NEW CLASSES AND NEW HORIZONS

Marie Lloyd, the darling of the music halls, sang a song that contained the deathless line: "A little of what you fancy does you good."

In addition to their evangelism, their occasional ruthlessness, the British have a streak of self-indulgence. This trait was encouraged by the peculiar circumstances of the country after the Conservative victory in the general election of 1951.

It was not a smashing victory. The Conservatives came back to power with 326 seats in the House of Commons as opposed to 295 for Labor and 6 for the Liberals. Yet it is doubtful that even with double their majority the Tories would have wished to undo all the work in the fields of nationalization and social welfare accomplished by the Labor administrations of 1945 and 1950. This was not politically feasible and, with Britain still in the toils of economic difficulties, it would have been unwise to convulse the industrial structure. There was no restoration after the revolution. The Socialists obviously had not attained the goals outlined by Professor Laski, but they had started the nation in that direction.

If economic conditions had deteriorated, the new administration of Winston Churchill might have been short-lived. But the world demand for British products, especially such raw materials as rubber and tin from Malaya, strengthened the economy. So did the gradual rise in British production and the economic improvement in Europe which created a larger market for British exports. After some uneasy months the indices of economic health began to move upward. After twelve years of military, political, and economic strain and anxiety the British were ready for a little of what they fancied. Life around them looked good, and they wanted to take advantage of it. There was a steady return of confidence.

British exports were rising. You could actually go down to the butcher's and buy all the meat you wanted. The Tories really were building all those houses they had promised to build. It was easier now to buy a new car and say good-by to Old Faithful that had served since 1938 or earlier. Taxes were as high as ever, but the government said they would be reduced. And if you had a little money, there was plenty in the shops to spend it on.

During the struggle with austerity after the war the British had been surprisingly sensitive to foreign criticism of their apparent inability to fight their way back to prosperity. Now here was prosperity or a reasonably accurate facsimile of it. Those foreigners had been wrong.

Presiding over their recrudescence of national confidence was the familiar figure of Mr. Churchill. The Prime Minister might lack the acute economic penetration of Sir Stafford Cripps and Clement Attlee's social consciousness, but he was a world figure in a way that neither Socialist could claim to be. When in May 1953 the best-known voice in the English-speaking world proposed a conference at the summit with the new masters of the Soviet Union, the British felt that their leader had enforced their country's claim to a share in the leadership of the West.

Neither the economic nor the political developments of 1951-3 altered the raw facts of Britain's existence: the importance of denial at home to expand sales abroad, the rising competition of Germany and Japan in international markets. But these facts, which had been presented to the people with monotonous regularity under the pedagogical leadership of the Socialists, slipped out of sight. There was money to spend and there were things to buy. And reading about the Queen and the preparations for her Coronation was much more interesting than worrying about the dollar balance.

The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was one of the most impressive and romantic spectacles of modern times. It is quite possible that this combination of national pride, religious symbolism, and perfectly performed ceremony will never be duplicated. It is also possible that from the standpoint of national psychology the Coronation did the British a good deal of harm by leading some of them into romantic daydreams at a time when it was essential that they should keep their heads and face the ugly realities of their position.

The young Queen pledging herself to serve her people, the evocation of a glorious past, the survivals of ancient custom, the splendid ceremony in London, and the other smaller ceremonies around the country all exalted values that, although real and important in their place, are only a part, and not the most important part, of a society that must fight to retain economic and political power. People should be reminded occasionally of their place in the historical procession and of the existence of values other than those of the market place. But such reminders are useful only when the people return to their normal jobs with a new vigor and enthusiasm. In Britain the festivities of the Coronation year seemed to drag on interminably.

In the case of the Coronation the monarchy might be said to have overfulfilled its function of arousing national patriotism. Whipped on by the national newspapers and the BBC, patriotic fervor went beyond the bounds of reason and led to an overoptimistic estimate of Britain's position in the world. We can make this the new Elizabethan age! chanted the newspapers.

The idea that the subjects of Elizabeth II would emulate their restless, adventurous, enterprising forebears of the reign of Elizabeth I was a pleasing one. But it sounded odd in a nation of whose citizens millions were devoted to security. In 1953, Coronation year, the age of adventure and chivalry bowed resplendent and beautiful before a nation in which the forces that had been working since 1940 were evoking new classes and new ways of life. Neither had physical or mental connections with the heroic past of aristocratic rural England or with the old middle class.

In preceding chapters we have encountered some of the forces that changed British life: the leveling effect of the war, the Socialist victory of 1945, the extension of nationalization of industry and of the social services, the decline in the economic well-being of the old middle class. Now in the mid-fifties, as a result of these forces and two others—full employment and rising wages—a class new to modern British history has emerged.

Over the years between 1940 and 1955 there was very little unemployment in Britain. The percentage of unemployment in 1940 was 6.4. Thereafter, under the special circumstances of the war, the percentage fell until in 1944 it was only 0.6. In the post-war years it rose slightly, but the highest figure was 3 per cent in 1947.

Simultaneously, wages rose. Using October 1938 for the base figure of 100, weekly average earnings in the principal industries rose to 176 in 1943, 229 in 1949, and 323 in 1954.

The new class resulting from these changes and the earlier political ones is composed mainly of the manual workers of British industry, better housed, better paid, and more secure than ever before in their history.

Definition of the new class from either a geographic or an economic point of view is difficult. In the 1930's there was an extensive redistribution of the British working population. Industries, heavy and light, began to spring up in places like Oxford and in the heart of hitherto largely rural counties like Berkshire and Northamptonshire. Tens of thousands of workers left their homes in slum areas or drab working-class neighborhoods and moved to new jobs in new industries. In the six years before the start of World War II more than 2,000,000 new houses were built in Britain. This was important in the resettlement of the industrial population. Equally important was the fact that over 500,000 of them were built and let by local government authorities who in turn were helped by the central government.

Subsidized housing had come to stay. In the decade since the war more than 2,000,000 new houses have been built. Of these about 1,600,000 are owned by local governments, which let them at low rents made possible by government subsidies.

Another development that benefited the new class was the advent of the New Towns. These are self-contained communities outside the great centers of population, complete with industries, schools, churches, hospitals, and public services. They are intended to draw people from the cities and conurbations, already too large, and establish them in the countryside.

The idea is old. Ebenezer Howard proposed it in 1898 and the proposal was promptly attacked as the spawn of the devil and his socialist friends. It was not until 1903 that Letchworth, the first of the New Towns, was established. But World War II impressed on both Socialist and Tory the wisdom of dispersing the industrial population, and in 1946 the House of Commons approved the New Towns Act. Today there are fourteen New Towns in Britain, eleven of them in England. None is complete, although workers are moving into them by the thousand.

Harlow, which occupies ten square miles of Essex, is the most advanced of the New Towns. Its present population is about 30,000. The target is around 80,000. The cost of this vast resettlement scheme is high. Thus far it has been about £112,000,000, approximately $313,600,000. Estimates indicate that more than double that sum will be needed to complete the New Towns.

The New Towns are by all odds one of the most interesting and imaginative developments in modern Britain. Their social and political consequences are almost incalculable. For the New Towns will continue to grow and to house a new class whose political and economic power will be a dominant factor in British society.

They will not be completed overnight. In most cases the rate of growth depends on the willingness of industry to build in the New Towns. Exceptions are towns like Newton Aycliffe and Peterlee in the North of England which have been built to house miners and their families. On the whole, however, industrial support has been encouraging. With the establishment of a new industry in a New Town more houses are built and schools, churches, shops, and parks constructed.

In the process hundreds of thousands of people are leaving the working-class sections of the Clyde or South Wales or London, trading tiny, old-fashioned flats or houses for well-designed houses. The children are going to schools that are new and not over-crowded. They are playing in fields rather than city streets.

But the New Towns are not the only factor in the emergence of the new class. In addition, there has been a steady increase in the construction of low-rent housing estates by local authorities. Incidentally, the people of the New Towns are sharply critical of ignoramuses who confuse them with the people of the housing estates. The housing estates are most often built on the fringes of big cities; the tall—for Britain—apartment houses rising in Wimbledon, outside London, are an example.

Each housing estate, when completed, siphons off some hundreds or thousands of Britain's slum population. In some cases, notably in east London south of the Thames, new housing estates have been built in the wastes left by German bombing.

As a consequence of these efforts by both Labor and Conservative governments to resettle the working class, Britain's slums are slowly disappearing. Of course many square miles of them remain, and any newspaper can publish photographs showing conditions of appalling filth and squalor. Yet a great deal has been done to destroy the slums. There remain, of course, the miles and miles of old working-class districts, shabby and dull, but these are part of the landscape of any industrial nation and it is probably impossible for any government, British or American or German, to eliminate them entirely.

The people of the New Towns, of the housing estates, and of the working class generally enjoy full employment and higher wages than they have ever dreamed of in their lives. Admittedly, prices have risen steadily since the war. But rents have not. In Norwich, for instance, there were in 1956 eight thousand council houses that rented at seven shillings, or ninety-eight cents, a week. The manual worker in British industry often pays only a nominal rent. The Welfare State has relieved him of the burden of saving for the education of his children or for medical care.

A skilled worker in industry may have a basic wage of £12 ($33.60) or £13 ($36.40) a week. Overtime work may raise the total to an average of £15 ($42.00) for a week's work. A worker at a similar job in a similar industry before the war was extremely fortunate if he made £4 a week.

Under these circumstances the buying spree on which the British people embarked in 1953 was inevitable. The new class had no need to save. The state took care of its welfare, and taxes were taken at the source under PAYE (Pay As You Earn). Workers had been fully employed for more than a decade. Now at last the shops were full, and the hucksters of installment buying, known in Britain as "buying on the Never-Never," were at every door.

One investigation of life in the New Towns revealed a typical weekly budget for necessities. The family spent £5 10 s., or about $15.40, for food and household necessities. Rent and local taxes cost £2, or $5.60. Lighting and heating cost 10 s., or $1.40, while the same amount went to clothes and repairs. Cigarettes took a pound, or $2.80, and the weekly installment on the television set was 15 s., or $2.10.

Few things demonstrate more strikingly the change in the status of the British manual worker than his insistence on a television set as a "necessity." Cars, radios, and, earlier, gramophones were available only to the middle class or wealthy in pre-war Britain. For the first time they are within the range of the manual worker.

Few families budget the considerable sum spent each week on beer, the obligatory trips to the local movie theater, or gambling either through football pools or bets on horse races. But it is not unusual in these new circumstances to find men who spend £2 or £3 a week for such purposes. "Why the bloody hell not?" a worker in Liverpool asked. "I've got me job and I don't 'ave to worry." The permanence of his job and of high wages had become an accepted part of his life. He was one of those who had not been moved by the Labor Party's dire forebodings of unemployment and the dole under Conservative rule. To him these were as shadowy and distant as the Corn Laws and Peterloo.

The new class has money, security, and leisure: this is the promised land. According to theories of some reformers, the worker, freed from the oppression of poverty, should be expanding intellectually, worrying about the future of Nigeria rather than the football fortunes of Arsenal. My opinion is that the opposite is true, that with the coming of the good life the worker has gradually shed his responsibilities (some of these, in fact, have been stripped from him) and has lost the old desperate desire to improve his lot and make himself and his class the paramount political power in the land.

There is no need to save, for the state provides for all eventualities the worker can foresee. There is no compulsion to ensure that the children get an education that will enable them to rise above the circumstances of their parents. For the circumstances are so good, so unimaginably higher than those into which the fathers and mothers of this class were born, that there seems to be nothing further to be sought. Why should a boy be given a good education—"stuffing 'is head with a lot of nonsense 'e'll never use" was the way one father put it—when he can make £10 a week after a few years in a factory? The schools are there, they are free, but when the time comes the boy can leave the school and take up a man's work in the factory.

There seems to be a conviction among working-class mothers that a girl needs a little more schooling to fit her for an office job. But the men of the class, proud of the money they are earning and the "rights" their unions have won, see no virtue in an office job or the higher education that fits one for it.

For the manual worker has found security, and that is what he is interested in, that is what he has sought through the long, bitter history of industrial disputes in Britain. He is not interested in and he does not share the standards of the old middle class or even of the artisan class that preceded him.

Charles Curran, in a brilliant article on "The New Estate in Great Britain" in the Spectator, put it this way: "One word sums up the New Estate: the word 'security.' It is security in working-class terms, maintained and enforced by working-class methods. The traditional values of the middle and professional classes form no part of it; among wage-earners these values are meaningless.

"To the middle-class citizen, economic security is a goal to be reached primarily by personal effort. It is a matter of thrift, self-help, self-improvement, competitive striving. But the manual worker sees it differently. To him, any betterment in his conditions of life is essentially a collective process—something to be achieved not by himself as an individual but in company with his fellows. He will organize for it, vote for it, strike for it, always with them. It is 'Us' not 'I.' Eugene Debs, the American Socialist leader, put this attitude into one sentence when he said, 'I don't want to rise from the ranks; I want to rise with them.'"

In this psychological situation it is ludicrous to appeal for New Elizabethans among the men and women of the new class. For they have no great admiration for individual enterprise, for risk or sacrifice. Among the many men I have talked to in the New Towns, I never met one who was interested in saving enough money to buy his own small business, to strike out for himself. The ideal seemed to be a community of equals protected from economic dangers by full employment and high wages, politically lethargic, unstirred by Socialist or Tory. Everyone earned about the same amount of money, spent it on the same things, and appeared to think and talk alike.

Yet theirs is a nation that desperately needs the imaginative, inventive mind if it is to overcome its economic difficulties.

The paramount emphasis on security found among manual workers may be regrettable. But in view of Britain's past it is natural and understandable. These, after all, are the descendants of farm laborers who worked twelve hours a day and lived in hovels. The grandfathers and grandmothers of the young people in the New Towns knew the dank, dirty poverty of the slums of London and Liverpool. There must be among the miners at Peterlee men and women whose female ancestors dragged coal carts through mine tunnels on their hands and knees.

The new class begins with a strong bias in favor of the Labor Party. It is never allowed to forget the inhumanities of the past or the long struggle of the unions against entrenched capital. It is reminded at every election that all it has today is a result of the efforts of the Labor Party. This is not true, but we are talking about politics. Finally, in every new housing development or New Town there must be an aging group who remember with fierce-eyed resentment the long periods of unemployment and the marginal existence that were the lot of many working-class families a quarter of a century ago.

The Welsh, in particular, have never forgotten. And hundreds of thousands of bitter, talkative, excitable Welsh workers have left South Wales in the last twenty years to work in other parts of Britain, carrying with them their hatred of the Tories and their zeal for "the movement." When Aneurin Bevan, that most Welsh of Welshmen, describes the Tories as lower than vermin or genially compares them with the Gadarene swine, he is expressing a sentiment strongly held by a considerable percentage of his fellow countrymen.

The geographical redistribution of the working class altered the political map of Britain. Housing estates and New Towns introduced solid blocs of Labor votes into traditionally Tory constituencies. This was a factor in the Socialist victory of 1945 and it is still a factor today. The constituency of Melton, for instance, was long considered a safe Liberal seat. Then it became equally safe for the Conservatives. But the advent of a housing development and several thousand new votes made this rural constituency insecure. The influx of a new type of voter is one of the main reasons why this must now be considered a marginal constituency by the Tories.

But the effect of the geographical redistribution is being matched and balanced in many constituencies by the effect of their new economic status upon the voters of the working class. They now have something to conserve: jobs, good wages, pleasant homes. This does not mean an immediate conversion to Conservatism. Among many, particularly the older age groups, the memories of the past are still strong. But the achievement of a new economic status has resulted in a lessening of the fervor and energy for the Socialist cause. A class that puts security above everything else is not likely to be won by a Labor platform that endorses more nationalization and the ensuing upheaval in the British economy. Its younger members, many of whom have never been jobless, are unimpressed by dire prophecies of the return of the bad old days under Tory rule because they themselves have never experienced such a period.

Nor should we forget that in each general election the Conservative Party wins a substantial share of the working-class vote. Even in the catastrophe of 1945 the Conservatives estimate they won between 4,000,000 and 4,500,000 votes among manual workers. In 1951 about 6,000,000 electors of this group voted Tory. Of course the vote for Labor rose too: it is estimated that in the general election of that year 52 per cent of the working class voted for Labor. But Labor was defeated by the coalition of middle-class and working-class votes for the Tories.

Nonetheless, the Tories continue to gain in the areas where the new working class has reached a new economic status. In 1945 the Labor Party won Chislehurst in Kent, normally a safe Conservative seat. The influx of working-class voters was the principal cause. Ten years later Chislehurst was safely back on the Conservative side.

The Conservative Party is thus faced with a difficult question. Like all major parties, it is a coalition of various economic and social interests. In the last decade a new interest, that of the working class, has become vital to the party. But the Conservative government's efforts to meet the wishes of that group, particularly its insistence on the continuation of the Welfare State, clashes directly with the interests of the old middle class, which has suffered a loss of social prestige, economic standing, and political influence at the hands of the working class.

The rebellion among Conservative voters of the middle class against the government's policies, reflected in their refusal to vote in by-elections, cannot go unchecked without damaging the Conservatives. That this is fully realized by the party leaders was shown by the warnings they gave the Tories against seduction by political groups of the extreme right.

What kind of people are the new working class? You will not find them portrayed in the novels of Angela Thirkell or, indeed, any other English novelist popular in America. But veterans of World War II may recognize them as the slightly older brothers of the British soldier they knew in Africa, Italy, and France.

They are not at all reserved; reserve is the province of the upper-middle-class Briton. They are friendly, incurious, and polite. For the first time in history they are satisfied with themselves and with their lot.

I mention this as a curiosity. When I first went to England to work before the war I was struck by the powerful interest shown in the United States. An American in a working-class pub was bombarded by queries about the organization of the unions, John L. Lewis, the absence of a labor party in the United States politics, the techniques of mass production in industry. The young men were eager to know and anxious to improve.

Today one encounters the same politeness but less interest. After the preliminary and obligatory question about the "Yank corporal" named Jackson who lives in Chicago and do you know him, the talk is likely to trail off into inconsequentials. The English, as opposed to the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, are a people notably difficult to arouse and, equally important, difficult to quiet once they are aroused. But in recent years the pubs have been quiet. The new working class has what it and its predecessors wanted. It is not excited either by the prospect of Tory rule or by the infiltration of the British Communists into the union structure.

It would be aroused, however, by any policy that appeared to endanger its new position. That is certain. And consequently both major parties will be circumspect in their approach to the new class.

Socially, the new class is modern. Increasingly it is making use of new techniques in living which were out of the economic range of its fathers and mothers. The old family life built around the kitchen and the pot of tea on the stove has been replaced by one built around the television set.

For the first time in their lives the young people of the New Towns and the housing estates have enough room in their homes to plan and build. The three-piece bedroom suite is as important as the television set as an indication of economic status. The "do it yourself" craze that swept the United States did not "catch on" among the working class in Britain for the simple reason that its members had always done it themselves. A great deal of the painting and decoration and some of the furniture-making is done by the man of the house in his spare time.

The class is not notably religious. The Catholics and the Methodists support their churches, but the response to other faiths is not ardent. The British are not "a pagan people," as some critics have charged, but there certainly is little enthusiasm for conventional religious forms.

The working class is a definable class. Thus it takes its place in the graduated ranks of British society. Within the class, however, there is very little snobbery. I have mentioned one instance: the resentment of the dwellers in the New Towns when they are classed with the people of the housing estates. But in a community in which all the men work in the same or similar factories and in which everyone knows almost to the penny what everyone else makes, pretense of economic superiority is difficult.

Here is the new British workingman. He moved to a New Town or a housing estate from a slum or near-slum. If he is in his late thirties or forties, he fought in the war and his wife knows more about the effect of high explosives, flying bombs, and rockets than most generals. He is living in what is to him comparative luxury: a living room, a clean and, by British standards, modern kitchen, a bedroom for the children, a modern bath and toilet. He can walk or cycle to his work, and if the weather is fine, he comes home for lunch. In the evening there is "the telly" or the football-pool form to be filled out or the new desk he is making for the children's room. Some two or three times a week he drops in at the "local," the neighborhood pub or bar, for a few drinks with friends from the factory. Even here his habits are changing. The actually potent "mild and bitter" or "old and mild" that was his father's tipple has been replaced by light ale—"nasty gassy stuff" the old-fashioned barmaids report.

It is a quiet life but to our subject a satisfactory one. He reads the Daily Mirror rather than the Daily Herald, which was his father's Bible, but he is only occasionally aroused by international problems. He did get excited about the idea of arming "those bloody Germans," but when the leaders of both the Conservative and Labor parties accepted the necessity he went along with German rearmament. But he was never particularly happy about it. In general, however, he is not interested in world affairs. There are one or two fellows at "the works," he will tell you, who get excited about China or Suez or Cyprus. Here it should be noted that he is more nationalist than internationalist. He doesn't like it when British soldiers are killed by the bombs of Greek Cypriotes, chiefly because the Army is no longer a professional force but one composed largely of conscripts of National Service. Young Tom from down the street, a nice lad, has gone out there with the Green Howards.

There he is: content, complete, complacent. His contacts with the rest of the world, British or foreign, are limited, and this is especially true of his contacts with the old middle class.

The old middle class itself is intensely interested in this new kind of working class. Partly this is true because the new class is blamed for many of the reverses that have fallen upon the middle class. Partly it is because of political spite. Partly it is jealousy. Whatever the dominant reason, the feeling is there, and the middle class, harking back to the first Socialist boasts in 1945 about remaking bourgeois Britain, will tell you: "They started it."

This class (here we are talking about the professional men, civil servants, Army, Navy, and Air Force officers, the higher but not the highest ranks of business and industry, the clergy of the Church of England, and the retired pensioners of these groups) fights hard to resist the uniformity that the last fifteen years have imposed upon it. It finds itself unable to organize to win higher salaries, and it knows that the taxation of the last decade has closed the gap between it and the new class of industrial workers. Finally, its more intelligent members are aware that it too is being challenged from within—that there is arising in its ranks a new group which from the economic standpoint can claim to be middle class but which has very little in common now, socially or politically, with the old middle class. Yet, as both groups claim a certain superiority over the class of manual workers, it is safe to predict that the two groups will unite and make common cause in defense of their standards. Interestingly, this is already happening in the field of education, where the sons of the physicists, engineers, and scientists who are among the leaders of the new middle class are going to the public schools that were one of the solid foundations of the old middle class.

Such schools, incidentally, are one of the bones of contention between the political leaders of the Labor Party, which represents the majority of the working class, and the old middle class. This class has pressed the Exchequer for a tax allowance for public schools—i.e., private education. The Socialists replied that such an allowance would be a private subsidy to a system that spreads inequality. To this the Tories of the old middle class retorted that part of the British freedom was the right of the parent to decide how and where his child was to be educated. They added a reminder that if the new working class were to save a bit on installment payments for television sets and the football pools, it too could send its sons to public schools. The answer, of course, is that the new working class cares little for schools, public or national.

The change in the composition of the middle class brought about by the introduction of new members reflects a change in Britain's industrial life and, to some extent, her position in the world. The administrators, managers, and technicians of the new industries such as plastics and electronics, the leaders in the newspaper, television, radio, and movie industries are becoming as important as the lawyers, judges, general officers, retired pro-consuls who once led the class. Just below these leaders is a steadily increasing group of newcomers to the class who have worked their way out of the working class since the war. Industrial designers and chemists, buyers, advertising men, production engineers—all these have come to the top.

This group reflects modern Britain and her problems. The colonial governor is less important to it than the expert on foreign markets. The scientist is infinitely more necessary to the country's progress than the soldier.

There is an important difference in income between the new entries into the middle class and the professional men who formed its backbone in the past. On the whole, the incomes of the new group are a good deal higher. It is engaged, for the most part, in industries, businesses, or quasi-public organizations that are expanding. Moreover, many of its members augment their incomes with expense accounts.

But these differences in types of activity and in income are only the beginning of the differences between the two segments of the middle class.

Many members of the new group have just arrived, pushed to the top by the necessities of war or of Britain's long economic struggle. The percentage of public-school graduates is lower than in the established middle class. Attention to that class's recognized totems is much less. The new group is less concerned with the Church of England, the Army and the Navy—the Air Force and the production of new weapons are, however, its special province—the Foreign Office and active politics. These it has left largely to the established middle class, and frequently the interests of the two groups clash. For example, the conflict within government between the traditionalist view of the Navy as vital to Britain's defense and the view that all that matters is the big bomber today and the intercontinental ballistic missile tomorrow is essentially a clash between two groups in the same class.

The new group is not primarily managerial, although managers make up a considerable percentage of its total. It includes a great many creative workers, architects, scientists and engineers, and a surprisingly high percentage of men who have risen without the aid of the Old School Tie.

The group has had less education and less leisure than the old middle class, and, consequently, its approach to culture is different. Its interest in the arts is limited, its taste in literature tends toward Nevil Shute rather than Thackeray. But it has a furious curiosity about Britain and the world: it devours magazine articles and books. Like the new working class, it has reached income levels that seemed out of sight fifteen years ago, but, unlike the new working class, it is not content to rest in its present position. For it knows enough of the world and the country to doubt that the present security is enough.

The middle class in Britain over the centuries has developed a marvelous capacity for altering while maintaining roughly the same faÇade. This process is going on now. The sons of the new group within the middle class are going off to public schools and Oxford and Cambridge rather than to state schools and the red brick provincial universities that trained their fathers. But because this group has an abiding interest in technical education, its members are anxious for the spread of such education in the old classical schools.

It should be noted that the trend toward the public schools and the great universities is not due entirely to snobbery. As an industrial engineer told me, "That's still the best education in the country, and my son's going to have it." He himself was the product of a state school and a provincial university. Obviously he enjoyed talking about his boy's public school.

Consequently, the two groups within the middle class are mixing slowly. But the old middle class is on the defensive; its standards are not those of the new group, and with the continued rise of the new group this defensiveness probably will remain. As Britain's world political and military responsibilities decline, the men and women charged with overseeing her new position as an exporting nation—in which salesmanship and industrial techniques are paramount—will find their importance increasing.

Once again we find a new group that, like the new kind of working class, has very little to do with Merrie England. Its roots are less deep. It is not intimately concerned with the institutions that the old middle class served. In its outlook toward the world it is much more realistic and modern. Yet it is gradually assuming the forms of the old middle class—the schools, the regiments, the clubs. These institutions inevitably will change as a result of the admission of the new group. However, if the outward form remains unchanged, the British will be content.

Politically the new group within the middle class began its adult life well to the left of center. In the ten years since the war it has gradually shifted to the right. Young Conservative ministers like Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling represent the ideas of the group, although they themselves are not of it. In general, the group admires tidy planning and crisp execution in government. Its shift away from Socialism probably began when many of its members realized that the execution of Labor's economic plans left a good deal to be desired and that some of the party's radicals were cheerfully advocating other plans—the further extension of nationalization, for instance—that might wreck an already delicately balanced economy. But the new group's support of the Conservative Party is far removed from the bred-in-the-bone, true-blue Conservatism of the old middle class. It is on the right at the moment because the Tories offer the greatest opportunity to the activities it represents.

The old middle class, based mainly on the professions and government service, is thus under pressure from the new middle class and from the new working class. Its importance in British society is diminishing because the former has a closer connection with what is immediately important to Britain's survival and because the latter will no longer accept leadership by the old middle class. It is important to note, however, that the ties between the new middle class and the new working class are more substantial. Many of the new middle class have risen from the urban working class in a generation. In regard to the technical aspects of industry, the two groups speak the same language.

The influence retained by the old middle class should not be underestimated, however. Especially in the countryside the lawyer, the vicar, the retired officer who is the local Justice of the Peace continue to wield considerable authority. And in clinging to traditional forms through two wars and the long night of austerity, the middle class has demonstrated its essential toughness.

The old middle class still reads The Times of London, that great newspaper, although you are liable to be informed in country drawing-rooms that The Times is "a bit Bolshie nowadays."

The forms and felicities of British life are encouraged and supported by the old middle class. The Church of England, the local Conservative Party fete, the gymkhana, the voluntary social services, the Old Comrades Associations of regiments owe their continued life to unstinting aid from the men and women of this class. It has had its periods of blindness (Munich was one), but it has never doubted where duty lay. When the war began in 1939—or, as its members would say, "when the balloon went up"—it sent away its sons and daughters and settled down to man the Home Guard and the civil-defense services. It suffered bombing and austerity, but it made certain that when the boys and girls came home there was a dance at the yacht club—some Polish sailors lived there during the war, and everyone pitched in to put it back in shape—and all the food the rationing would allow.

The positive characteristics of this class are impressive: its courage, its desire that each generation have a wider education and a greater opportunity, its cool calmness in the face of danger, its willingness to accept as a duty the responsibility for the lives of untaught millions living in famine and poverty and to labor for their welfare, its acceptance of the conviction of duty well done as the suitable reward for a lifetime of work. To me these seem to outweigh the pettiness, the snobbery, the overbearing self-confidence. No nation can do without such positive characteristics, and it will be a sorry day for Britain if the change in the middle class eliminates their influence on the country.

We Americans are fond of thinking of Britain as a settled, caste-ridden society. But at least two groups, the new middle class and the resettled working class, are on the move or have just moved into a new status, politically, economically, and socially. Moreover, one large class, the middle class, is in the process of changing. British society is much more mobile than it appears from the outside because of the Britons' desire to retain traditional forms while the substance changes.

As these changes take place, the value of many old indications of class change also. Accent remains one of the easiest methods for placing a Briton, but it is no longer an infallible guide. The effect of the BBC upon British speech has been considerable, and today the clerk in an obscure provincial shop may talk, if not in the accents of Eton, at least in a pleasant voice that reveals only a trace of provincial accent. The disappearance of old robust provincial accents would be a loss. And an acute ear in London can still, like Shaw's Professor Henry Higgins, place a Londoner in Wimbledon or Barnes or Stepney. It is the conviction of many Socialists that equality will never reign in Britain until there is a universal accent.

Clothes, too, are a much more accurate indication of class in Britain than in the United States. The derby or bowler is the almost universal headgear of the upper-class male in the city, with the cap for the country. The workingman affects a soft hat, sometimes a Homburg and often a cloth cap. The mass production of clothing came later in Britain than in the United States, but today the miner can be as warmly clothed as the banker. The difference lies in the styling given the banker's clothes by his London tailor. Then, too, the banker may be far more negligent in his dress than the miner: it is a mistake, if not a crime, in Britain for a member of the upper class to be too well dressed.

Nancy Mitford and Professor Alan Ross have made Americans aware of the infinite variations of U (upper-class) and Non-U (non-upper-class) phraseology in Britain, but many of the distinctions so carefully drawn are changing. A young lady of my acquaintance habitually uses "serviette" instead of "napkin," a crime Miss Mitford ranks just below arson and beating an old woman with a stick. As she goes to an expensive and very U school, the young lady was queried about her choice of words. No one, she reported, had ever heard of Miss Mitford at her school, and what did it matter anyhow?

There has been no mention of the aristocracy in this long chapter, which will probably offend readers whose views on Britain have been formed by the Merrie England school of writing. The fact is that the aristocracy does not rate a great deal of space in a book dealing with modern Britain.

The real aristocracy of Britain was composed of the great landowning families whose power began to decline with the rise, at the start of the nineteenth century, of the great industrial and commercial families. The remaining British servants of the old school—the best judges extant of who is and who is not an aristocrat—are inclined to look down their noses at the pretensions of Johnny-come-latelies who earned their titles by services, usually financial, to political parties, or by the proprietorship of chain stores. To them the people who count are the old families and the old names—Derby, Norfolk, Salisbury.

Inheritance taxes, the import of foreign foodstuffs, reckless spending all contributed to the reduction of the aristocracy's position. One reason why the institution of monarchy is supported by most and tolerated by some Socialists is that the Crown does not command the immediate allegiance of a large, influential, and moneyed aristocracy. There is no court party between the Crown and the people. The rulers of Britain have become progressively more popular with the common man as the influence of the real aristocracy declined. Of course, that influence has been exerted in a different way. Two recent Conservative Prime Ministers have been of aristocratic birth. Sir Winston Churchill was born the grandson of a duke; he was offered a dukedom on his retirement in 1955 and characteristically refused it. Sir Anthony Eden comes of an aristocratic North Country family one of whose members was a colonial governor in Maryland. They headed a Conservative Party that was middle class rather than aristocratic.

A few members of the old aristocracy strive to continue life as their fathers and grandfathers knew it, but they fight a losing battle. The opening of the great country houses to the public, the most desperate expedients to cut down spending so that the heir can enter the Guards and the daughter enjoy a proper introduction to London society cannot compensate for the taxation and for the changes in the character of British society and in the world.

The aristocracy, the real aristocracy, makes its presence felt in modern Britain only when such men as Lord Salisbury or Lord Mountbatten leave the peaceful countryside and contend with the active body of Britons.

The moment of a significant decline in the aristocracy's position has seen a gallant defense of it in literature. Both Miss Mitford and Evelyn Waugh have expounded its virtues of courage and responsibility in war. The "damn your eyes, follow me, I'm going to do what's right" idea always appeals powerfully to those who reject thinking for themselves. It is easy for an author to poke fun at the sober civil servant or the earnest trade-unionist dropping his h's, but in modern Britain they are far more important than Lord Fortinbras.

For, as we have seen, this is a society in the throes of change. New groups are rising to the top just as, and frequently because, Britain's survival demands new habits, new enterprises. Individual members of the declining classes who adapt themselves to the changing times will survive. Lord Salisbury, bearer of an ancient name, presides over Britain's entry into the age of nuclear fission. But those who cannot adapt will slowly disappear.

In all this change there is strength. Britain's hope for the future lies in her ability, proven in the past, to change to meet new conditions. The nation that has emerged since 1945 is the product of greater changes than Britain has ever known. There are weak spots—the lack of individual enterprise on the part of the working class is certainly one. But the changes so bitterly resented by many are the best reason for optimism concerning Britain's destiny in this century's struggle with totalitarian powers.

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