Spirit of the Brits

Read Rowland Manthorpe's winning essay and extracts from the shortlisted essays on history and Britishness. The prize is run by the Fabian Society and The Guardian. (July 2006)

Read the winning essay

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,,1809895,00.html

Congratulations to Rowland Manthorpe, winner of the 2006 Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, run by the Fabian Society and The Guardian, in memory of Ben Pimlott. His winning essay argued that while the London bombings of 2005 saw many instinctively invoke the Blitz spirit, it is the history of anti-Catholicism in the eighteeenth century which offers more relevant lessons.

The 2006 theme was 'Who do you think you are? Can history help us to define British identity today, or is it part of the problem'. Over 260 entries were received, taking a wide range of approaches to the topic of Britishness and history. Extracts from the ten shortlisted essays can be read below.

The judges were Annalena McAfee, editor, Guardian Review, Gordon Marsden MP, former editor of History Today, Sunder Katwala, Fabian General Secretary, Jean Seaton, University of Westminster. We are grateful for the support of the Sternberg Foundation.

Shortlisted essays

'As observers played the game of historical analogies in the weeks after July 7, one particularly relevant episode in British history was notable for its absence. The brutal anti-Catholicism that has marked Britishness for much of its history is still commemorated every year on November 5. Yet in the wake of the London bombings no one talked about Guy Fawkes and his grisly fate, nor dared to compare Muslims to Catholics. Beneath the scab of this repressed memory lies a potent warning of the power of historical narrative. The Gordon Riots of June 1780 were the most tumultuous and destructive of a violent century. In the wake of the Commons' refusal to repeal the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, rioting erupted around London. Over two hundred people were killed in the city's streets. Politics in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century shares many similarities with the politics of the late 1770s. Then, the country was unsettled by a divisive foreign war: for Iraq 2003, read America 1775. The war was far from universally supported: newspapers at the time excoriated the government's bungled imperialism. But it still cast its polarising shadow back into the domestic arena. Preparing for another bout of conflict with Catholic France, in which contest the engagement in America was a round of shadow-boxing, eighteenth century Britons questioned the loyalty of the Catholics in their midst. How could one be committed to the Pope and the global Catholic brotherhood and stay loyal to the King?

Rowland Manthorpe, Who do you think you are?

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/history/story/0,,1809895,00.html

'My fourth British journey was in 1970, to Wad Medani, in the Sudan. A brown plain so hot you could smell it. A small darkened room with three beds and a table. I was a volunteer teacher, working in a state boarding school. The British had built the school as a cross between an army barracks and a municipal park. The examination board was Oxford. The houses were named after the great Islamic schools of thought. The paths were marked out straight, in small rocks, each one painted white. The boys were organized in dorms, marched in berets, played football, read Buchan, banged their mugs, got caned and wanted to know what I thought of The Beatles. God knows what they thought of me. Allah kareem. I celebrated Eid with a fellow teacher, back in his village. Out in the early morning, spread across the vast plain of the Gezira, we faced Mecca, our shining white gelabirs flapping audibly in the breeze. The ranks of the faithful. But even as I knelt and prayed, I knew what they knew. I was not one of them but one of the old colonialists. Knowing that could incite jealousies, skew friendships, make tongues stick. In order to thrive, I had to raise my standards. For the first and only time in my life, I stiffened my upper lip. By which I mean, I tried to control my feelings. It was a strength, I have to admit, though a battered and clichéd one. When I returned to London in the summer of 1971, I had forgotten how to be me'. Robert Colls, British journeys.

'Doctor Who is a very British alien. The Doctor can be at the same time hi-tech and camp, familiar and terrifying, self-effacing as he saves the world, asexual though he always leaves with the girl. The Ninth Doctor, who in 2005 carried on the series that has been a part of British consciousness since 1963, appeared in only thirteen episodes. During this brief incarnation, he seemed to find himself spending a lot of time on Earth, and most of that in Britain – not surprising, perhaps, since the Doctor shares many cultural reference points with the British, not least of which is a fascination with the Second World War. The double episode of the 2005 series set during the London Blitz is one of only two trips to the past made by the Ninth Doctor; voted the most frightening episode of the series by BBC viewers, it also presented one of the series' most evocative images. A small child in a gasmask wanders the streets of wartime London calling for its Mummy in eerie and plaintive tones. The image is chilling: the faceless child is sinister as well as pitiful. But it is also familiar. It is suitable for scheduling before the watershed on the BBC. The civilian gasmask as an iconic object is a useful allegory for the way Britain today understands the Second World War – it inspires a frisson of fear, but since we know gas attacks never came, the mask evokes not sorrow, terror and ugly death, but danger averted and overcome'.

Justine Doody, War in our time: Modern Britain and the second world war

'As I grew up, I was aware of my own culture quite separately from and prior to any feeling of Britishness. It was a situation that might today be recognised as the norm … At the time, however, during the 1980s and under the Thatcher government, being Scottish, being raised Catholic, felt distinctly like being in opposition to power in Britain – even if there were lots of others who were opposed to it too. Like other cultural identities, mine relied upon an awareness of history. On family holidays, the explaining and defining of Scotland, and ourselves, as a product of history was an indispensable aspect of day-tripping. We saw stones in Angus carved by the ancient Picts; fields where Scotland's independence had been secured in battle against English invasion; abbeys and cathedrals torn down and left to ruin, four centuries earlier, by hysterical Presbyterian reformers; the tumbling shells of ruined crofts dotting highland slopes, a ghostly reminder of the British government's support for 'clearances'. Meanwhile, it was Britain which, to a large extent, could usefully explain who we were not, even though we were tied to it … No doubt it was this sort of reflection on the past which led the novelist Malcolm Bradbury to observe 'that mixture of strange fact, romantic fiction and cultural resentment that in Scotland is called history'.

Alasdair Gillon - 'An attractive version of events'

'On a BBC History website you can type in Multicultural History and find entries about Asian and Caribbean soldiers in the two world wars, Windrush, 'Post-Windrush Black British Literature', 'the first black Britons' ('black men and women have lived in Britain in small numbers since at least the 12th century'), Dr. Johnson's black servant, the British in India, the 1857 Rebellion, an overview of the Holocaust, pieces on Eichmann, Churchill and the Holocaust and a link to a BBC radio programme on 'The awesome achievements of the Mughal Empire'. There is something for everyone: new histories for a new multicultural Britain. But this is a mishmash. It tries to speak to everyone but speaks to no one. Some of it was always there, in the old histories (1857), some of it is not British history at all (the US Civil Rights movement, Eichmann) and some of it is self-contradictory: Ignatius Sancho was 'a major [Black] literary celebrity in Georgian London' but the '100 Great Black Britons' website doesn't feature anyone born before the 1890s. Much of this is minor, muddled and patronising. Whose confidence or sense of identity is going to be bolstered by shrill references to Henry VII's black trumpeter or Dr. Johnson's black servant? … This is a history of minorities following small byways. It misses the great highways of British history. History is a way of holding a society together. We sometimes speak as if this is a new problem. It is not'.

David Herman, History lessons

'My family have a very British surname; and we've largely been, at least ostensibly, an archetypally British family; we were, for example, saddled for fifteen years with a blue B-reg Nova with a glove box that opened when cornering because it had been built in a factory near Luton. Each of these things, however, have the potential to mislead. As my dad has peered deeper into our family history, he has discovered that our identity cannot be mapped out solely within the borders of this little island. The same is true of the history of our nation as a whole. For anyone who is willing to look, there is, waiting to greet you, the realisation that there is, to varying degrees, international, multicultural and multiethnic blood, ancestry and culture in all of us. It is perhaps for this reason that, whenever there is a national debate in the press on the concept of British identity, it feels that so much knowledge and understanding is lost in trying to identify a series of lowest common denominators of what a British person is like. Although this desire is in many ways admirable, there is a risk that in trying to define Britishness; or to distil it into a finite list of traits, characteristics, likes and dislikes, that we forget the broad palette of influences, peoples, genetics, events and culture from which our nation has been drawn, over the course of the country's history as well as over the last fifty years. Our varied differences are perhaps the major thing we all have in common. Anthony Hainsworth, Who do you think you are?

'I grew up in an unremarkable, if middle-class Kikuyu household in Nairobi. My siblings and I knew that our grandfather had been detained during the emergency but we were not told much more. If we visited our grandparents, we were more likely to get a reading from the Bible than a lecture on the evils the British visited upon the Kikuyu during the dreadful Mau Mau years. Twenty years ago I landed on British soil for the first time. I was fortunate to be sent out here to attend university. I had spent a childhood and adolescence in Kenya absorbing so much that was British – books, comics, newspapers, television, games and boyhood activities – that England did not feel like a foreign country to me. What I felt about England had no bearing on how England felt about me, however. As far as England was concerned, I was a foreigner (never mind the fiction that Commonwealth citizens are not foreigners in Commonwealth countries) looking to obtain an expensive university education for a fee. No more. The rules were clear: stay in England for as long as was required by your course and then go back home. By the end of the first year of my university course, I found that I rather liked being in England and decided that I wanted to remain here as a lawyer.

Gitau Githinji, British Thinking: the legacy of colonialism and Mau Mau

'As the second world war has receded, the building blocks of national self-awareness have largely lost their force and relevance. We have a parliamentary democracy in dire need of reform and rejuvenation. We are in Europe but not comfortable with it. We have a long-standing monarchy but have developed doubts about its future. Above all, we had a great empire but have not managed to come to terms with its loss and with its long-term consequences.

For this historians bear some of the responsibility. We are raising a generation in almost complete ignorance of our imperial past. In schools students are more familiar with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin than with Robert Clive, General Gordon or Cecil Rhodes. Not that they need to be fed on a diet of imperial heroics. The study of empire offers a wonderfully vast and varied experience that encompasses everything from the Indian 'Mutiny', the 'drain of wealth', and the Amritsar Massacre, to Indian democracy, cricket and the Indian railway system …. That this caution is unnecessary is obvious when one considers how the imperial experience is viewed in India today. As a mature national community Indians are fully conscious of their struggle for independence, but they know it takes away nothing from their achievements since 1947 to recognise the extent of the British impact on their political system and political culture, on the law, on the army and on education'.

Martin Pugh - Who do you think you are?

'You are right, my friend, to lament that there is no single day that we point to as the birth of our country. 29th September 1066 hardly qualifies, since that was the conquest of mere England, and by a Frenchman at that. 24th March 1603 might be more appropriate, when the Scotsman James VI merged his throne with that of his mother's murderer. But his was a divisive reign and it could hardly be said that his kingdom was 'united'. Other dates fall into similar problems … Each 'Act of Union' that increased power in London was also a death knell of one of its neighbours. To suggest we should celebrate them now would not be a popular move.

We are perhaps alone in this dilemma. Other countries can define themselves by their liberation (such a noble virtue to found a country) from a dominant other, one that is usually … well, us. Our friends in the USA define themselves against our King George. Each country in our Commonwealth celebrates the day when we were no longer their masters. Our European neighbours can define themselves against the plague of dictators that blighted the twentieth century. Wbo is our oppressor? There is none. Our history is long and unconquered, and we have no Independence Day to show for it. We were almost conquered however … Hitler never defeated us but the extent to which we define ourselves against him reaches deep into our psyche, even today.

Robert Sharp, A Most Respectful Letter from an Englishman in Scotland to a Scotsman in England; In Which the Subject of Their Shared Britishness is Discussed at Some Length.

'The girls babbled in English and in Bengali, tripping between languages as easily and as agilely as they did over delicate political assumptions. Allusions to racism or sexism fitted into their banter as easily as boy talk. The girls seemed to inhabit several worlds at least: the Bangladeshi culture which their parents varyingly imparted, the versions of England in mixed East London, and the bridge that connects the two, that allows them to cross-reference and to dart back and forth. The lived on the Robin Hood estate, popularly known as Little Sylhet. In Bangladeshi terms they were rich and privileged; by English assumptions they were deprived – deprived anyway of opportunity. …

We were taking a break from the session. "What did you study then?" They looked at me archly, after I'd asked a question too many. "History". A long pause. "Why, why d'you do that then"? they said in unison. "Don't you find it interesting"? I began, thinking perhaps that I could question my way out of this examination. "Well, I mean it's done, innit. It's passed. Finished. What's interesting about that?" they replied just as suspiciously. Dead matter no longer moved, no longer fizzed. And anyway, the history teacher was boring'.

To these sharp, edgy teenagers, I felt myself floundering in trying to find an answer, or a justification for such a commitment. I was on the back foot. I knew I could not deploy some lofty rationale about truth and reconciliation, or the search for understanding of motives or identity: their eyes would glaze over and onto the next heart-throb on the tiny screen. These girls travelled lightly, unharrassed by the triplicity of their identity.

Isabella Thomas, Against Literalism

More on the Pimlott Prize

Pimlott prize 2005: read the winning essay

Mark Hayhurst on Aneurin Bevan

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1493978,00.html

Pimlott prize 2005: shortlist extracts

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1494031,00.html

Ben Pimlott remembered: Tributes and obituaries