Chapter 26
In This Chapter
● Legal systems and civil rights
● The Beatles and Gilbert and Sullivan
● Advances in technology, science, and medicine
● The world’s first - and many of the greatest - novels
● Tea with milk
How would the world have been different if the British hadn’t come along? Here are some examples of great - and maybe not so great - cultural contributions which the world would have missed.
Parliamentary Government
You can’t get away from this one. Of course, parliamentary government wasn’t always a happy export, but the idea that it is possible to have a stable and workable system of representative government was one of the most important ideas the British gave the world. Parliamentary government was an inspiration to the French revolutionaries, and it was never far away from the minds of other Europeans as they manned the barricades in the nineteenth century. We all get fed up from time to time with the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, but the importance of what it achieved cannot be denied.
The English Common Law
Alongside Parliament, English Common Law is probably the most influential aspect of Britain’s ‘unwritten’ constitution. It is the basis of legal systems around the world, and it forms an important part of the legal system in the United States: American courts can and sometimes do cite English legal precedents.
The basic idea of English Common Law is that people are tried by their peers on a specific charge and on nothing else. So the issue’s not ‘Are you a bad person?’ - which you may well be - but ‘Did you do this?’ which you might not have done, even if you are a bad person. And you are innocent until proven guilty. Oh, and all those gowns and wigs make a great TV drama.
Organised Sport
The Victorians had quite a genius for creating sports and exporting them round the globe. The Duke of Wellington said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, where his officers learned about leadership and being part of a team. And look at the list of international sports the British have given the world: Golf from Scotland, rugby from England, football, tennis, badminton, horse racing, and of course cricket. The British didn’t just invent these games; they drew up the rules and took them around the Empire. Just think: If they hadn’t exported sports, the rest of the world would never have had the chance to beat the Brits at golf, rugby, football, tennis . . .
The Novel
A bit difficult to call the novel a British invention exactly (though Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is normally regarded as the first one), but the British very quickly made the novel their own. The Victorians were obsessed with novels and awaited each instalment just like a modern TV audience with the latest soap. Dickens got lapped up on both sides of the Atlantic, and when ships from Britain docked in New York while The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, people on the quayside yelled out to the people on board,
‘Is Little Nell dead?!’ As well as producing world-class novelists like Dickens, Jane Austen, and the Brontёs, the Victorians also created a whole new genre of children’s books, like Alice in Wonderland and The Water Babies, which has carried through to Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, and the unstoppable Harry Potter phenomenon.
DNA
Something wonderfully British exists about the way James Watson and Francis Crick came up with the DNA double helix. Yes, I know Watson was American, but he and Crick were working in Cambridge, in a race with Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at Imperial College, London. The process was all so gentlemanly and amateurish, and when Watson and Crick finally worked it out, they immediately ran out and announced the news in the nearest pub. You don’t get more British than that.
The BBC
Telecommunications owe a lot to Britain: Marconi, who invented the radio, worked in England, Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, was a Scot, and so was John Logie Baird, who invented television so you could have something for your telephone to interrupt. The BBC quickly turned radio into an authentically British institution, to go with afternoon tea and crumpets. The BBC radio soap The Archers, about the goings-on in a small country village, has been running since the 1950s. Nothing ever happens in The Archers, but people exist out there who’d kill rather than miss an episode.
The Beatles
The great thing about the Beatles is that they used words. The lyrics matter, which is why you can hardly visit any major tourist attraction in Europe without hearing someone strumming a guitar and singing ‘Yezderdeh, oll mah trrbles simmed so feurrh aweh.’ The Beatles are a good example of how the British managed to take the pop revolution and tame it. When they first arrived on the scene, the British didn’t know what had hit them, but if you looked, all those girls screaming their heads off at London Airport were still wearing their school uniform: Very British. The boys went through their different phases (remember those weird suits with no lapels or collars?), and before you knew it, you had military bands playing Beatles numbers at royal garden parties.
Tea with Milk
Originally, putting the milk in first meant that your china was so fine - that is, expensive - that, if you didn’t, it would shatter; now putting the milk in first is considered not quite the done thing in posh circles. Tea purists look with horror on the British habit of swamping fine oriental teas with cold milk, but you probably just have to accept that now two different drinks flow: Tea as drunk in most of the world, with lemon or sugar to taste, and tea-with-milk as drunk by just about everyone in Britain. And don’t forget British builders’ tea, which is milk with half a pound of sugar added and waved in the general direction of a used tea bag.
Penicillin
How many times have you had an infection or a cut that’s gone a bit septic? Quite a few I expect. Right. For most of history, a good chance existed you’d have been dead by now. Ordinary infections killed millions of people until Alexander Fleming (another Scot - see how many of the really useful advances are made by Scots) discovered penicillin by peering at some mould that had formed on an unwashed petri dish. A long time elapsed before penicillin got into a form where people could take it as a medicine (and that was done by a team working in Oxford) but when it did, it changed history. It’s hard to think of anything the British have come up with that has saved more lives and done more good around the world than penicillin.
Gilbert and Sullivan
They may or may not be to your taste, but these guys deserve a mention here. Their operettas were meant to be fairly light skits on the fashions and fads of their day. Iolanthe pokes fun at politicians (who doesn’t?), The Pirates of Penzance sends up the Victorians’ strong sense of duty, and Patience was written specifically to have a laugh at Oscar Wilde and all his hideously pretentious chums. Normally satire dates very quickly, but G&S are still phenomenally popular both in Britain and in the States because they’re good enough to work even without the satire.