic new patterns have appeared. During the 1980s, for example, the south-coast seaside resort of Eastbourne and the Durham coal town of Easington were both major economic losers, while Oldham in the north and Oxford in the south came to share similar poverty profiles. The biggest wealth gains were made in mixed urban-rural areas outside the south-east.›⁄ If it was no longer clear what was meant by the North as industrial and working class, then it was also no longer clear what was meant by the South as being different from that. Certainly, the idea of a continued agricultural or ‘rural’ relationship with the land was increasingly hard to sustain. At first, the English people had been separated physically from the land; then, from the 1950s, they were separated culturally, that is to say, in terms of their experience and knowledge of the land and its products. The 1947 Agricultural Act introduced subsidies for all major farm products. They were offered in the same way that regional aid was offered: across the board and with little ›‚ Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927; New York, 1955), 339–50; O Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1950; London, 1956), 200; E. Colson and M. Gluckman, Seven Tribes of British Central Africa (1951; Manchester, 1959), ch. 1. By 1972 it was concluded that anthropology had cut survivalism ‘to ribbons’, replacing evolutionary-universal models with an ‘open-ended world’: R. M. Dorson (ed.), Folklore and Folklife (Chicago, 1972), 39. ›⁄ Ann E. Green, findings, J. R. Rowntree Foundation, Social Policy Research 55, 56 (Aug. 1994).

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concern for actual business practice. Prices were guaranteed and, in order to maximize their advantage, farmers sought to guarantee production by locking the land into a factory operation. This spelled the beginning of the end for organic agriculture as well as for the people’s practical, local relationship with the land itself.›¤ The result is that, since the 1950s, and in spite of price and production guarantees, the number of farms has halved while those that have remained have specialized in such a way as to destroy a countryside once rich in wildlife and largely free of pollution.›‹ Most English people buy processed food from supermarkets not knowing what it is or where it comes from, and they no longer work the land in numbers sufficient to know what goes on there. In other words, England is fast departing that place designated by the Council for its Preservation. Amidst the bulldozed hedgerows, the cutdown woods, the conifer plantations, the nitrates, pesticides and dubious feedstuffs, the battery cages and broiler sheds, the slurry tanks, the giant machinery, and the sheer emptiness born of planning policies designed to prevent smallholders from repopulating and reworking the land, not to mention the wasting away of village facilities, it is by no means clear what ‘rural’ means any more. If it had a meaning that was formed in critical relationship with all that was considered industrial, then the demise of what is industrial, and the industrialization of what is rural, has thrown one great national relationship into confusion. In all its planned rationality and emptiness the English countryside can be seen as the last industrial landscape. The pace of change in the ex-rural south shows no signs of letting up. Early in this century the government envisages the building of nearly 4 million new homes, and in order to accommodate them, wants easier planning rules for large villages and market towns.›› The single greatest reason for the need for new homes is the higher rate of divorce. Home and work constitute the second great national relationship redolent with extended meanings, this time normally to do with the cohabitation of men and women. The historic relationship of femininity and household is under severe pressure. So is the idea of what constitutes ‘a job’, ›¤ Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 103. ›‹ Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside (London, 1998), 113–14. ›› Balchin found that the fastest-growing areas during the 1970s and 1980s were in Dorset, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk (Regional Policy in Britain, 133). On the ‘creative untidiness’ of popular land-ownership: W. and D. Schwarz, Breaking Through (Bideford, 1987), ch. 2, p. 82; David Crouch and Colin Ward, The Allotment (London, 1988), 157.

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and with that an identity—often a lifetime’s identity—as was the case especially for men. Employers are now demanding worker flexibility, not only across jobs and between jobs, but ahead of jobs, in permanent retraining. And as information technology reduces the time and cost of transactions, all job lines are being crossed (except, of course, the line between owning and not owning capital). In 1994 more women were in a greater variety of waged work than ever before, while one in four men of working age was economically inactive. During the 1990s the youth labour market just about disappeared. The Economic and Social Research Council’s first major investigations in the new century will address ‘youth’ and what will happen to it as the great maturing agencies of family, household, and job undergo fundamental and as yet barely understood changes.›fi That women’s work is even more flexible and unstable, and that males are beginning to share in this pattern, is leading to the break-up of those gender identities which have long centred on work, marriage, children, and a certain view of husbandry and ‘being a husband’. Who is responsible for what, and for whom, is not clear—though everyone has a view. Indeed, the break-up of work and wages and their shifting connection to identity and settlement is happening at such a rate, with such unconjecturable consequences, that even its researchers seem baffled. Linked to escalating fluctuations in employment, there are also more cohabitations before marriage and more separations after it—a major correlation in itself and one that was earmarked by its researchers as a watershed in national self-perception. Over the next twenty years, the number of people living alone will rise from 3.4 million to 8.5 million. As fertility stays low, single-person households continue to rise, and work begins to discard its formal organizational aspects, what this demographic transition will mean in terms of real-life solitariness is also unknown. Certainly, the pattern of lifelong occupation denoting what is masculine and what is feminine, and the gathering of resources prior to cohabitation in a marriage which reflects those denotations, and pools them, is waning fast.›fl Finally, the idea of a single standard of English language is less and less convincing. The spread of all communications at all levels at all times is generating ›fi ESRC: ‘The Future of Social Policy’ (London, 1997); Valerie Bayliss, Redefining Work (RSA, Swindon, 1998). ›fl Nick Buck et al., Changing Households: British Household Panel Survey (University of Essex, ESRC Research Centre, 1994), 265, and 52, 28, 155, 62. Anne Green recorded a sharp increase in more ‘precarious’ forms of employment among both sexes: Poverty and Wealth, 2.

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a general shift away from the idea of stable territorial properties to that of variable and fluid exchanges across territories. The new approach sees languages (‘linguistic systems’) as adaptable to the technologies and relationships they are intended to serve. Not the other way round. ‘Speech communities’ have begun to replace received pronunciation, any received pronunciation, as the governing idea. Regional dialect-speakers, ‘Sloane’ dialect-speakers, ‘Estuary’ dialect speakers, the speech communities of the visual media, the elite universities, the mobile phone, and the club musics, among many others, all speak in a variety of tones and registers according to context and function. The need to identify is generally seen as greater than the need to conform. And as the range of identities extends with the multiplicity of cultures and the means of communicating those cultures, then the vernacular will mix and switch according to who is listening. For example, young, Jamaican-descended London blacks carry at least four ways of speaking. ‘London Jamaican’ is the most positive and self-conscious ‘rap’. Exclusive, but difficult to keep up for long stretches, it is ranged in bursts against external authorities as different as police and parents. ‘Black London English’ is easier, a lingua franca used for all black relationships across the city. ‘Jamaican Creole’, the deep language of their first-generation migratory parents, is known but little used. ‘London English’, or ‘Cockney’, the working-class speech of black and white alike, is the easiest and most fluent.›‡ During the 1970s ethnicity joined social class and sexuality as the third key national relationship, but all three were seen as difficult to define except by means of relationships which were themselves provisional, relative, and, to a certain extent, performed by means of ‘texts’, ‘readings’ of texts, and ‘deconstructions’ of the readings of texts.›°

De-centring in the Real World Deconstruction of texts was the order of the day, in academic circles at least. The old idea of people having a set of properties discernible in their history ›‡ R. B. Le Page and Andree Tabouret-Keller, Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Identity (Cambridge, 1985), 156–80. ›° Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London, 1993). Of the four major definitions of ethnicity offered by Talcott Parsons, David Bell, William Petersen, and Jyotirindra Das Gupta in 1975, all are based on fluid relationships rather than given properties: Nathan Glazer and Daniel P Moynihan (eds.), Ethnicity (Cambridge, 1975), 53–83.

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through natural or text-free cultures was simply no longer plausible. In a fluid world of switching identities, what was natural in humans could not exist. The idea of the post-modern did not deal in absolutes. All that was foundational, original, central, and grounded was out; all that was processual, relative, diffuse, and floating—in meaning at any rate—was in. The study of the use of signs and languages replaced the study of the meaning of things and experiences. Human experience was permeable, everything was devised, nothing was text-free, nothing was natural, nothing, in fact, could be simply itself, including persons, who only existed insofar as they had language, and only had language insofar as the meaning of words existed only against the meaning of other words.›· Post-modernism and post-structuralism conspired to get rid of the real world as a category of perception, while social science and cultural studies conspired to get rid of human nature as a category of understanding.fi‚ Intrinsic worth, therefore, was impossible. Instead, everything depended on ‘signifiers’ and what they signified, on a ‘terrain’, within ‘parameters’, avoiding ‘closure’ but inviting ‘problematics’. Under this kind of analysis, the nation signified ‘a polyglot identity of enmeshed cultures’ at the very least.fi⁄ To the theoreticians, to those who reflected upon a life of instant information, relative values, de-centred de-constructions, deconstructed texts, and de-territorialized cultures, what all this signified was nothing less than the demise of stable ways of ‘reading’ (being in) the world, ways which appeared to include the study of history itself.fi¤ Although much of this came out of narrow and somewhat unreal academic circles, there was, and is, a disquieting moral dimension to it because, whatever the nation-state had done or had failed to do, it had once been advocated as an ethical community capable of lending solidarity and trust to the world.fi‹ In Britain, it was not long since the invention of the welfare state offered its political credentials, and its revenue base, on just these grounds. National acts—‘nationalization’, ‘National Health’—served to ›· ‘Meaning . . . is thus never identical with itself’: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford, 2001), 111. fi‚ Bringing it back: Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (London, 1994), ch. 1. fi⁄ Tracey Hill and William Hughes, Contemporary Writing and National Identity (Bath, 1995), 42. Not all nations have given up on indigenous culture: R. K. Ray, Exploring Emotional History (New Delhi, 2001), and Prasun Sonwalkar, ‘Opposition to the Entry of the Foreign Press in India’, Modern Asian Studies, 35 (2001). fi¤ Simon During, Cultural Studies Reader (London, 1993), 15–17. Evans and Joyce call the challenge to existing history ‘post-modern’: Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 2000), Patrick Joyce, ‘History and Post-Modernism’, Past and Present, 133 (Nov. 1991). fi‹ David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford, 1996), 90.

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centre a very public need. Quite suddenly, the case was made that there were no true centres, only communications wide open, markets fluid, and no concerns that were not relative concerns.fi› In the 1990s a set of writers and theorists founded a new revolutionary Utopianism centred (if anything could be centred) on these precepts. By rejecting all that was determined and centred in favour of all that was indeterminate, inchoate, messy, they even rejected the periphery. The new authority was in the border, not on it, and it was there that the new, decentred future would be built.fifi After 1945 there had been little point in supposing (though many tried) that Britain remained at the centre of an imperial and industrial world order. On the most favourable analysis available, with their empire given up in little over twenty years, the British shared the Western part of that world with the Americans as very senior partners. This was the first decentring in the real world. In the 1970s that world was further decentred by British entry into the European Community, a formation which comprised a number of new economic centres, only one of which was British. After the Maastricht agreement of 1992, all Britons were ‘citizens of the Union’ now. The American connection continued to shore up the military-diplomatic end only to confuse successive British governments, who found it difficult to decide upon their real place in the world. At home, with the post-1945 political settlement deliberately broken by the mid-1980s, nowhere more so than in Scotland, mainstay of the Union, and with a constitution which was unable to adapt to this and all the other changes rushing in, the English were beginning to lose their old collective sense of self. On the one hand this probably meant greater autonomy in people’s personal lives; on the other, national properties in the old sense were fading while national relationships in the new sense appeared to offer little that was permanent. This decoupling from permanence hit the UK hard in October 1992. In that month, and under great pressure from the world money markets, the government withdrew the pound sterling from the European ExchangeRate Mechanism. This was a hard fall into a world that, for a time, appeared to have lost its centre. The ERM was a conceptual ‘mechanism’ for tying UK futures to a hard language if not to a hard currency. Without the ERM to fi› For ‘post-modern’ consciousness and its (exaggerated) capacity to destabilize pre-existing identities: Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London, 1995), 21–30. fifi The most powerful statement of which is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (Dover, Del., 1992)

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govern sterling’s position, there was no knowing how world money markets would react and where they would stop in their continuing deconstruction of the currency. Without a conceptual mechanism with which, first, to think, the British state appeared to float off, like its exchange rate, into a wide blue yonder. For that the government was despised. There is evidence that it even despised itself. The United Kingdom looked adrift, and it was hard to see where it was heading: ‘A sort of failed Taiwan of the North Atlantic without wealth, without influence, without self respect, and without hope.’fifl In the same month British Coal announced the closure of thirty-one collieries. The government supported the announcement. Now that the national centre had not held, it seemed the edges were about to be rubbed out. The people rebelled. Media pundits were extremely rude to ministers. Government popularity polls hit all-time lows, and stayed there, and while the old left language of ‘smash’ and ‘fight’ was revived in the miners’ union, outside it a Coalfield Communities Campaign was started with a rally, in Cheltenham of all places.fi‡ They rallied for Coal, St Arthur, and England. Coming only days after the defeat of sterling on the international money markets, the pit closures only added to the sense of national humiliation.fi° But the rebellion of the people didn’t last long because, at bottom, it was not about coal but about intangible and long-term changes in how they recognized themselves. For a couple of months, who were the English without their exchange-rate mechanism? What sort of England was it that had no industry? What sort of industries were they that had no regions? The nation raised its head, not for the miners, but in defence of a country they feared they could no longer imagine. The prime minister sat down as a traitor or a fool. Mr Arthur Scargill stood up, briefly, as the people’s tribune. Yet few now sang ‘The Red Flag’. Few even sang ‘An ah wanna anarchy . . .’ It felt like anarchy all the same. fifl Guardian Weekly, 4 Oct. 1992. fi‡ The Coalfield Communities Campaign advertised through the Spectator. See the North-East Miner, 1 (Oct. 1992). fi° Financial Times, 17 Oct. 1992; Guardian Weekly, 25 Oct. 1992.

22 Thinking With England

Culture is not [only] what we live by. It is also in great measure what we live for. (Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, 2000) . . . he knew he did not belong to himself. (Tom Brangwen, in D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, 1915)

Last Chapter In spite of the changes, many of the old ideas about England carry on. Over the past twenty years, indeed, ‘national heritage’ has become something of a national obsession, even though no one is sure what it means. People sense that it is more than Chatsworth, or any number of beautiful places. They know, too, it is more than the nineteenth-century labourer’s cottage, or the coal-mining museum, or Remembrance Sunday, or the National Trust, or all the conservation projects funded by the Lottery to improve our sense of place. They sense that it is really to do with the qualities of the people, but, because those qualities have so very recently been stripped of their moral and political significance, it is difficult to recognize them as anything other than shadows of their former selves. In certain forums, the Home Counties chap continues to do duty as an essential English type—while in the Shell Guide to England, or the Telegraph newsapapers, or the BBC’s cricket commentary box, or many a popular drama series, the northern regions still lend face and character to his rather bland and chalky features.⁄ In Scotland, the ⁄ Melvyn Bragg, Speak for England (London, 1976), 4–7.

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Highlands and Islands continue to be recycled as a British version of the longue durée,¤ and, just as they did fifty years ago, hotels continue to offer guns, gillies, and four meals a day (inclusive of a round of golf ). The Border English still incline towards Celtic Britain as a land nearer the survival trail. PA Consultants recommended to the English Tourist Board in 1973 that ‘Northumbria’ would sell to tourists keen on all things old.‹ Sir Walter Scott inaugurated the modern taste for a historic Northumberland, but now it is marketed by people with degrees in ‘applied geography’. In Nottinghamshire, there was always Robyn. First popularized in 1521, Robin Hood has lived long enough to tell his tale into the modern tourist period through a line of revivals stretching from Kitson in 1795 to Scott in 1819 to Child in 1888 to Flynn in 1936: ‘You know we Saxons ain’t going to put up with it much longer.’› Nor, indeed, was Wigan. Long troubled by Orwell’s criticisms of it in the 1930s, Wigan paid consultancy fees fifty years later to be advised that ‘the name Wigan Pier is an estimably valuable marketing asset’.fi A museum followed. In fact, during the mid-1980s one heritage museum was opened in Britain every week, while during the 1990s history, archaeology, and Englishy costume dramas enjoyed unprecedented mass audiences on radio and television. Yet, however well it is made and however readily it is marketed, national heritage is usually only about a past that has gone for good. Rarely is it valued for its bearing on the present, let alone for what it has to say about the qualities of the English people, though it might be that current obsessions are recognition that something fundamental has changed—that a line has been crossed, a last chapter opened. In this last chapter, I want to look at some writers and critics who have tried to think not just about England, but with England. By doing so, I hope we can finish the book by concentrating on some of the qualities which might go forward into an English future. We begin with the search for authenticity.

¤ Alastair M. Dunnett, Highlands and Islands of Scotland (London, 1951), 6; Kenneth MacLeish, ‘The Highlands, Stronghold of Scottish Gaeldom’, National Geographic (Mar. 1968). ‹ PA Management, Marketing and Development of Tourism in Northumbria (English Tourist Board, 1973), 101. › Errol Flynn, quoted in R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robyn Hood (London, 1976), 61. fi Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry (London, 1987), 19.

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The Search For Authenticity The last major movement to offer an influential theory of authentic Englishness started at Cambridge University in the 1930s with the work of Frank Raymond Leavis. Leavis, with his wife Queenie, inherited from the nineteenth-century ethnologists a view of England with which we are already familiar: that, at some point in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a terrible breach opened between literary and oral cultures which undermined the cultural unity of the nation. The rich claimed all knowledge and authority, while the common people stayed silent and went underground. In 1933 Leavis and Dennys Thompson produced a textbook, Culture and Environment, which carried some of this historical background, but which carried also a clear message to the young teachers for whom it was intended. It said: ‘We have lost . . . the organic community with the living culture it embodied.’ Once trained in the Leavis technique, and knowing therefore what had been lost, the idea was that those who had kept faith with England were invited to go and make organic community again by rebuilding the culture. The book’s subtitle was ‘The Training of Cultural Awareness’.fl By the time of Culture and Environment in 1933, the first folk revival was played out except for the devoted few at Cecil Sharp House. Yet through Leavis and his followers the folk revival carried on in new ways of defining and studying ‘English Literature’. The impulse to extol what was authentically English remained central, as did the suspicion of cultural elites and their ‘texts’, or at least, their ‘literariness’. Authenticity had been the clarion call since Matthew Arnold. In Culture and Anarchy Arnold’s argument had been that the culture of the best could not be achieved in the anarchy of modern production. The best the nation could know could never be mass produced, for mass ‘culture’, if one could call it that, was entirely derivative. Because it was incapable of asking original questions, it was incapable of giving authentic answers, and what was the point of a culture that couldn’t do that? True culture, on the other hand, could be achieved only by the selfdetermining self, a view which put authenticity at a premium. And for the same reasons, nations no less than individuals should have rights of selfdetermination. Once in possession of those rights, a nation’s integrity no less than a person’s integrity would be tested by the quality of what it fl F. R. Leavis and Dennys Thompson, Culture and Environment (London, 1933), 2, 87.

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achieved. Only then could culture prevail and personality grow: originally, authentically, and together. But just who was this self-determining self, or nation? And where might she, he, or it, be found? One place, the place supplied by the folklorists, was before the fall—that is, before the onset of the modern period, before the demise of what Leavis and Thompson referred to as the organic community. They picked up where the folklorists had left off, and set about practical criticism, not of survivals in culture (which they took as dead and buried),‡ but of all that had destroyed the organic community and, more importantly, those few who had stayed in touch with it. These were not modest aspirations. Nor were they particularly new. Leavisism rested on a peculiar mix: first, a love of English literature and some powerful, old-style moral polemic; second, some of the ideas we have seen already—distrust of suburbia, belief in the folk, a revived ‘Condition of England’ discourse (extended now to address the depression); and third, the work of a newish academic discipline called economic history. The economic historians, in turn, shared some of the Leavisite background. They too had been prompted by the Condition of England question. They too were making assumptions about what had survived and not survived the Industrial Revolution, and in so doing, they provided the Leavisites with essential information about the historic destruction of the authentic England. R. H. Tawney’s work, for example, centred on that which had led to ‘The great decay of people’.° His study of The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century examined the break-up of an agrarian order and its replacement by landlessness, wage labour, competitive rents, maximum returns, and a new ‘covetousness’ which unhinged the community. When Tawney asked what had happened to a ‘comyn folke’, once ‘‘so mighty, so strong in the felde as the comyns of England?’’, he found his answer in greedy landlords who cared more for their sheep than their tenants.· William Cunningham’s work took the longer view. This time from the vantage of the Middle Ages, Cunningham peered forward to a modern nation more divided at every conceivable level—between north and south, town and country, work and ‡ Ibid. 2. ° R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, Tudor Economic Documents, 3 vols. (London, 1924), i. 89. · R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1912), 17.

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skill, class and class, sustenance and money.⁄‚ Once there had been estates stocked with meat and men; now they were valued only by their rent-rolls. The Poor Law had come at the end of the first agrarian break-up. Sir John Clapham’s History was more restrained than Tawney’s, but in his third volume Sir John could not avoid dealing with the catastrophic implications of that break-up. In a society of the landless, he said, the state had found it necessary ‘to define and redefine’ different classes of worker according to their capacity for wage labour.⁄⁄ The parish had been the bedrock of the poor, but after 1601 parish officers made it their life’s work to overturn it by denying settlement, pushing men into the market, and litigating against the weak and the destitute. These dissolutions were designated ‘early modern’ because they had provided the historic conditions for ‘modern’ capitalism, an economic system that could not have happened except in the willingness of the many to move and work for the few. Capitalism was conditional on wage labour, and wage labour was conditional on landlessness, the full consequences of which were explored by John and Barabara Hammond: ‘The history of England at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war’, they said.⁄¤ Leavis felt the civil war was raging still. He held that since the sixteenth century ruthless expropriation of the land had reduced the country to two fundamental classes, the landed and the landless, marking a deep, almost spiritual, change in what it meant to be English. Out of this division came further divisions. Whereas once craftsmanship had practised the means of production as art, mass production had reduced it to the cheap and trashy. A sort of Gresham’s Law prevailed, where bad derivative culture drove out good authentic culture, and war was declared on the bad. English people had to be taught to remember who they were before the great divide. Leavisites saw school classrooms as training camps for the resistance. Children were to be taught how to disarm all that mind-dulling, massproduced dross that went on around them—in ‘films, newspapers, advertising’. While in the training of English language and literature, Leavis said, ‘a great deal can be brought in . . . [in] taste, habit, presumption, attitude to life’.⁄‹ Language was best when it was nearest to ‘life’. Leavisites preferred ⁄‚ W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce (1910; Cambridge, 1922), 27. ⁄⁄ Sir John Clapham, Concise Economic History of Britain (Cambridge, 1949), book iii, p. 297. ⁄¤ J. L. and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (1919. London, 1979), 1. The other volumes were The Village Labourer (1911) and The Town Labourer (1917). ⁄‹ Leavis and Thompson, Culture and Environment, 4–6.

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words so near, in fact, that in all their bursting vigour and texture and ripeness they almost ceased to be words at all. As for the best literature, they were very clear about the novelists who had stayed with England: Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence—‘the great tradition of the English novel is there’. In a looping argument beginning and ending with himself, Leavis explained what had made these writers great. He said that they were great because they had shared an ‘awareness of the possibilities of life’, and had shown that awareness by giving ‘meaning to the past’. This was an English past, for sure, but it was also open (through the language) to sympathizers like Conrad and James. Students would recognize all these things by authenticity of the form of writing, by the writers’ interconnectedness with each other, and by a deep moral seriousness which was only too obvious to the great interpreter: ‘And by “great tradition” I mean the tradition to which what is great in English fiction belongs.’⁄› Matthew Arnold in 1869 had called for ‘real thought and real beauty’ for as many as could have it, but ‘the masses’ were gullible. In a telling sentence, Arnold encapsulated all future dilemmas: ‘Plenty of people’, he said, ‘will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper . . .’⁄fi What these people supplied in the way of ‘food’, and what the masses demanded, were two intersecting lines of the selfsame problem. For Leavis and for those who clustered round his journal Scrutiny (1932–53), Arnold was right. Only great literature could show the masses their more authentic self. Only practical criticism could reveal literature’s truths. Only a minority could do practical criticism, grasp the urgency of the culture wars, and do their best to show the rest.⁄fl The Leavisites did not doubt that the organic England was lost forever. Equally, they were certain that, tended by critics and teachers like them, the national culture could be made authentic again. Leavisism was far more interested in literature than in people’s practical lives. It did not much scrutinize the sociological assumptions upon which its judgements rested. Nevertheless, it was influential. By the 1950s it had won the argument about the purposes of English as an intellectual activity, particularly so in the schools and colleges.⁄‡ By the 1960s Professor Bantock ⁄› F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948; Harmondsworth, 1962), 37, 10, 14, 16 ⁄fi Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 69. ⁄fl F. R. Leavis, Education and the University (1943; Cambridge, 1979), 145. ⁄‡ ‘English students in England are Leavisites whether they know it or not’: Eagleton, Literary Theory, 27.

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was calling for a folk curriculum, no less. As we have seen, this was a time when children could be seen as among the last survivors in culture. Childcentred teaching methods were seen as a way of tapping into child-lore. Yet, as usual, what was of the ‘folk’ was not the same as what was of the people. Bantock criticized Leavis (while dedicating his book to him) for failing to comprehend ‘social structure’ and the way learning was transmitted through it. But Bantock never used the word ‘culture’ in regard to workingclass people. In his view it was the job of the teachers to counteract the mass market, not the parents, and it would be foolish of teachers to suppose that they could find allies in the mass of the people. Mr Raymond Williams and Mr Richard Hoggart were wrong. Speaking from the portals of Leicester School of Education, Professor Bantock opined that Hoggart and Williams had overstressed ‘the contribution that ordinary people can make to the sustaining of our culture’. Culture was a minority activity, and always would be.⁄° Raymond Williams went to Cambridge University between 1939 and 1941, and came back, to finish the course, in 1945. A working-class Welsh boy on a scholarship, Williams had not been aware of Leavis on his first stay, but came under his spell during his second. In particular, he was attracted by Frank Leavis’s fierce criticism of the literary establishment and also by the older man’s underlying faith that literariness was not everything, that there was literature, but beyond literature and far more important there was ‘life’.⁄· Authentic life was lived through a ‘structure of feeling’, or ‘experience[s] in solution’, as Williams put it, and could not be easily surrendered to predefined or predisposed categories of experience.¤‚ Drawn to Leavis’s sheer audacity, to his willingness to rethink and rewrite from scratch in order to get at the true condition of being, Raymond Williams approached literature with all the moral seriousness of a disciple, but added to it Marxist ideas about social class.¤⁄ Williams measured the cost of what had been lost from the old world against what had been gained in the new. It was a difficult assessment to ⁄° G. H. Bantock, Education, Culture and the Emotions (London, 1967), 160. ⁄· Philip Larkin was at Oxford 1940–3 and took a similar line. There was ‘Literature’; but better than that there was ‘Art’, which deals in the fundamentals. He hated writers who ‘richly brocaded’ with words. The trouble with poetry was that it ‘is a thing depending almost entirely on words’: Larkin to J. B. Sutton, 23 June 1941, in Anthony Thwaite (ed.), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (London, 1992), 17; Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (London, 1993), chs. 5 and 6. ¤‚ Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977), 133. ¤⁄ Id., Politics and Letters (London, 1981).

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make, demanding fresh concepts and unusual ways of setting literary texts against historical texts. This included his own texts, because his fiction and his non-fiction were just different approaches to the same end. In Williams’s first (autobiographical) novel, Border Country, Matthew Price was an economic historian who, though he ‘knew of nothing he more wanted to be’, knew also that the price mechanism was not up to the job of weighing the old culture against the new. Anxious about ‘the means of measurement’,¤¤ Price worried about ‘substance’, and the handling or measuring of ‘substance’ in ways that market price could neither know nor express. In Williams, this blending of things measurable with things non-measurable was rich, rich enough to begin a new approach to intellectual endeavour inaugurated in 1958 with his book Culture and Society. Things not measurable needed a language, and for Williams, ‘culture’ as a ‘way of life’ which nevertheless carried with it notions of evaluation and discrimination, provided that language. When Williams thought of ‘culture’, at its best, for him, it never quite ceased to be located emotionally in the community of his childhood, in Pandy, Gwent, where he had been born in 1921 into a family of farmworkers and railwaymen. Williams, ‘who looked and spoke more like a countryman than a don’, questioned a social order which did not allow most people fair shares or fair say.¤‹ What that ‘say’ was was open to interpretation, but if Leavis and his Scrutineers wanted authentic culture back again, then here it was, in places like Pandy, before their very eyes.¤› ‘Common want and common remedy’: that was the life.¤fi The year before Culture and Society, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy had been published. Like Williams, Hoggart had taken a broadly Leavisite position, but in his attack on the enervating influence of mass production he went way beyond literature. Though never a Cambridge man (Leeds and Hull), Hoggart turned out to be Dr Leavis’s finest student. At any rate, he did what was implicit in Leavisism though never carried through: he tried to see its sense and apply its judgements to a living culture. Hoggart drew heavily on Leavis’s fears about the drift from authenticity to ‘substitute living’, and applied those fears to the memory of his childhood ¤¤ Id., Border Country (1960; London, 1988), 9. ¤‹ Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams (London, 1995), 10–11. ¤› For a time Williams came to see his own upbringing as a ‘bit of the old society’, a survival in culture. Williams was impressed ‘deeply enough for my ultimate rejection of it to be a personal crisis lasting several years’: Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope (London, 1989), 9. ¤fi Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958; Harmondsworth, 1968), 205.

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in Hunslet in the 1930s. Though he too had been through the higher literary mill, Hoggart retained a sure touch for what was authentic. This included great literature, of course, but for him it could also include pub singing or family clichés or work repartee ‘across the din of the machines’. As a scholarship boy, Hoggart had been given the opportunity to move easily in and out of cultures high and low. Lofty aesthetic propositions denoting what was good and bad did not fit his experience and, more than that, carried a snobbishness which he didn’t like or trust. Leavis found the embodiment of culture in certain great texts. Hoggart, on the other hand, found it in literacy and in people’s strategies for living—so recognizing a world deeper than criticism where the steadying effect of home and street and work and skill made for a working-class culture as valuable and as necessary and authentic as anybody else’s.¤fl Perhaps more authentic, for Hoggart was a man with a mission. He would show the nation the value of what was being given up to a mass-produced, second-hand, third-rate world. Through Hoggart and Williams, then, ‘culture’ was reworked as a sort of standing conference on the nation’s moral and emotional health. With so much pollution in the air, the inspectors were about. Both men worked in University adult education. They assumed that in the extra-mural class their theory of hidden or repressed authenticity could find practical outlet.¤‡ Edward Thompson was the third figure working in university adult education who also found his way into the search for authenticity. Thompson had been to Cambridge and—also like Williams, though after a much longer membership—he too had given up on the Communist Party. After 1956, with others, he began a new kind of left politics. In his work one can see the line, certainly back to Leavis, and then further back to ethnology, Arts and Crafts, and the early economic historians. It was through this particular line that Thompson re-engaged with Marxism.¤° In his The Making of the English Working Class (1963) he said that he wanted to dispel economic reductionism and give back to the people their ability to make history. The English working class had been present at their own making, he said. By rescuing them from the condescension of a ¤fl Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 202. ¤‡ Inglis, Cultural Studies, 49. Leavis and Thompson testified that their Culture and Environment had been incited by ‘work under the Workers’ Educational Association’ (p. vii). ¤° Before that, in the Communist Party Historians’ Group there had been momentous attempts to anglicize Marxism by making the proletariat the people and the people the nation: Bill Schwarz, ‘ “The people” in history’, in Richard Johnson et al. (eds.), Making Histories (London, 1982).

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(literary) posterity, he hoped his work would recover their authentic voice.¤· Sometimes that voice had been written down, but mostly it had not. So Thompson moved the argument away from the study of persons and institutions and toward the reconstruction of ‘consciousness’—seen in a full Leavisite way as ‘life’, or ‘experience’, and as such not entirely verifiable. Thompson’s argument was that, somewhere between 1790 and 1830, English waged workers became conscious of themselves as a class, and he drew on the evidence of a teeming underground to show it. In radical tracts and unstamped newspapers, in secret meetings and reports, in crowd actions, strikes, congregations, tumults, revivals, and all the ‘rituals of mutuality’, Thompson found his truer England. Ranged against it were all those who would seek to enclose its freeborn spirit. Thompson used the category of ‘experience’ to build his bridges between Marxism and English history. From Tawney, the Hammonds, and Sir William Ashley,‹‚ he took his point of historical departure, at first moving forward into the nineteenth century, and then pushing back into the eighteenth in search of a people—never a folk, but not yet a class—discernible through a non-literary construct. Eventually he called this construct a ‘moral economy’,‹⁄ a device whereby the people were to be known through a predominantly oral culture expressed in the consequences of their actions. In Thompson’s account, the people had gone underground to build their own traditions, and those traditions had survived in culture, regardless, more or less, of what was happening in the world above. For him, rough music, common right, common law, and community custom had all but coalesced into a whole moral economy of oppositional Englishness, sometimes in the open and slugging it out, toe-to-toe with state and market, at other times underground and burrowing, but in the end thinking and feeling as another England.‹¤ Thompson, Hoggart, and Williams all came to their views from a position both inside and outside the academy.‹‹ As academics, they enjoyed its ¤· Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Preface. ‹‚ Sir William Ashley, The Bread of Our Forefathers (Oxford, 1928). ‹⁄ E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (Feb. 1971). ‹¤ See G. L. Gomme, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1913), quoted in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993), 6. A. R. Wright’s English Folklore, first published in 1928, touched on what would be some of Thompson’s richest themes (pp. 25–49). ‹‹ A tradition of esteeming adult education seems to have come disproportionately from Balliol College and Rugby School: H. W. Carless Davis, Balliol College (London, 1899), 198; John Jones,

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scholarly standards. But as teachers, they despised its narrowness of thought and practice. University adult education departments, ‘extramural’, were neither in nor out, and that suited them. At the same time, they were never so stupid as to suppose that the culture could be made authentic again by a few-dozen staff tutors doing night classes (inspiriting as that might be). Extramural was a good idea based on Matthew Arnold and the labour movement, but, like them, its time was coming to an end. In the 1960s the new freedoms of expression and communication, the new universities and polytechnics, and that combination of affluence and welfare which was so new to human history, powered the mass search for what was authentic or, in the argot, for what was real. At the very moment when academics were beginning to doubt the existence of intrinsic worth, in Britain and America the young were on the lookout for it, just as their parents had been.‹› Rock music, folk and blues, civil rights, realist cinema (verité), modernist fashions (‘Mod’), ethnic clothing, street demos, long hair, and a certain duty to do social science and apply it were the new ways into the real and the unmediated. As was a student lifestyle that not only did not have to clockin in the morning, it did not have to clock-in at all. What was called the ‘New Left’—staffed, among others, by Williams and Thompson—was only one part of the flow. Revolt, if it was that, was revolt into style, or idiom, not politics. Even so, in some quarters it was still seen as threatening. On publication of the Robbins Report on the expansion of higher education, The Times doubted whether the universities could continue with their preservation of the great cultural tradition. More students would mean lower standards.‹fi When Raymond Williams took up his post at Cambridge in 1961, Mr Maurice Cowling assessed him for the Fellows. Cowling was half-wrong in detail but dead-right in tone. Those who shared his contempt knew exactly what he meant. Mr Williams, he said, came out of a world of ‘extra mural boards, the community centres and certain Northern universities’.‹fl Balliol College (Oxford, 1988), 256–7; Lawrence Goldman, Dons and Workers (Oxford, 1995). On that other extramural university of left-ish politics: M. D. Bess, ‘E. P. Thompson: The Historian as Activist’, American Historical Review (Feb. 1993). ‹› J. D. Salinger’s teenage hero, Holden Caulfield, reserves his deepest loathing for all things ‘phoney’: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The sociologist Ferdynand Zweig concluded that ‘the word “artificial” damns anything’: The British Worker, 212. ‹fi The Times, 4 Dec. 1963. ‹fl Cambridge Review, 29 May 1961, quoted in Inglis, Raymond Williams, 177. Sounds like Richard Evans on E. P. Thompson: ‘At the time of writing the book, he was not a university historian at all, but taught in extra mural studies . . .’ (Defence of History, 208)

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Cowling could have included the folk clubs. In search of the authentic and unmediated voice, Ewan MacColl’s ‘Radio Ballads’ (1958) posited a science of speech not unlike the old science of text-free cultures. According to MacColl and Peggy Seeger, working on interviews of working men with the BBC producer Charles Parker, the ‘thrusts’, ‘presses’, ‘glides’, and ‘dabs’, the generous metaphors and similes, shifting tenses, and rolling vowels, all denoted a cultural authenticity not to be found among the educated. For these coalminers, seamen, navvies, and railwaymen, speaking was represented as a physical as well as an intellectual activity—full of ‘vigour’ and ‘life’. MacColl likened it to boxing. Those who acclaimed the ‘Ballads’ thought a whole new England had been retrieved. The people might now be known, and known in their own voice: ‘After days of concentrated exposure to this enormous corpus of actuality, we were left with the impression that our educated informants used words to convey information and, simultaneously, to conceal their feelings, while the labourers used language in order to reveal themselves to us in the course of conveying information.’‹‡ In 1934 MacColl and Joan Littlewood, aged 20 and 19 respectively, had founded Manchester’s Theatre of Action, a street-theatre company. After the war they went on to found Theatre Workshop at Stratford in East London. Twenty years later, Raphael Samuel and associates founded a History Workshop movement at Ruskin College, Oxford. Both Workshops were very important to their professions, and both wanted to do the same thing—to rejuvenate the people by giving them back their own authentic and unmediated voice. Joan Littlewood distrusted the division of labour between audience and actors. She saw this divide—as the Leavisites saw the division between literary culture and popular culture, and as the History Workshoppers saw the division between professional history and people’s history—as inimical to the common good. By closing that divide, live, on stage, she wanted to return drama to lived experience and vice versa. Critics called it ‘Brechtian’ but in fact its idiom was English. As for MacColl, he left Stratford in the 1950s to help build what came to be known as the ‘second folk revival’, a movement given recognition in 1959 when Vaughan Williams, a leading player in the first revival, honoured its impact on young people in the ‘youth hostels, city pubs, skiffle cellars, even in the jazz clubs’ of Britain’s major cities.‹° ‹‡ Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, I’m A Freeborn Man (New York, 1968), 8. ‹° R. Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd, The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (Harmondsworth, 1959), 7.

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The second folk revival grew out of new youth attitudes which were distinctly English and British, and new musical forms which were American. Like the first revival at the turn of the century, it ranged widely, but this time what was new was British Marxism and American civil rights. A ‘Ballad and Blues’ radio show was broadcast from Littlewood’s Stratford base. The folk revival was broadly based, both in its politics and its music. But MacColl, a street-theatre Bolshevik to the last, wanted to give it discipline. In The Singing Island, he and Seeger laid down musical correctness. Their notes on accompaniment insisted on the great tradition: unaccompanied voice, purest and best; fiddle and flute, never guitar and banjo; lean, simple renderings, not virtuoso performances.‹· To MacColl, this was ‘actuality’ speaking. It was certainly not the people, whose actual tastes were often not in tune. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and those who loved them were seen as the culturally dispossessed, the musically false-conscious. MacColl and Seeger hated showbiz ‘stars’. They preferred their native-peasant-worker singer, a universal, anonymous figure, intoning in a voice vaguely regional. So they founded their ‘policy clubs’, disciplined their stage, and extracted their confessions.›‚ This did not mean, however, that only folk songs in the oral tradition were acceptable. MacColl wrote brand-new songs and called them folk songs. In Bert Lloyd’s classic collection, Come All Ye Bold Miners, MacColl contributed a song on behalf of Ashton Colliery, Lancashire.›⁄ For he believed that he knew just what the true folk idiom was, and tried to reinvent a song in that idiom just as he had reinvented himself as ‘Ewan MacColl’. If this was invention, it was not seen as inauthentic. Believers believed there was a folk nation to be rediscovered, and its fictive invented forms were not imaginary but imagined, in touch with their past, in touch with a tradition just as great as Leavis’s. People’s survival in culture, great literature, and a certain sort of ethnology had always been central. Now it was music’s turn. In their prefiguring of the future, committed folk artists had to ‹· Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl (eds.), The Singing Island (New York, 1960), 2–4; Ewan MacColl, Scotland Sings (Scottish Workers’ Music Association, 1953), 147. ›‚ ‘I must regretfully class myself as an outsider in relation to any folksong, since my own community . . . has not yet produced a distinct body of folk music of its own . . . And so I am driven to the sad conclusion that I cannot sing authentic folk music, no matter what I do’: Sam Hinton, in David A. De Turk. and A Poulin Jnr, The American Folk Scene (New York, 1967), 69. On MacColl’s preference for block anonymity: Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London, 1985), 254. ›⁄ ‘The Plodder Seam’, in A. L. Lloyd, Come All Ye Bold Miners (London, 1952), 132.

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stand, not where they were, but where they wanted to be. Peggy Seeger’s father had been a professor of musicology. Son Pete had been educated at a New England prep school and Harvard, but when he went to perform, he ‘always manages, somehow, to look like a lumberjack on a Saturday night’.›¤ The British and American folk revivalists, many of them students, brought their own commitment to the show. They wanted their audiences to see the country as they saw it—young and alive and real again. In the 1960s some part of their music and attitude found itself on the front line, in anti-war demonstrations and freedom rides and picket duty. Not that all of those who identified with the student movement were folk enthusiasts. Popular music was much bigger business. With a rapidly expanding technology, ‘pop’ thrived on crossing and recrossing musical idioms. Any notion of pure folk had little chance against it, but the idea of folk as an expression of authenticity did remain and does remain a powerful counterpoint to what was blatantly commercial and derivative in the music industry.›‹ For instance, during the 1980s the music of Billy Bragg mixed pop with an English folk tradition where socialism supplied the words and ‘punk’ supplied the rock. Bragg did not pretend that his music was native, but he did insist that it was authentic. Punk rock had many origins, in fact, not all of them off-the-street, but at the centre which it denied it had, it is instructive to compare Sir Hubert Parry’s inaugural address to the English Folk Song Society, delivered in 1899, with the Sex Pistols’ lunge to notoriety in the 1970s.›› At the heart of each was a call for complete unity of expression with emotion. Performance was all, and had to be immediate, direct, untutored, non-literary: not derivative, ‘not mimicking’, not clever, not American, not ‘phoney’, but fused with the audience.›fi When the fusion was right, they were hardly an audience at all. What punk could do, they could do: ‘A. E. G. This is a chord . . . now form a band.’›fl Black American music offered an authenticity and excitement which, more than any other modern musical tradition, came to tutor young English emotions. Before the war it had found its way into England, either ›¤ De Turk and Poulin, Folk Scene, 16, 205–6. ›‹ Steve Redhead, The End-of-the-Century Party (Manchester, 1990), 67. ›› Charles Hubert Parry (1848–1914), English composer; The Sex Pistols (1975–8), English band. ›fi Laing, One Chord Wonders, 26, 15. Recent candidates for the fusion of expression and emotion have been live poetry ‘slams’, ‘raps’, football terraces, and the Detroit band White Stripes (New Musical Express, 11 Aug. 2001). ›fl Sideburns fanzine (Dec. 1976): Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming (London, 1992), 281.

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through specialist routes or through closed networks within the white popular music business. During the 1930s American academics advocated gospel, spiritual, blues, and jazz as the essential American folk music, and during the 1940s and 1950s they were translated, which is to say they were taken and tidied, by the white radio companies. In Elvis Presley these companies stumbled upon someone whom they saw as the white translator, though he was more than that. After him, rock and blues were out as essentially black idioms played by black artists, and new mixes were on the way. ‘Soul’ in particular had to be authentic. That is what ‘having soul’ meant. At any rate, it had to appear to be authentic, and committed: ‘Your music should be abou’ where you’re from an’ the sort o’ people yeh come from.—Say it once, say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud . . . —The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.’ They nearly gasped: it was so true.›‡

By the 1960s, black American music was easily available. Listening to it in England no longer depended on being friends with merchant seamen (‘Cunard Yanks’), who in the 1950s had bought what were called race records in American ports and played them back home on their Dansettes. From that point on, two generations of kids had to check see if their mojo was working. Like rock and blues and soul, country-and-western meant different things in England. It had to. The Dusty Road Ramblers, after all, had rambled out of Kirkby,›° just as the Stones had rolled out of suburbia, and they and a thousand other English bands had said what they wanted to say in the rhythms of Mississippi and Chicago. This was authenticity too. Alex Campbell had lived in London composing Scottish folk songs about Lady Douglas’s Lament. But after street singing in Paris, where he discovered American folk, he found the courage to acknowledge his real heritage in a Glasgow of work and whisky.›· It wasn’t that Campbell ‘dug’ Robbie Burns less, just that he loved Woody Guthrie more. Ewan MacColl (born Jimmie Miller, Coburg Street, Salford) had called Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, Third Avenue East, Duluth, Minnesota) a ‘youth of mediocre ›‡ Roddy Doyle, The Commitments (1987; London, 1996), 9, 71.On American music translations: Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis (London, 1994), and Paul Oliver (ed.), Black Music in Britain (Milton Keynes, 1990). ›° As did the Blue Mountain Boys, the Drifting Cowboys, the Kentuckians, and Patsy Foley come from Liverpool: Kevin McManus, ‘Nashville of the North’ (Liverpool, 1994). ›· Alex Campbell, Frae Glesga Toon (Woodham Walter, 1964), 29.

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talent’, but the shame was that MacColl failed to recognize that Zimmerman had travelled in search of his authentic self no less than Miller had travelled in search of his: I’m out here a thousand miles from home Walkin’ a road other men have gone down . . . Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too.

As the New York Times said: ‘Mr Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his porch. All the husk and bark are left on his notes.’fi‚ Four years later Dylan cut himself adrift from the old left American ‘road’ tradition, and went electric. But still he stayed true. He defended his move with the same call—‘It was honest. It was honest.’fi⁄ All this search for authenticity, from Frank Leavis’s ‘life’ to Bob Dylan’s ‘husk and bark’, must be seen as part of a living English culture. Most people do indeed treasure these musics as among the best they know of themselves, but find difficulty seeing them as part of a national culture because for so long that has been bound up with questions of origin and tenure. The search for authenticity described here is about people increasing the number of points of origin, and loosening the terms of tenure.

The Search For Community It might seem that thinking with England only existed on the left. This was not the case. There were other voices raised, with more grounds for common cause than could have been imagined at the time. On the face of it, T. S. Eliot advocated a view of culture that had nothing in common with that of populists—rockers or revivalists. Notes Towards a Definition of Culture was published in 1948, when the poet was at the height of his fame. In it, Eliot declared that a real education had no role other than to preserve the elite. Education was not equal to the task of transmitting a culture. It was not a human right. It ought not to be about equality of opportunity. It had nothing to do with promoting democracy, liberty, happiness, or authenticity.fi¤ Eliot dubbed those who disagreed with him (no fi‚ New York Times, 29 Sep. 1961, quoted in Sy and Barbara Ribakore, Folk-Rock: The Bob Dylan Story (New York, 1966), 35. MacColl on Dylan, in De Turk and Poulin, Folk Scene, 157. fi⁄ Robert Shelton, No Direction Home (Sevenoaks, 1986), 304. fi¤ Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, 100.

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doubt with one jaundiced eye on the university adult educators) believers in ‘The Mute Inglorious Milton dogma’—the belief that privilege hampered genius. The contest appeared to be clear. There were the democrats, and there were the reactionaries. Eliot’s position was with the reactionaries. It was the sort of position Leavis and Williams saw as their lifetime’s duty to defeat. A closer look at Eliot’s thinking, however, reveals a more interesting line of approach. According to him, the ruling class claimed exclusive right to national leadership because, as a hereditary class, they recognized the value of stability and the continuity which stability bestowed. Any other sort of ruling class, Eliot reckoned, a class based, perhaps, on merit or education, would make it its ‘chief aim’ that all society should be measurable only by reference to the merit it had achieved or the education it had enjoyed. Such a class might pretend, for instance, even to itself, that this education represented a common culture. But in fact it was just an egotism which would lead, and did lead, to the insult of calling poor people half-educated when in fact their half-measure was just that their point of view and way of life did not match up to those who were more educated than them. Eliot was trying to leave open the door to things deeper, things to do with culture, things Leavis might have called ‘life’ and Thompson might have called ‘experience’: We then proceed to think of the humbler part of society as having culture only in so far as it participates in this superior and more conscious culture. To treat the ‘uneducated’ mass of the population as we might treat some innocent tribe of savages to whom we are impelled to deliver the true faith, is to encourage them to neglect or despise that culture which they should possess and from which the more conscious part of the culture draws vitality . . .fi‹

In general, the post-war intellectual right feared the heavy tread of the state into areas of personal life which, in their view, it did not have the right or the competence to improve. A nationalizing Labour government was an obvious target for their barbs, and of course there were grisly foreign precedents in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Against this thing, ‘the state’, the intellectual right made their stand. States qua states were ignorant. Their elevation above everyday life led them into an abstract rationalism and a tendency to put their faith in systems. Because those systems could never know as much as they claimed to know, they were dangerous. fi‹ Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, 107.

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In his essay on Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin highlighted the novelist’s belief that the only real knowledge in life was personal, local, and everyday. It was in experience that true understanding lay. When historians and other rationalists came along and composed their theories purporting to describe the causes and consequences of power, said Berlin, they were faking it. He advised those who thought otherwise to recall Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and poor, lost Pierre Bezukhov wandering the field of battle searching in vain for the set-piece battle the generals had predicted and the painters and historians who came after would, in due course, find. Their ‘pale abstractions’fi› were as nothing compared to the multitudinous and unknowable experiences of ordinary people like Pierre. Berlin took Tolstoy beyond Tolstoy’s own position, but the warning was clear: stick to what you know and make sure states do the same. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian-born economist teaching at the LSE, called repeated personal experience and the knowledge it rendered a ‘catallaxy’. Against the elevated, centralized planning of the ‘taxis’, Hayek set the spontaneous, popular order of the catallaxy. Whether it was a problem of how much to pay or what course of action to take—a market problem or a welfare problem—only ‘repeated exchanges and mutual adjustment by agents of their interests and plans’ could yield best knowledge.fifi Best knowledge like this was spontaneous, but it needed entrepreneurship to help it adapt to ever-changing conditions. Catallaxic entrepreneurs, therefore, were cultural as well as economic agents who, like Bezukhov at Borodino, operated on the ground. Large, complicated societies should beware the hubris of claiming to know more than could possibly be known. For Hayek, the beauty of English liberalism lay in how it began by admitting its own ignorance. A liberalism built on ‘local responsibility’ and ‘suspicion of power and authority’ was embedded in the English national identity, said Hayek in 1944, and Berlin agreed. False political knowledge was usually doctrinal, elevated, and apart, ‘be it state socialism, “real politik”, “scientific” planning or corporatism’. Authentic knowledge, on the other hand, flickered daily in millions of exchange signals, whether they be market prices or wisdoms glinting from out of the concentrated experience of communities.fifl fi› Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London, 1953), 29. fifi Andrew Gamble, ‘Hayek and the Left’, Political Quarterly, 67 (Jan.–Mar. 1996), 49. fifl F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944; London, 1986), 161, 15–16, 57.

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When it came to everyday things, conservative intellectuals were not keen on the word ‘culture’. Their language was different from that of the Leavisites or the socialists. But in the political philosophers Michael Oakeshott and John Gray, English conservatism found its most effective representatives of authentically devolved knowledge, otherwise known as culture. When Oakeshott talked of ‘civil association’ he had in mind a miscellany of thoughts and experiences appertaining to a particular time and place, where civil association was merely the legitimization of good practice based on those thoughts and experiences. Over time, and in a particular environment, real political knowledge was forged: it could be only be known by living a life and engaging in the common discourse of that life. It could not be known from above, still less could it be understood from outside. To Oakeshott, this ‘conservative disposition’, this ‘custody of a manner of living’,fi‡ was a natural human response because it protected people from what they sensed would wreck their lives and the common life which undergirded those lives. Oakeshott’s conservatism, built on Burke and an English common-law sensibility which gathered itself from the bottom up rather than from the top down, was nevertheless entirely contemporaneous and, in one version at least, defensible from both left and right points of view. For it was not about nostalgia, nor about conserving the status quo, nor the fixities of ‘human nature’, nor national properties, nor religiose or royalist rituals. It was about what living communities knew they knew and thought was worth keeping. Social manners and agreed ways of doing things were more important than a priori principles, because out of them stemmed a politics which was sustainable because it was understood, like a conversation maybe, or a cricket match, or plumbing.fi° Oakeshott’s examples were usually masculine. As far as possible, he thought states should respect these common arrangements, encourage them, and let the people get on. In 1989 John Gray strengthened the case by rebuffing the three main claims of political rationalism by reference to the ‘framework of a common life’.fi· Gray argued that to suppose political or social order could be won by contract was a rationalist illusion. The common life always came first. Fighting fi‡ Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (1962; Indianapolis, 1991), 409, 406, 424. fi° Ibid. 62. In a 1961 essay, quite absurdly, Oakeshott could find no place for a collective part in this ‘conversation’: 365–73. fi· John Gray, ‘Postscript—After Liberalism’, in Liberalisms (London, 1989), 254.

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to establish that life and preserve it was the highest and most basic of the political arts. Gray stressed the relevance of Hobbes: The image [he] projects, of a restless band of castaways, among whom order is ever at risk, and who have little in common but aversion to violent death and a passion for self assertion, is hardly an inapt metaphor of our condition; it is, whether we know it or not, the way we live. In this predicament, the Hobbesian search for a modus vivendi, reached and renewed through dialogue, rhetoric, bargaining, force and all the devices of the political arts, is for us an historical fate . . .fl‚

Hoggart and Williams had reasoned the common life from the inside. Both wrote about community with the peculiar knowledge it had ingrained in them. Hunslet and Pandy had been different, of course, but both men agonized about how each community was under attack from a commercial and political system that was rationalist, universalist, and destructive from the top down. But there was a candour in both scholars which took the matter further. They knew that rationalism, universalism, and top-down points of view came not only from the outside, through the agencies of corporate capitalism or the state, but also from the inside, through people like them. Williams called Marxism ‘the high working-class tradition’, and knew that taking its rationalist credos and universalist messages and connecting them up to local communities was ‘the most difficult bit’. Hoggart was less enamoured of talk of high traditions, Marxist or otherwise, but he too had realized that pitting his scholarly training against local knowledge produced ‘all sorts of doubts’—‘a running argument’.fl⁄ In the end both men agreed that the essential question was ‘whether high culture is compatible with the ordinary values’, not the other way round.fl¤ If this was conservatism, it was a conservatism which put community first. Left and right community dispositions were both minority movements. Left community conservatives most feared the market, were sceptical about the state, and dared to believe in the redemptive qualities of their own ideal state (whatever that might be). Right community conservatives most feared the state, were sceptical about the market, and dared to hope in the redemptive qualities of their own ideal market (whatever that might be). Over them both hovered party allegiances which could not see, or did not want to see, fl‚ Ibid. 215. fl⁄ Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, ‘Working Class Attitudes’, New Left Review, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1960), 28, 26, 30. fl¤ Raphael Samuel convened his last History Workshop in Theatres of Memory (London, 1994), to find high culture wanting against everyday values and judgements.

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that whether under Labour or Conservative, the forces they feared most— rationalism over experience, abstraction over practice, power over community—would predominate. But it was impossible for the two dispositions to make common cause. There were ancient enmities between them, and both sides were more prepared to talk with the politicians of their own side, supposing they got the chance. They were only academics, after all. From the mid-1970s the right intelligentsia did get their chance. However, even if a right community disposition was ever raised in ministerial circles and, if it was, whether it could have held up against a succession of Conservative governments more interested in business than conservatism, it has to be said that there wasn’t much effort during the 1980s to defend living communities as they came under attack of the sort described in the last chapter. Right intellectuals were astonishingly naive, or silent, about how markets could be socially destructive. Their failure to fight might have been to do with philosophy as their core discipline, a rough trade given to dealing in clearly defined positions rather than with the messy propensities of a culture. They seemed quite detached from what was actually happening on the ground.

Conclusion

From the time of the Anglo-Saxons, the English state has been central to the making of the English nation. When in the 1640s that nation, or those representing that nation, acted independently against the state, there was already a tradition of ‘freeborn’ Englishness going back to what they took to be Saxon times. From the eighteenth century the English state began formally to incorporate the Scots and the Irish into a Union it called British. From 1707 a British state took over, but failed to carry with it, and indeed never seriously tried to carry with it, commitment to a British nation. The state was British and dominated by England, but the Scots, Welsh, and Irish were not over-much expected to convert into English or even into something synthetic called British, though at first it was hoped that they might be cajoled into some form of naturalized Protestantism. The English sought Union for reasons of security, the Scots for economic advantage, some Irish tarried with it in the hope that it might yield to them what it had yielded to others. The Welsh were not consulted. Few envisaged full legislative, religious, or cultural convergence. What this left was a set of British peoples with a sense of their own nationality but never quite sure of how to talk about themselves as a collective of nations. To have talked of an English state would not have done justice to the way political power was shared amongst a British elite. To have talked of a British nation would not have done justice to the actual feelings of the four nationalities who made up that nation. To have talked of four co-equal nationalities would have failed to recognize England’s overarching dominance, and too much talk of that would have missed the very real multinational successes of Great Britain. So, for over 300 years, the people of these islands have been uncertain. This can be seen as good or bad, depending upon your point of view. But it had important consequences, most important of which was that, up to very recent times, learning to be English and learning to be British were more or less taken for granted as being roughly the same thing. As a gesture of power abroad and citizenship at home, a British project served. But now

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that Imperialism has gone and the spirit of Union fades, the English are beginning to find themselves exposed. They may not have spent a lot of time asking each other who they were in the last century, but now they are beginning, just a little, to wonder how they might start discussing it in this one. Being English is not a natural, or a fixed, or an absolute quality.⁄ Nor is it an inconsequential myth or an irrational act liable to fade in post-modern times. Nor is it always what statesmen, mass communicators, or intellectuals say it is; but there again, neither is it beyond our powers. Alternative modes of political representation abound, as do types of constitution, but in the discussion that is to come, four things might be borne in mind. First, the story that Crown-in-Parliament adequately represents the nation no longer holds true. To take the Crown first. After 1945 the aristocracy retreated from the show to live their lives as the ordinary rich. Bagehot’s dignified part came to rest on royal shoulders alone, and not all of those shoulders have proved broad enough. In the week leading up to the funeral of Diana, princess of Wales, in August 1997 the English tried to say something about themselves and their monarchy. They eschewed established (constitutional or mass-media) representations of themselves, and they spoke out, quite spontaneously, in millions of small expressions of regret. They were speaking personally, but it was also clear that they were trying to speak authentically, and together. Most would have preferred Diana as their queen, so her funeral was a sort of black coronation—an enfilade along the Windsors. For a while she became the bluest eye. Far from giving up on Bagehot, as The Times claimed,¤ just for once the people had taken monarchy seriously, and for a few weeks, very fleetingly, and quite unusually, they tried to say that the monarchy as it was currently constituted no longer stood for them As for parliament, present constitutional arrangements, in Oakeshott’s terms, miss too many ‘conversations’. In spite of the rolling devolutionary programme (and acting as a de facto threat to it), the state remains too centralized, too secretive, too discretionary, and too out of touch.‹ That constitutional arrangements have acted also as powerful models for civil society, business, and non-governmental organizations, only underlines the problem. In the ⁄ ‘National identity’ is a phrase unknown by much of the history covered by this book. ‘Loyalty, station, degree, honour, connection’ were the historic words: Kidd, Identities Before Nationalism, 291. ¤ The Times, 8 Sept. 1997. ‹ The 2001 general election attracted only 59.2% of the vote; the lowest ever.

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face of the stuttering failure of the old politics, a new kind is in the making. It has no name, no party, and no accountability. It avoids normal channels as hopelessly mediated and compromised, but networks with other groups. It can be passionately committed to England, though not in the old way. Most important, when it feels the centre is loaded against it, it goes back to the edge, or underground. This kind of politics is growing as fast as the Crown-inParliament sort is failing. Second, the idea that the state stands for a homogeneous nation is no longer credible. Arguments against a written constitution used to say that such was their homogeneity, the English did not need one. However misleading this was in the past, and it was, nowadays homogeneity can be taken for granted only at the most reified levels of state business. The English ‘gentleman’ who tied it all together has changed beyond recognition, as has his constituency, which is far more diverse, not just in its constituents but also in how those constituents think about diversity itself. At the same time, it is difficult to think of a national identity—any national identity—that can be pluralist and normative at the same time.› Pluralism works best for pluralists. It works less well for those who regard being English as a uniquely important way of valuing themselves. Nor should pluralism become a super-identity taking homage from, and denying comparison between, all other identities beneath.fi It might be that the concept of ‘civil society’ can accommodate pluralism better than nations can, but, in the modern era at least, no civil society has stood free. Whether a civil society ever could stand free of nationhood is an open question, and in essence is the same question Durkheim asked on how to sustain solidarity in large, impersonal, and highly differentiated societies.fl While it is true that state and nation are in retreat as effective institutions, it is also true that equivalent, trans-national, democratic institutions have yet to emerge (if indeed they ever can emerge), and until they do (if they do), properly constituted states are the only homes for pluralism.‡ The more that state business can be devolved down to the nation as it coexists and converses with itself, practically, on the ground, then the better the question of solidarity can be addressed. In searching for › Durkheim defined ‘anomie’ as pluralism in permanent conflict—‘conflicting multiple normative paradigms’: Edward A. Tiryakiau, ‘Emile Durkheim’, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet, A History of Sociological Analysis (London, 1979), 211. fi Amartya Sen, Other People, British Academy Lecture, 7 Nov. 2000 (London, British Academy, 2001), 9. fl Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1893; Glencoe, 1949), 131. ‡ John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge, 2000), 125.

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a new modus vivendi, the nation’s propensity for seeing itself as diverse should not be allowed to outstrip its propensity for seeing itself as unified. Third, it is necessary that the English continue to remember their history. Peoples remember, therefore they are. But what sort of remembering can it be? In some ways, remembering past agendas will contradict future ones. Being part of the European Union, being part of a ‘globalized’ world, being adaptable, and mobile, and multilingual and multicultural, and open and rational and secular and forward-looking and de-centred and amnesic, does not square with the nation as it is. It is not possible to imagine a nation as old as this one suddenly forgetting its history simply because it has been asked to do so. The British Empire (1588–1997) did not subscribe to the aims and objectives of the Commission for Racial Equality (1976– ), but both came out of the same history and the same institutions. In the future, political pluralism will insist on the erasure of core identity, of any sort, and the wholeness that will replace it—if a wholeness can be negotiated to replace it—will be a mosaic of calculable interests and political compromises. Probably there will be less and less room for heartfelt mysteries to do with ‘that place deep inside which is attached to ancestral places and times’.° Fourth, it remains true that how people see their old life rather depends on how they see their new. Certain ways of seeing England are clearly on the way out. Island races, garden hearts, industrial landscapes, ecclesiological villages, fixed properties, structured geographies, ordered relationships, native peoples, cultural survivals, northern grit, southern charm, rural redemption, rule Britannia—all these discourses persist, but with less conviction. Yet it is perhaps timely to remember that the English have never only been right little, tight little islanders. They went through Empire (the biggest) without altogether losing track of the common decencies, and they went through an Industrial Revolution (the first) without ever giving up on the prospect of the natural life. They did not lose their desire to belong, nor did they give up on their belief that, if the law was there to be obeyed, then freedom was their natural condition. At the same time, for all of the modern period, they put themselves in positions of extraordinary openness to the cultures of other peoples. There has been an England and an English since at least 937,when Alfred’s grandsons Aethelstan and Edmund defeated the Northumbrians at the ° Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Political Quarterly, 72 ( July–Sept. 2001), 393.

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unidentified place of Brunanburh. Since then, the territory has stayed roughly the same and the people have continued to call themselves English. This book began with George Orwell in 1940—at a moment when their long history looked likely to end. Orwell called for the authentic English to emerge from the shadows. Only then, he believed, could the people trust themselves and win. It is necessary for peoples to trust each other, and somehow, the English still do.

S E L E C T B I B L I O G RA P H Y

The following works have been important in shaping my thinking about English history. Their importance is not always proportionate to the number of times they appear in my footnotes. Many of them are not directly concerned with national identity. Not all of them are concerned with England. But they did offer ideas that I was able to exploit and explore. Before the listing, however, there is one book that taught me most at the time when I had most to learn. That is Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, coedited by me and Philip Dodd and published by Croom Helm way back in 1986. At that time, when Philip and I tried to sell the idea of English national identity to publishers, not many knew what we were talking about. I’m not even sure that we knew. But, for all that, the book was a great first shaping exercise for me with the help of all who were involved in writing it—as they appeared in the volume: Alun Howkins, Brian Doyle, Peter Brooker, Peter Widdowson, Jeremy Crump, Jane Mackay, Pat Thane, D. G. Boyce, Dennis Smith, Hugh Cunningham, Stephen Yeo.

English and Anglo-British State Formation Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550–1700 (Cambridge, 2000). John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London, 1994). P. K. O’Brien and P. A. Hunt, ‘The Rise of a Fiscal State in England 1485–1815’, Historical Research, 66: 160 (1993). L. B. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds.), A Union of Multiple Identities (Manchester, 1999). R. C. Van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge, 1973). James Campbell, The Anglo Saxon State (London, 2000). Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985). Gary W. Cox, The Efficient Secret: The Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1987). Norman Davies, The Isles (London, 1999). Alexander Grant and K. J. Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995).

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383

Ian Harden and Norman Lewis, The Noble Lie: The British Constitution and the Rule of Law (London, 1987). Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, 1997). Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975). Peter Hennessy, The Hidden Wiring: Unearthing the British Constitution (London, 1995). Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England c.1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000). Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism (Cambridge, 1999). Michael Lobban, The Common Law and English Jurisprudence 1760–1850 (Oxford, 1991). S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London, 1981). Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain (London, 1981). J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957; Cambridge, 1987). Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition (Oxford, 1986).

Political and Cultural Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, 1971). John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939 (London, 1992). J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1987). George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (1936; New York, 1961). Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (London, 1981). Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class (Cambridge, 1991). Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (London, 1987). Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918 (Cambridge, 1989). Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998). Rosemary Sweet, ‘Freemen and Independence in English Borough Politics 1770–1830’ Past and Present, 161 (1998). A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965). C. S. Yeo, ‘ “A New Life”. The Religion of socialism in Britain 1883–1896’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977).

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Economic and Social Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960 (London, 1994). David Cannadine, ‘The Past and the Present in the English Industrial Revolution 1880–1980’, Past and Present, 103 (1984). —— The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, 1990). Peter Damesick and Peter Wood, Regional Problems, Problem Regions and Public Policy in the UK (Oxford, 1987). Martin Daunton (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. iii, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000). Richard Holt, Sport and the British (Oxford, 1989). Brian Inglis, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1972). Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991). Jane Lewis, Women in Britain Since 1945 (Oxford, 1992). Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998). K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change in Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1987) Lawrence Stone and J. C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1986). E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963). F. M. L. Thompson, ‘English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Presidential Address, Nov. 1990. Jim Tomlinson, ‘Inventing decline’, Economic History Review, 49: 4 (1996). Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000)

Imperial The Oxford History of the British Empire is a landmark work: Nicholas Canny (ed.), vol. i, The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998); P. J. Marshall (ed.), vol. ii, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998); Andrew Porter (ed.), vol. iii, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999); Judith M. Brown and William Roger Louis (eds.), The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999). C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1997). ——Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1995). Bernard S. Cohen, An Anthropologist Among the Historians (Delhi, 1996). E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (London, 1987). —— and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford, 1994).

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385

O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (London, 1956). Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination 1880–1930 (London, 1972). Jonah Raskin, The Mythology of Imperialism (New York, 1971). Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1985). E. Wurgaft, The Imperial Imagination: Magic and Myth in Kipling’s India (Middletown, Conn., 1983).

Ethnographical and Environmental Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester, 1993). Stefan Collini, English Pasts (Oxford, 1999). Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Cambridge, 1993). W. K. D. Davies, The Conceptual Revolution in Geography (London, 1972). Joseph-Marie Degerando, The Observation of Savage Peoples (1800), trans. F. C. T. Moore (Berkeley, 1969). Patrick Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain 1945–75 (Oxford, 1981). Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York, 1980). Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside (London, 1998). Arild Holt-Jenson, Geography (London, 1982). Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society (London, 1988). Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England (Cambridge, 1986). Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity: Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991). Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998). Paul Oliver, Ian Davis, and Ian Bentley, Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies (London, 1982). Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995). Simon Pugh, Garden—Nature—Language (Manchester, 1988). John Shaiel, Rural Conservation in Inter War Britain (Oxford, 1991). D. R. Stoddart, Geography, Ideology and Social Concern (Oxford, 1981). Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1984). E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1993). Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (1957; Harmondsworth, 1967).

Shetland Lerwick

Orkney Cape Wrath Thurso Lewis

Hebrides

HIGHLANDS

Elgin Inverness

AND Skye ISLANDS

Fort William Dundee Perth Stirling

Mull

S e a

i r t h of Forth Berwick upon Tweed Edinburgh Glasgow

C ly d e

F

ATLANTIC

Ayr

C

of

Islay

H

IO

EV

TS

Newcastle upon Tyne South Shields Sunderland Durham Middlesbrough

GREAT BRITAIN AND

LAKE DISTRICT

N

Belfast Isle of Man

Portadown

Tyne

E

N. IRELAND ULSTER

Carlisle

P

Fir

th

Londonderry Donegal Bay

N o r t h

Aberdeen

S CO T L A ND

N

N O R T H E R N I R E L A N D York

R I A N M T S

n no an Sh

B

A

M

L

C

N

D

Cape Clear

G

Cork

Waterford

Birmingham rn Seve

Killarney

Sheffield Derby Nottingham N

Limerick

Kingston upon Hull

Norwich Leicester Cambridge C Wexford Aberystwyth W A L E S Coventry Ipswich Fishguard Luton A Oxford Southend-on-Sea Swansea ames Bristol SHIRNE S Th W K O London E R D Reading Cardiff Bath B Dover Southampton Brighton Bournemouth Exeter Arklow

R E P U B L I

se

Leeds

Manchester

Stoke-onTrent

Roscrea

Ou

S

Anglesey

e

E

Liverpool

Holyhead

Athlone Dublin

Ri

l bb

E

Irish Sea

I R I S H

Galway

Lancaster Blackpool

N

Westport

Trent

Douglas

Dundalk

I

Sligo

OCEAN

PURBECK HILLS

Plymouth Penzance Land’s End

Isle of Wight

l anne h C h is Engl

The United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland

Index

A1, road 230 Abercrombie, Sir Patrick 243 Aberdeen 281 Aborigines 100, 169, 267 abroad 99 Accra 268 Act of Settlement (1701) 22, 46, 74, 282 Act of Union (1707) 34, 39, 44, 46, 74–5, 200, 282 Act of Union (1801) 34, 41, 158, 200 Adams, G. B. 72 Adams, Gerry 194 Admiralty Arch 234 Admiralty hydrographers 239 adolescence 136 advertising 59, 64–5 Advice to Young Men 224 Aethelbert, English king 13 Aethelstan, king of England 380 Africa 99, 103, 106–7, 164, 168, 174–5 Afrikaners 104–6, 174 Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, The 359 Agricultural Act (1947) 349–50 agricultural labourers 252, 257, 295–6, 302, 313 Air Raid Precaution 125 Airstrip One 249 Aitken, William, Lord Beaverbrook 63 Akbar, ruler of India 173 Alan of Galloway 42 Alba 42 Albert Hall 279 Alfred of Wessex, king of England 13, 18, 35, 42, 72, 380 All Souls College, Oxford 136

Allanstand 258 Allen brothers 281 allotments 205, 219, 222 alterity 181–2 amateurs 71, 78–9 American: attitudes to English/British 83, 99, 134, 368–9; folk musics 370; land 220, 224; see also British attitudes to Americans Amery, Leopold 172 Amin, Idi 175 Amos, Sir Maurice 57, 72 Anansi tales 297 Anderson, Perry 188 Andrews, William 228 Angell, Norman 62 Angles 35 Anglesey 279 Anglo-Irish attitudes 282 Anglo-Saxonism 133, 137–8, 276, 280 Angola 348 Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan 229 Anne, Queen of England, Scotland, (Great Britain from 1707), Ireland 39, 283 anthropology 247–8, 266–7, 348–9 antiquarians 26, 43, 226–7, 228, 249–50 anti-racism 180–1 Antrim 286 Antrobus Village News 203 apartheid 105–6 Arabs, representations of, 163, 170–1 Arch, Joseph 112, 216–17, 305 Archaeology 133, 138, 246, 357 Arden-Clarke, Sir Charles 175 aristocracy 51–2, 75–6, 78, 307–8, 378

388

index

Aristotle 79 Arley 203 Armistead, Wilson 261 Army Information, and Bureau of Current Affairs 127–8 Arnold, Matthew 62, 167, 171, 281–6, 308, 358–9, 361, 366 Arran Isles 269, 275 arrested development 245 Arthur, mythical British king, 278 Arts and Crafts 292, 305, 364 Arts Council 189 Aryan 246, 298 Asante 104 Ashington 218–19 Ashley, Sir William 365 Ashton, T. S. 215 Ashton colliery 368 Asquith, H. H. 45, 118 assimilation 161, 180–1 assizes 17 Atherton 311–12 Atkins, Tommy 315 atomic weapons 144–5 Attlee, Clement 130, 145, 316 Auden, W. H. 296 Austen, Jane 205, 361 Austin, John 31 Australia 96, 99, 100, 199, 208, 267 ‘back-to-backs’, housing 113 Badminton Magazine 122–3 Bagehot, Walter 50–5, 57, 59, 60, 62, 69, 71, 78, 82, 87, 97, 127, 130, 211, 307, 378 Baldwin, Stanley 59, 309 Balfour, A. J. 171–2 Balliol College, Oxford 172 ballroom dancing 70, 189 Bank of England 234, 328 banks 324, 326, 340, 344 Bantock, G. H. 361–2 Bantry Bay 41 Bantu 106 Barbados 169 Barker, Ernest 206 Barker, W. H. 297

Baring-Gould, Revd S. 259, 262–3 Barlow, Sir Montague 317, 320, 323, 326, 329 Barrell, John 304–5 Bartholomew’s 226 Bateman, John 222–3 Bateman’s 261 Bath 76–7, 231 battleships 240 Beano, The 45 Beaverbrook, Lord, see Aitken, William Beckton 125 Becontree 346 Bedouins 163, 267 Beetle & Wedge 306 Belfast 41, 158, 186, 193, 286 Belgrano, the 88 Belvoir Castle 110 Benfield, Eric 259 Bengal 164, 166, 229 Benn, Tony 147 Bentham, Jeremy 30–1 Berkshire 110, 212–13, 259, 266, 296 Berlin, Irving 188 Berlin, Isaiah 188, 373 Bermondsey 215 Bethnal Green 168, 183 Betjeman, John 342 Beveridge, William 130, 317, 319 Bevin, Ernest 111, 130 Bezukhov, Pierre 373 Bible, King James 18 Biblical archaeology 261 Bidpai 296 Bihar 229 ‘Billy Welcome’ 311 Birmingham 115, 163, 306, 322 Bitter Cry of Outcast London, The 213 Blache, Vidal de la 237, 241, 271 black identities and representations 152–3, 165–6, 174, 180–2, 197 black London, English 352 Blackburn 165 Blackie, John Stuart 279 Blackpool 187 Blackstone, Sir William 26–7, 29, 30

index Blackwood’s Magazine 52, 207 Blasket Isles 275, 278 Blitz, The 125, 262, 314 Blue Banana, The 339 blues, music 189, 366, 370 Blunt, Sir Anthony 91–2 board schools 228, 306 Board of Trade 317–9, 326, 332 Boas, Franz 348 Boer War 63, 105 Bon, Gustave Le 294, 303 Book for Boys 175 Book of Common Prayer 109 Book of Martyrs 109 Booth, Charles 165, 213, 223, 230 Booth, William 168, 213–4 Border Country 363 Boroughbridge 16 boroughs, civic sense 226–7 Bosworth 16 Botany Bay 199 ‘bourgeois individualism’ 63, 289, 307–9 ‘bourgeois revolution’ 70–1, 76, 95–7 Bourne, George 219–20, 256, 263–4 Boy Scouts 163 Boyne 40, 284 boys 136–9 Bracton’s 15 Bradbury, Malcolm 147 Bradford 235 Bragg, Billy 369 branch plants 324, 328 Brand, John 249 Brandt, Bill 290 Brangwen, Tom 356 Braudel, Fernand 248 Brewer, John 131 Brief Encounter 82 Bright, John 108, 111, 257 Brighton 170 Britannia 239 British Americas 164 British Architects, The Royal Institute of 234 British army 46, 94, 98, 101, 127, 131–3, 158, 163–4, 188, 193, 226, 315

389

British attitudes to Americans 134, 144–5, 188–90, 220, 253, 306, 311, 338, 354, 368–70 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 59, 60–1, 64–5, 88, 128, 190, 232, 311, 356, 367 British Coal 355 British Expeditionary Force 124 British empire: administration 99–102, 104, 164; aims 380; attitudes 106, 138; English dominion 134; evaluation of other peoples 164–73; exhibitions 106; field of study 251; linked 58; loss 143–4, 354; and nationality 137; ‘People’s’ empire 135; size 99 British identity 42–9, 127, 130, 134–5, 144, 159, 276–8, 337, 377 British intelligence services 90–1, 173 British Leyland 155 British Muslims 151, 182 British republic, flag 38 British Steel 155, 327 British Way and Purpose 127 Britons 35, 39, 192 Brixton 213 Brodsworth 311–12 Brooke, Rupert 123 Brookhill Tavern 306 Brookhouse 186 Brown, R. N. Rudmose 208 Brunanburh 381 Brussels 340 Bryant, Arthur 219 Buchan, John 45, 212 Buckingham Palace 234 building societies 243 Bulldog 138 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 74, 78–9 Bunyan, John 256 Burgess, Guy 91–2 Burke, Edmund 26, 55–8, 80, 82, 127, 154, 337, 374 Burma 165 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 205 Burns, Robert 275, 370 ‘Bush’, The 267

390

index

business efficiency 319, 321, 324; failure 145–6; parks 346 Butterfield, Herbert 72 Cairo 182 Caine, Hall 287 Cairncross, Sir Alec 330 cake walk 306 Calico Act 48 Cambrian ‘Wall’ 275, 286 Cambridge 264 Cambridge University 91, 129, 358, 362, 363, 364, 366 Cambridge Urban History 346 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 91 Campbell, Alex 370 Canada 96, 100, 216, 267 Cannadine, David 215 Cape province 99 Cardiff 185, 196 Cardwell, Edward 226 Caribbean region 104, 105, 163, 170, 174, 181 Carlyle, Thomas 48, 97, 101, 135 carols 250 Carr E. H. 126 Carter, Paul 199 cartography 230, 237 Casterbridge 205 casualties, war 132–3 catallaxy 373 Catholic emancipation 41, 52, 96, 192, Cecil Sharp House 358 Celtic Cornish Society 279 Celtic Society 281 Celticism 275–88, 294 Celts 42, 94, 96, 97–8, 133, 168, 275–88 census 152, 230–1 Ceylon 170, 174 Chactonbury Ring 260 Chamberlain, Joseph 104, 135 Chancery 15 Chancery Standard 232 Channel ports 229, 239 Charity Organization Society 268 Charles I, king of England, Scotland,

Ireland 20, 25, 36, 37–8, 72 Charles II, king of England, Scotland, Ireland 38, 72 Charles Edward Stuart 44, 46–7, 75, 283 Chartists 30, 53, 111, 186, 224 Chatsworth 356 Cheltenham 355 Chesterfield, Lord, 4th earl 77 Chesterton, G. K. 188, 248–9, 289, 315 Chicago 208, 370 childhood 253 children’s learning 360–1; literature 254; play 215, 253, 345 cholera 230 chota-hazri 299 Christie, Agatha 84 Church of England 15, 36, 109; and Conservative party 110; 128; and ‘high’ church 250, 262 Church of Ireland 37, 42, 96 Church of Wales 280 churches, and Islam 182 Churchill, Winston Spencer 45, 124–5, 126–7, 188 cinema 59–60, 64, 106–7, 128–9, 328, 366 citizenship 43, 127–9, 160 City, The, of London 342–3 civil rights 366, 368 civil society 21–2, 379 civil wars 20, 37–9 Clapham, Sir John 360 Clare, John 221, 236 Clarendon Commission 122 Clark, Jonathan 146 class relations 127, 129, 190–1, 214, 220, 231, 269–72, 294, 344, 372 class struggle 111, 114, 117, 135, 147, 154, 165, 307, 313, 359–60, 362–3, 365 classical, music 61, 306 Clerk, Sir John 44 Clifton Hampden 305 climatic determinism 208 closure, ‘usurpationary’ and ‘exclusionary’ 165 Cnut, king of England 13 Coalfield Communities Campaign 355

index coalmines, and miners 32–3, 154–6, 163, 256, 263–4, 272, 312–14, 320, 347 coal strike (1984–5) 154–6, 185–6 Cobb, Mrs 169 Cobbett, William 27, 29–32, 221, 224 Cobden, Richard 137 Cocker, Jarvis 300 Cockney 165, 255, 262, 303, 329, 352 coherence, in nations 97, 218–19 Coke, Sir Edward 23–5 Cole, Margaret 247 Coleridge S. T. 61, 250 Colley, Linda 192 Collins, Michael 285 Colonial Office 170, 175 colour prejudice 138 Colson E. 348 Combination Acts 52 Come All Ye Bold Miners 368 commercial television 61 common culture 192–3, 306, 372, 374, 375–6 common law 13, 15, 16–7, 23–30, 30–3; and Africa 103; and community 374; and constitutional incorporation 56, 82; and lawyers 17, 23–5, 31, 43 Commons, House of 69, 87–8 Commonwealth 105, 164 Communist art 295 Communist Party of Great Britain 91, 175, 303, 364 communities 219, 224, 258, 314, 320, 329, 345, 346–7, 355; (catallaxic) 373; (left and right dispositions) 374–6; (organic) 359–61, 363 competitive advantage 324, 327, 330 ‘condition of England question’ 214, 304, 308, 359 congruity, between state and nation 194 Connemara 275 Connolly, Billy, his wellies 287 Conrad, Joseph 103, 247, 361 Conran, Terence 292 conscientious objectors (to war) 120–1 conservatism: adaptations 177–8; community 375–6; devolved know-

391

ledge 373–4, 379; ideological difficulties with cultural pluralism 153–4; intellectuals 374; landscape 221; use of Marxist concepts 154; Conservative governments: 317, 320, 330, 342, 376 Conservative party: 81, 91, 110, 126, 149; and devolution 196, 331; and land 205; and southern bias 328; and Mrs Thatcher 342 constables 23, 343 constitution: ‘asymmetrical’ growth 51; conservative defence 45–6, 52, 57; conventions 89–90, 178; dignified part 51–5, 71, 87, 378; efficient part 51, 53, 71, efficient secret 60; the Irish 97, and Northern Ireland 191–2, and Scotland and Wales 196–7; organic metaphor 71–3, 210–11, 310–1; the people 54–5, 56, 159; as a person 82; separation of powers 21; versatility 55, 204, 208–11, 235, and very existence of, 54, 57, 210–11 constitutionalism: 22, 54; Attlee 130; Churchill 126–7; crisis 134–5; metaphorical history 71–4; middleclass trust 80–6; model of progress 69, 74; suspicious of coercion 131; variable 73–4, 209–11; working-class versions 111, 257 contact zones 209–10 Cook, James 199 Cook, Thomas 110, 227 Cooperative movement 111, 188, 224 copyholders 32–3 core to periphery, journeys 266–71, 275–82; erosion, 333, 354–5; European, 338–40 Corinthian 233 Cork 35, 285 Cornwall 164, 251, 279 corresponding societies 111 corruption 330 Corsley 305 cosmopolitanism 214 cotton industry 112–13 Cotswolds 254, 293, 305, 314

392

index

cottagers 108, 112, 263, 293, 301 cottages 234, 243, 301 Council for Preservation of Rural England 350 council housing 243, 344–6 counties: revived 226; and mapped, 228 country and western, music 370 County Down 286 County Durham 163, 279, 349; and Development Plan 320–1 Coupland, Sir Reginald 72 Covenanters 38 Cowen, Joseph 257 Cowling, Maurice 366 Crane, Walter 224 Cranmer, Thomas 72 cricket 70–1, 83, 122–3, 374 criminal law 31 Crisis 52 critical and flight distance 130–2 Cromer, Lord 168 Cromwell, Oliver, General and Lord Protector 20–1, 38–9 Crosby, Bing 368 Crown colonies 93, 100, 104 Crown Film Unit 60, 129 Crown in Parliament 51, 53, 55, 75, 378 Crowns, union of 37 cruise missiles 185 Cullercoats 263 Culloden, battle 46, 281 cultural pluralism 150–3 cultural studies 353 Culture and Anarchy 283, 358–9 Culture and Environment 358 Culture and Society 363 cultures, high and low 371–6 Cumberland 37, 121, 279, Cunard Yanks 370 Cunningham, William 359–60 Cup Final 61 Curzon, George, 1st marquis 101 Cushendal jail 278 customs 23–30; 300–6: see also common law cycling 226, 264

Dail Eireann 285 Daily Express 63 Daily Mail 59, 81 Daily Mirror 59, 186 Daily News 117 Dalton, Hugh 319 Dalyell, Tam 88 dancing 189, 214 Dartmoor 259 Darwin, Charles 97, 135, 245, 246, 251 Davenport’s 306 Davies, Sir John 24–5 Davies, Maud 305 deaf people 233 decentred society 149, 352–4 Declaration of Rights 22 Declaratory Act 40 decline, sense of 143, 145–7, 192, 213–19, 326 decommissioning 195 Dee, River 110 Defoe, Daniel 48 degeneration 216–19 Delhi 168, 169, 170 democracy 168, 200 Department of Economic Affairs 325 depressions: agricultural 236; 1870s–1890s 215–17; 1920s–1930s 313, 316–17, 327, 337, 359 Derbyshire 235, 256 dereliction 320–2 Descent of Man 97 Design Council, and Centre 292 development areas 322, 331 devolution 95, 192, 331, 333, 378–9 Devon 110, 246, 255, 263, 304 Devonshire, 6th Duke 242 dialects 232–3; poetry 250 Diana, princess of Wales 378 diarrhoea 306 Dicey, A. V. 53, 72, 89 Dickens, Charles 30 Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English 250 Die Geskiedenis van ous Land in die Taal van ous Volk 105

index Dilke, Sir Charles 135 directories 227–8 Disraeli, Benjamin 167, 205 Distribution of Industry Acts 317, 327 division of labour 112–15, 350–1, 360, 367 divorce 350–1 Docklands 332 documentaries 60, 128 dominions 93, 96, 99–100 Donnellan, Philip 128 Dorrington Committee 229 Dorset 108, 259, 260 Dover Straits 239 Dublin 35, 36, 40, 41, 94, 157, 158 Dundee 45, 284 Dunkeld 75 Durham 250 Durham report 99 Durkheim, Émile 247, 379 Dusty Road Ramblers, The 370 Dyer, Revd T. F. Thiselton 271 Dylan, Bob 370–1 Easington 349 East Anglia 110 East End, London 117, 125, 168, 183, 213–14, 230, 262, 271, 305, 314, 346, 367 East Fife 45 East Hendred 296 East India Company 100, 102, 170 East Kent 236 East Mersea 263 Eastbourne 349 Easter Rising 94, 286 Ebbsfleet 261 Economic and Social Research Council 351 economic thinking 321, 325–6 economists 21–2, 217, 257, 327, 328, 340 Eden, Sir Anthony 88 Edinburgh 48, 196, 279 Edinburgh Review 45 Edinburgh University 283 Edward, Saxon king of England 35 Edwards, I, II, III, kings of England 16, 19, 36, 41

393

Egdon Heath 304–5 Eisteddfod 280, 282 Eliot, George 256, 361 Eliot, T. S. 247, 296, 371–2 Elizabeth I, queen of England 32, 36, 37, 228 Elizabeth II, queen of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 92 Ellis, Alexander 254 emasculation 337 emigration 216 Eminent Victorians 310 emparking 235 Empire Marketing Board 60 enclosure: 16th century 19; 18th and 19th century 219–20, 230, 298 England: and Britain 338, 340, 354; flexible 26–7, 73, 209–11, 235, 377; hard and soft 203–4, 219, 377–8; history and interpretation 265, 300–4, 364–5, 367, 379–80; London 329–30, 332; nature and origin 218–19, 235, 241–2; 254, 288, 299, 337; north 122, 187, 207, 255–6; ‘profond’ 260; secrets 253, 365; south 35, 113, 232, 241–2, 259–62, 339; north–south contrasts 261, 266, 296, 302, 323, 327–8, 330–3, 341–2, 349–50, 356, 366; wholeness 270–1, 353–5, 380; as a work of art 64, 236 ‘England My England’ 256 English: architecture 233–5, 292; authority 85, 248, 270; bands 306; carols 250; children 360–2; church 14, 16, 18, 151; citizenship 230; civil servants 83; climate 207–9; clubs 84; collective memory 294, 303–4, 354, 360, 365; common people 306–11, 358–9, 365; cookery 292–3; costume 305, 310; craftsmen 252, 260, 266, 291–2, 305, 360; cricket 70–1, 83, 122–3, 307, 309, 356; customs 23–30, 300–6, 309; dancing 70, 189, 214, 221, 293–4, 298, 303, 306; Dialect Dictionary 254; Dialect Society 254; dialects 232–3, 250, 290–1, 302, 352; faces 83, 356;

394

index

English (cont.): flowers 292, 316; folk 214, 219, 248, 253, 281, 294, and the masses 302–3, 359–62; Folk Cookery Association 292–3; Folk Dance Society 293; folk song 294, 298, 306; Folk Lore Society 246, 262; Folk Song and Dance Society 279, 306; Folk Song Society 250, 253, 306, 369; food 298–9, 302, 305, 350; gardens 206, 292; gendered 167; geography 207, 237; humour 85; icons 162–3, 295–6, 315; means of identity 17–19, 260–1; independent 33, 196–7; ironic 83, 315; land 224, 291, 314, 337, 350; landscape 83, 204, 221, 235–6, 242, 263, 290, 296, 302, 340, 341, 350; language 286–7, 290–1, 351–2, 360–1; liberty 86, 223, 297; literature 83, 308, 358, 361; maps 338–40; materials 291–3, 296; morals 214–15, 356; music 308, 368, 370–1; nation 51, 64–5; natives (cultural survivals) 248–51, 258–64, 269–72, 301–4, 359, 362; painting 82–3, 235, 240, 265; peasants 219, 248, 253, 256, 295, 310; personality 235–8, 252, 254, 272, 276, 353–4; place to be 125, 251, 266, 272; properties 290–4, 300, 305, 306–8, 337, 347–9, 353, 374; pubs 305–6; race 133–6, 176, 239, 303–4; radicals 30, 33; regions 197, 218–9, 237–8, 260–1, 316–33, 340; reliability 168; revolutionary 129–30; Roman and Greek character 203; sailors 252, 272, 367; slang 298; speech 232, 250, 298, 311, 352, 367; spirit 203–4, 218–9, 365; sport 83, 307; stage 239; suburbs 218; talkers 249, 252, 255–6, 268, 296, 302, 310, 367; Tourist Board 357; trees 206–7; (true) people 134, 219, 252, 257, 272, 309, 356, 359, 365, 368; underground 365, 379; villages 29, 221–2, 235, 252, 293, 297, 302, 305; weather 209 English/British state: centralization 86–92, 158, 196–9, 320, 378–9; ethical community 353–4; finance 23, 131; gender 115, 118, 123; identity 191–2;

legitimacy 156; media 65, 88; nation 20–1, 64, 86, 112, 124–30, 180, 199–200, 377; organic 211; regions 225–33, 325–8, 330–2, 348–9; sovereignty 145, 147–8; Union 35, 41–3, 193, 377 English, Barbara 223 English Folk Lore 271 English Heritage Series 316 English People, The 310 engraving 58, 228 Epping Forest 262 Eriksay 49 Essex 263, 271, 329 ‘Establishment’, The 85 ethnographic time 261 ethnography 245–7, 280–1 ethnology 248, 268, 358, 364 European Economic Community 338–40, 354 European economic reconfigurations 333, 339–40, 354 European exchange rate mechanism 354–5 European Union 354 evacuation 314, 337 evacuees 347 Evans, Estyn 276, 286–7 evolution 246 Exmoor 293 Expansion of England, The 134 Fabians 90, 305, 317 factor advantage 318, 324 factories 215–16, 256, 344 Falklands campaign 88, 148 ‘false consciousness’ 112 families 184–5, 186, 351 ‘Fancy’, The 307 farm subsidies 349–50 Farnham 219 fascism 135–6, 295, 303–4 fashion 79, 85 Fawcett, C. B. 241, 261 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett 118, 183 Fawlty, Basil 85 federalism 95–6 fellahin 267

index fellwalking 264 Female Eunoch, The 185 femininity 123, 255–6 feminists 183 Fenian Brotherhood 94, 95, 282 Ferguson, Adam 48 Fermanagh, South 157 fertility 116, 120, 351 Film Censors, Board of 60 financial institutions 324–5, 328, 330, 342–3 Fires Were Started 129 fish and chips 328 fishermen 272 Fitzgerald, Admiral Penrose 121 Flanagan & Allen 129 Flanders 124, 170 Fleure, H. J. 241, 286 flight, and critical, distance 131, 137 flintworkers 252 Flodden 36 Flynn, Errol 357 folk: art 252; curriculum 362; dance 247, 259; music 61, 189, 247, 258, 262, 366–7; revivals 367–8 Folkestone 127 folklorists 246, 250, 262, 268–9, 359; and interpreters 300–4, 308; and modernists 290 football 71, 121, 122, 306 Ford, John 114 Forster, E. M. 247, 260 Forsyte, Jolyon 81 Four Quartets 296 Fox, Cyril 238 Foxe, John 109 franchise 51–2, 69, 72–3, 110–11, 115–16, 118–20, 183, 187 Francis, Dai 278 Frazer, Sir James 247 free trade 145, 170 freeborn 18, 21, 22–3, 33, 186, 365, 377 Freeman, E. A. 70, 73, 84 French geography 241, 248, 271, 276 Freud, Sigmund 247, 294 Froude, J. A. 70, 255

395

Fry, C. B. 122–3 Fukuyama, F. 148 functionalism 348 Gaeltacht, The 278 Galloway 212 Gandhi, M. K. 175 Gardiner, Rolf 308 Geddes, Sir Patrick 241 generations 346 gentleman: amateur tradition 78; binds society together 77, 379; business 145–6; estate 204–5; ethic 176–9, 197, 307; fame 71; land 222–3, 242; moral lead 74–9, 176–7; performance 83; sporting 121–2, 204, 307; virtues 69, 82–3 gentlemanliness 42, 77 Gentleman’s Magazine 301 geographical determinism 209–11 geographical region 333, 340 geology 255 George I, king of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 42, 283 George IV, king of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland 53 George V, king of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of India 55, 135 George, Sir Ernest 234 George, Henry 212 Georgeham 269 Glamorgan 313 Glanvill’s 15 Glorious Revolution 39, 69, 71–2, 73, 75, 100, 134 Gluckman, M. 348 Goa 297 Golden Bough, The 247 Gomme, Alice Bertha 253 Gomme, George Laurence 246, 248, 251, 259, 297, 301 Gordon, Anna 281 Gorsedd 280 Gorseth Kernow 279 gospel, music 189, 370

396

index

gothic 233 Grainger, Percy 255, 269 Grattan, Henry 40 Graves, Robert 247 Gray, John 374–5 ‘Great Tradition’: in folk music 368, in learning 366; in literature 361 Greater London 339 Greenham Common 185 Grimethorpe 186 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 321, 326, 332, 339 Guthrie, Woody 370 gwerin 278 ‘Habitat’ 292 Haiti 104 Haldane, Richard 226 Hale, Sir Matthew 25–6 Hales, John 19 Halifax, Lord 126 Hammonds, John and Barbara 29, 220–1, 360, 365 Hampshire 110 Hampstead 213 Hancock, Tony 85 Hannay, Richard 212 Hanoverians 22, 39, 45, 46, 75 Harcourt, Sir William 118 Hardie, James Keir 111 Hardwick Hall 235 Hardy, Thomas 206, 207, 266, 304–5 Harmsworth, Alfred, Lord Northcliffe 59, 63 Harold, earl of Wessex, king of England 35 Harrison, Tom 269 Harrow school 172 Hartland, Edwin 246–7 ‘Have A Go’ 311 Hawnaway 277 Hayek, Friedrich 373 Heaney, Seamus 287 Heart of Darkness 103 heartland thesis 239 Heath, F. G. 305

‘Hebraism’ 167–8, 171 Hebrides 279 Hegelian 204 Hejaz desert 163, 171, 267, 277 ‘Hellenism’ 167–8 Helpstone 236 Henry II, king of England 16–17 Henry III, king of England 16 Henry VII, king of England 16 Henry VIII, king of England, and Ireland 37, 72 Herbert, Col. Kenny 299 Herbertson, A. J. 241 Herzl, Theodore 170 Hesketh, Lord 177 Hewins, W. A. S. 260 ‘Hibernia’, Miss 280 hierarchical relations 149; texts 233 Higgins, Henry 232 high accessibility corridors 339 higher education 366 Highlands and Islands 37, 42: armies 46; clearances 277; farming 280; history 47; holidays 357; literature and language 279; mapping 229; myth 276–8, 281; porrage 310 Highland Society 281 hikers 206, 230, 236, 262, 263, 264 Hill, Octavia 268 Himalayas 164 Hinckley 301 Hindi 169 Hindle Wakes 113 Hindu 296 Hints to Travellers 237 History of British India 173 History Man 147 History of Modern Taste in Gardening 205 History profession 146 History Workshop 367 Hobbes, Thomas 375 Hobbs, Jack 309 Hobden the Hedger 254 Hobhouse, L. T. 97, 204 Hobsbawm, E. J. 148

index Hobson, J. A. 62, 63, 99, 216 ‘Hodge’ 114, 295, 310, 313 Hodge and His Masters 304 Hogg, Quintin 81, 159 Hoggart, Richard 127, 190, 311, 362–6, 375 hokey-cokey 306 Holdenby, C. 252, 263 Holne 246 Home Counties 356 Home Guard 125 Home Office 180 home rule 94–6 homosexuality 78, 123 Honest to God 150 Hood, Robin 357 Hoskins, W. G. 220 House of Commons 14, 15–16, 19, 20, 26, 51–2, 55, 69, 71, 100 House of Lords 15–16, 51–2, 134, 259 housing 213–14, 218, 227, 343–6, 350 Howard, Trevor 82 Hull, Eleanor 303 human nature 353, 374 Hume, David 41, 48 Hunslet 364, 375 Hunt, Henry 111 Hunting of the Snark, The 55 Hutton Will 325 Hymns Ancient and Modern 189 Hyndman, H. M. 111 imagined community 58, 60–1, 193, 228–9 immigration 137–9, 151–3, 159, 170, 173–4 immigration policy 160–1 In Search of England 265–6 ‘In Town Tonight’ 61 India 93, 99; administration 102–3, 164; anthropological models 101–2; conquest 132; folk song 268; gender 166–7; Mutiny 101, 166–7; peasantry 173, 175–6, 297; scholarship 173, and state 164 India We Served, The 101, 162 Indian Army Corps 169 Industrial Revolution 113; last battle 156; failure 215–17, 219–20; England 241–2,

397

301, 333; heartland 163; landscape 350; study of 359–60; women 186 Industrial Transference Board 314, 316 Industry Act 327 Ine, English king 14 Influences of Geographic Environment 209 information technology 343, 351 instinctualism 250, 276, 300, 313 intelligence 229, 265, 268–9, 302–4, 343, 372–3 intelligentsia 112, 375–6 interactionism 180–2 International, Second 303 Inuit 100 Inverness 46 Ireland: Catholics 34, 36, 38 40; emigration 95, 284–5; kingdoms 35–7, 93; famine 95, 159, 284; land 95–6; mapped 229; survey 229; western parts 238, 275–6, 284 Irish–American points of view 281 Irish Free State 34, 98 Irish, gift for words 287 Irish national identity 34, 40, 43, 93–9, 192, 284–5 Irish nationalists and revolutionaries 41, 94, 186, 278, 285–7 Irish, rational qualities 285 Irish Republic 193 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 158–9, 192, 193–4 Irish statehood 40–1, 93, 97, 98–9, 157–8 Islam 151 islands 131, 239 Israel 172 ‘It’s That Man Again’ (ITMA) 128 Jack Tar 239–40, 309 Jacobins 28 Jacobites 39, 42, 46–7, 49, 75, 283 Jacobs, Joseph 297 Jamaica 99, 101, 135, 169, 268, 352 James I, king of England (James VI, king of Scotland) 15, 34, 37

398 James II, king of England, Scotland, Ireland 40, 72 Jarrow 313 Jatakas 296 jazz 189, 303, 306, 370 Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard 344 Jefferies, Richard 295, 304 Jekyll, Gertrude 292 Jekyll, and Hyde 251 Jenner, Henry 279 Jennings, Humphrey 129 Jennings, Sir Ivor 57 Jeparit 267 Jerusalem 109 Jesus College, Oxford 37 Jewish identity 165, 167–8, 174, 212–13, 284–5 jive 189 Joad, C. E. M. 208, 302 John, king of England 15 Johnson, Nevil 154 Johnson, Paul 154 Johnson, Dr Samuel’s dictionary 232 Jolson, Al 188 Jones, A. C. 175 Jordania (Trans) 171 Journal of Ethnological Society 246 Joyce, Patrick 257 Joyce, T. A. 247 Joyce, William 311 Judenstaat, Der 170 judges 23, 25–6 judicial review 196 ‘Just So’ stories 297 justices of the peace 30, 31–2 justiciars 17 Jutland 132 juvenile delinquency 190 Karpeles, Maud 258 Kaunda, Kenneth 175 Kay-Shuttleworth, J. 71–2 Keal, Minna 261 Keats, John 112 Kennedy, Douglas 259 Kennedy-Fraser, Mrs 278

index Kent 110, 169, 212, 213, 229, 314 Kentucky 238 Kenya 173 Kerry 275 Keswick 270 Kew Gardens 164 Keynes, John Maynard 130, 319–20 Killiecrankie 75 Kilmainham jail 278 Kim 168 Kipling, Rudyard 84, 168, 169, 205, 225, 240–1, 254, 261, 267, 297 Kirkby 370 Kodak 81 Kololo 348–9 Kuru Kshetra 169 labour 112; surplus 316–17; mobility 319, 324; market 351 Labour governments 11, 128, 130: and countryside 236; development 322; immigration 160; nationalization 372; planning 316 labour movement 110–11: and adult education 366; class 188; collectivism 155; Englishness 257; inferiority complex 130; modernity 313; organization 341 Labour party 91, 111, 117, 126, 149, 187, 188; and devolution 196; Irish 285; regions 331 Lake District 206, 261 ‘Lambeth Walk’ 298 Lancashire 113, 163, 271, 341 Lancet, The 342 land use 318 landedness 204–5, 220, 222–3 landlessness 220–2, 224, 359–60 Lang, Andrew 246 Langport 38 larch 207 Larcom, Lt Thomas 229 Larkin, Philip 296 Laski, Harold 329 Laurel County 258 Law of the Constitution 89

index Lawrence, D. H. 247, 256, 308–9, 361 Lawrence, Stephen 180 Lawrence, T. E. 123, 163, 171, 267 Lawrence, Walter 162 Leavis, F. R. 62, 256, 358–61, 371, 372 Leavis, Q. D. 358 Leeds 163 Left Book Club 127 Leicester 110, 152 Leicester, Guide To 227 Leicester City F.C. 306 Leicester University 362 Leigh, Margaret 279 Leninism 148 leprechauns 281 Letchworth 169, 235 Lew Trenchard 263 Lewes 16 Lewis 81 Lewis, C. S. 208 Lewis, John Saunders 286 liberalism 69–71, 137: greatest possibilities 129–30; and Ireland 96–8; opposition to 134–5, 153; populism 111; in South Africa 105; survival of 125 Liberals 44, 45, 62, 88, 94, 117–8 liberties, British 22, 28; English 70–1; gardens 204–5; personal 149–50, 154; post-1945 84–5, 143 ‘life’ 360, 362, 371–2; and ‘actuality’ 367–8; and ‘experience’ 365; and ‘lived experience’ 367; and ‘vigour’ 367 Life Peerage Act 177 Light, Alison 183, 310 Lille 339 Limehouse 125 limited liability 217 Lincoln Cathedral 235 Lincolns Inn 175 Lindsay, A. D. 127 Lion and the Unicorn, The 129 Listen To Britain 129 ‘literariness’ 61, 234, 270, 308, 358, 362, 367 Littlewood, Joan 367, 368 Liverpool 164, 284, 286 living standards 143–4

399

Livingstone, David 45 Lloyd, Bert 368 Lloyd, Marie 262 ‘Lob’ 256 local government 226, 344, 347 Local Employment Act 325 local history 228 Logan, James 281 London 35, 37, 44, 63, 125, 200, 213–17, 234, 242, 259, 262, 285, 311, 312, 329–32 London English 352 London Jamaican 352 London News 97 Longnon, Auguste 241 Longue duree 248 Look Back In Anger 85 Lord Snooty 45 lords lieutenant 23 Lore and Language of Schoolchildren 253 ‘lost generation’ 315 Loudon, J. C. 205 Loveless, George 108, 110, 169 Lowry, L. S. 302, 341 Lozi 348 Luccombe 293 ludo 297 Lugard, Frederick 104 ‘lumpen’ class 165 Lutyens, Edward 169, 234, 292 Maastricht 354 Macaulay, T. B. 48, 70, 251 Maclean, Donald 91 MacColl, Ewan 367, 368, 370–1 MacCormick,Donald 278 McCowan, Mr Justice 88–9 MacDonagh, Thomas 286 MacDonald, Malcolm 172 MacGregor, Alasdair Alpin 277 MacGregor, Ian 155 McGuinness, Martin 194 McKibbin, Ross 187 MacKinder, Halford 238–9, 255 MacKintosh, Charles Rennie 287, 292 Macmillan, Harold 328 Macpherson, James 280

400

index

MacPherson, John 277 Madge, Charles 269 Madina 182 magistrates, see justices of the peace Magna Carta 15–6, 18, 25, 53–5, 72 Mahabharata 169, 267 Maharajah Ranjit Singh 166 Maine, Sir Henry 297 Mais, S. P. B. 60, 260 Maitland, J. W. 73–4 Major, John 191 Making of the English Working Class, The 364–5 Malinowsky, Bronislaw 247, 348 Malthusian 231 Malvern Hills 206 ‘man in the street’ 217 Man, Isle of 279, 287–8 managerialism 178 Manchester 170, 264, 284 manliness 77, 121–2, 123, 166–7, 171, 177–8, 187 Mannoni, O. 348 manors 18, 33 Mansfield, first earl 23–4 manual work 190 manufacturing 324–5, 326–7, 332 Maoris 100 mapping 199, 226, 228–30, 338–40 Marathas 166 markets 29, 112–13, 147, 307, 318, 326, 341–2, 355, 363, 373 Marmite 81 Marple, Miss 84 Marrett R. R. 247 Marston Moor 38 Marwick, Arthur 146 Marx, Karl 52, 61, 165, 190, 251 Marxism 111, 112, 146, 148, 154, 187, 247, 278, 362, 364, 368, 375 Mary, Queen of Scots 36 Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) 71 Masefield, John 240 mass communications 65, 152, 253, 351–2, 358–9 Mass Observation 64, 129, 269

masses 50, 51, 58–9, 61–2, 64–5, 302–4, 306–10, 358, 361–2 Massingham, H. J. 263, 296 Maude, Angus 81 Maurier, Daphne Du 279 May day festivals 246,303 Mayer, Colin 325 Mearns, Andrew 213 measurement 228, 363 Mee, Arthur 175 Melbourne 267 Members of Parliament (MPs) 87–8 Menzies, Sir Robert 267 Mercator’s projection 238 Metaphysical Theory of the State, The 204 Methodists 109, 111, 341 Metropolitan Police 180 MI6 92; MI5 88, 91 middle classes 70–1, 80–6; crisis 214–15; Home Counties 261; housing 218, 243, 316, 342; Lawrence, D. H. 308–9; lifestyle 212–3; modesty 315–16; political thought 307–11; security 341–2; snobbery 309–11, 364; travel 264; women 117–18, 119–20; work 190 Middlemas, Keith 154 Middlesborough 261 Midhurst Common 263 Mill, James 48, 173 Mill, John Stuart 48, 62, 86–7, 96–7, 101, 120 Milton, John 20 Milwall 125 Miners Federation of Great Britain 114 mining districts 313 Ministry of Information 128 Mississippi 370 Mitchell, J. T. W. 111 Mitchell and Butler’s 306 mobs 22, 62, 205 modern: art 214, 320; capitalism 360; disciplines 261; Englishness 316; geography 237–8; town centre 344 modernity 62, 69–70, 200, 214, 234, 248, 279, 288, 292

index mods 166, 366 monetary union 147 Montesquieu, Comte de 21, 207 Montessori school 173 Monthly Magazine 249 Monty Python 85–6 More Odd Corners in English Lakeland 270 More, Thomas 15 Morganwg, Iolo 44 Morley, Henry 290–1 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 308 Morris dancing 221, 293, 298, 303 Morris, William 234 Morton, H. V. 265–6 Mosley, Sir Oswald 135, 299 ‘Mother India’ 175 motorways 339 Moulsford 305 mountain climbing 264 Moyne committee 60 Muker 293 multiculturalism 143, 151–3, 160, 180 multiple centrisms 180–1, 379 mumming 221 Murray, Gilbert 203 museums 227, 247, 304, 348 music halls 215 Muslims 166 Mysterious Affair at Styles 84 Namier, Sir Lewis 146, 172, 175 naming 230–3, 242 Narnia 208 Naseby 38 Nash, Beau 76 Natal 99 National Biography, Dictionary of 233 National Coal Board 155, 317, 319, 327 National Enterprise Board 327, 331 National Front 139 National Insurance 328 National Investment Board 319 National Lottery 356 National Miners’ Union 226 National Park 211

401

National Plan 325 National Trust 242, 356 National Union of Mineworkers 91, 155–6 National Union of Seamen 91 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 118–19 nationalism 288, 290, 295–6, 302 Nationality Acts 137, 160, 161 nations 50, 56, 289, 307–8, 348 naturalization 159 Navigation Acts 47 Ndbele 104 Neale, J. M. 250 ‘negroes’ 83, 303, 348 Nelson, Admiral Horatio 240 neurotics 247 Neville, Charles 213 New Left 148, 364, 366 New South Wales 100 ‘New town’ type 214–5 ‘New town Blues’ 347 New Towns Act 317 ‘new woman’ 115, 123 New York 188, 192–3 New York Times 371 New Zealand 99, 100, 122, 267 Newbolt, Sir Henry 240 Newcastle Philosophical Society 224 Newcastle Society of Antiquaries 250 Newcastle upon Tyne 257 Newlyn 263, 279, 292 Newman, John Henry 61 newspapers 58–9, 60, 62–4 Newton, E. 234 Nicolson, Harold 204 Nineteen Eighty Four 249 Nisbet, Robert 146 Nkrumah, Kwame 175 Nolan, Lord 178–9, 197 nonconformity 110 Norfolk 112, 229 Normans 14, 35 North East Development Council 322–3 Northcliffe, Lord, see Alfred Harmsworth

402

index

Northern Industrial Group 319 Northern Ireland 98–9, 156–8, 194–5, 286–7 Northumberland 37, 251, 259, 279 Northumbria 18–9, 35, 42, 357, 380 Notes Towards a Definition of Culture 371 Nottingham 322 Nottinghamshire 156, 256, 357 Nova Scotia 99 Nyasaland 348 O’ Connor, Feargus 111 O’Neil, Henry Nelson 103 Oak, Gabriel 207 oak trees 206–7 Oakeshott, Michael 374, 378 Observer, The 92 Observer Corps 125 Offa, English king 14 Official Secrets Act 88–9 ‘Old Corruption’ 32 Old Norse 254 Oldham 349 Ollerton 186 On Liberty 86 Onllwyn Miners’ Hall 278 Oor Wullie 45 ‘open plan’ 149 Opie, Iona and Peter 253 oral transmission: of customs 301, 365; of law 25–6; left interpretations 303, 365–8 Orange Order, The 192, 284 Order of the White Feather 121 Ordnance Survey 229–30 organic farming 350 organic metaphor: for constitution 71–2; and people 206 Orient 83, 167,170 Orwell, George 83, 124, 129–30, 165, 167, 208, 211, 249, 310, 328–9, 357, 381 Osborne, John 85 Osler, C. A. 115 ‘Ossian’ 280–1 Our Own Lands 208 Outer Hebrides 277 ‘Oxbridge’ 85, 90, 172, 283

Oxford 38, 267, 349 Oxford English Dictionary 233 Oxford, Provisions of 16 Oxford University 123, 167, 169, 235, 255, 271, 280 Oxfordshire 216 ‘Paddies’ 97, 280, 287 Paine, Thomas 27, 55–8, 76, 111, 127 ‘Paki-bashing’ 165 Pakistan 166 palais glide 306 Palatine, of Durham 32 Palestine 163, 170–3, 266 Palmer, W. T. 270 Panchatantra 297 Pandy 363, 375 Pankhurst: Emmeline, Christabel, Sylvia, and Adela Mary 118–20 ‘parasitism’ 216 Paris 303, 370 parishes 18, 23, 28, 225, 360 Parker, Charles 367 Parliament: authoritarianism 86; authority 16–23; Bagehot 51–5; conflict with king 24–5; control 65; and freedoms 131; as a natural force 72; moral standards 178–9; recognition 16 Parnell, Charles Stewart 96, 280 Parry, Sir Hubert 247, 369 passports 159 Pathan 170 patronage 31 Peacehaven 213 Peake, William 284 peasants 219, (yeomen) 222, 252; in art 290 Pease, Edward 90 Penguin Books 81, 127 Penny Magazine 52 Penyberth 286 People’s Budget 134 People’s History 367 People’s War 124–30, 311, 314, 316 ‘performativity’ 181 Pevensey Bay 261 Pevsner, N. 235

index Philby, Kim 91 photography 228, 240–1, 302 photojournalism 58, 59 Pickard, Ben 226 Pickles, Wilfred 311 Picts 35 Piltdown Man 255 Pitt, William, younger 41 Plaid Cymru 286 Plain Tales from the Hills 267 planning 316–19 Planning and Land Act 332 plantations 37, 163 Player’s 310 Plumb, J. H. 146 pluralism 379–80 poaching 223 poetry 276, 311 Poirot, Hercule 84 Polesworth 301 Pollock, Sir Frederick 29 pollution 211, 262; moral health 364; public health 343 Polytechnic, South West London 293 Ponting, Clive 88–9 Poole harbour 163 Poor Law 225, 308, 322, 360 poor people 165, 256, 259, 268, 307–8; 328–9, 349, 372; Irish 284–5; rural 248, 302, 305 popular music 154, 369–71 population 230–1; Irish-born 284; Royal Commission 236, 317–18 Porter, Jimmy 85–6 Porter, Michael 325 positivism 269 post-industrial 332 post-modern 353 postcards 187 potatoes 219 potters 252, 291 Pound, Ezra 247 pound sterling 354 poverty 150, 213–14, 257, 328–9 Powell, Enoch 72, 95, 135, 139 Powell, Robert Baden 163

403

Poyning’s Law 40 practical criticism 361 Pre-Raphaelite 173 Presbyterians 37–8, 40 Presley, Elvis 370 Press, Royal Commission 64–5 Preston, Iris 186 Pretty Nancy of Yarmouth 258 Price, Alan 312 Price, Matthew 363 price mechanism 363 Priestley, J. B. 125, 206 Prime Minister, office of 87 primitive 349 printing 58 private ownership of land 223–4 privatization 333 Privy Council 15 productivity 319 professional cricketers 71 Profumo, John 178 progress, idea of 69–74, 90–1, 112, 218–19; Africa 104–5; USA 145; Commonwealth 137; dual view 219; lost idea 143–9; Marxists 146–7; pain for 97; return of 126; women and 118 Pronunciation of English 232 Protestantism 18, 337 Proud Valley, The 114 ‘provincial’ 249 Psychologie de la colonization 348 psychology 64–5, 135, 247, 330, 348 public life 178 public schools 77–8, 85, 122, 232, 315 public sector 150 Puck of Pook’s Hill 254 Pugh, Simon 205 Pugin, A. W. 234 Punch 114, 123 Punjab 164, 296, 297 punk rock 166, 369 Purbeck Hills 259, 260 puritans 38, 167 Putney Debates 224 pygmies 135 Pym, Barbara 342

404

index

‘quashies’ 97 Queen Anne, style 233 queueing 130 race: Anglo-Celt 181, 280; biological category 151; collective memory 303–4; imperial concept 100–1; interchangeable with ‘culture’ 151, 246; records 370 Race Relations Act 151, 152 race rhetoric 135, 143 race struggle 135, 138–9 racial attacks 179–80 Racial Equality Commission 380 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 348 radical press 257 radio 59 ‘Radio Ballads’, The 367 Rainbow, The 356 Raj, The 102–3,166–7, 173, 175 Rajputs 166 Rastafarians 166 Ratzel, Friedrich 209 ‘real world’ 353, 373 received pronunciation 232, 254 Redesdale 259 Redmond, John 96 Reform Acts 120, 154 Reformation 36–7, 44, 151 reggae 165 Regional Development Associations 197 Regional Employment Premium 327, 331 regionalism 241, 316, 323, 333 regional policy: 312–14, 332–3; planning 316–23; inducements 326–7; infrastructure 330 regions 17, 197, 241–2, 251, 255, 333 Registrar General 230–1 Reith, Sir John 59, 319 Remembrance Sunday 356 Renaissance style 233 Renier, G. J. 82–4, 310 Representative Government 96–7 Repton 123 Repton, Humphrey 205 republic 20–1, 38–9 Republican Brotherhood 94

Republican News 158 ‘residuum’ 165 Return of Owners of Land 222–3 Rhodesia 104, 348 rhododendrons 164 Rhondda 313 ribbon development 236 Riyadh 182 Road Beautifying Association 302 roads 230 Robbins Report 366 Robert, of Gloucester 18 Robinson, Bishop John 150 rock and roll 189, 366, 370 Rodger, Richard 318 Rolling Stones, The 370 Roman Wall 261 Romanesque style 233 romantics 61–2, 250, 260 Rosebery, 5th earl 118 Ross, Lt-Gov. Robert 208 Rotherhithe 125 Rowbotham, Sheila 271 Royal Academy 263 Royal Artillery College 238 Royal Geographical Society 237 Royal Institute of International Affairs 62–3 Royal Navy 130–2, 144, 239–40 Royal Niger Company 104 Royal prerogative 75, 91 Royal Ulster Constabulary 158 rugby football 122 Runciman, Alexander 281 ruralism 302, 350 Rushdie, Salman 180 Ruskin, John 48, 83, 175, 234–6, 237 Ruskin College, Oxford 185, 367 Russophobia 208 Rutherford, Frank 253 Sadler, Michael 203 Said, Edward 192 St George 38 St Ives 279 St Just and St Anthony in Roseland 266

index Salford 370 Salisbury, 3rd marquis 54–5, 86 Salisbury Review 154 Salvation Army 168, 213 Sanders of the River 106 Sandringham 112 Sands, Bobby 157 Sandys, William 250 Saro Yaruba Methodists 104 Satyagraha 175 Sauda 170 Saxon kingdoms 13–4, 20, 25, 35, 377 Scarman, Lord 152 science fiction 251 Scotland 35, 42, 195, 213, 249, 276 Scots 35 Scott, Sir George Gilbert 234 Scott, Sir Walter 47–8, 235, 251, 357; memorial 45 Scottish: Catholics 36; folk 281, 287; history 47; identity 39, 42–3, 44–5, 251, 277, 281; intellectuals 47–8; nationality 34, 283; Protestants 36; statehood 39, 42–3, 46, 49, 287; Union 41–3, 44–5, 47–9, 281–3; working class 45 Scrutiny 361 sea, as territory 239 Sea Maiden Story 297 Seabrook, Jeremy 149 seafarers 272 seaside 187 secrecy 82–3, 84, 86–92 Seeger, Peggy and Pete 367–9 Seeley, Sir John 134, 238 self-determinism 358–9 Sellar and Yeatman 148–9 semi-detached houses 243, 316 semiotics 353 Semple, Ellen 209–10, 238 Senanayake, D. S. 174 Senegal 348 settlement, post 1945 147, 155–6, 354 Seven Pillars of Wisdom 267 sewing machines 79 Sex Pistols, The 369 sexual division of labour 117, 341, 351

405

sexual scandals 178 Shaftesbury, Lord 215 Shakespeare, William 291, 315, 316 shanties 252 shares, in companies 343 Sharp, Cecil 247, 258–9, 281, 303, 306 Sharpville 105 Shaw, R. N. 234 Shears, W. S. 72, 310 Shell Guide to England 211, 356 Shell petrol 302 Shelley: Mary and Percy 250 Shepherd’s Bush 285 Shetlands 264 Shona 104 Shoreditch 231 Sierra Leone 104 signing, on the hands 233 Sikes, Wirt 278 Sikhs 166 Sinatra, Frank 368 Singapore 132 Singing Island, The 368 Sinn Fein 157, 192, 194 Sissinghurst 204 Skeat, W. W. 291 skinheads 166 slate quarries 252 slavery 104, 163–4, 208 slums 344, 346 Smiles, Samuel 109 Smith, Adam 48, 112, 283 Smith, Winston 249 Smollett, Tobias 76 Smuts, Jan Christian 163 Snagge, John 311 Snell, K. D. M. 221 Snow, John 230 Snowdon 230 social: class 150, 230–1; context 217; cost 221; discipline 154–5; science 353; space 150, 230–1, 234; theory 349, 353; socialism 111, 130, 224, 278, 369 Socialist Society 148 Society for Psychical Research 277 sociology 150, 224, 247

406 Soldiers Three 169 Solway Moss 36 Somme 132 soul, music 370 South Africa 83, 100, 122, 163, 212 South Downs 260 South Downs Preservation bill 236 South Shields 272 South Uist 278 Southend 262 sovereignty 50, 193–4 Soviet Union 148 Special Areas 317–29 Spence, Thomas 224 spies 90–1 spirituals, music 370 sport 121, 146, 179 Staines, Sir John 250 Stamp, Sir Dudley 241 staple industries 312, 332, 340–1 stately homes 110, 242 statute hiring 301 Stepney 129 Stock Exchange 342 stone wall builders 252 Stonehenge 236 Stormont 98, 157 stows 237 Strachey, Lytton 310 Stratford 367 Street, G. E. 234 streets 345 strikes 110, 112 ‘structure of feeling’ 362 Stuart, house of 34, 38–9, 42, 44, 46 Stubbs, William 70 Study of Celtic Literature 281 Sturt, George, see George Bourne Stuttgart 339 ‘sub-cultural’ 151 Suburban Gardener, The 205 suburbs 63–4, 212–13, 217–18, 236, 243, 342 Sudan 298 Suez 88 Suffolk 262, 296

index suffragettes 118 sugar 164 Sun Belt, The 339 Sunday Post, The 45 Surrey 110, 256, 259, 262, 263 Surrey County Council Act 236 survivals in culture 245–8, 255, 258–9, 264–7, 277–81, 283, 294, 296–9, 337, 347–8, 363 Sussex 110, 236, 255, 261, 263 sweated industries 117 sword dancing 308 Sydney 267 Synge, J. M. 269 tango 189 Tasmania 169 Tawney, R. H. 343, 359, 365 Taylor, A. J. P. 147 Taylor, Grace 262 Taylor, Harriet 120 teacher training 253, 361–2 Teddy Boys 165 Tees, River 261 teeth-locking 268 Telegraph, newspapers 342, 356 television 59, 253 temperance 170 Templemore 229 Tennessee 258 terraced housing 243–4, 346 Territorial Force (Army) 226 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 266, 304 Test and Corporation Acts 52, 72, 154 Teutonic 276, 282, 297 ‘text free’ cultures, and species 247, 293, 301, 303, 353, 358, 365, 367 Thackeray, W. M. 76 Thailand 106 Thames, River 338 Thatcher, Margaret 147, 155, 331–2, 342 thatchers 252 theatre 78, 106 Theatre of Action 367 Theatre Workshop 367 Thirty Nine Steps, The 212

index Thomas, Edward 256 Thompson, Dennys 358–9 Thompson, E. P. 146, 364–6 Thoresby 186 Three Little Pigs 297 time, perceptions of 251 Time Machine, The 214 Times, The 126, 154, 156, 165, 203, 282, 366, 378 tinned food 293, 328 Tintagel 279 Tithe Commutation Act 230 Toby jugs 22 Tod, James 229 Tolpuddle Martyrs 108–9, 169 Tolstoy, L. N. 373 topographical books 227–8, 264 Tories 27, 33 Torres Strait 348 tourism 170, 264–5 tower blocks 344–5 Tower Bridge 125 Town and Country Planning Acts 236, 317, 320 Town and Country Planning, Ministry 319 town planning 117, 183, 226, 236, 344 towns: ceremonials 28; changing shape 243, 344–6; civic achievement 226, 236, 343–4; reforms 52, 135; rights and privileges 16 Townsend, Pete 166 tracts 237–8 trades 226 Trades Union Congress 60, 114 trades unions 109, 110, 156, 187, 190 trading estates 344 Trafalgar 132 ‘transgressive difference’ 180, 267 transport 264 Transport and General Workers’ Union 111 Transvaal 169 travel writing 261–6, 269–71 tribes 135 Trinity College, Dublin 37

407

‘Troops Out’ 157 trusts 227 trysting 258–9, 260 tuath 280 ‘Tudor-Bethan’ 234 Tudors 14–15, 19 Tunbridge Wells 169 Tweddell, George 261 Tylor, E. B. 245–8, 249, 251, 163, 281, 294 Tyneside 313, 332 Tynwald, parliament 288 typologies 152–3 Uganda 172 Ulster 34, 37, 40–1, 158; geographic ‘personality’ 238; folk music 279 Ulster Unionists 95, 98–9; geographers 238; identity 284, 286–7; paramilitaries 192, 194, 197 Underground, London 233 understatement 82, 128 unemployment, and employment 314, 319, 321–3, 324, 327–8, 330, 332, 339; ‘economically inactive’ 351 Union: British nation 377; English view 157, 242, 282, 377; north of Ireland 143; rethinking 196–7 Union Jack 138, 166 United Gold Coast Convention 175 United Irishmen 41 United Kingdom, Stuart version 38, 46 university adult education (‘extral mural’) 238, 260, 271, 364, 365–6, 372 Unto This Last 175 Unwin. Raymond 234 Uppingham 122 urban degeneration 218 Urban Development Corporations 332 urban (inner city) renewal 346–7 urban way of life 219, 236, 318 Urdu 164 ‘Utility’ design 292 Utopianism 354 Utrecht, Treaty 131

408

index

Vale of Evesham 260 Van Gogh, Vincent 290 Vedic culture 175 Vereeniging 105 Vergil, Polydore 19 vernacular 255 Victoria, queen of Great Britain and Ireland, empress of India 53; Golden Jubilee 240 Vienna 295 Vikings 35 ‘villadom’ 213, 220, 243 Virginia 258 viruses 119 visual culture 341 wage fund 113 waged work 351, 359–60 Wahhabi theology 182 Wainwright, A. L. 261 Walberswick 263 Wales: annexation 34; Government of, Act 195; identity 43–4, 282; landscape 234–5; princes 36–7, 112; rugby 122; south 275, 278; university 310; west 255, 275–6 Wallas, Graham 62 Walpole, Horace 205 war artists 314 War and Peace 373 warrant of procedure 149 Wash, The 110 Washington DC 83 Waterford 35 Waterloo 132 Waugh, Evelyn 173 waulking songs 278 Waverley 47 Waziristan 164 Wealth of Nations, The 112–13 Webb, Philip 234, 292 Webb, Beatrice 121, 214 Webb, Sidney 90, 172, 216 Weber, Max 109 Weizmann, Chaim 172 welfare state 183, 320, 326; ‘welfare regionalism’ 328–9, 342, 353–4, 373

Wells, H. G. 214, 315 Welsh: dissent 280; dons 310; geography 275–6, 286; Marches 279; miners 114, 313; nationality 34; nationalism 286; race 280 Wembley 117 Wessex 35, 42; Hardy’s 206, 226, 304–5 West End, London 117, 184, 214 West Ham 125 West Ilsley 296 West India Committee 100 West Indies 37, 100, 164, 208 West Riding, Yorkshire 254 Westminster 168, 323, 331 Westminster, Provisions 16 Westmorland 279 Wexford 35 Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? 337 Whickham 32 ‘Whig’ progress 41; ‘history’ 205, 251 Whigs 28, 33, 134 Whitby 263, 271, 308 ‘white’ identity 102, 138–9, 153, 197 Whitechapel 169 Whitehall 234, 317, 323 White’s directories 227 Who, The 166 whole sight 262–6, 270–1 Wholeness, sense of: and abroad 267–71; and Celts 277; and Cockneys 262; ‘illative’ sense 61; and middle class 81–2; in nation 50; and south of England 242; through communications 58–61; through constitution 50–8; through gentlemen 113; through geography 236–9, 270; through land 199–200, 233–6; through regions 311–14, 332–3, 337–8, 354–5; through war 314 Wicklow 275 Wigan 357 William, duke of Normandy, king of England 13, 24, 35, 72 William and Mary, king and queen of England, Scotland, Ireland 25, 39, 72

index Williams, Ralph Vaughan 279, 294, 367 Williams, Raymond 65, 362–3, 365–6, 372, 375 Williams-Ellis, Sir Clough 234 Williamson, Henry 269, 304 Wilson, John 121 Wiltshire 305 Wingate, Orde 163 Witan 14, 17 Wittgenstein, L. 340 Wollstonecraft, Mary 120 Wolsely, Sir Charles 21 women: institutions 116,123; personal qualities 117, 119–20, 184, 214; photojournalism 119; public sphere 119, 120, 122, 183–6; representation, in art 115; and the state 116, 120, 123, 185–6; and work 116–17, 350–1 Women’s Institutes 128, 302 Women’s Social and Political Union 118–21 Women’s Suffrage Society 115 Woodhouse, Emma 208 Woolf, Virginia 123, 316 Woolwich 125, 238 Wooton, Barbara 317 Wordsworth, William 61, 221, 350 workhouse 308 Working class: and bigotry 347; character 128–9, 187; class 190; culture 149, 187, 363–4, 367–8, 372; documentary films

409

128; Englishness 187–91; folk 362, 367; ignorance 113–14, 115, 372; Industrial Revolution 186–7, 364–5; middle class 308; misbehaviour 110; movements 109, 148; oppositional force 188, 365; patriotism 112; political constitution 52–3; racism 135, 166, 347; urban life 244, 347; work 114, 190 World Bank 148 World War I 121, 123, 289, 315 World War II 124–30, 183–4 Wright, A. R. 309 Wright, Joseph 271 Wright, Thomas 250 writs 17 Xhosa 100 ‘yobs’ 137, 139 Yorkshire 156, 169, 235, 259, 263, 306, 308, 341 Young Irelanders 94 Young Women’s Christian Association 117 youth hostels 265 youth 366–7 Ypres 132, 133 Zion 109 Zionism 170–2 zoot suit 190