British Culture 1 Country and people

The origin of the adjective ‘great’ in the name Great Britain was not a piece of advertising. It was first used to distinguish it from the smaller area in France which is called ‘Brittany’ in modern English.

The largest island is called Great Britain. The other large one is called Ireland.

In this geographical area there are two states. One of them governs most of the island of Ireland and is usually called The Republic of Ireland (Eire). The other state has authority over the rest of the area (the whole of Great Britain, the north-eastern area of Ireland and most of the smaller islands). Official name: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (United Kingdom/UK/Great Britain/Britain).

It’s not easy to keep geography and politics apart. Geographically speaking, it is clear that Great Britain, Ireland and all those smaller islands belong together. So you would think there would be a (single) name for them. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were generally called ‘The British Isles’. But most people in Ireland and some people in Britain regard this name as outdated because it calls to mind the time when Ireland was politically dominated by Britain.

So what can we call these islands? Among the names which have been used are ‘The north-east Atlantic archipelago’, ‘The north-west European archipelago’, ‘IONA’(Islands of the North Atlantic) and simply ‘The Isles’. But none of these has become widely accepted.

The most common term at the present is ‘Great Britain and Ireland’. But even this is not strictly correct. It is not correct geographically because it ignores all the smaller islands. And it is not correct politically because there are two small parts of the area on the maps which have special political arrangements. These are the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which are ‘crown dependencies’ and not officially part of the UK. Each has complete internal self-government, including its own parliament and its own tax system. Both are ‘ruled’ by a Lieutenant Governor appointed by the British government.

1922  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland emerged. (Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland became a single state).

AFBEELDING KOPIEREN!

The following are also associated by British people with one or more of the four nations.

The prefix ‘Mac’ or ‘Mc’ (such as McCall, MacCarthy, MacDonald) is Scottish or Irish. The prefix ‘O’ (as in O’Brien, O’Connor) is Irish. A large number of surnames (for example, Evans, Jones, Morgan, Price, Williams) suggest Welsh origin. The most common surname in both England and Scotland is ‘Smith’.

The Scottish of ‘John’ is ‘Ian’ and its Irish form is ‘Sean’, although all three names are common throughout Britain. Outside their own countries, there are also nicknames for Irish, Scottish and Welsh men. For instance, Scottish men are sometimes known and addressed as ‘Jock’, Irishmen are called ‘Paddy’ or ‘Mick’ and Welshmen as ‘Dai’ or ‘Taffy’. If the person using one of these names is not a friend, and especially if it is used in the plural (e.g. ‘Micks’), it can sound insulting.

The kilt, a skirt with a tartan pattern worn by men, is a very well-known symbol of Scottishness (though it is hardly ever worn in everyday life).

There are certain stereotypes of national character which are well known in Britain. For instance, the Irish are supposed to be great talkers, the Scots have a reputation for being careful with money and the Welsh are renowned for their singing ability. These are, of course, only caricatures and not reliable descriptions of individual people from these countries. Nevertheless, they indicate some slight differences in the value attached to certain kinds of behavior in these countries.

(in millions)

Northern Ireland – 1,7

Wales – 3,0

Scotland – 5,1

England – 50,8

UK total – 60,6

These figures are estimates provided by the Office for National Statistics (England and Wales), the General Register Office for Scotland and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. In the twenty-first century, the total population of Britain has risen by about a quarter of a million each year.

The harp is an emblem of both Wales and Ireland. Bagpipes are regarded as distinctively Scottish, although a smaller type is also used in traditional Irish music.

When you are addressing a letter to somewhere in Britain, do not write anything like ‘Edinburgh, England’ or ‘Cardiff, England’. You should write ‘Edinburgh, Scotland’ and ‘Cardiff, Wales’ –or (if you feel ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales are not recognizable enough) write ‘Great Britain’ or ‘United Kingdom’ instead.

88,6 white British, 2,4 white other, 1,8 Asian Indian, 1,3 Asian-Pakistani, 1,2 mixed ethnicity, 1,1 white Irish, 1,0 black Caribbean, 0,8 black African, 0,5 black Bangladeshi, 0,4 Chinese, 0,4 Asian other (% of UK population in 2001). One of the questions in the 2001 census of the UK was ‘What is your ethnic group?’ and the categories above were offered as choices. Here are some of the results, listed in order of size.

As you can see, about one in nine people identified themselves as something other than ‘white British’. The largest category was ‘white other’, but these people were from a variety of places and many were only temporarily resident in Britain. As a result, they do not form a single identifiable community. (For these and other reasons, the same is largely true of those in the white Irish and black African categories.) By far the largest recognizable ethnic grouping was formed by people whose ethnic roots are in the Indian subcontinent (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi in the chart); together they made up more than two million people. The other established, recognizable ethnic group in Britain were black Caribbeans (a little over half a million people).

What this chart does not show are all the people who came to Britain from eastern Europe (especially Poland) in the years 2004-2007. Their numbers, estimated between three quarters of a million and one million, represent the largest single wave of immigration to Britain in more than 300 years. However, it is not clear at this time how many will set up home in Britain.

Another point about the people of Britain is worth nothing. Since the 1980s, more people immigrate to Britain than emigrate from it every year. A quarter of all babies born in Britain are born to at least one foreign-born parent. At the same time, emigration is also very high. The people of Britain are changing.
Flag

The Union flag, often known as the ‘Union Jack’, is the national flag of the UK. It is a combination of the cross of St. George, the cross of St. Andrew and the cross of St. Patrick.

Stonehenge was built on Salisbury Plain some time between 5,000 and 4,300 years ago. It is one of the most famous and mysterious archaeological sites in the world. One of its mysteries is how it was ever built at all with the technology of the time (some of the stones come from over 200 miles away in Wales). Another is its purpose. It appears to function as a kind of astronomical clock and we know it was used by the Druids for ceremonies marking the passing of the seasons. It has always exerted a fascination on the British imagination, and appears in a number of novels, such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

These days, it is not only of interest to tourists but is also held in special esteem by certain minority groups. It is now fenced off to protect it from damage.
Hadrian’s Wall

Hadrian’s Wall was built by the Romans in the second century across the northern border of their province of Britannia (which is nearly the same as the present English-Scottish border) in order to protect it from attacks by the Scots and the Picts.

King Arthur is a wonderful example of the distortions of popular history. In folklore and myth (and on film), he is a great English hero, and he and his Knights of the Round Table are regarded as the perfect example of medieval nobility and chivalry. In fact, he lived long before medieval times and was a Romanized Celt trying to hold back the advances of the Anglo-Saxons – the very people who became ‘the English’!

King Alfred was not only an able warrior but also a dedicated scholar (the only English monarch for a long time afterwards who was able to read and write) and a wise ruler. He is known as ‘Alfred the Great’- the only monarch in English history to be given this title. He is also popularly known for the story of the burning of the cakes.

While he was wandering around his country organizing resistance to the Danish invaders, Alfred travelled in disguise. On one occasion, he stopped at a woman’s house. The woman asked him to watch some cakes that were cooking to see that they did not burn, while she went off to get food. Alfred became lost in thought and the cakes burned. When the woman returned, she shouted angrily at Alfred and sent him away. Alfred never told her that he was her king.
1066

This is the most famous date in English history. On 14 October of that year, an invading army from Normandy defeated the English at the Battle of Hastings. The battle was close and extremely bloody. At the end of it, most of the best warriors in England were dead, including their leader, King Harold. On Christmas day that year, the Norman leader, Duke William of Normandy, was crowned king of England. He is known in popular history as ‘William the Conqueror’ and the date is remembered as the last time that England was successfully invaded.

Robin Hood is a legendary folk hero. King Richard I (1189-99) spent most of his reign fighting in the ‘crusades’ (the wars between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East). Meanwhile, England was governed by his brother John, who was unpopular because of all the taxes he imposed. According to legend, Robin Hood lived with his band of ‘merry men’ in Sherwood Forest outside Nottingham, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. He was constantly hunted by the local sheriff (the royal representative) but was never captured.

As an example of the class distinctions introduced into society after the Norman invasion, people often point to the fact that modern English has two words for the larger farm animals: one for the living animal (cow, pig, sheep) and another for the animal you eat (beef, pork, mutton). The former set come from Anglo-Saxon, the latter from the French that the Normans brought to England. Only the Normans normally ate meat; the poor Anglo-Saxon peasants did not!

During the fifteenth century, the power of the greatest nobles, who had their own private armies, meant that constant challenges to the position of the monarch were possible. These power struggles came to a head in the Wars of the Roses, in which the nobles were divided into two groups, one supporting the House of Lancaster, whose symbol was a red rose, the other the House of York, whose symbol was a white rose. Three decades of almost continual war ended in 1485, when Henry Tudor (Lancastrian) defeated and killed Richard III (Yorkist) at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Being an important person in the sixteenth century was not a safe position. The Tudor monarchs were disloyal to their officials and merciless to any nobles who opposed them. More than half of the most famous names of the period finished their lives by being executed. Few people who were taken through Traitor’s Gate (see below) in the Tower of London came out again alive.

Henry VIII is one of the most well-known monarchs in English history, chiefly because he took six wives during his live. He has the popular image of a bon viveur. There is much truth in his reputation. He was a natural leader but not really interested in the day-to-day running of government and this encouraged the beginnings of a professional bureaucracy. It was during his reign that the reformation took place. In the 1530s, Henry used Parliament to pass laws which swept away the power of the Roman Church in England. However, his quarrel with Rome was nothing to do with doctrine. It was because he wanted to be free to marry again and to appoint who he wished as leaders of the church in England. Earlier in the same decade, he had had a law passed which demanded complete adherence to Catholic belief and practice. He had also previously written a polemic against Protestantism, for which the pope gave him the title Fidei Defensor (defender of the faith). The initials F.D. still appear on British coins today.

Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, was the first of three long-reigning queens in British history (the other two are Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II). During her long reign she established, by skillful diplomacy, a reasonable degree of internal stability in a firmly Protestant England, allowing the growth of a spirit of patriotism and general confidence. She never married, but used its possibility as a diplomatic tool. She became known as ‘the virgin queen’. The area which later became the state of Virginia in the USA was named after her by one of the many English explorers of the time (Sir Walter Raleigh).

This is remembered as a contest between aristocratic, royalist ‘Cavaliers’ and puritanical parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ (because of the style of their hair-cuts). The Roundheads were victorious by 1645, although the war periodically continued until 1649.

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,

A pocket full of posies.

Atishoo! Atishoo!

We all fall down.
This is a well-known children’s nursery rhyme today. It is believed to come from the time of the Great Plague of 1665, which was the last outbreak of bubonic plague in Britain. The ring of roses refers to the pattern of red spots on a sufferer’s body. The posies, a bag of herbs, were thought to give protection from the disease. ‘Atishoo’ represents the sound of sneezing, one of the signs of the disease, after which a person could sometimes ‘fall down’ dead in a few hours.
The Battle of the Boyne

After he was deposed from the English and Scottish thrones, James II fled to Ireland. But the Catholic Irish army he gathered there was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and laws were then passed forbidding Catholics to vote or even own land. In Ulster, in the north of the country, large numbers of fiercely anti-Catholic Scottish Presbyterians settled (in possession of all the land). The descendants of these people are still known today as Orangemen (After their patron William of Orange). They form one half of the tragic split in society in modern Northern Ireland, the other half being the ‘native’ Irish Catholic (See page 29 The creation of Northern Ireland).

The monarchs of the eighteenth century were Hanoverian Germans with interests on the European continent. The first of them, George I, could not even speak English. Perhaps this situation encouraged the habit whereby the monarch appointed one principal, or ‘prime’, minister from the ranks of Parliament to head his government. It was also during this century that the system of an annual budget drawn up by the monarch’s Treasury officials for the approval of Parliament was established.

Despite all the urban development of the eighteenth century, social power and prestige rested on the possession of land in the countryside. The outward sign of this prestige was the ownership of a ‘country seat’ – a gracious country mansion with land attached. More than a thousand such mansions were built in this century.

Queen Victoria reigned from 1837-1901. During her reign, although the modern powerlessness of the monarch was confirmed (she was sometimes forced to accept as Prime Minister people whom she personally disliked), she herself became an increasingly popular symbol of Britain’s success in the world. As a hard-working, religious mother of ten children, devoted to her husband, Prince Albert, she was regarded as the personification of contemporary morals. The idea that the monarch should set an example to the people in such matters was unknown before this time and has created problems for the monarchy since then (see chapter 7).

Here are some lines from the poem of this title by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who is sometimes referred to (perhaps unfairly) as ‘the poet of imperialism’.

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve tour captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, most people in Ireland wanted either internal self-government (which was known as ‘home rule’) or complete independence from Britain. Liberal governments in Britain had attempted at various times to make this idea a reality. However, the one million Protestants in the province of Ulster in the north of the country were violently opposed to it. They did not want to belong to a country dominated by Catholics. They formed less than a quarter of the total Irish population, but in six of the nine counties of Ulster they were in a 65% majority.

In 1920, the British government partitioned the country between the (Catholic) south and the (Protestant) six counties, giving each part some control of its internal affairs. But this was no longer enough for the south. There, support for complete independence had grown as a result of the British government’s savage repression of the ‘Easter Rising’ in 1916. War followed. The eventual result was that in 1922, the south became independent from Britain.

The six counties, however, remained within the United Kingdom. They became the British province of ‘Northern Ireland’ (see chapter 12).

When the European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1951, the British government thought it was an excellent idea – but nothing to do with Britain! Long years of an empire based on sea power meant that the traditional attitude to mainland Europe had been to encourage stability there, to discourage any expansionist powers there, but otherwise to leave it well alone.

But as the empire disappeared, and the role of ‘the world’s policeman’ was taken over by the USA, the British government decided to ask for membership of the newly-formed European Communities. There was opposition to the idea from those (both inside and outside the country) who argued that Britain was an ‘island nation’ and thus essentially different in outlook from nations in mainland Europe. Finally, ten years after its first application, Britain joined in 1973.
What happened in the twentieth century?

There are many opinions about whether the events of the twentieth century and Britain’s role in it were good or bad. Here is one view: “What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure.” (Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island).

On 10 August 2003, a momentous event occurred at Heathrow airport just outside London. There, a temperature of 37,9C was recorded. This may not look an especially significant figure to you, but to the British it had great psychological impact. This is because many of them still think in the old Fahrenheit scale – and 37,9C is 100,2F. It was the first time in British history that the temperature had passed the 100F mark.

Since that day, temperatures of more than 100F have been recorded several times in several different places in Britain. People have become generally aware of climate change. In Britain, there seem to be three trends: (1) like the rest of Europe, temperatures are generally rising; (2) the difference between the warmer, drier south-east and the cooler, wetter north-west is becoming more pronounced; (3) extreme weather conditions are becoming more frequent – so perhaps the British will start to be more prepared for them!
Britain under attack

Some people worry that Britain’s political sovereignty is in danger from the European Union and from Scottish and Welsh independence movements (see chapter 12). This may or may not be true. But what is certainly true is that Britain itself – the island – is in very real danger from the sea. For one thing, global warming means rising sea levels everywhere, so that low-lying coastal areas are threatened. For another, the Atlantic waves which hit Britain’s north, west and south coasts are getting taller. This means they have more energy than before – energy with which to strip sand from beaches, undermine cliffs and damage coastal defences. Finally, the east coast, although safe from those Atlantic waves, is actually sinking anyway (as the south-east corner of Britain tilts downwards). Every year, little bits of it vanish into the North Sea. Sometimes the land slips away slowly. But at other times it slips away very dramatically (as when in 1992 the guests of the Holbeck hotel, built on a clifftop near Scarborough, had to leave their rooms in a hurry; the cliff was collapsing into the sea - and so was their hotel).

London is in special danger because it is also vulnerable to flooding through tidal surges along the River Thames. One flood in the seventeenth century left the Westminster area under nearly two metres of water. In 1953 a tidal surge killed 300 people in the Tames Estuary to the east of London. Realization of the scale of disaster that would have been caused if this surge had reached London provoked the construction of the Thames Barrier, completed in 1983. Since then, it has been used to protect London from flooding an average of three times every year. It is widely thought that the Barrier will soon be inadequate. New defences are being considered.
The better side of town

In the industrial age, the air in Britain’s towns and cities used to be very polluted. And the prevailing winds throughout Britain are from the west. For these two reasons, the more desirable areas of the average British town or city were to the west of its centre. This probably explains why, even now, when industrial pollution is no longer a problem, it is the western suburbs of most towns and cities in Britain which are the richest.

In the last 50 years, a combination of the British preference for building outwards and intensive farming in the countryside has had a curious effect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of people migrated to Britain’s towns and cities. The British changed into a nation of urban dwellers. More recently, British animals have been doing the same thing! And for much the same reason. It’s all about where you can make a living. In the countryside, decades of intensive farming and monoculture (the cultivation of a single crop over a large area) have led to food shortages for many species. But all those back gardens, lanes and parks in Britain’s towns and suburbs are not farmed this way. There, a wide and tempting variety of flora and fauna is to be found. For all those starving rural animals, it’s too good an opportunity to miss.

The pioneers were the foxes. They started in the 1950s and have become mainly urban animals. Many other species have followed. Shrews, squirrels, roe deer and brown hares have all been spotted in cities and many more have colonized suburban back gardens. As more species take this route, more ‘employment’ becomes available for other species there. It’s a mass migration. Some wildlife experts believe suburban gardens are now so important to wildlife they should be classified as a special type of habitat.
The north-south divide

In 1854, a novel called North and South appeared. It tells the story of a woman from the south of England who finds herself living in the horrors of the grim north of England. Since around that time, the ‘north-south divide; has been part of English folklore. It denotes a supposed big difference between the poor north and the rich south (although there is no recognized geographical boundary between the two). Historically, there is much truth in this generalization. The south has almost always had lower rates of unemployment and more expensive houses. This is especially true of the south-eastern area surrounding London. (This area is sometimes referred as ‘the Home Counties’, an indication, perhaps, of London’s domination of public life.)

So well-known are these stereotypes that statisticians and economists sometimes attempt to draw the boundary between north and south based purely on wealth, so that a relatively poor place is designated ‘north’ (and vice versa) because of this fact alone.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the decline of heavy industry, which was mostly confined to the north, caused large-scale migration of well-qualified workers from north to south, so that the north-south divide seemed to be getting even wider.

However, the picture is not that simple. Net migration in this century has been the other way around – towards the north – and some of the poorest areas in the country are actually in London. Indeed, one well-known (northern) journalist has claimed that if the same kind of novel were written today the big divide would be between London and the rest of England – and London would be the awful half!
SAD

Aberdeen, on the east coast of Scotland, has done well out of North Sea oil. But its people have a problem in the winter. They are nearly 60 degrees north and on top of that, almost the whole city is built in granite, a grey stone which just soaks up the little light available. And it is this lack of light (not the cold wind) which researchers blame for depression in the city. The estimate that as many as 20% of the people there suffer from a condition known as SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), some of them so seriously that they become suicidal.

In fact, SAD has increased all over Britain in the past two decades. Changed living and working patterns mean that people spend far less time outdoors than they used to, and so experience less daylight than they used to.
Ugly Bug Ball

One small indication of the generally benign nature of the British geography is the fact that even the mosquitoes are relatively harmless – almost nobody bothers to take precautions against their bites.

There is, however, a notable exception in one part of Britain – the Scottish Highlands. This is the territory of a cousin of the mosquito, the midgie (some people say ‘midge’). Midgies are much, much smaller than mosquitoes. But they are fiercer and there are many, many more of them, usually in ‘clouds’ around your head!

Midgies make picnics in the highlands a gamble, camping uncomfortable and outdoor cocktails impossible. You know the image of the British always moaning about the weather. Well, Highlanders are always moaning about the midgies. Recently, one group of Highlanders decided to abandon the struggle and celebrate instead. They held the world’s first midgie festival, including an Ugly Bug Ball, a ‘midge-summer night’s party’ featuring a mardi-gras style procession with midgie masks. The organizers claimed that, in their tenacious single-mindedness (when they go after you, they get you), midgies were ‘a brilliant symbol for our country [Scotland]’.