Goodbye to the Working Class

"This book is set in the seventies. After writing it, Roy Greenslade went on to become editor of The Daily Mirror . He is now a prominent media commentator in The Evening Standard and The Guardian . He comes, I think, from an upper working class, lower middle class kind of background. He went to a grammar school in Dagenham, which is a very working class part of the UK, and the grammar school wasn’t particularly prestigious or academic. Dagenham is famous for motor car manufacturing and it was home to a huge council estate which was built between the wars. In this book, 12 or so years after he left his grammar school, Greenslade went back to interview the people he had been there with and find out what had happened to them. He spoke to around 120 contemporaries from his year. So the book takes a fascinating look at two periods. The first is the time that his friends were at school with him, and the second shows what has happened to them 12 years on. You get the sense of what a typical grammar school would have been like. What comes across very strongly is how important streaming was. You were streamed when you joined the school – if you were in the A stream you got the best teachers and facilities, and if you were in the bottom stream you were pretty much abandoned. Many of them ended up leaving school as soon as they were able to, which was at 15. There was a huge division in society between grammar schools and secondary moderns – which are what you went to if you failed your 11-plus [exam] – but we forget that there were also huge divisions within the grammar schools themselves. What is even more interesting about the book, and what gives it its special importance, is that talking to people in their early thirties Greenslade finds that almost without exception they are essentially materialistic in focus. They have little interest in intellectual life or in public affairs generally, although politically they are kneejerk right wing and very hostile to immigrants. It is essentially a picture in the mid-seventies of people who were Thatcherite in outlook even before she came on the scene. Absolutely. It also ties in with the television play that Mike Leigh directed in 1977, Abigail’s Party , which looked at the working class in an entirely different way. I remember watching it at the time and it was quite shocking. On the whole television had shown the working class as noble and heroic or down to earth and matter of fact, but Mike Leigh showed them to be vulgar and materialistic. In a way this book provides the background text to Abigail’s Party ."