neither appropriate nor practical and left the debating chamber. But the bigger argument about English governance would not go away.
The coalition government of 2010 sought to banish any thought of regionalism in England to the extent that civil servants resorted to the use of an acronym when discussing the issue: TAFKAR — the areas formerly known as regions. Its localism agenda promises power to the parishes, grass-roots influence which may well give voice to people who remain deeply aggrieved at the actions of anonymous planners.
What is revealed in all of this is an important facet of the English personality. After two thousand years of administrators trying to bully the population into neatly defined blocks, England has developed a natural distrust of straight lines on a map. They prefer the quirkiness of a complicated back story, they like things to be irregular and idiosyncratic, revel in the fact that Americans cannot pronounce, never mind spell, Worcestershire. As the nation’s influence has diminished, people have wanted to reconnect with the past in all its obscurity and convolution. What’s more, the English apparently delight in putting two old-fashioned fingers up at any official with a clipboard who gets in their way.
S is for Silly Hats
Ask a foreigner to describe Britain and the picture painted is likely to be of a nation obsessed with the trappings of its past. Millions come to gawp at earnest looking men with one-and-a-half pounds of Canadian bearskin perched on their heads, or strutting about in bright red stockings and Tudor-style gold-laced tunics. Feathers and fur, sequin and serge — the effect is of a people who like nothing better than to parade in kitsch fancy dress.
But such peculiarity is treated by most of this country’s inhabitants with solemnity and profound respect. The hushed tones of a television commentator describing the State Opening of Parliament are a case in point. A bureaucratic state function that could be achieved with a simple press release is transformed into national spectacle with a bejewelled monarch, a golden carriage and a great deal of ermine. Doors are banged with sticks, men walk backwards, and ceremonial hostages are taken. No one is allowed to giggle.
Tradition is serious business. The hats are silly for a sensible reason. The homogenising force of globalisation risks turning every town into Anytown: from the architecture of a bank to the thread of a screw, standardisation and conformity drive towards a multinational, corporate modernity. So we decorate Britishness, our national identity, with strange, surprising and often plain daft souvenirs from a time gone by.
Many countries parade their identity with historical tradition that looks odd against the cellophane culture of the twenty-first century, but the British have turned anachronism into a distinguishing feature. Tourists flock to watch the Changing of the Guard because it reflects a typically British conceit — that nothing really changes at all. We present ourselves as a country steeped in the ancient and wonderful ways of our ancestors. Tradition, though, does not stand still. It is an evolving and adapting reflection of how a nation sees itself and how it wants others to see it.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm famously claimed that British traditions ‘which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented’. A committed Marxist, his assertion that many of the ceremonial trappings of nationhood hailed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dismissed as lefty propaganda by some conservatives. This scrutiny of tradition, holding it up in the light to check its provenance and authenticity, was condemned as thoroughly unpatriotic.
The Tory MP David Willetts gave a lecture at his party’s conference in 1998, accusing Hobsbawm and others of mounting an attack on conventional national identities. ‘They are quite right to show how traditions and cultural identities may emerge,’ he said, but they were wrong to suggest ‘there is some other authentic form of national identity’. In other words, the ostrich-plumed cocked hat may be a relatively recent addition to the ceremonial dress, but who cares? ‘We should simply keep calm and refuse to be shocked by these so-called disclosures,’ he told the Tory faithful.
A few years later, the Labour academic Anthony Giddens returned to the fray. In a Reith lecture for the BBC he described tradition as ‘perhaps the most basic concept of conservatism’, arguing that kings, emperors, priests and others invented rituals and ceremonies to legitimate their rule. The very term ‘tradition’, he said, was only a couple of centuries old. ‘In medieval times there was no call for such a word, precisely because tradition and custom were everywhere.’
No one denies that cultural heritage has to start somewhere and, through adaptation and time, becomes part of the warp and weft of a nation’s fabric. Take the tartan kilt. The iconic symbol of Scottish dress was almost certainly designed by an Englishman after the Act of Union in 1707. Clan tartans are thought to be an even later invention, many originating in the weaving rooms of one shop near Stirling. William Wilson & Sons of Bannockburn supplied ‘authentic’ clan patterns to tribal chieftains who wanted their names included in an historical collection being put together by the Highland Society of London in 1815.
The point, though, is not when and where the idea of men in patterned skirts first came from, but whether the tradition reflects the character and heritage of the nation. Wearing a kilt not only hints at the belted plaid worn by highlanders in the sixteenth century, but requires a degree of bravado and hardiness that chimes with our impression of Scottishness.
Born and raised in Glasgow until the age of ten, I regularly put on the kilt as a boy and would suggest there was something else about wearing it that reflected the character of Scotland. It was a bit of a laugh. There were inevitable comments about whether I was wearing underpants, about what I kept in my sporran and how I felt dressed like a girl. But I felt I was in on the joke — the gentle teasing only made me more proud. The Scots are masters of self-mockery, as demonstrated by the ridiculous ginger Jimmy wigs they wear when supporting the country’s sports teams.
It is a similar story with English cricket fans. The self-styled Barmy Army have managed to invent a new tradition of their own: the Saturday of a domestic Test Match has become fancy dress day when supporters wear outrageous costumes and, inevitably, the silliest of hats. No other nation, I would suggest, attempts to conjure a sense of national pride by attending an international sports event dressed as Mr Blobby.
Britain’s island status may help explain our sense of otherness, our need to define ourselves by nonconformity. We have always been good at eccentricity — our dislike of straight lines, perhaps, as the previous chapter identified. The ‘crazy Brits’ have something of a reputation for it. Being slightly dotty is not cause for concern but for celebration: ‘You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps!’ The wildly eccentric nineteenth- century aristocrat Jack Mytton, for example, fed the favourites among his two thousand dogs on steak and champagne, and dressed his sixty cats in livery. His wardrobe contained one thousand hats, many of them remarkably silly. And we love him for it.
Our heroes, historical and fictional, tend to be blessed with odd mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. From Sir Winston Churchill to Dr Who, from William Blake to Sherlock Holmes — as John Timbs wrote in his nineteenth- century anthology,
Perhaps post-colonial Britain feels the need to counter any suggestion of residual imperial arrogance by nurturing a reputation for modest self-deprecation. We define ourselves by our history, but to adapt a phrase from the US statesman Dean Acheson, maybe we have lost an empire and not yet found an identity. There is a tension between the blazered traditionalists in the cricket pavilion at Lord’s and the raucous beery crowd in pantomime drag, but they are both patriotic faces of the same nation. We simultaneously tip our trade-mark bowler to a glorious past and lampoon such pomposity with the Ministry of Silly Walks. Britain has become the land of clowns as well as castles.
Some see this contradiction as dangerous, that we must either embrace our past or risk losing our very identity. Immigration and globalisation, it is argued, threaten our cultural integrity, and so there is a need to celebrate our history and heritage more enthusiastically than ever. Rituals and traditions should be moulded into a compelling island story, but they must be handled with care. ‘Tradition that is drained of its content, and
