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Unsatisfied with George Orwell’s description of patriotism, John Mitchinson digs deep into his own personal history to untangle the complex roots of his Englishness
“The suet puddings and the red pillarboxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you”
George Orwell wrote these lines in the middle of the Blitz, at a point where the future of England looked as bleak and threatened as it has ever done.
The Lion and the Unicorn, the long essay they are taken from, is his not altogether successful attempt to reconcile his left-leaning self with his patriotism, his hopes of “bringing the real England to the surface”. With the hindsight of history, we can see he scores a creditable six out of 10 in predicting how the war and post-war reconstruction would turn out. Democracy did triumph, industries were nationalised, the health service was created, but the idle rich were not turfed out of their mansions, private education and the institutionalised inequality it entailed were not abolished.
But it isn’t the predictions that draw me to this essay, 80 years later. It’s the suet puddings and the red pillarboxes: Orwell’s attempt to pin down a national culture that was worth fighting for.
It wasn’t easy then; it isn’t any easier now, in the ominous calm that has followed our departure from the European Union. Given the choice, like many of us who have benefitted from closer ties with Europe without really admiring the political institution of the EU, I would have preferred the status quo.
Being forced to contemplate your identity is always painful because it requires you to pay attention to the extremes. With ‘Englishness’ this means acknowledging, on one hand, the Faragiste bigotry and reckless hatred of outsiders that nationalism so often brings in its wake; while at the other end of the room listening to the unconvincing mantra that there are as many different Englands as there are people who live here. Both are delusional.
This is why the term ‘British’ has proved so useful. Despite the obvious irony that it was invented in 1707 as a brand devoted to the imperial and economic exploitation of much of the rest of the planet, it is still easier for people of different ethnicities to call themselves ‘British’ rather than ‘English’.
But not to face up to Englishness feels like a cop-out. To pretend that we come from nowhere, that we appear as ready-formed citizens of a political construct like ‘Britain’ is dishonest and psychologically hazardous. Self-knowledge comes from examining what has formed us, however painful.
England’s ‘Hippest Village’
To do this we need to drop the idea that ‘English’ implies a specific ethnicity. It doesn’t and never has done; it is a culture that has been fed by many different peoples and languages, in various degrees of willingness. To hide from that fact is to insult all those people who have chosen to make this country their home. Anyone who does and considers themselves English is English as far as I’m concerned. It’s how we each get to that point that interests me: what feeds our individual sense of English identity. And, instead of avoiding that history, we should roll our sleeves up and start digging.
In her exhilarating and mind-clearing book Insurgent Empire, the historian Priyamvada Gopal provides a bold recalibration of Britain’s imperial past showing that colonisation was resisted in a well-organised and politically articulate way in almost every country where it was imposed. She also reveals how these resistance movements had a galvanic effect on radical movements such as the Chartists back in England. “We need,” she writes, “a more demanding relationship to history than is offered by prevalent island stories”, one that “cautions against levelling and self-serving assumptions about the past in order that we might engage in a more demanding way with the present”.
This more demanding relationship is required every bit as much (maybe even more) in rural England as it is in the more culturally diverse communities that make up our cities. I have lived in an English village – there is no such thing as a ‘British’ village – for the past 23 years. And not just any village: Great Tew is at the extreme edge of picturesque, almost oppressive in its thatched comeliness and about as challenging to received notions of Englishness as a Boden catalogue.
But dig a little deeper and you find a rich history of entrepreneurialism and exploitation. An important Saxon village with a church by the time of the Domesday Book (itself an unmatched record of theft and appropriation), it was likely built on an older settlement – there’s evidence of occupation going back 7,000 years. By the early 17th Century, it had fallen into the hands of Laurence Tanfield, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, the most powerful and influential lawyer in the land.
In Tew, he soon acquired a reputation as a tyrant, enclosing the best fields of the common land for his own sheep, digging up ancient boundary stones, refusing the villagers access to the timber they needed to repair their homes, and imposing savage fines on them for trespass. At the church, he stripped lead from the chancel to make his own pipes and guttering, refused to pay the manorial dues, prevented villagers from using his straw to kneel on and knocked down the churchyard wall so his cattle could graze among the gravestones.
This went on for 10 years until a group of “poor oppressed inhabitants of Great Tew” petitioned Parliament in 1624. The Baron was unrepentant; his wife, Elizabeth, went even further. “The villagers of Great Tew,” she declared “were more worthy to be ground to powder than to have any favour showed them” and she promised to play the “very devil with them”. Both Lord and Lady Tanfield are reputed to haunt the village still.
A happier time ensued when the estate passed to Lucius Cary, their grandson, the Viscount Falkland (the village pub, the Falkland Arms, is named after him). He was Charles I’s secretary of state and ran an open house, gathering a collection of writers and philosophers around him, including Ben Jonson, the poet Abraham Cowley, the historian Lord Clarendon and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. They formed a royalist think-tank known as the Great Tew Circle, and tried, in vain, to persuade Charles to avoid his war with Parliament.
By the mid-18th Century, Tew had passed into the hands of George Stratton, a member of the East India Company, who bought the estate (and a seat in Parliament) with money he had made in India. In the early 19th Century, Stratton’s son blew what remained of his father’s fortune on a failed model farm in the village and was forced to sell to Matthew Robinson Boulton, son of Mathew Boulton of Soho Foundry, who, with James Watt, was the great architect of the Industrial Revolution.
By the late 20th Century, Great Tew had fallen into serious disrepair and passed out of the Boulton family’s hands. Under the entrepreneurial vision of its current owners, Tew is now restored to its former glory, home to Soho Farmhouse and the Beckhams and frequently written up as ‘England’s hippest village’.
A Map of the Heart
So much for the quiet seclusion of rural life. Looked at properly, Great Tew teaches salutary truths about the English countryside.
Over the centuries, from the Conquest through the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution to the Instagram-fuelled celebrity economy of today, this tiny backwater has witnessed huge tidal surges of investment sluice through it as one rich man’s vision has replaced another’s. Our village looks pretty because it was designed to look pretty 200 years ago – authenticity is relative. And Tew isn’t unique in this: every view, every landscape in England is more or less the product of human agency and investment, much of it made from exploiting poorer, less powerful people, first of all on their doorstep (like Tanfield) and then in colonies far from home. There is no escape from the cruelty of history in England, no wilderness to hide in.
Great Tew had fascinated me long before I knew anything of its past. What took me there as a 10 year-old was a map. And not just any map b