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.
CHAPTER 3
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.1
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.
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