Heyday Ian Hislop's Stiff Upper Lip - An Emotional History of Britain

'In 1888, a satirical sketch appeared in the Victorian magazine,

'Funny Folks.

'It was a send-up of a real-life trial.'

-You say the prisoner was begging in the Strand?

-Yes, Your Worship.

The policeman's real name was Sergeant Holmes.

But to the wags at the magazine Funny Folks, he was

"Constable Robert Emotional". The joke's in the name, you see.

Please, Your Honour, he said he hadn't tasted food

for two whole days and that he had a starving family at home!

And so I 'ave, worse luck!

You hear him, Your Worship! Isn't it...pitiful?

I must point out, Constable, that these exhibitions

of feeling are slightly out of place in a police court.

The prisoner will go to jail for seven days.

BANGS GAVEL

A policeman in tears - extraordinary!

The press had a field day.

The public were aghast and Robert Emotional became a figure of fun.

Because, by the 1880s, this sort of behaviour was simply not acceptable.

English men, and English women, across society

just didn't get "emotional" in public.

Nowadays, of course, if we don't show our feelings

we're said to be cold and labelled repressed.

We may see the benefits of being more sensitive

but don't like the thought of being touchy-feely.

Males, for example, are encouraged to act like "new men"

and then they get told to "man up".

Are we meant to be "emotional" or not? It's terribly confusing!

As an English public schoolboy with a Scottish Presbyterian background,

you can imagine what a representative

of emotional literacy I am!

But the Victorians had no such doubts.

This was the period

when the ideal of the stiff upper lip reached its zenith.

It produced a parade of fair-playing heroes, valiant soldiers

and intrepid explorers.

It made the people fearless, doubt free, self-confident,

or heartless, imagination-free and self-denying.

But how did Britons of all ranks come to buy into the idea

that repressing your emotions was the way to get through life?

And what were the consequences?

It was famously said of the Battle of Waterloo that it was

won on the playing fields of Eton.

That was a tribute to the character of men turned out

by the English public school.

I'm heading back to my own, which for good or ill,

undeniably helped shape mine.

When I used to come back at the beginning of term,

I was initially... I was always a bit homesick,

I was leaving my parents, leaving my sister but then there was

also an excitement. I mean, I was going to see my friends again.

It certainly made you very independent from an early age,

the essential attitude was, you know, don't make a fuss about it,

get on with it. Which we all did.

This is Ardingly College in West Sussex.

This is it, where I got dropped off from the ages of 8-18.

Usually with a trunk, a huge trunk and a tuck box,

which you had to get someone to help you carry it up the stairs.

Ardingly may now look like a conservative institution,

but when it was founded in 1858 it embodied educational reform

and a progressive mindset.

Public schools in the past, like Eton, Harrow and Rugby,

had been mainly for the aristocracy.

But by the 1850s, aspirational parents from the growing

middle classes thought that their boys,

if taught the same values, would also measure up.

A wave of new schools was founded where these boys could be

taught to be gentlemen.

Ardingly's founder, who set up nine of these schools,

was very clear on how to do this.

Ah, there he is, the founder,

Nathaniel Woodard, a severe looking man.

He wrote a terrific document called A Plea For The Middle Classes,

and he lays it all out, it's for gentlemen of small incomes

and by this he includes the sons of clergy,

sons of army and navy, sons of solicitors, sons of tradesmen

and the important thing was to get them here.

He wrote, "The chief thing

"to be desired is to remove the child

"from the noxious influence of home."

So, the suggestion was that these bad influences actually included

parents, and certainly covered home comforts.

My dormitory was up there.

35 boys, one room, no curtains, not much heating.

Very good for you!

You weren't meant to show emotion in front of your fellows.

You weren't meant to blub

when you said goodbye to your mummy at the railway station.

You weren't meant to blub when people hit you very hard

with sticks, even though it's a perfectly normal thing to do,

to blub!

And therefore, it's probably created the most extraordinary

psychological types which we still see living with us in England today.

At public schools across the country in the mid-19th century,

masters increasingly strove to mould boys into men who would be

a credit to Britannia, whether serving her at home or in the Empire.

Training began in the classroom, where the key subject

on the curriculum was Classics - Greek and Latin.

Aeneas and his men have been wrecked on the shore of Libya

and he is now about to speak to his men.

I'll just join in.

Talia voce refert

curisque ingentibus aeger...

To learn how to govern, boys were introduced to inspiring role models.

Ancient heroes, like the poet Virgil's Aeneas.

"Such words he spoke, while sick with deep distress

"he feigns hope on his face, and deep in his heart stifles his pain."

What qualities do you think Aeneas is showing as a leader here?

What is he trying to do for his men?

He's showing a sense of steadfastness,

he can't let out his emotions.

It also says here, "durate", which very modern could be translated as,

kind of, "man up", putting on a brave face.

And is that a good quality in a leader?

I think it's an essential quality for a leader.

To pretend everything is going fine?

Well, in this situation, yes.

It's almost kind of a prototype for how the English

thought they could act. The young British men

out in the colonies, for example, would take on the role of Aeneas.

Outside the classroom,

equally essential lessons in conduct were being taught.

Here we go. Play.

Good.

Discipline on the sports field...

..and morality in chapel.

A popular new idea summed up the spirit of the age -

that Godliness need not exclude manliness.

A combination dubbed "Muscular Christianity".

There was a worry that hearty, virile boys might see

Jesus as a bit wet, so his teaching needed beefing up.

Different class, mate, well done!

You can't imagine putting Jesus in charge of a hill station in India,

or a regiment, because obviously the fellow wouldn't have any discipline.

And so, Muscular Christianity is obviously

the exaltation of strength.

It's the idea that a decent person keeps order,

both over himself and over the world, with help from the Almighty,

but if the Almighty's not interested then an English person can do it on his own!

CHEERING

Everything about schools like Ardingly was designed to work

together in a sort of social, almost moral engineering project.

The physical education on the playing field,

the spiritual education in chapel, a very particular classical education

in the classroom. All working together to create a product -

the English gentleman, the British officer, the imperial administrator.

And, in 1864, a royal commission no less, made it official -

it declared that the public school, at best, could be used

as "an instrument for the training of character",

where boys could learn to govern others and control themselves.

# Dear Lord and Father of mankind

# Forgive our foolish ways... #

From all sides, Victorian boys absorbed the principle

that while emotions may be felt, they should never be shown.

# ..in purer lives thy service find... #

Not that this was always easy.

# ..in deeper reverence, praise. #

These are the letters home from a boy called Charles Herbert Shaw,

Charlie, writing to his mother, who he addresses as,

"Dear Ma, the last three or four days it's been raining.

"Sunday was very hot.

"I went out with a master and got some violets and primroses.

"I send you one of the violets."

And he's put it in, you can still see the mark of it.

"The cricketing season is coming on,

"there's a new railway which is being built.

"I have nothing more to say. I remain your affectionate son.

"Charlie."

A year later, that formal attitude has something rather more serious

to deal with - "Dear Ma, I have a very sad letter to write to you.

"During the last week, scarlatina..." - scarlet fever - "..has broke out.

"One boy named Moore in School House dormitory died very suddenly

"last Wednesday 23rd.

"They say another boy is ill and not expected to live.

"I suppose you've received the circular,

"which the college has sent?

"What I want to know is that, am I coming home?"

He then says, "Thanks for the flags of all nations.

"I'm glad you enjoyed yourself when you were at Southport."

A week later he writes again, he hasn't gone home,

his parents haven't come and picked him up.

He says, "The fever is still going strong, between 20-30 boys

"are ill with it, five boys are prayed for.

"Only 28 boys are left."

Then having described this rampaging epidemic, he says, "I'm sorry

"you've got a cold", and then tells his mother, "I'm learning algebra."

And then he signs off, "Charlie."

And it is the extraordinary jump in tone. You can almost feel

the sense of someone learning a process

of dealing with their emotions.

These things happen, he's been left there to stick it out,

because that's what you do, and you do it by restraint.

Unlike several of his classmates,

14-year-old Charles Herbert Shaw survived the scarlet fever.

He went on to a career in the army, a successful product of the system.

The model for Victorian manhood was now established, but it was

widely believed that a good dose of emotional restraint would

fortify the women too - despite the less promising raw material!

Middle class women, conditioned to be wives and mothers,

were learning how to minister to the shrine of the Victorian home.

And to preserve a haven of calm

and happiness no matter what life threw at them.

Their lives were extraordinarily difficult -

giving birth to any number of children,

well over five or six, and losing some of them, and suffering

enormously in childbirth, so they are having to exhibit a steeliness

on the home front that is basically the equivalent of stiff upper lip.

They are very good at suffering,

that's what all the literature about women in this period says.

Women are very good at maternal altruism,

sacrificing themselves and suffering in silence.

This is a very backhanded compliment, of course,

to say to women, "You're so great at suffering and having no power.

"Please carry on doing it."

Women not only had to manage their own feelings,

they were also expected to steady the ship for those around them.

This duty was the subject of popular paintings, like this one

by George Elgar Hicks at the Museum of London.

This painting is called Companion Of Manhood, and it's

part of a triptych called Woman's Mission.

And this is, quite literally, a depiction of what the mission is.

It is to support the man in every way possible.

This is a beautifully run home -

breakfast things are all in order, there are fresh flowers,

the fire is stoked, the woman has done everything.

But, as happens in tragic Victorian pictures,

something awful has happened and we can tell that because the husband

has opened the letter, dropped the envelope which has a black border,

so someone has died, there's been some tragedy and his face, which

you're drawn to up the diagonal, his face is hidden in his hands.

What we can see is the reaction of the woman.

Her face there is noble, it's compassionate, it's restrained.

The implication for the viewer is that without the woman,

without her solid presence, the man might just lose it,

he might start blubbing, he might fall apart.

The woman is there for her husband, offering, quite literally,

tea and sympathy.

For these "companions of manhood" across the country, guidance

was helpfully at hand in the form of instruction manuals.

Not for the women the advice of ancient poets,

but instead the sage words of a Mrs Sarah Ellis.

Mrs Ellis urged the women of England to bear pain with cheerfulness

and resignation and to engage in moral work in a domestic setting.

And this is clear from the titles of her best-selling books,

Daughters Of England, Wives Of England,

Mothers Of England, and the works

are full of words like "influence", "responsibility" and "character".

But Mrs Ellis also recommends something key to

the development of the psychology of the stiff upper lip

in the decades to come.

"By the mastery of judgment over impulse,

"she..." - the ideal woman of England -

"..will be able in time, not only to appear calm,

"but really to feel so."

What she's arguing is that by controlling their facial

expressions and consequently the feelings that give rise to them,

her readers will be able to train their emotions and bury them

so deep they don't even have to acknowledge them.

That level of emotional reserve would later come to be seen

as emotional repression,

and once Freud started his work on the human psyche,

would be considered to be, potentially, extremely damaging.

Self-control was now becoming a hallmark of

the British middle class.

But it would take a violent and bloody event overseas -

the Crimean War of the 1850s - to demonstrate that this quality

might also be found in the "lower" orders.

This is Britain's first public memorial dedicated to all ranks.

The allegorical figure at the top is Honour, bestowing her

tributes on three common soldiers.

These are privates - their faces are carved ideally.

They are looking determined, resolute and noble.

Now, for much of Britain's long and extremely martial history,

the ordinary rank-and-file soldier was not considered to be

statue material, too often they were perceived as lazy, drunk,

ill-disciplined, thieving, mutinous or worse.

The Duke of Wellington once memorably referred to his own army as, "The scum of the earth".

But this monument shows what changed in the Victorian era -

it was a more democratic ideal, in tune with the spirit of the times.

Now any Briton could be put on a national pedestal.

This change in public opinion was not a consequence of anything

new in how the war was waged,

but in how it was seen back home.

Thanks to the new medium of photography,

civilians could see documentary images of the battlefield.

And with the rapid development of the telegraph,

news could be sent home in hours.

Moreover, the reports were not glorified eulogies,

but damning indictments of a bungled campaign which cost over 20,000 Britons their lives

on the battlefield and from disease.

It was total blundering stupidity and incompetence from beginning to end. By the politicians,

by the senior soldiers and the officer class.

And indeed, it exposed the officer class

and the idiotic way in which they'd been running the Army ever since Waterloo.

In contrast to their officers,

the character of the ordinary soldiers shone through.

"Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die."

That bittersweet line from Tennyson's much loved poem,

The Charge Of The Light Brigade, epitomised a nation's pride and sympathy for its heroes.

In 1856 the Queen was moved to create the first medal for

valour to be awarded to servicemen of any rank, the Victoria Cross.

A reputation for duty and resilience under fire is one of which

the British squaddie remains proud.

Of those original Crimean VCs,

8 were awarded to members of the Rifle Brigade.

Today, the 4th Battalion The Rifles, is based in Bulford near Salisbury.

If you have a body injury, obviously you can man-up slightly and try

and limp to the next marker if you've got...

In 2013 they will be returning to Afghanistan for a second tour of duty.

..and one man go and get help for a marker or any other of the PC Staff.

Questions? Awesome.

The idea of the British soldier,

of you guys, is that you don't complain, you can handle anything,

you're unflappable, you don't show it...is that what it's like?

Well, when you're here in the rain, everyone moans, but

when you're out there you don't moan at all because it's your job.

You're there to protect the bloke left and right of you,

so you just have to get on with it.

And you've got a lot of foreigners around you, you're in someone

else's country, you've got to be a certain person haven't you?

Yeah, you've got to put a face on to the public to show them

that you're strong enough to handle the situation.

So if you're going out on a patrol and you look scared,

they aren't going to have confidence in you.

As a nation we've a lot of respect for those who brave danger

in war zones in the national interest.

But we also have a peculiar regard for Brits attempting feats

that are not just perilous, but arguably pointless.

And that too dates back to the stiff upper lip's Victorian heyday.

Meet Captain Matthew Webb.

A merchant seaman from Shropshire with a fine moustache, and a strong

competitive streak, he accepted every challenge for its own sake.

In 1874, Webb took on an unlikely opponent in a swimming contest...

..a Newfoundland dog!

Newfoundlands are very popular with fisherman.

They have a well-deserved reputation for being able to

stay in water for a long time.

But Webb boasted that he had greater stamina than any dog.

So bets were taken and both competitors entered a fairly choppy sea.

An hour and half later the dog gave up

and went back to his master's boat whimpering to be let back on board.

Webb was declared the victor.

Never a man to rest on his laurels,

he then said he would take on the ultimate challenge, he would boldly go where no man had been before.

The final frontier. France! He would swim the English Channel.

Webb's challenge was deemed impossible by fellow swimmers

and to the French it was "Une folie Anglaise!"

When it comes to the display, of the stiff upper lip,

demonstrating it, performing it, there is something peculiarly British.

This does have something to do with the sheer enjoyment of the absurdity

of this kind of survival, of surviving for the sake of surviving.

It's a kind of masochism.

Masochistic or heroic? You decide.

On one of the coldest days of the year, Bryn Dymott is here in

Dover, training to swim the channel in the wake of his hero, Webb.

-Hi, Bryn.

-Oh, hi, Ian.

What are you putting on yourself?

A bit of Vaseline, just to help, it's a bit salty in there.

Right, and is that what they would have put on?

No in the past, swimmers would have used lanolin,

that's...Channel grease.

That's what most people would use for a real solo attempt.

-What about Captain Webb?

-Ah, he used porpoise oil.

Porpoise oil?

Porpoise oil, really smelly stuff.

-He believed that it would offer him a little bit of thermal protection

-And did it?

-I don't know.

But we do know but we do know it attracted the porpoises and it's rumoured, or written,

that the porpoises came and had a swim with him during his crossing.

And Captain Webb, he's a hero of yours?

Absolutely, he was the very first person to swim the channel, 1875,

and he did it breaststroke.

Is that a gentlemanly stroke? You could see what you were doing?

Absolutely and Matthew Webb had all sorts of tricks that he would

perform in the water, breaststroke, eating, drinking,

glass of port in one hand, cigar in the other.

It's true.

Do you do any of that?

No, why do you have a glass of port handy?

I'm sorry to ask this but, um...no wet suit?

-Definitely not.

-Is that offensive?

Well, no, it's not. If you want to use a wet suit, that's fine,

but Matthew Webb didn't and I want to be a Channel swimmer,

not someone who has swum the Channel.

There's a difference, a Channel swimmer doesn't wear a wet suit.

Fair enough, well, I'm not going to hold you up any further, you must get on.

Thank you very much.

-You're not feeling the cold.

-You not going to join me then?

-No, I am not going to join you!

Well, nice of you to come down!

On 24th August 1875 a small crowd gathered here in Dover

to watch Webb set off for his toughest endurance test yet.

Webb had to battle turning tides, agonizing pains in his muscles

and being stung by a jellyfish, but he swam on

at a steady 22 strokes a minute.

For sustenance the crew in the boat accompanying him handed him

beef tea, brandy, beer and half way across,

a nice cold glass of cod liver oil!

For the last two hours,

according to a journalist who was along for the ride,

it was "perfect torture." Webb slowed down to 12 strokes a minute

and he was heard to cry out "This sea is killing me by inches!"

After 22 excruciating hours, Webb eventually reached

the shores of Calais.

So how did he feel?

As all good journalists are primed to ask then as now?

Had he been on a journey?

Had he given it 110%?

Had it always been his dream?

No. All Webb would admit to was, "A peculiar sensation in my limbs, somewhat similar to that

"which is often felt after the first day of the cricket season."

The public swooned!

British understatement, manly humility,

and a reference to cricket.

He went straight into the Victorian pantheon of national heroes.

Webb's success was a seen as a trophy for the whole country,

everything from mugs to matchboxes celebrated his achievement.

And songs were written in his honour.

# He said "I'll take no Jersey for there's one already there!"

# I'll leave alone the Boyton Dress, the Macintosh and flannel

# And wear a suit of British pluck The one I always wear. #

No-one would repeat Webb's achievement for 36 years.

This superman swimmer was proof, to the British at least,

of their national superiority.

These tests of endurance that British men are putting

themselves through in these periods, the exploration,

swimming the Channel, climbing mountains,

trying to find the source of the Nile and so on,

they were an extreme version of the stiff upper lip,

proving that the Anglo Saxon male could achieve anything,

could suffer anything, and come out the other end robust and manly.

And I think it was a bit pathological.

Webb's ultimate challenge was an attempt to swim across the foot of Niagara Falls.

But he was dragged under by a whirlpool and died.

In this case British pluck wasn't enough.

The British people's supreme confidence in their physical,

mental and moral hardiness underpinned their achievements

in the growing Empire.

This is what so many of those Public Schoolboys had been trained up for.

They needed to be able to stare danger in the face

and walk straight towards it.

No Empire in history had ever expanded further or faster

or revelled in such exotic battle honours. 1871-72 - The Lushai Campaign.

1873-1874, The Ashanti War...

Between 1870 and 1900, British territory

increased by over 50%.

'..The Battles of Rorke's Drift and Ulundi...'

Every glorious, far-flung victory seemed to prove

the very stuff of which those in the fabled thin red line were made...

'..the Capture of Mandalay...'

By her Diamond Jubilee, the Queen Empress Victoria

famously ruled over a quarter of the world's population.

'..The Battle of Omdurman..'

In fact, there wasn't a single year in the entire reign

of Queen Victoria when the British Forces were not

fighting for the Empire somewhere across the globe.

And the public back home lapped it up!

High-spirited adventure stories by the likes

of Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling and the prolific G A Henty thrilled

a British society increasingly besotted with imperialism.

Indeed, ordinary British men and women were encouraged to believe

that they had a stake in something magnificent.

But the truth was that colonial rule was built on something

astonishingly flimsy.

The control of vast populations rested in the hands of only

a tiny number of men.

And the illusion that the British were all-powerful was maintained by an extraordinary...

piece of theatre.

At the centre of the performance were the iconic figures

of the unflappable Englishman and his wife, the doughty memsahib.

It was a grand mask of stoic control played out in inappropriate dress.

The stiff upper lip gave the British an image of themselves that

allowed them to feel that, somehow,

they deserved the benefits of the trade and the conquest.

That the civilising mission that they talked about, was genuine.

That there were values behind the military force

and the commercial enterprise.

The British would never have described themselves as having

anything as grand as an ideology.

But they had an attitude.

The stiff upper lip kept the whole show, and it was a show, together.

The days of Empire might be over.

But its legacy does live on in the 21st century.

I'm going to see a politician, administrator and adventurer who has

both studied and in a sense lived a version of the Imperial show.

MP Rory Stewart was educated at Eton and Oxford and at only 30 was

the Deputy Governor of two provinces of occupied Iraq.

It found it one of the most satisfying, exciting jobs I've ever done.

You get to be a knight in shining armour.

You get to be a hero from a fairytale.

Did you, as a child, read any Empire literature?

Were you taken with tales of Imperial daring-do?

Yes, definitely.

And I think it's...it's er, very important

because I think that sort of history created the culture

and the unwritten rules by which you knew how to react. I mean,

I felt, the first time I actually went out, with my compound under

siege and the heavy machine guns are going and people are trying to crawl over the roof,

and you feel that somehow your dreams and your early

childhood reading have suddenly coincided with your life and you

know exactly what to do and that's an incredibly powerful experience.

What's clear from your accounts is, you appear to have been unflappable.

I mean, this is classic British stiff upper lip. Was that important?

I think incredibly important.

I mean, when I was attacked in the compound in Iraq,

and we'd been up, I think by that stage, for about three nights without sleep,

there were 140 rockets and mortars come into the compound.

I remember very, very clearly going back to my room

and how important it was to change my shirt, to put on a tie,

shave and come back again with a big smile on my face.

So what does the stiff upper lip mean to you?

I think the stiff upper lip to me

has its main quality not in courage but in truthfulness,

that sense of modesty, of understatement, of seriousness

which actually made us work, which stopped us being just stiff-fronted buffoons,

but actually made us some of the most canny, energetic, well informed,

flexible and successful people of the 19th century.

There's no doubt that this British attitude was critical to

the nation's success.

But as the Empire went from strength to strength, this national

achievement started to be regarded as somehow racially determined.

The Imperial mission appeared to be gaining the stamp of scientific credibility.

Anthropologists believed they'd found proof of a racial

hierarchy, with so-called "savages" at the bottom,

and "civilised" Anglo-Saxons at the top.

And how did they arrive at this - to us shocking -

and suspiciously convenient, conclusion?

By taking a ruler to the human body!

19th century scientists were very keen on measuring skulls,

and this is an authentic piece of apparatus and I come out at 160mm.

Now, if we compare that with this skull, which is that of an African.

You see? Mine is much bigger.

Therefore as a European I have a much bigger brain

and I'm much cleverer.

That's science!

I am simplifying a bit but that was more or less the conclusion.

And, equally scientific in the 1870s,

was the theory that not only are native

and colonial people's brains smaller but their characters are weaker.

The authority for this was no less a figure than Darwin who said,

"Englishmen rarely cry".

He deduced this from comparing the emotional restraint of his

fellow countrymen with the emotional incontinence of native people.

He wrote, "Savages weep copiously from very slight causes".

He gave the example of a native chief in New Zealand who had,

"Cried like a child because the sailors spoilt his favourite

"cloak by powdering it with flour."

Nowadays we might call that a traveller's anecdote

but in those days that was cold, scientific fact.

In the emotional survival of the fittest,

the British were going to win.

Science seemed to be confirming what the British had suspected all along.

As the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes is supposed to have said,

"To be born an Englishman is to win

"first prize in the lottery of life".

The new suggestion that national success was based

not on divine providence but a sort of racial evolution added

a rather darker side to the triumph of the stiff upper lip.

In the later 19th century there was a shift from Darwinism to

what became known as neo-Darwinism or sometimes ultra-Darwinism and, if you like,

it hardened the scientific racism of the time.

And you find in writers like Francis Galton,

the founding father of eugenics, this view that it was

unfortunate but other races, almost certainly because of their physical,

emotional and moral weakness, would become extinct gradually

because of the great superiority

of the white races that were settling all around the world

and this was unfortunate but inevitable.

Whilst across the globe the white man seemed to be forging ahead,

closer to home it appeared that the Anglo-Saxon race was under threat from within.

The underbelly of Britain's industrial slums.

Glasgow was grandly known as the Empire's second city.

But there were worries about the degenerate stock of its poorest elements,

and this was a time when Britain needed them to be on side.

The unfortunate truth was that Britain had taught other nations

to play up and play the game -

and now they were vying to beat her at it.

Germany - all Prussian rigour and awesomely synchronised callisthenics -

was becoming a military player with real steel.

And America's can-do spirit and clean-cut zeal

mirrored its accelerating economic pace.

It was all a bit worrying.

If Great Britain wanted to remain top of the league

and to stay ahead of the serious international competition

then it desperately needed to improve the quality of its next generation of players.

The physical and moral health of the urban poor -

particularly that of adolescents - was considered to be so bad

as to be endangering the whole national enterprise.

The raw material just wasn't good enough.

It needed to be knocked into shape.

But neither the boys' hard-pressed families nor their basic schools

nor their uninviting churches were doing the job.

So what could be done with them?

TRUMPETS PLAYS

The solution was obvious -

the instilment of military discipline,

moral fibre...

and a lot of jolly good fun.

Company, fall in.

Everyone's heard of its more famous cousin, the Boy Scouts established in 1907,

but 24 years earlier in Glasgow,

Sunday School teacher, William Smith founded this pioneering group...

God, our Father...

..the Boys' Brigade.

This is 5th Company of Boys' Brigade in Glasgow.

Going strong, since 1885.

The Boys' Brigade had what was in every sense a mission statement -

"The advancement of Christ's Kingdom amongst boys,

"and the promotion of habits of reverence, discipline, self-respect

"and all that tends towards a true Christian manliness."

It's the perfect expression of classic Victorian muscular Christianity,

but this time geared towards the working classes.

Just like at the public schools before them, misbehaviour was to be averted by a heady dose

of God and games - fresh air and fair play.

In 1891 the Brigade's honorary Vice President, Henry Drummond,

issued every member with an inspirational present.

This is a special Christmas story that Drummond wrote called

Baxter's Second Innings, and of course it's about cricket

or rather it's ostensibly about cricket.

In fact it's the captain of the cricket team giving a lecture to a boy, Baxter,

about the great game of life and it's an extended allegory.

So he tells him that the bowler is temptation throwing sneaky balls at you and you as a boy have

to guard your wicket with the three stumps of truth, honour and purity.

He says, "I tell you it's all written down."

"Where?" "On the scoring-sheet." "What scoring-sheet?"

"Your scoring-sheet. Your character."

"Oh," groaned Baxter.

"Yes," exclaimed the Captain, almost mercilessly, "it's all there,

"every innings you play and every run you make and every ball you miss.

"There's not a mistake on that sheet, not an omission.

"Character cannot lie. Character cannot be taken in.

"Character hides nothing.

"It forgets nothing"

It may seem absurd, a bit contrived, but the boys loved it!

So what does it feel like wearing the uniform?

It feels really good because you feel proud,

that you're a part of something, like community.

I feel really proud and good in it.

How much religion is there?

-There's a lot-ish.

-Yeah? A lot-ish?

-Yeah, a lot-ish.

-IAN LAUGHS

Do you think it's keeping you in check or would you run wild,

if you weren't here?

Possibly! Yeah.

So what does this give you? Somewhere to go?

Yes, so where to go, something to do, people to be with.

The Boys' Brigade was a huge success partly because it allowed all

classes and all backgrounds to share in the idealised national identity.

The stiff upper lip was in a sense being mass-produced.

Drummond himself, uses the word "machinery"

to describe the new movement which was designed for

"turning out boys rather than savages".

Yet as the century neared its end, alongside concern about the poverty and the squalor and ugliness

of the cities, there were stirrings of criticism for this homogenised,

industrial approach to character building,

as though it was a process that could be managed, like forging steel or constructing ships.

Was the spirit of the age crushing the human spirit?

Some people thought the answer was a passionate "Yes!"

Towards the end of the century, there were cries of dissent

against the dehumanising effect of Victorian culture.

They came first from a group of artists, designers and writers.

The Aesthetic Movement - as they became known -

thought human potential could best be developed through art.

They thought the beauty of a bridge

was more important than its function

and they celebrated uniqueness over conformity.

Their self-appointed spokesman and pin-up and was Oscar Wilde,

with his flamboyant attire and hedonistic lifestyle.

Wilde described Oxford, where he studied,

as "the most beautiful thing in England".

No small praise, because for Wilde,

nothing could possibly be more important than beauty.

Looking out over the dreaming spires you can see why Oscar Wilde

and his fellow Aesthetes became fixated by beauty.

They were inspired by the work of an Oxford don, Walter Pater,

who wrote that the key to success in life was "to burn always

"with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy".

For these intellectuals, emotions were not to be suppressed, rather they were the key

to fulfilment, perhaps the very point of existence itself.

Nothing could be further from the stiff upper lip!

The funny thing is that with the cult of beauty that came with

the Aesthetic Movement, we went back to a large extent

to the origins of this cult of beauty,

which was the Romantic Movement,

which was, obviously, the cult of the emotions, the cult of pathos.

A world where pathetic didn't mean awful and bad.

In fact, quite a useful little example there, semantically speaking,

what other language in the world uses pathetic as a term of abuse.

Pathos is the feeling that we all cultivate in order to show

that we're human beings, but the Victorians repressed it.

The assault on the emotionally restrained establishment

came not only from arty types,

it had many champions

and pursued many shocking new causes...

At the same time, disturbing continental mood-swings

were finding their way across the Channel -

a whole troublesome cocktail of fin de siecle anxieties.

The turbulence would culminate

with Freud exposing the strange, unconscious world of the self.

Even the most sturdy and resolute Englishman might understandably have been overcome.

One disaffected intellectual,

who nonetheless understood the deeply conservative nature of the English character,

was the writer EM Forster.

In later life, he became a national institution,

but as a homosexual, writing in Edwardian England,

Forster's most intense feelings were outlawed by society.

Perhaps understandably he harboured a desire for a more emotionally open way of life

and he urged his readers to communicate as human beings.

His epigraph to the novel Howard's End,

published in 1910, sums it up with the words, "Only Connect."

Forster had been to public school, an experience he hated.

He wrote in later life in an essay on the English character

that the educational system was adept at producing

"Englishmen with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds

"and undeveloped hearts."

Forster didn't believe the English were innately unfeeling - it was just that they had been

taught to, as he put it, "bottle up their emotions."

And it was this entrenched self-control that Forster saw

as not only limiting for the individual but also extremely dangerous.

In his 1907 novel The Longest Journey,

the hero Rickie, who is being bullied at public school,

urges a girl whose fiance has just been killed to express her feelings, to "mind".

"It's the worst thing that can ever happen to you in all your life, and you've got to mind it -

"you've got to mind it."

"They'll come saying, 'Bear up, trust to time.'

"No, no - they're wrong. Mind it."

These ripples of opposition to the stiff upper lip may have

begun as a rarefied intellectual critique of establishment values,

but a decade or so into the 20th century

they were rapidly gaining momentum.

And they might have developed into a great wave of dissent

had not something happened, which would halt the advancing tide.

In 1914 thousands of young men,

fresh from the playing fields of Great Britain

had to prove their mettle on the battlefields of France.

Many hoped they could live up to the soldier heroes

ingrained in their consciousness.

And the press fuelled this patriotic resolve.

An article in The Times to all officers advised,

"Keep men by you with a stiff upper lip when you're facing

"the finish, and when nothing remains but the honour of the regiment."

And resolve was never more necessary than at the front

when rallying men to go "over the top".

At 7.30am on 1st July 1916,

the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment were in their trenches

here near Carnoy, waiting for the whistle to go over the top

and attack German positions in the town of Montauban, over there.

It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

The commander of B Company,

a former public school head prefect and hero of the sports field, Captain Billy Nevill,

had brought with him his choice of secret weapons - footballs.

This is one of those very footballs.

The lettering has rubbed off but one of the balls originally said

"The Great European Cup - The Final - E Surreys v Bavarians. Kick-off at Zero."

Captain Nevill kicked one of the balls

out into no-man's land as the signal to advance.

A Private Fursey kicked another and the men charged after.

There was a prize for whichever platoon managed to dribble the ball over enemy lines first.

They were quite literally treating war as a game.

To us it seems ludicrous, but to Nevill the football was

a standard, a rallying point for the troops,

something familiar and inspiring amidst the noise and the horror and in a sense, it worked.

They took the village and the German lines.

Incredibly the football survived.

Captain Nevill didn't.

Captain Nevill and Private Fursey were killed in the attack,

along with 145 men from their battalion.

And it didn't take long for news of the fatal game to reach the public back home.

The Daily Mail published a verse in tribute on the 12th July...

"On through the hail of slaughter, Where gallant comrades fall,

"Where blood is poured like water, They drive the trickling ball,

"The fear of death before them, Is but an empty name

"True to the land that bore them, The Surreys play the game."

It's terrible, but it's terribly moving.

And you can't stand here without feeling the loss of these young men, the loss of innocence,

the loss of a certain kind of idealism.

This poem written back at home safe in England with its jolly,

jingoistic tone shows that they had no idea of the scale

of what was happening where Nevill and the Surreys were fighting,

no idea of the horror, the waste, the volume of death, that was occurring on the Somme.

Nearly 20,000 British men died on that first day of the Somme alone.

This stands as the worst loss of life in one day in the history of the British Army.

It's really hard - in a place like this -

to know what to think about the stiff upper lip.

It's difficult not to admire those who adopted it,

but easy to feel angry at its consequences.

What had helped us build an Empire had also, perhaps, allowed us

to sleepwalk into a national catastrophe and keep on walking.

Surely this was the point that something in the ideal

of the British character had to change.

I feel that the First World War proved that the stiff upper lip came with a price.

Never again was there the same confidence,

the same swagger about that form of Britishness.

There was still resistance, fortitude, resilience,

an ability to survive but it was no longer accompanied by enthusiasm,

optimism, delight, confidence, swagger, all that...

all that had gone.

So was this the end of the stiff upper lip

or would it prove more resilient and more adaptable than that?

Can you hold on?

EXPLOSION

Next week we keep calm, and carry on.

Control. Control?

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