These are the British

by Drew Middleton

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.