‘Eating is not merely a material pleasure, eating well gives a spectacular joy to life and contributes immensely to goodwill and happy companionship. It is of great importance to the morale’ – Elsa Schiaparelli
I was first initiated to the British mode of civilized behaviour many years ago on a business trip when I was asked by a colleague ‘will you dine tonight?’ Being a fresh import to the UK at the time, my immediate reaction was ‘Are you nuts? Of course I am going to eat after a hard day’s work’.
I quickly came to realize that to dine involved more than fuelling the body and is in many ways an art. In a country so abundant in history, of architecture, in painting and so on, there is also a history of behaviour. Embroiled in the many faces of class in this country came many forms of eating. There is supper which comes from the word to sup or take in sip, or spoonfuls – usually soup which comes at the very end of the day, even after an evening dinner. Or you could dine, which is usually associated with entertaining guests or partaking of a few courses of thoughtfully planned and carefully prepared food. These are just two of the many ways breaking bread was made civilized in this country.
Despite their often misconstrued association with bad food (no longer true), the British have at least always aspired to the ceremony of eating in a civilized manner. One of the greatest achievements of this was the great British dining car. Starched linen, the clink of glasses brimming with wine, a white coated waiter on hand to spoon a navarin of lamb or a slice of succulent roast meat onto a crested plate while the lush green pastoral landscape of these green and pleasant isles floated past the window, gave solace to the weary businessman and pleasure seeker alike. I can personally vouch for the great British breakfast which I ate every Friday morning on the London to Sheffield run for nearly five years. I could socialize with colleagues, where we set our strategies and last minute meeting notes in a manner that tempered the cool thrust of business with civility.
But recently the Department of Transport dealt a death blow to the great British dining car. Even when the national British rail service was privatised in 1994, 249 dining cars still existed across the country. Now there will be none. Airline meals will be plonked in front of your iPad and a cold salad or worse – the utilitarian microwave burger - an affront to both man and the beast that provides it, will be your standard fare. You can still sit with colleagues and eat but you will more likely be talking into your iPhone rather than to each other.
Compare this with the art of dining and what you see is a lack of beauty. Man has always been drawn to beauty. It is in our human nature to be drawn to and enjoy beauty. Formal dining when executed well is elegant, and elegance by its nature is defined by refinement, grace and beauty of movement as anyone who has been served food from a serving dish onto a plate will know. It is calming and lends itself to conversation and appreciation of the person you are with. And this is the key. The more we step away from, and do away with these rituals the more base and uncivil we become. Taking away the great British dining car is stripping away one of the great achievements of rail travel. To serve up hot food in a restaurant with white coat waiters is one thing, to do it all on moving wheels is quite another. The minute we start downgrading our aspirations to achieve these things is the beginning of the end of civilized behaviour.
Formal dining is not constrained to any class. In its heyday the Great Eastern Railway was the first to provide dining cars for third class passengers. Evening meals were served on all routes going to all the minor towns in East Anglia and included midnight super trains to the seaside resorts in Essex. The famous Brighton Belle on the Southern Railway was renowned for its kippers. The actor Sir Lawrence Olivier loved them so much; he campaigned to have them saved when they were dropped from the menu. In the 1960s a kipper for breakfast cost the equivalent of an affordable 18 cents at the time, and a lunch of steak, chips and peas was a mere $1.55, all served in carriages with quaint names like Vera and Audrey that were decorated with beautiful art deco marquetry.
With the aspiration to create and enjoy beauty comes the impulse to better behaviour which is where manners are so closely tied in with the whole experience. As Emily Post pointed out decades ago, the point of manners is to navigate a socially complex world. They are rooted in three important principles: honesty, respect and consideration.
In the UK this aspiration to beauty and the manners that goes with it is on the road to extinction. In just about any city and even the picture-postcard towns that tourists so love, are places to shun on a Saturday night. When the pubs empty so do drunken youth who often clash with police and clog up the emergency rooms with alcohol poisoning and the harm they inflict upon themselves in drunken brawls. It is quite usual to see girls in skimpy dresses swearing and fighting before vomiting in the street. In their alcohol fuelled oblivion they are completely detached from the beauty of civil behaviour. They’ll fight or better still, go off and have sex with whoever suggests it. Think I’m exaggerating? I live in a fairly nice middle class area and was woken up last summer at 2 am to the sounds of the sex act being performed in my neighbour’s front garden. The kicker came after they had finished and the girl asked the guy’ What‘s your name anyway? ’. When I once caught my unspayed puppy in the same situation, I poured water over the pair to get them apart. Is it going to come to that with humans?
So what’s this got to do with getting rid of dining cars? In the impetus to get rid of pleasantries that demand manners, we put ourselves onto the slippery slope of uncivil behaviour. We give up on trying to be better, to hold ourselves to a higher standard that embodies those principles of honesty, respect and consideration. Without these we detach ourselves from our fellow man. The guy on the train shoving a sandwich into his mouth while texting, will come to have the same detached regard for others as the pub drinkers. Instead of seeing the wonderful marketing opportunity the dining car brings to the British railway experience, the men in suits have decided we are cattle to be put in rolling carriages with plastic food to sustain us. A piece of a British history has died and with it begins the demoralization of a new generation of rail travellers.
