Middle Classlessness

I realize that this is such a bad sociological or anthropological interpretation of class structure that it muddles every aspect of respectable research.

Social stratafication is a useful way to categorize people if you need to study trends in available social services, or linguistic patterns, or the correlation between income, say, and education. Throw in ethnicity, or lineage, or whatever you would like to call it, add accent if you are talking about England (where "received pronunciation" is considered a vital component of the upper class)--and you have a strange brew, indeed.

The US maintains that it is a classless society, and the UK has historically agreed with this assessment of their American cousins (usually equating "classless" with "tasteless"), considering the States to be composed of "Yankee cowboy rednecks," as my father once described the neo-natives of this great land. Having lived here since 1984, I've figured out just how funny that definition is, and wonder whether the labels equate to different social strata in any meaningful way.

For example, are rednecks an equivalent to the working class in Britain? Are New Englanders upper middle class? How do we describe Californians? What about the silent (because voiceless) hispanic underclass?

The UK has always been so class-conscious, in fact, that it overflowed into other areas of life: letters used to be subject to stratification, with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd class postage providing different speeds of delivery. I remember a sign over a shop (either in Belfast or Glasgow, I don't recall) reading "First Class Family Butchers," and you can probably see why that one stuck in my mind. Trains used to have 1st class carriages, which no one else could afford. Now, though, this kind of elitist categorization is only really found on cruise ships or--where it hurts the most--on airplanes, where there is one class for human beings (1st) and hell for everyone else.

I haven't thought about class for many years. In one sense, the US is the great equalizer, although that may not be altogether a good thing, since it appears to depend on the education system being so bad that high school classes are repeated in college (they just call them freshman year). It was long held (in the State Senate) that kids in South Carolina, for example, didn't need an education anyway, as they were required to work in agriculture and unskilled labor. Ouch.

But I was reminded of societal class systems the other day, when someone called me a "middle class twit." Now, the twit bit I have no problem with ("twit" in the sense of "eejit," at any rate; the implication in the UK, though, is a little more derogatory, as it carries with it the idea that the twit in question has more money than sense [and I have neither] and a hoity toity accent. In this particular instance, yoga also apparently has something to do with it, although I couldn't figure that bit out).

But the "middle class" epithet made me wonder if anyone still thought of him/herself in terms of class. Do you?

It might seem a little strange to begin an examination of the class system in the north of Ireland by talking about what happened a few hundred years ago in France, but just bear with me a little.

It isn't.

So, then: France. With the beginning of the Holy Wars in 1562, religion became a bit of a touchy subject. In 1572 , in a span of several weeks in Paris and elsewhere, an estimated 70,000 French Protestant "Huguenots" were massacred. The persecution of the Huguenots (the term was originally insulting, possibly derived from the name Hugues--a Protestant who was from Geneva, Switzerland--and a corruption of the Frankish word for a conspirator or confederate) was very bloody indeed. The Protestants dispersed from their home land, mostly ending up in the Netherlands, in tens of thousands of panicked families clutching their children before they were torn from their arms and gutted on a pike. [Now, don't be jumping to any conclusions, or you'll miss the real reason I'm mentioning the French.]

One of the seemingly enduring facts of life in the northern Irish counties comprising the province of Ulster is that ethnicity generally, rather than a particular lineage or income bracket, is viewed by many to be a basis for interpreting social stratification. In this definition, therefore, class depends on where your ancestors came from , not where they shopped .

So, anyone with native Irish ancestors, therefore, going all the way back to the days when the Celts came from the continent of Europe and moved in on the Picts, say, belongs to one "group/ division/ ethnic entity" of society, while those whose ancestors later came from Scotland, England (or France!), belong to another. Most of the settlers who later came to the North came from Scotland, a country that has long maintained its need for a national government separate and distinct from its southern neighbors; and that is of some significance, I believe, if not downright irony, in a small province where a majority of the population (if we could ever stand to listen to a certain Ian Paisley) allegedly claim some sort of loyalty* to the Crown. Of England.

Except for the fact that it isn't really that simple; some parts of the island were planted mostly by the Scots, less by the English, and there were only about ten thousand French refugees (but I couldn't leave them out; especially after they had come all that way). The English Protestants were planted mostly in the South of Ireland, the Scots in the North, and since the Scots already had quite a history of settling in Antrim and Down--going back centuries, the British crown did not plant either of those counties.

If we are to believe the history books (no, I don't mean that I'm some sort of conspiracy theorist who thinks we are all being lied to, I'm just saying that during the course of the research I did for this piece I read some radically different interpretations of Irish history, and of the British involvement in that history), if we are to believe that events as they occurred happened for the reasons made apparent in the history books, the six counties in the North (FAT LAD, or FAT DAD: Fermanagh, Armagh, Tyrone, (London)Derry, Antrim, Down) voted themselves out of the Irish Free State and back into the United Kingdom for the simple reason that they were all such loyal Unionists they couldn't imagine a day without the Union Jack flying over their heads.

The northern counties were the seat of the O'Neill, the earls' rebellion, and mostly planted by the Scots, anyway (and the French!). How did they build such a strong loyalty to the Crown? Could it have had anything to do with their rich industrial concerns and commercial potential? The many foreign enterprises that had enjoyed success? (French linen, in particular, is now known as Irish linen, and was developed as an industry by the very Huguenots who had fled the massacres in France.) Britain had many investments in the North, from livestock to rope; what would an Irish Free State encompassing all of the island have meant for those investors?

In the 1910s and '20s, the shipyards in Belfast were the largest in the world. The importance of that fact to the British owners in particular (Harland was from Yorkshire, Wolff was born in Hamburg and lived in Liverpool), and British industry in general, can hardly be ignored; and yet--in negotiations for Irish independence (after the war of 1919-1921) that led to the creation of the Irish Free State--the plan proposed (1919) by David Lloyd George, the prime minister of England, and brought into being in 1920 as the Government of Ireland Act--had originally been to partition Ireland into two entities that would initially both be governed by Home Rule.

Initially. They would share the Council of Ireland, and that, Lloyd George believed, would lead to the reunification of the island under one parliament. Or so he said.

All of which brings me back to the topic of class. In the twentieth century, in the north of Ireland at any rate, the lower classes were often Catholics locked out of an insular enclave of Protestant-owned industry and the Protestant workers in many of those industries themselves. The middle classes tended to lean towards a more Protestant orientation, and the upper classes--lived in England.

That's a gross oversimplification and misstatement of a more complex situation, but it pretty much represents how the northern Irish saw themselves, bound as they all were by the "cordon sanitaire" of their accent, and their international status as Great Britain's red-headed stepchild.

I will be very interested to see how many of you consider class to be an integral part of your identity--like nationality or gender--and how many of you haven't thought about it for decades. And am I a middle-class twit, or not? I have no idea. I was pleased, I must admit, to discover that our family name (not McGurk) came from (you guessed it!) the French Huguenots who settled in the north. That technically removes me from the class distinctions described above. . . .