Evil May Day revisited

David Cameron’s decision to make a speech about immigration in the run up to local elections may be surprising to some. It is unusual for a political leader in Britain, whether a monarch or a Prime Minister, to make such an overt statement about immigration.  Nevertheless, there is a history of violent, albeit short-lived outbursts of anti-foreign feeling in Britain, usually as a result of rabble-rousing by a demagogue like Oswald Mosley

One example took place in London in 1517 and became known as “Evil May Day.” This sudden, and probably terrifying, riot occurred two weeks after an inflammatory sermon by a Dr. Bell, in which he appealed to “Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal.” Attacks on foreigners began immediately, but events came to a head on the first of May when apprentices, later joined by Thames watermen and city porters (these three groups seemed always to be up for a riot) ran wild in the city of London, attacking foreigners, looting their homes and shops. In this case, the “foreigners” were mainly French, but such outbreaks of aggression took place periodically, aimed at Jews, or the Dutch or other groups who were identified as being an economic threat to the indigenous population.

Here’s a contemporary account from Hall’s Chronicle (ca. 1548) which was sympathetic to the rioters: “[The Eighth year of King Henry VIII.] In this season, the Genevese, Frenchmen and other strangers said and boasted themselves to be in such favour with the king and his council, that they set nought by the rulers of the city; and the multitude of strangers was so great about London, that the poor English artificers could scarce get any living; and, most of all, the strangers were so proud, that they disdained, mocked and oppressed the Englishmen, which was the beginning of the grudge.”  … Allegations of assaults and a murder follow before the account continues, “For, amongst others that sore grudged at these matters, there was a broker in London, called John Lincoln, which wrote a bill before Easter, desiring Doctor Sandish at his sermon at Saint Mary Spital, the Monday in Easter week, to move the mayor and aldermen to take part with the commonalty against the strangers.  The doctor answered, that it became not him to move any such thing in a sermon.” Lincoln then succeeded in persuading a Dr. Bele or Bell to give a sermon about the dangers the foreigners posed to those “born in London.”…  “Of this sermon many a light person took courage, and openly spake against strangers.  And, as the devil would, the Sunday after, at Greenwich, in the king’s gallery was Francis de Bard, which, as you heard, kept an Englishman’s wife and his goods.  And with him were Domingo, Anthony Caueler, and many more strangers; and there they, talking with Sir Thomas Palmer, knight, jested and laughed that Francis kept the Englishman’s wife, saying that if they had the Mayor’s wife of London, they would keep her.  Sir Thomas said, ‘Sirs, you have too much favour in England.’ There were divers English merchants by, and heard them laugh and were not content, in so much as one William Bolt, a mercer, said, ‘Well, you whoresome Lombards, you rejoice and laugh; by the mass, we will one day have a day at you, come when it will;’ and that saying the other merchant affirmed.”

The chronicle then goes on to describe the riots of the following May Day: “Then suddenly there was a common secret rumour, and no man could tell how it began, that on May day next, the city would rebel, and slay all  aliens …” The rioting involved many hundreds of people and there was considerable destruction to “foreigners’ ” property, although it was not recorded whether anyone was killed or not.

After intervention by Sir Thomas More, the riot was quelled and hundreds were arrested. Henry VIII pardoned most of them but 13 rioters, including John Lincoln, were executed for treason. It is interesting to compare how, even in the 16^th century, the authorities were aware of the dangers of allowing tensions about immigration to boil over into violence and hatred.

History tells us that the smallest thing can exacerbate tensions, particularly at a time of economic hardship. Perhaps our current leaders should study a little more history.

*

I wrote this back in April 2011 and, obviously, attitudes to immigrants and refugees have hardly improved since then. I was reminded of it because I watched an interview that Ian McKellen gave to Owen Jones in which he referred to a speech about Evil May Day, delivered in the character of Sit Thomas More, in an eponymous play, which has now been attributed to Shakespeare. I tend to be very sceptical about “new’ Shakespeare writing, but I can quite believe that he was involved in this speech. Besides which, it’s remarkable in its own right and so apposite to what is happening in Britain right now not to be important and moving. So I have added a link to the McKellen interview, the text of the speech taken from a piece by Sylvia Morris on The Shakespeare Blog and another clip of Ian McKellen talking about and delivering the speech at a film festival. It’s worth listening to the whole thing, because his introduction is important too. Finally, here’s (probably) Shakespeare’s  writing from Sir Thomas More:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise
Hath chid down all the majesty of England;
Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
And that you sit as kings in your desires,
Authority quite silent by your brawl,
And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;
What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
Not one of you should live an aged man,
For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
Would feed on one another….
Say now the king
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? this is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.

 

 

Why no demo ever shouts “what do we want? The one per cent Oxbridge elite”

I have to confess to having a bit of a problem with Tristram Hunt MP. It’s probably terribly unfair, and a manifestation of some class-based prejudice about people named after Arthurian knights but there it is. It’s just he’s an MP for Stoke-on-Trent, and whenever I see his name, I hear my North Staffordshire-born mother saying: “What kind of name is that? I bet he didn’t go to a comprehensive in Longton.” (I’ve looked Stoke schools up and its all the Stanley Matthews Academy and Business and Enterprise colleges now.) To be fair to Tristram, it isn’t really his name that’s the problem, although I was amazed the people of Stoke voted him as their MP. They elected Oswald Mosley’s wife, Lady Cynthia in 1929 though, so who really knows?

I was prepared to give Tristram a chance. I believe in equality and people can’t help coming from a privileged background any more than they can help coming from a deprived one. But the privately-educated son of Julian, Baron Hunt of Chesterton, has really started to get on my tits. I’ve been irritated for some time by the juxtaposition of his New Labour stance supporting Tory welfare cuts with the reports that children in Stoke were searching in bins for food, or his seemingly bizarre views on education when shadow minister. It’s his most recent remarks I’ve been most irritated by though. The Labour Party, Trist opines, needs to be run by Oxbridge graduates, people – uncannily similar to Mr H himself – he seems to believe are automatically greater of intellect, or ability, than trade unionists, or care workers, or Poly-then-red-brick types like me. Like Tony Blair, I think Tristram Hunt is a believer in “meritocracy” – a term coined by sociologist Michael Young, later Baron Young of Dartington (although I have been reminded that Young meant it satirically – see comment below).  It was the second worst thing he ever did after fathering the egregious Toby. I’m not going to write about how much I detest the idea of meritocracy here. I’ll simply say that it’s an idea that, oddly enough, is normally beloved of those who consider themselves to be meritorious. It’s bound up with the whole idea of the successful or unsuccessful, the deserving or undeserving. It raises up a specific view of what is “intelligent” whilst ignoring that there are so many other ways that people can contribute to society – altruism, compassion, technical skills, parenting, and so on. The path to becoming one of the 1% at Oxbridge is not only smoother for those from certain backgrounds but it also priviliges those who think in a certain way, who have been schooled in certain kinds of knowledge. Apols, Boris Johnson, but I’ve never found Latin to be very useful in my life.

Perhaps, Tristram, we might look at education in a fundamentally different way. Not so much a pedagogic survival of the fittest, training and schooling pegs of all kinds of shapes into differently-shaped holes, but a way of giving everyone a chance to learn about all the things that make life worth living, to lead a fulfilled life. For some that might involve being in business, or becoming a politician, but for others it might be literature, art, science or sport that allows them to lead a happy life, contribute to society in the best way they can. A friend of mine once told me that his father, a London bus driver, would come home every evening and the first thing he would do was listen to a complete opera record. He hated his job, but he had a window into a world of beauty that he loved. Only education – in its truest sense – can do this.

But I digress, because what I wanted to talk to an eminent historian about was the history of workers’ education. I won’t have to tell him about the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Working Men’s educational associations, the WEA and so on. The rise of workers’ education in towns like Hanley and Stoke, or like the Sutherland Institute in Longton gave opportunities to generations of people. Now they’re withering away from under-funding and neglect, in order to throw money at private organisations to promote a divisive and damaging form of elitism that will leave most people behind. It was through these institutions, now deemed old-fashioned, that people from my background gained access to education. Through evening classes, part-time study, free public libraries, Access to HE courses, the Open University (the brilliant brainchild of an Old Labour government, now priced out for many), not elitism, meritocracy, Grammar schools or privately-owned academies. Not testing and training people to become unquestioning automata.

It was through these institutions that, if I can use my own family as an example, two generations could go from illiteracy to, not only postgraduate studies, but to become rounded human beings who have spent their entire lives contributing to this country’s economy, as well as to society through teaching and librarianship, and to have lives that have been enhanced by its culture.

The Labour Party doesn’t need to be led by your 1%, Tristram, but by people who’ve had no advantages in life, who have not benefited from an expensive education, or parents who could pay for educational “extras.” Those people have a big enough say already, don’t they? Why don’t we make the Labour Party (shock, horror!) a party that speaks for the poor, the dispossessed, the single parent, the carer, the zero hours worker?

Because, Tristram, meritocracy looks much easier when you start your climb of the social ladder from near to the top.

What the Poppy is not

Some years ago, I was privileged to work for Norfolk Libraries on a brilliant project digitising thousands of old photographs. Amongst these was a collection of portrait photographs of the Norfolk Roll of Honour – those members of the armed forces who had been killed during the First World War. I have written about it before and I still find the images of those men incredibly powerful, and for a short time afterwards, I started wearing a poppy. I remember having to restrain myself on a train home from London to Norwich when an American student made a lot of pointed remarks, directed towards me, about the politics of anyone who wore a poppy, that it was somehow a demonstration of support for the Iraq war. I didn’t. It wasn’t.

Now I have stopped wearing poppies, but for the opposite reason. The current jingoistic, militarist atmosphere that seems to prevail in Britain, led by its cheerleaders in the tabloid press – almost completely owned by people who don’t live in this country for tax reasons – had politicised what was, in fact, always a fundraising effort by the British Legion. It should be comparable to the daffodils people wear when they’ve donated to a cancer charity, but some people with an unpleasant political agenda are attempting to use it as something more sinister.

I’m not a pacifist. I believe in self defence. Although I haven’t agreed with any of the reasons we’ve gone to war, or occupied other countries, during my lifetime, I’m aware that many people join the army to escape poverty, lack of opportunity, and unemployment. The British Legion look after people who have served in the forces, because as a nation, we have never done right by them, and organisations like the BL, SSAFA and Combat Stress have had to step in. From the days when injured soldiers and sailors from the Napoleonic wars had to beg in the streets upon their return to an ungrateful nation, we’ve failed those whose lives are forever blighted by physical injury or psychological trauma incurred by the experience of war.

So why won’t I wear a poppy? Because it is being twisted into a symbol of patriotism, of conformity, of all kinds of things it was never meant to represent. Last week, social networking was full of abuse by Tory supporters who were scanning the shadow cabinet, looking for someone who hadn’t pinned a poppy to his or her lapel. They thought they’d found Tom Watson out until it was clear that he was wearing a small enamel one. It’s only a matter of time until they find someone to attack on this issue. Irrespective of their own personal feelings, no politician or TV celebrity would dare appear without a poppy. The enforced poppy-wearing has now spread to sport where what might have once been a bucket collection will now involve a minute’s silence, a parade of service men and women, and the players having a special strip with a poppy on it. Is it all to raise money for a good cause, or part of the pressure to conform to nationalism, and its corollary, hostility to outsiders?

Now, of course, the fatuousness of the debate, if it can be dignified as a debate, has really come to the fore in our tabloid press. Size really does matter, apparently. When I was growing up, I don’t remember seeing anything other than the one standard, paper poppy, that British Legion volunteers sold on the streets. Now, in order to show the absolutely humongous size of your patriotism, you can buy great big, massive poppies. I expect David Cameron to be wearing one the size of the moon on Remembrance Day.

The reverse of that is the accusations made against people like the footballer James McClean (an Irishman) who has been vilified because he won’t wear a poppy. Yet I know people who have spent decades serving in our armed forces who choose not to wear one. I think they’d argue that, if we are to believe the political rhetoric that we have fought some of our wars to preserve our freedom, then everyone has the choice whether to wear one of not. I’m afraid being called “scum” by Barbara Windsor, actor of dubious ability and friend of gangsters, only served to make up my mind not to wear one.

The British Legion’s website explains the history and meaning of the poppy very clearly:

Importantly, it ends with this statement:

“The poppy is NOT

A symbol of death or a sign of support for war
A reflection of politics or religion
Red to reflect the colour of blood

Wearing a poppy is a personal choice and reflects individual and personal memories. It is not compulsory but is greatly appreciated by those it helps – our beneficiaries: those currently serving in our Armed Forces, veterans, and their families and dependants.”

I am not writing this to discourage anyone from wearing a poppy, or donating to the British Legion appeal, but to raise the question of how disturbing it is that we are now living in a society where conformity to an imagined political and military agenda is not only demanded of people, but that symbolic manifestations of it must be worn. That has happened before in Europe. We should not make the Flanders poppy into a broken cross.

A gift from the Polish people to Ipswich

Writing what had to be a rather short book about “secret” or Unknown Ipswich l knew that there were always going to be omissions, so I hope to rectify that here.

One of the things that I had to miss out was this lovely Polish icon, which is in St Pancras church in Orwell Place. It was given to the church by the Polish armoured train unit that was stationed in Ipswich during the Second World War. There were twelve armoured train units in Britain at that time and, looking back, they seem very much part of that amateur Heath Robinsonish approach to defence during that war that now seems both comical and admirable. The trains, basic wagons filled with armed Polish troops, patrolled the country from Cornwall to the north of Scotland.

Having discovered the existence of the icon in Ipswich, I was interested in finding out more about St Pancras’ church which is the kind of unprepossessing, neo-Gothic construction that English Catholics were forced to build as their own churches were taken by the established Protestant Church of England following the Reformation. Unlike Victorian era C of E churches, there were few Catholic aristocrats willing to fund beautiful buildings (an exception being the Earl of Shrewsbury who financed, among others, Pugin’s over-decorated St Giles at Cheadle in Staffordshire, where half my family were baptised, married and buried) and the neo-Gothic brickwork does not look so pretty to our 21st-century eyes, but this jewel of an icon is hardly known about and it must be significant to one of Ipswich’s new communities, the Poles who have immigrated to work in the town over the last few years.

Like many such holy images, the icon has lots of stories attached to it, for example that it was painted by St Luke the Evangelist. It appears to have been kept in the monastery of Czestochowa, and one of the stories alleges that Czech soldiers attempted to steal it but were thwarted by heavenly intervention. It was so highly valued that in 1904 the Pope presented a crown set with precious stones to be placed above the image. It was brought to England when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 and it is a measure of the gratitude and esteem of those Polish troops that they left such a significant symbol behind in Ipswich.

Researching one thing always leads to another and a reference to “anti-Catholic riots” at St Pancras’ church in 1863 could not be ignored, although in fact the reports in the Ipswich Journal of that year tell a story that is so comical it probably belongs in the pages of a Dickens’ story. On 7 November 1863 the newspaper reported that a lecture at the Temperance Hall by someone “styling himself as André Massenn, Baron de Camin” was full of anti-Catholic sentiment. Things were not going too badly until the “Baron” announced that the women in the hall should be sent home. He then regaled the remaining male audience with racy stories about the goings on in monasteries and convents. Although it was obvious even to the reporter of the Ipswich Journal that Camin was bogus and a scurrilous rogue, he was wildly applauded by some of his audience, including some Protestant clergymen. The “Baron’s” great mistake was that he went on to impugn the character of the priest at St Pancras, Father Kemp, not perhaps realising that the 18th Hussars who were then at Ipswich Barracks were made up of Irish soldiers.

To avoid further trouble the Mayor decided to ban the lecture the following evening but this only served to stir up trouble. It has to be said that it seems that the “young men and lads” referred to as causing the disturbances did not need much provocation and they were soon persuaded by the “Baron” to go out and smash up the houses of the Mayor and other local dignitaries. A policeman was stabbed, although not seriously.

On the third evening the “Baron” once again spoke. This time the Ipswich Journal described it as a “rather dreary historical lecture on Popery,” so presumably he diplomatically missed out the bits about the naughty nuns. According to the report, “a noisy rabble of two or three thousand boys and lads” waited outside, unwilling to pay the 3d admission price. Afterwards they went to St Pancras’ church and smashed the windows and gas lamps.

It makes you wonder whether the Polish troops who left their treasured icon in Ipswich would have done so if they had known a little more about the history of the town.

Tithes and treason: some background to fascism in East Anglia before and during the Second World War

For those with an interest in the history of British fascism, the news story that appeared the other day about the treacherous wartime activities of Ronald and Rita Creasy of Eye in Suffolk, did not come as a huge surprise. Papers that have been released by the National Archives reveal the extent of their willingness to give assistance to Germany during the war, help that would have been regarded as treason. Creasy, a farmer and land owner – he owned more than 80 farms in East Anglia, had been elected as a councillor for Eye as a representative of the British Union of Fascists and was, to all appearances, unrepentant until his death in 2004. Whilst it’s simplistic to judge all those who were attracted to fascism during the Depression – after all, Aneurin Bevan was briefly a member of Oswald Mosley’s New Party – it’s hard to have any time for the right wingers who remained committed to the cause when the truth about Nazism and the Holocaust was revealed at the end of the Second World War. Like the people who remained in the Communist Party after 1956, a defence of naïveté was no longer credible.

There’s no real evidence that fascism, or Mosley’s version of it, was ever very popular among the working people of East Anglia. In fact, at this time, the area from which a great deal of left wing radicalism had originated – the agricultural workers’ union began in Marsham in Norfolk – was not a very fertile ground for Mosley supporters. Despite some vestiges of support – fascist “lightning flash” symbols as graffiti at Aylsham and Stiffkey in Norfolk, and, anecdotally, at Wortham in Suffolk – it seems that support for the British Union of Fascists was confined to some farmers and landowners, and some of Mosley’s supporters appear to have come into the area hoping to use the grievances of the rural population as a means of recruitment.

Henry Williamson’s home at Stiffkey, Norfolk

The graffiti at Stiffkey was on the back of cottages owned by the writer (author of Tarka the Otter, among other books) Henry Williamson, who farmed there. Williamson, was a member of the BUF, but his politics had been strongly influenced by his harrowing experiences in the trenches during the First World War and, like Bevan, he had been appalled at the treatment of ex-servicemen after the war was over, combined with his inability to succeed as a farmer during the Depression. It is arguable that Williamson’s fragile mental state was exploited by Mosley and his friends. He was recruited by Viscountess Downe of Hillington Hall, near Kings Lynn, a long-standing fascist, later described in government files as “a most enthusiastic admirer of Hitler.” The existence of the graffiti at Aylsham may be connected with Williamson’s circle, although it is interesting that Oswald Mosley’s mother, Maud, an enthusiastic supporter of her son, was living in the town during the 1930s.

Williamson was one of several landowners who was drawn to fascism. In part, this was the result of a dispute at that time between farmers and the Church of England (and hence, presumably, “the Establishment”). It is a curious aspect of East Anglian history from this period, which has become known as the “Tithe War” after the novelist, Doreen Wallace’s book about it. Wallace had married a farmer, Rowland Rash, and their farm at Wortham in Suffolk was at the centre of the dispute. The Church of England was entitled under an obscure law, which was only repealed in the 1970s, known as Queen Anne’s Bounty, to impose a tax on any farmer’s income regardless of the religious faith of the farmer. The act had originally been meant to provide for impoverished clergy but by the time of the Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, many farmers resented it to the point that there was an organised campaign to refuse to pay it. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners ruthlessly pursued those who refused, and in some cases, including at the Rash farm in Wortham, bailiffs were sent in to distrain agricultural produce and household goods. 

This was where the BUF came in. It is still a common tactic of the political right to home in on local issues – as they have done more recently in the North West of England and Rotherham – appearing to take the side of powerless against the government or other authorities. Black-shirted Mosley supporters suddenly appeared in East Anglia to back up the aggrieved farmers and the farm labourers who had been laid off work because of the dispute. Never averse to a punch-up the fascists took the dispute to a new level of violence and acrimony.

The dispute paled into insignificance with the onset of another world war, but it remains something of an anomaly in the history of the British right. It may be that the very limited electoral success of the BUF in East Anglia, that enabled Ronald Creasy to become a councillor, for example, was part of a protest vote, similar to the recent rise of UKIP, by people who feel let down by the mainstream political parties. The overwhelming rejection of right wing politics in the 1945 General Election is probably a better reflection of the views of the East Anglian electorate. North Norfolk, for example, elected Labour MPs, Edwin Gooch and Bert Hazell, from 1945 until 1970. The main support for fascism in England appears to have come -with the possible exception of some urban areas, like the East End of London – from the upper classes. Anti-Semitism and pro-German sentiment was common among the aristocracy, particularly those with military connections. It is among these upper class landowners that the majority of support for Mosley’s fascists came in East Anglia.

Ronald and Rita Creasy were interned during the Second World War, along with Mosley and many other fascists under Defence Regulation 18B. Seeing the new evidence of the lengths that they were prepared to go to in their support for the Nazi regime in Germany, they were probably lucky  to have escaped the death penalty suffered by fellow fascists William Joyce and John Amery, who were both convicted of treason at the end of the Second World War.

The naming of the dead

The recent events to commemorate the beginning of the First World War in 1914 have been very moving, despite the fact that – given the nature of the society we live in – they have been exploited by not only a wide range of political groups, but also by corporations that appear to be able to commodify everything and sell it back to us. I think that the Tesco commemorative pizza probably takes the prize for the most tasteless of all, perhaps literally.

Given the emotion, much of it sentimental but often genuine and heartfelt, that people have expressed about grandfathers and great-grandfathers who died or were injured or traumatised forever by the events of 1914-1918, it strikes me that we find it easier to mourn people who are long gone than to recognise the suffering that is going on around the world right now. That’s true of all kinds of suffering, from people dying in Palestine and Syria to those lives destroyed by poverty, disease, or slavery. We may not share a common culture with many of those people – although I think we’d be surprised how little we have in common with those early twentieth-century war dead too – but what we do share is a common humanity. Sometimes, with all the terrible things that are going on in the world, it’s hard to hold on to that.

One thing in particular has struck me today with all the discussion about alleged corruption at FIFA connected with the next two World Cup final tournaments, particularly in Qatar. Many people who are better qualified and more knowledgeable than I am will be able to discuss the machinations at high levels in football administration, so I’d like to put a word in for the people who really matter. They have not been completely forgotten, and they are often mentioned in reports or newspaper articles about what’s wrong with football at a global level but they mainly feature as statistics, nameless and about as recognisable as a pile of spent matches. Not, as they should be, as individuals, as human beings, as real people, with real lives and families who loved them and grieve for them.

These are the people who have been killed in Qatar, building the infrastructure necessary for the World Cup tournament in 2022. Dozens of articles and blogs have been written about the inhuman treatment these workers receive, the appalling conditions they have to endure, and the rape and sexual abuse of women that resulted in the Nepal government banning women under 30 from even travelling to work in Doha. I think what disturbs me the most is that many of these articles and reports include the information that “an estimated 4,000 workers will die” on the Qatari World Cup project. So we can predict their deaths and still we do nothing.

FIFA has investigated itself and pronounced that it’s all ethical. Some vague promises have been made by the Qatari government that conditions will improve. No-one believes either of those things, probably not even the people who have written them. There has been, and there will continue to be, a great deal of hand-wringing, but people will continue to suffer and die. Perhaps it’s easier to think of these deaths, and all the other concomitant suffering, in terms of figures. It’s easy, for example, to say how good it is that only eight workers died building the stadia for this year’s World Cup in Brazil. Eight certainly sounds better than 4,000. Only eight bereaved families. Good on us.

It is simply easier to turn our faces away. After all, how are we responsible? How can we change things? It’s not in our power, is it? What have we to do with the 1,200 odd labourers who have died already, or the 4,000 plus who will lose their lives making those fantastical arenas in which football matches will be played to thrill and entertain people the world over?

In 2000/2001, I was privileged to work on a project that put photographs of all Norfolk’s dead from the First World War online. I read the brief biographical notes on the back of each photograph and looked into the eyes of the young soldiers, their open, honest gaze so much more compelling than the ubiquitous, vacuous-but-knowing, selfies of today. Learning about those young men, looking at their faces, reading about their parents, their brothers and sisters, their children, made more of an impression on me than all the statistics, documentaries and history books that I’ve ever read, and it has stayed with me. I wonder if, perhaps, we could humanise the suffering that is going on in Doha in the same way, if we knew about the people who are dying, knew their names, how old they were, where they were from, what they looked like. If we could do that, would we be more inclined to try to do something to stop it going on? The death toll, and the suffering is not on the scale of the First World War, of course, but across the world the same iniquities mean that we can multiply the Qatar statistics many times over.

The naming of the dead, after all, is fundamental to our acts of remembrance from those recorded on the Menin Gate to the names of those who died at Hillsbrough in 1989 or at the World Trade Centre in 2001. I thought it might be a good and even a useful idea to try to include the names of those who had died working on the 2022 World Cup here. The Pravasi Nepali Coordination Commmittee (PNCC) has published a list of all the 138 Nepali workers who have died in Qatar, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to find it anywhere, and there are so few newspaper articles that include any information about the people involved – this piece in the Daily Record is an exception – that I can only offer this one example, from an article in the Guardian,  – about Ganesh Bishwakarma, who died at the age of 16, of cardiac arrest while working in Qatar – as a kind of symbolic representative, like an unknown soldier in the battle against global, corporate greed, of loss, and a reminder of our indifference.

I don’t think what I have written, or the fact that a few more people will know that Ganesh Bishwakarma lived on this planet for 16 years, will make any difference or change anyone’s mind. Ultimately, we want to be entertained more than anything else, and like debauched Romans watching slave gladiators fighting to the death, we will inevitably give Ganesh’s successors the thumbs down.

 

 

 

 

“The best British football manager ever” – Alf Ramsey

Alf Ramsey celebrating winning the Championship in 1962. Photograph copyright David Kindred kindred-spirit.co.uk

The World Cup finals are always accompanied by a glut of retrospectives, and it seems inevitable that there will be references to the only man who ever guided England to win that trophy, Sir Alf Ramsey. Unfortunately it’s equally certain that those references will for the most part be clichéd and predictable: Ramsey’s accent, the elocution lessons, his reputation as a private, uncommunicative man with little sense of fun and no ability to relate to others. Worse still, though, it appears that many writers consider his achievements on the football field to be insignificant or that they’ve been overrated in some way. Somehow, it seems, golden boy Bobby Moore won the World Cup all by himself or England won the World Cup despite Alf Ramsey rather than because of him. His achievements in club football  are often overlooked too but I suspect that, for many reasons, he will forever remain the only manager of Ipswich Town ever to achieve the highest award in English football.

Sadly the first two mentions of Sir Alf that I’ve seen in the run-up to Brazil 2014, both by writers I admire very much – Barney Ronay of The Guardian and the incomparable Danny Baker, in Brushing Up on the World Cup, a comedy clips show – resorted to this lazy stereotype. Ronay even failed to mention that Ramsey had won the trophy in 1966, as if it’s some minor detail, while praising Alf’s predecessor as England manager, Walter Winterbottom, who – not to put too fine a point on it – won, appropriately enough, sweet FA.

Researching for a chapter on Sir Alf Ramsey for my book about the history of Ipswich Town FC, I read everything that I could find about the man and also spoke to a number of people who had met or knew him: someone who as a small boy knocked on the door of Alf’s house in Ipswich to ask for his autograph, the woman who was his secretary for his entire time at Ipswich Town, ex-footballers who played for him. Every one spoke of his kindness, courtesy and love of the game.

The contrast between the Alf that they spoke of and the cold, detached and rather unknowable figure depicted in the books and newspaper articles that were written during his lifetime is remarkable. Yet frequently, as well as invariably talking about Ramsey’s shyness, his detachment, the regret that they could never quite get to know him, people also spoke warmly of the respect and love they felt for him – and in several cases they actually used the word love. These were (mostly) men of my father’s generation, men who would rarely, if ever, speak openly about their feelings especially towards other men. One example – and it’s quite typical – is Alan Ball, who was in Ramsey’s England squad for many years, and said: “I loved him to death. He was very, very special in my life.”

Most biographies and articles about Ramsey, however, portray a quite different individual. One in particular, by Max Marquis, is a clear and obvious attempt to destroy the man’s reputation and it was published while Ramsey was still alive. I enjoy a good hatchet job as much as the next woman (see Taylor Parkes on Tim Lovejoy in When Saturday Comes for one of the best) but Marquis seemed to have an agenda to bring Ramsey down. Perhaps it’s just that thing foreigners notice about the British, that we have a need to destroy anyone who is successful, to point out that they have feet of clay. Perhaps it was more personal than that. Whatever, his motivation, it makes painful reading.

Alf Ramsey was born in Dagenham, then a small village, in 1920. When interviewed he said that his family “were not exactly wealthy.” This was a characteristic understatement on Ramsey’s part, and like his much-quoted reply to a question about where his parents lived (“I believe they live in Dagenham.”) is often used as evidence of an almost eccentric desire to hide his origins. I don’t believe that this was an attempt on his part to cover up the poverty of his background or some kind of snobbish dismissal of his folks by a self-made man. Ramsey was a diffident person who disliked speaking to the press, and some of the things that he said may simply have resulted from a desire to protect his family from unwanted intrusion.

There may be more to it, however. Ramsey’s grandparents came from Suffolk and Essex and were agricultural labourers. His father had a smallholding and sold straw and hay. Like many farmworkers, they moved around quite frequently. People had to go where the work was. This may be the reason that as a young man, including when he was a professional footballer, Alf had been given the nickname of Darkie, which apparently referred to the fact that many people thought that he was from a Romani (or gypsy) family. There is no evidence that the Ramseys, or his mother’s family, the Bixbys, were Romani, but nevertheless this may have caused him to be a little more reticent about his background than he might have been. Let’s not pretend that attitudes towards travellers were particularly liberal in the 1950s and 1960s.

There is another reason, however, why Alf Ramsey may have wanted to be a little bit discreet about his family background. He had three brothers, Len, Cyril and Albert. Alf learned to play football with his brothers as a schoolboy in Dagenham. Albert, was a little older than Alf, according to the Leo McKinstry in his biography, was usually known by his nickname “Bruno,” and was a heavy drinker and gambler, who kept greyhounds. “Bruno’s disreputable life would cause Alf some embarrassment,” according to McKinstry.

There’s a further possible reason for Alf’s growing detachment, and this is speculation on my part, but like many professional footballers in the days when they played with those leaden old footballs, he would eventually suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. His mother, Florence had the same illness. Although Alf was only formally diagnosed with the disease in the 1990s, who knows what effect it might have had upon his personality and behaviour?

How the Alf Ramsey of the media stereotype managed to get along with the notoriously bibulous Cobbold family when he went to manage Ipswich Town at Portman Road is uncertain. He was never an unsociable man during his time in football though, and was often photographed at parties. One of Alf’s former players at Ipswich told me that Ramsey always wanted his players to have fun, even though he didn’t want to join them himself. He felt that encouraging his players to go out and have a good time was an important part of building team spirit. Latterly, Ramsey has been criticised for coming down hard on his England players for over-indulging, but it has since transpired that some of them had serious problems with alcohol. It would have been odd if he had turned a blind eye to that as the manager of a national football team.

What’s clear is that Ramsey always wished to ensure that his players were protected from the attentions of the media but also given all the credit for any success that they might have. When Ipswich Town won the Championship in 1962, the football correspondent of The Times wrote: “The players, called from their humble dressing room, did a lap of honour almost embarrassed by all the attention; and an incessant chant rose for the man who had quietly planned this remarkable feat in the background.”

One of Ramsey’s best players at Ipswich Town, Jimmy Leadbetter, said: “He did not want any praise. When people congratulated him, he gave all the credit to the players.”

A story that has often been told but is still endearing is that when all the celebrations of that great Championship victory for Ipswich were over and everyone had gone home, Alf’s chairman John Cobbold found him sitting alone in a completely deserted, dark Portman Road, staring out over the pitch. Without a word, Ramsey handed Cobbold his jacket, walked down onto the pitch and ran a silent lap of honour, alone.

When researching my book almost all the photographs that I could find of Alf showed him smiling. He seems to have been particularly happy when coaching, or with his players. He mistrusted the media and this may not have helped him, particularly after he fell foul of the Football Association and the ridiculous Harold Thompson who appeared to have had a vendetta against him following an incident when Ramsey – once again trying to protect his players – asked him not to smoke a cigar in front of the England team.

To this day, the media continue to use a stereotypical – and I think innacurate – portrayal of Alf Ramsey and that makes it difficult for many people to see beyond the suit and the clipped, artificial accent. He should be judged as a man of his time, the era of National Service, of post-war austerity, of overt and often cruel class distinction. It’s unhelpful to impose the attitudes of our own time. A quiet man from a working-class background, in a society where there was a great deal of snobbery and deference, might be forgiven for taking elocution lessons, or for being a little bit reticent about his origins. The men in blazers at the FA were very powerful people and, indeed, they never quite accepted Alf Ramsey – partly because of his background but also because he did something that someone from his class was not supposed to do. He stood up to them.

In the end, Thompson had his revenge. Ramsey was treated so shabbily by the Football Association that when he died there was no FA representation at his private funeral at St. Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich. According to The Guardian, his widow had “in effect told the Football Association… to go jump in the Thames.” It did not add that Lady Vicki’s  instruction – had it actually been uttered – would have been accompanied by the loud cheers of every Ipswich Town fan in the country. Typically, the BBC – part of the same Establishment as those officials at Lancaster Gate – reported this as Sir Alf’s “last snub” to the FA.

The prevailing view in the 21st century appears to be that Ramsey’s achievements were not so remarkable, that perhaps after all he was only building on the work of his predecessors at Ipswich (Scott Duncan) and England (Walter Winterbottom) but as any Ipswich Town fan will tell any Norwich City supporter: it’s what’s in the trophy cabinet that counts in the end. Bobby Robson who also achieved great things for both Ipswich Town and England, declared that Sir Alf Ramsey was the “greatest British football manager ever.” Who are we to demur?