The English by Jeremy Paxman

Author:Jeremy Paxman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141922393
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

By preserving the ruins, the National Trust feeds this belief that the worst is yet to come. Of course, the millions who visit historic houses and gardens have a gentle, undemanding day out, usually involving a cup of tea and a bit of a stroll. But what does the Trust’s phenomenal success tell us about the English frame of mind? We must accept, first, that a sense of history runs deep in the English people. It may not be particularly well informed (a surprising number of people are unsure precisely how many wives Henry VIII had), but it is deeply felt and is one of the things that makes the people what they are. The National Trust expresses this sense, as does the appetite for cheap historical romance, a love of Shakespeare and a deep-rooted scepticism about the political leaders of the rest of Europe.

Secondly, it is indicative of a deep conservatism. Every traditional English family home has a room, a cupboard, an attic, cellar or garage piled with everything from ancient prams to odd rolls of wallpaper in the patterns of twenty years ago, old light-fittings to the boxes in which long-broken electrical appliances were sold. They are kept because ‘they might come in useful some day’. Really, their pragmatic and sensible owners are just reluctant to part with them. In 1930, after twenty years living among the English, Émile Cammaerts concluded the habit was indicative of an attitude to life: ‘The present is not, for them, a hard line of demarcation between two opposite worlds, but a gentle mist through which they wander leisurely … They travel through time, as they do indeed through space, dragging behind them a quantity of useless luggage.’15 He has a point. How else can one explain the survival of so much that is so utterly pointless – barristers’ wigs, bearskins, an unelected House of Lords, flummeries from the Trooping the Colour to Swan-upping, or archaic-sounding offices of state like Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster or Warden of the Cinque Ports? In the end, it gets to everyone: those who start their adulthood in passionate argument for modernization end up dreaming of a seat in the House of Lords.

Thirdly, of course, the English are class-obsessed and intensely nosy. Part of the attraction for the 160,000 people visiting Churchill’s home at Chartwell, or the 140,000 going to the Astors’ residence at Cliveden is to see how the other half lived and to imagine themselves in their shoes. The Duchess of Devonshire treasures the baffled comment written in the visitors’ book at Chatsworth, their pile in Derbyshire: ‘Saw the Duke in the garden. He looked quite normal.’ In the great houses, the staff easily outnumbered the family, often many times over. Yet how many of the tourists at these places call to mind a picture of themselves as a ‘tweeny’, helping out the cook and housemaid, as the third footman or the twelfth undergardener?

The National Trust’s success story tells us something else about the English.

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