Endangered speicies: the English gentleman...

We have just finished watching a TV documentary about the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The role of this venerable institution is to turn out officers and gentlemen (and ladies these days). We were appalled and disgusted.

Why so?

When I was at Officer Cadet School in the mid-50s, foul language was absolutely forbidden. You might just get away with ‘damn’, but not ‘bloody’, ‘bastard’ and definitely not the ‘f’ or ‘c’ words. An officer cadet would be firmly disciplined and possibly ‘RTU’d’ – returned to unit. A staff member would be out. (But I do remember at a church parade later in my service when a squaddie went into the church wearing his hat. The Sergeant Major bawled out ‘Take your ‘at off, laddie. Show some respect in the House of the Lord, you c**t’).

And yet at modern-day Sandhurst we get an unbroken stream of profanity from the instructors. The deeply unimpressive NCO instructor seemed incapable of speech otherwise. A high proportion of Officer-Cadets are women. Formerly it would have been unthinkable to use foul language in front of women of any class under any circumstances. Now it is commonplace; even young women seem to use the ‘f’ word as a normal and frequent part of speech. Perhaps now we only train officers, even the concept of ‘gentleman’ being incomprehensible.

As the OED defines it, the word conjures up ‘a chivalrous, courteous man’. It has little to do with class. In days past, the labourer might be a perfect gentleman and the Squire anything but.

I remember my old man describing someone as ‘a gentleman-farmer; the only thing he raises is his hat!’

It envisages good manners (like  saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and sending letters of thanks in return  for presents, concepts largely foreign to today’s generation), consideration for others, opening a door for a lady .Years ago when feminism was just taking hold a friend of mine did just this. In reply he got ‘Sexist rubbish’. ‘No, madam, just good manners’ was his reply; but that episode might just give us a clue as to why ‘gentleman’ is no longer understood.

It was not shouting, not boasting, not ‘showing off’, no flashy or scruffy dressing. It was minding your own business and nor asking personal questions especially of people you scarcely knew (the bourgeois cocktail party gambit of opening a conversation with a patronising ‘And what do you do?’ was intended to ‘place’ you and determine early whether you were worth talking to). It was about having good table manners and not eating in the street.

A very important concept used to be ‘a gentleman’s word is his bond’. A friend of mine was a tea trader in London, as was his father and his father’s father before him. They never had paper contracts. He reckoned he would sometimes do two or three deals as he walked from Liverpool Street station to his office in Finsbury Square in the morning, always on no more than the strength of a handshake. Then came the ‘Big Bang’ in the City and American and Dutch traders moved in. Thereafter every deal needed a voluminous written contract.

He left the City.

It was Oscar who said ‘a true gentleman is never rude unintentionally’, although I rather like ‘a gentleman is one who would never hit a woman with his hat on’. And reverting to the military, our weapons training instructors would always advise when lying behind a light machine gun ‘to take the weight on your elbows......like a proper gentleman!’

Why does it matter, if at all? 

Perhaps because it is part of being civilised.