How to pass the posh test: ‘Do you know Marmaduke Von Snittlebert?’

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/15/posh-test-privately-educated-war-pros-and-cons-pass

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Owen Jones: the posh problem

Unless you’re a Social Darwinist who believes the privileged are inherently more talented (I’m going to presume you’re not), then the lack of diversity at the top of society should be profoundly depressing. More than half of the top 100 media professionals in Britain hail from private schools, even though only 7% of Britons are privately educated. Amongst court judges, the figure surges to 71%; in the senior armed forces it approaches two thirds.

Not so much an establishment as a racket. Britain is supposed to be a modern, advanced democracy: our ancestors fought at considerable personal cost to drive back the unaccountable power of our overlords. So why are so many of the pillars of our society manned by the pampered and the well-to-do?

First off, there’s a hint of conspiracy. New research from the social mobility and child poverty commission reveals the privileged choose and look after their own: they don’t like accents that sound a bit, well, “common”. They like people who go on gap years. When I was at Oxford university, “gap-year crew” was a catch-all phrase for those from the most extravagantly well-off backgrounds, because finding yourself in Uruguay costs more than a few pennies. “This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs,” says Alan Milburn, the chair of the commission. In Britain, in 2015, employers are giving interviewees the once-over and deciding they’re distinctly too proletarian for their oh-so sophisticated workplaces.

There’s a more subtle, but even more damaging, culprit: the grotesque inequality that not only scars our society, but defines it. It begins from birth. The child from a poor background has a birthweight lower than a child from a better- off background. If you grow up in an overcrowded home – as does one in four young Londoners – your wellbeing and educational attainment will be damaged. Then there are the effects of poor diet and the general stresses of poverty. “Cultural capital” – such as the children of middle-class, university-educated parents being exposed to a broader vocabulary from day one – has an impact, too. By the age of five, those with affluent parents can have a vocabulary 18 months ahead of their poorer peers.

There’s structural inequality, and then there are stitch-ups. The scourge of unpaid internships has helped turn professions (such as my own, the media) into playgrounds for the privileged. Want to become a journalist? You may well find yourself expected to work for free for months, or longer, with no promise of a job at the end of it. If you have parents with the financial means, you have a shot, but otherwise the idea of labouring for nothing in London – one of the world’s most expensive cities – is a non-starter. So is shelling out for an expensive post-graduate qualification, which is increasingly a must. The professions have built walls too high for most to climb, discriminating not on the basis of your talent, but on the basis of your parents’ bank balance.

It’s enough to make you go full-on Jacobin. But while Madame Guillotine isn’t the answer, these manifest multiple inequalities – all of which conspire to keep out the talented but non-privileged – will only be defeated in a peaceful but all-out war. Where are the politicians courageous and farsighted enough to take them on?

Stephen Moss: talking posh isn’t enough

As the working-class son of a steelworker and a pub pianist from south Wales, moving up to Oxford in the mid-1970s was a bit of a shock to the system. I was about as far away from posh as it was possible to be. I recall that tipping the “scout” – the man who cleaned my room and made my bed – was a source of particular concern. I suddenly had a servant, but how much was I supposed to give him at the end of term? I’m sure the pathetic amount I coughed up soured our always-uneasy relationship.

The combination of not having taken a year off – most of the students from public schools did the Oxbridge entrance exam in their post-A-level year – and being from a background that was the antithesis of posh made it hard to adjust. I tended to hang around with sporty types who talked mainly about cricket averages.

Nobody ever told me it would be a good idea to go to lectures, not just in modern history – the subject I was studying – but ancient history, art, philosophy and politics, too. The difference between comprehensives and public schools is that the latter give you the space to develop as a rounded person early. They encourage free thinking. For me, the jump from A-level spoonfeeding to self-directed learning was huge and, by the time I was getting to grips with it, the course was more or less over. Education really is wasted on the young, at least on this young person.

I must have been conscious of my lowly social origins because I changed my accent more or less overnight, abandoning my Welsh lilt in favour of a form of received pronunciation so extreme that, when years later I met a theatrical voice coach, she said it was redolent of Oxford in the 50s rather than the 70s. I make Prince Charles sound common, though, if you listen closely, you can tell it’s not the genuine article. Some people think I’m South African, so clipped are my vowels. The literary editor Karl Miller thought I’d been to Sandhurst.

The disguise sort of worked. I did a passable posh accent (for a while the Welshness used to reassert itself when I was tired), got a first because I was very good at passing exams, and got a job in publishing. I was a moderately successful ersatz posh person.

Except you never really become posh. For all the carapace of poshness, you remain what you are. Or rather, you end up not fitting anywhere: too posh for the working class, too working-class to be truly posh. This is why I ended up being a journalist: an observer, an outsider, restless and self-doubting.

Those who are born posh enjoy the benefits of a social capital in early life that can never be replicated later. You just can’t manufacture that ease, that assumption that the world exists for your benefit. We had a “buttery” at Oxford where students, almost invariably the posh ones, would gather with dons for pre-dinner drinks. I never dared go in there. Even though we were all supposed to be equal, somehow it didn’t seem that way.

I’ve been rereading Anthony Powell’s great novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time recently. Powell (he pronounced it “Pole”) is the archetypal posh Englishman: Etonian, military family, steeped in art and literature from a very early age, certain in his judgments, critical of error and fuzzy thinking, alert to the many shades of social class, preoccupied by lineages and hierarchies, and – in the character of his narrator Nicholas Jenkins – all-seeing, all-knowing and in complete control.

The sympathetic characters in Dance are doomed posh romantics – Charles Stringham and Hugh Moreland, especially. The arch-villain is Widmerpool, another Etonian, but one whose father made his money selling liquid manure. Widmerpool is a parvenu who devotes his life to climbing the greasy pole, imposing his will. Powell dislikes the imposition of will, the out-and-out triers. He admires easy talent and selfless service; he identifies with people who punt their way through life.

Being unposh, I have spent my life trying to be Stringham – to have his style and ease, his contempt for the worldly and workaday – but I know that my autodidactical destiny is to be Widmerpool. The dance is an ungainly one.

Lucy Mangan: wear your learning lightly

There isn’t a list of books to read that will enable you to fake your way through posh. The instinct, of course, is to work your way through the classics and some Booker winners, because they’re highbrow and will make you sound – or, indeed, they may even actually make you – cleverer. The only flaw in this plan is that most posh people are thick. That’s the whole problem with class privilege and elitism: it’s not a meritocracy. The race goes to the shit, not to the swift or those who have actually read Swift.

So, your aim is actually something subtler. You are going for an air of easy familiarity with all the good things in life, including, but not especially, books. Being posh (or privileged, or however else you want to shorthand the complicated, webby phenomenon of class for the duration of this exercise) means leading – and having led for a long time, usually generations – a life of comfort and leisure. The effects of the social capital enjoyed by the posh are harder to mimic than the effects of fiscal capital, but almost more important. Tell yourself this: you have always had time to read. You have always had the money to buy books. You cannot conceive of a life in which this is not the case (this, of course, is why you must not in fact read too many books. They will teach you otherwise, and then where will you be?).

You must give the impression of a life spent surrounded by books – bought on endless whim, inherited, borrowed from exactly like-minded souls, simply accumulating round the house while others (lesser, oiky others) accumulate dust and bus tickets and broken plastic toys. You have absorbed the titles and the general gists – from picking up many copies over the years, reading the blurbs and flicking through the pages while you waited for girlfriends/boyfriends to pull on their tan boots/Church’s shoes – of everything from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This is plenty. No one you know is ever going to have closer acquaintance with them than this. It is more than enough.

Posh people have all read Wodehouse (the Psmith books as well as Jeeves and Wooster, if you really want to fart about with the best of them). Getting a bit of Biggles (your grandfather’s collection was in the summerhouse as you were growing up), John Buchan and Dorothy L Sayers under your belt will add a subtle streak of authenticity to your performance. Other than that – stay breezy. Remember, nothing really matters. Posh people are OK whatever happens.

If you want to do a bit of reading around your subject, I’d recommend Kate Fox’s Watching the English (an outsider looking in and going demented), Ferdinand Mount’s Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain and The New Few: Power and Inequality in Britain Now (an insider looking in and getting worried) and The English by Jeremy Paxman (an insider trying to look out and getting frustrated).

Imogen Fox: pump up your hair volume

The sartorial cliches of the posh are easy to list: the propensity for the men to wear red trousers that are slightly too short; the gravitational pull that urges the women to wear wedge shoes from LK Bennett; and the penchant for both sexes to seek out too-narrow Oakley sunglasses. The cliches are pretty easy to avoid, but hard to use as a disguise if you are not bona fide posh. If you are not posh, your trousers will never have the right amount of too-entitled-to-care crease. If you are not posh, you will remove your uncool ski sunglasses before you get into the office lift. It is much more nuanced and effective to smash the posh ceiling with your hair.

Posh men’s hair defies trends. It almost always behaves in the same way, whether it be full and shiny or thinning at speed. It is worn swept back: from Hugh Grant to David Cameron to Prince George. That is the default setting for posh men. I’d wager someone has told George Osborne this. His old hair was ultra-Bullingdon: all swagger and a three-course lunch. But the newer Caesar cut – combed downwards – is an attempt to look more “everyday dude who is satisfied with an austerity sandwich for lunch”.

Remember, the very act of sweeping your hair back makes you look posh, drawing subtle attention to your forehead, behind which is your enormous posh male brain. But don’t go too short at the sides – swept back and shaved at the sidesthat says “footballer”, and that isn’t the type of privilege you are attempting to semaphore.

For women, smashing the posh ceiling with your hair requires considerable volume: flat hair never looks entitled. This, too, is relatively easy to fake for an HR meeting. Go to an interview with a blow-dry and you will have a much better chance of being mistaken for posh – flat looks harassed and rushed; bouncy says “I’m ready for stuff”.

The caveat here is to not to go too perfect with the blow-out. Voluminous and straight indicates extensions, which posh people don’t generally go for, being too blessed of follicle to need to. Get it too neat and your head is saying confectionery heiress, at best.

Archie Bland*: practise self-deprecation

Look, I don’t go into interviews in a top hat and tails, and I don’t recommend that you do, either. Make the signals of your indisputable social superiority anything other than effortless and they won’t work. No one wants to admit they’re biased towards posh people – even other posh people. They want to be able to tell themselves it’s a preference for clever people, or cosmopolitan people, or charming people. This stuff is insidious and deniable. That’s why it persists.

So, self-deprecation is your watchword. Think Hugh Grant, or Miranda Hart. Apologise constantly, and truly believe that you are obliged to do so. Colditz escapees supposedly learned to swear in German even when they were punched in the balls, so as to pass for locals under even the most extreme pressure; you, likewise, must internalise your sorrow that the world is the way it is, so as to capitalise on it all the more effectively. (For example, writing this is making me hate myself more than ever, which is employable poshness in action.)

Dropping a name? Don’t just flop it on the table and expect an invitation to the golf course. Differentiate yourself from the oiks, yes, remind your prospective employer that you won’t show them up at drinks, but cringe as you do so. “Oh, God, it’s just occurred to me – I bet you know Marmaduke Von Snittlebert, don’t you?” you’ll groan, hair flapping in the wind. “This is awful, isn’t it, I feel like such a cliche. Oh, yeah, I knew him at school. Fantastic at fives.” Issue a strangled laugh. Grimace. Do not specify the school: like Prince, your school is too important to need naming.

Does this stuff work? Of course it does – in this country as nowhere else. A few years ago I was interviewed for a job by two executives, one British, the other European. The exact details are a bit hazy now, but I recall pulling the usual shtick, part of which was jovially noting my lack of qualifications for the position, then trying to demolish this point by suggesting all the other reasons they should give it to me. At the time, it didn’t particularly occur to me that this was a posh move, but I think it’s probably born of the hardwired, unearned confidence that comes from knowing that, basically, everything’s going to be all right for you. Anyway, I later heard that, after I left, the British executive had suggested that I was quite a good candidate, to which the European, baffled, pointed out: “But he told us he would be bad at it!” In the end, the British guy – privately educated himself – prevailed, and I was offered the job. To be honest, though, I think the European might have been on the money. Unless, of course, I’m just self-deprecating again.

*(A genuine posh person)