I am convinced that the English get great vicarious pleasure from our pets’ uninhibited behaviour. We grant them all the freedoms that we deny ourselves: the most repressed and inhibited people on Earth have the most blatantly unreserved, spontaneous and badly behaved pets. Our pets are our alter egos, or perhaps even the symbolic embodiment of what a psychotherapist would call our ‘inner child’ (but not the sort of inner child they mean, the one with big soulful eyes who needs a hug – I mean the snub-nosed, mucky, obnoxious inner brat who needs a good slap). Our animals represent our wild side; through them, we can express our most un-English tendencies, we can break all the rules, if only by proxy.
The unspoken law states that our animal alter egos/inner brats can do no wrong. If an English person’s dog bites you, you must have provoked it; and even if the attack was clearly unprovoked – if the animal just took a sudden irrational dislike to you – the owners will assume that there must be something suspect about you. The English firmly believe that our dogs (and cats, guinea pigs, ponies, parrots, etc.) are shrewd judges of character. If our pet takes against someone, even if we have no reason at all to dislike the person, we trust the animal’s superior insight and become wary and suspicious. People who object to being jumped on, climbed over, kicked, scratched and generally mauled by English animals who are ‘just being friendly’ also clearly have something wrong with them.
Although our pets usually provide a vital therapeutic substitute for emotional relationships with human beings, the superior quality of our communication and bonding with animals can sometimes also have beneficial side effects on our relations with other humans. We can even manage to strike up a conversation with a stranger if one of us is accompanied by a dog, although it must be said that both parties are sometimes inclined to talk to the canine chaperone rather than address each other directly. Non-verbal as well as verbal signals are exchanged through the blissfully oblivious dog, who happily absorbs all the eye contact and friendly touching that would be regarded as excessively forward and pushy between newly acquainted humans. And pets can act as mediators or facilitators even in more established relationships: English couples who have trouble expressing their feelings to each other often tend to communicate through their pets. ‘Mummy’s looking really pissed off, isn’t she, Patch? Yes she is. Yes she is. Do you think she’s annoyed with us?’ ‘Well, Patchy-poo, Mummy’s vewy, vewy tired and she would appreciate it if your lazy old Daddy gave her a bit of help round here instead of sitting on his arse reading the paper all day.’
Most of the above rules apply across class barriers, but there are a few variations. The middle-middles and lower-middles, although just as dotty about their pets as the other classes, tend to be somewhat less tolerant of mess, and rather more squeamish about the ‘ruder’ kinds of misbehaviour than those at the top and bottom of the social scale. Middle-middle and lower-middle pets are not necessarily any better behaved, but their owners are more zealous about cleaning up after them, and more embarrassed when they sniff people’s crotches or try to have sex with their legs.
The type and breed of pet you keep, however, is a more reliable class indicator than your attitude towards animals. Dogs, for example, are universally popular, but the upper echelons prefer Labradors, golden retrievers, King Charles spaniels and springer spaniels, while the lower classes are more likely to have rottweilers, alsatians, poodles, afghans, chihuahuas and cocker spaniels.
Cats are less popular than dogs with the upper class, although those who live in grand country houses find them useful for keeping mice and rats at bay. The lower social ranks, by contrast, may keep mice and rats as pets – as well as guinea pigs, hamsters and goldfish. Some middle-middles, and lower-middles with aspirations, take great pride in keeping expensive exotic fish such as Koi carp in their garden pond. The upper-middles and upper classes think this is ‘naff’. Horses are widely regarded as ‘posh’ animals, and social climbers often take up riding or buy ponies for their children in order to ingratiate themselves with the ‘horsey’ set to which they aspire. Unless they also manage to perfect the appropriate accent, arcane vocabulary, mannerisms and dress, they don’t fool anybody.
What you do with your pet can also be a class indicator. Generally, only the middle-middles and below go in for dog shows, cat shows and obedience tests, and only these classes would put a sticker in the back window of their car proclaiming their passion for a particular breed of dog or warning other motorists that their vehicle may contain ‘Show Cats in Transit’. The upper classes regard showing dogs and cats as rather vulgar, but showing horses and ponies is fine. There is no logic to any of this.
Middle-middles and below are also more likely to dress up their dogs and cats in coloured collars, bows and other tweenesses – and if you see a dog with its name in inverted commas on its collar, the animal’s owners are almost certainly no higher than middle-middle. Upper-middle and upper-class dogs usually just wear plain brown leather collars. Only a certain type of rather insecure working-class male goes in for big, scary, aggressive-looking guard dogs with big, scary, studded, black collars.
English pet-owners are highly unlikely to admit that their pet is a status signal, or that their choice of pet is in any way class-related. They will insist that they like Labradors (or springer spaniels, or whatever) because of the breed’s kind temperament. If you want to get them to reveal their hidden class anxieties, or if you just like causing trouble, you can try the canine equivalent of the Mondeo and Mercedes tests: put on your most innocent face, and tell a Labrador-owner ‘Oh, I’d have seen you more as an alsatian [or poodle, or chihuahua] sort of person.’
If you are of a more kind and affable disposition, note that the quickest way to an English person’s heart, no matter what their class, is through their pet. Always praise people’s pets, and when you speak to our animals directly (which you should do as much as possible) remember that you are addressing our inner child. If you are a visitor eager to make friends with the natives, try to acquire or borrow a dog to act as a passport to conversation and as a chaperone.
PROPS AND FACILITATORS – PUBLIC, SOCIAL ACTIVITIES
If you do not have a dog, you will need to find another kind of passport to social contact. Which brings me neatly to the second type of English approach to leisure mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: the public/social pursuits and pastimes – sports, games, pubs, clubs and so on. All of these relate directly to our second main method of dealing with our social dis-ease: the ‘ingenious use of props and facilitators’ method.
Rules of the Game
It is no accident that almost all of the most popular sports and games played around the world today originated in England. Football, baseball, rugby and tennis were all invented here, and even when we did not actually invent a sport or game, the English were usually the first to lay down a proper, official set of rules for it (hockey, horseracing, polo, swimming, rowing, boxing – and even skiing, for heaven’s sake). And that’s not counting all the rather less athletic games and pastimes such as darts, pool, billiards, cards, cribbage and skittles. And let’s not forget hunting, shooting and fishing. We didn’t create or codify all of these, of course, but sports and games are widely recognized as an essential part of our culture, our heritage and our legacy – one cannot talk about Englishness without talking about sports and games.
Testosterone Rules
A number of students of Englishness have tried to explain the English obsession with games. Most of these commentators attempt to find historical explanations. Jeremy Paxman wonders whether the development of this obsession might have had something to do with ‘safety and prosperity and the availability of leisure time’ or perhaps ‘the fact that duelling was frowned upon earlier than in the rest of Europe meant there was a need to find alternative challenges’. Hmm, well, maybe. He comes closer with the observation that our great boys’ boarding schools had to ‘find ways of exercising the hormonally challenged’. But this is what I would call a ‘cross-cultural universal’, a valid reason for any human society to develop sports and games, and indeed one of the reasons every human society has them. We all have testosterone-fuelled adolescent and post-adolescent males to deal with, and we all deal with them by trying to channel their potentially destructive aggression and other disruptive tendencies into relatively harmless sports and games.
The universal testosterone problem cannot in itself explain why the English in particular should have developed so many of these pastimes, although I would argue that the young English male, being socially uneasy as well as hormonally challenged, has perhaps a more pressing need for such channelling. And the rest of us also need some means of overcoming our social inhibitions and dis-ease. The real reasons for the English love of games are perhaps best explained through an example from my research.
The ‘Props and Facilitators’ Method
It was during my study on pub etiquette that I began to understand the importance of games. In conversations with tourists, I found that to foreign visitors, many English pubs seem more like children’s playgrounds than adult drinking-places. One American tourist I interviewed expressed his bewilderment at the number and variety of games in a local pub: ‘Look at this place! You’ve got a dart board, a bar-billiards table, four different board games, and card games and dominoes and some weird thing with a box and a bunch of little sticks – and then you tell me this pub has a football team and a cricket team and quiz nights... You call this a bar? At home we’d call it a kindergarten!’ Fortunately for me, this scornful tourist had only noticed about a dozen or so typical pub games, and had not heard of all the more obscure regional eccentricities such as Aunt Sally, wellie-throwing, shove ha’penny, marrow-dangling, conger-cuddling and Wetton Toe Wrestling. Another equally puzzled but marginally more polite visitor asked: ‘What is it with you English? Why do you have to play all these silly games? Why can’t you just go to a bar and drink and talk like the rest of the world?’
Somewhat defensively, I explained in the pub-etiquette book that the rest of the world is not as socially inhibited and inept as the English. We do not find it easy to initiate friendly conversation with strangers, or to develop closer relationships with fellow pubgoers. We need help. We need props. We need excuses to make contact. We need toys and sports and games that get us involved with each other.
What works in the microcosm of the pub also works in English society as a whole. More so, in fact. If we need games and sports even in the special social micro-climate of the pub, where the usual restraints are relaxed somewhat, and it is acceptable to strike up a conversation with a stranger, we clearly have an even greater need for such props and facilitators outside this sociable environment.
The Self-delusion Rule
But sports and games do not only provide the props we need to initiate and sustain social contact, they also prescribe the nature of that contact. This is not ‘random’ sociability, but sociability hedged about with a lot of rules and regulations, ritual and etiquette, both official and unofficial. The English are capable of engaging socially with each other, but we need clear and precise guidelines on what to do, what to say, and exactly when and how to do and say it. Games ritualize our social interactions, giving them a reassuring structure and sense of order. By focusing on the detail of the game’s rules and rituals, we can pretend that the game itself is really the point, and the social contact a mere incidental side-effect.
In fact, it is the other way round: games are a means to an end, the end being the kind of sociable interaction and social bonding that other cultures seem to achieve without all this fuss, subterfuge and self-delusion. The English are human; we are social animals just like all other humans, but we have to trick ourselves into social interaction and bonding by disguising it as something else, such as a game of football, cricket, tennis, rugby, darts, pool, dominoes, cards, scrabble, charades, wellie-throwing or toe-wrestling.
Games Etiquette
Every one of these games has its rules – not just the official rules of the game itself, which the English like to be as complex as possible, but an equally complex set of unofficial, unwritten rules governing the comportment and social interactions of the players and spectators. Again, pub games are a good example. Even in this sociable microclimate, our natural diffidence and reluctance to intrude on other people means that we are more comfortable when there are established ‘rules of introduction’ to follow. Knowing the etiquette, the correct form of address, gives us the courage to take the initiative. Even if we are feeling in need of company, we are unlikely to approach a stranger who is sitting at a table with his pint, or with his mates, but if they are playing pool or darts or bar-billiards, there is not only a valid excuse to make an approach, but also a set formula to follow, which makes the whole process much less daunting.
For pool and bar-billiards players, the formula is straightforward. You simply approach a player and ask, ‘Is it winner stays on?’ This traditional opening is both an enquiry about the local rules on turn-taking, which may vary from region to region and even from pub to pub, and an invitation to play the winner of the current game. The reply may be ‘Yeah, coins down,’ or ‘That’s right – name on the board.’ This is both an acceptance of your invitation, and an instruction on the pub’s system for securing the table, which may be by placing your coins on the corner of the table, or writing your name on a nearby chalkboard. Either way, it is understood that you will pay for the game, so there is no need for any embarrassing breach of the money-talk taboo. If the reply to your original question is simply ‘Yes,’ you may ask ‘Is it coins down?’ or ‘Is it names on the board?’
Having completed the correct introductions, you may now stand around and watch the current game, gradually joining in the banter as you wait your turn. Further enquiries about local rules are the most acceptable way of initiating conversation. These usually begin with the same somewhat impersonal ‘Is it...’ as in ‘Is it two shots on the black?’ or ‘Is it stick pocket or any pocket?’ – rather than using anything so intimate as a personal pronoun. Once you are accepted as a player, the unwritten etiquette also allows you to make appropriate comments on the game. Well, actually there is only one entirely safe and appropriate comment you can make, particularly among male players, and this is to say ‘Shot’ when a player makes a particularly good shot. Perhaps to compensate, this one word is pronounced in a drawn-out fashion, as though it had at least two syllables: ‘Sho-ot’. Other players may also tease and taunt each other over bad shots, but newcomers wisely tend to avoid making any derogatory remarks until they are better acquainted.
Sex Differences and the ‘Three-emotions Rule’
There are some sex differences in the codes of conduct governing pub games, and indeed many sports and games played in other contexts. As a rule of thumb, males are supposed to adopt a strong, stiff-upper-lipped, manly approach to the game, both as players and as spectators. It is not done to jump about and exclaim over one’s own or another player’s luck or skill. In darts, for example, swearing at one’s mistakes, and making sarcastic comments on those of one’s opponents is allowed, but clapping one’s hands in glee upon scoring a double-twenty, and excessive laughter on failing to hit the board at all, are regarded as ‘girly’ and inappropriate.
The usual ‘three-emotions rule’ applies. English males are allowed to express three emotions: surprise, providing it is conveyed by shouting or swearing; anger, also communicated in expletives; and elation/triumph, displayed in the same manner. For the untrained eye and ear, it can be difficult to distinguish between the three permitted emotions, but English males have no trouble grasping the nuances. Female players and spectators are allowed a much wider range of acceptable emotions, and a much more extensive vocabulary with which to express them. This often seems to happen – that one sex is required to be ‘more English’ than the other, in a certain context. Here, males are subject to more restrictions than females, but in other contexts – such as, say, the giving and receiving of compliments – the unwritten rules place more complex constraints on female behaviour. It may all balance out, but my suspicion is that, overall, the rules of Englishness are probably a bit harder on males than on females.
The Fair-play Rule
The English concern with fair play is, as we have seen, an underlying theme in almost all aspects of our life and culture, and in the context of sports and games, fair play is still – despite the rantings of the doom-mongers – an ideal to which we cling, even if we do not always manage to live up to it.
At the top national and international level, sport has become, for the English as for all other nations, a rather more cut-throat business, and there seems to be more focus on winning and on the exploits of individual superstar ‘personalities’ (a misnomer if ever there was one), than on high-minded notions of team spirit and sportsmanship. Until, that is, there is some accusation of cheating, unfairness, loutishness or unsporting behaviour, whereupon we all seethe with righteous indignation – or cringe with shame and embarrassment, and tell each other that the country is going to the dogs. Both reactions suggest that the sporting ethic, which the English are often credited with inventing, is still very important to us.
In Anyone for England, one of the many recent premature obituaries for English national identity, Clive Aslet bemoans the loss of all these gentlemanly ideals, claiming that even cricket, ‘the game synonymous with the sporting ideal, has changed beyond recognition in terms of the spirit in which it is played.’ But apart from the rather unseemly row between Ian Botham and Imran Khan in 1996, the worst sin of which he accuses the England team is that the players ‘make little effort to cultivate an image of gentlemanliness through their dress.’ He objects to the baseball caps, stubble, T-shirts and shorts worn by off-duty cricketers. He refers to the ‘ungentlemanly tactics’ of national players, without giving any examples, and then is ‘shocked to learn from cricketing friends’ that these are even being adopted at village-cricket level. Intimidating ‘war-paint’ and helmets, as seen in televised international matches, are sometimes worn; opposing batsmen, it seems, are no longer always clapped to the crease; and in 1996, the Woodmancote team, from Hampshire, was expelled from the National Village Cricket Knockout Tournament for being ‘too professional’. The first two of these examples do not strike me as particularly shocking, and the third seems to indicate that, if anything, the old values of amateurism and fair play are very much alive and well in village cricket.
Even Aslet admits that people have been mourning the demise of this sporting ethic for at least a century – indeed, the obituaries started almost as soon as the Victorians invented the gentlemanly ‘sporting ideal’ in the first place. The English have a habit of inventing ‘traditions’ out of thin air, to suit the spirit of the times, and then almost immediately waxing mournfully nostalgic about them, as though they were a vital and now tragically dying part of our cultural heritage.
Which brings me to football. And the modern evil of football hooliganism, of course. Football violence is always wheeled out as Exhibit A by those who complain that the country is going to the dogs, that we have become a nation of louts, that sport isn’t what it used to be, and so on. These complainers admittedly constitute quite a large proportion of the population, but that is an indication of our Eeyorish love of moaning and national self-flagellation, rather than evidence for the truth of our moans.
What all the mourners and moaners fail to understand is that football violence is nothing new. You know the well-worn joke about ‘I went to a fight and a football match broke out’? Well, that’s pretty much how football started. The game of football has been associated with violence since its origins in thirteenth-century England. Medieval football matches were essentially pitched battles between the young men of rival villages and towns. They involved hundreds of ‘players’, and were often used as opportunities to settle old feuds, personal arguments and land disputes. Some forms of ‘folk-football’ existed in other countries (such as the German Knappen and the Florentine calcio in costume), but the roots of modern football are in these violent English rituals.
The much more restrained, disciplined form of the game with which we are now familiar was the reformed pastime of the Victorians, but the violent traditions and rivalries have persisted, mainly among spectators, on the terraces and in the towns. Only two quite brief periods in English history – the inter-war years and about a decade or so following the Second World War – have been relatively free of football-related violence. Historically, these periods are the exception rather than the rule. So I’m sorry, but I cannot accept modern football hooliganism as evidence of a recent decline in sporting manners or values.
In any case, the rule or ideal I am concerned with here is not the entire Victorian gentlemanly package, but just the basic notion of fair play, which is not necessarily incompatible with a desire to win, or with inelegant dress, or with financial gain and commercial sponsorship – or, for that matter, with violence. My colleague Peter Marsh (among others) has shown that human violence – including specifically English football-hooligan violence – is not a random free-for-all but a rule-governed affair, in which considerations of fairness may often play a part. Football violence is not as widespread, or indeed as violent, as it is cracked up to be. There is a lot of aggressive chanting and taunting, some intimidating displays and threats, and a few scuffles, but serious physical violence is actually relatively uncommon. The hooligans’ aim is to scare rival fans into running away, and then jeer at their cowardice, not to beat them to a pulp. A typical football chant (this one sung to the tune of Seasons in the Sun) encapsulates the hooligans’ mission:
We had joy, we had fun, we had Swindon on the run
But the joy didn’t last, cos the bastards ran too fast!
I am not trying to whitewash or defend football hooligans here. They are loud, obnoxious, ill-mannered and often racist. All I am saying is that they do have their own codes of conduct, and that ‘fair play’ is very much part of the etiquette governing their aggressive and violent encounters.
The Underdog Rule
In 1990, the Tory MP Norman Tebbit caused much outrage and uproar when he complained that too many Asian immigrants in Britain failed what he called the ‘cricket test’ – by cheering for India or Pakistan when these countries played England at cricket, rather than cheering for England. His remarks were aimed primarily at second-generation Asian and Caribbean immigrants, whom he accused of having ‘split loyalties’, when they should be demonstrating their Britishness by supporting the England cricket team. ‘When people come to a new country, they should be prepared to immerse themselves totally and utterly in that country,’ he declared.
The racism, ignorance and arrogance of the ‘Tebbit Test’, as it came to be known, are quite breathtaking. Was Tebbit suggesting that Asian immigrants in Britain should follow the shining example we provided as uninvited residents in their countries? And for whom would he suggest that English settlers in Australia should cheer, when England plays Australia in their adopted home? And what about Scottish and Welsh people living in England – who should they support? Did he realize that the Scots always, on principle, cheer for whatever country is playing against England? As do many members of the cynical chattering-class English intelligentsia, among whom any display of patriotism, particularly over sport, is regarded as deeply unsophisticated. Not to mention all the other English people who just find patriotic fervour somewhat embarrassing, and would feel silly and self-conscious if obliged to cheer for England. Should we all be denied full citizenship?
But even leaving all this aside, the ‘Tebbit Test’ would still not work as a test of Englishness. Those who are truly, culturally ‘English’ – whatever their race or country of origin – can be distinguished by their automatic, instinctive inclination to cheer for the underdog. I am by no means the first to notice this trait: the English tendency to support the underdog is one of those national stereotypes that I was determined to ‘get inside’ during my field research. I saw plenty of examples, but the one that sticks in my mind, the one that really helped me to understand the depth and complexities of the underdog rule, was the men’s final at Wimbledon in 2002.
Tennis buffs apparently found this match rather dull, for a Wimbledon final, but I was there to watch the spectators, not the players, and I found it fascinating. The match was between the world-famous, top-seed Australian player Lleyton Hewitt, and a virtually unknown Argentine called David Nalbandian, who had never even played at Wimbledon before. The result was a predictably easy victory for the Australian champion, who beat Nalbandian 6–1, 6–3, 6–2.
At the start of the match, all the English spectators were cheering for Nalbandian, clapping and whooping and shouting ‘Come on, David!’ every time he scored a point or even made a good shot (or whatever it’s called in tennis), while Hewitt only got a few token, polite claps. When I asked the English spectators around me why they were supporting the Argentine – particularly given that there was no great love between England and Argentina; indeed, we were at war not so long ago – they explained that nationality was irrelevant, that Nalbandian was the underdog, highly unlikely to win, and therefore obviously deserved their support. They seemed surprised that I should have to ask such a question, and several people even spelt out the rule for me – ‘You always support the underdog.’; ‘You have to support the underdog.’ Their tone suggested that I really should already know this, that it was a fundamental law of nature.
Fine, I thought, good, another ‘rule of Englishness’ in the bag. Feeling rather smug, I watched complacently for a bit, and was just beginning to get bored, and thinking about maybe sloping off in search of an ice-cream, when something strange happened. Hewitt did something particularly good (don’t ask me what, I don’t understand tennis) and the people around me started whooping and cheering and clapping him. ‘Eh?’ I said, ‘Hang on. I thought you were supporting Nalbandian, the underdog? Why are you now cheering for Hewitt?’ The explanations offered by the English spectators were a bit less clear-cut, but the gist was that Hewitt was, after all, playing exceptionally well, and that everyone had been cheering for Nalbandian, because he was the underdog, which meant that poor Hewitt, despite playing brilliantly, was getting little or no support and encouragement from the crowd, which seemed rather unfair, so they felt sorry for him, out there all alone with everyone cheering his opponent, so they were cheering for him to redress the balance a bit. In other words, Hewitt, the overdog (is that a word? never mind – you know what I mean), had somehow become the underdog, the one who deserved their support.
For a while, that is. I was now alert, shaken out of my complacency, and paying close attention to the behaviour of the spectators, so when the cheering for Hewitt dwindled, and the spectators began giving all their support to Nalbandian again, I was ready with my questions: ‘Now what? Why aren’t you cheering for Hewitt any more? Is he not playing so well?’ No, apparently he was playing even better. And that was the point. Hewitt was now clearly heading for an easy win. Nalbandian was struggling, was going to be ‘slaughtered’, had absolutely no chance – so obviously it was only fair to give him all the noisy vocal encouragement and praise, and only clap politely for the all-conquering overdog Hewitt.
So, in the logic of English fair play, you must always support the underdog, but too much support for the underdog can be unfair on the overdog, who then becomes a sort of honorary underdog, whom you must support until balance is restored, or until the real underdog is clearly going to lose, at which point you must support the real underdog again. Simple, really. Once you know the rules. Or at least at Wimbledon it was relatively simple, as there could be no doubt as to who was the real underdog. When this is not immediately obvious, there can be difficulties, as the English dither over who is most deserving of their cheers; and further problems can arise when an English player (or team) happens to be the overdog, as fairness demands that we give at least some support to the underdog opposition.
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