Family Britain, 1951-1957 (24 page)

Instead, if the middle class had any real cause to complain, it was the specifically
lower
middle class.11 Their children were being squeezed out of free grammar-school places by more prosperous members of the middle class who had previously paid for those places; their salaries were increasing by appreciably less than the wages of manual workers in a full-employment economy; and, as Lewis and Maude pointed out, they were in equal measure despised by the working class for their social pretensions and subservience, looked down on by the upper middle class and cruelly mocked by the intelligentsia. ‘Clerks had to live at an address approved by the bank, they had to ask permission from the bank manager to get married, they had to have “appropriate hobbies”, and they were evaluated once a year for such qualities as their appearance, their demeanour, and their loyalty,’ the sociologist Mike Savage has written on the basis of a close study of bank clerks. ‘To be a salaried worker did indeed involve selling yourself: in this respect the perception of male manual workers was entirely accurate.’

A clutch of authentic lower middle-class – or anyway, self-ascribed lower middle-class – voices comes through among M-O’s 1948 panel:

Lower-middle class. My income suggests nothing higher. Living in a working-class neighbourhood I find I am rejected, presumably because I don’t call my neighbours ‘mate’. I try to maintain certain standards of manners and morals and have received a university education which I have endeavoured to extend by selected experiences such as travel, music etc. Upper middle class life as I have once experienced it seems expensive, artificial and insincere. Working class would reject me (some of the worst snobs I’ve ever met are of this class) mainly because I think I have the audacity to think for myself and not accept ready-made ‘headline’ opinions.
(Schoolteacher)

Lower middle-class. By birth, upbringing and wish I feel I belong to this class. I am not working-class and not true middle-class, which I consider needs the qualification of private means of some sort for a generation or two and a public-school education. Yet I am of the professional class and therefore some sort of middle.
(Dental surgeon)

Lower Middle Class. Wages now about £460 a year. Feel that wages are the first consideration together with standard of living adopted. There are probably a considerable number of men earning more than I do whom I consider to be ‘working class’ because of their standard of living.
(Bank clerk)

‘E.G.,’ he added to cheer himself up, ‘earning £11 a week, perhaps living in some slum property and spending £6 or £7 a week on beer, tobacco and pools.’12

The whole question of how the working class was generally perceived is a difficult one, not least because – just as much as sex, politics and religion – class was traditionally not a fit subject for polite conversation. Back in the 1930s it had taken protracted agonising by the BBC before allowing a series of radio talks (wholly innocuous in the event) on the topic. Things were changing by the early 1950s, but not very fast, with honest, realistic, non-caricaturing/non-sentimental portraits and assessments of working-class life still largely off limits. ‘Beautiful, safe and middle-class is what you had to be, like Virginia McKenna,’ was how Sheila Hancock, brought up in King’s Cross, ruefully recalled her ‘difficulty getting launched’ as a young actress. It was different up to a point in the cinema – for instance,
It Always Rains on Sunday
(1947) was a convincing depiction of East End life – but only up to a point, while it was essentially the same in fiction. ‘Novels of working-class life are extremely rare, both in general and among the writers who succeed in being taken up by the arbiters of taste in the literary reviews, on the BBC, etc,’ the American sociologist Edward Shils observed as late as 1955. Moreover, to write about the working class was to risk the unmistakeable sniffiness of the brief
TLS
review two years earlier of Catherine Cookson’s Tyneside-set
Colour Blind
: ‘The general effect is noisy in the extreme, as though she were writing at the top of her voice; but presumably life in a crowded slum is in fact very noisy.’ Much, as Shils implied, turned on assumptions about the BBC as chief cultural arbiter. Pending the arrival of competition, it was still largely cast in an unrepentantly hierarchical Reithian mould. ‘A broadly based cultural pyramid slowly aspiring upwards,’ was how the director-general, Sir William Haley, conceived of the radio audience in 1948. ‘This pyramid is served by three main Programmes [ie Third, Home and Light], differentiated but broadly over-lapping in levels and interests, each Programme leading on to the other, the listener being induced through the years increasingly to discriminate in favour of the things that are more worthwhile.’13 It was not a vision that willingly embraced the demotic.

Unsurprisingly, the dominant sense is of the working class as living in a world apart from most other people – a world looked upon (inasmuch as it was not just simply ignored) with a mix of emotions, most of them negative or at best condescending. ‘The working man’s needs are simple,’ asserted Mr Buckle of Leicester in a 1946 letter to
The Times
explaining why incentives for increased production were unlikely to do the trick. ‘He wants a house to live in, a wife to cook his meals and look after his children; he wants a little to spare for a trip to the pictures with his wife, a pint or so of beer and a few smokes; and he wants money to keep up to this standard.’ Six years later another letter-writer was Phyllis Willmott, on the subject of the day care of young children. This contribution to an ongoing correspondence led to an invitation to a meeting held in a large, elegant room overlooking a Bloomsbury square. ‘There,’ she recalled, ‘I found myself facing a bevy of women seated around a long table. “Oh, Mrs Willmott,” exclaimed one of them who had rushed over to greet me, “we have all been so curious to meet you – for we couldn’t help wondering who could be writing to
The Times
from
Hackney
.” ’ Schools of course had their moments of collision between different worlds. The poet Tony Harrison (born 1937) grew up in a working-class part of Leeds and was brusquely told off by his English master at Leeds Grammar School for mispronouncing the word ‘us’ – an episode caught in his celebrated early poem ‘Them & [uz]’. Or take the case of the teacher Donald Lindsay, who after leaving Portsmouth Grammar School in 1953 to become headmaster of Malvern College was told on arrival, ‘We don’t want any of your state school ideas here.’14

There persisted an undeniably pervasive fear of the ‘common’. ‘If there was one consideration that determined my parents’ conduct and defined their position in the world it was not to be (or to be thought) common,’ Alan Bennett has memorably written; elsewhere in Leeds, Sheila Rowbotham, daughter of a salesman, had a childhood defined by her mother’s aversion to ‘common’ children who ‘scream and play rough games and get dirty’; while in Liverpool, John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi (whose husband ran a dairy business) was, in Hunter Davies’s words, ‘very protective, looking after him all the time, trying not to let him mix with what she called common boys’. There was perhaps no one more snobbish than the seaside landlady. ‘The older ones lament the difference today from pre-war times, when Newquay was filled up by professional people and middle-class families generally,’ reported
Picture Post
from Cornwall in 1952. ‘Higher wages and holidays with pay and the poverty of the middle classes have changed all that. Now “it’s a different class of people we get. They’re nice enough. But there’s just no comparison with the people we used to have.” ’ That same year, the
News Chronicle
reported an agitated debate in Littlehampton about the ‘disorderly parking of coaches on the sea-front’ and the resulting ‘tripper menace’:

For 1¾ hours the chairman banged for order while 176 ratepayers voiced protests at the ‘gradual decline of the town’.

Women in evening dresses cat-called and jeered across the ballroom where the meeting was held, and one said: ‘I have lived here a long time and seen this very nice town become horrid’.

A man in tweeds said: ‘Let us consider how we may exercise a gentle control of the trippers’ activities’.

Another said: ‘Let us park the cars and coaches away from the seafront and increase charges to dissuade certain types’.

The future lay with the fun-seeking south London working class, and in due course a coach park was built. ‘Is it necessary to so encourage day trippers?’ a local woman forlornly asked at another meeting. ‘This is a free country,’ replied the chairman, ‘and we are powerless to stop them.’15

Was there an element of sexual envy? Probably – though when Mass-Observation in 1949 asked its panel about the ideal size of a family, with particular reference to working-class families, mention of the act of procreation was noticeable by its absence. No occupations were given, but the addresses confirm one’s impression of an overwhelmingly middle-class set of respondents:

There is still a need to increase the knowledge of birth control amongst working-class families.
(‘Stonycroft’, Rockland Road, Grange-over-Sands, Lancs)

Working-class families seem to have more children, either through laziness or ignorance.
(Gresham Road, Staines)

They [ie working-class families] could perhaps have more children as they wouldn’t want to educate them privately.
(Castle View Road, Weybridge, Surrey)

No children, unless they could afford to keep them properly.
(Somerset Road, Farnborough, Hants)

Lack of education allows them too much money & freedom, & lack of self control.
(‘Kemp House’, The Avenue, Birtley, Co Durham)

Owing to greater crowding of homes, the children can get companionship from neighbours. A smaller family will suffice.
(Greenbank Drive, Edinburgh 10)

If the working class do not get a better knowledge of what a civilised human being should develop like, I would suggest NO CHILDREN.
(Combe Park, Bath)

Two only [compared to an ideal of five for the middle class] if income low.
(Belgrave Crescent, Sunbury-on-Thames)

It would be desirable to reduce the number of children to two [four for the middle class], as working-class families breed a poor stock too rapidly, resulting in too many of this class in proportion to the others.
(Harcourt Road, Redland, Bristol)

One of the replies came from Dr Alex Comfort (Honor Oak Road, SE23), future bestselling author of
The Joy of Sex
(1972) in a somewhat less censorious age. Comfort declared that working-class families, ‘when living in a genuinely social community, display better maternal physique and morale, and can contemplate larger families provided they have a genuine option’.

There is little doubt what one Islington teacher thought about the working class. ‘Notice in so many windows of Council flats the model of an Alsatian dog in plaster where once the aspidistra stood,’ observed Gladys Langford in 1949. ‘These highly coloured figures are even less beautiful than the plants.’ Three years later, by this time retired, she went one Friday afternoon in June to Chapel Street market:

It was very crowded. Nearly every woman of child-bearing age was pregnant and many were pushing prams as well and these often had more than one infant in them already. It was shocking to see how many of these women were very dirty. They practically all had a smear of lipstick and most of them had had their hair ‘permed’ at some time but their eyes were gummy, their necks & ears were dirty and their bare legs grimy. These are the people who are multiplying so fast and whereas once a number of their children would have died now, thanks to pre-natal and post-natal clinics, most of their children will live – and will choose those who are to govern us. Anyhow I shall be safely dead by that time.

Her distaste extended to the people’s friend, a Yorkshireman who as never before on British radio gave a platform to working-class voices. ‘For the first – and last – time I listened to Wilfred Pickles who was speaking about his visit to Hoxton,’ she noted in 1953. ‘How people can endure his programme [
Have a Go!
] week after week, I do not know. He is nauseatingly cheerful, telling people how wonderful they are, exhorting bed-ridden people to “keep smiling” and asking sodden beer-drinkers for their “philosophy”.’

So too, at least on the surface, for another middle-class diarist, Nella Last. ‘Trippers poured in – some of the “lowest” type I’ve ever seen,’ she recorded in 1947 while on holiday in Scarborough: ‘Dirty old women who have come on charabancs as if on a works or street outing, the worse for drink just after lunch & bawling & singing & sitting helplessly round. I thought we had seen some queer ones at Blackpool but Yorkshire mill workers seem more uncouth & “rough” both in speech & behaviour – the children I’ve heard threatened with a “real good battering”!’ Even so, three days later in her hotel, she had something of an epiphany. Almost certainly she was referring to middle-class as well as working-class people, and it is perhaps a salutary reminder of not only the limits of class analysis, but also the abiding importance of the fundamental, essentially Victorian, supra-class divide between the respectable and everybody else: ‘Somehow looking round the dining room, hearing little snatches of conversation between children & parents, seeing the love & “ordinariness” of the little families, makes me feel more convinced of “things all coming right”. Over sexed, neurotic, & down right
silly
people get into the news, but we have a solid layer of “ordinary” folk, decent in their ways, loving home & children & doing each day’s tasks well, neither looking back or too far forward . . .’16