Recently I had what I think may have been the most British experience of my life. I was in London, with a few hours to spare and enough luggage that going into museums or shops was likely to be tricky. So I decided to wander through some of the parks, and then being nearby, thought I’d pop along and have a look at Buckingham Palace and wander down to Westminster. British enough, you’d think. Oh, but there’s so much more.
There was a crowd around the palace, and I could hear bagpipes in the background. I’m not sure you can get much more British than standing in the drizzle waiting for something to happen but not knowing what, hearing bagpipes slowly approach.
Anyway, due mainly to not really being able to move anywhere because of police holding crossing points closed, I ended up hanging around for the Ceremony of Assorted Marching and Shouting (aka the changing of the guard). Not that you could really see or hear from where I was. Until I suddenly recognised the music the marching band (who thankfully had taken over from the bagpipes) were playing.
Bohemian Rhapsody.
Which takes the prize for the contextually weirdest song I have personally heard performed at Buckingham Palace (March of the Peers from Iolanthe- “bow, bow ye lower middle classes-” at a royal garden party suddenly seems at best mildly insulting in comparison).
In the middle of it all an grey looking man in a suit came out through the gates on foot and I wondered why he was waving at the crowd, before realising it was the prime minister having had his weekly meeting with the King.
It all chimed in with thoughts I’d been having about questions of power and nationality. After wandering round London for a couple of days it was hard not to, even if I hadn’t come from an area of York where every other lamppost has a St George’s flag, Union flag, Yorkshire flag or, in one place, a Danish flag (I wasn’t sure if they just hadn’t noticed the difference between red cross on white and white cross on red, or whether the Vikings had invaded again while no one was paying attention).
I don’t think I’d been to the capital since about 2006. Coming to London from even a small city like York is different to when teenage me ventured to the capital from very rural, very white Norfolk. I'm better at navigating crowds than I was back then, less overawed by buildings with more than three floors. And maybe I'm naive, but in central London I didn’t feel any less safe than at home. The main differences from York seemed to be that there were more over-decorated doughnut shops than pasty shops, which just seems wrong.
The other thing that felt wrong? The number of people living on the streets. Too many. Considering I was there to see musicals, my internal soundtrack instead wandered quickly into Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, (are you surprised?) in particular the sombre, "Fold your flapping wings" where the character Strephon berates his fellow MP's for thinking themselves better than people who, due to circumstances, end up destitute.
“Take a wretched thief,
Through the city sneaking.
Pocket handkerchief
Ever, ever seeking.
What is he but I
Robbed of all my chances,
Picking pockets by
Force of circumstances?”
Wonder why it might have been cut from the show as it’s usually performed? (https://gsarchive.net/iolanthe/web_op/iol21a.html) Incidentally, I wandered through what is referred to elsewhere in that song as ‘soapless Seven Dials’. It’s now home to a food court that I looked into but decided I wasn’t hipster enough to eat in.
As for ‘dingy Drury Lane,’ as also referred to in that song, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane is very far from dingy. Courtesy of a recent renovation by Andrew Loyd-Webber, there’s enough bling and shiny fittings to satisfy even the current inhabitant of the Oval Office.
Disney’s Hercules was a lot of fun, if I did spend most of the show being distracted by the very impressive ‘stone’ columns that made up the set and were almost constantly moving, almost like they were dancing among the cast. After last year’s experience of trying to move furniture on stage while dressed as a giant plate I guess it’s not surprising that I’m jealous of stages where things move by themselves, or rotate, or rise up, or have a whirling vortex of souls... Or indeed to be jealous of an ensemble who can make their dance movements look convincing, rather than just vaguely waving their arms around and worrying that they look a bit daft.
I also kept being distracted by not being able to take the Greek gods seriously. I’ve obviously listened to too many episodes of ‘Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics’ on the subject to take the idea of Zeus and Hera as a loving couple seriously (This recent episode on Hera should fill you in https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002gzyv). Although portraying the gods as incapable of doing anything even slightly helpful feels more accurate. Again it brings up the themes of power- the Greek gods are not exactly role models for how it should be used or distributed. Hercules himself has to learn how to use his strength to help, not hurt. But in the end everyone gets their happy ending through sacrifice, not strength. I wonder what our leaders today would think of that?
Talking about stone columns, the next day I went to the British Museum. I thought I might as well see the ‘Elgin marbles’ before we get round to giving them back to Greece. But to me the more impressive artefacts are those from the excavation at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk (and their modern reproductions).
Thought to be the grave of a Saxon king of East Anglia, these artefacts are all about projecting the power of the ruler. Weapons, armour, silver and gold and jewels- the wealth on display here is a signal and a warning to any potential challengers not to try. The goods on display represent materials and artistic influences from Celtic, Roman, Byzantinum (modern Turkey), and northern European imagery and techniques. All in one sandy grave on the Suffolk coast. The fact that this king could support craftsmen who could make such intricate symbols of power, and could connect with such a wide-ranging network of trade and diplomacy surely challenges the version of history where post-Roman Britain sank into a ‘Dark Age’ cut off from the ‘civilised’ Mediterranean world, as later historians would have us believe.
Talking of one-sided versions of history, my wanderings turned into an impromptu reflection on how women were under-represented among the many statues and monuments that dot the city.
There’s Boudicca (or Boadicea, as the Victorians called her), celtic ‘queen’ of the Iceini in my own native Norfolk, driving her chariot straight at the Houses of Parliament with scythes fixed to the wheels. I’m not sure what message that’s supposed to send MP’s. But at least she’d stopped at the traffic lights (which seems to be optional in London).
Opposite the Houses of Parliament there’s a square with a lot of statues of famous (and less famous) parliamentary leaders. In among them one caught my eye- Millicent Fawcett, campaigner for women to have the vote, whose statue went up in 2018. Though I have to admit the pigeon perched comfortably on her head didn’t seem very impressed.
The only other reference to 50% of the population that I found nearby was the Women of World War II memorial on Whitehall. It shows uniforms and equipment representing the jobs women took up during the war as men went off to fight- and then mostly had to give up once the men came home. An exhibition outside St Paul’s cathedral also highlighted the roles women and civilian men played during the blitz, watching for bombs, firefighting, first aid; and how many lost their lives trying to protect others.
That evening I went to see The Lion King. I’d never seen the stage show and was a bit worried that it had been over-hyped, but that didn’t last long. For a show about lions and set in Africa based on an animated Disney film, it too felt oddly British, in a strange way. But very different from the kind on display at the British Museum. Simba and Mufasa spoke with accents that were very ‘Received Pronunciation’ (presumably to emphasise that they were upper class lions with a right to rule) and it was oddly Shakespearean, not just the obvious Richard-III-with-lions (or Hamlet-with-lions) but somehow in feel and ‘weight,’ if that makes sense.
Which brings us back to where we started, with royalty, ceremony and power. I guess it’s a lot simpler for lions. Our royals don’t have much power these days, although I do wish we could come up with a better national anthem (anyone else found themselves accidentally singing ‘God save the quing?’). But from a historical point of view, I understand the role that ceremony and stories play in how we see ourselves- as a nation, as a people. Our ‘history’ as often taught is in many ways a story constructed from our past- leaving out or minimising the bits historians or storytellers in the past haven’t thought are important (e.g. women) or where we don’t have much in the way of written records (e.g. the early medieval ‘Dark’ ages). Or perhaps the bits we’re less proud of (e.g. all the stuff in the British museum that we casually swiped from other countries because we were the ones with power). That’s not meant as a criticism of anyone who learned that version of history. But I think it’s important to realise how our story of Britain (or, let’s be honest, mainly of England), our national myth, shapes us and how we interact with the world.
It’s not all bad. Our history can inspire us to be better- the example of a population prepared to make sacrifices to stand up to fascism, or to build a strong welfare state, or stop the spread of disease, for example. But we need to realise that regardless of how much truth our national story contains, it is a story, and someone is controlling it. And perhaps it wouldn't hurt to have some humility about our past, and to accept the complexity of some of our more divisive historical figures (Cromwell, even Churchill) while still recognising the good, because after all why should we expect historic figures not to have flaws when our modern leaders and celebrities certainly do. And in a hundred years’ time someone else will be writing about how people of the 21st Century left out important facts that we’re currently not even aware that we’re ignoring, so there’s no room for self-congratulatory smugness.
So who controls our stories now? Journalists? Algorithms? (or the people who write algorithms?) Politicians? Podcasters? Historians? In some ways we've never had more freedom to write our own stories, with widespread literacy and multiple platforms to share our experiences. But the sheer number of voices makes it just as hard to find objective truth now as it is in poorly recorded past eras. So we tend to look for patterns, stories that confirm our own feelings even if they ignore the experiences of others.
There's a limited amount we can do to change that. But being aware of what's happening to the stories we consume helps. As does looking for what we're missing, whether that's the stories of those history tends to ignore (e.g. craftsmen rather than kings), or just those with less opportunity to make themselves heard (e.g. those living on the streets). Maybe if we listen more to those less heard stories, our future will be less about arguments over flags, and more about stories and songs.
