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