How to Be English (26 page)

The third individual responsible for the atmosphere of the Underground has to be the poet and conservationist John Betjeman, with his evocation of Metroland and the days when trains were ‘rumbling under blackened girders'.

A thing may be right and beautiful and true without being lovable, though a thing cannot be lovable without being also in itself right and beautiful and true. Love is the harmony which such a thing awakes in the emotions; it is the harmony of what it feels to be. It adds the heart, as we call it, to the conscience, the sense, and the mind, to make the four great organs of being.

Frank Pick

Underground lines:

Metropolitan Line 1863

Hammersmith & City Line 1864

District Line 1868

Circle Line 1871

Northern Line 1890

Waterloo & City Line 1898

Central Line 1900

Bakerloo Line 1906

Piccadilly Line 1906

Victoria Line 1968

Jubilee Line 1979

THERE ARE THOSE
who are a little sceptical of the whole idea of meat pies. They say that, if the manufacturer of the pies doesn't know what kind of animal gave rise to the meat, then maybe the pies should be treated as slightly dodgy.

I'm sure they are right to be nervous, but nevertheless, in flagrant disregard for the origins of the meat, English meat pies have still fuelled many a cold afternoon on the football terraces, as well as evenings working late at the factory. English lunchboxes have been graced by a meat pie for centuries.

Why this indeterminate meat? Why not just say beef or ham or chicken pie? Well, the answer appears to lie in the medieval period, when the first of our ancestors gave us the meat pie – beginning as fast food for the poorer inhabitants of medieval cities.

In London, by the docks, in the twelfth century, there emerged the phenomenon of the cookshop. It was a place where, if you had no cooking facilities yourself, you could take your joint – or whatever meat you happened to have purloined that day – and they would cook it for you. What they did was wrap it in pastry, put it in the bread oven for fifteen minutes, and out it would come. And
voilà
! A meat pie.

The pies were also sold by hawkers in the streets, in baskets covered with a muslin cloth, the beginning of the famous ‘pieman'.
Piers Plowman
, creation of William Langland in the fourteenth century, remembers the street cries like this: ‘Hot pies, hot good piglets and geese, go dine, go!'

By that stage of history, the main source of meat pies was in Eastcheap. The problem with cookshops was they tended just to chuck the bones and unusable bits out into the street and were therefore a public nuisance, so they tended to be moved along as the centuries went by. They were also notoriously dodgy even then. A ruling in 1301 forbade the cookshops from buying meat any more than a day old in the summer months. You could hide no end of diseased stuff in a pie.

By Tudor and Stuart times, the pie makers became more specialised – pork pies from the north, veal and ham pies from the Midlands, steak and kidney, eel and chicken pies from the Lake District. In 1660, Samuel Pepys upbraided his wife for cooking her pies for too long in her brand-new oven, comforting himself that she'll know ‘how to do better another time'.

Even so, pies remained something of a fare for poorer English people, or for those having a night on the town, when they could buy from the piemen or, after 1850s or so, from the pie shops. The piemen used to avoid complete bankruptcy by going round the pubs and offering to toss a coin with the customers for a pie. If the customers lost, they had to pay a penny; if they won, they got the pie for free – which, often enough, they would then use to throw at other customers.

It wasn't quite the sad end for the great English institution of meat pies though. In the end, they are rather a good way of keeping meat for longer. They are convenient when you are travelling or away from home. They are comforting when you bite into them and the juices and steam come out. And they do after all owe part of their inspiration to the great Tudor pies, many feet across, cooked with porpoise or elk for up to eight hours.

She made her living by selling pies,

Her meat pies were a treat,

Chock full of meat and such a size

'Cos she was getting the meat from—

Mr Sweeney Todd, the Barber.

Ba Goom, he were better than a play

Sweeney Todd, the Barber

‘I'll polish them off!' he used to say.

R. P. Weston, ‘Sweeney Todd'

THERE IS SOMETHING
about the English which prefers things to be a little broken, unpreposseing, and worn by the passage of time. It is more than the polite English preference for old things, which is a kind of English snobbery. ‘He had to buy all his furniture,' said the Conservative politician Michael Jopling about Michael Heseltine, dismissively (as quoted by Alan Clark in his
Diaries
) – it is the kind of snobbery which is deeply suspicious of anything too shiny and packaged. It results in the enthusiastic commissioning of Roman or medieval ruins in country parks, and in the traditional English preference for elegies, laments and fatal departures.

The English were supposed for many centuries to be prone to melancholia, mainly because of their climate but also because beef was supposed to interfere with the digestion. That may not be the reason, but you can hear the clear note of nostalgia in Chaucer and
Hamlet
, in Gray's ‘Elegy' right back to Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur
– there is a clue there: why write the whole Arthurian legend in terms of death and loss? Then, up almost to the present generation, there was George Orwell meditating on the fate of his country village in
Coming Up for Air
(1939).

There does also seem to be a link here with the Gothic fascination with madness and insanity. ‘It is worth attention that the English have more songs and ballads on the subject of madness than any of their neighbours,' wrote Bishop Thomas Percy in his
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1765). There is the English attitude in a nutshell. Not only is life ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing', as Shakespeare put it – but to make matters worse, upstairs in the attic is our mad wife.

The writer Peter Ackroyd talks about the English landscape, the rolling, winding roads, and the stories of generation after generation, as the basis of this sense of heaviness. He conjures up a huge empty England, as it was in the days of the invaders – with little homesteads along the South Downs and a few crumbling Roman roads, and the great impenetrable forest to the north. There was the roots of English melancholy: it is ancient, and somewhat lonely out there.

But here in London streets I ken

No such helpmates, only men;

And these are not in plight to bear,

If they would, another's care.

They have enough as 'tis: I see

In many an eye that measures me

The mortal sickness of a mind

Too unhappy to be kind.

Undone with misery, all they can

Is to hate their fellow man;

And till they drop they needs must still

Look at you and wish you ill.

A. E. Housman, ‘A Shropshire Lad' XLI (1896)

THE ENGLISH HAVE
a habit of calling their most ancient institutions ‘new' – as in New College, Oxford, which was in fact established in 1379 – and using the word ‘old' to indicate something traditional. This doesn't entirely explain why there are two famous sports venues called Old Trafford, only half a mile from each other, on the outskirts of Manchester. But it is perhaps an acknowledgement that there is something older here than either football or cricket – the land involved used to belong to the old Trafford family, stretching back before the Norman Conquest.

So let's hear it, not so much for Matt Busby or Bobby Charlton or even Shane Warne, but for Radolphus de Trafford who died in 1050 (in the reign of the former patron saint of England, Edward the Confessor) – the lineal forefather of them all.

As far as sports grounds are concerned – and we are talking about hallowed ground here – the oldest of the Old Traffords is undoubtedly the cricket ground, home of Lancashire County Cricket Club, built in 1857 on the meadows belonging to the de Trafford estate. The ground was originally only accessible via a winding footpath from the railway station. The crowds began to flock there to see W. G. Grace in the 1870s. When the Ashes Test match between England and Australia was held there in 1884, Old Trafford's future was assured. It was also the scene in 1956 when Jim Laker managed to take nineteen wickets for just ninety runs, an achievement that has never been bettered.

Wander about 800 yards and there is the other Old Trafford, the football ground and home of Manchester United, probably the most famous football team in the world.

Manchester United used to be known as Newton Heath and suffered from a series of disastrous grounds, either on marshland or on gravel. Their final temporary stadium was in Bank Street, where fumes from the local factory cast an annoying pall over the experience of spectators. New owner John Henry Davies chose the site for their new stadium, designed it to take crowds of 100,000 and managed to get it open by 1910. The first game held was against Liverpool (Manchester United lost). It has been in use ever since – with a brief hiatus in the 1940s when it was damaged by German bombs. The stadium never quite managed to hold 100,000 fans as intended – the biggest crowd they ever managed was in March 1939 with the FA Cup semi-final between Grimsby and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Old Trafford has hosted rugby games, Olympics events and a great many other fixtures. The international following for Manchester United began to grow in the 1950s, and under the leadership of Alex Ferguson (manager 1986–2013), Old Trafford has gained a mystique that no amount of money from American sports magnates can quite dispel.

In many ways, Old Trafford has as good a claim as anywhere else to be the spiritual home of English football. Having said that, the only part of the original 1910 stadium to survive is the old players' tunnel – and that isn't used any more.

Biggest crowds at Old Trafford:

March 1939 (Wolverhampton Wanderers versus Grimsby Town): 76,962

March 2007 (Manchester United versus Blackburn Rovers): 76,098