At the friction point of two cultures

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Marion Oliver
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1 At the friction point of two cultures The story of a working class boy struggling to keep his identity Introduction This presentation is about how we experience the issue of class. It is also about personal identity and how class shapes that identity. It is also, essentially about me. Ever since I was taken into the selective education system which operated in the UK when I was 11 [back in 1966], I have been aware, often unconsciously, that my personal identity and self-esteem have been shaped by the culture and backdrop of my class. And, as I have progressed through my professional and educational career my interest in the way that we experience class and the way it continues to shape our world view has grown. The title of this presentation is taken from the British cultural critic, Richard Hoggart, whose influential book The Uses of Literacy [1957] popularised the study of working class culture and addressed the issue of what is now often called social mobility. To what degree does it make sense to talk about people moving out of their class and into another? Is our class identity measured only in terms of how we accumulate economic, cultural or symbolic capital or is there something deeper about our sense of self that is involved in this something which touches on emotional and deep-seated attachment to a set of cultural mores that we often find difficult to locate or articulate? What is clear is that working class individuals who find themselves living lives surrounded by the trappings and symbols of a lifestyle more usually associated with the middle class often feels the conflict and contradictions inherent in this. Hoggart described this as being at the friction point of two cultures [pg. 239] and when I first read this phrase I immediately understood what he meant because it so clearly spoke to my own experience. However, despite the recognition I felt for Hoggart s expression of personal conflict, I found he had little more to offer to me. His study speaks of the working class individual experiencing this encounter with the middle class as something which scars him at a psychological as well as sociological level, leaving him or her cowed or shamed by this coming together of worlds: He cannot face squarely his own working class, for that, since the intuitive links have gone, would require a greater command in facing himself than he is capable of. Sometimes he is ashamed of his origins; he has learned to turn up his nose, to be a bit superior about much in working class manners. [Pg 246] I instinctively felt I could not recognise or sympathise with this. Yes, I knew I was not of the middle class despite having access to the institutions and symbols of that class but equally I was also sure I was working class and had not sought to abandon that 1 Page

I am on a journey to find some answers about my class identity and at the moment it s a journey without an end. Why not let me take you some part along the way.

no central heating. I lived with my father, who was a bricklayer, and my mother who worked part-time in a number of casual factory assembly jobs.

2 identity. And I felt no shame. In fact I had a fierce sense of loyalty and commitment to my class. Something different was happening here that wasn t explained by the literature of embourgeoisement or the politics of social mobility. I am on a journey to find some answers about my class identity and at the moment it s a journey without an end. Why not let me take you some part along the way. A bit of my history I was born in 1953 in Birmingham, England, and grew up in working class family, in a working class inner city environment where the houses were small, had outside toilets and had no central heating. I lived with my father, who was a bricklayer, and my mother who worked part-time in a number of casual factory assembly jobs. I was a middle child of three and I had grandparents, uncles and aunts all living within a radius of two or three miles. My grandparents lived on the same street as my family, as did many of the men with whom my father worked and socialised. Within the city we lived as if we were a village community and I only rarely and with trepidation left the safety and security of that environment. My school, to which I walked every day, was close at hand and my school-friends all boys shared my values, my experiences and provided me with a peer group in which I had security and confidence to grow and express opinions on a whole wide range of things, including our aspirations for the future. 2 Page

My world was: Safe with a family close to hand Secure friends allowed me to express myself without judgement Small we

However, money, or the lack of it, was never made to be an issue for me as a child.

for the economy and my family benefited from the stability this bought.

clothing and we continued to live almost as if still in the grip of wartime shortages and rationing.

3 My world was: Safe with a family close to hand Secure friends allowed me to express myself without judgement Small we lived a village-style life in an urban setting It is only in retrospect I understand now that we were also poor. However, money, or the lack of it, was never made to be an issue for me as a child. My parents earned little but they did earn it on a regular basis this was a period of full employment and a boom time for the economy and my family benefited from the stability this bought. Both of my parents drank in moderation as part of their social life and smoked in a way that was typical of all adults I knew in my childhood. Christmas and birthdays were celebrated but there was never much spare money for luxury household goods or replacement clothing and we continued to live almost as if still in the grip of wartime shortages and rationing. This lack of material goods did not, at this age, prevent me from spending long evenings and weekends playing in one of the many municipal parks that the Victorian benefactors of Birmingham had established across the city and I was happy to spend what little disposable income I had on sweets, boy s comics and football heroes. 3 Page

4 Entering a foreign world At the age of 11 the tranquillity of the world was shattered by my transition to secondary school. At this time the UK had a functionalist model of secondary school education based on a tri-partite system. This was characterised by a separation of children into grammar, technical or secondary modern schools each representing a part of the well established class structure of the UK. The grammar school would produce the future decision makers and the political elite; technical schools would provide the new lower-middle class and blue-collar workers and the secondary modern would provide an education, devoid of aspiration, for the bulk of the working class. I was allocated a place at a technical school across the other side of Birmingham from where I lived and had none of my friends to keep me company. My parents didn t own a car and so I travelled every day on public transport for over an hour each way, there and back. The Lordswood Boys School Badge Looking back once again to Richard Hoggart s Uses of Literacy, he identifies how the working class child who is thrust into this environment feels compelled to prove his worth : even though his family may push him very little, he will probably push himself harder than he should He tends to over-stress the importance of examinations He discovers a technique of apparent learning, of the acquiring of facts rather than the handling and use facts. And so school became an extended exercise in self-worth and building my own selfesteem. I was always aware of not knowing the codes of proper behaviour, of being the other excluded by what I could never know. However, forced into self-sufficiency I was also forced to experiment. And this took me into the world of reading and books until now a foreign country to me. I had grown up in a house where there were only two books a small encyclopaedia and an atlas and reading for information or pleasure had never been any part of our family experience. But now I discovered that books could speak to me directly and about a 4 Page

range of issues I thought that only I ever thought about.

there to the world of non-fiction and intellectual debate.

5 range of issues I thought that only I ever thought about. I moved from the world of the comic book to the serious novel and from there to the world of non-fiction and intellectual debate. From : To And when I left school after my exams I continued to see books as the only real thing in my life. Books were everything ideas, pleasure, excitement. And in pursuit of them I trained as a bookseller and went to work in Birmingham s biggest bookshop. 5 Page

6 But working with books wasn t enough, I needed more engagement with them as the carriers of ideas and the repository of knowledge. I knew that I had to go on to university and to continue to explore what this storehouse of the intellect could offer. I went to the University of Wales in Bangor. I went with a rich mix of emotions: Excitement Growing self reliance Anticipation of the world of possibilities Intoxicated by ideas Full of fear and self-doubt But the world of university education didn t open for me in the way it did for others. I went to study English Literature and found myself exposed to the great writers but I was unable to connect with them. I was shown how the great novels taught us taste and discernment, that this exposure to taste civilised us and transmitted value. Culture, as embodied by Matthew Arnold [1876], was the bastion against anarchy : it was the triumph of the middle classes over the masses. What sense was I to make of this? I was not middle class, I was working class. The working classes were not represented on my course in fact they were seen as positively undesirable; at best embodiments of populist junk fiction. I was being invited to marginalise the culture I came from and, further, to collude in the assumption that the true hegemonic literary discourse was really a middle class one. 6 Page

7 All the messages of my university education were clear: Discernment and taste make for a good education A good education means a good job A good job means good money Good money means the good life The good life is a middle-class life But I knew that however much I was being exposed to the cultural and symbolic capital of the middle class, this did not make me middle class. The conscious decision to retain, nurture and cherish my working class identity was much more powerful than the impact of my environment. For the first time I asked myself the question: why does everyone want to make me middle class when I know that s not where I belong? Looking for answers Richard Hoggart had spoken of the working class boy feeling shame over his inability to identify with his own class and that the education system effectively placed him between two cultures and belonging to none. But this was not what I felt: I had no shame for my class and no desire to belong to another. Clearly the answers for me lay elsewhere and I began to find them in the writings of other great British cultural and class theorists. Whilst we need to acknowledge the tensions that exist, the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Alan Sinfield and Carolyn Steedman have shown us that shame doesn t have to be the dominant emotion. We can celebrate and retain our working class identity as a positive force; we can acknowledge that it is working class culture that has given us some of the most significant collective cultural, social and political institutions in the shape of the trade union movement and the co-operative movement. More importantly, we need not see class as hierarchical. We need not characterise working class culture as low and middle class culture as high and movement out of the working class need not be a necessary part of betterment. The working class may have, as Raymond Williams puts it, their own structure of feeling [1977] a valuebased culture that emotionally binds them together. Moving on a young man s epiphony The work of these commentators gave me the confidence and the theoretical underpinning to make some demands; to shape a manifesto that would act as a roadmap for my journey of discovery. I demand the right for the working class to be: Educated Ambitious Creative Politically aware Financially secure 7 Page

8 Culturally eclectic And to remain working class Furthermore I demanded: The right not to be colonised by the middle class Not to be co-opted into their cultural values or mores Not to conform to their hegemonic concepts of good taste Not to participate in their attempts to insist on classifications of high and low cultures. These simple demands have steered me on since I left university and they have, in many ways, determined the shape of my adult life. I am still researching class, I am more than ever interested in identity and how much agency we can exercise over how the world sees us. I still know much less than I feel. So do I know what I am? No. But there are some things I can share with you: I am working class I am educated and working class I am educated, financially secure and working class I am educated, financially secure, politically aware and working class I am everything that frightens the middle classes Terry Potter Senior Lecturer Working with Children, Young People and Families Newman University College 8 Page

9 References Arnold, M. [1876] 2006 ed. Culture and Anarchy Oxford : Oxford World Classics Hoggart, R. [1957] Uses of Literacy London : Chatto and Windus Williams, R. [1977] Marxism and Literature Oxford: OUP 9 Page

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