by Jilly Cooper
‘One thing I did learn was that, if I got drunk, I broke up public school boys’ rooms, and they always broke up mine. It’s much easier to break up rooms of those who you know will take it well. Public school boys don’t seem to mind so much about their possessions or other people’s whereas yobbos do seem to care.’
Today at university the classes seem principally to be re-aligning into the upper- and middle-class guilty, the lower-middle materialistic and working-class cross. And although the middle and upper classes are no longer assiduously courting the working classes, a terrible inverted snobbery has now developed. ‘The young,’ said Anne Thwaite in the Introduction to My Oxford, ‘tend to avoid Oxford and Cambridge for egalitarian reasons, opting for Sussex, York or East Anglia, as somehow being more mysteriously like real life.’ There was a don at a redbrick university who said he would never dare write a book about the middle classes because he couldn’t possibly justify it to his students.
Nicholas Monson overheard two sociology students having a passionate row over which of them was more working class: ‘One said his father was a miner in Darlington, while the other countered victoriously that, although his father had worked as an insurance clerk, his grandfather had gone on the Jarrow march. The first refused to concede his superior origins because his opponent’s origins had been partially diluted by the capitalist occupation of his petit bourgeois father.
‘They clearly needed the assistance of a recognized authority,’ added Nicholas Monson dryly. ‘Perhaps next year we might see the first edition of Burke’s Peasantry.’
Even upper-middle-class at Oxford are worried about their image at the moment. They were perfectly beastly to Princess Anne, priestess of the flat ‘a’, when she visited the Union recently. Gay libbers, women’s libbers and general lefties jostled her and shouted four-letter words outside; inside there was intense heckling and a ghastly audience participation exercises in which everyone had to turn to the person on their right and ‘say in your poshest voice “Hullo dahling”.’
Then The Cherwell also runs a competition for the pushiest freshman: ‘He who hacks most people in the most disgusting way in his first term.’ A hack is someone who solicits, pesters, toadies, and generally social climbs, in order to cunningly gain an advantage over others, by boring the pants off people in the Union bar, and then relying on their vote. Rather like Eton running an Upper-Class Twit of the Year contest.
Oxford, in some way, is more a target for egalitarianism than Cambridge. As Eleanor Bron pointed out, ‘At Oxford all acquire a veneer of upper-middle-classiness, while at Cambridge, home of scientists and fact rather than opinions, they simmer down to a vague middle and lower-middleness.’ Oxford’s trouble is that, despite efforts to the contrary, they get more and more élitist. ‘In the old days considerable gifts of spirit and intellect were needed to counter severe economic disadvantage,’ said J.I.M. Stewart, ‘but now most people are hard up, no college is noticeably cluttered up with hopelessly thick or incorrigibly idle youths from privileged homes.’
Ironically, although they may no longer be idle and overprivileged, 50 per cent are still from fee-paying schools because Oxford can’t get enough candidates from the state system.
‘Chaps from comprehensives simply aren’t up to it,’ said one don. ‘You look for promise not achievement, then you say, “Dash it, would they ever pass prelims if we let them in?” and so in the end you say, “No, go somewhere else where they’ll feed you compulsive lectures”.’
An interesting statistic is that women graduates as a whole tend to be socially superior to men. Most of them come from Social Class I in the Census which means they are daughters of lawyers, doctors, engineers and accountants. This is probably because the upper-middles are the least male chauvinist of all the classes and therefore, unlike the aristocracy, the lower-middles and the working classes aren’t so resistant to women being educated.
The exception to the upper-class rule is, of course, the Pakenham family, who were all expected to get a first. Evidently when Lady Antonia broke the terrible news to Lord Longford that she’d only got a second, there was a long pause; then he said with characteristic charity, ‘Never mind, darling, I expect you’ll get married.’
According to the Old Harrovian at Reading University, ‘A lot of girls go to university to find a husband, although they would be livid to be told that. I fancied a girl who’d been to grammar school. Very clever—three As at A level—who I started to go out with, but she would only allow me to kiss her, saying if I wanted more I’d have to promise more. Well I ran away like a coward, and in my absence a creepy sort of chap stepped in and having promised all, i.e. an engagement which he’ll never keep, is enjoying her favours.’
The undergraduate at Oriel said that, in almost every case, people take sexual partners from the same class. ‘If they’re socially mis-matched there’s usually not enough common ground to keep a conversation going.’
‘Nice girls,’ wrote Antonia Fraser about Oxford in the fifties, ‘never accepted invitations from unknown undergraduates in the libraries, and lived in mortal fear of being seen out with men in college scarves and blazers with badges on,’ and adds, with commendable hindsight now that she’s living with the far from patrician Harold Pinter, ‘no doubt missing the company of almost every interesting man in Oxford.’
‘But Wayne, dear—are you sure that’s the sort of tails they meant?’
Dive Definitely-Disgusting, however, is so proud of getting to a university that he wants to advertise the fact by wearing college scarves and blazers with badges, at the same time dissociating himself from the plebs in the street, showing that he’s ‘ge-own’, not ‘te-own’.
In the conventional late ’seventies sales of college scarves went up sevenfold in Oxford and sales of blazers with badges fourfold. This may be because the campus look is fashionable, because in a time of uncertainty people search for identity, or because they’re all being bought by Zacharias Upward trying desperately to look like a yobbo.
An upper-middle Old Rugbeian up at Cambridge said it was certainly not done to wear college scarves, but the upper-middle Old Wellingtonian at Oriel said he thought they were O.K. now, although old school scarves were smarter, and in fact college scarves tended to be worn by those who didn’t have a respectable old school scarf. Badges with blazers were never worn by the upper and upper-middle classes.
The Old Harrovian at Reading said the only thing he and his friends considered ‘not on’ was another piece of advertising: a T-shirt with ‘Reading University’ printed across the front of it, which some undergraduates insisted on wearing on the campus—again distinguishing ge-own from te-own.
Georgie Stow-Crat imports crumpet from London, spends about three hours a week reading geography (a traditionally thick yock-yock’s subject) and runs the college beagles. One fellow of All Souls put a low gate on his stairs, not to keep his children in, but to keep hounds out. Jison Nouveau-Richards, who calls himself Jason now, has given his college scarf and blazer with a badge to a jumble sale, after one acid comment from Georgie, and now wears cavalry twill trousers, a tweed jacket and fine green check shirt, and looks more straight than Georgie, all of whose gambling debts he’s paid off.
Mrs Nouveau-Richards is ecstatic about the whole experience. She knows Magdelene should be pronounced ‘Maudlin’ and Caius ‘Keys’, but she makes Jason wince by talking about the ‘varsity’ and ‘freshers’ and ‘undergrads’ which is almost as common as ‘students’. Zacharias Upward wishes Georgie and Jason would ask him to their ‘dos’, as he calls parties. With seven men to one girl, he never gets even a fumble. Where Stow-Crats rush in, Upwards fear to tread.
When Samantha and Gideon take their daughter Thalia back to Sussex, Samantha in her ethnic and Gideon in his jeans, it looks as though Birnam Wood has arrived at Dunsinane, the car is so thick with potted plants for her room. Samantha was certain she would be the youngest and trendiest mother, and was disappointed to find the entire campus
swarming with identical middle-aged Bolivian peasant ladies.
Dive Definitely-Disgusting feels horribly disorientated and homesick his first year. He’s never been away from home before, and this is his introduction to ‘adollt’ life, and his college doesn’t even look ‘ollde’. Since her latest baby, Joanne, was taken on by a modelling agency, Mrs Definitely-Disgusting has had a telephone installed, so Dive rings her every night, holding the telephone miles away because Mrs D-D talks so loudly. Dive is reading maths or science. Used to being a big fish in a small comprehensive pool, he find no one takes much notice of him here; they all seem to be in ‘clicks’. No wonder he eats in hall every night and sticks to his rooms. He doesn’t meet any girls and in desperation imports his steady girlfriend from home, but is so broke on his grant that he has to smuggle marmalade rolls for her from Hall. Mrs Definitely-Disgusting doesn’t quite appreciate the glory of having a son at Oxford until she sees him on University Challenge and hears that Bambi Gaskett telling him, ‘Well interrupted, St Cats’.
Games, it seems, are the one great social mixing ground. Social divisions are genuinely forgotten and genuine friends are made between people of different classes. The smart set would never bother to know anyone who didn’t go to a public school if it weren’t for rowing or cricket.
Rowing used to be élitist, but although Old Etonians have gained 650 Blues since the boat race began, (schools such as Radley and Shrewsbury failing to get within 500 of that score), times are changing. Over the last 10 years, Eton still leads with 22 Blues, but Hampton Grammar is now third. In 1978 there were three undergraduates in the Oxford boat who would formerly have been dismissed as colonials, four grammar school boys, and three public school boys.
The old sneer, ‘You never see a blue on a bicycle,’ no longer applies. Most of the crew were, according to the Daily Mail ‘reading unsmart subjects like engineering, science or economics, which demand not waffle but unequivocal answers in exams, and who you know or how you rowed are no help at all.’
‘The class thing is going fast,’ said one of the crew. ‘Last year there was a touch of class feeling, a sort of “them” and “us” in the boat, but not this year. Perhaps it’s something to do with the whole sport opening up. All along the river are clubs who want good rowers and don’t care where they went to school.’
In the national eight there are now more dockers and lightermen than people who went to a university.
6 WORK
Oh let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live upon our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations.
According to the sociologists the two most important factors affecting upward mobility are your job and your marriage. But this may be partly due to the fact that the Census, upon which most government and sociological statistics are based, judges a person’s class entirely by the occupation of the head of the house in which they live. In all societies there is a division of labour and consequently a hierarchy of prestige, but such arbitrary distinctions as the Census makes lead to a gross over-simplification of the class system. Photographers, for example, are rated Class III which puts Patrick Lichfield, Anthony Armstrong-Jones and Christopher Thynne in the same social bracket as David Bailey and Terry Donovan. Brewers like the Guinnesses and the Cobbolds are even lower, in Class IV. Athletes all rates Class III which puts Princess Anne on a level with Kevin Keegan. While the Marquess of Anglesey, as a writer, is rated lower than all the dentists, chemists and opticians in Class 1. The deb, working as a waitress (Class IV) and having nostalgie de la boue fantasies about lorry drivers, is actually bettering herself because they’re rated Class III. Peers of the realm don’t get a rating at all, and if they don’t work are lumped together with the disabled, undergraduates, ex-convicts and the chronically sick. Did Lady Chatterley, as the wife of a non-working baronet, enhance her social status when she embarked on an affair with a Class III gamekeeper?
Cabinet Ministers, M.P.s and diplomats are only graded Class II, which is logical. Once upon a time diplomats used to be Old Etonians with firsts, now they’re parvenus like Peter Jay, and all the British embassies, according to a recent observer, ring with flat ‘a’s and regional accents. You also get a judge like Lord Denning, who would be rated Class I by the Census and upper class by the majority of the population because he’s a peer, using such unpatrician expressions in an interview as having ‘no help’ in the house, ‘a roast’ for lunch on Sunday, and referring to his wife as ‘Lady Denning’.
When you marry you automatically take on the class of your husband, which means that the day a duke’s daughter (even if she’s qualified as a Class I barrister) marries a chimney sweep she is promptly assessed with him as Class V.
What one does is certainly indicative of one’s class. One thinks of solicitors as being middle-class and lorry drivers as working class—but I know of a peer of ancient lineage whose daughter has been a long-distance lorry driver for the last five years. Again and again one is struck by the relativity of the whole situation. To the working class, barristers and solicitors seem not middle but upper class while to the aristocracy they are definitely middle class. A solicitor told me that lower-class women invariably put on a hat when they come to see him, and Michael Young, in Family and Class in a London Suburb, quotes a man from Woodford Green:
‘We have a very dear friend who’s a practising barrister, and it amazed us that people might want to know us because we knew him and called him by his Christian name.’
Similarly we had a lower-middle-class nanny who stopped going out with a solicitor because he made her feel socially inferior.
The other day I met a woman at a party who said her daughter had just got engaged to a dustman. Uncertain of her political affiliations, I was wondering whether to compose my features into a ‘How Splendid!’ or ‘How Awful!’ expression when she went on complacently,
‘But it’s quite all right. His father’s a general.’
But of course a general who’d started his career in the cavalry would probably be of a very different class to one who had begun in the Royal Corps of Transport.
One poll conducted among the working classes showed that a footballer was regarded as the most prestigious career, followed by a chauffeur. My daily woman was grumbling one day that her daughter didn’t speak to her any more since she’d married into the professional classes. What did her son-in-law do, I asked.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s an undertaker.’
One notices, too, that occupations that have a slightly ludicrous image acquire new, more euphemistic and therefore more Jen Teale titles: ‘dental surgeon’ instead of ‘dentist’; ‘rodent operative’ for ‘rat catcher’; ‘public health inspector’ for ‘sanitary inspector’; and, worst of all, ‘refuse collector’ (presumably because they refuse to collect) for ‘dustman’.
The position of the doctor is also ambiguous. The working classes think of him as upper-class. He has even usurped the lord as the most popular hero in romantic fiction. But a publisher I know was driving down the village street with a very grand old woman when he saw a man on the pavement waving to her.
‘Some friend’s trying to attract your attention,’ he said.
‘That’s not a friend,’ snorted the old lady. ‘That’s my doctor.’
I recently heard a very upper-class girl say she must go home to Lancashire because ‘I’ve got to help Mummy with a horrors party for the doctor, the dentist, the solicitor and the agent.’
Medicine, except in the private sector, is fast dropping caste, along with teaching, nursing and the army, because they’re all dependent on state pay, too ethical to go on strike, and getting broker and broker and more and more demoralized as the system breaks down.
Doctors, too, used to get invited to a lot of smartish parties, but now your G.P. won’t come and see you any more, and you can’t welcome him in a glamorous nightie in the privacy of your home, people tend not to know the
m socially. Certain doctors are also to blame for this loss of status. A friend who hadn’t been to her doctor for over a year was greeted with the words, ‘Not you again’.
The upper-class attitude to farmers is curious, too. Many aristocrats have land run by farm managers with whom they enjoy talking shop, and who they far prefer to businessmen or people in the professions who don’t know their place—‘more genuine’ is the phrase used. Harry Stow-Crat also has to suck up to neighbouring farmers in case he should want to hunt over their land. Upper-class young men often go and work on farms as apprentices, before going home to manage their own estates, and say ‘How sooper the farm blokes are’, although they don’t drink in the same pubs as them. This preference of the upper classes for the working class because they are far enough away socially is exquisitely summed up by Jane Austen’s Emma (who, I suppose, could be described as landed gentry):
‘A young farmer, whether on horseback or on foot, is the very last sort of person to raise my curiosity. The Yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower and a creditable appearance might interest me, I might hope to be useful to their families in some way. But a farmer can need none of my help and is therefore in one sense above my notice, as in every other sense he is below it.’
Emma, believing her young friend Harriet to be the illegitimate daughter of a gentleman, firmly discourages her from marrying this particular young farmer as being far beneath her. When, however, Emma discovers Harriet is only the daughter of a rich tradesman, she changes her mind and finds the farmer a perfectly suitable match.