How to Be English (29 page)

THE BRITISH BROADCASTING
Corporation has a global reputation for impartiality and truth and is well known the world over for being a byword for Britishness. This is not completely fair. The reputation for impartiality and truth was won the hard way during the Second World War, broadcasting to occupied Europe in thirty-six languages – still the biggest broadcasting operation in the history – but was carried out by the European Service under the control of the Foreign Office, having escaped BBC control altogether.

As for the Britishness, this is actually – and despite the full toolbox of regional accents – clearly Englishness. Yes, the BBC retains some of its Puritanism from its dour Scottish founding director general, John Reith. But its understated politeness, its obsessive political balance, is overwhelmingly English.

So it is strange that such an upright English institution, which feels sometimes as if it descended on a cloud from heaven shortly after the creation of the world, should have owed its existence to a stunt by a tabloid newspaper.

Tom Clarke, assistant to the
Daily Mail
's founder, Lord Northcliffe, had been a signals officer in the First World War, which had been over for little more than eighteen months. It was he who suggested that the
Mail
should sponsor a radio broadcast. A few short musical broadcasts – even the train timetable read slowly over the crackling valves – had thrilled the handful of enthusiasts during the early months of 1920. The first licences had been issued through the Post Office the previous year. Now Northcliffe leaped at the idea that they would organise something truly professional, and as soon as possible.

To that end, on 15 June 1920, the great soprano Dame Nellie Melba was transported to Chelmsford to sing into a microphone. She did, and listeners as far as Newfoundland were able to hear her (she never broadcast again once she discovered they could do so for free). They even recorded a record from the foot of the Eiffel Tower. It caught the public imagination. Wireless, as they called it in those days, had arrived. It was barely a quarter of a century since inventor Guglielmo Marconi had taken out a patent for a transmitter and receiver capable of making a bell ring in a secret black box.

The first regular broadcasts were transmitted from January 1922 by the Marconi Company's radio station 2MT, and shortly afterwards, from Marconi House in the Strand, the sound of 2LO – the forerunner of the BBC – first crackled through the ether to be picked up by the precise positioning of a cat's whisker. 2LO broadcast for one hour a day, repeated at teatime. Music was banned and, every seven minutes, there had to be a three-minute interval for official announcements.

There never were any official announcements, but the early listeners welcomed the breaks – or so it was said – so they could pop next door or upstairs or into the kitchen for a cup of tea.

By the time 2LO was on the air, the government was already struggling with the question of how to organise a better broadcasting system, while avoiding what they saw as the chaos of American wireless. The last thing the English wanted was anything too spontaneous or – heavens above – jazz. The biggest six companies interested in broadcasting formed a committee and, by 25 May 1922, the name British Broadcasting Company had been agreed, its shares available only to British manufacturing companies. It would be funded by a five-shilling levy on wireless sets.

The first BBC broadcast was a six o'clock news bulletin, also from Marconi House, on 14 November. In line with the government guidelines, no news was allowed that had not already been published in the newspapers. It was read twice, first quickly and then slowly with pauses, so people could take notes.

The rest is history. History,
ITMA
,
Blue Peter
,
Doctor Who
and Arthur Askey.

When I was under house arrest, it was the BBC that spoke to me – I listened.

Aung San Suu Kyi

‘
NOT A DRUM
was heard, not a funeral note …' The line from Charles Wolfe's poem is so familiar to generations of English schoolchildren, though perhaps less so today, that it fails to quite do its job. The rhythm is so powerful that the words no longer quite manage to conjure up the silence at dusk after the battle as the body of Sir John is laid to rest in his bloodied uniform.

Moore himself was from Cobham in Surrey, though he was actually Scottish. An oak tree grown from an acorn from the garden of his home still stands in a small park to commemorate him in the Spanish city of Corunna. Like Nelson before him, he had the reputation of being a humanitarian maverick. In command of the Kent coast when Napoleon was expected to invade, he built the Martello Towers, cut the Royal Military Canal and recruited 340,000 militia men to defend the South Downs. He also invented the light infantry.

In 1809, he was leading the British expeditionary force against Napoleon, defending Spain from invasion, outnumbered by the French in what was one of the longest retreats the British army has ever endured. When Moore reached the coast at Corunna, he found the rescue fleet had failed to arrive and the enemy was getting closer. He had already lost 5,000 men. This was an early version of Dunkirk, as Moore's remaining troops held back the French long enough to get away.

It was terrible January weather and Moore took a musketball in the shoulder, rather as Nelson had just over three years before, and spent the remainder of the battle dying in a fisherman's house where he had been taken in. Officially, his last words were: ‘I hope the people of England will be satisfied! I hope my country will do me justice!'

Like many English heroes, Moore's official last words didn't quite square up with his real ones. Turning to his aide-de-camp, he said: ‘Remember me to your sister, Stanhope.' This referred to the explorer Lady Hester Stanhope, providing a hint of evidence that they might have been in love.

Moore was buried wrapped in an army cloak next to the ramparts of the city. When the French commander Marshal Soult arrived, he ordered a memorial to be built to mark the spot.

Corunna was another of those typically English victories snatched from the jaws of defeat – or, more accurately, an escape snatched from the jaw of annihilation. It might not have been remembered at all, outside Corunna, where Moore remains a local hero, were it not for Charles Wolfe's poem, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna'.

Nor was Wolfe actually English. He was from County Tyrone and a relative of the great Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone. He published the poem after graduating and it appeared in a local paper in Newry in 1817. It was promptly forgotten until, some years after Wolfe's death, Byron found the poem and popularised it.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,

From the field of his fame fresh and gory;

We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,

But we left him alone with his glory.

CLOTHES HAVE ALWAYS
been political in England. The New Look dresses of the late 1940s shocked public taste with their sumptuous sense of luxury. The miniskirt was a sign of liberation for women in the 1960s, just as bicycling skirts were a symbol of much the same thing for their grandmothers. The great art critic John Ruskin imagined a return to the medieval sumptuary laws which laid down which class was allowed to wear what. But the English, being an awkward race, would have none of it.

We may be conventional in our dress, unless we are in the tropics as Noël Coward pointed out (‘Although the English are effete / They're quite impervious to heat'), but we don't like being told what to wear. There is something of the servant–master relationship about it, as if we were being asked to wear livery.

The advent of cloth caps – now such a symbol, paradoxically, of both working-class and upper-middle-class life – began with one of the last of these dress codes, In 1571, during the reign of Elizabeth I, Parliament legislated to support the wool industry by boosting the consumption of wool. All men over the age of six had to wear some kind of what was then called a woollen ‘bonnet' on Sundays and holidays. The only people who were exempted, apart from women and babies of course, were ‘persons of degree'. If ordinary people didn't wear a cap they were fined three farthings, and those were the days when three quarters of a pence was the value of a pint of beer or a chicken

The law stayed on the statute book for nearly three decades and, by the time it was repealed, cloth caps had become a symbol of respectability – of people prepared to keep the law, of upright citizenship and successful bourgeois trade. The Tudor bonnet was so popular that it remains part of some forms of academic dress today, so if you have been awarded a PhD at some universities, you have to wear a Tudor version of the cloth cap made out of black velvet.

By the early twentieth century, most men still wore hats and the cloth cap was widely adopted by a range of classes, and for golfers in particular, on both sides of the Atlantic – and especially for boys, who (if they were anything like me) chafed and rebelled at the mere prospect. The old Tudor bonnet had become a symbol to say ‘I am a person of degree'. You will still see the Prince of Wales wearing one, or David Beckham, just as you will see the same thing on the head of Andy Capp or Del-Boy Trotter. It is peculiarly paradoxical, a symbol of class identity which is actually worn by almost every class.

The cap is traditional wear for American newsboys too, though often with a button on the top, and for older men in South Korea or Irishmen in Boston. It is worn back to front in some forms of hip-hop culture and by Hollywood figures like Robert Redford, and other people who hail from California. The Canadian and American teams at recent Olympic events have been dressed in specially designed red or white flat caps.

But above all else, it is a symbol of working-class English life in the mid-twentieth century. There is a famous photograph of the workforce returning from lunch at the shipbuilding yard of John Brown & Co. in Clydebank, filing up the gangplanks on to the hulk of the liner
Queen Mary
as the ship was being built in 1935, having started work again a few months before with a huge government loan to support Clydeside through the Great Depression. Not one head lacks the not-so-distinctive cloth cap.

Pubs in Yorkshire have been ordered to ban people from wearing flat caps or other hats so troublemakers can be more easily recognised.

Daily Telegraph,
June 2008