by Jilly Cooper
‘It takes many years,’ writes Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, for the outsider to master those complex, subtle distinctions, those nuances of accent, attitude and behaviour which went, indeed which go, into that living, changing thing—English upper-class snobbery. He might have added that this is true of any class’s snobbery.
When Class was eventually published in 1979, it caused a fearful rumpus. Having written most of it hiding in the potting shed, to avoid our creditors, I was enchanted when it stayed on the best seller list for 20 weeks. Less fun was promoting it round the country. I was berated by tattooed and nose-studded radio presenters. I was shouted down by miners, egged on by Lord Montague of Beaulieu.
The Duke of Edinburgh attacked me at a Hatchard’s party, snarling that the class system no longer existed.
‘That’s odd,’ I said politely, ‘According to the 1971 Census, which categorizes people’s social class by their occupation, Princess Anne, as an event rider, is the same class: 111 (Non Manual) as a game keeper.’
‘Rubbish,’ thundered the Duke, ‘Keepers are working class.’
I got the most flak for being beastly to the working classes, by calling the couple who portrayed them: Mr and Mrs Definitely Disgusting. This was not because I thought them remotely disgusting, but because, as I point out, in reply to questions on everything from encroaching gypsy encampments to rocketing gas bills, they would tend to snort:
‘Disgusting! Definitely.’
The main difference today is that they would probably say:
‘Disgusting! Definitely. “Social” wouldn’t unblock our drains for nuffink, and they didn’t offer us any counselling neither.’
Having suffered so much opprobrium when Class came out I have hardly glanced at the book since, only opening it with colossal trepidation, like Pandora’s Box, because my publishers suggested in view of this beautiful new reprint, I might like to draw readers’ attention to how the class system has changed.
My first reaction was how on earth had I been brave or crazy enough to write all these things. But settling down, I realized I had been looking at a different era. For in 1979, everything changed. Margaret Thatcher came to power, and suddenly the English became obsessed with making money, buying their own houses, and rising socially. The Yuppie was born. Throughout the same time, recession kicked in, the stock market crashed, the power of the unions was broken. More tragically a new cardboard boxed underclass, suffering appalling poverty, grew up, which had hardly existed when I was writing.
Another tragedy I hadn’t anticipated was the demise of the miner. Back in 1979, he was the ultimate macho hero, king of the working classes. Mining, as I write on page 150, was regarded as much grander than building because it was a steady job. I also singled out miners, power workers, dockers, engineers and lorry drivers as the new élite, because by striking they had the power to bring the country to its knees.
Their hour of glory was brief, as pit after pit closed down. Today with short-term contracts, loss of pension and no certainty of a job for life, or in the poor miners’ case, no job at all, the majority of the working classes have suffered.
I also state on page 149 that becoming a shop steward was the easiest way for a working class boy to get on, but since the weakening of the unions, this no longer applies.
But not only the working classes lost clout. ‘Lorses’ at Lloyds decimated the upper classes more effectively than any revolution and the middle classes, who are light years behind the working classes when it comes to working social security and the black economy, have also been laid off in the most brutal way. There’s no kudos in working at a desk if it has to be cleared in an afternoon.
Much of what I wrote on my chapter on education, I think, still stands, except that since 1979 drugs have invaded all schools, and girls most of the public schools.
Eton has been one of the few schools resisting the latter.
‘If one is caught in bed with a girl,’ grumbled a young Etonian, ‘one gets chucked out, but if you’re caught with a boy, you get two hours gardening.’
Other changes were more of detail. Only the poorest of the working classes no longer have refrigerators. Mrs Definitely Disgusting has a hair dryer now instead of wearing her curlers to the corner shop and working class streets are entwined with satellite dishes like columbines. Upper class girls flaunt tattoos and nose-studs like radio presenters. Upper class mothers no longer wear fur coats and only think babygros are common if they have logos on. Many of the regiments I wrote about have sadly been amalgamated or disbanded. Many men’s clubs now allow in women and are particularly charming to them.
Generally though, I was surprised and pleased, despite these changes, how the archetypes I’d created behave in just the same way today, and can be found in Harry Enfield’s working class couple, Wayne and Waynetta, in his chinless wonder, Tim Nice But Dim, and in the socially mountaineering Hyacinth Bucket—all characters we love as we laugh at them.
As a writer, one must stand by one’s prejudices. I have therefore only made a dozen or so small changes to the text, where I felt I had been totally inaccurate or unnecessarily cruel or insensitive.
I realize the entire book is wildly politically incorrect. This is as it should be, because political correctness with its insistence on verbosity and the use of euphemisms, like ‘lone parent’, ‘replacement mother’, ‘sibling’, ‘vertically challenged’ for short, ‘young woman’ for girl, ‘member of the homeless community’ for tramp, the dreadful ‘partner’ for lover, is irredeemably genteel and lower middle class.
As Class is a study of twenty years ago, we have left people’s titles, prices and figures as they were then. It was a happy day when you could get a temporary secretary for £50 a week.
Flipping through the pages, I felt a huge sadness that so many of the friends who’d helped me with the book or contributed marvellous anecdotes: Frankie Howerd, Frank Muir, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery, Reginald Bousanquet, Jean Rook, to name only a few, are now dead.
When I went on Yorkshire television with the splendidly redoutable Miss Rook in the early seventies, the interviewer began most embarrassingly by saying:
‘Now here you are: two columnists from Yorkshire but from very different backgrounds. You’re working class aren’t you, Jean. And Jilly, you’re upper class?’
We both shrieked with horror.
‘I’m middle, not upper,’ I muttered going scarlet.
‘I’m upper-middle,’ said Jean witheringly, ‘I know lots of duchesses.’
Even people who pretend class doesn’t exist are affected by it. I am reminded of a psychiatrist who was treating an aristocrat for depression. A month went by and they seemed to be making little progress.
‘I want you to be completely honest,’ said the psychiatrist at the next session, ‘and tell me exactly what’s in your mind at the moment.’
‘I was thinking,’ said the aristocrat apologetically, ‘what a vulgar little man you are.’
It was their final session. The psychiatrist was unable to go on because he’d completely lost any feeling of ascendancy.
‘And so,’ wrote John Coleman in the Sunday Times, ‘the old movements of social advance and recoil go on, just as much as they always did. It is the perpetual inaccuracy of imitation that makes up the English social comedy and tragedy.’
But there is plenty of comedy. As a small boy at my son’s prep school once pointed out in an essay,
‘All people should be gentlemen except ladies, but it puts a bit of variety into life if some are not.’
I am very aware of the inadequacies of this book. I have made many sweeping generalizations, which I hope people won’t take too seriously, because other classes are not better or worse than one’s own, they are merely different.
One need look no further for an example than Dame Barbara Cartland being interviewed, back in the seventies, by Sandra Harris on the Today programme and being asked whether she thought the class b
arriers had broken down.
‘Of course they have,’ said Dame Barbara, ‘or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.’
1 THE CLASSES
THE ARISTOCRACY
All the world loves a titled person
According to sociologists the aristocracy is such a tiny minority—about 0.2% of the population—as to be statistically negligible. The ones who do not work or who run their own estates are not even listed in the Census. They are like the scattering of herbs and garlic of top of a bowl of dripping, or more poetically, like water lilies that float, beautiful and, some would say, useless, on the surface of a pond. Being a peer, of course, doesn’t make you an aristocrat. Only about half the nobility are aristocracy, the rest being life peers, and only about a third of the aristocracy are ennobled, the rest being families of younger sons, or country squires living in manor houses, some of whom have had money and influence for far longer and can trace their families much further back than many a Duke or Earl.
A good example of this is Mrs James, the aristocrat in Pamela Hansford Johnson’s novel The Unspeakable Skipton. Mrs James had an air of undefinable authority and spoke in a direct and barking shorthand:
‘Feel sorry for poor Alf Dorset, son’s marrying some girl who sings on the wireless.’ Unbound by convention, she made all her own rules, making a point of going everywhere out of season.
‘That’s why seasons are inevitably such a flop,’ says one of the other characters, ‘because if they’re out of season they’re wrong anyway, and if they’re in season, Mrs James had buzzed off to Gozo or somewhere extraordinary.’
As so many of the aristocracy don’t have titles they regard Burke’s, which covers the landed gentry as well as the peerage, as far more important source books than Debrett’s. One peer told his secretary she must get up-to-date copies of Burke’s ‘so you’ll know all the people I’m talking about’. The point about the aristocracy is that they all know each other.
Traditionally, as will be shown in later chapters, the aristocracy didn’t work for their living and, although many of them have jobs today, they find difficulty in applying the same dedication to their work as the middle classes.
They used, of course, to be terribly rich. At the turn of the century, if you were asked to stay at Woburn one chauffeur and a footman would take you as far as Hendon, where another chauffeur and a footman would be waiting to take you to Woburn. As a gentleman never travelled with his luggage, another two cars were needed to carry that. So it meant two chauffeurs and two footmen to get you and your luggage as far as Hendon, and two more chauffeurs and footmen to take you to Woburn—eight men to transport one guest for heaven knows how large a house party, down to the country. The Marquess of Hertford had a house in Wales he’d never been to, but where, every night, a huge dinner was cooked by a fleet of servants in case he did turn up.
The Westminsters today own 300 acres in Belgravia and Oxford Street, 12,000 acres around Eaton, 14,000 acres in North Wales, 1,000 acres in Kent, 400 acres in Shropshire, 800 acres in New South Wales, 1,000 acres in British Columbia, Hawaii and Australia. The present Duke inherited £16 million on his 21st birthday. Hardly the bread line.
Today, as a result of death duties and capital transfer tax, most aristocrats are desperately poor in comparison with their grandfathers and are reduced to renting off wings as apartments, selling paintings, turning their gardens into zoos and amusement parks, and letting the public see over their houses. Anyone who has experienced the nightmare of showing a handful of people over their own house when they put it up for sale will understand the horror of having a million visitors a year peering into every nook and cranny.
Although they have considerable influence in the Tory party, the aristocracy no longer run the country as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But if their privileges have been eroded, their responsibilities remain the same: responsibilities to the tenants, to the community (the good aristocrat always has a strong sense of public duty) and to the house he lives in, often so beautiful as to be a national monument, but to the upkeep of which the nation pays no contribution.
One of the characteristics of the aristocrat is the extreme sentiment he feels towards his house and his inheritance. His wife is expected to feel the same. When the Marchioness of Tavistock recently expressed her boredom at running Woburn her father-in-law’s sharp reaction was quoted in the Daily Mail:
‘If you marry some guy with a title, you have a duty and a responsibility to carry on what his ancestors did in the past. She was perfectly aware of what she was getting into. Trouble is she’s an only child.’
Because they believe in their inheritance, the upper classes set enormous store by keeping things in the family. They don’t buy their houses like the middle classes, they inherit them. When the house gets too big for a grandfather and grandmother, they might move into a smaller house on the estate, to make way for their eldest son, but they leave all the furniture behind, as their ancestors have for generations. One definition of the middle classes is the sort of people who have to buy their own silver.
Because the aristocracy were so anxious to preserve their inheritance, they tended only to marry their own kind. The middle classes married for love. The upper classes married to preserve their rank. All twenty-six Dukes are, at present, related to one another. And as long as rank was protected, and money obtained in sufficient quantities to support that rank, infidelity after marriage was taken for granted, as Vita Sackville-West points out in her novel The Edwardians:
‘A painter,’ screamed the Duchess, ‘What painter? Sylvia Roehampton’s daughter to marry a painter? But of course she won’t. You marry Tony Wexford, and we’ll see what can be done about the painter afterwards.’
As they weren’t expected to be faithful, unlike the middle classes they didn’t feel guilty if they wandered, which explains the over-active libido of the aristocrat. He expected to exercise droit de seigneur over his tenants but he also saw himself as a Knight Errant like Don Quixote living in a world of romantic adventure. ‘When your ancestors have been fighting battles and seducing women for thousands of years,’ said one German nobleman, ‘it’s terribly difficult to settle down to one wife and an office job.’
As a result of all this infidelity a high proportion of the aristocracy is irregularly conceived, but, as they tend to sleep with each other, they’re still pretty dotty with inbreeding. When my uncle was Lord Spencer’s agent, my aunt said she met all the local aristocracy, many of them as mad as hatters. When they talked about one of their friends ‘coming out’, you never knew if they were doing the season, or being discharged from a psychiatric clinic.
Colossal self-confidence is perhaps the hallmark of the aristocrat. Like the chevalier he goes through life unafraid; he doesn’t question his motives or feel guilty about his actions. When I went shooting in Northumberland last summer I noticed a beautiful blond young man in a red sweater at the next butt. Why didn’t he have to wear green camouflage like the rest of us, I asked.
‘Because he’s a duke’s son,’ said my host. ‘He can do what he likes.’
Not answerable to other people, the aristocrat is often unimaginative, spoilt, easily irritated and doesn’t flinch from showing it. If he wants to eat his peas with his knife he does so.
‘Dear Kate,’ said Henry V, ‘You and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion; we are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults.’
As the maker of manners, many of the aristocracy, while feeling they have a duty towards the community as Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants, are indifferent to public opinion.
‘One doesn’t care what the press say,’ said the Marquess of Anglesey at a dinner party. ‘One’s friends know what one’s like and that’s all that matters.’ The only thing he minded, he went on, was that the National Trust film on television had said he was very rich. The hostess then asked him if he’d li
ke moussaka or cold turkey.
‘I’d like both,’ he said.
Not caring a stuff what people think also leads to a rich vein of eccentricity: the Marquess of Londonderry throwing soup at a fly that was irritating him in a restaurant, and Sir Anthony Eden’s father hurling a barometer out of the window into the pouring rain, yelling, ‘See for yourself, you bloody thing.’
Or there was the imperious peer who, when he missed a train, ordered the station-master to get him another one.
Professor Ross has said that above a certain level all U people are equal. With respect, I think few upper class people would agree with him. The ancient aristocracy consider it very vulgar to have been founded after the Tudors, which puts most of our present Dukes beyond the pale. In fact, in the nineteenth century many of them were so worried about the comparative youthfulness of their families that they employed genealogists to try and trace their ancestry back to the Conqueror.
When Oliver Lyttelton was made Viscount Chandos, his wife Lady Moira, who was the daughter of the 10th Duke of Leeds, was furious at becoming Lady Chandos, and having ostensibly to drop rank. Oliver Lyttelton was evidently so thrilled to be ennobled that he went round putting coronets on everything, including books of matches. Brian Masters in his book The Dukes tells a story of the Duchesses of Buccleuch and Westminster sidling through a door together in their determination not to cede precedence.
Between aristocrats and other classes there is certainly a barrier of rank. My mother and father used to live near Hampton Court Palace, where widows of distinguished men, some of them aristocrats, have apartments. My mother met a peer’s widow at a drinks party and they got on so well that my mother wrote to her next day asking her to dine. Back came a letter of acceptance but with a P.S. ‘I hope you don’t mind my pointing out, Elaine dear, that the Palace should be the first to issue invitations.’
Brian Masters thinks this obsession with rank probably had something to do with boredom. Without a career, the aristocrat had to fill his days. He was not a great intellectual: Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot, whose reading consisted of his own entry in The Baronetage, is fairly near the mark. He preferred more exciting entertainment, hence his addiction to blood sports and to gambling. I shall never forget watching an aristocrat and a television newsreader playing backgammon one evening. The newsreader’s wife, who was ravishingly beautiful and bored with the lack of attention, suddenly came in with no clothes on and danced round and round them. Neither of them took any notice.
