How to Be English (23 page)

Fish and chips had become our national dish, certainly for the working classes, and although its origins may be lost in the mists of time, these particular mists were not that long ago. Charles Dickens described fried-fish shops in
Oliver Twist
in 1838, when the fish came with baked potatoes or bread. Sometime in the 1860s, fish and chips first emerged as a classic combination. One possible originator was the Jewish immigrant Joseph Malinin from London's East End, who first wrapped up fish and potatoes in old newspaper – a practice that carried on into the 1980s. Another was the Lancashire shopkeeper John Lees, working out of Mossley Market in Greater Manchester.

The modern combination of newspaper, greasy chips, vinegar, pickled eggs, cockles and mussels seems to have emerged from various different influences at once: the chips probably from Belgium, the fried fish brought by Jewish immigrants from Spain and Portugal and spread by Italian immigrant families to England in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937) George Orwell suggested that fish and chips might have averted revolution – the cheapness and comfort, especially on a dank English evening, does certainly have an extraordinary power to cheer you up.

Wartime civilians in both world wars seemed to sense the defence implications of fish and chips, the ‘good companions' as Winston Churchill described them. War Cabinets went to enormous lengths to make sure they were never rationed. By then, they already felt a little patriotic.

Oldest fish and chip shop in the world:

Yeadon near Leeds (1865)

THE AMERICAN NOVELIST
Gore Vidal was so obsessed with the forgetfulness of his fellow countrymen that he renamed the nation Amnesia. Something similar afflicts the English. It isn't that their memories are faulty, it is just that they assume that what was true recently was always true. It is a strange English kind of conservatism.

The English like to think that all their most beloved institutions date back sometime to the arrival of Noah on Mount Ararat, when actually most of them seem to have started around 1859–64. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, John Lewis department store, the London Underground, the Football Association, lawn tennis, you name it.

Another beloved institution, born in 1862, was the Flying Scotsman, or as it was actually known back then, the Special Scotch Express. Two expresses started simultaneously that year from London King's Cross and Edinburgh Waverley. They journey took ten hours, with a half-hour lunch in York.

The real drama of the Flying Scotsman came in two explosions of competitive Races to the North, in August 1888 and August 1895 when – although the directors never admitted that there was a race – the rival managers of the west and east coast main lines struggled for the title of the fastest service. It began in 1888 when the London and North Western Railway announced at the last minute that they were re-timing the arrival of their Day Scotch Express by one hour. Crowds greeted the trains at Euston and King's Cross when they set off and cheered the trains at Carlisle, even in the middle of the night. Reporters accompanied the trip as the services steamed through the night for Edinburgh and on to Aberdeen.

Two things conspired to end the competition. The first was that arriving in Aberdeen at half-past four in the morning was virtually useless for everybody, and there was also a derailment at speed in 1896. The rival companies agreed to cool it.

When the LNER Flying Scotsman train service began under that name in 1927, it was a non-stop service, and there was a corridor so that a new shift of drivers and firemen could take over without stopping at a station. Even then, their rivals at the London, Midland and Scottish Railway put on a new non-stop train to Glasgow leaving at the same time. The actual
Flying Scotsman
locomotive had tested out the feasibility of this service back in 1924 and managed to get up to a top speed of 100 mph for the first time.

They were heady days, with a restaurant car and a barber on board for the customers. But they are gone, and since 1958 the Flying Scotsman Service has been hauled by a diesel. Anyone who wants to get from London to Edinburgh fast nowadays tends to fly. These days, the train advertised as the Flying Scotsman stops at York and Newcastle and travels at an average speed of just below 100 mph. It isn't quite the same.

When the English think of the Flying Scotsman service today, they tend to think of three things. The first is the idea of the journey, the string luggage shelves above the heads of the passengers, the mirrors behind the chairs in the compartments, the porters in black and making your away through the steam on the platform from the buffet, after tea and toast. The second is the
Night Mail
film by the Post Office, with its poem by W. H. Auden and music by Benjamin Britten. We also think of the 1923 locomotive (No. 4472), still in existence, and still roving across the rail network of the nation.

For a century it has been with us. Out on the great fens, across the Plain of York, in the hill villages of the North-East and in the Border farms, people have set their clocks by it, down the long years.

C. Hamilton Ellis, describing the endurance of the Flying Scotsman, 1968

THERE NEVER WAS
an English composer more able to conjure up a hummable tune than Arthur Sullivan. There is a class of English intellectual superiority that peers down its nose at Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, as if they fail to rise to the level you expect of Glyndebourne or the Royal Opera House, where they are very rarely if ever played (‘What, never? Well, hardly ever!').

But if the great age of tunes petered out in the 1960s, it began in the 1860s, and Sullivan – the son of a bandmaster who managed to master every instrument in the band by the age of eight – was at the very forefront. It wasn't just the melodies of ‘Poor Wandering One' or ‘The Sun Whose Rays', it was great Victorian classics like ‘The Lost Chord' and hymns too. He adapted the music for the hymn with the best tune of all: ‘It Came Upon a Midnight Clear'.

Though he chafed at the ridiculous plots he composed to, and the time they took – he longed to write grand opera – it was Sullivan whose music keeps Gilbert's words afloat well over a century later.

William Schwenck Gilbert was certainly not the junior partner. He was an innovative and inventive man of the theatre, with a clear view of what his productions should look like, which he drove through with a single-minded, grumpy determination.

Gilbert's words and comic sense certainly stand the test of time – his patter songs like ‘I've got it on my list' and ‘The Modern Major-General' still resonate now. His brilliant lampoons of English government live on in
The Mikado
(though the English establishment, being what it is, suppressed a production of
The Mikado
in honour of the state visit of the Japanese prince in 1907 in case it gave offence).

Gilbert was an ill-tempered tyrant with a hugely generous streak, and his argument about the costs of a carpet nearly undermined the partnership with Sullivan and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company completely. It was a series of flops in the 1890s that finally managed that. The public eventually outgrew Gilbert and Sullivan, the scenery of the various D'Oyly Carte touring companies began to fall apart, and it took Jonathan Miller's brilliant reimagining of
The Mikado
at the English National Opera in 1987 – and Mike Leigh's portrayal in the film
Topsy-Turvy
in 1999 – to bring Gilbert and Sullivan back into fashion.

Richard D'Oyly Carte and his wife Helen were a key element of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership. They formed the agreement after D'Oyly Carte's previous business partners lost their heads during the production of
HMS Pinafore
, and sent thugs on stage to seize the scenery.

But it was Sullivan's music that ensured the brilliant, yet very peculiar, contemporary satire became a lasting contribution to English culture – the juxtaposition of fairies and the House of Lords in
Iolante
, or the presiding judge marrying the key witness in
Trial by Jury
, might not have been achievable by every composer. It was also Sullivan's determination that he needed emotion in order to compose effectively which forced Gilbert – as far as Gilbert could ever be forced – into providing plots which might last.

The collaboration began with
Thespis
in 1871, the music and lyrics of which have since been lost, right through to the disastrous
Grand Duke
in 1896.

Sullivan never married and carried on a series of affairs, including with the American socialite Fanny Reynolds. He had previously carried on secret affairs simultaneously with two sisters, the daughters of the engineer John Scott Russell. Like many English gentlemen, he very much enjoyed life in Paris, loved gambling, and had a knack for some of the great English sports – and not others. ‘I have seen some bad lawn-tennis players in my time,' said his leading man George Grossmith, ‘but I never saw anyone so bad as Arthur Sullivan.'

Sullivan suffered recurrent ill health, and his kidney disease forced him to conduct sitting down. He died aged only fifty-eight with his opera
The Emerald Isle
still unfinished on his desk. Gilbert lived until 1911 when he dived into his own garden pond to rescue girls he believed were drowning (they were just larking about) and the sudden cold gave him a heart attack. It was somehow a thoroughly Gilbertian ending.

Their influence can be felt in the lyrics of P. G. Wodehouse in his Hollywood screenwriting days, right through to the satire of Tom Lehrer. Sullivan's songs formed the basis of the great tradition of hummable tunesmiths, including George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and maybe even Andrew Lloyd Webber. They launched the humorous career of Grossmith too, author of
The Diary of a Nobody
. In fact the Gilbert tradition of English satire is one which punctures the airs of the pompous and the fatuous, and continues to this day as a distinctive pillar of English life.

In enterprise of martial kind,

When there was any fighting,

He led his regiment from behind

(He found it less exciting).

But when away his regiment ran,

His place was at the fore, O –

That celebrated,

Cultivated,

Underrated

Noble man,

The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

W. S. Gilbert,
The Gondoliers
(1889)

THE ENGLISH CLING
to their history, and not just the nice bits. They cling obsessively to their festivals commemorating bloody defeats or capitulations (see Chapter 33). The idea of creating a kind of effigy of a man, putting him on top of a bonfire every year and letting off fireworks to celebrate his demise, is one of the most peculiar, not to say embarrassing, of our national habits.

Fawkes was born in York in 1570 and became a Catholic under the influence of his stepfather. Like so many religious obsessives, he went abroad to fight for the cause – fighting Dutch Protestants on behalf of Spanish Catholics in the Low Countries, and travelling to Spain to try to get support for some kind of English revolution. He failed, but ran into his fellow plotter Thomas Wintour, who in turn introduced him to Robert Catesby, and so the plot to assassinate James I developed, link by link.