What makes you working class?

[Bdueb]

Was listening to an interview with oa well known actor talking about their childhood and growing up working class. For them a key part was lack of travel and having not left their local area much etc. That was 20 years ago. What about now - what do you think distinguishes working and middle class childhoods of today?

I think you are being very naïve. And I can assure you if your husband is old school privileged as are his friends they absolutely will have sussed out your background- it will surely have been obvious at the wedding. They just won’t have commented as it would be rude.

@MerryMaker I put our income in the 25-50 k bracket and I came up as middle class.

Dh is middle class; I am also middle class, but there is not a university degree in the picture apart from mine. Both our fathers were military officers, both pilots, and both our mothers qualified as nurses, RCN, not SEN nurses, in the the 1950s. Back then, that level of income was sufficient to educate children privately; now, it's not. But we were both brought up to understand that a person needed to be able to make conversation across all classes, poitely, amusingly and respectfully. It leaves us with a veneer of sophistication that allows me to chat on friendly terms with everyone I meet in daily life. So I am middle class, I can talk intellectual stuff with university professors or medical consultants and chat about vans with delivery drivers without a gear change. But I am shit at popular social cultural stuff because I dont watch TV, at all.

So I am middle class, I can talk intellectual stuff with university professors or medical consultants and chat about vans with delivery drivers without a gear change

I don’t think this has anything to do with class

I know delivery drivers who have PHDs (extra income /between contracts) and hospital consultants who would happily chat about vans with you (into outdoor sports and they would all drive vans)

How grim to reduce people to those stereotypes

It's all accent

That's the crux of the matter

Of course they will be able to guage your background. There will be little tells all the time.

Plus surely you talk about your childhood from time to time? And if not, why not?

What about immigrants?

@chocolatespreadsandwich you find fault where you find it, but you'll find it everywhere if you want. Out of interest, why do you seek controversy?

Agree- it’s an intelligence thing and good interpersonal skills. Good sales people are excellent at it- just have to know how to read people and be relatively well read/ take an interest in the world around you.

I don't get the obsession.. I'm just me.. unless I fill a form in & have to say I'm retired. That reduces me to the lowest of the low, lol, just clinging to the bottom rung of the class system!

Just after reading another thread I'm going to add putting your Christmas tree up before December.

What's the rule on taking it down?

In what way am I seeking controversy?

...but you don't mind being rude, do you? 😜

@florasl for what it's worth, I don't think you're being naive at all. And I completely agree with you when you say:

The things you are saying aren’t anything I recognise, I really do think things have move on for the better. I really fail to see how the historic class system has any real relevance in modern Britain.

I disagree. Most teachers would firmly call themselves MC. Most have degrees and enjoy MC interest/have MC aspirations.

I work with disadvantaged communities. To say class no longer matters is total bollocks.
Just last week I accompanied two women to court. They looked less well off than me. They were both searched. I was not. This is just one of MANY examples I could give.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=4K5fbQ1-zps&pp=ygUZUHJpdmlsZWdlIHJhY2UgZXhwZXJpbWVudA%3D%3D

I don't think she meant that class no longer matters at all, but that the HISTORIC class system class system doesn't work in modern society. Some posters are claiming a very rigid working, middle, upper class system based on the occupation of a person's parents. Others (like me) believe the class system has evolved from that.

I think that people who have moved up like to think it has evolved but I don’t think in truth it actually has. People are just more discreet now and pretend to be more inclusive but when push comes to shove they close ranks. People form groups with people like themselves and it is extremely hard to fully assimilate.
Private schools are an interesting one- in my experience mothers bond over the fact they all have children in the same place BUT there are still subsets and separate socialising just with adults which are far from as inclusive and very much on class lines. I can guarantee you that my footballer wife friend is not being invited to the Christmas drinks party with the landed gentry families.

That's funny, I am in the United States and I have observed these threads about class and the opposite appears to be true, to me. It seems like people want to be working class and they're desperately trying to prove that they aren't middle class.

I am a university professor (and would incidentally class myself as ‘educated working class’), and most of our neighbours are medical consultants because we’re near two hospitals. I can assure you that campus or neighbourly chat is just as likely to be about Arsenal’s chances in the PL or someone’s lost cat as it is Derrida or biomedical ethics.

This is the oddest thing about this thread, the idea that the middle and upper classes spend their time opining about weighty matters and going to the opera.

Totally agree.

In fact I would say most people with heavy weight professional jobs are quite happy to relax into some thing fairly mindless when not at work.

The only times as an adult I have had the brain energy to read lots of meaty literature as an adult was when I had a year off from my professional job due to illness and worked very part time as a receptionist. Oh and during chunks of my gap year and university holidays, where I worked in a local deli (and was often spoken to like I was thick by the newly MC, and spoken to nicely by the established wealthy). Oh and during maternity leave.

Otherwise decent books have rather gone on the back burner as I spend my life reading dense texts at work

Oh and two of the colleagues in that deli job were both fabulously well read too and we discussed literature in depth on quiet days.

It's all accent

That's the crux of the matter

What about immigrants?
^^

Different prejudices depending on what accent!

@chocolatespreadsandwich I agree. It's why I spend time on MNet. Mindless chatter largely.

When I worked in the City in the 80s and early 90s, it was interesting that the "spoons" and the barrow boys rubbed along remarkably well and both equally sneered at what they considered "grammar school boys".