When do you become middle class?

[ForMintUser]

I was reading the “rich get richer” thread which made me think about something I have been wondering about, interested in other people’s opinions.

My parents came from working class, council house backgrounds, neither set of grandparents ever had much money, never owned a house.

Both parents left school with no qualifications, didn’t go on to further or higher education.

My father worked as a salesman, eventually got promoted to management and ended up working in senior management for a UK wide company.

I would say they were working class from birth but would probably be middle class now, jobs in management, home owners etc.

I would say I was raised middle class, there wasn’t a huge amount of money when we were children but certainly didn’t grow up in poverty, myself and siblings all went to university, have professional jobs.

I will say I recognise there is a lot of luck and timing in this (particularly in relation to house prices and the fact that my mother was able to be a SAHM because a family could live on one income then). I’m not a big believer in the idea that hard work always equals success, it does for some but not for others.

My question is, if they were born working class and are now middle class (happy to be corrected on that if people don’t agree) surely there needs to have been a point where you would say they had become middle class? So at what point do you become middle class?

Social mobility is a funny thing though.

In the classic scenario:

Start with a working class couple, The As, born into council house families whose parents worked in traditional working class roles eg bus driver/ cleaner.

The As work in a trade - eg plumber - and pull themselves up by their boot straps. Run their own business, work hard, make prudent decisions, Live in a five bedroomed new build and drive new cars on lease. Send their kids to private school. After school they do football, self defence. Holiday in hotels in Dubai.

The kids are at private school with other kids who come from a long line of middle-class people, the Bs. Their parents are hospital consultants and senior partners in law firms. They live in Victorian properties and drive (owned outright) ten year old Golfs and Audi estates. Their kids have been brought up skiing, sailing, playing tennis. They holiday in a damp cottage in Scotland or a borrowed villa in the south of France.

The A and B children will feel the multiple layers of differences between them.

Is it so implausible for an tradesman and an academic to come from the same background? They could be brothers, born to the same doctor parents. I know a doctor, one of whose sons learned a trade, and the other followed in his father's footsteps to medical school.

I've gone from working class (council estate, chaotic single mother, mostly raised by grandparents) to passing for middle class in every day life. I think the key factors were university, accent, use of 'standard' English and certain experiences - I always read a lot, I got to travel a lot in my twenties, I was always a 'museums & historic buildings' type of person. I've been fascinated by how successfully I pass - I don't talk about my background much but people are generally surprised when I do. Its not even about money, up to a point. I'm less affluent than some 'working class' people I know on a day to day basis.

Absolutely nothing to do with income!

Not implausible at all. DH was an academic for years, though he’s now moved into industry —he has a sister who is a cleaner and two brothers who are a plumber and a delivery driver respectively. Their parents, now long retired, were a cleaner and a bin man.