The search for sunlit uplands

photo © Smallredgirl / dreamstime . com

Sunlit uplands are not new. They have been around for a while and have often served as part of the rhetorical armamentarium of Conservative writers and orators. Sunlit uplands have a sort of Blakean feel. If you’ve ambled over a green and pleasant land and walked over England’s mountains green (which are often rainy), then it makes total sense to head for sunlit uplands. Perhaps with an Elgar soundtrack.

But we cannot blame William Blake for sunlit uplands. The phrase in fact gained popular currency after a House of Commons speech by Winston Churchill in June 1940. Towards the end of a longish speech, he shifted to grand oratorical style and proclaimed with Churchillian gravitas that:

“The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.”

A few lines later at the very end of that speech, we run across Churchill’s emblematic ‘This was their finest hour’ flourish.

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’.”

It is that close coupling of the sunlit uplands metaphor with the finest hour that has given sunlit uplands special resonance in the English imagination. It is a wonderful example of affective landscape; just as with Blake’s green and pleasant land, we are inspired by the Utopian prospect of sunlit uplands. Who, faced with the obdurate reality of everyday life, would not opt for a trip to the sunlit uplands?

We have actually tracked down a few pre-Churchill sunlit uplands. The work of Swedish feminist and poet Fredrika Bremer was hugely popular in Victorian England and the English translation of her poem Volcano includes the line:

“O’er sunlit uplands golden harvests spread”

Late Victorian literature has plenty of sunlit uplands, often contrasted with a dreary or darksome valley. So Churchill, a well-read man, referred in his finest hour speech to an existing trope which evoked images of an Arcadian future. Churchill picked up many phrases from HG Wells – ‘the gathering storm’ is a celebrated example. And he surely knew Wells’ perspective on uplands (in The Discovery of the Future):

“We can see no detail, we can see nothing definable and it is, I know, simply the sanguine necessity of our minds that makes us believe those uplands of the future are still more gracious and splendid than we can either hope or imagine.”

That nicely brings us back to the sunlit uplands so cherished by the Brexiteers. There was no detail, nothing definable in the pro-Brexit agenda. It was a masterly show of rhetorical flag waving, with the principal characters plucking at the chords of history and nostalgia. Here’s Jacob Rees-Mogg in the House of Commons bemoaning the fact that Britain did not in fact manage to leave the European Union as he hoped on 31 October 2019:

“We would have left on 31 October, and we would have gone on to the broad, sunlit uplands that await us.”

Britain has pursued a course of dangerous and wilful self harm. The only real sunlit uplands are the ones that we as travellers discover on our journeys. The sunlit uplands of the Conservative imagination are like fool’s gold. And therein lies an even greater danger for Britain in the years ahead. As Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards put it in a parliamentary question in May 2019:

“Will not the biggest danger to confidence in democracy come when the promised sunlit uplands fail to materialise?”

As Britain ploughs its nationalist furrow, here on this website we shall highlight some of the less figurative sunlit uplands that we, as European travellers and writers, have discovered on our journeys through our shared European homeland.

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