How to Be English (11 page)

THERE WE ARE
in the middle of the north Atlantic, surrounded by small, floating pieces of ice, the ocean floor two miles down beneath the great, green, freezing ocean. The lifeboats have gone and the ship is sinking and the only other ship within sight is not responding to signals. What do you do and how do you behave?

That is the question at the heart of the English version of the
Titanic
story. It is a question of stiff upper lips and gentlemanly farewells in your dinner jacket, listening to the quiet, restrained sound of the orchestra playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee' wafting over the icy air.

But
Titanic
is not just an English story. It was a ship built in Northern Ireland, managed by a struggling shipping line owned by an American banker, carrying passengers who certainly included the English but also Americans and, locked into the third-class dining room, a large number of Irish emigrants. The heroic story (see Chapter 17) – part of the English myth of fair play, good behaviour and women-and-children-first – is overwhelmingly one of the English upper and middle classes. It is part of their great romance with ice: just as Captain Scott's frozen body lay in the Antarctic, here was another block of ice getting revenge on those who presumed to set sail in an unsinkable ship.

The various film versions are not all English either. The original version, commissioned by Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, emphasised that this was the last gasp of a plutocratic class. The American version with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio (1997) portrayed an ossified, hypocritical society about to collapse under its own contradictions, with the help of a small collision.

Only the Kenneth More version,
A Night to Remember
, maintains the English myth. It is poignant, heroic, tragic and terribly English as, one by one, the overwhelmingly heroic characters – perhaps not the chairman of the White Star Line, who jumped ship with the women and children – realise what is about to happen. They smoke their last cigars, occasionally resorting to firing a revolver in the air – there is no suicide as there was in James Cameron's film version. Though even
A Night to Remember
was based on a book by the American writer Walter Lord, so it may be more about an outsider's view of Englishness than anything truly home-grown.

Of all the great disasters at sea, each one remembered for its heroism in a different way, why does
Titanic
capture people's imagination? The answer is partly that the combination of melancholy inevitability and tragic self-sacrifice supports the English self-image. English souls beat with a twinge of excitement at the idea of going down with the ship, especially when it is clearly a symbolic disaster for a whole generation, the very class that found itself sacrificing life and limb on the front line of the trenches only twenty-eight months later.

The disaster has also become part of the peculiar relationship between the English and the sea, as if they were chained to a fearsome and tempestuous lover. We revel with horror at Captain Smith going down with his ship. We cheer on Captain Rostron steaming through the night at top speed on the
Carpathia
, to find the sea full of frozen corpses. We warm to Lightholer, the senior surviving officer, who went on to sail his small yacht over to Dunkirk to fetch the retreating soldiers off the beaches in 1940. ‘We have strewn our best to the waves' unrest / To the shark and the sheering gull,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, who – though not English himself – caught the essence of the relationship. ‘If blood be the price of admiralty, by God we have paid in full.'

Nearer, my God, to Thee,

Nearer to Thee!

E'en though it be a cross

That raiseth me,

Still all my song shall be

Nearer, my God, to Thee.

Sarah Flower Adams (1805–48)

‘LITERALLY FOR THIS,'
said Edward Thomas, soil in his hand, to explain why he had joined up to fight on the Western Front. He was killed on Easter Monday 1917 by a shell, as he smoked his pipe. It was in this kind of mood that he began to write poems celebrating English life, and his most famous poem seems to start in mid-conversation: ‘Yes, I remember Adlestrop'.

He explained something of his feelings about his native land in his essay ‘This England', referring to himself in the Quantocks when he experienced the sense of ‘home'. ‘His train stopped at a station which was quite silent, and only an old man got in, bent, gnarled and gross, a Caliban; but somehow he fitted in with the darkness and the quietness and the smell of burning wood, and it was all something I loved being part of.'

Thomas presented this as a kind of spiritual experience, aware suddenly of ‘all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire'. But we know a little more than this about it because of his diary entry immediately before the First World War, on 28 June 1914, about his train journey from London to Dymock, via the Oxford to Worcester Express, which included the phrase: ‘Then we stopped at Adlestrop.'

The poem itself was written in winter, on 8 January 1915 in fact, in the middle of an extraordinary surge of creativity – he wrote thirty-three poems between December 1914 and early February 1915, still writing under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway and pretending he wasn't actually doing it.

The problem was that Thomas was struggling with his conscience. He had been an insightful poetry critic for most of his writing career, siding usually with the Georgians – the young poetry movement represented by his friends. He had recently found that he could write poems himself. In the few short years left to him, he had written enough to carve out a proud section in the
Oxford Book of English Verse
. But his real struggle was about whether to enlist.

His nation was at war, and though he was old enough to avoid comment for not being in uniform, he didn't want to think of himself as afraid. He was agonising about whether to join his great friend Robert Frost in America or whether that might be seen, primarily by himself, as a form of escape from the Western Front. In the end, Thomas opted for uniformed life. The rest we know.

‘Adelstrop' was published three weeks after he died, in the
New Statesman
. His admirer the composer Ivor Gurney said it was ‘nebulously, intangibly beautiful'. This is true, and it is still hard to put a finger on its charm except perhaps that it conjures up that final summer of peace, a quiet moment in more than one way, and its absolutely simplicity has a innocence about it – and about England – that still makes it compelling a century later.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop –

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop – only the name

BANK HOLIDAYS ARE
English saints' days. Other European nations gave their people breaks from work to enjoy the sunshine. Even the Bank of England used to close on thirty-three religious festivals a year until 1834. After that, the English had to invent bank holidays to give themselves the occasional day off – to enjoy the drizzle, the sandy, soggy sandwiches and the experience of close proximity to everyone else having ‘fun'.

Amazingly, the idea was not invented by the founders of England – by St Augustine or King Alfred – but by a Victorian scientist-politician who was looking for ways to encourage the English to evolve a little bit faster.

Sir John Lubbock had been flung into the world of scientific inquiry because he lived next door to Charles Darwin. When his father's bank ran into difficulties, and school fees became impossible, Darwin became his tutor and Lubbock became an early advocate of the theory of evolution.

But he was also a politician, and he believed that evolution had a special meaning for society: it meant that societies would evolve too. People would educate themselves. They would rise above the struggle for survival. The trouble was, their employers kept their noses to the grindstone six days a week, so self-education was endlessly delayed. What could be done?

Like his father, Lubbock was also a banker. As a politician, he knew he could not force employers to give people the day off. But, as a banker, he knew that, if the banks closed their doors, then so would the nation's businesses – and the day off would have been achieved. Hence his decision to draft a new law which closed the banks on four days a year (Easter Monday, Whit Monday, Boxing Day and the first Monday in August) so that people would have the time to rest and maybe read a bit – Lubbock was a doyen of the Working Men's College and a great lister of all the books people should read.

Christmas Day was already a day off in England, so he never included that. Nor did he include New Year's Day, which wasn't designated a bank holiday in England until 1974.

At one stroke, the nation was transformed. The first Monday in August 1871, after the Bank Holidays Act became law, saw extraordinary scenes at the London railway terminals as the crowds overwhelmed the trains available to take them to the seaside. ‘The passengers were packed on decks and paddleboxes like herrings in a barrel, and so great was the hunger of the crowd on board one of the vessels that the steward declared himself to be “eaten out” in ten minutes after the vessel left Thames Haven,' said the
News of the World
.

Margate Jetty was simply blocked so far as to be impassable, whilst thousands of excursionists who came down by rail wandered along the cliffs. How many may have gone down is impossible to say. The people arrived at Cannon Street and Charing Cross for Ramsgate at 8am and it was 10 o'clock before the surprised but active officials of the South Eastern could accommodate all their customers.

Nothing was ever quite the same again, though the queues at railway stations have given away to exhausting queues around the M25 as people struggle to get away on a Friday afternoon for their extended weekends. Lovers escape by car. People propose to each other on bank holidays. People ignore the weather in their determination to have fun – and, often, they never forget it.

Harold Wilson later misused the whole idea during the sterling crisis of 1968 and proclaimed an extra bank holiday to avoid the value of sterling sinking through the floor, forcing the resignation of his foreign secretary as a result. Bank holidays can be dangerous weapons. Three years later, exactly a century after Lubbock's law, it was repealed and replaced with a new piece of legislation, the name of which is too long to detain us here. Bank holidays continue.

Lubbock himself died in 1913 and was buried in a wood near his home in the High Elms estate in Bromley. On the August bank holiday after that, his widow happened upon a family having their picnic on or near the grave. She flew into a rage and had his body moved into the churchyard at Farnborough in Kent, where he still lies. Had he been aware of it, you can't help feeling that Lubbock himself might have been rather pleased.