Today thousands are following in Raleigh’s apocryphal footsteps as they journey west for the World Cup. About 65,000 Brits are expected to enter the US for the tournament, with the Tartan Army terrorizing Boston and Miami and the English shamefully yelling grim sexist chants in Dallas bars. Along the way they are encountering the delights of American consumer culture — the land of UHT milk and high-fructose corn syrup honey — and posting relentlessly about how supersized, sugary and surreal the American diet can be. They are agog, nay aghast, at the offerings in Walmart and Costco, polluting X and TikTok with wide-eyed content that may as well be from the queue of the first McDonald’s in Moscow. You’d think they’d never seen a side of fries before.

Football is an apt context for this culinary “cultural exchange” to be playing out in. The European game defines itself against American sports by imagining itself to be anti-commercial; equivalent basketball or NFL leagues in the US are unabashedly the opposite, often being entirely designed around ad breaks. The congressman Jack Kemp told the House in 1983 that while American football was about “democratic capitalism”, “soccer” was “socialist”. Plus ça change: the furor over the frequency of “hydration breaks” in this year’s tournament is partly about the sly insertion of extra ads and the showing-off of branded sports beverages — but it strikes me that a sport which has already been transformed by acquisition by broadcasters, sponsorships, gambling companies and sovereign wealth seems unlikely to be ruined by a 20-second Tostitos slot. Football’s delusions about itself seem particularly ready to be punctured over the course of an American away-day, where tickets come at eye-watering price points and stadia are structured to upsell you on refreshments. In England, sports often involve warm cans on the train, then inedible pies; in the US, it has jumbotrons, fan zones, fireworks and half-time entertainment. The jury’s out on which is more “real”; are we yet ready to admit which is more enjoyable?

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About football, I am indifferent. Food is a different matter. I have lived in America for 13 months now, and I get it. In the first five, I must have gained a stone. But what first shocks is a different kind of scale: here, soft drinks come in 48-ounce vats. Then there’s the dizzying variety of American supermarket fare: the wall of powdered and boxed macaroni; the squirty cheese in aerosol cans; the cereal aisle with the dimensions of a municipal library. Here they sell pickles in buckets as if for army bivouacs; white bread flavored like “birthday cake”; 500-calorie hot dog sausages condemned to rotate under a 7-Eleven heat lamp until gobbled down the gorge of a 500lb teaching assistant. It can be scary, all this abundance. But what really unsettles us latter-day settlers isn’t the size, the processing, or even the mysterious abstraction in food marketing itself — what is a glacier-flavored Gatorade supposed to taste like? — it’s the sense of meanness it confers on us.

The austerity of continental Europe has for a long time been flatteringly repackaged as good taste. How many British holidaymakers have let “refreshingly easygoing locals” off for malfunctioning lifts, or wafted away the criminal lack of air conditioning as civilized? Shops that shut at lunchtime are humane; outrageously rude waiters are authentic. In reality, this is the infrastructure, and these are the holidays, that we can afford. To pretend that smallness, inconvenience and froideur are in fact born of sustainability, civility or character is absurd; really, these things relate to expense and enshittification. 

I can see how tempting it must be for the sniffy German or the pouting Hollander to frame American consumer habits as vulgar or decadent, but that steering-wheel-sized pretzel must taste awfully bitter in the mealy mouth of a hypocrite. Having coffee with 12 pumps of caramel syrup is hardly ascetic, but neither is it a moral failing. In the Fifties, indulgence, scale and convenience were understood as signs of American confidence and success, and these things remain largely true — even if Ozempic has tamped down pop culture’s ability to stomach fatness.

When these principles collide with culinary culture, the result may not be ideal: values like seasonality and regionalism are trounced by a megatruck infrastructure designed around a country 2,800 miles wide. This fact is difficult for Old Worlders to get our coiffed heads around: American dining was optimized for a different civilization entirely, one of long drives, huge supply chains and workaholism. Charming terms like terroir wither on the vine here. Needless to say, some American food is exceptional — but that’s beside the point. The lie we tell ourselves is that we’re huffing about obesity and low-quality food by posting videos of Dunkin’ Donuts drinks the size of babies; really, our objection is that America is our coarse, corpulent cousin and we envy him anyway. The inconvenient truth is that while you are sipping Hobgoblin and tutting at the ad breaks, he is slinging back Bud Lights and cheese balls, enjoying the Hollywood-quality commercials. He is happier. And Bud Light is actually fine.

If all the intrepid fans making their way to the home of the brave have to cling on to is some garbled conception approaching “scarcity chic”, then we are in a sorry state indeed. My social-media feeds are plagued by videos in which wide-eyed Italians hold oversized drinks and exclaim, verbatim: “I ask medium size! Che medium! Madonna! My entire family can drink from here for one month!” seemingly ventriloquizing Fawlty Towers’s Manuel. But Americans experience this excess not as decadence but hospitality. Free refills, ultra-attentive waiting staff (motivated by tipping culture) and the normalization of “to-go” boxes are little civic sacraments. They may seem disturbing to those of us used to being ignored by the often poisonous service workers of Western Europe, but after a little time living here I began to accept the kindness of staff without suspicion. 

For other European nationals in America, this country’s supersized culinary confidence offends some vestigial sense of refinement; for Brits, it’s about shared shame. In gastronomic transgressions we recognize ourselves. After all, who has been more criticized for their food than the land of cheese, tuna and beans? It’s worth remembering that as in the World Cup, in a competition of cuisine we are unlikely to come out on top; perhaps our desire to broadcast horror at our transatlantic brethren is about family embarrassment. It’s also a surefire way of sticking the knife into a nation which seems always to be telling us that British society is going down the tubes; relentless interventions by JD Vance have rattled our sense of identity over the course of this second Trump presidency. I understand the appetite to get the Yanks where it hurts: the improbable size of their hoagies.

Those tall tales about Raleigh’s servants not realizing the potential of the potato seem beautifully resonant for my intrepid compatriots taking in the New World for the first time. Then, the cooks on his estate may have inspected that tuber with narrowed eyes; now, we venture back to its home to eat them swamped in cheese sauce with bacon bits, or deep-fried as tater tots, or cushioning quarter-pounders as potato rolls. Then, as now, the arc of Anglo-American civilization bends towards the French fry. It may be occasionally grotesque, but don’t pretend that’s the problem here: enough with your snarky TikToks. We know you’re stuffing your face with Taquitos as you write your captions.

In 1954 Professor Ross, a latter-day Henry Higgins, published a lengthy essay called “Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English” in the Finnish philological periodical, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. His argument was that aside from “minor points of life” — such as “the games of real tennis and piquet, an aversion to high tea” and “having one’s cards engraved (not printed)” — the only remaining class distinction in post-war Britain was spoken language. Today, he argued, a member of the upper classes was “not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class”, he simply spoke differently. And thus to guide those keen to distinguish between the language spoken by “gentlemen” from those “persons who, though not gentlemen, might at first sight appear, or would wish to appear, as such”, Ross created the terms “U” (for upper class) and “non-U”.

The first part of his essay, “The Written Language”, is effectively a style sheet: how to correctly address an envelope and begin and end a letter; what to call, in correspondence, a Duke or a Lieutenant Commander; the correct use of “Esq”. “Knowledge of at least one initial of the recipient’s name is, of course, a prerequisite for addressing him with Esq.” The writer “will be in a quandary” if he does not have this information: “in these circumstances I myself use the Greek letter ø (as ø. Smith, Esq), but this is probably idiosyncratic.”  

Ross gets into his stride in the second part, “The Spoken Language”, which starts with pronunciation: U-speakers say “temprilly” rather than “temporarily”, “goff” rather than “golf”, and “tar” rather than “tire”.

Next comes an alphabetically ordered vocabulary list in which the middle classes are shamed. Here we find non-U “serviette” versus U “table napkin”, “toilet” versus “lavatory”, and “mirror” versus “looking glass”. While a U house must have a name rather than a number, the names of many houses are non-U: “Fairmeads”, for example, or “El Nido”. “U-children” and “U-dogs” eat their “dinner” in the middle of the day when their U-parents and owners are having “lunch”; “pardon” is non-U: the U response after belching should be silence. A non-U speaker cannot, Professor Ross argued, become a U-speaker, because the misuse of “one word or phrase” will give him away (“for U-speakers never make mistakes”).

Alan Ross was a U-speaker in a non-U university. Born in Brecon in 1907 and educated at Malvern College and Balliol, he worked during the war at the government code and cipher school in Bletchley Park. It was as an undergraduate that he lay the foundations of his study of English linguistic class signifiers, working on it for his own amusement while developing his lifelong interest in Finno-Ugric languages. Like Nancy Mitford, whom he met at a luncheon (“old-fashioned U”) in 1955, Ross was famously witty. He had employed in his article, he revealed to Mitford, the class distinctions made in her autobiographical novel The Pursuit of Love (1945). Fanny Logan, Uncle Matthew complains, is picking up “dreadful expressions” at school such as “note paper”: “What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantelpieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother”. Uncle Matthew is famously unreasonable, but on this occasion even the conciliatory Aunt Sadie agrees with him. “Fanny darling. It is called writing-paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.” The case of the Mitfords proved Ross’s point. Far from being “better educated, cleaner, or richer” than their non-U neighbors, the single proof of their social superiority lay in their peculiar use of language: the Mitfords employed a vocabulary understood by no one outside the family circle, while the “Mitford voice”, even they admitted, was ridiculously posh.

Nancy Mitford responded to Ross’s essay with an essay of her own called “The English Aristocracy”, published in Stephen Spender’s Encounter (September 1955). The upper classes, she explained, did not use fish knives or put the milk in first when pouring tea. Silence, she agreed, was the U response to belching, as well as being “the only possible U response” to other “embarrassing modern situations”, such as being told “it was so nice seeing you” after saying goodbye. She would tear up any letter beginning “Dear Nancy Mitford”, rather than “Dear Miss Mitford” or “Dear Nancy”. To Ross’s vocab list, Mitford added “sweet” as the non-U version of “pudding”, “sofa” as opposed to “settee”, “glasses” and “dentures” as the non-U equivalents of “spectacles” and “false teeth” (U-speakers dislike euphemisms).

The September 1955 edition of Encounter sold out instantly. “U” and “non-U” became the buzz words of the day, and newspaper letters pages were filled with the responses of readers. “It is sad to find”, Graham Greene wrote to The Observer, “that by Miss Mitford’s exacting standard Henry James was often non-U in his correspondence. Frequently he allowed the “unspeakable usage” of writing to someone as “Dear XX”. Henry James, Mitford explained, “was an American”. Another letter to The Observer pointed out that Shakespeare had made clear, in Richard II, that in fact “mirror” was U and “looking glass” non-U:

King Richard: An if my word for sterling yet in England
Let it command a mirror hither straight…
Bollingbroke: Go some of you and fetch a looking-glass.

To this, Mitford replied: “It is probable that Richard II, like many monarchs, was non-U”.

It was Mitford’s idea to republish in book form a shortened version of Ross’s essay together with “The English Aristocracy” as Noblesse Oblige. “It seems like a natural for the Xmas market”, she wrote to Heywood Hill. Illustrated by O. Lancaster and entitled ‘‘Are You U?”, the volume also included a letter by Evelyn’s Waugh and other satirical delights such as John Betjeman’s “How to Get on in Society” (“Phone for the fish-knives, Norman”). Malcolm Muggeridge, editor of Punch, devoted almost an entire issue to the book. The magazine’s cover bore a mock coat of arms with the device “Snoblesse Oblige” and a coronet was printed at the top of each page.

Why does Noblesse Oblige continue to sell and make us laugh? One reason is that the English have always enjoyed the comedy of our intricate class distinctions, particularly those within what George Orwell called in 1920, “the lower-upper-middle classes”. Another is that Ross gave us a snapshot of the end of an era, after two wars had dramatically altered our social structures. England in the Fifties had a Labour government, and the Angry Young Men, disaffected offspring of the Bright Young Things, were documenting the new equality, which included the democratization of language. Four years after Noblesse Oblige appeared, academics were called to the witness stand at the Lady Chatterley trial to explain that the word “fuck” was not, in the right context, obscene, while the judge, Mervyn Griffith-Jones (U), caused nationwide hilarity when he instructed the jury to consider whether D.H. Lawrence’s novel was the kind of book you would “wish your wife or servants to read”.

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Noblesse Oblige has dated in the 70 years since its publication, but surprisingly not that much. Middle-class men are now less likely to play tennis in their braces, and we no longer have either (the U-pronunciation is “eye-ther”) jerries (U) or chamber pots (non-U) to contend with. But status anxiety is still with us. I wince at the word “toilets”, for example, and “serviette”, despite not coming from the top-drawer myself, and am always, like society decorator Nicky Haslam, on the look-out for things that are “common”. Haslam’s special-edition Christmas tea towel, “Things Nicky Haslam Finds Common”, include social crimes such as “side plates”, “Confidence”, “type-2 diabetes”, “Bach”, “Loving your parents”, and “Primrose Hill”. Remember the tabloid furore (the “e” in “furore”, according to Haslam, should not be pronounced) when Carole Middleton, mother of the Princess of Wales, said “pleased to meet you” to the Queen, rather than “How do you do”?  

Linguists today talk about standard Southern British English (SSBE), Estuary English (EE) and Multicultural London English (MLE) rather than U and non-U, but there is still a U way of speaking. The Queen’s English is now the King’s cockney, with public school boys saying “wanna”, “gonna”, and “wa’er”, while a 2025 update of Noblesse Oblige would include the U pronunciation “twenny-twenny five”. The copious use of the word “fuck” is now very much U. 

Mary S. Lovell writes in The Mitford Girls that Alan Ross, who died in 1980, “resented” Miford for “making fun of his serious academic thesis”. This is surely not the case, and Lovell offers no source for her statement. The whole notion of writing what Ross ironically called a “scientific” disquisition on upper-class lingo was parodic (“U-dogs”, for example). Trading on his celebrity, Ross produced three further books on the theme: What Are U? (1969), How to Pronounce It (1970), and Don’t Say It (1973). His grandson, Carne Ross, who resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret evidence to an official inquiry into the use of intelligence before the 2003 Iraq invasion, has since become an advocate for anarchism. “His accent”, writes Anthony Andrews in an interview with Carne Ross for The Observer, “is now faultlessly demotic, but he says it wasn’t always like that.” One-downmanship is the new one-upmanship.

Scouring maps of southern Europe like a Napoleonic general, the Brit Abroad plots his summer holidays. He seeks abandon, hot sun, cold beer and cheap 20-packs of Camel Blue. Territory selected, he readies his armoury: Dior Sauvage, Stone Island tee, Gucci belt. A stealth vape in the plane loos, a blast of Balearic heat when the doors slide back. The mission begins, the battlefield beckons: sunburnt bodies totter down tourist strips; big blobs of pork sizzle in the sun of a concrete Spanish resort; stumbling brigades of bloodshot-eyed boys spill plastic pints.

Such is the mythos of our favourite summer bogeyman. The past 20 years has seen the figure of the largely working-class, largely male, largely large holidaymaker conquer the middle-class imagination — a yardstick against which to define oneself.

Contrast this with the other spiritual half of British summertime, the yin to Mallorca’s yang: Wimbledon. Here, we breathlessly spot “who’s who” in the Royal Box; ladies in frilly dresses grimace through the rain; there are strawberries and cream, Pimms and “new balls please”. Hordes of neon-lit bodies in coastal Spain make way, each June, for the great and the good of “SW19” — and by the end of summer, all presuppositions about the great British class system are tidily confirmed, tucked away for the following year.

How does the Wimbledon “set” do a holiday? For many, it will involve a restless and self-conscious consumption of culture: betterment is one of the things that sets us apart from the drunken hedonists over there. In practice, this means peering around fusty-smelling churches, picking through broken tat at worthy-of-their-name flea markets and getting annoyed when waiters disregard your International Baccalaureate Italian, handing you English menus instead. Capisci, I speak from experience.

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Being a “good tourist”, with hefty disdain for your vacational inferiors, means jumping through a million performative hoops to constantly prove your politeness, patience and sophistication. A memorable holiday with four of my friends descended into farce as we tried to do just that through the most Sicilian of trials, including freewheeling a clapped-out hire car down a mountain and getting stuck in a lift, only to have a furious Palermitan engineer yell at us down the phone for interrupting his lunch break. (“I come back… a domani.”) The funniest thing about middle-class tourists is the die-hard instinct to insist that everything local — broken, infuriating and a bit rubbish — is simply part of the rhythm of life here. Hyacinth Bucket tutting is reserved solely for when things go wrong at the airport (“this is why I don’t fly easyJet!”).

Yes, British tourists do sometimes behave badly — and cities have taken action accordingly. Stag-do hotspots such as Amsterdam and Dubrovnik have introduced hefty fines for public drunkenness, limitations on party boats and pub crawls, and crackdowns on lewdness and nudity. In May, party towns in the Balearics banned the sale of alcohol in shops from 9.30pm to 8am.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, a full-on tourists vs locals war has ensued, with 3,000 protesters using hazard tape to cordon off dining holidaymakers, spraying them with water pistols. The row is based on tourist rentals driving up housing costs — which seems to me like beef with multinational bedsit-peddler AirBnB, not Gary and Sue on their summer holidays. There is similar discontent among locals in our own beauty spots, from Whitby to Weymouth, facing exactly the same problem because of Londoners’ second homes. But only one has become a cultural obsession: the one steeped in delicious snobbery about how other people holiday.

Sneering at other people’s leisure time has become an aspirational sport. This may be because, on holiday, we are encouraged to relax into our true forms, to act on our desires. Every stage of planning a trip involves a thousand moments of self-fashioning: party city or shambling slice of life? Carbon-belching Ryanair or socially conscious train travel? Resort food or chancing the local cuisine? The fork in the road seems often to fall on hedonism versus sophistication. But for some commentators, certain tourist behaviour amounts to political aggression: one, from the i, unironically ascribed the national shame of our holidaymakers to Brexit, arguing that “we don’t want to contribute to the EU, we just want to trash it, thanks”. We love to look down on our compatriots for loutishness — as though a foreign setting gives us licence to vocalise our most toxic prejudices. This is not to say that I would throw myself headlong into an all-inclusive, living off Fanta lemon and cardboard chips for a week in a Shein bikini. But haughty narratives of social degeneration are not the answer.

Once, the working classes (yes, that’s who the disdain is aimed at) could not spend their summer holidays abroad. Your big yearly trip might have involved a caravan in drizzly Wales, or knobbly-knees contests at Butlins. But firms such as Thomas Cook changed the game, offering affordable package holidays. In 1961, 1.75 million Brits went abroad; three years later, four million of us flew off. The proportion of British tourists in some Spanish resorts reached a third by the end of the decade. At a time when olive oil was something you bought from a pharmacist, European travel suddenly became available to the masses.

Before then it was the preserve of the upper classes who, springing from the pages of an E.M. Forster novel, sauntered about on the Grand Tour, sighing at suitors, clicking at waiters and mixing with none but their own aristocratic circles. The most daring antics would still be contained to the same swaggering elites, typified by the original lad on holiday — Lord Byron — who romped about in Albanian dress, shagging his way through Venice, swimming the Hellespont and barging into the issue of Greek independence.

Would some prefer the old way? To send our brightest young things to frown at Roman ruins while the poor relations “embarrass themselves” behind the closed gates of a regional Centre Parcs? It seems that though travel can broaden the mind, it can also narrow it — feeding off the stratified snottiness of rainy England. If there is a Brexit comparison to make, it is of that same self-defeating snobbery — us, respectful, cultured, cosmopolitan; them, brutish, provincial, rude. Surely, surely it’s time to pack that all in.

Sunday was the epitome of this divide. At half nine in the morning, England fans piled into pubs, swarming around Clapton’s Crooked Billet like wasps around a rotting plum. In the early afternoon, the Princess of Wales walked on to Wimbledon’s Centre Court in a magenta dress to heartfelt applause. There were polite ripples of laughter when Annabel Croft called the victorious Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz “hot”. Both finalists gave sportsmanlike speeches. A few hours later, our Euros finalists lost 2-1 to Spain; at one point before the equaliser, the camera trained on two men in crusader costumes — a common sight at any England match. There they were, leaning anxiously over the railing, decked out in the splendour of Christian knights, a shell of national fantasy. This may be the image that best crystallises the irony of the Brit Abroad: a bygone valour, a hubris, that clashes with the damp reality of our global standing.

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The atmosphere around Sunday’s football had the brash sincerity of a lads’ holiday, Wimbledon the genteel and self-conscious restraint of middle-class trips to continental cathedrals. One is heavily male-coded, booze-centred, charged with a mythic optimism, the other a measured, picnic-y affair. That only one could be said to be “quintessentially English” — the latter — tells us all we need to know about who we hope to project ourselves as internationally. The sensibilities of the Grand Tour are more difficult to scrub than we think: the cringing irony around big football tournaments is, I suspect, grounded partly in disdain for the envoys sent to represent us.

On holiday, everything is political. It’s time we stopped pretending that going abroad is an act of escapism or authentic self-discovery: travel is as shot through with the anxieties of class as anything taking place on the British high street. Wimbledon and Benidorm are simply part of the circus of these social signifiers. None of us is immune: these trips are an opportunity to rehearse who we want to be, and the way we behave in our leisure time has come to represent our essential moral status. Yes, tourists shouldn’t behave like tyrants; but we should be a little more clear-headed about a fascination with a certain type of traveller. For this reason, I’m calling time on the spectre of the Brit Abroad — the most threadbare of national myths.

The first Wetherspoon I went into was The Cherry Tree in Huddersfield, to hide from a morning rain shower. Even at 10.30am, it was buzzing. At first glance, it appeared to be filled with more outwardly broken people per square foot than almost anywhere I’ve been in the world: alcoholics (functioning and not), people with disabilities (mental or physical), and the very poor. If I were that way inclined, I could easily paint it as a scene to be gawked at, mocked, pitied, or all three. I could make a clown of the perfectly and precisely dressed bald gentleman who sat four tables down from me, alone, staring straight ahead, sipping his pints and periodically lifting up his tie to lick off the drops that fell on it. Yet as I sheltered in The Cherry Tree, what I saw in him, and beyond him, were hundreds of warm, human and moving scenes of otherwise lonely people not being alone.

The table directly next to mine catered to an evolving mix of mostly elderly people who seemed to all know each other. They would come, hug, sit, sip, gossip, get up, hug again, then move on. It ebbed and flowed like that through lunchtime, until by 2.00pm the table sat only a single couple, across from each other. They eventually invited me to join them. When they introduced themselves, they explained they were not a couple. Not like that, you see. Just friends, drawn a little closer now, because each had recently lost their spouse, and they were more alone than they’d ever been.

She had lost her Oliver eight months before, after 53 years of marriage. He was everything to her, and her to him. Oliver had been a builder, she had been a dinner lady, and after they raised a family, they retired to live their dream of travelling the world. Nashville, Italy, Spain, Vegas. Then he passed away. She tried to tell me more, but kept teetering on the edge of tears.

Her tablemate, a retired military man, had a similar story, although instead of tears there was a measured stoicism. A lost spouse of 22 years, and now confusion. Life wasn’t supposed to be lived without her.

So, they both came to The Cherry Tree daily, to forget and connect. We talked for two beers, and they tried, with all they had left, to keep the conversation positive — even though Huddersfield isn’t what it used to be, the world’s become crueller, and everything is going down the gutter. You have to make the best of the ups, and weather the downs, and focus on the grandkids.

It was an eerily similar conversation to one I’d once had with two widowers in McDonald’s outside of Houston, Texas: a conversation that had helped me to see the fast-food chain not as the soulless corporation to look down on, but as an essential part of local communities, especially “downscale ones”. A welcoming space in a world that’s becoming ever colder and more mechanical. Society needs these inexpensive, judgement-free zones, for people who are used to being judged; places where those of any race, class or age can get together simply to be together; where someone can escape loneliness and the elements, and sit all day in a quiet corner, reading the paper.

After The Cherry Tree, I would go into a Wetherspoon whenever I was near one, and I came to respect them even more than I respect McDonald’s. Partly because they are so pleasant: there is no blasting music or blinding lights. They have comfortable chairs with actual fabric. They are thoughtful, too, with separate spaces for every type of customer, from large families with rambunctious toddlers to sullen singles wanting to bond only with their pint. The employees are polite, which puts the customers on their best behaviour, even those who’ve been drinking for hours straight. I’ve now been to over 40 Wetherspoons, in all parts of the UK, and there are no clunkers.

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It is easy to take those things for granted, if you are well-off. But Wetherspoons are also beautiful. Other large chains aim to be dull in their consistency, but every Wetherspoon is unique. With rare exceptions — The Cherry Tree being one of them — each one is in a refurbished historical space, done up in neither a gaudy nor a sterile fashion, honouring the past while keeping it alive in the present. The preservation spirit alone ought to make cultured people gush about Wetherspoons, but, as I quickly learned, when I did gush about them, few gushed back. In fact, they tended to be downright scornful. I learned that I wasn’t supposed to love Wetherspoon, except perhaps ironically, because the chain is “problematic” with an owner “who’s a closed-minded arse”, who supported Brexit and “was wrong about Covid”.

The founder and owner of Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, is not loved by journalists, or others in the credentialed class. When I first picked up the chain’s in-house magazine, I found that the feeling was mutual. The issue in question had a blood red cover blaring, “Does Truth Matter?” with the subheading: “Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight.”

The case he makes — about a snobby media class twisting his words to make him sound like an Evil Boss — might have merit, but it really doesn’t matter. The snobs can adjudicate over the finer details of the morality of going to a ’Spoons for breakfast when they’re hungover; meanwhile, the regulars’ loyalty has never wavered.

I find it particularly odd that people object to Wetherspoon because the owner supported Brexit. Because the other reason the chain gets judged is because it’s killing off smaller, family-owned pubs: undercutting them in price, due to its size and scale. I won’t deny that, after a week of going to such pubs, I was shocked at their prices. Was I really getting my favourite locally-made cask ale — the work of a craftsman, from an American perspective — for around £2? The same one for which I’d paid over double a few nights before? In short, Wetherspoon is doing exactly what the EU was doing.

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One of the main reasons for voting against Brexit was for more open markets: for the cross-border, neoliberal agenda that encourages global uniformity, and consequently larger corporations offering lower prices — like Wetherspoon. Those well-travelled, well-educated Londoners, with careers in big global corporations and enough money to pay the £7 for a pint in their uptight South Kensington local, sneer at the poor for drinking in a big corporate chain run by a bad man. But if they were consistent, they’d cheer it on, as one of the more pleasant and socially useful manifestations of corporatisation.

Because ultimately, what matters is this: that Wetherspoon is good for people. Politics has absolutely no bearing on whether that couple will keep meeting to share their sorrow over a drink, or whether that solitary man with the 1,000-yard stare will find shelter in a well-upholstered corner. It does not explain why I will continue to tour the Wetherspoons of England. All of us will keep going simply because we take ’Spoons at face value, and like them without irony. They are simply great establishments to have a pint in — which is how a pub is generally judged.

I now tune out when people start telling me the political reasons they don’t like a Wetherspoon. But I also skip over the editorial at the front of Wetherspoon News, before I read the rest of the magazine, which tells the stories of regular customers and long-time employees, such as shift leader Carol, who skipped 100 times a day for a month to raise money for cancer research, in honour of her late grandmother. 

Not surprisingly, my favourite profile to date is of a former medic, Steve Jones, who’s halfway to his retirement goal of visiting every Wetherspoon in the UK — using only trains and his feet. Wetherspoon is not its owner’s politics or even its owner. It is this: human stories, told simply.

Smith’s most celebrated panorama relived his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 — which had been an astonishing physical feat for a clubbable bon viveur (though he had to be dragged to the summit barely conscious, he claimed to have celebrated by drinking a bottle of champagne and smoking a cigar). He pulled out all the stops to recreate Mont Blanc on the stage of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1852, importing woodcarvers from Chamonix to recreate a Swiss chalet. St Bernards roamed the aisles and during the interval hot baked potatoes were dispensed for those in the audience feeling a glacial chill from the buckets of cold water placed around the hall. The stage was decked with alpine plants; there was a waterfall with real water, a mill wheel and a lily pond; the walls of the theatre were hung with chamois skins. “The Ascent of Mont Blanc” ran for six years and 2,000 performances, and on top of the fortune he made in ticket sales, Smith cannily expanded his repertoire by selling colouring books, fans, board games and miniature models of Mont Blanc.

Smith, an unrepentant populist (he liked to shock Thackeray by saying that Shakespeare was “all rot”), knocked the high culture out of the touristic experience. He made the adventure of foreign parts bite-sized and accessible — if not in reality, at least in dreams. He called it “the Alps in a box”. Figuratively speaking, Smith’s panoramas boxed up the great sights of the classical Grand Tour and sold them in miniature form, building them up with a dramatic flourish then cutting them down to size with a knowing dig in the ribs. Smith’s success runs parallel with the emergence of photography, the industrial manufacture of souvenirs, and the “I was here” frame of the postcard. After Smith, it became possible to think of “buying” the travel experience without actually going very far, framing it, and taking it home with you. Antiquarian high-culturists looked for quiddity and oddity when abroad but Smith encouraged a joyful appetite for mass-produced kitsch. His own apartment off Tottenham Court was a riot of knick-knackery from his travels. There was a figure of a Swiss peasant with a clock-face in his waistcoat, Venetian glasses, miniature Swiss chalets, soap from Vienna in the shape of fruit and a working model of a guillotine.

The tourist boom in Chamonix inspired by Smith was viewed with horror by those who thought the mountain were theirs to command. Ruskin found the “white leprosy of hotels” and souvenir shops that followed the visitors into the Alps was a blasphemy against “all the deep and sacred sensations of nature”. Everywhere the new tourists went, reported a journalist in 1856, they brought with them “Cockneyism, Albert Smithery, fun, frolic and vulgarity”. The rise in popular tourism to Europe, sparked most importantly by Thomas Cook, had highlighted a divide which has characterised British travelling ever since. In this paradigm, the tourist is the new bug and the traveller is the old soul. And even when they are gazing at the same view, the latter thinks the former is spoiling the view. The distaste is notable in how often crowds of tourists were, and still are, described in terms of mindless cattle or insects — they come in “herds” and “swarms” and “flocks”.

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Naturally as most people like to think they are an old soul, the tourist, as Evelyn Waugh put it, “is the other fellow”. Wherever the crowd goes, it is sure to be perceived by those in another crowd to debase the special spirit of place. Quite what the original spirit of place is often hard to define, but traditionally the British tourist thinks that their fellow countrymen are trampling on it. Newlywed Emily Birchall in 1870 found her visit to St Peter’s ruined by the sight of a British tourist reading his guidebook under the high altar and one feels her pain. The more expensive and bespoke the tourist experience, the more it will sell itself as being particular and unconventional, off the beaten track, away from the throng; until the throng reaches Easter Island or Lapland or Everest. Which of course it almost always does.

Thomas Cook, progenitor of the modern package tour, was a much more serious character than Smith, a former printer and temperance campaigner whose package tour business started as an effort to keep working men away from the pub on the holidays (more properly known as holy days) that constituted their only days off. By the time Smith had conquered Mont Blanc, Cook had been running tours to the Continent for several years. He had become used to the jibes about “Cooks’ Tourists” with their aspirational itineraries and their guidebooks, with points of interest rated by stars or exclamation marks. But Cook was proud of his groups and of what he was introducing to people unaccustomed to travel. “Practical people from the provinces and representatives of the better style of the London mercantile community” is how he described his tourists and he loved them. And they loved him too — a Thomas Cook tour became a byword for trustworthiness and paternal consideration. What Cook offered was something new: the holiday as a collective as well as an individual experience. And it brought with it all the expansions and limitations of the group itself.

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By John Lewis-Stempel

From Lawrence Sterne’s fastidiously risk-averse Dr Smelfungus to a coach tour of larky cockneys in Carry on Abroad, the humour that can be squeezed out of the comical figure of the Brit abroad still seems inexhaustible. One of Albert Smith’s many insights was that tourists like laughing at their fellow countrymen. The ingénue, the know-nothing, the stuck-up type, the travel bore, the vulgarian and the gullible lady traveller all make appearances. They were a satirical speciality of comic novelists like Thomas Moore (The Fudge Family in Paris) and Thackeray (The Kickleburys on the Rhine). The one defining feature is that the reader does not recognise herself in these hopeless embarrassments: they are other ones, the noisy passengers in the overcrowded night train or the ones (snigger) demanding a cup of tea in bad French. Those for whom maintaining social distinctions was important have found plenty to criticise in their fellow tourists but increasingly, others were delighted by the general flattening of class signifiers. By the Thirties, a passenger on a cruise noted: “The thing about cruising is that everyone is dressed in the same kind of light and bright clothing, and so you cannot tell the dukes from the dustmen.”

In the end most people, it appears to me, are after the same thing. British tourists of all types are surely at heart seeking a slice of pastoral, however mass-produced it might be in reality. It doesn’t seem to matter how inauthentic the peasant culture or the artisanal breakfast may be, for tourism simultaneously kills and preserves the thing it seeks. Even the hermetically-sealed world of the beach resort offers its own version of a lost arcadia. So what if the price of arcadia is other people?

No wonder people turn to conspiracies or theories of identity oppression.

It would be a strange person who would actively campaign for a return to the social attitudes of the Seventies. But writing my book about growing up in that uniquely screwed up decade, I was reminded that class has its uses — even the weirdest of class systems in which the English, and perhaps only the English, excelled.

In the early Seventies, in an unfashionable, un-Georgian corner of Bath — a place known as Bear Flat — you could spy at lunch time an elderly woman walking slowly towards one of those cafes that used to be part of every city-scape: not a chain; no coffee offered except, well, coffee with milk or without; the food mostly fish and chips or burger and chips or just chips. Ketchup suspiciously decanted (Heinz too pricey) into giant tomato-shaped vessels. There would have been people smoking in a section of it.

The elderly woman, my granny, would sit in a corner and eat some of this basic fare, but call as well for a glass so that she could take her medicine. Poured out from a medicine bottle. Semi-sweet wine, a whole glass full. Granny had no money to speak of and lived in a rented flat, but she had enough to buy wine and drink it every day.

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Here is the question that arose: did this daily ritual mean that Granny was working-class? She had never done any work to be sure. Her tiny hands had once played the piano but never lifted anything heavy. She had lived in Italy and studied music in Belgium. Her parents were Irish and Austrian aristocrats who had no job. She had been married to a magazine editor; in the pre-war years they had a cook and a driver.

And yet here she was drinking sweet wine. Which my mother, enter stage right as it were, regarded as working-class. Along with, in no particular order: holding hands, growing begonias, eating in public, saying “toilet”, watching ITV, listening to music while doing something else, saying “couch”, saying “settee”.

Have I missed anything? God yes. It goes on and on. But the wine issue was important. Proper people — by which she meant us, the ruling class — drank dry wine unless it was with pudding.

I asked mum about it once. Her response was bewildering and telling at the same time. Bewildering because it was protected by a carapace of pure, indestructible self-belief. Telling because underneath, it was mush. It was nonsense.

This is the logic: Granny was not working-class because she was not. So when she did working-class things they were not working-class. When working-class people did those things, they were. Got it?

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Yep. I grimace too. I cannot defend the attitudes my mother had. She was kindly in many ways. She worked for Amnesty International in the days when it had a single purpose: to help prisoners of conscience. She was a Quaker, a pacifist who visited the protesters at Greenham Common. And yet her view of the human beings she wanted to save from nuclear holocaust, or from foreign jails, was dismissive at best.

Fifty years on, our social attitudes are utterly changed. We have said good riddance to the system that Mum believed in, that kept her and Granny safe from class disaster even when poverty overwhelmed their lives. A system of caste as much as class.

But I wonder at what we have lost: in solidarity, in safety, in togetherness — and above all in psychological freedom. No longer can we shrug and say, whatever, I had no agency. Life is what it is, and I am protected from the deepest psychological hurt because I am a member of a social class and I cannot rise, and cannot fall, because of it.

Consider the falling. Distressed Gentlefolk, like the poor, are always with us. And very sad they often are. Granny certainly was. Even the Association that used to look after them has deserted them, changed its name and cleared its throat, to assure people that its charity is available to all.

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But in Britain in the Seventies, Granny and her ilk could hold on to something. They were still able to consider themselves socially superior and, crucially, be treated by everyone else with the kid gloves they could no longer afford to wear. That café had no licence for alcohol consumption, but they let Granny drink her wine because she was a lady. She was treated with deference, although she had nothing.

Granny still fell — economically, materially — but not socially. The pride — the haughty, foolish, risible stuff that she and my mother believed about themselves and their place in society — helped them when times were tough.

And what about those who served them? I think of the man who used to drive me to boarding school. Den Davis (polyester shirt, neat slacks, slicked back hair) ran a one-counter sweet shop squeezed between the railway tracks and the main road. Den was from a part of Bath even more unfashionable than Bear Flat, a section of the city that is still genuinely down at heel. He probably had more ready cash than Mum but treated her with proper reverence, holding open the door of his Vauxhall Viva for her to get in and only closing it once he was sure her coat was safely folded in with her.

Den told me once that the boys at my school (he didn’t acknowledge the education of girls as a serious project) would one day make the world “better for all of us.” He was a victim of class for sure. He had been fooled into believing that this impecunious but grand duo — mother and son — was superior to him.

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And yet in the dark of the night, when Den considered his lot, I bet he was able to laugh at us a bit. We had the Queen’s English and the books at home. But he had the car. And the knowledge that he could not compete with us in class matters would have been tempered by the simple fact of being a working man. I don’t think for a minute that he wanted to compete. He had his identity and, crucially, it was an identity that linked him to other people.

This is not, of course, a reason to bring it all back. The kow-towing, the secondary moderns, the manual jobs with no prospects, the judges (and the politicians) who all went to Eton. The staggering waste of talent that was never looked for, never found, never nurtured. But a look back at the Seventies reveals a society in which there were groups, into which all of us could sink our own identities, our own selves.

Meritocracy has flourished thanks to atomisation. And it has come with costs that we are only now daring to start talking about. Class was a warm blanket in that decade of power cuts. When it was pulled away there was always going to be trouble.

Justin’s book, The Gift of a Radio: My childhood and other trainwrecks, is published by Doubleday

Christopher Hitchens, that unthinking man’s iconoclast, once called her “an averagely-volatile woman from a disadvantaged family”. He was almost being nice, but like so many others, he only really used her as an excuse to tell hideous anecdotes. Craig Brown published a whole book that pasted together the worst stories that people recorded about her in their diaries. It was a sure and sorry way to ensure your letters were published after you were gone: put in an anecdote about Princess Margaret being difficult or looking, as Nancy Mitford had it, “excessively common”.

Remember, these are not tabloid reports. This isn’t the rough and tumble of a free press. We are quoting public intellectuals. Despite Margaret being awful, as they saw it — trashy and appalling, rude and condescending, and, frankly, low brow — the elites found her irresistible. Few of us are too classy for gossip, too clever to mock an appearance instead of imagining what lies beneath it. Margaret’s punishment for projecting upper-class indifference, privileged selfishness, is to be seen as more of a soap-opera character than a woman. Perhaps that says more about us than her.

Her husband, horrible bully that he was, once set her dress on fire. “Good thing too, I hate that material,” he said. To which Margaret replied: “Material is a word we do not use. We call it stuff.” This sort of thing gets held up as inexhaustible snobbishness. Really, it’s a stiff upper lip, splendid resilience in the face of abuse. And anyway, can’t we live with a little high handedness in our princesses? Consider her nephew’s current reputation and Margaret’s blue-blooded insistence on calling scrambled eggs buttered eggs starts to look rather appealing. It’s a small price to pay for a stable and enduring monarchy: that a king’s daughter’s might occasionally be too royal.

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But living off the public purse makes you fair game for voyeuristic bitching: there is an assumed public ownership of Royal lives. The story of Margaret and the Queen, along with the Queen Mother, getting the giggles when T. S. Eliot read The Waste Land at Buckingham Palace is often reference to show what a bunch of philistines the Royal Family is — as if Modernist poetry has anything to do with constitutional monarchy. (And as if most of the rest of us wouldn’t have done the same. Eliot was a terrible reader.) When people enjoy that story, I am reminded of the painter Francis Bacon, who once booed Margaret off stage at a party because her singing wasn’t very good; the poor woman ran out in tears. Somehow when you are born into the Royal cage, many intelligent people think it is acceptable, maybe even clever, to treat you like you’re an animal.

People like Christopher Hitchens did this because they had a bigger target: the institution of monarchy. He could happily paint the Windsors as emotionless bastards without caring very much about their so-called victims. But the old saw about Margaret being the lamb sacrificed for the good of The Firm needs investigating. It fits the narrative of heartless Hanovarians to say that the Princess wasn’t allowed to marry Peter Townsend out of cruelty or myopic traditionalism or whatever. It’s a simplification, though, to see it as a case of the establishment crushing young love for the sake of expediency.

Sarah Bradford reports a friend saying “Princess Margaret was very religious, much more than you would think”. Yes, her desire to marry a divorcé was a moral and constitutional dilemma: the Queen was the head of a church that didn’t allow such things. But in the story about the institutional thwarting the individual, Margaret and her feelings have been ignored. As Bradford says: “Asked whether, as the general public perceived it, she had been sacrificed on the altar of the monarchy, the queen’s private secretary replied simply, ‘She sacrificed herself’.”

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Margaret defies the stereotype, then, of a selfish, useless celebrity. Jonathan Freedland once said of her: “Five decades before Paris Hilton, there was the current Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret — an object of glamour and gossip, permanently on vacation, internationally famous yet achieving nothing at all.” (If only she had written book reviews for the New York Review of Books!) If you are more interested in bourgeois tattle-rags than humdrum duties, it’s easy to share his view that she did nothing at all. But in reality, Margaret was a great charity worker. She was a patron of the London Lighthouse, an AIDs charity more famous for its association with Princess Diana, and she used to visit patients there and make them laugh. (She did her work without any media attention and before Princess Diana was involved.)

Margaret’s friend Lady Glenconner had a son with AIDs at the height of the epidemic; Margaret turned up and gave the boy a big hug as if nothing had changed. But while Diana was hugely — rightly — praised for shaking AIDs patients’ hands, Margaret remained in the shadows. Of course, Margaret didn’t want attention for her good works, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them.

In the stories told about Margaret, style so often comes before substance. It’s easy to use anecdotes to make someone look bad, but there are plenty of stories that make Margaret seem not just nice but remarkably normal — the opposite of the character drawn by gossipy republicans. Gore Vidal reported how he and she once saved a number of bees from drawing in a swimming pool at Windsor. “Go forth and make honey,” the charming and humorous Princess said, in what Vidal called “a powerful Hanoverian voice”. When she visited Lady Glenconner, she would do her friend’s hair and lay fires in the grates. On these visits, she showered out of a bucket, ate tinned food, and went scrambling up mountains. Away from people who were desperate to say something shocking and scathing about her, Margaret appears to have been quite ordinary. Likeable, even.

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One of the few people who seems to really understand Margaret is the biographer Selina Hastings, who said that the Princess,

“looked at the world outside between the bars of her extremely comfortable cage. She was inquisitive and she was courageous, and sometimes she ventured halfway out. But the moment it looked as though there may be difficulties, back she flew into her cage, slamming the door behind her.”

Margaret was forced into public life, and when she was expected to accept people’s offensive intrusions into her life, she sometimes refused. She wasn’t perfect; but she was goaded and cornered. As Ferdinand Mount said, “being ghastly is so much expected of her that it becomes her party piece”.

Craig Brown called her life “Cinderella in reverse”, in a classic example of our inability to see Margaret as anything but a character out of a story. “Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting,” he wrote. He could have been talking about all the journalists, biographers, diarists, and so on, who used her to fill their pages.

Margaret, unlike Cinderella, was never destined to be a queen; she was first and foremost a sister. There was a constant, silent presence in her public life — a gold standard of decorum — against which she was judged. Elizabeth and Margaret are, like Kate and Meghan, presented as stereotyped female opposites: the good wife and the wayward celebrity, the modest Queen and the flagrant Princess. Such reductions make for a lonely life.

For Margaret, this perpetual isolation began at her sister’s coronation. According to Sarah Bradford, Margaret had “very mixed feelings because I adored my father and he was dead and yet I felt I had to be pleased for Lillibet being crowned Queen though I knew that in a way I’d lost her.” She was only 23 when that happened.