"ENGLISH" -- "BRITISH."

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 129, 2 June 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

"ENGLISH" -- "BRITISH."

CONTINUAL CONFUSION. ENGLAND'S APPROPRIATIONS. (By NELLE M. SCANLAN.) Yesterday (April 23) was St. George's Day, and many things were done to mark the occasion. Mr. H. Marshall, writing in a daily paper, Bald that "St. George for England" was giving place to "St. George for Great Britain," a phrase that "stuck in his gullet." The English cannot have all the saints. East month an eminent churchman claimed St. Patrick as an Englishman. He did not suggest his English birth as a theory, but asserted it as a fact. England is perfectly entitled to her saints and her sinners, but there is a tendency to absorb the good and discard the bad. The great and the successful ones of British birth or origin soon cease to be credited to their particular country. Lord Rutherford is never "the great rcow Zealand scientist" and Melba has long ceased to be "an Australian singer." They had been absorbed into the whole as "British," and even at times "English." But let a man get two years' hard for a confidence trick, and he is definitely and absolutely "an Australian criminal." Mr. Marshall protests against Englishmen signing foreign hotel registers as "British." He says that Englishmen should be proud to sign English. He also declares that a hotel manager is entitled to know when he has a Scot to deal with.

I write as a New Zealander of Irish parents, who loves —and lives in— England. I was in America two years before I saw England, but they always called me English. When I protested and said I was not English but British, they thought it odd, and asked the difference. Many of these kindly people thought the best way to please the English was to abuse the Irish (it was at the time of "the trouble"). When I proclaimed my Irish blood but sang "God Save the King," and was proud to live under the Union Jack, they were more bewildered. When during my wanderings I sign myself in foreign hotel registers "New Zealander," not two out of ten recognise my nationality, and I am often debited to Holland.

At international conferences, English delegates are most punctlious in discriminating between an opinion that is British, and one that is purely English. The foreigner knows that "British" is somehow allied to "English," and respects it as such, but the separate nationalities which compose the Empire are beyond his comprehension. Even in England, if you are buying fruit from some of the shops, and ask if it is British or foreign, they will tell you it is British as it ' comes from California, and foreign when it is South African.