7
A Different Class of People
‘And then there was this business of Britain’s class system,’ recalled Doris Lessing about leaving Rhodesia in 1949 and coming to London. ‘It shocked me – as it does all colonials . . .’ One day she and an ex-RAF friend from Rhodesia went into a pub in Bayswater: ‘It was the public bar. We stood at the counter, ordered drinks. All around the walls, men sat watching us. They were communing without words. One got up, slowly, deliberately, came to us, and said, “You don’t want to be ’ere. That’s your place,” pointing at the private bar. We meekly took ourselves there, joining our peers, the middle class.’ The following year another young writer, Dan Jacobson, arrived from South Africa and was struck by ‘the appetite the English had for “placing” not only a stranger to the country like myself, but perhaps even more pressingly those who were not strangers, who were native to the islands, and whose hands, faces, accents, clothes and bearing would, if studied with sufficient attention, reveal valuable items of information about them: the most important of these, inevitably, being the social class to which they belonged’. He added that it was a ‘kind of detective work’ that reminded him of ‘an insect stroking an object ahead of it with its feelers, or of a cat sniffing a person’s shoes’ – and that the process reflected a society ‘deeply, obsessively divided by a host of invidious, criss-crossing “social indicators” that would go a long way towards determining relations between its members’.
It was indeed a society of class consciousness – 90 per cent of the 11,000 respondents to a 1950–51 questionnaire printed in the
People
unhesitatingly assigned themselves to a social class – and class separation. Janet Madge in 1948 investigated ‘Some Aspects of Social Mixing in Worcester’ and, as a result of fieldwork in the city’s social clubs, sports clubs and societies generally, concluded that there was ‘little evidence of inter-class association’. It was also a society that functioned along deeply entrenched hierarchical lines: when Tom Bottomore in the early 1950s immersed himself in the voluntary organisations of ‘a small English country town’ unhelpfully called ‘Squirebridge’, he found a significant degree of correlation between occupational status and status in those organisations. The first flowering was now appearing of what would become the golden age of British empirical sociology, and a particularly rich study was that made by Margaret Stacey of Banbury. ‘The techniques of acceptance or rejection are subtle,’ she wrote about the frontiers between the classes in a town pervaded by class. ‘You must possess appropriate characteristics: occupation, home, residence area, income (suitably spent), manners, and attitudes. You must know or learn the language and the current private “passwords” of the group. You must be introduced. If you fail in these particulars you will simply be “not known”. Nothing is said or done. The barrier is one of silence.’ Moreover, she went on: ‘This is also true for those who are dropped for some offence against the code of their class; they may never discover what their alleged offence is and certainly have no chance of defence. They simply find that invitations cease and backs are turned at the bar.’1
Even a list can only hint at the ubiquity of class. ‘A working man speaks a language of his own, while the middle-class man generally speaks the King’s English,’ asserted Ferdynand Zweig in his 1952 survey
The British Worker
. ‘As soon as a man opens his mouth everybody knows to which class he belongs.’ At home, towels were a reliable status indicator (Alan Bennett ruefully compared his childhood towels – ‘thin, ribbed, the nap long since gone’ – with the almost unimaginably luxurious ‘thick fleecy’ variety), while the middle class only reluctantly abandoned its pre-war habit of having the breakfast marmalade spooned in and out of special pots each morning in order to conceal its shop-bought origins. ‘Dinner in the evening is probably still the mark of the upper-middle and upper class,’ T. H. Pear remarked in his sound but disappointingly bland 1955 survey
English Social Differences
. ‘For the working class, the substantial evening meal is “tea,” whether “high” (including meat) or not.’ The middle class went to bed appreciably later than the working class, with widespread complaints in Birmingham in 1949, when BBC television began its Midland service, that 8.00 p.m. was too late for the start of evening programmes, that indeed the first main one would not have finished before normal bedtime. Audience research revealed in 1950 that only 25 per cent of viewers with incomes of £1,000 or more approved of music-hall programmes, against 65 per cent of viewers with incomes of less than £350; as for listening habits, BBC figures in 1947 showed that on a typical evening, the Third Programme was heard at some point by 24 per cent of the upper middle class, 12 per cent of the lower middle and only 3 per cent of the working class. At the cinema, according to a detailed study done in Wales, the working class almost invariably stuck to the stalls, the middle class to the more expensive balcony. So too with other leisure pursuits. Long-established climbing clubs had vigilant gatekeepers to exclude the proles; tennis clubs were notorious for the face having to fit; athletics was dominated by the cult of the well-bred, well-behaved amateur; the social chasm between rugby union and rugby league was absolute; and in the still Victorian, two-class (amateurs and professionals) world of cricket, there was a deathless announcement over the tannoy at Lord’s one Saturday in May 1950 when a young Middlesex pro was walking out to bat against Surrey: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, a correction to your scorecards. For “F.J. Titmus”, please read “Titmus, F.J.”.’2
Of course, nothing stood entirely still. ‘The differences between the working class and middle class are becoming less pronounced,’ was the optimistic view of Zweig in 1952:
The workers’ security of employment and earning capacity are constantly improving; education is rapidly reducing the differences between the standards of the classes, and standard English is becoming more widespread, especially on account of the wireless . . . The classes now dress more alike than they used to, and it is becoming difficult to distinguish a workman from a black-coated worker on Sundays. The income differences between classes are also growing smaller, and many craftsmen earn more than clerks and officials. The differences in the sizes of families are diminishing as well; birth control is more and more being practised in poor homes. Council houses too are getting rid of the class barriers which formerly existed between districts.
There was also a generational dimension. ‘Compare the young couple in a prefab or a post-war Council house with their working-class parents,’ Michael Young wrote in his 1951 essay ‘Is This The Classless Society?’:
Observe the disappearance of the parlour as a room, seldom used, where precious photographs, old children’s encyclopaedias and horsehair shoes were placed on show. Look at the furniture obtained on hire purchase, almost indistinguishable from that in the larger privately-owned houses. See the gadgets in the kitchen and the use made of the opener for the tins, of mass-produced foods which flow endlessly into bigger as well as smaller houses. Notice the collection of crockery and cutlery, and the similar ways in which the table is now laid for meals. See the radios in the kitchen waiting for
Woman’s Hour
and the television sets sprouting out of the roofs in all quarters of the town. Note the occasional Penguin or library book in the corner of the shelf. Watch the son in his pin-stripe drinking his light ale in the Saloon Bar, and his girl-friend sipping a gin and orange, while down the road in the Public Bar father takes his pint of wallop and mother takes her Guinness.
One factor that neither Zweig nor Young mentioned was the war. Some historians have seen it as the supreme agent of social change in modern Britain – thereby ignoring the overwhelming extent to which social and cultural life reverted after 1945 to familiar patterns. Just as the war was ending, a young Donald James (the future writer Donald James Wheal) had a chat with his father:
‘We’re working class,’ I remember him saying. ‘For the moment anyway. It might not look it but we’re on the move. I think this war has got a lot of people on the move.’
‘Because they’ve been bombed out?’
‘I’m talking about the way people are beginning to think now. The different classes have all rubbed shoulders in this war, because of the bombs and evacuation, much more than they did in the last one. We’ll all come out of this a bit different to what we were when we went in. The working classes have seen that upper-class people can be scared or brave, bright or dim, same as anybody else. And the upper classes are beginning to see that if the working classes
are
sometimes found keeping coal in the bath, they don’t do it by choice. They do it because the way they live, there’s nowhere else to keep it.’
‘Does that mean all these different classes are coming together?’
‘It’s a nice thought, but it’s a lot to hope for.’
‘Do you have to have a lot of money to be upper-class?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. Some people at Whitelands [a block of private flats in Chelsea where he was head porter] can hardly find enough for a Christmas tip for the porters. It’s more than just money. It’s a generation or two of education that kicks it off, Dee. Then it’s the way the upper classes live. The way they dress, they way they talk. And then there’s masses of customs, ways of saying things, for instance, that people like us don’t know anything about. If you don’t say the right thing, or don’t say it in the right way, then you’re not one of them. They laugh up their sleeves at you. I’ve seen it at Whitelands.’
‘Is that how you know about all these things?’
‘I don’t.’
This shocked me. ‘You mean,
you
make mistakes?’
‘Dozens, I expect,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know when I’m doing it. And if I tried too hard not to, I’d just make a fool of myself. That’s the other catch – you mustn’t try too hard.’
‘I think it’d be better if we were all just one class.’
‘It’s never happened anywhere in the world yet, Dee. And it’s not likely to. Class differences are here to stay. In themselves they’re not important. It’s the senseless part of class discrimination that hurts people.’
Judy Haines would surely have agreed. ‘She would worry about what other people thought of her at times,’ her daughter Pamela recalled in somewhat (if not totally) different 2007. ‘She was self-conscious, I think, about coming from a rather poor background in Leyton, and moving to the slightly more “up market” Chingford she found people snooty and unfriendly. People tended to jostle for social position there after the war. North Chingford looked down on South Chingford, and South Chingford looked down on Walthamstow, which in turn looked down on Leyton!’
It was the same – but even more so – by the Cam. Ted Hughes (son of a small shopkeeper, Mexborough Grammar School) went up to Pembroke College in October 1951. ‘Well aware of the class divisions that permeated the university,’ according to his biographer, ‘he held on all the more obstinately to the Yorkshire accent that would have been used to place him instantly.’ Hughes himself subsequently attributed the destructive effect of university on him to ‘social rancour’. Joan Rowlands (daughter of an engineering draughtsman, Stockport High School for Girls, later Joan Bakewell) went up to Newnham College the same month. ‘It wasn’t only my clothes that weren’t right,’ she recalled about the jumpers and cardigans lovingly knitted by her Manchester aunties:
Neither was my accent – at elocution tests I had always scored badly. Living in Stockport, I hadn’t got the hang of what supposedly correct speech sounded like. At Cambridge I could hear at once that some of the grander girls spoke in braying, honking tones that indicated class and money. Perhaps I should copy them, I thought. I made the switch instantly – and disastrously – affecting a sound locked somewhere at the back of my throat that emerged through tightened lips in a parody of speech that was in itself an affectation. I hadn’t the confidence to be myself.
Two months later Alan Bennett (son of a Co-op butcher, Leeds Modern School) arrived at Sidney Sussex College for his entrance examination. ‘That weekend was the first time I had ever come across public schoolboys in the mass, and I was appalled,’ he remembered in his preface to
The History Boys
. ‘They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy . . . Seated at long refectory tables, the walls hung with armorial escutcheons and the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stuart grandees, neat, timorous and genteel, we grammar schoolboys were the interlopers; these snobs, as they seemed to me, the party in possession.’ Bennett added a coda on the radio in 2008: ‘I also realised they had been better taught than I had and more individually taught. They were coming to this examination very much better prepared than I was and I thought that was unfair when I was 17. And that view has never changed.’3
In a world of limited social mobility and generally sharp inequalities of opportunity as well as wealth, it was a truism among many activators that access to grammar schools (which the 1944 Education Act had made free), followed by access to higher education, was the crux if significantly more of the working class – especially the semi-skilled and unskilled working class – were ever to have the chance fully to exercise their talents.
The figures were not altogether encouraging. A 10 per cent sample of those entering English grammar schools in 1946 revealed that the numbers of children of skilled and semi-skilled manual workers were broadly in line with the national occupational breakdown, but that the number of children of unskilled manual workers was less than half of what it ‘should’ have been; five years later, Hilde Himmelweit’s sample of four grammars in Greater London showed the working class taking only 52 per cent of the places – some 20 per cent fewer than they ‘should’ have taken. Indeed, Ross McKibbin in his survey
Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951
has concluded that ‘in most parts of the country the proportion of free places won by working-class children was no higher in 1950 than in 1914, and in some places lower’, adding that ‘at no point did it equal the proportion won by working-class children in the 1920s’. Moreover, an authoritative 1954 report,
Early Leaving
, found that, once at grammar school, more than half of the children of unskilled or semi-skilled parents obtained fewer than three O-level passes and that a third did not stay on to the sixth form. As for the universities, their full-time student intake was gradually increasing – 70,405 in England and Wales in 1955, compared to 39,438 in 1937 – but the composition of that intake was obstinately out of line with a society that was about 70 per cent manual working class. Only 26 per cent of the men admitted to English universities in 1955 were sons of manual-working fathers, while of that year’s male intake who had attended grammar schools, 64 per cent were sons of non-manual-working fathers (ie middle or upper class), 30 per cent were sons of skilled manual-working fathers, 5 per cent of semi-skilled, and just over 1 per cent of unskilled manual workers.