Why DID we British lose the stiff upper lip?
How our most patriotic generation don’t love EVERYTHING about the nation we’ve become
THEY lived through two world wars to become our greatest generation. Now, in a new book by STEVE HUMPHRIES and SUE ELLIOTT, they are sharing their memories. Yesterday, they recalled the extreme poverty and grief they endured. Today, in our final extract, they tell what makes them such proud patriots.
PERHAPS what most differentiates and distinguishes the generation of Britons born in the early part of the 20th century is their patriotism.
Austin Byrne, 92, a World War II veteran, has a flagpole in his garden in Bradford and raises it for Remembrance week every November. ‘I go out each morning and salute it, say my prayers and bow to it and sing Land Of Hope And Glory. I’ll keep doing it as long as I can.’
In children like him, parents, school and media instilled a strong sense of nationhood, of belonging to a country at the heart of a great empire of which they should be proud.
They were made to feel part of something bigger than self and family, even if this offered no tangible help in times of trouble. As Charles Chilton — born into poverty in 1917 and brought up in a tenement in London’s King’s Cross — recalled: ‘ Most of us didn’t have soles to our shoes and some of us didn’t have shirts on our backs, but we were proud of being British.’
Patriotism was important to all those we interviewed for our BBC TV series Britain’s Greatest Generation. As a child, Diana Athill felt sorry for people from other countries because Britain was ‘the best country in the world’.
This was reinforced by maps showing large areas of the world coloured salmon pink — the colour of the British Empire — something mentioned by many of this generation. This pride and strong sense of belonging gave confidence and self-assurance, and it still does.
For this generation, the Empire is still a potent memory and part of their early lives. After more than 80 years, Enid Wenban still knows the date of Empire Day, once an annual occasion for patriotic ceremony and celebration for all schoolchildren across Britain’s colonies and dominions. ‘It’s May 24, of course,’ she said. ‘We were very proud of leading the Empire.’
The same patriotic sentiments were imbued in those who came as refugees during the turbulent years between the wars. Dorothy Bohm, a Jew from Eastern Europe, declared her ‘tremendous love for this wonderful country, for what it stands for, its principles, the humanity compared with other countries’.
She was grateful for how, when the chips were down, Britons responded with generosity and took in many like her. ‘It lets you be, it accepts you. It has much more freedom, and freedom is important.’
Gus Bialick, born in 1914 in London’s East End, the son of Polish immigrants, remembered his father’s pride in being recognised as a British citizen.
‘He was naturalised in 1928 and the first time he went through Customs as an Englishman he held his papers high in the air as he walked straight through without having to queue up with the foreigners. To him that was a wonderful thing.’
GUS added: ‘ He arrived here as a boy from a barbaric nation, to a nation of civilised people. He lived to be 100 and every single day he was here, he loved Great Britain.
‘When your parents are immigrants from an area of the world where the rulers don’t care for their own people, let alone for people of a different religion and a different outlook, you knew that this country stood for something better, and you wanted to be part of it.’
As a second-generation immigrant, Gus Bialick shared his father’s pride when he went to war as a soldier, fighting in North Africa and Italy. ‘We thought of England as our home, the place we were born in and where we wanted to live for the rest of our lives. We knew exactly what we were fighting for.’
The world, of course, has altered much since those days, such sentiments now much rarer. There is no Empire any more, replaced by a Commonwealth of independent states, just one of the many substantial changes that took place in this generation’s lifetime.
After the war, Britain’s preeminent place on the world stage faded, and America and Russia were the new world powers.
Personal goals took the place of national struggle in people’s lives just as the sentimental songs of Vera Lynn gave way to rock ’n’ roll, the Rolling Stones and the My Generation anthem of The Who.
Britain’s moral compass shifted and the certainties the war generation grew up with disappeared. The simple pleasures of family life, of managing on little and making the most of what you had, gave way to conspicuous displays of prosperity.
To the regret of many, divorce became commonplace. Families fractured and re-formed in unfamiliar configurations. With the stigma of illegitimacy lifted, the proportion of unmarried parents rose steadily to approaching 40 per cent by the end of the century.
Looking back on their lives and the many differences between their heyday and now, they come up with some predictable grumbles. They don’t like young people tapping on their mobile phones rather than talking face to face, automated checkouts, waste, politicians.
Joy Lofthouse bemoans a world in which ‘everyone has to open up and express their feelings’. ‘In the war we learned to control our emotions, because you didn’t know a family that hadn’t lost someone. If we’d all expressed our feelings then, I don’t think we’d have ever won the war.’
They fear for their great-grandchildren’s prospects as good, secure jobs become more scarce. They feel the benefits of the welfare state they enjoyed in adult life and relied on in old age seem unlikely to outlast their children’s lifetime, much less their grandchildren’s.
They feel lucky to have had them and regret what they see as the gradual erosion of the New Jerusalem they helped build in the era after World War II. There is sadness, too, that the lessons of the war haven’t been learned.
Some prejudice persists among them but that’s hardly surprising given the habitual and casual racism that was ingrained in British society for so much of their lives, with references to ‘ coons’ and ‘Pakis’ commonplace in everyday life until around the Eighties.
EVEN if expressed in general rather than overtly racist terms, a fear of the incomer is still there beneath the surface. But suspicion of extremism and hatred of oppression eclipses that tradition of fear of the foreign. Fighting a fascist regime and witnessing its vile fruits during the Thirties and Forties had a profound effect. It elicited a strong sense of fair play and the desire to protect the weak from bullies.
The rise of religious intolerance is a particular worry. ‘ Our tolerance allows the intolerance of others,’ is a common view. This concern for the oppressed tempered intolerance, especially when it came to accepting refugees. Though they are still firm patriots, many believe in the idea of Europe as a bulwark against future conflict.
The suggestion the UK should break up is firmly resisted.
For proud Scot Matthew MacKinnon-Pattison, interviewed just before last year’s Scottish Referendum, the idea of ‘my old country’ breaking away was stupid. He couldn’t fathom why they should want to, ‘except greed, hatred or something else’.
‘What good’s it going to do?’ he said. ‘We’re trying to trying to bring countries together. We got into the Eu. We don’t fight Germany any more, we don’t fight France — marvellous! But then you get people wanting to fragment it, break away a little bit here, a little bit there.’
They can be passionate English, Welsh, Scots or Irish but many elderly Britons are proud, still, to be part of the union and many still refer to it as Great Britain, a usage little heard these days.
For this generation, there remains overwhelming pride in what they did in World War II. Russell Margerison recognised that war was ‘a nasty, horrible business, but once you get involved it has to be all out. I would do it all over again.’
They played their part in a momentous struggle, did their best to overcome all obstacles and then went on to help make a better world for their children.
Eileen Younghusband (born 1921) said: ‘Despite all the tragedies and trials and unhappiness we had to face, I’m proud I’m a member of the generation that managed to fight their way through those terrible years and hold our heads high.’
The thought was echoed by 90year-old Gladys Parry: ‘We stood up and we were strong. We still are.’
ADAPTED from Britain’s Greatest Generation by Steve humphries and Sue elliott, published by Random house Books at £18.99 © 2015 Steve humphries and Sue elliott. To buy this book go to mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. The second of the four-part series, Britain’s Greatest Generation, is on BBC2 on Friday at 9pm.