How to Be English (20 page)

Either way, William then advanced by a circuitous route on London and crowned himself king on Christmas Day. The Norman transformation of England had begun, and the language changed as a result – and it might be argued that the great divide between the defeated Saxon populace and a new Anglo-Norman aristocracy has never quite been healed.

You can still stand in the ruins of Battle Abbey, on the stone dedicated to Harold on the spot where he was supposed to have died, and look down the less challenging slopes of Senlac Hill – which have been smoothed out somewhat over the centuries – and imagine the battle that changed English history and changed the nation perhaps more fundamentally than any other event. You can, also, if you close your eyes, imagine the shouts and screams of the dying as the Saxon housecarls swung their double-headed axes so hopelessly at William's cavalry and never rose again.

But why does English history always seem to start at 1066? Certainly it emphasised the importance of the new Franco-Norman elite, and obscured the institutions and history of the Anglo-Saxon elite who had been displaced. Maybe in those days, when the ancient liberties of King Alfred were a radical English rallying cry, it seemed safer to pretend that English history began with the invasion.

It is, in short, a small plot to stop us looking too closely at the world before the current aristocracy took up their castles and stately homes. Perhaps it didn't suit our rulers' purposes either to remember just what a close-run thing the Battle of Hastings was, as in so many of the decisive battles throughout English history.

‘The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.

But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice right.

When he stands like an ox in the furrow–with his sullen set eyes on your own,

And grumbles, “This isn't fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.'

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Norman and Saxon' (1911)

WHEN THE COMPUTER
pioneer Alan Turing was sent to the USA in 1942 to help the Americans build their own code-breaking computers, he found something quite different from the eclectic and somewhat eccentric approach to code-breaking adopted by the English authorities. Instead of the peculiar mixture of mathematicians and crossword puzzlers, he found a group of lawyers.

Turing's discovery does throw into sharp relief the peculiarly English approach to problem-solving, highlighted by the code-breaking efforts in the Second World War. Around him at the secret establishment at Bletchley Park were not just mathematicians, but linguists, statisticians, puzzle creators, and strange individuals, from the future novelist Angus Wilson to the future Home Secretary Roy Jenkins and the future historian Asa Briggs, all of them in their own enclosed huts, revealing nothing to the outside world and little to each other.

There were Egyptologists, bridge players, even one expert on seaweeds and mosses who had been sent there because of a misunderstanding of the biological term ‘cryptogams', and who played a critical role working out how to dry out code books damaged by seawater. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who visited often, described the atmosphere as ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy'. One military policeman famously mistook Bletchley for a military asylum.

Turing was the archetypal English boffin, bizarrely, logically unconventional. He wore a gas mask on his bike to avoid the pollen. He famously chained his mug to a radiator and used string to hold up his trousers. He was often unshaven, or – even more peculiar in a semi-military world – was to be found knitting in a corner. He was briefly a member of the Home Guard, but got bored of it in 1942 and stopped turning up. The commander tried to frighten him with military law, only to find that on his application form, under the question ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?', Turing had written ‘No'.

What made Bletchley Park distinctively English was its approach to being a boffin, the respect for peculiarity, the faith in the cross-disciplinary fertilisation of ideas, the idea that clever people should be free to nose around into whatever intrigued them. It was an approach that clearly pre-dated Churchill, but which clearly exemplified his own approach.

Churchill, after all, had some hint of a boffin about himself. He dreamed up the idea of a tank back in 1914. He was an influential supporter of the Mulberry harbour system of floating wharves which made it possible to offload the equipment for the D-Day armies off the Normandy coast in 1944. It was Churchill who insisted that his scientists – notably the physicist R. V. Jones – should carry on investigating navigation radio beams used by German bombers, when his scientific advisors assured him that such things did not exist.

Boffins such as Robert Watson-Watt (Scottish), or Barnes Wallis (from Derbyshire), and their successors in the development of Blue Streak and Concorde, turned what had been a term of abuse into an accolade. The origins of the word are unclear but it seems to have started with a character in Charles Dickens'
Our Mutual Friend
(1864–5) who is described as ‘a very odd-looking fellow indeed'. Perhaps the portrayal of Q in the James Bond films as a fussy civil servant was a sign that the boffin was on the way out. The boffin's great successor, the nerd, is, after all, a product of California rather than England.

In 2011, Eric Schmidt, Google chairman, named three technologies invented by English boffins:

Photography (strictly speaking, this was only Henry Fox Talbot's paper-based negatives)

Computers

Television (strictly speaking, this was invented by a Scot)

BOWLER HATS USED
to dominate the streets of the City of London in the middle of the twentieth century, like so many black tortoise domes on the heads of the financial middle classes. Unusually, they were invented in England too, the most appropriate place for something that became symbolic of a certain kind of respectable Englishness. Bowler hats were created in 1849 by Edward Coke, the younger brother of the Earl of Leicester.

This was a rare moment of achievement in the life of a man who made very few other ripples on the world. Coke became a Whig politician after a forgettable minor career in the army, and held the seat of Norfolk Western in the mid-nineteenth century, but a perusal of Hansard – the parliamentary record – reveals no contributions to debate at all. Still, give him his due, by inventing the bowler hat, Coke left his mark.

Coke ordered the first one from the London hatters Lock & Co., who sub-contracted the order to Thomas and William Bowler. It was designed by himself to protect the heads of his gamekeepers from low-hanging branches – their top hats kept getting knocked off. Oddly enough, there is even a date for the day Coke came to collect it – 17 December 1849. When he unwrapped it, he put it on the floor, and jumped on it. He went away satisfied.

This was a hat originally designed for servants. In fact, the odd thing about the bowler hat is that, after Coke, it became anything but respectable. It became synonymous with people involved with horses, and within decades it had been adopted across the American West. Outlaws found it de rigueur. Butch Cassidy wouldn't have been seen dead without his bowler hat or, as he called it, his derby. The other profession that adopted it, and for similar reasons – it didn't blow off easily – was navvies. It was British railway workers who were supposed to have introduced them to Bolivia in the 1920s, where they were widely used by local women. These were supplied to Bolivia until recently by an Italian factory.

There is a peculiar ambiguity about bowler hats. Despite their original respectability, on both sides of the Atlantic – Jack Lemmon wears a bowler hat when he reaches senior management in
The Apartment
– the most famous bowler hat of them all was the one that graced the head of Charlie Chaplin as his Little Tramp. Laurel and Hardy wore bowler hats too, perhaps to imply the same thing – hopeless aspiration.

The same peculiarly mixed messages are contained in the bowler hats worn by the tramps in Samuel Beckett's nihilistic tramps in
Waiting for Godot
. Beckett said many years later that when he started thinking about the play, the only thing he knew was that both characters wore bowler hats.

As a cure for the cold, take your toddy to bed, put one bowler hat at the foot, and drink until you see two.

Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart (1887–1970), spymaster, diplomat and journalist

IF ENGLISHMEN HAVE
a reputation for buttoned-up dullness, for the kind of alluring fashion sense that means they wear socks in bed, long johns and tweeds by the fire, then Byron tips the balance the other way. Byron was the model of the great English lover, his affairs passionate and numerous and involving both sexes and probably also his own half-sister, Augusta.

Byron defied the ideal for an English gent by being terrible at football and cricket (he had a club foot) – though having said that, he was in the team for the very first Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord's in 1805. It was at love that he really excelled, in a kind of destructive and scandalous way, leaving the wreckage behind him – scandals which eventually forced him to leave the country, probably for fear of prosecution for sodomy. Once abroad, he ended up as an enthusiastic participant in the Greek revolution against Turkish rule, where he died of fever at the age of thirty-six.

Byron managed his legendary sexual attraction despite being born with a club foot, which he unfairly blamed on his mother.

Byron was a great lover, but he was also a great hater – one of the few parliamentary defenders of the Luddites, he was also pretty ferocious towards his fellow Romantic poets. He could not stand the poetry of Coleridge, and he referred to his famous contemporary William Wordsworth as ‘Turdsworth'.

In his own lifetime, there were many who regarded him as the greatest poet in the world. These days, his reputation is not quite so high. But he does represent a particular English type: one who becomes a celebrity in his own life, who disdains convention, a mild revolutionary whose own secrets hang heavy and who dies self-destructively and in exile.

Byron himself was over-romantic about most things, veering wildly between men and women, just as he veered between an abstemious diet of biscuits and white wine and great roaring gorges on meat and everything that went with it. The poet of the Victorian age, Alfred Tennyson, remembered the news of Byron's death when he was fifteen. ‘Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end,' he said. ‘I thought everything was over and finished for everyone – that nothing else mattered. I remembered I walked out alone, and carved “Byron is dead” into the sandstone.'

Polygamy may well be held in dread,

Not only as a sin, but as a bore:

Most wise men, with one moderate woman wed,

Will scarcely find philosophy for more.

Byron,
Don Juan,
Canto VI