Composer Howard Goodall explores why England does not have an anthem distinct from that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at sporting events and assesses the leading candidates
We seem to be caught in an endless, inescapable loop about national anthems, great and small.
Whether it is prompted by the oddity of an English team playing a Scottish team at Wembley in the Euros with one constituent nation of the United Kingdom singing God save the Queen, the other Flower of Scotland; or the Department of Education urging primary school children to sing a newly-composed ‘official song’, One Britain, One Nation; or what’s to be in the Last Night of the Proms, we are divided and unhappy as a population on the subject of patriotic songs.
Why does England not have an anthem distinct from that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at sporting events? It’s particularly curious since the footballing authorities of these small islands are very firm in insisting that its constituent nations compete separately in EUFA/FIFA competitions, not as Team GB, the Olympic model.
God Save the Queen is, from a musical, soul-stirring point of view, sub-optimal. Its solemnity borders on funereal.
With over one-eighth of the world’s landmass, 85 administrative regions or states, containing 22 separate republics, speaking 36 official languages and over 100 minority languages, Russia is just Russia on the international football field. So it is weird, under the circumstances, to use the national anthem of the United Kingdom for just the England bit of it.
Land of Hope and Glory
It’s not as if there aren’t quite a few English anthem possibilities lurking around, often discussed, though there are problems with quite a few of the front-runners. The words of Land of Hope and Glory, for example, were originally written in 1902 by Etonian A.C. Benson to extol the virtues of the Empire, indeed calling for it to be expanded further still.
This echoed Cecil Rhodes’ clarion call of the same year (in his will) for ‘the extension of British rule throughout the world’, following triumphantly on from victory in the Boer War (1899-1902).
The Boer War(s), let’s not forget, saw the ‘Mother of the Free’ British Empire introduce concentration camps for both white Afrikaner women and children, and black Africans, in which an estimated 50,000 civilians died. This was the hushed-up reality of the ‘Global Britain’ Rhodes and Benson wanted to expand.
Edward Elgar, who composed the tune, before Edward VII’s suggestion to Benson to add a lyric for his (eventually delayed) coronation, was uneasy at the jingoistic tone of the text. This unease turned to outright distaste during the First World War, a conflict both he and (pacifist) Benson felt was a catastrophic tragedy, not to be celebrated, even at the point of victory.
Handel could have written us a cracking national anthem if asked, though being a German migrant who was granted British naturalisation by a unique act of Parliament
It’s also worth noting that the other stirring melody Elgar is famous for, Nimrod, from the Enigma Variations (1899), often used to underscore patriotic videos or party political broadcasts as the quintessential ‘English’ tune, is not quite what it seems. Elgar, lifelong Germanophile, intended the movement to be his tribute to German composer Beethoven’s symphonic slow movement style, to fit neatly with the fact that the dedicatee of Nimrod, his dear friend Augustus J Jaeger, was a German who had settled in Britain (his name, Jaeger, means ‘hunter’ in German, and Nimrod was a ‘mighty hunter’ in the Old Testament).
If it’s anything, then, Nimrod is a loving homage to German friendship, even if its melodic arc is admittedly rather Anglican in its shape and harmony.
Jerusalem
Charles Hubert Parry’s magnificent setting of William Blake’s 1808 poem, And did those feet in ancient time, known better as Jerusalem, is another contender for English national anthem, and at least of all of the front-runners it actually mentions the country by name.
Again, the genesis of this great hymn is not quite what you’d expect. Leaving aside the somewhat outlandish premise that provokes the poem’s opening questions – namely that Jesus of Nazareth manage to fit into his busy schedule an in-person visit to Tiberius’ Provincia Britannia with his friend Joseph of Arithamea – Blake’s message was certainly not that Britain’s heavenly purpose was to rule the world.
Blake, a serious, brilliant and radical thinker, asks the question whether Jesus, were he indeed to have visited, would have tried to establish a peaceful, natural haven in England rather than the grim industrial reality of what it was becoming in Blake’s lifetime: a machine of exploitation, cruelty and enslavement tearing up the beauty and harmony of the landscape and the communities that used to live in it.
Blake was taking aim at capitalist greed: did successive Tory party conferences in the 20th century, ending their annual gatherings with the hymn, know this, one wonders? Did they know Blake underlined this point in another epic poem of his, also called Jerusalem, writing ‘And all the Arts of Life they changed into the Arts of Death in Albion’? Did they know Blake was charged (though acquitted) with high treason and sedition for writing in favour of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte?
Jerusalem’s composer, Old Etonian Parry, added music to the Blake text, fairly reluctantly, in the event, for the occasion of a patriotic rally at The Royal Albert Hall in the middle of the First World War, promoted by an organisation called ‘Fight for the Right’.
Parry had misgivings about the jingoistic nature of the campaign. At the same time he was composing a series of ‘Songs of Farewell’, deeply personal reflections on grief and loss, a response to the deaths of so many of his students in the war and what he saw as the disastrous rupturing of the previous comradeship between Britain and his beloved Germany.
He later withdrew his support for the campaign and was delighted and relieved that, at the request of Millicent Fawcett, his hymn was taken up instead, almost immediately, by the women’s suffrage movement, of which he and his wife were firm supporters.