Oiks and toffs

What does it say about the British approach to their own class system that for 70 years the working class kids in the shot have been portrayed as “toughs” or “oiks” when they’re just ordinary kids on a day out…?

sg – surely you are misrepresenting them as much as anyone portraying them as “toughs” or “oiks” is, the article tells us they were skipping school to make extra money as porters or whatever, which isn’t exactly ordinary kids on a day out I hope.

Stuart, I thought the article was saying that they’d been represented in the press as toughs, when they were just ordinary working class kids.

I don’t think it’s a misrepresentation to say that ordinary working class british kids skip school on the odd occasion…

Whatever would Alf Tupper say?

somewhat unfortunate that the later lives of the five turn out to be so unrepresentative of their socio-economic odds.

“see? inequality isn’t a problem at all–some rich lads die young, and many poor lads outlive them! why, there’s hardly any advantage to class privilege–especially with the extra responsibilities that the governing class are required to take on!”

Photographs can be misleading in that they freeze people in a particular time that is not really representative of their life as a whole.

Dorothea Lange’s migrant worker camp photos are another example. They are very powerful photos, and maybe make some good points about what was going on in the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

However, if you go to trace those people who were in the photos, you see that what happened there was just one period in their lives, and they went on and did other things and had other experiences, so it is tricky to try to extract some kind of universal principle from these photos.

In this particular example it turns out that the oiks did OK and the toffs not so much. Partly due to the breakdown of the prewar class system, and partly luck of the draw.

I think it’s a good thing to be able to find out more about the background of the photo. Just like I’d like to find out more about the people who modelled for well-known paintings of the Renaissance …

But how is this particular picture misleading? The dressed-up boys are in fact children of the upper classes (and they are literally waiting for a chaffeured Rolls-Royce!), and the other three are in fact children of the working class.

What else is the picture implying?

But how is this particular picture misleading? The dressed-up boys are in fact children of the upper classes (and they are literally waiting for a chaffeured Rolls-Royce!), and the other three are in fact children of the working class

One of the Harrovians is actually the son of a Huddersfield-born army officer in a not-very-fashionable regiment, and is at the school on a scholarship. Not exactly upper class.

14 is a very good point.

Further to Ajay @15,

… and the other Harrovian is from a family that had plenty of money — lots more than the other boy’s, certainly — but for a number of reasons seems none the less to have been not quite top-drawer.

“Misleading” might be overstating things. To a first approximation, after all, “toffs & oiks” is what the photo shows. It’s true that, within a broad spectrum of privilege, there were significant and not always terribly subtle economic, social and other differences between the two public schoolboys the photo shows and between them and the other Harrovians and Etonians of their day. Still, it would be understandable if those differences were lost on the other three boys in the picture. Similarly, the situations of those three boys were not identical, and one could easily have found working class children who were better off, and others who were significantly worse off, than these three. And yet the two Harrovians are unlikely to have seen beyond the not-quite-right fitting, hand-me-down clothes.

“Unnuanced” might be nearer the mark than “misleading”. The photo packs a walloping message, and it’s a message that was certainly accurate and true in broad social terms. But the photo can’t easily convey the complexities of the early 20th c. British class system, still less the individual backgrounds and destinies of its five subjects. The article does that, and does it well. And, pace Kid Bitzer upthread, I see the article as enriching the experience of viewing the photo, not as deconstructing or falsifying the photo’s powerful statement.

And, oh yes, agreed about 14.

In my book, if you go out to a cricket game wearing a top hat and tails and carrying a cane, then if someone takes a picture of you and uses it to exemplify class distinction, then that’s not misleading. What is the point of wearing a top hat and a silk waistcoat, if not to symbolise a class distinction?

Words? Forget about the words. Each sentence is led by an uppercase (capitalized) letter, and followed by a long progression of lowercase letters. Propertied nouns and names are capitalized. And, of course, the ego is distinguished with a capitalized “I”.

It is sad, I suppose, that while the British were busy ruling over various non-white people, their children sometimes got sick.

That’s a pretty unpleasant thing to say. But I suppose it will serve to burnish your Spartist credentials, so there’s that. Death to the oppressors, brother! Right on!

How do you two know Alf Tupper?

i seem to have expressed myself more obscurely than usual, even, given the wild misconstructions being applied to my remarks. when i am failing so signally to make myself understood, i’m not sure i’ll succeed any better on a second effort.

but, please, at least note quotation-marks.

Gosh, if only someone, anyone, had written a book on mid-twentieth century British social history, we wouldn’t be flailing around wildly displaying our ignorance here. Sometimes I wonder why the historical profession exists, when so many people are content to deal with an historical document on the basis of what they think it looks like.

Be fair, alex – if most people _didn’t_ take historical material at face value, there would be very little need for people like me to rush from the wings every so often saying “History police! You are misinterpreting a primary source. Stand away from the document, please, while I tell you about History.” You’ll note, for example, that more easily- and hence widely-understood forms of written communication (road signs, for example) don’t need several thousand people employed in UK universities to explain them. It’s ignorance that is our raison d’etre: we fight it, but if ever we were to win, we’d be out of a job.

Me, I think that Jack’s article pointed out the irony rather nicely – when the picture was taken, class was pretty visible, but mobility possible. Now, it’s the other way round.

If I didn’t know that the world and its social order in 1937 was as Our Lord intended it and it’s been all downhill from there, Bloix @32 would have had me until his final sentence, in which he reveals himself as a comedian of the first water.

I think it was on this blog that someone mentioned The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine, which prompted me to buy a copy and read it. According to Cannadine, starting in the 1870s, British society made a concerted effort to destroy the privileges of its hereditary aristocracy, and by the end of WWII pretty much succeeded.

What a revelation for someone like me, who grew up in middle-class America. Throughout my life, in which this process was more or less complete, I witnessed again and again a kind of mindless Anglophilia (Anglo-reverence, actually) by a certain breed of irritating social climber. These climbers or their parents had made a bundle of dough, or somehow or other clawed their way into the upper middle class (East Coast version), and now they pined to take tea with the aristocracy, as if nothing that Cannadine described had ever occurred.

I’ll look that up, Salient, thanks. Haven’t read any Orwell in a long, long time.

The “toffs” are boys who have been dressed up like monkeys for the pleasure of adults. They don’t know each other very well, they don’t particularly like each other, and they are standing on the street waiting for an adult who doesn’t show up. They are where they are because adults have told them to be there, not because they want to be there. They are bored, slightly worried, and well aware of their own ridiculous appearance. They have no power at all over their personal situation. Suddenly a stranger shows up, and starts talking – not to them, but to some other boys – “hey boys, move closer to those two so I can take your picture together.” It’s clear to them that the stranger views them as objects of ridicule. How do they react? Defensively, of course – they put on faces of complete blankness and assume positions of disdain that they have learned from their parents.

The oiks are boys out for a day on their own. These are not street urchins – they are clean, dressed in clean clothes, decently fed, and in school. They are making money, hanging out with other boys of their own choosing, in their own neighborhood, with complete freedom to come or go as they please. They are ignoring the toffs until a stranger starts to talk to them – not with any hostility to them, but with obvious hostility to the toffs. They move closer, grinning with embarrassment and pleasure at the transgressive nature of what they’re doing, but sanctioned by this strange adult.

I think this is actually a picture about the different relationship of adults to children in the different social classes. What we can see if we are willing to look beyond the clothing is the contrast between the firm control over childhood in the upper classes and the relative freedom of children in the working classes.

The story of these boys’ lives reminds me of the Up series of films by Michael Apted, which begin with a clear didactic purpose and, over the years, wind up showing lives that are quite a bit more interesting and complex than the director’s original intent .

PS – Mrs Tilton (#33) – if you read the link you’ll see that this is a posed picture that is pretending to capture a spontaneous moment. It is literally a fraud. It’s no different than a journalist making up quotes. And because we the viewers are intended not to know it’s posed, we read emotions into the faces of the individuals that are likely very different from the emotions that they felt. The emotions we read are the emotions that the photographer wants us to read, not the emotions that were likely there. So the image is an emotional fraud. I’m not saying anything new or startling here – this sort of manipulation has long been considered a sin among journalistic photographers.

I think that quite a lot of this debate just upthread about ‘fraud’ might be to do with the changing status of newspaper photography. Take, for example, _Picture Post_, which was in its heyday 1940-1955. The pictures were quite artificially posed in order to look good, and I imagine that the readers knew that they were posed. But nowadays, pictures in newspapers are (at least in theory) far less posed: so the story of The Photo from 1980 onwards is of a generation who think that the camera never lies, and that a picture taken on the street is not going to be posed, looking at a picture which was constructed according to different rules. Perhaps.

#19: “What is the point of wearing a top hat and a silk waistcoat, if not to symbolise a class distinction?”

To be fair to the boys, that was school uniform, not something they chose to wear: so it’s not simply a question of how the photographer manipulated the scene, but of all the children having been manipulated one way or another. Bloix’s point at #39, about the different relationships between children and adults in different strata, is worth a ponder. I’ll sit in a corner and go “Hmm” for a while.

Lemuel Pitkin at #20: my first impression was the same – it’s the rich what gets the attention, it’s the poor what gets the quick couple of paragraphs at the end, it’s the same the ‘ole world over. But Jack does explain, very briefly, that he couldn’t find any traces of two of the “oiks”, and the third wouldn’t talk to him. So I’m not convinced that the point stands up.

“According to Cannadine, starting in the 1870s, British society made a concerted effort to destroy the privileges of its hereditary aristocracy, and by the end of WWII pretty much succeeded.”

Yes, I was making this point to the Duke of Westminster only yesterday. “I believe you’re right, guv’nor,” he croaked, and the discussion might have gone further if he hadn’t insisted that I buy a copy of The Big Issue to make it worth his while.

@25,26: That’s right. Anyone who follows the latest developments in sports medicine knows Alf Tupper was the first high-profile athlete to use carbohydrate loading.