Friday, August 25, 2006
Those eccentric English
I have been enjoying Joseph Pearce's musings on things English on the First Things blog during the month of August. If English eccentricities amuse you as much as they do me, you'll enjoy them too.
Among other things, he has commented on a ban on foxhunting:
I’m sure that many Americans were, and remain, somewhat bemused at the passions aroused in England over the subject of foxhunting. Those passions raged in the months and years leading to the ban, culminating in an enormous pro-hunt demonstration in London. The passions remain, embedded in bitterness, in the ban’s wake. I trust, therefore, that my bemused American friends will indulge me while I comment on the subject, and I hope that, after I have done so, they might even understand that the passions are more than mere English eccentricity and that, on the contrary, they go to the heart of the modern malaise affecting my homeland.
And the Englishman's fondness for the eccentric by telling the story of "King" Anthony Hall:
Looking to the future, “King” Anthony promised to pay off the national debt while building millions of homes for the working classes, whose houses would be of Tudor robustness and stateliness as befitted the dignity of the greatest nation on earth. He also promised to popularize portrait painting and planned to establish a ministry of pleasure that would revive public pageants, and would encourage manly pursuits such as boxing and wrestling. As a former police inspector in Shropshire, he claimed to have been the first policeman in the county to have secured a conviction on a fingerprint; he hoped to be the first policeman to become king, he said, and hoped also that he would become the first policeman to cut off the king’s head (presumably King George’s, not his own).
“King” Anthony’s desire to reign was quelled by the threat of two months’ hard labor in prison, after which very little else was heard from him. We know that his wife Ethel divorced him in 1938 for desertion and that he died in 1947, leaving no male heir. Such was the rather pathetic end to a rather grandiose, if neglected, dynasty.
Among other things, he has commented on a ban on foxhunting:
I’m sure that many Americans were, and remain, somewhat bemused at the passions aroused in England over the subject of foxhunting. Those passions raged in the months and years leading to the ban, culminating in an enormous pro-hunt demonstration in London. The passions remain, embedded in bitterness, in the ban’s wake. I trust, therefore, that my bemused American friends will indulge me while I comment on the subject, and I hope that, after I have done so, they might even understand that the passions are more than mere English eccentricity and that, on the contrary, they go to the heart of the modern malaise affecting my homeland.
And the Englishman's fondness for the eccentric by telling the story of "King" Anthony Hall:
Looking to the future, “King” Anthony promised to pay off the national debt while building millions of homes for the working classes, whose houses would be of Tudor robustness and stateliness as befitted the dignity of the greatest nation on earth. He also promised to popularize portrait painting and planned to establish a ministry of pleasure that would revive public pageants, and would encourage manly pursuits such as boxing and wrestling. As a former police inspector in Shropshire, he claimed to have been the first policeman in the county to have secured a conviction on a fingerprint; he hoped to be the first policeman to become king, he said, and hoped also that he would become the first policeman to cut off the king’s head (presumably King George’s, not his own).
“King” Anthony’s desire to reign was quelled by the threat of two months’ hard labor in prison, after which very little else was heard from him. We know that his wife Ethel divorced him in 1938 for desertion and that he died in 1947, leaving no male heir. Such was the rather pathetic end to a rather grandiose, if neglected, dynasty.
