The Riddle of the British English

Photo by Peter Kingsford

The Riddle of the British English

In June 1949, my mother the former singer Miss Ann Watt became Mrs Ann Halling through her marriage to my father Patrick Clancy Halling, thereby substituting a Scottish surname for a Danish one.

 In Ireland, the Watt surname is exclusive to Ulster, home province of my grandfather James Watt, having been carried there by the Scottish and English planters of the late 1600s. It’s common in the Scottish Lowlands, especially in the counties of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire. Lowlanders are altogether distinct from their Highland counterparts, being widely considered to be of Anglo-Saxon rather than Celtic ancestry, although how accurate such a perception is I’m unable to say. What is certain is that many of those descended from the original British colonial settlers in the American south are of Ulster and Lowland Scottish ancestry.

 As might be expected the Watt surname is affiliated with that of Watson, and both are what is known as septs of the Forbes and Buchanan Clans, a sept being a family that followed a certain chief or Clan leader, either through being related by marriage or resident on his land, thereby making up a larger clan or family. Kindred septs include those of MacQuat, MacQuattie, MacQuhat, MacQwat, MacRowatt, MacWalter, MacWater, MacWatson, MacWatt, MacWatters, MacWattie, Vatsoun, Vod, Vode, Void, Voud, Voude, Vould, Walter, Walterson, Wasson, Waters, Waterson, Watson, Watsone, Watsoun, Wattie, Wattson, Wod, Wode, Wodde, Woid, Woide, Wood, Woyd and Wyatt and Watt.

 I came into the world a little over six years later as Carl Robert Halling, Carl being the name of my paternal grandfather, and Robert that of my mother’s brother Bob, and very much as a Briton as opposed to an Englishman…which is to not to say that I don’t consider myself English, because I do. But my origins are British as opposed to strictly English…which is to say Scots-Irish, Scottish and English Canadian through my mother, and Danish Australian and English Australian through my dad, with a possible Cornish admixture coming through my paternal grandmother. Her maiden name had been Pinnock, a  common one in England’s poorest county, and therefore of possible Brythonic Celtic origin.

 Like the Welsh and Manx of Britain, and the Bretons of France, the Cornish are of the Brythonic family of Celtic peoples, while the Scottish and the Irish are of the Gaelic. It could be therefore that I partake of both Gaelic and Brythonic Celtic ancestry.

 Whatever the truth, I’m proud of my roots in Ulster and Glasgow, both of which possess – I think it’s fair to say – long-established working class traditions. The same applies to Wales and the north and midlands of England, while the south and especially the south east of England are widely seen as affluent, middle class regions, although needless to say, variations exist within all regions of the country. For example, the aforesaid Cornwall in the south west is, as I’ve already stated, England’s poorest county, and the great metropolis of London, which is Europe’s financial centre and still one of the most powerful cities in the world, contains no less than fourteen of the nation’s most deprived twenty boroughs. 

 What’s more, while Glasgow is home to a massive working class with clearly defined Catholic and Protestant communities, Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, known as the Athens of the North, has a reputation for great gentility. Yet, in common with other affluent cities throughout a nation of striking extremes of wealth and poverty, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and so on, Edinburgh contains areas of considerable deprivation…Wester Hailes, Broomhouse, Clermiston, Muirhouse, Pilton, Granton, Leith, Niddrie and Craigmillar being especially affected in this respect.

 I’m also proud of a more bourgeois English ancestry which comes through my father, who although born in the Tasmanian hinterland in Rowella and raised by a Danish father, is English through his mother Mary, a brilliant woman who once ran her own school in Sydney and wrote for the Sydney Telegraph. Her own father was apparently what is known as a gentleman, which means he was independently wealthy, and therefore arguably part of the lower gentry. Yet, by leaving her first husband – an army officer by the name of Peter Robinson – for a Dane with no steady profession from what I can gather, she effectively cut herself off from her class and country, act which ultimately forced her out to work to support her young family, and with Carl desperately sick with the Multiple Sclerosis that would ultimately kill him.

 Yet, while I’m proud to be British, England is the country of my birth and the one I identify with in spirit despite the fact that I’m more British than English as such…indeed if anyone incarnates the riddle of what it is to be British, a citizen of a nation consisting of four nations and yet existing as one, it’s me. For all that though, in the words of the famous hymn…there’s another country, in which all distinctions of ethnicity and class will be a thing of the past, and whose citizens will be of one race alone, the human race, the only one created by God.

The Playing Fields of Pangbourne

My first school was a kind of nursery school held on a daily basis at the home of one Miss Pierce in Bedford Park, in the Southfields ward of South Acton, then as now one of the poorest areas of West London with its vast South Acton Estate, although Bedford Park was demographically mixed and relatively affluent. It’s now one of the capital’s most exclusive suburbs.

 My brother was born in Bethnal Green, East London on the 2cnd May 1958, and as he’s the only member of my immediate family who’s never been professionally involved with the arts or entertainment, I shan’t be mentioning him by name in order to maintain his privacy.

 Aged 4 years old, I joined the exclusive Lycée Francais Charles de Gaulle, situated in the fabulously opulent West London area of South Kensington, where I was to become bilingual by the age of four or thereabouts. My father was far from wealthy, but he was determined that my brother and I enjoy the best and richest education imaginable, and we were dressed in lederhosen as small boys with our heads shorn like convicts so that we be distinguished from the common run of British boys, with their short back and sides, and to this end, he worked, toiled incessantly in the tough London session world to ensure that we did. He himself favoured radically bohemian items of clothing such as faded canvas trousers covered in multi-coloured patches, and could therefore cut a striking figure among certain other Lycée dads. Almost every race and nationality under the sun was to be found in the Lycée in those days… and among those who went on to be good pals of mine were kids of English, French, Jewish, American, Yugoslavian and Middle Eastern origin.

 I left the Lycée in what must have been the summer of 1968 – or perhaps earlier – before spending a few months at a crammer called Davies Preparatory School so as to become sufficiently up to scratch academically to pass what is known as the Common Entrance Examination.

 Taking the CE is a necessity for all British boys and girls seeking entrance into private fee-paying schools, including those known as public schools, which are the traditional secondary places of learning for the British governing and professional classes…the ruling elite in other words. The vast majority of those who go on to public schools begin their academic careers in preparatory or prep schools, and so for the most part leave home at around eight years old.

 The school my father hoped I’d manage to get into was the Nautical College, Pangbourne, although I think his first choice had been either HMS Conway or Worcester, also known as the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College. However, naval colleges and training schools were fading fast in the late 1960s, Conway being on its last legs as a so-called stone frigate on the south coast of Anglesey, and Worcester having recently been incorporated into the Merchant Navy College at Greenhithe, Kent.

 Somehow though, I managed to pass the CE, and so at still only twelve years old became Cadet Carl Robert Halling 173, who was for a few months the youngest in the college, and an official serving officer in Britain’s Royal Naval Reserve. Pangbourne’s regime was tough in ’68, even by the standards of British public schools which had historically trained boys for service on behalf of the Empire, and its headmaster – a serving officer in the Royal Navy for what I think was a quarter of a century – was known as the Captain Superintendent.

 I was what was known as a stroppy moosh, stroppy meaning insolent, and moosh a neophyte or new boy, as distinct from a doggie, which was the Pangbournian equivalent of the traditional public school fag, or personal servant in the so-called fagging system. In my first term, I was deemed as so transcendentally incompetent that none of the seniors, or older boys would even consider me as their doggie…and yet when it came to my stroppiness, this came ultimately to work in my favour, when I became a virtual mascot of some of the hardest and coolest boys in college.

 I idolised these lads and happily clowned for them like some kind of court minion, and they protected me in return, instilling me with a sense of invincibility which can’t have had any kind of positive effect on the development of my character, which wasn’t too strong to begin with. I’d go so far as to say that I wasn’t born with natural backbone as perhaps some are, but that doesn’t mean to say that those who lack moral fibre can’t go on to develop it, nor that those who don’t are not capable of losing it, because they certainly are. Am I wrong to suggest that thanks to the New Covenant established by Christ, natural born sons and daughters of Cain can go on to become the noblest of men and women, while natural born scions of Abel can degenerate into the most unspeakable monsters? Perhaps so…but one thing I am right about…I’ve struggled to develop character in a way my parents never did, and I’m still struggling. If anyone ever needed Christ it’s me.

 By my second year, all the social standing I’d worked so hard to acquire had evaporated, as I was required to remain behind in the third form, while all my friends went on to the fourth, a reversal which exerted a devastating effect on my morale. Insecure and disaffected, I started throwing my weight around among my new classmates, until two of them came down so hard on me that I was cured of trying to act the lout with them at least. We eventually became very close friends, but I don’t think they ever fully forgave me for trying it on with them, not that they ever let on about it. Actually, I jest…of course they did.

 From the outset, I desperately wanted to distinguish myself at Pangbourne…and especially at sports, beginning with the great ruffianly game for gentlemen of Rugby Football…and oh with what longing I gazed at the sight of rugger colours on the blue blazers or striped Paravicinis of those who’d earned them on the playing fields of Pangbourne. At Pangbourne, colours were – and presumably still are – awarded during one or other of the main sporting seasons of rugger, hockey, cricket and rowing and for such subsidiary sports as swimming, boxing, sailing, fencing and so on, to one showing distinction within a particular team or rowing eight or whatever, and are a long-standing tradition within British private schools and universities. Sad to say, none ever came my way.

 The fact is that, raised as I was in the western suburbs of London in the sixties with its alleys, greens, parks, sweet shops and narrow streets lined by terraced or semi-detached houses, I was wholly ignorant of the secrets of the hallowed sports of Britain’s gilded elite…so ignorant in fact that by my third term, I’d got it in my head that I wanted to be a rowing coxswain, due to some crazy dream of mine of one day ending up in the 1st VIII. As things turned out, I ended up in the conspicuous yet humiliating position of coxing only lesser crews…except for on those rare occasions when a better man was unavailable. We were pretty thin on the ground we coxes.

The Genesis of the Beat Generation

It would be false to assert that Pangbourne was exclusively composed of the sons of the British privileged, because it wasn’t…and neither was it a narrowly Anglo-Saxon institution, because during my time I knew American, West Indian, Middle Eastern and South African cadets as well as British ones, and several of these were close friends. What’s more, it was supplemented in the autumn of ’68 by cadets from the recently dismantled TS Mercury, founded in 1885 by a wealthy businessman and keen yachtsman Charles Hoare for the rescue of London slum boys who would then be trained for service in the Royal and Merchant Navies. Until as recently as the previous July, she’d been moored on the River Hamble near Southampton. Its regime made that of Pangbourne resemble a holiday camp in comparison. For example, there’d been no heating onboard even in winter, and the boys were forced to sleep in hammocks. Nonetheless, I was friendly with several of them, and most were not too tough, although the truth is that a degree of resilience was necessary in those days at Pangbourne, even after ’69, when despite being renamed Pangbourne College, she changed little.

 As much as I struggled in the arena of sporting activities, my true failure came in the classroom where I had little if any interest in what the master was trying to teach me in any given subject except French, English and Physical Education. Terminally bored, I was constantly in trouble for one misdemeanour or another, and my grades were rarely anything other than appalling during the entire four year period I was at Pangbourne. In fact in pretty well every subject except French, I tended to be bottom of the form, term after term, year after year, and if not bottom then very near it.

 It’s my contention that I was a slow developer suffering from mild learning difficulties, and certainly there were those teachers at Pangbourne who found my behaviour medically worrying with good reason. On one occasion, I went for an eye test in the village, only to return to college without having taken it, before announcing that I’d forgotten why I’d gone into town in the first place. As for my hygiene, it was so minimal that at one point the bottoms of my feet were literally as black as soot, as if someone had painted them.

 But it would be false to say I was an unqualified rebel. In fact, I never stopped longing to be recognised as being good at something, anything…even going so far at one point as to become a member the college boxing team. As such I suffered punch-drunkenness at Eton at the hands – or should I say fists – of an elegant young adonis with a classic Eton flop who later commented on an especially cruel blow he’d inflicted on me with a certain degree of remorse, which was decent of him. But how deceptively graceful he was, this flower of Eton…king of all public schools.

 However, in around 1969, some time after having seen a TV programme about young revolutionaries who idolised Che Guevara, I became a Che acolyte myself, and one of the few genuine accolades I ever received while at college came in consequence of a short story I wrote about a young man who becomes involved with Che in his revolutionary activities in South America. Even the headmaster commended me for my work.         

 Following on from my infatuation with Che, I came to fancy myself as a full-blown Communist, covering various items with the hammer and sickle, including at various times, a school notebook, and my own hand, which provoked an older far larger boy into accusing me of being a bloody Red bastard – or something similar – before playfully setting about me in a spirit of mock-outrage…but he wasn’t going to deter me from my chosen path: I’d fallen hard for the hard Left and that was that. 

 My time at Pangbourne coincided with the counterculture being at its point of maximum intensity, which is to say between the infamous year of rioting and street fighting of 1968, and that, four years later, when the sixties really and truly came to a final close and which was defined in Britain at least by the artifice and decadence of Glam. 

 One afternoon around the turbulent turn of the decade, I found myself longing to join the Hippie throngs I saw flocking to the Reading Rock Festival one afternoon from the window of a college coach in all their ragged multicoloured glory. Rebellion was everywhere in a desperately imperilled West, and Pangbourne was not exempt, in fact, many of us dreamed of a world of Bohemian freedom lying only just beyond the confines of our college, and intensely close friendships were forged smoking cigarettes in secret wooded places where the Cadet Officers couldn’t find us. We were united by a love of Rock music and the floating hair and  defiantly androgynous clothes of our heroes…Hendrix, Morrison, Jagger, Page and so on.

 Needless to say, the Counterculture of the 1960s and early ’70s didn’t just spring out of nowhere, being merely the latest in a long line of Bohemias reaching at least as far back as Romanticism, which many consider to be the wellspring of Modern Bohemianism.

 Its most immediate predecessors though included the Existentialists and Lettrists of ’40s and ’50s Paris, and most especially the Beats of America, who’d exploded into the mainstream around 1955, but whose origins lie in New York City at the height of World War II. Few today are aware of the existence of Isidore Isou’s scandalous Lettrists, but the Beats continue to enjoy an exceptionally high profile. This may be as a result of Paris ceding her time-honoured role as the world epicentre of the avant garde to New York City in the late 1940s, which was the age of the proto-Beat, aka the Hipster.

 It had been earlier in the decade – around 1943 in fact – that a disparate group of would-be poets and authors of Bohemian inclination had coalesced around an angelically handsome and intellectually brilliant young Columbia University undergraduate from a socially prominent St Louis family by the name of Lucien Carr. The first to gravitate towards Carr was a fellow Columbia student from a middle class socialist family from nearby New Jersey by the name of Allen Ginsberg.

 Through Carr, the bookish-looking Ginsberg was introduced to Arthur Rimbaud, the quintessential post-Romantic bad boy poet whose terrible yet beautiful visionary verse and frenzied rebellious rage has exerted an influence on the development of the adversary culture of the post-Romantic West that is second to none or close to it. Rimbaud went on to significantly inform the evolution of Ginsberg’s own poetic vision.

 Also through Carr – and perhaps even more importantly in terms of his artistic career – he met the boyfriend of another of Carr’s Columbia friends, future Beat biographer Edie Parker. This was Jack Kerouac, a recent Columbia drop-out with movie star good looks from a working class French Canadian family from Lowell, Masachusetts. After having gained a Football scholarship to Columbia, things had gone wrong for the gifted athlete, when he cracked his tibia, and then repeatedly clashed with coach Lou Little, the upshot being that he quit his Football career in his sophomore year, and ended up drifting in New York City, where he met the two men with whom he went on to form the nucleus of the Beat Generation – both through Carr – namely the aforesaid Ginsberg, and a friend of Carr’s from St Louis, the patrician William S Burroughs.

 In 1957, Kerouac emerged as the movement’s undisputed leader with the publication of his second novel “On the Road”, a fictionalised account of the cross-country wanderings he undertook between 1947 and 1950. The character who, early on, emerges as the work’s epic hero is Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac’s closest friend, Neil Cassady.

 Cassady, who bore a striking resemblance to the film icon Paul Newman, was the working class son of an alcoholic whose early life had included the loss of his mother, a childhood on skid row, a spell in reform school, and eleven months imprisonment for theft. Little wonder, therefore, that he served as muse to Kerouac who – from such a stable loving background himself – was the genius behind Beat’s defining work, while Cassady provided the inspiration as the Beat par excellence. 

 Oddly perhaps, Carr himself never went on to write anything of note, preferring to father a family and pursue a long career with the venerable news agency United Press International. It fell to his son Caleb, author of The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, Casing the Promised Land, Killing Time and the Italian Secretary among other works to be the novelist of the family…but his place in literary history is secure. As Allen Ginsberg once put it, “Lou was the glue”,  which is to say of what was probably the most significant and influential avant garde movement of the 20th Century.

Pastorale (for Pangbourne College)

1964 was the year that Beat started to shift imperceptibly into the Hippie movement. It was in ’64 in fact, that Colorado farmer’s son and former Stanford University student Ken Kesey – author of the best-selling “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1962) – set off on his legendary cross-country trip from California to New York on a psychedelic school bus he named Furthur, with one Neil Cassady doing most of the driving. He did so in the company of a band of counterculture pioneers, writers, artists, students &c., known as the Merrie Pranksters.

 Once in the Big Apple, they met up with the New York Beats including Jack Kerouac who, deeply patriotic and a devout Catholic at heart, was allegedly repelled by the Pranksters’ outlandish dress and appearance, and took no part in the coming psychedelic revolution, unlike Allen Ginsberg, who embraced it wholeheartedly. 

 The first of the infamous Acid Tests occurred a short time later in 1965, and during these LSD-fuelled events, there’d be slide and/or light shows and experiments with cutting edge sound technology, and bands such as the Warlocks – later the Grateful Dead – or Kesey’s own Psychedelic Symphonette would regale the crowds with proto-psychedelic Rock, and so on…all of which served to usher in the Hippie era.

 However, it wouldn’t be until ’67 that the Hippie phenomenon entered the mainstream to became an international obsession…and it was in that very totemic year I think that I harried my mother into making me a psychedelic paisley shirt which I went on to wear with a peaked Dylan cap and possibly also purple corduroy jeans.

 By the end of the decade though, the relative innocence of my infatuation with the Hippie dandies I witnessed each Thursday night on Top of the Pops and other frothy Pop programmes had mutated into a passion for actual social revolution, whose apologists I read about and revered. Today what I revere are the very old-fashioned phenomena the revolutionists of the sixties set themselves against.

 Yet, even at Pangbourne, there was a part that never stopped wanting to be accepted by the system…never stopped hoping that one day, favour would look kindly on Cadet CR Halling 173, and he’d be promoted to Cadet Officer, and given a star to wear on the right sleeve of his navy blue pullover, but it just wasn’t to be. In fact, I ran away once…just the once, in order to avoid being punished for something stupid I did. It was a completely irrational thing to do as it was the last day of term, but I just panicked and bolted, and on kept running…until I ended up trekking through a muddy field in the heart of the Berkshire countryside before just giving up and sitting by the side of the road…

 After a time though, the college chaplain, who just happened to be driving by, offered me a lift back to college…but by the time we arrived, my poor mother, who’d been in a frantic state all afternoon after having driven to Pangbourne to take me back home for the holidays only to find I’d vanished, had already left for home. This would have been in ’71, or perhaps ’72, I can’t recall.

 Certain pieces of – specifically pastoral, and quintessentially English – music have the power to evoke this strange and sudden rush of blood to the head for me. Not so much Vaughan Williams’ “A Lark Ascending”, which bespeaks a passion for the Arcadian soul of England that verges on the ecstatic, nor any kindred work by Delius, Ireland, Finzi, Grainger, as much as I love these composers.

 For some reason though, pieces within the Rock realm have more power to transport me back to the day of my mysterious and sudden flight into the heart of the English countryside than any within the Classical. I’m thinking especially of Moving by Supergrass, which wails out the anguish of an aimless wanderer in a way that so reminds me of my own attack of blind panic of nearly 40 years ago…which saw me moving, keep on moving till I didn’t know what was sane. The same applies to certain songs by another supremely English band of provincial middle class English origin, Coldplay, which  suggest a deep mournfulness beneath the picture perfect image of English privilege.

 Any argument in favour of a tragic element within the gilded world of English privilege would be powerfully reinforced by playing the music of the much-loved singer-songwriter Nick Drake. Many of his impeccably crafted songs – contained within the mere three albums he recorded between 1969 and ’72, together with out-takes and four final songs – convey the same kind of chronic tortured restlessness evinced by Supergrass’ Moving…songs such as River Man from the first album, Five Leaves Left, and Things Behind the Sun and Parasite from the third, Pink Moon.

 He was born in 1949 into an upper middle family based in Rangoon, Burma, where his father had been working as an engineer for the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation since the early ’30s, and after an idyllic upbringing in the English countryside, was educated at Malborough and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. As if the foregoing weren’t sufficient to ensure his happiness, he was not so much handsome as beautiful in a classically English, one might say, Byronic way, and blessed with charm, intelligence, and a precocious musical genius which ensured him a recording contract with the prestigious Island label when he was just 20 years old and still at Cambridge.

 He subsequently dropped out, and set out to make his mark as a Rock musician. Sadly though, he was unable to translate his enormous gifts into commercial success, and became very seriously depressed in consequence of this and other issues, including possibly his own deeply shy and inhibited personality.

 I can’t help thinking that in any era other than that ushered in by the Rock and Roll revolution, Nick Drake would have pursued a career more suited to his background than that which ensured his immortality, but broke his fragile English heart, and thence a perfectly conventional existence. However, he came to maturity in a Britain whose young were in active rebellion against the traditional Judaeo-Christian values on which the nation had long been founded, although he himself doesn’t appear to have been especially rebellious, despite the long hair and passion for Rock music that was more or less ubiquitous among young men of his generation.

 That said, he was unavoidably affected by the spiritual chaos of the age, which propelled him – as it did many of his contemporaries – towards the endless night of worldly philosophy, deadly for a mind as touch-paper sensitive as his in my opinion, and which must surely have played its part in the mental deterioration which resulted in his spending his final few months of life as a recluse at his parents’ home in Tamworth-in-Arden, Staffordshire, where, wrongly convinced he’d failed at everything, he died aged only 26 in 1974. 

 Since his death, his small but perfect life’s work has inspired some of the most successful Rock artists of all time on both sides of the Atlantic, including – in addition to the aforesaid Coldplay – Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, Michael Stipe of REM, Elliot Smith, Badly Drawn Boy and Norah Jones.

 Listening to him, I become aware of a colossal compassion within myself for the privileged classes of Britain, a somewhat unusual receptacle for the milk of human kindness some might say…but they are no less in need of salvation than any other social group. They are after all one with whom a somewhat distant connection exists in my own case through my paternal grandmother, whose flight from a gilded cage of upper middle class convention resulted in my branch of the family being cast out into a kind of social exile. At least, that’s how I see it.

 By sending my brother and I to Pangbourne, my father was perhaps attempting to reverse this exile for our sakes, yet I remain desperately declassé, although not through personal choice…it’s just turned out that way…and it’s tough at times. That said, I feel an enormous spiritual kinship with the everyday people of my adopted home town on the Surrey-London border, as much as I feel for the privileged…because social advantage can clearly be a cruel and heavy burden to bear for some, like poor Nick Drake who once sang so hauntingly of falling so far on a silver spoon.…

 But let us not go too far…the vast majority of those who’ve passed through the public school system since its inception before going on to university and a successful professional career have been perfectly normal and far from melancholy. As for myself, if I possess a single quality that might termed noble, such as patience, or self-mastery or consideration of the needs of other people, then I am significantly indebted for such a blessing to my education. Within this sphere, I would place parental discipline, and the four years I spent at Pangbourne…whose authorities extended me a fair and decent report after my departure, commenting on my resilience, and the fact that I was universally well-liked. They also gave me a good send-off in the college magazine, mentioning my time in the Boxing and Swimming teams, and my tenure as 2cnd Drum in the college band. God bless you for that, Pangbourne, beloved old friend and sparring partner…and long may you thrive in your sanctuary deep in the Arcadian heart of the English countryside…