Toby Young
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If this is true, it is a catastrophe. As an Englishman who has lived in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, I can attest that life in those cities would have been intolerable if I had not been able to exploit this ‘misperception’. Without the myth of the English gentleman to fall back on, I would have been just another newly arrived immigrant, forced to take my chances alongside the Pakistani cabdrivers and Mexican busboys. I don’t suppose I would have persuaded a single woman to go to bed with me.
What makes this turn of events tragic is that it was avoidable. Those expats who have been benefitting from this snobbery have always made a point of warning new arrivals that it depends upon maintaining an air of refinement when dealing with the natives. Among other things, that means never taking a service job. ‘It’s a responsibility, I can tell you, and in various degrees every Englishman out here shares it,’ says one of the British characters in The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh’s Hollywood novel. ‘We can’t all be at the top of the tree but we are all men of responsibility. You never find an Englishman among the underdogs — except in England, of course. There are jobs an Englishman just doesn’t take.’
Of course, most sophisticated Americans have long been aware we are not as gentlemanly as we seem. In 1987 Richard Stengel, now the managing editor of Time magazine, wrote an article for Spy entitled ‘The British Art of Freeloading’. ‘Brits seem to believe that New Yorkers can spiritually launder their nouveau wealth by spending it on civilised English folk,’ he harrumphed.
However, the fact that Americans have always known we were out to bilk them of their hard-earned dough did not mean we were unable to do so. As long as we were willing to play up to the Terry-Thomas stereotype — to show them postcards of stately homes and pretend that we lived in them — they were willing to stand us a few meals. Even if they knew we were not as grand as we seemed, they were happy to reward the performance. They got a kick out of the fact that their former colonial masters had to sing for their supper.
The illusion has been shattered. Moynihan pinpoints the Ricky Hatton/Floyd Mayweather fight in Las Vegas as the moment the scales fell from American eyes. ‘The crowd of Union Jack-bedecked fans… became so unruly that for the first time in its history, the MGM Grand Casino shut down its archipelago of bars,’ he writes. ‘Hatton’s troglodyte supporters achieved what was long considered impossible: they managed to class-down Vegas.’
Apparently, it wasn’t just the hopes of Britain’s boxing fans that lay shattered on that fateful night last December, but the dreams of every Englishman who has fantasised about moving to America to start afresh. ‘I have come here to rook the Americans, to make money and to have a good time,’ wrote Cecil Beaton in his diary when he first arrived in New York. Anyone hoping to do the same in 2008 is in for a rude awakening.
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