David Sugarman 214 II In today’s multiracial Britain, positioned uneasily on the brink of European federation, talk of “Englishness” appears increasingly passé. It evokes a pastoral land, of thatched cottages and bed and breakfast’s, uncontaminated by foot and mouth and mad cows. It conjures up the days when sports were played by gentlemen for whom the game was more Important than winning. “Britain” recalls an unquestioned monarchy, a respected parliament, a revered judiciary and incorruptible police force. It also means the feeling that there was something not quite right with foreigners. In Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, “The Lady Vanishes” (1938), Calidicott and Charters travel across central Europe complaining constantly about the food and the accommodation. Their principal concern is to hurry home for the test match. They are sublimely unaware that their companion, the tea-drinking Miss Foy, is in fact a daring British secret agent being pursued by the local secret police (uniformed and with strong foreign accents). On discovering that Miss Foy’s life is endangered, Caldicott and Charters defend her fearlessly. This was howthe English liked to think of themselves on the eve of World War Two.- Belief in the intrinsic superiority of everything English (or, increasingly, British) seems to be long-standing. In 1497 the Venetian ambassador remarked that: “The English them. They think there are no other men like themselves and no other world but England and whenever they see a handsome foreigner, they say he looks like an Englishman ... great lovers of themselves and of everything belonging to are ”3 When WilliamHogarth visited Calais in 1747 he began sketching its old fortifications, a relic of its English heritage, when he was arrested and imprisoned as a British spy. Hogarth retaliated in his celebrated engraving “Calais Gate, or the Roast beef of Old England”. Here, he trenchantly portrayed the French as tyrannical, poverty-ridden and Catholic—in contrast to the blessed English. ^ See Richards, Jeffrey. Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997 p. 86 and passim, to which I amgreatly indebted. Lord Macmillan, the first Minister of Information in World War Two, singled out films like “The Lady Vanishes” as exemplifying the kind of British character that should be portrayed in Wartime propaganda (Richards, p. 85). Caldicott and Charters "... became popular national characters, evidence of the British ability to laugh at themselves in a basically admiring way” (Richards p. 86). For another popular and parallel treatment of English temperament from the pen of England’s leading political scientist of the day, see Barker, E, National Character and the Factors in its Formation (D' ed 1927). ^ Richards, Jeffrey. Films and British National Identity p. 13. ■* See Colley, Linda. Bntons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 33-35.
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