given up smoking in order to save money to send young Nigel through
Winchester. Someone else at the table muttered that "this public-school
business" was a lot of damned nonsense. My friend smiled. "Damn it,"
he said, "you [the mutterer] are always talking about how well the
Russians do things. Well, I read in _The Times_ this morning that
Khrushchev says they're going to start schools to train leaders. What's
good enough for old Khrush ought to be good enough for you pinks down
at the London School of Economics!"
THE ARMY, THE NAVY, THE AIR FORCE
"The Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, they always play the game."
So sang the girls and boys of careless, complacent Britain in the
thirties. The verse symbolizes the middle-class public-school
atmosphere of the services' place in British society. Prior to World
War II the three services enjoyed a more honored place in British
society than did the Army and the Navy in American society.
The commanding officer of a battalion on home service thought himself
socially superior to the leading industrialist of the neighborhood,
and, in most cases, the industrialist agreed. The retired Navy
commander or Army major was a recognized figure in the life of the
village or town in which he lived--a figure of fun, perhaps, to the
bright young people down from Oxford or Cambridge, and an easy mark for
social caricaturists and cartoonists, but also a man of importance in
the affairs of the community.
He was also, in many cases, a man of means. Pay in the pre-war Army
was ridiculously small, and an officer in a "good" regiment needed
a private income if he were to live comfortably. Again, the retired
officer and the serving officer knew a good deal about the world, a
circumstance forced upon him (for he was never especially cordial to
foreigners) by the necessity of garrisoning the Empire. He had lived
in India or China or Egypt and fought in South Africa or France or
Mesopotamia, and he had formed firm conclusions about these countries
and their people. These conclusions, often delivered with the certainty
of an order on the parade ground, raised the hackles of his juniors
and were derided as the reactionary ideas of relics from Poona, the
citadel of conservatism in India. There is an old service verse about
the "Poona attitude":
_There's a regiment from Poona
That would infinitely sooner
Play single-handed polo,
A sort of solo polo,
Than play a single chukker
With a chap who isn't pukka._
After the Second World War had burst on Britain in all its fury and in
its aftermath, it occurred to many who had fumed while the ex-officers
talked that the Blimps had known what they were talking about. Earlier
I noted that the retired officers were right in their predictions about
what would happen in India once the British withdrew, and that the
politicians and publicists of the left were wrong. I do not suggest
that the British should or could have remained. But several hundred
thousand lives might have been saved if the withdrawal had been slower.
The services and their officers thus had established themselves as
a much more important part of society in Britain than had their
counterparts in the United States. They were always in the public eye.
The Army and the Air Force fought campaigns on the north-west frontier
of India. The Navy chased gun-runners and showed the flag.
Socially, the Army was the more important. The sons of the very
best families--which means the oldest and most respectable, not the
richest--went into the five regiments of the Brigade of Foot Guards
or into the Household Cavalry or into the old, fashionable, expensive
cavalry regiments like the 16th/5th Lancers or the Queen's Own Fourth
Hussars (which once, long ago, attracted a young subaltern named
Churchill). It was the fashion among the intellectuals of pre-war
England to laugh at the solemn ceremonials of the Foot Guards and
to snicker at the languid young men who protested when their horses
were taken away and replaced by armored cars and tanks. (It might be
remarked that when the time came there was nothing to laugh at and a
good deal to be proud of. The account for the parties at the night
clubs and the hunting, shootin', and fishin' of the careless days
was rendered and paid in blood. You could see them in France in May
and June of 1940 going out with machine guns and horribly antiquated
armored cars to take on the big German tanks.)
If the Army was predominant socially, the Navy held military
pre-eminence. It was the Navy which was the nation's "sure shield," the
Navy which had been matchless and supreme since Trafalgar. It was the
Navy which time and again had interposed its ships and men between the
home islands and the fleets of Spain, France, and Germany. The naval
officer standing on his bridge in the North Sea or off some tropic port
was a watchman, a national symbol of security.
As the two senior services were so firmly implanted in the public
consciousness, it is easy to see why the Royal Air Force, the youngest
of the three, lived on such short commons before the war. Socially it
did not count. "He's one of these flying chaps," a young Hussar said at
Lille one day in 1939, "but a very decent fellow." It did not attract
the young men who entered the Guards or the Cavalry, for the RAF dealt
with machines and grimy hangars smelling of grease and oil, and it
planned for the future without much hope of governmental financial
assistance or any real support from tradition. Whereas the Loamshire
Hussars had been fighting since Blenheim, the Secretary of State for
War was an ex-officer, and the port at the mess was beyond praise.
Militarily, the RAF meant a great deal more. When the war began, it
became the savior of Britain--for a few years the one service through
which the country could strike directly and powerfully at Germany. The
rise of the RAF to pre-eminence among the fighting services in post-war
Britain began with its long, bitter, successful battle against the
_Luftwaffe_ in the summer of 1940.
The ascent of the RAF to its present position is the first of the
changes that have overtaken the services in Britain, which is a martial
if not a militaristic nation. Of course, the development of air power
as the means of carrying the new nuclear weapons would have ensured an
improvement in its position in any case. But the expansion of the RAF
during the war, the post-war necessity for continued experimentation
in associated fields such as the development of guided missiles, and
the creation of a large, highly trained group of technical officers
provided an opportunity for the new middle class and the upper levels
of the industrial working class, the planners and technicians, to win
advancement in what is currently the most important of the services.
The Battle of Britain was won by public-school boys. But the modern
RAF, although it has its share of public-school boys especially among
the combat units, is increasingly manned, officers as well as the
higher noncommissioned officers, by products of the state schools. The
RAF needs now and will need increasingly in the future the services of
the best technical brains Britain can offer. The main source of supply
will be not the officers' training units at the public schools or the
universities but the new technical colleges and training courses in
Britain.
It follows, then, that in time the military defense of the realm will
rest primarily not upon the class who have always considered themselves
ordained by birth and education to carry out this task but upon a new
group springing from the new middle class and from the proletariat.
This is a social development of the first importance.
The change in the character of the officer class is not confined to the
RAF, although it is most noticeable there. There has been a change,
too, in the composition of the commissioned ranks of the Army.
When World War II ended, the "military families," which for generations
had sent sons into the local county regiments, found that the second
war, following the terrible blood-letting of the first, had almost
wiped them out. Perhaps one son in three or four survived. And he,
surveying the post-war Army and the post-war world, was disinclined
to follow tradition and devote the remainder of his working life to
the service. He might gladly have served another twenty years in the
"old" Army with its horses and hunting, its tours of duty in India,
its social importance. But now tanks and armored cars had replaced
the horses, India was gone, and a bunch of shirking Bolshies from the
Labor Party were running things. Above all, the two wars had swept away
many of the private fortunes with which young officers eked out their
miserable pay and allowances. So the survivor of the military family
became a personnel manager in a Midlands factory, and elderly men
said to elderly wives: "Do you know that for the first time since '91
there's no Fenwick serving with the Loamshires?"
But the Second World War also raised to officer rank thousands of
young men whose social and educational background would not have been
considered suitable for commissioned rank in peacetime. They came from
the state's secondary schools, from technical colleges, or from the
ranks, and they did remarkably well. Many of them are still serving as
officers.
At the war's end many of them remained in the service. I was always
interested during the maneuvers of the British Army of the Rhine to
find how many of the young officers in the infantry and tank regiments
had served in the ranks or had come to the Army with a sound education
and a proletarian accent from one of the state schools. The technical
branches of the Army, such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical
Engineers and the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, draw an increasing number
of their officers from the noncommissioned officers and from among the
graduates of technical schools.
Nowhere is the middle class's ability to assimilate new groups and thus
perpetuate itself more striking than in the Army. The officers from
the ranks or from a state school assume the social coloration of the
established officer class. Manners, accent, turns of phrase, and dress
alter to conform with those of the old officer class. At present the
new group is in a minority. There naturally are many members of the old
officer class still serving. With the return of prosperity the upper
middle class has resumed the tradition of sending its sons into the
Army as a matter of course.
The general officers of the old school, which in this case means the
old public school, vehemently defend the middle class as the only
proper breeding-ground for service officers. They assert that only
men from a certain class, by which they mean their own, and from a
certain background, by which they mean a public school, will accept the
responsibility and provide the leadership necessary in war. A general
told me: "It's really very simple. Men who drop their _h_'s won't
follow an officer who also drops his _h_'s. They don't think he'll take
care of them as well as some young pipsqueak six months out of Eton but
with the correct accent."
This will strike Americans as ridiculous. Certainly it ignores the
high quality of leadership exercised by sergeant pilots of the RAF
Bomber Command. But the general cannot be dismissed as unrealistic. The
correct accent _does_ count in Britain. The public-school boy _has_
been trained to look after others. The idea of an officer class may
offend us as contradictory to democratic equality. But it can and does
work. Nowhere in the world is the officer caste better treated than in
the proletarian society of Soviet Russia.
The Army and the Navy will continue to assimilate into the commissioned
ranks of their services an increasing number of men of working-class
origin. Science's invasion of the military art, long established but
tremendously accelerated since 1945, makes it inevitable that the
sharp young technician, "without an _h_ to his name" as the middle
class says, will continue to rise to commissioned rank. It also seems
relatively certain that as he rises he will assume some of the social
patina of the middle class.
The old conception of military leadership as a prerogative of the
aristocracy died hard. It took the blunders and casualties of the
Crimean War, the Boer War, and the First World War to kill it.
During World War II the British services produced a large number of
outstanding leaders: Alexander, Brooke, Dill, Montgomery, Slim, Wavell,
Leese, Horrocks in the Army, Cunningham, Fraser, Vian, Mountbatten in
the Navy, Portal, Harris, Tedder, Slessor, Bowhill in the RAF. With the
exception of Alexander and Mountbatten, all were products of the old
middle class. But in a changing Britain the authority of this class
in the field it made particularly its own is being undermined both by
new techniques of war and by the shifts in internal power which have
occurred in Britain since 1940.
Those officers and ex-officers who recognize this are not greatly
concerned for the survival of their class leadership; most are
convinced that it will survive. They are concerned, however, lest
in this rapidly changing century the traditions that their class
perpetuated and, in some cases, changed into fetishes should perish.
Regimental traditions, some of which stretch back three centuries into
military history, will, they insist, be as important in the era of
guided missiles as they were in the days of the matchlock.
It is argued that the sense of continuity, the conviction that men
before them have faced perils as great and have survived and won
is essential if Britain is to continue as a military power. The
composition of the Army, Navy, and Air Force officer groups may change.
But the new men will have to rely quite as much on the service and
regimental traditions as did the men who fought at Minden, Waterloo, or
Le Cateau.
WORKER'S PLAYTIME
The leisure activities of the British people in the present decade
offer a revealing guide to the changes that have overtaken their
society. One can learn a great deal by comparing a rugby crowd at
Twickenham and a soccer crowd at Wembley. The rise in popularity of
some forms of entertainment, notably television, testifies to the new
prosperity of the working class. The slow decline of interest in some
sports and the shift from playing to watching illustrate other changes
in the make-up of Britain.
Television is the greatest new influence on the British masses
since the education acts of the last century produced a proletariat
capable of reading the popular press, a situation capitalized by
Lord Northcliffe and others. And the mass attention to "what's
on television," like every other change in Britain, has social
connotations. Among many in the middle class and the upper middle class
it is close to class treason to admit regular watching of television.
"We have one for Nanny and the children," a London hostess said, "but
we never watch it. Fearfully tedious, most of it."
Significantly, the middle class, when defending its right to send
its sons to public schools, emphasizes that the working class could
send its sons to the same schools if it were willing to abandon
its payments for television. This may reveal one reason for the
middle-class dislike for this form of entertainment. Television sets
are expensive, and possibly the cost cannot be squeezed into a budget
built around the necessity of sending the boy to school.
The spread of television-viewing in Britain has had far-reaching
economic and social effects. A sharp blow has been dealt the corner
pub, by tradition the workingman's club. Since the rise of modern
Britain, it is to the pub that the worker has taken his sorrows, his
ambitions, and his occasional joys. There over a pint of bitters
he could think dark thoughts about his boss, voice his opinions on
statesmen from Peel to Churchill, and argue about racing with his
friends. "These days," a barmaid told me, "they come in right after
supper, buy some bottled ale--nasty gassy stuff it is, too--and rush
home to the telly. In the old days they came in around seven, regular
as clockwork it was, and didn't leave until I said 'Time, gentlemen,
please.'"
Television also has affected attendance at movies and at sports events.
The British have never been a nation of night people, and nowadays
they seem to be turning within themselves, a nation whose physical
surroundings are bounded by the hearth, the television screen, and
quick trips to the kitchen to open another bottle of beer. My friends
on the BBC tell me this is not so; television, they say, has opened
new horizons for millions and is the great national educator of the
future. It is easy to forgive their enthusiasm. But how can a people
learn the realities of life if what it really wants on television is
sugary romances or the second-hand jokes and antics of comedians rather
than the admirable news and news-interpretation programs produced by
both the BBC and the Independent Television Authority? The new working
class seems to be irritated by attempts to bring it face to face with
the great problems of their country and of the world. Having attained
what it wants--steady employment, high wages, decent housing--it hopes
to hide before its television screens while this terrible, strident
century hammers on.
The view that the British have become a nation of spectators has been
put forward with confidence by many observers, British as well as
foreign. It is valid, I believe, only if one takes the view that the
millions who watch soccer (which the British call football), rugby
football, field hockey, and other sports on a Saturday afternoon in
autumn are the only ones who count. But there are hundreds of thousands
who play these sports. Some few hundred are professionals playing
before thousands, but many thousands more are amateurs. Stand in a
London railroad station any Saturday at noon and count the hundreds of
young men and young women hurrying to trains that will take them to
some suburban field where they will use the hockey sticks, football
shoes, or cricket bats they are carrying.
Neither soccer nor rugby football is so physically punishing as
American football, although both demand great stamina. So the British
play these games long after the American college tackle has hung up his
cleats and is boring his friends at the country club with the story
of how he blocked the kick against Dartmouth or Slippery Rock. An
ex-officer of my acquaintance played cricket, and pretty good cricket,
too, until he was well into his forties. On village cricket grounds
(the British call them "pitches") on a Sunday afternoon one can see
sedate vicars and husky butchers well past fifty flailing away at the
ball.
If one adds to these the thousands who take a gun and shoot or a rod
and fish, and the tens of thousands more who cycle into the countryside
spring, summer, and fall, the picture reveals a nation which does not
rely solely on watching sports for its pleasure but which still gets
enormous fun out of playing them.
Sports of all sorts, either spectator or participant, occupy an
important, even a venerated, place in British society. Kipling's
warning against the damage that "the flanneled fool at the wicket and
the muddied oaf at the goal" might do to the nation's martial capacity
was never taken very seriously. After all, Britons have been told
interminably and mistakenly that Waterloo was won on the playing-fields
of Eton. The Duke of Wellington, who commanded the British forces in
that notable victory, could recall no athletic triumphs of his own at
Eton save that he had once jumped a rather wide ditch as a boy. The
Duke's pastimes were riding to hounds and women, neither of which was
in the Eton curriculum at the time he matriculated. Nevertheless, the
tradition remains.
When an American thinks of British sport, he automatically thinks of
cricket. But cricket is a game that can be played in Britain only
during the short and frequently stormy months of late spring and
summer. In point of attendance, number of players participating, and
national interest, _the_ game is soccer. Soccer, the late Hector McNeil
loved to emphasize, is "the game of the people." It is also the game of
millions who have never seen a game but who each week painfully fill
out their coupons on the football pools, hopeful that _this_ time they
will win the tens of thousands of pounds that go to the big winners.
The football pools are an example of a diversion that has moved upward
in the social scale. The British, almost all of them, love to gamble,
and the retired colonial servant at Bath finds as great a thrill in
winning on the pools or even trying to win as the steel worker at
Birmingham does. These days the steel worker has a little more money to
back his choices.
To many Americans soccer is a game played by national groups in the big
cities and by high schools, prep schools, and colleges too small or
too poor to support football. Soccer, actually, is an extremely fast,
highly scientific game whose playing evokes from the crowds very much
the same passions that are evident at Busch Stadium or Ebbets Field.
There is no gentlemanly restraint about questioning an official's
decision in soccer as there is in cricket. The British version of "ya
bum, ya" rolls over the stadium on Saturday afternoons. Once I heard a
staid working-class housewife address a referee who had awarded a free
kick against Arsenal as "Oh, you bloody man!" The English can go no
further in vituperation.
Although soccer is principally the game of Britain's working masses,
there are some among the middle class who find it entrancing. But the
great game of this class in the autumn and winter is rugby football.
Here we encounter a social difference. Rugby was popularized at a
public school and is pre-eminently the public-school game. The "old
rugger blue" is as much a part of the rugby crowd as the ex-tackle from
Siwash in the American football crowd. The games, incidentally, have a
good deal in common and require similar skills. There is no blocking or
forward passing in rugby, but the great backs of rugby football would
hold their own in the American game.
In the middle class it is good form to have played rugby or to watch
rugby. At the big games at Twickenham just outside London one will see
a higher percentage of women than at the major soccer matches. The
difference between the classes watching the two sports is emphasized
by the difference in clothing. Twickenham costumes are tweeds, duffel
coats, old school ties, and tweed caps. At Wembley there are the
inevitable raincoat (usually called a "mac"), the soft gray hat, and
the decent worsted suit of the industrial worker on his day off.
Rugby crowds are as partisan as soccer crowds but less vociferous. A
bad decision will occasion some head-shaking and tut-tutting, but there
will be little shouted criticism--with one exception: the Welsh.
The people of the Principality of Wales take their rugby as the
people of Brooklyn take their baseball. In the mining valleys and the
industrial cities rugby, not soccer, is the proletarian sport. The
players on an English team in an international match with Wales will
include university graduates, public-school teachers, and law students.
The Welsh side will boast colliery workers, policemen, and teachers
at state schools. More than a sport, rugby is a national religion.
Consequently, the invasion of Twickenham by a Welsh crowd for an
international match is very like the entry of a group of bartenders
and bookmakers into a WCTU convention. The Welsh feel emotionally
about rugby, and they do not keep their feelings to themselves. They
are a small people but terribly tough. My happiest memory of the 1956
international at Twickenham is of a short, broad Welsh miner pummeling
a tall, thin Englishman who had suggested mildly that Wales had been
lucky to win.