List of the Month - Elements of 'Englishness'

I'm currently doing a series of trainings with the Beijing staff of a UK-based professional institute, and the emphasis is supposed to be, rather than on merely teaching them some English (since they're all pretty good already), on stretching their English by confronting them with some unexpected and challenging reading articles and discussion topics, on seeking to motivate them to use English more (both inside and outside of the workplace), and..... to give them some geographical, historical, and cultural background on the UK so that they will be able to relate more easily to their colleagues in the home office.

The latter has been stressed, by both the British and Chinese staff I've liaised with, as a primary goal of the course; although I fear this is somewhat misguided, or at any rate over-optimistic, since these guys - like every other group of mainland Chinese students I've ever worked with - seem have a massive incuriosity about anything outside of China.

Nevertheless, I'm doing my best with this seemingly hopeless task. I'm actually rather enjoying writing a series of 'cultural briefings' notes for them to digest and discuss once a month or so. Before I took on this project, I'd seldom consciously reflected on what it meant to be 'English' (or 'British' - and that's a whole bag of worms in itself!); so, I've often been surprising myself a little with some of the ideas I've come up with on this.

Here are some of the main points I've isolated so far:

Elements of Englishness

Rooting for the underdog

Are we the only nation on earth that invariably supports the likely loser in a contest, when we have no special reason to affiliate ourselves with one side or the other? It seems a strange thing to do. I have facetiously suggested that perhaps we do this because it mimics the masochistic experience of following our own almost invariably disappointing national sports teams.

Being 'sports mad'

We were, for curious historical reasons, the birthplace of most of the world's major organised games, and managed to export them all over the globe via the influence of the British Empire in the later 1800s. I think only the Americans rival, or perhaps exceed us, in their enthusiasm for sports - but their self-invented games haven't travelled nearly so well.

A sense of fair play and good sportsmanship

I think this is probably the aspect of our culture of which I feel most proud - the veneration for the spirit of the game, the conviction that how you play the game is more important than winning. There's a remarkable amount of 'self-policing' expected in many of the British-invented sports. Americans and others may have imbibed some of this ethos from us, but it was originally our idea.

Making a virtue out of failure

Again, I think there's a likely relationship with our admiration for underdogs to be found in our celebration of 'noble failures'. It does seem rather perverse that the disastrous Captain Scott should be the most venerated of our Victorian/Edwardian era explorers, or that the defeats at Dunkirk and Arnhem should loom largest in our shared narrative of World War Two.

The "Bulldog" spirit

The keynote of our national character seems to be this ideal of tenacity and resilience, a fighting quality that perhaps has less to do with conventional bravery than with a stubborn refusal to accept defeat. It is epitomised by our defiance of Nazi Germany during World War Two, and personified in the bulldog-like physique of our rotund and jowly wartime leader, Winston Churchill.

Reserve

Most of the stereotypes the Chinese, and other nations, hold about us are largely inaccurate, I feel; but this one is still mostly true. We're just not a very outgoing people; our emphasis on privacy (both in a reluctance to impose upon others, and an unwillingness to share our personal thoughts and opinions) tends to make us rather socially restrained. I'd like to think that this is changing slowly, as people travel more, become more 'internationalized'. But when I first hit the road in the 1990s, this difference soon became very apparent to me; you can sit in a bar in Britain for hours at a time without entering into any substantial conversation with another customer, or even with the bar staff; that just doesn't happen anywhere else in the world I've been.

Chivalry

We don't wear hats that we can doff any more, and the feminists are slowly beating us out of our drilled-in-childhood instincts to open doors for them or offer them our seats; yet courtesy towards women still seems to be at the core of the English/British sense of polite behaviour. I'd be curious to know how many other countries/cultures really push the 'women and children first!' policy in a disaster as much as we do (or how much we'd abide by it when actually faced with such a crisis!).

Individuality, eccentricity, idealism

We do revere the oddball, the obsessive, the 'great British eccentric': we have way more than our fair share of such exceptionally gifted and determined individuals, both in the useful field of technological innovation (Trevor Baylis, James Dyson), and in useless ones like setting Guinness World Records in pointless activities like brick carrying and beermat flipping. We also have a proud tradition of radical social and political innovation: abolishing slavery, improving conditions in factories and prisons, developing universal free education and healthcare, etc. I like to remind people that all of the most radical ideas associated with the French Revolution had actually been anticipated during the English Civil Wars nearly 150 years earlier.

Disdain for the French

Well, they ask for it. The Parisians are probably the most disdainful group of people on the planet: they even disdain the rest of their fellow countrymen. The rest of the French pass on that disdain to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world disdains them right back, with interest. Of course, we do it better, or at any rate more, than anyone else, because we have the additional (dis)advantage of being their close neighbours. And we have a longstanding territorial dispute (Britanny - that's obviously ours, right?), which led to 100 years of fighting with them. And in more recent times, De Gaulle was a complete arsehole. However, I suspect this historical antipathy may have been softening in the last few decades. We Englishmen have always had a bit of a weakness for French ladies (and I mean always: Shakespeare's Henry V got all soppy over a French princess!), and we probably resent French men primarily because of the better access they enjoy to French women. Lately, we've been warming up a bit more to French men because they play such darned good football: the success of Thierry Henry and other French players in the English Premiership over the past decade or so has done a lot to restore some cordiality to cross-Channel relations, I believe.

To be continued (possibly).....