How to Be English (24 page)

Fawkes was a big man with a bushy red beard and moustache. He was recommended by a Jesuit friend of his as ‘pleasant of approach and cheerful of manner, opposed to quarrels and strife … loyal to his friends'.

The plotters met for the first time in May 1604 in a pub called the Duck and Drake on the Strand in London. The plan was to blow up Parliament along with the king at the state opening, and to replace him with his daughter Elizabeth. There would be a simultaneous uprising in the Midlands. In the end, the business of planting the gunpowder couldn't have been easier. They simply rented the undercroft beneath the House of Lords.

What gave them away were the qualms that terrorists tend to have when they are civilised people. An anonymous letter was sent to the Catholic Lord Monteagle, urging him to stay away. He showed it to the king, the undercroft was searched and Fawkes was discovered, along with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, designed – according to the conspirators – ‘to blow you Scotch beggars back to your native mountains'.

He was tortured until he revealed the names of his conspirators. All were found guilty in the Lords, watched secretly by the king and his family. Fawkes was the last to die in Old Palace Yard, managing to fling himself off the scaffold and break his neck before the agonies of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

King James himself suggested that their ‘joyful deliverance' ought to be celebrated with bonfires every year on 5 November and the tradition soon caught on. Fireworks began about half a century later and they have continued ever since. Although the dangers of fireworks have muted the general mayhem in recent years, Bonfire Night – and the smell of burned cardboard, wet sparklers or the traditional ginger parkin – remains an essential part of English childhood.

William Harrison Ainsworth's 1841 novel
Guy Fawkes
began the rehabilitation of Fawkes as a kind of anti-hero. He is a sympathetic character in the book and, in the century and a half that followed, Guy Fawkes has developed less as a villain and more as a kind of symbol of defiance against vested interests. This may be peculiar for a man who was a terrorist, after all, committed to the victory of another nation with which England was at war; but in the end, despite all the drawing and quartering, the English are a forgiving lot. It just takes them a few centuries to discover that Fawkes was a heroic character, and to don his masks from the film
V for Vendetta
to demonstrate outside Parliament.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,

The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,

I know of no reason

Why the Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t'was his intent

To blow up the King and Parli'ment.

Three-score barrels of powder below

To prove old England's overthrow;

By God's providence he was catch'd

With a dark lantern and burning match.

Holla boys, holla boys, let the bells ring.

Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!

And what should we do with him? Burn him!

Traditional rhyme for 5 November

IS THERE ANYTHING
that remains English about Harrods department store? It has been in foreign ownership since 1985. Most of its shoppers are foreign. The former owner, Mohammed al Fayed, had peculiarities that included a dress code that meant occasionally having customers thrown out on the grounds that they were not wearing the correct clothing (thoroughly un-English).

There are two reasons for including Harrods in this book, in spite of everything. The first is its origins as a draper's shop founded by Charles Henry Harrod in 1824, in Bermondsey Street in the poverty-stricken London borough of Southwark. By the 1840s, it was a grocer in Islington and then in Stepney in the East End. By the 1850s, it was a small shop on its present site in the Brompton Road, and was built up into the retailing monster that it became by the next generation, in the form of Charles Digby Harrod.

For some reason, it is so often the second generation which makes the innovative breakthrough in English retailing. It was not Michael Marks but his son Simon who turned Marks & Spencer into the bastion of the English middle classes, selling a quarter of all socks bought in the nation. It was not the cantankerous John Lewis but his son Spedan who turned the store chain that still bears his name into the pioneer of mutualism. Harrods was no exception.

That is the first reason, and don't let us forget also that the Brompton Road site turned into one of the most valuable strips of real estate in the world, owned by the legacees of a salt merchant called Henry Smith who left the proceeds in perpetuity to the victims of Turkish slavers.

The second reason is that England more or less invented the department store. It is true that there is a reasonable challenge from Paris in the shape of Le Bon Marché, but the full flavour of a multi-department store was really the brainchild of William Whiteley, who launched his monument to Victorian consumerism in 1863 in Paddington, followed shortly afterwards by John Lewis the next year, who borrowed money from his sister to allow him to do so, and scraped all the plaster off the walls to give him more room to sell. Both represented an English revolution in retailing – it meant turning away from actively trying to persuade or cajole customers into buying things they didn't want, to encouraging them to trust.

The department-store idea also took some time to bed down, but in the end it was less trouble for Mr Pooter and the other inhabitants of the new London suburbs to order all their furniture from Whiteleys or Harrods, and have it driven round, than to be snubbed by snobbish shop assistants or sneered at for not knowing precisely what they wanted.

This is a brief explanation about how Harrods became the worldwide brand it is today, priding itself on selling everything, as it used to say, ‘from a pin to an elephant'. It was Harrods which first introduced an escalator in 1898, a fearsome thing, and offered customers a glass of brandy at the top to revive them once they had risked the journey.

Still, there is no doubt that the traditional, restrained white Christmas lights still warm the heart, and there remains something spectacular about its food hall, which is perhaps why it is sometimes visited by up to 300,000 people a day.

Harrods' peculiarities:

Most famous purchase: The original Winnie-the-Pooh (1921) Strangest purchase: A live alligator bought by Noël Coward (1951)

IT IS ONE
of those tunes that were instantly recognisable a generation ago, but now – perhaps because of an ironic distaste for bombast – have rather gone out of fashion. ‘Heart of Oak' was well known as the official march of the Royal Navy, and supported a sense that oak trees and the wooden walls of England (see Chapter 42) were somehow the quintessence of the nation. In fact, it is also the official march of the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal New Zealand Navy. The Royal Australian Navy dropped it for something more appropriate.

The words were written by the great English actor David Garrick (1717–79) and sung for the first time in 1760. The year is significant because the ‘wonderful year' referred to in the first verse was 1759, the year of a string of military and naval victories, including James Wolfe's successful attempt to take Quebec (see Chapter 59) – 1759 was a kind of military version of the 2012 Olympics, when everything went rather better than expected, an unusual experience for the English.

There may be another reason ‘Heart of Oak' has gone out of fashion. The English have entered one of those occasional periods when they no longer see themselves as a primarily naval nation. The photographs of warships which used to grace the front pages of our newspapers have given way to photographs of soldiers. We have become a military nation instead.

This may be a shift in the soul of the English. It may just be a temporary blip. But military nations believe in discipline and centralised rigour and immediate obedience. Naval nations tend to be more relaxed and to believe in the flexibility and humour and individualism of a command somewhere out on the great oceans.

We will see. In the meantime, ‘Heart of Oak' has been shoved rather under the carpet.

Come, cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer,

To add something new to this wonderful year;

To honour we call, you as freemen not slaves,

For who are so free as the sons of the waves?

Heart of Oak are our ships,

Jolly Tars are our men,

We always are ready: Steady, boys, Steady!

We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again.

THE FIRST CENSUS
in England was during the Napoleonic Wars, but it was not the first nation in the world to count its population: that was Sweden. Parliament rejected the idea in 1752, on the grounds that it was an intolerable interference in people's privacy.

The man behind the plan was the former secretary of the Prince of Wales and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Potter, MP for St Germans – ‘a man of more than middling abilities', according to
Gentleman's Magazine
, ‘and somewhat conceited of his own parts'. He was defeated almost single-handedly by York MP William Thornton, who was the only MP voting against in the first vote, but by the time the legislation reached the House of Lords, he had so stoked up the opposition that they threw it out.

‘Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased?' Thornton asked fellow MPs. ‘And what purpose will it answer to know where the kingdom is crowded, and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle? If this be intended, let them brand us at once; but while they treat us like oxen and sheep, let them not insult us with the name of men.'

You don't have to agree with Thornton to admire his courage, his boneheaded English individualism, and his determination to resist the rise of the technocrats.

The English have always regarded themselves as unbiddable. They have harboured a suspicion, both about the Napoleonic tyranny of continental Europe – buttressed perhaps by a Protestant nervousness about the tyranny of the pope (Brussels and Rome have played similar roles in the minds of the English at different periods of their history) – and about the slavish obedience of the Americans, with their jaywalking fines and perfect municipal grass. The English might complain about the resulting disorder back home, but they prefer it to the alternative. They complain that their trains are late, but have never (so far) been tempted by the apparent efficiency of totalitarianism.

There is no doubt that the result is a muddle. No written constitution. No coherent legal codes. No coherent government either: English laws and policies are the sum total of every fudge back through time. But there is something rather wonderful, as well as infuriating, about the ramshackle business of English administration, with its amateur magistrates and its unarmed police (well, usually). It is the product of English individualism, and none the worse for that.