rugby. A game called Rugby League, somewhat different from the older
and more widely played Rugby Union, is played in the North of England.
It is definitely a working-class game and a professional one, whereas
Rugby Union is, by American standards, ferociously amateur. The English
feel badly when one of their players succumbs to the financial lure of
Rugby League and leaves the amateur game. The Welsh feel even worse,
not because the player is turning professional but because "Look,
dammit, man, we need Jones for the match with England."
There are survivals of the old attitude toward professionals in sport
in the English (but not the Welsh) attitude toward rugby football.
Soccer football, like baseball in America, began as an amateur game and
at one time was widely played by the middle class. But middle-class
enthusiasm and support dwindled as the game became professionalized.
Of late there has been a revival of interest in the amateur side of
the sport, but basically the game is played by professionals for huge
crowds drawn from the industrial working class. However, thousands in
the crowds also play for club and school teams.
Yet here we encounter another contradiction. Cricket, considered the
most English of games, is played nowadays mostly by professionals,
as far as the county teams (the equivalent of the major-league teams
in baseball) are concerned. But many English approach cricket with
something akin to the Welshman's attitude toward rugby. Professionalism
is no longer looked down upon, and the old distinctions between
Gentlemen and Players are slowly vanishing.
John Lardner once mentioned how difficult it was to explain the
extraordinary ascendancy that baseball assumed over Americans in the
last half of the nineteenth century. It is equally difficult to explain
the hold that cricket exercises today on a large section of Britain.
More people watch soccer, but that game does not seem to generate the
dedicated, almost mystic attitude displayed by cricket enthusiasts.
Cricket is an extraordinarily involved, delicate, and, at times,
exciting game. But it cannot be merely the game itself which brings
old men doddering to Lord's and rouses whole families in the chill cold
of a winter morning to listen to the broadcast of a match played half a
world away in the bright sunshine of Melbourne.
Part of the hold may be explained by cricket's ability to remind the
spectators of their youth and a richer, greener England. To that
nation, secure, prosperous, and powerful, many thousands of the middle
class return daily in their thoughts. Cricket--village cricket or
cricket at the Oval or Lord's, twin sanctums of the game--represents
that other England. For a time they can forget the taxes, forget the
unknown grave in France or Libya, forget the industrial wasteland
around them, and return to the village green and the day the Vicar
bowled (struck out) the policeman from the next village.
It is a peaceful game to watch. The absence of the noise, the strident
criticisms and outbursts, of the baseball game has been noted by enough
Americans. In addition, there is a soporific atmosphere about cricket.
Men sit on the grass and watch the white figures of the players make
intricate, shifting patterns against the bright green of the grass.
Their outward show of enthusiasm is confined to an "Oh, well hit,
well hit indeed, sir" or applause when a player makes fifty runs or
is bowled. There is no need to hurry or to worry about anything more
important than saving the fellow who is on. The pipe is drawing nicely,
and later you can meet old So-and-so at the club, or the pub, for a
chat about the match. "I go out on a summer evening to watch them
play," a Londoner said. "Sort of rests me, it does."
The influence of cricket on the middle class that follows the game has
been and is remarkable. Cricket terms have become part of the language
of this class. Such phrases as "hit them for six" and "batting on a
sticky wicket" pepper the speeches of politicians. As cricket was
played originally by amateurs who were presumed to be gentlemen, it
assumed an aristocratic tone. Anything that was "not cricket" was not
gentlemanly.
Many Britons in World War II showed a tendency to think of the war in
terms of cricket. This was discouraged by the tougher-minded commanders
on the sensible grounds that war is not cricket. But no one could stop
Field Marshal Montgomery from promising his troops they were about to
"hit the Germans for six." This introduction of a sporting vocabulary
into a fight for survival is one of the reasons why many Continentals
regard the English as a frivolous race. I remember still the look,
compounded of awe and disgust, on the face of a Norwegian, lately
escaped from his homeland, when in the summer of 1940 he found that the
newspaper-sellers on the street corners were writing the results of
each day's fighting in the Battle of Britain in cricket terms. "Here
they are," he said, "fighting for their lives, and I see a sign reading
'England 112 Not Out.' I asked the man what it meant, and he said:
'We got 112 of the ----ers, cock, and we're still batting.' A strange
people."
If soccer is primarily a working-class sport and cricket the central
sporting interest of the middle class, horse racing is the attraction
that transcends all class distinctions. In Britain, as in America,
great trouble is taken by those who administer the business to clothe
it with the attributes of a sport. But essentially horse racing is a
means of gambling, and the British, beneath their supposed stolidity,
are a nation of gamblers. I do not recall during my childhood buying
a ticket for a sweepstakes on the Kentucky Derby. But in Britain boys
and girls of ten and eleven customarily buy tickets in "sweeps" run by
their classmates, and the more precocious swap tips on horses.
A tremendous amount is bet each day on racing in Britain, and it is
estimated that more money is bet on the Epsom Derby each June than on
any other single horse race in the world.
Derby Day at Epsom is one of the best opportunities of seeing
contemporary British society, from the Queen at the top to the London
barrow boy at the bottom, en masse. Inside the track are the vans of
the gypsy fortune-tellers, the stands of the small-time bookmakers,
scores of bars and snack bars, carousels and other amusement-park
attractions. Across the track are the big stands filled with what
remains of the aristocracy and the upper middle class of Britain
carefully dressed in morning coats, gray top hats, and starched
collars. Its members may envy the great wads of bank-notes carried by
some of the prosperous farmers and North Country businessmen across
the track, but on Derby Day anything goes, and there are champagne and
lobster lunches, hilarious greetings to old friends, and reminiscences
of past Derbies.
Queen Elizabeth II's love of racing endears her to her subjects.
An interest in racing has always been a passport to popularity for
monarchs or politicians. Sir Winston Churchill, who divined the wishes
and thoughts of his countrymen with uncanny ability during the years
of crisis between 1939 and 1945, had few interests in common with the
people he lectured and led. He cared little for soccer or cricket. But
when, after the war, he began to build up a racing stable, he acquired
a new popularity with the people. Naturally, this was the last thing in
Sir Winston's mind. He had made some money, he was out of office, and
racing attracted him.
Racing is an upper-class sport in the sense that only the rich
can afford it. But the true upper-class sports that survive are
fox-hunting, shooting, and fishing, known in upper-class parlance as
"huntin', shootin', and fishin'." Shooting is bird-shooting--pheasant,
grouse, partridge. Fishing is for salmon or trout. As Britain's
sprawling industrialization has gobbled up land, the field sports
have become more and more the preserve of the rich or at least the
well-to-do. George Orwell once noted the dismay of British Communists
who learned that Lenin and other revolutionary leaders had enjoyed
shooting--shooting birds, that is--in Russia, a country teeming with
game. They thought it almost treasonable for the Little Father of
the masses to engage in a sport that in Britain was reserved for the
capitalists.
Fox-hunting, chiefly because of its close connection with the cult
of the horse, takes social precedence over shooting and fishing. But
here again we encounter a change. Death duties, taxes on land, and
income taxes have impoverished a large number of rural aristocrats
who formerly supported local hunts. Their places have been taken by
well-to-do farmers and professional men and women from near-by towns.
Some of the better-established hunts, such as the Quorn and the
Pytchley, try to maintain the old standards of exclusiveness.
The attention paid the cavalry regiments in the old Army, the
middle-class conviction that children must be taught to ride because it
is a social asset, the aristocratic atmosphere of fox-hunting and show
jumping are all expressions of the cult of the horse which flourishes
in one of the most heavily industrialized nations in the world. This,
too, may express an unconscious desire to return to the past and a
secure Britain. Here, too, we see the newly emerging middle class
sending its sons and daughters to riding schools where they will meet
the sons and daughters of the established middle class.
Golf and tennis are two games that Britain spread around the world.
Golf is every man's game in Scotland and a middle-class game in
England. I well remember my first trip to St. Andrews in 1939 and my
delight at watching a railroad worker solemnly unbutton his collar,
take off his coat, and play around one of the formidable courses
there in 89. The incongruity was made more marked by the foursomes of
expensively outfitted English and Americans who allowed the Scot to
play through.
Tennis in Britain, like tennis in America, retains aristocratic
overtones. But today it is a middle-class sport; membership at the
local tennis club is ranked below membership in the local yacht club or
the local hunt.
In both games British representatives in international competitions
are at a disadvantage because there is not in Britain the urgent drive
to develop players of international ability which exists in the United
States and Australia. British cricket and rugby football teams, on the
other hand, have enjoyed a number of brilliant successes in competition
with Commonwealth teams since the war, and English soccer football,
after some lean years, has begun to climb back to the top of the
international heap.
In this land of paradox which was the birthplace of the modern
"sporting" attitude, the original home of "the game for the game's
sake," we find that the most popular sport is soccer football played
for money mainly by professionals; that rugby football can be a
middle-class game in England and a working-class game one hundred miles
away in Wales; that cricket through the years has acquired the standing
not of a sport but of a religion among one important class in society;
and that shooting and fishing, two proletarian pastimes in both the
United States and the Soviet Union, are the domain of the wealthy, the
well-bred, and the middle class in Britain.
PUBS AND CLUBS
Long ago one of my bosses advised me to spend less time listening
to people in pubs. Had I taken his advice, which fortunately I did
not, I would be richer by many pounds but poorer in both friends and
information.
Although writers have contended otherwise, the public house is not a
unique British institution. Frenchmen gather in _estaminets_ to drink,
to argue, and to write interminable letters. Americans meet at bars and
taverns. The Spaniard patronizes his café. The unique aspect of the
British pub is its atmosphere.
The pub is a place where you can take your time. In city or country
it is a refuge. A man may enter, drink three or four pints of beer in
moody silence, and depart refreshed. Or he can come in, drink the same
amount of beer, debate the state of the nation and the world with other
drinkers and the barmaid, and play darts. Dart-playing, of course,
is a national sport, and there are enthusiasts who claim it has more
devotees than tennis or golf. Dart leagues flourish throughout the
country, to the delight of the publicans, who reap a rich harvest from
each match.
Pubs come in all shapes and sizes. Recently many of the old London pubs
have been modernized. Plastics and neon lights have taken the place
of huge glass walls engraved with advertisements for gin and beer and
old-fashioned glass-shaded electric lights. In their efforts to meet
the competition of television at home and milk bars or soda fountains
down the street, many pubs have adopted new and, to a purist,
disgusting attractions. The news that a pub in Cambridge intended to
sell ice cream convinced many serious thinkers that this _was_ the end
of the Empire. Similarly, a friend told me in shocked tones that when
he was served a pint of beer in a suburban pub the barmaid handed him
"a damned doily" to put under the glass. He informed her, he reported,
that he had given up spilling his drinks at the age of three and a half.
Despite the inroads of the milk bars and the trend toward bottled beer
bought in the pub and drunk before the television set, draught beer
is still the mainstay of British drinking. "Beer and beef have made
us what we are," said the Prince Regent. (His friend, the Duke of
Wellington, somewhat surprisingly, thought the Church of England was
responsible.)
English beer has a bad name in the United States. The GI invading the
country in 1942-5 found it weak, warm, and watery. During the war years
it was indeed both weak and watery. Today, however, it has regained its
old-time potency.
In addition to the standard beers and ales, the British brew small
quantities of special ales that, as the old saying goes, would blow
a soft hat through a cement ceiling. The Antelope, in Chelsea, had
managed to hoard some bottles of this liquid as late as the autumn of
1940. After two bottles apiece, three Americans walked home through
one of the worst nights of bombing exclaiming happily over the pretty
lights in the sky.
The merits of the brews in their respective countries are a favorite
topic for conversation between Britons and Americans. The tourist will
find that his host holds no high opinion of American beer, considering
it gassy, flavorless, and, as one drinker inelegantly described it, "as
weak as gnat's wee." The British are continually surprised by American
drinking habits. They consider that the GI who hastily swallows three
or four double whiskies is asking for trouble, and that the object of
a night's foray in the pub is not to get drunk but to drink enough to
encourage conversation and forget your troubles. Prohibition, gone
these many years, is still a black mark against Americans in the minds
of the pundits in the pubs. They regard it as a horrible aberration by
an otherwise intelligent people.
It should not be assumed that the British drink only beer. When they
are in funds or when the occasion calls for something stronger, they
will drink almost anything from what my charwoman once described as "a
nourishing drop of gin" to champagne. During the war they drank some
strange and weird mixtures and distillations that, if they did not kill
the drinker as did some Prohibition drams, at least made him wish he
were dead the next morning.
But the pub's importance, let me repeat, is due to its place as a
public forum as much as to its position as a public fountain. There
questions can be asked and answers given which the average Briton would
regard as impertinent if the conversation took place in his home or
his office. There interminable public arguments will probe the wisdom
of the government's policy on installment buying or Cyprus or, with
due gravity, will seek to establish the name of the winner of the
Cambridgeshire Handicap in 1931.
The atmosphere of discussion and reflection of the English pub thus
far has been proof against the juke box, the pinball machine, and the
television set. But the fight is a hard one. These counterattractions
to the bar are making their appearance in an increasing number of
pubs each year. At the same time, publicans are giving more thought
to the catering side of their business. The bar, which was the heart
of the pub, has become merely an adjunct to the "attractions" and the
restaurant.
The spread of restaurant eating is itself a novel change in British
habits. Until the Second World War the great majority of the working
class and the middle class ate their meals at home. Even today, in the
New Towns, the industrial worker prefers to return home for lunch.
But the shortage of servants, the difficulties of feeding a family on
the weekly rations, the need to get away from the drabness of chilly,
darkened homes during the war and immediate post-war years combined to
send millions of Britons out to eat.
This has changed the character of a large number of pubs. It has also
improved restaurant cooking, especially in the provinces. British
cooking is a standard music-hall joke, but the comedians are somewhat
behind the times. It has improved steadily since the war, largely
because the British had to learn how to cook in order to make their
meager rations palatable. The squeeze on the established middle class
forced the housewives of that group to study cookery. Dinners in that
circle are shorter and less formal than before the war, but the cooking
is vastly improved.
Décor in modern pubs varies from the overpoweringly new to the
self-consciously old. Tucked away in the back streets of the cities,
however, or nestling in the folds of the Cotswolds one can still see
the genuine article. There the political arguments flourish as they
have since Bonaparte was troubling the English. There on a Saturday
night you can still hear the real English songs--"Knees Up Mother
Brown" or "Uncle Tom Cobley and All."
A sense of calm pervades the rural bars. The countryman is a
long-lived, tough person. At the Monkey and Drum or the Red Dragon or
the Malakof (named for a half-forgotten action in the Crimean War) the
beer is set out for wiry ancients in their seventies and eighties,
masters of country crafts long forgotten by the rest of the population.
The sun stays late in the sky on a summer evening. From the open door
you can see it touching the orderly fields, the neat houses. It is
difficult, almost impossible in such surroundings to doubt that there
will always be an England. Yet this is precisely the England that is
and has been in continuous retreat for a century and a half before the
devouring march of industrialization.
The pub is the poor man's "club"--in the sense that it is a haven
for the tired worker and a center of discussion. The actual British
clubs are another singular institution. There are, of course, men's
and women's clubs throughout the West, but only in Britain have they
become an integral and important part of social life. Like the pubs,
they are changing with the times. But they still retain enough of their
distinctive flavor to mark them as a particularly British institution.
London's clubs are the most famous. But throughout the islands there
are other clubs--county clubs in provincial capitals, workingmen's
clubs that compete with the pubs. There are women's clubs, too, but the
club is mainly a masculine institution in a nation whose society is
still ordered for the well-being of the male.
"Do you mean to tell me that these Englishmen go to their clubs for a
drink after work and don't get home until dinnertime?" a young American
matron asked. She thought it was "scandalous." Her husband, poor devil,
came home from work promptly at six each night and sat down to an early
dinner with his wife and three small children. I suppose he enjoyed it.
London's clubs cater to all tastes. There are political clubs such as
the Carlton, the Conservatives' inner sanctum. There are service clubs:
the Cavalry or the Army and Navy. On St. James's Street are a number of
the oldest and best: White's, Boodle's, Brooks's, the Devonshire.
The same American matron asked me what a club offers. The answer is,
primarily, relaxation in a man's world. Like the pub, the club is a
place where a man can get away from his home, his job, his worries. If
he wishes, he can drink and eat while reading a newspaper. Or he can
stand at the bar exchanging gossip with other members. He can read, he
can play cards, he can play billiards. If he wants advice, there may
be an eminent Queen's Counsel, a Foreign Office official, a doctor, or
an editor across the luncheon table. There is the same atmosphere of
relaxed calm which marks the best pubs.
Because for centuries the clubs have been the refuges of the wealthy
or the aristocratic or the dominant political class they have exerted
considerable political influence. Feuds that have shaken great
political parties have begun before club bars and, years later, been
settled with an amicable little dinner party at the club. In politics,
domestic and foreign, the British put great faith in the "quiet
get-together" where an issue can be thrashed out in private without
regard for popular opinion.
During the worst days of the debate over the future of Trieste a
Foreign Office official remarked to me that "all these conferences"
complicated the situation. "There's nothing that couldn't be settled
in an hour's frank talk over a glass of sherry at White's," he said.
Foolish? Old-fashioned? Perhaps. But how much progress has been made
at full-dress international conferences where national leaders speak
not to one another but to popular opinion in their own and foreign
countries?
The clubs are centers in which opinion takes form. As the opinion of
many who are leaders in Britain's political and economic life, it is
important opinion. For instance, it was obvious in the clubs, long
before the failure of the Norwegian campaign brought it into the open,
that there was widespread dissatisfaction in the middle class over
Neville Chamberlain's direction of the war. Similarly, stories of the
aging Churchill's unwillingness to deal with the pressing domestic
economic problems of his government were first heard in the clubs.
The high cost of maintaining the standards of food, drink, and service
required by most members has hurt the clubs. There are in every such
institution a few staff mainstays whose remarks become part of club
lore. But the Wages and Catering Act has made it difficult to staff
clubs adequately.
The food in clubs is man's food. Its emphasis on beef, lamb, fish, and
cheese would upset a Mamaroneck matron. But some of the chefs are as
good as any in Britain, and the food can be accompanied by some of the
finest wines in the world.
Essentially, the club remains man's last refuge from the pressures of
his world. He can talk, he can listen, he can drink a second or even a
third cocktail without the slight sniff that betokens wifely censure.
The latest story about the Ruritanian Ambassadress or the government's
views on the situation in Upper Silesia will be retailed by members.
The taxes may be high, the world in a mess, the old order changing.
Here by the fire with his drink in his hand he is his own man. "Waiter,
two more of the same."
[Illustration]
XII. _Britain and the Future_
_I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land._
WILLIAM BLAKE
_Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden
age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and
decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be
disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present._
THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
[Illustration]
Is the long story of British greatness nearly done? That is the
question we must ask ourselves as we survey the real Britain, the
changing Britain of today.