Social Climbing and Kates family

[GabbyLoggon]

Kate Middletons family must be top of the league in respect of Social Climbing...

Lets make it more personal than royal

My Family? A big one, there are just 2 of us who were bone fide Social Climbers.

How are your tribe doing?

I assume the first step towards moving into a different class is by getting your kids in private prep school

How about social descenders? well, the author who wrote 1984, went to Eton and down the mines.

If KM is a social climber then good on her!

Beats the hell out of this shit!

She's young and good-looking. Why not marry William?

Will do the monarchy good too expat! I'm all for social climbers.

Not fussed about the monarchy, but don't see what's so bad about 'social climbing'. Why on Earth shouldn't a person use what they've got to do what they want so long as it's not harming anyone else? If she has good looks and the right personality to cut it as a royal WAG, and Wills must feel she has, what's so bad about it all?

Besides, she can now snub all those gits who called her doors to manual.

Haahaahaaa! :o

i dont want my dc to struggle,being poor isnt glamorous.and we all sell ourselves for employment.so id rather they had well paid employment than faffing about struggling

social climber just smacks of know your place and stay in it.very english class concept

I'd rather the same for mine, too, SM. So that's our focus.

But if KM wants to marry this guy and get chased by press all her life, well, I can't say I give a toss. It's her life.

I agree this whole thing about 'She's social climbing' does strike me as very English and you're-not-knowing-your-place and outdated crap like that.

But it's a cod GabbyLoggon thread.

Some people, looks is what they've got. Others are good with their hands and get a trade. Others are brainy and develop a skill with that. Still others are very athletic and make a living from that.

Takes all kinds.

Best to use what talents you have in addition to developing as many as you can.

People use the term "social climbing" disparagingly, even though it describes a perfectly natural up-turn in the social status of any family.

Mobility isn't just upwards - if you trace the history of any family back through a few generations you will find the entire spectrum of social class.

I grew up in a very, very lower middle class household in the north-east. My grandparents were working class made relatively good (merchant navy sea captain and his wife). I went to one of the real "old school" boarding schools on a scholarship and to two universities including Oxford. I am a qualified professional and my son will, barring any major financial hiccups, start off in life from a fairly secure financial setting with two professional, middle class parents. Does that make me a social climber?

If you go back the other direction through my family, one line goes like this:
merchant navy captain
merchant navy engineer
sanitary inspector (and landlord of several houses)
dockyard pub landlord
shoemaker
illiterate labourer
farmer
baronet
skip 20 generations or so - King Henry II

Social mobility in both directions is entirely natural and normal, and also surprisingly fast. So in my family the grandson of a baronet was an impoverished, illiterate labourer. His great-grandson was doing pretty well for himself.

Give it another 200 years and the son of a low-income blue-collar family might be trying to work out how his many times great-grandfather was the king of England.

Kungfupannda I wouldn't call what you have described 'social climbing'. That is just doing well.

There is something extra about social climbers that makes what they are doing slightly repugnant - that looking over one shoulder of people they are talking to, to see if anyone more useful has arrived/studied name dropping etc.

There is a significant difference between bettering your self - upward mobility if you like - ans social climbing. One is a natural desire to do the best for yourself and your family - the other is despicable snobbery.

What a great debate this has turned into.
Well worth publishing in a newspaper.

There is nothing else to say but. ya, great, top hole, spiffing, one is very appreciative.

I think it is a snob thing-one person's 'upward mobility' is another person's social climbing-hence all the sneering about 'new' money.

within a couple of generations, my mums family went from mill/factory/land owning upper middle class/moneyed to working class/poor.

As much as it suits both ends of the spectrum to pretend otherwise, class and status have always been rather fluid in this country.

oh, and I'm sure if I ever managed to make a fortune (like the Middletons) and DS or a yet to be born DC married into the Royals, we'd be seen as social climbing with 'new' money, and my mum from a working class home, with no notice paid to the 'old money' and land a couple of generations back that'd all long gone before she was born.

well, obviously the land isn't long gone, it's still physically there - just not owned by my family... shall shut up now...

I think that it's not really levelling the cricism of being a social climber that smacks of classism. I think being a social climber is itself classist. The word doesn;t describe someone who wants a better life, wants to go up a notch on their education and earning compared to their parents/grandparents etc. IMO it describes someone who thinks that there is a group of people who are somehow inherently "better". Social climber, as a criticism, I think, is used to describe someone who wants to join that group and, by implication,leave behind people they consider "lesser".

I would use it as a criticism - in very select circumstances - not levelled at someone who's done a degree and earned more than their parents and made friends with people with degrees and high-paying jobs; not levelled at someone I think should "stay in their place" (as someone said lower down); but levelled at someone seemingly determined to rank our population, according to dubious criteria, from inferior to superior.

for one thing people feel comfrtable with others of similar status.

It can cause mild friction when one member of a family goes upwards and expects to call the shots.

Money only talks up to a point in families.

Most CLASS is inbred