The 1951 census put the middle class at around 28 per cent of the population, compared with 22 per cent twenty years earlier. The middle class – in some ways best defined as ‘not working class’ in terms of attitudes, assumptions and self-image – included the professional class and the self-employed petite bourgeoisie (typified by small shopkeepers) that had emerged strongly in the nineteenth century, as well as the managerial class that had begun to flourish during the inter-war rise of the large corporation, not to mention the ever-expanding lower middle-class legions of clerks, salesmen, insurance agents and shop assistants. There were also, in terms of specific occupational trends, two rapidly growing sectors within the middle class: first, in the science/technology/engineering fields, in part driven by the increasing number of non-arts university students (doubling between the 1930s and late 1940s), and second, in the public sector, especially social services and the nationalised industries. Overall, it was a far more salaried middle class than it had been, say, half a century earlier – and also appreciably more meritocratic in terms of both intake and subsequent performance evaluation.7 But not entirely. ‘Like many doctors’ children, I had from my earliest schooldays come to look upon a medical qualification like a hereditary title,’ the young hero notes at the outset of Richard Gordon’s Doctor in the House (1952). The rest of the first chapter sees him going up to St Swithin’s, the teaching hospital where his father had been, and undergoing interviews in which the crucial considerations are a) public-school background, b) ability to pay the fees and c) ability on the rugby field. He satisfies the first two criteria and fortunately, in a hospital already stuffed with forwards, is a wing threequarter and gets the nod.8
Perhaps inevitably, significantly more than 28 per cent of people perceived themselves as middle-class. In Geoffrey Gorer’s extensive 1950–51 survey of what social class people saw themselves as belonging to, 2 per cent identified themselves as ‘upper middle’, 28 per cent as ‘middle’, and 7 per cent as ‘lower middle’, totalling 37 per cent. Within the sample, a realistic 31 per cent of men claimed to belong to one of those three non-working-class groups – compared to 41 per cent of women, with women (especially those over 45 who were unmarried or widowed) having a particular preference for ‘middle’. Gorer’s findings were not wholly out of line with a British Institute of Public Opinion survey shortly before. Here, 6 per cent claimed to be ‘upper middle’, 27 per cent ‘middle’, and 15 per cent ‘lower middle’, totalling 48 per cent, but this time, men were almost as likely as women to allow themselves a questionable self-ascription. Still, as most respondents would probably have replied if confronted by the occupationally classified census figures, if you felt you were middle-class, then you were middle-class.
So, no doubt, it was in 1948 when Mass-Observation asked the largely middle-class members of its panel to say something about their class identity:
I feel that anyone who has to consider prices and be economical at every turn cannot claim to belong to the ‘Middle Classes’. This term seems in my mind to be synonymous with prosperity, not yet wealth, but with carefree liberality in all things costing money. On the other hand perhaps people who, like myself, had a secondary education or, like my husband, a University education, can be promoted to the ranks of the Middle Classes, whatever the bank balance! (Housewife, married to a civil servant)
I am something of a hybrid. I was brought up middle-class and am financially in that position but my husband [a printer on a London newspaper] retains his working-class breeding which causes most (not all) middle-class people to drop us. (Housewife)
The professional upper middle class. There has never been much money in the family, and often very little indeed. But we consider we have obligations to fulfil rather than demands to make, which I think is a characteristic of this solid upper middle class. (Retired schoolmistress)
I consider that I belong to the middle class of society. It is so because I have had a Grammar School education, my home is in Pinner (semi-suburban), and amongst other people whose houses are furnished, and are kept in a good condition, as mine is . . . Hammersmith is a typical working-class district, and it is from here that I make my comparisons. I see houses with torn, dirty (I know that this is almost unavoidable in London) curtains, broken windows mended with cardboard, for months not days, and generally slovenly appearance. Children are admitted into hospitals (mine in particular) with filthy clothes, skin, hair, etc. (Student nurse)
‘I am not prejudiced,’ Ms Pinner added, ‘but cleanliness should come naturally.’
Predictably, a palpable pride, even smugness, shone at times through the replies:
Middle-class. Because I have a civic conscience, am internationally minded, have a feeling of responsibility towards people I don’t know and time for enough leisure to be able to use my education (school, social and cultural) to a culturally satisfying end. (Housewife)
Middle-class. Because I am not an aristocrat, nor am I a plebeian. My parents were of excellent breeding, and we have as a family the attributes of what is known as the middle-class type – independence, hatred of charity, sans patronage and sans servility, delight in doing one’s job thoroughly but with a soul that can rise above it occasionally without fanaticism. (Housewife)
The following year pride was redoubled when the panel was asked what value it attached to ‘the continued existence of the middle classes’:
Today, when the ‘workers’ and their families have unprecedented power in this country, the ‘middle class,’ I think, have one special role: to try to maintain a high level of culture and social responsibility in the country at a time when the trend is in a downward direction. (Journalist)
It would be almost impossible for any Government to carry on if the middle classes went out on strike on every possible pretext in the way the – so called – working classes do. (Chartered accountant)
‘The chief value of the middle classes,’ succinctly summarised a housewife, ‘is that their way of life represents a standard which the working class can emulate.’9
Constantly bubbling up below these moral certainties, there was no doubting the anxiety, even the bitterness, of the newly servantless, highly taxed middle class during the immediate post-war period. ‘How grievously,’ wrote Roy Lewis and Angus Maude in their 1949 paean to threatened virtues, The English Middle Classes, did this group’s ‘cherished ambitions conflict both with the egalitarian philosophy and with recent political tendencies!’ Crucially, this bitterness was not decisively assuaged by Churchill’s return to power in 1951. ‘The New Poor’ was the title of a Daily Express series two years later, depicting an oppressively taxed middle class struggling ‘to keep up appearances’ and reliant on its unique qualities of ‘standards, ambitions, self-discipline, education, and immense adaptability’. In truth, though, the middle class as a whole was not doing too badly during, say, the ten years after the war. Its numbers were expanding; the widespread introduction for more senior employees of tax-free ‘perks’ (such as subsidised mortgages, company cars, and insurance and pension contributions) significantly cushioned things; and in actual practice as opposed to theory, it was the children of professionals and businessmen who disproportionately won the free grammar-school places created by the 1944 Act, with those children about six times more likely to pass the eleven-plus than working-class children.10
Instead, if the middle class had any real cause to complain, it was the specifically lower middle class.11 Their children were being squeezed out of free grammar-school places by more prosperous members of the middle class who had previously paid for those places; their salaries were increasing by appreciably less than the wages of manual workers in a full-employment economy; and, as Lewis and Maude pointed out, they were in equal measure despised by the working class for their social pretensions and subservience, looked down on by the upper middle class and cruelly mocked by the intelligentsia. ‘Clerks had to live at an address approved by the bank, they had to ask permission from the bank manager
to get married, they had to have “appropriate hobbies”, and they were evaluated once a year for such qualities as their appearance, their demeanour, and their loyalty,’ the sociologist Mike Savage has written on the basis of a close study of bank clerks. ‘To be a salaried worker did indeed involve selling yourself: in this respect the perception of male manual workers was entirely accurate.’
A clutch of authentic lower middle-class – or anyway, self-ascribed lower middle-class – voices comes through among M-O’s 1948 panel:
Lower-middle class. My income suggests nothing higher. Living in a working-class neighbourhood I find I am rejected, presumably because I don’t call my neighbours ‘mate’. I try to maintain certain standards of manners and morals and have received a university education which I have endeavoured to extend by selected experiences such as travel, music etc. Upper middle class life as I have once experienced it seems expensive, artificial and insincere. Working class would reject me (some of the worst snobs I’ve ever met are of this class) mainly because I think I have the audacity to think for myself and not accept ready-made ‘headline’ opinions. (Schoolteacher)
Lower middle-class. By birth, upbringing and wish I feel I belong to this class. I am not working-class and not true middle-class, which I consider needs the qualification of private means of some sort for a generation or two and a public-school education. Yet I am of the professional class and therefore some sort of middle. (Dental surgeon)
Lower Middle Class. Wages now about £460 a year. Feel that wages are the first consideration together with standard of living adopted. There are probably a considerable number of men earning more than I do whom I consider to be ‘working class’ because of their standard of living. (Bank clerk)
‘E.G.,’ he added to cheer himself up, ‘earning £11 a week, perhaps living in some slum property and spending £6 or £7 a week on beer, tobacco and pools.’12
The whole question of how the working class was generally perceived is a difficult one, not least because – just as much as sex, politics and religion – class was traditionally not a fit subject for polite conversation. Back in the 1930s it had taken protracted agonising by the BBC before allowing a series of radio talks (wholly innocuous in the event) on the topic. Things were changing by the early 1950s, but not very fast, with honest, realistic, non-caricaturing/non-sentimental portraits and assessments of working-class life still largely off limits. ‘Beautiful, safe and middle-class is what you had to be, like Virginia McKenna,’ was how Sheila Hancock, brought up in King’s Cross, ruefully recalled her ‘difficulty getting launched’ as a young actress. It was different up to a point in the cinema – for instance, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) was a convincing depiction of East End life – but only up to a point, while it was essentially the same in fiction. ‘Novels of working-class life are extremely rare, both in general and among the writers who succeed in being taken up by the arbiters of taste in the literary reviews, on the BBC, etc,’ the American sociologist Edward Shils observed as late as 1955. Moreover, to write about the working class was to risk the unmistakeable sniffiness of the brief TLS review two years earlier of Catherine Cookson’s Tyneside-set Colour Blind: ‘The general effect is noisy in the extreme, as though she were writing at the top of her voice; but presumably life in a crowded slum is in fact very noisy.’ Much, as Shils implied, turned on assumptions about the BBC as chief cultural arbiter. Pending the arrival of competition, it was still largely cast in an unrepentantly hierarchical Reithian mould. ‘A broadly based cultural pyramid slowly aspiring upwards,’ was how the director-general, Sir William Haley, conceived of the radio audience in 1948. ‘This pyramid is served by three main Programmes [ie Third, Home and Light], differentiated but broadly over-lapping in levels and interests, each Programme leading on to the other, the listener being induced through the years increasingly to discriminate in favour of the things that are more worthwhile.’13 It was not a vision that willingly embraced the demotic.
Unsurprisingly, the dominant sense is of the working class as living in a world apart from most other people – a world looked upon (inasmuch as it was not just simply ignored) with a mix of emotions, most of them negative or at best condescending. ‘The working man’s needs are simple,’ asserted Mr Buckle of Leicester in a 1946 letter to The Times explaining why incentives for increased production were unlikely to do the trick. ‘He wants a house to live in, a wife to cook his meals and look after his children; he wants a little to spare for a trip to the pictures with his wife, a pint or so of beer and a few smokes; and he wants money to keep up to this standard.’ Six years later another letter-writer was Phyllis Willmott, on the subject of the day care of young children. This contribution to an ongoing correspondence led to an invitation to a meeting held in a large, elegant room overlooking a Bloomsbury square. ‘There,’ she recalled, ‘I found myself facing a bevy of women seated around a long table. “Oh, Mrs Willmott,” exclaimed one of them who had rushed over to greet me, “we have all been so curious to meet you – for we couldn’t help wondering who could be writing to The Times from Hackney.” ’ Schools of course had their moments of collision between different worlds. The poet Tony Harrison (born 1937) grew up in a working-class part of Leeds and was brusquely told off by his English master at Leeds Grammar School for mispronouncing the word ‘us’ – an episode caught in his celebrated early poem ‘Them & [uz]’. Or take the case of the teacher Donald Lindsay, who after leaving Portsmouth Grammar School in 1953 to become headmaster of Malvern College was told on arrival, ‘We don’t want any of your state school ideas here.’14
There persisted an undeniably pervasive fear of the ‘common’. ‘If there was one consideration that determined my parents’ conduct and defined their position in the world it was not to be (or to be thought) common,’ Alan Bennett has memorably written; elsewhere in Leeds, Sheila Rowbotham, daughter of a salesman, had a childhood defined by her mother’s aversion to ‘common’ children who ‘scream and play rough games and get dirty’; while in Liverpool, John Lennon’s Aunt Mimi (whose husband ran a dairy business) was, in Hunter Davies’s words, ‘very protective, looking after him all the time, trying not to let him mix with what she called common boys’. There was perhaps no one more snobbish than the seaside landlady. ‘The older ones lament the difference today from pre-war times, when Newquay was filled up by professional people and middle-class families generally,’ reported Picture Post from Cornwall in 1952. ‘Higher wages and holidays with pay and the poverty of the middle classes have changed all that. Now “it’s a different class of people we get. They’re nice enough. But there’s just no comparison with the people we used to have.” ’ That same year, the News Chronicle reported an agitated debate in Littlehampton about the ‘disorderly parking of coaches on the sea-front’ and the resulting ‘tripper menace’:
For 1¾ hours the chairman banged for order while 176 ratepayers voiced protests at the ‘gradual decline of the town’.
Women in evening dresses cat-called and jeered across the ballroom where the meeting was held, and one said: ‘I have lived here a long time and seen this very nice town become horrid’.
A man in tweeds said: ‘Let us consider how we may exercise a gentle control of the trippers’ activities’.
Another said: ‘Let us park the cars and coaches away from the seafront and increase charges to dissuade certain types’.
The future lay with the fun-seeking south London working class, and in due course a coach park was built. ‘Is it necessary to so encourage day trippers?’ a local woman forlornly asked at another meeting. ‘This is a free country,’ replied the chairman, ‘and we are powerless to stop them.’15
Was there an element of sexual envy? Probably – though when Mass-Observation in 1949 asked its panel about the ideal size of a family, with particular reference to working-class families, mention of the act of procreation was noticeable by its absence. No occupations were given, but the addresses confirm one’s impression of an overwhelmingly middle-class
set of respondents:
There is still a need to increase the knowledge of birth control amongst working-class families. (‘Stonycroft’, Rockland Road, Grange-over-Sands, Lancs)
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 18