Memories to Savour, Blog 4 - November 2012
Social systems, Downton
Abbey and Joni Mitchell
I've looked at life
from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
From up and down and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all
Coming from a
family with shopkeepers on both my paternal and maternal side, it was
inevitable that I would be brought up to vote Liberal. When my mother had told
her grandma that a particular young man was showing an interest in her, the old
family matriarch immediately responded with a …. “Well don’t bring him round
here if you start courting him, because his family is all Tory and I’ve never
met a decent one yet.” Local legend also has it that when a prospective
Conservative town councilor knocked on her door one evening to canvas her
support in the forthcoming election, my great grandmother responded with a …..
“I would sooner vote for a donkey wearing a Liberal rosette than thee, so be
off with you”. My mother must have listened because she married a
Liberal-voting fruit and vegetable vendor and perhaps it was fortuitous that
the grand old lady had died before I was eligible to cast my first vote. When I
announced that I intended to put my cross against the name of the Labour
candidate, it was not a move calculated to make me popular. Watching Downton
Abbey on ITV on Sunday evenings has reminded me of why I became a socialist.
I do like the programme; it
has become compulsive viewing for me. Its every scene is so professional, it
has a credible story line, the characters are so well drawn and the detail is
spot on. There are aspects of the society it portrays however which make me
cringe. The obvious class divide between upstairs and downstairs, the sheer
snobbery and formality, the obvious hierarchy with the head of the family being
the master whereas the butler’s word is law amongst the serving classes. Even
in a poor industrial town such as Blackburn, wealthy mill owners employed ‘live
in’ servants and I can remember as a child, at least two elderly distant
relatives regaling me with stories from when they were ‘in service’ during the inter-
war years. When
I moved to Leeds in 1964 to study to become a teacher, this was
the type of society
that I longed to see the back of. I yearned for the arrival of the
great day of
reckoning when, metaphorically speaking, the rich would rot in hell.
Bob Dylan’s ‘The
times they are a changing’ from the album of the same name
became my
anthem of choice.
But how did this island become so
encumbered with such an inequitable system is a question worth asking. The
answer in actual fact is quite simple. When Duke William landed in Pevensey Bay
in 1066 and defeated King Harold of England at the Battle of Hastings, he had
to reward his fellow Normans who accompanied him across the Channel. As a
consequence, each of his noble friends was allotted a piece of England and, to
make their presence felt, they quickly constructed wooden motte and bailey
castles. Later to be strengthened with thick stone walls and a keep, they were
located at the highest point in the village. Each time a peasant farmer looked
up from tilling the fields and tending the crops, the shadow of the enormous
bastion reminded him that he had no status whatsoever. His position was to be
subservient to his foreign master ……. forever.
Throughout the middle ages, there was
scarcely a change to the social stratum. The barons would occasionally have
skirmishes amongst themselves and King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta
in 1215 on Runnymede, an island on the Thames close to Windsor, thus limiting a
number of his rights and privileges. (If you did not know that, you are in
exalted company. Neither did David Cameron when recently asked about it on the
Letterman Show in America.) The Tudor monarchs of the sixteenth century
distanced themselves from the power of the barons by relying more on the new
‘middle classes’; bankers and civil servants who were well paid for their
services, but none of these changes remotely affected the working classes. The
execution of Charles I and the subsequent setting up of a republic headed by
Oliver Cromwell gave far more power to parliament. However, as few men (and no
women) had the right to vote, it made little difference to the lives of the
masses, particularly as following Cromwell’s death, the Stuart monarchy was
restored when Charles II returned from exile.
The Industrial Revolution changed the face
of Britain and there was much more social movement as the demand for labour in
the North and the Midlands increased rapidly. For the first time we saw
economic immigration as Irish navvies flooded into Liverpool, but in terms of
freedom for the ‘great unwashed’, they simply exchanged one overlord (the Lord
of the Manor) for another (the mill/mine owner). Slowly during the nineteenth
century, more and more males were given the vote but it was not until 1929 that
all adults over the age of twenty one gained this particular privilege. By this
time, the first Labour government had been formed, Trade Unions were accepted
and while the rich young things danced the ‘Charleston’, the poor became poorer
as the ‘Great Depression’ began to bite.
I was educated at a ‘working class’
grammar school and had mates from the local secondary modern. The offspring of
Blackburn’s elite however either went to public school or a fee paying grammar
school, established in 1509 and eventually named after the first Queen
Elizabeth. Until I was in my twenties, I cannot remember meeting anyone who
could be even vaguely referred to as upper class. This of course suited me real
fine and I genuinely hated the concept of a generation living privileged lives
simply because their family had done so for many generations. I did not want
them to prosper and believed that they brought no benefit to the country.
Somehow, without really realising it, I
must have watered down these feelings, because that anger in me has dissipated.
However, it was only when watching this current series of Downton Abbey that I
came to the conclusion that I did not quite have the full picture back in the
sixties. The Dowager Countess of Grantham (it means widow of the previous Lord
by the way) and magnificently played by Dame Maggie Smith, was pontificating.
“These people have no idea of what the
aristocracy has given to this England. Without us there would be no employment
in the countryside? No, they never think of that’
She was correct, I never did. I was
unaware that many of them actually cared for their staff and the inhabitants of
the village. Some would go out of their way to help them if they were in
trouble, believing that they had a responsibility for their welfare.
The great capitalists were another group
whom I loved to hate in my youth. Again I failed to realise at the time that
the public library which I frequented so much as a boy had, like so many
throughout the country, been financed by Andrew Carnegie. He emigrated from
Scotland in the nineteenth century and rose from sweeping up in a bobbin
factory to being the founder of the American steel industry. He literally gave
away almost all of his colossal fortune to educational causes such as libraries
and colleges. I never thought of him when I was tarring all capitalists with
the same brush.
Neither did I spare a thought for the
Cadbury family who built a chocolate making factory in the village of
Bourneville near Birmingham in 1879. The family pioneered worker pensions, fair
wages, treated the staff with respect and built rows and rows of modern housing
with gardens and an adjacent park for their recreation. In 1888, the Lever
family built a similar project at Port Sunlight across the River Mersey to
house those employed in their soap making factory. I also paid scant regard to
the likes of John Howard, the wealthy High Sheriff of Bedfordshire who
dedicated his life to ensuring that prisoners in our gaols were treated as
human beings. I totally forgot to remember Elizabeth Fry, born into the family
which founded Barclays Bank. She worked tirelessly to help all sorts of
under-privileged people in workhouses, asylums and slum areas. As someone who
had studied the history of the nineteenth century, The Earl of Shaftesbury
ought to have been fresh in my memory. A member of the landed gentry, he used
his influence to improve life in the lunatic asylums, fought to eliminate the evils
of ‘little boy chimney sweeps’ and helped to introduce the free Ragged Schools
for the hopelessly poor city children whose lack of footwear prevented them
from attending the voluntary schools which were springing up in the 1840s. Did
I think of him when I wanted to exterminate aristocrats and bring the
capitalist system to its knees? Not a chance.
I immediately joined a left wing trade
union on qualifying as a teacher, picketed the offices of Lancashire County
Council, occasionally went on strike and staunchly worked to rule when the
Thatcher government was hell-bent on destroying any group which attempted to
uphold the rights of the working class. It lasted a good six months and tested
my loyalty to its very core. All out of school hours contact with pupils,
including extra-curricular activities which offered the only hope for many of
our poor children to shine, was banned and we even lost a whole season of
schoolboy football. That was agony for me but like thousands of other teachers,
it seemed like a cause worth fighting for. A compromise deal was eventually
hammered out, but in truth it was the last hurrah for the militant unions. The
miners had been crushed and the will to fight seemed to evaporate.
On looking back, I accept now that I was
so entrenched in my left wing views that I never considered an opposite
viewpoint. I was right, the rest were wrong; it was as simple as that. But I
should have known better. In 1967, a folk singer called Judy Collins recorded a
beautiful song entitled ’Both Sides Now’ which in terms of alliteration, rhyme
and pure poetry, was arguably the most beautiful song of the decade. Look the
words up on the internet but can you beat ‘Bows and flows
of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air” as a description of cloud patterns. It was written by the legendary Canadian
singer/song writer Joni Mitchell, was a massive hit for Collins and has been
covered by stacks of artists as diverse as Bing Crosby, Paul Young, Herbie
Hancock and Susan Boyle. I loved the song way back then, snuggling up on a
settee with the girl of the moment and simply dreaming.
But how could I have missed the point of
the lyrics; to look at things from both sides, to see the other person’s point
of view. As I learned later, those from privileged backgrounds can actually be
OK. How could I try to verbally blast a group of people that I did not
understand? Did not understand because I had not taken the time to get to know
them, to listen to their point of view. Of course, even looking at society
patiently and in the most considered manner, I would still have voted Labour. I
cannot accept the theory of Social Darwinism; the survival of the fittest, the
law of the jungle. I do now understand that to have totally equal pay will not
work; there has to be incentive, a kind of meritocracy, but I believe that
those who have more than enough should support those who have not through a
system of taxation which cannot be avoided simply because they have a clever
accountant; are you listening Starbucks? There are lazy oiks in all walks of
life but the majority of those who struggle do so because they have been less
fortunate than others. Even now I struggle to come to terms with the likes of
Cameron and Osborne with their aristocratic upbringings, including expensive
public school and Oxford educational backgrounds. However, I would no longer
think of them in terms of forces of evil, simply people who look at the country
in a totally different and (in my opinion) a totally incorrect way.
But the Joni Mitchell song is not just
about political difference, it is also about personal relationships. How often
have we fallen out with someone because we only evaluate a situation from our
own perspective? At one time in my life, I could regularly have fallen out with
everyone; jumping to hurried conclusions, not trying to reason why they may
have acted in a certain way. Many a friendship can be lost through a rash word;
through an unconsidered opinion. Surely it has to be better to think carefully
about a problem we may have, to try to understand the opposing point of view
before ‘going off on one’. Then if all else fails, there is always the ‘get out
of jail free’ card. I don’t like to contradict a diva like Diana Ross, but
sorry often does make it right. Good friendships, strong relationships are the
jewels in our crown and we can protect them if we listen to Joni. In other
words, look at situations ‘from both sides now’.
M.J Hodkinson
No comments:
Post a Comment