England, Their England

Product Information

But you can generally pick up from context what's being referenced, at least in general terms, and the Wikipedia feature on my Kindle was helpful in many cases too. A review of an amateur production in Thursley, printed in The Times in January 1930, notes that he played his role with "immense gusto" which was "vastly to the taste of the audience".

It's well known for the description of the village cricket match, and deservedly so, but there are plenty of other wonderful chapters: the country-house stay where an eccentric English friend of the hero "helps" him by ringing up and pretending to be various important people leaving messages for him with people who'll be impressed that he knows those important people, leading to conversations which poor Donald finds either incomprehensible or deeply embarrassing; the hotel fire, in which the English partygoers trapped on the roof behave with complete calm under the command of the Major-General; the fox-hunting chapter already mentioned; the episode at the League of Nations, an organization the author worked for at one time, where the English delegate gives speeches that are so careful to say nothing that they get attached to the wrong issues and nobody notices.I was reminded of Wodehouse's Psmith in the City, where the viewpoint character visits Wodehouse's old school (which is not the character's old school). The book, he is told, is to be about the English, their social life and their related institutions, and written in such a way as to be enlightening for foreigners. OK - it pokes fun at the English from a Scottish point of view which ought to be edifying for those of us on this side of the pond.

England, Their England is an affectionately satirical inter-war comic novel first published in 1933. If the book has a fault, it's that it's very much about its own time (which is also a strength, if you're interested in getting an insight into that time), and a lot of the contemporary references have lost their resonance in almost a century. Of these, I'm afraid I didn't find the cricket match nearly as funny as it's cracked up to be, but the comments on, for example, schools of novelists or the pretentiousness of modern theatre were much more amusing. I bought it having read a short positive critique of it by John Carey in his book The Reluctant Professor.The scenes include a country house weekend, a visit to the theatre, cricket and rugby matches, a voyage to Danzig, the village pub, political meetings (". I was left with the impression that Donald thinks that the English are kind largely because he is kind. It hit the right spot at the time and became a bestseller, and has endured as a classic of humour, transcending the passage of time. I can’t say this book gives a good idea of the “real” England but more, a picture of England as a “type”: the cricketers, the fox-hunters, the footballers, the rugby-players in mud and cold rain, the diplomats, the country “gaffers”, the city slickers, the parliamentarians, the factory-hands, the Yorkshiremen who are good at engineering, the land-owners, the village dwellers. Banished from his native Scotland by a curious clause in his father’s will, Donald Cameron moves to London and decides to conduct a study of the English people; a strange race who, he is told, have built an entire national identity around a reverence for team spirit and the memory of Lord Nelson.