Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain

And the average size of the British family continued to shrink, with two key exceptions – the top end and bottom end of society.

The Portland Privateers breed prodigiously. Children, with their exotic names and scaled-down designer clothes (Burberry even call their children’s department in their flagship Regent Street store in London the ‘mini me’ section), are the ultimate status symbol. Again, look at the birth announcements of those born in the Lindo Wing or the Portland – frequently the sprog is one of four, five or even six children. Tana Ramsay, Jools Oliver, Nicola ‘supermum’ Horlick – all birthing machines, proving that a large horde is as much a class delineator as a Garrick club tie. Judith Woods, writing in the Daily Telegraph in 2011 after David and Victoria Beckham said they were going to have a fourth child, expressed the horror that many Middleton classes felt: ‘The Beckhams are reproducing in a way that, were they members of the underclass, would be regarded as not quite responsible. The only couples who have four children these days aren’t really couples at all. Either they’re brands, selling thousands of cookbooks faster than you can boil an egg, or they’re people who resemble the cast of Shameless and don’t stay together long enough properly to qualify as couples.’

While the Portland privateers and the über-rich are surveyed with wry amusement for collecting children like Swarovski crystal animals, having four children or more if you are a member of the Hyphen-Leighs is seen as deserving of scorn. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has done extensive research into child poverty and found that, at the lower end of the scale, large families are closely associated with deprivation. A child in a family of five or more children is almost four times more likely to be poor than a child in a one-child family.

Scorn for large lower-class families has always been doled out, even in the early days of the Welfare State. Mass Observation diaries from the early 1950s bring out the fear among some middle-class people about the dirtiness and lack of self-control of the working classes. Gladys Langford, a retired schoolteacher, wrote after visiting Chapel Street Market in Islington: ‘It was very crowded. Nearly every woman of child-bearing age was pregnant and many were pushing prams as well and these often had more than one infant in them already. It was shocking to see how many of these women were very dirty … their eyes were gummy, their necks and ears were dirty and their bare legs grimy. These are the people who are multiplying so fast and whereas once a number of their children would have died, now, thanks to pre-natal and post-natal clinics, most of their children will live – and will choose those who are to govern us. Anyhow I shall safely be dead by then.’

Anna Woodthorpe Brown, mother of two, and daughter of Irish working-class parents, who was educated at a Roman Catholic comprehensive and brought up on a council estate and who defined herself as ‘middle class’, was interviewed in the Observer for a feature on class in 1993, a few years after John Major promised a classless society. ‘My big thing is people not being able to control their reproductive parts. I just get irritated people aren’t in control of the number of people living around them that are dependent on them. They moan about it, and they whinge about the fact they don’t have enough facilities to take care of those people they’ve reproduced.’

This hostility towards people at the bottom end of the socio-economic scale having lots of children has only intensified as the era of austerity has taken hold, and the Coalition government has vowed to cut back on benefit payments. A small number of people who have undoubtedly abused the system, by using children to get higher up on the council homes waiting list, has tarnished the reputation of all who chose for whatever reason to have a large family. The prejudice is deeply held by many. John Ward, a councillor, said during the Shannon Matthews farrago, when a woman from West Yorkshire kidnapped her own child in an attempt to win reward money: ‘There is a strong case for compulsory sterilisation of all those who have had a second child, or third, or whatever while living off state benefits.’

Louise Casey, the head of the Government’s troubled families unit, said in the summer of 2012 that struggling mothers with lots of children, who are a drain on social workers’ resources, should be ‘ashamed’ of the damage they inflict on society.

My mother was born too late to be presented at court to the Queen, a practice which ended in 1958, but she was unequivocally a ‘deb’, with a coming-out ball and the strict expectation she would marry someone she met in this tight group of people. The archaic tradition of debs and ‘the Season’ served a most definite purpose for the aristocrats and Portland Privateers of their day, many of whom didn’t go to university or work in a bustling office – it provided a forum in which to meet a spouse. It was also a way for their parents to assert their status. The Season limped on for many years and still exists in a truncated and rather commercial form to this day. I was surprised one summer holiday, in the mid-1990s while I was at university, to suddenly receive a number of invitations to parties from people I’d never heard of. When I mentioned this to my mother she explained I must have made it onto Peter Townend’s list of ‘debs’ delights’. Townend was the idiosyncratic, amusing if oleaginous, borderline alcoholic, ‘confirmed bachelor’ editor of the Bystander column in Tatler magazine, who single-handedly managed to keep the Season alive after the Queen stopped presentations. It was he, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the gentry and squirearchy of Britain (he was a one-time editor of Burke’s Peerage, which he kept by his hospital bed as he lay dying) and an insatiable appetite for cocktail parties, who drew up the list of debs. He was a one-man arbiter of who was upper class. Each spring he would send 200 letters to mothers in his extravagant turquoise handwriting inviting them (you could never apply) to submit their daughters. My sister was persuaded by my mother to partake, and found the whole experience a painful one.

I too thought Townend’s puppet-master act bizarre and ever so slightly creepy. Despite the allure of free champagne and vol-au-vents, I was happy to turn down the invitations to stand awkwardly in a room with people I’d never met – even if that was how my parents had found each other, both of whom loved the whole process. It just wasn’t for me. I knew instinctively that anyone whose mother thought I was a debs’ delight was not going to make future wife material. I ended up marrying outside my class. This sounds an absurd statement to write, but back in the 1950s, or even the 1960s when my mother and father met, this was still a radical idea. When Princess Margaret broke off her relationship with divorcé Peter Townsend (not to be confused with Tatler man Townend) in 1955, it was widely seen as a class issue rather than a religious one, with many unhappy that she wanted to marry an untitled commoner. It prompted a thunderous letter to the Daily Express written by a number of angry young men, including the cartoonist Ronald Searle, the public school film-maker Lindsay Anderson and Kenneth Tynan, who said: ‘It has revived the old issue of class distinctions in public life.’

Fifty-five years later nearly all applauded William’s marriage to Kate Middleton. Only pockets of 1950s-style resistance remained. A letter to the Telegraph from a James Lewis, in Wembley, said: ‘SIR – I don’t doubt that middle-class Miss Middleton is just what “The Firm” needs. However, that is not what royalty is all about. The Royal family is by definition above us all. You cannot have an institution that is bowed to, sung to in anthems, privileged and exalted in history, and then say it needs penetrating by the middle class.’ No one outside of hard-core Telegraph letter writers seriously questioned the appropriateness of the marriage. Most immediately recognised that they came from two very different classes, but the idea that this meant they could not form a successful union was not seriously entertained.

If you accept that people come from different classes, you have to also accept that the act of marriage allows one member of the partnership, or both, to alter their class. It sounds feudal, but it is a simple act that still transforms many families’ sense of position. The choice of whom you marry remains one of the surest ways for people to leave the class into which they are born, and possibly more importantly it ensures that their children have a different sense of their status than they do – a process that continues with endless little acts of consumption from the moment they leave the womb.

Carole Middleton, born in 1955, arguably represents the golden generation of social mobility. Statistics show that of those people born into the poorest families in 1958, fewer than one in three was still poor three decades later. Most had moved up the ­ ladder – impressively, almost one in five had reached the highest income bracket.

Much of their journey upwards was thanks to Britons enjoying significant amounts of disposable income during this period, allowing them to make purchases and choices that were just not available to the previous generation. The affluent, consumer society not only offered Britons a wide array of choices, from the supermarket they frequented to the clothes they wore and the holidays they took, but also engendered an attitude that you did not have to ape your parents. You could choose to break out of their social circle. You could even marry outside it.

And of all the consumer purchases available to these New Elizabethans, none was bigger than buying your own home.

CHAPTER 3

PROPERTY (#ufbdc2ae3-c675-5cbb-b0ba-32a2c48ddca8)

Our home is the most expensive consumer product most of us will ever buy. But is home ownership an essential requirement for ‘middle-class’ status? Here we meet the old-fashioned aristocrats, and the Sun Skittlers.

When the 12th Duke of Bedford, Hastings ‘Spinach’ Russell, died in a mysterious shooting accident in 1953 on his estate in Devon, it appeared to be the final straw for one of Britain’s premier aristocratic families. His son had to find £4.5 million to pay the Treasury in death duties. A sale of 200 Dutch and Flemish paintings, most of them masterpieces, had failed to raise enough money. The trustees of the estate – whose jewel was Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, but which sprawled across several counties – urged the 13th Duke to sell up, give the Abbey to the National Trust and live off the proceeds of the rents from Covent Garden, the prime piece of real estate in central London that the family owned.

But the 13th Duke, John Russell, who at the time was a fruit farmer in South Africa, was determined that Woburn, given to his ancestors by Henry VIII on the dissolution of the monasteries, would stay in the family and not be sold. ‘Once that happens, then your roots have gone, and if a place like Woburn means anything in terms of history and tradition, then it is only because of the personal identification with the family that has built it up,’ he said.

The Abbey, with its 120 rooms, then cost some £300,000 a year to maintain, with a heating bill alone of £5,000. It had not been lived in for decades, the paintwork was peeling off the walls, and furniture was stacked up as if in an antiques warehouse. The annual running costs were the equivalent of well over £6 million in today’s money. It seemed impossible that it could continue. Its perilous position echoed that of thousands of other country houses and estates that were beset after the war by a new, higher level of death duty and the unwillingness of servants to go back to their former jobs after fighting or working in factories. Family after family found it easier to sell up, hand over the estate to the National Trust or – scandalously – demolish the buildings, an act of vandalism that was perfectly legal then. In 1955, country houses were being destroyed at a rate of one every five days.

It seemed that the war, and the subsequent years of austerity and the Welfare State, had driven the final nail into the coffin of the British aristocracy and their landholdings, from which flowed not just their wealth, but their prestige and power. For centuries those that physically owned Britain – its farmland, rivers, forests and cities – had run Britain. It was as simple as that; and it looked as if they would no longer have any basis for their assertion of superiority. As Sir Ian Anstruther, the 13th Baronet, lamented: ‘The upper classes are not wanted.’ My own grandfather, the 9th Earl of Portsmouth, was one of many to despair about the new era of the Welfare State, high taxes and his lack of purpose. The family home – an 11-bedroom house which he described as a ‘modest mansion for 20th-century living’ and which had been in Wallop hands since Elizabethan times – was leased to a prep school as he decided to start a new life in Africa. ‘All was drab, alas too drab, in England. The motto of the new democracy seemed to be … “the greatest misery to the greatest number”,’ he said.