Class (18 page)

Engineering has always been an unsmart profession, partly because no one knows what it involves. Harry Stow-Crat thinks it is something to do with driving a train. When people asked me what my father did I always used to say he was in the army or that he was a scientist because I thought that sounded more romantic and boffinish than being an engineer. But once again things are changing.

Among the great variety of middle-class occupations there are three main strands which are particularly in evidence: the ‘burgesses’, the ‘spiralists’ and the lower middle class. The terms ‘burgess’ and ‘spiralist’ were coined by W. Watson in his article ‘Social Mobility and Social Class in Industrial Communities’ (1964). The burgess tends to stay put in the neighbourhood where he was brought up or started work, and establish prestige in the community. He is often the country solicitor, accountant or local businessman; he takes an interest in the community and often gets into local government to further his business interests.

In
Middle Class Families
Colin Bell quotes a burgess describing his life. He is a typical Howard Weybridge. The Weybridge expressions are italicized.

‘My
people
have always been
comfortably off.
After going into the
forces,
I went into
Dad’s
business. We have several
representatives,
who have come up from the shop floor . . . I am a very keen member of
Rotary
[on a par with Teacher and Doctor]. I belong to many clubs and associations because I think it’s a good thing other Swansea
folk
see me at the right
functions
, and realize we are not just tradesmen. I also belong to several
social clubs
as a duty, so that I meet the important Swansea people.’

This is typical middle-class behaviour, the careerist socializing, the pomposity of expression, the desire to be a power in the community, a big fish in a small pool, and the joining of clubs, which would all be unthinkable to the working or upper classes.

The second category, the spiralist, moves from job to job and place to place, upping his salary and his status as he goes. Colin Bell quotes a chemist from a working-class background who is far more upper-class and direct in his language than the burgess.

‘I went to a grammar school and then to a university, very red brick and provincial. I worked like hell and got a first, then did a Ph.D in chemistry to avoid going out in the world. Meantime I got married and had several children; after that I moved from firm to firm, upping my salary every time. Then I was promoted to Holland’ (where class and accent didn’t matter).

He then left the research side, because, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t get on, and went into the middle-class admin’ side, which was far more cut-throat, but which counted for more. Now, as the head of a large industrial plant, he had to decide whether to move to head office in London to up his salary or change jobs. His only friends were people he worked with, his wife’s only friends their wives. The only way to get on, he felt, was to move. He hoped it didn’t interfere too much with the children’s education.

‘If I get a couple of notches further up,’ he concluded, ‘I’ll send them to boarding school. Not that I really approve of it, but it will make moving about easier.’

Here you have a man, sometimes working-class, sometimes lower-middle in origin, who is prepared to sacrifice friends, children and principles to his career. In fact he’s eager to leave his family and the friends of his childhood because they might be a social embarrassment. Later the spiralists often jettison their wives and trade them in for a Mark II model that goes with a new life-style.

Interesting, too, that this particular spiralist showed working-class shyness by cocooning himself against the world and taking a Ph.D. He made a typically working-class early marriage to combat the loneliness, but then made a deliberate decision to move over to the middle-class admin’ side because it would further his career.

In a survey of managers’ wives, it was shown that they all wanted their daughters to marry a ‘burgess’ in the professions. All believed this would provide more security and status than industry. They did not realize how many young barristers have to tramp the streets for months after qualifying before they get any work. Nor could they appreciate the status props that go with the spiralist’s job: the houses, the company cars, trips for wives, gardeners and chauffeurs, the source of which can all be concealed from the neighbours.

‘It’s great, Angela! I’ve been promoted to Patagonia!’

The salient characteristic of the spiralist, whether he is from the working classes or the lower-middles is his adaptability and his total ruthlessness. He is the cog in the wheel, the corporation man who can charm his colleagues while trampling them under foot with his slip-on Guccis. His mecca is the conference.

‘I’ve come a long way,’ said one spiralist. ‘My parents were working-class in the North-East; my expectations were at best tradesman. When I’m at conferences I feel how far I’ve come.’

On the other hand his social mecca would be Sunningdale or East Horsley, so he often ends up turning into a Howard Weybridge.

I went to a conference recently where the spiralists were rampant. The ‘venue’, as they would call it, was the Café Royal, and it was all firm handshakes and announcing of names:

‘Vic Taylor. Pleased to meet you Ji-ell’ (always two syllables), accompanied by a card pressed into one’s hand.

Another favourite gesture on seeing an acquaintance was the thumbs-up sign, or jerking the head to one side and winking simultaneously. (The middle classes, particularly schoolmasters, tend to raise one arm at about 20 degrees.) The smell of
Brut
fought frantically with that of deodorant. Most of the spiralists had goalpost moustaches and brushed-forward thatched-cottage hair, with that flattened lack of sheen which comes from being washed every day under the shower, rather than in the bath. They all wore natty lightweight suits in very light colours.

On their lapels, like the faded square on Harry Stow-Crat’s drawing-room wall where the Romney’s been flogged, are unfaded circles which have been protected by conference badges. One could hear the rattle of Valium as they took off their lightweight long-vented jackets to reveal belted trousers. Their accent is mid-Atlantic, justified by the fact that they’ve spent a lot of time in the States (Non-U for America), which usually means a cheap weekend on a Thomson flight.

Their vocabulary is peppered with expressions like ‘product attributes’, ‘growth potential’, ‘viability’ and ‘good thinking’. Perhaps it is some unconscious search for roots, but whenever they meet, they start tracing advertising genealogy.

‘That’s Les Brace, he used to be Saatchi and Saatchi, Garland Compton, before they became . . .’, with the same intensity with which Caroline Stow-Crat and her group of jolly nice girl-friends are always saying:

‘Sukie Stafford-Cross, she was . . .’

Conscious of their seemingly effortless mobility, spiralists always have razors, toothbrushes, Gold Spot, pyjamas and a drip-dry shirt in their briefcases.

Our third strand is the lower-middles, who don’t rise and who Orwell described as ‘that shivering army of clerks and shopwalkers. You scare them by talking about class war, so they forget their incomes, remember their accents, and fly to the defence of the class that’s exploiting them.’ They are also the sergeant-majors, the police sergeants, the toastmasters, Prufrockian, neatly dressed, cautious, thrifty. ‘In the old days,’ as Len Murray pointed out, ‘they had an affinity with the boss, who saw them as people who could be confided in and trusted. They haven’t the bargaining power, now there’s more education about.’ The nineteenth century entrepreneur has gone, and in his place have come huge management empires, where the smooth pegs thrive in round holes.

If the ex-working-class spiralists’s mecca is the conference, the lower-middle’s mecca is the ‘function’, where, in hired dinner jackets (which they call dinner ‘suits’), they play at gracious living and the ‘Ollde Days’. Howard Weybridge goes to lots of such occasions and rather takes them for granted. But Bryan Teale’s ambition is to be president of the Stationery Trade Representatives’ Association for one year, and stand with a chain round his neck, beside his wife, who has a smaller chain and a maidenhair corsage, graciously welcoming new arrivals, and being stood up for and politely applauded when they come in to dinner. Throughout the five-course dinner which starts at 6.30 they will ‘take wane’ with each other and various dignitaries and past presidents and their ladies down the table. As this is a Ladies’ Night, each lady will get a gift of a manicure set or an evening ‘pochette’ in uncut moquette by her plate. Later there will be Ollde Tyme dancing, interspersed with popular favourites. Bryan will ‘partner’ Jen in the valeta. They both enjoy ‘ballroom dancing’. The conference gang, on the other hand, bop until their thatched hair nearly falls off. The difference between the lower-middle ‘function’ set and the spiralists is that the former crave the ‘dignity’ of a bygone age, while the latter, with their natty suits, their bonhomie and their slimline briefcases, are geared towards America and the future.

But the real battleground in the late 1970s was between the ‘function’ brigade of the clerks and insurance salesmen, and the skilled manual worker one rung below. For a long time the skilled worker has been earning far more money than most clerical workers, and because the former tend to live in rented council flats, rather than paying commercial rents or buying houses on mortgage, and have all the kiddies at state schools, they have far more money to play around with.

One notices, too, that, in the light of extra cash, people tend to think of themselves as being in a far higher class than they really are. In Woodford, which is a predominately lower-middle-class area, 48 per cent of the skilled workers interviewed said they were middle-class, but in Greenwich, a more down-market area, only 23 per cent said they were middle-class, whereas in Dagenham, which is a working-class and principally socialist stronghold, only 13 per cent claimed middle-class status. The working classes tend to think that class depends not so much on education and income as production and consumption. Large numbers of miners interviewed in a similar survey called themselves upper-middle-class, whereas the Census would have called them upper-working-class.

BARRIERS

Although the barriers are slowly breaking down, there are still jobs from which you will be excluded unless you come from a particular class. Many firms in the city—stockbrokers, insurance and shipping brokers, commodity dealers—still appreciate what they call ‘polish and mixability (which is a euphemism for upper- and upper-middle-class background) beyond academic qualification.

The discrimination, however, is now going both ways. A company director recently said that if he interviewed two graduates, one working-class and one from a public school, he took the working-class boy, because he’d had to fight harder to get there. Nicholas Monson, an Old Etonian, was sacked from a provincial newspaper because of what was loosely called his ‘background’. A fortnight later he was told by a London advertising agency that his credentials were fine, but he couldn’t have the job because the staff objected to Old Etonians.

You can’t get a job as a disc jockey if you’re upper-class nor as a television reporter, particularly if you’re an upper-class woman. Time and again one hears the terrible flat ‘a’s and dreary, characterless Midlands accent of the reporter, which conjure up a picture of some folk-weave goon. Then suddenly the camera pans on to a ravishing creature in a trench coat, tawny mane blowing. Jison Richards, having dropped the ‘Nouveau’ and gone back to being Jison, by dint of touting his mother round all the interviews has got a job interviewing on ITN. Georgie Stow-Crat, on the other hand, despite brushing his hair forward and taking elocution lessons from the gardener, forgot to say ‘As-cót’ and ‘Sollisbury’ at the interview and was turned down.

A public school accent, said the
Daily Mail,
is a positive disadvantage in acting. So you get Ian Ogilvie, an Old Etonian, playing the Saint as a transatlantic spiralist. RADA advises one even more confusingly to keep your regional accent but speak the Queen’s English. Vivat Regions presumably.

Many people, particularly rock stars, find they can only hit the big time if they go abroad. Vidal Sassoon went to America, which he described as ‘a society where there are no class barriers, where the cop’s son can become president of a great corporation, and where profit isn’t a dirty word’. Mr Sassoon was wrong. There are plenty of class barriers in America, but he, as a foreigner, wouldn’t be aware of them, nor feel self-conscious if he transgressed them.