Class

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘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.

  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 ov
er 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.