Family Britain, 1951-1957 (23 page)

Predictably, the Oxbridge figures in 1955 were even further out of line: just 9 per cent of sons of manual workers in the Cambridge male intake and 13 per cent at Oxford. Both universities had, of course, a traditionally high public-school intake: in the academic year 1953–4, for instance, 36 out of the 74 blues awarded for football (association and rugby) and cricket went to public schoolboys. The public schools themselves were now clear for the time being of any political threat. ‘Though the 1944 Education Act will no doubt greatly increase the amount of social mobility in Britain,’ the sociologist David Glass remarked in 1954 in the generally downbeat introduction to his pioneering survey
Social Mobility in Britain
, ‘there is an upper limit to that increase which the Act itself imposes by leaving the independent public school system substantially intact.’ This was, he added, a fundamental inequality of educational opportunity ‘likely to cut across the line of social mobility, blocking ascent to, and limiting descent from, the upper reaches of social status’. Still, as the Tory politician Angus Maude had put it the previous year, there had been since 1944 blessedly no longer any case to answer: ‘So long as the clever child of poor parents is given a free place in a school which will develop his aptitudes to the full, the parent who is prepared to make sacrifices to provide his child with better-than-average schooling has as much right to spend his money on that as on a better television set.’4

‘Another day of silence, listening to other people’s trivialities – a dreadful hour at night when all the completely banal information gained from a visit of relatives is repeated and reviewed,’ John Fowles wrote in his journal on 24 September 1949. The family tobacco firm was struggling, Fowles’s parents were leading lives of genteel poverty, and vacations at 63 Fillebrook Avenue, Leigh-on-Sea, far from suited the intolerant Oxford undergraduate:

Another appalling half-hour of talk. When screaming was close. Talk of the utmost banality, on prices of mattresses, on Mrs Ramsey’s daughter who married a doctor in Montreal. A few comments are made on poetry. So hopeless to try and explain. They would never understand. No mention of art can ever be developed in case we are ‘highbrow’ – God, how I hate that word! . . . Then there is ‘niceness’ as a standard of judgement – God, how I hate that word, too! – ‘a nice girl’, ‘a nice road’. Nice = colourless, efficient, with nose glued to the middle path, with middle interests, dizzy with ordinariness. Ugh!
(30 September 1949)

Spasm of hate. Trying to listen to Mozart 465 Quartet when M [Fowles’s incorrigibly talkative mother] seems, almost deliberately, to spoil it . . . Finally (in the middle of the third movement) the decision that the decorations should be put up: ‘Everyone else has put them up. The Farmers have put them up.’ We’re out of line, horror! Father, up till now a passive spectator, infuriates because he remains passive, i.e. instead of saying, ‘Whenever! It can wait,’ he mumbles, ‘Better get it done,’ and starts fiddling about with the streams of coloured paper. Partly I feel this is to annoy the highbrow in me. I switch off the wireless, and help in a savage, couldn’t-care-less way.
(16 December 1949)

Quai des brumes
. Beautifully made film. Simple tragedy of sordidity, Kafkaesque despair . . . I hate the damned condescension of Basil G [Basil Glover, a stockbroker neighbour, slightly older than Fowles], who says of the film ‘one of them things about life in the raw’ – in an amiable, tolerant, amused sort of way, as if life in the raw is something of a joke, and not real compared to the silly, conventional routine of a suburban semi-man-about-town.
(6 April 1950)

In August 1951 – Oxford behind him, a writer’s life still a distant dream – Fowles saw
The Cherry Orchard
. ‘The characters seem mysterious, unreal, but their mood I recognise at once,’ he reflected. ‘It is the mood of this town – the ubiquity of futility; the genteel descent into oblivion, where no one is capable of saying what their heart says.’5

Fowles while at New College had presumably never encountered Madge Martin. The middle-aged wife of an Oxford clergyman, she enjoyed without any self-loathing – but not qualmlessly – a very middle middle-class way of life and culture. Take 1952. In January there was a car outing, including lunch at the department store Heelas (‘always nice’) in Reading; in February she and her husband took their annual holiday in Brighton, staying at the Old Ship Hotel; later that month there was a rather guilty coffee morning with Mrs Pegler on Ash Wednesday (‘it was
not
a proper Ash Wednesday thing to do, and I ought to have called it off’); in March, another annual routine: the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia (‘better than ever, with a beautiful décor, and lots of nice things to look at’); in August the annual holiday in Scarborough (‘the food is
vastly
better, this year’); and in December a 53rd birthday that featured a visit to the Royal Opera House for
Swan Lake
(‘a perfect birthday treat’) and presents that included nylon stockings, blue table napkins, a blue scarf, yellow wool gloves, a silk cami-knicker, a Helena Rubinstein lipstick and a kitten cake tin. At year-end she looked back on her cultural highlights.
The African Queen
,
Singin’ in the Rain
,
The Quiet Man
and
Limelight
were among the most enjoyable films,
Waters of the Moon
(seen at the Oxford Playhouse) and
Paint Your Wagon
(at the New Theatre) among ‘the best plays’; while in terms of novels (probably mainly borrowed from circulating libraries), she gave four stars to Paul Gallico’s
The Small Miracle
and three to Barbara Pym’s
Excellent Women
and Stella Morton’s
Turn by Days
, but only two to
Young Shoulders
by Ruby M. Ayres. The following February it was back to Brighton – ‘ “We’ve arrived – and to prove it, we’re here,” as Max Byfield [ie Bygraves], the radio comedian, always says’ – and on a Tuesday in March ‘another lovely, carefree day’: ‘Sometimes I think I lead too easy a life these days, but am certainly enjoying them, and feel relaxed. The mornings are always fully occupied, with house-work, shopping, and cooking, but I almost feel guilty and sluttish when I have my adored hour’s rest, with my favourite radio programme, “Woman’s Hour,” and feel I should be doing more constructive work of some sort.’ Still, a glimpse of a different life came in April with a trip to Essex for a wedding: ‘Southend – though rather awful – wasn’t half as common and noisy as we had imagined, but of course this is not “the season.” ’6

The 1951 census put the middle class at around 28 per cent of the population, compared with 22 per cent twenty years earlier. The middle class – in some ways best defined as ‘not working class’ in terms of attitudes, assumptions and self-image – included the professional class and the self-employed petite bourgeoisie (typified by small shopkeepers) that had emerged strongly in the nineteenth century, as well as the managerial class that had begun to flourish during the inter-war rise of the large corporation, not to mention the ever-expanding lower middle-class legions of clerks, salesmen, insurance agents and shop assistants. There were also, in terms of specific occupational trends, two rapidly growing sectors within the middle class: first, in the science/technology/engineering fields, in part driven by the increasing number of non-arts university students (doubling between the 1930s and late 1940s), and second, in the public sector, especially social services and the nationalised industries. Overall, it was a far more salaried middle class than it had been, say, half a century earlier – and also appreciably more meritocratic in terms of both intake and subsequent performance evaluation.7 But not entirely. ‘Like many doctors’ children, I had from my earliest schooldays come to look upon a medical qualification like a hereditary title,’ the young hero notes at the outset of Richard Gordon’s
Doctor in the House
(1952). The rest of the first chapter sees him going up to St Swithin’s, the teaching hospital where his father had been, and undergoing interviews in which the crucial considerations are a) public-school background, b) ability to pay the fees and c) ability on the rugby field. He satisfies the first two criteria and fortunately, in a hospital already stuffed with forwards, is a wing threequarter and gets the nod.8

Perhaps inevitably, significantly more than 28 per cent of people perceived themselves as middle-class. In Geoffrey Gorer’s extensive 1950–51 survey of what social class people saw themselves as belonging to, 2 per cent identified themselves as ‘upper middle’, 28 per cent as ‘middle’, and 7 per cent as ‘lower middle’, totalling 37 per cent. Within the sample, a realistic 31 per cent of men claimed to belong to one of those three non-working-class groups – compared to 41 per cent of women, with women (especially those over 45 who were unmarried or widowed) having a particular preference for ‘middle’. Gorer’s findings were not wholly out of line with a British Institute of Public Opinion survey shortly before. Here, 6 per cent claimed to be ‘upper middle’, 27 per cent ‘middle’, and 15 per cent ‘lower middle’, totalling 48 per cent, but this time, men were almost as likely as women to allow themselves a questionable self-ascription. Still, as most respondents would probably have replied if confronted by the occupationally classified census figures, if you felt you were middle-class, then you were middle-class.

So, no doubt, it was in 1948 when Mass-Observation asked the largely middle-class members of its panel to say something about their class identity:

I feel that anyone who has to consider prices and be economical at every turn cannot claim to belong to the ‘Middle Classes’. This term seems in my mind to be synonymous with prosperity, not yet wealth, but with carefree liberality in all things costing money. On the other hand perhaps people who, like myself, had a secondary education or, like my husband, a University education, can be promoted to the ranks of the Middle Classes, whatever the bank balance!
(Housewife, married to a civil servant)

I am something of a hybrid. I was brought up middle-class and am financially in that position but my husband [a printer on a London newspaper] retains his working-class breeding which causes most (not all) middle-class people to drop us.
(Housewife)

The professional upper middle class. There has never been much money in the family, and often very little indeed. But we consider we have obligations to fulfil rather than demands to make, which I think is a characteristic of this solid upper middle class.
(Retired schoolmistress)

I consider that I belong to the middle class of society. It is so because I have had a Grammar School education, my home is in Pinner (semi-suburban), and amongst other people whose houses are furnished, and are kept in a good condition, as mine is . . . Hammersmith is a typical working-class district, and it is from here that I make my comparisons. I see houses with torn, dirty (I know that this is almost unavoidable in London) curtains, broken windows mended with cardboard, for months not days, and generally slovenly appearance. Children are admitted into hospitals (mine in particular) with filthy clothes, skin, hair, etc.
(Student nurse)

‘I am not prejudiced,’ Ms Pinner added, ‘but cleanliness should come naturally.’

Predictably, a palpable pride, even smugness, shone at times through the replies:

Middle-class. Because I have a civic conscience, am internationally minded, have a feeling of responsibility towards people I don’t know and time for enough leisure to be able to use my education (school, social and cultural) to a culturally satisfying end.
(Housewife)

Middle-class. Because I am not an aristocrat, nor am I a plebeian. My parents were of excellent breeding, and we have as a family the attributes of what is known as the middle-class type – independence, hatred of charity, sans patronage and sans servility, delight in doing one’s job thoroughly but with a soul that can rise above it occasionally without fanaticism.
(Housewife)

The following year pride was redoubled when the panel was asked what value it attached to ‘the continued existence of the middle classes’:

Today, when the ‘workers’ and their families have unprecedented power in this country, the ‘middle class,’ I think, have one special role: to try to maintain a high level of culture and social responsibility in the country at a time when the trend is in a downward direction.
(Journalist)

It would be almost impossible for any Government to carry on if the middle classes went out on strike on every possible pretext in the way the – so called – working classes do.
(Chartered accountant)

‘The chief value of the middle classes,’ succinctly summarised a housewife, ‘is that their way of life represents a standard which the working class can emulate.’9

Constantly bubbling up below these moral certainties, there was no doubting the anxiety, even the bitterness, of the newly servantless, highly taxed middle class during the immediate post-war period. ‘How grievously,’ wrote Roy Lewis and Angus Maude in their 1949 paean to threatened virtues,
The English Middle Classes
, did this group’s ‘cherished ambitions conflict both with the egalitarian philosophy and with recent political tendencies!’ Crucially, this bitterness was not decisively assuaged by Churchill’s return to power in 1951. ‘The New Poor’ was the title of a
Daily Express
series two years later, depicting an oppressively taxed middle class struggling ‘to keep up appearances’ and reliant on its unique qualities of ‘standards, ambitions, self-discipline, education, and immense adaptability’. In truth, though, the middle class as a whole was not doing too badly during, say, the ten years after the war. Its numbers were expanding; the widespread introduction for more senior employees of tax-free ‘perks’ (such as subsidised mortgages, company cars, and insurance and pension contributions) significantly cushioned things; and in actual practice as opposed to theory, it was the children of professionals and businessmen who disproportionately won the free grammar-school places created by the 1944 Act, with those children about six times more likely to pass the eleven-plus than working-class children.10