Britannia Rule The Waves

In one of the more bizarre twists of the Brexit debate the waving of flags at the last night of the Proms has become a contentious issue.  As a regular prommer this feels very close to home for me.  I've never been to the last night itself but I get to a couple of events most years and have some great memories of great music there.  I always watch the last night on the telly.   It isn't to be frank the highlight of the year musically but the familiarity makes it very enjoyable and I love a bit of tradition.


When I hear people moaning about EU flags there my reaction is quite simply that these guys just don't understand what the event is all about.  It is an international music festival.  Musicians come to it from around the world and are given a great welcome.  And they get listened to.  If you have never been to a prom I recommend going to at least one in your life.  Quite apart from the music the sight of such intent attention to the music from a big crowd is in itself a unique experience and worth the ticket price on its own.

The flag waving on the last night is a tradition which is easily misunderstood if you just look at a big crowd of people waving union jacks.  The event had to move to the Albert Hall after the original venue got bombed during the Blitz.   But which continued to play the works of Wagner and Beethoven even so.  Indeed I can remember when Beethoven's 9th symphony was a regular feature on the Friday before the last night.  Even the music of the last night isn't as narrowly nationalistic as it appears at first sight.  My personal favourite is Spanish Ladies which is a folk song.   Jerusalem is stirring but isn't jingoistic.  As for Rule Britannia - well its history doesn't really fit a nationalistic narrative.

When it was written we had a German king and were linked to Hannover on the continent.  Britannia most certainly didn't rule the waves at that point.  Indeed the actual words are an instruction to Britannia to rule the waves in the future.   In the days when ships were made of wood the country with the most forests, the deepest rivers and the best located ports was France.  If anywhere was going to achieve worldwide naval supremacy the smart money would have bet on the French.   The reason that Britain was able to grab the lead was entirely down to the industrial revolution increasing its productivity.  Seamanship, pluck and patriotism didn't do any harm.  But it was hard economics and technical advances that gave us the British Navy that ruled the waves.

None of this was predictable to Thomas Arne when he wrote it.  He was just urging on his side in a Europe which at the time was often at war with itself.  But he wouldn't have regarded Britain as being somehow outside the European sphere.  Indeed if you look at the music itself it is of its time.  There is the clear influence of Handel whose Thine Be The Glory is another last night regular.  Handel of course was a Saxon.   He wouldn't be called a German at the time.  Handel's domination of British music came from his own musical genius and his absorbtion of Italian opera which he introduced to London.  Rule Britannia is in debt to songs like this one from Handel's Rinaldo.

And at the time they would have sounded like nothing people had heard before.  This was a new style of music from abroad.  It would have sounded as British in the eighteenth century as Gansta Rap does to us.  But that is one of the things about Britain.  We are open to ideas from other places and happy to adopt them into our own traditions.  And our traditions are flexible enough to adapt.  So long after Brexit is forgotten about I have a feeling that the blue flag with its circle of stars will continue to be waved in the Albert Hall on the last night of the Proms and it will feel as British as ever.