Episode 1 Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture

The unprecedented rise of pop music in the 1960s

was just one of the many collisions between class and culture

that have changed this country in the last hundred years.

It's an extraordinary story, full of oppositions, exceptions

and contradictions. A rollercoaster ride.

Inevitably selective through a century.

This is Wigton in Cumbria.

A small market town with a couple of factories, it's where I grew up.

It was a church-dominated town.

12 of them in this little town alone.

I sang in the choir here in St Mary's Anglican Church.

Every time I came, I heard magnificent language

from the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

Outside the church, it was comics and pop songs and socials

and dances and outings and gangs

and roaming about in the countryside, liberty hall.

At the Grammar School I was introduced to great literature.

I acted in plays and I joined the Memphis Five,

a skiffle group that could have gone all the way.

There was the Palace Cinema, now a warehouse

and then, as now, a thriving amateur theatre.

Both my parents worked in factories in the town

and just before I went to grammar school, my dad tenanted this pub.

We lived in the flat above it.

We were working-class and you don't lose that.

At that time, it was austere, intelligent, swarted,

funny and strong.

Later on, I bolted on the media middle class.

I'm a class mongrel these days.

Behind me is the House of Lords.

A hundred years ago, it was occupied by hereditary peers, aristocrats,

some of whose families had occupied the place for centuries.

Now, people like me are in the Lords.

So, does that mean that the ancient class system in this country

has finally been turned on its head? Are we all classless now?

The gains have been immense but have there been losses along the way?

The working classes were to emerge from a rigid system

but did that leave much of their distinct culture

as derelict as the old industrial sites?

In this first programme, we'll see how a middle class

determined to hold on to what it possessed

despised the working class and its culture.

And could the upper classes, who once dictated a narrow view of art and taste,

survive the changes brought about by two World Wars and a depression?

And in our second programme the lower-middle and working classes

were to lead a cultural attack, but did they sweep the old system aside?

Was the lure of the middle classes so strong

that it simply began a cultural takeover?

And a superclass was emerging.

The new wealthy, the celebrities, artists among them.

But also an underclass.

Even so, in the third programme, I'll be asking

is class as we used to know it still with us?

Or is culture, recharged by the ever-growing reach

of the middle classes, now more important?

I'm going to look at the connections between class and culture over the last hundred years.

Everybody has a view on it, this is mine.

The big ceremonial event in 1911 was the coronation of George V

in London in June.

The Edwardians dearly loved a parade and people joined in

up and down the country.

In 1911, my father's father was a farm labourer, married,

with a daughter, the first of eight children.

He would go through World War I and then go down the coal mines.

My mother's mother was a few years away

from a lifetime in domestic service.

Britain's favourite author Rudyard Kipling observed

and many wanted to believe

that the essential note of the thing was the oneness of the people

and the ease and intimacy that goes with it.

There were strains and fears running through society about wages

and conditions and taxation.

Women were beginning to insist on their rights.

But the famous British class system seemed secure.

I think it's absolutely the moment, 1911,

when you see the three classes

at their brightest and, apparently, most triumphant.

The rich enjoying an unparalleled extravagance of display.

Huge land-ownings and sense of power.

And then, in the middle classes,

the rising of the professions expanding hugely.

Doctors and lawyers and shop owners and so on.

But most striking of all, in a way, in 1911,

is the working-class culture, which is at its zenith.

The trade unions, the non-conformist churches

and all these other institutions which were created by the working classes.

All this was at its greatest then. And, yet, in all the cases,

it was about to crumble or be greatly changed

by the First World War and by the social consequences of the War.

Such were the classes, but what of their culture?

Throughout this series I want to ask of each class, what did they own?

What did they consume? And what did they produce?

Certainly, the upper classes owned plenty of material culture,

mostly inherited, and built by the labour of social inferiors

who were firmly excluded from it.

Centuries of exploitation were transformed into fine houses

like this one, Cliveden in Buckinghamshire.

They owned great gardens, they owned paintings,

which often recorded family lineage.

In Edwardian society, as for centuries before,

rich and titled women sought out fashionable painters.

And nobody, at that time, was more fashionable than the American

John Singer Sargent.

And this is his portrait of the woman who lived in this house,

Lady Astor.

Nancy Astor was untypical.

She was interested in social reform and became the first woman MP.

But, nonetheless, she was very much a member

of the Edwardian aristocracy.

They inherited, they curated,

but the Edwardian aristocracy didn't seem to make much.

Once the aristocracy, as a class, had produced art through patronage

but now they seemed to quit the field.

But there was the occasional enthusiastic individual.

Gladys, Marchioness of Ripon, was another forceful upper-class woman,

also painted by Sargent.

In Paris, Gladys Ripon had seen the Ballets Russes,

produced by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev

and featuring the gravity-defying Nijinsky,

drawn here, again, by Sargent.

Assisted by Thomas Beecham, she brought the company to London

and they performed in front of the new King and Queen.

There was silence.

There was no applause and Diaghilev thought, "This is a disaster.

"What is...? What have I done?"

And then he looked up

and thought there must be a hole in the roof

because there was this little pattering sound,

until somebody said, "No, no, it's not rain at all,

"it's the audience putting their kid gloves together

"and showing their appreciation."

The rest of the nation was totally excluded from such experiences.

A box at Covent Garden cost up to £60,000 a season in modern money.

Diaghilev's production was radical but the aristocracy,

so secure in its position, coped with his striking modernity

and took it in its stride.

They had a common code of speech and behaviour and manners and, yes,

they were at ease with each other and inclined to repel borders.

The insulated aristocratic world of Ladies Ripon and Astor

was more fragile than they knew.

Soon, like every other class, they'd be faced with upheaval.

And what about the middle classes? What did they own?

What did they produce? What did they consume?

In this post-Victorian era,

the middle classes saw themselves as the backbone of the nation.

While they paid deference to the upper class,

they disapproved of their frivolity.

They liked to improve themselves.

They liked concerts, music, especially Gilbert and Sullivan.

They liked the theatre. Perhaps, above all, they liked novels,

especially big, class-bound books

by Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy and others.

A best-selling author of his day

and, for many, the voice of the time was Rudyard Kipling.

He lived here in Bateman's in Sussex.

By now, Kipling had written The Jungle Book,

the Just So Stories, Kim and much of his poetry, including Gunga Din.

This is Rudyard Kipling's study.

A fitting study for a great imperial writer.

Kipling's books were enjoyed across the classes.

And Kipling himself, unlike many other writers of the time,

was idealistic about people in this country,

from whatever background, getting on together.

Kipling wanted the British, I think, to be one class,

above the class system.

He did that in his novels

but there's one piece he wrote which shows it most of all.

It shows aristocratic confidence,

what became the middle-class stiff upper lip

and working-class grit, all in one place.

If.

"If you can keep your head when all about you

"Are losing theirs and blaming it on you."

"If you can think and not make thoughts your aim

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

"And treat those two impostors just the same."

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute

"With sixty seconds' worth of distance run

"Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it

"And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!"

The success of that poem was quite extraordinary.

It was hung in schools and homes and barracks and messes

throughout the world. It was translated into 27 languages.

When Ernest Shackleton went to the Antarctic,

he framed it and put it on the bulkhead of Endurance.

Kipling created a vision of Englishness

which he wanted all classes to share in,

whether at the far reaches of empire or in a garden in Sussex.

That vision of the classes in harmony was to recur

in the two World Wars but, always, it was temporary and ephemeral.

There was another novelist who saw that age

just as clearly as Kipling but from a different aspect.

He was born into fuzzy territory, this upper-working-class,

lower-middle-class family.

He was born here, in Bromley High Street in 1866.

HG Wells.

Looking back on his young self, Wells would write that,

"He's an individual

"becoming the conscious, common man of his time and culture."

His early experiences were similar to many of those struggling

to keep a foothold in the middle class

and not slip into what, they feared, was the abyss beneath them.

His parents had run a dry-goods shop in Bromley and they'd gone bust.

HG Wells would use that experience

when he came to write his novel Kipps - The Story Of A Simple Soul,

about a draper's assistant

who comes into money and goes up a notch or two and is all at sea.

He doesn't know what to do, this is a new culture.

He seeks help, he wants the particulars.

Kipps's misadventures were hugely popular

and the book was, later, turned into a film, starring Michael Redgrave,

which caught the social vulnerability

of the innocent, lower-middle class hero.

You, erm,

you really think I could become a gentleman?

You owe it to your position, my dear Kipps.

You mean, I ought to get with educated people who know how to do things properly?

So, say, if I wanted to call on someone I could know how to behave.

That and other things.

Being a gentleman is a full-time occupation, I'm afraid.

I can see that.

Wells had seen social disaster in the fate of his parents.

He also saw upper-class life

when his mother took a job as a housekeeper, here, at Uppark House.

Kipling might paper over the idea of class conflict.

Wells would see only the chasm between the classes.

He saw the skull beneath the skin.

Wells's views on class are most clearly seen in his science fiction.

But the future Wells predicted for the human race

was a dark and bleak one with savage class divisions.

This mural is in Bromley High Street,

just across the road from where HG Wells was born.

And it celebrates Charles Darwin,

a man who changed the way we look at the world.

He lived nearby at Down House.

Wells studied evolution under TH Huxley,

a close disciple of Darwin's.

And his idea of evolution,

when it came into contact with his acute consciousness

of class divisions, painted a chilling view of our society.

What it was and what it might become.

In the book The Time Machine,

the traveller is transported thousands of years into the future

to find that the upper and lower classes have now evolved

into virtually different species.

The sybaritic Eloi living on the surface.

The industrious and vicious Morlocks labouring beneath it.

You say of the Elois and Morlocks in The Time Machine of HG Wells,

you wrote, "Wells sees them as the logical culmination

"of existing tendencies."

What were those tendencies and do you think he was right?

It is a very peculiar thing that these great prophets of the future

in literature, HG Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell,

all foresee, foresaw the future as sharply divided by class.

While the politicians were saying, "We're all going to be one big happy family, the class war is over,"

the writers were saying, "No, no,

"the tendencies of modern society are to divide people more strongly."

I don't know whether you could say they're more prescient

or whether it's just a, kind of, they like to, kind of,

unnerve their readers

and say it's not going to be as nice as you think.

In another novel, The Dream,

which, again, seesaws between the present and the future,

he has a drunken, failed shopkeeper tell his pal about the miners.

"'These 'ere miners are paid and paid 'andsomely,' he said."

Sorry about the accent. "'Paid 'andsomely they are. 'Andsomely.

"'Why, I'd be glad of the pay they get, glad of it.

"'They 'as bulldogs, they 'as pianos. Champagne.

"'You and me, Smith, me and you and the middle classes generally,

"'we don't get pianos. We don't get champagne.

"'Ought to be a Middle Classes Union,' said my father.

"'Keep these 'ere workers in their places.'"

Who were these workers, these failed bogeymen

who froze the imagination of the middle class?

Most of the upper and middle class thought the working class

had nothing that could be called culture.

The working classes, what did they own? What did they make?

What did they consume?

Well, they didn't earn much in material terms.

But they did earn a sense of themselves as communities

and that was underpinned by the common and participating culture

they made in music, for a start.

# Jesu, joy of man's desiring. #

In Wales and across the land, the people sang.

Choirs were a rich seam in working-class culture.

And there were the brass bands, the orchestras of the working class.

Each colliery and many factories had a band attached.

And they, like the choirs,

made no concessions in the quality of the music they played.

Some of the great composers of the day wrote for them.

Holst, Vaughan Williams and Elgar.

# Near, far

# Wherever you are. #

And there was craft. Working men and women made things.

Beautiful things. Whether it was ironwork for a balcony,

a ceramic pot or intricate marquetry

for the inside of an ocean liner.

# You open the door

# And you're here in my heart

# And my heart will go on. #

And behind this was a network of institutions and associations.

There were the non-conformist chapels,

often built by the workers themselves,

providing a rich culture through religion.

They set up Sunday schools, there were sports,

there were reading rooms and the Mechanics' Institute.

But we shouldn't be too sentimental, there were classes within classes.

To enjoy the culture I've described, you needed access to community,

a decent wage and leisure. And not everyone had those.

Two of my great grandmothers were in Middlesbrough,

bringing up very large families on a very inadequate income.

The town was very much the iron industry

and there was no work for the women, basically.

The men, if they were unskilled or semi-skilled,

often reached their maximum earning capacity

when they were very young men. And what happened after that,

they set up house on 23 shillings a week.

One child after another arrived.

If the man was injured at work,

and injuries in the iron industry were extremely frequent,

the family was very quickly faced with absolute destitution.

So, when we're talking about culture with regard to the unskilled workers

and the lower-skilled workers, what are we talking about?

Why does it feature at all in your description?

Scarcely at all, I'm afraid.

In the early years of the marriage,

where I think the children were arriving

one a year or one every two years, and money was particularly tight,

and the woman's health was generally poor,

I think there was very little going on

that most people would call culture. I mean, there was some. I mean,

I don't really see why neighbourhood talk and gossip

should be excluded from culture. There'd be football, perhaps.

And perhaps a very, very occasional visit to the musical hall.

Though I rather doubt that in some of these families.

The working class at that time could and did nourish genius.

Thomas Hardy, for instance, and DH Lawrence.

He was brought up in that mining community,

the community that we've been talking about.

And he added to it by going towards culture.

He read more and more widely

and took on an intellectual view of society.

He painted, he drew. He went to cathedrals and museums.

He drew in as much as he could from that base.

But inside that there's always class and an interest in sex

and the sexual politics of class and love.

And the feeling that the world had to be explored

from where he started.

Lawrence fused a working-class imagination

which would be taken up and fired by young men and women

in the cultural revolution of the '50s and '60s.

In the Great War, men and women of all classes

answered the call to serve their country.

In the response, there seemed to be unanimity across the classes.

Common purpose.

Private WB Owens spoke for many -

he was one of the Liverpool Pals

who joined up with a gang of his friends - when he wrote,

"Well, we're away at last and, though no-one feels,

"it's a solemn occasion to be in England for perhaps the last time.

"I think the predominant feeling in every chap's heart,

"in mine, at any rate, is one of pride and great content

"at being chosen to fight and endure for our dear ones

"and the whole country."

There was common purpose but the class system went to war too.

Officers could suffer from shell shock, men were shot for cowardice.

The officers were, on average, five inches taller than the men.

And the officers had a servant at the front

just as they'd had servants at home.

Behind the lines, the officers slept in the farmhouses.

I'm not saying it was comfortable, but the men slept in the barns if they were lucky

and, you know, they were out in the field if they weren't lucky.

So, the whole thing was completely different.

But did that intense experience of sharing the danger

actually weaken the class system?

And what culture came out of it?

Officers, many of them upper-class, even aristocratic, were expected to lead from the front.

And they did and their rate of attrition was terrible.

While the generals would be vilified,

many officers, coming into contact with working-class men

for the first time, acted with a grace and humanity

not always associated with their class.

This is Second Lieutenant Stephen Hewitt.

One of his duties was to censor men's letters.

"Naturally, there are many quietly funny things in the men's letters

"which we have to censor.

"But they often blend with true pathos, courage and nobility.

"What a lesson it is to read the thoughts of men,

"often as refined and sensitive as we have been made

"by advantage of birth and education,

"yet living under conditions much harder and more disgusting

"than my own."

# If you want to find the private I know where he is. #

In the ranks, a mordant culture did grow up, expressed in songs,

cartoons and even trench newspapers.

# I know where he is

# He's hanging on the old barbed wire

# I saw him

# I saw him. #

Some men used their peacetime skills while waiting to go over the top.

They made objects that would later be called trench art.

And then, there were the recorders and observers from the middle class

who were often shaken out of their class loyalties by this experience.

The middle-class painters and poets set themselves

to find and express the deep themes in the horror of the Great War.

Some of the group of painters who'd studied at the Slade,

including Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash,

went to the front as official war artists.

Their former professor Henry Tonks made paintings of wounded faces

to assist plastic surgeons.

In some cases, like Richard Nevinson,

painters abandoned the new styles they'd picked up such as Vorticism

and returned to a simpler, more direct style,

more in keeping, they thought, with the horrors of war.

One of the most powerful paintings to come out of the First World War

was, rather surprisingly, painted by the fashionable artist

John Singer Sargent.

He left the drawing rooms of London

and went to the battlefield in France to paint this.

"If I should die, think only this of me

"That there's some corner of a foreign field

"That is for ever England."

Rupert Brooke died of septicaemia in 1915.

His poem lasted. It came out of an aristocratic, chivalric tradition.

But there was a new tradition.

The realism of the middle-class writers

who would not conceal their disgust.

"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

"Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

"Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

"Of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues

"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

"To children ardent for some desperate glory

"The old Lie

"Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori."

Early in the war, the decision was taken not to bring back

any bodies from the front.

Mourning would have to be done at a distance.

Monuments like this by Charles Jagger would have to serve at home.

One in three of all the men aged between 20 and 24 in 1911

was now dead, including Kipling's son, Jack.

But had the terrible sacrifices done anything

to break down divisions between the classes?

There was a shifting of the class sands after the Great War

but it wasn't a tectonic shift.

The equality of the trenches and the immense symbolism

of the fallen being buried together in the war graves,

whether they were officers, squaddies,

non-commissioned officers, was very, very powerful indeed.

But, once they were demobbed,

went back into the great industrial bastions of the big cities,

this huge, manufacturing base that we still had,

there were the old divisions.

The Kaiser and the violence of that war

brought about an enforced equality but it was temporary.

It was temporary but nothing was quite the same again.

Religious faith had sapped powerfully,

never to be restored in terms of church attendance.

Plus, the homes fit for heroes that Lloyd George promised

that didn't materialise.

The returning of unemployment within two, two and half years

on a grand scale.

All this led to a deeply embittered home front

to which the soldiers returned.

There had been changes but great social gaps still remained.

The one thing every class in the United Kingdom shared

in the 1920s was anxiety.

The upper class had lost sons, brothers, fathers.

Now they lost land. Hundreds of thousands of acres changed hands

as death duties soared.

The bereaved middle classes, too, faced economic uncertainty.

They worried that the Revolution in Russia would spread west.

For the workers, disillusionment with promises made and broken,

the fear and reality of unemployment.

This insecurity bred tension and fear between the classes.

In 1921, the poet TS Eliot used to visit this shelter in Margate.

He was trying to recover from a nervous breakdown.

He was also composing the poem The Waste Land

which, more than any other, would express the nihilism of the time,

the very opposite of Kipling.

"On Margate Sands I can connect

"Nothing with nothing

"The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

"My people humble people who expect Nothing."

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

"Out of this stony rubbish?"

That line and a half in The Waste Land from Eliot

summed up, for many people, what had happened to this country

after the devastations of the First World War.

Eliot was on his way to becoming a naturalised Englishman,

a high Anglican, at the top of the literary

and poetic hierarchy of this country

which matched the hierarchy of the classes.

Eliot's first title for this poem

was taken from Our Mutual Friend in Dickens,

He Do The Police In Different Voices,

and it's full of different voices. Esoteric, literary, philosophical,

mythological, ravishing for any adolescent of any background

who could read, who read it.

And, at one stage, he attempts, rather patronisingly I think,

rather superficially even, a working-class conversation.

"When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said

"I didn't mince my words I said to her myself

"Hurry up please it's time

"Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart

"He'll want to know what you've done with that money he gave you

"To get yourself some teeth He did, I was there."

Eliot himself was middle-class.

He worked part of his life in a bank and in a publishing company.

He was a friend of the intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Set

which included Virginia Woolf.

You quote Virginia Woolf on the Armistice Day celebrations,

saying, "The London poor with their hideous voices and clothes

"and bad teeth make one doubt whether any decent life

"will ever be possible.

"Or whether it matters if we're at war or at peace."

I shouldn't imagine that wasn't commonly thought

but it was thought, emphatically, by a serious number of intellectuals.

It's very odd, it seems to be confined to intellectuals,

particularly intellectuals who regarded themselves

as socialists and wanting to see,

you know, social improvements.

I can't get to the bottom of it. You know, if you read poetry

and novels, particularly the great novels of the mid-19th century,

they're full of sympathy and often respect for the poor.

Then, suddenly, Modernism appears to carry with it this strange,

kind of, vicious side and a wish to draw away from the masses

and to regard them as the enemies of civilisation.

The working class was taking a cultural hammering.

Maybe it was fear of their potential strengths.

In the mid-'20s, the author Warwick Deeping,

a former doctor and wartime officer,

wrote a book that spoke for the fearful middle classes

and re-voiced that revulsion of the working class

expressed by HG Wells.

Sorrell And Son was a blockbuster of the '20s and '30s.

It went into 41 editions and it was filmed twice.

A remarkably faithful television series was made in the 1980s.

The novel, according to one critic, achieved talismanic status

among its middle-class and lower-middle-class readers.

Shall I go to school at Staunton?

Of course. I expect there'll be a grammar school.

Will it be a gentleman's school?

Oh, yes.

Stephen Sorrell had been an officer in the war.

His wife has left him for a richer man and he can't find a job in London.

Desperate to care for his son and educate him as a gentleman,

he finally takes a job well below his class as a hotel porter.

Sorrell is bitter about the profiteers who sat out the war

but he has another target.

Sorrell and, I presume, Warwick Deeping's real venom

is reserved for the working class, who he sees as brutes getting ready for a class war.

Perhaps this was what made his books so popular.

Kit is the victim of a class-based attack

and the author pulls no punches.

"Sorrell had seen that these sons of working men hated

"the son of an ex-officer.

"They hated his face, his voice, his pride, his very good temper.

"They hated him for his differences, his innocent superiorities.

"Hatred, a cheaply educated hatred, was loose in the world."

In Sorrell And Son, class issues come to be crystallised

around the matter of Kit's education.

-Would I get cricket at the grammar school?

-You would.

But there's one thing we must face.

You'd be the son of a porter at the Angel Hotel.

They might refuse to take you.

That's my fault, not yours.

Between 1911 and 1947, education was the most powerful motor

in shoring up and challenging the class system.

Between the '20s and '40s,

successive governments tried to change the state educational system,

which looked after 75% of the population.

It was a big job. There were board schools, council schools,

local-authority-funded schools, church-funded, community-funded.

No-one argued against the goal of creating a ladder of opportunity

but no-one quite knew how to achieve it.

Above the struggle, the public schools sailed on serenely.

They continued to prepare their pupils for lives in government,

in empire, the law. Yet, from the middle of the 19th century,

the time of Tom Brown's Schooldays,

the public schools had managed to find a place

in the public's affections and even in popular culture.

Greyfriars School and its cheery pupils lead their carefree lives

in the comic The Magnet for almost 40 years.

The debates about reforming state education

and what to do with the public schools rumbled on

but they would become crucial in the Second World War

when people had to decide

what sort of society they wanted after that war.

But it wasn't all dissension and class conflict.

After the War, everybody wanted to find a place they could have fun.

In 1919, ragtime raged in from America

and there was an explosion in public dancing.

Everybody wanted to do it.

And they took to the dance floor, the dustman and the duke.

Though, not always the same dance floor.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band played a sensational residency

at the fashionable Savoy Hotel in London in the same year.

The first Palais doors opened in Hammersmith

and working-class people cascaded onto the floor.

The working classes, those feral masses,

turned out to be stylish dancers,

well-dressed, well-mannered, cultivated.

The working class was, literally, on the move.

Upper, middle and lower classes might have found new common ground.

Ballet and opera might have been exclusive,

books might have been mainly for the middles,

but everyone could go dancing.

And for the next 30 years, dance music and public dancing

became popular across the nation.

It was a great unifier of class.

Everyone, everyone went ballroom dancing.

It's where probably 90% of people of my age's parents first met.

It did come in as a great invasion, partly from America, didn't it?

And the idea of, people had a little bit more money

and then the clever people built the great ballrooms

which are sort of dancing palaces.

They must have been amazing for people from ordinary backgrounds

to go into these, palaces like the great cinema palaces, weren't they?

Wonderful. Yeah, no, you go into the Empress Ballroom

or the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, and you look up.

These are people that are probably living in tenements,

all the buildings around and about

and suddenly you're in this most palatial place.

You have the band, the orchestra.

You've got a chance to get hold of a girl

and smooch around and maybe a slight touching of the bosom. Oh, come on.

I can see her now, a couple of mates, in we go,

"Phew, she looks good over there, going to go and...

"May I have the pleasure of this dance?" "Of course..."

Fabulous! Who wouldn't love it?

Do you think it was a class thing

that was mostly for working class, lower-middle class, that end?

My dad, who was a keen ballroom dancer, as I say, met my mum.

He would say it was mostly the working class.

You'd finish work and you'd get home and you'd scrub your nails

to get them clean and put your best stuff on and off you'd go.

And he had a regime, as long as the money lasted,

Monday nights he'd be at the Orchid, Purley,

Tuesdays he'd be at the Royal, Tottenham,

Wednesday he'd go to the Hammersmith Palais, and so they'd go.

-Was there anything left for Friday?

-No, no, by then...

-Bated breath.

-They were skint by then.

And if you weren't going dancing for your night out,

you were probably going to the pictures.

The flicks, the movies, the pictures,

the other form of popular culture that everybody enjoyed.

I'm standing at the epicentre of cinema-going in Britain,

in Churchgate in Bolton. Around me, there were once 47 cinemas.

There was The Royal, The Regal, The Queens.

We had loads of cinemas in the town.

What was it like on a Friday and Saturday night when you had all those cinemas here?

Oh, it was fantastic. It was lovely.

And, they had two houses and there's one early, just after six o'clock,

and then another after eight.

So, of course, people'd come for their tea and then go to the show

and the people waiting to go to the second show

would come and eat and then queue up to go into the Grand or the Theatre.

This street was the very centre of it.

This was the equivalent of Bolton's Golden Mile.

So, you'd have the Grand Theatre behind us,

the Theatre Royal, the Capital Theatre,

the Regal right at the end of the street,

the Hippodrome and the Embassy.

So, all the way up here would be absolutely chock-a-block with people

visiting the cinema.

And there's not one left in this street now?

Unfortunately, not one left in the town centre.

All of them have gone.

Bolton was a mill town.

People laboured long hours in difficult conditions.

When they went home it could be to overcrowded, cold,

uncomfortable houses.

The picture house was warm, cheap and glamorous.

Working-class people didn't have a lot of choice in their lives

but they could choose what they wanted to enjoy when they weren't working.

And they wanted to enjoy the cinema.

And, at the cinema, they wanted to enjoy, most of all, American films.

For Bolton cinema-goers and working-class audiences

around the country,

the heroes they mostly wanted were cowboys or gangsters.

Dangerous broads rather than society ladies.

In American films, they found an energy, excitement and, above all,

a classlessness missing from most of the films made here.

But the middle classes and the upper classes also went to the cinema.

Middle-class writers and directors would make the films

and the upper classes were besotted by them.

It was a form of cultural equality.

From the late '20s, there were new voices available,

mostly from the wireless.

These immediately fell into the old, established ways.

'Leicestershire and Yorkshire at Leicester.

'Yorkshire 365, Leyland made 153.'

In 1932, the British Broadcasting Corporation, funded by all of us

through the licence fee, moved into its new headquarters, here,

at Broadcasting House.

There was a need for a voice to unify classes and cultures.

Now there was the institution which could do it.

But did it do that?

The BBC's tone came from its Director General, the flinty Scot John Reith,

whose values were, and appealed to, that solid middle class.

The BBC was the sound of the Establishment,

giving the public,

as he put it, slightly better than it now thinks it likes.

# The weird sisters, hand in hand. #

Reith's intention was that the BBC should impose culture

from the top down.

It should be, as he said, "Authoritative, impartial

"and embody the best in the values of the educated classes."

But he never went onto explain why the values of the educated classes

should have such national domination.

That's not to say there weren't programmes for people of every class to enjoy.

Popular music, for instance, played by the best bands and orchestras

was relayed from London's top hotels.

Variety shows soon started, as did coverage of sports.

Yet, despite this spread,

the BBC, staffed almost exclusively by public school boys,

was, in its official voice, a narrow, rather than a broad-caster.

Famously, from 1924,

radio announcers wore dinner jackets to read the news.

And, in 1926, an advisory committee on spoken English decreed that,

"A form of educated English,

"which would fall within a narrow band of southern English,

"should be the sound of the BBC."

Now we're taking you over to Montreal, where Captain Bisset

of the Ascania will describe last week's rescue in Mid-Atlantic.

It would be some years before the BBC would live up

to its licence-fee obligation to speak to and for all the nation.

Two passages from successful novels published in the early '30s in Britain

show the difference of experience between the classes.

The first is from Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.

"Masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties,

"Wild West parties, Russian parties,

"parties at Oxford where everyone drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes.

"Dull dances in London, comic dances in Scotland

"and disgusting dances in Paris.

"All that succession and repetition of mass humanity.

"Those vile bodies."

Waugh was a middle-class writer who'd adopted the upper classes.

He went on to write Brideshead Revisited.

Other writers, like the working-class Walter Greenwood,

were beginning to turn to the plight of those at the bottom of society.

"Nothing to do with time Nothing to spend

"Nothing to do tomorrow or the day after

"Nothing to wear, can't get married

"A living corpse

"A unit of the spectral army of three million lost men."

In 1936, the future QC Lord Hutchinson

had just left his public school.

You witnessed the Jarrow March.

Could you look back and say that had a challenging and an important affect on your life?

Yes, an enormous affect.

One's experience

as a public school boy living in the South,

we had no experience of the North at all.

And the Jarrow marchers going past,

all with their caps on and their haggard appearance

and what they'd gone through made a tremendous impression on me.

And so, were you seeing another part of the country for the first time?

-Yes, really.

-The, sort of, hidden nine tenths.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, one didn't know about the North.

I mean, my nanny came from Newcastle in the North

and, therefore, I knew a lot from her about how people lived

on the Tyne and so on but I never went there, until leaving Oxford.

Events like the Jarrow March forced the nation

to look at the kind of lives some of its people were living.

People who were demanding a better life.

There'd always been those who'd taken an interest in the lives of the lower classes.

Now there grew up a new movement, which at times lamented

but at times celebrated the life and work

of ordinary people. Documentary.

The documentary film makers wrestled with their bulky equipment

to show the dignity of labour, the hardship of life

and to give working-class people a voice,

something the Establishment and BBC, up to that point,

had largely failed to do.

It gets on your nerves when everything's filthy.

Dirty, filthy walls and the vermin in the walls is wicked.

So, I tell you, we're fed up.

Writers as well as film makers set out to rediscover their own country.

The novelist and journalist JB Priestley

made his English journey, chronicling some of the glories

and many of the horrors of England in 1933.

Some have regarded these sort of accounts as patronising

in their approach. I don't agree.

There's no doubt that there was the will

to help pull the working class up the ladder.

JB Priestley, already, in the 1930s,

an enormously successful writer,

travelled England in his trusty Daimler.

Another writer, not as well known at the time, came on foot or by bus.

George Orwell made his way to Wigan.

We're near the site of the original Wigan Pier.

It was where they used to load coal onto barges.

The title came from George Robey,

the musical artist who used it rather facetiously.

George Orwell nicked it for his book The Road To Wigan Pier.

The Road To Wigan Pier was based on Orwell's experiences

over January and February 1936.

And his observations of the realities of working-class life

and unemployment have entered the canon of human observation.

"One scene stays in my mind," he wrote.

"as one of my pictures of Lancashire.

"The dumpy, shawled women with their sacking aprons

"and their heavy, black clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud

"and the bitter wind, searching eagerly for tiny bits of coal."

Wigan Pier is about living conditions and unemployment

and politics.

But it's also, and perhaps mainly, about class,

particularly the class of the writer himself.

An old Etonian, a middle-class writer

who tries to work out how he can interact with other classes.

He spells it out. "Here am I, a typical member of the middle class.

"It's easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class distinctions

"but nearly everything I think and do

"is as a result of class distinctions.

"All my notions, notions of good and evil,

"of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious,

"of ugly and beautiful are essentially middle-class notions.

"My taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour,

"my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent,

"even the characteristic movements of my body

"are the products of a special kind of upbringing

"and a special niche about halfway up the social hierarchy.

"When I grasp this, I grasp that it's no use clapping a proletarian

"on the back and telling him that he's as good a man as I am.

"If I want real contact with him, I have got to make an effort

"for which, very likely, I am unprepared."

Right at the end of the book, Orwell, rather tongue-in-cheek,

envisions the sinking middle classes.

The private school master, the bankrupt commercial traveller

and the freelance journalist hitting on hard times.

All of them "sinking into the working class", he writes.

"Where they belong." And he adds,

"It may not be so dreadful. All we have to lose is our aitches."

He was completely wrong about that.

The middle class has not sunk. It's risen and risen and risen.

Another matter Orwell was wrong about, I think,

was that values of the middle class

and the working class were different and incompatible.

Essential moral values, like a sense of honour or, as he writes,

"Notions of good and evil, funny and serious, ugly and beautiful,"

could be found in the working class every bit as much

as in the middle class. And they meant much the same to both.

In 1936, Hitler invaded the Rhineland. War was coming.

'Now, isn't that a cheery dance?'

Soon the nation would have to face hardship and danger again,

less than 20 years after the end of the First World War.

But, in the meantime, they'd enjoy themselves while they could.

Ballroom dancing flourished.

It had categories, competitions, judges, professionals.

But, in 1937, one dance emerged from the working class

which became a symbol of national unity almost. The Lambeth Walk.

Even the King and Queen did it.

# When you walk down Lambeth Way

# Any evening, any day

# You'll find us all

# Doing the Lambeth Walk, oi! #

And off you'd go.

The dance came from a musical, Me And My Girl.

In it, the Cockney who's become a lord invites his mates

to a knees-up.

The toffs can't help joining in

and the result is a riotous dance in which class divisions are dissolved.

It became a national myth and a propaganda weapon.

MUSIC: "The Lambeth Walk"

When war broke out, Jeremy Hutchinson had already served a year

in the Navy as a rating.

That was an eye-opener and something that I very much wanted to do and enjoyed.

What was the eye-opening thing about it?

Living with people of a completely different background of all sorts.

And finding that it was perfectly possible to do that

without embarrassment, with a common purpose, as everybody had,

and enormous enjoyment.

All guns closed up and cleared away and communications tested, sir.

-All to action stations.

-Very good. Open fire.

The theme of people of different classes pulling together

in the national interest

is one that the British cinema would take up and push relentlessly.

Reynolds, Adams, Blake, Coombe, Parkinson,

what sort of a ship do I want the Torrin to be?

-A happy ship, sir.

-That's right.

-An efficient ship, sir.

-Correct.

A happy and efficient ship.

A very happy and a very efficient ship.

In the film In Which We Serve, Noel Coward told the story

of Louis Mountbatten's destroyer Kelly and its company.

And he emphasised the respect and affection between the classes.

SHE GIGGLES

Hello, Blake, what are you doing here?

-I'm on my honeymoon, sir.

-Well, that's splendid, congratulations.

Thank you, sir. This is my wife, Mrs Blake.

-How do you do?

-Pleased to meet you, I'm sure.

Alex, come and meet one of my shipmates and his wife,

they've just been married. Ordinary Seaman Blake, Mrs Blake, my wife.

-How do you do?

-Ma'am.

-I hope you'll be very happy.

-Thanks.

Jeremy Hutchinson experienced it first-hand.

He knew Mountbatten, played by Coward,

and he was on the Kelly when it was torpedoed.

How accurate was that film, in your view, of what really went on?

It was really very accurate

because Mountbatten was a friend of Noel Coward's.

I've come to say goodbye to the few of you who are left.

And when Mountbatten told him about his goodbye to the survivors,

standing on a box and each of us coming up

and shaking his hand and talking to him

and saying goodbye, which was very, very moving.

Noel Coward said,

"Well, that's very interesting, I want to know exactly what you said."

And Mountbatten then told him exactly what he'd said.

It is accurate.

Goodbye.

Good luck.

And thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

It's a scene Kipling would have applauded.

During World War II, politicians seemed to realise

that those returning home, if the Allies prevailed,

would have the power to demand a better, more equal society.

And realistic plans must be laid and made to work.

'As the result of much intensive study

'into questions of social security,

'Sir William Beveridge is the recognised authority

'on present-day and post-war problems.'

In 1942, the Beveridge Report delivered its strategy

on social security which would attack inequality and poverty.

The welfare state was plainly in view.

It means that no-one is to fall below a certain standard.

'At last, Labour in power in Britain

'and here are some members of the new government.'

The Labour Party got this huge, 146-seat overall majority,

and the Conservative Party was prostrate.

The expectation was both, I think, higher in 1945 than in 1918

and also it was fulfilled, to a remarkable degree.

It wasn't socialism and paradise on earth, far from it.

But the huge deprivations

that the Industrial Revolution had bequeathed this country

were in retreat.

And there was a period of genuine optimism

that, generation upon generation,

there would be a kind of exponential betterment

and you would gradually ease the class antagonisms

that had so disfigured the 19th century and the interwar years.

It was the most extraordinary moment.

There was a real bloom of promise and optimism for all the austerity.

But there was still unfinished business.

The Education Act had promised free secondary education for all.

But it had stopped short of abolishing the public schools.

The Labour Party's great victory shows that the country is ready...

Attlee, a public-school man himself, who loved his old school,

could have done it but he didn't.

Perhaps he thought public schools would wither on the vine

as state education achieved excellence.

When the Labour won that election and we had the great meeting

in the Westminster Hall the next day,

I was convinced the apartheid in education would go

and that the...this would be the end of the public schools.

I really believed that.

Would you welcome, would you have welcomed that?

No. Absolutely. I thought the..

I mean, as long as the public,

as long as 7% of the population go to public schools,

have a separate and wonderful education,

the class system will go on.

Bound to. We have class somehow in our genes in this country.

It still goes on.

On November 20th 1947, the bells rang out from Westminster Abbey,

just over there, announcing the wedding of Elizabeth Windsor

and Philip Mountbatten.

The gathering of crown princes, kings, titled aristocracy,

the enthusiasm of the crowds might have recalled

the scenes of George V's coronation in 1911.

But this was now poised to be a very different Britain.

So, had the class system and the culture that reflected it

disappeared after two World Wars, economic hardship,

a depression and the promise of a socialist future?

Or is class locked in our genes as Jeremy Hutchinson suggested?

In the next programme, I'll be looking at 1945 to 1979.

The angry young men, rock'n'roll and the full impact of TV.

# We gotta get out of this place

# If it's the last thing we ever do

# We gotta get out of this place

# Girl, there's a better life for me and you

# Believe me, baby

# I know it, baby

# You know it too. #