Find your station in life. A reality check on the toffs.

A funny reality check on life with toffs

Brexiting. A series on being English. #05

As we have seen from earlier blog messages of mine in this series, the essence of the English class system is two-fold. The people that are 'in' want to keep lower-graded people 'out' of their class. At the same time, the ones who are 'out', except the monarchs and landed gentry (dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, barons and their ladies), are trying to get higher up by means of emulation of some class above them or, traditionally, by buying (men) or marrying (women) themselves into it. For foreigners, this is an odd game, and for English, it is a frustrating one.

Of course, one can never really emulate the next level without actually being there. The little secrets that distinguish one class from another, are
never written down, let alone published. One can only know them by being 'in', i.e. being part of the particular social echelon itself. Accents, choice of words, behaviour, ways to greet one another, codes for cooperation, these are all quite obfuscated.
Actually, people emulate a mental image they have of that what they are trying to emulate. They follow figments of their imagination, often fed lavishly and luxuriously by the tabloids and glossies. And this makes the comedy of the famous television series Keeping Up Appearances with the immortal character Hyacinth Bucket ("Bouquet") (BBC, 1990-1995). Just like in Faulty Towers, it is made clear to the viewer that the main character is just following some delusional fantasy of how that higher social stratum would be. The funniness evolves from juxtaposing the protagonist and one or two characters from that echelon and letting them behave accordingly.

So, just for the fun of it, let us examine an unusual aspect of the highest levels of society, so removed from daily life that they call themselves simply 'society' whereas 'the common people' calls that stratum 'high society'. Let us look at it from a young lady's point of view. Let us start with the traditional debutante. She comes from a finishing school to prepare her for a life with one of the elite boys.

In fact, at finishing school girls are warned that the eligible young boys they are about to vie for, as a rule, are "a beautiful species of mankind but boring as hell". Still, if you want one, you have to be able to keep the conversation going. These boys had never had to fight for anything serious so their brains are a bit underdeveloped. A good dose of service in the army as a private, or any effort to make some money themselves, would cure that but most of them never come that far. The silly way they are depicted in the Jeeves&Wooster books of P.G. Wodehouse comes closer to their actuality than one might think. Fortunately, their speech, by which I mean their accent and pronunciation skills, is so bad, that they can't be understood well which, frankly, is no problem, really, for they have nothing to say anyway. Indeed, what is there to say to a girl of eighteen when you yourself are a boy of eighteen to twenty-two at most and have had no real problems ever except maybe a lack of information about womanhood when locked up for years in a boarding school (called "public school" in England).
So it was up to the girls to get a conversation going and keep it up. Girls from finishing schools like the ones in the picture left at the Queen Charlotte's Ball in 1930 in London, were well-read and of impeccable manners. An obvious question is "What have you read, lately?" meaning what books, not the latest data on some sport. If no grunt, then they could exchange views on books, writers and so on and the conversation has a chance to last longer than a few seconds. But more often than not, the young man has not read much of anything he cared for, let alone remember. To handle this, finishing school girls were taught the alphabet game. They memorized a host of subjects that may interest young gentlemen to some extent so that they would be able to have some kind of conversation with a young lady. Start with A, (taught as "apples"), if that does not work, go to B, remembered as "bran 'n jelly, then C - "cats" which could be done like "Do you like cats?" and then the boy could rant about how bad cats were or fawn over their loveliness. And so on. And then you can connect that to a list of subjects you like yourself. Believe it or not, in the old days, girls were advised to stick to the words themselves if the gent was not up to par, and talk about cats for a while if he'd like cats, otherwise one may skip to the next one, D, which is advised to be "dogs". "Do you like dogs?" used to have a high hit rate among scions of landed gentry but as reactions were more along the line of "I have a Pointer and a Retrievers sleeping in my room, you know, sometimes even on my bed.", these days an aspiring girl had better try for "Do you play Dogs of War?" H, remembered as "hats", could be "(Have you) been to Henley?" after A through G have failed to arouse any interest of the prospect at hand. The Henley rowing regatta having been two months before the opening of the London Season gave the debutante a faint chance her object of interest still can remember some fragments of that five-day drinking bout.

Today, debutantes like Mollie Lindholm-Saltskog (2013, right) tend to be savvy young women full of ambition, very well educated, with pedigree or not. They are happy with this rare opportunity in time that permits women to go after their own careers. You never know how long it will last. So they grab the new bridles and ride ride ride. Such women do not accept marrying some bore just to get a title. If anything, many of them would be deemed able to earn the title 'lady' for themselves on their own merit - unthinkable until quite recently, except in politics of course, where the unthinkable happens by way of daily routine.

I would like to close off with an unusually funny thing that would be unthinkable to non-British people but actually happened. Until 2013, the English, steeped in fossilized thinking as they are traditional, were allowed to distinguish only three classes: Upper Class, Middle class and Lower Class, generally called "Working Class", a typical label put on those who in the era of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century laboured to let the leisure class have their leisure time as seen recently in the television series "Downton Abbey". The elites from Oxford and Cambridge and their ilk have not bothered to change this class distinction ever since.
Upper Class is about 4% of the British population, They have all the right networks, plenty of money and lead a life full of opportunity and leisure, all of which they accept as a matter of course. They own their houses, cars, boats, and so on. They consider this state of affairs as normal and if they ever come to realise their privileged status, their rightful right. They have a collective feeling that they somehow 'earned' their station in life.
The Lower Class comprises about 15% of the British population (I have no figures for England as such). The lower class people are also easy to distinguish. They have no money, are born in families with little money and scarce education, have low-paying jobs, have no time nor opportunities to build up networks that will elevate them to higher levels in life, and so, after all is said and done, stay in their lower class all of their lives and so will their children.
And then there was the Middle Class, these days consisting of a whopping 81% of the population. Because people tend to shift a bit up and down in that class, the Upper Class, who is in power, never bothered to sort that out. They looked upon these middle classed people as 'them', living in a large den, or rather like chickens in a large coop, and they were outside of that den, looking in, wondering what to do, if anything.

However, thanks to the amiable professor Tom Devine (picture) and the Great British Class Survey with 160.000 people in Great Britain, we have now, as of April 2013, not three but seven social strata in British society. At the top, we still have the upper class, but we now call them "the elite". In the middle, we have the established middle class, followed by the technical middle class, the new affluent workers, and the traditional working class, the emergent service workers. And the lowest class is now being classified as "the poor". And that makes seven. It took 99 years to come up with the idea that there are more than three classes in society. Now, that is what I call fossilisation of thinking. That is what culture does.
And the funny part of it is that now, for the first time in history, one can find the exact social class one belongs to, thanks to the Class Calculator. No need to be frustrated or put down by horrible events like finding oneself on the wrong side of 'the cut'. A typical member of the elite, and a psychologist would say, "Find your station in life!" implying of course that you would stay there forever, the word 'station' itself implying that it is quite, well, stationary (fixed).

Amsterdam, 5th of August, 2017.