Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain. Harry Wallop
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appeared to prove the triumph of the lower orders’ ability to climb up the ladder, not to dispense with the ladder altogether.
In this regard, the attention was focused not really on Kate, nor on her Royal Hotness Pippa, but on Carole Middleton, the mother of the bride. It was her family history which gave the story its potency. Kate herself was already in an elite of sorts, just one of the 7 per cent to be educated privately, and at Marlborough, a top boarding school, at that. Michael Middleton, Kate’s father, came from a long line of respectable and successful county solicitors, was privately educated and had been a senior employee at British Airways. Carole, by contrast, was not just a former air stewardess but the daughter of a lorry driver turned builder and the granddaughter of a miner. Within one generation she had travelled from a council house in Southall, west London, to stand next to the Queen in front of a million cheering people. The journalist Amanda Platell, in what was meant to be a hymn of praise for Mrs Middleton’s poise and elegant dress on the wedding day, couldn’t halt a tide of class-based judgements in the pages of the Daily Mail. ‘The woman from the council estate, whose daughter was once pursued by taunts of “doors to manual” by William’s toff friends because her mother had been an air hostess, was about to watch her daughter marry the future King of England. Who could deny her a wry smile of satisfaction? She may be a social climber, her daughters may be called the “Wisteria sisters” for their ability to climb and cling on so tenaciously, but the Middleton women on this day triumphed. The bride, the mother of the bride and the maid of honour – all of them middle-class Middletons and proud of it. Kate had got her man.’
This social mobility exercised by Carole was achieved by a combination of hard work, the accumulation of wealth, ingenuity and education – the traditional routes up the class ladder – and the oldest of them all: marriage. You may be born into a certain class, but you can marry out of it.
It is often assumed that before the war the class system was as rigid as a coronet. If you were born into a family of coal miners, you were destined to be sent down the pit yourself. If your birth was ushered in with a courtesy title and trees planted in your honour, you would always reside in the upper classes. This was true for many, possibly most. But long before the war social mobility was very much part of British life, thanks in part to the grammar school system, which catapulted many into university, enabling millions to leap-frog their parents. And the Establishment had always welcomed plutocrats, public servants and political fighters to its ranks, not least by creating hereditary peerages for many of them. Arguably, Harold Macmillan, in creating the concept of a life peer – and the resulting complete decline in the creation of hereditary peers (Macmillan himself was one of only three non-Royal hereditary peers created since 1965) – was instrumental in kicking away one of the ladders up which people could climb.
But beyond industry and education, marriage was always the quickest guarantee of ensuring that your children began life in a different class from the one in which you did. While that is spectacularly so with any children that the Duchess of Cambridge may have – among them the future monarch of the Commonwealth realms – it is also just as much the case with Carole Middleton herself. She gave birth to three children who have ended up in a dramatically higher class than she was, principally thanks to her marriage to Michael Middleton.
It can work the other way too, of course. And at this point I should explain my family and how my four children have ended up as a triumphant product of the fluidity and perversity of the British class system. My children were born into a distinctly lower class than one of their grandfathers, my father, and an assuredly higher one than their other grandfather, my father-in-law. My own father was born in the nursery of the house that had been in the Wallop family since Elizabethan times, and as a son of an Earl was immediately granted a title. If we are being honest, it’s about the lowliest one there is: The Honourable. Five rungs on the ladder below a standard Duke, six below a Royal Duke and waving rights on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Though, according to comically intricate rules of precedence, if he should ever be invited to a State Banquet he gets to sit closer to the Queen than any Knight and he trumps the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Take that, Gideon. He started life as unambiguously posh. Of course that’s a word the posh never use. They say ‘smart’. Nurses, cooks, monogrammed linen, a house with a sprung ballroom, ‘map room’ and library, shooting, fishing, a few thousand acres of Hampshire farmland to explore. It was all his.
But despite the silver spoon, the history, the entry in Burke’s Peerage, the enormous advantages that were bestowed on him on his birth, he was always destined to end up in a lower class than his own father. The die was cast by the mere fact that my father was born after his older brother. He would never become an Earl, never inherit a prime dairy herd, never sit in the House of Lords. That is how primogeniture works, and one of the principal reasons for the enormous power the aristocracy held in Britain for about 900 years – their estates and wealth were not divided up between all their children, as happened on the Continent. They became concentrated in one individual. Among the über-aristocracy there are enough subsidiary estates to fund all the children into a life of luxury. Not so with the Earldom of Portsmouth, which was never awash with cash, but fell into impoverishment after the war. My cousin and I, himself a younger son of a different Earl (the aristocracy tend to attract each other and two of my father’s sisters married into grander families), joked as children about how we could mastermind a Kind Hearts and Coronets style plot to leap up the social ladder. How many murders and poisons before we got our hands on the prize? Yes, it is possible to have an inferiority complex as an Honourable. In fact, it is probably a prerequisite.
So my father, without the prospect of land and peerage, became the first Wallop in the twentieth century to seek regular employment and – gasp – one in trade too. This may have been a blow to his ego, but he did what all shabbistocrats do when low on income and prospects: marry well. Of course, I would say that because she’s my mother. But he went down the classic route of finding a bride with money and beauty. My mother was the granddaughter of Sir Montague Burton, a man who arrived in Britain in the first year of the twentieth century from modern-day Lithuania as a penniless Jew. He started off peddling shoe laces around the slums of Leeds and ended up with a tailoring business that clothed much of the British Empire. In doing so he accumulated, and gave away, mountains of cash, much of it to good causes. And a small but meaningful amount ended up in our household. I was acutely aware that all of the comforts in my life as a child – holidays, a private education – were not because of the posh lot from Hampshire but thanks to the enterprise and chutzpah of a Jewish immigrant. If in any doubt, it would be drummed into me every September, when I went to get school uniform from Debenhams (then part of the Burton empire), and I’d suffer the embarrassment of my mother whipping out a staff discount card and the check-out girl invariably asking which branch she worked in. She would quietly, but politely, tell the white lie: ‘head office’. I would squirm. Why couldn’t we just go to John Lewis, like all my classmates?
My childhood in 1970s and 1980s west London was utterly unremarkable to me at the time, as it always is for children. I knew, because I was told so and because I sensed it clearly, that I was very lucky. But we were far from grand. We had a live-in nanny – but so did many of our friends – and a ‘daily’, but no other staff. There were occasional shafts of light that illuminated the slightly abnormal privilege – the Christmas drinks parties at St James’s Palace, where my aunt and uncle lived in a grace-and-favour flat; the play dates at Kensington Palace, where a school friend, the heir to a Royal Dukedom, lived; the knowledge from an early age of how to tip a gamekeeper correctly (note folded up small, passed over with a firm handshake and with no reference at all to the money, but a hearty quip about the crosswinds on the final drive); the black tie dinner parties my parents would hold where the women really would retire to let the men smoke cigars and discuss affairs of state. Even at a young age, I knew this was not what most children did. But they were rare moments, and for most of the time it was a quotidian cycle of normality: The Times and the Daily Express, the Beano, homework, Saturday Morning Swapshop, Sunday School, walking the dog (a golden retriever, of course) in Hyde Park, Wagon Wheels and Findus Crispy Pancakes, Action Man and Lego, dread of Wednesday afternoon swimming, washing the Ford Granada, perfecting a John McEnroe impression, waiting for Abba on Top of the Pops, filling in Royal Wedding scrapbooks.
I always