‘GRAMMAR SCHOOL BOYS DID IT’ was the Daily Sketch’s exultant headline in January 1958 after the Atomic Energy Authority announced that a team of young British scientists at Harwell had produced the world’s first controlled fusion reaction. This was ZETA, the Zero-Energy Thermonuclear Assembly, ‘a 120-ton yellow and black painted reactor’ that was a man-made sun on earth and held out the promise of limitless fuel. Sadly, that promise flattered to deceive, but the emphasis on ‘a team of grammar school and scholarship boys’ was a reminder of how the scientific and technological thrust of grammar schools and red-brick universities was an increasingly frequent element in the advance of the new men. Two of engineering’s notable new men by the late 1950s were James Drake and Denis Rooke. Drake, Accrington-born and spiky, was Britain’s first great motorway creator, with a vision of roads like ‘sculpture on an exciting, grand scale’, carving and moulding ‘earth, rock and minerals into a finished product’; the lantern-jawed, no-nonsense Rooke, in his mid-thirties and the son of a south London commercial traveller, had recently joined the North Thames Gas Board to explore the crucial possibility of importing natural gas. In 1959 he was in charge of the technical team aboard the Methane Pioneer, as it transported liquefied gas from the Gulf of Mexico to Canvey Island on a storm-tossed, 23-day voyage.3
The meritocratic businessman was also afoot, with a trio poised around the end of the 1950s for great things. For the implacably rational Arnold Weinstock, son of Jewish refugees from Poland, the start of a remarkable career in electronic manufacturing was the 30-year-old’s arrival in 1954 at the firm of his father-in-law Michael Sobell, who made radio and television sets. ‘With colossal self-confidence he immediately took charge, largely ignoring his 63-year-old father-in-law, who was suffering from prostate problems,’ records a biographer. ‘Weinstock concentrated on producing – efficiently and profitably – basic products that worked, in contrast to his competitors, dominated by engineers who did not believe as did Weinstock that “the customer is king”.’ By 1958, when the firm was floated under the name of Radio and Allied, Weinstock was ‘established as among the most formidable operators in the whole electrical sector’. At the textile manufacturers Courtaulds, the rising star was Frank Kearton, whose way to the top was blocked by the ageing, indeed failing, Sir John Hanbury-Williams. The thrusting Kearton had been educated at Hanley High School, the gentlemanly Hanbury-Williams at Wellington College, and the former’s ‘barely concealed contempt’ was reciprocated by the latter’s ‘active dislike’. There were no tantrums at the merchant bank Schroders, where Gordon Richardson was on a rapid upward curve. The son of a Nottingham provision merchant, he had become a successful barrister before in 1955 trying his luck in the financial world, going to the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (the future 3i). There he was unhappy, according to a mole, because ‘it is not the kind of business nor does he in general meet the sort of people which he hoped for when he left the Bar’. But by 1957 this handsome, imposing, intelligent man, vanity his only Achilles heel, was ensconced among the City’s crème de la crème, just as the post-war revival of the Square Mile was at last getting under way.4
Inevitably, the meritocrats – almost all of them male – would flourish especially in the media and the arts. Robert Robinson, a product of Raynes Park County Grammar School under the famed headmastership of John Garrett, wrote sardonic radio criticism for the Sunday Times and from 1959 was the astringent presenter of television’s Picture Parade about current films. The Manchester Guardian’s features editor Brian Redhead, son of a Newcastle printer, would also make the transition to the small screen, though in his inveterately loquacious case radio ultimately loomed. Another northern journalist, Harold Evans, son of a railwayman, was a wiry, energetic assistant editor of the Manchester Evening News; meanwhile Jean Rook, Hull-born daughter of an engineer and an usherette, was gearing up on the Sheffield Telegraph to take on the world. Keith Waterhouse, whose father walked about Leeds selling produce from a barrow, was on the Daily Mirror and by 1958 writing his second novel, about an undertaker’s assistant (as he himself had been) who was a habitual fantasist; another young novelist, Malcolm Bradbury, first-generation grammar school let alone university, debuted in 1959 with Eating People is Wrong, about the dilemmas of a red-brick university professor. The as yet unpublished B. S. Johnson, undergraduate at King’s College London and son of a stock-keeper, threw a party at his parents’ home in Barnes, but not before taking down from the wall of the lounge the three horribly tell-tale flying ducks, unfortunately leaving marks that provoked amused comments. John Carey, accountant’s son and from a grammar school in East Sheen, had his first teaching job at Christ Church, Oxford, full of window-smashing public schoolboys, and spent his time ‘totting up how much more their clothes had cost than I earned’; a more attractively self-possessed Oxford undergraduate, Ian Hamilton, launched the literary magazine Tomorrow, having already at grammar school in Darlington started The Scorpion and got Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson and Cecil Day Lewis among others to contribute. Two young, already well-established theatre directors, Tony Richardson (son of a pharmacist) and Peter Hall (son of a stationmaster), were facing the future with high artistic ambition and seemingly inexhaustible drive, while John Thaw, son of a Mancunian lorry driver, arrived as a 16-year-old at RADA in 1958 ‘dressed like a typical teddy boy’, whereas ‘the other kids all looked so bloody superior, I’ve never felt so alone in all my life’. Stanley Baker, from the Rhondda Valley and close to rivalling Dirk Bogarde as Britain’s leading male film star, brought working-class machismo and sexual arrogance to Joseph Losey’s 1959 Blind Date; that same year Terence Donovan, from the Mile End Road, set up his own studio, just before Leytonstone’s David Bailey, while the third of what Cecil Beaton would ruefully call ‘The Terrible Three’ of fashion photographers, East Ham’s Brian Duffy, was already shooting for Vogue, ‘an easy way to make money’. A defiantly non-fashion photographer, Don McCullin, whose Finsbury Park childhood had been dominated by weekly trips to the pawn shop, had his picture of a gang posing on an old bombed-out building published by the Observer in 1959 and suddenly was in demand (‘that little thing inside me knew this was the only hope of having a life’). The artist Peter Blake, son of a Dartford electrician, was starting to embrace, in a contemporary yet nostalgic way, the popular culture of postcards and pin-ups. The self-educated, self-made Bryan Robertson, who had had a hard childhood in Battersea, was several years into the directorship of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and becoming the witty, generous presiding spirit of the British art world. Zandra Rhodes, her mother a fitter at a fashion house, was at Medway College of Art; Lionel Bart, son of an East End tailor, wrote his first songs for Tommy Steele and enjoyed claiming he could not tell the difference between A flat and a council flat; and Joe Meek, whose father had run a fish-and-chip shop on the edge of the Forest of Dean, was the engineer on ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ and, by 1958, was writing home that ‘I’m sure your Son is going to be famous one day Mum, as things are going I am very well known in the whole record world and have a very good name too.’5
Few if any of that gallery, though, were classic meritocrats – ‘classic’ in the sense of passing the triple historical test of (a) being born in 1933 or later, (b) being working-class and (c) going to grammar school as a direct beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act and using that education as a ladder for further advancement. It was those meritocrats who were, par excellence, ‘Britain’s New Class’, as sharply described in Encounter in February 1958 by Frank Hilton, himself from a grammar school (though born in 1929) and now a teacher:
Our underdogs are on the move today . . . In some ways everything and anything is possible. But they don’t know where to start. They have no background that could have nursed their talents and trained them how to use them. They have only their intelligence, their energy, and too much choice. So they have no confidence and approach everything with suspicion. They loathe the scullery, the kitchen, and the front room
they’ve left behind, and most of them – whatever they may care to say to the contrary – look upon their mums and dads as semi-prehistoric creatures, evolutionary missing links between the gin-and-work-sodden 19th-century working-class ape-man and the modern Grammar School-Redbrick university-Sergeants’/Officers’ Mess working-class ‘cream’.
This arguably overheated depiction prompted Joe Lampton’s creator to respond from Bingley. ‘As for the New Men,’ predicted Braine, ‘they will be quite content with a little house, car, wife, TV, and a bottle of gin in the sideboard. And if they work hard enough they will get them. And what on earth is wrong with that? Only a tiny minority, thank God, ever wants power.’
Dennis Potter was undeniably a classic meritocrat. The son of a coal miner in the Forest of Dean, he went to Bell’s Grammar School in Coleford and then, in 1956, to New College, Oxford, richly populated with Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘The few other grammar-school boys were creeps, adopting as many mannerisms of Oxford as they could and distancing themselves from their past,’ he recalled. ‘I took to being aggressive and making an issue of it.’ Part of that aggression was keeping his accent intact, and he rapidly began to make a university name for himself as both a debater and an actor, as well as writing for Isis, with a first article unashamedly describing his personal background. ‘There’s nothing more terrifying than a young man on the make,’ he conceded many years later. ‘And of course I was feeling these things, but at the same time I was manipulating the very feelings that I was in a sense enduring. Therefore I went out of my way [to say] “My father is a miner.” Which of course is a slightly more complicated sort of betrayal.’ Potter’s second year featured an acrimonious spat with fellow undergraduate Brian Walden, an article in the New Statesman on being torn between two worlds and a book contract for a state-of-the-nation tract, culminating in August 1958 in a lengthy interview on a BBC television documentary about class. ‘Do you want to become classless, Mr Potter?’ asked Christopher Mayhew. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Well, I did at one stage, I think, like most people from the working classes want to get away from the working class, but I certainly want to keep a sense of identity, as it were, with that background.’ Yet, as Potter went on to explain, that sense of identity was far from untroubled:
By now my father is forced to communicate with me almost, as it were, with a kind of contempt, now and again. It is inevitable. I mean, he does everything he can possibly do to get through to me, and I to him, but it is just that our circumstances make this communication rather difficult. I mean, he is likely to ask me a question through my mother, for example. And a little thing like the allocation of radio time – it might seem small, petty. If I want something on which is likely to be – in fact very often is – very different from what the rest of the family want, then, well, this is likely to spotlight the tensions. The little petty things like that. I mean, I have a row with my sister, inevitably, over whether we should have something like Life with the Lyons on, or not. And, well, I – it’s at times like this that I think, oh darn, why does one have one way of life, and you just can’t come to terms with it ever again?
Potter by his last year was an established star at the Oxford Union – ‘in a slashing peroration he denounced the Tory chrome-plated coffee-bar civilization,’ reported Peter Jay in November 1958 – and, after taking an undistinguished Second (having barely worked) he slipped into a BBC traineeship in July 1959.
Two other ‘classics’ began at Oxford in 1957, a year after Potter. ‘My room in Somerville was on the ground floor of the library block, a large, square, high-ceilinged room with a mullioned window overlooking a lawn shadowed by a huge cedar tree,’ remembered Margaret Forster, daughter of a fitter at the Metal Box factory in Carlisle. ‘It was easily four times the size of any room at home and the sheer space thrilled me.’ Writing essays about medieval history proved less thrilling – ‘it was such an unreal task, so removed from my mother’s life’ – but Forster loved being pulled into a different social and political world. ‘I’d thought political allegiances were according to class and money but now I saw they could not be – it was as odd that my working-class mother voted Tory as that my Somerville friends voted Labour. They were all upper middle class, all from wealthy (to me) homes, and yet they all passionately wanted to align themselves with the working class.’ In the more traditional (and right-wing) culture of a men’s college, her contemporary Melvyn Bragg, son of an RAF sergeant and (later) publican, was making a largely cautious transition from Wigton in Cumberland to Wadham College. ‘I took it all on “their” terms,’ he reflected many years later. ‘I was trying to learn the secrets of those in the educational and social citadel.’ Significantly, this did not lead to chippiness:
I knew an awful lot they didn’t, but I sort of thought it didn’t count. I mean, at breakfast in college they’d have really detailed conversations about Africa or Malaysia. Some of these men had led people into battle. But I’d been to places like Manchester and Blackburn about which they knew nothing. I knew about a whole range of life that simply didn’t appear on their agenda. It was as if your past was locked away at the age of 18, as if they were saying ‘put that away, you won’t need that for the journey, dump that over the side of the stagecoach’. I didn’t resent it, frankly, I just thought ‘that’s the way it is.’6
Crossing the Lines would be the title of Bragg’s subsequent novel about his Oxford experience. Probably for most meritocrats, certainly including him, they were at this point not enemy lines.
For Potter, Forster and Bragg, as also for Ian McKellen, Trevor Nunn, Tom Courtenay, Alan Plater, Alan Bennett, Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, Hunter Davies, Joan Bakewell, Neil Kinnock, Tim Bell, David Hockney, Roy Strong, Dudley Moore and many other meritocrats starting (or about to start) to come through by the late 1950s, the grammar school had been the formative, indispensable education. ‘What is the most important factor in getting to the top?’ a Sunday Times survey into teenage aspirations asked in 1959. Specifically, was it hard work or personality? Among public school boys, 48 per cent plumped for hard work and 45 per cent for personality. Among grammar school boys, the respective figures were 80 per cent and 16 per cent. Going to a grammar was of course a variable experience, both within the school and between schools. But a trio of retrospective accounts for these years is particularly suggestive about an educational world where for the most part charm was not the name of the game.
Anton Rippon’s recollections of Bemrose School, Derby (1956–61) are largely benign. He enjoyed the daily morning assembly (Victorian hymns accompanied by the magnificent school organ) and was appreciative of the general lack of bullying; his only real complaints were over the ‘silly rules’, especially the regulation school cap to and from school, and the house system, ‘particularly because of its obsession with cross country running’, an obsession that once caused him to be ‘spectacularly sick’ at the top of Rykneld Rec hill ‘not long after I’d enjoyed two helpings of treacle pudding and custard on the second sitting for school dinner’.
Mary Evans’s take on her unnamed girls’ grammar (1957–64) in her trenchant memoir-cum-essay A Good School, is markedly more critical – though with a similar exasperation about the petty rules, such as ‘never going upstairs on buses (since they were apparently dens of iniquity, or more precisely men smoking cigarettes), always wearing our school hats in the streets, never walking along a pavement more than two abreast, never, ever, eating in the street, never going outside in our indoor shoes and never bringing into the school either sweets or books or magazines that were not part of our school work’. During these years, she notes, ‘pupils were still sufficiently intimidated by the authority of their teachers to believe that school rules had the force of absolute law’.
It was the first year, though, that set the tone, a year in which Evans not only had her posture continuously assessed (with the reward of a posture stripe, to be sewn into her navy-blue tunic, if she proved herself not to be a sloucher), but spent all the
domestic-science lessons on smocking a pinafore – seemingly futile and pointless, but ‘we were quite explicitly told that our performance at this task would be taken as a measure of our “patience” and our ability to do something called “work steadily”.’ Indeed, the emphasis throughout was on diligence and steadiness, with Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise ‘much favoured as an illustration of the virtues of plodding away’. With the academic work, teachers imparted the inflexible virtues of what she calls ‘the conventional sandwich essay’ (defined as ‘beginning with a proposition to examine, examine it and then reach a conclusion’), and where ‘to have an essay returned as “badly organised” was the greatest shame’. Was it an ultra-competitive environment? Evans’s answer is interestingly nuanced: yes, in the sense that there was rigorous streaming from the start, and at one level the dominant ethos was all about individual achievement, yet at the same time, by sixth form anyway, ‘our civics classes were weekly exercises in being taught that individuals were not allowed to act merely for themselves’. Altogether, she reckons, ‘a reliable product, the grammar school child, emerged at the end of a seven-year education, and the product was reliably well schooled in writing legibly, writing grammatically, being punctual and having at least the appearance of respect for authority’. A Good School, written in the early 1990s, ends with a thought as double-edged as its title: ‘We emerged into the adult world with extensive and authoritative evidence of our ability to carry out given tasks and to live a disciplined and sober life. Little wonder that many people still dream fondly of the institutions that apparently created us.’
Roy Greenslade is the most negative of the three. Looking back on his time (from 1958) at Dagenham County High School (very far from one of the country’s top-rated grammars), he highlights ‘the communication barrier’ between the middle-class staff and mainly working-class pupils; the widespread disaffection and divisiveness, caused in his analysis by a mixture of the streaming system, the pressure of exams and differences in home status; the general absence of classroom discussion, with teachers ‘preferring instead the these-are-the-facts-now-go-away-and-learn-them approach’; and the prevailing conformity, with ‘dissent the school’s dirtiest word’. Caustically, Greenslade describes the education that he received as ‘simply a five-year course in how to succeed without understanding why’:
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