BEARDED WONDERS

I have to confess to a wholly unreasonable prejudice against the bearded, the be-whiskered and the hairy-faced irrespective of their no doubt substantial individual merits. Is it simply congenital idleness that prevents them from daily wielding a razor or is it a proud statement proclaiming their separation from conventional lifestyles? I suspect the latter and I present as proof four choice specimens from my rogues’ gallery:

Jeremy Corbyn

Karl Marx

Fidel Castro

Lenin

 

Much of the civilised world was unshaven until say 1900, daily visits to the barber-shop being an adventure in Sweeney Todd’s day; so I will not disparage hirsute Victorians such as John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Lord Tennyson so representative of their elevated caste.

The unshaven ranks have always been swelled by hordes of the unconventional and the bohemian, for instance Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Ernest Hemingway, Augustus John et al. I have less patience with this brigade, wedded to their beards, sandals and nut-cutlets and spouting “pinko” politics. They have totally infiltrated the acting profession and join ever-complaining teachers, civil servants and trades unionists (all well pensioned by the taxpayer) in noisy demonstrations in favour of #Me Too, Trump Out or whatever this week’s fashionable cause happens to be. The world-view of these characters is quite contrary to the Truth and Beauty we (at least supposedly) cherish.

Mainstream Anglophone politicians have almost entirely forsaken the beard. You have to go back to Benjamin Harrison (1889-93) to find a bearded US President and the last British Prime Minister to be so adorned was arch-imperialist Lord Salisbury who finally left office in 1902. Mind you, his beard was of the broad shovel variety, a sight to behold. George V sported a beard all his reign (1910-36) but he affected a sea-salt persona and was as old-fashioned as they come, an ace shooter of pheasant but never mastering the radio, the motor car nor tolerating the jazzy lifestyle of his prodigal elder son, clean-shaven Edward, Prince of Wales.

Bearded George V

                                                        

At the height of their junta power, the Greek Colonels (1967-74) occasionally insisted that tourists remove their beards, in their eyes a badge of Communism, or face deportation. This was a ludicrous piece of over-kill but demonstrates the power of prejudice. Business boardrooms are often beard-free areas (no commies, please, we’re British!) though the likes of abrasive Sir Alan Sugar and charming Sir Richard Branson have managed to squeeze by.

 I personally did grow a beard about 8 years ago but it was fleecy white and Greek children mistook me for Santa Claus, not ideal for a parsimonious Scotsman! I quickly snipped and shaved back to blessed normality.  Outside the West, many bearded wonders from the 20^th century have made their distinctive contribution to their own cultures, like Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian writer and polymath and Grigori Rasputin, Russia’s mad monk and purveyor of the black arts.

I sign off, nursing my irrational prejudices, and apologising to my bearded friends – but do dig out those scissors, cut-throat razors and leather strops, old chaps!

Goody Tagore

                            

Baddy Rasputin

           

SMD

16.01.18

Text Copyright ©Sidney Donald 2018

BEING BEASTLY

Noel Coward trilled wittily in 1943: Don’t Let’s be Beastly to the Germans, making a distinction between the Nazis and ordinary Germans, but although Churchill enjoyed the song, it caused a popular furore and soon the BBC banned it. We have been rather beastly to the Germans and most other nationalities ever since – a national trait by no means confined to the British. It takes a long time for foreigners to build up favour in the eyes of native populations; it is all too easy to notice and disparage their differences from us.

Of course WW2 and its many horrors are still latent in our memories and I have no doubt that all averagely intelligent Germans since Adenauer have done everything possible to rehabilitate their great country to the civilised standards of Western Europe. We Brits may have been slow to give credit for this. I recall  going to a satirical revue in a West End theatre in the late 1950s and in one sketch a group of Germans were trying to convince sceptics of their good faith, singing as they goose-stepped across the stage,

We are high, heil, heil-y democratic (struggling to stop their arms from saluting), and complaining,

Why all the fuss and the furore? The Führer, the Führer! (their eyes revolving)

We laughed at this caper but there was a sting in its tail. More than 50 years on, our attitudes have hopefully mellowed but Wolfgang Schäuble and Martin Schultz, with their fanatical plans for a German-led EU, will only have tiny fan-clubs in Britain.

An uneasy and unsmiling Alliance

In truth we are very like the Germans. Our real historic antagonists are the French. Invading Britain in 1066 and creating the Norman medieval state here, the weakened French fought an aggressive England for 116 years in the conflict known as The Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1453 and beat us back across the Channel. The Tudors provoked religious war and the French supported the absolutist Stuarts. Britain struggled to contain Louis XIV, the excesses of the French Revolution and the ambitions of Napoleon. Allies for the first time in 900 years in the Crimea, we fought shoulder to shoulder in WW1 and gamely sponsored the Free French (led by an ungrateful de Gaulle) while mainland France fell under the Nazi yoke. Michel Barnier in 2018 is as anglophobic as Vichy’s Pierre Laval in 1942.

Laval toadies to the Nazis in 1942

    

Barnier readies himself for combat with the British

Some of the more disobliging taunts between Britain and France are on the subject of syphilis – or, as the English called it, “The French Pox”. The first epidemic was among French soldiers fighting in Italy in the late 15^th century.  Soon enough the French called the pox “The English Disease”, the Russians called it “The Polish”, and the Arabs called it “The Christian”! The English would characterise homosexuality as the French Vice, but tit-for-tat retaliation inevitably had it also described it as The English Vice, The Italian and The Spanish Vice.

The only vice for which the English might claim some proprietorial rights is flagellation, an old favourite fostered by traditional public school life and Nelson’s Navy but the French invented sadism and the Austrians masochism, so the honours are even. Churchill himself mocked the Navy as dependent on rum, sodomy and the lash, though the second is usually deemed a speciality of the blameless Greeks! So it is with some relief that we turn to other activities named after our Gallic friends – the relatively innocent French Leave, French Letters, French Toast and French Cricket.

Even within the United Kingdom, name-calling is rife. The English are accused of being class-ridden and arrogant, the Welsh are said to be thieving, the Scots drunken and the Irish dishonest and violent. We can always trot out a tired old stereotype to masquerade as fact or argument. The petty enmities between nations flourish notably in the minds of politicians, media-men and saloon-bar ranters.

For at least two centuries we have shared and mutually admired the achievements of each other. Who could not thrill at the greatness of Luther, Dürer, Kant, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Heine, Nietzsche and Mann illuminating the German firmament? The depth of genius in France astonishes with Rabelais, Molière, Charpentier, Voltaire, David, Flaubert, Balzac, Bizet, Berlioz, Gide, Camus and a thousand others.

The bonds between us pre-date and will outlive the strains of Brexit, which after all is merely a useful economic arrangement, quite susceptible to change. I have every confidence our European friends will continue to cherish our British culture and praise the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Purcell, Johnson, Gibbon, Hume, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Scott, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, Turner and Elgar for time immemorial. There is nothing to justify anyone being beastly!

SMD

7/01/18

Text copyright © Sidney Donald  2018