Class (19 page)

No one now is more in demand with the American television cameras than Mr Sassoon, who attributes his success to his stepfather, who taught him how to cut hair and made him take elocution lessons to smooth out his cockney accent.

But despite the film
Shampoo
, which portrayed the hairdresser as a superstud, and Mr Sassoon making the gossip columns as ‘millionaire crimper and health food freak inviting 400 close friends to the Hilton’, hairdressers are not likely to be accepted by the upper classes because of their pansified and plebeian image. Her hairdresser may be the recipient of Caroline Stow-Crat’s indiscreet confidences, but he’ll never be asked to dinner, although, as a token working-class, he might get asked to her wedding.

THE WORKING CLASSES

‘While I was at University, I took a vacation job. To a nicely brought-up girl from an academic family the horror of sitting at a conveyer belt eight hours a day packing chocolates was indescribable. I also remember the feeling of being a non-person to the manager and the secretaries of a small firm. I hope the custom of students doing manual work continues. For many of us it is the first time we have been in close contact as equals with the working classes.’

Letter in
The Sunday Times

The use of the words ‘working classes’ is interesting. The girl who wrote this letter must have met people from working-class backgrounds at university, but then, perhaps by definition, they had already become middle-class. Recently, when a Sunday paper published a middle-class man’s account of how he swept the streets for six months as an experiment, what came across was the monotony, the hard grind, and the way people in the street behaved as though he didn’t exist —was a ‘non-person’ in fact. Evidently the only compensation for working in a factory is that it teaches you to lip-read.

If the career is the supreme reality to the middle classes, the worst thing about the working classes, said Ernest Bevin, was their poverty of ambition. They are far more interested in good pay than job satisfaction. In a recent survey 96 per cent of clerks interviewed thought that pay was less important than prospects, but only 20 per cent of the manual workers wanted to be promoted to foreman. Promotion would involve too much commitment to the management and much less overtime pay. If Mr Definitely-Disgusting is made a foreman, he finds himself in an ambiguous position. The management think of him as a junior executive, but he wants his fellow workers to think of him as one of the boys. He also finds he has to cajole and threaten to make the slacker on the assembly line pull his finger out. The only thing Mr D-D’s really good at is assembling cars—and he doesn’t do that any more. If he works too hard, even on the factory floor, he’ll show up his colleagues and they’ll resent it. To rise is to feel less secure; paranoia is the disease of the upwardly mobile.

If Mr D-D wants to get on, therefore, it’s far easier to become a shop steward and rise through the unions. Then he can have a chauffeur-driven car, expense-account lunches, first-class tickets, trips to Brighton, Blackpool and abroad, and the ear of the Prime Minister, all without losing the respect of the shop floor.

For the middle classes it is much easier to move upwards. By hard work and a bit of luck, a man in Unilever can become managing director of sausages at 28, then move on through soap, and toothpaste up to the central board.

The tradition of the working classes is a fatalistic acceptance of hierarchy and status. Mr D-D’s hopes for the future are based on the price he and his mates can get for the work they do. This is emphasized by the belief that they will do better by collective bargaining under appointed union leaders, who often manipulate their demands, rigging ballots and forcing them to come out on strike. Striking is also a good way for union leaders, shop stewards, pickets, even Mr Definitely-Disgusting to get on Telly, and have Auntie Edna ringing up from Darlington after
News at Ten
, screaming excitedly, ‘We’ve just seen you’. Even Mrs Definitely-Disgusting was asked for her autograph the time she attacked a picket with her shopping bag during the lorry drivers’ strike.

It’s significant that two of the great working-classes heroes are Harvey Smith and Oliver Reed, two bruisers who are totally unafraid of, and repeatedly raise two-fingers at, the Establishment.

As work on the whole is hell, the working-class man likes to keep home and work quite separate. Mr Definitely-Disgusting comes home, having been bossed about all day, and wants his tea on the table. Nor does he see work as a place where he makes new friends or joins social clubs. He couldn’t go to one of these clubs in his overalls, all sweaty from work, and once he’s out of the place, he doesn’t want to have to go home, clean up, change and come back. Firm’s social clubs and societies for this reason are almost exclusively middle-class.

When work is so exacting, monotonous and unrewarding, it is hardly surprising that workers seeing people having candle-lit dinners, frisking on sundrenched beaches and driving blondes in fast cars every night on television, often fail to clock in.

At British Leyland if Mr Definitely-Disgusting works for three months without taking a weekday off, his and Mrs D-D’s names are included in a draw for a fortnight in Majorca. For those who can go for two months without playing hooky there’s a chance of five days in Belgian beer halls, after which you’ll probably need a month to recover. If you don’t go to work because you’re ill, the working class refer to it as being ‘on the sick’, which sounds awfully slippery.

Within the working classes themselves, there are also numerous rankings. We know of the Respectable and the Rough, and those in work despising those who are unemployed. There are also great divides between skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. There is great kudos in being skilled as my hairdresser pointed out: ‘My Dad works at Vauxhall on the cars—skilled of course. Then there’s my father-in-law on nights at Fords, earns £200 a week, but he only does two hours a night, spends the rest of the time learning Spanish. He’s skilled too.’

There is also status in having the power to paralyse. The biggest rewards go to the workers who, if they stop work, do the most harm to the country collectively. Thus miners, power workers, dockers, engineers and lorry drivers are the new élite who can bring the country to its knees, while the poor postmen, firemen and ambulance men, who have less clout, slink home without a decent rise. (The spiralist would call it a ‘raise’.)

Mining and quarrying is regarded as much grander than building, because it’s not casual work. Engineers regard themselves as the cream of the working class. Printers are evidently the most imaginative and intelligent. Miners in Britain know that their counterparts in Poland are payed twice as much as dons and doctors, and are biding their time.

CHOOSING A CAREER

The great problem when the working-class school leaver looks for a career is the discrepancy between fantasy and actuality. According to a Careers Officer: ‘Jasmin comes in with one C.S.E. in needlework and says she wants to be a brain surgeon. “How about nursing?” you say. No, if she can’t be a brain surgeon, she wants to be an architect. Some school leavers fancy science, but they think it’s going to be all “Eureka! I’ve discovered a new gas and I’ll be awarded the Nobel prize my first week.” They also love anything with a ‘y’: psychiatry, psychology—not having a clue what it involves. Of course all the E.S.N. automatically go into a factory.’

E.S.N. stands for educationally sub-normal, which Dive Definitely-Disgusting is not. With one C.S.E., he wants to be a helicopter pilot; he doesn’t know how to fly, but they’ll learn him. A few years ago he might have gone into ‘The Print’ as he calls newspapers, but they’re not taking on any more apprentices; or he might have trained as a motor mechanic, because it would have been his only chance of handling a car, but now his father’s got a second-hand Vauxhall, the job has rather lost its appeal.

Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, who accompanied Dive to the interview with the careers officer, thinks he ought to learn a trade, then he’d be skilled, definitely. Dive rather likes the idea of being a tool-setter, which he thinks is somefink to do with chisels and hammers, like, and he enjoyed woodwork at school. He might go in for television repair, then he can mend the knocked-off telly when it goes wrong, and he’s quite drawn to electronics, because he thinks it will involve somefink like that spaceship in
Star Wars
, and it’ll help him mend the knocked-off Hi Fi when that goes wrong, like.

As you need a good C.S.E. for bricklaying these days, Dive might have a crack at that. He’s read somewhere that hod-carriers earn £200 a week, and anyway it sounds rather grand if you refer to it as the construction industry. Anything to do with shops is known very grandiosely as retail distribution. Dive’s mite, Stan, has become a butcher’s assistant and refers to himself as a trainee manager.

Mrs Definitely-Disgusting, having scattered Coke tins and crisp packets over Wandsworth Common all weekend, wants to know if they’ve got anything on The Environment, y’know pollution and all that. Dive thinks this involves rushing around in a Land-Rover with a theodolite. Dive also fancies geology and marine biology, which he sees as whizzing around in jets, personally discovering crude oil. Like many town children, having seen green fields and sheep and cows and pigs and hens on telly, he believes he would enjoy forestry and farming. But the moment he gets to the country, he can’t bear the quiet, and there’s what he calls ‘no life, like’; so he wants to come back to the town again. Because he sees beaches and Martini ads on telly, he would also like to be a courier, anything where a golden-hearted employer will pay him to move about, and as he still identifies with Divid Bailey as a great working-class hero, and because 6/8ths of his holiday snaps came out, he quite wants to be a photographer.

Looking for a job at 16, he’ll probably be luckier than little Wayne Teale who’d been persuaded by Jen and Bryan to stay on until he’s 18, presuming there must be some lollipop at the end. A headmistress at a comprehensive school admitted that she uses class as a carrot, telling her girls that if they stay on longer and take G.C.E. they will get a job in a better firm, and more nicer girlfriends, and meet a better class of man. In fact, as the Careers Officer pointed out, it’s easier to get a job at sixteen because the employer feels he doesn’t have to pay you nearly as much as an eighteen-year-old.

Alas too, today’s more straight and sober teenagers are reaping the wild oats sown by the last hippy generation, who were so restless that they dropped out of any job after three months. In the end employers got fed up and now tend to employ Old Age Pensioners, rather than office juniors—they’re more reliable, they’re grateful for the work, and they don’t feel jobs like making the tea and doing the post are demeaning.

Even so Sharon Definitely Disgusting will probably end up in an office or a shop, which she always refers to as a ‘booteek’, unless it’s Woolworth, where she will call herself a trainee buyer. Mrs D-D would rather she worked in an office. If ‘they learn her to type’ she’ll become a ‘sekkertry’, go straight into Class III Nonmanual, and cross the great manual divide. She’d quite like Sharon to become a hairdresser—‘skilled’ again—and then she could do Gran’s hair on the weekend. But Sharon doesn’t like the idea: On your feet all day, and you have to work Sa-ur-days. She’d enjoy doing something with kiddies. (For 80 places last year Wandsworth Borough Council has 900 applicants.) She’d do anything not to have to work in a factory, or for some reason in a laundry, nor would she touch nursing—far too many soap-dodgers. But nursing is still very popular with West Indian young who regard it as a step up from Mum who used to clean wards when she first arrived from Jamaica.

Ten years ago, Sharon’s ambition would have been to become an air hostess, but as it would take her away from her steady boyfriend for such long stretches, she’d prefer to be a ground hostess. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting likes her at home, anyway. She’d like Dive to get on but she doesn’t have any real ambitions for Sharon. One working-class school-leaver in a very depressed area of the North managed very creditably against a lot of competition to get herself a job as a hotel receptionist. Her parents refused to let her take the job because they thought it would make her ‘too posh’ and they didn’t want her carrying on like they do in
Crossroads
.

WOMEN

The greatest occupational change in the last twenty-five years has been women going out to work, the telling statistic being that three-fifths of all working women now take non-manual jobs, while three-fifths of all working men do manual work. This is reflected in the vast shift to and swelling of Class III. With increased technology, the top Class I and II jobs have gone to men, and with women filling the increasing array of lower white-collar jobs. Consequently schools, for the first time, are taking seriously the fact that most women will work before and after they’re married.

One of the great job phenomena of the ’seventies was the way the upper classes took up cooking. All the debs take
cordon bleu
courses automatically now, instead of learning to type and undo the flowers. All their mothers cook like mad because they’ve got upper-class husbands with picky appetities, and have to organize grand house parties and dinner parties without servants. So it’s like falling off a house for them to cook for other people. The result is Caroline Stow-Crat organizing directors’ lunches and working wives’ buffet parties, starting take-away food shops and running Mrs Nouveau-Richards’ dinner parties.