A Canterbury Tale, Richard Rorty and Stanley Kubrick

Guy Stagg understands A Canterbury Tale:

A Canterbury Tale suggests that love of country does not mean some romanticised retreat into the past, but rather drawing on England;s heritage to navigate the uncertainty of the modern world. 

As a result, the film floats free from its origins as wartime propaganda to become one of cinema’s most beautiful explorations of history and belief. 

Though the pace is slow and the plot dreamlike, it finds space for art and nature, friendship and love, nation and faith – all the things people sacrifice their lives for.

I'm reminded of something the American philosopher Richard Rorty said:

National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.

Stagg does get something wrong though. He tells the always-moving story of how Martin Scorsese sought out Michael Powell, who by then was living in obscurity and near poverty, and told him his films had inspired a whole new generation of American directors.

But then he adds:

The best evidence of this influence is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the film’s opening sequence, a prehistoric ape throws a bone into the air; as it falls, the camera jump-cuts to a satellite floating in space. 

The trick was lifted from Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, which begins with a group of pilgrims making their way across medieval England. When a falconer sets a bird of prey into flight, it soars from his arm and sweeps through the air, to become a Spitfire diving from the sky. In a single cut, the viewer is carried from Chaucer’s England to the Battle of Britain.

I don't think Kubrick can have got this idea for his jump-cut from A Canterbury Tale. In a footnote to an article of his own on the film, Paul Banks says:

Ian Christie has recently pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 6023 (7 September 2018), 6, that even if Kubrick had seen A Canterbury Tale before making his own film, it would have been the "severely truncated and re-ordered US version", the only print available between the late 1940s and 1978, which omitted the sequence in question.

Still, Stagg's short post on Engelsberg Ideas is well worth a read.

Three Lions but no St George's flags

I went for a walk across the town after lunch today and saw this Three Lions flag. What I didn't see was any St George's flags.

Twenty years ago, I was in Shropshire during the 2006 World Cup and I can remember St George's flags in the upstairs windows of houses in some very leafy streets in Shrewbury. I expect the children of the house demanded them for their bedroom windows. This year in Market Harborough, there's nothing.

It looks as though the far right has put us off our national flag by making it a symbol their thuggish politics. They couldn't be more unpatriotic if they tried.

The Joy of Six 1507

"These settings are not registered – as they should be by law – with Ofsted. They are meant to be temporary, but a recent report by the children’s commissioner found the average placement lasted six months – one child had been in a 'holiday camp/activity centre' for almost nine months." Alexandra Topping explains why social workers are forced to place children in unregistered homes.

Heather Stewart analyses Labour's crabwise approach to closer economic ties with the EU.

Richard Kemp condemns the snobbery behind the use of classical music to disperse groups of young people: "I have instead asked the Council and Police to support the 'In Harmony' programme of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic which is taking music playing into some of the most deprived areas of Liverpool both during the day and evening. During the day they ensure that every child in three schools gets to play a musical instrument for an hour a week for three years."

"I hope what comes across at the end is an invitation for people to consider the aspects of British culture that they want to celebrate. Albion can't be determined by me; this is a personal quest and a personal vision of the aspects of Britishness that I feel need to be celebrated. It's an invitation for people to say: "I have a stake here, and what do I want to champion?" Zakia Sewell talks to Michaela Makusha about her first book, Finding Albion.

Rob Hakimian reports on a scheme to use the Grand Union Canal to transfer water from the Midlands to London and the South East.

"I have a soft spot for Waddon (1937). Beneath garish commercial signage is a striking Modernist building which can hold its own against any inter-war Tube station." Daniel Wright takes us on a tour of the South London railway stations built between the wars to rival the striking architecture of those on the Underground.

The Joy of Six 1494

"After months of rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves blaming newts and bats for supposedly blocking growth, it’s good to see the Land Use Framework recognises nature restoration is a priority, underpinning all our other uses of land. Senior civil servants in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs now view their ministry as a 'department of land', and regard implementing the Land Use Framework as their overriding mission." Guy Shrubsole welcomes the news that revealing who owns England has just become government policy.

Josiah Mortimer finds that Reform UK councils are dismantling the fight against climate change.

Sarah Fitz-Claridge on the relationship between Karl Popper's account of human knowledge and her view of raising children.

"The new Peaky Blinders film, The Immortal Man, offers us a character, John Beckett, who is a British Nazi. One of the two founders of Britain’s first Nazi party in 1937, alongside William Joyce, was indeed a man named John Beckett, who was formerly a Labour MP. He had been director of publications for Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, but that year he fell out with Mosley. I'm Beckett’s biographer. I'm also his son." Francis Beckett decries the trend for popular films to create populist myths about the second world war – myths that will do us real harm as we confront the new face of fascism in 2026.

"What if Auden had died on the cusp of exile? If, say, his first airplane flight, to Denmark in 1935, had crashed into the sea? Auden would still be remembered. He was, after all, an astonishingly prolific poet, already well known in Europe and America. But he would not be known as a poet of anxious urbanity, and certainly not as a Christian, or even as a leftist. Instead, he would be defined, as many young people are, by the land of his parents and ancestors. The young Auden was, first and foremost, an Englishman, haunted by England's tortured landscape and its war-battered population." James Chappel considers the early poems of W.H. Auden.

Jo Hutchings has some behind-the-scenes photographs of Jon Pertwee filming filming the Doctor Who story The Dæmons in Aldbourne.

GUEST POST An essay in identifying Englishness

Stuart Whomsley attempts to do what the frontrunner for the Conservative leadership can't.

Robert Jenrick has recently stated that Englishness is under threat. However, he seemed unable to say what Englishness actually is. He knew the term had currency, but on enquiry he could offer no more. Like a patient trying to blag medication for an illness that they do not have because that medication can be sold on the streets. What are your symptoms? I have the symptoms of that illness. 

But what exactly are your symptoms? The illness symptoms. Jenrick, when asked, could not define Englishness; he looped around about a shared history and culture, but was unable to say what that was or to give any examples.

So I will try to help. How could I not try to help, with Jenrick being the Newark MP where I live? I could say my neighbour, but he does not seem to get here much, even before his leadership bid.

When you try to define Englishness there are problems. The territory of Englishness has been invaded by nationalists in recent years, people who have a fuzzy blur into racists and white supremacists. Therefore, this can make be a tricky topic to engage with; the brand has been sullied.

Another issue to consider is the question of Britishness compared to Englishness. Many of the features of what defines Englishness do cross over into what is Britishness. But there are differences. 

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are much smaller in terms of population, and though punching above their weight, have been the junior partners in the union, and some have felt a sense of subjugation by the English. Something the English themselves have never really felt. That is an English thing; no one will push the English around.

Englishness is about a language, that language, the English language, that has spread around the world and has been a bond between England and all the people around the globe who use it. People from England have also used the language well and we have a strong literary heritage in prose, poetry and song.

The people of England have been shaped by being an island nation, that there is bit of water around us kept us separate from the rest of the world. Maybe, this is one of the reasons why people arriving by small motes have hit a nerve with some people. The moat is being repeatedly breached. 

Being surrounded by water gave us oceans that we could utilise to take over, if briefly, large parts of the rest of the world. We are a nation of pirates, then colonialists. Not a heritage that we can be proud of without reservations. But after we went out and invaded the world some people have followed us back home, which has greatly enriched the nation, more than the Elgin marbles have.

We are a nation that has a proud history of democracy, even if sometimes we have been hypocritical about it, and even if it has been eroded in recent years, democracy is still a value that is dear to the English. 

I remember being on the march to stay part of the EU after the Referendum vote, a man who had been an accidental passer-by, stopped and went red in the face shouting at us that we needed to obey democracy, that a referendum had occurred, and we needed to abide by it.

The religious values of England are unsurprisingly, those of the Church of England. Which is basically Catholicism with the Pope and obedience to him removed - replaced for a while by the monarch, but then only the monarch nominally. It is also a religion without the guilt that seems to be bequeathed to every Catholic. In the Church of England there is nothing to be guilty about: you were born English, and so you are winning, chin up, chest out, sing a hymn.

England has been organised around the class system going back for centuries. It is very English to try and work out where someone else fits, because of how they talk, how they dress, and fitting them within the English sociological landscape. Not that I am a fan of this, but it is part of being English, with the monarch as the lid that keeps it all in place.

The monarch, even for Republicans, still has a central place in our national consciousness, that has long past for many previous monarch ruled countries. We divide our history up by them, we name our streets after them, we still sing about them being long to rule over us. This is very English.

England is a country with a super high density of historical places; you cannot drive very far from wherever you are without soon passing a marker of an historical figure or event. It might not be labelled, but when you stop and check it out, there will be historical treasure piled upon historical treasure. It is simply falling out of the hedgerows and ancient churches whichever way you turn at the next crossroads.

In terms of economics what could be more English than the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, which shaped the post war years? A very English pragmatic approach to economics that stands in the face of the more ideologically driven approaches of communism, monetarism or neoliberalism.

Englishness means being the inventor of rules for games. We might not have been the original inventors of the games themselves, but we were the ones who set to work drawing up rules of how the games are to be played, before teaching everyone else how to play them by our rules (very English), so that they can beat us at them. What can be more English than cricket?  A game that in its proper format, test cricket, is played over five days with meal breaks.

Pets, I have not mentioned pets. The English are a nation of animal lovers. This really got going under the Victorians. We went out into the wild and captured animals and turned them from being wild and free, to being our pets. So it is not all rosy, but we were at the front of animal welfare, and our love of pets, particularly our dogs, is a defining feature of Englishness. This is one of the British owned features too.

The people I know, directly or indirectly, whose parents were migrants seem to have picked up what it means to be English, no problem. It is some kind of osmosis achieved by growing up here, no matter where your family come from you are taking on Englishness, from the details of regional accents, to the bigger values stuff. They get it. They get what it means to be English. They too can fail at penalty shoot-outs. Did I mention the English sense of humour?

Ironically, and what could be more English than irony, the people who often make a big fuss about Englishness do not seem to be looking at England for their values base, but are instead looking at the USA and longing for us to be the 51st state, thus undermining Englishness.

So going forward, Englishness will continue to thrive, in part because of the people who migrated here in more recent times than the Angles, Saxons or Normans. They migrated here because they too wanted to be part of the English dream.

You can follow Stuart Whomsley on Twitter.