Manners Maketh Man

Our rude, badly behaved and scruffy culture is holding us back. And holding back the working class most

So I’m driving along Keighley Road from Harden towards Long Lee. It’s a lovely road with great views - when I stood for parliament in Keighley, Paul Barker took my election photos from that road with the town as backdrop behind me. I’m following a white Audi, tinted windows and a slightly noisy exhaust, and occupants who as they drove along threw things out the windows onto the verge - an empty can, a coffee cup, a scrunched up takeaway bag and finally the plastic takeaway carton. I ought to have been shocked, certainly 20 years ago I would have been shocked, but on this occasion I was just annoyed at yet another pair of people who don’t care, think the outside world is theirs to litter.

Another day and I’m waiting for the train into Leeds. It’s half past five in the afternoon and the train is not that busy. But that doesn’t stop two young men pushing past me and a woman to get onto the train, ignoring the three people including a mum with a buggy getting off onto the platform. Challenged, these men call me a rude word or three, stick their hands into their tracksuit bottoms and strut off down the train as if they owned the place. The rest of us look about with sheepish grins followed by shrugs and a raised eyebrow or two. 

Coming home later that evening on a quiet train, not the last one so mercifully free of loud drunk people swearing. Instead there’s a smartly dressed woman, thirty-something, who is playing clips of music on her smartphone, smiling and laughing at some image we can’t see. Just her choice of tune, or rather a few seconds of loud music followed by a brief hiatus, then another different few seconds of loud music. The woman is oblivious to the polluting noise she is making, her moments of personal pleasure are more important than the peace and comfort of the people she shares the carriage with.

I could go on - the three school kids tearing up a newspaper and throwing the shreds around the station waiting room, the middle-aged man stood in the street unwrapping a sandwich and carefully dropping the plastic box onto the street just ten yards from a litter bin, the old man spitting on the pavement, the unknown litter bug who christened the newly laid pavement on North Parade with his or her chewing gum. 

I could talk about the blokes who can’t take their empty glasses back to the bar when they leave the pub. Or that they’ve sat there making crude jokes, swearing and cursing for the 40 minutes they’ve been in the place. Or the young women sitting eating a takeout at the park picnic table who, rather than walk a few feet to use the bin, just get up leaving half-eaten food and empty packets for someone else to clear away.

The rest of us slink by, give no challenge to the people who contribute so much to making the places we live so unpleasant. We, probably rightly, criticise the council for cutting litter picking and street cleaning, and we can point to how the disaster that is local government funding doesn’t help. But this doesn’t get us away from how messy we have all become, how tolerant of poor behaviour, and fearful of challenging the noisy, the rude and the dirty.

William Horman, headmaster of Winchester and Eton in the early 16th century put together a collection of what he called “Vulgaria” containing hundreds of popular and commonly used proverbs, epithets and sayings including the one that is still the motto of Winchester School - “Manners Maketh Man”. The idea Horman knew and which Winchester still teaches is that we are judged but our outward appearance and behaviour. You do not think well of those people I’ve described in those little anecdotes above and that does these people no favours.

The problem we have is that, for all the talk of mental well-being, kindness and care, we live is a rude society. On one level this is reflected in the petty ignorance I described above, but on another the arrogance of those young men on the train and our fear of challenging them remind us that our culture still celebrates aggression and bullying. I wrote a little piece about teaching manners and related a different sort of story - one from a Chamber of Commerce dinner:

“...in a conversation with the gentleman beside me, the subject of a TV interview with former spin doctor, Alistair Campbell, came up. My neighbour was blown away by Campbell's behaviour - he was being interviewed along with a woman (and remember Campbell is a very big man). "While she was talking," gushed my neighbour, "he folded his arms and leaned in dominating her, it was brilliant". It struck me at the time that, far from being brilliant, Campbell was just being an ill-mannered, rude bully. The argument wasn't won by the brilliance of Alistair's argument but by his intimidation of the other, far smaller, person.”

It is only a short step from Campbell’s behaviour to the sort of ‘might is right, use your strength to get what you want’ outlook that I’m sure he (and the senior and influential man I was sat beside at the dinner) would condemn. In truth, Andrew Tate exists because people like Alistair Campbell, Gordon Brown and Dominic Raab (and a thousand other important ‘assertive’ men) exist - men using their power to get what they want. This sort of aggressive, unchivalrous masculinity exists in part because people think ‘The Thick of It’, a celebration of the bully, is funny.

And then when people who are concerned about all this bad behaviour start to do something about it, they get abused, called ‘far right’ and vicious campaigns are mounted to undermine what they are trying to achieve. When a headteacher tries to instil a little good discipline, chivalry and politeness in young people, the response from the great and good is to castigate and attack that teacher, not support and celebrate. When a school adopts the sort of disciplines that William of Wykeham and William Horman spoke of hundreds of years ago the response is screams of horror at making children prepare for lessons, walk silently and treat adults with respect. When some indulgent mum or dad sends their precious child to school with £500 worth of inappropriate haircut too often the response to school discipline is to head to the tabloids rather than the barbers.

During the world cup finals, not for the first time, we expressed delight and amazement at Japanese fans and players as they picked litter, swept floors and left changing rooms looking spotless. This behaviour exists because people are brought up to have respect for their environment, to be clean and tidy and to behave like good guests. It is not something peculiarly Japanese, we in Britain used to behave that way too. And it starts with not tolerating bad behaviour in small children (and the parents of small children), with making it socially unacceptable to litter, spit and swear. Plus treating other people properly by instilling good manners and politeness into the young.

We laughed at Kingsman when the character played by Colin Firth, Harry Hart uses the phrase ‘manners maketh man’ before dealing with the yobs bullying Eggsy. But the message of the movie is that an ordinary working class kid brought up by a single mum can have the same standards and discipline as a man benefitting from the best education, perhaps (like our current Prime Minister) from a school with that phrase - manners maketh man - as its motto.