Читать книгу Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain - Harry Wallop - Страница 7

How important are your birth certificate and maternity ward in deciding what class you end up in? Here we meet the Portland Privateers and the Middleton classes.

2011 was acknowledged to be an abnormally busy year for news. A devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Arab Spring, bogeymen Bin Laden and Gaddafi both killed in a violent and dramatic way, the News of the World shut down by scandal, the worst riots on Britain’s streets in a generation – all events that demanded acres of coverage and analysis. But there was one story, above all, that obsessed the British press: the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton. This was partly because there had not been a royal wedding on a large scale since 1986 (you need to discount the low-key second marriage of the Prince of Wales and any event involving the Earl and Countess of Wessex); partly because they looked like two attractive young adults genuinely pleased to be tying the knot; partly because many of us love a soldier in uniform, and the Household Cavalry in their pomp, because the sun shone and we were granted an extra bank holiday. But more than anything it was the story of how not just Kate, but also her parents, Carole and Mike, had ended up on the Buckingham Palace balcony sharing the limelight with Britain’s premier family. It was, in some ways, a modern wedding embraced by the YouTube and Twitter generation – the wedding was, up to that point, the most streamed event on the internet. However, at its heart was an old-fashioned story about class, and it was the Middleton family’s very particular status and position which appeared to inject the necessary ‘fairy-tale’ element into the big day.

The Daily Express described the engagement thus: ‘From Pit to Palace; the Middletons used to be miners, now they can boast a future queen.’ The Daily Mail’s take was ‘From Pit to Palace, the first steps in a very upwardly mobile family.’ The Times went with ‘From Pit to Princess, the long journey of the Middleton family.’ Even the Guardian, many of whose readers are of a republican bent, wrote in its leader: ‘Hats off to the prince and commoner Kate.’ The coverage was unequivocal and curiously old-fashioned: not only was there a unanimous belief that the class system very much existed in Britain – and their readers immediately understood the terms and conditions – but that social mobility was also alive and well. During the week of Kate’s engagement, 192 newspaper articles mentioned her family’s class. Apparently it was impossible to mention the Middletons without reference to their supposedly humble background. Kate’s story was one that confirmed there was hope for us all. However miserably horny-handed and proletarian we may be, we could one day end up a Royal Highness waving to the adoring crowd. Karl Marx’s belief was that one day we would become a classless society, but that was not the lesson of the Middleton family – they appeared to prove the triumph of the lower orders’ ability to climb up the ladder, not to dispense with the ladder altogether.

In this regard, the attention was focused not really on Kate, nor on her Royal Hotness Pippa, but on Carole Middleton, the mother of the bride. It was her family history which gave the story its potency. Kate herself was already in an elite of sorts, just one of the 7 per cent to be educated privately, and at Marlborough, a top boarding school, at that. Michael Middleton, Kate’s father, came from a long line of respectable and successful county solicitors, was privately educated and had been a senior employee at British Airways. Carole, by contrast, was not just a former air stewardess but the daughter of a lorry driver turned builder and the granddaughter of a miner. Within one generation she had travelled from a council house in Southall, west London, to stand next to the Queen in front of a million cheering people. The journalist Amanda Platell, in what was meant to be a hymn of praise for Mrs Middleton’s poise and elegant dress on the wedding day, couldn’t halt a tide of class-based judgements in the pages of the Daily Mail. ‘The woman from the council estate, whose daughter was once pursued by taunts of “doors to manual” by William’s toff friends because her mother had been an air hostess, was about to watch her daughter marry the future King of England. Who could deny her a wry smile of satisfaction? She may be a social climber, her daughters may be called the “Wisteria sisters” for their ability to climb and cling on so tenaciously, but the Middleton women on this day triumphed. The bride, the mother of the bride and the maid of honour – all of them middle-class Middletons and proud of it. Kate had got her man.’

This social mobility exercised by Carole was achieved by a combination of hard work, the accumulation of wealth, ingenuity and education – the traditional routes up the class ladder – and the oldest of them all: marriage. You may be born into a certain class, but you can marry out of it.

It is often assumed that before the war the class system was as rigid as a coronet. If you were born into a family of coal miners, you were destined to be sent down the pit yourself. If your birth was ushered in with a courtesy title and trees planted in your honour, you would always reside in the upper classes. This was true for many, possibly most. But long before the war social mobility was very much part of British life, thanks in part to the grammar school system, which catapulted many into university, enabling millions to leap-frog their parents. And the Establishment had always welcomed plutocrats, public servants and political fighters to its ranks, not least by creating hereditary peerages for many of them. Arguably, Harold Macmillan, in creating the concept of a life peer – and the resulting complete decline in the creation of hereditary peers (Macmillan himself was one of only three non-Royal hereditary peers created since 1965) – was instrumental in kicking away one of the ladders up which people could climb.

But beyond industry and education, marriage was always the quickest guarantee of ensuring that your children began life in a different class from the one in which you did. While that is spectacularly so with any children that the Duchess of Cambridge may have – among them the future monarch of the Commonwealth realms – it is also just as much the case with Carole Middleton herself. She gave birth to three children who have ended up in a dramatically higher class than she was, principally thanks to her marriage to Michael Middleton.

It can work the other way too, of course. And at this point I should explain my family and how my four children have ended up as a triumphant product of the fluidity and perversity of the British class system. My children were born into a distinctly lower class than one of their grandfathers, my father, and an assuredly higher one than their other grandfather, my father-in-law. My own father was born in the nursery of the house that had been in the Wallop family since Elizabethan times, and as a son of an Earl was immediately granted a title. If we are being honest, it’s about the lowliest one there is: The Honourable. Five rungs on the ladder below a standard Duke, six below a Royal Duke and waving rights on the Buckingham Palace balcony. Though, according to comically intricate rules of precedence, if he should ever be invited to a State Banquet he gets to sit closer to the Queen than any Knight and he trumps the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Take that, Gideon. He started life as unambiguously posh. Of course that’s a word the posh never use. They say ‘smart’. Nurses, cooks, monogrammed linen, a house with a sprung ballroom, ‘map room’ and library, shooting, fishing, a few thousand acres of Hampshire farmland to explore. It was all his.

But despite the silver spoon, the history, the entry in Burke’s Peerage, the enormous advantages that were bestowed on him on his birth, he was always destined to end up in a lower class than his own father. The die was cast by the mere fact that my father was born after his older brother. He would never become an Earl, never inherit a prime dairy herd, never sit in the House of Lords. That is how primogeniture works, and one of the principal reasons for the enormous power the aristocracy held in Britain for about 900 years – their estates and wealth were not divided up between all their children, as happened on the Continent. They became concentrated in one individual. Among the über-aristocracy there are enough subsidiary estates to fund all the children into a life of luxury. Not so with the Earldom of Portsmouth, which was never awash with cash, but fell into impoverishment after the war. My cousin and I, himself a younger son of a different Earl (the aristocracy tend to attract each other and two of my father’s sisters married into grander families), joked as children about how we could mastermind a Kind Hearts and Coronets style plot to leap up the social ladder. How many murders and poisons before we got our hands on the prize? Yes, it is possible to have an inferiority complex as an Honourable. In fact, it is probably a prerequisite.

So my father, without the prospect of land and peerage, became the first Wallop in the twentieth century to seek regular employment and – gasp – one in trade too. This may have been a blow to his ego, but he did what all shabbistocrats do when low on income and prospects: marry well. Of course, I would say that because she’s my mother. But he went down the classic route of finding a bride with money and beauty. My mother was the granddaughter of Sir Montague Burton, a man who arrived in Britain in the first year of the twentieth century from modern-day Lithuania as a penniless Jew. He started off peddling shoe laces around the slums of Leeds and ended up with a tailoring business that clothed much of the British Empire. In doing so he accumulated, and gave away, mountains of cash, much of it to good causes. And a small but meaningful amount ended up in our household. I was acutely aware that all of the comforts in my life as a child – holidays, a private education – were not because of the posh lot from Hampshire but thanks to the enterprise and chutzpah of a Jewish immigrant. If in any doubt, it would be drummed into me every September, when I went to get school uniform from Debenhams (then part of the Burton empire), and I’d suffer the embarrassment of my mother whipping out a staff discount card and the check-out girl invariably asking which branch she worked in. She would quietly, but politely, tell the white lie: ‘head office’. I would squirm. Why couldn’t we just go to John Lewis, like all my classmates?

My childhood in 1970s and 1980s west London was utterly unremarkable to me at the time, as it always is for children. I knew, because I was told so and because I sensed it clearly, that I was very lucky. But we were far from grand. We had a live-in nanny – but so did many of our friends – and a ‘daily’, but no other staff. There were occasional shafts of light that illuminated the slightly abnormal privilege – the Christmas drinks parties at St James’s Palace, where my aunt and uncle lived in a grace-and-favour flat; the play dates at Kensington Palace, where a school friend, the heir to a Royal Dukedom, lived; the knowledge from an early age of how to tip a gamekeeper correctly (note folded up small, passed over with a firm handshake and with no reference at all to the money, but a hearty quip about the crosswinds on the final drive); the black tie dinner parties my parents would hold where the women really would retire to let the men smoke cigars and discuss affairs of state. Even at a young age, I knew this was not what most children did. But they were rare moments, and for most of the time it was a quotidian cycle of normality: The Times and the Daily Express, the Beano, homework, Saturday Morning Swapshop, Sunday School, walking the dog (a golden retriever, of course) in Hyde Park, Wagon Wheels and Findus Crispy Pancakes, Action Man and Lego, dread of Wednesday afternoon swimming, washing the Ford Granada, perfecting a John McEnroe impression, waiting for Abba on Top of the Pops, filling in Royal Wedding scrapbooks.

I always knew exactly where I fitted in. I always have done. I am not sure how this was achieved. But I knew exactly how ‘smart’ we were, and I knew, as a result, that despite the flashes of proper, undiluted privilege, many of my classmates and cousins were considerably grander. I knew that we were ‘smart’, mostly on account of my father’s side, and that we were ‘comfortable’, thanks to my mother’s side. In short, I knew we were upper class. Just. Hanging on to the coat-tails of aristocracy by our fingertips, though hoping we didn’t look too desperate as we got caught up in the slipstream.

My children have been born middle class. Or, if we are being more accurate, Class A in the National Readership Survey category: born to a share-owning, broadsheet-reading professional in the 40 per cent tax bracket. Or, if we are being more up-to-date, using the Office for National Statistics’ most recent classifications for socio-economic groups, introduced in 2000, they live in an L3.1 household, fourth placed in a list of 17 different gradings. I am a traditional employee in a professional organisation. Or, if we are being even more specific, in category 18 of 56 Acorn socio-economic classifications: ‘multi-ethnic, young, converted flats’, where the Guardian is likely to be the newspaper of choice, and the householders visit the cinema far more regularly than most people, while having a strong propensity to buy their groceries online, but an above-average experience of having had their mobile phone stolen.

Confused? Trying to be specific about your class is like trying to nail jelly to a fast-moving Mondeo Man.

My children are not aristocrats, certainly. Neither are they Rockabillies with a tendency towards the scruffy and occasionally expensive country tastes and habits of old Britain. That’s because I have spent most of my adult life, indeed from adolescence onwards, trying – not always successfully – to edge away from the class I was born into, while retaining some of its habits and even maintaining a quiet affection for it. Indeed, I am probably onto at least my third class, even though I am (I hope) less than half way through my life. The process has been accelerated by marrying out of my class.

And this is where I need to explain my father-in-law’s class. He was born resolutely in the working classes but ended up assuredly in the middle classes. He, indeed, is a triumphant member of the Middleton classes, because for every Carole there are many millions of others who in the space of one lifetime climbed up from the bottom of the ladder to pretty much the top. Money is important but not really the key. What matters is assimilation – the ability innately, or through careful consideration, to make the right choices in order to furnish themselves with the lifestyle and habits of the class above them. And to then feel comfortable, confident even, to continue upwards.

He was born in Workington, now a sad and depressing town on the wrong side of the Lake District. His actual father was a ‘wrong ’un’ who never featured in his life, so he was brought up by his mother and grandparents. His grandfather, whom he always referred to as ‘Dad’, was a blast furnaceman at the Oldside iron works, a dirty, dangerous and physically demanding job. His grandmother was a maid in service, though not for a grand family. It was a home financed by and in the shadow of the great factory. In the days before the Welfare State and the widespread building of council houses, there were many millions who lived in a factory or pit house on a peppercorn rent. It was a proudly working-class household, and a respectable one at that. The man he called Dad was a union man and a member of the Co-operative; bills were paid from the jar of savings, the New Gresham Encyclopaedia was on the bookshelf, the Daily Herald on the kitchen table.

He passed the 11-plus exam, unimaginable to ‘Dad’ who’d started work at the iron works at the age of 13, and this was the first rung up the ladder, as it was for countless members of the Middleton class. University, however, was denied to him by lack of money. To escape national service, he opted to join the merchant navy. Caked in oil and sweat in the engine room, it might have looked as though he’d done no better than his own father, but it was skilled labour of a kind that only an engineer who’d trained as an apprentice could undertake. In the evening he’d wear his white mess uniform and host a table in first class, and it made him realise that the luxury the passengers at his table were enjoying was something worth aiming for. Back on land, he used his savings to open a ten-room hotel in Workington designed for travelling salesmen; his mother did the cooking in the kitchen. It was a success, and was expanded. Eventually he built the biggest hotel in town, with crêpes Suzette on the menu and Rotary club dances in the ballroom. Golf was learnt, the Telegraph was taken, and savings were used to send the children to private school. Holidays were initially in Bournemouth, but as the years rolled on they ventured first to the Costa Brava, later to Normandy, eventually to Tuscany. In 1980 the Queen visited the hotel, where she was served roast saddle of Lamb Henry IV (with artichokes, a bewildering array of tubers: Parisienne Potatoes & Bernaise Sauce, Delmonico Potatoes, New Potatoes, and Bouquetière of Vegetables). It was his Carole Middleton-on-Buckingham-Palace-balcony moment. ‘It was a huge thing, huge,’ he remembers.

Whether or not your family ends up defining you until the day you die has to do with the choices made along the way. Not all of them are choices governed by economics, and not all of them are choices you can make. Some of the most important ones are made for you by your parents, who can purposefully or unwittingly set you on a path very different from the one down which they travelled. The most important choice, in many ways, is the first one: your name. Before you have even left the womb you have already been allotted a very specific socio-economic class thanks to a (frequently idiotic) decision made by your parents. And the divisions have increased along with the proliferation of names. Last year 6,039 boys’ names were registered by the Office for National Statistics along with 7,395 girls’ names – a bewildering choice.

It used to be the case, in the main, that you named your child after either a monarch or a saint. My parents played it straight – as most people did in the 1970s, be they Rockabillies, the Middleton classes or Asda Mums. I was Harry, my sister was Victoria. Simple. Solid. Classy but classless. Shakespearean Prince Harry or Cockney Harry Palmer: names back then just didn’t carry that much baggage. There were a handful of names such as Sharon, Tracey, Wayne or Kevin that were a little downmarket for children born in the 1970s, and Quentin and Rupert were certainly quite upmarket, but the class issue has become far more stark as more and more people – regardless of which class they come from – attempt to find something a little bit special. It’s another example of how consumers since the 1950s have striven to assert their individuality through the choices they make – it just happens, in this case, to be a decision as long-lasting as a tattoo on your ankle. And even though it costs nothing, it can carry as much metaphorical baggage as a Louis Vuitton suitcase.

Casper or Casey? One is posh, one is not. Jayden is unequivocally low class. Artemis and Arthur are for the type who think slumming it is buying Waitrose Essentials ratatouille. Acorn, the data company that splits the country up into 62 different socio-economic groups on behalf of consumer companies and government agencies, can immediately categorise you by your name. It has 51 million individuals on its database by name, and statistically if you are a Crispian, Greville, Lysbeth or Penelope you are about 200 times more likely to be in the ‘wealthy executive’ top class than in the ‘inner-city adversity’ bottom one. Seaneen, Terriann, Sammy-Jo, Jamielee, Kayliegh and Codie are the six names most disproportionately skewed towards the ‘struggling families’ category, a group of people Acorn works out as most likely to live in social rented accommodation, work in a routine occupation, read the Sun newspaper and play bingo.

If in doubt about how class determines baby names, just spend a minute scanning the Births announcement column in the Daily Telegraph – a group which is immediately self-selecting. Not only are they readers of the most upmarket national paper in Britain, but they are a niche category within that, happy to spend upwards of £150 on an announcement and keen to make public the joy of their child’s birth along with a sense of pride in the wisdom of their choice of names. ‘A son, Zebedee Ebenezer Jay, a brother for Badger, Clementine and Florence’ is a particular favourite of mine. So too: ‘Sybella, a sister for Freddy, Hugo, Oscar and Rex’ and ‘Lysander, a brother for Ottilie and Rafferty’. These all appeared over the last year.

The truly grand have no need to be so showy. When the 15th Duke and Duchess of Bedford had their first child in 2005 – a son and heir, Henry Robin Charles Russell, born already bearing the title Marquess of Tavistock – the following announcement appeared in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Bedford – On June 7th, to Louise and Andrew, a son.’ That was it.

The Telegraph’s top ten names for girls in 2011 were Florence, Isabella, Charlotte, Alice, Isla, Jemima, Daisy, Matilda, Olivia and Emilia. Just two of those names appear in the Office for National Statistics’ top ten list of all baby names registered that year. You will not find many Jemimas or Florences shopping in Brighthouse, visiting a bookmaker’s or claiming housing benefit. Just compare this list of names to those of some who were convicted during the riots that erupted during the summer of 2011: Shonola, Ellese, Aaron, Reece, Kieron and Wayne. The difference between the two is as great as the gulf between Gieves & Hawkes and Primark and, more importantly, it is immediately apparent to anyone hearing those names.

Much of this class divide in names is because of the proliferation of new names appearing in recent decades. The most famous example of these is Kayleigh, which came into existence thanks to the neo-prog rock band Marillion, who had a number two hit with a single of this name in 1985. It was almost unheard of before the song. But since then it has taken hold, especially with parents who grew up with a love of long-haired bouffant power ballads. And it is exclusively a lower-class name, as most newly invented names are. The Jemima class are happy to dredge up an obscure family name, and have no fear of calling their child after an animal (I was at school with both a Beetle and a Frog), but the invention of entirely made-up names is reserved for those lower down the social scale. Some are remarkably imaginative. I know of both a Meta-Angel (her mother ‘met an angel’ early in her pregnancy who told her to keep the child) and a Taome (it stands for ‘the apple of my eye’).

A few years ago Kayleigh made it to the 30th most popular girl’s name in Britain, and it remains popular: 267 children were given it last year. And as I’ve mentioned, the version spelt Kayliegh is one of the five names most heavily skewed towards Acorn Group N, made up of ‘low-income families living on traditional low-rise estates, where unemployment is high’. Kayleigh has spawned a bewildering subset of names, nearly all of which are unrelentingly bizarre. There were 101 Demi-Leighs born last year, seven Chelsea-Leighs, six Tia-Leighs (which could be a liqueur), five Everleighs (a retirement home?), three each of Honey-Leigh and Kaydie-Leigh and even a trio called Lilleigh, which sounds like a sanitary product. In total there were 128 different iterations of ‘Leigh’. These children were born with that name and have no control over what class they have begun life in; but the Hyphen-Leighs represent a group all of their own: children of parents desperate to assert their individuality, regardless of income, housing or education. They do it through a series of public actions, from the naming of their child to their choice of clothes brands. These youngsters were born after Princess Diana stumbled over her wedding vows in St Paul’s Cathedral, but they are as steeped in class as Charles Philip Arthur George. Even the use of a hyphen – a hijacking of what was once the preserve of the upper classes – is a tacit attempt to assert their status, to prove they are not part of the masses. But this has been done on such a scale that those who have done it have become a whole new class.

The Hypen-Leighs are the main supporters of certain fashion chains, and we meet them again in the clothing chapter. As with their appropriation of upper-class punctuation, they are the most agile at spotting high-status brands and making them, or cut-price versions of them, their own, be it Burberry, BlackBerry, Barbour or Ugg. They are as central to this book as the Middleton classes. They both, in their own way, revel in the status they have gained through the choices they have made.

One of the other key class markers when it comes to children’s names is the number of them. It used to be simply that the more you had, the posher you were. It was a way for the Rockabillies who sent their children off to boarding school to help keep Cash’s nametape company in business. I was given two middle names along with my Christian name and was baffled when I met someone at my prep school called just Leo. He had fewer characters in his name than I had initials. The 12th Duke of Manchester, who has spent three years in jail for fraud, called his son, who had the courtesy title Lord Kimbolton, the following jumble of names, all high ranking on the Telegraph list: Alexander Michael Charles David Francis George Edward William Kimble Drogo Montagu. That’s ten pre-names plus the family name Montagu – enough for a cricket team. My father-in-law was embarrassed when he made it to grammar school that he was just ‘John’ and had no middle name – this became apparent when the team sheet for the cricket XI was posted on the school noticeboard. He proceeded to tell the cricket master that his initials were ‘T.G.J.’ – a complete lie, but one that was believed. It was his silent little joke; only he knew that T.G. stood for The Great.

The Hyphen-Leighs have proved that double-barrelling is no longer the preserve of the upper classes, which used the technique as modern companies do with corporate mergers. Families into which they married, and which frequently injected the upper classes with a shot of money or strong genes, were rewarded with being added to the surname. It was briefly thought that Prince William might marry Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, but he ended up with Miss Middleton. Who knows? Maybe he thought it might damage the Windsor brand to associate it with a triple barrel.

The method of your birth is another key marker of class, though again it reflects far more on the parents than on the babies, who clearly couldn’t care two hoots if they were born at home with a doula, in a busy NHS hospital or in a thick-carpeted private one. But, boy, does it matter to the small number that avoid the NHS option. A mere 0.5 per cent of the population is born in a private hospital, and it is almost entirely for the status-enhancing comfort that it brings to the parents. The two most famous options are the Portland, a private hospital in London, where all of the Spice Girls, Jemima Khan and the Duchess of York had their respective children, and the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Paddington, where Princes William and Harry were born. Only a handful of parents announcing the birth of their children in The Times or Telegraph waste precious words (you pay by the word) on detailing the location of the delivery. But a disproportionate number of those giving birth in the Lindo Wing or the Portland like to tell you so. I suppose if you have spent many thousands on a private birth, what’s an extra £20 on telling the world about it? And indeed the Portland offers you a 50 per cent discount on placing a birth announcement in The Times as part of the package, though the choice of name is as much a giveaway as the consultant’s invoice. Hermione, Zander, Honor, Felix, Oscar, Freya, Walter, Amalfi Cordelia and Cosima Celery are just a small selection of the names of the children born in these places.

The statistics support the cliché that the Portland really is the first choice for those too posh to push. Of the 2,232 births that took place there in 2011, 53 per cent were Caesarean sections, more than double the UK average of 24 per cent. Those that come here to give birth are the real elite in Britain. The babies born at the Portland are, of course, at that moment of naked, mewling innocence no different from those born a quarter of a mile down the road at University College Hospital, but they are born into a world absurdly different, and some might say grotesquely privileged. A simple birth costs £5,900, an elective Caesarean costs £8,200 – though you need to add £890 for an epidural. And all of these fees must be added to the consultant’s bill, which starts at £5,000 a baby. But it is not the cost that marks out the Portland Privateers as Britain’s über-elite. It is the added extras that come as part of the package. Along with the discount for announcing the birth in The Times, Sky television, a hair dryer and complimentary toiletries from Molton Brown, there are discounts for certain nanny agencies and an extensive menu for you to enjoy during your stay (£1,750 for each extra night after your first day). I know of a couple, both City lawyers, who chose the Portland over the Lindo Wing purely on the basis of the wine list. I kid you not. Perrier-Jouët, chilled, will set you back £70 a bottle.

The great majority of the Portland Privateers easily fall into the legendary ‘1 per cent’, so despised by politicians as being the venal, blood-sucking, corporate-raiding section of society, earning over £150,000 a year. But they can be surprisingly insecure about their status, with most of them recent arrivals into the Club Class lounge. They have enough money to buy almost any comfort, but they do not feel it. Over-taxed and under-loved, they seek comfort in various brands and labels that offer them the reassurance that their sacrifice of working ludicrous hours and rarely seeing their children is all worth while. Most of them are successful enough professionally – as lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, consultants, fund managers, designers – to have rubbed shoulders with the mega-rich, the 0.1 per cent, the ‘have yachts’, the servant-employers, and to know that their own wealth is but small change for the international plutocracy who mostly pay their wages. And despite earning five times or more the national average salary, their disposable income is not that huge once they have paid for what they consider key outgoings: private medical insurance, nannies, private school fees, a cleaner, gym membership, weekly frothy coffee and dry cleaning bills. What defines them is their separateness, from Britain and from the other classes that make up Britain. They are almost uniformly Londoners, or live in the commuter towns around the capital, while a handful can be found in Cheshire, and they reside within certain very specific postcodes within those areas, sometimes even choosing the gated community option. While private births make up just 0.5 per cent of the national figure, they are as high as 33 per cent in certain wards in Kensington & Chelsea in London. They will at every opportunity choose private over state, believing – with some justification – that the Welfare State was never designed for them. They have a sense of community, but it is unrelated to their neighbours; it almost entirely derives from fellow parents at their children’s private school and work colleagues. Unlike the Middleton classes, they have no desire to assimilate if that means they have to wait for a dentist’s appointment, swim at their local council-run pool, shop at Asda and eat at La Tasca. Without the support of the Portland Privateers a whole host of very successful brands would not thrive as they do. We will come across some of them in later chapters, but they include Smythson iPad covers, By Nord bed linen, Jo Loves smelly candles, Mulberry handbags, Louboutin shoes, Hermès ties, Bugaboo buggies, Emile et Rose and Marie Chantal baby clothes, Beulah London (Lady Natasha Rufus’s ethical clothing line), Emu furry boots, anything from Daylesford Organic, the Chewton Glen hotel in Hampshire and the Harbour Club gym chain: all brands that defiantly cater to the affluent bubble floating above the rest.

Many of the Wood Burning Stovers would love to go private, but don’t dare face the opprobrium of their friends for buying their way to a room and a midwife all to themselves. The Rockabillies, who have fewer scruples but often less money, pretend they adore the NHS, but can’t wait to get home to the comforts of the au pair. The solution for the WBS crowd is to go for a home birth, with a doula, a Birkenstock-wearing hand-holder, who can help you deliver your baby with the same stamp of exclusivity that a box of Abel & Cole organic vegetables brings.

After the birth, there is the delicate matter of circumcision. This is now seen as a barbaric act to perform on a young child and one only practised by orthodox Jews and Muslims. Not true. It is, or was until really quite recently, common practice among the upper classes, all the way down to Rockabillies, but no further. The most recent figures suggest just 3.8 per cent of male babies are circumcised, with the rates lowest in the white working-class districts of Liverpool, specifically the Bootle area, as medical opposition to the act takes hold. But it was as high as 20 per cent during the 1950s, with those at the upper echelons the most likely to do it. My father reckons that 95 per cent of his school contemporaries were done. In my prep school changing rooms you could tell who was really smart by their lack of foreskin. Mine was lopped off, when I was one week old, at home, by a rabbi called Jacob Snowman, who performed the procedure on Prince Charles. His name was shared around the upper classes of 1970s London in the way the Portland Privateers now divulge the name of their plastic surgeon. When my mother asked if he needed anything, expecting an answer such as ‘some hot water’, he replied, ‘A glass of red wine would be nice.’

Breast-feeding, too, is still widely a class issue. Your willingness to expose yourself to feed Clemency during lunch at Leon says as much about you as your ironing board cover or newspaper of choice. An academic study of thousands of mothers found that 86 per cent of the top class, as defined by job status, initiated breast feeding when the baby was born. Only half of the lowest class did so. By the time babies were four months old the discrepancy was even more stark: half the top class were still exclusively breastfeeding, but just one in five of the lowest class were.

From life-changing events to tiny immaterial items, class is everywhere when it comes to babies. Even nappies. There is a clear hierarchy, with Pampers the smart option. Huggies are low class. The really chic choice is any of those supposedly eco ones such as Nature Babycare. Only a handful of self-flagellating Wood Burning Stovers attempt washable nappies. If you think it is only the higher echelons of the modern middle classes that obsess about such ludicrous things, think again. Asda Mums are defined by their children almost as much as their supermarket of choice. Vikki, a dental receptionist, is typical of many in her careful choosing of brands. Little Angels nappies, the supermarket’s own brand, are acknowledged by many of its customers to be excellent. ‘I haven’t tried them,’ says Vikki. ‘I just think they wouldn’t be the same quality. I feel bad that I haven’t tried them. It sounds awful, but I’d feel bad sending the baby to nursery wearing Little Angels. I’d be embarrassed.’ Her baby is nine months old, but already wearing a brand that ensures she is a cut above.

After the name and location of birth, the number of children is the next clear marker of class. How many children do you have? For, make no mistake, the number of mouths you have to feed is driven just as much by class as it is by religion or money. The 2.4 children that British families had on average in the 1960s has shrunk to 1.7 children – freeing up a significant amount of income to be spent on life’s little luxuries that lend status and class, be it a side-return conversion or a cruise through the Panama Canal. But whether you are under or over the average, that’s a class issue.

In the 1950s the received wisdom was that having plenty of children was one of the most socially useful things the swelling middle classes could achieve. Britain needed not just New Towns for its returning heroes, but young people to grow up and fund their pensions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, told the Mothers Union in 1952 that ‘a family only truly begins with three children’. But public opinion was moving quickly away from big families. A Gallup poll in 1957 found that most people wanted just two children.¹ 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.’²

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.’³

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.’⁴ 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.’⁵

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.⁶ 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.