The puzzling English – friendly and kind or hypocritical?
On this day in 1962, the Guardian published this story.
An interesting article re-published by the Guardian online found in their archives from 26th March 1962; describing the opinions held by our European neighbours of sunny old blighty and it’s inhabitants.
A land of fog, custard and pastry. That was how a Norwegian girl of 24 thought of England before she came here. A Swedish girl imagined grey houses, green lawns, damp, and wet.
Guess the great British weather just isn't for some people?
To an Italian woman it would be “a welfare state with the best conception of Utopia in the world. Besides that, a country which offers everything in a sort of immature way.”
Those comments were elicited during a survey of young people from Europe attending classes in English at either State or private schools. A broadsheet based on the survey, which was carried out by Mr T.N. Postlethwaite, lately assistant lecturer in the Liberal Studies department of St Albans College of Further Education, is published by PEP. The survey showed that opinions of England (before coming here) were generally favourable (45 per cent to 36 per cent).
The young Europeans were next asked: “Now that you have lived in England for a time, if a friend from your own country asked you to make a list of the good characteristics and the bad characteristics that you think English people have, what would you write?”
Looking for the good, 55 per cent found that the English were kind, polite, helpful, obliging, hospitable, friendly, generous, and nice to foreigners.
A typical remark (by a 23-year-old Austrian girl):
“Very calm when there is a difficult situation. Reserved – not interfering or inquisitive, live their own lives, and let others live theirs; humorous, extremely helpful towards strangers. I find the people in Scotland even more so.”
On the critical side there was also a high degree of unanimity. Thirty seven per cent of the replies found the English insincere, false, “too polite to speak the truth,” hypocrites, without feeling and that it was often impossible to know what they were thinking or feeling.
A young Swiss wrote:
“Like scandals, sometimes love animals more than people, women smoke in public; shocking behaviour of the pairs of lovers in parks, rather don’t mix with foreigners, cook very badly, have laws which should have been changed long ago, never like Americans, girls are too much made up, men often look unclean.”
An Italian girl of 19 struck what may have been an aggrieved note with the observation that Englishmen did not show enough interest in women.
The broadsheet remarks that those who were very anti-English were a rather special group living in Central London, were either Italian or Spanish, and most of whom were au pair girls between the ages of 18 and 23. Asked about discrimination because of their nationality, 18 per cent claimed they had experienced this. Just over half of all the Germans questioned believed that there was discrimination against Germans in this country.
The survey also studied the criticisms that au pair girls were often unhappy and overworked. Eighty per cent of the girls thought that they were well treated; 14 per cent that they were treated fairly and only six per cent felt that they were not well treated, mostly on the grounds that they did not always get enough time off or that they were regarded as a servant or an inferior.
The sample comprising 417 young people (89 per cent girls) was drawn from four areas – Central London, the Home Counties, Oxford, and Cambridge. Germans were the largest national group.
Original article from the Guardian website.
Image courtesy of Ian Britton on Freefoto.
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