How to Be English (25 page)

In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

John Stuart Mill,
On Liberty
(1859)

WHAT IS IT
about the north-east region of England? Yes it provided us with the Venerable Bede, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Geordie accent and much else besides; but it has also been the source of England's great troublemakers, and as such has shaped the culture of England around it.

The Pilgrimage of Grace is generally supposed to have started with the failure of the Lincolnshire rebellion in October 1536, and to have emerged in Yorkshire under the leadership of a London barrister from Richmondshire called Robert Aske. Enraged by the behaviour of Henry VIII, as well he might have been, and suspicious of the new religion being foisted on them – and particularly about the privatisation of the welfare structures (basically what the dissolution of the monasteries amounted to) – they took over York Minster and drove the new tenants out of the monasteries.

As many as 40,000 people marched with Aske to Selby to negotiate with the dukes, arriving from all over the north and carrying with them the supposedly miraculous five-yard banner of St Cuthbert, brought by the Durham contingent. They were all given a royal pardon and a promise that the next dissolution would wait until Parliament had met in York. Then, trustingly, Aske dismissed his followers. He ended up hanged in a cage in London, and other leaders were hanged and beheaded, or hanged, drawn and quartered.

No such punishment was meted out to the Jarrow marchers, 200 of whom set off precisely four centuries after Aske in October 1936, carrying a petition signed by 11,000 people, enraged by the closure and dissolution of their local shipbuilding company, by seventy-two per cent local unemployment, and by the closure of one of only two grocery shops. There were no beheadings when they reached London a month and nearly 300 miles later, but they were snubbed by the prime minister Stanley Baldwin and given £1 each to get home again.

As in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the marchers – who called themselves the Jarrow Crusade – were blessed by the Bishop of Jarrow before they left. Halfway down, they were attacked by the Bishop of Durham as purveyors of ‘revolutionary mob tactics'. In 1536, a previous Bishop of Durham had been forced to escape from his castle by a mob which had arrived to try to persuade him to lead the rebellion. In both cases, the prospect of the marchers arriving in London filled the authorities with apprehension. In 1936, the Special Branch gave the Cabinet a briefing which suggested that ‘selected journalists … be interviewed and given material for exposing the origin, motive and uselessness of the march'.

A revealing picture now hangs at the Geffrye Museum in London of a languid young couple at the window of a smart house in central London, looking down at the burning torches of the marchers as they arrived. There is some interest, but not much. It is an evocative portrait of the strange peculiarities of the English class system.

It was the same to-day all along the road from Ripon. The villagers of Ripley and Killinghall rushed to their doors to see the marchers pass; motorists waved as they went by; one shouted, ‘How are you sticking it?' and a woman cried, ‘Hello, Geordies.' And the ‘Geordies' themselves were in great form, so that every moment I expected the band to change from ‘Annie Laurie' and ‘Swanee River' to ‘Cheer, Boys, Cheer'. Contributions to the ‘kitty' fell in as we went; here it was a pound there it was a penny, the penny specifically being the offering of an ecstatic little girl who ran across the road to meet us as if no one less than Bonnie Prince Charlie was at our head.

The Guardian,
13 October 1936

THE PROMS WERE
created by Robert Newman, the impresario and manager of the Queen's Hall, opposite the building that is now Broadcasting House in London. In August 1895, the young conductor Henry Wood launched the series under Newman's direction.

Newman's original idea for the Proms was that they should lure the middlebrow into new experiences in music. He was aware that the idea had been tried before in Covent Garden, but had only really worked at the hands of a romantic figure like the French conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien. Henry Wood was the proposed solution and Newman took him out to lunch at Pagani's restaurant next to the old Queen's Hall. The money needed came from a music lover, a surgeon from Upper Wimpole Street, Dr George Cathcart, who funded the experiment on condition it would include Wagner.

They were promoted originally as Robert Newman's Promenade Concerts. When they opened on 10 August 1895, they were due to last for ten weeks, sixty performances, with admission of only one shilling and with another big idea – discounts for season tickets. They were a great success, but always controversial. Newman himself went bankrupt. His successor was forced out during the First World War because of his German name, and disputes about broadcasting with its new promoters (Chappell & Co.) beset the Proms during the 1920s. The saviour of the Proms was undoubtedly the BBC, which came to the rescue in 1927 and never let go, even when the venue was moved to Bedford to avoid the doodlebug raids.

The creator of the peculiar English institution known as the Last Night of the Proms was the televisual conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent, a showman who took the Proms into the television age and out of the slightly prim control of the BBC.

It was Sargent who encouraged promenaders to take a more active part, and who tolerated the banners, balloons and funny hats, and it was Sargent who set the traditional programme of the Last Night, with Wood's ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs' and Elgar's ‘Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1', which first appeared on the programme to celebrate the end of the Second World War at the 1945 season. It was also Sargent who dragged himself up from his deathbed in September 1967 to be with the promenanders on the Last Night for the final time.

He did all this in the teeth of opposition from the establishment, who deeply disapproved of the antics of the crowd. ‘A music-hall rabble,' said Lady Jessie Wood (Sir Henry's widow) in 1947. ‘A frightening emotional orgy,' said the controller of the BBC's Light Programme. ‘For the first time, I realised the full extent of the dangers that attend the popularising of music,' he wrote in 1950. ‘Plato knew what he was doing when he proposed to banish music and poetry from his republic.'

But the Last Night became known around the world, and every year from 1947 – when television cameras first appeared – the paraphernalia and bacchanalia increased. In 1952, a firework smuggled in for Tchiakovsky's ‘1812 Overture' went off early. Sargent also had to give a pep talk to the audience about the dangers of throwing coins.

But there is something heroic about the Last Night, a wild concert with an ironic edge to it, celebrating some of the bravado of being English.

Traditional Last Night programme:

Edward Elgar: ‘Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1' (including ‘Land of Hope and Glory')

Henry Wood: ‘Fantasia on British Sea Songs' (including ‘Rule, Britannia')

Hubert Parry: ‘Jerusalem'

IF LONDON IS
a nation of itself, cut off from its surroundings by the great sweeping waves of the M25, then the London Underground is a world within a world. It has its own design, its own atmosphere and people behave differently down there. Perhaps they respond to the light roar of a train approaching a packed platform, or the dark dusty swirl of old newspapers as the breeze of a distant train ruffles the hairs on the back of the mice down on the track. Perhaps their own underground comes out.

The Underground itself goes back to the year 1863. The early Tube had gaslit carriages hauled by steam locomotives. The Metropolitan Railway soon teamed up with the District Railway to create the Circle Line, finished in 1884. There are now 270 stations, some of them emphatically above ground, and it is always a surprise how new the rest is. The Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines opened in 1906, and in decaying darkness rest many of the forgotten stations, their platforms boarded up, their empty lines the preserve of the rats and yeti (Dr Who) – Down Street, Aldwych, Trafalgar Square – a strange shadowy world that remains half in and half out of reality.

What really created the Underground that we know today was a joint marketing effort in the early years of the twentieth century, using the term ‘Underground' for the first time in that context – and the decision to electrify the lines at the same time. The shadowy elements, the sense of otherness, is the result of the efforts of three men.

The first was Frank Pick, a solicitor who rose to be managing director of the Underground in 1928 and ruled London Transport until 1940. Pick was an admirer of William Morris – he used green ink in his honour – and who believed like Morris in the role of design in civilisation.

Pick set out to put this thought into action in the Underground, with a strong sense of design. He used the original roundel, which is so distinctive, commissioned the latest art-deco architecture for many stations. He was also a great commissioner of poster art, with some of the most distinctive, colourful mid-century evocations of the English countryside the product of his chequebook, advertising his Green Line buses, snaking out into the rural areas. His posters advertising the suburbs evoked the emerging Metroland before the First World War. In fact, it was his standardised advertising sizes that first drew him to the attention of his superiors.

It was Pick who commissioned the calligrapher Edward Johnston to design the very distinctive typeface that has been used by the Underground ever since. Pick's fanatical attention to detail saw him wandering his stations late at night, moving ticket machines a few inches to the right or left.

But it wasn't Pick who designed the distinctive topographical Tube map. That was Harry Beck, who was inspired to draw the map in full colour when he was working on electrical diagrams. He sent it to Pick in 1931. Pick forwarded it to his publicity department who rejected it, because it didn't show the distances between stations.

Beck kept pushing and they tested it out in 1932 and the public liked it. Beck's name used to go on the bottom and they paid him, on a freelance basis, to update the map. That was until 1960 when, to his horror, Beck found his name had been removed and somebody else had added the route of the new Victoria Line.

Legal action followed and Beck kept on updating the map and submitting his designs until he gave up, with a sense of betrayal. He died in 1974 but, in 1997, the Underground had a change of heart and now his name is back on the map again. Because he worked on the map as a London Transport employee (though in his spare time), it is not clear whether he was ever actually paid for the original.