Tears and Anthems - 28 December 2001

Christmas I find is a great time for surprise letters, notes, cards - hearing from people long forgotten, hearing from strangers who went to school with my father in South Africa - need I say, my father never left England, or Scotland, ever anyway.

Getting warm, jolly letters from an old buddy at Cambridge. I remember very well my old buddies at Cambridge, and you were not one of them, buddy!

A note from my old golf teacher who's now retired down in Florida. Like me he's long in the tooth and short in the cartilage and says: "Forget about the golf swing, you're above ground and mobile."

Glory be, he's right - in the first part anyway.

The most touching card I had was a postcard of the band of the Coldstream Guards. On the other side a note from an old actor friend whose very signature reminded me that he was the son of a very famous English actor indeed, notable in his day for imperious good looks, a fatally hypnotic effect on comely females and a voice that sounded like the organ reverberating through St Paul's Cathedral.

This son - himself, so help me, now ageing - wrote simply to say that in all the sad and shattering scenes since that Tuesday in September only one brought him to tears.

Now this is an actor who can shed a tear on cue. And as the very old Churchill said, whenever anyone said a kind thing to him: "I tend these days to blubber."

John Gielgud blubbered all the time even when nothing kind or unkind was being said.

I stress this mechanical, heartless gift of tears because it's part of an actor's craft and you'd expect they'd be more susceptible than most at grievous occasions in real life.

But this old actor implied that while he could withstand all the horrors of Ground Zero, the only time he gave in was the morning he went down to stand outside Buckingham Palace and watched and listened to the Coldstream Guards playing in the forecourt for the first time in history, he says, the American national anthem. He wept.

That night on our television I saw it and it was too much for me too. And later I began to wonder why this should be uniquely affecting.

Well I can't speak for my friend but for me the sight and sound of those early chords was, first, a vast relief and a great surprise because it was the first time that we'd heard the national anthem played anywhere since the crumbling of the towers and the shattering of the Pentagon.

This absence of the obvious at first puzzled and then alarmed me and then deeply annoyed me and I gather many, many others.

Why? What was the cause of this strange paranoia almost?

Well probably most Americans assume, like any other people, that at the sudden approach of a national crisis the national anthem will break out everywhere.

But no, on September 11 and the following days and weeks, at the terrible site itself, at the first funeral services, most memorably at that candlelight vigil of senators and congressmen on the steps of the Capitol, it was God Bless America.

"God bless America, God bless America, land that I love."

A very sentimental song which begs, as all combatant nations do, to have God on their side.

Well this extremely sentimental tune was written by an army private, way back in 1918.

Private Irving Berlin was in training on Long Island. The United States had been in the war since April 1917 but no American went into action until the summer of 1918.

Private Berlin thought it a poor song for a camp show. He'd intended it as a prayer for peace and now he was begging God to stand beside her and - ah - guide her away from war.

It was, he said, painting the lily to have soldiers singing this song and marching off to war. So God Bless America was buried and forgotten.

Twenty years went by when a popular crooner, an enormous woman with an enormous radio audience, begged Berlin to write a patriotic song, another one that would for her Armistice Day programme exorcise the coming war, ward it away from America.

It was 1938, the year of Hitler's takeover of Austria and annexation by treaty of Czechoslovakia. It was the year of Munich.

Irving Berlin failed again and then he remembered the abandoned God Bless America and all I can say is that in the intervening years between 1938 and September 11, 2001, God Bless America has been sung more in this country, in more places, on more occasions, more often than any other song or hymn in history.

The political conventions grabbed it. President Eisenhower gave the ageing Berlin a gold medal for it.

There was a move, after a national poll, to have it replace the actual national anthem. To his credit Berlin was the first to protest the idea.

Now why God Bless America should have sprung to life everywhere across the country four months ago is a mystery that lies hidden deep in the national psyche.

It's a namby pamby tune. It tells God that America is so beautiful from the mountains to the prairie that he therefore should bless it.

It may have drenched the cheeks of millions of Americans but to other millions it was an embarrassment, in the same way as the recent emergence of - yet again - those leftist student groups who in every war declare they are, unlike you and me, working for peace.

By shouting the word often enough they hope to turn it into a reality.

No work is entailed. It's a case of what the poet William Empson called "incessant belief labouring to create its object". Same with the song.

However, on 7 December in commemoration of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, President Bush did what he ought to have done on 11 September, he proclaimed that the national anthem should be played at all military naval and airforce stations and in every state capital in the Union.

And so for the first time we heard the Star Spangled Banner.

Missing it so strangely and for no given reason maybe you can see now why hearing it that first day and played in London should have been so singularly poignant.

I don't know whose idea it was to have the Coldstream play in Buckingham Palace but it came over to us as an act of inspired good manners, a great salute from the first ally to give force to Nato's vow that an attack on one is an attack on all.

Well I see an incendiary topic burning up a headline at my elbow and I'm loathe to talk about it. It's the prospect of war between India and Pakistan.

This is however a matter of speculation and prayer and good hope and I think I'd rather turn to a question a listener puts, related to that early fall obsession with God Bless America.

"Is it true," he asks, "and if so why did the United States not even have a national anthem until the 1930s?"

Well he's absolutely correct. After independence was won Congress spent 120 years wrangling and putting up bills and killing bills and stomping out of Congress shouting: "Better no anthem at all than either of those mongrels!"

I'm not going even to sketch the history of the Star Spangled Banner at the risk of driving you out of the building.

Simply to say it was written in a great blaze of patriotism by a young American lawyer who watched a batch of American sailors rescue an American doctor who was being held prisoner by a ship of the British fleet, anchored off Baltimore, Maryland.

This happened in 1814, two years into the so-called war of 1812.

The lawyer quickly put his lyric to an English tune and it swept the country.

During the Civil War new words were written but the tune went marching on.

Its gradual takeover as a national anthem was protested, however, by old Anglophiles who preferred the song, equally popular on patriotic occasions, My Country Tis of Thee, which goes:

"My country tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing."

[Tune of the British national anthem].

What? God Save the Queen? Right.

This confusion was heightened every time the United States felt particularly warm towards Britain or particularly hostile.

As you must know by now, love of America and hatred of America have been alternating in Britain with the regularity of a pendulum for over 200 years.

The crash of 1929 threw both countries into depression with little emotion left over to blame either for the hard times.

A bill to forget the copycat British National Anthem was quietly passed in March 1931 and the Star Spangled Banner has remained in possession of the ragged, but patriotic field ever since.

The Coldstream performance at the Palace and President Bush's proclamation of December 7 have, I hope and believe, banished God Bless America as the proper response to sombre occasions.

I think the Coldstream Guards band should be invited to make a tour of the United States and play the Star Spangled Banner in the majestical way that they do, to remind Americans of the seriousness of the mission best defined by Prime Minister Blair as "an attack on civilisation itself".

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