Not from nowhere
From Neil Glanfield Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s article (‘Stagnant Britain’, 28 May) on declining social mobility might have been even more powerful if he had known a little more about Jamie Oliver’s origins. He states that ‘most of Jamie’s classmates are condemned to a life in which, as of old, ‘disadvantage reinforces itself across the generations’.
I suspect they are not, since Jamie’s classmates attended the Newport Free Grammar School in a highly prosperous area of Essex. The school was founded by Dame Joyce Frankland in 1588 and until the late 1980s always had a headmaster educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (the last of whom would have been Jamie’s first headmaster at this exclusive boys’ school). The chairman of governors as of right was the master of Caius College or his nominee. In every sense it resembled a minor public school and is the kind of school middle-class parents fought to get their children into.
Jamie himself hails from the village of Clavering, which is replete with millionaires. I suspect most of his classmates were condemned to nothing less than what their parents expected: elite education at prestigious universities followed by secure jobs in the professions. Rather than suggesting that Jamie has come from ‘nowhere’, the tragic point Mr Vander Weyer should have made is that despite carefully cultivated appearances he has come from a very real
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