Many Britons in World War II showed a tendency to think of the war in terms of cricket. This was discouraged by the tougher-minded commanders on the sensible grounds that war is not cricket. But no one could stop Field Marshal Montgomery from promising his troops they were about to "hit the Germans for six." This introduction of a sporting vocabulary into a fight for survival is one of the reasons why many Continentals regard the English as a frivolous race. I remember still the look, compounded of awe and disgust, on the face of a Norwegian, lately escaped from his homeland, when in the summer of 1940 he found that the newspaper-sellers on the street corners were writing the results of each day's fighting in the Battle of Britain in cricket terms. "Here they are," he said, "fighting for their lives, and I see a sign reading 'England 112 Not Out.' I asked the man what it meant, and he said: 'We got 112 of the ——ers, cock, and we're still batting.' A strange people."

If soccer is primarily a working-class sport and cricket the central sporting interest of the middle class, horse racing is the attraction that transcends all class distinctions. In Britain, as in America, great trouble is taken by those who administer the business to clothe it with the attributes of a sport. But essentially horse racing is a means of gambling, and the British, beneath their supposed stolidity, are a nation of gamblers. I do not recall during my childhood buying a ticket for a sweepstakes on the Kentucky Derby. But in Britain boys and girls of ten and eleven customarily buy tickets in "sweeps" run by their classmates, and the more precocious swap tips on horses.

A tremendous amount is bet each day on racing in Britain, and it is estimated that more money is bet on the Epsom Derby each June than on any other single horse race in the world.

Derby Day at Epsom is one of the best opportunities of seeing contemporary British society, from the Queen at the top to the London barrow boy at the bottom, en masse. Inside the track are the vans of the gypsy fortune-tellers, the stands of the small-time bookmakers, scores of bars and snack bars, carousels and other amusement-park attractions. Across the track are the big stands filled with what remains of the aristocracy and the upper middle class of Britain carefully dressed in morning coats, gray top hats, and starched collars. Its members may envy the great wads of bank-notes carried by some of the prosperous farmers and North Country businessmen across the track, but on Derby Day anything goes, and there are champagne and lobster lunches, hilarious greetings to old friends, and reminiscences of past Derbies.

Queen Elizabeth II's love of racing endears her to her subjects. An interest in racing has always been a passport to popularity for monarchs or politicians. Sir Winston Churchill, who divined the wishes and thoughts of his countrymen with uncanny ability during the years of crisis between 1939 and 1945, had few interests in common with the people he lectured and led. He cared little for soccer or cricket. But when, after the war, he began to build up a racing stable, he acquired a new popularity with the people. Naturally, this was the last thing in Sir Winston's mind. He had made some money, he was out of office, and racing attracted him.

Racing is an upper-class sport in the sense that only the rich can afford it. But the true upper-class sports that survive are fox-hunting, shooting, and fishing, known in upper-class parlance as "huntin', shootin', and fishin'." Shooting is bird-shooting—pheasant, grouse, partridge. Fishing is for salmon or trout. As Britain's sprawling industrialization has gobbled up land, the field sports have become more and more the preserve of the rich or at least the well-to-do. George Orwell once noted the dismay of British Communists who learned that Lenin and other revolutionary leaders had enjoyed shooting—shooting birds, that is—in Russia, a country teeming with game. They thought it almost treasonable for the Little Father of the masses to engage in a sport that in Britain was reserved for the capitalists.

Fox-hunting, chiefly because of its close connection with the cult of the horse, takes social precedence over shooting and fishing. But here again we encounter a change. Death duties, taxes on land, and income taxes have impoverished a large number of rural aristocrats who formerly supported local hunts. Their places have been taken by well-to-do farmers and professional men and women from near-by towns. Some of the better-established hunts, such as the Quorn and the Pytchley, try to maintain the old standards of exclusiveness.

The attention paid the cavalry regiments in the old Army, the middle-class conviction that children must be taught to ride because it is a social asset, the aristocratic atmosphere of fox-hunting and show jumping are all expressions of the cult of the horse which flourishes in one of the most heavily industrialized nations in the world. This, too, may express an unconscious desire to return to the past and a secure Britain. Here, too, we see the newly emerging middle class sending its sons and daughters to riding schools where they will meet the sons and daughters of the established middle class.

Golf and tennis are two games that Britain spread around the world. Golf is every man's game in Scotland and a middle-class game in England. I well remember my first trip to St. Andrews in 1939 and my delight at watching a railroad worker solemnly unbutton his collar, take off his coat, and play around one of the formidable courses there in 89. The incongruity was made more marked by the foursomes of expensively outfitted English and Americans who allowed the Scot to play through.

Tennis in Britain, like tennis in America, retains aristocratic overtones. But today it is a middle-class sport; membership at the local tennis club is ranked below membership in the local yacht club or the local hunt.

In both games British representatives in international competitions are at a disadvantage because there is not in Britain the urgent drive to develop players of international ability which exists in the United States and Australia. British cricket and rugby football teams, on the other hand, have enjoyed a number of brilliant successes in competition with Commonwealth teams since the war, and English soccer football, after some lean years, has begun to climb back to the top of the international heap.

In this land of paradox which was the birthplace of the modern "sporting" attitude, the original home of "the game for the game's sake," we find that the most popular sport is soccer football played for money mainly by professionals; that rugby football can be a middle-class game in England and a working-class game one hundred miles away in Wales; that cricket through the years has acquired the standing not of a sport but of a religion among one important class in society; and that shooting and fishing, two proletarian pastimes in both the United States and the Soviet Union, are the domain of the wealthy, the well-bred, and the middle class in Britain.

PUBS AND CLUBS

Long ago one of my bosses advised me to spend less time listening to people in pubs. Had I taken his advice, which fortunately I did not, I would be richer by many pounds but poorer in both friends and information.

Although writers have contended otherwise, the public house is not a unique British institution. Frenchmen gather in estaminets to drink, to argue, and to write interminable letters. Americans meet at bars and taverns. The Spaniard patronizes his café. The unique aspect of the British pub is its atmosphere.

The pub is a place where you can take your time. In city or country it is a refuge. A man may enter, drink three or four pints of beer in moody silence, and depart refreshed. Or he can come in, drink the same amount of beer, debate the state of the nation and the world with other drinkers and the barmaid, and play darts. Dart-playing, of course, is a national sport, and there are enthusiasts who claim it has more devotees than tennis or golf. Dart leagues flourish throughout the country, to the delight of the publicans, who reap a rich harvest from each match.

Pubs come in all shapes and sizes. Recently many of the old London pubs have been modernized. Plastics and neon lights have taken the place of huge glass walls engraved with advertisements for gin and beer and old-fashioned glass-shaded electric lights. In their efforts to meet the competition of television at home and milk bars or soda fountains down the street, many pubs have adopted new and, to a purist, disgusting attractions. The news that a pub in Cambridge intended to sell ice cream convinced many serious thinkers that this was the end of the Empire. Similarly, a friend told me in shocked tones that when he was served a pint of beer in a suburban pub the barmaid handed him "a damned doily" to put under the glass. He informed her, he reported, that he had given up spilling his drinks at the age of three and a half.

Despite the inroads of the milk bars and the trend toward bottled beer bought in the pub and drunk before the television set, draught beer is still the mainstay of British drinking. "Beer and beef have made us what we are," said the Prince Regent. (His friend, the Duke of Wellington, somewhat surprisingly, thought the Church of England was responsible.)

English beer has a bad name in the United States. The GI invading the country in 1942-5 found it weak, warm, and watery. During the war years it was indeed both weak and watery. Today, however, it has regained its old-time potency.

In addition to the standard beers and ales, the British brew small quantities of special ales that, as the old saying goes, would blow a soft hat through a cement ceiling. The Antelope, in Chelsea, had managed to hoard some bottles of this liquid as late as the autumn of 1940. After two bottles apiece, three Americans walked home through one of the worst nights of bombing exclaiming happily over the pretty lights in the sky.

The merits of the brews in their respective countries are a favorite topic for conversation between Britons and Americans. The tourist will find that his host holds no high opinion of American beer, considering it gassy, flavorless, and, as one drinker inelegantly described it, "as weak as gnat's wee." The British are continually surprised by American drinking habits. They consider that the GI who hastily swallows three or four double whiskies is asking for trouble, and that the object of a night's foray in the pub is not to get drunk but to drink enough to encourage conversation and forget your troubles. Prohibition, gone these many years, is still a black mark against Americans in the minds of the pundits in the pubs. They regard it as a horrible aberration by an otherwise intelligent people.

It should not be assumed that the British drink only beer. When they are in funds or when the occasion calls for something stronger, they will drink almost anything from what my charwoman once described as "a nourishing drop of gin" to champagne. During the war they drank some strange and weird mixtures and distillations that, if they did not kill the drinker as did some Prohibition drams, at least made him wish he were dead the next morning.

But the pub's importance, let me repeat, is due to its place as a public forum as much as to its position as a public fountain. There questions can be asked and answers given which the average Briton would regard as impertinent if the conversation took place in his home or his office. There interminable public arguments will probe the wisdom of the government's policy on installment buying or Cyprus or, with due gravity, will seek to establish the name of the winner of the Cambridgeshire Handicap in 1931.

The atmosphere of discussion and reflection of the English pub thus far has been proof against the juke box, the pinball machine, and the television set. But the fight is a hard one. These counterattractions to the bar are making their appearance in an increasing number of pubs each year. At the same time, publicans are giving more thought to the catering side of their business. The bar, which was the heart of the pub, has become merely an adjunct to the "attractions" and the restaurant.

The spread of restaurant eating is itself a novel change in British habits. Until the Second World War the great majority of the working class and the middle class ate their meals at home. Even today, in the New Towns, the industrial worker prefers to return home for lunch. But the shortage of servants, the difficulties of feeding a family on the weekly rations, the need to get away from the drabness of chilly, darkened homes during the war and immediate post-war years combined to send millions of Britons out to eat.

This has changed the character of a large number of pubs. It has also improved restaurant cooking, especially in the provinces. British cooking is a standard music-hall joke, but the comedians are somewhat behind the times. It has improved steadily since the war, largely because the British had to learn how to cook in order to make their meager rations palatable. The squeeze on the established middle class forced the housewives of that group to study cookery. Dinners in that circle are shorter and less formal than before the war, but the cooking is vastly improved.

Décor in modern pubs varies from the overpoweringly new to the self-consciously old. Tucked away in the back streets of the cities, however, or nestling in the folds of the Cotswolds one can still see the genuine article. There the political arguments flourish as they have since Bonaparte was troubling the English. There on a Saturday night you can still hear the real English songs—"Knees Up Mother Brown" or "Uncle Tom Cobley and All."

A sense of calm pervades the rural bars. The countryman is a long-lived, tough person. At the Monkey and Drum or the Red Dragon or the Malakof (named for a half-forgotten action in the Crimean War) the beer is set out for wiry ancients in their seventies and eighties, masters of country crafts long forgotten by the rest of the population. The sun stays late in the sky on a summer evening. From the open door you can see it touching the orderly fields, the neat houses. It is difficult, almost impossible in such surroundings to doubt that there will always be an England. Yet this is precisely the England that is and has been in continuous retreat for a century and a half before the devouring march of industrialization.

The pub is the poor man's "club"—in the sense that it is a haven for the tired worker and a center of discussion. The actual British clubs are another singular institution. There are, of course, men's and women's clubs throughout the West, but only in Britain have they become an integral and important part of social life. Like the pubs, they are changing with the times. But they still retain enough of their distinctive flavor to mark them as a particularly British institution.

London's clubs are the most famous. But throughout the islands there are other clubs—county clubs in provincial capitals, workingmen's clubs that compete with the pubs. There are women's clubs, too, but the club is mainly a masculine institution in a nation whose society is still ordered for the well-being of the male.

"Do you mean to tell me that these Englishmen go to their clubs for a drink after work and don't get home until dinnertime?" a young American matron asked. She thought it was "scandalous." Her husband, poor devil, came home from work promptly at six each night and sat down to an early dinner with his wife and three small children. I suppose he enjoyed it.

London's clubs cater to all tastes. There are political clubs such as the Carlton, the Conservatives' inner sanctum. There are service clubs: the Cavalry or the Army and Navy. On St. James's Street are a number of the oldest and best: White's, Boodle's, Brooks's, the Devonshire.

The same American matron asked me what a club offers. The answer is, primarily, relaxation in a man's world. Like the pub, the club is a place where a man can get away from his home, his job, his worries. If he wishes, he can drink and eat while reading a newspaper. Or he can stand at the bar exchanging gossip with other members. He can read, he can play cards, he can play billiards. If he wants advice, there may be an eminent Queen's Counsel, a Foreign Office official, a doctor, or an editor across the luncheon table. There is the same atmosphere of relaxed calm which marks the best pubs.

Because for centuries the clubs have been the refuges of the wealthy or the aristocratic or the dominant political class they have exerted considerable political influence. Feuds that have shaken great political parties have begun before club bars and, years later, been settled with an amicable little dinner party at the club. In politics, domestic and foreign, the British put great faith in the "quiet get-together" where an issue can be thrashed out in private without regard for popular opinion.

During the worst days of the debate over the future of Trieste a Foreign Office official remarked to me that "all these conferences" complicated the situation. "There's nothing that couldn't be settled in an hour's frank talk over a glass of sherry at White's," he said. Foolish? Old-fashioned? Perhaps. But how much progress has been made at full-dress international conferences where national leaders speak not to one another but to popular opinion in their own and foreign countries?

The clubs are centers in which opinion takes form. As the opinion of many who are leaders in Britain's political and economic life, it is important opinion. For instance, it was obvious in the clubs, long before the failure of the Norwegian campaign brought it into the open, that there was widespread dissatisfaction in the middle class over Neville Chamberlain's direction of the war. Similarly, stories of the aging Churchill's unwillingness to deal with the pressing domestic economic problems of his government were first heard in the clubs.

The high cost of maintaining the standards of food, drink, and service required by most members has hurt the clubs. There are in every such institution a few staff mainstays whose remarks become part of club lore. But the Wages and Catering Act has made it difficult to staff clubs adequately.

The food in clubs is man's food. Its emphasis on beef, lamb, fish, and cheese would upset a Mamaroneck matron. But some of the chefs are as good as any in Britain, and the food can be accompanied by some of the finest wines in the world.

Essentially, the club remains man's last refuge from the pressures of his world. He can talk, he can listen, he can drink a second or even a third cocktail without the slight sniff that betokens wifely censure. The latest story about the Ruritanian Ambassadress or the government's views on the situation in Upper Silesia will be retailed by members. The taxes may be high, the world in a mess, the old order changing. Here by the fire with his drink in his hand he is his own man. "Waiter, two more of the same."