The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.

See also Votz zo funny?

It was antipathy to this dead but artificially fizzed beer which precipitated the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). This is beer made from the traditional ingredients - malted barley, liquor (water) and yeast-matured in casks and deliverecl to the glass by any method that does not involve gas; generally by a simple suction hand pump, or drawn by gravity straight from the barrel. CAMRA, despite some vexing internal political troubles, has been a great populist movement, and the nearest English male equivalent to Women's Lib.

For the English love of ale is true and deep. 'Good ale, the true and proper drink of Englishmen, declared George Borrow. and every Englishman feels with the Boy in Shakespeare's Henry V at the battle: 'Would 1 were in a alehouse in London: 1 would give all my fame for a pot of ale and safety.' Yet the best single remark on the matter was made by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then Poet Laureate, on the occasion of his visit to the International Exhibition of 1862. Having written an ode to be sung by a choir of four thousand at its opening he enquired: 'Is there anywhere in this damned place where we can get a decent bottle of Bass?' Hence the innate thrall of the great real ale brewers to the Englishman, reverberating through his mind like a litany. Adnams of Southwold, Ruddles of Rutland, Theakston of Masham, Vaux of Sunderland, Thwaites of Blackburn, and Tennyson's favourite, four-square tipple, Bass of Burton.

The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.

See also Tony Martin Support Group

Tony Martin is a Norfolk farmer who shot and killed a young man who was in the process of burgling his home. Tony Martin was been convicted of murder and was now in prison for life - sentence now reduced to manslaughter..

Sterling times...

The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.

James was born in India in August 1899 where he spent much of his early years. In 1913 he moved to England to live with his uncle and in February 1914 he began at Malton Hall School. It was here that he inherited the nickname Biggles, originally given to his elder brother, Charles. After the outbreak of the First World War, Biggles joined the Royal Flying Corps with the rank of Second Lieutenant and learnt to fly fighter planes. He was posted to France in 169 Squadron only weeks later.

Biggles Flies the Web

See also Image of Britannia

When Britain first, at heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
Arose, arose, arose from out the azure main.
This was the charter, the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang the strain.

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

Rule Britannia (here is a Real audio version - not streaming - will replace in time)

See also Images of Churchill

In full SIR WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER CHURCHILL British statesman, orator, and author who as prime minister (1940-45, 1951-55) rallied the British people during World War II and led his country from the brink of defeat to victory.

Images of Empire 1
Images of Empire 2

"The Engishman's best friend is his dog."

"Maddogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun."

Perhaps the Englishman is best summed up by the Paddy Roberts record, see lyrics below, "L'Anglais avec son sang froid" - The Englishman and his usual bloody cold. See more here.

The publisher, Edward Allhusen. EMALLHUSEN@AOL.COM , 31 December, 1998. Godfrey Smith's witty and stylish A-Z companion of England and Englishness was published to great acclaim in the 1980s and is now available again in this revised and updated edition. Smith takes us on a leisurely but perceptive tour of all that he holds dear in England and the English. It is very much an informal ramble, as if in the company of an old friend, hence it is unashamedly subjective, idiosyncratic and occasionally capricious. He does not flinch at English failings, but as he says 'No reader will be left in much doubt about where my affections lie. I find England so overwhelmingly the best country in the world that it is really rather bad form to say how much.' Wearing his learning likely, he opens with Abroad, that most un-English of places, and Accent, the quintessential English concern, and then treats us to a display of sparkling and knowledgeable comments on a wealth of topics. the breadth and depth of his imaginative insights into our national life are a joy to read. He touches on anything and everything, from Churchiill to Pubs, Elgar to Rugby, Bertie Wooster to George Orwell, and from Fish and Chips to Evelyn Waugh. It is impossible here to do full justice to his writing, but perhaps it is best summarised by his observations on the profound truth that the Thames is a magic river, Oxford an enchanted city and England an imaginary land inhabited by improbable people.

Gotcha: The Sinking of the General Belgrano.

See also Vintage Music

Kiss me good-night, Sergeant-Major,
Tuck me in my little wooden bed.
We all love you, Sergeant-Major,
When we hear your bawling, "Show a leg."
Don't forget to wake me in the morning,
And bring me round a nice hot cup of tea
Kiss me good-night, Sergeant-Major,
Sergeant-Major, be a mother to me.

Song is here in Real Audio: Kiss me good-night, Sergeant-Major (audio link temporarily suspended - sorry).

English short-story writer, poet, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

The White Man's Burden 1899
And here is Britain's favourite poem: "If" by Rudyard Kipling.

Heritage Magazine.

The charter meant less to contemporaries than it has to subsequent generations. The solemn circumstances of its first granting have given to Magna Carta of 1215 a unique place in popular imagination; quite early in its history it became a symbol and a battle cry against oppression, each successive generation reading into it a protection of its own threatened liberties. In England the Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679) looked directly back to clause 39 of the charter of 1215, which stated that "no free man shall be . . . imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] . . . except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." In the United States both the national and the state constitutions show ideas and even phrases directly traceable to Magna Carta.

The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.

As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
Every sack had seven cats,
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

This England.

BRITISH POLITICIAN Enoch Powell, a member of Parliament for 37 years, died on Sunday. Powell was a man of extraordinary ability, who had the courage to speak the truth on immigration. For this, he was driven from the Tory leadership and became known as the best prime minister Britain never had.

The son of teachers, Powell won a scholarship to Cambridge, was a professor of Greek at 25, enlisted in the British army as a private at the outset of World War II and rose to the rank of brigadier general.

A Thatcherite before Thatcher, Powell was a forceful intellectual and an eloquent speaker.

On his death, Margaret Thatcher said: "There will never be anybody else so compelling as Enoch Powell. He had a rare combination of qualities all founded on an unfaltering belief in God, an unshakable loyalty to family and friends, and an unswerving devotion to our country."

Enoch Powell Screensaver
Enoch Powell speaks about Britain and Europe
Enoch Powell: Rivers of Blood Press Cuttings

Would you believe that the British Labour Party banned the English from eating beef-on-the-bone. Selling it has been a criminal offence. We have to keep an eye out from the police nowaday in case we are discovered in the pursuit of consuming our national dish.

When mighty Roast Beef
Was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our brains
And enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave
And our courtiers were good
Oh the Roast Beef of old England
And old English Roast Beef .

But since we have learnt
From all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts
As well as to dance,
We're fed up with nothing
But vain complaisance
Oh the Roast Beef of Old England
And old English Roast Beef .

Some recepies from Mrs Beeton will be referenced here in due course.

Financier, statesman, and empire builder of British South Africa. He was prime minister of Cape Colony (1890-96) and organizer of the giant diamond-mining company De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. (1888). By his will he established the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford (1902).

See also Image of Saint George

Patron Saint of England. Music (midi)

The Seige of Harfleur 1415

" I see you Stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the Start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge
Cry "God for Harry! England and Saint George!"

Shakespeare, Henry V (1599) act 3, sc. 1, l. 31

See also other patriotic magazines

The Shadow Foreign Secretary, John Maples and the Shadow Chancellor, Francis Maude joins William Hague, every member of the Shadow Cabinet and over 80% of our Party membership in confirming this promise.

BY PAUL JOHNSON

She was the catalyst who set in motion a series of interconnected events that gave a revolutionary twist to the century's last two decades and helped mankind end the millennium on a note of hope and confidence. The triumph of capitalism, the almost universal acceptance of the market as indispensable to prosperity, the collapse of Soviet imperialism, the downsizing of the state on nearly every continent and in almost every country in the world--Margaret Thatcher played a part in all those transformations, and it is not easy to see how any would have occurred without her.

Born in 1925, Margaret Hilda Roberts was an enormously industrious girl. The daughter of a Grantham shopkeeper, she studied on scholarship, worked her way to Oxford and took two degrees, in chemistry and law. Her fascination with politics led her into Parliament at age 34, when she argued her way into one of the best Tory seats in the country, Finchley in north London. Her quick mind (and faster mouth) led her up through the Tory ranks, and by age 44 she got settled into the "statutory woman's" place in the Cabinet as Education Minister, and that looked like the summit of her career. But Thatcher was, and is, notoriously lucky. Her case is awesome testimony to the importance of sheer chance in history. In 1975 she challenged Edward Heath for the Tory leadership simply because the candidate of the party's right wing abandoned the contest at the last minute. Thatcher stepped into the breach. When she went into Heath's office to tell him her decision, he did not even bother to look up. "You'll lose," he said. "Good day to you."

Link suspended owning to action from MCPS/PRS

See also British Flags

The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.

Wapping, the newspaper plant Rupert Murdoch built in the London dockland cost him £100 million. It was, he announced, designed to print his new paper, the London Post For six years he tried to get a viable deal with the print unions; and for six years failed. One union negotiator told Murdoch his best plan was to blow the plant up. At some time during that long travail - no-one knows quite when - he decided on a far more revolutionary plan. He would print his existing titles - The Times The Sunday Times, the Sun, and the News of tbe World - there. Eddie Shah had got a foot in the door when he succeeded, after a bitter fight, in printing his free sheets in the north without traditional union agree-ments. Murdoch kicked it down. He printed a section of The Sunday Times there without a single print worker His workforce - all, that IS, except management and journalists - struck. They were never to work for him again. Electricians bussed in each morning from Southampton ran the high-tech machines. The journalists were split into refusenicks, who would not agree to the move, and those whc) would. There were quite enough of the latter to run the papers. The dispute lasted a year. Throughout that time , despite determinecl picketing and ugly clashes with the police, the print unions spectacularly failed to prevent the four papers getting out. In the end, they settled for £6O,000,000 compensation. The rest of Fleet Street followed suit, moving en masse to dockland and able at last to settle with the previously entrenched unions on the new technology . While much of Fleet Street' s troubles stemmed from the cowardice, avarice and stupidity of management and owners, and much from deep historical roots, the unions displayed a stunning lack of imagination in not making a deal before it came to war. They had always won their battles with the owners; they thought they always would. The vast economies engendered meant that the newspaper industry had ensured its survival for another generation. The barbed wire was taken down at Wapping; the bitterness remains.

The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.

The English Companion, Godfrey Smith.