Uploaded 1 March 2000
Long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and [football] pools fillers…old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist. (Former Conservative Prime Minister John Major’s vision of Britain.) [2]
You [the British] take a delicious oriental infusion – and dump cow juice in it. You invent a game [cricket] which no one else understands and the whole world still whips you at it. Your favourite dish is… curry!? [Shot of participants in an English Civil War battle re-enactment queueing to use a portable lavatory] Nowadays, even your Civil Wars are…civilised. And when it comes to sex, we all know what you prefer [shot of a cup of tea]. (P.J. O’Rourke’s assessment of the “British”,as featured in a recent British Airways T.V. commercial.)
P.J. O’Rourke’s flippant distillation of “Britishness” is revealing as well as amusing. The libertarian American author, no doubt spurred on by the commercial’s corporate paymasters, playfully contrasts this “small country” of cricketers, pet-lovers and tea-drinkers with the global popularity and excellence of the nation’s major airline. With their ubiquitous cups of tea and surprising (at least to O’Rourke) taste for Indian cuisine providing constant reminders of their imperial past, the British are portrayed elsewhere in the commercial as deferential, bumbling, harmless eccentrics – in short, the sort of people who sunbathe fully-clothed. This is, surely an outmoded and irrelevant view of a Britain which passed away long ago – if, that is, it ever existed at all. However, John Major proposed just such a vision of Britain in the early 1990s and there are many who share his sadness at the perceived disappearance of this quaint, picture postcard world. Yet how many people outside certain parts of southern England could truly lay claim to this Britain? Would the Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish, not to mention the myriad other ethnicities and regional groups which people the United Kingdom, recognise this Britain as their own? A similar version of Britain – with its eccentric and ultimately gentle people – was exemplified and popularised by the cinematic output of Ealing Studios, whose apotheosis as a national institution was reached in a series of lighthearted, satirical comedies produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s – of which Passport to Pimlico (Great Britain 1949) is perhaps the finest example.
However, the film’s portrayal of Britain, like those of John Major and the British Airways advertisement, offers a vision of Britain which is predominantly Anglo-centric. Britain and England have often been seen, especially by the English themselves, as interchangeable entities. J.B. Priestley, the left-leaning, patriotic author, journalist and broadcaster, embarked on an English Journey in 1933. Though himself prone to speaking of England when he meant Britain and vice versa, Priestley was still able to recognise the problematic nature of addressing one homogenous England, even though his journey was not complicated by visits to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. Priestley discovered four thematic versions of England: the “Old England” of thatched cottages and countryside which “at its best cannot be improved upon in this world”,[3] a newer England of mass consumption and American-style popular culture, the stagnating industrial north and its concomitant underclass comprising the mass-unemployed. As well as these strands, Priestley encountered a variety of distinct regions each still displaying their own indigenous characters and identities. All of these Englands are still, to varying extents, discernable. Yet how much more fragmented would Priestley find the multicultural, polyglot England of today?
If defining England and the English – as distinct from Britain and the British – still poses such problems, what can we hope to learn from a film which assumes a shared conception of the nation and its character so much more confidently than is possible today? With a devolved parliament and assembly already in place in Scotland and Wales, respectively, and a more realistic settlement in Ireland appearing to be closer than at any time in the last thirty years, England stands at a crossroads in its constitutional history. Any sense of uncertainty as to England’s future which has been provoked by this recent decentralisation of power within the United Kingdom can only be magnified by the, as yet unresolved, question of Britain’s place in the European Union. If it is to emerge from these changes as an entity and not some further devolved conglomeration of regional councils, which version or versions of England will survive and prevail? Although it might be said to reinforce the outmoded notions of Englishness outlined above, Passport to Pimlico captures England during a similar period of transition to that which it is experiencing today. Produced against a backdrop of the decline of the empire, the formation of the welfare state and realignment of the global power balance – all of which would provoke similar feelings of uncertainty among the English – the film offers an insightful and timely meditation on the contending versions of England still competing today.
The wording of the plaque installed at Ealing Studios on its sale to the BBC in 1955 encapsulates the company’s lofty aims and achievements:
Here during a quarter of a century were made many films projecting Britain and the British character. [4]
Ealing’s output was prolific and diverse, ranging from documentary through period costume drama, historical reenactments and literary adaptations to outright wartime propaganda. The comedies, though, were and remain its most cherished works. Although films had been produced at the Ealing site since the turn of the century, it was with the arrival of producer Michael Balcon in 1938 that Ealing began to emerge from the shadow of its parent company, Associated Talking Pictures. Whilst the studio briefly continued the conveyor-belt production of lightweight vehicles for popular singing stars of the day, Gracie Fields and George Formby, in other films such as Cheer Boys Cheer (Great Britain 1939) and Hue and Cry (Great Britain 1947), the development of the “Ealing” style which reached its zenith in the comedies can be discerned.
Under Balcon, the company itself assumed many of the characteristics which it would present on the screen as typically British: a small, tightly-knit group operating in the face of larger, corporate competition; allowed leeway by, but also reined in by, the authoritarian, patriarchal Balcon. In short, the studio’s creative output was both nurtured but ultimately contained by a “middle-class institution of a mildly radical disposition”. [5]
Balcon’s “ruling passion was the building up of a native [film industry] with its roots firmly planted in the soil of this country [6] As Jeffrey Richards suggests in his illuminating overview of the Ealing Comedies, “Cul-de-sac England”, this passion would adopt increasingly social and political dimensions – arguably nowhere more so than in Passport to Pimlico. Mindful of the negative impact on perceptions of Britain abroad manipulated by Nazi propaganda, Balcon “outlined a programmatic schedule for post-war film-making which demonstrates a high level of civic responsibility and patriotic pride” [7] :
Clearly the need is great for a projection of the true Briton to the rest of the world…The world, in short, must be presented with a complete picture of Britain…Britain as a leader in Social Reform in the defeat of social injustices and a champion of civil liberties. [8]
Yet, as Richards further suggests, what many of the Ealing comedies “project…is a world that is essentially quaint, cosy, whimsical and backward-looking” in the minds of its viewers. I would add that it is also predominantly, with the possible exception of Whisky Galore (Great Britain 1949) which is set on a Hebridean island, a world viewed through English eyes.
The commonly acknowledged classics of the Ealing comedy genre – Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore, Kind Hearts and Coronets (Great Britain 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit (Great Britain 1951), The Titfield Thunderbolt (Great Britain 1953) and The Ladykillers (Great Britain 1955) – portray a variety of place and period settings. With the exception of Whisky Galore, all are set in England. However, though they all appear to confirm Richards’ suspicion of cosy nostalgia, all, to varying degrees, hint at darkness and conflict beneath England’s veneer of order and stability. Kind Hearts and Coronets is a satirical Edwardian period piece concerning a humble shop assistant who believes himself to have been ostracised by his dead mother’s aristocratic family. His revenge for a lifetime of social slights consists of an increasingly macabre series of murders which bring him ever closer to his rightful inheritance. The Lavender Hill Mob plays out the fantasy of a more contemporary London bank clerk who conceives and implements a scheme to steal the gold bullion he has guarded for most of his working life. The Man in the White Suit is “one of the few British films to deal with British industry [and] focuses on the impossibility of reconciling capitalism and progress.” [9] The Titfield Thunderbolt revisits some of the concerns of Passport to Pimlico, substituting a steam driven train line faced with closure by British Railways and a semi-feudal rural setting for the coveted Burgundian treasure and London district featured in the latter. In The Ladykillers, a group of criminals are thwarted by the kindly old lady with whom they lodge. The film contrasts the gangsters’ grubby contemporaneity with the old lady’s Victorian primness. No other film in the canon of Ealing comedies examines the undercurrents of division and dissatisfaction that lurk beneath England’s calm surface as fixedly as Passport to Pimlico.
The film shows many of the propagandist tendencies of the Ealing tradition. Balcon was sympathetic to the reformist Labour administration elected in 1945 and, interviewed by John Ellis in 1974, revealed the extent to which the Ealing staff supported the government’s desire to create a “brave new post-war world” [10] :
We were middle-class people brought up with middle-class backgrounds and rather conventional educations. Though we were radical in our points of view, we did not want to tear down institutions…we were people of the immediate post-war generation and we voted Labour for the first time after the war: this was our mild revolution…and we wanted…to look for a more just society in the terms that we knew. [11]
However, “the euphoria of 1945” [12] was short lived. Tony Williams delineates the sequence of events which conspired to turn the “dream” of the 1945 election into the “nightmare” of austerity Britain:
The 1947 summer…witnessed a disastrous convertibility crisis. This followed one of the worst winters in recent British history, resulting in a crisis in fuel production and low national productivity. A decline in national unity began that would have adverse effects in the 1950 and 1951 elections, the latter returning the Conservatives to power. As if these factors were not bad enough, 15 July 1947 saw a monetary crisis caused by conditions resulting from an American loan made in December 1945. This loan necessitated the conversion of the pound into dollars, causing financial instability until the scheme’s suspension a month later. This was the first sign of Britain’s developing economic dependence on the USA. [13]
Despite, or maybe because of, the detrimental effects of these external pressures on the Labour government, “Passport to Pimlico is perhaps the arch-Labour film [amongst the Ealing comedies] pointing to the evils of a blanket removal of restrictions and seeking to reconcile the public to its lot.” [14] With the wartime system of rationing still in place, the film was presented to an audience accustomed to, but increasingly weary of, the daily grind of frugality and eking out of food and clothing coupons.
Although it is a reaction to them, Passport to Pimlico is more than an amiable satire on austerity Britain and Cold War US dependency. The film projects an English ambivalence to both socialism and free-market capitalism – the two forces which would battle for the hearts and minds of post-war Britain. More important, the text highlights the arbitrary nature of national identity and its narrative is designed to and does briefly liberate its English protagonists from the restrictions of their national identity. Of all the Ealing comedies – which “pleased everybody by showing English people to be kindhearted, eccentric and inefficient” [15] – this is perhaps the most subversive. As well as presenting an alternative to the image of the English as bumbling and deferential, it also allows for the possibility that such Englishness is an invention and therefore capable of reinvention.
Dedicated to “the memory of rationing”, the film was inspired by a newspaper story spotted by its screenwriter, Tibby Clarke, which related that:
during the war, in order that a rule be observed whereby the Dutch royal succession must be born on Netherlands soil, a room in Ottawa where the family was in exile from the German occupation, officially became Dutch territory [16]
This story was transposed to the London district of Pimlico, whose inhabitants stoically endure Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps’ austerity measures without sharing his missionary zeal for the project which led Winston Churchill to say of him “there but for the grace of God, goes God.” [17] The film is a reaction to the prevalent mood of “jaded despair”[18] which had replaced the optimism generated by the Labour party’s landslide electoral victory of 1945. If those sympathetic to the Labour victory were feeling disillusioned, “the strident emotions of the period were felt by the people who had voted Conservative in 1945” who sensed:
as Evelyn Waugh the novelist put it, that living under a Socialist government was like living under an army of occupation. [19]
However, contrary to Waugh’s disdain, the farewell which is ruefully bidden to ration books in the film’s dedication is perhaps less ironic than might at first appear.
The residents of Miramont Place, Pimlico, are shown queuing for food and clothing with their meagre handfuls of coupons. The bleakness of this economic climate is ironicised by a most “un-English” heatwave in which the community basks. That community’s two most prominent members personalise the contending political forces at work within it. Albert Pemberton, portrayed by Stanley Holloway, is the owner of the local grocery store and could be said to symbolise the community’s heart. He is an idealist who works long into the night building models of the communal swimming pool which he dreams of constructing on the square’s bombed out waste land. Wix (Raymond Huntley) the bank manager is, in contrast to Pemberton, a pragmatic monetarist.
However, despite their differences, Wix and Pemberton are both similarly thwarted in their daily lives – the bank manager by his hidebound superiors, Pemberton by the unimaginative Council – a factor which will eventually enable them to find common cause.
At a Council meeting, Pemberton submits a plan for the regeneration of the area which would see the derelict land transformed for the benefit of the whole community, in particular its children. Wix is prominent in securing an agreement that the land is sold to developers who will provide luxury apartments and business outlets for those who can afford them: after all, the Council is “in no position to finance daydreams.” Pemberton chastises his fellow councillors for their obsession with “pounds, shillings and pence” as they begin to list the advantages the site can offer would-be investors. The camera pans along the desolate rubble strewn town square accompanied by the hyperbole of the intended sales pitch. Just as the business proposition is declared to be “a thoroughly safe investment”, a bomb explodes.
Following this inadvertent detonation of “Pamela, [hitherto] the last unexploded bomb” in London, a trove of medieval treasure is discovered by Pemberton, ownership of which pits the citizens of Pimlico against the state. The discoverer of the treasure is loathe to hand over his find to the treasury, especially as it may help to realise his swimming pool dream. Before the treasure can be requisitioned by the “Men from the Ministry”, a royal decree signed by Edward IV, which accompanied the haul, is brandished by Professor Hatton-Jones – portrayed by the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford – as proof that the citizens of Pimlico owe their allegiance not to Westminster or Buckingham Palace, but to Burgundy: “Blimey, I’m a foreigner”, as the police constable remarks. Though the Pimlicans’ reaction is jocular at first, they are gradually forced by the Whitehall ministers’ intransigence into adopting a more militant stance and, eventually, the status of Burgundians. Ironically, it is Wix who initially grasps the power which the community can wield through their temporary leave of absence from the union. He impounds the treasure in the vault of the local bank branch claiming Burgundian sovereignty.
With the state’s jurisdiction temporarily removed whilst the two parties negotiate, Pimlico’s business community grasps its new found economic and political freedom with both hands: “ration books? This is Burgundy!” Identification papers are “ritually destroyed”[20] in a gesture of defiance as the locals enjoy the spontaneously relaxed Burgundian licensing laws. However, in little time, the district has become a magnet for black marketeers on a scale which threatens to unleash anarchy onto its streets. Before the citizens can appeal to the state for help, they find their “borders” have been closed. Their bluff called, the residents of Pimlico have become Burgundians, trapped in an England within England.
Whilst the isolation of the Burgundians mirrors that of the citizens of West Berlin, it could also be seen to represent the embattled nature of Labour Britain, whose efforts to reconstruct the country as a social democracy were hampered by its economic reliance upon a foreign power.
The film provides a pithy analysis of the contending ideologies of the post-war period as well as a prescient distillation of the fluctuations of Britain’s political mood in the decades to follow. Both the state-planning, “interfering” socialists and the laissez-faire, free-marketeers are seen to be, in their pure forms, anathema to the Burgundians. More recent manifestations of moderation suggest that the post-war desire for the kind of consensus which eschews the extremism of both left and right – as alluded to in the film – has largely persisted. Jim Callaghan’s Labour administration was rejected by the British electorate in 1979. The government had presided over the “Winter of discontent”, brought about by a comparable monetary crisis to that of 1947 and the seemingly uncurbable Trade Union militancy. Strike action by public service workers led to the non collection of refuse and to dead bodies remaining unburied for weeks. Similarly John Major’s more consensual but sleaze-ridden administration was brought about by the perception that his predecessor – the increasingly ideologically driven and dogmatic Margaret Thatcher – had become an electoral liability. Major’s own downfall was magnified enormously by the huge appeal to British voters of the even more consensual and moderate Labour leader, Tony Blair.
Although it does serve direct satirical purposes, the beauty of the conceit of transforming Pimlico and its citizens into Burgundy and Burgundians respectively is that it temporarily removes the restrictions of a prescribed and fixed notion of what it is to be English and enables the protagonists to negotiate their own version. This they do, arriving at a version of England similar to that commonly associated with the war era though, thankfully for the Burgundians, without the bombs. The film shows how easily the certainties of the English can assume the appearance and status of the foreign and unfamiliar and suggests that it is only when they perceive themselves to be foreigners or outsiders that the English can see themselves as they are. The ambiguities of national identity are nurtured throughout the film. Its opening sequence playfully manipulates the audience’s expectations of Englishness and otherness. To the accompaniment of “exotic” Latin music, a man in a white suit stands by a fan mopping his brow with a handkerchief as if incarcerated in some distant colonial outpost. Another smokes a cigar whilst tossing his pet dog a derisory scrap of food in stark contrast to the received idea of England’s much-vaunted love of domestic animals. The camera pans outside to take in a woman lounging on a sunbed removing her South American-style sun hat, before making its slow descent down a striped awning to arrive in front of an English fishmonger which is, appropriately, “frying today”. Any illusion that we are anywhere but in England disappears when the clipped tones of the BBC inform us that we have been listening to “a programme of lunchtime music by Les Norman and his Bethnal Green Bambinos”.
Amusing as this scene is, it does make serious points. The montage offers a fine encapsulation of the way in which the cosmopolitan peacetime dream collapsed into the humdrum parochial reality of post-war England. The down beat comedy punch line to a sequence which manipulates and raises the audience’s expectations only to dash them could be said to represent an example of “typically” English self-deprecation. However, it could equally represent an unrealised (or unrealisable) and deeply felt yearning to escape that very condition of Englishness. The sequence offers an alluring set of assumptions as to what it is like not to be English. The viewer is invited to connive at the disappointment of being brought back down to earth after a flight of fancy – a sense presumed to be familiar to the audience by the film’s makers. Although it comments specifically upon the envy felt by many in Britain towards the more rapid reconstructions taking place elsewhere in Europe, the scene also reflects a deeper ambivalence felt by the English towards their national identity. The sense of Englishness as entrapment is reinforced by the film’s conclusion which sees the Burgundians’ reabsorption into England accompanied by a typical downpour. Even this more typical weather, the film suggests, represents a deflating, limiting manifestation of English reality after the fantasy of the “foreign” sunshine. Elsewhere in the film the stereotypical orderliness of the English is questioned The Duke of Burgundy comments upon the “fact” that the English need only to be asked to desist from clamouring to buy from the black marketeers and they will do so whilst in the rest of Europe more authoritarian methods would be applied to less effect. He is, of course, proved hopelessly wrong when, as the words have barely left his mouth, the sound of a riot is heard breaking out in the square. The Duke also points out to Pemberton’s daughter that the French town from which he comes – which she has romanticised into an idyllic lovers’ paradise – is in reality as mundane as her quarter of London, suggesting that the ambiguities of national identity are not a peculiarly English preserve.
These ironic sequences also raise two crucial questions: is England really the way the English perceive it? And does it have to be the way it is? Given the opportunity to construct a community in their own image “the Burgundians….recover the spirit, the resilience and local autonomy and unity of wartime London”. Dispensing with the inflexibilities of class, nationality and gender bequeathed to them by England they “submerg[e] differences that are otherwise intractable.”[ [21] Women become, if not prominent, at least included in the decision-making process. Pemberton, whose idealistic plans for a children’s swimming pool are voted down in England, shines as Burgundy’s first minister and eventually wins the community its “Burgundy Lido”. Similarly, Wix, initially told dismissively by his “superiors” that he is no Montague Norman, is compared favourably to that former Chancellor by his more illustrious English counterparts after his adroit handling of the Burgundian economy. Indeed, it is Wix who hits upon the solution to the crisis – “a Burgundian loan to Britain” – as he and Pemberton are unified in their pursuit of Burgundy’s interests. This symbolic reconciliation of the previously estranged Wix and Pemberton affirms the consensual partnership of social and business interests which would emerge in the 1950s and 1960s. Pointedly, the Duke of Burgundy, although a foreigner, is made welcome – to the extent that the people of Pimlico are willing to surrender to his sovereignty – a scenario which might be seen as heresy by those members of the film’s current audience who oppose greater (or sometimes any) involvement in the European Community. This suggests, as well as the established notion of the ease with which the English accept the status of subjects, an accommodating version of Englishness far removed from the xenophobia and nationalism prevalent among the far-right in England today. Certainly, the society constructed by the Burgundians is more akin to small-scale communism than to the unrestrained free market capitalism which is also advocated by the political right.
Crucial to the renegotiation of Englishness delineated in the film is the strong sense of community which is, by necessity, reawakened in Burgundy once the blockade begins. The Burgundians endure worse restrictions than even Sir Stafford Cripps can dream up for them as they endure the siege. The film warns against the rejection of the solidarity and self-sacrifice which characterised the war just won and which, it argues, will be essential if the peace to come is to be similarly successful. Such feelings persisted into the 1950s, during which Britain had, according to Conservative Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, supposedly “never had it so good”. Playwright John Osborne contrasts the “lean and sinew of the forties” with the “fat and spineless fifties”,[[22] suggesting that the disciplined and ascetic nation which had won the war was in danger of lapsing into a bloated and easily sated populace of unaligned individuals. Certainly, the invasion of Burgundy by hordes of market traders selling products of dubious origin and quality will resonate for anyone who lived through and recalls the excesses of the Thatcher era – the apogee of the transformation of the English into a motley collection of consumers, strangely disenfranchised despite their greater freedom in the marketplace.
Intriguingly, though the Burgundians are hamstrung and seemingly discarded by the Whitehall ministers when they attempt to retain their treasure and autonomy, they are ultimately saved, by those same ministers’ blockade, from the horrors of unfettered market forces. They are also, eventually, able to compromise with the state and thus end their incarceration – a privilege not afforded them by the unanswerable market forces which threaten to engulf them. In a way, the film portrays the transformation of the “subjects” of Pimlico into citizens. The Burgundians’ temporary independence from England springs from their rejection of a status quo which leaves them powerless in the face of a patronising and authoritarian state. Pointedly, they can only make their protest by matching the state’s inflexibility in an undignified battle of wills. Their return to England – symbolically accompanied by newly issued identity cards and ration coupons – may seem to be a defeat. However, that return is only brought about after the institution of a reflexive dialogue between the state and its citizens and the anarchic generosity of the British public, whose gifts prevent Burgundy’s submission. The public in the auditorium are encouraged to empathise with the public on the screen as they make a nonsense of the state’s attempts to starve the Pimlicans back to their senses.
Passport to Pimlico captures England as it struggles to come to terms with the end of empire and the formation of the welfare state – whose ethos, to my mind, it affirms. Although the text could be accused of espousing precisely the sort of inward-looking Englishness which British Airways parody to their advantage, in the context of the decline of the empire, it could also be seen as an honest recognition of the need to reconstruct England and reassess its position in the world order. The closure of the colonial chapter of its history and the simultaneous emergence of the new global super powers rapidly and drastically undermined Britain’s position as a world power. Indeed, the film features an obvious parody of the Berlin Blockade as the citizens of London shower Burgundy with food parcels. Taken along with the film’s general tone of moderation, the comparison with the Cold War posturing of the super powers is pointed: intractable conflicts are the logical extension of entrenched ideology and dogma, whether at home or abroad. The film suggests – perhaps naively – that, whatever its shortcomings, England is capable of striking a balance between the individual and the wider community.
The spirit of equality and self sacrifice which prevailed through the war was essentially decent – or so the film persuades us – and to attempt to repress the cussedness and recalcitrance of the English is folly indeed. However, the Second World War could be said to have represented a high watermark in England’s recent history which has seen an inevitable decline since then. Jonathan Freedland argues that Winston Churchill’s famous words occasioned by the Battle of Britain – “if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men would still say, ‘This was their finest hour'” – “enshrined in [the British] the belief that, whatever else [they] achieved, [their] best days were behind [them].” [23] Freedland cites this belief as one of the major causes of the nostalgia for a bygone England such as that expressed by John Major. A firm believer in the necessity of recreating Britain as a meritocratic republic, Freedland sees this clinging to a long-decayed past as a retarding effect on England’s modernisation in a world of global markets and communication. The film offers an intriguing contrast to the attitude that Britain should cling to its past, made as it was with the post-war future still to be negotiated. Yet, if the Burgundians present an image of an enduring English spirit, it is one which has yet to be enshrined formally in a written constitution or bill of rights. Perhaps as a consequence of the informal nature of its citizenship, post-war Britain has experienced comparable outbreaks of Burgundianesque insurrection. With Scotland, Wales and Ireland offered the opportunity to redefine themselves and their place within the United Kingdom, in many respects, the England of today finds itself in a similar position to that in which the Burgundians found themselves. Yet can today’s England face the future with anything like the sense of optimism in the face of adversity which the inhabitants of Pimlico drew upon?
With the benefit of hindsight, Will Hutton suggests that “early socialist critics of…unalloyed British capitalism had been right”. He argues that “the social democratic settlement of the post-war years”, whilst failing to achieve the level of economic growth achieved elsewhere:
had maintained social order and, paradoxically preserved the institutions of Conservative England better than Conservative England was able to do when given its head – an irony lost on Mr. Major when he mourns the lost world of the 1950s. [24]
Under a Labour government similarly endowed in terms of its majority to that of 1945 which will, sooner or later, need to confront the spectre of English nationalism which its own constitutional reforms seem to invite, what sort of reconstruction can the England of today expect? On current evidence, the Blair administration seems to have taken Hutton’s assessment as a blueprint. Arch-conservative elements such as the countryside lobby – which has protested vocally that the government in Westminster does not understand rural ways – and the recently (and partially) reformed hereditary peerage are conceded to in the name of the consensus. At the same time, the government continues to pursue Tory reforms of the National Health Service and benefits systems – much to the dismay of more traditional Labour supporters. This finds modern advocates of the principle of the welfare state grateful for the defiance of the unelected House of Lords – whose very constitutional existence they abhor – in supporting the rights of recipients of disability benefit. If many Conservative voters feared that Labour in power would bring about a return to the days of high taxation, powerful Trade Unions and profligate public spending, they need not have. Tony Blair’s government has, if anything, attempted to preserve the right of centre consensus which the electorate overwhelmingly rejected in 1997.
However, to what extent does that consensus represent the will of Britain? If Clement Attlee’s 1945 government foundered on an unwillingness of the electorate to accept the prolonged hardships required for the creation of the “more just society” envisaged by Michael Balcon, it is also worth remembering that the Conservative government which replaced it did so only because it vowed to preserve the welfare state. It was only with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 that the consensus of which Hutton speaks was dispensed with. As well as beginning a systematic erosion of the mechanisms of the welfare state, Thatcher’s government was as authoritarian and intransigent as that which faced the Burgundians. This dogmatic inflexibility induced a Burgundy style retreat of many socialist and left of centre opponents. In the capital, Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council, which had proved a resolute, democratic and popular thorn in the government’s side, was abolished. Mining communities were torn apart during the lengthy and highly emotive strike of the mid-eighties which at times verged on becoming a small scale (and far from civilised) civil war. The Greenham Common women who protested against the basing of US nuclear missiles in England provide an image redolent of the Burgundians – ordinary people united in a determined opposition to the militarised and intransigent machinery of the state and a menacing foreign influence. Above all, voters in Scotland and Wales persistently rejected the Conservative party whilst England continued to return enough Conservative MPs to govern the whole of Britain. Consequently, the accrued resentment of the Scots and Welsh at having to live under policies which they themselves had vigorously opposed further echoes the plight of the Burgundians who became “foreigners” in their own country.
With European and domestic questions of citizenship still largely unresolved, it is tempting to see today’s England en masse as a similarly besieged latter-day Burgundy. Tony Blair is determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous Labour administrations as he seeks to become the first Labour Prime Minister to win a consecutive second term of office. Crucial to this end seem to be a continued demonisation of the Left and courting of “Middle England” – the less urban, more affluent areas of the south surrounding the metropolitan sprawl of London. Consequently, the re-emergence of Ken Livingstone as a prospective candidate to become Mayor of London has seen Blair revert to an unprincipled use of Trade Union block votes – which “New” Labour had supposedly consigned to the past – in an effort to block the progress of this living symbol of “Old” Labour. Similarly, the countryside lobby which holds the key to Blair’s continued electoral hegemony, seems closer to the Prime Minister’s ear than are many of his own party.
Of all the current factions in England which could be said to resemble the Burgundians, those which make up the Countryside Alliance most expose the fragility of the consensus which Tony Blair is attempting to establish. Bereft of their traditional representation in Parliament – the beleaguered Conservative Party – they are particularly fearful of the current government’s pledge to abolish their highly emotive and symbolic pastime, foxhunting. The Alliance (correctly) perceives Mr. Blair and his coterie to be city dwellers for whom the countryside and its traditions can have no real meaning. It is ironic, though, that those same people who have for so many years benefitted from the privileged status of the tranquil, rural image of England should now condemn a government which has done a lot to appease them. It is equally strange that a political party committed to modernising both itself and the nation should be so timorous in the face of a lobby which clings to a sport which belongs more to the Eighteenth than the Twentieth Century. Yet, perversely, the countryside lobby is right. The government, though it speaks of diversity and consensus, itself possesses a view of Britain which is, though perhaps more genuinely reflective of the nation’s present and future than that of the Countryside Alliance, similarly narrow. Blair’s England of Internet cafes, Italian restaurants and mobile phones does not wholly represent England either. That there is no longer one hegemonic England but, instead, many Englands – some of which are not as palatable to the spin-doctors and PR gurus who currently define what England is – presents Tony Blair’s consensual style of government with its greatest challenge. Should he contrive to construct a truly inclusive nation it would certainly be his greatest achievement.
Writing in response to the recent crisis concerning France’s continuing embargo on British produced beef, political commentator Andrew Marr – a Scotsman – urges “the Centre-Left to reclaim….the democratic strand, the stroppiness of beef-patriotism, not its xenophobia or swagger.” [25] Marr sees the unrest triggered by the stand-off between the British and French farmers and governments as signalling the need for more profound change than is currently contemplated:
The rhetoric of the ‘beef war’ may be embarrassing. It may be illogical. But it was a cry of pain from parts of a country feeling increasingly put-upon and disoriented. Blair has tried reason. He has tried to describe the country as it is, With its great variety and energy. But this is about power, not about rebranding. Until the English feel democratically strong and confident again, neither the future of Britain as a Union, nor its place in the European Union, can be happily addressed. [26]
Marr’s sentiments could also address the feelings of many inhabitants of contemporary England as well as those portrayed by the fictional inhabitants of Pimlico.
When Councillor Pemberton announces his plans to travel the world with a ship full of young girls if he reaps the rewards of the discovered treasure, his wife reminds him that he gets “seasick on the Serpentine”. The implication of the phrase is that there are enough domestic difficulties to contend with to be bothering with the affairs of the rest of the world. With Indian independence and the Berlin Blockade fresh in the memory of the film’s creators and audience, Passport to Pimlico is a brave and humorous attempt to salvage a modicum of dignity in the face of a perceived loss of national prestige and an alarming realignment of the world order. The film is, far from being a renunciation of the principle of the Welfare State established by Attlee’s administration, a qualified acceptance of it and an attempt to reaffirm a sense of pride in the nation’s achievements and future. However, its most significant and relevant attribute to its present day audience is that it depicts the empowerment of its protagonists. The Burgundians become fully engaged citizens who are able, briefly, to take their destiny into their own hands. If the film does illustrate a “lost world”, it is that which briefly arose from the ruins of the Second World war as England optimistically set about its reconstitution, rather than the balmy gentility of John Major’s version of Englishness with which the Ealing tradition is often associated.
The film’s most telling line is also voiced by Pemberton’s wife. She speaks of an English ability to transcend narrow conceptions of their national identity in embracing an abstract and high-minded idealism: “It’s just because we’re English that we’re sticking up for our right to be Burgundian.” This tradition – as made manifest in the institutions of the welfare state – rather than that of “warm beer” and village cricket has at times over the last fifty years gone some way towards producing the “more just society” which Michael Balcon desired. The England which pioneered the welfare state, though possessed of many of the qualities of gentleness and deference which are now gently mocked in postmodern advertising campaigns, stands in stark contrast to the myopic, parochial England eulogised by John Major which is now the last refuge of a spent and backward-looking Conservative Party. England is now a fragmented and disparate collection of Englands in need of common cause. The majority of its young people – its future – are eclectic and multi-cultural in their taste and outlook. P.J. O’Rourke is correct in his observation that curry has replaced fish and chips as the nation’s favourite dish. If the tradition which unified the nation in a pursuit of the collective betterment of its people can be extended to formalising the citizenship and celebrating the diversity of its inhabitants, the English may one day possess a Burgundy of which they can be proud.
Footnotes:
[1] The Serpentine is an elongated pond which runs through Hyde Park in London.
[2] John Major quoted in J. Freedland Bring Home the Revolution (London, Fourth Estate, 1998), 160
[3] J.B. Priestley, English Journey (London: Mandarin, 1994), 397-8
[4] A. Aldgate, & J. Richards, Best of British – Cinema & Society from 1930 to the Present Day (London: Tauris, 1999), 149
[5] G. Perry, Forever Ealing (London: Pavilion, 1985), 111
[6] M. Balcon, A Lifetime of Films (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 48
[7] Aldgate & Richards, 149.
[8] Michael Balcon quoted in Aldgate & Richards, 150.
[9] Aldgate & Richards, 158-9.
[10] Aldgate & Richards, 152.
[11] J Ellis, “Made in Ealing,” Screen , no. 16 (1975): 119.
[12] Perry, 112.
[13] T. Williams, “The repressed fantastic in ‘Passport to Pimlico'” Re-viewing British cinema, 1900-1992 (Albany: State of New York University Press, 1994), 96-7
[14] Aldgate & Richards, 155.
[15] T.O. Lloyd, Empire to Welfare State: English History 1906-1985 (Oxford: O.U.P., 1986), 303.
[16] Perry, 112.
[17] Lloyd, 293.
[18] Perry, 112.
[19] Lloyd, 294.
[20] C. Barr, Ealing Studios (London: Studio Vista, 1993), 100
[21] Barr, 103
[22] J. Osborne, Damn You, England (London: Faber, 1994), 191
[23] Freedland, 160.
[24] W. Hutton, The State We’re In (London: Vintage, 1995), 54
[25] A. Marr, “Anglo-Saxon attitudes: so what kind of England do we really stand for?” The Observer, 31 October 1999, 22
[26] Marr, 22.
The author would like to express his sincere appreciation to Susan Dennington, Terence John Daily, and David Fulton for their invaluable support and encouragement during the writing of this article.