The Times, UK
May 26 2006
Have prejudice, won’t travel
Ben MacIntyre
We used to be happiest at home, away from ‘bloody foreigners’. That
was before cheap air fares
THIS SUMMER, as an antidote to all those books rhapsodising about the
Tuscan sun, you could dip into The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or,
Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World, which may
qualify as the most intolerant travel guide ever published. Driving
over lemons? Mrs Mortimer would rather drive over foreigners.
Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer, an Englishwoman who started out as a
children’s author, published three volumes of travel writing between
1849 and 1854, covering the globe from Asia to Africa to the
Americas. She was even-handed, in a back-handed way: she despised
just about everyone and everything.
The Portuguese, as well as being `the clumsiest people in Europe’,
are `indolent, just like the Spaniards’. The Welsh are `not very
clean’; the Zulus: `A miserable race of people’; the Greeks: `Do not
bear their troubles well; when they are unhappy, they scream like
babies’; Armenians `live in holes in the ground . . . because they
hope the Kurds may not find out where they are.’ Buddhists, Hindus,
Mohammedans: all received a thrashing from the aggressively
Protestant Mrs Mortimer.
Lao-Tzu, the father of Taoism, is dismissed as `an awful liar’. Roman
Catholicism comes off little better: `A kind of Christian religion,
but a very bad one.’ Oddly, however, she professes a soft spot for
Nubians: `A fine race . . . of a bright copper colour’.
Mrs Mortimer’s guide (which comes out in paperback next month)
provides a strange glimpse into the blinkered mind of a middle-class,
middle-aged bigot in Middle England in the middle of the 19th
century. Her sweepingly negative generalisations and racial
stereotyping seem even more remarkable for the fact that this doughty
world traveller didn’t go to the places she described and disparaged.
The sum total of her foreign travel was one childhood trip to Paris
and Brussels. Her knowledge of Taoism was exactly zero. She had never
set eyes on a Nubian. She amassed her pungent prejudices sitting in
her English drawing room.
This was once an acceptable British way to travel (or, more exactly,
stay at home and not travel). Mrs Mortimer’s all-embracing xenophobia
was probably extreme, but it was far from unique. Those sorts of
casual prejudices were part of the arrogance of empire, but also
reflected a deep-seated insecurity. Mrs Mortimer was terrified of
anybody un-English because she stayed in England.
Other countries have chauvinists, but the blanket disdain for Johnny
Foreigner was a peculiarly British phenomenon. `Don’t go abroad,’
muttered George VI, speaking for his class and most of his realm.
`Abroad’s bloody!’ Nancy Mitford’s Uncle Matthew ventured abroad
once, but `four years in France and Italy between 1914 and 1918 had
given him no great opinion of foreigners . . . `Frogs are slightly
better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and
foreigners are fiends’.’
There is a delightful line in Gosford Park, when one snobbish British
character turns to his weeping wife and hisses: `Would you stop
snivelling? One might think you were Italian!’ It is a remark that
perfectly blends snootiness, stiff-upper-lippery and ignorance.
Evelyn Waugh, so acute on so many subjects, was capable of travelling
with his eyes closed: he sneered that, from the air, Paris without
the Eiffel Tower looked like an extended High Wycombe.
Cheap and plentiful foreign air travel may be killing the planet, but
at least it has finally killed off the sort of prejudice that was
once the hallmark of the British armchair traveller. Britons today
wander in vast droves, and are informed about Abroad in a way that
would have been entirely foreign to our grandparents. Mrs Mortimer
insisted that the English `like best being at home, and this is
right’. Today the English like best being on a cheapo flight bound
for somewhere as far from home as possible. And this, it seems to me,
is right.
The World Cup will bring with it the usual bout of soul-searching
when some sunburnt, beer-drenched oik insists on performing the
`Don’t mention the war’ sketch in downtown Munich. But if this is
xenophobia, it is a pale, ironical imitation of the deeply ingrained
aversion to foreign folk that once prevailed in our culture.
Racism persists, but gone is the fear of foreignness. The British are
as likely as ever to complain that the French smell of garlic and the
Germans have no jokes. The difference is that the vast majority of
Britons know the stereotypes are not true. We no longer laugh with
Mrs Mortimer – as she points to the clumsy Portuguese and the scurvy
Greeks – but at her.
No politician could now declare, as the Earl of Crawford, a former
Tory Cabinet minister, did in 1929: `I am a xenophobe, particularly
as regards the French. I look upon France as a corrupt and corrupting
influence, and the less personal intercourse between Britain and
France the better.’
The Second World War reinforced that sense of superior isolation. The
MI5 officer responsible for interviewing suspected foreign agents
during the war compiled an official report offering observations such
as `Italy is country populated by undersized, posturing folk’. He was
not joking.
For some time after the war, the British island mentality meant
defining our nationality in contradistinction to others. `For the
English,’ David Frost and Anthony Jay once wrote,`the best definition
of hell is of a place where the Germans are the police, the Swedes
are the comedians, the Italians are the defence force . . .’. Today,
according to Crap Towns, the best English definition of hell is Hull.
We owe Mrs Mortimer a debt, for her little book is the shining
example of how not to travel in the British manner, a reminder of a
way of thinking that has gone forever.
Mrs Mortimer wrote her own epitaph: `They always laugh when they hear
of customs unlike their own; for they think that they do everything
in the best way, and that all other ways are foolish.’ Was this some
sudden flash of self-knowledge? No, this is Mrs Mortimer, sticking
the boot into the Bechuanas of South Africa.