Foreign News: The Status War

In a London school playground, a little girl cried to a boy who had muffed her throw: “Cor blimey, you ain’t ‘arf a butterfmgers.” The boy shouted amiably:

“Go boil yer ‘ead!” Minutes later, in class, the same two children recited Housman’s poetry, and their every o was pear-shaped, every a well rounded, every h clearly aspirated. Confided the boy: “We know if we talk nice—I mean, nicely—we’ll get better jobs.”

Beer at the Table. The children were reacting to a problem centuries older than Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), in which he observed: “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him,” and as up-to-date as a London councilor’s remark: “Every man carries his caste mark in his mouth.” But last week, with diction and elocution classes flourishing throughout Britain and the BBC spreading its own slightly precious brand of proper accent into every home, caste-conscious Britain was still confronted by an unexpected phenomenon of the welfare state: equality of opportunity had eased the economic tensions in Marx-proclaimed “class conflict,” but it had led to a sharp increase in what the sociologists call “status conflict”—in other words, snobbism.*

Britain’s discontented middle class, says London University Professor Ronald Fletcher, “is actually better off than before the war, but is worse off in relation to those below.” Workers own TV sets, cars and motor scooters, often go abroad for their holidays. Free education enables their children to aspire to be physicians, naval officers, scientists. “Working class” has become a pejorative phrase. In the new low-cost housing development at East Grinstead, authorities recently refused to distribute a police leaflet giving advice on protecting homes from burglars until the phrase “working-class families” was eliminated. Laborers no longer doff their hats to squires or mumble that the good things of life “are not for the likes o’ me,” and more and more of them, in their work clothes, move from the stand-up bar to the saloon bar adjoining, where for a penny a pint more, they can sit at a table. “Before the war,” says a pubkeeper, “they wouldn’t have dared. Apart from the cold stares they would have received, their mates would have ridiculed them.”

Among the middle class, people often worry more about where they live than how. Says London House Agent Roy Brooks: “I have no trouble selling for thousands of pounds matchbox houses in Chelsea and Knightsbridge that cost only hundreds to build. I can get people to spend fabulously for a mean little house because a princess once used the lavatory there. Even sensible businessmen act like superstitious peasants in responding to the magic of a ‘good’ address.”

Ten Guineas A Head. In the upper levels of British society, where money talks, it often betrays its origins. A large group of “expense account” businessmen and admen are beating at the gates. Many have the proper backgrounds, went to school at Eton and Oxford, served in the Guards or other “good” regiments. But. laments one adman who makes $56,000 a year: “People I grew up with, who have gone into civil service or banking, are members of the Athenaeum or Reform Club by now. I can’t get in. I’ve tried and failed. Most of us have. It’s because we have the use of so much money. Having capital is all right, but unlimited expenses are looked down on.”

Explains Jocelyn Stevens, editor of the glossy fashion magazine, Queen: “Society smiles on all the up-and-coming money and enjoys it. but then withdraws into its own inner circle.” In Stevens’ world, the,socially important “ins” compromise brilliantly with the new-rich “outs.” “Ascot, Lord’s the Royal Academy, Henley are still very smart and as important as ever,” and the ins cunningly let enough of the outs into Ascot at ten guineas a head to pay for the “necessary pomp and glamour.”

In the debutante season, says Stevens, “girls come from abroad—Greeks and people like that with lots of money—and huge balls are given by them, and everyone goes—but no one feels obliged to ask them back.”

The Queen Is Coming. Ins, of course, know each other by language and manner as well as by sight. Yet the Duke of Bedford, who eagerly invites crowds of shilling-paying visitors to his stately country home, has become an out, says Queen’s Stevens, “because he has comnlercialized what he has inherited, and enjoyed doing it. It is ‘in’ to open your house to the public, but you must say, ‘Oh, what a bore this is.’ ” Land is important to all ins, “but only an out would inquire the number of acres. Instead, one asks: ‘How many days’ shooting have you?’ The reply, ‘Four first days,’ means about 8,000 to 10,000 acres.”

It is tremendously out in Britain these days to have a Rolls-Royce, tremendously in to drive a battered Land Rover. The royal family, according to Editor Stevens, is in just so long as it is treated lightly. “One says, ‘I’m giving a little party. I know it’s a bore, but the Queen is coming. Never mind, she will leave about 2 and then we can enjoy ourselves.’ That is terribly, terribly in.”

Weightier commentators see the status war as containing grave national dangers. Fortnight ago London’s Economist pleaded with upper-crust Tories to stop grumbling that workers “are getting above their station.” Instead, “the modern Conservative should be one who looks up at the television aerials sprouting above the working-class homes of England, who looks down on the housewives’ tight slacks on the back of motorcycles . . . and who sees great poetry in them. For this is what the deproletarianisation of British society means.”

To the uppers, the thought was as repulsive as the word. Or, as Editor Jocelyn Stevens might put it: “Not while the ins are in, and the outs want in.”

* For U.S. heart and head wounds in the status war, see BOOKS.