Family Britain, 1951-1957 (25 page)

To the despair of Marxists, respectability also mattered intensely on the working-class side of the fence. ‘The main social distinction was probably between unskilled labourers and those working-men who prided themselves on traditional artisan values,’ Peter Stead has written in an illuminating essay on post-war Barry in south Wales. ‘The tone of the town was determined by the way in which railwaymen, coal-trimmers and other workmen came together with clerks, teachers, shopkeepers and shopworkers to maintain older standards of respectability.’ It was, he adds, a ‘social alliance which had been forged in churches and chapels’. In Fife – where he had the misfortune to live above a ‘naturally noisy’ family that ‘smashed firewood and coal on the kitchen floor with an elderly axe-head’, roared at their pet mongrel Rover, and ‘spat great streaks of phlegm’ on the ‘shared concrete path’ – it was not so different in the case of the once religious, now atheist Harry Jack, a fitter by trade. ‘For all his socialist convictions I don’t think my father ever saw social divisions in purely political or economic terms,’ wrote his son Ian:

He would make ritual attacks on the big local landlords, the Earl of Elgin and the Marquis of Linlithgow, and on people who showed how they ‘fancied themselves’ by sending their children to piano and elocution lessons (‘Aye, but do they have books in the house?’), but it was an older moral force which generated the most genuine heat in him, and the class conflict as I most often heard it expressed was not so much between classes as internal to each of them; it was ‘decent folk’ versus the rest. This may be a simple social analysis; it was certainly a relevant one. A strict application of socialist theory would mean that our natural allies were the Davidsons (crash, thump; ‘Where’s ma fuckin’ tea?’) and that we would be bound to them for life . . .

It was, according to Ian, ‘the embers of Calvinism’ that freed his father from ‘class-bound loyalty’ – a freedom encapsulated in one of the elder Jack’s ‘favourite concluding statements’ at the end of a conversation: ‘There’s good and bad everywhere.’

In general, though, it seems to have been mainly for women that the question of respectability trumped that of class. ‘Working-class women divide themselves not so much by the jobs their husbands do – and still less by the jobs they themselves do – but rather by ways of life,’ concluded Ferdynand Zweig on the basis of extensive empirical investigations:

They would more often say: ‘This is a
superior
woman,’ meaning in education and way of life, living in a good house, well serviced, with lots of leisure time or ‘this is a
respectable
woman,’ who keeps herself right and knows how to cope with her family and her husband, while all the others are of a lazy irresponsible type who fall below these standards. The main line of division is respectability, and the sense of respectability, i.e. conformity to accepted standards, is much stronger among women than men. A labourer’s wife, if she is respectable and leads a clean reasonable life, doing her bit and coping sensibly with adversities, is much more respected and classed higher in the social hierarchy than a craftsman’s wife who leads the irresponsible life of a waster.

Zweig did not deny that ‘women who go out to work regularly’ had ‘a greater class consciousness, in the male sense of the term, than those who stay at home’ – but overall still insisted that ‘the idea of class solidarity’, central to the class consciousness of the male working class, had relatively limited appeal or even meaning to working women.17

Yet for all this, there remains a certain irreducible sense in which the working class of the late 1940s and early 1950s did indeed see itself as ‘working-class’. Whatever the internal divisions (including of skill and pay as well as of gender and lifestyle), it was still generally the case that the
larger
divide was between the working class and the much less numerous everyone else – a divide accentuated by the fact of an overwhelmingly white society as yet uncomplicated by major ethnic divisions. ‘I have always had to earn my living by working with my hands,’ explained a member of M-O’s panel in 1948 about calling himself working-class:

Despite forty years of hard work I have never been able to lift myself out of this class. I am paid a weekly wage and not a salary . . . Until recently I could be sacked at an hour’s notice, or sent home in the middle of the week because there was no work in hand . . . I have never had an account at the bank. The small amount I have been able to save from time to time being in the Post Office Savings Bank. I have not been able to buy my own house. The above reasons are sufficient, I think, to give me the right to be called working class.

‘We are working-class – the sort that call the mid-day meal “dinner”,’ declared a 32-year-old married woman from Bournemouth not long afterwards in Geoffrey Gorer’s respondent-rich survey of how the English mostly recognised and accepted their class position. Others were similar: ‘One of the people, an ordinary everyday worker’; ‘Usually known as working-class or manual workers’; ‘Average lower paid worker, who you would see at any football match or at the local’; ‘I am a typical working-class man, I go to work in the morning and come home at night and I take my £5 10s a week, and that’s how it goes on week after week, just like everyone else.’

Still, these and similar voices get one only so far, for as Zweig shrewdly explained in his pioneering study of the British male worker, ‘class subconsciousness is much more common, and more marked, than class consciousness’ – a subconsciousness ‘expressed more by people’s behaviour and reactions than by what they say’ and ‘produced by common experiences, common attitudes, behaviour and common environment’. Obvious examples of this subconsciousness-moulding behaviour included shopping habits (a residual suspicion of department stores and a strong preference for chain stores, corner shops and the Co-op), sporting preferences (above all football and rugby league) and choice of daily paper. ‘I read the
Herald
,’ a 60-year-old unskilled worker told an M-O inquiry in 1949. ‘I like to read about the working man.’ A 25-year-old labourer plumped for the
Mirror
: ‘You get good articles in it. And also it’s a paper for the working-class man.’ Nevertheless, ultimately it was something rather more intangible that defined working-class identity. In 1953 a survey of 631 people (of roughly equal sexes) in Derby who claimed to be working-class asked which of certain given factors was the most important in deciding whether another person belonged to the same class as themselves. A lowly fourth, with only 7 per cent, was ‘job’; ‘education’ came third with 12 per cent; and ‘family’ was second with 19 per cent. Easily top, on 44 per cent, was a factor called ‘beliefs and feelings’ – with the authors of the survey glossing that ‘one of the more fundamental reasons for identifying yourself with a particular social class is a feeling that your outlook on life is similar to that of people belonging to the class in question’.18

Was there an underlying working-class resentment towards the rest of society? ‘The worker’s attitude towards the middle classes is different from his attitude towards the upper class,’ reckoned Zweig:

He rather dislikes the middle class, especially its lower stratum with which he often comes into contact. People of the lower middle class often snub him, regard themselves as superior to him, take away his money in the shops, or order him about in the offices. These are the people who have cushy jobs, while he has to sweat. These are the climbers, while he stays put. They look at everything in terms of money, while for him money is merely a medium of exchange, not something to accumulate for its own sake.

For the upper classes, on the other hand, he has no dislike at all; often, in fact, he has admiration for them. They are, he thinks, genuine, as he is; and have not a foot in both camps, as the middle classes have. They do not climb in the world, or make their money; their position and wealth are inherited. The worker admires a man with money he has made by gambling or money he has inherited, but he does not like a man who is out to make money. The upper-class man is primarily a sportsman, like himself; he breeds horses and bets on them, the workman breeds dogs and bets on them. They both like gambling . . .

The rigidly enforced apartheid between rugby union and rugby league provided a telling example of prevailing attitudes. In particular, there seem to have been two reasons for rugby league’s refusal until as late as the 1990s to challenge rugby union’s almost McCarthyite policing of this sporting segregation. ‘First, the leadership of rugby league for all its northern self-confidence was fundamentally deferential to those of a higher social class,’ reflects Tony Collins, the historian of rugby league. ‘To challenge rugby union in the courts would bring accusations of undermining traditional social structures. Second, and apparently paradoxically, this deference sat alongside a deep-going sense of moral superiority towards union; a conviction that not only was theirs a better sport to play and watch, but also that it was democratic and meritocratic in comparison to union’s exclusivity. Every union ban and restriction simply added weight to that belief.’

In general, ‘deference’ and ‘moral superiority’ also had to be weighed alongside what one might term fantasy interest vis-à-vis stolid indifference. For instance, in 1950 almost a third of the adult population in London and the Midlands listened to the Boat Race, but less than 20 per cent in Wales and the north – and only 4 per cent in Scotland. Or take the unwaveringly middle-class world of
Mrs Dale’s Diary
. Margaret Forster’s mother, married to a Carlisle factory worker, ‘loved Mrs Dale’s life because it was the life she felt she should have had – the life of a doctor’s wife, perfect’; and 1951 figures showed that whereas 25 per cent of the upper middle class listened to it every day, and 43 per cent of the lower middle class, no fewer than 52 per cent of the working class did so. Yet away from the lure of soap operas, the fundamental applicability remained until well into the 1950s – and arguably beyond – of George Orwell’s wartime ‘nightly experience in any pub to see broadcast speeches and news bulletins make no impression on the average listener, because they are uttered in stilted bookish language, and, incidentally, in an upper-class accent’. The overwhelming sense is of a deep linguistic-cum-cultural apartness – allied to a stubborn dislike of being patronised. ‘They make me sick,’ declared ‘Rose’, Doris Lessing’s fellow-lodger in a rundown Notting Hill boarding house in about 1950, after returning from the cinema and smoking several cigarettes to get over her crossness:

It was a British film, see. I don’t know why I ever go to them sometimes. If it’s an American film, well, they make us up all wrong, but it’s what you’d expect from them. You don’t take it serious. But the British films make me mad. Take the one tonight. It had what they call a cockney in it. I hate seeing cockneys in films. Anyway, what is a cockney? There aren’t any, except around Bow Bells, so they say, and I’ve never been there. And then the barrow-boys, or down in Petticoat Lane. They just put it on to be clever, and sell things if they see an American or a foreigner coming. ‘Wotcher, cock,’ and all that talk all over the place. They never say Wotcher, cock! unless there’s someone stupid around to laugh. Them people just put it in to be clever, like the barrow-boys, it makes the upper-class people laugh. They think of the working-class as dragged up. Dragged up and ignorant and talking vulgar-ugly. I’ve never met anyone who spoke cockney. I don’t and no one I know does, not even Flo [the landlady], and God knows she’s stupid enough and on the make to say anything.

‘Well,’ she added, ‘that’s what I think and I’ll stick to it.’19

Working-class attitudes were at their most cohesive in somewhere like Featherstone in Yorkshire: a virtually single-class town, dominated by one industry, coal mining. ‘The working man,’ wrote Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter in their classic study (
Coal Is Our Life
, 1956) of that mining community based on early-to-mid-1950s fieldwork, ‘thinks not in the abstract terms of social and economic relations, but in a more concrete way. For example, his pride in being a worker and his solidarity with other workers is a pride in the fact that they are real men who work hard for their living, and without whom nothing in society could function . . . Nothing provokes more anger among working-men than to hear from non-manual workers exaltations to increased effort.’ Two other significant findings, both negative, also emerged from this study: first, that a deep, historically shaped awareness of ‘them’ and ‘us’ far from automatically translated into political action, with most miners instead offsetting their dangerous, insecure work with as vigorous a pursuit of secular pleasures as possible; and second, that this pursuit ran along entirely conventional working-class lines (pub, club, rugby league, etc), with no apparent wish to imitate middle-class lifestyles. It was seemingly much the same in Ebbw Vale when Kenneth Allsop visited ‘Steel Town’ and found a new prosperity, but with memories of the 1930s still acting as ‘a brake of caution’ in 1952. ‘A joint family weekly income of £40 net isn’t out of the way, but there is no aspiration to middle-class standards: the house remains uncompromisingly working-class. There is no sign of a car-and-TV splurge.’ That particular splurge was, of course, only a matter of time; but between them, Dennis et al and Allsop offered a useful pre-emptive warning against the imminent pseudo-sociological assumption that acquisitiveness was inevitably accompanied by embourgeoisiement. Or, as a latter-day sociologist, Mike Savage, has put it, the concept of ‘rugged individualism’ is one that avoids either/or and helpfully reconciles two diverse strands that most working-class men from traditional working-class cultures had within themselves.20