Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  There were many reasons – including institutional bias, going back to primary school – why most working-class children failed to thrive in a largely middle-class educational system, but arguably the most important revolved round parental attitudes and expectations. Floud et al found in their study of grammars in South-West Hertfordshire and Middlesbrough in the early-to-mid-1950s that over half the working-class parents ‘either desired no further education for their children or were uncertain in the matter’, while when Abrams in 1956–7 interviewed some 200 married couples in London, mainly from the skilled working class, he seldom encountered ‘that degree of personal ambition which is likely to carry them socially upward’. This also applied to their aspirations for their children, even though a majority hoped they would go to either a grammar or a technical school (the latter thin on the ground, but viewed as good for learning skills and job security), and only 15 per cent positively wanted a secondary modern – where, of course, most of their children would in the event go. As Abrams reflected:

  For most people in the sample, ‘education’ is something provided by the authorities for which parents do not have to pay but over which, correspondingly, they can exercise no control . . .

  It is difficult to persuade oneself, from the general tone of the results of this enquiry, that the majority of working-class parents or children yet regard education as being so important that the frustration of their hopes is a major disaster. The system is still new, still imperfectly understood, and its possibilities are still rather vaguely glimpsed. The parents themselves, almost without exception, left school at 14 or 15, and most of them see no reason why they should be unduly disturbed if their children have to do the same, provided that after they leave school they can get decent jobs which they are unlikely to be thrown out of.

  So too with other studies. Interviewing working-class couples in Dagenham (mainly in 1958–9, on the LCC’s huge inter-war Becontree estate), Peter Willmott ‘found some support for the view that most parents on the estate are not educationally ambitious for their children, and do not take a keen interest in their schooling’, typified by a trio of vox pops:

  I’ve never really thought about it. I’ve always taken it for granted he’ll leave school at 15 unless he turns out brilliant and goes to College.

  I don’t care a lot myself. The main thing is for the children to be happy.

  It’s immaterial to us. If he wants to go in for the 11-plus, we wouldn’t stand in his way.

  The classic, most nuanced account of this whole charged area is by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, whose Education and the Working Class (1962) was a groundbreaking survey, conducted in about 1959–60, of 88 young working-class people who had been to grammar school in Huddersfield during the 1950s. Coming out of the Institute of Community Studies (run by Young and Willmott), and combining sociology with anthropology, it gave a detailed, moving picture of the social, cultural and psychological pressures faced by working-class pupils – especially over such matters as sport, uniform and friendship groups – and their often baffled, frustrated parents. Jackson and Marsden identified on the part of those parents a familiar pattern. Initial pleasure at their child’s 11-plus success and, during that child’s early terms at grammar school, flickers of intellectual excitement for themselves, were followed, by the third year, by ‘a growing sense that the child was out on its own, moving into worlds to which the parents had no access’. At this point many of those parents, usually the fathers, ‘sought to reassert control over their children’s education by demanding some clear statement about the kind of job this was leading to’. They quoted one: ‘I always wanted education for myself, and then I thought our lad would have it. But what I thought was the technical side, something that I could understand. That was what I thought education would be. I never thought about that Arts side, literature and language and all that stuff. That was new to me; that didn’t come into my reckoning about education at all.’ There was also, explained another parent, the problem of the neighbours:

  Many a time you’d be out and the neighbours would say, ‘Eeh, is your lad still at school? What’s he going to be then?’ And I’d have to say, ‘I don’t know what he’s going to be yet.’ And they’d say, ‘Doesn’t he know yet?’ . . . I hadn’t got an answer and I felt soft. They’d look at you as much as to say, ‘Staying on at school all that time and don’t know what he’s going to be, well!’

  The obvious solution was for the parents to talk to teachers about courses and choices, but, suffused by a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, they seldom did, even if their children were in the A stream and there was no shame involved. Altogether, noted the authors, ‘by the time the leaving age was reached and the General Certificate taken, many wondered whether there was much to be gained by leaving their child at school’. Or, as one father put it about the whole unsettling experience: ‘Tha can’t afford to send t’lasses to t’grammar schools. Tha sends ’em and when they come back they’re no good to y’. They don’t want a mucky job even if that’s where t’brass is. They won’t look at it!’

  Still, it was sometimes the teacher who thwarted a parent’s aspirations. From Sheffield in about 1960 is this emblematic account of a leaving pupil’s interview with the headmistress of a secondary modern and the Youth Employment Officer:

  The YEO enquires – with a smile designed to put mother and child at ease, but standing no chance of overcoming the suspicion which mother feels for officials – what job the girl would like to do. Before the girl has a chance to speak, mother jumps in, saying with a determination made more formidable by the certain knowledge that she will shortly be contradicted, ‘she ain’t going to work in a warehouse.’ The head teacher disregards mother and turning to the girl says ‘What do you want to do?’ The girl blurts out that she wants to be ‘one of them shorthand-typewriters’. The YEO now has something to work on, and enquires of the girl whether she is good at spelling. There is a dull silence, broken by the head teacher, who says in a significant tone, ‘One out of ten’. An enquiry about English Composition leads to the comment ‘Four out of twenty’. The head teacher is becoming impatient, and tells the girl that this is a waste of time: that there is no likelihood of her getting an office job: that she would not be happy doing office work: and that she would be happy doing packing work in a warehouse. Mother has by this time reached ‘the sniffing stage’. The head teacher turns her attention to her and says, ‘Look here, Mrs So-and-so, things have changed since you and I were children. Lots of valuable things are packed nowadays. It is an important job. Factories have good conditions, girls can earn good wages, wear nice clothes and be happy doing the work.’13

  On 31 July 1958 the Yorkshire professional cricketer Johnny Wardle was, reported the Daily Mail, ‘cheered all the way to the wicket by the Sheffield crowd’ – the day after the club had announced it would be dispensing with his services from the end of the season. He had fallen out badly with Yorkshire’s new amateur captain – 39-year-old Ronnie Burnet, who had never played first-class cricket before this season – and though in the rest of the match he performed brilliantly, taking eight wickets at fewer than ten runs each, he never played for Yorkshire again. The following week he was back in the pages of the Mail with two prominently displayed articles, ‘Why I Was Sacked’ and ‘We’re Carrying the Captain’, claiming that Burnet’s ‘lack of experience’ had made it ‘desperately hard for the key men of the side’. Later in August, offended by Wardle’s trenchant criticism of the Yorkshire committee, the MCC (which still ran English cricket) withdrew his invitation to tour Australia.

  The amateur-professional divide continued to run deep: an amateur, Surrey’s Peter May, would be captaining the English tourists, and, earlier in the year, an MCC committee chaired by the club’s president, the Duke of Norfolk, had concluded that ‘the distinctive status of the amateur cricketer was not obsolete, was of great value to the game and should be preserved’ (though at the same time, in terms of the financial recompense
of those nominally unpaid performers, the committee admitting to being ‘disturbed by the apparent over-liberal interpretation of the word “expenses” in certain cases that had come to their notice’). The hypocrisy was rank, with a range of different methods being found to pay the socially more prestigious, so-called amateurs. Ahead of the tour, England’s other spinner, also a Yorkshireman, gave George (‘Gubby’) Allen, chairman of the selectors, stockbroker and a pillar of the Lord’s Establishment, a bad quarter of an hour. ‘I told Gubby that I was considering becoming an amateur and I wondered how he would feel about this,’ recalled Jim Laker. ‘He asked me if I’d given it serious consideration and said that, if I had, he thought it was absolutely splendid but wondered why I wanted to do this. He didn’t look best pleased when I told him that I thought I would be better off in financial terms playing as an amateur in the England team in Australia with expenses rather than drawing professional pay.’14

  The Wardle Affair, the introduction of life peerages (Sir Eric James, High Master of Manchester Grammar School and arch-meritocrat, on an early list), satire about the complacent incompetence of the traditional ruling class (the Boulting brothers’ film Carlton-Browne of the FO, with Terry-Thomas as the bumbling diplomat), Basil Bernstein’s pioneering study (‘Some sociological determinants of perception’) of the different affective and cognitive equipment of working-class children compared to middle-class, even some daring cross-dressing (the fashion photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones taking a riverside room in Rotherhithe, the metropolitan intelligentsia starting to form Sunday morning soccer teams) – one way and another, quite apart from the celebrated new wave of plays and novels, class and related issues were bubbling away strongly in the late 1950s.15

  ‘Despite (and sometimes because of) the Welfare State,’ declared the Radio Times in August 1958 in its preview of Christopher Mayhew’s television series ‘Does Class Matter?’ (including the Dennis Potter interview), ‘we British are still one of the most class-ridden peoples in the world.’ Produced by Jack Ashley, this was a notable examination of a ubiquitous but seldom overtly discussed subject, and, noted BBC’s audience research, ‘many viewers found it an enjoyable and interesting experience to be looking at themselves “from outside”, though some questioned the wisdom of stressing class distinctions’. Not long afterwards, in January 1959, Tom Lupton and C. Shirley Wilson published their pathbreaking analysis ‘The Social Background and Connections of “Top Decision Makers”’, taking as their starting point the recent evidence given to the Bank Rate Tribunal. This detailed with unambiguous clarity the narrow social and educational background of the City elite, as well as its multiple interconnections, and, though appearing in an obscure academic journal, it received considerable publicity. So much so that four months later, at the City of London Society’s annual luncheon at the Mansion House, that body’s chairman (the self-made Harley Drayton) was compelled to declare, boldly if unconvincingly, that ‘if a young man has talent, integrity and courage, not only is there nothing to stop him going to the top, he will almost be kicked there’.16

  Among those watching ‘Does Class Matter?’ were Florence Turtle and Tom Driberg. ‘He is a Socialist & somewhat prejudiced against Public Schools,’ Turtle noted unenthusiastically of Mayhew, but the Labour politician (and regular TV reviewer for the New Statesman) was struck by how ‘95 per cent of those questioned put education as the first determinant of class’, reflecting further that it was ‘hard to believe that most people will acquiesce for much longer in an educational system which artificially reserves so many of the best jobs for those with a particular kind of education, identified by a particular accent’. Two years earlier Anthony Crosland in The Future of Socialism had had strong words about the existing ‘system of superior private schools’ – ‘open to the wealthier classes, but out of reach of poorer children however talented and deserving . . . much the most flagrant inequality of opportunity, as it is cause of class inequality generally, in our educational system’ – while there was a degree of unease even among some Tories. After referring in 1957 to ‘the almost comically overwhelming predominance of Old Etonians in the Conservative Party’, the writer and former MP Christopher Hollis went on in the Spectator: ‘I think that the time has come when it would be for the advantage of the nation that the Conservative Party should be somewhat less “U” in its higher personnel and when a party which pays lip-service to equality of opportunity should in practice treat at least (shall we say?) a Rugbeian as the equal of an Etonian.’ The next year, more seriously, the Education Minister Geoffrey Lloyd (Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge) privately expressed some sympathy with ‘elements on our side, e.g. The Bow Group, which thinks that basis for entry should be widened, and not restricted, as for all intents it is, to those who can meet the heavy cost of a preparatory, as well as of a public school education’. But, anxious about charges from elsewhere in his party that direct government subvention to enable ‘deserving’ children to take up places would threaten the independence of the schools, he opted for a policy of masterly inaction. And those institutions themselves? ‘You Can’t Write Off the Public Schools’ was a Daily Mail headline in May 1958, with the article revealing that numbers had increased since the war from 50,000 to 80,000 and that many had no vacancies until 1966 or 1967.17

  Although their academic superiority over the better grammars was now questionable, they were continuing to deliver the goods where it mattered, and when the New Statesman later in 1958 published statistics definitively revealing their dominance of Oxbridge entrance, a flurry of letters ensued. It was all ‘simple enough’, insisted the constitutional expert Ivor Jennings, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge: ‘It is that the number of applicants from public schools is more numerous – in this college much more numerous – than the number of applicants from other schools: and all are meritorious because they are supported by the schools, which are familiar with Cambridge standards and help us enormously in our selection.’ Other correspondents were unconvinced, with some (including John Vaizey) calling for the integration of the public schools into the state system, while a youngish Oxford historian, Lawrence Stone, conceded there were ‘too many’ public-school men at Oxbridge ‘who in a world of equal opportunity would not be there at all’. About the same time, another Oxford fellow, J. R. Sargent of Worcester College, elucidated in Socialist Commentary the three ‘ineluctable factors’ at work:

  First, there is the classical tradition of the public schools, combined with the large number of classical scholarships offered at Oxford or Cambridge. Secondly, there is the fact that public school masters are old hands at the complex procedure for getting admission. They make less mistakes than grammar school masters with less experience, and this does not simply mean that they are better at ‘nobbling’. Thirdly (let’s face it), there is the fact that many public schools provide very good teaching and can do so because many people are willing to pay large sums in order to get it.

  There was an Oxbridge coda the following spring, when scientists at both universities led campaigns to get the Latin exam dropped from admission requirements. Cambridge agreed to relent, but Oxford narrowly not, before eventually permitting those with a maths or science A level to be exempted.

  ‘I have never been able to understand,’ declared Crosland in The Future of Socialism, ‘why socialists have been so obsessed with the question of the grammar schools, and so indifferent to the much more glaring injustice of the independent schools.’ Yet it was clear which issue had the greater traction in the popular mind. Certainly, the BBC television documentary in February 1957 on the 11-plus, featuring a secondary modern in north London, engendered no shortage of viewer response:

  The answer is, Eleven Plus is bad, comprehensive schools not the remedy. The remedy is better teachers and less crowding of classes. Look at that nondescript lot of stuff you showed us tonight. No wonder you chose a powerful commentator, otherwise we may have dozed off. (Technician)

  There is a good standard o
f education in these schools [i.e. secondary moderns]. It would be a poor sort of world peopled with academic types only. We must have practical men and women. (Engineer’s Wife)

  I feel too much pressure is brought to bear on the children at this age and they are far better left alone, with a natural interest in their work being shown by the parents. (Correspondence Clerk)

  The ‘do-or-die’ attitude of many parents towards their children – pass and so win a place to a grammar school or else . . . – has as its basis near snobbishness. (Cashier)