Hands off Jerusalem, my family heirloom
George Bridges on the part played by his great-grandfather, Robert Bridges, in the composition of Parry’s music to Blake’s lyric: too precious, he says, to be hijacked by separatists Isuspect you had better things to do last Friday evening than stay in to watch the English Democrats’ party political broadcast. I missed it. In fact, I didn’t know the party existed until I was throwing out the newspapers at the weekend, and happened to see the broadcast listed on the TV page. Intrigued, I looked them up online. ‘England: we have a right to be angry. THE ENGLISH HAVE HAD ENOUGH.’ I began to feel as if I had just hitched a ride with White Van Man, raging on about Gordon! Ken! Tax! Immigration! Europe! Everything in capitals, with lots of !!!!!s. And then I read this: ‘It’s time for England to have her own anthem. In fact it is long overdue. “Jerusalem” has consistently been voted the nation’s favourite and that will do for me.’ Well, English Democrats are not alone in their love of ‘Jerusalem’. It is Gordon Brown’s favourite hymn too. No doubt he has it on his iPod. Maybe singing about dark satanic mills appeals to his brooding, fingernail-biting inner self. Well, I agree with Gordon (four words I thought I would never write) but should ‘Jerusalem’ be Engerlund’s anthem? No. ‘Jerusalem’ is not a hymn for England, still less the Little Englanders. The story of its creation begins a year after the outbreak of the first world war with — suitably enough — a letter to the Daily Telegraph. On 4 August 1915, Sir Francis Younghusband, explorer, invader of Tibet (best not to be dwelt on today) and man of imperial derringdo, wrote to the paper that the war was ‘a spiritual conflict — a holy war — the Fight for Right’.
If the Germans won, ‘all who oppose will either be poisoned or, with liquid fire, scorched off the earth’. And so he proposed a movement to rouse his countrymen to serve in the sacred cause, and ‘to impress upon the country that we are fighting for something more than our own defence, that we are fighting the battle of all Humanity and to preserve Human Rights for generations to come’. (European judges and Cherie, rejoice!) Cautious to avoid ‘jingoism and brassy imperialism’, Younghusband wanted to appeal to ‘the whole of Humanity — Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists... I do not want to emphasise the Christian part’. Hardly a political ‘dog whistle’ to motivate Little Englanders: more a foghorn to anyone who can hear. Among those who flocked to the banner of his Fight for Right movement were the general secretary of the Federation of Trade Unions, John Buchan, Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Hubert Parry and my great-grandfather, the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges.
Bridges also believed the nation was on a crusade, ‘a war declared between Christ and the Devil’. The Germans’ ‘infernal machine, which has been scientifically preparing for the last 25 years, is now on its wild career like one of Mr Wells’s inventions.... There was never anything in the world worthier of the extermination, and it is the place of all civilised nations to unite and drive it back into its home and exterminate it there.’ (Were he around today, something tells me that my great-grandfather wouldn’t be a Guardian reader.) But the war, horrible though it was, could purify the nation of its ‘domestic boils’. ‘Certainly the English people deserve a whipping,’ he believed, ‘and we must hope that our chastisement will return us to favour.’ In his first poem of the war, ‘Wake up England’, Bridges wrote:
Much suffering shall cleanse thee But thou through the flood Shalt win to Salvation, To Beauty through blood.
As the casualties rose, so did his rhetoric against the Germans — ‘Satan’s chamberlains, highseated in Berlin’. ‘I never liked the Germans,’ he told a friend in 1915. ‘I always felt antipathetic towards them, and avoided them as I should sauerkraut at dinner — but I never thought they were such slavish and unprincipled pigs as they prove to be. The idea such contemptible filth can turn the world upside down is the sad side of it all.’ And so, in March 1916, Bridges addressed a meeting of the Fight for Right. ‘A hundred years ago, when Napoleon’s armies were conquering Europe, England was threatened; and the cloud that then overshadowed our country seemed to the men of those days as dark and black as the present cloud can ever have seemed. In those days William Blake wrote a poem the last verse of which may serve as a motto for our Society. When I heard that Dr Walford Davies was providing the music for us tonight, I asked my friend Sir Hubert Parry to compose a setting of Blake’s poem for us: he has done so, and we shall hear it tonight for the first time.’ Bridges had suggested that Parry write some ‘suitable, simple music that an audience could take up and join in’. Little did they know just how many audiences would take it up. By May 1917 Parry, concerned the hymn had been hijacked by the jingoists, told Younghusband that he no longer supported its use by Fight for Right — while telling the Suffragettes that he would be delighted if it became their anthem. And after the Suffragettes came the Women’s Institute, the Labour party, the Last Night of the Proms, Billy Bragg, the Barmy Army of cricket supporters, and of course, rugby fans.
Yes, in 1916 Bridges wrote and spoke of England. But his aim was to rise above factionalism and separatism, to pull people together in a supreme national effort. Nation, race, religion did not matter: these differences had to be put aside to defend civilisation itself. After all, it was a British (not English) Expeditionary Force that had been sent to France, to be joined by men from throughout the empire, fighting and dying side by side. And, within a year or so of Bridges speaking, a Scot (Haig) would be commanding the army. That’s not to mention the Scottish Lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary. Nor the Welsh Prime Minister, or the Irish First Lord of the Admiralty.
The first world war did for our romantic view of ‘England’. The pals regiments, each an embodiment of English pride, were massacred. The vast government machine, created to win the war, gave birth to the man in Whitehall, with his blueprints for Britain. By 1940, Britain (not England) stood alone — a fact relayed around the world by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In the years that followed we were ‘nationalised’, given British rail, steel, telecoms, airways, coal — to be followed by the Scottish Executive, Welsh Assembly and English regions.
Yes, I can well understand why the English feel taken for granted, and that the McMafia are taking the mickey. But an English national anthem will not help. We already have a national anthem — one that celebrates the monarchy, one of the few institutions that still binds us together as a nation. Yes, it is official in so far as we call it our ‘national anthem’, but there’s no law that enshrines its status. It’s part of the wonderful jumble of unwritten customs and traditions that make our constitution. Give England an official anthem, recognised by Parliament, and before long we will begin to unstitch another seam of our not-so-green and pleasant land. You can be English and you can be angry. But if we surrender ‘Jerusalem’ to the Little Englanders, those who believe in the United Kingdom would truly cease from mental fight.
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