The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / St George’s Day

St George’s Day

by 53 Comments

Is there any other country where the National day is so ignored – why, is it in case someone is offended, or in case it appears too right wing, or is it just apathy.
Anyway, post a patriotic tune for ‘God,Harry and England’ if you wish.

1

Comments

  3. Apathy, I think. I’m Scottish but live and work in England. When I saw the Google doodle this morning I wished my colleagues a happy St George’s Day but they were more excited about it being pay day, which is fair enough.

  4. Well in our family it was my late mother’s birthday rather than St. George’s day. But in my case English just feels like part of my personal identity. Roughly in order: northern English, British, Yorkshire, European, English, westerner. Much of what is celebrated on St. george’s day seems like a celebration of Southern England which is just as familiar/unfamiliar to me as Scotland (though more familar than Wales or NI).

    Incidentally the (Scots) GLW can never understand why the English stick with God save the Queen at sporting matches, rather than Jerusalem. She has a point.

    • I’d refine that down to a celebration of South Eastern England*. I’ve spent the vast majority of my life in the West Country, and I identify myself as that first, ahead of English. I feel more affinity with Wales than I do Kent or Essex (might be the Cornish in me, or simply because I lived in Cardiff for a couple of years).

      *just strikes me that maybe there’s more sense of national identity in those parts because those were the very parts that were getting invaded centuries ago, and first in line for Operation Sealion?

    • Well I’m in Essex, and no one seems bothered about St George’s Day here, but I do agree that people in southern England seem to think that their identity is the definition of English, and for that matter British, identity.

  5. There’s a quote in the sleeve notes of an old Oysterband compilation that is quite apposite, and is pretty close to my own feelings on English patriotism:

    “To love this land and its music but yet to hate how it’s ruled and a lot of what it stands for is a position many people will find strange”.

  7. Here in Italy there’s no real equivalent. Italy’s national day is a public holiday to celebrate becoming a republic. It’s really just seen as another welcome break from work rather than a patriotic event. There’s no saint’s day on a national level, I don’t think, though local saints are celebrated.

    • A joy to hear every time. Sitting in the Greenfield at Glastonbury hearing it come pouring up the slope from one of the outdoor stages mid afternoon was especially fine.

  12. Billy Bragg – England, Half English

    This isn’t my favourite Billy Bragg song. Far from it. But it does mention St. George.

    Britannia, she’s half English, she speaks Latin at home
    St. George was born in the Lebanon, how he got here I don’t know
    And those three lions on your shirt
    They never sprang from England’s dirt
    Them lions are half English and I’m half English too

  15. Swedish singer Ulf Lundell commented on how the ultra right here have hijacked the Swedish flag and of the need to reclaim it for the ordinary Swede. This is a trend you see in many countries.

    Hats off to Billy Bragg for trying to reclaim a pride in Englishness.

    They’ve made the National Day a public holiday here but it feels very artificial somehow. Swedes look jealously over the border at Norway where the 17th of May, where they celebrate independence from Sweden, is an unashamed orgy of patriotism.

    The whole country dresses up in folk costumes. The Swedish royal family try that too but they look like a bunch of uncomfortable toffs who are dressing down.

    • When I lived in Sweden 15 years ago, I couldn’t believe how many flags I saw, on proper flagpoles in people’s gardens. I thought that that If I’d seen this many Union flags around an ordinary town in the UK I’d assume there was a war on.

      I’m not sure that’s as true any more, as both the UK and English flags seem to have been reclaimed from old-school patriots and Nazis. Sadly the English flag is largely used to support a shitey football team, which is barely better. You still don’t see many flagpoles though. We haven’t the space.

      • Re: large flagpoles in gardens everywhere in Sweden.
        Yes, you’re absolutely right, Moosey. It’s a very Swedish phenomenon.

        I’ve been a Swedish citizen for quite a few years now, but I don’t think I’ll be regarded as truly Swedish until I’ve … erm … erected a huge one in my garden.

    • Re: the Swedish National Day; no need for it, we’ve got Midsummer Eve. Nobody knows why we celebrate our National Day anyway (something about Gustaf Vasa? or the Riksdag? both? something else entirely?)
      But no others celebrate Midsummer like the Swedes, and it’s not artificial and it’s not been hijacked by the ugly side of patriotism, it’s just a day when absolutely everybody celebrates their love of Sweden, Swedish nature, summer (and drinking…and dancing like frogs around a gigantic phallic symbol…)

    • I agree. I used to manage a bookshop and one of my staff said he wanted to create a St George’s Day display. I encouraged him, be he wouldn’t follow through with it because he said that some people might find it jingoistic and offensive. I couldn’t see it myself, and said that anyone who did object was welcome to discuss it with me, but that was the end of that.

  19. In answer Bargepole, I would suggest that we, the English, don’t have occasion to celebrate being liberated from anyone in particular and, not being a strongly Catholic country, we’re not particularly big on saints either?

  21. As BlueBoy points out, today is a prominent date for fans of old Billy Shakespeare. Not a tune as such, but some lovely words…

    True, I talk of dreams,
    Which are the children of an idle brain,
    Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
    Which is as thin of substance as the air
    And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
    Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
    And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence,
    Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

  22. FWIIW. Today, April 23rd 2015 is the 14th anniversary of my dear wife Karen passing away from breast cancer, just a month after her 39th birthday.

    I am sure you can all understand my not seeing this date as a day of celebration.

  23. Ah yes a complex issue for many (well for me) I subscribe to the view that Burden of Shame by UB40 sums and yet we have made some progress. I am proud of multi-cultural Britain even though there are increasing numbers who seem intent on attempting to take us back to a Britain that has never existed (aside from maybe some early 70’s television programmes and Midsomer Murders without the crime or the editorial pages of the Daily Mail and Daily Express).

    A shame that England, Half English is a terrible Billy Bragg song because Lyrically it has a lot going for it.

    I struggle with the flags and the posturing because to me it still screams right wing xenophobe – my demons and I fight them every day but there it is.

  24. It’s hard to accuse us of apathy in not celebrating a pointless date in the calendar. Like christmas and easter for the non religious, what exactly is being celebrated? I do struggle to understand the folk in England that celebrate St Patrick’s day but not St George’s day.

  25. My parents 49th wedding anniversary. They’re nearly golden (though they already stardust, as we all are).

    In their B/W wedding photos me mam’s a definitively sixties chick with a blonde bob. My Dad is a young Biggins in a mod suit. Another age, another age.

  26. On radio this morning Billy Bragg said that he believes St Patrick’s Day is really an American import into British and Irish culture and that the celebrations for St Pat’s day are much bigger and livelier in New York than they are in Dublin or Belfast.

    I have to admit that during my travels I have met many Americans who see themselves as “Irish American”, I’ve met quite a few who claim to be “Scottish American” but I’ve never met one who would identify him/herself as “English American”.

    • Americans don’t really recognise English as a distinction from British. And British means George III, and he can go f*** himself. So even those folk from the North East US with semi-English accents and manners won’t hear of it.

      I’ve got this from John Irving novels.

  27. Is it maybe because these ‘saints’ are irrelevant? I mean slaying dragons and having something to do with Jesus (oor St. Andra’) don’t really have much resonance in our age.

Leave a Reply