Last Thursday night found us enjoying a post-show pint in The Round Table. We had just seen Robert Icke’s brilliant adaptation of Oedipus at The Wyndham’s Theatre, starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, and if that 2,600 year old tale of innocence, incest and intriguing doesn’t give you a thirst, then frankly nothing will.
Outside the pub sat some of the cast of Oedipus, unwinding after the performance.
At the next table sat some of the cast of Dr. Strangelove, hot-foot from appearing at The Noël Coward Theatre around the corner, who were similarly engaged.
While inside the pub, Thesps and non-Thesps alike were engaged in heated speculation about who would (and should) be the next England Manager …blissfully unaware that Southgate’s replacement had already been confirmed as Thomas Tuchel.
Oedipus, fleeing from his adopted parents in neighbouring Corinth, arrived in Thebes with a skill the locals lacked… riddle solving.
Dr. Strangelove, fleeing from a distinguished career in Nazi Germany, arrived in the USA with a skill the locals lacked …rocket-building.*
Thomas Tuchel (Please God!) will also bring with him a skill the locals (apparently) lack… the ability to let footballers play in their natural positions and not lose the plot when things start to go tits-up.
There is nothing new, or wrong, in countries acquiring talent from beyond their shores.
If your bathroom is flooding, or your U-bend is suddenly (and alarmingly) Non-U, you’re far more likely to employ the services of a plumber than spend three years studying to acquire the requisite skill-sets to tackle the task yourself.
Similarly, when Hollywood was the centre of The Business of Pleasure, the Major Studios, often run by retreads from The Rag Trade, would attract the greatest talents from across Europe and beyond. There was a simple (if simplistic) logic to the equation: “You buy the best material you can find. You hire the best designers and cutters, no matter where they’re from. And you’ll make the best suits.”
As a small island nation, surrounded by deep, and often stormy, waters, the English have a long history of attracting talent from the Continent (or beyond) to fill their skills gaps. The Tudors, who themselves had been imported from Wales to replace a woeful line of hopelessly inadequate English monarchs, were desperate to welcome highly-skilled Europeans to come and settle in England (mining, metallurgy and chemical manufacture being most central to the national interest in those pre-football days).
And, being England, it was a mere three hundred years later (1868-1870) before Parliament finally got its act together and formed a committee of the great and the good to look into exactly why English science education (which had produced the occasional star player such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday) was so mind-bogglingly far behind that of our competitors in the international leagues???
The answer, when it came, was as English as a troop of out-of-tune Morris Dancers randomly trampling a village green on a rain-swept August afternoon…
For three centuries, the English Public Schools, their entire staff and syllabuses, had been dominated by the Dons (think Christ Church not Corleone) of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Dons, since time immemorial, had been obsessed with The Classics (think Hesiod and Virgil not Psycho and The Breakfast Club).
But while a few lines of Homer were great for sending Tommy Atkins over the wire, (Parliament reflected) they were utterly useless for developing the technologies required to maintain and progress an advanced industrial economy. Or, (much more importantly in 1870) waging successful wars against European competitors superbly equipped with the requisite educational resources for advancing their industries ...and weaponry.
Now, as The Treasury beaver anxiously away at the knotty problem of removing non-dom status (think $ & € not S & M) cast your minds back to 2002. A bunch of West Country archaeologists, welly-deep in a trench, were also beavering away; digging up what they believed to be the site of a Roman (think I Claudius not Abramovich) cemetery. It was a bank holiday, so it was probably raining, but any dampened spirits soon soared skywards when the team found gold. I don’t know if they did a little ‘gold-dance,’ like Andy and Lance in The Detectorists. I hope they did. Because that first, fragile, mud-covered hair tress (an ancient accessory) they’d uncovered turned out to be the oldest gold artefact ever found on these islands. And its owner, who they found a few yards away, had been laid to rest approximately 4,500 years ago; a good 2,500 years earlier than the remains they were hoping to find. The man had been in his mid-forties when he’d died. With a dodgy knee and a bad tooth. And if he’d carried a passport, it would have been either Swiss, German or Austrian. The archaeologists also believe that his profession would have most probably read ‘Engineer,’ because this very high-status Alpine migrant’s arrival on our shores coincided with a major infrastructure project. You might even have heard of it, 4,500 years later. Let’s just hope that Thomas Tuchel’s appointment proves as successful at that of his Bronze Age Germanic counterpart. And that he restores the foundations of the England team as well as The Amesbury Archer rebuilt that other national icon ...Stonehenge.
DT
18 October, 2024
*The titular character in Dr. Strangelove is widely believed to be based on an amalgam of prominent emigres to the USA, but most notably Werner Von Braun, who had developed the V-2 rocket for Hitler before applying his highly-prized transferable skills to NASA’s Space program. One wit suggested that von Braun’s autobiography ‘I Aimed For the Stars’ should have been subtitled “’But Sometimes I Hit London.’
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