JENNI MURRAY

I’m guilty of pretending to be working class too

THERE was a slight sense of guilt as I read the headline ‘Affluent actors cast themselves as working-class heroes,’ earlier this week. Sociologists at the London School of Economics conducted 175 interviews with actors, TV professionals, architects and accountants and found a significant number of those who had a middle-class background claimed to be working class.

There is, according to the research, ‘a symbolic market for downplaying class privilege in these professions,’ and a pressure ‘to ward off suspicions of hereditary privilege.’ So, why the guilt?

I’m afraid I’ve always described myself as working class, feeling really proud of my father’s assertion when I joined the BBC that I had ‘come a long way’.

I believed I had. My grandfathers on both sides had worked at the pit in Barnsley, South Yorkshire.

My paternal grandfather was a miner who died in his early 50s as a result of the miner’s lung disease, silicosis, caused by constant inhalation of dust underground.

My maternal grandfather was a slight cut above, working as a winder on the surface of the mine, winding men up and down to their work.

My father left school at the age of 14, got a job in a local TV repair shop, and he and my mother began married life with my maternal grandparents. Then, when I was three, they got a council house.

It was my mother who orchestrated the changes that brought us to what I must agree was the middle class.

There’s nothing so powerful as a pushy woman to force a man to, as my father put it, ‘pull himself up by his bootstraps’.

He went to night school, qualified as an electrical engineer, bought a house and made sure there was enough money for me to have elocution lessons, learn to ride and be beautifully dressed.

By the age of four I was a competent reader and desperate for school. The family pooled their resources to send me to the feepaying convent school. It was the only institution that would take such a young child. I flourished. Education was central to my parents’ plans for me. When I passed the 11-plus, I fulfilled their dream of their daughter becoming a grammar-school girl. I have no doubt my elevation to the middle class, with an accent that was far from broad Barnsley, helped open the doors to the BBC. Regional accents were unheard of among broadcasters in the early 1970s. Among the interviewees in the research were women, now working in the acting profession, with similar backgrounds to mine, who claimed they were working class. The study adds: ‘By framing their life as an upward struggle against the odds, they misrepresent themselves as more worthy and more deserving.’ So, there we are. No more pretending. I and so many others are middle class and successful, but we must never forget the parents who worked so hard to get us there and I’ll try never to describe my mother as ‘pushy’ again. Ambitious, determined and proud is what she was, and I thank her for it.