British National Identity and the Great War (lecture)

British National Identity and the Great War Dr. Paul Mulvey London School of Economics Student Survey a. As far as Britain was concerned, the First World War was chiefly characterised by futile bloodletting. b. The First War was a good cause, but badly mishandled by Britain’s military and civilian leaders. c. The First World War was entered for good reasons, and Britain’s leaders did about as well as could have been expected. Which of these three statements do you feel most accurately sums up Britain’s part in the First World War? The first answer is, of course, the one which most closely matches the view of the war that was dominant from the 1960s, and was based on much of the original poetry of the war, along with later historical works, such as Alan Clarke’s The Donkeys (1961) and the musical and film it inspired, Oh, What a Lovely War. All three answers were also offered up at the time of the war itself, although then the respondents to number one would have been very much in a minority as we shall see. The major debate then, as between most historians of the war today, was where to locate Britain as between answers two and three. But our question today is not really about whether the war was worthwhile or not, but about the extent to, and the reasons why, people felt it to be justified at the time and in the immediate years afterwards, and what this said about, and did to, ideas of national identity within the British Isles and the wider British Empire.  Overview of the subject • Pre-War Patriotism and August 1914 • How the War changed British national identities. • War and Remembrance – post-war British national identity National Identity before 1914 – ‘more tea vicar?’ Let’s start with pre-war Britain. Here it has been argued, for example by Jay Winter, that British national identity was only vaguely formulated before 1914, so that the most important effect of the War on national identity was to clarify its nature. Winter argues in particular that ‘Englishness’ was redefined at the core of Britishness. Before 1914, he suggests, people’s identities tended to be imperial or local ones. As we have seen, the empire had become an important part of ‘Britishness’ in the latter part of the 19C, while at a day-to-day level, most people still had a strong sense of loyalty to their region, their county, and even to their town. Such feelings of local loyalty had been demonstrated before the war in civic pageants designed to emphasise the part played by particular towns and cities in the story of the nation, and they were to be exploited once the war started by the recruitment of regiments and battalions on a regional, or even a town to town basis, such as the Sherwood Foresters or the Accrington ‘Pals’. But there were identities between the whole empire and the local back-yard – there was a vision of the nation, albeit a sometimes vague one. And it was an overwhelmingly English vision – of Britain as a rural place in Southern England – perhaps with a beautiful Cathedral, certainly with a cricket pitch and an old village inn. It was a sentimental vision – perhaps a sign in itself of the relatively casual attitude that the British – well, those on the larger of Britannia’s islands at least – took to ideas of national identity compared to some at least of their continental neighbours. There were those who talked of racial decline, as evidenced by the apparent physical deterioration of the urban poor and the country’s poor performance in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, and whose adherence to social Darwinism led them to advocate eugenic methods of selective breeding to strengthen the race. But with one or two possible exceptions (e.g. the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913), such ideas did not find legislative expression, nor did such ideas reach far beyond a select (self-selected anyway) coterie of ‘experts’ and political thinkers. Pre-War Patriotism – Roberts, Fisher, Chamberlain The Boer War, however, had not simply raised fears about racial fitness. At a much wider level, it had prompted great outbursts of patriotism. Over 80,000 men volunteered to fight in South Africa in 1900, and the militarily insignificant but highly emotional relief of Mafeking was met by national rejoicing – and literally by dancing in the streets. The government, not usually slow to exploit a favourable mood, made the most of it by calling a ‘Khaki’ election as soon as the bulk of the fighting looked to be over, which they won, unlike the war, by a landslide. It was a trick successfully repeated by Lloyd-George in 1918, although not by Winston Churchill in 1945. And although the war-time sense of patriotism inevitably declined, and in some turned to revulsion as Britain used ‘concentration camps’ to incarcerate Boer women and children, it left a strong residue of support for a greater degree of patriotic, even militaristic, endeavour in Edwardian Britain. Perhaps the most significant of these ‘patriotic’ groups were the National Service League, the Navy League and the Tariff Reform League. The first of these, especially in the light of the Boer War and the rise of German military power, stressed the necessity of conscription if Britain was to retain her status among the world powers. G. F. Shee propagated this cause in a work entitled The Briton’s First Duty (1901) and military heroes such as Lord Roberts of Kandahar campaigned for universal military service. The League published a paper, The Nation in Arms and claimed by 1912 some 99,000 full members and a further 120,000 adherents, those paying only a penny subscription. But for all its vigour the NSL did not bite deeply into the predominant tradition in Britain of voluntary enlistment and a small professional army. We might quite relevantly recall the deeply–ingrained prejudice in Britain against standing armies as a threat to popular liberties, a prejudice easily reinforced by contemporary comparisons with Prussian or Russian militarism. Arguably the Navy League’s cause was more popular since the Navy had traditionally been seen as not such a threat, while embodying the essence of British world power. Its cause – the provision of more battleships - gained considerable popularity not only among the middle classes but also from the working classes, for whom the Navy had represented a more attractive escape from grim industrial reality than the army. Finally, the Tariff Reform League aimed to protect British trade and British jobs against foreign competition. It attempted to redefine the British nation, rejecting ‘free trade’ Little England in favour of a protectionist Greater Britain. Although in doing so, it fed on a distinct distrust of foreigners and immigrant labour, attacking free trade for its cosmopolitanism, with more than a hint of anti-German and anti-Semitic messages. But then, as Frank Trentmann has pointed out, free traders could be equally nationalist in their responses, equating tariffs with negative images of German workers forced to eat horse flesh to stay alive. Christian Militarism – Wolseley, Kitchener, Baden-Powell Given these active pressure groups, to what extent can we talk, as Anne Summers has done, of ‘militarism’ in Edwardian Britain. Here, I think, we need to tread carefully, for military enthusiasm in Britain took different forms from that of continental Europe. For example, there were, as Summers argues, strong links between religion and the Army; military action within the British tradition was legitimated not so much by service to the state, as in Germany, but by notions of duty and Christian service. The soldier as Christian hero was a key motif, as we have seen, in the cult of General Gordon, and the general as hero, if not always overtly Christian, continued with soldiers like Wolseley and Kitchener. ‘Militarism’ was primarily based on voluntary organisations with close links to civil society. Typically, the growing form of military participation in Edwardian Britain were the territorial army, the Boys brigades, Boy Scouts, and school cadet corps, reformed as Officer Training Corps in 1911. In 1914, 24,000 schoolboys and 5,000 undergraduate were enrolled in OTCs. In addition, to an extent, the whole ethos of the Victorian public school was one of muscular Christianity with an emphasis of playing games, which in turn prepared men for the ‘game of war’. The heavily Latin and Greek based syllabus may also have imbued many pupils with a blind patriotism on the classical model that encouraged a glorification of death in battle. Thus, such schools helped create a gentlemanly elite ready to welcome danger and to die in battle. The effects of public schools were confined to a small elite, but in many ways their curricula and attitudes filtered downwards, at least to the many grammar schools of the period. Meanwhile, other cultural forces also sustained a growing sense of a nation under threat – and increasingly the threat was seen as coming from Germany, rather than, as in the 18th and 19th centuries, from France. And while we should not exaggerate the extent of this, as it turned out, justifiable paranoia, it was certainly the case that a growing proportion of the British population were, in the early 1900s, coming to see Germany as Britain's number one enemy. It was a belief encouraged by many in the media, from the lower end of the market – as typified by the patriotic populist (and as it later turned out – crook) Horatio Bottomley and his newspaper, John Bull, to the also popular, but this time well-written efforts of novelists such as Erskine Childers, with his 1903 novel about German invasion plans, the Riddle of the Sands, and Hector Munro’s satirical 1913 novel, When William Came, published under the pen-name Saki, which described a London ruled by the Hohenzollerns. This new sense of the nation under threat prompted a reappraisal of British national identity in the Edwardian era, but it did so to a lesser degree than in other European countries at this time, where the risk of war and invasion seemed more feasible, while also, as Winter suggests, it was a British privilege ‘as an old nation either unaware of or untroubled by fundamental threats’… not [to] have to define who or what it is’.’ (p.265). Well, at least not too closely. Volunteering But this situation was not to last and in August 1914 with the outbreak of war, Britons did face the sort of fundamental threat that would help crystallise the identity of the nation. There was an immediate rush to arms by the young men of the country, which was sustained for over a year. Indeed, of the 4.97 million soldiers recruited in the UK during the war, 2.48 million were volunteers in the first fifteen months or so – while a further 140,000 volunteered from Ireland. Such enthusiasm was officially interpreted at the time as a spectacular demonstration of patriotism, although there were other reasons – escape from boring jobs for some, better pay for others, and anyhow, none of the early volunteers seemed to think the war would last long – ‘home for Christmas’ was a common view. Nonetheless, although it is difficult to quantify, volunteering for war cannot be dissociated from ideals of imperial and national greatness, from notions of honour and patriotic duty. And such views were not only held by the officer class – indeed, when push came to shove, the working class of Britain unambiguously put their loyalty to the state ahead of any feelings of international proletarian solidarity, which Marx had predicted would make them refuse to fight foreign workers. This commitment to ‘King and Country’ was not confined by any means to those, mostly Conservatives, who had been enthusiastic about conscription before the war. Indeed, given that the whole ethos of a volunteer army had been based on the assumption that in a national crisis, a free people would respond to the call to defend the nation; voluntary service was then the military face of British liberalism. The appeal to fight was based on conscience, on service as an ethical duty - not to realise some abstract state purpose but in order to defend the homeland. For some, Kitchener’s volunteer legions were ‘the purest embodiment of national life that has ever sprung from the depths of England’. The volunteers represented in this perspective the essence of the nation, which in normal times remained shapeless. But equally, when later conscription was adopted, many were to criticise it as ‘un-English’ and a violation of that essence. For the Liberal MP Richard Lambert, for example, and thirty or forty other MPs, conscription represented the very type of ‘Prussianism’ that Britain was supposed to be fighting against. Enlistment was, however, rarely entirely spontaneous and recruitment was supported in two ways which drew on, and re-affirmed, conceptions of national identity. First, of course there was a strong deployment of anti-German sentiment, a demonisation of the forces leading to war, particularly identified with the Prussian militarism that Lambert was so concerned about. A whole range of propaganda devices – such as posters and postcards - portrayed English qualities, such as decency and fair play, opposed to German qualities, like bullying and brutality. The British were above all decent, moral, and manly. This was reinforced by the emphasis on the fate of Belgium - a small nation crushed by German might, accompanied by abominable atrocities committed against men, women and children. Interestingly, it seems the cause of small Belgium struck a particular chord in Ireland - another small nation seeking to achieve its freedom and therefore willing to fight with England against Germany. Secondly, recruitment more directly exploited patriotic motifs – not only the famous Kitchener poster ‘Your Country needs You’, but posters in which John Bull appeared in his characteristic guise – overweight, irritable, and old-fashioned, but stirred reluctantly to fight. Recruitment – patriotism or guilt? Other motifs stressed the part of women, ‘Women of Britain say Go’, or Britain as Liberty comforting Belgium – or even children, as we see in this poster. There were also historic appeals – looking back, for example, to Henry V or Francis Drake. Such messages were reinforced by the music of contemporary British composers such as Elgar – it was during the War that Land of Hope and Glory was popularised as a leading patriotic anthem. The music hall also became a key recruiting ground. For example, at a concert held in the Royal Victoria Hall opposite Waterloo Station there was a recitation from Henry V followed by a patriotic address, while Miss Edith Bracewell, a music hall star of the time, donned a recruiting sergeant’s cap and walked among the audience picking out likely recruits. There were also hit tunes such as those of Harry Lauder and Vesta Tilley, including Jolly good luck to a Girl who loves a soldier’. Appealing perhaps to a different audience were some still familiar hymns – ‘I vow to thee my country’ written in 1914 by the former British ambassador to Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice, or J. S. Arkwright, The Supreme Sacrifice, translated into Latin and Welsh; the words of Blake’s poem Jerusalem were also first set to music (by Elgar) in 1916 as part of the drive to maintain recruitment. Recruitment was also perhaps aided by a peculiar form of what has been seen as female patriotism – the giving out of white feathers to apparently able-bodied men who had stayed at home rather than volunteering for the army (again, the poster offers a similar example of moral blackmail). There is lots of evidence that this was counterproductive – arousing ill-feeling with many war heroes given white feathers by meretricious young women, while this strident public behaviour was also seen as an unwelcome contrast with women’s normal nurturing roles. However, war in many ways disrupted such normal expectations, and it is interesting that ultimately women themselves were allowed, not to join the army, but to don khaki as members of the Woman's Army Corps and similar units; in this way the wearing of uniforms by women may have been a far more authentic form of patriotism than giving out white feathers – ‘The uniform, The Evening News wrote, is the outward and visible sign of her patriotism’. Going to glory – Rupert Brook and the Somme How far the fighting of war as opposed to recruitment itself drew on concepts of national identity is difficult to say – what evidence there is tends to suggest that the immediate motivation for men in battle was to do well in front of their mates, and hatred of the enemy, rather than any urge to go once more unto the breech for Harry, England and St. George. Having said that, the battlefields of the Western Front were not far from the sites of the English victories at Crecy and Agincourt, and it was said at the time that many English soldiers had visions of the knights of Henry V as they fought the Germans, although to me this has the ring of propaganda rather than truth about it, and certainly, chivalric images and St. George played a role in the recruitment drive. Nonetheless, while not exactly reciting Shakespeare or singing God Save the King as they went over the top, the soldiers were constantly aware that they were fighting for England, or Scotland. As Rupert Brook so memorably put it in 1915, If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be  In that rich dust a richer dust concealed. Brook’s good looks and early death (of blood poisoning) made him a symbol of romantic patriotism. As the war dragged bloodily on, however, cynicism tended to replace romanticism as the prevailing mood at the front – certainly if the evidence of the war poets and the lyrics of popular contemporary songs are anything to go by, but while ‘old soldiers’ lost the hope and naivety that they had as young volunteers, they never stopped believing that their cause and country were right and would win in the end. Nation building on the Home Front Away from the front itself, patriotism took many shapes – not just the White feathers movement. Here again, in part this was spontaneous, or was orchestrated by voluntary bodies, rather than by government. Negative images of Germany continued to circulate – atrocity tales from the front, fear that a German invader would kill every male child, the execution of Edith Cavell, a nurse, by the Germans on spying charges, and the sinking of The Lusitania – which prompted this recruitment poster in Ireland, presumably on the basis that the ship had gone down near the Irish coast. The war spirit was encouraged by bodies such as The Fight for Right movement which included the writers John Buchan, Henry Newbolt and Thomas Hardy, and the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organisations, set up in August 1914. The role of the clergy was also prominent, so much so that it has been claimed this produced a backlash after the war – with many women permanently put off religion by the role of the church in sending their men folk to their deaths. In addition, the war legitimised an outburst of anti-German xenophobia – with a number of riots aimed at German shopkeepers, and attacks on German individuals, thought to be spies.  Elizabeth von Saxe- Coburg und Philip von Battenberg German names became very unfashionable to say the least. The First Sea Lord, Prince Louis von Battenberg, lost his job because of his German background, and in 1917 Anglicised his name by changing it to Mountbatten. Another royal of German extraction was also obliged to change his name, but at least Georg von Saxe-Coburg – better known as King George V – got to keep his job when he changed the family name to Windsor. An Anti-German League was formed (but changed its name to the British Empire Union in 1915); and this produced in 1918 a film called Once a Hun always A Hun, which advocated a ban on trade with Germany after the war. It is worth noting that almost all this propaganda was not produced by the government, but by the newspapers – which were overwhelmingly patriotic – and by voluntary groups. It was felt, indeed, that government propaganda was likely to be counter-productive, and although increasing by 1918 through bodies such as the National War Aims Committee, it is probably true to conclude, as de Groot has done, that ‘the steadfast patriotism of the British people and their unquenchable faith in eventual victory …rose from within themselves.’ Popular culture – Charlie Chaplain and John McCormack As well as what a person should be called, the war also encouraged a debate as to what constituted patriotic behaviour – for example, should young men still play association football? This became a hotly contested issue at the start of the war – and eventually professional football matches were banned. However, if the masses were deprived of the pleasures of football they enjoyed the consolation of increased opportunities for cinema-going. Part of the attraction here were of course the newsreels with authentic scenes from the Front. It became almost a patriotic duty to see these films; for example an advertisement for a film of the Battle of Ancre in 1917 urged ‘It’s your duty and your privilege to see it’. The film of the Battle of the Somme, although depicting the deaths of British soldiers was also held to impart a ‘thrill of pride in the British race’; the Times critic wrote that the film left him ‘more convinced than ever of the invincible spirit of his fellow countrymen in France’. Other film-makers also produced effective patriotic propaganda – for example, the American director D.W. Griffith, with the Great Love or Heart of the World, which combined action, sex (The star is almost raped by a German Officer), romance, a hated villain, and a happy ending. Escapist films, such as those of Charlie Chaplin, also helped boost morale. Music halls too, continued to provide what were in effect political cartoons put to music – with set routines, like the fat German soldiers with large sausages hanging from their pockets; and patriotic singing, like It’s a long way to Tipperary, made famous in 1914 by the most popular singer of the day, the Irishman John McCormack. The theatres too, remained open and served up a diet of crude patriotic dramas. Most popular culture therefore revealed, unlike the war poetry of Owen and company, that the British public wished to be both amused and convinced that the war was noble and just. The War and Politics Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald & Milner Finally, we should note that although normal party politics were suspended in wartime, patriotism was an important political theme. This was good news politically for the Conservatives, who had been banging on about how patriotic they were since the time of Disraeli. For the Liberals, on the other hand, the war presented a much more serious challenge, and one which ultimately they failed. For the requirements of total war – coalition, conscription, decisions about war aims and the peace – all had a divisive effect on the coalition of interests that had made up the pre-war Liberal party. Many radicals, for example, did not believe that Germany was responsible for the war, but that it was a dreadful accident caused by secret treaties and the pre-war alliance system, and therefore could be stopped if only men of sense on each side could negotiate openly. Others, such as Lloyd George, decided early on that Germany was headed by an evil regime, and that the war would be a life and death struggle – with no holds barred – an attitude that often proved too much for liberals who had been schooled in the old traditions of free-trade internationalism and personal liberty. These were traditions that most of the small Edwardian Labour Party had also subscribed too, but while some notable Labour leaders, including the future Labour Prime Minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, sided with some Radical Liberals in opposing the Government’s decision to fight until Germany was defeated, most of the Labour Party, and all of its Trade Union supporters, disproved Marx’s prediction that the workers would not take arms against each other by loyally and, generally, eagerly supporting the war. The war, then, gradually saw the more bellicose Liberals, led by Lloyd George, moving into coalitions with Bonar Law’s Tories – supported by most of the Labour Party, while a small anti-war rump of Liberal and Labour activists opposed them, leaving Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister until the end of 1916, heading a residual Liberal party of those who essentially could not choose between the Coalition and the anti-war progressives. When Lloyd George decided to keep his Conservative-dominated coalition in being in 1918, that doomed the Liberals to remain split and provided the by then re-united Labour party with the opportunity to become the main party on the British political left. Perhaps of more significance for the changing nature of British nationality than the wartime and post-war realignment of the Left, was the somewhat surprising, but certainly welcome, failure of the radical right to make much progress in British politics – surprising given its growing popularity not only in Germany and Italy, but also in France. This failure of the more extreme right to make progress was not for want of trying, as two small parties emerged which sought more directly to exploit patriotism. One, associated with Henry Page Croft in 1917, was called the National Party and sought to campaign for economic warfare against Germany after the War. This was really a splinter for the pre-war tariff reform League and although supported by 6 MPs at one point never elected its members independently. Croft had become disillusioned with normal party politics, which he believed had become corrupt, especially with the large scale sale of honours by Lloyd George. Among other policies, he urged that all Germans should be banned from Britain for ten years. The other example is that of Alfred Milner – the man who had instigated the Boer War and who had fully supported Ulster Unionists’ dubiously legal opposition to Home Rule in 1912-14. Now, although a member of the wartime cabinet, he put his faith in the patriotic working class, setting up first a National Democratic Labour Party and British Workers League and publishing a paper, The British Citizen. The aim was to prevent the revolutionary indoctrination of the working class and allow their natural patriotism to express itself [the National Socialist German Workers Party – NSDAP – or Nazi party – was to have similar aims in post-war Germany, although it also had a visceral anti-Semitism which went far beyond the Anglo-Saxon racism of Milner’s outfit]. Milner’s Patriotic Labour movement, however, proved an unconvincing alternative to the strengthening Labour party, perhaps in part because patriotism was seen as something that belonged to people of all parties and of none – and was not something that people wanted to see usurped as the particular property of one political agenda.  War Memory & National Identity The Cenotaph, Poppies and ‘some corner of an English field’ Turning now to the aftermath of the War and its important effects on the definition of national identity. Here above all the memory of war was to produce dramatic effects, with the emergence of a cult of war memory, with celebrations such as Armistice day, the wearing of poppies, the erection of war memorials, and literature and films about the war producing important effects through the interwar period and beyond. Jay Winter, for example, suggests that the war memorials which we see virtually every day acted as key repositories of communal symbols of ‘Englishness’ - they presented the British soldier, the Tommy, often in sad tired pose, but with a laconic sense of humour that was pointedly not German. They confirmed that Britain had been unwillingly drawn into war and was now shocked by the price of victory. Archbishop Benson sought, in these memorials, to create, ‘a record of a great fact which has punctuated our national life more deeply than any historical event in the whole of our annals’. Winter also makes the point that war cemeteries were often created as English style gardens to the dead and fallen. These graves, he suggests, celebrated men, not armies, creating rural images of eternal repose and an outward sign of the Englishness of the men who died, including the planting of Yew trees, which were so typical of English country churchyards. And it was Kipling, the poet and novelist of empire, who wrote many of the now famous words that embellished the soldiers’ graves, such as, ‘A soldier of the Great War known only to God’, ‘lest we forget’, and ‘Their name liveth for evermore’. Other rituals of remembrance were also created, whose basis was often that of sacrifice rather than a parading of patriotic virtues. In London there are two great memorials to the fallen of the Great War - the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, which celebrates the individual rather than the nation, and consists of the tomb of an unidentified corpse exhumed in France and reburied in a coffin made from oak from Hampton Court palace along with a Crusaders sword. Again, the suggestion of knightly chivalry and God-given mission is present. The coffin was buried on the same day that the second memorial, the Cenotaph [empty tomb], was unveiled in Whitehall. This was much more a collective national memorial, and was visited by 400,000 visitors in its first three days, a shrine of national pilgrimage. This, of course, is still the site of Remembrance day ceremonies, although today they do not quite have the impact they had in the early years. On 15 Nov 1920, for example, a queue seven miles long waited to place wreathes at the cenotaph. Armistice day itself (11-o-clock on the 11th day of the 11th month) became Remembrance Day – not in celebration of a Great Victory, but as a remembrance of patriotic collective sacrifice. It’s defining moment is not the military march past that might typify a French or Russian celebration of the nation, but a two minute silence, first started in 1919, to allow for private contemplation and a collective show of respect for those who suffered in the struggle. As war memorials sprang up along the length and breadth of the country – frequently featuring a list of local soldiers who had died – the mixture of private grief and national patriotism that Remembrance Day invoked also became tied into local commemoration and identity. As the years have gone by, the sense of personal grief has inevitably faded away, although the collective remembrance, perhaps best seen in the wearing of poppies – reminiscent both of the fields of Flanders and of blood sacrifice – has continued up to the present – sweeping subsequent wars into its patriotic embrace along the way. War Memory & National Identity Journey's End and Private Lives But remembrance aside, what was the broader cultural impact of war on British national identity? Jay Winter claims that it reinforced a particularly English and conservative view of the national character – one to do with masculine decency, moral rectitude, and martial virtues expressed in the accents of southern England and the officer class. The wartime public school officer became in effect the typical Englishman, while provincial and local cultures were subordinated. Certainly this was the pattern on the stage and in the ever more popular cinema, where works such as R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End (play 1928, film 1930) commemorated the lost generation of public schoolboys and their elite values – class, breeding, athleticism, loyalty, courage and masculine bearing of arms - as the essence of the British way of Life. Sherriff, at the end of his career, also wrote the script for the famous World War Two film, The Dam Busters, where his view of upper middle-class England as representing the nation in heroic mood (‘Tally-ho, chaps’) had not materially changed. And nor was it significantly different in the characters portrayed by less serious, albeit more talented writers, such as Noel Coward, whose Private Lives was also first produced in 1930. Perhaps, as Winter suggests, the institution which became most closely identified with the nation as conservative, English, posh, and essentially rural or occasionally suburban, was the BBC, despite the fact that its founding genius, John Reith, was an engineer from Glasgow.