In defence of English

PERSONAL COLUMN GILES PLAYFAIR

To begin with an unfashionable admission, I try to speak pure Standard English. To con- tinue with another one, I am hoping to per- suade my children to speak it, too.

This is an uphill task. They are not imper- vious to the sounds of bastard cockney, bastard American and other equally unpleasing species of accent that persistently reach them from the television screen. Besides, though still too young to have passed beyond the engine- driver state of ambition, they seem to sense that my influence is a threat to their prospects of material advancement in life. They may well be right. But, for the moment, I am more con- cerned that they should do their little bit to preserve their country's aesthetic values. • If at this point I appear to be writing as a last-ditch defender of the class system, let me swiftly deny it. A foreigner, observing how wealth, power and fame are actually divided in the Britain of 1967, might pardonably wonder what, if anything, the class system still signifies, and why, among the British them- selves, it should continue to be such an ob- sessively discussed subject. The simple answer may be that paranoia dies hard, and that while it lives there will always be a market for it.

But paranoia can be as productive of cant as it is of fantasy. If the British class system is in fact defunct for all practical purposes, there is no wonder that its surviving antagonists, high powered (and highly paid) though most of them are, find little of pertinence to say against it. Unfortunately, virtually all they do say, and say ad nauseam, boils down to an easily swal- lowed but none the less toxic piece of cant: namely, that because Standard English is ex- clusively associated with the upper class, its use is undemocratic and discreditable.

The first part of this proposition is palpably untrue. In the sense of revealing information about a person's social background, Standard English, assuming it can properly be described as an 'accent'—and to describe it as such is really a contradiction in terms—is of all accents the only one that is wholly, and in the broadest sense, classless. A Glasgow accent, say, provides a reasonably reliable clue to its owner's birthplace or parentage. A 'refeened' accent, with its too careful attempt at the vowel sounds of Standard English, is strongly indicative of a middle-middle-class environ- ment. But Standard English, when correctly spoken, gives away nothing about its speaker.

At least two tell-tale types of upper-class accent do exist, and at their worst they bear as little resemblance to Standard English as any other debased form of speech. There is aristocratic cockney which, with its in- sufficiently rounded vowel sounds, is remark- ably similar, in broad effect, to a lower-middle- class London accent. Indeed, it may take a trained ear, and certainly does take a British- born one, to detect any difference between the way Mr John Osborne, for example, chooses to say such a word as 'hold' and the way the Queen or, still more commonly, the Duke of Windsor is too apt to say it.

There is also an indolently affected kind of speech, exemplified in such transmutations as `pahe for power and 'fahr shahrs' for fair shares. This used to be called the 'Oxford accent.' It is regrettably not unknown on the Tory Front Bench—Quintin Hogg and lain Macleod are among the most honourable ex- ceptions—and it appears to be especially favoured by Old Etonians. It is also imitated by people who deludedly believe that it offers them their easiest and most impressive means of covering up social origins they prefer not to expose. But, again, it is not impossible, though it may be difficult, to distinguish be- tween the genuinely upper class and the ersatz versions.

Admittedly, a person who is born into a home, or goes to a school, where Standard English is spoken has a better opportunity of mastering it than he might otherwise have. And though I personally am not enamoured of the public schools—the thought that I am no longer at Harrow has been one of the abiding delights of my adult life—I should deplore their passing, if this were to mean the death-knell for good speech. But here the danger lies not so much in the idea of universal state education as in the cant of its trend-setting proponents, who adhere to the curious notion that the planned downgrading of the few, rather than the planned upgrading of the many, is the way to the egalitarian millennium.

For it is, of course, nonsense to suppose that a public-school education is an absolute prerequisite to a mastery of Standard English. On the contrary, good speech, like good grammar, can, if necessary, be self-taught; and one may note, parenthetically, that the anti- class system propagandists, who are permitted such abundant opportunities on television to offer bad speech as evidence of their own pro- letarian credentials, see nothing inconsistent in not offering bad grammar in evidence as well. When Mr Malcolm Muggeridge cheerfully boasts of his 'atrocious accent,' as he did in an article some months ago, one cannot but agree with him that his accent is, indeed, atrocious. But one may also find it hard to be- lieve that a man who puts words together as angelically as he does could not, if he were of a mind to try, very easily learn how to dignify them with their proper vocal value.

That is something which every ambitious actor has to learn. Or, rather, it is something that he did have to learn until recently; for, even in the theatre, the insidious cant of the trend-setters is spreading, and nowadays one risks, say, a Gwendolen Fairfax with a Lanca- shire accent—something rather more intrinsi- cally absurd than a Jimmie Porter with an 'Oxford accent.' Still, among the older genera- tion of actors at least, accents of all kinds remain a matter for mimicry when the occa- sion requires. Standard English, on the other hand, is their professional speech; and it is still in the theatre that Standard English can be heard in its purest and most musical form.

Yet to picture the theatre as a traditionally upper-class bastion which, during our brave new times, has been stormed and occupied by Mr Albert Finney and his cohorts is to believe in one of the most fanciful of modem pub- licity inventions. It is true that after the First World War, with the example of Du Maurier and other successive captains of the Stage Golfing Society in mind, even parsons became convinced that the theatre was a respect- able enough profession for their sons and daughters to enter. This was doubtless unfortu- nate, and if the much-abused 'thirties were not the worst period in the theatre's history, they were certainly the most genteel. But even then only a minority of successful actors were (dare one use the word?) gentlemen by birth.

While I do not need to be reminded that Shakespeare knew nothing of Standard English, I strongly suspect that Standard English can only have enriched the spoken glories of his language. This cannot be proved, of course; nor, for that matter, is it possible to argue conclusively that any one form of speech is the superior of any other. It is a question of taste, and personally I would not deny that some purely regional accents, particularly the Celtic ones, are as intrinsically pleasing to the ear as Standard English is.

But equally, I suggest, there are accents, in- cluding all the varieties of London accent, that are irredeemably ugly, unmusical and anti- poetic. Moreover, the hybrid or adulterated accent—and that is the kind advocated by the trend-setters—is worse than ugly. It is lazy.

If this laziness had permeated the vocal quality of Winston Churchill's wartimespeeches, can one seriously imagine that they would have had half their thrilling effectiveness at home or abroad, or have been half as eloquent of this country's grandeur in adversity? Churchill was a master of speech as well as language, and this may be one reason why his imme- diate successor, Anthony Eden, suffered so sorrowfully by comparison with him. For apart from Eden's apparent inability to coin a memorable phrase, he was addicted in his public utterances to the 'pahrs' and the lahr shahrs.' Nor am I persuaded that a leader speaking for Britain in Churchill's accents would today be widely resented. Presumably, Mr Heath does not deliberately uglify diphthongs in order to assure the electorate of his plebeian back- ground, since his speech is otherwise perilously close to ersatz Oxford. The net result can hardly be pleasing to anybody, and, I should guess, has more than a little to do with his evident failure thus far to persuade many people that they want him as Prime Minister.

By contrast, Mr Harold Wilson's adulterated Yorkshire appears to be purposively assumed; at least, to judge from recordings made when he was President of the Board of Trade, he could and did speak perfectly good Standard English in his younger days. No doubt he be- lieves that his present mode of speech is right in line with the current trend, that it is just the thing to warm the hearts and win the affections of the mass of the electorate. And he may even be right.

But he is also setting a bed example: an example of lazy speech, symptomatic, one may suspect, of that larger laziness with which this country is said to be lethally afflicted. So, too, ' are the heroes of our time, the television 'per- sonalities,' setting a bad example, when they trade in some fashionably hybrid accent. A prime culprit is Mr David Frost, with his em- phatic if essentially rootless cockney, retained (or developed) in defiance of a university edu- cation. If people in positions of power or influence make a sort of cult of debasing English speech and proclaim their indifference to the vocal beauties of the English language, why should anyone else bother to learn better? Well, at least—and this will do as a last word to the trend-setters—at least Miss Chris- tine Keeler did.