Posh? His grandad was a lorry driver
IT’S often assumed that with his double-barrelled name, wellspoken tones, Eton and Oxford education and double-breasted suits, Jacob Rees-Mogg is upper class or even aristocratic. Yet on the British social scale, this is wide of the mark, as he would no doubt be the first to acknowledge.
When the broadcaster Andrew Neil asked him in 2010: ‘So, what class are you?’ Rees-Mogg blushed slightly and replied: ‘I’m a man of Somerset.’
Certainly his forebears never owned a great estate, nor a hereditary title. He has been privileged, but that is different from being born into great prosperity or being truly ‘posh’.
Over the years Jacob Rees-Mogg has said very little about his mother Gillian’s family. But archival research has shown that when his grandfather Thomas Morris married his grandmother Eileen in 1934, the former was a milk contractor in Ilford, Essex. Thomas’s own father – Jacob’s great-grandfather – had been a dairyman himself.
By the time Gillian was born in 1939, her father had left the milk business and, according to a census of the time, was a ‘motor lorry driver’ at the outbreak of the Second World War. He later became a sales representative at a company called Car Mart, based in Euston Road in Central London.
Public records show that Gillian’s mother’s family, whose surname was Shakespeare, worked in a variety of manual jobs. Her grandfather, Jacob’s great-grandfather, Christopher Shakespeare, was a printer and compositor who lived in Northern Ireland at the time of the 1911 Census. Friends of the Rees-Moggs are united in their praise for Gillian and speak fondly of her as a ‘brilliant mother’ and ‘lovely woman’ whose unwavering support for her husband William was an essential ingredient of his successful journalistic career.
During his wedding speech, Jacob is said to have praised his father as ‘the greatest living Englishman’, while according to a guest: ‘He also said he would like to say his mother was the greatest living Englishwoman, but Margaret Thatcher was still around.’