Modernity Britain by David Kynaston

Author:David Kynaston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-05-06T22:00:00+00:00

This arguably overheated depiction prompted Joe Lampton’s creator to respond from Bingley. ‘As for the New Men,’ predicted Braine, ‘they will be quite content with a little house, car, wife, TV, and a bottle of gin in the sideboard. And if they work hard enough they will get them. And what on earth is wrong with that? Only a tiny minority, thank God, ever wants power.’

Dennis Potter was undeniably a classic meritocrat. The son of a coal miner in the Forest of Dean, he went to Bell’s Grammar School in Coleford and then, in 1956, to New College, Oxford, richly populated with Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘The few other grammar-school boys were creeps, adopting as many mannerisms of Oxford as they could and distancing themselves from their past,’ he recalled. ‘I took to being aggressive and making an issue of it.’ Part of that aggression was keeping his accent intact, and he rapidly began to make a university name for himself as both a debater and an actor, as well as writing for Isis, with a first article unashamedly describing his personal background. ‘There’s nothing more terrifying than a young man on the make,’ he conceded many years later. ‘And of course I was feeling these things, but at the same time I was manipulating the very feelings that I was in a sense enduring. Therefore I went out of my way [to say] “My father is a miner.” Which of course is a slightly more complicated sort of betrayal.’ Potter’s second year featured an acrimonious spat with fellow undergraduate Brian Walden, an article in the New Statesman on being torn between two worlds and a book contract for a state-of-the-nation tract, culminating in August 1958 in a lengthy interview on a BBC television documentary about class. ‘Do you want to become classless, Mr Potter?’ asked Christopher Mayhew. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Well, I did at one stage, I think, like most people from the working classes want to get away from the working class, but I certainly want to keep a sense of identity, as it were, with that background.’ Yet, as Potter went on to explain, that sense of identity was far from untroubled:

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