Society Abroad

Power, Throne, and Rank

Richard Hoggart

W ' henever I think about that complicated mix and gelling in British attitudes toward rank, show,

money, royalty, and the lares and penates of suburban life, two images swim into view, one several decades old, the other recent. But they hang together, sadly.

The older one is of a certain Lady Docker, the wife of Sir Bernard Docker, who was chairman of the huge British Small Arms, Ltd. (BSA) conglomerate in Bir- mingham not long after World War II. Lady Docker was monumentally vulgar, like a retired chorus girl who had married into money and meant to flaunt it. She rode in a gold-plated Daimler and sought acceptance in high places. I do not know if she ever mixed with royalty, but below that level she was accepted (except, oddly but to their credit, by the Rainiers of Monaco, who found her ostentatious antics too hard to bear).

She was the glittering pinnacle of a triangle. One leg of it was the tabloid press, who rightly guessed that their readers would swallow this glossy coarse- ness by the bucket load and so gave Lady Docker massive attention.

Little did those readers know that the other leg of the triangle, Sir Bernard himself, was presiding over the collapse of his industrial empire. Not enough R&D, not enough attention to new design, not enough sales initiative. The BSA motorbike, as I knew from the war, was a fine machine. Like the rest of British motor- cycle production, it lost to the Japanese. And thus the miserable collapse went on. Sir Bernard ran a crum- bling complex at the heart of British manufacturing; his wife spent money like confetti; the workers swal-

lowed all the silly, glossy tattle of the tabloids--and lost their jobs in thousands. It was a microcosm of so many things that were and are wrong with Britain.

My second picture is less striking but no less potent. Not very long ago, I was waiting in line at the checkout in the supermarket behind two obviously middle-class women in early middle age. One of them turned to the other and said simply, without preamble: "Isn't it a pity about Charles and Di?" Members of their local tennis club? Neighbors in their Queen Anne executive-housing development? Neither, of course; but the heir apparent had been seamlessly absorbed into the middle-class sub- urban myth. This was in 1992; we don't change.

That pattern--royalty seen as part of a phony middle- class family, many of which thrive in places like Famham much as they ever did; that love of money, show, and rank; that sheer attachment to the constituents of a sac- charine, small-minded snobbery; the popular press's shameful role in feeding all those attitudes; and the sen- tentious voices of the lackeys, some of them editors of broadsheets, some lords and other parliamentarians fond of quoting Walter Bagehot, some heads of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges--all these things help sustain an institution that has outlived its usefulness and can only be propped up by sentimentality, fawning, misguided history, self-interest, and muddled thinking.

I tell those two anecdotes because they illustrate a major fact: that most British people are not ready in- tellectually or, more important, imaginatively to have done with the monarchy. It would be silly to let our blood boil about this, and it would be self-indulgent

52 / SOCIETY �9 N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 1995

to accept it "for others." We can each of us, though, run up a little flag in the meantime. For what it is worth, I have refused three invitations to Buckingham Pal- ace and one royally bestowed honor. No histrionics, just a polite refusal.

I want to say something about patronage and heri- tage. We all know and are properly impressed by the Princess Royal's transmogrification from a royal goose to a royal swan, especially in her work for the Save the Children Fund. But in general, my experience of royal patronage is of snobbery--and jobbery. I remem- ber more than one call to the Arts Council from dis- gruntled clients who did not hesitate to point out that their patron HRH something or other was particularly anxious that their grant be increased. Were we meant to bow low at this instance of royal interest or to shake in our shoes, or both, before handing over the money?

At all levels, the British are besotted with titles. When I complained that the governors of the Royal Shakespeare Company were given nothing to do at their quarterly meetings, I was told that for many people being a governor alone was regarded as an honor, and that hence many people- -"even people who are already t i t led"--let it be known that they would welcome the elevation.

Similarly, people will actually ask to be nominated for honorary degrees. Most universities look around for some sprig of royalty to become their chancellor. To its credit, the new University of Leicester was one of the first to shun that practice. It sought and obtained a great scientist, Lord Adrian. That is admirable aca- demic democracy.

So it all goes on. I am almost convinced that the House of Lords can have a useful role to play these days. I am entirely sure, nonetheless, that the existence of hereditary peers is an inexcusable hangover. The fact that it remains is a tribute to that network of snobberies and sentimentalities that I have been describing and to that ingrained lethargy that the British like to call toler- ance. So it all goes on and will go on for some time yet.

The system is, these days, buttressed by tourism and by the image of Britain promoted by the British Tourist Board: a film set; a nostalgic, television-type, costume drama, which most tourists do lap up, cer- tainly. I sometimes think of offering another set of pic- tures to those who are not taken in: a tour round Hull, Hunslet, and Halifax to have a look at "the people of England who have not spoken yet," those who have received little more than "the enormous condescen- sion of history," and, finally, a look at a modern sub- urbia, say, Fleet in Hampshire, pure Waitrose country, where wife-swapping is also said to thrive.

So there we are; it is bound to be a long, slow haul. Meanwhi l e , we can clear a w a y s o m e favor i t e counterarguments to change. Above all, we need to do away with the one that says: "You will need a figure- head." True, probably. "But what you are likely to get in this country is a worn-out politician, a tired trade union boss, an elderly aristocratic hack. Better the devil. . ." True again; but this response, this assumption that a re- placement for the monarch would almost have to come from that tired, old, routine procession, is precisely an extension of that sad substitute for thought that I have been describing. We need to take a better thought.

It would be one good sign of change, an indication that we were ready for change, if we thought quite differently. A pleasant game, that, to think of people outside the expected conventional names as possible presidents. Other countries have found nonexecutive presidents who are dignified, wise, and demotic. Have a good think. Having just read her very impressive new book on metaphysics and morals, I put forward, as a first shot, Iris Murdoch.

What should be done to reduce this weight of privi- lege, patronage, and snobbisms? There are some prac- tical steps of varying difficulty. Number one would be to move toward abolishing hereditary peerages. Number two would be the reform of the public schools.

The really difficult steps are longer- term and trickier; they are, by education, by writing, by irony, and by comedy, to reduce the need that so many people have for this sentimental pabulum, and to shame out of their awful flattery of people with these attitudes the many who should know better--journalists of all persuasions and levels, members of both Houses of Parliament, all those "gatekeepers of opinion" whose gates have not been oiled or inspected for death-watch beetles for generations. It must eventually become a matter of self-respect to avoid talking about the mon- archy as an institution "giving innocent pleasure to the people"--urgh?--or to refuse to talk about it as a "symbol of our heritage." That is not the enormous condescension of history but the continuing conde- scension of those who, at present, blindly prop up this foolish remnant, this sentimental pacifier.

Meanwhile, we can cheer ourselves up by recog- nizing that a fair number of people at all levels do not succumb, are not taken in, "aren't as daft as all that."

Richard Hoggart has spent all his working life teaching English literature and involved in different ways with cul- tural studies. He is the author of the seminal book The Uses of Literacy and most recently of Townscape with Figures: Farnham--reviewed in this" issue of SOCIETY.