WHAT SORT OF A PEOPLE ?
By D. WELSTEAD WILLIAMS There is very little doubt in my mind that Mr. Roger Clarke is the only writer who has, in The Spectator, said anything at all about the real British public since I have been a subscriber during the past ten years. Here is a real, authentic, picture of the largest section of the people of these islands—those parents who send their children to the elementary, or Council, schools. And I suggest that this distinction, as between the parents of Council school children and the " rest," is truly indicative of the social cleavage between the British people. This is the true dividing line—on one side the Mrs. Minivers, on the other the parents of the Council school scholars— and never, or at least hardly ever, shall the twain meet. The tragedy of it is that the opinions and views, the hopes and aspirations, of the Mrs. Minivers are constantly expressed, while those of the vast remainder rarely have voices raised or pen wielded on their behalf. Nearly all the books, articles, radio commentaries, films, deal with the Minivers of Britain and convey an entirely false impression of what we, the parents of the Council school children, really think.
This is only natural. We are not " educated "—at least not in the same sense as that word is viewed by, say, Mr. Nicolson. One has only to follow, carefully, the recent correspondence on the future of education in The Times, Daily Telegraph and The Spectator to be quite sure of this. Nearly all the contributors to that discussion live in a world very far removed from the influence of the Council school. It seemed to me, indeed, that most of the writers were quite un- conscious of the fact that there was such an educational establish- ment as a Council school at all. To them, education began with Prep. School and finished up, as a matter of course, with Public School or University. What happened to our children did not seem to concern them in the slightest degree. I sometimes wondered, when I followed that correspondence, where the writers imagined, for instance, the majority of the pilot sergeants who took part in the Battle of Britain received their early education.
Is it not time, now that we are approaching the fourth year of this " war of survival," that our intellectuals, writers and publicists came down from-their high horses, took off their blinkers and saw Britain as a whole, as it really is, and not merely that small patch of land surrounding their pleasant houses, their Public Schools and Univer- sities? Let them travel with us in our third-class compartments, feed with us in our British restaurants, stand up alongside us in our packed, draughty buses, visit our children in our Council schools— and, what is more pertinent, give some of us the opportunity to air our views, opinions, our hopes and aspirations, where they cannot fail to read them—in The Times, The Spectator and similar journals. I am convinced that it is only in this way that Britain will get to know itself. At the moment there is a timid attempt by the " cultured " to reach down to the masses—rather, to talk or write down to them— but I am convinced, from my study of the better-class journals, that this is not meeting with much success. They have lived so long in their splendid isolation that they do not, cannot, understand, what is in the minds of the masses. There must be more contacts in every way, and to bring this about there must be, first and foremost, a real, sincere, effort to break down that reserve, that snobbishness, which is so marked 'a feature of the British, and more particularly, the English, people. An attempt to do something to destroy these barriers of caste by frank discussion would be well worth while.
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