There’ll Always Be an England in Southland

When the queen of England surveys her empire, she can hardly ignore Santa Monica.

There are perhaps 50,000 to 500,000 Brits living in Southern California--depending on how you define them and count them--and this sunny, briny little town is their London.

Here they can take a pint of Guinness at the King George V or the Mucky Duck, or sit for fish and chips or faggots (mincemeat) and peas and a Watney’s at the King’s Head.

Most of them have melted into Southern California’s sprawling suburbs, but there are enough who want to chum with their own kind to keep the pubs crowded or to queue up for tea at the Tudor House.

“There’s no Brit-town here,” said Phil Elwell, a Birmingham native 22 years in America and still a British citizen. “There’s a Chinatown. There’s a Koreatown. The one thing we have here is the culture of the pubs.”

The culture of the pubs is not for everyone. At the tiny offices of the British Weekly, a woman who did not want to be identified by name was scornful of the habits of her pub-crawling countrymen.

“To come to America and do the same things they did at home is barbaric,” she said. “But old habits die hard, I suppose.”

Pubs aside, it isn’t all gin and beer when you are quartered safe and warm out here. There are any number of Brit organizations, centered more on tea and sympathy than on cakes and ale.

There is the British-American Chamber of Commerce, the socially oriented Mayflower Club in West Hollywood, the Daughters of the British Empire and the Southern California Cricket Assn., which plays all summer long at Woodley Field near the old Sepulveda Dam. The pubs field their own soccer teams and bring in cricket ringers from England.

There is no accurate census of this California extension of the British Empire. Some locals blithely accept the 500,000 figure. A spokesman for the British Consulate said, “Um, maybe 50,000 still carrying British passports. Um, maybe 300,000 or more who are British-born, or born of British parents, and maybe British grandparents.”

The first to come likely were actors and actresses attracted by Hollywood. But they were not all Noel Cowards or Cary Grants or Ronald Colemans. Businessmen and bankers were close to follow. And intellectuals. The British painter David Hockney, for instance, lives here and the British author Christopher Isherwood died this year at his Santa Monica home.

The latest wave of Welsh, Scots, Irish, Aussies, New Zealanders and English include artisans, stonemasons, carpenters and the like.

Why do they come? Maybe some come for jobs.

But under the new immigration law, many will have trouble getting green cards to work here, unless their employers can show that they have special skills not available locally.

A better explanation is right here on the palisades above the blue Pacific: the swaying palm trees, the wide sandy beaches, the casual life style. It sure beats London.

“This is one of the best spots on the planet,” said Elwell, proprietor of the King’s Head. “Nothin’s perfect, but this is near it.”

In a way, the transplanted pubs are more complementary to the California life style than traditional Yankee cocktail lounges.

“I didn’t like the quote ‘American bar,’ which was usually a tunnel, pitch black and everybody nodding like bloody oil rigs at the bar,” Elwell said. “I didn’t like that atmosphere.”

“This is more what a pub should be,” he adds, waving his hand at the light and airy surroundings, the pictures of celebrities on the walls, the dart boards, the stand-up islands in mid-room, the wandering bar stools that are seldom at the bar.

“It’s a community, a crossroads of people. In the society we live in now there’s hardly any human contact. Half the people don’t know their bloody neighbors, you know. So this is a kind of get-to-know-what’s-going-on meeting place.”

Range of Products

One woman from New Jersey comes twice a year to shop for British goodies at the Tudor House, spends $700 or so and has it shipped home. The Tudor catalogue offers about 40 kinds of British jams and preserves, from Robertsons’ silver shred lemon marmalade to Edna May’s lemon cheese, from Keilers’ Dundee Ginger preserve to Lyles’ Black Treacle. There are more than four dozen kinds of biscuits, more than 60 kinds of tea, from Irish breakfast to China black, from Formosa Oolong to Gunpowder Green. And back-home medicines such as Andrews liver salts and Cow & Gate Glucose and Seven Seas Malt Extract.

The British retain a strong desire to know what’s going on back in Blighty. Hence weekly newspapers from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The paper in the San Fernando Valley is called “True Brit.” Here they are the British Observer and the British Weekly.

The reader can muse over such tidbits as, “More than 300 square miles of urban land in Britain, equivalent to half the area of Greater London, are vacant and derelict. . . . “ or that the vicars of the Church of England are losing their right to hire and fire their organists, or that British bookmakers, their equivalent of off-track betting, have expanded from dog and horse races to soccer, cricket, darts, the America’s Cup, elections, beauty contests, the sex of the next baby in the Royal Family, weather changes, the Super Bowl, even the confirmed sighting of aliens landing on Earth within the year. One bookmaker offers 500 to 1 odds on that one.

Prince Andrew to Visit

Next spring, subject to his naval commitments, Prince Andrew and his bride will visit a major British extravaganza featuring British culture and art in Los Angeles, everything from Dudley Moore in “The Mikado” to a retrospective of David Hockney’s works, from a Gathering of the Clans to concerts by the English Chamber Orchestra, the Birmingham Symphony and the National Theater of Great Britain.

Those so disposed can celebrate any of the traditional British holidays such as Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) at the local pubs and restaurants. But what do the Brits do on the Fourth of July?

“Oh, we celebrate it as a holiday,” Elwell said, straight-faced. “There’s no big celebration as such. We look at that as a civil war anyway. When you look at the Brits, they can’t be celebrating every war or battle or independence. They’d be doing it every day.”