9
Just as Coleman was preparing to take the hot seat (and a peasant’s son was being elected Pope John XXIII), the first reviews started to appear of Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy – the book for which he would be remembered even more than Family and Kinship. Contrary to subsequent assumptions, Young did not in fact coin the term meritocracy: two years earlier, writing in Socialist Commentary (a magazine to which Young contributed), the sociologist Alan Fox had put the word in quotation marks and defined it as ‘the society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfilment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure’. But it was certainly Young who popularised it.
The book itself – in which ‘Intelligence and effort together make up merit (I + E = M)’ – is set in 2034 and comprises two parts. The first traces the rise, well under way by 1958, of a meritocratic elite chosen largely through intelligence-testing and educational selection; the second relates the disturbing consequences, as those deemed unmeritorious become an increasingly alienated underclass, with the threat looming by the 2030s of a ‘Populist’ revolution. Although the first part reveals Young as far from unsympathetic to the meritocratic case, ultimately the book is a dystopian warning against a rampant, self-serving, IQ-driven, intolerant meritocracy. ‘Were we to evaluate people, not only according to their intelligence and their education, their occupation, and their power, but according to their kindliness and their courage, their imagination and sensitivity, their sympathy and generosity, there could be no classes,’ asserts the ‘Chelsea Manifesto’, issued by a local group of the Technicians Party (as the Labour Party has been rebranded) in 2009. ‘Who would be able to say that the scientist was superior to the porter with admirable qualities as a father, the civil servant with unusual skill at gaining prizes superior to the lorry driver with unusual skill at growing roses?’1
The notices were respectful rather than wholly enthusiastic. The Financial Times waited ‘in vain for the sound of a human voice or a glimpse of earthy people’; the TLS reckoned the final revolt ‘too sketchily contrived to be convincing’; and in the Spectator the literary critic Boris Ford regretted that Young’s satire ‘operates at a comparatively simple debating level’, with ‘little command of the undertones of irony, let alone of the verbal compression, that one associates with Swift’. On the substance of the satire, Young was attacked from both directions. ‘He seems to think that if we now chose comprehensive schools, with a common curriculum for all children, the cleavage in society would never take place,’ observed The Times. ‘But in a country whose economic survival depends on discovering and promoting the best brains, even such schools would still be selective instruments. There is no getting away from the rise of the meritocracy in a scientific world.’ By contrast, reviewing in the Manchester Guardian, Raymond Williams was unconvinced by the reach of the new meritocracy: ‘I see no evidence, in contemporary England, of power being more closely connected with merit, in any definition. The administrators, professional men and technicians are increasingly being selected on educational merit, but the power is still largely elsewhere, “and no damned merit about it”.’
Perhaps the most searching critique, looking ahead and similarly sceptical, came from Charles Curran in Encounter, arguing that Young was ‘guilty of a gross over-simplification’ in assuming that ‘the road to Meritocracy’ lay wide open without obstacles. Instead, he contended, ‘the British masses’, far from seeking a meritocracy, ‘want a society that protects and cares for the untalented many’, and he identified ‘three great barriers to the attainment of Meritocracy in Britain’, which collectively were ‘impregnable’: first, an increasingly elderly electorate, who had ‘outlived their competitive years’ and were now ‘social pacifists, against change and struggle’; second, the power of the family unit, involving parents ‘caring fiercely, irrationally, instinctively, combatively’ for their offspring, so that the family was ‘the historic fortress of favouritism, the nest of nepotism, the protective shell that guards the dull, the timid, the slow, the non-competitive weakling’; and third, the deep roots in British history of status being ‘fixed by inheritance and tradition, rather than achieved as a prize in competitive struggle’. In short, Young had constructed a meritocratic straw man. And, he added, ‘the lower classes need not start advertising for a Spartacus just yet’.2
But undoubtedly, even if their numbers and potency were exaggerated, the meritocrats – advancing largely by dint of their own endeavours, as opposed to socio-economic background and connection – were on the march in the course of the 1950s, and Young’s analysis was tapping into a real trend.
‘Lucky Jim Dixon is the first hapless hero to climb from the crib of the Welfare State,’ Philip Oakes wrote in the Evening Standard in September 1957, almost four years after Kingsley Amis had given birth to a literary-cum-social phenomenon. ‘His bones are reinforced by Government dried milk. His view of the world is through National Health spectacles. And he looks back – not in anger – but with surprise, that he has been allowed to barge through the privileged ranks of bores and phonies, towards some kind of success.’ In short, ‘he is the man most likely to move into the room at the top’. The last four words had a particular resonance, just six months after the publication of John Braine’s instantly best-selling novel Room at the Top, the story of the aspirational, socially climbing, lower-middle-class (like Braine himself) Joe Lampton, newly arrived in a prosperous northern provincial town. ‘A callous, ambitious, sexy L-cky J-m,’ declared John Davenport in his Observer review. ‘He is a ruthless rather than an angry young man.’ Over the summer, Richard Crossman read this ‘nauseating new vulgarized Lucky Jim book’ and pondered its success. ‘It is lower middle-class, anti-working-class, describing the working classes as dirty, smelly people, eating fish and chips and favouring the upper class as people who have tiled bathrooms and beautiful voices.’ Only a Wykehamist, of course, could fail to appreciate the allure of tiled bathrooms, and over the next few years Joe Lampton increasingly replaced Jim Dixon as the symbol of new, meritocratic social forces dynamically and hungrily on the move.
‘GRAMMAR SCHOOL BOYS DID IT’ was the Daily Sketch’s exultant headline in January 1958 after the Atomic Energy Authority announced that a team of young British scientists at Harwell had produced the world’s first controlled fusion reaction. This was ZETA, the Zero-Energy Thermonuclear Assembly, ‘a 120-ton yellow and black painted reactor’ that was a man-made sun on earth and held out the promise of limitless fuel. Sadly, that promise flattered to deceive, but the emphasis on ‘a team of grammar school and scholarship boys’ was a reminder of how the scientific and technological thrust of grammar schools and red-brick universities was an increasingly frequent element in the advance of the new men. Two of engineering’s notable new men by the late 1950s were James Drake and Denis Rooke. Drake, Accrington-born and spiky, was Britain’s first great motorway creator, with a vision of roads like ‘sculpture on an exciting, grand scale’, carving and moulding ‘earth, rock and minerals into a finished product’; the lantern-jawed, no-nonsense Rooke, in his mid-thirties and the son of a south London commercial traveller, had recently joined the North Thames Gas Board to explore the crucial possibility of importing natural gas. In 1959 he was in charge of the technical team aboard the Methane Pioneer, as it transported liquefied gas from the Gulf of Mexico to Canvey Island on a storm-tossed, 23-day voyage.3
The meritocratic businessman was also afoot, with a trio poised around the end of the 1950s for great things. For the implacably rational Arnold Weinstock, son of Jewish refugees from Poland, the start of a remarkable career in electronic manufacturing was the 30-year-old’s arrival in 1954 at the firm of his father-in-law Michael Sobell, who made radio and television sets. ‘With colossal self-confidence he immediately took charge, largely ignoring his 63-year-old father-in-law, who was suffering from prostate problems,’ records a biographer. ‘Weinstock concentrated on producing – efficiently and profitably – basic products that worked, in contrast to his competitors, dominated by engineers who did not believe as did Weinstock that “the customer is king”.’ By 1958, when the firm was floated under the name of Radio and Allied, Weinstock was ‘established as among the most formidable operators in the whole electrical sector’. At the textile manufacturers Courtaulds, the rising star was Frank Kearton, whose way to the top was blocked by the ageing, indeed failing, Sir John Hanbury-Williams. The thrusting Kearton had been educated at Hanley High School, the gentlemanly Hanbury-Williams at Wellington College, and the former’s ‘barely concealed contempt’ was reciprocated by the latter’s ‘active dislike’. There were no tantrums at the merchant bank Schroders, where Gordon Richardson was on a rapid upward curve. The son of a Nottingham provision merchant, he had become a successful barrister before in 1955 trying his luck in the financial world, going to the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (the future 3i). There he was unhappy, according to a mole, because ‘it is not the kind of business nor does he in general meet the sort of people which he hoped for when he left the Bar’. But by 1957 this handsome, imposing, intelligent man, vanity his only Achilles heel, was ensconced among the City’s crème de la crème, just as the post-war revival of the Square Mile was at last getting under way.4
Inevitably, the meritocrats – almost all of them male – would flourish especially in the media and the arts. Robert Robinson, a product of Raynes Park County Grammar School under the famed headmastership of John Garrett, wrote sardonic radio criticism for the Sunday Times and from 1959 was the astringent presenter of television’s Picture Parade about current films. The Manchester Guardian’s features editor Brian Redhead, son of a Newcastle printer, would also make the transition to the small screen, though in his inveterately loquacious case radio ultimately loomed. Another northern journalist, Harold Evans, son of a railwayman, was a wiry, energetic assistant editor of the Manchester Evening News; meanwhile Jean Rook, Hull-born daughter of an engineer and an usherette, was gearing up on the Sheffield Telegraph to take on the world. Keith Waterhouse, whose father walked about Leeds selling produce from a barrow, was on the Daily Mirror and by 1958 writing his second novel, about an undertaker’s assistant (as he himself had been) who was a habitual fantasist; another young novelist, Malcolm Bradbury, first-generation grammar school let alone university, debuted in 1959 with Eating People is Wrong, about the dilemmas of a red-brick university professor. The as yet unpublished B. S. Johnson, undergraduate at King’s College London and son of a stock-keeper, threw a party at his parents’ home in Barnes, but not before taking down from the wall of the lounge the three horribly tell-tale flying ducks, unfortunately leaving marks that provoked amused comments. John Carey, accountant’s son and from a grammar school in East Sheen, had his first teaching job at Christ Church, Oxford, full of window-smashing public schoolboys, and spent his time ‘totting up how much more their clothes had cost than I earned’; a more attractively self-possessed Oxford undergraduate, Ian Hamilton, launched the literary magazine Tomorrow, having already at grammar school in Darlington started The Scorpion and got Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson and Cecil Day Lewis among others to contribute. Two young, already well-established theatre directors, Tony Richardson (son of a pharmacist) and Peter Hall (son of a stationmaster), were facing the future with high artistic ambition and seemingly inexhaustible drive, while John Thaw, son of a Mancunian lorry driver, arrived as a 16-year-old at RADA in 1958 ‘dressed like a typical teddy boy’, whereas ‘the other kids all looked so bloody superior, I’ve never felt so alone in all my life’. Stanley Baker, from the Rhondda Valley and close to rivalling Dirk Bogarde as Britain’s leading male film star, brought working-class machismo and sexual arrogance to Joseph Losey’s 1959 Blind Date; that same year Terence Donovan, from the Mile End Road, set up his own studio, just before Leytonstone’s David Bailey, while the third of what Cecil Beaton would ruefully call ‘The Terrible Three’ of fashion photographers, East Ham’s Brian Duffy, was already shooting for Vogue, ‘an easy way to make money’. A defiantly non-fashion photographer, Don McCullin, whose Finsbury Park childhood had been dominated by weekly trips to the pawn shop, had his picture of a gang posing on an old bombed-out building published by the Observer in 1959 and suddenly was in demand (‘that little thing inside me knew this was the only hope of having a life’). The artist Peter Blake, son of a Dartford electrician, was starting to embrace, in a contemporary yet nostalgic way, the popular culture of postcards and pin-ups. The self-educated, self-made Bryan Robertson, who had had a hard childhood in Battersea, was several years into the directorship of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and becoming the witty, generous presiding spirit of the British art world. Zandra Rhodes, her mother a fitter at a fashion house, was at Medway College of Art; Lionel Bart, son of an East End tailor, wrote his first songs for Tommy Steele and enjoyed claiming he could not tell the difference between A flat and a council flat; and Joe Meek, whose father had run a fish-and-chip shop on the edge of the Forest of Dean, was the engineer on ‘Last Train to San Fernando’ and, by 1958, was writing home that ‘I’m sure your Son is going to be famous one day Mum, as things are going I am very well known in the whole record world and have a very good name too.’5
Few if any of that gallery, though, were classic meritocrats – ‘classic’ in the sense of passing the triple historical test of (a) being born in 1933 or later, (b) being working-class and (c) going to grammar school as a direct beneficiary of the 1944 Education Act and using that education as a ladder for further advancement. It was those meritocrats who were, par excellence, ‘Britain’s New Class’, as sharply described in Encounter in February 1958 by Frank Hilton, himself from a grammar school (though born in 1929) and now a teacher:
Our underdogs are on the move today . . . In some ways everything and anything is possible. But they don’t know where to start. They have no background that could have nursed their talents and trained them how to use them. They have only their intelligence, their energy, and too much choice. So they have no confidence and approach everything with suspicion. They loathe the scullery, the kitchen, and the front room they’ve left behind, and most of them – whatever they may care to say to the contrary – look upon their mums and dads as semi-prehistoric creatures, evolutionary missing links between the gin-and-work-sodden 19th-century working-class ape-man and the modern Grammar School-Redbrick university-Sergeants’/Officers’ Mess working-class ‘cream’.
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:
By now my father is forced to communicate with me almost, as it were, with a kind of contempt, now and again. It is inevitable. I mean, he does everything he can possibly do to get through to me, and I to him, but it is just that our circumstances make this communication rather difficult. I mean, he is likely to ask me a question through my mother, for example. And a little thing like the allocation of radio time – it might seem small, petty. If I want something on which is likely to be – in fact very often is – very different from what the rest of the family want, then, well, this is likely to spotlight the tensions. The little petty things like that. I mean, I have a row with my sister, inevitably, over whether we should have something like Life with the Lyons on, or not. And, well, I – it’s at times like this that I think, oh darn, why does one have one way of life, and you just can’t come to terms with it ever again?
Potter by his last year was an established star at the Oxford Union – ‘in a slashing peroration he denounced the Tory chrome-plated coffee-bar civilization,’ reported Peter Jay in November 1958 – and, after taking an undistinguished Second (having barely worked) he slipped into a BBC traineeship in July 1959.
Two other ‘classics’ began at Oxford in 1957, a year after Potter. ‘My room in Somerville was on the ground floor of the library block, a large, square, high-ceilinged room with a mullioned window overlooking a lawn shadowed by a huge cedar tree,’ remembered Margaret Forster, daughter of a fitter at the Metal Box factory in Carlisle. ‘It was easily four times the size of any room at home and the sheer space thrilled me.’ Writing essays about medieval history proved less thrilling – ‘it was such an unreal task, so removed from my mother’s life’ – but Forster loved being pulled into a different social and political world. ‘I’d thought political allegiances were according to class and money but now I saw they could not be – it was as odd that my working-class mother voted Tory as that my Somerville friends voted Labour. They were all upper middle class, all from wealthy (to me) homes, and yet they all passionately wanted to align themselves with the working class.’ In the more traditional (and right-wing) culture of a men’s college, her contemporary Melvyn Bragg, son of an RAF sergeant and (later) publican, was making a largely cautious transition from Wigton in Cumberland to Wadham College. ‘I took it all on “their” terms,’ he reflected many years later. ‘I was trying to learn the secrets of those in the educational and social citadel.’ Significantly, this did not lead to chippiness:
I knew an awful lot they didn’t, but I sort of thought it didn’t count. I mean, at breakfast in college they’d have really detailed conversations about Africa or Malaysia. Some of these men had led people into battle. But I’d been to places like Manchester and Blackburn about which they knew nothing. I knew about a whole range of life that simply didn’t appear on their agenda. It was as if your past was locked away at the age of 18, as if they were saying ‘put that away, you won’t need that for the journey, dump that over the side of the stagecoach’. I didn’t resent it, frankly, I just thought ‘that’s the way it is.’6
Crossing the Lines would be the title of Bragg’s subsequent novel about his Oxford experience. Probably for most meritocrats, certainly including him, they were at this point not enemy lines.
For Potter, Forster and Bragg, as also for Ian McKellen, Trevor Nunn, Tom Courtenay, Alan Plater, Alan Bennett, Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, Hunter Davies, Joan Bakewell, Neil Kinnock, Tim Bell, David Hockney, Roy Strong, Dudley Moore and many other meritocrats starting (or about to start) to come through by the late 1950s, the grammar school had been the formative, indispensable education. ‘What is the most important factor in getting to the top?’ a Sunday Times survey into teenage aspirations asked in 1959. Specifically, was it hard work or personality? Among public school boys, 48 per cent plumped for hard work and 45 per cent for personality. Among grammar school boys, the respective figures were 80 per cent and 16 per cent. Going to a grammar was of course a variable experience, both within the school and between schools. But a trio of retrospective accounts for these years is particularly suggestive about an educational world where for the most part charm was not the name of the game.
Anton Rippon’s recollections of Bemrose School, Derby (1956–61) are largely benign. He enjoyed the daily morning assembly (Victorian hymns accompanied by the magnificent school organ) and was appreciative of the general lack of bullying; his only real complaints were over the ‘silly rules’, especially the regulation school cap to and from school, and the house system, ‘particularly because of its obsession with cross country running’, an obsession that once caused him to be ‘spectacularly sick’ at the top of Rykneld Rec hill ‘not long after I’d enjoyed two helpings of treacle pudding and custard on the second sitting for school dinner’.
Mary Evans’s take on her unnamed girls’ grammar (1957–64) in her trenchant memoir-cum-essay A Good School, is markedly more critical – though with a similar exasperation about the petty rules, such as ‘never going upstairs on buses (since they were apparently dens of iniquity, or more precisely men smoking cigarettes), always wearing our school hats in the streets, never walking along a pavement more than two abreast, never, ever, eating in the street, never going outside in our indoor shoes and never bringing into the school either sweets or books or magazines that were not part of our school work’. During these years, she notes, ‘pupils were still sufficiently intimidated by the authority of their teachers to believe that school rules had the force of absolute law’.
It was the first year, though, that set the tone, a year in which Evans not only had her posture continuously assessed (with the reward of a posture stripe, to be sewn into her navy-blue tunic, if she proved herself not to be a sloucher), but spent all the domestic-science lessons on smocking a pinafore – seemingly futile and pointless, but ‘we were quite explicitly told that our performance at this task would be taken as a measure of our “patience” and our ability to do something called “work steadily”.’ Indeed, the emphasis throughout was on diligence and steadiness, with Aesop’s fable of the hare and the tortoise ‘much favoured as an illustration of the virtues of plodding away’. With the academic work, teachers imparted the inflexible virtues of what she calls ‘the conventional sandwich essay’ (defined as ‘beginning with a proposition to examine, examine it and then reach a conclusion’), and where ‘to have an essay returned as “badly organised” was the greatest shame’. Was it an ultra-competitive environment? Evans’s answer is interestingly nuanced: yes, in the sense that there was rigorous streaming from the start, and at one level the dominant ethos was all about individual achievement, yet at the same time, by sixth form anyway, ‘our civics classes were weekly exercises in being taught that individuals were not allowed to act merely for themselves’. Altogether, she reckons, ‘a reliable product, the grammar school child, emerged at the end of a seven-year education, and the product was reliably well schooled in writing legibly, writing grammatically, being punctual and having at least the appearance of respect for authority’. A Good School, written in the early 1990s, ends with a thought as double-edged as its title: ‘We emerged into the adult world with extensive and authoritative evidence of our ability to carry out given tasks and to live a disciplined and sober life. Little wonder that many people still dream fondly of the institutions that apparently created us.’
Roy Greenslade is the most negative of the three. Looking back on his time (from 1958) at Dagenham County High School (very far from one of the country’s top-rated grammars), he highlights ‘the communication barrier’ between the middle-class staff and mainly working-class pupils; the widespread disaffection and divisiveness, caused in his analysis by a mixture of the streaming system, the pressure of exams and differences in home status; the general absence of classroom discussion, with teachers ‘preferring instead the these-are-the-facts-now-go-away-and-learn-them approach’; and the prevailing conformity, with ‘dissent the school’s dirtiest word’. Caustically, Greenslade describes the education that he received as ‘simply a five-year course in how to succeed without understanding why’:
At school the propaganda was subtle, but it combined well with the thrust from home. ‘Pupils, you are in a privileged position; take your chances while you can; don’t fall behind; don’t end up like the secondary modern layabouts; there really is room at the top.’ Classroom competition was fostered with the front-runners constantly exhorted to do better; and those at the bottom put under pressure to do much, much better. I hardly need add that the sports field was another element in the same indoctrination.
Accordingly, ‘the boys of County High emerged into the adult world bursting with enthusiasm for little more than money’, a long way removed from ‘the once-favoured ideal that grammar schools would carry on the public school tradition of training for community service’. And when Greenslade interviewed many of his contemporaries in the mid-1970s, he was dismayed by their apathy and complacency towards the wider world – characteristics that he largely attributed to the narrow, reductive efficiency of their grammar-school training.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch Boys’ Grammar School was almost certainly of a higher standing than Dagenham County High, perhaps somewhere in the middle range. The report in the school magazine for 1957–8 about the activities of the Literary and Debating Society, written by a sixth-former, nicely conveys the grammar culture – not least its ineradicable whiff of priggishness – in this its final classic phase:
3rd October, 1957
In two embryo debates, we considered the relative merits of BBC and Commercial Television and the advisability of continuing experiments with nuclear weapons. The eloquence and humour elicited by the former discussion was soon surpassed by the zest with which the scientists defended their colleagues’ activities, to the great joy of the members.
17th October, 1957
The House debated the motion ‘That gambling is socially and morally indefensible’. Impassioned appeals to our conscience earned little but scorn and eventually the suffrage of precisely half our number: the Chairman’s casting vote alone preserved the Society’s reputation for moral rectitude, while the need for it left room for grave doubts.
20th February, 1958
Candidates ranging from Machiavelli to Gilbert Harding were proposed to fill the last place in Heaven; every speaker had cogent arguments for his protégé, and it is doubtful whether the final choice of Babyface Nelson, the notorious American gangster, reflects genuine anarchical sympathies, or merely the eloquence of his advocate.7
Of course, these debaters were only there because they had passed the 11-plus. The exam itself was usually taken in January and often at the actual grammar school, with masters invigilating. ‘Even I feel nervous,’ wrote one in 1957 about the experience of superintending a classroom of excited hopefuls:
The starting bell makes one sallow child visibly start, but only for a second. Immediately all are at work: their fingers nervously nicked to their pens, their lips pursed or tacitly murmuring as they do their sums. Somehow they looked years older than when they came in; already on their foreheads frowns are beginning to appear which time will etch more deeply. Ten minutes have passed; according to my instructions, I remind them that there are more questions on the other pages of their answer books. Some have already started on them. Some have finished five minutes before the end of the fifty-minute paper.
After a ten-minute interval they get down to English (‘Do not forget to put your number on the top of the paper’). Now I begin to see them more clearly. There is little difference in their size although the two largest boys are already in long trousers. Only two of the thirty wear glasses. Some are in their Sunday suits, others wear cardigans and sweaters, sometimes with a watch (Dad’s or Uncle’s?) fastened over the sleeve. Somehow it seems that the most poorly dressed have the grandest fountain pens.
One boy upsets his ink-well; I help him to mop up the ink which has divided his answer book into blue and white sections. I notice that his hand shakes. Another boy absorbed in work sits on his own leg and rather dirty shoe. Yet another picks his nose and then puts his finger in his mouth. I feel embarrassed that he has noticed that I have noticed; he probably thinks that I will take a mark off!
I wonder if it is possible to estimate their intelligence from their physiognomy. Surely that intense boy with the tousled hair is intelligent? I walk up the aisle only to discover that he not written down anything. His vacant-looking neighbour who has at least half a dozen badges on the lapels of his green blazer has half-finished the paper.
At the end of English they go out to break, and I warn them to use the toilets before returning to the classroom. In the Common Room where I go for coffee they are discussing the illiteracy of some of the candidates and the foolhardiness of some of the examiners. Somebody says that even the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education has not been able to do some of the questions that have been set. No wonder that two candidates have been sick and one has had a fit.
Back to the classroom for the General Paper (‘Put your examination number . . .’) and then English Composition (‘. . . at the top of the paper’). Some children have their own personal spelling (‘cushion’ for ‘cousin’; ‘duck’ for ‘Dutch’; ‘arrisen’ for ‘horizon’), others write very creditable conversation passages in idiomatic prose. Only two write in italic hand; their penmanship creates a very favourable impression when contrasted with the others. One boy in describing ‘An Enjoyable Outing’ describes a trip to France; in another row a boy describes ‘the flicks and fish an chips and sweets.’
At last, at 12.30, the final bell shatters the silence. I collect in the papers and tell them to be careful crossing the road. They become young again, and some even say ‘Ta-ta, sir!’ as they leave the room. It is over. Some parents are already at the school gates to take their offspring home after what for most will be their one and only visit to a grammar school.
So much, in every sense, depended. Jacky Aitken (later Jacqueline Wilson), from Kingston in Surrey, sat the exam that year and had ‘one of those head-filled-with-fog colds, when you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you can’t taste, you certainly can’t think’. The result was a nightmare (‘I’d never felt so frightened in my life’), especially the arithmetic test (‘I couldn’t calculate in my bunged-up head, I had to use my ten fingers, like an infant’) and the number sequences in the intelligence test. A year later, on a Friday morning in January 1958, it was the turn of Ione Haines at Chingford. ‘I feel sick,’ noted an apprehensive Judy, but Ione herself ‘awoke happily and tucked in to a three-course breakfast’. They set off for the High School, Ione taking with her the ‘“success” cards’ she had received and ‘many lucky charms, including 3d bit from Daddy’; nearing their destination, ‘the children poured off buses and along to the school in the snow’. An anxious few hours followed, before Ione returned at lunchtime, ‘eyes shining, and saying she had had a lovely time’, with ‘questions not too bad’, and that ‘she enjoyed using my fountain pen’.
Then came the waiting. Eventually, Jacky was informed by her primary teacher, in front of the class, that she had failed and ought to be ashamed of herself, leaving the poor girl to tell her parents. As for Ione, her mother’s diary recorded the outcome:
24 April. Gwen had told me 11+ results would be out today and I waited and waited for post. Suddenly I wondered if a tearful Ione would come home from school. Relieved this was not so and nobody appears to have heard anything.
25 April. No post.
Ione came rushing home from school with the good news that she has passed General Admission Examination. What a thrill! We ’phoned Daddy, me in tears . . .
By the way, the official card came at mid-day.
A year or so later, in the Cheshire village of Bunbury, there was elation too at the Blakemore home after a little brown envelope popped through the door:
I’d come downstairs to get some breakfast and found Mum waiting for me in the hall, smiling. And then something totally unexpected happened. With a whoop of joy she held me round the middle and danced around the hall with me.
It was one of those moments that stay with you forever. The fresh green summer morning, sunlight dappling through the windows, the threadbare carpet on the stairs, the press of my mother’s apron against my face, the giddy feeling as she swept me off my feet. And all this from a mother who’d rarely put her arm around me. For those few seconds I’d been grabbed and returned to early childhood.
When she stopped I smiled, embarrassed. It felt good, though the evident relief and joy in her face led me to wonder whether my parents had really expected me to fail. From Dad I just got a cheery smile and a ‘well done’ as he sat at the breakfast table neatly polishing off his bacon and tomato.
Ken Blakemore then went to school, where he found that though two of his friends had passed, the one who had really wanted to, Clive Bevan, had failed: ‘He was sullen, red-faced with anger and disappointment, and couldn’t bring himself to talk to us.’ Several months later, in September after Ken had started at the grammar, he decided to go round to see Clive at his home, a little bungalow. ‘It was an attempt to ask whether we could still be friends. We couldn’t. He couldn’t wait for me to leave.’
Passing the exam did not necessarily clinch the deal. A quite common impediment was financial, despite the 1944 Act, and revolved round the purchase of a uniform and other expensive, compulsory accoutrements. ‘They felt exploited by having to go to the school’s selected outfitters and paying prices they, rightly or wrongly, felt were higher than elsewhere,’ recalled Roy Greenslade about Dagenham’s working-class parents. ‘For some it was undoubtedly a financial burden and a real sacrifice. For a few, it was an impossibility and their children were never equipped in County High’s sombre black, blue and white.’ Another possibility was that the child might demur. In May 1958, for instance, Kent Education Committee notified John Jones that his son David (the future Ziggy Stardust) had, having passed his 11-plus, a choice between Bromley Grammar and the new Bromley Technical School, due to open in the autumn. Mr Jones initially preferred the former but David strongly the latter, and so it was – though not before the council’s education officer had interviewed the 11-year-old about his career plans.8
The Britain of the late 1950s was not conspicuously characterised by equality of either outcome or – rising meritocrats notwithstanding – opportunity. In terms of the former, despite some redistribution during the 1940s, not only did the richest 5 per cent own some 75 per cent of total wealth, but also the share of incomes (both before and after tax) enjoyed by the different occupational strata was not yet fundamentally different from what it had been shortly before the First World War. In terms of the latter, some eloquent detail peppered Tom Bairstow’s analysis of ‘The Establishment’ in the News Chronicle in April 1958. All but two of Macmillan’s Cabinet had been educated at public school, including almost one-third at Eton; all but four had gone to Oxbridge; the two Opposition leaders, Gaitskell and Grimond, had backgrounds of (respectively) Winchester and New College, Eton and Balliol. The top three ambassadors had all gone to Eton or Winchester, while in the City, the governor of the Bank of England was an Etonian, and the chairmen of the Big Five banks included two Etonians, one Harrovian and one Wykehamist.
Bairstow did think, though, that the power of the old school tie was perhaps waning in industry at large, and he cited Sir Alexander Fleck, head of ICI, ‘who came up the hard way from an elementary school’. Or as one industrialist, A. D. Bonham-Carter, had recently put it in a radio talk on ‘The Way to the Top in Industry’: ‘Social and educational backgrounds are now immaterial. What matters is the way in which a man uses his qualities and knowledge, not how he acquired them.’ Yet almost certainly this was a gross exaggeration, to judge by the statistical evidence of a trio of surveys conducted between 1955 and 1958 into the backgrounds of Britain’s business leaders. ‘These three studies agree that, while some men have managed to get to the top without special advantages, the odds were heavily against them,’ concluded Roy Lewis and Rosemary Stewart in their 1958 book The Boss. ‘The men who were most likely to succeed were those with family connections in business, although this was less important in the larger firms, and those who had been to public school. Most likely of all were the Old Etonians.’9
Of course, by the late 1950s the effects of the 1944 Act had not yet started to work through into these sort of surveys. What is striking, though, is the extent to which – even in the new dispensation – the working class as a whole was still seemingly being shut out of the meritocratic race. Take the key question of social composition of the grammar schools, systematically investigated by Jean Floud and colleagues in their much-quoted Social Class and Educational Opportunity (1956), based on grammar admissions in 1953 in two contrasting parts of the country. The following were the percentage chances, from the parents’ occupational groups, of their sons being selected for admission:
| South-West Hertfordshire | Middlesbrough | |
| Professional workers, | ||
| business owners and managers | 59 | 68 |
| Clerical workers | 44 | 37 |
| Foremen, small shopkeepers, etc. | 30 | 24 |
| Skilled manual workers | 18 | 14 |
| Unskilled manual workers | 9 | 9 |
| All social classes | 22 | 17 |
It is unlikely that these figures changed markedly during the second half of the decade, and in late 1959 the Crowther Report, 15 to 18, was unequivocal that in secondary moderns – overwhelmingly the most common destination for those who had failed to pass the 11-plus and thereby get into a selective school (usually a grammar) – ‘the children of non-manual workers are much under-represented, and the children of semi-skilled workers over-represented’.
In theory, there was ‘parity of esteem’ between the roughly 1,200 grammar schools and 3,800 secondary moderns. In practice, not only did most people view the secondary moderns as vastly inferior but there was a shocking relative shortfall in their resourcing. ‘It is likely,’ noted John Vaizey in his 1958 treatise The Costs of Education, ‘that the average Grammar school child receives 170 per cent more per year, in terms of resources, than the average Modern school child.’ Teachers at secondary moderns were paid less, only about a fifth were graduates, and even by the end of the 1950s barely 10 per cent of the buildings they worked in were new and purpose-built.
The gulf in expectations was even greater. Surveying in 1961 that year’s school-leavers from a semi-skilled and unskilled background at five Leicestershire schools (two grammars and three secondary moderns), William Liversidge found that 93 per cent of the grammar boys anticipated moving into a higher class of employment than their parents – whereas only 18 per cent of the secondary modern boys did. ‘The general conclusion that emerges from this study,’ he reflected, ‘is one of startlingly accurate appraisal of life chances by the children, and a shrewd appreciation of the social and economic implications of their placing within the educational system.’ Not long before, in 1959–60, another sociologist, Michael Carter, had sampled 200 boys and girls (overwhelmingly from working-class homes) who were about to leave, or had just left, secondary moderns in the Sheffield area. Among those still at school, three-quarters ‘expressed their satisfaction that they would soon be workers – independent, recognised as grown-up, no longer “school kids”’, while half the overall sample, including those who had left, ‘objected strongly’ to the very idea of raising the school-leaving age to 16. ‘I don’t think I could have lasted,’ said one girl, and a boy was equally adamant: ‘It is not fair; we left at 15, so the others should be able to.’10
Social class was not just relevant to grammars vis-à-vis secondary moderns; it also did much to determine outcomes within grammars. In 1954 an official report on Early Leaving found that whereas children from the semi-skilled and unskilled working class represented over 20 per cent of grammar school intakes, by the sixth form that proportion was down to barely 7 per cent. Given which figures, it was unsurprising that by the mid-1950s a middle-class child who had been to a grammar was five times as likely to go on to a university as was a child from an unskilled working-class background who had also been to a grammar. Why was this? Towards the end of the decade, Eva Bene sought part of the answer by surveying 361 boys from the Greater London area who were in the third year at their grammars; she revealed by social class the percentages of replies to various suggestive statements such as ‘If he had a chance he would like to go to university’. There was a telling 20-per-cent gap between that working-class minority wanting to stay on after the age of 16 (45 per cent) and that working-class majority wanting to go to university (65 per cent).11
The university system itself was gradually expanding – 50,000 university places just before the Second World War doubling to some 107,000 by 1960–61 – and plans were afoot by the end of the 1950s for a clutch of new universities, including what would become Sussex, York, East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Warwick. ‘The elite of tomorrow’ was the Observer’s headline in 1960 for an article by Mark Abrams on the 1.6 per cent of the adult population – some 570,000 people – who were university graduates or who had comparable professional qualifications. ‘Since the war the graduates have not looked back,’ he declared. ‘Today they are still far from having completely supplanted the pre-war elite, but by the end of the 1960s they will be well on the way towards doing so.’ And, according to Abrams, ‘the rise of the graduates has been resisted only in trade union leadership, industrial management, popular journalism and the entertainment industry’. It was heady, Whiggish stuff, but Abrams did not pretend it would be a wholly open elite. ‘Where yesterday’s elite was based on birth and wealth, tomorrow’s will rest largely on education and wealth. And because of this difference the gap between the elite and the rest of society will surely be just as great as it was in the past.’ Indeed, in 1960 itself, only 2.6 per cent of 18-year-olds from working-class homes went to university – compared to 16.8 per cent from middle-class homes. At the pinnacle of the university system, Oxbridge, the public schools continued to dominate: 56 per cent of the 1955 intake at Cambridge came from there; two years later, 70 per cent of scholarships and exhibitions awarded at Oxbridge men’s colleges went to public schoolboys; and Abrams in his 1960 article cited a recent survey of the latest Cambridge graduates, showing that a majority still came from public school and only 9 per cent from the working class.12
There were many reasons – including institutional bias, going back to primary school – why most working-class children failed to thrive in a largely middle-class educational system, but arguably the most important revolved round parental attitudes and expectations. Floud et al found in their study of grammars in South-West Hertfordshire and Middlesbrough in the early-to-mid-1950s that over half the working-class parents ‘either desired no further education for their children or were uncertain in the matter’, while when Abrams in 1956–7 interviewed some 200 married couples in London, mainly from the skilled working class, he seldom encountered ‘that degree of personal ambition which is likely to carry them socially upward’. This also applied to their aspirations for their children, even though a majority hoped they would go to either a grammar or a technical school (the latter thin on the ground, but viewed as good for learning skills and job security), and only 15 per cent positively wanted a secondary modern – where, of course, most of their children would in the event go. As Abrams reflected:
For most people in the sample, ‘education’ is something provided by the authorities for which parents do not have to pay but over which, correspondingly, they can exercise no control . . .
It is difficult to persuade oneself, from the general tone of the results of this enquiry, that the majority of working-class parents or children yet regard education as being so important that the frustration of their hopes is a major disaster. The system is still new, still imperfectly understood, and its possibilities are still rather vaguely glimpsed. The parents themselves, almost without exception, left school at 14 or 15, and most of them see no reason why they should be unduly disturbed if their children have to do the same, provided that after they leave school they can get decent jobs which they are unlikely to be thrown out of.
So too with other studies. Interviewing working-class couples in Dagenham (mainly in 1958–9, on the LCC’s huge inter-war Becontree estate), Peter Willmott ‘found some support for the view that most parents on the estate are not educationally ambitious for their children, and do not take a keen interest in their schooling’, typified by a trio of vox pops:
I’ve never really thought about it. I’ve always taken it for granted he’ll leave school at 15 unless he turns out brilliant and goes to College.
I don’t care a lot myself. The main thing is for the children to be happy.
It’s immaterial to us. If he wants to go in for the 11-plus, we wouldn’t stand in his way.
The classic, most nuanced account of this whole charged area is by Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden, whose Education and the Working Class (1962) was a groundbreaking survey, conducted in about 1959–60, of 88 young working-class people who had been to grammar school in Huddersfield during the 1950s. Coming out of the Institute of Community Studies (run by Young and Willmott), and combining sociology with anthropology, it gave a detailed, moving picture of the social, cultural and psychological pressures faced by working-class pupils – especially over such matters as sport, uniform and friendship groups – and their often baffled, frustrated parents. Jackson and Marsden identified on the part of those parents a familiar pattern. Initial pleasure at their child’s 11-plus success and, during that child’s early terms at grammar school, flickers of intellectual excitement for themselves, were followed, by the third year, by ‘a growing sense that the child was out on its own, moving into worlds to which the parents had no access’. At this point many of those parents, usually the fathers, ‘sought to reassert control over their children’s education by demanding some clear statement about the kind of job this was leading to’. They quoted one: ‘I always wanted education for myself, and then I thought our lad would have it. But what I thought was the technical side, something that I could understand. That was what I thought education would be. I never thought about that Arts side, literature and language and all that stuff. That was new to me; that didn’t come into my reckoning about education at all.’ There was also, explained another parent, the problem of the neighbours:
Many a time you’d be out and the neighbours would say, ‘Eeh, is your lad still at school? What’s he going to be then?’ And I’d have to say, ‘I don’t know what he’s going to be yet.’ And they’d say, ‘Doesn’t he know yet?’ . . . I hadn’t got an answer and I felt soft. They’d look at you as much as to say, ‘Staying on at school all that time and don’t know what he’s going to be, well!’
The obvious solution was for the parents to talk to teachers about courses and choices, but, suffused by a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’, they seldom did, even if their children were in the A stream and there was no shame involved. Altogether, noted the authors, ‘by the time the leaving age was reached and the General Certificate taken, many wondered whether there was much to be gained by leaving their child at school’. Or, as one father put it about the whole unsettling experience: ‘Tha can’t afford to send t’lasses to t’grammar schools. Tha sends ’em and when they come back they’re no good to y’. They don’t want a mucky job even if that’s where t’brass is. They won’t look at it!’
Still, it was sometimes the teacher who thwarted a parent’s aspirations. From Sheffield in about 1960 is this emblematic account of a leaving pupil’s interview with the headmistress of a secondary modern and the Youth Employment Officer:
The YEO enquires – with a smile designed to put mother and child at ease, but standing no chance of overcoming the suspicion which mother feels for officials – what job the girl would like to do. Before the girl has a chance to speak, mother jumps in, saying with a determination made more formidable by the certain knowledge that she will shortly be contradicted, ‘she ain’t going to work in a warehouse.’ The head teacher disregards mother and turning to the girl says ‘What do you want to do?’ The girl blurts out that she wants to be ‘one of them shorthand-typewriters’. The YEO now has something to work on, and enquires of the girl whether she is good at spelling. There is a dull silence, broken by the head teacher, who says in a significant tone, ‘One out of ten’. An enquiry about English Composition leads to the comment ‘Four out of twenty’. The head teacher is becoming impatient, and tells the girl that this is a waste of time: that there is no likelihood of her getting an office job: that she would not be happy doing office work: and that she would be happy doing packing work in a warehouse. Mother has by this time reached ‘the sniffing stage’. The head teacher turns her attention to her and says, ‘Look here, Mrs So-and-so, things have changed since you and I were children. Lots of valuable things are packed nowadays. It is an important job. Factories have good conditions, girls can earn good wages, wear nice clothes and be happy doing the work.’13
On 31 July 1958 the Yorkshire professional cricketer Johnny Wardle was, reported the Daily Mail, ‘cheered all the way to the wicket by the Sheffield crowd’ – the day after the club had announced it would be dispensing with his services from the end of the season. He had fallen out badly with Yorkshire’s new amateur captain – 39-year-old Ronnie Burnet, who had never played first-class cricket before this season – and though in the rest of the match he performed brilliantly, taking eight wickets at fewer than ten runs each, he never played for Yorkshire again. The following week he was back in the pages of the Mail with two prominently displayed articles, ‘Why I Was Sacked’ and ‘We’re Carrying the Captain’, claiming that Burnet’s ‘lack of experience’ had made it ‘desperately hard for the key men of the side’. Later in August, offended by Wardle’s trenchant criticism of the Yorkshire committee, the MCC (which still ran English cricket) withdrew his invitation to tour Australia.
The amateur-professional divide continued to run deep: an amateur, Surrey’s Peter May, would be captaining the English tourists, and, earlier in the year, an MCC committee chaired by the club’s president, the Duke of Norfolk, had concluded that ‘the distinctive status of the amateur cricketer was not obsolete, was of great value to the game and should be preserved’ (though at the same time, in terms of the financial recompense of those nominally unpaid performers, the committee admitting to being ‘disturbed by the apparent over-liberal interpretation of the word “expenses” in certain cases that had come to their notice’). The hypocrisy was rank, with a range of different methods being found to pay the socially more prestigious, so-called amateurs. Ahead of the tour, England’s other spinner, also a Yorkshireman, gave George (‘Gubby’) Allen, chairman of the selectors, stockbroker and a pillar of the Lord’s Establishment, a bad quarter of an hour. ‘I told Gubby that I was considering becoming an amateur and I wondered how he would feel about this,’ recalled Jim Laker. ‘He asked me if I’d given it serious consideration and said that, if I had, he thought it was absolutely splendid but wondered why I wanted to do this. He didn’t look best pleased when I told him that I thought I would be better off in financial terms playing as an amateur in the England team in Australia with expenses rather than drawing professional pay.’14
The Wardle Affair, the introduction of life peerages (Sir Eric James, High Master of Manchester Grammar School and arch-meritocrat, on an early list), satire about the complacent incompetence of the traditional ruling class (the Boulting brothers’ film Carlton-Browne of the FO, with Terry-Thomas as the bumbling diplomat), Basil Bernstein’s pioneering study (‘Some sociological determinants of perception’) of the different affective and cognitive equipment of working-class children compared to middle-class, even some daring cross-dressing (the fashion photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones taking a riverside room in Rotherhithe, the metropolitan intelligentsia starting to form Sunday morning soccer teams) – one way and another, quite apart from the celebrated new wave of plays and novels, class and related issues were bubbling away strongly in the late 1950s.15
‘Despite (and sometimes because of) the Welfare State,’ declared the Radio Times in August 1958 in its preview of Christopher Mayhew’s television series ‘Does Class Matter?’ (including the Dennis Potter interview), ‘we British are still one of the most class-ridden peoples in the world.’ Produced by Jack Ashley, this was a notable examination of a ubiquitous but seldom overtly discussed subject, and, noted BBC’s audience research, ‘many viewers found it an enjoyable and interesting experience to be looking at themselves “from outside”, though some questioned the wisdom of stressing class distinctions’. Not long afterwards, in January 1959, Tom Lupton and C. Shirley Wilson published their pathbreaking analysis ‘The Social Background and Connections of “Top Decision Makers”’, taking as their starting point the recent evidence given to the Bank Rate Tribunal. This detailed with unambiguous clarity the narrow social and educational background of the City elite, as well as its multiple interconnections, and, though appearing in an obscure academic journal, it received considerable publicity. So much so that four months later, at the City of London Society’s annual luncheon at the Mansion House, that body’s chairman (the self-made Harley Drayton) was compelled to declare, boldly if unconvincingly, that ‘if a young man has talent, integrity and courage, not only is there nothing to stop him going to the top, he will almost be kicked there’.16
Among those watching ‘Does Class Matter?’ were Florence Turtle and Tom Driberg. ‘He is a Socialist & somewhat prejudiced against Public Schools,’ Turtle noted unenthusiastically of Mayhew, but the Labour politician (and regular TV reviewer for the New Statesman) was struck by how ‘95 per cent of those questioned put education as the first determinant of class’, reflecting further that it was ‘hard to believe that most people will acquiesce for much longer in an educational system which artificially reserves so many of the best jobs for those with a particular kind of education, identified by a particular accent’. Two years earlier Anthony Crosland in The Future of Socialism had had strong words about the existing ‘system of superior private schools’ – ‘open to the wealthier classes, but out of reach of poorer children however talented and deserving . . . much the most flagrant inequality of opportunity, as it is cause of class inequality generally, in our educational system’ – while there was a degree of unease even among some Tories. After referring in 1957 to ‘the almost comically overwhelming predominance of Old Etonians in the Conservative Party’, the writer and former MP Christopher Hollis went on in the Spectator: ‘I think that the time has come when it would be for the advantage of the nation that the Conservative Party should be somewhat less “U” in its higher personnel and when a party which pays lip-service to equality of opportunity should in practice treat at least (shall we say?) a Rugbeian as the equal of an Etonian.’ The next year, more seriously, the Education Minister Geoffrey Lloyd (Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge) privately expressed some sympathy with ‘elements on our side, e.g. The Bow Group, which thinks that basis for entry should be widened, and not restricted, as for all intents it is, to those who can meet the heavy cost of a preparatory, as well as of a public school education’. But, anxious about charges from elsewhere in his party that direct government subvention to enable ‘deserving’ children to take up places would threaten the independence of the schools, he opted for a policy of masterly inaction. And those institutions themselves? ‘You Can’t Write Off the Public Schools’ was a Daily Mail headline in May 1958, with the article revealing that numbers had increased since the war from 50,000 to 80,000 and that many had no vacancies until 1966 or 1967.17
Although their academic superiority over the better grammars was now questionable, they were continuing to deliver the goods where it mattered, and when the New Statesman later in 1958 published statistics definitively revealing their dominance of Oxbridge entrance, a flurry of letters ensued. It was all ‘simple enough’, insisted the constitutional expert Ivor Jennings, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge: ‘It is that the number of applicants from public schools is more numerous – in this college much more numerous – than the number of applicants from other schools: and all are meritorious because they are supported by the schools, which are familiar with Cambridge standards and help us enormously in our selection.’ Other correspondents were unconvinced, with some (including John Vaizey) calling for the integration of the public schools into the state system, while a youngish Oxford historian, Lawrence Stone, conceded there were ‘too many’ public-school men at Oxbridge ‘who in a world of equal opportunity would not be there at all’. About the same time, another Oxford fellow, J. R. Sargent of Worcester College, elucidated in Socialist Commentary the three ‘ineluctable factors’ at work:
First, there is the classical tradition of the public schools, combined with the large number of classical scholarships offered at Oxford or Cambridge. Secondly, there is the fact that public school masters are old hands at the complex procedure for getting admission. They make less mistakes than grammar school masters with less experience, and this does not simply mean that they are better at ‘nobbling’. Thirdly (let’s face it), there is the fact that many public schools provide very good teaching and can do so because many people are willing to pay large sums in order to get it.
There was an Oxbridge coda the following spring, when scientists at both universities led campaigns to get the Latin exam dropped from admission requirements. Cambridge agreed to relent, but Oxford narrowly not, before eventually permitting those with a maths or science A level to be exempted.
‘I have never been able to understand,’ declared Crosland in The Future of Socialism, ‘why socialists have been so obsessed with the question of the grammar schools, and so indifferent to the much more glaring injustice of the independent schools.’ Yet it was clear which issue had the greater traction in the popular mind. Certainly, the BBC television documentary in February 1957 on the 11-plus, featuring a secondary modern in north London, engendered no shortage of viewer response:
The answer is, Eleven Plus is bad, comprehensive schools not the remedy. The remedy is better teachers and less crowding of classes. Look at that nondescript lot of stuff you showed us tonight. No wonder you chose a powerful commentator, otherwise we may have dozed off. (Technician)
There is a good standard of education in these schools [i.e. secondary moderns]. It would be a poor sort of world peopled with academic types only. We must have practical men and women. (Engineer’s Wife)
I feel too much pressure is brought to bear on the children at this age and they are far better left alone, with a natural interest in their work being shown by the parents. (Correspondence Clerk)
The ‘do-or-die’ attitude of many parents towards their children – pass and so win a place to a grammar school or else . . . – has as its basis near snobbishness. (Cashier)
Despite all that has been written and spoken about those children who do not gain Grammar School status, in attempting to alleviate their feelings at having failed, failure is in fact the cold clear truth, and nothing can now change this. (Architect)
Hard words, and a teacher (unstated at which sort of school) could offer only another cold, clear truth: ‘The Grammar Schools can only take a certain number of pupils, and in most parts of the country there are not enough Grammar Schools.’18
In fact, by the late 1950s the dynamics of this whole inter-related cluster of issues – 11-plus, grammar schools, secondary moderns, comprehensives – were changing quite rapidly. Above all, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the future of the widely admired grammars was being threatened by deep dissatisfaction with two things beyond their control: the 11-plus and the secondary moderns.
A significant part of the 11-plus problem was that a child’s chances of passing the exam hinged to an alarming extent on where he or she lived, depending on the availability of grammar-school places. Those chances were as high as 35 per cent in the south-west, 33.5 per cent in Wales, and 31.6 per cent in London and the south-east, but as low as 24.1 per cent in the Midlands, 22.4 per cent in the north-east, 18.9 per cent in the south and, in one particularly ill-favoured city, Nottingham, a mere 10.1 per cent. More generally, beyond that, there was the key question of misallocation. In practice, 11-plus failures had relatively few opportunities to transfer across at a later stage to a grammar, yet even in 1954 the Early Leaving report was revealing, on the basis of 1951 O-level results, that whereas 45 per cent of those who had been at state grammars since the age of 11 got five or more passes, the comparable figure for those who had subsequently been transferred from secondary moderns was 45.7 per cent.
But the first real heavy lifting in the debate on intelligence testing and selection came from a committee of leading psychologists led by the Institute of Education’s Professor Philip Vernon. In their 1957 report, Secondary School Selection, they declared, in contradiction to the theories of genetic determination popularised by Cyril Burt, that
psychologists should frankly acknowledge that completely accurate classification of children, either by level or type of ability, is not possible at 11 years, still less on entry to the junior school at 7 [a reference to the prevalent streaming at primaries], and should therefore encourage any more flexible form of organisation and grouping which gives scope for the gradual unfolding and the variability of children’s abilities and interests.
Moreover, they added, ‘only among the top 5% or so and the bottom 50% do we consider that allocation to grammar, technical and modern schools can be made automatically from test scores and scaled estimates’, with ‘all intermediate pupils’ to be ‘regarded as border-zone’. Later that year, a detailed report on how selection worked in practice (Admission to Grammar Schools, commissioned by the National Foundation of Educational Research and written by Alfred Yates and D. A. Pidgeon) found that, even if all possible improvements were made in the selection process, there would still be an ineradicable misallocation of at least 10 per cent. ‘Whether a 10% error for all the country at large, involving 60,000 children per annum,’ reflected Professor Ben Morris in his preface to the report, ‘is to be regarded as reasonable or intolerable of course depends upon what particular educational values are regarded as most important.’
Nevertheless, what in most people’s eyes ultimately did for the 11-plus was its inherent cruelty and divisiveness – prompting even a Tory minister, the liberal-minded Sir Edward Boyle (the Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Education who had apparently struggled with some of the questions), to refer publicly in 1957 to its ‘evil effect’ and to how it ‘casts a shadow over the classroom’. Understandably, many parents voted with their feet, it being estimated at the time that nearly half that year’s eligible children were not in the event sitting the test. And when, soon afterwards, a Daily Express poll asked whether the 11-plus should be left as it was or replaced by an assessment based on the child’s general school record, only 25 per cent opted for the status quo, with little difference between Tory and Labour voters.19
As for the other Achilles heel of the existing system, a bald statement in the Manchester Evening News in April 1956 said it all: ‘With shock and disbelief many parents have learned this week that their own son or daughter will be going to a Secondary Modern school next September.’ A year later, Manchester’s recently retired, strongly pro-selection chief education officer, Norman Fisher, accepted that ‘even where there are secondary modern schools in first-rate buildings, it has seldom been possible to persuade parents or children that they offer a reasonable alternative to the grammar school’. And in June 1957 the Spectator published a stark piece by Colm Brogan based on the experience of a female teacher he knew who had recently worked in a co-ed secondary modern on a housing estate near London. ‘Nearly all the teachers devote time, labour and anxious care,’ he concluded, but in the end it was ‘the apathy and the negative attitude of the pupils’, from a working-class East End background, that prevailed, including a total lack of discipline and corporate spirit:
The school had nothing to offer them that they believed to be of any value whatever. Educationists may talk of deepening the aesthetic experience, rounding the personality and enriching the lives of secondary modern pupils, but these words are as thorns crackling under the pot for the pupils themselves. With the exception of the minority who have agreed to stay on, the sole aim and object of the children is to get out the instant the law releases them. The world outside is Eldorado, to which their eyes and thoughts are ever straining.
The negative depictions continued. ‘Run away to sea rather than go to a secondary modern,’ was the sage advice of A.J.P. Taylor later in 1957; in 1960, in his manual Secondary Modern Discipline, Richard Farley called secondary moderns ‘the focal point of the duller, less responsible, maladjusted and potentially criminal young people’, so that as a result ‘ninety per cent of the work in a Secondary Modern School is control and discipline’.
Inevitably, among those teaching in the secondary moderns, a deep defensiveness prevailed. ‘Why is it that when I go into your secondary modern schools the teachers are so apologetic?’ a visiting educationalist from abroad was quoted as asking in 1956. ‘“You must remember,” they tell me, “that these are not the brightest children. You must realise that we do not have the best.” And so they warn me not to be disappointed. They make excuses for the work I shall see.’ But it could hardly have been otherwise, as the Times Educational Supplement (still strongly pro-selection) went on in its report: ‘The visitor was surprised that the teachers expected him to judge the secondary modern school by the grammar school. The teachers, of course, could have told him that the public as yet had seldom done anything else. This was not an apology the teachers were offering the visitor. It was seasoned self-defence.’20
Yet for all this – including (not least) press treatment of secondary moderns in which, as one observer wearily put it, ‘the stress is upon physical violence and the threat of the adolescent’ – the larger reality was perhaps not quite so bleak. In implicit riposte to Brogan, the New Statesman in September 1957 ran a five-page survey by Judith Hubback in which she did not deny that the 59,000 secondary modern teachers, almost half of them taking classes of over 30, were often mediocre, so that ‘most of the dull classrooms will go on witnessing dull, overcrowded, incompetent and undisciplined lessons for the next few years’. But, she stressed, ‘the majority of classes do not get out of control, the majority of children are moderately well taught and most of the regular teachers do not have discipline problems’. A more whole-hearted defence came the following year from Harold Dent (educationalist and former editor of the TES) in his Secondary Modern School: An Interim Report. By his calculations, over half the secondary moderns were doing good work, almost half sound work and only 5 per cent bad work; vocational courses, tailored to a wide range of aptitudes and interests, were giving ‘a lively sense of purpose and reality’; and altogether, the ‘incontestable fact’ was that ‘hundreds of thousands of girls and boys in secondary modern schools’ were now ‘being given a much better, much more genuinely secondary education than were even their elder sisters or brothers who attended the self-same schools only a few years previously’. The picture was positive too in 1959 in E. R. Braithwaite’s To Sir, With Love, his justly celebrated account of a black teacher at a secondary modern in the East End – drawn from his real-life experience at St George’s-in-the-East Secondary Modern, located amidst the grimness and periodic violence of Cable Street, Stepney, but where a remarkable, inspiring head, Alex Bloom, made every child feel counted and created a real sense of school community.
Even so, this was undoubtedly the exception rather than the rule. More representative – but still positive in its own terms – was the experience of Julia Gunnigan, teaching in 1959 in the secondary modern at Pimlico and encountering an atmosphere that was rough but friendly. ‘The boys queuing to hand over their lunch money would sometimes pause at the head of the line and demand: “Fulham or Chelsea, Mam?”,’ relates her son John Lanchester. ‘The wrong answer would get a scowl and sneer; the right answer would be met with “Buy ya dinner.”’ And, relevant not just to the typical working-class secondary modern, he also describes what his mother found during her London sojourn:
No one would ever admit it, but people were happy where they were. They were especially happy with the level of complaint and grumbling, which often seemed one of life’s most important pleasures. A few of her brightest pupils had passed the eleven-plus and been offered a place at grammar school, but their parents had not allowed them to take it up. She raised the question with one of the parents and they shuffled and looked shifty and embarrassed and eventually admitted to her – as they perhaps wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been Irish – ‘We didn’t want him to think he was better than us.’21
Middle-class parents, alarmed by the possibility (however statistically slight) of their children failing the 11-plus, felt very differently. ‘In some of the Home Counties and other areas where there is a large middle-class dormitory population, the abolition of entry to the County Grammar schools by payment of fees has caused a great deal of bewilderment and intense public pressure upon the authorities to provide some outlet of comparable value,’ noted F. S. Marston in the Journal of Education as early as 1954. ‘Indeed, it may be that parents with this social background will, despite their preference for the Grammar school, join with others having very different ideas to replace it by the comprehensive [i.e. non-selective] school unless some other acceptable solution is forthcoming. It is only too probable that the unilateral Modern school is engaged in a race against time.’ In practice, this race against time meant not an ‘education for life’, the vocational model upon which the secondary moderns had originally been conceived in the 1940s, but instead something more akin to grammar school lite, through the provision of exam-tested extended courses. ‘The knowledge that others in such a [secondary] modern school are succeeding and going to college or a student apprenticeship is the greatest educational tranquilliser for parents and is worth 1,000 pamphlets describing the methods of selection!’ declared Rhodes Boyson, head of a secondary modern in Lancashire’s Rossendale Valley and a Labour councillor, in a letter to the Sunday Times in February 1958. ‘What parents fear in the 11+ is not technical error, but an alternative choice which will cut their children off from later educational opportunities.’ Progress along these lines, however, was relatively slow, and by 1960 there were still only 21,680 secondary modern pupils staying on after 15 to take GCE exams.
From Tory politicians, for the most part viscerally committed to the grammars, mere boosterism of the ill-favoured but indispensable secondary moderns was no longer enough. In late 1958, Geoffrey Lloyd unveiled the government’s White Paper Secondary Education for All: A New Drive, promising among other things a five-year £300 million programme of new school building, mainly for the secondary moderns, as well as a greater emphasis at the secondary moderns on supplying examination courses for academically abler pupils. Altogether, reckoned The Economist, ‘it embodies the Conservative tactic for grasping the political thistle of the eleven-plus: to level up educationally without seeking to stamp flat socially; to overbid the comprehensive school with the new-style secondary modern (renamed high school); to put the really big money behind a practical “parity of esteem” which will alone take the sting out of selection’.22
From this perspective, there was no doubt about the identity of the elephant – or potential elephant – in the room. ‘Have you heard about what are called comprehensive schools?’ asked Gallup earlier in 1958, a reasonable question given that there were still fewer than a hundred – one of which, Holland Park, started in September that year under reassuringly traditional lines (uniforms with school crest, house system, streaming). By a narrow majority, most people had heard of comprehensives; by a much larger majority, 58 to 19 per cent, those who had heard of them thought they were ‘a good idea’. Accordingly, it was an urgent political context in which Lloyd’s White Paper served, in The Economist’s sympathetic words, ‘blunt warning’ that the Conservative government ‘will not approve attempts by local authorities to “comprehensivise” schools if they would damage existing grammar schools’– a warning designed to ensure that ‘the grammar schools can be left to get on with their essential job of training the country’s upper quartile of intelligence for the major academic and scientific skills’.23 Grammars and selection on the one hand, comprehensives on the other: by the late 1950s a national debate was gathering steam.
There were already some predictable anti-compers. ‘Greater equality of opportunity is not to be attained easily by some administrative reorganisation of our schools,’ but rather by ‘the civilising effects of extended education on the homes and on the whole community’, warned Eric James of Manchester Grammar School, reviewing Floud et al; ‘a veneer of confidence is being spread about the comprehensive school which has no substance to support it’, claimed the TES soon afterwards, in February 1957, in a fierce attack on the LCC’s determination to push ahead with more comprehensives; and later that year The Economist visited one (probably Kidbrooke in south-east London) and worried not only about ‘too ready a flight in the new schools from academic subjects into pottery and cookery and dressmaking’ but also whether the staff was ‘so “comprehensive-minded” that duty to the majority is all and a special effort with the bright ones thought rather unfair’. In his sceptical response to Lloyd’s White Paper, which he interpreted as the government trying ‘to catch votes by buttering up the secondary modern schools rather than by thinking out what is their purpose’, Christopher Hollis in the Spectator declared that selection went with the grain of the fundamental human reality that there were many children who were ‘simply of the type that learns by doing rather than by reading’, whereas at a comprehensive, ‘if the non-academic boy is to leave school at fifteen and the academic boy to stay on till eighteen, then the non-academic can never in the nature of things attain to a position of prominence and responsibility and is likely to feel more frustrated than if he stayed in a school [i.e. a secondary modern] of his own kind’.
Another seemingly entrenched anti-comper was Harry Rée, liberal-minded head of Watford Grammar School, who in his 1956 book The Essential Grammar School rejected the comprehensive alternative as requiring huge, unwieldy schools and strongly defended the grammars as ladders of social mobility and as the democratic alternative to what he saw as the dying public schools. So too a promising playwright, who had taught at a grammar, in his letter to the New Statesman soon after Hubback’s survey of the secondary modern. ‘The fact is that if a child has failed his 11-plus he is probably stupider, or lazier, or both, than the child who has passed,’ wrote Robert Bolt. ‘Socialists don’t quite like to say this because it seems to imply second-class citizenship, but a human being has his citizenship, not in virtue of his attainments, but in virtue of his mere humanity.’ And, Bolt continued, it was the ‘special style and panache’ of a grammar sixth form ‘which enables children of ability from moneyless homes to compete on a footing of absolute equality with the sprigs of the upper class’, thereby making ‘a Grammar school sixth the only wholly successful intrusion of democracy into the special reserve of the rulers’. A starker warning still, also from a leftish perspective, came in the same magazine a year later (October 1958) from B. Laslett:
Unhappily, these schools [comprehensives] are too new to have the confidence of many parents who care about education, and many, given a choice, will feel unable to take a risk, and will struggle to find money for fees in a misguided effort ‘to buy the best’ for their own children. Among grammar school teachers there is at present strong prejudice against comprehensive schools, and many will get out, if they can, into fee-paying schools.
The comprehensive threat to grammars would, in short, ‘make it more certain than ever that fee-paying schools will flourish’.
Two heads of new comprehensive schools naturally on the other side of the argument were Miss Margaret Miles of Mayfield in Putney and Mrs Harriet Chetwynd of Woodberry Down in Stoke Newington. The comprehensive principle, claimed Miles in a Third Programme talk in 1957, recognised through its heterogeneity that pupils had ‘widely varying interests and abilities and long- or short-term objectives’, whereas in the avowedly homogeneous grammar ‘the average girl’ was ‘often regarded as a dud’. As for the assumption that, in order to provide courses for all abilities, comprehensives by definition would be too big, she asserted that ‘size can give dignity to an institution and it can give stimulus and a sense of adventure’. Chetwynd, writing in the New Statesman in February 1959 to counter an ‘Against the Comprehensive’ article by Rée, impatiently summarised the familiar anti-comp negatives (‘size, chaos, teachers will not mix, children will not mix, parents will not mix, the most able will be neglected, the least able will suffer, schools will be sausage machines, there will be no room for the individual, leadership will go only to the academic seniors’) before setting out her credo:
The Comprehensive school exists to develop a new conception of secondary education based on a positive moral philosophy – that it is right for all children (or at any rate a full cross-section) who will be the next generation’s adult society to spend their adolescent years together; that it is right for their education to be concerned not only with the brain, important though that is, but with the mind and character, the body, the spirit, the standards of judgment – both personal and to the community; that it is right for the individual to have the means to grow to his full stature and yet to discipline himself as a member of the society in which he will live, with its obligations, its rights and limitations.
Others onside included two tireless educationalists, Brian Simon and Robin Pedley, the latter writing the influential Comprehensive Education: A New Approach (1956) and declaring soon afterwards that the abolition of the 11-plus would be ‘a giant stride towards the achievement of national prosperity and individual happiness’; Professor Vernon and his fellow psychologists, arguing that ‘on psychological grounds there would seem to be more to be said in favour of comprehensive schools than against’ while not denying that ‘it would be unwise to ignore the strength of tradition and parental prejudice’; and of course Michael Young, so alert to the dangers of a meritocratic elite.
But what about the ladder for the working class? Raymond Williams did not specifically refer to grammar schools, yet – even though he had been to one himself – they were surely in his sights in a passage towards the end of Culture and Society. Arguing that the ladder was essentially a ‘bourgeois model’ that had ‘produced a real conflict of values within the working class itself’, he claimed that it was especially ‘objectionable’ because ‘it weakens the principle of common betterment, which ought to be an absolute value’ and ‘sweetens the poison of hierarchy’. Williams concluded with unshakable moral certainty: ‘In the end, on any reckoning, the ladder will never do; it is the product of a divided society, and will fall with it.’24
Increasingly the debate would be played out also at local level, nowhere more pertinently than in Leicestershire. There, a Conservative-controlled authority sanctioned in 1957 the ingenious, attention-attracting ‘Leicestershire experiment’, initially applied to two areas of the county and inspired at least in part by the Leicester-based Pedley. ‘It is the county’s boast,’ explained the educational journalist Dinah Brook, ‘that it is not only the first education authority to abolish eleven-plus but also the only one to give parents the freedom to choose a grammar school for their children if they want it.’ Essentially, it was a two-tier approach: ‘All children go from primary school at the age of eleven to a new version of the secondary modern school, called the high school. At fourteen, children whose parents undertake to keep them at school until they are sixteen can transfer to grammar school.’ The TES’s response to the announcement of the scheme was scathing – ‘a wholly needless abdication of leadership’ – but on the ground the early signs were positive, to judge by the reports of the headmaster (Rev. E.S.C. Coggins) of Oadby Gartree High School, one of the county’s new-style secondary moderns. ‘I have not received a single parental objection to the Scheme,’ he reported to his governors in September 1957. As for the open meetings held that term for parents, some of whose children might have been admitted directly to grammar school under the previous system, ‘I did not encounter any feelings of injustice or snobbery. The parents of children in the less academic streams were equally enthusiastic.’
Ironically, in Labour-controlled Leicester itself, selection and the traditional ladder-climbing 11-to-18 grammar remained the order of the day, though from 1959 the external 11-plus examination did give way to what the city’s director of education reassuringly called ‘a standardised junior school assessment of each child’s ability’.25
Passions ran higher in Bristol, and along somewhat more orthodox party lines. ‘If the babblement of confused voices demanding the destruction of grammar schools – and the latest one is that grammar schools breed Tory voters – showed less envy and prejudice and more hard thought about what is to replace them if they are destroyed, they might convince us that they care something about education and less about playing politics,’ declared the headmaster John Garrett at Bristol Grammar School’s prize-giving in October 1957. ‘At a time when trained minds are more than ever necessary to enable the nation to skirt the edge of the abyss of bankruptcy; at a time when men unafraid of doing a hard day’s work are desperately needed, is it wise to jerrymander with schools which have shown they can produce both?’ This was too much for Alderman St John Reade, before the war a teacher at the local public school (Clifton College) but now Labour chairman of Bristol Education Committee and pushing hard for comprehensivisation, including of Garrett’s 425-year-old grammar school: ‘We must, I suppose, expect that our future leaders, now being trained at Bristol Grammar School, will be stout supporters of the “separate but equal” principle advocated by Mr Garrett and Governor Faubus and Little Rock.’ Readers of the Western Daily Press would have picked up the allusion to American bigotry; even so, another letter-writer chose to distance himself from Reade’s structural ambitions. ‘Generalisations about a whole class of school are rash,’ reflected an anonymous Labour Party member who was also a teacher. ‘A really first-rate school of its kind, be it Grammar, Technical, Secondary or Comprehensive, is as different from most of its kind as from quite another kind of school. Where such a school exists, it should be cherished and preserved for the sake of the whole community.’
Up in the north-east in autumn 1958, educational ferment seized Darlington after the town council narrowly voted, despite a split in the ruling Labour group, to establish a comprehensive school at Branksome. ‘We believe every child in this town has the right to a proper education and proper standard,’ declared Councillor Whelan, while Councillor O’Brien was more emollient: ‘We want to absorb the Grammar Schools, not supplant them. We hope the best traditions of these schools will be carried over into the new.’ There ensued a flurry of mainly hostile letters to the Northern Despatch, typified by L. Davis writing sarcastically that ‘when Coun. Whelan has demolished our Queen Elizabeth Grammar School and our sons are receiving their diplomas for rock ’n’ roll at the comprehensive schools, he may turn his attention to other ways in which he can promote our community’s welfare’; that grammar’s Old Boys’ Association took out a half-page ad on ‘YOUR CHILD’S FUTURE’ (‘If Comprehensive Schools are set up in Darlington, no child will have the opportunity of the best education now available . . . Grammar School education requires special gifts and great application . . . It would be harmful to force it on children who are not really fitted for it’); early in 1959 both Macmillan and Gaitskell paid visits to Darlington, touring respectively the grammar and a secondary modern; and finally, in April, the minister, Lloyd, refused permission for the new school to go ahead as proposed, a decision confirmed in June largely on the basis of 2,500 local objections, mainly parental.26
Or take Bradford, whose City Council was bitterly divided during 1957–8 about a seemingly innocuous proposal from the controlling Labour group to build a new secondary school in Flockton Road in the south of the city, next to Bolling Girls’ Grammar School. ‘It must have a disturbing effect on the teachers of that school, knowing that they were going to be integrated into a comprehensive school,’ claimed Councillor J.E.B. Singleton for the Tories in December 1957. ‘What effect would it have on the pupils? They were going to lose the grammar school environment . . . It was all very well saying: “Put them under one roof” but it did not work out in education practice. They had to have a certain amount of environment and they could not bring the clever ones down to the level of the dull ones.’ This provoked, later in the meeting, a telling Tory–Labour exchange:
Coun. Audrey Firth said she did not want a comprehensive school in Bradford. There would be some sort of remote control and it would be a great barrack-like place where the child was not going to be an individual. It could not be with 2,000 children in the same building. Someone mentioned environment, and someone called ‘snobbery’. Surely there was nothing wrong in giving a child environment and background. They should be proud to provide it.
Coun. J. T. Tiernan said the mention of snobbery brought back memories to him. He went to an ordinary elementary school and had to pass a grammar school. The children there told them: ‘My mother has told me we haven’t to play with you.’
Almost a year later the issue was still unresolved, with Labour’s Alderman R. C. Ruth, leader of the anti-selection, pro-comprehensive lobby within the Labour group, giving the larger picture:
Ald. Ruth said it was proved over and over again that children with brains were being denied an opportunity to go to University because of the test made at the age of 11-plus. Was it suggested because they were building a Secondary School near a Grammar School that it was going to reduce the social status of the Grammar School because of the adjacency of boys and girls who fail to pass the 11-plus examination?
Singleton refused to yield ground. ‘Alderman Ruth appeared to have forgotten that in Bradford they had a transfer system between Secondary and Grammar Schools, and no pupil was denied the possibility of going forward to Grammar School and then to University,’ insisted the councillor. ‘It was known in educational circles that schools of a smaller population had a better opportunity of encouraging pupils than had the larger schools. Alderman Ruth had accepted the fact that all children had the same educational attainment. That was not so . . . They could not all be put in one school and attain the same standard at the end.’
Muriel Beadle, wife of the visiting professor of genetics at Oxford in 1958–9, despaired. This keen-eyed American came – after immersing herself in educational debates, visiting several schools of each type and following the ‘hot controversy’ in the spring of 1959 over whether north Oxford should get a comprehensive – to ‘the inescapable conclusion’ that ‘England’s educational problems are not likely to be solved as long as schooling and social status remain so inextricably entwined’. And, like the Bristol letter-writer, she drew a parallel between racial segregation in the USA and educational segregation (whether private/state or grammar/secondary modern) in England:
The sad thing is that secondary education, as education, is so much better overall than it was before 1944. A pity it had to get mixed up with social class, and the business of having a proper accent. That hopeful phrase, ‘parity of esteem’, is as hollow as our ‘separate but equal’. The main difference is that we discriminate against a minority and the English against a majority.27
Amidst the swirling controversies, Labour’s challenge by 1957 was to forge a coherent education policy ahead of the next general election. The Study Group on Education that met for the first time in March comprised mainly MPs, including two Wykehamists in Gaitskell and Crossman, Anthony Greenwood (Merchant Taylors) and Michael Stewart (Marlborough). Soon afterwards, Stewart was in public conversation with Edna Healey, who chaired the managers of a group of schools in London, and they touched on the issue of whether and how comprehensives needed to build a ‘tradition’ of good reputation in order to compete with established schools:
EH – It is true that we don’t want to create a mystique of tradition, but neither do we want to throw the baby out with the bath water. The grammar schools understandably take the view that since they are doing a good job already, why interfere with them . . .
MS – The question that matters is: what is the whole education system turning out? Is it doing the best for the average as well as the clever pupil? History gives no instance of a civilization collapsing because it neglected its élite; but it tells of many which perished because they paid insufficient attention to the mass and allowed a gap to yawn between the élite and the ordinary citizen. Is there not a lesson here for modern England?
Throwing the baby out with the bath water: Healey’s understandable fear reflected a party still deeply conflicted about the grammars, though ultimately it would be Stewart’s take-no-prisoners line that spoke the loudest.
Over the rest of the year the Study Group considered a series of memos and submissions. ‘Our real enemy is, surely, not the examination of children but the separation of them at 11,’ argued Stewart in tandem with Margaret Cole, while on the other key front, it was ‘an illusion’ that ‘if the Labour Party leaves the public schools alone and concentrates on creating comprehensive schools, these latter will become “Everyman’s Eton”, and the special advantages enjoyed by those parents who can pay public school fees will disappear’. For his part, Crossman did not deny the socially pernicious consequences of the old boy network, but warned against policy ‘actuated by motives of envy’ and was adamant about the need to recognise ‘one basic human right – the right of the parent to pay twice for the child’s education’. The great historian and radical R. H. Tawney advocated ‘establishing not a small percentage of free places at a large number of schools, as the Fleming Committee recommended [in 1944], but a large percentage of free places at a smaller number of schools’, claiming that ‘nothing would do more to knock on the head the boarding school social snobbery of today than the existence, side by side with the one-clan Eton, Harrow and the rest, of equally successful boarding schools recruited from all sections of the nation’. And, in another memo, Eric James solemnly stated that grammars had been ‘the strongest solvents of class divisions’, given that ‘Manchester Grammar School, and a few others like it, represent probably a wider social cross-section than almost any other schools, not in England alone, but in the whole Western world (this is literally true), and an academic standard which challenges the very best independent schools.’
The Study Group also heard evidence in December from Mark Abrams, commissioned to survey parental attitudes to education. In terms of working-class parents and the maintained sector, a predictable enough set of findings emerged: that most were ‘quite happy to leave things as they are’; that ‘while emphatic that children with good brains should be given every chance to develop, most parents seemed convinced that their own children were unlikely to obtain this opportunity because of lack of ability’; that ‘they did not feel that their own children were likely to benefit particularly from any improvements in education’; and that ‘the idea of the comprehensive school had made practically no impact upon them’. As for private education, Abrams noted that his survey had revealed ‘an overwhelming majority of parents’, including working-class ones, ‘in favour of private spending on education’, with ‘the general feeling’ being that ‘if parents wanted to send children to private schools there was no reason why they should not do so’. Accordingly, concluded Abrams, ‘any attempt’ to abolish private education ‘or even to stir up hostility against private education would probably only seem curious to the electorate’.
In February 1958 the Study Group decamped to Clacton-on-Sea for a weekend conference, listening to the views of some 18 outside experts. ‘There was no criticism of Labour’s proposals for reorganisation of secondary education on comprehensive lines,’ recorded the official summary of the proceedings, ‘provided that these were submitted in terms of a 15/20-year plan and full provision was made for flexibility in implementing the new system.’ Crossman, however, privately recorded that ‘everybody emphasised how impossible it was to go too fast towards a comprehensive system’.
Gaitskell looked in on the Sunday session and expressed his preference for ‘Flemingism’, in effect the extension of free places, chosen by intellectual ability, in about 30 public schools, but this was dismissed by Crossman as ‘totally impractical’, an opinion that most of the Study Group apparently shared. Altogether, noted the official summary of the session, ‘the discussions were largely inconclusive but seemed to indicate the view that under present circumstances the public schools were best left alone’. Next day, writing up his diary, Crossman reflected wryly how ‘at the conference there was almost universal bewilderment and amazement at the idea, and all for the right reasons – that to attack Manchester Grammar School, while leaving Eton, is the act of a zanie’.28 The syntax was confusing, but the sense was dismayingly clear.
Learning to Live, Labour’s policy document on education (largely drafted by Stewart), was published in mid-June. Under a future Labour government, all local authorities would be required to produce plans ending selection at 11; but at the same time, there was an acceptance that, in terms of the precise mechanics, local circumstances would demand a degree of flexibility. What about the public schools? The document yielded nothing in its ferocious denunciation of the current system – ‘damages national efficiency and offends the sense of justice . . . all who desire equality of opportunity and social justice will agree that the existence of this privileged sector of education is undesirable’ – but the nub, it insisted, was the question of priorities:
There is a risk that argument over this question may give it an importance which, in proportion to the whole field of education, it does not possess. Compare, today, the free national system of education and the private fee-paying system. It is the national system which provides the greater variety and attempts the most difficult tasks. Despite all its present inadequacies, it is vigorous and capable of great advances. To make the nation’s schools fully worthy of the nation will be an immense achievement. Smaller classes, better-qualified teachers, better equipment and a higher proportion of sixth formers in our own schools will open the door of opportunity and steadily reduce the influence of the privileged fee-paying schools in public life. We believe that the next Labour Government should concentrate its educational endeavours on this work.
And ‘therefore’, as Mollie Panter-Downes not long afterwards informed her New Yorker readers, ‘Eton, Harrow, and the others will be left as they are’.
The document inevitably provoked some strong criticism. ‘We are afraid to tackle the public schools to which the wealthy people send their sons,’ lamented the working-class ‘Manny’ Shinwell (a former Labour minister) in The Times, ‘but at the same time are ready to throw overboard the grammar schools, which are for many working-class boys the stepping stones to the universities and a useful career – I would rather abandon Eton, Winchester, Harrow and all the rest of them than sacrifice the advantage of the grammar school.’ The journalist Geoffrey Goodman, in a letter to the New Statesman, was equally appalled: ‘It is almost inconceivable that a party dedicated to the concept of greater equality (to say nothing of Socialism) can argue that privilege of any kind will wither away in an acquisitive society, provided you offer “suitable” alternatives.’ And in the same magazine, the Cambridge literary critic Graham Hough offered a caustic prediction: ‘There will remain to the Labour Party the glory of messing up the grammar schools, the oldest and best of English educational institutions; and of continuing the nineteenth-century public school system for the very few who can afford to pay for it.’29
The party conference was at Scarborough at the end of September. In the same debate that endorsed the anti-11-plus aspect of Learning to Live, Fred Peart, a dissenting member of the Study Group, moved a resolution calling for the integration of public schools into the state system. In support, Gillingham’s delegate, the young Gerald Kaufman, declared that ‘a progressive measure of this sort would be advancing Socialism and gaining middle-class support’, while for Frank Cousins the issue was that something needed to be done about the fact that ‘this country’s economic, international, political and industrial affairs are in the hands of a privileged group who hand the privileges on from place to place, whether it is in the Tory Party or in our Party’. On the other side, Alice Bacon (also of the Study Group) argued that the practical problems of integration were too great and its immediate relative importance too limited, but promised that the ‘scandal’ of public schools getting ‘priority of entry into Oxford and Cambridge’ was ‘something we can stop’, while Stewart dismissed Peart’s resolution as irrelevant: ‘Ask yourselves how many members of your own constituency party want to send their children to public schools.’ The outcome, on a card vote, was a defeat for Peart by 3.54 million votes to 3.07 million. ‘Some day,’ reflected the New Statesman soon afterwards, ‘Labour must clearly make away with the fee-paying public schools; but it had better choose its own time, which will not be until the comprehensive schools have been firmly established in sufficient numbers and have had time to show their merits.’
A range of reasons had contributed to Labour’s unwillingness to take on the public schools – not least an honourable dislike of interfering with people’s liberty, a dislike felt as much by Bevan as by Gaitskell and Crossman. But perhaps the last word should go to Sir Richard Acland, reviewing Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1959. According to this singular man – Rugby and Balliol, from 1935 a Liberal MP, then founding member during the war of the socialist Common Wealth Party, later a Labour MP until in 1955 resigning from the party over its support for nuclear weapons – Young’s optimistic forecast that by the end of the 1970s the public-school question would be (in Acland’s paraphrasing words) ‘quietly and effortlessly eliminated’ as a result of vastly increased educational expenditure on the state system was ‘almost wholly divorced from reality’:
The privilege of public school education has little to do with better teachers – man for man I doubt if they are very much superior to grammar school staff. Still less has it anything to do with some subtle atmosphere distilled from the spirit of Matthew Arnold hovering in the quads. It is based on something far more material which I very seldom see mentioned. Having them under their hands all day long the public schools can give their pupils many more hours of education per week.
At a typical public school known to me the boys have 38 hours of organised instruction per week, including all games, and 1½ hours prep. per night in quiet study or under discipline in hall. The corresponding figure for Wandsworth School (comprehensive) where I taught last year is 28 hours, including 1 hour’s prep. in a home where there may be no escape from the tele. The other material factor is size of class – averaging about 22 compared with 32 at Wandsworth.
Speaking to a sixth form at a public school recently I had to say to them: ‘Of those at Wandsworth who will seriously try to reach university this year and will fail, two-thirds would succeed if they could work under your conditions; of you who will succeed in entering university, two-thirds would fail if you worked under Wandsworth conditions.’
This is the measure of the educational privilege which the rich can buy. This is the reason why no wealthy socialist can do other than send his son to public school – he cannot face the vision of his own son, aged 21 and perhaps by then a keen Conservative or Liberal, saying to him: ‘You had the means of giving me the best chance, and for your blasted political humbug you didn’t do it.’
And this is the reason why the Labour Party, in the present temper of the nation, does not and dare not propose to end public schools. Putting it quite brutally, they know that against such an appalling invasion of privilege and inequality, the rich would ‘go on strike’ in one way or another and bring the economic life of the community to chaos in which (once again in the present temper of the nation) the government would not receive such zestful backing from workers and middle-classes as would win from the chaos a government victory over the rich.
Therefore, let it be perfectly clear, we are not going to have Michael Young’s Meritocracy or anything like it merely by accentuating our present tendencies.30