Class (12 page)

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS

A gentleman has good table manners and should not make wild gestures when speaking at banquets, so that he sweeps a bowl of semolina into his neighbour’s lap.

King’s House School, Richmond, magazine

There is no worse snob than the prep-school boy, but he is usually a possession snob, status being dependent on the size of his parents’ car, how many rooms his house has, whether they have a swimming pool, where he went on holiday, and the intricacies of his digital watch.

The dawnings of true class consciousness vary. A duke’s daughter said she was aware of her position for the first time when she was four; she was playing in the garden and a particularly oily butler said, ‘Would my lady like some luncheon?’ She was very clever, however, and said that at school her intellect was much more of an embarrassment than her title. Rather like my niece the other day asking my nephew what subjects he was planning to take for A levels.

‘Maths I and II, and Physics,’ came the reply.

My niece gave a gasp of horror:

“Oh Henry, what
will
you talk about at dinner parties?’

My daughter, at seven, is unaware of class, except in so far as she’ll suddenly lapse into a Liverpool accent to make her friends laugh. My son, at ten, is beginning to come out with remarks like, ‘How many Lords do we know?’ And when my husband told him to undo the top button of his shirt he said,

‘Well Ken doesn’t.’

‘Ken,’ snapped my husband, ‘is not a gentleman.’

‘Of course he is,’ said my son. ‘He’s a millionaire.’

When he spent the day with one of his old state-school friends, however, he came back and said in passing that he didn’t like their house—the colours were too bright and shiny and you couldn’t see through it. After pondering for a long time, I realized he meant there were net curtains on the windows.

‘My family used to own most of Bath,’ announced one of his school friends, ‘but unfortunately they lost it in a game of cards.’

Most snobbery, in fact, is instilled by the parents. For a brief period an earl’s son was sent to my son’s day school, and it was horrifying the way the mothers urged their sons to ask him to tea and birthday parties. He must have seen Star Wars about fifteen times.

There is beautiful story of a very aristocratic child going away to prep school for the first time, who got hauled up before the headmaster because he insisted on calling his form master ‘Mr Brown’ instead of ‘Sir’.

‘I suppose,’ said the headmaster with infinite sarcasm, ‘you expected Mr Brown to call
you
Sir.’

‘Yes,’ said the boy simply.

At boarding school, as has already been pointed out, where a child is divorced from its origins and everyone wears uniform, it is often difficult to tell what class someone is.

‘The twins are awfully grand,’ I remember a friend telling me in awe.

‘Why?’ I asked in surprise. They were much younger than us.

‘Oh, they flip through
The Tatler
and know absolutely
everyone
.’

One becomes suddenly aware that people are different, like the reporter on the
Daily Mail
who said how jealous she felt of the one girl in the class whose parents had a telephone. A girl at Oakham was teased for being the only girl in the class who didn’t say lounge.

You find the same upstaging in George Orwell:

‘My father’s got three miles of river.’

‘My Pater’s giving me a new gun for the 12th. They’re jolly good blackcock where we go. Get out, Smith, what are you listening for? You’ve never been to Scotland. I bet you don’t know what a blackcock looks like.’

Today, in most boarding schools, considering the number of Africans and Indians, he certainly would.

I also talked to a girl who had just left a London fee-paying school in the City.

‘No one ever talked about class,’ she said, ‘but one day a friend whispered, “You and I are upper-middle, but the rest of the class are incredibly lower-middle.” Most of them come from Romford and Loughton. Their parents have scraped the money together to send them. One girl’s father is a chartered accountant from a grammar school. Another girl’s father is the head of a local primary school. He won’t let her out in the evening. She has to work. If you ask her where she lives, she always says “the back of beyond”. Actually it’s somewhere like East Ham. One girl lives in a council house. Her father’s a postman, but she wants to be an accountant and go to the L.S.E. Because they tend to be alderman class, they’re very job-conscious and materialistic. They have no desire to do good for other people, only themselves. They’re very impressed by the professions, probably because they regard it as a step up. We went round the class; 17 out of 25 wanted to do law, solicitors rather than barristers, because it’s more secure, and probably in local government. I was the only one who wanted to do English.

‘The rest all dress very neatly—white shirts that stay tucked in, and clean shoes and skirts. They think I’m incredibly scruffy. They buy a lot of cheap shoes, but never any books.

‘Their idea of social success is to be asked to a tennis club or cricket club dance. They talk a lot about losing their virginity but are more interested in whether it will ruin the relationship than the moral aspect. And they endlessly discuss the pill, but there again, because they might put on weight. They’re all terribly competitive, but the main battleground, apart from the academic, is the rush to drive. They’re obsessed with provisional licenses and three-point turns. One girl’s father gave her a car when she passed her A levels.’

These girls, as can be seen, are the same class as Bryan and Jen Teale.

WARFARE—OR THE ETON/JARROW MATCH

I am conscious, moreover, of a marked distaste for those who have not benefited from a public school education. This distaste is based on no superficial prejudice, it is founded on experience. People who have not endured the restrictive shaping of an English public school are apt in after life to be egocentric, formless and inconsiderate. These are irritating faults. They are inclined also to show off. This objectionable form of vanity is in its turn destructive of the more creative forms of intelligence.’

Harold Nicolson.

Whenever people attack the English class system they start slinging mud at the public schools. I say ‘English’ deliberately because there aren’t any famous public schools in Wales and because education in Scotland is far more democratic. Anyone wanting to explore the splendours and miseries of the public school system should read Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s excellent book on the subject,
The Public School Phenomenon.
One interesting point he makes is that the expression ‘working class’ was only used pejoratively for the first time in the 1830s, when the industrial revolution was spewing forth Nouveau-Richards in unprecedented droves. ‘There is a natural tendency,’ he writes, ‘for those who have just made money to join the company, and ape the manners of those who have always had it, and despise those they have left behind. In the nineteenth century this was hugely reinforced by the fact that the newly rich appeared at a time when the land-owning upper classes still held political power.’

The easiest way for the Nouveau-Richards to join the upper classes was via a public school. Obviously you could never become a gentleman if you remained jammed up against a lot of common tradesmen. The upper classes, as Gathorne-Hardy goes on, had evolved distinct ways of speaking, dressing, holding their knives and forks, writing letters and so on. And boarding schools, where everyone was in view of everyone else, and away from the coarsening influences of home, were a particularly good way of elaborating and enforcing these aspects of behaviour.

In the nineteenth century the difference between the old landed gentry and the manufacturing classes was that the first had inherited his money, the second had earned it. And paradoxically, although the ambitious merchant or industrialist exalted work, once his son went to a public school and then on to Oxford or Cambridge, and mixed with the upper classes and espoused country house life (probably the most seductive of all life styles), he had then to value idleness as the supreme mark of status. The point of the aristocrat was that he did not need to work for his living. This is crucial to an understanding of English class attitudes. It underpins the idealization of the amateur, it explains why money went on houses and horses and beautiful things, rather than back into the business; it explains the horror of trade, and why the English, unlike the French, Americans or Germans, have always regarded intellectual as a dirty word. The public schools were not required to educate, they taught strength of character, leadership and self-reliance. This, in turn, explains why, until a few years ago, the upper and upper-middle classes took little interest in education. The English gentleman, wrote Douglas Sutherland as recently as the middle ’seventies, regards any child who comes more than half way up the class with extreme suspicion.

Things have changed, however, during the last twenty-five years. Death duties and capital transfer tax made it impossible to leave much money to one’s children; taxes were eating into capital and income. The only inheritance one could be sure of giving one’s child was a good education. When the Russians come a good engineering or physics degree might save him from the salt mines. In the nick of time, most public schools abandoned their role as character-builders and gentleman-factories and became academically excellent. The Old Boy Network was a thing of the past.

This obsession with education spread down the classes, because, according to the Census, you can’t be in Social Class I unless you’ve got a degree (nuns for some reason being the only exception). To the working classes barristers, doctors and dentists are upper class. To them an ‘educated’ voice means an upper-class voice. A good education therefore means climbing the social scale. It gives the bright child the chance to leap from Class V to Class I, and enables the middle-class child to stay put.

Education, as a result, has become a complete rat-race—with nine-year-old day-school children working ten hours a day, with no Arthur Scargill to protect them, with teenagers being offered holidays in Bermuda if they pass A levels and whole families, including the cat, going on tranquillisers before O-Dear levels.

Last year 67% of middle-class children interviewed in one sample said they would rather work for an exam than go to a party, and one working-class family knifed their father collectively because he pushed them so hard to get into university. Even the upper classes are infected and in August the beaches at Bembridge and the grouse moors echo with Caroline Stow-Crat and her friends upstaging each other over how many A levels Fiona’s got.

‘’is teacher says ’e’s gifted at writing.’

Consequently the crammers are overflowing, coaches are having a field-day teaching new maths in the holidays, and the paediatricians are coining it in testing middle-class children because they aren’t coming top of the class. They’ve even evolved a new category called ‘Gifted Children’, who are the new educationally deprived, according to the
Daily Mail
, because they’re not being sufficiently stretched. One can’t think how poor Beethoven and Shakespeare managed in the old days. The Great Train Robbers are all supposed to have been gifted children.

We now see that the aim to produce ‘extra-bright’ children is common to all classes. The pressure on the middle classes to stand firm against competition from below not only kept the private and direct-grant schools full, in spite of increased fees, but has also been a factor in people having smaller families.

In
The Anatomy of Britain
Anthony Sampson expressed his doubt as to whether the public schools could maintain their dominant position in the ’80s. The middle classes would no longer be able to afford them and the great lower-middle-class movement, the growth of the grammar schools, was acting as a bridge between the lower classes and the corridors of power. Getting into a grammar school was the crucial step for upward mobility, since this made entry into the middle classes and the professions much easier. But in 1975, with the abolition of the grammar schools, the bridge was smashed. The direct-grant schools joined the public schools, as did several of the old maintained grammar schools. In fact, with the scrapping of the grammar schools, the schism has been intensified. With the feepaying and the comprehensive schools glaring at each other across the abyss, the result is well and truly a class war.