Ruling out ‘Rule! Britannia!’

There are, to my mind, any number of good reasons to kill off James Thomson’s words for Arne’s tune.

First, it was straightforward image-burnishing for the Prince of Wales (né Friedrich Ludwig of Brunswick-Lüneburg) who had a ‘difficult’ relationship with his dad, King George. OK: don’t they all. Thomson was a thrusting go-getter, anxious to build his own reputation as a good patriotic Brit rather than a minority and difficult Scot.

Second, the anthem was calculated to build on Admiral Vernon’s capture of Porto Bello (about the only bit of ‘The War of Jenkins’ Ear’ I remember). Apart from giving the damned Dagoes a bashing, the popularity of Vernon’s exploit was good news to the planters of the American colonies, now able to import slaves without Spanish interference or middlemen, and therefore good for many British traders and merchants.

Third, I don’t see why twenty-first century Brits should be boosted by blatant imperialist twaddle:

To thee belongs the rural reign;
Thy cities shall with commerce shine:
All thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.

Good grief! Any moment now the Gammons will recover the fourth verse of the National Anthem:

Lord, grant that Marshal Wade,
May by thy mighty aid
Victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush
Rebellious Scots to crush!
God save the King!

Fourth, in 1740 Thomson was selling his conceit of never, never, shall be slaves. By the law of 1606, tightened further in 1661, miners and salters, coal-heavers and bargemen (women included) in Thomson’s native Scotland were in life-long servitude to the coal-owners, their children obliged to follow along the same trade. From 1672 the coal-owners became entitled to conscript vagabonds and beggars and anyone in the Houses of Correction.

Burning bright

Long, lubricated lunch at the Tiger Inn, Coneythorpe.

5W+H

• The Who? was the Lady in my Life, my daughter and her three sons.
• The What? is because it’s high summer: they are off for a few days holiday starting tomorrow..
• The When? is because one grandson has properly delivered his requisite quote of A-grades for his chosen university place, the second grandson is about to clean up on GCSEs, and the youngest is always ready for fodder.
• Which also defines the Why?
• The How? is by car: us from York, them from Harrogate, to meet somewhere vaguely in between.
• The Where? is a less-frequented bit of North Yorkshire. And that’s what, for the next bit, I’ll go with.

Coneythorpe

The name is a distractor.

Until I looked, I had assumed the connection was rabbits.

One of the main shopping streets here in York is ‘Coney Street’, linking Lendal and Spurriergate in a direct, but not straight line. Spurriergate (remembering gate is nowt to do with southern ‘gates’, but Nordic gata or street) is only sixty yards or so long, but makes one wonder just how many spur-makers one town needed. Lendal gets its name either from  a Viking tennis-player or as a corruption of ‘landing’ — look past the York Guildhall, and you’ll see it’s still the place where the river cruisers moor up. So, logically, just about recalling the days before Myxmatosis, when rabbits were a staple food for Norfolk, I was vaguely assuming that Coney Street was an elongated rabbit-meat market.

But, inevitably, not.

It’s a corruption of koning or some variant thereof, which is instantly recognisable in German König. So ‘King’s street’ (indicatively the Mansion House and the one-time administrative HQ for the city is right on the spot). My romantic self reckons that the southern gate of Roman Eboracum was about this spot, with the main Roman road south (Stonegate is the ancient Via Principalis) crossing the river and heading towards Calcaria (now Tadcaster) and then all the way to Rome. So, an obvious place for an Imperator to base himself, and for Ivar Ragnarsson to move in.

So here I am at the Tiger Inn in ‘King’s thorpe’.

‘Thorp’, as we all know, being the Nordic version of the Germanic dorf. Wherever one finds a ‘thorpe’, one is in Danelaw. Get past the interminably gossipy, but great fun, Wife of Bath‘s Prologue, and she starts her Tale proper. She complains, “Nobody see fairies anymore”. The confounded friars have purged them all, by

serchen every lond and every streem …
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures
Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,
Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes —
This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes.

Any wandering friar who made it to Coneythorpe would have travelled a fair bit. I find it hard to impose medieval drovers’ roads on the modern Ordnance Survey, but there seems to be a possible coming up from Knaresborough (‘Bridleway only. No public access for vehicles’), through Goldaborough, across the modern A59, take the left bend at Flaxby, past the Tiger Inn and all stations to Arkendale and the Blue Bell. Just as the River Nidd, with remarkably few crossing points, must have been a divider in earlier periods, so the A1(M) is to the east of Coneythorpe today. Who needs a Berlin Wall, when road engineers include it as part of the brief?

The last time …

… I was at the Tiger Inn, middle of the Yorkshire grandsons was still at junior school. This week he is waiting for his GCSE results in twelve subjects (can that be correct?). And totally insouciant with it. He tells me his A-level choices are Eng Lit, History, Art and Politics. He is already contemplating doing his special study on the fall of the Ottoman Empire. His elder brother has — despite the algorithms of the Department and OfQual — cleaned up with two A*s and two As at advanced level, and is off to wrangle law at Durham. Right now both are winging their way to Berlin for a bit of Kultur.

Life goes on … especially in places like Coneythorpe.

One-time council houses sell fro over a quarter of a million. One-time barns and granaries have been converted into desirable residences, for multiples of that amount. The BMW, Volvo or Range Rover is ubiquitous. And the Tiger Inn, once the haunt of horny-handed sons-of-toil, does a good pub-lunch, with Timothy Taylor Landlord or a red cabernet, and employs half-a-dozen busy ladies. All too ‘based’, too solid to be fayeryes.

ɛdjᵿˈkeɪʃn/ — process of bringing up a child, with reference to forming character, shaping manners and behaviour

As I age, I become more convinced we’ve seen it all before, that political history repeats itself, first as the Book of Revelation, then as the regurgitation of a bad Ruby Murray.

The furore of the weekend involves exam results. We’ve had the A-levels: next week it’s GCSEs. The first infuriated every socially-ambitious student and parent, denied their ‘rightful’ university place. After all, that’s what schools, private tutors, ‘enrichment’ classes for the last dozen years have been working toward.

Next week’s GCSE may not be quite so Krakatoan: admission to sixth-forms is at the discretion of schools, and tutors know (or think they do) the potential of sixteen-year-olds.

Even so, we have been here before.

Back in the ’60s the burgeoning middle-class took the hump about sheeping-and-goating in the Eleven-Plus. After all, no loving parent wants their little goat to be denied sheep-hood at the local grammar, especially when the neighbours delivered their brats through the selection process.

Goodness knows, there was any number of problems with the Eleven-Plus. There were always more places more boys than girls. There was a built-in discriminator to prevent girls grabbing their dues. Thus the early ‘comprehensives’, often smuggled through the education committee to avoid designating their new-build as a sec. mod. And Labour councils discovered that the new ‘comprehensive’ was a popular choice, when parents were asked to opt for the alternative.

Margaret Thatcher, in Ted Heath’s government, transformed more Sec Mods into Comps than any other Education Secretary. That was partly the doctrine of the times: it was also a recognition the Tory wannabes wanted that change. It meant, though, that the sheeping-and-goating took place at 16+, by inventing a two-tier examination system (GCE for the grammar school, and CSE for the lumpens).

Next up, the debate about ‘average’. The cut-off for pass/fail became 60% — let’s not get too involved in how that 60% was calculated or — in this weekend’s vocabulary — algorithm-ed. Since when did 60/40 determine ‘average’? But they got away with that sleight-of-terminology — until they didn’t.

So the next ‘innovation’ was ‘norm-basing’. Rather than 60% sheep and 40% goats based on a normal distribution (itself a reaction of how the English economy was moving from industrial to service employment), we had heavy documents identifying those ‘norms’ to the satisfaction of Secretaries of State. Notice one prime exemplar of ‘grade-inflation’: in 1964 the Ministry of Education (itself an upgrade by the 1944 Act from the mere ‘Board of Eduction’) became a Department, dignified with a Secretary of State.

‘Norm-basing’ involved tick-the-box, get-the-grade. Objective rather than subjective, one might think. But not necessarily ‘a good thing’, because an awful lot of goats became promoted to semi-sheep-hood. Teachers are cute: once they learn the boxes-to-tick, they set about subverting the system by showing the short-cuts. Again, that wouldn’t have mattered had the previous operations applied: academic sheep to universities (and the unis weighed by norms), sheep/goat hybrids to polytechnics. The life-long discriminator became sheep marked ‘BA’ (or MA for Oxbridge) or BSc, but not-quite-sheep with Higher Diplomas. I’ll leave others to decide which group worked harder for their bits of paper, and then employment.

Along comes another sheep-dipping: transform all those polys into universities.

Nobody was wholly convinced.

A former poly doing ‘applied’ and vocational stuff was a poly in all-but-name. Take a look at rankings of UK universities: Oxbridge, Imperial, UCL, Edinburgh are generally top dogs. The other end is where we find the likes of the University of Bedfordshire (né Luton Modern School and Technical Institute), the University of East London (a paternity back to West Ham Technical Institute), and London Met (Northern Poly). The upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie may not have these lower-status joints as UCCA preferences, but they seem to deliver.

I have a personal convention: at this stage of my argument I revert to Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (and that’s 1903), The Superman, in one reading (and a fair one), is Enry Straker, the chauffeur:

TANNER: A little moderation, Tavy, you observe. You would tell me to draw it mild, But this chap has been educated. What’s more, he knows that we haven’t. What was that board school of yours, Straker?

STRAKER: Sherbrooke Road.

TANNER: Sherbrooke Road! Would any of us say Rugby! Harrow! Eton! in that tone of intellectual snobbery? Sherbrooke Road is a place where boys learn something; Eton is a boy farm where we are sent because we are nuisances at home, and because in after life, whenever a Duke is mentioned, we can claim him as an old schoolfellow.

STRAKER: You don’t know nothing about it, Mr. Tanner. It’s not the Board School that does it: it’s the Polytechnic.

TANNER: His university, Octavius. Not Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Dublin or Glasgow. Not even those Nonconformist holes in Wales. No, Tavy. Regent Street, Chelsea, the Borough—I don’t know half their confounded names: these are his universities, not mere shops for selling class limitations like ours. You despise Oxford, Enry, don’t you?

STRAKER: No, I don’t. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the Polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?

There speaks Shaw, the Fabian socialist and (briefly) member of the London County Council.

Scratch an educator, find a social-engineer

I have spent much of my life ‘educating’ and socialising students to ‘rise’ above their allowed stations. Those that made it, in one way of another, are the successes. Not all those warming successes were Archaeology at Cambridge, English at Warwick — there was also the one whose greatest wish was an engineering apprenticeship with London Transport.

My personal inner sense of worthiness derives, thereby, from beating the system.

English education is little to do with schooling, or qualifications. It is all about social stratification and ‘class’. How else did this present underqualified Cabinet rise, like mushrooms, to such dignity and importance?