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
