Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain - Harry Wallop

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and to know that their own wealth is but small change for the international plutocracy who mostly pay their wages. And despite earning five times or more the national average salary, their disposable income is not that huge once they have paid for what they consider key outgoings: private medical insurance, nannies, private school fees, a cleaner, gym membership, weekly frothy coffee and dry cleaning bills. What defines them is their separateness, from Britain and from the other classes that make up Britain. They are almost uniformly Londoners, or live in the commuter towns around the capital, while a handful can be found in Cheshire, and they reside within certain very specific postcodes within those areas, sometimes even choosing the gated community option. While private births make up just 0.5 per cent of the national figure, they are as high as 33 per cent in certain wards in Kensington & Chelsea in London. They will at every opportunity choose private over state, believing – with some justification – that the Welfare State was never designed for them. They have a sense of community, but it is unrelated to their neighbours; it almost entirely derives from fellow parents at their children’s private school and work colleagues. Unlike the Middleton classes, they have no desire to assimilate if that means they have to wait for a dentist’s appointment, swim at their local council-run pool, shop at Asda and eat at La Tasca. Without the support of the Portland Privateers a whole host of very successful brands would not thrive as they do. We will come across some of them in later chapters, but they include Smythson iPad covers, By Nord bed linen, Jo Loves smelly candles, Mulberry handbags, Louboutin shoes, Hermès ties, Bugaboo buggies, Emile et Rose and Marie Chantal baby clothes, Beulah London (Lady Natasha Rufus’s ethical clothing line), Emu furry boots, anything from Daylesford Organic, the Chewton Glen hotel in Hampshire and the Harbour Club gym chain: all brands that defiantly cater to the affluent bubble floating above the rest.

      Many of the Wood Burning Stovers would love to go private, but don’t dare face the opprobrium of their friends for buying their way to a room and a midwife all to themselves. The Rockabillies, who have fewer scruples but often less money, pretend they adore the NHS, but can’t wait to get home to the comforts of the au pair. The solution for the WBS crowd is to go for a home birth, with a doula, a Birkenstock-wearing hand-holder, who can help you deliver your baby with the same stamp of exclusivity that a box of Abel & Cole organic vegetables brings.

      After the birth, there is the delicate matter of circumcision. This is now seen as a barbaric act to perform on a young child and one only practised by orthodox Jews and Muslims. Not true. It is, or was until really quite recently, common practice among the upper classes, all the way down to Rockabillies, but no further. The most recent figures suggest just 3.8 per cent of male babies are circumcised, with the rates lowest in the white working-class districts of Liverpool, specifically the Bootle area, as medical opposition to the act takes hold. But it was as high as 20 per cent during the 1950s, with those at the upper echelons the most likely to do it. My father reckons that 95 per cent of his school contemporaries were done. In my prep school changing rooms you could tell who was really smart by their lack of foreskin. Mine was lopped off, when I was one week old, at home, by a rabbi called Jacob Snowman, who performed the procedure on Prince Charles. His name was shared around the upper classes of 1970s London in the way the Portland Privateers now divulge the name of their plastic surgeon. When my mother asked if he needed anything, expecting an answer such as ‘some hot water’, he replied, ‘A glass of red wine would be nice.’

      Breast-feeding, too, is still widely a class issue. Your willingness to expose yourself to feed Clemency during lunch at Leon says as much about you as your ironing board cover or newspaper of choice. An academic study of thousands of mothers found that 86 per cent of the top class, as defined by job status, initiated breast feeding when the baby was born. Only half of the lowest class did so. By the time babies were four months old the discrepancy was even more stark: half the top class were still exclusively breastfeeding, but just one in five of the lowest class were.

      From life-changing events to tiny immaterial items, class is everywhere when it comes to babies. Even nappies. There is a clear hierarchy, with Pampers the smart option. Huggies are low class. The really chic choice is any of those supposedly eco ones such as Nature Babycare. Only a handful of self-flagellating Wood Burning Stovers attempt washable nappies. If you think it is only the higher echelons of the modern middle classes that obsess about such ludicrous things, think again. Asda Mums are defined by their children almost as much as their supermarket of choice. Vikki, a dental receptionist, is typical of many in her careful choosing of brands. Little Angels nappies, the supermarket’s own brand, are acknowledged by many of its customers to be excellent. ‘I haven’t tried them,’ says Vikki. ‘I just think they wouldn’t be the same quality. I feel bad that I haven’t tried them. It sounds awful, but I’d feel bad sending the baby to nursery wearing Little Angels. I’d be embarrassed.’ Her baby is nine months old, but already wearing a brand that ensures she is a cut above.

      After the name and location of birth, the number of children is the next clear marker of class. How many children do you have? For, make no mistake, the number of mouths you have to feed is driven just as much by class as it is by religion or money. The 2.4 children that British families had on average in the 1960s has shrunk to 1.7 children – freeing up a significant amount of income to be spent on life’s little luxuries that lend status and class, be it a side-return conversion or a cruise through the Panama Canal. But whether you are under or over the average, that’s a class issue.

      In the 1950s the received wisdom was that having plenty of children was one of the most socially useful things the swelling middle classes could achieve. Britain needed not just New Towns for its returning heroes, but young people to grow up and fund their pensions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, told the Mothers Union in 1952 that ‘a family only truly begins with three children’. But public opinion was moving quickly away from big families. A Gallup poll in 1957 found that most people wanted just two children.1 And the average size of the British family continued to shrink, with two key exceptions – the top end and bottom end of society.

      The Portland Privateers breed prodigiously. Children, with their exotic names and scaled-down designer clothes (Burberry even call their children’s department in their flagship Regent Street store in London the ‘mini me’ section), are the ultimate status symbol. Again, look at the birth announcements of those born in the Lindo Wing or the Portland – frequently the sprog is one of four, five or even six children. Tana Ramsay, Jools Oliver, Nicola ‘supermum’ Horlick – all birthing machines, proving that a large horde is as much a class delineator as a Garrick club tie. Judith Woods, writing in the Daily Telegraph in 2011 after David and Victoria Beckham said they were going to have a fourth child, expressed the horror that many Middleton classes felt: ‘The Beckhams are reproducing in a way that, were they members of the underclass, would be regarded as not quite responsible. The only couples who have four children these days aren’t really couples at all. Either they’re brands, selling thousands of cookbooks faster than you can boil an egg, or they’re people who resemble the cast of Shameless and don’t stay together long enough properly to qualify as couples.’2

      While the Portland privateers and the über-rich are surveyed with wry amusement for collecting children like Swarovski crystal animals, having four children or more if you are a member of the Hyphen-Leighs is seen as deserving of scorn. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has done extensive research into child poverty and found that, at the lower end of the scale, large families are closely associated with deprivation. A child in a family of five or more children is almost four times more likely to be poor than a child in a one-child family.

      Scorn for large lower-class families has always been doled out, even in the early days of the Welfare State. Mass Observation diaries from the early 1950s bring out the fear among some middle-class people about the dirtiness and lack of self-control of the working classes. Gladys Langford, a retired schoolteacher, wrote after visiting Chapel Street Market in Islington: ‘It was very crowded. Nearly every woman of child-bearing age was pregnant and many were pushing prams as well and these often had more than one infant in them already. It was shocking to see how many of these women were very dirty … their eyes were gummy, their necks and ears were dirty and their bare legs grimy. These are the people who are multiplying so fast and whereas once a number of their children would have died, now, thanks to pre-natal and post-natal

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