The People by Selina Todd

Author:Selina Todd [Selina Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2014-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

11

Working-Class Heroes

IN OCTOBER 1957 Margaret Forster began a history degree at Somerville College, Oxford. She came from a council estate in Carlisle: her father was a factory worker; her mother a former clerk; her older brother, Gordon, had failed the eleven-plus exam and now worked in a chemist’s shop and her younger sister, Pauline, was still at school. To her surprise, she found at Oxford that ‘being working class at the end of the Fifties … was the thing … instead of being embarrassed by our class, or concealing it, we flaunted it, to great effect, realizing how special it made us.’1

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a cultural revolution took place in Britain. Being working class became fashionable. Teenagers could take some of the credit. Although ‘affluence’ remained limited, young wage-earners were increasingly significant consumers. The few who managed to climb the social ladder, like Forster herself, also played a pivotal role. They did not look like their parents and they led very different sorts of lives – to many journalists and politicians they symbolized a prosperous, meritocratic society in which working-class people could play significant roles.

If a generation of teenagers played an important part in this transformation, so too did a small number of upwardly mobile writers, actors, journalists and television entrepreneurs. They brought working-class heroes of the post-war generation to an audience of thousands, and at times millions, of ordinary people. They created ‘angry young men’ like Joe Lampton in Room at the Top and Billy Fisher in Billy Liar, and Coronation Street’s duffel-coated Ken Barlow, whose Oxford degree and frequent fits of pique distinguished him from the other characters on Britain’s most successful soap opera. These young men personified a very modern dilemma: whether to use new post-war opportunities to pursue wealth and social status, or to reject these in favour of the community and solidarity that working-class life could offer. None of the new novels, films or television shows resolved this question – but all of them suggested that working-class life was of intrinsic interest and value.

This cultural revolution changed the lives of some working-class people for ever, as they found celebrity as writers, actors or pop stars. But it also touched millions more people, who saw their lives and experiences portrayed as being both normal and noteworthy. Those who came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s were particularly affected, as they came to believe that they deserved a better life than their parents had experienced, in which they would find not only a steady job, but more excitement and independence.

Just a year before Margaret Forster arrived at Oxford, no one could have predicted this transformation. Although the vast majority of people in 1950s Britain were working class, middle- and upper-class life dominated stage, screen and literature. BBC Radio offered The Archers, an ‘everyday story of country folk’ which focused on a rural squirearchy. The first television soap opera – the BBC’s Grove Family – followed the quiet, comfortable, suburban life of an English middle-class family headed by Jack Grove, a self-employed builder.

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