Watching the English

by Kate Fox

We huff and puff and scowl and mutter and seethe with righteous indignation, but only rarely do we actually speak up and tell the jumper to go to the back of the queue.

Yes, it is probably easier to get away with queue-jumping in England than anywhere else, but only if you can bear the humiliation of all those eyebrows, coughs, tuts and mutters – in other words, only if you are not

if you ‘play fair’ and explicitly acknowledge the rights and prior claims of those in front of you in a queue – or generously give them the benefit of the doubt where there is some ambiguity – they will instantly drop all their

paranoid suspicions and passive-aggressive tactics, and treat you fairly, or even generously, in return.

Queuing is all about fairness. As George Mikes points out, ‘A man in a queue is a fair man; he is minding his own business; he lives and lets live; he gives the other fellow a chance; he practises a duty while waiting to practise his own rig...

Foreigners may find the complexities of our unwritten queuing rules somewhat baffling, but to the English they are second nature. We obey all of these laws instinctively, without even thinking about it.

when people talk about the English talent for queuing,

To the naked eye, an English queue does indeed look rather dull and uninteresting – just a tidy line of people, patiently waiting their turn. But when you examine English queues under a social-science microscope, you find that each one is a little mini-drama – not just an entertaining ‘comedy of manners’, but a real human-interest story, full of intrigue and scheming, intense moral dilemmas, honour and altruism, shifting alliances, shame and face-saving, anger and reconciliation. I

now look at the ticket-counter queues at Clapham Junction and see, well, perhaps not quite War and Peace, but … something a bit more understated and English. Let’s say Pride and Prejudice.

mentioned at the beginning of this section that the ‘personal-territory’ factor is an important element of our relationship with the car. When Ford described their 1949 model as ‘a living-room on wheels’, they were cleverly appealing to a deep-seated human need for a sense of territory and security. This aspect of car psychology is a cross-cultural universal, but it is of particular significance to the English because of our obsession with our homes, which is in turn related to our pathological preoccupation with privacy.

The sense of home-like security and invulnerability provided by our mobile castles also encourages some more offensive forms of disinhibition.

Despite these lapses, most foreign visitors acknowledge that the English are, generally speaking, remarkably courteous drivers. In fact, many visitors are surprised, and often rather amused, to read the now regular diatribes in British newspapers about how we are suffering from an ‘epidemic’ of ‘road rage’. ‘Have these people never been abroad?’ asked one incredulous, well-travelled tourist. ‘Don’t they realise how polite and well-behaved English drivers are, compared to just about anywhere else in the world?’ ‘You call this “road rage”?’ said another. ‘You want to see road rage, go to America, go to France, go to Greece – hell, go anywhere but England! What you people call “road rage” is just normal driving.’

noticed well-mannered customs and practices that most of us take for granted: that you never have to wait too long before someone lets you out of a side-road or driveway, and that you are always thanked when you let someone else out; that almost all drivers keep a respectful distance from the car in front of them and do not ‘tailgate’, flash their headlights or lean on their horns when they wish to overtake; that on single-track roads, or streets lined with cars on both sides making them effectively single-track, people are remarkably considerate about pulling in to let each other pass, and almost always raise a hand in thanks; that drivers stop for pedestrians at zebra crossings, even when the pedestrians are still standing waiting on the pavement and have not set foot on the crossing (I met one tourist who found this so astonishing that he kept repeating the experiment, marvelling at the fact that he could single-handedly bring streams of traffic to a deferential halt, without the aid of red lights or stop-signs); that horn-honking is regarded as rude, and only used in emergencies or special circumstances, as a warning, not as an all-purpose means of communication or emotional outlet, as it is elsewhere in

am not saying that English drivers are paragons of automotive virtue, or somehow magically endowed with any more saintly forbearance than other nations, just that we have rules and customs that prescribe a certain degree of restraint and courtesy. When

frustrated or angry, English drivers are inclined to shout insults at each other just like anyone else, and the language used is no less colourful, but we mostly tend to do this from behind closed windows, rather than winding them down or getting out and ‘making a scene’.

Fair-play Rules English driving behaviour can be seen as an extension of our queuing behaviour, in that the same principles of fairness and good

As with queuing, people do ‘cheat’, but breaches of automotive fair-play rules provoke the same righteous indignation as pedestrian queue-jumping.

In the last chapter, I suggested that these two tendencies were related: that our excessive need for privacy is at least partly due to our social awkwardness, that ‘home is what the English have instead of social skills’.

rules chapter, which has been concerned with what happens when we venture outside the privacy and security of our homes, has caused me to revise this opinion. Both the denial rule and the mobile-castle rule confirm our inability to deal with the realities of social interaction: we can only cope by practising various forms of self-delusion, pretending either that other people do not exist, or that we are still at home.

The important point here is that politeness and courtesy, as practised by the English, have very little to do with friendliness or good nature.

What I am noticing is that there is rarely anything straightforward or direct or transparent about English social interaction.

We are always oblique, always playing some complex, convoluted game. When we are not doing things backwards (saying the opposite of what we mean, not introducing ourselves until the end of an encounter, saying sorry when someone bumps into us and other Looking-Glass practices), we are doing them sideways (addressing our indignant mutterings about queue-jumpers to other queuers, and our complaints about delayed trains to other passengers, rather than actually tackling the offenders).

Every social situation is fraught with ambiguity, knee-deep in complication, hidden meanings, veiled power-struggles, passive aggression and paranoid confusion. We seem perversely determined to ma...

Why, as one American visitor plaintively asked me, can’t the English just be ‘a bit more direct, you know, a bit more upfront?’ We would, as she pointed out, save ourselves and everybody else a great deal of trouble. The problem is, I think, that when we are ‘direct and upfront’, we tend to overdo it, becoming noisy, aggressive, rude and generally insufferable. Whenever I talk to English people about my research on Englishness, and mention that we tend to be inhibited and have lots of rules about politeness, they say, ‘But we’re ...

This dearth of national amour-propre, this seemingly unshakeable conviction that our country has nothing much to recommend it and is in any case rapidly going to the dogs, must surely be one of the defining characteristics of the English.

Although, having said that, I suspect that this trait is in fact a sub-category, a symptom or side effect of our modesty, moaning and humour rules (particularly the self-deprecation rule and the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule)79. rather than a defining characteristic in itself.

During the research for this book, almost all of the foreigners I spoke to were somewhat perplexed and confused by English attitudes to work and behaviour at work;

they all seemed to feel there was a ‘problem’, but they found it hard to pin down or express exactly what the problem was.

The French writer Philippe Daudy remarked that ‘Continentals are always disconcerted by the English attitude to work. They appear neither to view it as a heavy burden imposed by Fate, nor to embrace it as a sacred obligation.’

In other words, our attitude to work does not conform to either the Catholic-fatalist or the Protestant-work-ethic model, one or the other of which characterises the work-cultures of most other European countries. Our position is sort of somewhere in between these two extremes – a typically English exercise in compromise and moderation. Or

We often maintain that we would rather not work, but our personal and social identity is in fact very much bound up with work (either

In the course of our many encounters with people at all levels in English companies large and small, from shop-floor and front-line workers to managing directors and chairmen, we found that the most successful people – those most likely to be promoted or given plum jobs, that is – were not the most competent, or the most hard-working, or the most ‘businesslike’ or ‘professional’, but tended to have other, less tangible, qualities, particularly the self-deprecating humour exhibited by our biscuit chief.

am talking about the more subtle forms of humour – wit, irony, understatement, banter, teasing, pomposity-pricking – which are an integral part of almost all English social interaction.

I found that the English sense of humour, in various guises, was one of the most common causes of misunderstanding and confusion in their dealings with the English at work. All of the unwritten rules of English humour contributed in some measure to this confusion, but the biggest stumbling blocks appeared to be the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule and the rules of irony.

The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule is implicit in our whole attitude to work. The first ‘guiding principle’ I mentioned was that we take work seriously, but not too seriously. If your

work is interesting, you are allowed to be interested in it – even to the point of being ‘a bit of a workaholic’; but if you are too much of a workaholic, or over-zealous about an intrinsically uninteresting job, you will be regarded as ‘sad’ and pathetic and it will be suggested that you should ‘get a life’.

Training in Not Being Earnest starts early: among English schoolchildren, there is an unwritten rule forbidding excessive enthusiasm for academic work. In some schools, working hard for exams is permitted, but one must moan a...

We don’t mind people being ‘brainy’ or clever, as long as they don’t make a big song-and-dance about it, don’t preach or pontificate at us, don’t show off and don’t take themselves too seriously. If someone

‘of being rather underwhelmed by the whole thing, including themselves and the product they were supposed to be trying to sell me’. This

The dispassionate approach works perfectly well with English customers and clients, as there is nothing the English detest more than an over-enthusiastic salesman, and excessive keenness will only make us cringe and back off.

It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realise that when the English say, ‘Oh, really? How interesting!’ they might well mean ‘I don’t believe a word of it, you lying toad.’ Or they might not. They might just mean ‘I’m bored and not really listening but trying to be polite.’

Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested. You’ll never know. There

Similarly, a statement prefaced with a casual ‘Oh, by the way …’ is taken by foreigners to indicate an unimportant afterthought, when to the English it may well mean ‘Pay attention, this is the primary purpose of our whole conversation.’

English politeness almost always goes hand-in-hand

with English hypocrisy.

We might say, “Oh yes, do you think so?” when we don’t believe someone, but we will do it with all the signals blazing.

Only the Spanish even came close to matching us, and the poor Germans got the lowest humour-score of all, reflecting the popular stereotype in this country that Germans have absolutely no sense of humour – or perhaps that we find them difficult to laugh at, which is not quite the same thing.

A further potential impediment to the successful conduct of business is the English modesty rule. While the English are no more naturally modest or self-effacing than other cultures – if anything, we are inclined to be rather arrogant – we do put a high value on these qualities, and have a number of unwritten rules prescribing at least the appearance of modesty.

suggested that they could perhaps do more to publicise the unique social attractions of racing – the sunny ‘social microclimate’ of racecourses. With a look of horror, one of the racecourse managers protested, ‘But that would be boasting!’ Trying to keep a straight face, I said, ‘No, I think nowadays it’s called “marketing”,’ but the modesty rule proved stronger than any of my arguments, and he and a number of his colleagues remained unpersuadable.

we like to think that our approach to selling things is more subtle, more understated, more ironic – and certainly less overtly boastful.