Elizabethans
This meant that mothers lost their right to know the identities of the adopting families; and the children who were adopted in England and Wales had no right to know the names of their natural parents – until this law was finally amended again in 1978. It would cause a huge amount of pain and baffled misunderstanding for decades to come. Slowly, over the decades, attitudes changed and it became easier for unmarried mothers to live openly with their children. But in the meantime it seems that attitudes on the street were more kindly and more liberal than they were in the media and political establishment – where they could be icy. At one point, in a speech in 1959, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, seriously proposed that adultery should be made a criminal offence. His argument was not pursued at Westminster – the Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, never took Fisher terribly seriously – and this probably marks the highest ambition of the post-war morality police.
When it came to contraception, the demand from ordinary British families suggested that things were already changing. In 1938, just before the war, there had been sixty or so birth-control clinics in Britain. By 1963 there were more than 400. In 1958, the Church of England – not the Roman Catholic Church – had at last accepted the importance of family planning, albeit only within the context of Christian marriage. By the beginning of the decade, contraceptive methods were spreading fast, with the IUD and the diaphragm preceding the pill in 1961.
Did this mean that people were increasingly seeing sex as a source of pleasure rather than simply procreation? Mass Observation, the pioneering sociological survey, conducted a poll in the late 1940s which found that only around a third of those questioned thought that a good sex life was essential to happiness. The same poll, twenty years later, found that 67 per cent thought sex was very important. People may have tried harder to limit the size of their families because they were worried about poverty in the austerity years; but having done so and having discovered contraception, they promptly revealed that it had cheering side-effects.
Even at this early stage, it’s possible to see that the drilled and disciplined masculine Britain of National Service and the engineering workshops was giving way to a subtle but important power shift that started in the home. Contemporary observers thought so, anyway. The Polish-born sociologist Ferdynand Zweig said in his study The Worker in an Affluent Society, published in 1961 and based upon interviews with working-class Britons he had conducted in 1958–9, that there had been what he called:
a process of softening in the worker … I would venture to call it his feminization. The worker’s world was formerly known for its masculinity. Now he has mellowed considerably. The women around him imbue him with feminine values. He accepts his wife as his companion on more or less equal terms, especially when she goes out to work and earns her own living. All this means that the worker is moving away from his mates.
In 1957 Michael Young and Peter Willmott conducted a major survey of working-class families in Bethnal Green, East London, and in Essex, published that year as Family and Kinship in East London. They too found male authority and exploitation in decline: ‘the old style of working-class family is fast disappearing. The husband portrayed by previous social investigation is no longer true to life. In place of the old comes a new kind of companionship between man and woman, reflecting the rise in status of the young wife and children which is one of the great transformations of our time.’
These assessments are fascinating and correct a too-simplistic view of the era. But this is also a class issue. Sociologists are better-educated, university people, peering down on their teeming subjects like biologists staring through a microscope. In the 1950s, as it happens, the majority of British people classified themselves as working class. They were still governed, as well as investigated, however, by aliens.
6
UPPER CLASS IN THE 1950S
Whitaker’s Almanack, a book Sir Winston Churchill considered indispensable, contains a vivid portrait of just how class divided Britain was during the Queen’s early reign. It carefully lists the orders of peers, the bishops, the greater clubs, the higher rankings of the civil service and the military high command, forming a meticulous social taxonomy of the hierarchy. And of course, in outer form, some of it still exists. London’s clubland, from White’s and the Carlton to the Reform and the Garrick, continues to fascinate foreign observers in the twenty-first century. Furtive-looking chaps in weary tweeds, named after the lesser counties of England, potter in and out for lunch; filmmakers use the grand staircases they potter up as sets; some of the richest clubs are still doing fine. They still smell of boiled beef and they still serve potted shrimps.
In 1952 it was all on a different scale. There were no fewer than 107 proper, grand, listed London clubs, including many long vanished. Who now remembers the comfort and glory of the Bath Club in Brook Street, or the Challoner (Roman Catholics only) in Pont Street, or the Eccentric in Ryder Street, or the Goat in New Bond Street, or that fine establishment, the Ladies’ Empire Club in Grosvenor Street, or that succulently named gathering, the Sesame, Imperial and Pioneer, also in Grosvenor Street, or the Oriental in Hanover Square, or even the Royal Toxophilite in Albion Mews (for archers, obviously)? And on, and on, and on. Nor was London the only city where the well-off and well-connected met daily to flock, nibble and murmur. In the early 1950s Birmingham boasted eight gentlemen’s clubs. Liverpool had ten ornate, exclusive clubs. So did both Edinburgh and Glasgow, for the city’s stockbrokers, bankers, accountants and councillors.
We must be careful not to confuse archaic names and a grandiloquent style with fundamental social change. It could be argued that the growth of private clubs in modern London, where rich City employees can mingle with the children of Russian oligarchs and riff-raff from television or the cinema, are pretty much the same phenomenon as the old clubs of the grandees. The designer clothes are very different from the Savile Row suits; the hair is longer and fewer buttons are done up; the cocktails are stronger and the wine, perhaps, is no worse. It’s just that the nature of the elite has changed; in modern London, the influential, rich and connected can still hang out together well away from the prying eyes of ordinary folk. The real difference may be that in the 1950s the members of these clubs were part of a homogeneous English aristocracy – men and women who had gone to the same schools, had the same attitude to nation and Empire and shared the same private language.
From Moscow to São Paulo, Beijing to Chicago, the elites hang together. But in the lost Britain of the mid-twentieth century there was a tight solidarity of basic assumptions that we don’t find today. Unironic, full-throated enthusiasm for the monarchy and a rather myopic view of British history ran through the old ruling order like golden threads, rejected by only a few weirdo socialists and faddists. The best novelists, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, knew this world well. As the 1952 Almanack reminds us, Britain’s class structure also reflected a more Christian nation. It still observed twenty-eight ‘red-letter days’ when scarlet robes had to be worn by senior judges; and these mingled religious festivals (11 June, the festival of St Barnabas; 25 January, the Festival of the Conversion of St Paul) with royal birthdays (21 April, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s birthday’).
But if one lifts one’s eyes from the taxonomy, it was pretty clear that taxation had devastated much of the traditional British aristocracy in the decade after the war. Of all the grand London houses, only Londonderry House and those owned by the royal family were left. The Duke of Wellington’s Apsley House at Hyde Park Corner, where the annual commemorative Waterloo dinners were held, had been handed over as a national museum in 1947, though the dukes of Wellington were allowed to carry on living there in a few back rooms. Almost all the rest of the grand houses had been sold to be redeveloped as offices or hotels.
With land prices still depressed, grand-sounding families were scuttling and giving up: this was the great age of pulling down country mansions, too. In his history of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, the historian David Cannadine gave a sonorous roll-call of destruction: ‘Panshanger, Normanhurst, Lowther Castle, Rufford Abbey and Ravensworth Castle were only the most famous victims. Between 1945 and 1955, four hundred country houses were demolished, more than at any other period of modern British history. Indeed, by 1955, the peak year, they were disappearing at the rate of one every five days …’ If you had the cash it was a good time to buy Old Masters. But of course not many people did.
Yet on the surface, despite the impact of socialist taxation, Britain still felt mildly feudal. This was certainly reflected in the culture. In Ealing comedies, in West End plays and in novels, both crime and comic, the country-house setting remained a standard one. And if many of the old houses had been abandoned, demolished or converted into golf or spa hotels, their occupants had certainly not departed the national stage. The British peerage was headed by an impressive battlefleet of 26 dukes, 39 marquesses, 210 earls and 121 viscounts.
Many would eventually be forced to find new ways of surviving. Cannadine, writing in 1990, revealed that the ninth Earl of Buckinghamshire, who had died in 1983, had ended his career as a municipal gardener in Southend. He continued:
The present Earl of Breadalbane lives in a bed sitting room in Finchley while the Earl of Effingham – a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk – lives in the Cromwell Road … Earl Nelson is a police constable. Lord Northesk is a jewel salesman in the Isle of Man. The Countess of Mar is a saleswoman for British Telecom. Lord Simon Conyngham is an assistant in a delicatessen. Lord Teviot is a bus conductor. Lord Kingsale, the premier baron of Ireland, is a silage-pit builder in the west country …
In 1952, these horrors lay far ahead. The press was still greatly excited by the doings of a real-life, flesh-and-blood duke or baroness. Morning coats and top hats were worn even by socialist politicians. Up until 1958, when the practice was abolished by the new Queen, aristocratic young girls known as debutantes, sheathed in dresses of white, ivory or pink silk and garlanded with ropes of pearls, would be presented at court, curtsying and walking backwards as they bashfully sized up potential male admirers. This marked the start of the English social ‘Season’, to be followed by other highlights including Cheltenham races, the Chelsea flower show, the Badminton horse trials, the Epsom Derby and the Henley Royal Regatta – each of them an opportunity for flamboyant social display by the upper classes, a lengthy mating dance that kept milliners, florists and wine merchants in excellent humour.
To what extent was it all nostalgia for a pre-war world? There is no doubt that from the novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers through to the ‘society’ pages of the newspapers, Britons were reacting to the disorientating new post-war world with its unfamiliar global order by burrowing snugly into the rituals and traditions of the first part of the century. But this post-war social conservatism, which would soon be so exuberantly challenged, was itself an aberration. There never has been a placid social or historic norm. The 1920s had been a turbulent decade, and the 1930s even more so. To the extent that the British of the 1950s were harking back to what seemed stable, ordered and reassuring, they were misremembering. And the same is true of those who hark back to the stable, comforting 1950s today. Underneath, the country is always changing fast. It just rarely seems to feel like it now.
7
NANCY, AND HOW TO SPEAK PROPER
During the 1950s and early 1960s, class anxiety seems to have been at a high level. Consumerism and the break-up of the old industrial order meant that rebel working-class culture, which would soon take its most vivid form, was flowering. Yet the sense of a class-divided nation, in which those in charge spoke differently, remained very strong. Today, listening back to middle-class voices in films and broadcasts of the period, they sound like the Queen. (Rather, as she used to be: even the Queen in old age sounds less cut-glass regal than she did as a young woman.) In the 1950s, working-class people who wanted to ‘get on’ flocked to elocution teachers. More than trad jazz or skiffle bands, the confident plosives and icy sibilance of 10,000 neighbourhood elocution lessons should really be the sonic background to this period in British history.
Working-class icons were not exempt. In Liverpool, the young John Lennon, being brought up by his indomitable aunt, was taught from an early age not to speak the working-class ‘Scouse’. His chaotic father returned, pleased to find a small boy who spoke ‘like a gentleman’ and who gravely enquired of him, ‘Shall I call you Pater?’ Down in Leicester, John Orton, who would later grow up to be the shock playwright and smasher of bourgeois convention Joe Orton, managed to escape from the Saffron Lane council estate by getting himself elocution lessons from a local lady.
Want to get on – in politics, retail, banking? First and foremost, water down the local tang. Ambitious for the stage or television? Elocution lessons for you then. The need to ‘speak proper’ not ‘common’ was fostered by the new mass influencers. In the days before the independent broadcasting companies, BBC ‘received pronunciation’ was squirted into millions of kitchens and workplaces, where it must often have sounded quite alien. Working-class poets such as the Glaswegian Tom Leonard, and Liz Berry from the Black Country, have recorded the powerfully undermining effect on working-class self-confidence.
By the early 1960s, actors, politicians and other public figures rarely had strong local accents, though comedians seem to have been a permitted exception. History’s richly variegated and pungent archipelago of different speech patterns, phrases and words was starting to sound more like a modern British monoculture. This would change as a culturally rebellious working class fought their way to the front of the stage, but in the 1950s speech anxiety was impossible to dodge.
But class anxiety was not restricted to poorer Britons. One of the great, if ridiculous, talking points of the mid-1950s originated with a lunch in Paris, at which an earnest if witty professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, Alan Ross, was introduced to the wicked, hugely popular upper-crust novelist the Honourable Nancy Mitford.
Quite bizarrely, Ross had been asked to write an academic paper on British upper-class usage for a Finnish scholarly journal. Lacking conventional sources, he had rifled through one of Mitford’s earlier novels as a guide for what was, and was not, acceptable usage for aristocratic Britons. (Academic rigour has intensified since then, not always with happy results.) Mitford, a successful writer and the daughter of an impecunious peer, was living in Paris, where she was pursuing a love affair with Gaston Palewski, one of General de Gaulle’s leading supporters.
Despite living a glamorous life based at her chic townhouse in the centre of the city, Mitford was chronically worried about cash. With an instinct for the soft underbelly of the British psyche, she immediately saw the market potential in selling to her neurotic countrymen her explanation of what was – and what was not – acceptable aristocratic language. She asked Ross to send her a copy of his article. She loved it, writing to a friend in London that it was ‘dreadfully funny throughout because written in a serious scientific style … He is a great new character in my life and a card if ever there was one.’ Many pound signs flashed before her immaculately made-up eyes. She wrote to her bookseller chum in London, Heywood Hill, that her ‘crazy friend Prof Ross’s essay … is a natural for the Christmas market’.
Although he was initially reluctant to be dragged into a confected jape, Ross eventually allowed his piece to appear in the highbrow magazine Encounter. Mitford proved to be right. The magazine sold out. She then wrote her own essay to go with Ross’s, on ‘the English aristocracy’. With further contributions by Evelyn Waugh among others, and a fine satirical poem by John Betjeman, in 1956 Hamish Hamilton published it all in one slim volume, which may still be the most influential, if satirical, study in modern times of the British upper orders, Noblesse Oblige.
Professor Ross had briskly, ruthlessly divided words and accents into those acceptable for gentlemen, and presumably ladies – ‘U’ – and the mistakes made by lesser people, ‘non-U’. He had a very clear notion of class, beginning his essay with the forthright sentence: ‘Today, in 1956, the English class-system is essentially tripartite – there exist an upper, a middle, and a lower class.’ However, he went on, after a period of socialism and war, ‘It is solely by language that the upper class is clearly marked off from the others … Today, a member of the upper class is, for instance, not necessarily better educated, cleaner, or richer than someone not of this class.’ Ross argued that, nevertheless, U or ‘gentlemanly’ people were different in their tastes and behaviour. They had an aversion to telephones, cinema and the wireless. ‘Again, when drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.’
To mark off real members of the upper class, the professor explained, certain pronunciations could be immediately spotted: ‘In Berkeley, Berkshire, clerk, Derby, U-speakers rhyme the first syllable with dark (or bar), non-U speakers with mirk (or burr).’ All of this transfixed a generation of Britons brought up on the importance of class distinctions. Help! More rules! Sent down from above, too. Where did they themselves stand? Innumerable conversations started, along the lines of ‘Aunt Anne, say Berkshire for us will you, dear?’ But if subtle distinctions of accent – and the essay is full of them – weren’t enough, Ross also provided a long list of words and phrases used by proper gentlemen, as distinct from unctuous middle-class parvenus.
Here is a brief and necessarily incomplete summary, with posh U usage, followed by common non-U in brackets: have a bath (take a bath); bicycle (cycle); lunch (dinner); dinner (evening meal); sick (ill); rich (wealthy); hall (lounge); lavatory-paper (toilet-paper); looking-glass (mirror); writing-paper (note-paper); pudding (sweet); wireless (radio) … All of this was alarming enough to people who suddenly realized that talking about cycles and mirrors marked them out as being drearily middle-class; but Ross pushed ruthlessly on to explain that many apparently ordinary innocuous expressions, marked out their users as pathetically common: ‘Pleased to meet you! This is a very frequent non-U response to the greeting, How d’you do? U-speakers normally just repeat the greeting; to reply to the greeting (e.g. with Quite well, thank you) is non-U.’ Suddenly new verbal landmines were being set and primed all across the land.
Nor did Alan Ross have much good news for those who had not been born into the upper orders: ‘In England today,’ he wrote,
the question, ‘Can a non-U speaker become a U-speaker?’ is one noticeably of paramount importance for many Englishmen (and some of their wives). The answer is that an adult can never attain complete success. Moreover, it must be remembered that, in these matters, U-speakers have ears to hear, so that one single pronunciation, word, or phrase will suffice to brand an apparent U-speaker as originally non-U (for U-speakers, themselves, never make ‘mistakes’).
It is hard to imagine a more terrifying salvo aimed at the status anxiety of the British middle classes and, as Mitford had happily predicted, the Ross essay provoked a furore. It even rebounded a little on its authors: Mitford cattily complained of Ross himself, ‘poor duck speaks of table napkins’; and she herself had to go back through her earlier novels obliterating mirrors, striking out mantelpieces, tearing up note-paper and censoring other solecisms.
Nancy Mitford’s own essay on the British aristocracy began with all the breezy self-confidence of Alan Ross, before making an altogether more ambiguous argument about the current state of the upper orders. She was quite clear that the English aristocracy (she had little time for the Scots, or even the word Scottish, which she claimed was non-U; the hideous and incorrect ‘Scotch’ was her preferred form) ‘is the only real aristocracy left in the world today. It has real political power through the House of Lords and a real social position through the Queen. An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.’
She then roundly mocked modern British aristocrats for being indolently uninterested in making money, and so being forced to sell land, paintings and property in order to enjoy the easy lifestyle they expected for themselves. Although she must have known of the slaughter of the great country houses described by David Cannadine, Mitford produced her own list of grand homes whose owners had, either by dodging taxes or by letting in the public for a fee, stayed put. Most people, she said, took for granted that the aristocracy was utterly impoverished, ‘a view carefully fostered by the Lords themselves’. Only a violent crime, which brought police and reporters into a country house, revealed that the world in which manservants waited on single women at dinner still existed.
There are still many enormous fortunes in the English aristocracy, into which income tax and death duties have made no appreciable inroads. Arundel, Petworth, Hatfield, Woburn, Hardwicke, Blenheim, Haddon, Drumlanrig, Alnwick, Stratfield Saye, Harewood, Knole, Knowsley, Wilton, Holkham, Glamis, Cullen, Cliveden, Highclere, Althorp, Mentmore – all vast houses – are still inhabited by Lords who have inherited them, or by members of their families.
How had the peerage achieved this? Mitford argued robustly that they had done so by avoiding death duties, by handing the estates on to heirs. The duty did not have to be paid if the original peer then managed to live on for another five years: ‘one agreeable result of this rule is that old Lords are cherished as never before. Their heirs will do anything to keep them alive.’ But the aristocracy were also keen to flog off anything they could – farmland, outbuildings, Caravaggios – and charge outrageous sums for commoners to come and visit their homes.
This was all much too close to the bone for her fond but critical friend Evelyn Waugh. In his Noblesse Oblige essay he tartly reminded Mitford that she was twelve years old when her father succeeded to his peerage: ‘at that age, an indelible impression was made; Hons were unique and Lords were rich.’ Waugh accused her of revolutionary socialism – not, in his book, a compliment.
Clearly, a lot of this was what Nancy Mitford called ‘a tease’ and it had the desired effect. In September 1955, she wrote to another London friend about the response to the original Encounter article – ‘such wonderful … mail – furious baronets, furious Scotchmen, furious friends saying how vulgar I am …’ Eventually, as the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of a Twitter storm swirled around them, both Mitford and Waugh grew disgusted with the subject and referred to Noblesse Oblige as ‘the book of shame’.
Across the British media, the controversy continued to gambol and frisk for years to come. An almost throwaway line in Waugh’s own essay provided the next class-watchers with a new shorthand, MIF, for milk-in-first. Waugh wrote: