How to Be English (13 page)

An hour to play and the last man in.

Newbolt was conjuring up his very first sight of his school, which he revered, with the white flannels in the summer and an elegiac sense of youth and peace. He also managed to conjure up something about England; unhurried, the summer evening in the air and the shadows lengthening, and the prospect of tea and cakes, and the sunkissed faces watching the sky – rather than watching the action on the pitch.

Newbolt's poem goes on to praise the schoolboy rallying the ranks in some far-off imperial adventure, when the ‘Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead', with the phrase: ‘Play up, play up! And play the game.' The phrase came to mean a range of slightly contradictory things, about life as it was intended to be lived among certain classes of Englishmen, or a seriousness about life and war, or just about cricket.

Clifton Close was also the scene of another cricket moment: Arthur Collins' famous 628 not out in a school match, the biggest score ever achieved in cricket, which reached the front page of
The Times
in June 1899 as it developed over five days. Collins was killed in the First Battle of Ypres in 1914, giving Newbolt's poem added poignancy.

It was also where the great W. G. Grace was bowled out first ball, but very sensibly ignored it on the grounds that people had come to see him bat. It was where the future English Python, John Cleese, then a schoolboy, got the great Denis Compton out twice in one innings in 1958.

This kind of incident is especially valued in cricket, partly because it sets up a kind of David-and-Goliath struggle, which the English always like, and partly because it tests the English ability to control the emotions at their strongest. This isn't always effective. The inventor (or possibly reviver) of overarm bowling, a Kent cricketer called John Willes, did not last long at the top of the game. His first ball for Kent against the MCC in 1822 was overarm and therefore no-ball. He jumped on his horse and rode away, never to return to the game. It was made legal under the rules of the game in 1835, an appropriately lengthy period afterwards – perhaps the greatest tradition in cricket is that nothing much happens for a very long time.

Unusually for the contents of this book, all the evidence suggests that cricket really did originate in England, somewhere in the Home Counties at some distant date. Despite all the efforts of cricket historians, there are no clues about exactly when it began except that the young Edward II was once recorded to have played a game called
creag
, though whether that really was cricket is anyone's guess.

The first recorded cricket match actually took place in Greece on 6 May 1676, when a group of English sailors from ships called
Assistance
,
Royal Oak
and
Bristol
went ashore and played. The big expansion of the game took place the following century, and here at last there is a Scottish connection. The father of the founder of Lord's cricket ground, Thomas Lord, who had been born in Thirsk, arrived in London some time in the 1770s to find fortune. He was keen to do so because his father had been a wealthy landowner, but had lost everything in 1745 when he raised a troop of cavalry to support Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion and ended up working as a labourer on one of the farms he had previously owned.

There you have it. The authentic, poignant note of nostalgia essential to all truly English accounts of cricket.

For the field is full of shades as I near a shadowy coast,

And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

As the run stealers flicker to and fro,

To and fro:

O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!

Francis Thompson (1859–1907)

THIS SMALL FRENCH
port on the English Channel is forever associated in the English mind with one of those peculiar miracles of escape that they tend to celebrate as victories. It is always given the English spelling too, rather than the French Dunkerque, as if it was a small fishing village, perhaps in Scotland. It is, in short, a muddling kind of place – if indeed ‘Dunkirk' is a place at all, when it is actually a nostalgic idea.

Winston Churchill made his famous ‘We shall fight on the beaches' speech on 4 June 1940 to celebrate the escape of 338,000 British and French troops from the beaches there, but even he warned that ‘wars are not won by withdrawals'.

But if the English could not quite snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the point about Dunkirk was that – at great loss, among the rearguard and the rescuing ships – a small defeat was snatched from impending disaster. It did look as though the entire British army, and all its tanks and equipment, would be captured or destroyed by the sudden Nazi advance, leaving the nation horribly exposed to invasion.

What made Dunkirk possible was Hitler's controversial Halt Order of 22 May, which stopped the advance of his tanks from crossing the defensive canals, and handed over the task of finishing off the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to Goering's Luftwaffe. The order was sent uncoded and was picked up, so Churchill and the British government knew they might have time to build defences, pull back their troops behind the barrier and into the town, and organise some kind of rescue.

The naval planners believed they might have been able to rescue 25,000 men. In the end, over a period of a week, and thanks to the sacrifices of the Highland Division and the French rearguard, over 800 ships of all sizes managed to take off most of the BEF and a sizeable number of French troops, most of whom were transferred to Brest to carry on what turned out to be a hopeless defence of France.

The troops left by wading out to neck height in the waves and waiting all day, and they left minus their equipment. It was the little ships which captured the imagination, from pleasure steamers to fishing boats and cabin cruisers from the Thames – one of the yachts captained by the senior surviving officer from the
Titanic
, C. H. Lightholer (see Chapter 26), and many like him. It was somehow an English solution, by English heroes, and a symbol of the success of people power over an establishment which had failed so miserably either to prevent or prepare for war.

In the generations to come, when the problems become bigger and the institutions we deal with less human, the English may still look back to Dunkirk and the little ships, and think – Ah yes, that's what we truly are. There was something self-revelatory about Dunkirk, or at least there appeared to be to the English – the brilliant organisation, the individual flair, the popular uprising by small-boat masters, the anarchic pulling together, the snatching of consolation from disaster. It was, in the end, all very English.

Dunkirk statistics:

Troops evacuated from Dunkirk between 27 May and 4 June 1940: 338,226

Number of ships of allied nations taking part: 933

Number sunk: 236

Number of guns left by the BEF in France: 2,472

Number of tons of ammunition left: 76,097

Men of the BEF captured or killed during the retreat and evacuation: 68,111

Number of French troops taken into captivity when Dunkirk fell: 40,000

Merchant seamen who died during the evacuation: 126

Number of days Winston Churchill had been prime minister: 16

THERE IS SOMETHING
very English about the start of an FA Cup final, and somehow reminiscent of that waiting around that seems to go with major sporting fixtures in the UK, and everywhere else. In my childhood, it always seemed to be in a packed, heaving, raucous Wembley Stadium, with its distinctive towers from the 1923 Empire Exhibition. There always seemed to be the Royal Marines band and always some celebrity – was it Harry Secombe; was it Tony Blackburn? – who would try to conduct an unwilling crowd in the first and last verses of ‘Abide With Me'.

The FA Cup final isn't quite what it was. There are so many other football championships to compete for our attention, and all over the world. But there was a time when special trains carried tens of thousands of supporters of the finalists into London, to travel via the Metropolitan Line out to the stadium, arriving from before dawn on the damp paved streets of the capital. It was an era of ticket touts and terraces, beer and scarves, and brown, uncategorisable meat pies.

‘Abide With Me' was a permanent fixture that began at the final between Arsenal and Cardiff City in 1927 (Welsh clubs have regularly taken part in the FA Cup, when generally speaking Scottish clubs have refused to). Communal singing used to be a major feature on the pitch before the match. In 1956, the songs included light classics like ‘She's a Lassie from Lancashire' and ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road'. By the late 1960s, the crowds tended to have their own chants to sing. Perhaps little would induce them to sing the kind of songs people had sung around pub pianos a generation before.

As for the FA Cup, it dates back to the 1871–2 season, when the newly established Football Association had hit on the idea of a knockout tournament between the teams. Fifteen clubs entered, including the Scottish team Queen's Park which managed to get through to the semi-final without having to play a match, because they were all scrapped for one reason or another – mainly because of a failure to agree a venue for the games.

They managed a draw against Wanderers in London, but could not club together enough money to come back for a replay, so they had to withdraw. The first final took place at the Kennington Oval, know known as a cricket ground, and was won by Wanderers, a London club formed some years before by a group of former public schoolboys, which scored the only goal against Royal Engineers. And so the tradition had been born.

These days, there are no replays, and draws are decided after extra time in a penalty shoot-out.

Back in 1872, the trophy Wanderers won cost £20 and included a little figure of a footballer, which was why it had a nickname the ‘Little Tin Idol'. It was won for the last time in 1895 at the old Crystal Palace stadium, where FA Cup finals regularly attracted crowds of up to 100,000 to its twin railways stations. The winners that year were Aston Villa.

Five months later, the trophy was stolen from the William Shillcock football outfitters shop in Newtown Row, Birmingham. There was a reward offered of £10, but the trophy has never been found.

These days, the FA Cup finals are in Wembley again (after a brief period at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff), which takes the ceremony back to where the final was played from 1923 to 2000 in the old Empire Exhibition Stadium.

The first year at Wembley (between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham) was the famous ‘White Horse Final', called after a white police horse called Billy which pushed the over-capacity crowd off the pitch so that the match could start, forty-five minutes late. The reason for the problem was that an estimated 240,000 fans turned up for the match, squeezed inside the stadium, with another 60,000 locked outside the gates. Some say it is the biggest attendance for any non-racing sporting event in history, but this seems likely to be English hyperbole.

But despite the changes over the years, ‘Abide With Me' still gets sung, by assorted celebrities and opera singers, before the teams run out onto the pitch. The FA Cup remains one of the great sporting events of the English year, even if you are not too fond of football.

Venues for FA Cup finals:

Kennington Oval

Crystal Palace

Stamford Bridge

Lillie Bridge

Wembley Stadium

Goodison Park

Fallowfield Stadium

Old Trafford

Millennium Stadium, Cardiff

(Replays were sometimes held elsewhere)