Class

I also owe an eternal debt to my friends, who have entered into the spirit of things, and come up with numerous suggestions, some serious, some less so. They include Brinsley Black, John Braine, Lucinda Bredin, Christopher Brown, Madeleine Carritt, Tony Carritt, Camilla Dempster, Val ffrench-Blake, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Bertie Gratton-Belew, Caroline Gray, Laura Hesketh, George Humphreys, Sophie Irvin, Jennifer Justice, Susan Kyle, Ronald and Sylvia Lewin, Miles and Juliet McNair, Nicholas Monson, John Parvin, Humphrey Pullar, Elizabeth Steel, Michael Stourton, Antonia Thynne, Guelda Waller, Alexander Weymouth, David Wright, Michael Ward, and Caroline Yardley.

Five other people made it possible for me to complete the book. I would therefore particularly like to thank my agent, George Greenfield, who has always shown such enthusiasm for the project, Beryl Hill, who typed out the manuscript and who miraculously managed to decipher my appalling hand-writing, and my resident major domo, Maxine Green, who retyped chunks of the manuscript when I couldn’t read my own corrections and kept up my spirits throughout those dark, desperate weeks, before the book was finally handed in and Tom Hartman and Alan Earney, who helped so much with the editing. The lion’s share of my gratitude, however, must go to my publisher, Geoffrey Strachan, who has been amazingly kind, patient, and encouraging over a long long period, when he must have despaired that the manuscript would ever see the light of day, and finally to my husband, Leo, whose humour and powers of observation have been a constant source of inspiration, and who remained good tempered, even when the whole house, including our bedroom, disappeared under a sea of papers and reference books.

‘But that’s all finished,’ they said nervously, ‘no one gives a hoot any more. Look at the young.’ They sounded as if I was intending to produce a standard work on coprophilia or child-molesting. It was plain that, since the egalitarian shake-up of the ‘sixties and early ’seventies, class as a subject had become the ultimate obscenity.

What struck me, however, as soon as I started the book was the enormity of the task I had taken on. It was like trying to catalogue the sea. For the whole system, despite its stratification, is constantly forming and reforming like coral. ‘Even a small town like Swansea,’ wrote Wynford Vaughan Thomas ‘has as many layers as an onion, and each one of them reduces you to tears.’ To me the system seemed more like a huge, striped rugger shirt that had run in the wash, with each layer blurring into the next and snobbery fiercest where one stripe merged with another.

I found, too, that people were incredibly difficult to pin down into classes. John went to a more famous boarding school than Thomas, who has a better job than Charles, who’s got smarter friends than Harry, who lives in an older house with a bigger garden than David, who’s got an uncle who’s an earl, but whose children go to comprehensive school. Who is then the gentleman?

A social class can perhaps be rather cumbersomely described as a group of people with certain common traits: descent, education, accent, similarity of occupation, riches, moral attitude, friends, hobbies, accomodation; and with generally similar ideas and forms of behaviour, who meet each other on equal terms and regard themselves as belonging to one group. A single failure to conform would certainly not exclude you from membership. Your own class tend to be people you feel comfortable with – ‘one of our sort’ – as you do when you are wearing old flat shoes rather than teetering round on precarious five-inch heels. ‘The nice thing about the House of Lords,’ explained one peer, ‘is that you can have incredibly snobbish conversations without feeling snobbish. Yesterday I admired a chap’s wife’s diamonds; he said they came from Napoleon’s sword, and before that from Louis XIV.’

I was continually asked as I wrote the book what right had I to hold forth on the English class system. Most people who had tried in the past, Nancy Mitford, Christopher Sykes, Angus Maude, had been members of the upper classes. The answer was no right at all. All I could claim was a passionate interest in the subject and, being unashamedly middle class, I was perhaps more or less equidistant from bottom and top.

It might therefore be appropriate here to digress a little and explain what my origins are. My paternal grandfather was a wool-merchant, but my paternal grandmother’s family were a bit grander. They owned newspapers and were distinguished Whig M.P.s for Leeds during the nineteenth century. My mother’s side were mostly in the church, her father being Canon of Heaton, near Bradford. Both sides had lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire for generations and were very, very strait-laced.

My father went to Rugby, then to Cambridge, where he got a first in two years, and then into the army. After getting married, he found he wasn’t making enough money and joined Fords and he and my mother moved, somewhat reluctantly, to Essex, where I was born. At the beginning of the Second World War he was called up and became one of the army’s youngest brigadiers. After the war we moved back to Yorkshire, living first in a large Victorian house. I was eight and, I think for the first time, became aware of class distinction. Our next-door neighbour was a newly rich and very ostentatious wool-merchant, of whose sybaritic existence my parents disapproved. One morning he asked me over to his house. I had a heavenly time, spending all morning playing the pianola, of which my mother also disapproved—too much pleasure for too little effort—and eating a whole eight-ounce bar of black market milk chocolate, which, just after the war, seemed like stumbling on Aladdin’s cave. When I got home I was sick. I was aware that it served me right both for slumming and for over-indulgence.

Soon after that we moved into the Hall at Ilkley, a splendid Georgian house with a long drive, seven acres of fields for my ponies, a swimming pool and tennis and squash courts. From then on we lived an élitist existence; tennis parties with cucumber sandwiches, large dances and fetes in the garden. I enjoyed playing little Miss Muck tremendously. I had a photograph of the house taken from the bottom of the drive on my dressing table at school and all my little friends were very impressed.

My brother, however, still had doubts about our lifestyle. It was too bourgeois, too predictable and restricted, he thought. One wet afternoon I remember him striding up and down the drawing-room going on and on about our boring, middle-class existence.

Suddenly my mother, who’d been trying to read a detective story, looked over her spectacles and said with very gentle reproof ‘Upper-middle class, darling.’

Occasionally we were taken down a peg by a socialist aunt who thought we’d all got too big for our boots. One day my mother was describing some people who lived near York as being a very ‘old’ family.

‘Whadja mean old?’ snorted my aunt. ‘All families are old.’

There were very few eligible young men in Ilkley; the glamorous, hard-drinking wool-merchants’ sons with their fast cars, teddy-bear coats and broad Yorkshire accents were as far above me sexually as they were below me, I felt, socially. But when I was about eighteen two old Etonians came to live in the district for a year. They were learning farming before going to run their estates. They were both very attractive and easy-going, and were consequently asked everywhere, every mum with a marriageable daughter competing for their attention. I was terribly disconcerted when, after a couple of visits to our house, and one of them taking me out once, they both became complete habitués of the house of a jumped-up steel-merchant across the valley. Soon they were both fighting for the hand of his not particularly good-looking daughter. But she’s so much commoner than me, I remember thinking in bewilderment, why don’t they prefer my company and our house? I realize now that they far preferred the easy-going atmosphere of the steel-merchant’s house, with its lush hospitality, ever-flowing drink and poker sessions far into the night, to one glass of sherry and deliberately intelligent conversation .in ours. I had yet to learn, too, that people invariably dislike and shun the class just below them, and much prefer the class below that, or even the one below that.

I was further bewildered when, later in the year, I went to Oxford to learn to type and shared a room with an ‘Hon’ who said ‘handbag’. This seemed like blasphemy. Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love had been my bible as a teenager. I knew that peers’ daughters, who she immortalized as ‘Hons’, said ‘bag’ rather than handbag. At that time, too, aware of a slowly emerging sexuality and away at last from parental or educational restraint, I evolved a new way of dressing: five-inch high-heeled shoes, tight straight skirts, very, very tight cheap sweaters and masses of make-up to cover a still rather bad skin. I looked just like a tart. People obviously took me for one too. For when my room-mate introduced me to all her smart friends at Christ Church, one young blood promptly bet another young blood a tenner that he couldn’t get me into bed by the end of the week. Before he had had time to lay siege the story was repeated back to me. I was shattered. Shocked and horrified to my virginal middle-class core, I cried for twenty-four hours. My would-be seducer, who had a good heart, on hearing of my misery turned up at my digs, apologized handsomely and suggested, by way of making amends rather than me, that he take me to the cinema. On the way there he stopped at a sweet shop and bought a bar of chocolate. Breaking it, he gave me half and started to eat the other half himself.

‘But you can’t eat sweets in the street,’ I gasped, almost more shocked than I had been by his intended seduction.

‘I,’ he answered, with centuries of disdain in his voice, ‘can do anything I like.’

Hons who talked about handbags, lords who ate chocolate in the street like the working classes, aristocrats who preferred the jumped-up to the solidly middle class: I was slowly learning that the class system was infinitely more complicated than I had ever dreamed.

‘It takes many years,’ writes Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, for the outsider to master those complex, subtle distinctions, those nuances of accent, attitude and behaviour which went, indeed which go, into that living, changing thing—English upper-class snobbery. He might have added that this is true of any class’s snobbery.

When Class was eventually published in 1979, it caused a fearful rumpus. Having written most of it hiding in the potting shed, to avoid our creditors, I was enchanted when it stayed on the best seller list for 20 weeks. Less fun was promoting it round the country. I was berated by tattooed and nose-studded radio presenters. I was shouted down by miners, egged on by Lord Montague of Beaulieu.

The Duke of Edinburgh attacked me at a Hatchard’s party, snarling that the class system no longer existed.

‘That’s odd,’ I said politely, ‘According to the 1971 Census, which categorizes people’s social class by their occupation, Princess Anne, as an event rider, is the same class: 111 (Non Manual) as a game keeper.’

‘Rubbish,’ thundered the Duke, ‘Keepers are working class.’

I got the most flak for being beastly to the working classes, by calling the couple who portrayed them: Mr and Mrs Definitely Disgusting. This was not because I thought them remotely disgusting, but because, as I point out, in reply to questions on everything from encroaching gypsy encampments to rocketing gas bills, they would tend to snort:

‘Disgusting! Definitely.’

The main difference today is that they would probably say:

‘Disgusting! Definitely. “Social” wouldn’t unblock our drains for nuffink, and they didn’t offer us any counselling neither.’

Having suffered so much opprobrium when Class came out I have hardly glanced at the book since, only opening it with colossal trepidation, like Pandora’s Box, because my publishers suggested in view of this beautiful new reprint, I might like to draw readers’ attention to how the class system has changed.

My first reaction was how on earth had I been brave or crazy enough to write all these things. But settling down, I realized I had been looking at a different era. For in 1979, everything changed. Margaret Thatcher came to power, and suddenly the English became obsessed with making money, buying their own houses, and rising socially. The Yuppie was born. Throughout the same time, recession kicked in, the stock market crashed, the power of the unions was broken. More tragically a new cardboard boxed underclass, suffering appalling poverty, grew up, which had hardly existed when I was writing.

Another tragedy I hadn’t anticipated was the demise of the miner. Back in 1979, he was the ultimate macho hero, king of the working classes. Mining, as I write on here, was regarded as much grander than building because it was a steady job. I also singled out miners, power workers, dockers, engineers and lorry drivers as the new élite, because by striking they had the power to bring the country to its knees.

Their hour of glory was brief, as pit after pit closed down. Today with short-term contracts, loss of pension and no certainty of a job for life, or in the poor miners’ case, no job at all, the majority of the working classes have suffered.

I also state on here that becoming a shop steward was the easiest way for a working class boy to get on, but since the weakening of the unions, this no longer applies.

But not only the working classes lost clout. ‘Lorses’ at Lloyds decimated the upper classes more effectively than any revolution and the middle classes, who are light years behind the working classes when it comes to working social security and the black economy, have also been laid off in the most brutal way. There’s no kudos in working at a desk if it has to be cleared in an afternoon.

Much of what I wrote on my chapter on education, I think, still stands, except that since 1979 drugs have invaded all schools, and girls most of the public schools.

Eton has been one of the few schools resisting the latter.

‘If one is caught in bed with a girl,’ grumbled a young Etonian, ‘one gets chucked out, but if you’re caught with a boy, you get two hours gardening.’

Other changes were more of detail. Only the poorest of the working classes no longer have refrigerators. Mrs Definitely Disgusting has a hair dryer now instead of wearing her curlers to the corner shop and working class streets are entwined with satellite dishes like columbines. Upper class girls flaunt tattoos and nose-studs like radio presenters. Upper class mothers no longer wear fur coats and only think babygros are common if they have logos on. Many of the regiments I wrote about have sadly been amalgamated or disbanded. Many men’s clubs now allow in women and are particularly charming to them.

Generally though, I was surprised and pleased, despite these changes, how the archetypes I’d created behave in just the same way today, and can be found in Harry Enfield’s working class couple, Wayne and Waynetta, in his chinless wonder, Tim Nice But Dim, and in the socially mountaineering Hyacinth Bucket—all characters we love as we laugh at them.

As a writer, one must stand by one’s prejudices. I have therefore only made a dozen or so small changes to the text, where I felt I had been totally inaccurate or unnecessarily cruel or insensitive.

I realize the entire book is wildly politically incorrect. This is as it should be, because political correctness with its insistence on verbosity and the use of euphemisms, like ‘lone parent’, ‘replacement mother’, ‘sibling’, ‘vertically challenged’ for short, ‘young woman’ for girl, ‘member of the homeless community’ for tramp, the dreadful ‘partner’ for lover, is irredeemably genteel and lower middle class.

As Class is a study of twenty years ago, we have left people’s titles, prices and figures as they were then. It was a happy day when you could get a temporary secretary for £50 a week.

Flipping through the pages, I felt a huge sadness that so many of the friends who’d helped me with the book or contributed marvellous anecdotes: Frankie Howerd, Frank Muir, Larry Grayson, Dick Emery, Reginald Bousanquet, Jean Rook, to name only a few, are now dead.

When I went on Yorkshire television with the splendidly redoutable Miss Rook in the early seventies, the interviewer began most embarrassingly by saying:

‘Now here you are: two columnists from Yorkshire but from very different backgrounds. You’re working class aren’t you, Jean. And Jilly, you’re upper class?’

We both shrieked with horror.

‘I’m middle, not upper,’ I muttered going scarlet.

‘I’m upper-middle,’ said Jean witheringly, ‘I know lots of duchesses.’

Even people, who pretend class doesn’t exist, are affected by it. I am reminded of a psychiatrist who was treating an aristocrat for depression. A month went by and they seemed to be making little progress.

‘I want you to be completely honest,’ said the psychiatrist at the next session, ‘and tell me exactly what’s in your mind at the moment.’

‘I was thinking,’ said the aristocrat apologetically, ‘what a vulgar little man you are.’

It was their final session. The psychiatrist was unable to go on because he’d completely lost any feeling of ascendancy.

‘And so,’ wrote John Coleman in the Sunday Times, ‘the old movements of social advance and recoil go on, just as much as they always did. It is the perpetual inaccuracy of imitation that makes up the English social comedy and tragedy.’

But there is plenty of comedy. As a small boy at my son’s prep school once pointed out in an essay,

‘All people should be gentlemen except ladies, but it puts a bit of variety into life if some are not.’

I am very aware of the inadequacies of this book. I have made many sweeping generalizations, which I hope people won’t take too seriously, because other classes are not better or worse than one’s own, they are merely different.

One need look no further for an example than Dame Barbara Cartland being interviewed, back in the seventies, by Sandra Harris on the Today programme and being asked whether she thought the class barriers had broken down.

‘Of course they have,’ said Dame Barbara, ‘or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to someone like you.’

A good example of this is Mrs James, the aristocrat in Pamela Hansford Johnson’s novel The Unspeakable Skipton. Mrs James had an air of undefinable authority and spoke in a direct and barking shorthand:

‘Feel sorry for poor Alf Dorset, son’s marrying some girl who sings on the wireless.’ Unbound by convention, she made all her own rules, making a point of going everywhere out of season.

‘That’s why seasons are inevitably such a flop’ says one of the other characters, ‘because if they’re out of season they’re wrong anyway, and if they’re in season, Mrs James had buzzed off to Gozo or somewhere extraordinary.’

As so many of the aristocracy don’t have titles they regard Burke’s, which covers the landed gentry as well as the peerage, as far more important source books than Debrett’s. One peer told his secretary she must get up-to-date copies of Burke’s ‘so you’ll know all the people I’m talking about’. The point about the aristocracy is that they all know each other.

Traditionally, as will be shown in later chapters, the aristocracy didn’t work for their living and, although many of them have jobs today, they find difficulty in applying the same dedication to their work as the middle classes.

They used, of course, to be terribly rich. At the turn of the century, if you were asked to stay at Woburn one chauffeur and a footman would take you as far as Hendon, where another chauffeur and a footman would be waiting to take you to Woburn. As a gentleman never travelled with his luggage, another two cars were needed to carry that. So it meant two chauffeurs and two footmen to get you and your luggage as far as Hendon, and two more chauffeurs and footmen to take you to Woburn—eight men to transport one guest for heaven knows how large a house party, down to the country. The Marquess of Hertford had a house in Wales he’d never been to, but where, every night, a huge dinner was cooked by a fleet of servants in case he did turn up.

The Westminsters today own 300 acres in Belgravia and Oxford Street, 12,000 acres around Eaton, 14,000 acres in North Wales, 1,000 acres in Kent, 400 acres in Shropshire, 800 acres in New South Wales, 1,000 acres in British Columbia, Hawaii and Australia. The present Duke inherited £16 million on his 21st birthday. Hardly the bread line.

Today, as a result of death duties and capital transfer tax, most aristocrats are desperately poor in comparison with their grandfathers and are reduced to renting off wings as apartments, selling paintings, turning their gardens into zoos and amusement parks, and letting the public see over their houses. Anyone who has experienced the nightmare of showing a handful of people over their own house when they put it up for sale will understand the horror of having a million visitors a year peering into every nook and cranny.

Although they have considerable influence in the Tory party, the aristocracy no longer run the country as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But if their privileges have been eroded, their responsibilities remain the same: responsibilities to the tenants, to the community (the good aristocrat always has a strong sense of public duty) and to the house he lives in, often so beautiful as to be a national monument, but to the upkeep of which the nation pays no contribution.

One of the characteristics of the aristocrat is the extreme sentiment he feels towards his house and his inheritance. His wife is expected to feel the same. When the Marchioness of Tavistock recently expressed her boredom at running Woburn her father-in-law’s sharp reaction was quoted in the Daily Mail:

‘If you marry some guy with a title, you have a duty and a responsibility to carry on what his ancestors did in the past. She was perfectly aware of what she was getting into. Trouble is she’s an only child.’

Because they believe in their inheritance, the upper classes set enormous store by keeping things in the family. They don’t buy their houses like the middle classes, they inherit them. When the house gets too big for a grandfather and grandmother, they might move into a smaller house on the estate, to make way for their eldest son, but they leave all the furniture behind, as their ancestors have for generations. One definition of the middle classes is the sort of people who have to buy their own silver.

Because the aristocracy were so anxious to preserve their inheritance, they tended only to marry their own kind. The middle classes married for love. The upper classes married to preserve their rank. All twenty-six Dukes are, at present, related to one another. And as long as rank was protected, and money obtained in sufficient quantities to support that rank, infidelity after marriage was taken for granted, as Vita Sackville-West points out in her novel The Edwardians:

‘A painter,’ screamed the Duchess, ‘What painter? Sylvia Roehampton’s daughter to marry a painter? But of course she won’t. You marry Tony Wexford, and we’ll see what can be done about the painter afterwards.’

As they weren’t expected to be faithful, unlike the middle classes they didn’t feel guilty if they wandered, which explains the over-active libido of the aristocrat. He expected to excercise droit de seigneur over his tenants but he also saw himself as a Knight Errant like Don Quixote living in a world of romantic adventure. ‘When your ancestors have been fighting battles and seducing women for thousands of years,’ said one German nobleman, ‘it’s terribly difficult to settle down to one wife and an office job.’

As a result of all this infidelity a high proportion of the aristocracy is irregularly conceived, but, as they tend to sleep with each other, they’re still pretty dotty with inbreeding. When my uncle was Lord Spencer’s agent, my aunt said she met all the local aristocracy, many of them as mad as hatters. When they talked about one of their friends ‘coming out’, you never knew if they were doing the season, or being discharged from a psychiatric clinic.

Colossal self-confidence is perhaps the hallmark of the aristocrat. Like the chevalier he goes through life unafraid; he doesn’t question his motives or feel guilty about his actions. When I went shooting in Northumberland last summer I noticed a beautiful blonde young man in a red sweater at the next butt. Why didn’t he have to wear green camouflage like the rest of us, I asked.

‘Because he’s a duke’s son,’ said my host. ‘He can do what he likes.’

Not answerable to other people, the aristocrat is often unimaginative, spoilt, easily irritated and doesn’t flinch from showing it. If he wants to eat his peas with his knife he does so.

‘Dear Kate,’ said Henry V, ‘You and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion; we are the makers of manners, Kate; and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults.’

As the maker of manners, many of the aristocracy, while feeling they have a duty towards the community as Sheriffs and Lord-Lieutenants, are indifferent to public opinion.

‘One doesn’t care what the press say,’ said the Marquess of Anglesey at a dinner party. ‘One’s friends know what one’s like and that’s all that matters.’ The only thing he minded, he went on, was that the National Trust film on television had said he was very rich. The hostess then asked him if he’d like moussaka or cold turkey.

‘I’d like both,’ he said.

Not caring a stuff what people think also leads to a rich vein of eccentricity: the Marquess of Londonderry throwing soup at a fly that was irritating him in a restaurant, and Sir Anthony Eden’s father hurling a barometer out of the window into the pouring rain, yelling, ‘See for yourself, you bloody thing.’

Or there was the imperious peer who, when he missed a train, ordered the station-master to get him another one.

Professor Ross has said that above a certain level all U people are equal. With respect, I think few upper class people would agree with him. The ancient aristocracy consider it very vulgar to have been founded after the Tudors, which puts most of our present Dukes beyond the pale. In fact, in the nineteenth century many of them were so worried about the comparative youthfulness of their families that they employed genealogists to try and trace their ancestry back to the Conqueror.

When Oliver Lyttelton was made Viscount Chandos, his wife Lady Moira, who was the daughter of the 10th Duke of Leeds, was furious at becoming Lady Chandos, and having ostensibly to drop rank. Oliver Lyttelton was evidently so thrilled to be ennobled that he went round putting coronets on everything, including books of matches. Brian Masters in his book The Dukes tells a story of the Duchesses of Buccleuch and Westminster sidling through a door together in their determination not to cede precedence.

Between aristocrats and other classes there is certainly a barrier of rank. My mother and father used to live near Hampton Court Palace, where widows of distinguished men, some of them aristocrats, have apartments. My mother met a peer’s widow at a drinks party and they got on so well that my mother wrote to her next day asking her to dine. Back came a letter of acceptance but with a P.S. ‘I hope you don’t mind my pointing out, Elaine dear, that the Palace should be the first to issue invitations.’

Brian Masters thinks this obsession with rank probably had something to do with boredom. Without a career, the aristocrat had to fill his days. He was not a great intellectual: Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot, whose reading consisted of his own entry in The Baronetage, is fairly near the mark. He preferred more exciting entertainment, hence his addiction to blood sports and to gambling. I shall never forget watching an aristocrat and a television newsreader playing backgammon one evening. The newsreader’s wife, who was ravishingly beautiful and bored with the lack of attention, suddenly came in with no clothes on and danced round and round them. Neither of them took any notice.

The aristocrat, when he wants to, has very good manners. The Scottish upper classes in particular have that shell-shocked look that probably comes from banging their heads on low beams leaping to their feet whenever a woman comes into the room. Aristocrats are also deeply male chauvinist, and although you get left-wing extremists like Lord Weymouth who sends his children to a comprehensive school and has revolutionary ideas, on the whole they tend to be reactionary.

While writing this book I found that there were very much two strands in the character of the aristocrat: first the wild, delinquent, arrogant, capricious, rather more glamorous strand; and second the stuffy, ‘county’, public-spirited, but publicity-shy strand, epitomized by the old baronet whose family were described ‘as old as the hills and infinitely more respectable’.

Or, as a small boy writing in my son’s school magazine pointed out: ‘Gentleman are of two types: the nose-uppish and the secluded.’

In order to write this book I have dealt in archetypes. The aristocracy and upper classes are represented by The Hon HARRY STOW-CRAT. Son of the sixth Baron Egliston, educated at Eton, he served in the Coldstream Guards. He now runs his diminishing estate, selling the odd Van Dyck to make ends meet, but does more or less what he pleases. He lives in a large decaying house in the North Riding of Yorkshire and has a flat in Chelsea. He has a long-suffering wife, CAROLINE, who does a great deal for charity, an eldest son, GEORGIE, a daughter called FIONA, and several other children. He has numerous mistresses, but none to whom he is as devoted as to his black labrador, SNIPE. He has had many moments of frustration and boredom in his life, but never any of self-doubt.

Occasionally they have their defenders, ‘I come from the middle classes,’ said Neville Chamberlain, ‘and I am proud of the ability, the shrewdness, the industry and providence, the thrift by which they are distinguished.’

In a way the middle classes seem to suffer as the middle child does. Everyone makes a huge fuss over the firstborn and everyone pets and coddles the baby, (who, like the working classes, is shored up by the great feather bed of the welfare state), but the child in the middle gets the most opprobrium, is often left to fend for itself and is ganged up on by the other two. It is doubly significant that in the Civil War, the rabble joined up with the King against the Puritan middle classes. For if Marx was the champion of the working classes, Calvin was the prophet of the middle classes. They believed implicitly in the Puritan Ethic, in the cultivation of such virtues as diligence, frugality, propriety and fidelity. Work to keep sin at bay, feel guilty if you slack. Shame is a bourgeois notion.

Although there is a world of difference between the top of the middle classes and the bottom, between the great merchant banker and the small shopkeeper, they are united in their desire to get on, not just to survive. Unlike the upper classes and the working classes they think careers are important. They start little businesses, they work to pass exams after they leave school, they believe in the law of the jungle and not the Welfare State. If you get on in life good luck to you.

For this reason they believed in the importance of education long before the other classes. They believed in deferred satisfaction. They saved in order to send their children to private schools, or to buy their own houses. If the upper classes handed on estates to their children, the middle classes handed on small businesses. To the working classes the most important criterion of middle-class membership after money or income is owning a small business or being self-employed.

At the moment they are under increasing pressure, as the working classes get richer and more powerful. One of the great divides between the middle and lower classes used to be that the former used his brain and the latter his hands. Today, however, the miner and the car worker with their free housing and free education have far more spending money than a newly qualified doctor or barrister, and certainly than a policeman or a major in the army. According to my ex-bank manager, the middle classes are having increasing difficulty making ends meet. In 1976, they rather than the working classes became the chief candidates for the pawnbroker, bringing in watches, wedding rings, golf clubs, and binoculars.

Although they don’t ‘know everyone’ like the upper classes, the upper-middles and many of the middles, having been to boarding school, and have a much wider circle of friends than the working classes. They are able to keep in touch with them by telephone, or by their ability to write letters. Many of them also have a spare room where friends can come and stay.

They therefore tend to entertain ‘outsiders’ much more than the working classes, and don’t need to depend on their immediate neighbours for help or for their identity. They can afford to keep themselves to themselves. Aloofness, reserve and a certain self-righteousness are also middle-class qualities.

To illustrate the three main strands of the middle classes we again fall into archetypes, with GIDEON and SAMANTHA UPWARD as the upper-middle-class couple, HOWARD and EILEEN WEYBRIDGE as the middle-middles and BRYAN and JEN TEALE as the lower-middles.

Gideon and Samantha both went to ‘good’ schools, Gideon probably to Winchester or to Sherborne. He might be an architect or work in the City. He wears a signet ring with a crest on the little finger of his left hand, in an attempt to proclaim near aristocratic status, just as the middle-middles wear an old school tie to show they’ve been to boarding school, the lower-middles give their house a name instead of a number to prove it isn’t council and the working classes bring back plastic bulls from Majorca to show they’ve travelled.

Gideon and Samantha have two children called Zacharias and Thalia, who they might start off sending to a state school, and trying not to wince at the first ‘pardon’, but would be more likely to send to a private school. They love their English setter, Blucher, and feel frightfully guilty about loving it almost more than their children. Harry Stow-Crat would have no such scruples. Gideon plays tennis and rugger at a club, but he wouldn’t use the club to make friends, and he and Samantha wouldn’t go near the Country Club which, to them, reeks of surburbia. They prefer to entertain in their own house, which is large and Victorian, and being restored to its original state rather faster than they’d like. Samantha is into good works with a slightly self-interested motive: pollution, conservation, the P.T.A.

As they can’t be the most upper class in the land, Samantha is determined that they shall be the most ‘cultured’. She and Gideon go to the theatre, the ballet and the movies, as they rather self-consciously call the cinema, and try and read at least two books a week.

In the last fifteen years, the upper-middles have aimed at a standard of living they can’t afford, taking on many of the pastimes of the upper classes. Gideon goes shooting quite often; they have two cars, which are falling to pieces, and for which they have to pay a fortune every time they take their M.O.T.; they used to have a country cottage, holidays abroad, and a boat. Now they have two children at boarding school. Since the advent of the permissive society Gideon is playing at adultery like Harry Stow-Crat. As a result he spends a fortune on lunches, and another fortune on guilt presents for Samantha afterwards. They are both so worried about trying to make ends meet, they’re drinking themselves absolutely silly—hence the sub-title ‘The Merrytocracy’.

Virginia Woolf once wrote an unfinished novel about an upper-middle-class family called the Pargeters. ‘Parget’ is an English dialect word meaning to smooth over cracks in plastered surfaces: the Pargeters gloss over the deep sexual and emotional fissures of life. In the same way Samantha doesn’t particularly like her mother-in-law, or several of her neighbours; but she tries to get on with them because she feels guilty about her dislike. In the same way she feels guilty about telling someone she employs that they are not doing the job properly. Caroline Stow-Crat would never have that problem. If she hired a gardener even for two hours, she wouldn’t flaunt him as a status symbol, she’d keep quiet about him, because she feels it’s more creative to do the garden herself.

She and Gideon call each other ‘darling’ rather than ‘dear’, and try to remember to say ‘orf’. Gideon’s parents, Colonel and Mrs Upward, living on a rapidly dwindling fixed income, are much more thrifty than Samantha and Gideon. As they’re not drinking themselves silly, they don’t smash everything and still have the same glasses and china as they did when they were married.

Howard Weybridge’s father hasn’t a bill in the world and is on the golf club committee. He found bridge to be one of the most wonderful things in life; it’s a very easy way of entertaining. He has a sneaking liking for Enoch Powell: ‘We should have stopped the sambos coming here in the first place.’

The lower-middles never had any servants, but as they are obsessed with cleanliness, and like everything nice, they buy a small modern house and fill it with modern units which are easy to keep clean. Jen and Bryan have two children, Wayne and Christine, and a very clean car.

As Jen and Bryan didn’t go to boarding school, didn’t make friends outside the district, and don’t mix with the street, they have very few friends and keep themselves to themselves. They tend to be very inner-directed, doing everything together, decorating the house, furnishing the car, and coaching and playing football with the children. Jen reads knitting patterns, Woman’s Own and Reader’s Digest condensed books. To avoid any working-class stigma she puts up defensive barriers— privet hedges, net curtains—talks in a ‘refained’ accent, raising her little finger when she drinks. Her aim is to be dainty and wear six pairs of knickers. She admires Mary Whitehouse enormously, disapproves of long hair and puts money in the Woolwich every week. She sees herself as the ‘Woolwich girl’. The Teales don’t entertain much, only Bryan’s colleagues who might be useful, and occasionally Bryan’s boss.