Frankly fed up of present francophobia, I went to Pau. The place sits 15 miles short of the Pyrenees, so that one might appreciate the mountains – they rise mid-distance with majesty – without all the faff of mountaineering. It is among France’s fine middle-sized towns with, and here’s the point, a seam of Britishness as thick as John Bull’s forearm running right through. Zap the snow-topped peaks and, at moments, you could be in Berkshire. Well, the nicer bits of Berkshire. There’s much here to leave prejudices scrambled. The Duke of Wellington was a fan, for heaven’s sake.
In a couple of days, I went from an Anglican church, via vast villas and gardens of English sumptuousness to Pau Golf Club, the oldest in continental Europe. Scratch golfer, club employee and young Englishman Harry Mead indicated the honour boards bearing the names of trophy winners and club captains: English-speakers almost to a man. From foundation in 1856, French locals scarcely got a look in for a century.
They weren’t much more numerous at the Pau Hunt, also founded by our ancestors. It still rides out, now with Frenchmen chasing a drag rather than Englishman in pursuit of the uneatable. As English upper-class men invariably favoured horses over families, so hunting wasn’t enough. They also required a race-course and training ground. These remain among the very best, and most extensive, in France. I watched dozens of streamlined steeds surging from the morning mist, ahead of this winter’s major Pau meetings (from now to early February). The spectacle could as easily have been from 1821 or 1921. “Oh, I say,” I said, for I self-identify as upper class.
Back in town, talk turned to Prince Edward who, not that long ago, had shown up in Pau to play real tennis – what the French call jeu-de-paume – as part of a fund-raising tour. “Lovely man,” said Paul Mirat, Pau historian and real tennis master. In few places, thus, is a British past so positively palpable in a French present. St Andrew’s Anglican church still has Sunday matins at 1045am (while St George faces Joan of Arc on the altar triptych). And the Boulevard-des-Pyrénées runs more than a mile along the edge of Pau’s plateau, looking down to the river and plain and away to the full supporting cast of Pyrenean summits. Here is the grandest legacy of the British era. Alphonse de Lamartine said that the boulevard afforded “the world’s finest view over land as Naples offers the finest sea-views”.
A reasonable enough recommendation, perhaps, to give even our most rabid francophobe – a hotly-disputed title – pause for thought. At any event, all this stems from the time when, from around 1820, 100 years, Pau was known as “la ville anglaise”. As a winter resort, initially for British consumptives (who were legion), Pau was as renowned as Nice or Biarritz. Wellington was among the first in, after chasing Bonaparte’s forces out of Spain. Welcomed by the Palois as a liberator, he set up camp on Pau’s plain.
The rush came later, from the 1840s when Scottish doctor Alex Taylor wrote a best-selling door-stopper claiming Pau’s climate was ideal for chest complaints. Granted, he wrote, it did rain in Pau, but this was different from British rain for it didn’t “uncurl ladies’ hair”. It will startle no-one to learn that Dr Taylor had a private medical practice in town. Bingo! The world listened, and top-drawer Britons rolled in.
