How to Be English (10 page)

IS IT BECAUSE
of the use of sheds that the sports of pigeon-fancying and pigeon racing seem so English? Is it that peculiar link that working-class English males have to the wooden shack down the garden, full of nameless intricacies, that pigeon racing seems so much like a national sport? Or is it something to do with the squadrons of pigeons that used to descend on Trafalgar Square in London – until dealt with in one of the first acts of the new mayor of London in 2000?

That isn't clear. What is certain is that people have kept and bred pigeons in these islands, or used their homing instincts to deliver messages, for centuries and probably well into Roman times. But the sport of racing pigeons was actually developed by the Belgians, and it was only when the king of Belgium, the brutal Leopold II, gave the British royal family breeding birds that the sport began to take off over here in a big way. The first English pigeon race was held in 1881, encouraged mainly because the Belgians used to start their races from southern England.

Since then, the sport has been declining steadily – along with cloth caps and whippets – though it is attracting big money in the USA and so will almost inevitably be re-imported at some point. There remains something distinctively northern about pigeon-fancying, and there is the cliché of the clipped and reserved Yorkshireman who lavishes love and care on his pigeons, but finds it hard to do the same for his own children. It is a small slice of the great paradox of the English, for whom animals have often seemed a more comfortable conduit for love than human beings.

In fact, there is – as so often – rather a class divide involved. The working classes created their sheds out of old pieces of wood and scrap and concentrated on racing short distances, while the long-distance racers had to be aristocratic or anyway someone with the means to pay for it. The pigeons themselves came on to the market at low, affordable prices because the invention of the electric telegraph began to put them out of business as professional carriers of messages.

The return of pigeon post came during the siege of Paris in 1870–1; the English watched entranced as French pigeons carried over a million messages in and out of the city, over the Prussian lines. Then the rise of football as a working-class pastime in England in the final Victorian decades seems to have driven out the pigeons again. The days when the birds could be described as black caps, yellow boots and chockers, and the husky voices of a pigeon-fancier could be recognised immediately – maybe an early example of what we now know as pigeon-fancier's lung – have long gone.

But it has been a slow decline. The London, Midland and Scottish Railway reckoned it carried 7 million pigeons during the 1929 racing season. In 1934, one pigeon racer described his feelings when a fancier could see his own bird returning and stood ‘transfixed, electrified; there comes the faint rustle of wings: almost simultaneously upon the small platform at the entrance to the loft, there is the bird of his dreams'. There is no doubt of the strange mixture of reticence and emotion about the whole thing.

For George Orwell, pigeon-fancying emphasised what he called the ‘privateness' of English life. He even condemned as ‘something ruthless and soulless' the health and safety housing improvement regulations, which attempted to stamp pigeons out.

He marched off with a bunch of flowers in his hand and several pigeon eggs in his overall pockets … On arrival home, he put the eggs in a basin on the sink, awkwardly, almost abruptly, he handed the flowers to mother. No words, no glances, just a muffled grunt that seemed to say all that needed saying.

William Woodruff describing his father's return to Blackburn from a pigeon race in
The Road to Nab End
(2001)

THERE IS A
certain kind of dull-headed English temperament that deeply disapproves of reading. It still exists, though people rarely admit that they share it these days. Until a century ago, it was almost mainstream. When the future Poet Laureate John Masefield was orphaned (his mother died giving birth and his father had a breakdown and died shortly afterwards) he came into the care of an aunt who shared this disapproval with a passion.

The young Masefield devoured books and wandered, rather as Wordsworth did, ‘lonely as a cloud' around his home environs (he was born in Ledbury in Hereford, near where his older contemporary Edward Elgar was also wandering similarly lonely as a cloud – they should have got together). And the more he devoured his books, the more his aunt disapproved.

Strong measures were clearly required, and it was decided that he should be sent to sea. To prepare him for this, Masefield was sent to school on HMS
Conway
, the sail training ship and former wooden battleship
Nile,
then anchored off Birkenhead.

The three years he spent there from 1891 gave him a fascination for the sea, sea tradition and sea lore, but it certainly didn't cure him of books. This love of the sea was entrenched even further during his first seagoing position, on a four-masted barque called
Gilcruix
, which took him from Cardiff to Chile, via Cape Horn. Masefield's diary at the time recorded heavy seas, porpoises and flying fish and a rare nocturnal rainbow, but it ended all too soon, invalided home with sunstroke.

He abandoned his next ship altogether in New York Harbour at the age of seventeen, became a tramp, a barman and an employee in a carpet factory, where he saved enough money to buy the complete works of Chaucer. Back in England two years later, and through a series of happy meetings, he began to write poetry, thanks to the friendship of some of the most prominent poets of the age, on the fringes of the group that would eventually be known as the Georgian poets.

Masefield married an older woman called Constance Crommelin, introduced to him by the poet Laurence Binyon (author of the remembrance poem ‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old') and soon there were children on the way. His work for the
Manchester Guardian
wasn't exactly lucrative. It was time to capitalise on the handful of poems that he had managed to get published.

That was where ‘Sea Fever' came in. It appeared for the first time in his 1902 collection
Salt-Water Poems and Ballads.
His other famous poems like ‘Cargoes' and ‘Reynard the Fox' were all in the future, but this salt-water stuff sold reasonably well. Later versions changed the first line to the more familiar ‘I must go down to the seas again' – originally it had omitted the word ‘go'. It has a kind of mystical quality, not only able to conjure up the English love-and-hate relationship with the sea – the compelling way in which English history has intertwined itself with seafaring – but to do so in an era of semi-detached houses, ribbon development and commuter suburbs.

Somehow Masefield's poem speaks especially to the English life which gets no closer to the nautical than the garden pond in their semi. It speaks to the yearning for the wild in the commuter and the call of the running tide to those who peer out of their tower block. It is a deeply English poem, partly for the mismatch between the wildness described and the calm rhythm, which was so beautifully used in the musical version by John Ireland, but also in its prevailing melancholy. This is the English soul speaking trapped next to the office coffee machine, but still ‘it may not be denied'.

Masefield managed eventually to make ends meet as a successful playwright and novelist. His children's novel
The Box of Delights
has survived, and his other adventure stories –
Dead Ned
, for example – had an obvious influence on children's writing in the great age of Puffin Books in the 1960s, but have rather slipped from view.

Masefield was never the staid conservative he seemed. One of his poems (‘The Everlasting Mercy') was condemned from the pulpit, he was a supporter of women's suffrage, and he ran the amphibious ambulance during the Gallipoli campaign. Still, he managed to beat Rudyard Kipling to the post of Poet Laureate, twenty-eight years after the publication of ‘Sea Fever', and held the post until his death from gangrene in 1967.

He was a great survivor of the age of Georgian poetry, a friend of W. B. Yeats who lived long enough to see flower power, and he managed to hold the post of Laureate longer than anyone apart from Tennyson. He also managed to be the first English writer to release an LP reading of his own poems (just as Tennyson was the first to be recorded).

There is something about ‘Sea Fever' which speaks to a certain mood of English ennui, and the poem prefigures death rather as Tennyson's ‘Crossing the Bar' does. Masefield did after all experience the vagrant gypsy life himself, and he clearly looked forward as a young man when he wrote the poem to ‘quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over'.

I must down to the
seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

THERE IS SOMETHING
very English about suburban semi-detached homes, and especially those built between the wars, with their generous gardens, their little garden gates and garages and their twee stained-glass front doors. There is nothing like them anywhere else in the world, the product of the desire for family homes in limited spaces.

For some reason, they have been execrated in England, and have become deeply unfashionable, despite being one of the most popular and humane types of housing built anywhere.

The English invented commuter suburbs, when the railways allowed the middle classes to live on the outskirts of towns, in suburbs which centred on the railway station and the high street.

Perhaps the apotheosis of the English style of place-making was in Ebenezer Howard's pioneering garden cities, in Letchworth and Welwyn, the pioneers of the rather less English new towns. Letchworth also developed a style all of its own, thanks to Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker and their Arts and Crafts cottage styles. It provided the English contribution to town planning, just as Howard intended.

His other scheme, which was to make sure that the land values were vested in the community, has attracted the disapproval of successive governments. English governments have always been a little suspicious of making people economically independent, in case they never work again. They are not that keen on everyone having their own garden either, yet the semi-detached was designed on precisely that basis.

Howard was a shorthand writer from the House of Commons and, when the great and the good adopted his first garden-city plan, they rather looked down their noses at him as they set up their committees to urge the government to build it. Instead, Howard set off on his bicycle, found the site for Letchworth and set to work. If you wait for the government to do it, he said, ‘you will be as old as Methuselah'. That is as good a statement of English political philosophy as anyone ever made.

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand Ta's and Pardon's

Daintily alights Elaine;

Hurries down the concrete station

With a frown of concentration,

Out into the outskirt's edges

Where a few surviving hedges

Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.

John Betjeman, ‘Middlesex'