Tinkly And your extremely ignorant remarks about the miners' strike only emphasise your utter lack of historical knowledge of social conditions. You are looking at events that happenened in a completely different time through modern eyes. The past was another country Chandler. Though. I suspect you would have felt very at home during the Thatcher era.
I actually wonder if you are talking about a different country. I have for instance, read on here that the world was full of single wage earning families, mainly men, while the woman didn't work, but that was ok because she had to do washings by hand.
My grandmother and great grandmother both had to go to into service when they left home, which I imagine a lot of women did. No protected jobs for life for them in nationalised industries. My great uncle went to university, it was possible. The local secondary school, in what you would call a "working class area" no doubt, had a wooden board where the former pupils who got into Oxbridge had their names put up. It wasn't empty.
I went to University in the eighties. You had to be pretty bright to go, particularly as a working class person.
Oh come off it! My university when I went, in the late eighties, was full of research assistants from perfectly ordinary backgrounds who had got in in the early 80s. Hardly the brightest 5-10%, but they still benefitted from maintenance grants.
What on earth is a "working class person" anyway? Even in the late eighties, it was pretty much the die hard liberal CND badge wearers or militant miners that were the only ones to use such ridiculous terms. Yes, most of my family were employed. I thought that sort of thinking went out with the ark.
But clearly, despite a professional career since, I must know my place, as coming from a "working class background".