How to Be English (12 page)

The original bank holidays under the 1871 Act of Parliament:

New Year's Day (Scotland)

Good Friday (Scotland)

Easter Monday

Whit Monday

First Monday in May (Scotland)

First Monday in August

Boxing Day (England and Wales)

St Stephen's Day (Ireland)

Christmas Day (Scotland, but already a traditional holiday in England)

IT IS CALLED
Brighton Pier these days, but in its heyday it was always the Palace Pier, the last great pier to be built of a whole succession of English piers – the crowning glory of the English seaside resort. Many, if not most, have burned down, including Brighton's West Pier. There seems to be something particularly inflammable about English piers, but Brighton Pier carries on.

It is more than 1,700 feet in length and took more than a decade to build, opening in May 1899 before its famous Palace Pier Theatre had been completed. Halfway through its building work, in 1896, the old chain pier next door was swept away by a huge storm. Partly because of the pier, Brighton retains something of its louche reputation. It has managed to hold on to some of the sense of the glory days of the English seaside resort. It still combines an enjoyable seaside respectability with a hint of forbidden Parisian glamour. People would raise eyebrows if a Victorian gentleman said he was going to Brighton for the weekend. And the pier and its restaurants, smoking rooms and arcades, was the very heart of this temple dedicated to a particular side of Mammon – a very English, salty version of Las Vegas.

It was also the theatre, perched at the end of the pier, which was the great pinnacle of Brighton's appeal during the twentieth century. Here, from 1902 onwards, the greatest actors and music-hall stars would strut their stuff, with a summer celebrity season and a month of Christmas pantomime. Here you might rub shoulders with Arthur Askey, Tommy Trinder, Gracie Fields, Gillie Potter and (in the generation before) Little Tich, and (a generation later) Dick Emery and Morecambe and Wise, glimpsing them in their greasepaint slipping back to their digs opposite the Brighton Hippodrome. Or struggling into a taxi in their costumes to catch the last train back to London for the night.

The theatre was requisitioned by the army during the Dunkirk crisis in 1940, just as the audience was gathering for a performance. As soon as the audience had been refunded their money, the pier was blown up to prevent it being used as a hostile landing. The pier theatre did not reopen until 1946. It closed again in the 1970s and was removed in pieces in 1986 and stored ready to be rebuilt by the developers, who subsequently mislaid it, so that may be that for the theatre (this is a habit of developers and local authorities: Merton Borough Council stored stones for the medieval gateway of Merton Abbey safely, to make way for the new Sainsbury's Savacentre, and then – by a terrible error – used it as hard core).

Today, the pier is a shadow of its former self, a symbol of seaside culture and its decay, which is – in itself – terribly English.

The beautiful thing about Brighton is that you can buy your lover a pair of knickers at Victoria Station and have them off again at the Grand Hotel in less than two hours.

Keith Waterhouse

THE ENGLISH MAY
live in cities (eighty per cent of them live in urban spaces), but they hanker for the countryside.

There is a rural idyll beating in the heart of the English, a hankering for a golden age that never quite was. Though they live with kerbstones and bus stops and street lights, they condemn townsfolk – as Rupert Brooke condemned the people of Cambridge as ‘urban, squat and full of guile' – and feel deep down that they belong elsewhere.

Perhaps it is the frustrated gardener that inhabits every English soul. Perhaps it is the grandiose desire to direct the landscape around them. Perhaps it is because inside all of us there is a desire to emulate Capability Brown – to sit on a chair pointing to the far horizon, ordering: ‘Perhaps a lake there, and a rolling hillside with sheep on the right'.

You can certainly be snobbish about his approach, and Capability Brown's critics were even during his lifetime, fulminating against the formula of belt of woodland, using the contours of the land, clumps of trees to drape their shadows across the grass, with a watery element somewhere – a stream, lake or moat, bridged by some rustic or classical bridge, semi-submerged.

You could deride it, but it worked.

The future landscape designer Lancelot Brown was born in the village of Kirkharle in 1716. He is said to have gathered the famous nickname by his habit of talking about the ‘capability' of sites. But it was his own capability that really stands out, starting from a farmhouse in Northumberland, working as a gardener's boy, to becoming the lord of the manor of Fenstanton, the designer of around 170 parks, and famously turning down work in Ireland because he had not yet ‘finished England'.

His first landscaping work seems to have been at Kiddington Hall, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Then he happened to be recommended to Lord Cobham who asked his nurseryman if he could think of anyone who might help him landscape Stowe. So there he was, the assistant to the pioneer of naturalistic gardening, William Kent.

Brown also had a thriving architectural practice, remodelling country houses, which he handed on to Henry Holland, who in turn handed it to his pupil Sir John Soane.

Capability Brown was rooted in the English architectural tradition, and his style was deliberately picturesque. He famously dammed the small stream in the grounds of Blenheim Palace and half-flooded the new bridge that he built across the resulting lake. The poet Richard Owen Cambridge said that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could see heaven before he improved it (Cambridge actually survived him by twenty years).

In fact, although he was derided in his own lifetime, Capability Brown was destined to turn England into a kind of romantic heaven – to make it look rolling and lush, creating the blueprint for the quintessentially English garden. He was a nightmare for those committed to authenticity, but he was also highly successful – as the crowds which turn out to see his work in National Trust properties every weekend will testify even today.

Now there, I make a comma, and there, where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.

Capability Brown describing the language of landscape design to Hannah More at Hampton Court in 1782

THERE WAS A
time when all English boys were told Clive of India was the most important historical figure they needed to emulate. These days, hardly anyone has heard of him. In fact, Robert Clive's life seems as if it was led purely for the edification of boys.

He was born in Shropshire in 1725 near Market Drayton, and was soon organising a protection racket among the local shopkeepers. He was in so much trouble so regularly that his father packed him off as a clerk to the East India Company in Madras. From this inauspicious start, he managed to defeat the French in battle, become governor of Bengal and be given a peerage when he returned home as the richest man in England.

One of the ironies of Clive's life was that, although he was clearly English, his career was forged and took place largely somewhere else entirely – in India. It is even more ironic, perhaps, that – despite all this – Clive couldn't stand India. ‘If I should be so far blessed as to revisit again my own country, but more especially Manchester, the centre of all my wishes, all that I could hope or desire for would be presented before me in one view,' he wrote. Clive famously suffered from homesickness so badly that he tried to shoot himself twice. After one failed attempt he examined the pistol and found it was loaded and working, and thereupon decided that providence had spared his life for a reason.

Clive made his name at the age of twenty-five, with only a book-keeper's training, leading the successful defence during the siege of Arcot with a handful of men, and earning the epithet ‘heaven-born general' from William Pitt the Elder. When he defeated the French and Mughals at the Battle of Plassey, he added to the East India Company's lands an area larger than the British Isles, and laid the foundations of British rule in India. This was an extraordinary achievement, since it involved beating an army fifteen times the size of his own with the loss of just twenty men, and during the monsoon season.

He manoeuvred the French, in far greater numbers in India at the time, reorganised the East India Company's forces and attempted to reorganise the administration – putting down a mutiny by officers enraged at his ban on receiving gifts from Indians.

He had not exactly been above receiving gifts himself, and when his political enemies opened an inquiry into his conduct in India, and the way he had enriched himself, he answered in a thoroughly English way: ‘I stand astonished at my own moderation,' he said. Even so, the parliamentary inquiry decided that he had wrongly enriched himself to the tune of £235,000 from Siraj ud-Daulah's treasury.

Clive's melancholia clearly continued even when he returned home, because he died at the age of only forty-nine in 1774 at his home in Berkeley Square. There was never an inquest, and the reasons for his death are disputed, but he probably killed himself, possibly by cutting his own throat with a penknife. He is buried in the church of Moreton Say in Shropshire, where he was Lord Lieutenant.

It appears I am destined for something; I will live.

Robert Clive, after his attempted suicide, 1743

‘
THERE'S A BREATHLESS
hush in the Close tonight – / Ten to make and the match to win,' wrote the English poet Henry Newbolt, the part-time imperialist, about his school playing field at Clifton College in Bristol. The poem went on:

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,