I somehow managed to miss the big rugby match when England beat Australia but made good by watching the England/France game last week. Which set one of the many enraged bees in my bonnet buzzing. This is the one about the dreariness of the national anthem.
Apart from the ghastly droney tune and the utterly banal words, I can’t see what is national about it. Surely a national anthem should stir the heart at least a little and somehow try to representative us all. I’ve refused to sing it for years.
I’m not alone in my dislike of the national dirge. Billy Bragg, national treasure and socialist singer, wants ‘Jerusalem’; immensely stirring and already sung on many national occasions. The words are by William Blake and the music by Hubert Parry and the dark satanic mills are those to which the country people had to leave home for at the time of the Industrial revolution. A social history of the people of Britain is there and it aspires to a better country. As a national anthem for the UK it has the disadvantage of referring explicitly to England’s Green and Pleasant Land and confusingly and possibly contentiously to Jerusalem. Perhaps it could be an English anthem to join ‘Flower of Scotland’and the Welsh ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’aka ‘Land of my Fathers’. My own candidate would be ‘I vow to thee my country‘ which has gained much exposure because it was a favourite of the late Princess of Wales. It was written from a Christian perspective, the love of religion and country but it does not have specific religious references.
Meantime, we have to rally to an outmoded and unattractive piece of music on national occasions. Last Saturday was particularly embarrassing as it was sung after the glorious ‘Marsellaise’of France, a song so stirring, that whenever I see the defiant scene in Casablanca when it is taken up by everyone in the bar, I want to BE French. They may have lost the game but they were the only ones on the field national anthem wise.
As an American friend said to me when he heard God Save….played before the Oxford Cambridge university rugby match ‘Is that all?’
Mmm. Yeah.