Things are getting a tad sticky: how the Great British Understatement is dying a slow death

Things are getting a tad sticky: how the Great British Understatement is dying a slow death

Ben Macintyre

SLOGGING through the jungles of Africa in 1873, David Livingstone recorded an extraordinary example of a species that has since become almost extinct: the Great British Understatement.

The intrepid explorer was suffering from pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers and piles so savage he could barely walk. The roasting heat was punctuated by sudden torrential downpours. Many of his porters had run away and he had been forced to pull out most of his rotting teeth. He had been attacked by leeches, slavers and hostile African tribesmen. Lurking in his gut was a blood clot the size of a cricket ball that would shortly kill him.

In his tent, by the light of a candle, Livingstone picked up his pen and, using berry juice because he had run out of ink, he wrote these magnificent words: "It is not all pleasure, this exploration."

The words were not intended for publication (indeed, they did not come to light for many years), but for wry self-comfort. This was not the grandstanding of someone determined to appear tough at a moment of spectacular suffering, but the statement of a most resilient man, finding humour in downplaying horrors that could hardly be exaggerated.

Those early explorers were madly competitive and some, as Tim Jeal shows in a fine new account of the race to find the source of the Nile, were prepared to stoop low to claim the laurels of discovery. But they also competed over who could make the least fuss. In 1858, deep in the African interior, a small black beetle flew into the ear of John Hanning Speke and "began with exceeding vigour, like a rabbit at a hole, to dig violently". Speke pursued it with a penknife and injured himself so badly that he was left half-deaf. He thought this was quite funny.

Before finding Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley pondered long and hard over the right form of words that would convey the momentousness of the occasion (and his own achievement) with the correct admixture of understatement. He probably came up with "Dr Livingstone, I presume" well after the event, but the phrase resonated and stuck, precisely because it seemed to clothe an episode of profound historical significance in the correct formal garb of emotional containment.

The knack of understatement has all but vanished from public discourse. Over the past year, politicians, journalists and commentators have vied to portray various crises, both natural and manmade -- earthquake, riots, economic meltdown -- in the most extreme colours. Westerners covering the Japanese earthquake and tsunami were baffled and frustrated by the Japanese refusal to panic.

English is suffused with downplaying qualifiers: "quite", "rather", "a bit". Traditionally, the language requires the listener to "aim off". When something is described as "quite good", we mean it is very good; if it is "really quite good", it is superb; "not bad" is high praise, and "not bad at all" is the highest. Now, we aim off in the other direction: if something is described as completely appalling or utterly magnificent, then it may be, at most, quite bad or rather good. The language of X Factor and political exaggeration is slowly killing off the British determination to go under the top.

There are still flickers of old-fashioned understatement. During the inquiry into the 7/7 bombings, an insurance broker, Michael Henning, described his first reaction to the blast: "It's strange the thoughts that go through your mind, but I think it was one of obviously complete British understatement: 'Oh, this isn't good."' In similar vein, Sally Dowler told the Leveson inquiry into media ethics of her feelings when she first saw a photograph in the News of the World reconstructing a private walk she and her husband had taken after the murder of their daughter: "I was really cross."

The quality reflected in British understatement is not exactly stoicism, for the Stoic embraces hardship; nor is it merely a display of the stiff upper lip, an unwillingness to confront embarrassing or emotionally challenging reality. Rather, it is a refusal to succumb to drama or pander to the demands of high public emotion, whatever the extremity.

Sometimes, the language of understatement can lead to lethal misunderstanding. In 1951, 650 soldiers of the Gloucestershire Regiment were surrounded by an entire Chinese division on the Imjin River in Korea. Their commander, Brigadier Thomas Brodie, told the Americans that "things are pretty sticky", a statement that sounded reassuring to American ears but was as close to a scream for help as British understatement would allow. The British were left to fight on without reinforcement. Just 40 survived.

Next year offers a chance to celebrate centenaries of some of the finest understatements in British history, for 1912 saw a series of heroic failures and a corresponding refusal to get too het up about them. Cosmo Duff-Gordon survived the sinking of the Titanic in April, and went so far as to remark: "It was rather a serious evening, you know."

The previous month, Captain Titus Oates famously left the tent with the apparently offhand remark: "I am just going out and may be some time." But the words written by Captain Robert Falcon Scott are, perhaps, even more reflective of an Edwardian cast of mind that declined to quail in the face of imminent catastrophe.

One of the party was dead, and another about to commit honourable suicide. Scott had failed, Amundsen had beaten him to the Pole, food and fuel had all but run out and they were all about to perish. "We are in a very tight corner," wrote Scott to his wife, barely able to hold the pen in frost-bitten fingers. "Well, dear heart, I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly as I am sure you will."

There are signs that the next year may be pretty sticky. I want you to take the whole thing very sensibly, as I am sure you will.

George Mikes

Soul and Understatement

Foreigners have souls; the English haven't.

On the Continent you find any amount of people who sigh deeply for no conspicuous reason, yearn, suffer and look in the air extremely sadly. This is soul.

The worst kind of soul is the great Slav soul. People who suffer from it are usually very deep thinkers. They may say things like this: "Sometimes I am so merry and sometimes I am so sad. Can you explain why?" (You cannot, do not try.) Or they may say: "I am so mysterious... I sometimes wish I were somewhere else than where I am." (Do not say: "I wish you were.") Or "When I am alone in the forest at night-time and jump from one tree to another, I often think that life is so strange."

All this is very deep: and just soul, nothing else.

The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.

If a continental youth wants to declare his love to a girl, he kneels down, tells her that she is the sweetest, the most charming and ravishing person in the world, that she has something in her, something peculiar and individual which only a few hundred thousand other women have and that he would be unable to live one more minute without her. Often, to give a little more emphasis to the statement, he shoots himself on the spot. This is a normal, week-day declaration of love in the more temperamental continental countries. In England the boy pats his adored one on the back and says softly: "I don't object to you, you know." If he is quite mad with passion, he may add: "I rather fancy you, in fact."

If he wants to marry a girl he says: "I say... would you?..."

If he wants to make an indecent proposal: "I say... what about..."

Overstatement, too, plays a considerable part in English social life. This takes mostly the form of someone remarking: "I say..." and then keeping silent for three days on end.

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