What a cock-up! How mistakes have shaped the British psyche – and why we love them

You can tell how important a cultural phenomenon is by the number of idioms any given nation attaches to it. Hence sex and death have enough to fill their own volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary.

No surprise there, since Britons are created and die like any other people. But going by the number of entries in that and other dictionaries, one thing is perhaps peculiar to Britain: our love of amateurism resulting in things going south. A cock-up. A balls-up. A snafu that's fubar or gone utterly Pete Tong.

If you were to hop across the golden pond and tell our American cousins that you had a few too many G&Ts at lunchtime, wandered onto the internet and accidentally bankrupted your family/company/nation, they would look at you in horror, wondering why you had chosen to own up to something like that.

Talk about it in the bars of London or Edinburgh, on the other hand, and you will be slapped on the back and carried high on shoulders. Because there's something in our national DNA that says the cock-up is the most wonderful, celebration-worthy part of what it means to be British.

Not surprising really, when, at times, it has been what literally makes us British.

A case in point: it's said that if it hadn't been for a misheard word at an English provincial railway station, the progress – even the outcome – of the First World War could have been very different.

Gareth Rubin

Our somewhat speculatory story begins in August 1914 when a trainload of British soldiers pulled into a countryside station. The porter, a curious fellow, did what came naturally to him and asked the troops where they were from. ‘Ross-shire,’ one shouted down in reply. But here fate stepped in and instead whispered ‘Russia’ into the porter’s ear. And thus Germany lost the war.

You see, there was at the time a belief that Russia, Britain’s ally in the war, was going to send troops via Britain to join the Western Front, and so when that porter told his mates at the station that the Russian troops had arrived ‘with snow on their boots’, the rumour quickly spread through the land.

Fatefully, one of those who heard that rumour was Carl Hans Lody, who would later become the first German spy to be executed during the war. Before his capture, however, on September 4, 1914 he sent a telegram to Berlin informing them that large numbers of Russian troops had landed and would soon join the Allied front.

The message was passed to General von Moltke of the German intelligence, who consequently held back two German divisions from the next day’s Battle of Marne as reserves in case the phantom Russians joined the fray.

Those two divisions could have prevented the success of an Allied counter-attack, halting the German advance on Paris and beginning the trench warfare phase of the war that led to Germany’s eventual defeat.

But none of that came to pass because, it is claimed, one bloke at a train station misheard 'Ross-shire' for 'Russia'.

The incident is usually buried in the footnotes of history and yet it's one that lights up a British face just as much as the tales of extraordinary bravery in the face of the hell of the Somme and Wipers. That a random throw of the dice could undermine the plans of the German war machine fits with our national appraisal of the universe: rueful, self-effacing, wry.

Sometimes incidents which were actually errors or at the very least open to misinterpretation have since been seared into our civil consciousness as incredible acts of self-sacrifice.

Take the suffragette Emily Davison. Common knowledge says she deliberately threw her frail body under the fascist hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913 as an act of protest; but some witnesses at the time argued that she ran across the track having thought all the horses had passed only to be hit by a straggler.

Historians have taken up the argument: Davison had a return ticket from Epsom in her pocket that day, they say, and holiday plans in the near future. (Davison, by the way, was once arrested for violently assaulting a man she had mistakenly taken for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George.)

And in more modern political times, who doesn't love the fact that the most memorable moment of the 2010 election was Gordon Brown inadvertently describing a harmless grandmother as ‘a bigoted woman’ live on TV because he had accidentally left his radio microphone switched on? What a cock-up.

We collect these incidents as part of the national psyche. Sometimes we pay good money for them, such as the £90,000 paid for a key at auction in 2007. Unexceptional in most regards, it was an ordinary locker key but went for the price of a small flat because it was the key that sank the Titanic.

The key was sold by the descendants of David Blair, the liner’s second officer. Blair was supposed to be on the ship but was removed from the roster at the last minute and when that happened, it slipped his mind to give the key to his locker to his replacement. Unfortunately, the locker contained the binoculars for the look-out in the crow’s nest.

During the American inquiry into the disaster that was responsible for the loss of 1,522 lives, the ship's look-out, Fred Fleet, declared that if the crew had had the binoculars they would have been able to warn the captain of something a bit iceberg-ish on the horizon much earlier.

"How much earlier?" he was asked.

"Well, enough to get out of the way."

Incidentally, one of the lesser-known facts about the Titanic is that it was actually on fire when it hit the iceberg. Coal in one of the bunkers had caught light some time beforehand and for hours the crew had been attempting to put it out. It really was mistake wrapped up in cock-up.

And it all turned on manmade error – the iceberg was quietly minding its own business, it was the human factor that sank the ship.

It's always that human factor. There's no natural disaster or outrageous fortune in the British propensity to score an own goal. Just sheer, unadulterated blunder.

If you want it summed up, look no further than the MP and historian Edward Gibbon. History, he wrote, is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind". He was British, of course, and he was praising it.

Gareth Rubin is the author of The Great Cat Massacre: A history of Britain in 100 mistakes