 Celebratory, witty and incredibly insightful, Harry Bingham explores the eccentricities and customs of the British nation in a bid to answer a question which has everyone debating -- Who are we? For the British, that's an oddly difficult question. Although our national self-assessment usually notes a number of good points (we're inventive, tolerant, and at least we're not French), it lists a torrent of bad ones too. Our society is fragmented and degenerate. Our kids are thugs, our workers ill-educated, our public services abysmal. We drink too much. Our house prices are crazy, our politicians sleazy, our roads jammed, our football team rubbish. When the 'Times' invited readers to suggest new designs for the backs of British coins, one reader wrote in saying, 'How about a couple of yobs dancing on a car bonnet or a trio of legless ladettes in the gutter?' Is there really nothing to be proud of? British inventors have been responsible for myriad marvels we now take for granted, from the steam engine to the world wide web.
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British medical and public health innovations -- vaccination, integrated mains sewerage, antiseptic surgery -- have saved far more lives than all other medical innovations put together. And why stop there? The British empire covered a quarter of the earth's surface but used an army smaller than that of Switzerland to exert its rule. The world speaks our language. Our scientists have won vast numbers of Nobel Prizes. The evolution of habeas corpus, trial by jury and the abolition of torture aren't purely British in inspiration, but owe more to us than to anyone else. Our parliamentary democracy has been hugely influential in spreading ideals of liberty and representative government round the world. If the modern world is richer, freer, more peaceful, more democratic and healthier than it was, then Britain has played a leading role in that transformation. This book is about just that. Taking a particular interest in the many things that we did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do, this focuses especially on those of our oddities that spread across the world -- everything from football to the rule of law.
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Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
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Willy,Willy, Harry, Ste,
Harry, Dick, John, Harry three,
One, two, three Neds, Richard two,
Henries four, five, six – then who?
Edwards four, five, Dick the bad,
Harries twain and Ned the lad,
Mary, Bessie, James the vain,
Charlie, Charlie, James again,
William & Mary, Anna Gloria,
Four Georges,William and Victoria,
Ted, George, Ned, then George were seen
And now it’s Liz – God Save Our Queen. | When our present queen dies, then her eldest son, all being well, will ascend to the throne. The line of succession would then pass to Charles’s eldest son, William, who would in due course expect to become King William V. Or so convention has it. But the convention hides a slightly embarrassing truth: that Kings William I, II and III weren’t really Williams at all.
The first monarch with any name remotely like William was a certain Guillaume of Normandy, known as Le Bâtard. Guillaume le Bâtard was born in France, christened in France and spent most of his life in France. He spoke French. When he invaded England, he brought with him a French-speaking court, French-speaking nobles and French-speaking churchmen. King Guillaume was definitely not called William, just as his son (Guillaume II le Roux) was not called William either.
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Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
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Jeremy Clarkson – journalist, broadcaster and all-round motormouth – is wont to claim that ‘the British invented everything’, a view that has settled rather lazily into the popular consciousness. Even with a Clarksonian view of the world, however, the claim is hard to support.
 Take, for instance, the area of transport technology. It’s pretty clear that the pogo stick is not a British invention. Originating in Germany, the modern all-metal, enclosedspring pogo was developed and patented in the United States by an Illinois toy designer, George Hansburg, in 1919. The device proved a big hit. Hansburg taught the girls at the Ziegfeld Follies how to pogo, and in 1920 the world’s first pogo wedding was celebrated.
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Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
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And can any good thing come out of foreign parts? In matters of sport is the world not divided into two parties? – the one Greeks, the other barbarians; we being the Greeks and all other nations whatsoever the barbarians.
REVEREND J.G. WOOD, The Boy’s Modern Playmate, 1868 | In the twelfth century, one William Fitzstephen observed that ‘After dinner all the youth of the city goes out into the fields for the very popular game of ball. The scholars of each school have their own ball, and almost all the workers of each trade have theirs also in their hands. The elders, fathers and men of wealth come on horseback to view the contests of their juniors, and in their fashion sport with the young men.’ The game that was being played would have had no formal rules. It might have been fifty or more a side. Propelling the ball with hands or sticks may have been permitted. Good-natured physical brawling was certainly a core part of the entertainment, with injuries commonplace.
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Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
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The word yob – a lame nineteenth-century joke, boy backwards – has a comfortable feel to it, suggesting the back row of the classroom, flicked ink pellets and the occasional surreptitious whack with a ruler. But the reality of British yobbishness is much uglier than this. It’s binge drinking, fights after pub closing, knives in schools, teenagers mugging each other for their mobile phones. It’s football hooliganism, louts urinating in public, casual vandalism, road rage.
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Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
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If you poke around on an internet video service such as YouTube, you’ll be able to find video clips of the Japanese Parliament, or Diet, in action. At first glance, those videos are nothing so special: a whole load of blokes in suits, in a modernish assembly building, talking interminably in a language that few of us understand. Except that the blokes in question are clearly Asian not European, the clips might easily have been shot in Luxembourg or Slovenia or Denmark; or, for that matter, in Cardiff, Belfast or Edinburgh.
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