How to Be English (30 page)

WHEN JAMES WATT,
the Scottish pioneer, first cracked the business of making an efficient steam engine, it gave coal the status in the English economy and in English life that wool had won for itself in the Middle Ages. It underpinned not just the Industrial Revolution, but all the production and manufacturing that followed. For centuries, the coal man, with his black face and black sacks, was a familiar sight in any street, pouring the black gold down a hole in the pavement. For decades, the dirty business of coaling ships was as much a part of the seagoing life as sails in the breeze. And, of course, the miners struggled half-naked, hundreds of feet below ground, with lamps in their hats, to support the English on the ground above.

During the twentieth century, the appearance of miners – complete with lamps on their hats – would bring a standing ovation at any radical political rally. The last stand of the miners, in the disastrous strike of 1984–5, has entered folk legend.

It was for this reason, perhaps, that Sir Humphrey Davy, one of the inventors of the miners' safety lamp – an honour he shares partly with George Stephenson – became practically a new saint in the English calendar in the nineteenth century.

Coal was mentioned by Aristotle, so it is hardly uniquely English. There are also many different kinds of coal, all of which behave in different ways when burned. Even so, mining for coal seems to have begun in England back in the Stone Age. Archaeologists have found coal cinders in Roman camps, and we know that Newcastle was given a royal charter by Henry III to mine the stuff in 1239.

By 1306, London's air had become so disgusting – a great London tradition which continues to this day – that Edward I went so far as to ban sea coal. This lasted only long enough for Londoners to cut down all the trees within the vicinity of the city, and then the coal was back. It is one of the peculiar themes of English life through the ages: an overwhelming tolerance of dirt. And grime, smoke and soot – and ‘Chim Chim Cher-ee' from
Mary Poppins
, a film which at least gives chimney sweeps their proper place in the scheme of things.

‘Get up!' the caller calls, ‘Get up!'

And in the dead of night,

To win the bairns their bite and sup,

I rise a weary wight.

My flannel dudden donn'd, thrice o'er

My birds are kiss'd, and then

I with a whistle shut the door

I may not ope again.

Joseph Skipsey (1832–1903), the ‘Pitman Poet'

UNTIL THE END
of the Middle Ages, the patron saint of England used to be – not St George – but St Edward the Confessor, the only English king to be canonised. This was wholly undeserved: he was regarded by the church as particularly holy because of his apparent decision not to procreate, though he actually locked his wife up as a punishment for her failure to do so.

So cast your mind back, if you will, to St Edward's Day, 13 October 1257, when Henry III decided he would hold a Fish Day in celebration. Fish was considered holy too, as it wasn't meat, and his household gathered together and ate 250 bream, 300 pike and 15,000 eels, collected from all over the country. These were the days when a staggering number of different fish were eaten, even porpoise (not strictly fish, but treated as one), distributed right into the English Midlands.

Now here is the point of this slight digression: English fish – like everything else English – had a kind of class system about them. There were the fish that kings and nobles ate, like porpoise or carp, dressed in luxurious cream sauces. There were the fish the gentry ate: herring and cod and the salted fish known as stockfish, which eventually earned England so much of the gold and silver fetched from the New World. As for the poor, they tended to make do with eels or cockles, whelks and oysters.

These were gathered on the coast, usually by women, pickled and distributed inland. Seafood of this kind remained a staple food of the poor in England into the last century. By Victorian times, the whelks were brought to London and the cities, boiled alive and then sold by itinerant salesman or on stalls, along with hot eels – sold spicy ‘as if there was gin in it'.

One whelk-stallholder told the writer Henry Mayhew that the whelks accepted being boiled alive. ‘They never kicks as they boils,' he said, ‘like lobsters or crabs. They takes it quiet.' They weren't eaten to fill you up, but as a little luxury, from jars carried round pubs, eaten with a little pepper and vinegar; the Victorian equivalent of a bag of crisps.

Of all merry blades that ply merry trades,

Or win the affections of pretty young maids;

There is no one so trim or supple of limb

As light-hearted, ruddy-faced mussel man, Jim.

My musical sounds enliven my rounds,

I'm known the world over, from Stepney to Bow;

While singing aloud to a wondering crowd,

Fresh Cockles and Mussels alive, alive O!

J. B. Geoghagen, ‘Jim the Mussel Man' (1876)

THE FINAL DECADES
of the nineteenth century, when the biggest demographic earthquakes in English society were under way, coincided with the rising popularity of the pantomime about Dick Whittington and his cat. Whittington is a kind of patron saint for all those millions who made the journey from the rural life and found that the city streets were not in fact paved with gold – but who managed to scrape together a living anyway.

Whittington arrived penniless in London, his only asset – or so the story goes – a cat with a particular skill at catching mice. One thing leads to another and the cat makes Dick's fortune with the support of a wealthy merchant, whose daughter he marries. It is a very English story, and particularly it reeks of London – where the sound of the bells in ‘Oranges and Lemons' all seems to be about debts and the interest paid on them. These are the bells that are supposed to have drawn Whittington and his cat back to London: ‘Turn again, Whittington,' said the Great Bell of Bow, and it made him more than a living. He was a hugely successful merchant, operating out of the Mercers' Company, selling cloth to Europe, and – like so many in London – a financier.

Actually, as so often, the story about Dick Whittington founding his fortune by lending out his cat, who dealt so effectively with the mice, was not originally English at all: it is based on a Persian story. The real Whittington was born sometime in the 1350s in the Forest of Dean and really was mayor of London four times, imposed on the city by Richard II to settle his dispute with the merchants. He really did marry Alice Fitzwarren, as the stories say, in 1402. He died two decades later, extremely wealthy and founding a charity that still shells out money to this day.

There is a story that he lent Henry V most of the money he needed to invade France, then – after the great victory at Agincourt – he invited the king to dinner and ceremonially burned the debt papers in the fire next to the table.

But what was the connection between Whittington and cats? A mummified cat was found where he was buried in the church of St Michael Paternoster Royal, but that seems to have been put there some centuries later. There is also a cat in the portrait of him in the hall of the Mercers' Company. Maybe he just liked them. There is one other story: there was a merchant called Dick Whittington a century or so later, who was involved in one contract to import four lions from Africa into England for Henry VII. He can't have been the same man, who died anyway in 1423, but he may have been some kind of relative. The historian David Quinn suggested that here was the origin of the legendary linking of Whittington and cats. We will never know.

Turn again, Whittington,

Once Lord Mayor of London!

Turn again, Whittington,

Twice Lord Mayor of London!

Turn again, Whittington,

Thrice Lord Mayor of London!

What Bow Bells said to Dick Whittington

TEN DAYS AFTER
the Armistice in 1918, the British Grand Fleet steamed out of its safe anchorage at Scapa Flow to take the surrender of the German battle fleet. It was a misty day in the North Sea as the battleships waited for the encounter and a tense moment. The ships were cleared for action and it was widely believed that, when the moment came, the German battleships would not in fact surrender.

As they came into view, steaming in a long grey line, they were sighted on the new battleship HMS
Royal Oak
, manned by men from Plymouth and flying the flags made by the ladies of Devonshire. It was at that moment, and often again over the next few hours, that those on the bridge heard the unmistakable beating of a drum.

The
Royal Oak
was flagship of the First Battle Squadron. When it was clear that the German fleet was going to surrender safely, the admiral mentioned the drum. The other senior officers had heard it too and couldn't understand it. Two searches of the ship were carried out for the mysterious drummer, who should have been at action stations. Nobody was found. The conclusion was that this had been Drake's Drum.

There are actually three Drake's Drums. The first was the drum which went everywhere with Sir Francis Drake on his circumnavigation of the world, and was with him when he died off the coast of Panama in 1596. It is now kept safely somewhere in central England. The second is the exact replica made with original materials, and painted also with Drake's family coat of arms, which is kept in a glass case in his home at Buckland Abbey in Buckland Monachorum in Devon. The third is a little more peculiar – it is the strange sound of a drum that is supposed to beat when England is in danger, last heard – or so it is said – during the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940, and so memorably on board the
Royal Oak
.

Drake's Drum is the stuff of Edwardian romance. It is said that Drake himself urged that the drum be taken home, and if England was ever in danger, we were to beat it and summon him up from the afterlife to its defence. Sir Henry Newbolt, the doyen of Edwardian romanticism, even wrote a poem about it – and it was then set to music by Charles Stanford. In fact, the reported instances of it sounding do not seem to be always when England is in danger but when the danger's over – when Nelson was given the freedom of the city of Plymouth and when Napoleon arrived there as a prisoner.

Drake himself is an ambiguous character to choose as a national hero. He had derring-do in abundance, but he might be described today more like a terrorist – or a slave trader, which he undoubtedly was.

Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

Strike et when your powder's runnin' low.

If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven,

An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long ago.

Henry Newbolt, ‘Drake's Drum' (1897)