This article, penned by Tom Sharpe, was published in The Daily Telegraph on 18 November 1986.
AN APPRECIATION OF THE ENGLISH BRUTE BY TOM SHARPE
I HAVE always considered Englishmen to be foreigners, an alien people whose ways are strange and frequently barbaric. The fact that I am English makes not the slightest difference, except to reinforce my conviction that we are a strange and rather alarming lot. I certainly don’t pretend to know myself and my experience of other Englishmen persuades me that we are all so different from one another that The Englishman is a figment of the imagination.
Of course in the most simple terms we can define ourselves: we speak approximately the same language and have lived part of our lives in this country. Beyond that I find it almost impossible to go.
What else do we share? The same religion? No. The same colour of skin? Again No. The same belief in Parliamentary democracy? Good Lord, no. I can think of no factors that link us together except those of language and of living on the same portion of this island.
On the other hand there can be no gainsaying the fact that we are English. We are recognized as such by the people of other countries in the same irrational sort of way that we define them. “Lions led by donkeys,” said Ludendorff. “Albion perfide,” is the French view. Or was.
I knew a Frenchwoman once who put it more strongly and described us as savages. One doesn’t have to go abroad for that view. John Bright is quoted as saying, “We English are a nation of brutes.” I’m afraid that I tend to share that view. Our propensity for fighting is too well established.
I know this from personal experience, having once shared a set of rooms with a very fine poet with a first-class degree whose idea of a good evening was to sink a great many pints of beer and have a punch-up on the way home. True, he never went looking for trouble but, since he was large and weighed in at 16 stone, I cannot believe he didn’t invite it in some peculiar way.
So in this strange catalogue of characteristics, I tend to put down “Fighting,” only, of course, to realize that practically no one else I know has been in a fist fight since he was 14.
I turn to another quality that is frequently held against us: we don’t take enough baths.
When I lived in the hot climate of South Africa, I took two baths a day. (This is turning into some sort of ghastly confession.) In this climate, unless I’ve been digging and sweating in the garden, I don’t. I’m not going to reveal to the world at large how many I do take. That’s my business but, strangely enough, whenever I have to stay in a hotel, the first thing I do is hit the tub.
I learnt last night from a very truthful man that the French buy and therefore must use less soap than any other nation west of the Iron Curtain. The custom of the sweaty Frenchman is apparently to splash Eau de Cologne under his arms and elsewhere. Bang goes the argument that Englishmen are unique in our dislike of bathing. Evidently we are cleaner than the French. So, what does distinguish us from other people?
All right, let’s take a look at our hypocrisy. Now this I do find quintessentially English: we condemn out of hand men in public life who are accused of having sexual intercourse with anyone other than their wives.
Then we gleefully contemplate his misery and don’t give a tuppenny damn about the effect on his wife and family. No other people has this same foul characteristic. It is uniquely English and, since it didn’t exist in the age of Gladstone, we must look for its source in more recent developments and in particular in the decline of newspaper standards.
No other country in the world, no, not even the USA (and God knows that country produces enough other filth to entertain the masses) can beat the English gutter press for its gutteringness. But this is part of the implosion of the Empire and the price we must now pay for having inflicted such misery on our more enterprising countrymen in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Never mind the miseries we inflicted on those peoples we conquered; never mind that glorious chapter in our history when we fought to keep the drug trade in China going to our advantage; the real brutality of our ancestors is to be seen in the misery which drove men and women to emigrate or risk deportation to escape the hell that was life for millions of poor people in England.
My grandfather, a Dorset carpenter, was one of those who left aboard The Prince Consort in 1864 bound for a new life in Australia. Now the tide of emigration has turned and we are learning what enterprise means from the descendants of those emigres and deportees.
More humiliating still, we are learning what it means to work really hard from all those “Lesser breeds without the Law.” From another island people, the Japanese, we are learning the art of motivating employees and conducting business efficiently. And like all true Englishmen we whine. But that has been the way of the English throughout history.
We owe our good fortune to the successive waves of emigrants, entrepreneurs and refugees who have found this island a haven from their tormentors in other countries. Time and time again we have been saved from the consequences of our native indolence and inefficiency by the influx of foreigners, Jews, Dutchmen, French Huguenots, Irish, Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians, Australians, Americans, Arabs…. The list of those who have come and put up with our contempt only to invigorate our lives in every respect is endless.
Perhaps that is why I consider that the only unique quality of Englishness is that we are foreign to one another.
System of values
This follow-up letter to Tom Sharpe’s article was published in the same newspaper on 21 November 1986.
SIR—Tom Sharpe’s commentary on the weirdness of English sexual attitudes found an exquisite counterpoint in two news items in the same issue (Nov 18).
You report that a coach driver responsible for the gruesome deaths of 13 people by “careless” motorway driving was fined £200 and no costs, while a man found guilty of exposing himself to a couple of police agents provocateurs in a public toilet had to pay £270 in fine and costs.
One can only wonder at the grotesque system of values which arrived at these tariffs, both appalling in their different ways.
JOHN HARRIS
Bowdon, Cheshire