Two peoples separated by a common language. And some other stuff.

I ran across this review of the 1943 Ministry of Information film Welcome to Britain, a guide to American troops on how to make a good impression with the local population (or at least how to avoid making a really bad one).

The New Statesman and Nation had some very good things to say about it:

“The other film on my list, though it can’t yet be seen, is shown to every American soldier landing in England and has the official blessing of the M.O.I. Tells, in a very lively and endearing manner, the best way for Americans to take the English. Pub etiquette, the rations problem, scars of the Blitz, English grouchiness and hopes for future; a brilliant little elucidation of character, with Burgess Meredith interpreting the good and the bad American, and Bob Hope and Beatrice Lillie at their dazzling best. There aren’t so many friendly and helpful films about that we can afford to have this one buried in the files of the American War Office.”*

Not least since my father would have been one of those who were compelled to watch it, I find it an interesting little film, since I try to imagine what he would have made of it.

Corny and stilted at times, it remains pretty watchable. (From about 25:00 there is, for example, an extended section on race relations -- something I noted here recently -- which I hadn't expected.)

Actually, the Britain it depicts is probably as foreign for today's Britons as it ever was for the Yanks of the mid-1940s. Even those from New York City. 

But judge for yourselves.

*New Statesman and Nation, 15 January 1944, 39.

Special Relationships, II: Black-and-white issues

When I was young, my mother told me all about how the dance halls in her village instituted "black nights" and "white nights" during the war as a result of intra-American conflicts and fights breaking out when some white soldiers saw black men dancing with local white women.

I was reminded of that when reading this:

"Examples are beginning to reach me of the complications that are almost certain to arise if considerable numbers of coloured troops arrived with the American army. For instance, a British soldier writes to complain that in an English port part of a well-known restaurant is barred to coloured troops. He says that the employees of the restaurant disliked discriminating against coloured soldiers, and that a group of British soldiers near said what they thought about colour prejudice. He adds that his unit was called together and instructed to be ‘polite to coloured troops, answer their queries and drift away.’ They were not to eat or drink with coloured soldiers.

Before going off the deep end about this we must try to understand the nature of the problem that confronts the authorities, British and American. English people will find that coloured troops are particularly easy and pleasant to get on with, and I should think they should be extremely popular in most villages. American troops from a large part of the U.S.A. would agree with this, and be prepared to rub shoulders with the negro soldiers.

But the feeling of white troops from the ‘deep South,’ where the poison of slavery has never left the land, is something far too deep to brush aside. I have met Southerners who seemed rational enough until the negro problem was mentioned, and who would then suddenly show a terrified, lynching spirit which was about the ugliest thing imaginable.

The colour problem in the South is economic, political and sexual. The political side has been increased lately because the parties have begun to canvass for the negro vote. The economic aspect has increased with the increased opportunities of war-time employment. The social and sexual prejudice is so deep that there will be many Southern whites in this country who will take it for granted that it is their duty to interfere if they see black troops with white girls.

What is to be done? The American Government must itself face the problem. It must use every device of persuasion and authority to let white Southern troops know that it is against discipline to treat negro soldiers in the way to which their training and education has accustomed them. I am aware that with a prejudice as deep as that of the South, discipline and re-education will not work nearly quickly enough. I feel it is a mistake to send large numbers of coloured troops.

If things are left to drift an impossible problem will be set to the British authorities, and very unhappy incidents will occur between black and Southern troops, and, only too naturally, between Southern troops and the British, who will instinctively take the side of the blacks against their white assailants."

"A London Diary", The New Statesman and Nation, 22 August 1942, 121. (Paragraph breaks have been added.)

Special relationships, I: Swinging a line and sweet FA

Spotted in the New Statesman and Nation from many, many summers ago:

"The arrival of Americans makes us feel that something is really happening. I believe that for the most part the two armies are settling down well together, but inevitably there will be some friction. Old soldiers, who recall how the Americans came over last time, fresh when we had had three years of fighting and said they had won the war—they are just the men who are putting things right between the British and American troops. Both British and American have had wise advice given to them to prevent friction.

Difficulties are bound to arise because the Americans have far more money than the British, who are more sore about the allowances given to their wives than about anything else anyway. Also they are warned that Americans are apt to ‘swing a line’ while the British always understate.

An American recruit, naively pleased with his equipment, starts boosting his gas-mask. The English, smiling to themselves, egg him on a bit. The remark they would naturally make about their own mask is quite insincere, but traditional. They would curse the authorities for making them carry the thing at all, and add that anyway it would probably stop sweet Fanny Adams if came to the test."

"A Country Diary", The New Statesman and Nation, 25 July 1942, 58.

"I referred last week to the problem of Anglo-American relations in the village pub. My own observations this week have been that things are settling down very well, though the American habit of expecting whisky, which is not to be found because it has almost all been sent to America, has occasioned some ironic comment. It is just as well, in my view, that the whisky is not there, for the last two generations of Americans tend to treat alcohol too little as a social amenity and too much as an occupation."

"A London Diary", The New Statesman and Nation, 1 August, 1942, 72. 

Now: To the extent that Britons were ever more restrained than Americans when it comes to either self-regard or alcohol -- which may well have once been the case -- this seems like a long lost marker of cultural difference.

"Multitudes of Americans in England"

Spotted in the pages of the British Weekly (a Christian, Free-Church newspaper) from 1943: a short article by Lynn Harold Hough, an American Methodist minister, written after a visit to wartime Britain.

Just now there are multitudes of Americans in England. One meets American officers and men in the ranks everywhere. You see them on the streets, in the hotels, and in the clubs. And they are receiving a most hearty welcome.

Indeed, there is something winning about the way in which your English friends say to you: ‘What can we do to make your American soldiers feel at home among us? We cannot entertain them in the fashion which would have been possible in pre-war days. But if they will take us as we are, and accept such food as in these times of rationing we can offer, we will be glad to have them in our homes.’ And from the American you are apt to hear: ‘I am receiving so many invitations that I cannot accept them all.’

To be sure there are problems. Our soldiers are paid at a higher rate than the British. And sometimes the glamour of the American soldier—a very attractive person—and of the money he has to spend, causes English girls to show more interest in him than in the British Tommy.

Then there is the colour problem. These American Negroes, with their soft voices and gentle ways, are very interesting to the British, who are eager to serve them in their canteens and to welcome them in their homes. The white soldiers from south of the Mason and Dixon line—and not they alone—are a bit astonished. And sometimes more than that.

One asks rather searching questions about the nature of democracy as one confronts this problem.

Interesting: and not simply because I'm the son of one of those "glamorous" American soldiers.

Lynn Harold Hough, "Thoughts in War Time England", British Weekly, 14 January 1943, 197.

Separated by a common language

Something I ran across in The Spectator while looking for something rather different:

I reckon myself fairly competent as an interpreter of American newspaper headlines, but the Washington correspondent of the Morning Post sends one which, even with his translation as a guide, I still find baffling at points. It reads

‘MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF TO DOPE YANK TALK’

and its purport appears to be that the University of Chicago has invited an Oxford professor to supervise the production of a dictionary of American English. Most of it, of course, crystal clear. But—Midway? And Limey?
‘A Spectator’s Notebook’ (by ‘Janus’), 1 January 1937, p. 6

There was a follow-up the next week:

Thanks are due to correspondents who have explained satisfactorily the American terms, “Midway” and “Limey.” “Midway,” as I rather suspected, is the University of Chicago, and for fairly obvious reasons. “Limey” is more interesting. In old sailing-ship days the Board of Trade required the crews of British vessels to be served with a ration of lime-juice when ten days out of port as a preventive against scurvy. Hence “lime-juicer” or “limey,”=(1) a British ship, (2) a British sailor, (3) any Britisher.
‘A Spectator’s Notebook’ (by ‘Janus’), 8 January 1937, p. 38

I would have thought that 'Limey' would have been better known back then, but perhaps not. (It was commonly known in my household growing up, but then again it was half-Limey.)

What threw me a bit was the use of the word 'dope' as a verb...

'Spoken with the charm and purity of English vowel sounds.'

A few passages from one my current reads:

There is a continuing debate about how much blame the British motion picture industry must accept for the American domination of the inter-war market. At the peak of production British studios made only 30 per cent of what was on offer to British cinemas. But there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the American invasion met with only token resistance -- even though, initially, the natives were far from friendly. 'The public at first found the American accent bewildering and missed much of the dialogue.' Instinctive resistance was, naturally enough, strongest outside London. 'The English working class and the northern working class in particular exercised a strong suspicion, not to say hatred, of the American idiom.'

Some British producers attempted to capitalise on what they hoped was anti-American sentiment. British International Films advertised its productions as 'Spoken with the charm and purity of English vowel sounds'. Gradually the cultural chauvinists were won over. By 1935, when Winifred Holtby wrote South Riding, the working class had actually absorbed the idioms they heard at the cinema. Elsie, the South Riding housemaid, was 'like most of her generation and locality...trilingual. She talked BBC English to her employer, Cinema American to her companions and Yorkshire dialect to old milkmen like Eli Dickson'. She, no doubt, subscribed to the ideas advanced by a working man in the Bolton survey.

British films are tame. The actors are self-conscious and wooden, the setting easily recognised as the work of novices. The man in the street likes pictures which advertise an American cast. One often hears the remark, 'It's a British picture, let's go somewhere else.'

From Roy Hattersley, Borrowed Time: The Story of Britain Between the Wars (London: Abacus, 2007), pp. 310-11.

Essay surfing: Inglourious false consciousness special relationship edition

A few passages from things I've read in the last day or so which I've found interesting.

From Michael Wood's review of Inglourious Basterds in the LRB, which actually makes me enthused about seeing the film, despite what sounds like a fair amount of deranged incoherence (otherwise possibly known as reinventing the grammar of film).

I mean, this sounds intriguing:

Next, the film is spoken in German and French for most of its duration, with large excursions into English and a brief comic scene in Italian. The language in each case is very elaborate, almost baroque, and an essential part of the fun. What are we to do if we have only the subtitles to go by? How shall we grasp, let alone enjoy the moment when a German actor playing an English soldier is caught out by another German because of the imperfections of his German accent?

This, of course, means that I'll have to wait to see the film in its original version, as watching it dubbed into German is going to be...defeating this point.

From Xan Brooks in the Guardian on cinematic nostalgia for the 80s:

My view is this: by and large, the 80s sucked. They made me feel awkward and out-of-joint, and I was not sad to see them go. Yet now I find I miss them. By the same token, I was never particularly enamoured of John Hughes, the bard of the 80s teen genre – until he died earlier this year, at which point I decided that I'd really liked him all along. This is how nostalgia works. It plays tricks on the memory and reorders the past. Nostalgia, wrote the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is a false consciousness, "a historical inversion". Those early years look warmer, safer and more seductive when viewed through the rear-view mirror of advancing age.

From Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of two books on British Palestine and the creation of Israel, also in the LRB.

I can't judge Wheatcroft's larger points in the review, but I was struck by this bit:

After Truman's 'Yom Kippur speech' of October 1946, timed for the midterm elections, in which he demanded the admission of more Jews to Palestine, [British Prime Minister] Attlee lost patience. He bitterly rebuked Truman for not having consulted the prime minister 'of the country which has the actual responsibility for the government of Palestine in order that he might acquaint you with the actual situation and probable results of your action'. But then Attlee had early stumbled on the truth about the 'special relationship', which Gerhard Schroeder has said is so special that only the English know it exists.