CLASS

Cleese & Class

John Cleese was born in a middle-to-lower middle-class family. His parents, through their probity, his ability, and the fact that he was an only child, were able to afford to send him to a local, middle-ranking public school. The accent that he developed implied that he came from a socially more elevated background than he did. He went to the University of Cambridge, where, as a member of The Footlights club, he blossomed as a comic writer and performer.

Cleese was almost 2m.-tall, Ronnie Barker was of average height, and Ronnie Corbett was short. In 1970 the trio performed The Class Sketch on the Frost On Sunday television show. In this, they stood in a line shoulder-to-shoulder. Cleese played an upper-class individual (upper-middle would be more accurate), Barker a middle-class one, and Corbett a working-class one. The lines that they delivered described why they physically/socially they looked up or down on one another. The material pointed out the absurdity of evaluating an individual on the grounds of class.

Cleese went on to become one of the driving forces in the group that created Monty Python's Flying Circus. During that period, he lived in a flat on Basil Street, behind Harrods. The other residents were largely loud, over-privileged, braying youths, who felt entitled to make as much noise as they wished to at any time of the day or night. This conduct interfered with his being able to sleep. The experience promted him to write the Upper Class Twit Of The Year sketch for the Circus.

Location: Flat 28 Lincoln House, Basil Street, SW3 1AN (orange, purple)

Website: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppv97Sih14 (Frost) www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGxSM5y7Pfs (Twit)

The College of Arms

The College of Arms issues coats of arms both to individuals and to corporate bodies. Legally, it is part of the Royal Household. The officers of the College conduct heraldic and genealogical research. For this work they charge fees. They have been described as being dressed like playing card jacks.

In the Middle Ages heralds organised tournaments. The knights who attended these would have had their coats of arms emblazoned upon their shields. Heralds developed expertise about these emblems. Since the right to bear such a coat was often dependent upon descent, the officials went on to become knowledgeable about genealogy.

In 1420 the royal heralds started acting as a corporate body. The College of Arms was founded in 1484. It was given a property at Coldharbour on Upper Thames Street. The following year King Henry VII seized the throne. He repossessed his predecessor's gift and conferred it upon his mother. The College was reincorporated in 1555.

The institution is supervised by the Earl Marshal, an office that is held in a hereditary manner by the Dukes of Norfolk. This supervision was challenged by the heralds; in 1673 the issue was decided clearly in the Earl Marshal's favour. The heralds perform roles in some of the state ceremonies that are organised by the official, such as coronations, the State Opening of Parliament, and State Funerals.

The duties of the heralds included proclaiming the ends of wars. In 1856 James Planch (1796-1880) the Rouge Croix Pursuivant announced that the Crimean War had ended. He was a playwright who had become interested in historical costumes and then antiquarianism.

Location: 130 Queen Victoria Street, EC4V 4BT (purple, blue)

Website: www.college-of-arms.gov.uk

Armorial Imagery

The imagery that the College authorises is not limited to what was used in the Middle Ages. The senior mandarin Brian Cubborn (1928-2015) was awarded a knighthood in 1977. He was not from an armorial family and therefore had to be issued with a coat of arms. The crest was surmounted by a Kent oast house - he had one of his farm and had converted it into a dwelling - bookended by a pair of baboons.

See Also: CIVIL SERVANTS

Gentlemen Executioners

The executioner Jack Ketch (d.1686) was given to terming himself an Esquire . This was because one of his predecessors, Gregory Brandon, had been granted a coat of arms in 1616. It is believed that the responsible official at the College had not known either Brandon's trade or his reputation.

See Also: EXECUTIONS Executioners, Jack Ketch

Trade

The 6^th Duke of Somerset employed his distant patrilineal kinsman James Seymour (1702-1752), an equestrian artist, to create a series of paintings of horses at Petworth, which was one his country houses. The work was commenced and progressed well. The artist was invited one day to dine with his grace. The latter toasted the former in a condescendingly jocular manner Cousin Seymour, your health! The painter made bold by this gape, replied I really believe I have the honour to belong to your Grace's family. This was too much for the peer s pomposity. He was willing to make a joke about the possibility that he could be related to a tradesman but he was not prepared to admit to be the kinsman of one. He promptly rose from the table and left the room. The following day the painter was paid off for the work he had done and dismissed.

Finding another artist who had the necessary skill to be able to finish the paintings proved to be hard. With time, it became apparent that only Seymour could complete them. Somerset invited him to return to Petworth to complete the task. The painter sent the haughty reply My Lord Duke, I will now prove I am of your family, for I decline to come.

As craftsmen, painters were not regarded as being sufficient social standing to be granted coats of arms. Following the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, its members became entitled to the distinction.

Location: Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 1LA The Academy's initial home. (orange, purple)

See Also: COACHES Coach Precedence

Cricket

At some county cricket grounds, the gentlemen and the players had separate changing rooms from one another. On the scorecards the formers initial would be placed before their surnames, while the latters would be placed after theirs. In 1932 Wally Hammond, a professional, switched to amateur status so that he could assume the English captaincy. Two decades later Len Hutton declined to follow this example. He became the first professional player to captain the national side. In 1962 amateurism was abolished in cricket.

See Also: CRICKET; SOCCER Class and Soccer

Debutantes

The practice of presenting debutantes at court was instituted by Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III.

One of the honours of the season was to be the debutante who to cut the cake at Queen Charlotte's Ball.

Food

In Britain there is a social hierarchy of supermarkets. In London this is topped by Waitrose. In the North-West of England, Booths is its counterpart.

See Also: ICE CREAM Belgravia

Intellectuals

The funeral of the scientist Sir Isaac Newton was held in Westminster Abbey in 1727. The spectacle prompted the French author Voltaire to write of how elsewhere in Europe it was how they treated emperors, in England it was how they treated intellectuals.

Middle-Class

There is a definition that being middle-class is buying wine and not drinking it on the same day.

See Also: DETECTIVE FICTION Class

The Lattetude Festival

Latte is regarded as being a middle-class way of drinking coffee. The Latitude Festival is known as the Lattetude Festival because of the social profile of people who go to it.

Website: www.latitudefestival.com

The Military

Prior to the First World War, Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, was aware that the expense of uniforms was a major deterrent to men of ability but modest means entering the Royal Navy's officer corps and rising through its ranks.

During the First World War the British Army was losing junior officers at such a rate that it created a class of temporary gentlemen who could be granted commissions. The future mountaineer Morris Wilson, the son of a Yorkshire mill owner, was granted the status.

A Place Through

The diarist Henry Chips Channon recorded how Lady Scarbrough took against the Astors social pretensions. She inquired, What did they do in the War of the Roses?

Physical Expression

A Snug Divide

The Lamb pub in Lamb Conduit Street had a Victorian cut-glass screen that pivoted. This meant that employees in the public bar would not have to see their employers in the saloon bar and vice versa.

Location: 94 Lamb's Conduit Street, WC1N 3LZ (purple, yellow)

See Also: PUBS

Website: www.thelamblondon.com

A Wall Between Us

In 1926 a 7ft.-tall wall was built in Bromley to block off a posh area from the Downham Estate, whose residents were regarded as being declass . This was done without Bromley Council s permission. It was demolished in 1950.

Location: Alexandra Crescent, BR1 4ET

Precedence

In 1945 Louis Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia, refused a barony because it would deprive him of the precedence that he enjoyed over barons as the younger son of a marquis. He wanted to be made a viscount. Eventually, he secured his wish despite the move being opposed by a number of senior military figures.

The Revolution Has Been Cancelled

Ke Hua (1915-2019) served as China's ambassador to Britain from 1978 until 1983. As such, he spouted what was expected of him by China's Foreign Ministry. However, he had developed serious doubts about the reality of the regime's economic policies. As a young man, he had been taught that Britain's class system meant that the rulers did not look after the people and that this would inevitably lead to a violent revolution that would result in the workers victory. However, the experience of having a child treated for free by the N.H.S. led him to conclude that no such thing would happen.

Location: The Chinese Embassy, 49-51 Portland Place, W1B 1JL (blue, brown)

Sloane Rangers

Ann Barr's (1929-2015) paternal grandfather invented the soft drink Irn Bru. In 1971, after a series of jobs, she found her niche as the features editor and deputy editor of Harpers & Queen. The limited budget was a factor that induced her to encourage young writers such as were Craig Brown, Nicholas Coleridge, Loyd Grossman, Jon Savage, and Mary Ann Sieghart. She encountered Peter York at a film preview. Soon afterwards she was referring to him as Clever, clever, brilliant Peter. In his turn, he referred to her as being his honorary aunt .

Barr appreciated that a series of social tribes were emerging from the social chaos of the 1960s. Initially, the type was going to be dubbed the Connaught Ranger, however, Martina Margetts, a sub-editor, suggested Sloane as being better.

Starting in October 1975 Barr commissioned a series of articles about female Sloane Rangers. Barr herself was aware that she had a degree of personal eccentricity and that her own fashion sense - she was inclined to dress in Thea Porter-designed clothes - was not nuanced enough to be able to identify the subtleties of Sloanehood. Therefore, she consulted an arbiter upon the finer points. This was Deidre, the wife of a polo-playing army officer.

The multi-authored The Official Preppy Handbook was published in the United States in 1980. Barr concluded that there might be scope for using it as a model for updating Nancy Mitford's essay on U and Non-U. The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published in 1982. The Left-leaning New Society magazine granted the book the distinction of a review. The tome was reprinted five times within its first year of publication. It went on to sell over a million copies.

Barr was by nature much more reticent than York. Therefore, he fronted most of the book's publicity. A view developed that it had been principally his creation. Barr came to resent this and formed the opinion that he had done not enough to disabuse people of it.

Barr s final large literary endeavour was to ghost Dream Weaver (1983), the memoir of Elisabeth Furse, a Communist activist.

Location: 38 North Audley Street, W1K 6ZW. Barr's childhood home. (blue, purple)

Sloane Square, SW1W 8EG (purple, yellow)

See Also: PUBS The Sloaney Pony

Working Class

Not

Michael Meacher (1939-2015) was a Bennite Labour M.P. who liked to depict himself as being the son of a farm labourer. Alan Watkins, a journalist on The Observer newspaper, called this image into doubt. The politician sued him in the High Court. It emerged that Meacher s father had been an accountant who had retired to run the family holding. The case was decided in Watkins's favour.

Too Many

Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was a prominent birth control advocate. She had a particular interest in reducing the number of working-class births. She regarded them as being at the wrong end of the social scale and this was threatening the English race. She became a passionate advocate of eugenics.

Workplace Segregation and Prejudice

See Also: FOOD Canteens

All The Fun of The Fair

Historically, circus people looked down upon fairground people. The latter are more of a community, whereas a circus is built around an act.

See Also: CIRCUSES, DISAPPPEARED

Picky Business

Oscar Wilde was sentenced to first class hard labour on the treadmill for six hours a day at Pentonville Prison. He collapsed within days. He was reassigned to unravelling old rope (picking oakum).

David Backhouse 2024