30 April 2026
Note: This is the speech delivered at the RSGS of Halifax Annual Dinner on April 23, 2026.
Ladies and gentlemen of the oldest St. George’s Society in the world, I begin by congratulating you on 240 years of charitable work on behalf of English settlers here in Nova Scotia and by thanking you and especially your current President, my friend, Frank Metzger, for the honour of speaking to you tonight.
By co-incidence, I was in one of Britain’s oldest colonies and still a colony, Bermuda – where we English settled ourselves in 1609, when Frank’s invitation arrived. (During my two ten year residences in the U.S., I had always thought that, should the authorities decide to deport me, I’d get them to fly me to Bermuda, rather than Britain.) Surrounded by Union Flags and a taxi driver, all of whose children attended English universities, continuing benefits of English colonialism, I was already musing about what it means to be English as we enter the second quarter of the twenty-first century and foolishly accepted Frank’s invitation – not an easy man to refuse! Only later did I think to ask myself, what on earth I could say to people who, in all probability, know a great deal more about the English and England, it history, its laws, its literature, its art and culture than I do. My apologies if you hear me expressing erroneous information. I am not here as the voice of “Truth Social”.
Whatever we think about England and the English, I’m sure we can agree upon our culture’s ubiquity. The most obvious evidence of this is the 1.5 billion English speaking people across the world. Such is the dominance of the English language that we take it for granted in international commerce, science, aviation, diplomacy and, of course, the internet.
Looking around our table tonight, it is a safe bet that when most of you attended school, whether in England, or here in Canada, you had a map of the world on the classroom wall, showing a quarter of the globe in red. English common law and English constitutional modes of governance were indeed dominant. We were, of course, the last generation to be imbued with this, by then erroneous, world view. As Harold Macmillan announced, in 1960, the “winds of change” would blow away British occupation of so much of the earth, well before the end of the twentieth century.
Colonial control receded but not its footprint. Today, over eighty countries use the Westminster system of government, including, of course, Canada. English theatre, film and comedy are enjoyed around the world. Leather balls are kicked around from the barrios of Brazil to the back alleys of Birmingham. Association football is all but universal and where it isn’t, rugby and cricket are. Sometime ago, my wife and a daughter were hiking in the Himalaya. One night they slept in a village house. Villagers crowded around the television, cheering on the Indian cricket team against Sri Lanka. Commercial networks, established during the colonial eras, still function – think London and Hong Kong. In short, chances are that most of us would think the old Empire contributed to the world’s economic and social development in many positive ways.
You already know what my profession has been and is but in the heady days of the late ‘80s, I would attend social gatherings in Toronto in mufti – (a colonial expression). I would sometimes be asked what I did? Being a smartass, I’d answer that I worked for an English multi-national. When I was then asked what my “company” did, I’d say that we were “in Prophets”. This usually elicited a keen interested on the part of my new Bay Street friend! Only to be followed by his disappointment on hearing that the multi-national was the Church of England, re-branded the Anglican Communion and that “profits” was spelled “PROPHETS”.
I mention this because, in addition to language, commerce, governance and the other parts of the English footprint, there are communities around the world today, whose ways of making meaning – the purpose of religion – have been and are being formed by English prayers, worship and ancient stories mediated through the English language and the English culture it embodies. The Book of Common Prayer and the English Bible, in their varied forms, are central to the identities of men, women and children from Uganda to the Yukon, from Christchurch to Charleston. I have experienced this in Africa, in Texas, in Lancashire, in New England, Upper Canada and here in Nova Scotia. Perhaps you have too?
And so I return to my Bermuda musing, “What does it mean to be English today? What does Englishness – if there is such a thing – mean for those of us who find at least part of our identity in those things, those thoughts, those feelings? I ask this as a person, who has not lived in England since 1960. I ask this as a person who just renewed his British passport, despite being a Canadian citizen. There are “ties that bind”.
But at the same time, I admit, perhaps, “confess” would be a better word, that I lived most of my life in the U.S. and Canada oblivious to the dark sides of England’s world footprint. If you will allow me a little more time, I will share two experiences of recent years that have allowed me to see myself as both a beneficiary of the injustices of my own nation and culture and a continuing perpetuator.
A few years ago, my wife and I watched a Netflix movie, Mudbound. It is set in post-war Mississippi and tells the stories of two GIs, one black, one white, who have returned from the war in Europe. They become friends despite living in a violently segregated, Jim Crow, share cropping society. It is not a pretty picture. The shadow of slavery and the injustices of eighty years of racialist based extortion, make hard viewing.
Well, that’s the South. Well that’s America, I had always thought. We British abolished slavery in the Empire and by means of the Royal Navy, well beyond, a generation before the U.S. got around to it. Nothing to do with me. Except, this story, revealing of so much truth, took place during my lifetime. For once, I stopped to think. What was I doing in the 1940s? The answer, I was living in Lancashire’s largest mill town, where cotton was king.
The mill chimneys, in their dozens, were spewing out coal smoke – “where there’s muck, there’s money”, I was told. My father’s father was the engineer of one of those mills. I pictured the steam engine, three stories high that turned the belts that powered the machines that spun the cotton. I remembered watching bales of raw cotton, marked “USA” being derricked off lorries into the mill. But now I made the connection: that cotton had come from Mississippi, grown and picked by the sharecroppers portrayed in Mudbound. I had lived and lived securely, because of the legacy and current reality of one of history’s and the Empires greatest injustices, slavery and its aftermath. No longer a thing of the past, it had become part of my story, my life, my identity.
My mother’s father, was a businessman in the same town. He sold clothing to its men: “If you want to get ahead, get a hat!”, he advertised, hoping to get his cloth cap wearing customers into more expensive headdress. He also owned “cottages”, row houses, “two up, two down”, rented to mill workers. As a small boy I went with my grandmother to collect the rents. With those rents and other profitable enterprises my grandfather was able to buy a comfortable house for my parents, where I came to consciousness, without ever making the connection between my comfort and opportunities and the economic basis of our wellbeing in an unjust world.
E.M. Forster the chronicler and abuser of India and Indians, asked his readers to connect. “Only connect!” one’s rational thoughts and knowledge with one’s feelings. Mudbound made that connection for me.
An even more egregiously willful blindness was my dismissal of the people who were in the New World, Massachusetts specifically, before I arrived, indeed before English Pilgrims – migrants – landed at Plymouth on Massachusetts Bay in 1620. In Ontario, I followed in the footsteps of the first settlers on the lands of the Mississauga. They were driven from their ancestral land by the ancestors of my parishioners; removed so that the Irish and Scots and English settlers could clear the forest and create fields and farms. The Mississauga, like so many other Indigenous peoples were erased by us.
Nova Scotia was no different for me. The Mi’gmaq had been here in Nova Scotia for thousands of years before European contact with Europeans. But it is only recently that I have come to think of this land, these waters, this place as, first of all Mi’gmaqui.
That is a longer story but the short version goes like this. Keen angler meets and marries. His bride belongs to a family that owns a camp and a section of a salmon river. Said angler makes annual trips from Toronto to the Restigouche every summer for a quarter of a century, enjoying the company of his friends, the NB woods and the chance to catch the “King of fish”. He pays no attention to anything local beyond the camp staff. Angler moves close to NYC, where he attends the annual meetings of the Restigouche River Camp Owners’ Association and meets Mi’gmaq guests of the association. His fellow camp owners want to persuade the Mi’gmaq not to, in their word, “kill” so many salmon. Mi’gmaq resist. A stalemate persists. Angler retires to Nova Scotia and asks himself, “what is going on in this conflict between his fellow anglers and the Mi’gmaq and what might the local folks think about it? Five years later, I – the angler – have immersed myself in the cultures of anglers, settlers, Francophone and Anglophone and the Mi’gmaq of Listuguj and written a doctoral dissertation on my findings. What had I learned? More importantly, how had I been changed?
At one of the numerous meetings I attended in my years of research, the NB government was presenting a plan to the Mi’gmaq First Nation of Listuguj to make the Restigouche river a Wilderness Waterway Park. This would be in their territory, their land, their waters. The government emphasized the economic and legal benefits of the projected park. After listening quietly, silence followed, until one of their leaders rose and spoke. He began, “this “wilderness” you speak of, this “wilderness” (pause) is our home.” He sat down.
I learned that I lived not in some place that had once been someone else’s home, but is now their “home”, with all the weight that carries for homo sapiens: “this is our home”.
How had I been changed? I could no longer live in my mind and heart, the myth of innocence. I wasn’t, am not, guilty of the past crimes of colonialism but I am responsible for living with their consequences.
What does it mean to be English in a postcolonial world? What insights, what strengths, have we that might be useful?
The first is our long history of crafting laws which reconcile conflicting claims. The prophets tell us that what God requires of us is justice.
The second refers back to our imaginations, to the richness of our literature, a literature that can open our minds to that greatest of human gifts, the ability to empathize, to put ourselves not just in the position of others with whom we share our worlds but into their ways of understanding those worlds.
Justice; empathetic imagination; literature and law: we English have those in abundance.
Do you remember a saying, now seemingly relegated to the dustbin of history, that it is not whether we win or lose, but how we play the game? It seems to me that it encapsulates the greatest English characteristic Fairness based on reconciling justice and encapsulates the greatest English characteristic “fairness”. Fairness based on reconciling justice and born of our imaginative capacity for empathy. I identify these as the parts of my English heritage that are relevant to our being English in the postcolonial world of 2026, the 240th anniversary of this Royal Society.
