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Looking into England Papers
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[ Home > Papers > Nicholas J. Cull ] Englishness: The Great Escape of The Self Preservation Society
* * * England has an identity problem. As devolution gives Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales an unprecedented role in their own administration, England faces the prospect of being in a union of one - the sole owner of the identity called Britishness - that it dreamt up to conceal the fact of the domination of the neighbouring Kingdoms. Welshness, Irishness or Scottishness are defined by the experience of conquest: As A.L.Kennedy has noted: 'to be Scottish is to fight the English and lose', but what is Englishness? A mystery. As we know, all the best mysteries open with a set of seemingingly unconnected events - which the detective then connects to reveal the true nature of the crime. My events all come from the realm of contemporary English popular culture - its production and selection by the public - and you may well say that I've begun to dig in quite the wrong place. My belief, however is that if I'm right about the 'big story' I'll find evidence of it everywhere - it will be part of the fabric of everything like the DNA code, endlessly repeated. Here then are my unconnected cultural events. The first event takes place in France in the summer of 1998. The English football team begins its campaign for the World Cup. The crowd begins to sing the theme from the 1963 film: The Great Escape. This had begun at the end of the national season as football supporters in troubled clubs who nevertheless avoided defeat, marked their imminent escape from the bottom of their league and the ignominy of relegation. But it was strange to see the theme of escape from ignominy projected at a national level. My next two events were anniversaries and associated revivals - both of which are of relevance to ideas of Britishness (and Englishness within that) - the thirtieth anniversary of England's most successful situation comedy: Dad's Army and the fortieth anniversary of England's most successful comedy film series: Carry On. Finally we have a revival of interest in the British film comedy - The Italian Job - its ending is explicitly referenced in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; its music featured in a Nat West bank commercial and its action parodied at length in a Martini commercial and a pop video by the Stereophonics, until finally the film has been re-released with a restored print. Such texts must tell us something about the culture that embraces them. They all point in a similar direction: The Great Escape suggests a thread of Englishness as escape, Dad's Army: Englishness as membership of a community of resistance; the Carry On series: Englishness as camp subversion in which all identities are performance. The Italian Job - Englishness as theft. I hope to show something of what the study of popular culture can reveal about this issue of Englishness, and maybe answer the question of just who the English are escaping, resisting, subverting or stealing from. Before I begin I ought to say something about the overlaps between Britishness and Englishness. It is part of Englishness to assume that Britishness and Englishness are exactly the same thing. To recall the British historical experience without reference to the different ways in which that experience fell on England as against Scotland for example is very English. To propagate images of England under the assumption that they are images of Britain is very English. Much of this paper deals with experiences that are usually considered specifically British - particularly World War Two. I would argue that when these images are invoked by a community which does not have the additional identity of being a subordinate nation within the United Kingdom, they become the core of Englishness. Moreover the things remembered within the World War II experience follow a decidedly English agenda. For the English who are not bound by memories of personal bereavement, recalling World War Two is somehow a cosy and affirming experience. It feels warm and safe, the guest bed at grandma's house, after a childhood trip to the bathroom on a winter night. I want to consider first the opening of Dads Army. The animation of a union jack arrow retreating to the coast of South-east England and pecking defiantly at Nazi arrows across the channel and the song, with its rousing chorus: 'who do you think you are kidding Mister Hitler, if you think Old England's done!'may be the best known two minutes of television in the history of British broadcasting. It sums up the moment of Britain standing alone against the forces of European tyranny and is the perfect introduction to the adventures of the loveable platoon of Home Guard volunteers made up of English class and occupational comic types, and a single rather unsympathetic Scotsman, who served to point up the Englishness of the whole thing. The enduring popularity of this programme speaks not only to the quality of production but to the appeal of its theme: Britain in World War Two. This is also at the heart of the world invoked by the Hollywood film: The Great Escape. The first lesson I'd draw from the singing of the theme from The Great Escape is that it references World War Two. It is not so much remembering the war, as remembering, remembering the war as a unifying experience. World War Two is now the only British historical experience that can be universally recalled, and the English recall it rather more nosily than the other home nations, because they haven't got their own experience of conquest and resistance to recall. Yet the older concepts of Englishness exported to the other 'home nations' as Britishness remain within the memory of World War Two: the war was experienced through the prism of Englishness, now Englishness is encoded within the memory of World War Two. But what of Englishness? Although Englishness has long been mapped onto an ethnic category, it was historically constructed ideologically, rather like American-ness. In fact American-ness is an outgrowth of the sort of English political values. The American revolution was begun by colonists who sought the rights of domestic Englishmen. This Englishness focused on concepts of religious liberty, bourgeois economy, resistance to tyranny, individualism and democracy. Pre-war accounts of English history emphasised a development of these values, from an English metropole first and then outwards to the home nations, the colonies and commonwealth and then to the rest of the world. Thus the key moments of Englishness became resistance to Spanish and French (Catholic) tyrants, freeing slaves in the nineteenth century and resisting the Kaiser in our own century; the growth of trade, the linear development of parliament; and a sort of English style that emphasised the common man, eschewed professionalism and relied on improvisation and 'muddling through'. The core of this was an English exceptionalism, that held that this island possessed something special and distinct from the rest of the world. World War Two was experienced through the prism of this history. Such things were repeatedly recalled in the propaganda of the era. Although the older ethic history has been forgotten, not least in the face of the Americanisation of all historical memory, World War Two is still remembered according to the old English agenda. World War Two has become a tale of resistance to tyranny, freeing slaves, defense of the rights of the little man and democratic principles. It is a tale of ingenuity - of backroom boys inventing bouncing bombs, of muddling through (as with the story of the little ships saving the BEF at Dunkirk or the Home Guard of Dads Army). At its heart is an emphasis on an island standing alone. This is not the reality of World War Two - issues like the betrayal of Finland at the beginning of the war - or the ambiguity of lining up with Stalin in Europe hardly fit this story, but it helps to account for the attachment to the story and exactly why World War Two could be viable as England's only historical memory. From the war to the present there have been a number of stories that have been told and retold about the English at war. Often they include the token presence of representatives of the home nations - the navy film - the bomber film - exemplified by the Dam Busters - and the small unit combat film. Of these maybe the most explicitly English is the prisoner of war genre. If the received version of World War Two is the microcosm of English myth, the Prisoner of War genre is the microcosm of World War Two. The genre began before the war's end with films like The Captive Heart. It flowered after the war with highly successful film versions of the memoirs of camp escapers - such as The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story or Albert RN and Reach for the Sky. The English sense of fair play also produced a book and film about a German prisoner of war escapee The One That Got Away. As children we had a Prisoner of War escape outfit for my Action man dolls - a Colditz board game - and at my school at least thought that our teachers were mad for teaching us French, which would be of no use when we too had to escape from German camps. Today there are even re-enactors who spend their weekends trying to tunnel out of a replica camp somewhere in Devon. This was a powerful story. The genre had much to commend it to post war Britain. Firstly these films allowed the war to be depicted cheaply. It was only in the Prisoner of War Camps that the British met the Germans face to face on a daily basis: here were the issues of war in a conveniently compact environment. Secondly the films allowed the war to be remembered according to old notions of Englishness - the closest literary parallels to Prisoner of War texts are not prison or escape narratives from the nineteenth century or World War One, but rather boarding school stories: The archetypal POW story would be Kipling's Stalky and Co. The films frequently slip into a sort of school boy-ish mischievous attitude in which the guards (or Goons as they were called) seem like prefects. Characters in the Colditz Story compare their arrival to their first days at boarding school and even refer to one of the German guards as 'matron'. In a similar Prep School vein, Pat Reed, the author of the Colditz memoir, introduced his account of events by describing escape as a 'sporting thrill'. If Englishness was about things like improvisation, resistance, strength of character or individualism, how better to show this than through the POW stories, which seemed to give expression to these qualities. What could be more satisfying than watching British ingenuity solve problems like how to disperse sand from tunnels or improvise bellows with which to pump air. There is tremendous pleasure in watching the problems resolved and the plan come together. It also allows one to have all the thrill of a crime or prison escape story, with none of the moral problems of identifying with a criminal or necessity of a plot contrivance to establish the hero as wrongly convicted. In this war the triumph of one escapee could become the triumph of a nation and its principles. The genre was however itself an escape - from the reality of the war and the post war world of British impotence. World War Two was won by all classes in Britain. POW stories are set in officer only camps, and hence avoid working class characters. World War Two was won by all sexes participating in the war effort. The POW film has no opportunity at all for female characters. World War Two was won by the Soviet Union doing 70% of the fighting. The POW film in British Empire only. But maybe most significantly of all World War Two was bankrolled and won by the United States. Set the film early in the war or in an RAF only camp and there is no need to discuss the American presence at all. The POW movie became a perfect tunnel through which the British could escape from the Americans. The prisoner of war genre hearkened back to the role of passing in the English imagination. Prisoners would dress as Nazis in order to slip past their guards, and then evade capture by posing as French or German citizens. This draws on older fantasies of British life and exploration. The particular cultural arrogance that told the British they had the ability to take on the identity of others at will, as seen in stories of Sir Richard Burton, Lawrence of Arabia and such fictional heroes as Kipling's Kim. Implicitly this is the claim that all identity is performed, but power goes to the best performer. Hence at the climax of the Colditz story the prisoners plan to escape cross-dressed as Nazis - while their fellows perform a stage show in which they cross-dress as Scotsmen, and singing 'We Belong to Colditz' to the tune of 'I belong to Glasgow'. Englishness here is the ability to move between identities for ones own purposes. The genre in its historical context (the 1950s) had an important Cold War dimension. It looked back to a time of moral certainties. The behaviour of Prisoners of War in the Korean War had caused much concern - rather than tunnel out and attempt to paddle to Japan on an improvised raft - prisoners stayed put. Some even (horror of horrors) caved in under communist brainwashing and confessed to imaginary atrocities. In a world in which POWs had broken down is it any wonder that audiences looked to tales of their bearing up. It also had a dimension in the avoidance of thinking about the experience of the Holocaust. The genre allowed a flirtation with the world of barbed wire fences, and even atrocities - without direct engagement with the true implications of ethnically specific mass extermination. To acknowledge that Jews had been an extraordinary target was to confront a history of anti-Semitism at home, the failure of the allies to act to stop the persecution before or killing during the war, and perhaps called for special treatment for Israel in the post war world. This brings me to the culmination of the genre in The Great Escape. Ironically The Great Escape is a testament not so much to English endurance as American cultural power. The film is an ideal example of exactly the sort of domination that Britain needed to escape from. The POW genre was trapped by its own success. Successful films attract bigger and better productions - and given the success of America's own POW stories and such big budget POW related films as the fictional Bridge on the River Kwai it was inevitable that Hollywood would attempt a crossover film that would take a successful British printed POW history and match it with Hollywood budget and stars. The text given that treatment was The Great Escape, written by the Australian born author of the Dam Busters, Paul Brickhill, who had been in the camp at the time of the escape. The screenplay of The Great Escape, co-written by another Australian, James Clavell with the American crime writer WR Burnett, and as filmed by John Sturgis (the man who made The Magnificent Seven) elided many significant details and characters from the actual events. The key protagonists in the camp were an American volunteer in the Canadian airforce played by James Garner and an American: Steve McQueen. The historical roles of Commonwealth characters were otherwise elided. A Rhodesian 'tunnel king' became the Pole played by Charles Bronson. The South African planner of the whole escape became the Briton Bartlett, played by Richard Attenborough. Clavell at least created a prominent Australian character Sedgwick the manufacturer, played by another American, James Coburn who proved that Sedgwick could improvise anything except an Australian accent. The Americans intrude most blatantly in an invented scene in which the three Americans in the camp make the British march behind them to celebrate the Fourth of July. Although Americans were involved in the early stages of the historical events depicted, American POWs were actually moved to an adjoining camp before the escape began. The role of Belgian and Dutch prisoners is neglected all together - which is ironic and the only three escapees to actually 'make it' were from the Low Countries. The film prefers to dwell on the supposed ability of British officers to 'pass' as Germans or Frenchmen when on the run with faked papers and improvised clothes. One of the best remembered scenes shows - based on an actual incident - shows the limit on the British ability to pass; The film's sub plot develops in ways which not only marginalise English characters in their own story, but make their behaviour explicitly 'other'. The American characters are the norm, and their attachment to things like baseball are the most obvious expressions of national culture in the film, to differentiate them from the Englishness of the camp. There are many moments in the film in which it becomes clear that we are watching an American depiction of Englishness - attitudes are exaggerated and, indeed, the English prisoner Bartlett's whole plan for a Great Escape is presented as a vain glorious latter day Charge of the Light Brigade 'its magnificent but it's not war.' The idea was to have prisoners of war run riot behind enemy lines - its participants pay a heavy price - 50 are executed by the Gestapo - and the wisdom of the plan is called into question in the final moments of the film. The use of British characters to symbolise 'war lovers' and Americans as reluctant but resourceful cynics was typical of the Hollywood representations of Britain at War in this era. The conflict between the Alec Guiness and William Holden characters in The Bridge on the River Kwai is the most obvious example, or the contrast between the Anthony Quaile and Gregory Peck characters in The Guns of Navarone. In both cases American characters were written into the script to make national a difference that is ethical in the original source novels. That British audiences have been able to read through or even embrace the exaggerated American depiction of their own characteristics - must have something to do with the sheer joy of seeing ones own national characteristics represented in Technicolor and Panavision. It parallels the way in which Irish audiences embrace John Ford's The Quiet Man. I want to turn now to the context in which The Great Escape was viewed, and a world in which England recoiled from the American appropriation of its stories. As the tide of American popular culture washed forward English audiences found solace in a series of amazingly popular comedy films - consistently the Carry On films came top of box office grosses in the 1960s. They began in 1958 with a cheeky comedy about National Service called Carry on Sergeant. These films are not entirely unconnected with the Prisoner of War experience. From the early 1960s they were scripted by a writer named Talbot Rothwell. Rothwell had been a prisoner of war, and in fact began to write comedy while a prisoner of war. In fact he served some of his time in the very camp - Stalag Luft III depicted in The Great Escape. His job was to write sketches to both entertain the prisoners and distract the guards while his colleagues tunnelled out. Rothwell's work on the Carry On series retained an element of escapism - his scripts redirected what had been social satire of life within Britain (the initial targets had been life in the army, hospitals, schools and the police to satirize the genres handed down by American cinema, and to a lesser extent British high culture (his satire of the Hollywood Epic - Carry On Cleo, included a number of jokes at the expense of Shakespeare and Carry on Up the Khyber did much at the expense of Kipling. The most obvious subversions of American film could be found in Carry On Cleo, Carry on Cowboy, and Carry On Follow that Camel (on the French Foreign Legion). In these films all elements in identity were exaggerated into a camp performance - national, class and sexual - and made absurd. In a time of rigid class, gender and national roles, the frequently cheeky humour of the Carry Ons hinted at alternatives, yet rendered them safe through humour. Rothwell's use of language was nationally specific. So many of his scripts turned on puns that it seemed as if he was still writing scenes that would make his fellow prisoners laugh but baffle the German guards. The films created a different sort of community of escapism. Escapism from America's world and escapism from the rigidities of race, class and gender identities within Englishness. Today 'camp' or an aesthetic focusing on un-reality is only one way in which British or specifically English, film makers seek to escape from America's world. The dominant strategies may be summarised as follows. 1) Realism The attempt to be more realistic than the Americans. This began with the documentary film movement of the 1930s, dominated in the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s and remains an important element in British television work, not least in the way in which British soap operas are rendered distinct from American 'super soaps.' 2) Camp Next to realism the key British aesthetic has been the 'un-realism' of camp. From the old Gaumont British costume dramas with their emphasis on fantasy to the world of Carry On, or Monty Python, British film makers and more specifically English film makers have used camp to reveal a world in which all identities (class, gender, race etc) are performance and hence alternatives are possible. 3) Regionalism The presentation of specific local identities within either England or a home nation that refer up to the national identity without actually having to formally discuss it. Regions (and especially London) were a staple of Ealing comedies like Passport to Pimlico, and remain potent in films like The Full Monty. The presentation of a national subdivision has proved a successful route to national popularity for regional sit coms and dramas. 4) Cultural Superiority This is best seen in British costume dramas and literary (especially Shakespeare) adaptations, and the concept of 'quality'/'heritage' film and television. 5) Passing British films sometimes completely disguise themselves as the Hollywood product, and give no indication of their Britishness apart from the supporting cast. The sci fi drama Event Horizon was a recent example of this. 6) Matching/Mimicking British films sometimes take on American themes and produce British versions. This was most obviously seen in the development of the British crime film from the 1940s. Contemporary British crime film shows the influence of film makers like Tarantino, for example. 7) Hybridity - International co-production The only production strategy by which nearly anything British is now made is through co-production. This ensures that any major 'English' film will have an element of hybridity in its origins, and will have to appeal to either a European or US view of Britain/England in order to secure funding. The most interesting recent example of this is The English Patient which carries at its heart the message that national boundaries are bankrupt, most obviously in the fact that the English patient is actually Hungarian. The dying Catherine (Kristin Scott-Thomas) writes to her lover, Almassy: 'We are the real countries, not these lines on maps.' Encoded within these representations and despite these strategies we still find allusions to some of the issues that I've identified. One of the most successful British films was Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - it is a regionally specific tale of London low life and a gang of Tarantino style small time criminals trying to escape a gambling dead with one big robbery. Cultural reference points mix American independent film with British specific material - the most obvious being the casting of the bad boy of British football - Vinnie Jones - as a debt collector in the film; References to the war are limited to a single prominent object - a Bren Gun - a weapon only identified with British forces. The climax of the film was of particular interest to me as it spoke of uncertainty, which is a key element in English identity at present. In the last scene one of the gang is hanging on a bridge in London reaching towards a package containing a pair of antique shotguns. The package wobbles - and the film ends without our knowing whether it will fall or stay. This ending as every critic reviewing the film noted, referenced a text of 1968: The Italian Job, scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin - creator of the legendary Liverpool cop show: Z Cars - and the BBC's 1970s prisoner of war drama Colditz. The Italian Job is worth mentioning - a final element to English escape - the struggle to define oneself against Europe. Its current popularity also speaks of the vogue for the culture of the 'lad' personified by its star, Michael Caine. The film tells the story of a team of English criminals - made up of types all of whom were played by stars with a unique claim to representing a facet of Englishness including the laddish-spiv - played by Caine; the dandy played by Noel Coward; and the professor played by comedian Benny Hill. Their target was a shipment of gold bound for the Fiat factory in Turin. Coordinated from prison by the patriotic master criminal Bridger (Coward) and assisted by the fact that the city is full of England football supporters - the team strike. The get-away vehicles are three Austin minis driven by aristocrats - and painted red white and blue, while on the soundtrack we hear a rousing song with a cockney vocabulary, celebrating: 'the self preservation society'. The gang attempt to escape in a bus with their gold. Driving across the Alps the bus slips on a bend and skids to the brink of a precipice. As the film ends the bus wobbles on the brink of the abyss, weighed down by the shifting weight of the gold inside. Inside the bus the Michael Caine character tries to grab the gold without causing the bus to tip. The film ends with the bus still in limbo. It is easy to see much of English dilemma of the last 1960s and late 1990s in this scene. Identity has been aquired at the expense of others, but the weight of the ill gotten gains leaves the country that refuses to acknowledge the nature of its identity in a place of great instability. Hence Englishness continues to chew over the same themes - oddly for an identity founded on oppression of the home nations - it claims to be endangered. The themes of escape, defiance, subversion, and theft remain. Englishness seeks always to escape from Europe, escape from the humiliation of impotence in America's world, escape from a multicultural future of racially mixed inner cities and escape from the reality of its historical treatment of the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh, to say nothing of the Empire. The whole performance is parodied in the Protestant community of the Northern Part of Ireland - where bowler hatted men demand the right to march with Union flags down the streets inhabited by a Catholic minority because they are convinced that their 'civilisation' is endanged. English people recognise nothing of themselves in this behaviour. Yet there is hope for English identity to be reconsidered in terms of the other history of England - which always has been a history of mixture. England has emphasised purity in its notional identity not because that notion described reality, but because the reality has always been a mixture. Churchill had an American mother; Sherlock Holmes had an Irish creator and the Mini had a Greek designer. Going no further than The Italian Job - one learns that the stunt drivers were French, the producer who devised the ending was American, and the musician who wrote the 'self preservation society' song was the great African American composer and performer, Quincey Jones. The Bren Gun of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a Czech weapon. The hope of England is to have a national identity that matched the vibrant local identities which are emphatically mixed. The identities of Brummy, Scouser and Londoner are available to all. Maybe one of the more hopeful things around the World Cup was the way in which the commercially released supporters' song - Vindaloo - appropriated Indian food with a Portuguese name as a signifier of Englishness - 'we're Eng-er-land and we all like Vindaloo'. For the time being Englishness remains on the defensive - still digging - or caught on an edge, swaying on the precipice between oblivion and stability. |
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