Horseracing - another fascinating English sub-culture, which I studied for three years and wrote a book about - actually has more right than football to be called our 'national sport', not in terms of numbers of spectators, but because it attracts a much more representative sample of the population. At the races, you will see even more extreme examples of English observance of the fair-play and underdog rules - and indeed of Englishness in general. At race-meetings, you see the English in the behavioural equivalent of full national costume. The unique 'social micro-climate' of the racecourse, characterized by a combination of (relatively) relaxed inhibitions and exceptionally good manners, also seems to bring out the best in us.
Race-meetings, I found, also provide proof that, contrary to popular belief, it is entirely possible for hordes of young males to congregate, drink large quantities of alcohol, and gamble, in an exciting sporting context, without getting into fights or indeed causing any trouble at all. At the races, the same young males whose violence, vandalism and general bad behaviour at football matches and in town centres on Saturday nights has become legendary, not only exhibit none of these obnoxious qualities, but actually apologise when they bump into people (and even, in true English fashion, when people bump into them), and politely open doors for women.
Club Rules
There is an apparent contradiction, which has puzzled a number of commentators, between the strong individualism of the English and our penchant for forming and joining clubs, between our obsession with privacy and our 'clubbability'. Jeremy Paxman notes that the supposedly insular, individualistic, privacy-fixated English have clubs for almost everything: 'There are clubs to go fishing, support football teams, play cards, arrange flowers, race pigeons, make jam, ride bicycles, watch birds, even for going on holiday'. I won't attempt a more comprehensive list - it would take up half the book: just as every conceivable English leisure pursuit has a magazine or six, each one also has clubs, if not a National Society, with a whole network of Regional Groups and subdivisions. Usually there are two rival National Societies, with marginally different views on the activity in question, who spend most of their time happily bickering and squabbling with each other.
Citing de Tocqueville, Paxman wonders how 'the English manage to be simultaneously so highly singular, yet to be forever forming clubs and societies: how could the spirit of association and the spirit of exclusion be so highly developed in the same people?' He seems to accept de Tocqueville's pragmatic, economic explanation, that the English historically have always formed associations in order to pool resources, when they could not get what they wanted by individual effort - and he also emphasizes the fact that joining clubs is very much a matter of individual choice.
I would argue that clubs are more about social needs than practical or economic ones, but I agree that the issue of choice is important. The English are not keen on random, unstructured, spontaneous, street-corner sociability; we are no good at this, and it makes us uneasy. We prefer to socialize in an organised, ordered manner, at specific times and places of our choosing, with rules that we can argue about, an agenda, minutes and a monthly newsletter. Above all, as with sports and games, we need to pretend that the activity of the club or society (flower-arranging, amateur dramatics, charity, breeding rabbits, whatever) is the real point of the gathering, and that social bonding is just a secondary side-effect.
It's that self-delusion thing again. The English constantly form clubs and societies for exactly the same reason that we have so many sports and games: we need props and facilitators to help us engage socially with our fellow humans, to overcome our social dis-ease, and we also need the illusion that we are doing something else, that we have come together for some practical purpose, to pursue a specific shared interest, to pool resources in order to achieve something we could not manage alone. The pragmatic de Tocqueville/Paxman explanation of English clubbiness is a very English one: it perfectly describes this illusion, but fails to recognize that it is an illusion - that the real purpose of all these clubs is the social contact and social bonding that we desperately need, but cannot admit to needing, not even to ourselves.
If you are very English, you may well choose to reject my explanation. I don't like it much myself. I would much rather believe that I joined, say, the Arab Horse Society, and attended meetings of its Chiltern Regional Group, because I had an Arab stallion and was interested in breeding and riding Arab horses and participating in shows, events and discussions with other aficionados. I would like to think that at university I joined umpteen left-wing political groups, and went on countless demonstrations and marches and CND rallies, because of my firmly held convictions and principles55. And indeed, these were the conscious reasons. I am not saying that the English deliberately set out to trick themselves into sociability. But if I'm ruthlessly honest with myself, I have to admit that I also liked the sense of belonging, the ease of socializing with people with whom I shared an interest or a cause - compared to the awkwardness of trying to make conversation with strangers in public places or at gatherings where the sole purpose is to gather, to be sociable, without any shared hobbies or horses or political hobby-horses to help things along.
If you are a member of an English club or society, you may also resent my lumping them all together like this, as though there were no significant difference between the Arab Horse Society and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or between, say, a Women's Institute meeting and a meeting of a bikers' club. Well, sorry, but I have to report that there is indeed very little difference. I've been a member of many English clubs and societies, and gate-crashed a few others in the course of my research, and they are all much of a muchness. Meetings of regional or local branches of the AHS, CND, WI and MAG (Motorcycle Action Group) all follow more or less the same pattern. They start with the usual English awkward greetings and jokes and some preliminary weather-speak. There is tea, and sandwiches or biscuits (both if you're lucky), a lot of gossip, a lot of ritual moaning and a lot of in-jokes. These are followed by a bit of throat-clearing and attempts to get the meeting started without seeming pompous or officious. The unwritten rules prescribe slightly self-mocking tones when using official meeting-speak terms such as 'agenda', 'minutes' and 'chairman', to show one is not taking the thing too seriously, and eye-rolling at the long-winded speeches of the inevitable club bore who does take it all too seriously.