Britain's New Managerial Society
Fyvel, T.R.
Changing Britain-3 The New Managerial Society By T. R. Fyvel London The changes in British life brought about by the influx of half a million immigrants from Europe and the...
...much more typical is the busy undergraduate, hurrying from lecture or laboratory to quick meals and keeping a determined eye on the chance of the right administrative or research career to follow...
...At Oxford and Cambridge, the proportion was only one in eight...
...Every spring, some half a million 11-year-old British children sit for the fateful test, the so-called "1-plus examination," which will decide whether a child goes for another four years to the ordinary secondary school or to a grammar school that gives free stale education up to university-entrance level, which in England is at 18 or 19...
...But, if one looks at the broad picture, British youth today appears markedly radical, critical and anti-class-distinction...
...or they have been turned into schools, convalescent homes, corporation offices and even, let it be whispered, mental homes...
...Although, for instance, the new prosperous business classes go hunting as much as ever, the pastime is based on the automobile age and making do: For all the butlers and valets who still populate English detective fiction, there are today only about 100.000 resident domestic servants in the country, or one in 300 of the working population: half of these are from abroad...
...For Britain in her present position, no longer a great power but finding it hard to live on another level, the most urgent task is to rediscover the native inventiveness and talent that made the Industrial Revolution...
...Prime Minister Harold Macmillan presides today over a largely Old Etonian Tory Cabinet...
...For about a hundred years, when people talked of "England," they usually meant the England of the upper and upper middle classes, of what is today called "the Establishment," the society that rested securely on the pillars of stately homes and town houses, royalty and the "Season," Empire and titles, the Church and the Law, Oxford and Cam I)ridge, the public schools, the Times and Manchester Guardian, the hush of the Athenaeum and Reform Club...
...The first is based on family connection, the hundred or so historic upper- and upper-middle-class boarding schools, the public schools, and the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge...
...Income tax and death duties have cut the fortunes...
...England still lias her two sharply separate systems of education...
...Such a sharp dixision mav offend American ideas, but the minority get-ling grammar-school places is today as much as 2(1 per cent, and it is no longer difficult for a bright box or girl to get free state education all the way through grammar school and university...
...Standing out against this leveling in education and careers are the public schools, from an aristocratic concourse like Eton to sturdy middle-class schools with their old tight tradition...
...To be sure...
...Their scope in providing traditional ways to the top through wealth and family connections remains powerful in many spheres...
...The stately homes, the great country houses, where as late as the Thirties British politics was determined at weekend parties, have finally had their day...
...As for the country houses, they are either maintained as show-pieces by the National Trust, with the family in residence in one wing and Sunday visitors reverently trooping through the rest at a charge of 2-3 shillings a head...
...Men with the right school tie can still step fairly smoothly into directorships in banking and industry...
...Yet, one feels that both traditions already belong more to the last generation than to this one...
...And many of the grammar schools are first-class and excellently equipped...
...Common tradition means that the British may fumble badly, as at Suez, but morale will not break...
...high wages have seduced the former grooms and maidservants into the factories...
...Putting it very roughly, Britain during the next decade or two will be something of a parvenu country...
...Tradition also produces its stimulating literary milieu...
...A quarter of the Conservative members of Parliament are old Etonians...
...Such a tradition of common upper-class education and the confidence it engenders has its own considerable value...
...This change is strongly reflected at the university level...
...A certain way of life has ended...
...British scientists are extending their domain...
...Hugh Gaitskell's next Labor government is likely to include at least four ministers from Winchester, headed by himself...
...but more important was the fact that entrance to Oxford and Cambridge, too, is by highly competitive examination and 80 per cent of the students are receiving some form of public financial assistance...
...alongside this elite education, the British state education system looms steadily larger in providing plentiful avenues to the top...
...The axe of leveling has also been applied to the traditional structure of privilege in education...
...That is, British business and institutions and the state machine will be more and more run by men who, thanks to the educational opportunities of the welfare state, are leading lives quite different from those of their parents...
...Since the war, two processes have been at work: This England of the Establishment has been demolished and transformed, and a new bourgeois-and-working-class England —a social democratic England of sorts has been coming to the fore...
...Ambitious state-educated young men from every type of lower-income home have already entered the managerial class in a flood far larger than the public schools could furnish...
...As a visit soon shows, the gilded youth one read about in novels is largely gone...
...In visual terms, the demolition stares one in the fare...
...Just as American state education strives to be universal, with all the defects associated with this, so British state education is essentially still selective, with all the opposite faults...
...But the juxtaposition of the new British managerial elite and sub-urbanized working class, and the atmosphere created by flourishing mass entertainments and American influence, form a story for separate treatment...
...Educationally, their products compete on even terms with the public-school boys, but they also outnumber them by 10 or 12 to 1. Whether in university scholarship lists or junior athletic events—and the change is revolutionary in both cases—one can often see only isolated names from well-known public schools...
...This revolution is really as significant as was the arrival of the great upper middle class in mid-19th-century England...
...Social forces are strengthening this trend...
...It is a safe forecast that this elite of tomorrow will be largely parvenu...
...The sightseers who in past "Seasons" used to watch the arrivals at society dances and weddings have vanished, or rather been replaced by far larger crowds craning to catch a glimpse of film or television celebrities...
...Especially where aristocratic schools like Eton, Harrow and Winchester are concerned, the system still has its immense ruling-class and social prestige...
...In London, the last town houses are being pulled down to make room for offices and apartments...
...This may be happening faster than one thinks, but the change is being effected by new men...
...It is clear that, by and large, it is grammar-school boys who in ever-increasing proportion are getting "firsts" at the universities and taking the leading positions in industry, scientific work and government service—in fact, forming the cadres of that managerial elite which by Gaitskell's admission is today more important in the British economy than mere shareholders...
...This fits with the general mood...
...This attitude has spread downward, for there is an even larger parvenu class in England today: the British working class, which since the war has been moving from the legendary slums into suburban housing developments and has broken through into the world of automobiles and mass entertainment, which are scarcely less developed than in the U.S...
...An official survey of 1956 showed that nearly a third of British men students had fathers in manual (i.e., working class) occupations...
...True, even this system is graded...
...Changing Britain-3 The New Managerial Society By T. R. Fyvel London The changes in British life brought about by the influx of half a million immigrants from Europe and the Commonwealth—significant as they may be—are overshadowed by the social revolution which has taken place within the British class structure itself...
...John Strachey, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Anthony Powell and John Lehmann were all at Eton in the Twenties...
...But it is selective in a large way...
...All through the country, one can see the functional, modern buildings of the new state schools arising...
...To be sure, the last half-dozen years have seen a fitful revival of young Toryism and concern with "U" and "non-U...
...For one thing, the spectacular achievements of British nuclear science, the modernization of the state coal and electrical industries, the continuous expansion of the big automobile, oil, aircraft and chemical corporations offer more and more opportunities of technical and managerial careers...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 45
