An upper lip of remarkable stiffness

At the Battle of Waterloo Lord Fordyce of Crote had the misfortune to be struck by a cannon ball that severed his left leg below the knee. He turned to the Duke of Wellington and said “Gad Sir! My leg’s off. That’s going to make it damn tricky to play cricket.” Trapped beneath the peak of K2 by a four-day blizzard Sir Hugh Bermondsey recorded in his diary “Still chilly out. Cursed bad luck we forgot to bring that extra 6 ounces of tea. Leg fell off from frostbite this morning.” Surrounded by an entire division of Japanese infantry on the Burma peninsular Corporal Bert Allsop of the 9th London Rifles spent six days in a foxhole with the enemy only yards away. On the morning of the seventh day he poked his head above the parapet and shouted “‘Ere, any of you Nips got a lighter I could borrow, only the bleedin’ flint’s gone on mine?”

Why am I spinning these tall tales? Because I promised to write a post about the much misunderstood, and occasionally maligned, notion of British reserve and coolness. The easiest way to open a window onto this complex phenomenon, which lies at the heart of the British self image, is through the internationally known cliché of the stiff upper lip. In case you’ve never heard of it, let me explain. In the 1940s and 50s it was almost impossible to have a conversation without including the words “stiff upper lip,” I know – I’ve seen the movies. Any kind of adversity or misfortune was automatically responded to with phrases such as “Never mind lad. Worse things happen at sea. Chin up, stiff upper lip. Keep a straight bat and you’ll be fine” followed by a curt nod or, in extreme cases such as the loss of a major body part, a short pat on the upper arm (where present). Reluctance to display emotion in the face of extreme misfortune (or extreme good fortune) is the first key element of British cool.

Is this because we’re unemotional and icy-hearted creatures? No, in fact it’s because we’re exactly the opposite. The British are sentimental, romantic, and softhearted to an absurd degree. We are hypersensitive to the suffering or joy of others to the extent that it’s actually unbearable. We’re also extremely polite and, consequently, don’t like to upset others by pouring our own emotions out for all to see. Also, we don’t like wasting time on the bleedin obvious. As the wounded airman lies in his hospital bed hovering on the point of death his wing commander says “Chin up lad, we’ll have you up and about and chasing skirt in no time” meaning “You know you’re dying and I know you’re dying but if I actually come out and say it that would be a hell of a downer for everyone and I would end up as a useless emotional wreck.” “Right ho skipper” croaks the wounded airman “I hardly ever used that half of my body anyway” meaning “I know that you know I’m dying but thanks for not mentioning it and bringing me down.” We can’t let ourselves go emotionally because the result would be an utter chaos of weeping, wailing, and shouting bedlam like, I don’t know, Italy or somewhere.

A classic British wartime poster. In my opinion the “Keep calm” part is superfluous.

The stiff upper lip is a cornerstone of British civilization. It’s a social code that allows us to comfort and sympathize with each other without actually going through the tedious business of saying so. The only area in which the stiff upper lip breaks down entirely is in the British relationship to animals. For the stiff-upper-lip policy to work, both sides must be able to say the right things. Animals can’t. This is why the, allegedly, cold British are completely helpless emotional wrecks when it comes to the question of suffering animals. David Stirling, founder of the SAS, shed not one tear nor uttered one anguished cry during four years of unbelievably stressful combat behind enemy lines in North Africa and Italy. When his pet Labrador died, however, he cried like a baby and took to his bed for four days. This story isn’t actually true but any British person would accept it’s likelihood without blinking. The same thing applies to children.

The second key element to British cool is understatement. This is what makes British cool golden. The idea is that in extreme circumstances one deflates the anguish or horror of the situation by relating it to a mundane or domestic situation. This is what I was getting at in the examples that opened this post. Leg off – how will I play cricket?. Freezing to death – I wish I’d bought more tea and, by the way, parts of my body are falling off. Imminent death by bayonet charge – damn, bloody lighter isn’t working. For reasons that I am completely incapable of explaining the British have a pathological hatred of the grand gesture or the intellectual stance. In cliché-land an example would look like this:

Walking toward the guillotine Pascal and Peter are given the chance to say their last words:

Pascal (comedy cliché Frenchman): I die for the liberty of France, for love, and for the glory of freedom!!
Peter: Do try not to get blood on the shirt. I only had it laundered Monday.

Pascal is saying… well actually I don’t know ‘cus I’m not French, but that’s the kind of thing a British person would expect him to say. Peter is saying “You may be about to cut my head off but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you know that this bothers or even interests me in any way.” We are essentially intensely private and stubborn bastards. This is why the idea of identity cards and carrying your passport around in your pocket appalls us so much. It’s just not on. When it is eventually foisted on us, however, we won’t riot or shout in the streets – we’ll find some quiet and inoffensive way to make it mean nothing and carry on as usual.

The taste for understatement extends to every level of British culture. Vernacular British English is littered with phrases of understatement that we use without even thinking about them. “Not bad” is high praise, “Not bad at all” is probably the highest praise you can get. “A bit chilly” becomes properly pertinent when the temperature sinks below -20. “A little damp” is best used when you are up to your neck in a millennial flood.

By the way all these things apply ten-fold to positive situations. There is no greater pleasure to a British person than to experience a massive stroke of good luck, such as winning a lottery, simply because it gives them the opportunity to say something understated such as “Oh yes, it’s really quite nice” or “Now I can buy that hatchback I always wanted.”

The Death of British Cool?

1. The Death of Diana has been widely and frequently touted as marking the end of the kind of stiff-upper-lip understatement that I’ve been discussing, and not without good reason. The public outpouring of emotion that accompanied the funeral of the former Princess of Wales was utterly revolutionary and highly confusing in Britain. It was our Kennedy moment. Everybody remembers where they were when they heard the news and everybody remembers being bemused about the reactions we saw on TV. In fact I think the whole thing fits very neatly into the accepted cannon of British behavior. Diana was seen, especially at the time of her death, as an innocent, slightly lost, child-like figure. In other words, she was outside the normal range of stiff-upper-lip territory. If it had been Prince Charles in that car instead of her we would have had a deeply satisfying formal funeral with shovelfuls of understatement and straight-backed saluting. It would have done us the world of good. But because it was the child-like, informal, confused, ex-princess we lost it big time.

Diana, former Princess of Wales. An innocent according to the rule of British cool.

Compare the Hyde Park IRA bomb of 1982. Soldiers were killed yes, but the thing that made this one stand out above so many others was the slaughter of the horses. Ask any British person who was around at the time and they will remember the horror of half a dozen dead horses covered by tarpaulins on the street, while a hundred other outrages are forgotten (I’m blubbing like a four-year-old just thinking about it).

Slaughtered horses covered by blankets and jackets. The dead people have been taken away.

2. James Bond. Many non-British people assume that Bond is the epitome of British cool. In fact he’s just a psychopath. The whole point about Bond is that he’s emotionally burned out. He’s not being cool, he’s just incapable of feeling. This is what makes him such a compelling figure for the British. He’s the prefect Englishman (deliberate lapse into regionalism) but fatally flawed. He can use a woman as a bullet shield because be just doesn’t care. He acts exactly as a cool and understated British hero should but we can see it’s actually horribly, eerily, because be can’t feel anyway. To a thinking British audience he’s kind of like a zombie – just like a living person, but no empathy. Bond, the screen hero, was invented in the 1960s at a time when the British were going through a tremendous identity crises. The empire was disappearing and Britain was trying to come to terms with being a medium-sized economic power rather than Empress of the Waves. Bond was the perfect and uncanny personification of this period. The fact that he has become an international icon is completely beside the point for us. The recent films have been a source of acute embarrassment for every right-thinking Englishman. Bond has cried at the death of girlfriends and screamed at other emotional discomforts. Horrible, horrible, horrible… The new Daniel Craig incarnation shows promise of perhaps getting back to the point, but we shall see.

Bond. The psychopathic, atypical British hero.

Notes and Queries:
1. Everything I’ve said here is immediately and completely vulnerable to counter-examples. As polishpress mentioned in a recent comment, these are our ‘cultural scripts.’ This is how we imagine ourselves responding to extreme situations and, more importantly, this is the kind of behavior that automatically wins respect in British culture. Are we actually like this? No, of course not, but this is what we wish we could be in a perfect world and the ghosts of this fantasy effect us everyday and in every way.

2. The death of British servicemen is not to be taken as an event of lesser importance than the death of British servicemen’s horses but the latter seemed to me to have a greater emotional impact. I don’t know what that says about either.