How to Be English (4 page)

Since this is one tradition that really does go right back, we are forced to conclude that the link between beer and these islands really is something to do with the climate. The key point is that the climate was not, except perhaps until recent years, very good for growing grapes, which ruled out making wine. What else was there to do, in fact, than make beer? The result: they made beer in the most enormous quantities, house by house, pub by pub, and river by river.

Strictly speaking, this wasn't actually beer but ale: by definition it could not be beer until hops were added, and – admittedly – this was not an English innovation. In fact, you can almost hear the squalls of protest when the first hopped beer was imported from the Netherlands in the fifteenth century. There was indeed opposition to the idea, but the only regulation was that brewers were not allowed to produce both beer and ale. It had to be one or the other.

Not only have they been at it for a long time, the English have also always drank a prodigious amount. By the late Middle Ages, this seems to have been an average of sixty to sixty-six gallons a year per head of population – men, women and children. Perhaps this was inevitable when beer was drunk at every meal and was practically the only safe liquid available.

That was one reason why, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, campaigners like William Cobbett were sharpening their pens at the expense of tea – sapping the moral strength of the nation – and urging people to go back to drinking beer.

One of the peculiar aspects of English life, well into the twentieth century, was the enormous quantity of beer that was drunk, especially after factory shifts – when anything up to fifteen pints might be drunk by an industrial worker escaping from the furnaces.

It was in the twentieth century that the traditional English warm beer (actually cellar temperature), and its variations – bitter, mild, brown, India pale, and all the other London specialities, drawn from casks on tap at the bar – began to make way for the array of refrigerated international lagers produced by multinationals.

The English never made a fuss of their beers. They had no beer festivals like the Americans. They had no Oktoberfests like the Germans. So they stood drinking by the bar without really noticing that their beer companies had been consolidated and consolidated until there was nothing left except global mush. Nor did they realise that much the same was happening to their pub chains.

One very important innovation for the English came in 1963 with the legalisation of home brewing. At last, it meant that anyone could make their own beer again. In fact, it is here that the English have been masterminding something of a fightback for their own culture – via the microbreweries and the brewpubs, where they have been once more brewing their own beer, and via the Campaign for Real Ale that has popularised the insurgency.

The Rat, meanwhile, was busy examining the label on one of the beer-bottles. ‘I perceive this to be Old Burton,' he remarked approvingly. ‘Sensible Mole! The very thing! Now we shall be able to mull some ale. Get the things ready, Mole, while I draw the corks.'

Kenneth Grahame,
The Wind in the Willows
(1908)

THE PEAL OF
church bells along a string of different permutations and combinations, known as change ringing, is distinctively English. There are church bells in other countries too, of course, but the practice of ringing them was different in England, partly because the bells were bigger, the bell towers sturdier, and the bells were able to rotate through 180 degrees. It was partly also because of the involvement of seventeenth-century mathematicians – including Richard Duckworth and Fabian Stedman, whose book
Tintinnalogia
was published in 1668 – who rescued the whole business of bell-ringing from the Puritans by pointing out the complicated maths involved.

There have been bells all over Europe since the 1260s. They used to act as the local clock, tolling the hour when people should get up, start work, stop work and go to bed. There are still curfew bells tolled in at least three places around England, including Berwick-upon-Tweed. But it was the English who really took bells to their hearts. There are funeral bells and wedding bells and bells which sound for invasion, which is why bell-ringing was banned from 1940 to 1945. There are ghostly bells which toll from the sea, located offshore at Dunwich and Selsey. There is even a murder mystery about bell-ringing, in Dorothy L. Sayers'
The Nine Tailors
(1934).

England's robust bell towers also played a role in signalling danger, whether it was for seeing the beacons lit to warn people of the arrival of the Armada of 1588 or the complex system of semaphore, from church tower to church tower, which could carry a signal from the Admiralty in London to Nelson's fleet at anchor in Portsmouth Harbour in just twelve minutes.

The year 1668, when
Tintinnalogia
was published, also marked the birth of an otherwise ordinary and forgotten guardsman called John Hatfield. He was a sentry at Windsor Castle in 1690, or thereabouts, when he was court-martialled for falling asleep on sentry duty on the terrace. At his trial, he vehemently denied it, and to prove he had been awake at midnight – when he was accused of being asleep – he said he had heard something very strange. Far across the countryside of the Thames Valley, he had heard Great Tom – the bell in the tower opposite Westminster Hall – chiming thirteen times. Needless to say, this story did not go down well with the court. In fact, as far as they were concerned, it tended to prove his guilt. He was condemned to death.

Before the hanging could be carried out, over the next few days, the news of his claims reached Westminster. Several people swore that, on the night in question, they had also heard Great Tom strike thirteen. It was a peculiarity of the mechanism caused by the lifting piece holding on too long. It seemed highly unlikely that Hatfield could have heard it as far away as Windsor, but the fact that he did proved his innocence. William III pardoned him. History does not relate what happened to him later, but he died at his home in Glasshouse Yard, Aldersgate, on 18 June 1770, well into the reign of George III, at the age of 102.

Great Tom was an ancient thirteenth-century bell, which used to be known as Edward, until the Reformation. The bell tower was demolished in 1698 and the bell sold to St Paul's Cathedral. On the way there, it fell off its wagon at Temple Bar and cracked, was left in a shed in the cathedral for some years and was eventually recast in 1709 – in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which still exists – and hung in the bell tower of St Paul's where it sounds the hour to this day.

It is also used to toll for the deaths of members of the royal family, the Bishop of London, the cathedral's dean and the lord mayor – if he dies in office – but that, as Rudyard Kipling might say, is another story.

King Edward III made and named me

So that by the grace of St Edward the hours may be marked

Translation of the Latin inscription inside the Great Tom bell

THERE IS NO
more distinctive or iconic English building than the peculiar neo-Gothic clock tower that marks the boundary between the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Bridge. The tower itself looks too modern and compact somehow to be medieval, yet it soars like a cathedral above the clock face – the climax of so many films, from
The Thirty-Nine Steps
to
Thunderball.
It is instantly recognisable and not very pretty.

This is not the view of Augustus Pugin, the pioneer of neo-Gothic, for whom the clock tower was his last great achievement, and one which drove him to exhaustion and insanity.

The Clock Tower, as it has been called since then, was recently renamed the Elizabeth Tower after the Queen in honour of her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, but it hasn't caught on. England is not, after all, a nation that often renames its streets and buildings in honour of the recently departed or the living.

As everyone knows, Big Ben actually refers to the bell, which is now as familiar as the tower that houses it, because we hear it every day on the BBC before news bulletins. Its strange ding-dong-ding-dong chimes (said to have been adapted from Handel for the bells of Great St Mary's in Cambridge) are also familiar from television satire, annoying ringtones and much else besides.

When it was built, there was a row about the clock because nobody got round to commissioning one until the tower was 150 feet off the ground and it did not sit in its rightful place until 1859, twenty-five years after the old Palace of Westminster and parliamentary buildings had burned down.

The bell was already up by then, but not without difficulty. When Big Ben was being tested, it cracked in 1857 and had to be recast. It was hung in 1858, tested and cracked again in 1859, and remains cracked to this day. The solution was an English compromise: a lighter hammer. The bell finally tolled again in 1863. At 315 feet in height, and with no lift, it is a bit of a climb to see inside the careful mechanism and the Victorian pennies which still keep time – a penny is said to shift the timekeeping by 0.4 seconds a day one way or the other.

Big Ben is said to have been named after Benjamin Hall, the commissioner of the works. But there is an alternative story that Big Ben actually referred to Benjamin Caunt, a famous prizefighter, nicknamed by the workmen who had to heave the bell up and down, because of its weight.

As well as the cracks, another problem with Big Ben is that it is built on what used to be Thorney Island, on a sandy river beach connected to a marshy tract of land between two channels of the River Tyburn. The Victoria Tower at the other end – the tallest building in the country when it was built – was actually built on quicksand. When Westminster Underground station was enlarged, the huge tunnelling equipment had to stop work when Big Ben began to list. It now leans slightly to the north-west and oscillates very slightly according to the weather, rather like the MPs in the debating chamber below.

Big Ben is a kind of byword for English reliability, breaking down seriously only once in August 1976 – during the long hot summer that changed England forever, first bringing restaurant tables on to the London streets. It stopped again rather mysteriously, also in very hot weather, in May 2005.

It remains the icon of Englishness, understated, bizarrely antique-looking and thoroughly reliable, its pale moon face visible through the fogs and drizzle, its pilot light at the top indicating that Parliament is sitting, Members of Parliament are wrestling with the issues of the nation and all is right with the world.

All through this hour

Lord, be my guide

And by Thy power

No foot shall slide.

The lyrics of the chimes, as set out on the wall of the Clock Tower

IN 1933, WINSTON
Churchill's playboy son Randolph pulled a few strings and got his old housemate John Betjeman a job on the
Evening Standard
gossip column. It was then edited by the former spy Robert Bruce-Lockhart and, although Betjeman was no spy, he was rather a gossip.