The name is unusual: Bijan Omrani. If we can judge by it, then Bijan Omrani has the same sort of complex relationship to England and Englishness as I do. In my case, my Christian name betrays a foreign source (my mother is Italian) but my surname, while ostensibly English, conceals an even more exotic home: Sri Lanka. My father is Sri Lankan – half Sinhala and half Tamil – but at some point in the past an ancestor changed his name to Albert, possibly in honour of Prince Albert. Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure when this happened as my grandparents, one Sinhala and one Tamil, were a love match who married in the teeth of parental opposition and my father never met his own grandparents. So I don’t know when or why our name was changed.
But like Mr Omrani, I was born in England and I have lived all my life here. My roots lie draped over half the world but my growth is here, in this place and this city: London. So like Mr Omrani, at some level I am concerned with, and am trying to answer, the question of what is it to be English? In my case, I have also written a book to answer this question: Bede: the Man Who Invented England (due out next spring from Birlinn). It’s interesting to compare our answers, as given in our two books.
From various passages in Mr Omrani’s book, it’s clear that at least one set of his grandparents were what I might call properly English. Indeed, they appear to have represented something of a survival from Britain’s Imperial heyday during the reign of Queen Victoria: morning tea, choral evensong, self discipline expected and inculcated, and a deep but mostly unspoken patriotism.
In my case, there were no relatives in this country. In fact, all my childhood friends were the children of immigrants – it was only when I went to university that I became friends with actual English people. My mother, however, had distinct ideas as to what ‘Englishness’ was. I remember her, when I was about six, pulling me up about how I was speaking and telling me to talk like the BBC. Remember, this was the 1960s, when BBC presenters all spoke in proper RP. In terms of behaviour, she told me to behave like an English gentleman. Although I was young, I did not have to ask her what she meant by that. I was a reader, utterly formed by books, and the idea of the English gentleman had been formed in me by reading books like The Wind in the Willows and the Famous Five. I knew what she meant from what I had read.
For Mr Omrani, a key part of being English was the Church of England. Its rituals, its company, its words and its physical presence in town and school and through the passages of his growing life.
It was different for me. My parents were Catholic so I was too. This was, in the 1960s and ’70s, still the religion of outsiders and immigrants: Irish, Italians, Poles mostly at the schools I went to. Loyalties were mixed but still deep: my best friend, Paul Fitzpatrick, ran the cadet force during the worst times for IRA attacks in London when he, as a 16 year old, had the keys to the arsenal in the school – he literally had access to enough guns and ammunition to start a small-scale insurrection! (Times were a little different!) But despite his thoroughly Irish Catholic ancestry, Paul never even thought of sneaking any Lee Enfield rifles to the IRA. We weren’t English, but we were loyal.
Then, in 1998, I married an Englishwoman. My father-in-law, as my mother approvingly remarked, was a proper English gentleman. And he was. Oxbridge. High-flying civil servant and (we finally found out), he had even been a member of MI5 in the 1960s (when asked whether he had had anything to do with Philby, Burgess and Maclean, David answered, ‘Not directly.’) In fact, the stuff David was involved with was so secret that, after his death, when his daughters tried to find out about his service with MI5, they discovered that his career there was all covered under the 100-years rule, which only applies to the most sensitive of state secrets.
Together, we have three children, three sons. And watching them grow up, it was clear that they all regarded themselves as English. But then, what did that make me? In part, I wrote my book to answer that question.
Recently, some people have taken to claiming that being English is genetic: take a DNA test and if it comes up that your ancestry is, say, 90 per cent British with maybe 10 per cent Irish layered on top, then you qualify as English. It’s a view of national identity that lies in blood and, obviously, that would then exclude me – as it would exclude Rishi Sunak, Ian Wright or Frank Bruno. Now, these are three men I do regard as English. They see themselves as English. Sunak was prime minister. Wright played football for England, Bruno came close to winning the world heavyweight boxing title for England. Are they wrong?
I don’t think so. My mother-in-law was born in South Africa to English parents who emigrated there. She grew up under apartheid, which was in effect a sort of whiteness purity test: you might look paler than Snow White but if a great-grandparent was African, then you were put into the ‘mixed-race’ designation. This is clearly nonsense. There was no point at which the ‘taint’ of black blood could be washed away. The same is true in the opposite direction: how many generations born on this island are necessary to produce an Englishman? Following this logic, you’d have had to come over in the original boats with Hengist and Horsa to qualify as English. By this view, even an admixture of Norman blood would disqualify the bearer as properly Anglo-Saxon.
When I wrote my book on Bede, I realised that it was Bede who was, in part, the man who first developed the idea of England. Before Bede, there weren’t any Englishmen. There were Kentish men and men of Suffolk, Northumbrians and Mercians, the West Saxons, the South Saxons, the East Saxons and the Middle Saxons. Identity was local and personal. It was Bede who invented the English and he did this by contrasting them against the other people living in Britain, the Britons, the Picts and the Scots (who were actually from Ireland). What distinguished these different peoples were their languages:
“At the present time, there are in the island of Britain five languages, and four nations: the languages of the English, the Britons, the Scots, and the Picts, each having its own tongue; and the fifth is the Latin tongue, which is used in the service of religion.”
By defining the English in opposition to the Britons (who became the Welsh) and the Picts and Scots, Bede contributed to the long history of conflict between the later kingdoms. In his time, warfare was just as common between the Anglo-Saxon kings as it was against the Britons, the Picts and the Scots, but by creating an idea of a single English polity, Bede provided the impetus to turn its expansion outwards, against the Britons and the Scots.
Indeed, today’s blood nationalists have taken this idea and run with it, equating nationality and identity with genetic, and racial, inheritance, while also producing an idealised view of an Anglo-Saxon idyll destroyed by the Norman conquest.
However, while Bede might be guilty of defining the English against the Briton and the Scots, he had another basis of identity that superseded blood: Christianity. For Bede, religion was much much more important than race. The Britons were condemned not for their nationality but for their stubborn clinging to heresy. The man whom Bede admires most wholeheartedly in the whole history was the Irishman, Aidan.
For Bede, religion was the core of identity and, as a Christian, that identity transcended any local allegiances or ties of blood. When Benedict Biscop, the founder of Bede’s monastery, was dying he expressly forbade his monks to choose any of his own relatives as his successor.
Some of the more fervent of present-day English nationalists seem to have understood this, for they have forsaken Christianity for a full-throated embrace of a reinvented Anglo-Saxon paganism.
Mr Omrani clearly understands Bede’s unique role in the definition of England, and his equally unique role in opening England up to the world as England became Christian. Paganism is local and particular, tied to roots and unable to escape them. The genius of Christianity is that it is both local and universal, tied to roots and open to heaven, a religion of a people and the religion of the world. Mr Omrani’s book makes that very clear and I hope mine will too.
