Generating Greatness?

Doesn’t everyone like to be in a gang?

‘I promise that I will do my best to do my duty to. God and to the Queen to help other people and to keep the Cub Scout Law. ‘

I was reading the obituaries in The Times recently and there was an obituary of a musician called Len Garry. Garry was a member of John Lennon’s youthful band the Quarrymen in the late 1950’s and witnessed the first  meeting of Lennon and Paul McCartney.

McCartney subsequently joined the band, however, as the piece continues, he ‘missed the group’s first appearance at the Cavern Club that August, as he was away at scout camp’.

I know! McCartney was in the scouts, who knew? Today as a symbol of British society culture and history, the Beatles dwarf, if not God, the scout movement. But the scouts were huge. I was in the cubs and scout in the 1970’s, we were the 16th Balham and Tooting in our area alone.

By the 1990’s I was working with a young guy he was about 19, and we got on well and used to chat, I was about 10 years older than he was. He laughed when I told him I’d been in the scouts, he wouldn’t have said ‘uncool’ but whatever the equivalent was at that time I don’t remember; lame, naff, we’ve never really transcended cool and uncool as aesthetic signifiers.

The obituary describes the Quarrymen as “Lennon’s schoolboy ‘gang’”. In the cubs or scouts (they’ve merged into one in my memory) I sang in a ‘gang show’, that’s what these theatrical shows were called. Today we associate gangs with violence, but doesn’t everyone like to be in a gang?

In the 70’s and 80’s I used to spend my Saturday afternoons on the terraces of Chelsa Football Club; this period was the height of football hooliganism in the UK. Some who remember those days may raise eyebrows that I was there, Chelsea had a bit of a reputation for violence, and later on far right elements became attached to clubs such as Chelsea. But it was great to feel part of a big gang, I’d be with my brother and a group of others, and a lot of our friends were people we knew from the scouts. I guess what I’m saying is that I stayed pretty close to the promise above, and that today we have a dark a view of young men banding together unsupervised like we did. Maybe the purpose of the scouts was to indoctrinate us and give us a taste of military discipline, when world war was still fresh in the collective memory, but we enjoyed it.

This week the Bank of England decided to replace great figures of history with wild life images on its bank notes. Churchill’s granddaughter was interviewed, she said she was okay with it and that it was never supposed to be a forever thing. But in the UK we do have a problem of how we define greatness and who should be in that category. We might list the usually candidates, such as Churchill, Brunel, Newton, Shakespeare and Florence Nightingale and then we begin to feel self-conscious, and notice that they are all white, and maybe we need some ethnic representation. But we can’t just be great by an act of will. Churchill has a mixed biography but at a particular time he galvanised a nation perhaps even saved it from annihilation. Brunel’s engineering works are still around us and used today, if you read, write or think in English, you have been influenced by Shakespeare. It’s worth noting that the great Trinidadian writer CLR James said that the greatest gifts that England gave to the colonies were Shakespeare and cricket.

There’s a lot to be said for local heroes, someone from our school, town or community who has gone on to do great things and maybe it’s just a fact that those transcendent figures are rare by definition. Maybe today the late Queen would quality or possibly McCartney himself. But we can’t escape the fact that we have become nervous about representation. The idea that Britian has historically been a white country is difficult for some people to accept, or perhaps too controversial for the folk at the Bank of England to deal with.