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 picking 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
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
