I HAD a wonderful evening recently at Bolton Institute.

It was an international evening and students from across the world were all wearing their national dress. It was very colourful, and the students were obviously very proud to be sharing something of their national life with us.

One or two of us from this country began wondering what our national dress would be. Scottish people have their tartans and kilts, the Welsh have their bonnets, but what would be English national dress.

The very next day there was a picture of Fred Dibnah in the BEN. He is standing on the railway line at Llanberis station. It is a proud picture in which he is standing upright in cloth cap, collar-less workman's shirt, waistcoat and working trousers. Would this count as our national dress?

I remember my father wearing exactly the same when he worked in a foundry in the Midlands. In those days it was very much the dress of the working man.

But perhaps we have been denied a national dress by social class. I say this because Fred Dibnah's picture reminded me of the picture of another great engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He is standing in front of the huge chains that were used in the building of his ship The Great Eastern. His clothes are covered with mud and dirt but they are very different to Fred's. He is wearing top hat, frock coat, bow tie and he is smoking a cigar.

If Fred Dibnah shows us what the working man's dress was, Brunel's picture shows us the dress of the gentleman engineer.

England has no national dress because, being the birth of the industrial revolution it is also the place where social class was most distinctive. Cloth cap for the workers, top hat for the bosses.

It is true that my father's Sunday dress was a suit and a bowler hat, but he would never have worn gentleman's clothes like Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Although the industrial revolution has given us so much it has also taken away a great deal. Class divisions, which were rigidly adhered to, have deprived us of so much. This is why we have no national costume and why it is almost impossible to say what English culture actually is. It makes us culturally fragile people.

There was a deep and fierce pride in the traditional English working class. Fred Dibnah's picture is the epitome of it. But when capitalism moves on and industry moves elsewhere it leaves us stranded in a cultural vacuum.

This is why, for me, it is important to believe in a God who is above all culture so that, when culture is taken away from us, we are not left as total orphans.

Michael Williams

Vicar of Bolton Parish Church