Modernity Britain

by David Kynaston

  At school the propaganda was subtle, but it combined well with the thrust from home. ‘Pupils, you are in a privileged position; take your chances while you can; don’t fall behind; don’t end up like the secondary modern layabouts; there really is room at the top.’ Classroom competition was fostered with the front-runners constantly exhorted to do better; and those at the bottom put under pressure to do much, much better. I hardly need add that the sports field was another element in the same indoctrination.

  Accordingly, ‘the boys of County High emerged into the adult world bursting with enthusiasm for little more than money’, a long way removed from ‘the once-favoured ideal that grammar schools would carry on the public school tradition of training for community service’. And when Greenslade interviewed many of his contemporaries in the mid-1970s, he was dismayed by their apathy and complacency towards the wider world – characteristics that he largely attributed to the narrow, reductive efficiency of their grammar-school training.

  Ashby-de-la-Zouch Boys’ Grammar School was almost certainly of a higher standing than Dagenham County High, perhaps somewhere in the middle range. The report in the school magazine for 1957–8 about the activities of the Literary and Debating Society, written by a sixth-former, nicely conveys the grammar culture – not least its ineradicable whiff of priggishness – in this its final classic phase:

  3rd October, 1957

  In two embryo debates, we considered the relative merits of BBC and Commercial Television and the advisability of continuing experiments with nuclear weapons. The eloquence and humour elicited by the former discussion was soon surpassed by the zest with which the scientists defended their colleagues’ activities, to the great joy of the members.

  17th October, 1957

  The House debated the motion ‘That gambling is socially and morally indefensible’. Impassioned appeals to our conscience earned little but scorn and eventually the suffrage of precisely half our number: the Chairman’s casting vote alone preserved the Society’s reputation for moral rectitude, while the need for it left room for grave doubts.

  20th February, 1958

  Candidates ranging from Machiavelli to Gilbert Harding were proposed to fill the last place in Heaven; every speaker had cogent arguments for his protégé, and it is doubtful whether the final choice of Babyface Nelson, the notorious American gangster, reflects genuine anarchical sympathies, or merely the eloquence of his advocate.7

  Of course, these debaters were only there because they had passed the 11-plus. The exam itself was usually taken in January and often at the actual grammar school, with masters invigilating. ‘Even I feel nervous,’ wrote one in 1957 about the experience of superintending a classroom of excited hopefuls:

  The starting bell makes one sallow child visibly start, but only for a second. Immediately all are at work: their fingers nervously nicked to their pens, their lips pursed or tacitly murmuring as they do their sums. Somehow they looked years older than when they came in; already on their foreheads frowns are beginning to appear which time will etch more deeply. Ten minutes have passed; according to my instructions, I remind them that there are more questions on the other pages of their answer books. Some have already started on them. Some have finished five minutes before the end of the fifty-minute paper.

  After a ten-minute interval they get down to English (‘Do not forget to put your number on the top of the paper’). Now I begin to see them more clearly. There is little difference in their size although the two largest boys are already in long trousers. Only two of the thirty wear glasses. Some are in their Sunday suits, others wear cardigans and sweaters, sometimes with a watch (Dad’s or Uncle’s?) fastened over the sleeve. Somehow it seems that the most poorly dressed have the grandest fountain pens.

  One boy upsets his ink-well; I help him to mop up the ink which has divided his answer book into blue and white sections. I notice that his hand shakes. Another boy absorbed in work sits on his own leg and rather dirty shoe. Yet another picks his nose and then puts his finger in his mouth. I feel embarrassed that he has noticed that I have noticed; he probably thinks that I will take a mark off!

  I wonder if it is possible to estimate their intelligence from their physiognomy. Surely that intense boy with the tousled hair is intelligent? I walk up the aisle only to discover that he not written down anything. His vacant-looking neighbour who has at least half a dozen badges on the lapels of his green blazer has half-finished the paper.

  At the end of English they go out to break, and I warn them to use the toilets before returning to the classroom. In the Common Room where I go for coffee they are discussing the illiteracy of some of the candidates and the foolhardiness of some of the examiners. Somebody says that even the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education has not been able to do some of the questions that have been set. No wonder that two candidates have been sick and one has had a fit.

  Back to the classroom for the General Paper (‘Put your examination number . . .’) and then English Composition (‘. . . at the top of the paper’). Some children have their own personal spelling (‘cushion’ for ‘cousin’; ‘duck’ for ‘Dutch’; ‘arrisen’ for ‘horizon’), others write very creditable conversation passages in idiomatic prose. Only two write in italic hand; their penmanship creates a very favourable impression when contrasted with the others. One boy in describing ‘An Enjoyable Outing’ describes a trip to France; in another row a boy describes ‘the flicks and fish an chips and sweets.’

  At last, at 12.30, the final bell shatters the silence. I collect in the papers and tell them to be careful crossing the road. They become young again, and some even say ‘Ta-ta, sir!’ as they leave the room. It is over. Some parents are already at the school gates to take their offspring home after what for most will be their one and only visit to a grammar school.

  So much, in every sense, depended. Jacky Aitken (later Jacqueline Wilson), from Kingston in Surrey, sat the exam that year and had ‘one of those head-filled-with-fog colds, when you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you can’t taste, you certainly can’t think’. The result was a nightmare (‘I’d never felt so frightened in my life’), especially the arithmetic test (‘I couldn’t calculate in my bunged-up head, I had to use my ten fingers, like an infant’) and the number sequences in the intelligence test. A year later, on a Friday morning in January 1958, it was the turn of Ione Haines at Chingford. ‘I feel sick,’ noted an apprehensive Judy, but Ione herself ‘awoke happily and tucked in to a three-course breakfast’. They set off for the High School, Ione taking with her the ‘“success” cards’ she had received and ‘many lucky charms, including 3d bit from Daddy’; nearing their destination, ‘the children poured off buses and along to the school in the snow’. An anxious few hours followed, before Ione returned at lunchtime, ‘eyes shining, and saying she had had a lovely time’, with ‘questions not too bad’, and that ‘she enjoyed using my fountain pen’.

  Then came the waiting. Eventually, Jacky was informed by her primary teacher, in front of the class, that she had failed and ought to be ashamed of herself, leaving the poor girl to tell her parents. As for Ione, her mother’s diary recorded the outcome:

  24 April. Gwen had told me 11+ results would be out today and I waited and waited for post. Suddenly I wondered if a tearful Ione would come home from school. Relieved this was not so and nobody appears to have heard anything.

  25 April. No post.

  Ione came rushing home from school with the good news that she has passed General Admission Examination. What a thrill! We ’phoned Daddy, me in tears . . .

  By the way, the official card came at mid-day.

  A year or so later, in the Cheshire village of Bunbury, there was elation too at the Blakemore home after a little brown envelope popped through the door:

  I’d come downstairs to get some breakfast and found Mum waiting for me in the hall, smiling. And then something totally unexpected happened. With a whoop of joy she held me round the middle and danced around
the hall with me.

  It was one of those moments that stay with you forever. The fresh green summer morning, sunlight dappling through the windows, the threadbare carpet on the stairs, the press of my mother’s apron against my face, the giddy feeling as she swept me off my feet. And all this from a mother who’d rarely put her arm around me. For those few seconds I’d been grabbed and returned to early childhood.

  When she stopped I smiled, embarrassed. It felt good, though the evident relief and joy in her face led me to wonder whether my parents had really expected me to fail. From Dad I just got a cheery smile and a ‘well done’ as he sat at the breakfast table neatly polishing off his bacon and tomato.

  Ken Blakemore then went to school, where he found that though two of his friends had passed, the one who had really wanted to, Clive Bevan, had failed: ‘He was sullen, red-faced with anger and disappointment, and couldn’t bring himself to talk to us.’ Several months later, in September after Ken had started at the grammar, he decided to go round to see Clive at his home, a little bungalow. ‘It was an attempt to ask whether we could still be friends. We couldn’t. He couldn’t wait for me to leave.’

  Passing the exam did not necessarily clinch the deal. A quite common impediment was financial, despite the 1944 Act, and revolved round the purchase of a uniform and other expensive, compulsory accoutrements. ‘They felt exploited by having to go to the school’s selected outfitters and paying prices they, rightly or wrongly, felt were higher than elsewhere,’ recalled Roy Greenslade about Dagenham’s working-class parents. ‘For some it was undoubtedly a financial burden and a real sacrifice. For a few, it was an impossibility and their children were never equipped in County High’s sombre black, blue and white.’ Another possibility was that the child might demur. In May 1958, for instance, Kent Education Committee notified John Jones that his son David (the future Ziggy Stardust) had, having passed his 11-plus, a choice between Bromley Grammar and the new Bromley Technical School, due to open in the autumn. Mr Jones initially preferred the former but David strongly the latter, and so it was – though not before the council’s education officer had interviewed the 11-year-old about his career plans.8

  The Britain of the late 1950s was not conspicuously characterised by equality of either outcome or – rising meritocrats notwithstanding – opportunity. In terms of the former, despite some redistribution during the 1940s, not only did the richest 5 per cent own some 75 per cent of total wealth, but also the share of incomes (both before and after tax) enjoyed by the different occupational strata was not yet fundamentally different from what it had been shortly before the First World War. In terms of the latter, some eloquent detail peppered Tom Bairstow’s analysis of ‘The Establishment’ in the News Chronicle in April 1958. All but two of Macmillan’s Cabinet had been educated at public school, including almost one-third at Eton; all but four had gone to Oxbridge; the two Opposition leaders, Gaitskell and Grimond, had backgrounds of (respectively) Winchester and New College, Eton and Balliol. The top three ambassadors had all gone to Eton or Winchester, while in the City, the governor of the Bank of England was an Etonian, and the chairmen of the Big Five banks included two Etonians, one Harrovian and one Wykehamist.

  Bairstow did think, though, that the power of the old school tie was perhaps waning in industry at large, and he cited Sir Alexander Fleck, head of ICI, ‘who came up the hard way from an elementary school’. Or as one industrialist, A. D. Bonham-Carter, had recently put it in a radio talk on ‘The Way to the Top in Industry’: ‘Social and educational backgrounds are now immaterial. What matters is the way in which a man uses his qualities and knowledge, not how he acquired them.’ Yet almost certainly this was a gross exaggeration, to judge by the statistical evidence of a trio of surveys conducted between 1955 and 1958 into the backgrounds of Britain’s business leaders. ‘These three studies agree that, while some men have managed to get to the top without special advantages, the odds were heavily against them,’ concluded Roy Lewis and Rosemary Stewart in their 1958 book The Boss. ‘The men who were most likely to succeed were those with family connections in business, although this was less important in the larger firms, and those who had been to public school. Most likely of all were the Old Etonians.’9

  Of course, by the late 1950s the effects of the 1944 Act had not yet started to work through into these sort of surveys. What is striking, though, is the extent to which – even in the new dispensation – the working class as a whole was still seemingly being shut out of the meritocratic race. Take the key question of social composition of the grammar schools, systematically investigated by Jean Floud and colleagues in their much-quoted Social Class and Educational Opportunity (1956), based on grammar admissions in 1953 in two contrasting parts of the country. The following were the percentage chances, from the parents’ occupational groups, of their sons being selected for admission:

  South-West Hertfordshire Middlesbrough

  Professional workers,

  business owners and managers 59 68

  Clerical workers 44 37

  Foremen, small shopkeepers, etc. 30 24

  Skilled manual workers 18 14

  Unskilled manual workers 9 9

  All social classes 22 17

  It is unlikely that these figures changed markedly during the second half of the decade, and in late 1959 the Crowther Report, 15 to 18, was unequivocal that in secondary moderns – overwhelmingly the most common destination for those who had failed to pass the 11-plus and thereby get into a selective school (usually a grammar) – ‘the children of non-manual workers are much under-represented, and the children of semi-skilled workers over-represented’.

  In theory, there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the roughly 1,200 grammar schools and 3,800 secondary moderns. In practice, not only did most people view the secondary moderns as vastly inferior but there was a shocking relative shortfall in their resourcing. ‘It is likely,’ noted John Vaizey in his 1958 treatise The Costs of Education, ‘that the average Grammar school child receives 170 per cent more per year, in terms of resources, than the average Modern school child.’ Teachers at secondary moderns were paid less, only about a fifth were graduates, and even by the end of the 1950s barely 10 per cent of the buildings they worked in were new and purpose-built.

  The gulf in expectations was even greater. Surveying in 1961 that year’s school-leavers from a semi-skilled and unskilled background at five Leicestershire schools (two grammars and three secondary moderns), William Liversidge found that 93 per cent of the grammar boys anticipated moving into a higher class of employment than their parents – whereas only 18 per cent of the secondary modern boys did. ‘The general conclusion that emerges from this study,’ he reflected, ‘is one of startlingly accurate appraisal of life chances by the children, and a shrewd appreciation of the social and economic implications of their placing within the educational system.’ Not long before, in 1959–60, another sociologist, Michael Carter, had sampled 200 boys and girls (overwhelmingly from working-class homes) who were about to leave, or had just left, secondary moderns in the Sheffield area. Among those still at school, three-quarters ‘expressed their satisfaction that they would soon be workers – independent, recognised as grown-up, no longer “school kids”’, while half the overall sample, including those who had left, ‘objected strongly’ to the very idea of raising the school-leaving age to 16. ‘I don’t think I could have lasted,’ said one girl, and a boy was equally adamant: ‘It is not fair; we left at 15, so the others should be able to.’10

  Social class was not just relevant to grammars vis-à-vis secondary moderns; it also did much to determine outcomes within grammars. In 1954 an official report on Early Leaving found that whereas children from the semi-skilled and unskilled working class represented over 20 per cent of grammar school intakes, by the sixth form that proportion was down to barely 7 per cent. Given which figures, it was unsurprising that by the mid-1950s a middle-class child who had been to a grammar was five times as likely to go on to
a university as was a child from an unskilled working-class background who had also been to a grammar. Why was this? Towards the end of the decade, Eva Bene sought part of the answer by surveying 361 boys from the Greater London area who were in the third year at their grammars; she revealed by social class the percentages of replies to various suggestive statements such as ‘If he had a chance he would like to go to university’. There was a telling 20-per-cent gap between that working-class minority wanting to stay on after the age of 16 (45 per cent) and that working-class majority wanting to go to university (65 per cent).11

  The university system itself was gradually expanding – 50,000 university places just before the Second World War doubling to some 107,000 by 1960–61 – and plans were afoot by the end of the 1950s for a clutch of new universities, including what would become Sussex, York, East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Warwick. ‘The elite of tomorrow’ was the Observer’s headline in 1960 for an article by Mark Abrams on the 1.6 per cent of the adult population – some 570,000 people – who were university graduates or who had comparable professional qualifications. ‘Since the war the graduates have not looked back,’ he declared. ‘Today they are still far from having completely supplanted the pre-war elite, but by the end of the 1960s they will be well on the way towards doing so.’ And, according to Abrams, ‘the rise of the graduates has been resisted only in trade union leadership, industrial management, popular journalism and the entertainment industry’. It was heady, Whiggish stuff, but Abrams did not pretend it would be a wholly open elite. ‘Where yesterday’s elite was based on birth and wealth, tomorrow’s will rest largely on education and wealth. And because of this difference the gap between the elite and the rest of society will surely be just as great as it was in the past.’ Indeed, in 1960 itself, only 2.6 per cent of 18-year-olds from working-class homes went to university – compared to 16.8 per cent from middle-class homes. At the pinnacle of the university system, Oxbridge, the public schools continued to dominate: 56 per cent of the 1955 intake at Cambridge came from there; two years later, 70 per cent of scholarships and exhibitions awarded at Oxbridge men’s colleges went to public schoolboys; and Abrams in his 1960 article cited a recent survey of the latest Cambridge graduates, showing that a majority still came from public school and only 9 per cent from the working class.12