What does middle class mean to you?

Confession (gulp) when I moved from Lancashire to Surrey in the 70s, I spent quite a considerable time losing my Northern accent as I felt like a fish out of water. I would try to avoid having a 'bath' or cutting the 'grass' in case I was caught out. You can imagine the state I lived in, dirty and kept losing the cat!

People move around much more now and I'd like to think I wouldn't bother but I still find myself adopting the speech patterns of who I'm with, to some degree. Back up North, I try and speak Northern, down in the Surrey Stockbroker belt I can vary from regal to Eastend.

Pathetic or what?

I think that's natural, Sel. When my daughter, aged 8, went to stay with her gran in Manchester for a week she came back with a broad northern accent - it just wore off after a couple of days!

Middle class, for me, is having the confidence to not mind if you don't fit in with 'the crowd', so one acquires a look which puts people off making snobbish comments or asking snobbish questions about your accent or which school you went to. They somehow know that you don't care what they think about your open and clear northern vowels and that you are not impressed with posh names and labels and categorisations.

And so on.

A good anti-snob education is a strength, and very middle class.

Agree

My Northern accent has never held me back and I think if other people had a problem with it - it was their problem! I don't mind if it stops me being middle class!
All my grandchidren grew up in Kent and have accentless voices. When they moved to Yorkshire, the locals were intrigued and often asked them to say something in their 'posh' accent. After several years 'up North', only one of the ten had picked up a bit of the local accent - and I think she did it for fun. She is now at university in Hull.
When three of them moved to NZ they had no trouble fitting in and again the 'natives' seemed to like the way they spoke.
Perhaps it is because they are all quite confident and outgoing.
One thing I have found is that advertisers tend to like regional accents because people trust us more - perhaps they think we are too thick to be con artists!
Much as I love the Scottish accent normally, I do find the man on the Co-op ad who says 'guid with fuid' a bit irritating.

Greatnan That's probably less to do with his accent than the irritation factor of all advertisements.

Spent 3 years living in Germany, 'attached' to the Army.
One of the best 'putdowns' : 'I remember her when she was a rankers wife'.

It seemed that the Army emphasised class divide.
We were given 'Officer status' which meant we were allocated a bigger house, had a larger dining table and sideboard (presumably for entertaining!) when 'other' families were often squashed into smaller properties.

Those Officers who had 'come up throught the ranks' referred to Sandhurst Officers (mostly also educated in Public Schools) as 'Ruperts'.

Officers children were sent back to the U.K. often to be educated in 'minor' public schools, we had our boys with us and they attended the 'Army' school.
A bad move, educationally, as the ethos of the school was not to encourage individual achievement. ( No. 2 son was furious that he was only allowed to sit a maximum of 8 GCSEs, when his brother passed 11 '0' levels just before we moved).

I hope things have changed!

I suspect that all the armed forces are as class-ridden as ever. I have spent some time looking up the origin of the description of the British troops in WW1 as 'lions led by donkeys' - it seems that a similar phrase was used as early as 1871, of the French army.
My grandson is waiting for a date to enter the RN - he won't be going in as an officer cadet because he doesn't have the requisite A-levels, but he will be getting specialist training as a Bomb Clearance Diver. With unemployment running so high in East Yorkshire, this is his best chance of a career but I have mixed feelings about it. He has signed up for 18 years.

Bags, we are of one mind on this. In my post near the beginning of this thread I said: Not particularly caring what class people think you are.

Goodo, anno! And as my earlier post on the thread said, what defines middle class is, quite simply, education. Education is what made the middle classes emerge and education is what they stand for now, and gives them strength in the face of both outright snobbishness and inverted snobbishness.

<Ponder> Maybe true middle classness is a lack of snobbery caused by open-mindedness caused by good education.

On service attitudes, I seem to recall the description 'Officers and their Ladies, NCOs and their wives, other ranks and their women...', although I wouldn't swear to its accuracy!

My service time was the latter part of the 1950s - I wonder how much it has all changed since then?

Bags you are the most self confident person I have ever known! I'm full of admiration and I'm taking lessons

You've got that correct, feelebaum. My DH did his National Service at that time and oddly enough spoke of that description just the other day. Don't think much has changed.

baubles, I'm with you there. Bags is quietly self-confident, while being respectful of others.

Feetlebaum and Marell you are right about the ladies, wives and women. There was a revolt of the naval wives just before I married a sailor in 1967, and the navy had to stop it. So never suffered that insult.

When our lads decided to join the Australian Army Reserves, their Dad said "only if you go as officers". He didn't want anyone to subject them to snobbery. Not that there's much of that sort of thing in the Australian forces, but our youngest, now a captain, was always called 'the digger with (officer's) pips' because he was so very down to earth, and always dug his own latrine!!!

baubles, my teachers called it boldness! My dad called it contrasuggestibility, which he encouraged.

A friend of mine whose husband was a non-officer in the navy told me this story. She was at a posh navy dinner party. The 'wives' were chatting away over / while the men (mainly officers but not all, including her husband who wasn't, though he was promoted later) were elsewhere. When the husbands returned and the 'ladies' realised my friend's husband was not "officer class" they stopped speaking to her for the rest of the evening. I don't think she was flabbergasted, just disgusted, but I was flabbergasted when she told me. Such snobs!

Bags ...you are unique, and I love you.

Just reading the thread about children giving up their seats and remembered a bus driver telling me that children and adults from council estates always thanked her. Those from the middle class 'GoldenTriangle' rarely did. Bad manners and thoughtlessness are a definite sign of middle classness.

Quite a generalisation there NfkDumpling.

DH told me that although during the day, the 'women' could mix at such things as coffee mornings etc that were organised by officers' and sgt majors' wives, in the evenings if there was a social event it was back to what rank the husband held: Corporals' Mess, Sergeants' Mess, and Officers' Mess. No-one from different ranks was allowed to mix/socialise in these unless invited. Many good friendships have been lost because a soldier has been given promotion.

Well yes, Kitty of course! 4 x 4's, unruly children with really weird names, unthinking and bad mannered! On the other hand 4 x 4's, well turned out perfectly mannered children with names like George and Alice, very caring and volunteer a lot for no reward. Takes all sorts!

What's with the labelling and categorising, folks?

greatnan We came back to the NW of England in the 90s for 5 years. DH being sent by the German government, was part of the diplomatic service
(only for those years out of Germany) I met some official to do with schools and he was the one who asked me not only where I came from but which school I had been to.
He knew Sheffield and his business with my husband was about the teaching of German. He was really in a mess with me. Due to the fact that I was married to DH, he couldn't place me and struggled. He was such a snob. The more he struggled, the more I confused him.

The fact of NZ is following. This family is from very old stock and moved North to an area like a golf course near the sea and bought a plot of land as did many other similar people. To enter this land you need a card to access it. I can't listen to their conversation without getting upset. I have heard that 'he' doesn't like me. They used to live in Auckland but that would be impossible now according to him!
As for me I suppose I am middle class, because I'm not working class nor am I upper class. We had a sitting room with a piano in it, which I learned to play as a child. My father went to a private school but mother had moved up. She was working class, so married well as they say. They called it upward mobility and apparently according to sociologists this has now ceased.

According to my grandmother, I married above myself. My family worked for the Post Office while DH's father was a journalist. She was most upset when she discovered others in my new family worked on the railways!

I don't think you can label everybody on the strength of one person who knew Sheffield well, or one small enclave in NZ
My daughter's experience in South Island has been entirely different.

Looking back at all the previous posts education really seems to make the difference. I don't mean a cosseted,old school tie, private education because I would happily do away with private schools if I could, but a good general education means that you can confidently form opinions and not blindly follow whatever the latest flavour of the month is. You can feel secure in your choices and live life the way you want to.