How to Be English (5 page)

Even so, he wasn't exactly equipped for the task. One of his first missions was to interview the Hollywood film star Myrna Loy, then at the height of her fame. Unsure what to ask her, Betjeman – the future Poet Laureate – quizzed her about the subject closest to his heart. ‘Do you like perpendicular architecture?' he asked. He managed to persuade her to say that she was ‘very interested'.

But then there is nothing more English than the perpendicular style. It is the English version of Gothic, and it has a particular tone – gentler perhaps than the Gothic which emerged from France at the abbey church of St Denis in 1144. Strictly speaking, it is the style of Gothic that emerged in the 1360s out of the horror of the Black Death, with its yearning, vertical lines, and its long, stretching windows.

This is the style exemplified in the soaring nave of Canterbury Cathedral, the creation of the most famous English architect of the medieval era, Henry Yevele. Of all the examples of perpendicular, Canterbury Cathedral is perhaps the best known, with its tower and flying buttresses added over the following centuries (one tower wasn't built until 1858).

Canterbury is English in other ways. Like so much of English history, the very stones of Canterbury Cathedral echo with a bloody history, as well as a spiritual one. Thomas Becket was murdered there, on the steps between the crypt and the choir, his brains flung around the stones by the end of a sword, by four knights who thought they were carrying out the enraged instructions of Henry II. Becket was actually the second of four archbishops of Canterbury to die violently in office (the first was Alphege, carried off by Vikings and done to death in Greenwich, in 1012).

The cathedral had something of a crisis in the 1170s. Becket was murdered at the end of 1170, and was soon canonised, so providing the cathedral with extraordinary wealth over the next three and a half centuries as a centre for pilgrimage, along the Pilgrims' Way from London and Winchester. In the mid-1170s the old cathedral choir caught fire and burned down, which meant major rebuilding. There had been churches on the spot way before the arrival of St Augustine in 597. There had been a Roman church on the same site and probably holy structures even earlier. It was only as of 1174 that the cathedral took on its new Gothic guise. The initial work was carried out by the French architect William of Sens, who first brought a hint of Gothic to these shores. But William fell from his own scaffolding and paralysed himself, naming William the Englishman as his successor.

This William extended the building eastwards for what became the Trinity Chapel, a repository for the remains of the newly canonised St Thomas Becket. Originally the new chapel just held the top of Becket's skull, sliced off by his assassins. After 1220, his tomb was moved there too. His feast day was also moved, from the end of December to the end of July, to make the progress less muddy for the pilgrims. After three more centuries of pilgrimages and miracles, by the reign of Henry VIII the tomb had a wooden cover which could be raised to reveal all kinds of precious stone.

This was something that a tyrannical king like Henry could never endure and he summoned Becket to be tried for treason. Having been dead for some centuries, Becket quite reasonably failed to appear and he was tried in his absence, found guilty and twenty-six carts arrived at the cathedral to confiscate his jewels.

An unmarked tomb was discovered in the crypt in 1888, to great excitement, and even as recently as 1990 two former Foreign Legionnaires were arrested in the cathedral in the middle of the night with a map drawn by a French archaeologist and a crowbar, intending to open the tomb of Cardinal Châtillon (died 1571), believing that Becket's bones were in there instead.

It is a very English mystery, and more English than it seems at first sight. The nostalgic belief in a continuing link from our own Protestant age to the old English Catholic faith – and a continuing symbol of resistance to the power of the state – is not just romantic, it is also tremendously English.

In the meantime, the archbishops of Canterbury continue to sit, with their palace at Lambeth, as knitted into the state as it is possible to be – second in precedence only to the monarch. There have been 105 of them as I write, all boasting the peculiar, slightly simian title ‘Primate of all England'.

The four martyred archbishops:

Alphege (murdered by captors, 1012)

Thomas Becket (murdered by assassins, 1170)

Thomas Cranmer (burned, 1556)

William Laud (beheaded, 1645)

WHEN CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
stormed around the Caribbean, one of the reasons that he remained convinced, until his dying day, he had discovered a westerly route to China was that the so-called Indians he found on Cuba were wearing cotton shirts. They must have come from the East, from where all cotton came.

The English were late into the exploring game; John and Sebastian Cabot, who provided the basis for the original English claim to America, were from Venice and Genoa, and escaping from debtors when they arrived in Bristol and persuaded a parsimonious Henry VII to give them a contract to seek out lands ‘unknown to all Christians'. Cotton was hardly on any English wishlists at that stage. The cotton trade was dominated by Antwerp and Venice.

The origins of growing cotton are lost in the mists of time. It certainly took place at least 7,000 years ago in Peru and Mexico in the West and in India in the East. The soldiers of Alexander the Great began wearing cotton once his armies reached India in 326
BC
. So how did the story of cotton as a global commodity become entwined with that of the English? The answer is the success of the East India Company, which began importing it in great quantities in the middle of the seventeenth century.

By then, the English had become bored by wool, which had previously underpinned their wealth. It was too heavy, too unyielding, too English. As a result, in the eighteenth century, cotton became increasingly coveted, imported from India in those East Indiaman ships, with their red striped flags. It was light and easy to wash and you could print patterns on it. No wonder the fashionable sets loved it.

The key dates in the story of cotton in England are 1764 when James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire, and 1771 when Richard Arkwright opened his mill in Derbyshire. From then on, cotton powered the Industrial Revolution in England as surely as coal and steam. Along the great rivers of the Midlands and the north, Blake's satanic mills puffed and panted as men, women and children struggled with the looms to turn the imported cotton from India and America into cotton goods for export to the world. By the time Nelson sighted the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar, more than forty per cent of English exports were made of cotton.

At that time, the main source of cotton was from the Deep South of the USA, where it was produced by slaves. This is both the dark stain on England's history, and its opposite. Yes, they traded the slaves who produced the cotton, financed by English bankers, reworked in English mills by children doing twelve-hour days in appalling heat. And yet it was England itself that abolished the slave trade and eventually vowed to stamp out slavery from the globe, and – very slowly – began to see that the economics of their factory labour was in itself a kind of slavery too.

In fact, so dependent were they on American cotton imported from the blockaded South during the American Civil War that Britain came very close to entering the war on the side of the slave-owners of the South. It was an irony for the nation which was still congratulating itself for abolishing slavery in its empire.

Another cruel irony was that India, which had first clothed Alexander's troops, and sold cotton clothing to Vasco da Gama, was soon importing cotton products from factories in Lancashire.

The English textile industry was hit hard by the American Civil War and the Union blockade. It was hit hard again by Gandhi's boycott of English cotton goods. It was hit again as the remaining clothes retailers increasingly began to outsource their production in the twentieth century. Marks & Spencer, the clothes retailer founded by a Jewish émigré from what is now Poland, was selling one in four pairs of cotton socks in the UK by 1930. It then formed a series of strategic partnerships with textile companies, starting with Corah in Leicester. The partnerships lasted for most of the rest of the century but, by the 1990s, there were only ten big English and Scottish clothing manufacturers left, supplying two thirds of M&S clothing. But they were being squeezed hard by the company, just as food suppliers would later be squeezed so hard by the big four supermarkets. Corah, the start of Marks & Spencer's quest for long-term relationships, was among those which were now in trouble and losing money. It was taken over by a finance company Charterhall in 1989 and then broken up.

By the end of the century, the other suppliers had all gone. It was the end of the close English relationship with cotton. Not really a happy story after all.

Without the firing of a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war upon us, we could bring the whole world to our feet. What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? … England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her. No, you dare not make war on cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.

Speech to the US Senate on why the north of the USA would never make war on the South, Henry Hammond, 1858

IF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
is the most famous English poet, then his ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud' must be our most famous poem – and he comes face to face in it, as everyone knows, with a ‘host of golden daffodils'. The poem was written around 1804 (the same year that Blake wrote ‘Jerusalem') but refers to a specific incident, on a walk with his sister Dorothy, which has a date attached: 15 April 1802.

It is no coincidence that this was an April poem, because the daffodil has always been the most exciting and most unexpected herald of spring. It is of course the national flower of Wales, but also has special significance for the English as demonstrated by the sheer diversity of its names.

It is known as daffydowndilly, or the east lily, or fairy bells. It is was known as goose-flop in Somerset, as Lent pitcher in Devon, as Queen Anne's flower in Norfolk, as churn in Lancashire, as well as other West Country variants like cuckoo-rise or cowslip.

As for the poem, it was published in Wordsworth's 1807 collection, which was roundly condemned as puerile by Lord Byron. Even Wordsworth's great friend and fellow pioneer of Romantic poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, called it mental bombast. But the English feel otherwise. All that contemporary contempt has not prevented it from becoming one of the nation's best-loved poems.

There is also something rather wonderful about daffodils themselves, and not just for their visual cheerfulness. It's a little-known fact that they are traditionally used as an emetic to create vomiting – they're mildly poisonous – and these days are a key ingredient in the drug to combat Alzheimer's disease.

When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.

Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, 15 April 1802