Oh look Mummy, look! There’s some men playing cricket!
Yes darling. That’s what English country life is all about!
And look over there Daddy. There are boys and girls dancing round the maypole. Just like we do in Dagenham.
Yes Jonny. Everyone’s dancing round the maypole these days, now they’ve closed all those nasty factories down. It’s all going back to what it used to be like in the good old days, before we had an industrial revolution.
Are we getting a spinning wheel too, Mummy?
Yes darling. Then we’ll be able to make all our own clothes… And have wool from our sheep, like the ones over there in the field, and milk all the cows in our barn…
Chorus… And we won’t have to buy anything more from China!
Yes, it has been decided by the British Olympic Committee under the artistic direction of Danny Boyle and the watchful eye of the Coalition Government i.e. the Tory hunting and horse-riding class, that the opening ceremony pageant of the upcoming London Olympics will reflect the full panorama of ancient and modern British country life replete with all its idyllic joys and delights. And this perhaps with the thought in mind that such jolly semi-feudal arrangements are in keeping with their vision of a new Britain; everyone moving out of cities and going to live in the country. Oh how lovely and green! There would of course be certain exceptions made for Russian oligarchs and Arab oil sheiks but then what would it matter when we’d still have the City of London investment bankers running the show.
All the joys of British country life in the Pageant! Sunny spacious thatched roofed cottages full of happy peasants weaving and spinning or gathering roses out in the garden, lots of woolly sheep, churches and bell ringing, rural industries and folk-craft like blanket making and wood cutting. There’ll be a place of course for rural delights and past-times like boiling up the copper kettle on the log fire stove to make tea, doing archery in your green hat with a feather in it and of course, that very essence of Englishness, dancing round the maypole. It’s what the new British peasants have waited a whole year to do. Put on their best clothes and ribbons for Chinese tourists and dance round the maypole on the village green.
How things have changed. All the British living in the country and eating beansprouts and faggots and the Chinese living in cities, eating roast beef and manufacturing things!
Naturally those organising the farce will want to include all the different variations of British country life. The English with their thatched cottages and maypoles; Welsh women wearing those seriously Welsh black hats with their men endlessly busy making bread out of seaweed; the Irish doing green things under-ground while whispering fiendish spells, and finally the Scots. Ah the Scots! The women weaving tartan willy warmers because all the men wear skirts and it’s so cold up there in the winter, and the men spending all their time dancing on table tops across a couple of swords. Yes it’s all so very British and now you know where table top dancing was invented!
Amazingly enough, no other nation on the planet ever had a rural history like ours! No-one ever kept sheep or cattle or lived in a cottage or dressed up in funny clothes, kept farm animals, made alcoholic beverages and cheese, and above all, danced round a stick stuck into the ground. Yes, we British were the only people in the whole world ever to do all that kind of shit… so we’re letting you know it at our Olympic ceremony. All that cheese making and pole dancing made us different to you. Gave us our own special history! Yes, all those sheep and all that cheese, all those funny hats and rainy days, all those thatched roofs, ribbons and maypoles made us British and stand out from everyone else. And that is why we are so proudly showing it off to the world. The things that are essentially us!
Now wouldn’t some of it be fine if ANY OF IT were true. At least we could all have a laugh. Unfortunately it’s not. The history of the British rural landscape was one of unending misery for ninety-five per cent of its population and essentially a portrait of alternating heroism and violence. It was feudal for over a thousand years through Saxon and Norman epochs during which time a scattering of feudal nobility and their lackeys ruled over hundreds of thousands of peasants with unimaginable harshness aided by the Church stuffing the minds of the people with the notion that their lot was okay because some invisible god had ordained it to be so.
Let’s look at some cameos of the realities of this life. During this period there was the Great Peasants Revolt of 1381 in which the men of Kent and Essex refused to pay any more taxes to finance the foreign wars of their king. In the 16th century there was a great Enclosure Movement in which common land which had been traditionally used by the peasants to graze their sheep and cattle was fenced off and taken from them by the new rich under Elizabeth 1st. A verse of the time went like this…
The law condemns the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater rascal loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
The Enclosure process robbed the peasants of grazing rights forcing many to give up any land they worked and become paid labourers for the new large estate owners. Another cameo of rural life could be the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, where in 1830s Dorset a group of agricultural labourers banded together and began recruiting others to form an Agricultural Labourers Trades Union. This is a great and heroic story of the English Labour Movement in which men and women struggled to earn a living wage in the face of appalling legal threat and police violence. These Dorset labourers were taken from their families, tried, imprisoned and deported to harsh lengthy penal servitude in Australia. Their story would be a wonderful proud moment to show of English history. The first country in the world to have a Union of rural working men and women. But do not expect such a thing in the coming Olympic Pageant. Not on your sweet life! Not when its organisers only want the world to see cheese, rain, sheep and maypoles! Oh, and I forgot! Nice green grass!
An even more appalling slice of British rural life with a heady mixture of brutality, tears and terror, comes from the mid to late 19th century Scottish Highlands, the place where Queen Victoria loved to stay and make merry with John Brown. Perhaps some of you haven’t heard about the Highland Clearances. The Highlands of Scotland were always feudal. A handful of English Dukes owned eighty per-cent of it and controlled the lives of large numbers of landless Scottish peasants who were allowed to eke out a primitive existence sharing their wretched cottages with the few cattle they owned. Then it changed overnight. The English owners suddenly wanted every square inch of land to graze sheep and the crofters were in the way. So up and down the valleys of the central and northern Highlands violence was done on a grand scale by regiments of English soldiers aided by the Scottish clan chiefs.
It all made such a delightful pageant. The crofts were burned down and smashed along with all their possessions and the wretched Scottish peasants marched under guard, often dead of night, to the screams of the women and children at the sight of all their miserable belongings burning. Marched through the forests and glens to the seaports where they were forced onto ships that sailed to Canada, Australia and New Zealand and dumped on arrival and made to work as rural labourers and domestic servants for their new masters.
How about that for a pageant of British rural life Danny Boyle, or David Cameron and all the rest of you scummy Tories? Oh sorry! Have I said something I shouldn’t have said? Have I rained on your faery glade pageant of jollities with its sheep and happy peasants frolicking round your phoney maypole? Oh, I’m awfully sorry. Would you instead like me to tell you the sunny story of life for Welsh people in rural Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries where kids were whipped with leather belts at school for committing the crime of speaking their own Welsh language, banned by English governments… or would you prefer me talking about the most wretched rural existence of all in our green and pleasant land, Danny Boyle, that of the lives of the peasants of Ireland, illiterate, starving, humiliated and terrorised for hundreds of years on the landed estates of the English gentry?
Oh sorry! Did I miss out the cheese and the maypole again? Well I’ll tell you dear readers. If you want to know what it was really like for the rural people of Britain in our recent history you need go no further than the photographic archives readily available for study to see the faces of our rural folk and the conditions they lived in to understand the difference between the wretched reality and some phoney idealised myth creation.
If those organising the Opening Ceremony Pageant for the London Olympics of 2012 want to show anything more than myth and engage in anything more than myth making when portraying our rural history I suggest that you take on board the above and have the courage to let the world see it. A pageant of the Tolpuddle Martyrs for example would show the world that we here in Britain had the courage and nobility to stand together and work collectively to better ourselves against the most fearsome of odds. Would that not show us to be a people of courage and stoutness of heart? All our people, Welsh, Scots, English and Irish… acting together and for each other. Showing our nobility of purpose and our outrage against injustice. Showing the sombre reality of our rural life as well as its sticky moments.
A people’s struggle for justice and a better life… That’s what we gave to the world. Or don’t you Tory Boy descendants of the British feudal aristocracy like the idea and want to use our Olympic Opening Ceremony Pageant to tell it YOUR way? Well we’ll see.
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