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Rule Britannia! An Anglophile Abroad

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Rule Britannia!
Britannia rule the waves
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

Daughter Ceili is in London for the next five months, for a study-abroad term through the University of Oregon. This is the fulfillment of a dream she’s had since she was a very young girl, enthralled by the image of Harry Potter and his friends soaring up the Thames on broomsticks. I am quite certain that she also absorbed a heavy dollop of Anglophilia from her father…

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My own fascination with This Sceptred Isle has its origins, as most things do with me, in frontier history. The story of the American frontier is British history from the founding of Jamestown through the War of 1812. But it goes beyond that. The imperial frontiers of the 19th century — in Canada, Australia, southern Africa — offer fascinating parallels with American frontier history. The gold rush to the Transvaal is as fascinating to me as the California Gold Rush; the creation of Rhodesia is as compelling to me as the founding of the Republic of Texas. One of my favorite figures in frontier history, Frederick Russell Burnham, was a renowned American scout who served with distinction under the British flag in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902.

Mark me, I am not blindly sentimental about Jolly Olde England. The moniker “Perfidious Albion” was well earned. No one, not even the U.S., tops the British propensity for wrapping naked self-interest in a humanitarian package, and one need look no further than the Middle East during and after World War I for a master class in duplicitous diplomacy. I am most interested in “modern” Great Britain, which for me means from the Act of Union in 1707 on to the present day. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain led the world into the Industrial Revolution, ushering in an era where extraordinary bravery and gallantry, the birth of high ideals, and explosive material improvement sat side-by-side with the sordid, exploitative and downright grotesque.

I love it in all of its paradox.

Aye, the Brits have many a dark stain on the imperial escutcheon. The savage ethnic cleansing of the Scottish Highlands after Culloden in 1746; the repression of Irish liberty and the Famine; Boer concentration camps; the terrible Armistar Massacre in India in 1919…

“After Culloden – Rebel Hunting.”
John Seymour Lucas (1884)

But on the plus side of the ledger are the concept of individual British Liberty — the inalienable rights to life, liberty and property; the ideal of a high-functioning, professional, ethical civil service; the rule of law. Of course, these were applied unevenly, initially as the sole province of white, Protestant English males. We Americans had to break up with the Mother Country in order to fully enact them for ourselves. Whether or not they have been consistently observed, the ideals proved so potent that they could not be held by the stone walls of custom, and they have become universal, as has the English language. Classic schoolboy virtues — fair play, respect, perseverance, compassion, and courage — remain worthy lodestars, allowing youngsters to aspire to what H. Rider Haggard’s hunter-hero Allan Quatermain called:

…the highest rank whereto we can attain—the state and dignity of English gentlemen.

Allan Quatermain.

Capitalism, that great engine of material progress (and inequality and inequity), is largely a British invention, as are the tools of finance that keep the City of London relevant almost a century after she slid off the imperial throne that once presided over a fifth of the world’s population.

For good and for ill, love it or loathe it, Great Britain created the modern world in which we live.

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The folk music that is fundamental to my personal culture has its origins in the British Isles. It sailed across the Atlantic with waves of immigrants, particularly the Ulster Scots who moved into the backcountry of the American colonies in the 18th Century, carrying their fiddles and their ballad tradition with them. It’s the foundation of American country music. American music crossed back across the pond in the mid-20th Century to be refracted through post-War British teen culture, and it roared back again in a Jumpin’ Jack Flash to hit American shores in the British Invasion.

 

The British sporting tradition runs deep and wide. The classic English gunmakers like John Rigby & Co. and Holland & Holland are the stuff of dreams for one who fed himself on tales of Frederick Courteney Selous, WDM “Karamojo” Bell and Jim Corbett. Those men set a template for the gentlemen adventurers who, in Theodore Roosevelts estimation, combined “just the right alternations between wilderness and civilization.” And who cannot recognize in the Rigby Highland Stalker the very apex of a noble tradition?

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Marilyn and I traveled to England in 1996, and hope to do so again during Ceili’s sojourn there. It will be good to once again touch the historical soil from which so much of what made me sprang. To share it with my daughter, who is so strongly coming into her own will be … sublime. And maybe, just maybe, on that visit to the John Rigby & Co. London Gunroom, I’ll get to hoist that beautiful rifle…

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Jim Cornelius

Jim Cornelius

Born in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Jim Cornelius grew up dreaming of distant frontiers, of mountain men, long hunters, African explorers. His older brother gave him a tattered copy of Allan W. Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, a biography of Simon Kenton, and the twig was bent. Graduated from...

Comments

  1. Matthew says

    Long time no posts, Jim! How’s everything going?

    I tend to think that Britain’s record is like every other country mixed. All nations are made up of human beings who can be both noble and perfidious. Honestly, the Anglo-sphere at least tries to grapple with its mistakes. When’s the last time you hear of humanitarian reform from Iran.

    About Allan Quatermaine: His works definitely were written to aspire to the English Gentleman, but he noted that he knew natives of Africa who were gentlemen and Englishmen from good family who were not.

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  3. Katie Williams says

    Just love your writing! Excited for Ceili. She’s is going to love it! Full immersion. I can’t wait to be regaled with her stories and adventures.

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  4. Macgregor Hay says

    Well put Jim, as usual. I’m looking forward to Ceili’s blog. Hopefully she will be able to check out Scotland.

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  5. Thom Eley says

    Great post, Jim. Congratulations to Ceili. Nothing better for young adults to learn about another country by living there for a good spell.

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  6. Breaker Morant says

    Good Post.

    The most recent issue of Wild West or True West or one of them had a discussion of a book right up your alley (and mine). Apologies if you have posted on this.

    “Native but Foreign: Indigineous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands” by Brenden Rensink.

    »>In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant.”

    Rensink’s findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West–namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities.««<

    Reply

  7. John M Roberts says

    Haggard/Quatermain (the two are inseparable) were vast influences on me when I was growing up. And then there was Umslopogaas. He was a real man whom Haggard knew, though a Swazi, not a Zulu as in the tales. And his axe was as Quatermain described it. This has caused me to wonder where that axe is now. Is it rusting away in some Johannesburg junk shop? Used to split firewood in a Zulu hut? Of all the weapons of fiction/reality, the axe of Umslopogaas fascinates me perhaps the most, right up there with Bowie’s fabled knife. I hope it’s found in my lifetime.

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  8. Padre says

    This was a timely post for me as I’ve lately been experiencing some intense Anglophilia. It’s mainly from doing some research on my family history, which has led to taking Google street view tours of the small rural villages in Kent and Suffolk my ancestors came from. Now I want to walk down the same narrow farm lane past the oast houses that my 3x and 2x great grandfathers walked by on their way to the fields. It makes me wonder if the desire to own enough land to farm or garden that my father and I have is somehow hard-wired into our psyches. It didn’t come from conditioning, as our family skipped a couple of generations from farming as an occupation. That connection to the land some people groups and families have would seem to be a topic ripe for research for some psychologist or sociologist, or even geneticist. 

    The recent Brexit coverage and now this post haven’t helped the desire to tighten the budget and get myself and the wife across the pond somehow. Thanks for the synchronicity!

    Reply

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