What even is British culture then?

England Expects

From time to time, a would-be edgy Tweeter or columnist will shock us all by stating or suggesting that the heritage British, those awful boring white people who until the last third of the twentieth century made up almost the entire population of the United Kingdom, have no real culture to speak of. There is a twofold implication to this rhetorical ploy: that indigenous Britons should fall on their knees in eternal gratitude for the hitherto unknown liveliness and dynamism of the various diaspora communities who have made their homes here, and also that the demand that newcomers integrate into our way of life is meaningless because there is nothing into which the new Britons can integrate. 

Well.

Many white Britons are happy to participate in this self-abnegation. Pathologically anti-patriotic Tweeters like Otto English love to point out that much-loved aspects of British culture, from fish 'n' chips to St George, have been influenced by foreigners. They also love to emphasise how dull Britain was in the bad old days before Windrush or Tony Blair. A classic recent example was provided by George Monbiot, who Tweeted a year or so back, “I was brought up in a village that was almost exclusively white and Christian. It was the most boring and stifling place I've ever known.”

I, however, am not interested in doing so. As a matter of objective reality Britain, and its constituent parts, have one of the richest, most consequential and deepest cultures on the planet. 

England has existed as an organised unitary state within more or less its current borders since long before the Norman Conquest; Athelstan, who reigned from 927 to 939, was the first English monarch to exercise meaningful political authority over almost all the country. The English nation as a coherent polity is therefore 1100 years old. The cultural unity of the English can be plausibly traced to two centuries before Athelstan, to the time of Bede (d. 735). Our religious continuity goes even further back, with organised Christian communities appearing in the late Roman period. Parts of St Martin’s Church in Canterbury date to Roman times, i.e. before c410. It does not seem to have been a place of Christian worship in Roman Britain, but it was being used for that purpose by 597, as the private chapel of Queen Bertha of Kent. She was the wife of Ethelbert, who had married her while he was still a pagan but later converted to Christianity under the influence of the Augustinian mission. St Peter’s-on-the-Wall in Essex was probably built in the 650s, and its original stonework is substantially intact.

The first known English poet, Caedmon, lived and wrote in the second half of the seventh century, 1350 years ago. Most English counties and many towns have origins in the Anglo-Saxon period.  

The Alfred Jewel

I am not going to rehearse the long span of British history. This is a blogpost not a twenty-part book series. But the point needs to be made that there is a very solid answer to the question “What is British culture?”, even if it is not the pat, easy answer that the (usually bad faith) posers of the question expect.

It is not the twee, trite nonsense about tea and biscuits and queuing and grumbling about the rain and liking the Queen. Fundamentally British culture is the various products and components of the highly-developed civilisation that a largely homogenous and settled population achieved over a thousand years. There are different spheres to this, of course. In literature, we have Beowulf, Chaucer, Malory, Milton, Donne, Austen, Wordsworth, Dickens, Trollope, Scott, Wodehouse and Eliot, to say nothing of a certain gentleman from Stratford. There is the Robin Hood legendarium with its uproarious celebration of tradition and liberty against the greed and stupidity of bad rulers. In religion, take your pick from medieval Books of Hours, The Imitation Of Christ, The Book of Common Prayer, the Authorised Version of the Bible, the heroic courage of the Reformation martyrs on both sides, the Methodist revival, the Oxford Movement, the Catholic literary flowering, and the flourishing Jewish life of London. The whole fabric of Britain speaks of its long, fascinating history, and the genius and innovation of its people. The Welsh castles, the cathedrals, the parish churches, the country houses, the Box Hill Tunnel, The Iron Bridge, Edinburgh New Town, the Forth Bridge, the mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution.

Go to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and see HMS Victory. During the Napoleonic Wars Britain was building, maintaining, manning and supplying a vast global fleet of such ships, dominating the seas by force of will, national organisation, determination, and economic sophistication unmatched anywhere in the world. She continued to do so for another century after the defeat of Napoleon, winning and maintaining a global empire.

A few hundred yards away from Victory is HMS Warrior, the first ironclad warship, which on her completion in 1860 rendered almost all existing warships obsolete.

Britain was not unique in developing constitutional and accountable forms of government. But we were early adopters and shapers of the tradition of liberal, limited government. Freedom of speech, thought, assembly and religion have been observed and respected here – albeit imperfectly – for a very long time. The same is true of due process in the criminal justice system, while the flexibility of our partially unwritten constitution has meant that throughout the modern period we largely avoided the revolutions, political instability and civil strife that blighted almost every other comparable country.  

The most successful and prosperous nation in the world, the United States of America, was founded on political principles that had been given their clearest and most compelling exposition by British philosophers. The USA’s founders were mostly of British extraction, as many of its great men have been. The same is true of many of the most peaceful, orderly and free places – Australia, New Zealand and Canada being the most obvious examples. The British political tradition has been a huge boon to the world. Adam Smith, for example, was not the first advocate for the free economy, but he was one of the most brilliant and most sophisticated.  

I could spend thousands of words listing the scientific and technological breakthroughs made in Britain, or describing at length the learned societies and debating clubs and scientific institutes that grew up from the seventeenth century onwards, taking advantage of our free, orderly, well-organised society to push science forward. I could fill a dozen books with details of the tens of thousands of gentleman amateurs and underemployed clergy who produced monographs on every subject from astronomy to entomology. I could name painters – the Van de Veldes, Gainsborough, Turner, Lucian Freud, David Hockney – who will be enjoyed as long as there are people who wish to look at paintings, or composers like Purcell, Holst, Vaughan Williams and James Macmillan.

The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral

Britain has long provided a home and a refuge for those persecuted elsewhere, starting with the Huguenots more than four hundred years ago. Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the start of the Second World War we accepted something like 400,000 Eastern European Jews with very little violence or unrest. Indeed, we had a Jewish Prime Minister 155 years ago.

Twice in the span of three decades, we devoted vast resources – human, financial and material – to defeating huge threats to the peace and freedom of Europe. By so doing we practically bankrupted ourselves, but we were in the fight on the side of decency, humanity, freedom and democracy.

There are so many aspects of British culture that I haven’t mentioned – I’ve not even approached sport or folk culture or cinema or TV – but before I finish, I would like to return briefly to the George Monbiot comment I mentioned earlier.

The place where he grew up was Rotherfield Peppard in Oxfordshire. One can see how it might have seemed rather claustrophobic and limiting to an independent-minded, incipiently socialist teenager growing up in a well-off and well-connected Tory family.

And yet the very stability, order and quiet of Rotherfield Peppard represented – still represents – an extraordinary civilisational achievement. Safe streets and trustworthy neighbours are not the norm for human societies; they are the exception, even today. They did not arise by accident in Britain. They are the product of many centuries of hard national graft, of tough decisions, of sacrifice. They arise from a particular Christian context, a specific national character: the brilliance of a particular people in a particular place.