Read Online How to Be English by David Boyle - Free Book Online Page B

sighting from hill top, unhampered by other theories, found it yielding astounding results in all districts, the straight lines to my amazement passing over and over again through the same class of objects, which I soon found to be (or to have been) practical sighting points.
Alfred Watkins,
Early British Trackways
(1922)

‘ PUT YOUR FOOT down, Tony. They’re getting rather close,’ says Camp Freddie in the passenger seat of a turbo-charged, strengthened Mini Cooper, dashing through the back streets of Turin with gold in the boot.
    The Italian Job
(1969) includes many of the trademark elements of English cinema in the 1960s: a crime caper where the rogues almost get away with it but not quite, where the humiliation for Johnny Foreigner is pretty complete, and where the diverse English classes rub along together upside down and inside out – the snobbish Mr Big of crime is in prison, and the action is led by a heroic cockney (Michael Caine).
    The apotheosis of the Mini was undoubtedly this film, where red, white and blue Mini Coopers whizz through the Turin sewer system to escape from the Italian police. In fact, all three of the original Minis – which were supposed to be carrying more than one and a half times their own weight in gold in their boots – were written off in accidents in the sewers during filming.
    By then the Mini, originally called the Austin Seven and the Morris Mini-Minor, was ten years old. As so often in iconic English style, it was designed by a man who wasn’t English at all, but from the Greek community of Smyrna, whose grandfather had been awarded British citizenship after his work on the Smyrna–Aydin railway.
    Sir Alec Issigonis was an instinctive designer. When one engineer asked him what size to make the wheels, he held his hands apart and said: ‘This big.’ The engineer measured his hands at ten inches and that was how big the wheels were.
    Issigonis also designed the Morris Minor, which stayed in production between 1948 and 1971 as the quintessential preferred conveyance of the impoverished English middle classes. The Mini emerged from the energy crisis that followed the Suez Invasion of 1956, when Issigonis was asked by the British Motor Corporation to design a car which used less petrol.
    It was launched in the summer of 1959 to an uncertain reception. This was just too new a concept, for people still used to running boards and strange indicator lights that stuck out of the side of the car. It wasn’t until the Queen was photographed at the wheel of a Mini that the car began to gather to itself its extraordinary cachet. Soon there was hardly an English celebrity, whether it was David Niven or Peter Sellers, without one. The Beatles snapped up four of them.
    The size of the Mini, which became such an iconic version of 1960s London, was achieved by mounting the engine sideways – a leap of imagination which had eluded car manufacturers before. That meant the car was only ten feet long, but could carry a whole family and their luggage. Over 5.3 million Minis came off the production line before it was finally stopped in October 2000, after an amazing forty-one years. In fact, it is quite impossible to imagine English life in the Elizabethan years, the second half of the twentieth century, without a Mini somewhere in the corner of the picture.
    There was something of the era of miniskirts and instant mashed potato and instant coffee about the Mini – not just hassle-free, but compact, a pocket-sized car.
    The right to use the name Mini was then taken over by BMW, but the new BMW Minis are not the same as the original designs, though even these bigger, sportier Minis – built at the BMW Cowley plant in Oxford – have been selling well. Whether they are quite Minis in the traditional mould remains a controversial subject.
Just remember, in this country they drive on the wrong side of the road.
Charlie Croker in
The Italian Job

IS IT