England is a lucky country but doesn’t realise it
We seem to like playing the underdog, but our footballers have discovered a pluck our politicians lack
What a wonderful thing it is to be an underdog! If you lose, you have a ready-made excuse, and if you win, the glory is double. Being the favourite means a win is greeted with a shrug, and a defeat with derision. So it’s not surprising that we love an underdog, especially when it’s us.
While the underdog spirit has been on full display during the current World Cup, it’s not solely an English characteristic. The Americans “remember the Alamo”, when a small garrison was wiped out by the Mexican army in 1836. The French Foreign Legion remembers a detachment being slaughtered at Camerone (again by the Mexicans, oddly enough) in 1863. The Serbs remember the bloody defeat at Kosovo in 1389. There are any number of glorious defeats to choose from.
We English do, nevertheless, have a pretty enviable underdog tradition. The barely remembered defeat at Maldon in 991 (that was the Danes) was the subject of an early patriotic poem. Hastings in 1066 – well, the Normans cheated by firing arrows in the air. At Agincourt in 1415 “We few, we happy few” (as Shakespeare put it) won against huge odds – the underdogs triumphant. Winston Churchill brilliantly revived the idea of The Few in 1940 for the RAF.
Between ourselves, the memories may be a little questionable. Were Harold’s men at Hastings just hung over, as one story had it? The lumbering French knights at Agincourt had little chance against longbows. And wasn’t it really the Luftwaffe that lacked the planes and the pilots?
No. Let’s stick to the underdog version. There’s no glamour in winning when you’re stronger.
Our ancestors were supposed to fancy underdogs. They rallied to “Gallant little Belgium” in 1914. They admired the Poles, the Hungarians, the Italians, the Turks – all those fighting against bigger opponents.
Unless, of course, the bigger opponent was us: the Irish or the Indians rarely got much sympathy. Sometimes the risks of empire allowed the Brits to play the underdog themselves, when isolated detachments got wiped out or survived by the skin of their teeth, as at Rorke’s Drift in 1879, when a handful of redcoats beat off a Zulu regiment.
Still, it was on the whole difficult for our Victorian forebears, rich and powerful as they were, to play the underdog. Their usual tendency was to emphasise their power, leadership and greatness to a degree that now makes us squirm.
As one school textbook put it in 1860: “There are no people like the British …the greatest and most highly civilised people that the world ever saw.” Even then they had occasional jitters about being invaded by the French, the Russians or later the Germans. This was why the War Office repeatedly stopped attempts to dig a Channel Tunnel.
There seems to have been a change around the end of the 19th century, when the British began to worry that their power and civilisation was on the wane. Rudyard Kipling put it most memorably: “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”
It felt like downhill all the way after that. The Germans and the Americans invaded our markets and started empires of their own. The First World War was a mighty shock to all its participants. The interwar period saw Britain trying vainly to appease its potential enemies rather than deter them. During the Second World War, many people felt we had been rescued by others, particularly the Americans and the Russians.
After the war, the Empire broke up and, for many of its rulers – more than for its peoples – everything seemed to be falling apart. The economy was failing, the political system was unmanageable. The ruling class itself was mocked not only as a failure but as an absurdity. It was tempting for clever people to join the chorus of the mockers, rather than be caught among the mocked. The Scots had a way out through nationalism. The English, in contrast, began their “cultural cringe”: better to talk ourselves down before anyone else does. And sport was mocked like the rest.
We know now – or we should – that all this was an absurd exaggeration. The United Kingdom remains today what it has been throughout its history: one of the richest and most powerful states in the world. England is a lucky country that doesn’t know its luck. It is even world class in an extraordinary range of sports.
Still, feeling like the underdog is something the English seem to enjoy. Sometimes it excites and stimulates us, as now with the World Cup. Sometimes it leads to cynical defeatism – dare I say, as over Brexit? In both cases, I hope we’re not too dependent on the other side conceding penalties. Scoring from the spot requires nerve, determination, self-confidence and some knowledge of the other side’s psychology. Our footballers seem to be acquiring it. I’m not so confident of our Government.