‘Class doesn’t matter much any more,’ declares Prime Minister Harold Wilson as Britain steps into the white-coated era of modern industry.
‘I don’t think class distinction exists — not in my experience anyway,’ echoes Betty Kenward, long-serving writer of Jennifer’s Diary, the social column documenting the English upper classes and one of seven figures interviewed by John Heilpern for ‘The Class War’ issue of 23 October 1966. That said, public schools teach ‘what the other schools lack’: to lead, in the Army and the Empire – ‘though that’s going’, of course.
Despite being educated at a girls’ boarding school, 22-year-old Elizabeth Flower attends a different type of party, working as a bunny girl at the Playboy Club London. Having done ‘deb season for a year’, Elizabeth ‘became a bunny because it seemed like a good idea at the time’ and thinks she’d vote for Labour, although Harold Wilson ‘is a bit of a twit’.
A more committed Labour supporter is author Gareth Powell, 32. ‘We were working class. Everyone fools themselves that the revolution has come. There’s still a stack of publishers who wouldn’t offer me a job. I’ve got my Rolls, so bugger them. Life’s great!’
Author Dennis Potter agrees. His ‘betrayal’ of his mining culture notwithstanding, ‘talk of a social revolution is just nonsense’. Working class Lord Ted Willis shares this sentiment, avowing that to give an earldom to people of ‘his type’ is to ‘lower the currency’. Eton and Oxford-educated Jeremy Marston concurs: ‘You can’t really cross over barriers.’
Optimism prevails in Ernest Bishop, the restaurant receptionist of the Ritz Hotel, who’s got to know ‘all the top people’. He doesn’t ‘bow and scrape’ though — after all, ‘we’re all the same. Really we’re all the same. Don’t you agree — don’t you think so, sir?’
