English Page 5

  It was a baptism of fire for a lazy university student. I would spend my week drinking, sleeping and generally missing lectures, and weekends washing the heads (toilets) with a toothbrush and being shouted at by higher ranks. HMS Blazer’s permanent crew were technically lower ranking than us, but we all knew where the authority lay and the regular sailors took great pride in making life as much of a misery as possible.

  Truth be told, I loved the regimen of life aboard a naval vessel. In spite of the storms and the language and the discipline and the sleepless night shifts and the impossible navigation, there was something rather marvellous and English about the Navy. We took our small grey war vessel on foreign deployments as far afield as Norway and Gibraltar, where we would often host foreign powers’ First Sea Lords. I wondered frequently whether they ever realized we were mere university students dressed in our finest officers’ jackets. I shall never forget my time in Dartmouth at the Royal Britannia Naval College. It still gives me tremendous pride that I played a tiny part in our rich naval heritage.

  Throughout all of these maritime experiences, there has been one constant: the Shipping Forecast. I have listened to the Shipping Forecast in most of the regions included in the report. I have been on fishing trawlers, naval warships, yachts and remote islands, listening in to London. Often, the contrast between the conditions in the sea areas referred to and the calm of the BBC studio in which the report is read could not be more marked. There was always something reassuring about the smooth tones of the BBC reader’s voice as it crackled through the ship’s radio delivering the update from the Met Office, but I often wondered whether the reader had any idea under what conditions the words were being listened to.

  While I endured gales, rain and storms, I would imagine the calmness of London. The way the reader announced storm force winds without a hint of worry or drama was always a comfort. The report was utterly literal. Fact. No hype or drama. No jeopardy – that was hidden within the forecast in the numbers of the Beaufort Scale. You never wanted to hear of anything above a 10. The Shipping Forecast above all had the ability to transport me to a different place, more often than not a slightly nicer, calmer one.

  There is a school of thought that the Shipping Forecast is much more than purely weather information. Some consider it poetry; others a national anthem of sorts. However you see it – and poets, musicians, rock bands, comedians, film makers, video game designers continue to draw inspiration from it – the BBC broadcast attracts hundreds of thousands of daily listeners who have no technical need to know their Dogger from their Lundy.

  It is treasured just as it is – from its idiosyncratic vocabulary, whereby winds are either veering (changing clockwise) or backing (changing anti-clockwise), to its sense that there is, beyond the individual stresses and concerns we might ponder as we lie tucked up cosily in bed, a truly wild maritime world out there. Some fans go as far as to describe it as an adult lullaby, a soporific comfort that helps them nod off at the end of a long day. There is no doubt that it has evolved into a quirky but much-loved national institution, as intrinsic as the Houses of Parliament or fish and chips.

  In the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games, the Shipping Forecast was played with the accompaniment of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ to represent Britain’s maritime heritage. Such is its popularity, the BBC iPlayer website retains a collection of humorous and lyrical clips, even a quiz. It’s been read by playwright Alan Bennett. Its form and formulaic language have been borrowed to create a rap version called ‘Snoop Doggy Dogger’ and applied satirically to the world of politics and sport. Artists, musicians, writers, comedians and even politicians have lined up to both satirize and pay tribute to its distinctive tones: these include Seamus Heaney, Blur, Stephen Fry, Frank Muir, Radiohead, British Sea Power and Carol Ann Duffy. And there have been a few celebrity readings, such as that by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who read the forecast in 2011 to raise awareness of Red Nose Day. When it came to his native Humber, he deliberately dropped the ‘H’ and said: ‘’Umber, as we say it up there.’ Once, in 1995, a plan was mooted to move the late-night broadcast back by twelve minutes – prompting a fierce debate in Parliament and fierce newspaper outrage. The Shipping Forecast remained anchored in the schedule at 0048. Everyone, it seems, loves the Shipping Forecast.

  How can I sum up the forecast’s appeal to those who don’t technically need it? Mark Damazer, the Controller of BBC Radio 4, nails it: ‘It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend unless you’re one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.’

  Zeb Soanes, a regular Shipping Forecast reader, who once fulfilled a listener’s wish by delivering the forecast from the top of Orfordness lighthouse, touches on its emotional pull: ‘To the non-nautical, it is a nightly litany of the sea. It reinforces a sense of being islanders with a proud seafaring past. Whilst the listener is safely tucked up in their bed, they can imagine small fishing boats bobbing about at Plymouth or 170ft waves crashing against Rockall.’

  The purpose of the Shipping Forecast is to warn against the hazards of hostile weather. And as such it taps into an ancient impulse. Throughout history, the English have scanned the horizon along the country’s 2,748 miles of coastline on the lookout for perils. We can call upon Shakespeare to express in the most lyrical terms how geography – a sense of place and its attendant climate – makes a people who they are. John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II beautifully crystallizes the English view of their ‘sceptre’d isle’:

  This fortress built by Nature for herself

  Against infection and the hand of war,

  This happy breed of men, this little world;

  This precious stone set in the silver sea,

  Which serves it in the office of a wall,

  Or as a moat defensive to a house.

  There hasn’t been a successful invasion of our shores since 1066 – for 950 years – but still we keep an eye out to guard against threats. These are much more likely to be incoming weather formations than armadas or invading fleets. Our island existence depends on keeping a watchful eye over our waters. The Shipping Forecast subliminally reassures us that someone is doing that.

  The English language is full of vocabulary, phrases and idioms that reveal its people come from maritime stock. For example: the Romans arrived in AD 53, and stayed not just as imperial administrators, but also as traders and tellers of stories of the Christian ‘cult’ of Jesus alongside their pagan deities. A few centuries later, when Christianity had become established, the main body of the churches built all over the country at the centre of communities became known as the nave, from the Latin for ship, navis. The name came as a natural transfer of associated ideas. Like ships that introduced the religion, naves contain a body of people.

  Until mass air travel became the norm in the late 1950s, and the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, marine transport was the only way for anyone to reach the English or for the English to reach the rest of Europe and the world. That’s why maritime trade and the Royal Navy have always had such great importance. We send boats and ships out on missions (naval, commercial, leisure) and receive incoming vessels only by invitation or by arrangement with the harbourmaster.

  And as a nation, we spend a lot of time out on the water. In fine weather there’s nothing the English like more than pootling around in a dinghy or on a raft, feeling the sea air on their face on a bracing coastal walk, or enjoying a bucket and spade holiday on a stretch of sand. To live in a cottage by the sea has long been a dream of those approaching retirement. The fashion for affordable package holidays by the seaside was consolidated when Billy Butlin established a chain of hotels at locations such as Bognor, Blackpool, Skegness, Barry Island, Ayr and Clacton. Our top-rated chefs prize seaweed as ‘sea herbs’ and fight to stop all our hand p
icking of our own supplies. As no one lives more than a hundred miles from the coastline and many rivers have tidal reaches, the screech of seagulls is as familiar as the siren call of the fair-weather ice cream van. The hinterland behind the coastline is dotted with woods, hollows and tunnels romantically suspected to have once served as hiding places for smugglers’ contraband. Nautical novels are noted bestsellers, from C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books to Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-volume Aubrey–Maturin series of novels, set in the early nineteenth century and following the lives and careers of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval physician Dr Stephen Maturin.

  So many quintessentially English passions are built on sea-based stories, from the rock music popularized by pirate radio in the 1960s – broadcast from offshore ships or disused sea forts, providing music for a generation not yet served by legal radio services – to the notion of an ocean cruise as the dream once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Personal challenges and stories revolve around the sea too: to swim the English Channel, to row across the Atlantic, to circumnavigate the British Isles. We are bound to the sea in a way that infuses our whole national mindset.

  Take the fast-food dish we gave to the world: fish and chips. Piping hot fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, doused in salt and vinegar, is what foreigners think we eat outside as a comfort on cold and wintry days. And even today, with the invasion of fast food from America and elsewhere, it is estimated there are still eight fish and chip shops for every McDonald’s.

  Finally, it is impossible to document our English maritime heritage without mention of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. As a child I can remember my pride in raising money for the iconic RNLI. I had one of their famous lifeboat donation tins, which I used to fill over the course of the year. It is almost impossible to visit any beach or coastal village in England without seeing the famous RNLI flag, although I’m sure few of us notice it, because it’s so familiar.

  The RNLI has saved more than 140,000 lives since 1824. Today it is staffed almost exclusively by 4,600 volunteers – who provide search and rescue at sea as well as lifeguard cover at over 150 English beaches. Their work is invaluable in sustaining our proud island nation status.

  Back at Broadcasting House, Chris explains why he thinks the Shipping Forecast is so popular. ‘Many of the names are unfamiliar to people apart from the context of the Shipping Forecast, so it turns our landscape into a slightly ethereal world, inhabited by communities we are connected to but know nothing about. It’s something that binds us together when so much divides us.’

  I’m struck by how true this is. The Shipping Forecast is many things to many people – essential information, a lullaby to send them to sleep, a poem, a song, a comfort in times of stress or danger at sea. Perhaps above all, though, it reminds us who we are: an island people in the Atlantic who naturally, instinctively, look to sea.

  * UTC stands for Universal Co-ordinated Time – the new international term for GMT.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HEROIC FAILURES

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too:

  If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

  Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’

  ‘Success is overrated. We all crave it despite daily evidence that our real genius lies in exactly the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at.’

  Stephen Pile, The Book of Heroic Failures

  Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, but for me there is one hero who defines Englishness. He’s not a lantern-jawed explorer or a brave soldier but a builder and plasterer from Gloucester, Michael Edwards. I have come to meet him in a small coffee shop on Stroud High Street.

  With a rucksack slung over one shoulder, the now clean-shaven Edwards is still instantly recognizable. Nearly thirty years ago, he became an unlikely national hero when he finished last in the 70m and 90m ski jump at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada.

  Eddie looks thinner than I remember him, but then maybe it was all the padding he had to wear during those jumps. Without his moustache he looks slightly younger. He is fit and healthy-looking as he takes off a small day pack and apologises (English tick) for being a little late.

  I’m actually quite star-struck; you see, I really am a child of the Vancouver games. It hit the sweet spot during my adolescence and Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, as he became known, was the hero of the day. I can still remember sitting on Mum and Dad’s bed watching with bated breath as he took to the ski jump. The whole nation held its breath. We never expected him to do well, but as with the weather, we were forever hopeful. Eddie offered us the exoticism of snow and winter and cold combined with his ‘bloke next door’ derring-do. He was a cross between Shackleton and Benny Hill.

  That winter he gave the nation hope. A one-man army batting above his weight. A nation weighed down with sporting failure could only ascend.

  ‘I’ve just been on a cruise,’ he said, explaining his tan. I asked him what he thought it was that made him stand out from the crowd. ‘Being the underdog,’ he replied, ‘they liked the pluckiness’.

  I wonder whether he felt fairly portrayed by the press. Was he, is he, the hapless, clueless builder? He smiles and winks. I can only assume from his demeanour that he played the game well: an 80s Joey Essex.

  The English are always better when disarmed. We are not as generous with the bravado and arrogance of winners. We prefer modesty and understatement. It is a peculiarity of the English and Eddie is the benchmark. He doesn’t have the presence that some great people carry with them but he exudes an eccentric swagger. He is certainly brave, but in many ways Eddie is the perfect example of the Englishman. Slightly wonky-toothed. Plucky. Bold. Eccentric. Hapless. Failing. Odd. He is a jar of Marmite and the weather in one. Cloudy with a chance of Marmite showers. He has that English charm. A walking apology.

  We sit largely unnoticed as we sip our tea (English tick) in Stroud Costa Coffee. Me and this goliath of Englishness.

  Eddie the Eagle defines a unique type of heroism that defies the norm and is English to the core: his oversized milk-bottle glasses and helmet tied with string were the exact opposite of the typical profile of the Winter Olympics competitor. Yet perhaps for that reason, he captured the world’s imagination with his nerve and fearless attitude. Above all, his fame was not based on success but failure. Eddie the Eagle was for a time the most famous failure in England. As a sporting and academic failure myself, for a time he gave me hope: he was the little guy taking on the world in a series of terrifying jumps.

  Edwards had a dream from childhood about being an Olympian. As a teenager he became obsessed with downhill skiing after going on a school skiing trip. He achieved some success despite having no money – he was self-educated, working class and about as different from the British Olympic establishment as you could get. Defeated by money, he remained determined to wear the British Olympic tracksuit. Effectively shunned by the Olympic movement, he had a brainwave and decided to enter the ski jump; he had never jumped before, but Britain had no competitors. So, if he achieved the qualifying distance, he would be a shoo-in for the team in Calgary in 1988. He qualified … just. But if he thought he’d won over the establishment he was wrong; they continued to oppose his participation in the Games, considering him a national embarrassment. Happily, the huge worldwide television audience, me included, thought differently and he became a global sporting phenomenon.

  Despite his last-place finishes in both the 70m and 90m competitions, cheering the plucky underdog became a national pastime. Edwards epitomized everything we English love about an amateur hero: he simply played the game, with no care about whether he won or lost.

/>   When he came home, his face was everywhere and his earnings were huge. Over time, the bookings fell away – and this is what I love about his story. He went back to his plastering job, which he still does part time today.

  Edwards tried to qualify for the next three Winter Olympics, but failed – thanks to a rule specifically designed to keep amateurs like him out – often hurting himself in the process. Over the course of his career, he fractured his skull twice and broke his jaw, collarbone, ribs, knee, fingers, thumbs, toes, back and neck. ‘I think the only bones I haven’t broken are my shoulder, hip and thigh,’ he says.

  He retired at the age of thirty-four in 1998. In a further twist to his amazing story, a trust he’d set up to hold and manage his earnings failed and he was declared bankrupt in 1992. Again, a huge setback only spurred him on. He was fascinated by the legal process and decided to retrain as a lawyer. He went back to school, gained his qualifications – starting with GCSEs – and finally obtained a law degree from De Montfort University in 2003, fifteen years after the Calgary Winter Olympics.

  He says he has always believed that with ‘resistance and tenacity you can achieve anything’. ‘We are a resilient nation,’ he says, ‘but we are moving towards the US mentality’ of success marked by medals rather than just participating and doing your best. The last few Olympic Games, the Tour de France, golf and now the America’s Cup have all transformed the English sporting reputation from hapless failure to hero and the Eddies of this world have been replaced by bleached-toothed sporting machines.

  Eddie is still very much in demand. A regular on the speaking circuit, he has even had a Hollywood film made about his life. As we say farewell I wonder whether this kind of English sporting hero has become an endangered species in a country that has pulled up its socks when it comes to sport. In my mind, though, Eddie will remain my own sporting hero, taking on the establishment and winning.