Entertainment For Lively Minds
What is Englishness?
The thread about Brian True's comments on casting for Midsomer Murders has got me asking that question. I think it is an important question and I think it's importance can be easily explained without resorting to ideas of race. That's not to say that it can be easily answered because I doubt that any two people will have the same view view on what "Englishness" is, even if both of them were English or both were from Wales, Scotland or India.
Coincidentally I've been reading Rob Young's book Electric Eden and one of the main themes he develops is how certain artists, composers, authors and other culturally minded folk during the late nineteenth to mid 20th century sought to capture the idea of England in their work and art. For them the question was not about race but about using the naturally occuring heritage of England to help quantify and project a national identity for today and for the future. It was not about preserving heritage in aspic but about forging an identity from English heritage in order to create a united country, one that could take on the challenges it faced.
Young clearly separates the murkier side of patriotism from the benevolent side of it in terms of what these key players were trying to achieve, which was really to help all folk, irrespective of class, background or education, to find something that bound them together, to develop a "language" that defined Englishness.
A number of factors helped to stimulate the debate at that time, none of which were about race. The first was the Industrial Revolution which in its sweeping changes threatened to cut off the populace from what had provided them with an identity for centuries before. The second was socialism which radicalised many to queston the norm and to no longer accept the conventions of Establishment. The third, and the essence of what the book sets out to demonstrate, was a realisation that folk music (i.e. the music that was not created from artifice but from environment and upbringing) was in danger of being lost as a result of the rapid advancement of change. England over a hundred years ago was seen by many foreign commentators as a land without music. Hard to believe in this day and age but, nonetheless, a number of key cultural icons of the day took up the challenge of creating a legacy, a portfolio of cultural blueprints, to change that perception of England being a musical and cultural wasteland.
The clearest indication of the drive to create a sense of Englishness at a cultural level was the use of folk song by composers such as Holst, Delius and Vaughan Williams to develop a form of classical music that is now commonly known as pastoral. What Rob Young does - and this is summising on my part as I've not read the entire book - is to show how by continually toiling and working with the soil of our heritage we create a national identify for each generation and that is, essentially, the great legacy of folk music. It was the catalyst that started the idea of creating a cultural identity to the extent that it was truly for everyman, not just for a class or an elite.
In itself I think that process (but I would never claim the process is exclusively an English phenomenon) is partly what makes the English who they are and it is, at least anecdotally, a way of looking at why popular music has been such a fertile breeding ground in England, to the extent that we can absorb the influence of other cultures and in doing so "make them English", i.e a part of our cultural heritage, a part of our national identity.
Using these cultural indicators as a benchmark I think it is fundamentally important to create a national identity - an Englishness - because to my mind if you do not appropriate a positive identity for yourself as a nation, someone with a negative agenda will do so for you. If you have no sense of what it is to be English - and again I must stress that this is not about English as a race - then the risk is that you fail to establish its importance to anyone, English or otherwise. To me that runs the risk of making us a by-product of other cultures which I believe only creates a fertile ground for resentment and misunderstanding.
When the Victorian and Edwardian founding fathers of the cultural quest for what makes us English were taking great steps forward to forge a national identifty the question of race was not an issue so the debate they had was given a clearer run. Their main obstacles were largely the same as today's: Establishment and a lack of vision.
Today, because race has been allowed to become such a political issue and such a difficult and complex issue because so many entrenched sentiments about it have been allowed to fester and be propogated by the warped minded, it is only going to become more difficult to debate "What is Englishness?" the way it was in the past. We run the risk of being afraid to even ask the question.
But it is still an important question and shouldn't be drowned out by those who view it as a too great a risk because of complex issues and deep-seated perceptions regarding race and racism. It's fundamentally more important than that.
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Doesn't this rather ignore music hall? According to Wikipedia there were seventy-eight large music halls in London in 1878 and 300 smaller venues in addition to them. And that was just in the capital.
Or was music hall too working class for the cultural commentators of the time?
That's a good point
To be fair to the intention of the book it is about the emergence of folk music as a national cultural force in England and for the English identity, at home and abroad.
Could it be that Music Hall is a British, rather than an English, phenonomenon and has close associations with American vaudeville so perhaps it lacked certain qualities to make it distinctive enough at that time?
I suspect we're also now in the realms of what constituted low and high art. It was a German commentator, Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, who wrote that England was "Das Land Ohne Musik" and so one can imagine a need at the time for mining a perhaps a more established musical genre than that of the Music Hall, one that had been in the landscape for centuries but never written down. That was a key factor, the fact that folk music was an oral tradition and in danger of being lost as industrialisation encroached on the countryside and broke up communities.
But eventually Music Hall was toiled for ideas. The Beatles, for example, wouldn't have been anything like they were if it hadn't been subsumed by them.
Music Hall
In Peter Ackroyd's excellent book "London - A Biography" there is a whole chapter devoted to Music Hall and how music infiltrated the capital from Roman times right through to the War years.
Ackroyd's thrust was that music hall was very much a "London-centric" genre that pushed out to the regions as its popularity grew. It starter first in London and ended last in London. Far from a British phenomenon, it's argued that music hall is very much a London origination, despite being similarly hugely popular in places such as Middlesbrough, Leeds and Liverpool.
Das Land Ohne Musik
In short : yes.
This seems to be mainly a German argument from the late 19th- and early 20th-century, and was about a certain kind of (ahem) Art Music , with their perception of no English Bach, Beethoven or Wagner. Doubtless some commentators will defend the honour of a certain kind of English music but for these there were no major English composers between Purcell and Elgar, and our German friends still might argue against the value of those.
These commentators did not give a stuff about folk music until the likes of Bartok was going into the fields to record the music of the people.
I've just decided
to double-check the validity of using the term "Englishness" and so did a Google search and came up with this article from a few days ago in the Guardian which chimes with some of what I've just written and contains the ironic news that Nick Griffin loves the folk music of Eliza Carthy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/11/english-nationalism-...
Throwing race into the mix
(And I don't mean the negative connotations that arise thanks in no small part to the likes of the National Front along the way) defining the country as English becomes very difficult. Scotland and Wales have a particular racial mix that can be traced back a long way and even given the other elements that have entered the melting pot it's still quite easy to define, and very difficult to separate from their national identity. Whereas England has received many invaders and visitors and those have integrated into the country far more than happened in Wales and Scotland. Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and all the various immigration from other parts of the Empire, and all the like since.
The bits of England that I identify in my head are things like the whole pastoral thing, are little villages with cricket on the green and old churches and farms and duckponds and the like. That really doesn't tally with where I grew up, London and other urban centres. In fact amongst the people I grew up with none of us identified ourselves as English.
We were Londoners and we were British, thanks to our roots being from other places. My best friend is Jamaican British in his mind, he was born here, but he doesn't consider himself English. I'm half Welsh, and the other side came from Mauritius but can be traced to Ireland, Scotland and India. Racially I have no Englishness, despite being born in London. I'm a Londoner, a Cockney even, but I have no roots in England.
Culturally that leads me to a view of myself that I never see in the likes of a Midsomer Murders (for want of a better example) and yet describes a lot of the people I grew up with. We are classic mongrels (again for want of a better word) with a racially (as in country of origin and in ethnicity)mixed background. That is apparent in the way my friends and I spoke (a mix of classic Cockney, itself a mix of slangs from all sorts of places including Yiddish and West Indian patois), in the music we listened to, the sporting teams we followed and our whole identities.
The whole idea of identity is something I'm very interested in, probably because I don't have established roots in the area I grew up in; and also because I grew up in immigrant communities. You see it a lot in America, where as well as American they will describe themselves as Italian or Irish or African. I've never thought I could describe myself as Welsh-English for instance, or Mauritian English.
I'm waffling now, thinking out loud. But in my view of myself as a Londoner, living alongside people from all over the world, listening to music from all sorts of places, influencing and being influenced by other cultures is also my experience of my England. And it's one I recognise in the likes of The Beatles and The Stones and The Kinks and Madness and the works of Paul Weller and Elvis Costello and Ian Dury, all of whom I would probably hold up as culturally English.
A good insight
I'm half Irish and I know that when I say that to people they have a much clearer idea of what the Irish half of me is representative of than the English half.
I think that's a shame but I also suspect that the pastoral identity (which I think is very strongly English) is one that is less immediate. But it's there and it is as distinctive as any other if you want to find it.
But yes, I totally agree that a large part of what makes England have its identity is the influence of other cultures. We just seem to have lost our way in connecting with that really rather wonderful trait of absorbing cultural influences, probably because time and again we are being made to look at other cultures in capitalistic terms and in terms of what is allegedly being taken away.
I now live in the West Country
and the idea of a pastoral identity makes far more sense out here. In fact I've never had such a sense of Englishness in a place I've lived before. The cider, the fields, the various white horses in the hillside, folk festivals and village greens. Here it is the immediate identity and the London thing seems much further away.
Head a little way west though and you hit Bristol, which, especially being a port has the same racial and identity mixes as I'm used to.
I've not yet adapted myself to fit this place. The city boy identity is hard to shake.
Could it be that that particular identity is just that though, the identity of a city-dweller? Does somebody who grew up in New York or Paris feel similar to the description of my own identity that I gave above? Should it be discounted in any idea of Englishness due to being universal?
Big fish, small pond
National identity (in fact, a lot of identity, whether it's "I hate U2" or "I never watch the X Factor") is based on defining what you are not. This is where the Scots and the Welsh have an advantage in terms of self-definition - they are not the English.
Look at Scotland - it's enjoyed much the same waves of immigrations as England - indeed, given relative population sizes, these immigrations were probably much more significant. Anglo-Saxons settled the east coast (place names like Athelstaneford stand out), Vikings all around the coast, Normans (Robert de Bruis: the Bruis - now Brix - is near Cherbourg), Flemish (the early towns of Scotland were largely populated by Flemish merchants, brought in because they knew how to do this new-fangled living in towns thing), Irish (see Glasgow), Italians, Poles, Indians, English - the lot. The nineteenth century saw an awful lot of industrial migration as English, Welsh and Irish workers came to work in Scotland's heavy industrial areas.
That's quite a melting pot. However, at all times there's been the opportunity for people, no matter where their parents came from, to group together against another identity, that is the English, and say "I'm not that". Perhaps the urge to differentiate is stronger because the cultures and the people (whisper it) aren't *that* different.
I'll admit to not knowing a huge amount of Welsh history, but I'd imagine they are similar threads there too.
Perhaps England itself was too big, and regional identities too strong, to pool together into a single English identity (and when the big, whole country threats did come – WW1, WW2 – we were British). Like you, I grew up as with a local identity (Cumbrian) and a British identity. The only time being English came into the equation was watching a football or rugby international, and all that did was dictate what side you supported.
Interestingly, I’ve often thought that one of the few defining features of being from England was the absence of an urge or a need to make a song and dance about it – no need to have a flag pole with a St George’s Cross flying at the top, or to wrap yourself in a flag. That seems to be disappearing now, what with all those car flags. Which is a shame, I think. I always liked a nice bit of quiet reserve and dignity, but it seems now that people in England are feeling insecure and are seeking to define themselves against others.
I stumble over my words a lot,
get nervous in social situations and will often do anything to avoid confrontation. I see these as quite English traits for some reason.
Avoiding confrontation
That's probably why Tolkein made us the Hobbits.
Seriously, all the Hobbits struggle to speak their minds and would rather be gardening or left to their own devices than tackling bullies.
I can't see how you can seperate "Englishness"from race
especially for those who come from non white backgrounds. One of the advantages of "Britishness" was/is that it meant people from these backgrounds can/could feel included in a way that being "English" prevented them. Whether people like it or not being English means in the minds fo some ethnic minorities being born white.
Also Englishness defined by some appeal to an semi-mythical arcadian past seems problematically for many too.
As for "folk" music this seems to be almost enitrely defined (for good or ill) by being the music majority of "folk" don't listen to or care for a great deal.
I think
"Britishness" fudges the issue. It's a political cop-out in my mind, something to paper over the cracks. It denies the fact that Welshmen want to be Welsh and so on. Why piss on their chips just because the English have boxed themselves into a corner?
Whilst the mythical/Arcadian element drove the instigators of the "folk movement" it is the process of searching out and absorbing the quintessence of what is English that is important. You can do that without basing the idea that English is Beowulf, the Green Man, Morris dancing and men with niccotine beards and a finger in their ear.
As for what constitues "folk music" in the light of Electric Eden's thematic structure then it's as diverse as Vaughan Williams, Kate Bush, Boards of Canada, John Martyn, Julian Cope and The Orb.
erm but welshness etc can be excluding too
if you're not white and welsh, I don't think British is a fudge I think it's been thrown away too quickly in many areas as people focus on differences rather than similarities and for short term political ideals.
I can't understand how if you're searching for a mythical Arcadian suddenly the search becomes more important than the goal. If you can do the searching without basing it on Beowulf etc why has no one being doing that?
Oh and with the exception of Vaughn Williams in classical music and early Kate Bush your list of artist are hardly top of the pops and therefore don't have much claim to be "folk" music.
The Arcadian view of Englishness seems to avoid other traits such as non-conformist religion, science, industry, martial history, colonialism, organised sport, lots of food and drink culture as well excluding many who's families like mine that aren't in the doomsday book.
Excluding
who? Your logic therefore says that a national identity is an irrelevance or a problem so it's best if we just call oursleves "British" or "European" and it will make it OK. It just seems to me replace one problem with another, i.e. let's make everyone who isn't English feel happy but ignore those who are English and want to be. Replace one form of exclusion with another.
The "search" or the "process" for creating a national cultural identity isn't just about Arcadia and myths. We can find other essences for national identity in other places. The point is that the mystical/mythical backrop was the first wave of attempting to identify a cultural identity, it doesn't exclude anyone from claiming that an equivalent essence can be found down a coalmine, in a tower block or in a game of football. What Vaughan Williams et al were at pains to do was to make culture relevant to everyone at some level without losing the essence. The last thing they would want is for us today to put their blueprints in a museum or to view what they were doing just as a piece of history. They were trying to empower and were largely doing so in opposition to the political, social and religious conventions of the day.
No i think a national identity
that doesn't seek to include everyone in country can lead divisions and worse and I don't see the potentially narrow view of English laid out here as doing that and so it makes me uneasy. Nationality almost by definition seems to be defining yourself by what you're not and I'm more interested in what we have in common than what we don't.
Sigh
What is it about asking "What is Englishness?" that "doesn't seek to include everyone in the country"? I'm struggling to reconcile your concerns with the benevolent aims of those who are trying to do just that by searching out for what is influencing our cultural identity and in doing so are not looking at the question as one simply of race or point in time.
My daughter does Bollywood dancing. She loves it and it will help to define what makes her English.
Oh I like the sigh
you raise an issue and then get *deep sigh* indignant when someone disagrees *even deeper sigh* with you.
I just can't see how you can consider national indentity while sweeping race and origin under the carpet.
Also I'm not sure why you want to define it (or search for it) in the first place will there be some revelation at the end?
First off
it's not "indignation" it's frustration, borne from an erroneous intepretation (IMO) you've made of the OP that I've subsequently tried to clarify but which is continuing to be misunderstood. The meaning or rationale for what I have written so far has evidently not been communicated clearly enough by me. That's frustrating.
Second, I've not said that race should be swept under the carpet. I've said that the question "What is Englishness?" can legitimately be asked without directly referring to race. For example I think of Cornershop as an English band before I think of them in terms of the "race and origin" of the people in the band. So what is it about their music that makes them English if race is not a consideration in my identifying them as an English band? That process or search, in my mind, is no different to asking what makes Vaughan William's The Lark Ascending "English"?
Third I don't actually understand what you mean by "origin". The implication is that you can only identify something as English by race and place of birth whereas a number of the posts on here seem to be looking at it in terms of an attitude or a way of looking at life.
Fourth, I said in the OP that I'm not looking for or expecting a definitive answer. I tried to show - using an historical perspective - why asking the question is important and how it can be asked without referring to race. By placing it in an historical perspective I was underlining the fact that national identity in the past was asked from a basis of not considering race because it didn't require that level of explicitness to be made as it seems to require today.
It's important to me to find a rationale for asking it, for example, if only to stop groups like the BNP from appropriating "Englishness" for I believe to be the wrong reasons, to give THEIR answer legitimacy and in so doing make it THE answer because we're either too afraid or apathetic to concern ourseleves with the question. If we all just shrug our shoulders and say "whatever, there's no big revelation at the end so what's the point" then we might as well just give the BNP a clear run of it and stop pretending that we actually care what they say and do. A vaccum has been created and the BNP are filling it.
So that is why I think it's important to ask the question - using, for example, cultural signifiers as exemplified in the OP (Arcadia, Albion, Bollywood, Wenlock Edge, Tate Modern, a club playing Grime) - without having to justify or qualify an answer (of which there can be many as the thread illustrates) in terms of race.
It's not about ignoring race, it's about not making race the overriding basis for asking it. You can only have an influence on the answer if you're prepared to ask the question.
If this is irrelevant to you then fair enough but that is the point I'm trying to make and why I think it is fundamentally important.
Finger of Fudge
My father is Scottish, my mother English.
I was born and bred in England, and acccept that liking Big Country, Robert Louis Stevenson and Billy Connolly does not really balance this out, no matter how much I might occasionally delude myself otherwise, but nevertheless I always describe myself as British because I choose to be both rather than exclude one.
I'm not sure about fudging
I think of myself (a white, near middle aged man) as a Yorkshireman, a northerner and British. "English" doesn't enter the equation for me, partly because the image touted (and I'm thinking about John Major here) is very much something that is redolent of the Home Counties and all of the that bucolic mythologising of cycling spinsters and warm beer (WARM BEER! Sacrilege!). I have more in common culturally and linguistically with a Scot than I do with someone living in London.
Britishness was, I think about stoicism, self-deprecation and understatement. Trad British was stratified, yet tolerant and accepting of the eccentric and different. It was slightly world-weary and cynical, though admitting of good. It loved knowledge and learning. And it was trusting of the rule of law and the good intentions of many trying to implement it, even though it tried to prick them at the same time. What other country could have Vivian Stanshall, for example?
Interestingly, the more I look at Japanese culture, these value seem to chime with some Japanese values. Perhaps it's the feudalism?
I say was, because the new Britishness is about none of those things it: now it seems you wear your heart on your sleeve and grieve ostentatiously for people and things you don't know; you cling certainties and pick on the weak; you celebrate your ignorance and mock those who are not. Don't think, sit down with your Tesco bought six pack, eat your pizza, watch the performing monkeys on the TV and shut up.
Why do you think
Britishness has changed from what it was to what it is now?
1979
The post war consensus created a society with tensions, but with at least some mobility. Grammar school boys like Heath and Wilson prospered,and they weren't the only ones (Andrew Neil's documentary a couple o weeks ago touched on this). The political landscape was predicated on a Keynsian economic principle, where full employment was desirable and expected. Some people were richer, but most were in pretty much the same boat. I hesitate to use the word, but this was essentially a moderately socialist social contract.
Then 1979 happened. The core of Thatcherism was Friedman, and indirectly, the cult of individualism and consumerism. We have been encouraged to be more selfish and less tolerant; in return we were promised the illusion of wealth and the satisfaction of all our wants. In general we are technologically more advanced, with better and varied nutrition and medicine, but the gap between the richest and poorest is widening. That gap creates resentments and makes many try to hold on to the little they have. They become insular, and fearful. We are not happier as nation, are we?
Any of this sound familiar? That's why I found the "we are all in this together" PR blizzard of the coalition so very offensive. It has almost become a mantra, chanted by every middle ranking minster wheeled on to justify the kind of social and cultural vandalism that is going on now. It has tried to play on traditional British values (that many still pretend we have), in order to justify doing things which are utterly alien to that image of ourselves we once had.
Here's a clip from a pretty insightful US lecture, which has disturbing and very real echoes for us as a country. We ignore at our peril.
Actually, i suppose this is a quite British style of rant too, now I read it back.
About a year ago we had these light hearted interpretations
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/the-most-english-thing-ever
Englishness doesn't exist, regional identity is stronger
I don't think there is anything that unites English people, apart from their language and even that varies around the country.
Religion, agriculture, war, and belief in the monarchy may have united the country once but not anymore.
'Common traits' like the English sense of humour? No-one can agree on what that is (eg Top Gear v Stewart Lee).
I was born in Lancashire and live in Yorkshire and feel both counties have a stronger identity than the country. If you go back to the pre-1974 boundaries, both had big ports, cities, industrialised towns and rugged countryside.
When I visit the Cotswolds, with its twee towns and manicured countryside, I feel like I'm in another country.
Vast parts of England are a mystery to me - I don't know where Bedfordshire starts and ends or where Dorset is exactly. I don't feel I have anything in common with these counties.
England seems to be a divided country full of rivalries, sometimes friendly, sometimes not - London v the rest of England, cities v countryside, north v south, Liverpool v Manchester, Sheffield v Leeds - but I find that quite refreshing.
Maybe that's what Englishness is - different things to different people, a place where diverse people can co-exist in peace for most of the time.
I think you've nailed
it. The point of my OP was not to claim that Englishness is a closed answer but that asking the question "What is Englishness?" (i.e the process of trying to find an answer) is important.
I just think that issues of race have stifled that question and made the answer elusive in a negative rather than a positive way.
I also loathe the idea of the BNP laying claim to things that I value and claiming that they exclusively represent those values and therefore I must find some other values as a result lest I be associated with their vile bile.
Amen
Brother
Indeed
I am from Glasgow and so have been brought up watching a frisky Scottish nationalism plus the issues of wider family over in Ireland. In comparison it seemed, then and from a distance, that England was a more stolid thing, set in its ways though a bit tetchy that these recalcitrant cousins were proclaiming their difference.
However now I have lived in England longer than I lived in Scotland, but even during this time I have watched the emergence of debate, is it did not involve Writing Out The Ethnics. Instead, frisky work from the likes of The Imagined Village seems as modern and English as anything. I like Alisdair Gray's line about "work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation", and I see that happening in so many ways in England.
All this seems to have emerged from the strange fuss about Midsomer Murders. On the one hand it seems as silly to complain about MM as it would be to criticise Trumpton, of which it seems a more homicidal version. However even in the Cheshire villages round my way you will have the chippy run by Chinese and the local restaurant is as likely to be Indian as anything else. MM is as realistic as Hugh Grant flicks showing North London without graffiti and black people.
I know plenty of gently-ageing, Daily Mail-buying , garden-tending, small "c" conservative, English idyll-pursuing but definitely non-fascist people who, while perhaps delusionally hope to preserve a vision of their world in aspic, should not be confused with that section who will wish to wave the Union flag and bellow "We Are The People", with the implication of "And You're Not". Thankfully the latter are resisted everywhere, not least in England.
Cricket
Monty Panesar and Ajmal Shahzad are English. Jonathan Trott and Kevin Pietersen are not. One of the great recent England captains was Nasser Hussain, Andrew Strauss was born in South Africa and raised in England. What I am clumsily trying to say is that the lines are so blurred now that any traditional English identity is eroded beyond recognition, in reality which is how it has always been. Roman, Viking, Irish, West Indian, Indian, Somalian, Polish, the list goes on but this is mere evolution, no more, no less. It has taken over 200 years of immigration for an American identity to evolve and that too is changing all the time. Ultimately borders mean little, culture is meaning less and colour thank goodness is irrelevant. In answer to your original question, pass, next question?
!!!
That's a good thing?
Probably not
but it's a fact that your daughter learning Bollywood dancing maybe proves. I may have got myself muddled again but I meant an individuals cultural background is blurring at the edges to include others that we wouldn't have even been aware of before. Meaning less, or did I mean is becoming broader and therefore diluting? Where's my Simple Minds thread gone? It's safer there ;o)
Fascinating Stuff.
Lots of things I agree with up there and plenty of food for thought.
Born in England, but I do not particularly like, and do not choose, to think of myself as 'English'. And there's a number of reasons for that, I think:
Firstly, I'm not 'racially pure' English (and if I could think of a better way to put that, I would). By which I mean I'm a bit of a mongrel. You don't have to go too far back up (down?) the family tree to find both Scots and Irish blood, and there are strong Welsh ties through marriage. Go back far enough and my surname would suggest Scandinavian (Viking!) blood.
Nor do I feel 'culturally' English. Being (notionally) Catholic has something to do with that I suspect, as does being a Merseysider. The 'John Major' vision of England means nothing to me, despite having clawed myself into the middle class and now living in a leafy Cheshire village.
And finally, to the extent that 'Englishness' is articulated, I find it at best unnerving and at worst completely repulsive. To me, 'Englishness' immediately summons up the Daily Mail, unwarranted privilege bestowed by accident of birth, the tatty plastic St George Cross decorating the white van when the World Cup is on, petty xenophobia and a morbid fascination with vacuous celebrity and, still, class and social status.
'British' doesn't conjure up those same images for me.
And yet...there are other, positive aspects of Englishness I wish were more immediately redolent of the country and its people. I'm thinking of the England of Billy Bragg, of a sense of fair play and justice, of good humour and community. That's where our national identity should lie.
"unwarranted privilege bestowed by accident of birth"
but sometimes, with that comes the concept of noblesse oblige.
It's one of the reasons I dislike the tooling around being done to the House of Lords. Make it an wholly elected chamber and all that will happen is that it will turn into the venal, "cats fighting in a sack" atmosphere of the Commons. The process of getting elected will become just as bent and devalued as the current one. Only those with political patronage would get that far. The very richest might try for a veneer of respect, but probably wouldn't.
It's a good question, and
It's a good question, and it's one I ponder a great deal, being a Scot living in the States.
And I've come to the conclusion I have not got a clue. The Englishness and England that I love is the rolling Downs, good bitter, cricket, Nick Drake, patience and gentle tolerance - the Arcadian, pastoral idyll referenced earlier.
Which seems to be a different country from what I read in the newspapers and witness when I occasionally come home to visit.
I wonder if the answer is that there is no 'Englishness" - perhaps because it's too broad a church to which we can apply meaningful definitions.
I do think of myself as English.
I also think of myself as Welsh - by (a slim majority of) blood. I also think of myself as a West Countryman. I also think of myself as a London-dweller (but not a Londoner). Oh, and a reluctant public schoolboy, which is a definite demographic: there are tons of us, who probably have the accent and the classicalish education, might have been scholarship boys (me), but aren't braying rugger buggers and had a really hard time from the braying rugger buggers, hence the reluctance and the refusal to fit the stereotype.
The parts of my character which I consider English: I'm uncomfortable and diffident socially, which I'll often cover up by talking a bit too much. I can't dance or flirt to save my life. I don't really believe it when someone pays me a compliment, and mutter and fidget with embarrassment rather than graciously accept it. Or, if I do accept it, I'll look at my shoes and go red and say "well, thank you" in a slightly mumbly way. I'm mistrustful of OTT displays of affection and emotion, and tend to think of mercurial people as a bit shallow. I like a good argument. No, honestly. I realise it's hard to believe.
I *don't* conflate the idea of Englishness with the EDL and the BNP. That cognitive tie-up just isn't there for me, whereas it is just a bit with Britishness. The Union Flag, sad to say, still has shadows of unpleasantness for me which I'm powerless to resist. The George Cross just says "football", as far as I'm concerned, which just means I instantly ignore it.
Side by side with all that are the Welsh parts of me, and the West Country bits, and the reluctant public school bits. That's my cultural identity, and a large part of it is definitely English.
Incidentally, I don't think skin colour has anything to do with it. My public school had any number of brown faces which covered up similarly English, conflicted brains.
You are me
and I claim my £5.
...apart from the West Country bit (though I did live there for a while)
...and the public school bit... posh boy
What might Englishness be?
I suppose the clichés are:
Eccentricity, special sense of humour, stiff upper lip (sang froid), generosity in charitable giving, love of animals, good puddings, cricket, good pop, village greens, self deprecation, class, etc. But it's hard to separate Englishness from Britishness, nigh on impossible really, though the conventional idea of the Welsh and Scottish might be of somewhat less uptight, repressive peoples, more emotionally open and having the advantage of being the underdogs, historically hard done by so able to feel superior. History always gets brought up - it's unavoidable. Then again it was the British Empire, but the English led the way you could say. And there is an attempt to put our past in a better light with more positive reappraisals of Victorianism. Evidence to contradict the clichés can be found but stereotypes and clichés tend to often have an element of truth to them.
A new idea of Englishness would be hard to come up with without it seeming like some attempt at PR rebranding. Who decides what it is? Maybe there was a real Englishness as found in Powell and Pressburger films and the like that once existed but is now something of an illusory mythical world. Would it help stop other nations coming up with unfavourable notions of us? No. Our less admirable actions as a country mitigate against it, or is it all of Britain to blame, then again other nations have been as bad? It's all got quite messy. There is an idea of Englishness in our culture no doubt. The world of Penny Lane, psychedelia with roots in Lewis Carroll, a strong sense of nature and landscape in poetry and painting, but how much did that exist in reality, outside culture. And what about other ethnic contributions - they should feature. Still, an identifiable culture is something. But the French maybe beat us at literature and art, and cuisine obviously, historically I would say. What do we have? Shakespeare and The Beatles - internationally admired and recognisable representatives of English culture? Stately homes? But then there's the less happy story of where that wealth came from. It's all a bit of a minefield really. I think we have a mixed image - of tolerant people with an admired way of life (though that doesn't really exist for many). Other countries do better by being less prominent in history. If we want a good image based on something real for now we need to do better at manufacturing and have better public services and infrastructure so foreigners have something more concrete to look up to us for than past glories and heritage - England's dreaming! But I can't really separate English and British too successfully. I think the Welsh and Scots feel the need to push their own image more to prevent being overshadowed by a still dominant London-centric England. Englishness is much less tangible through being less coherent and consistent in indentity than Wales and Scotland. It's too varied to pin down really. An idea of Britishness is easier to come up with.
Englishness?
Not much bothered really. Anyone for a brew?
Englishness: no such thing.
Any national identity is onion-like ... peel away at the layers to reach the core but there is no core. Also applies to Scottishness of course ...
Consequently, national identity is what each generation defines it to be. Which is why it's a struggle. Which is why the tolerant, thoughtful, inclusive thread of argument stands in opposition to an intolerant, thoughtless, fearful and reactionary definition of Englishness (or whichever nationality is under discussion).
So, Ahh_Bisto, *how* do you want to be English? Although I guess a great deal of the answer is in the question and subsequent posts...
Not sure I can give
a coherent let alone definitive answer to the question. It feels like an important question though, particularly when there are those who seek to answer it in such prejudicial and exclusionary terms. So I suppose much of my answer would be about saying what it's not which in turn would lead to more affirmative answers such as being tolerant, inclusive and fair-minded. Joking apart there is a strong part of me that thinks "if we all just sit down and have a cup of tea I'm sure we can sort this out" is a good way of going through life.
Asking the question is still though the important part of the process. I'm not expecting a lightbulb moment or some total theory of Englishness. That's not the point of asking the question. I think culture and heritage are important facets of national identity because although they may not be directly relevant to you in your day-to-day lives they at least give an understanding of where you've come from. I firmly believe in the lessons of history providing a compass for today and tomorrow.
It's also probably an age thing for me. I now have kids and am increasingly finding myself on the fringes of what is apparently the consensus on many issues. I think Illuminatus came very close with his comparison of Britishness today and the Britishness that was. It's what it was that I have greater affinity with.
Culture these days seems like a very shallow pool at and it's through culture that I have primarily formed an identity for myself outside of upbringing and environment. Culture seems to have been marginalised and compartmentalised whereas I think a significant part of what made the English/British what they are was their ability to be polymathic, to really absorb other cultural influences. From that came cultural rebellion, another great trait, which sadly seems to have long faded away from how culture is defined these days.
This might help
to add to the mixture:
Dons tweed jacket, puffs pipe...
Bisto's right to emphasise the need to ask the question 'What is Englishness?' rather than to define the identity itself. Identity is a discourse, a story, and so is ongoing, constantly changing shape and colour, elements moving into and out of focus.
One of the fascinating things about Englishness is that, for the longest time, it wasn't really a problem. Consider what was happening elsewhere in Europe while the English were working up their pastoral myth. The effects of industrialisation were fairly common across the region, but England's identity issues are nothing when compared with France, Germany or - happy anniversary - Italy. These were nation-states born of the modern age, constantly trying to come up with a shared sense of nationality. d'Azeglio's words would never have applied in England: 'We have made Italy, now we must make Italians.' For over a century after the Revolution, the French continually struggled with what defined them as a nation, possibly still do.
On this side of the Channel, the Victorian English were a little withering about all this nationalism, despite the occasional argument about the Norman yoke.
No conclusions here, just observations.
1066 and all that
From the 11th Century to the 19th Century, Englishness could be defined as 'Not Being French'. In the 20th Century it was 'Not Being American'. I don't know about the 21st Century ...