Spongebag not Washbag!

Deconstructing class in the Ross family, a peculiar microcosm of a deeper story

I have been meaning to write about class for a while. Class explains a lot in Britain as it does elsewhere: it signifies many things. I have foreborne from doing so because deconstructing class means, if I am to write it, deconstructing myself and my family. And deconstructing oneself in public is an uncomfortable exercise, not least because of the unpleasant truths that may be uncovered. For my family has a peculiar and unusual, if not to say unique, relationship to class in Britain (or perhaps more precisely, England).

My grandfather was a brilliant man who won a scholarship to Oxford in astronomy at the age of fifteen. He went on to become a professor of linguistics who claimed to speak twenty nine different languages (we never believed him, though we never really knew). For several years during the Second World War, he worked secretly at the famous code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, alongside more famous luminaries such as Alan Turing. Long after his death, I learned that my grandfather, Alan Strode Campbell Ross, to give him his full name, worked on German naval codes, which means the Enigma ciphers, whose remarkable decryption was codenamed ‘Ultra’ as in ultra-secret, a secret that was not to be revealed until some thirty years after the war. When I contacted the successor institution to Bletchley, GCHQ¹, to ask about Alan’s work, the historian (who would not give me his or her name) told me that two of the decryption techniques innovated by my grandfather remain secret to this day. Interestingly, one of the first historians of Bletchley and Ultra, Peter Calvocoressi, claimed that the Ultra secret was kept for so long because of the shared class values of those who worked at Bletchley, that, for the upper middle classes or upper classes who mostly comprised the Bletchley staff, ‘one’ didn’t talk. For his part, my grandfather never mentioned his work there until his death.

But Alan was better known, and indeed famous for a while, for something that took up only a relatively small period of his professional life which was otherwise spent exploring unusual languages and deciphering obscure medieval texts. In 1954, he wrote an article² on the class characteristics of the English language (as spoken by the English, not Americans), for a little-known Finnish philological journal. Somehow, and I have not yet discovered how, the article came to the attention of Nancy Mitford, of the famous and storied ‘Mitford girls’, one of whom married the British fascist Oswald Mosley.

My grandfather had come up with the categories of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ where ‘U’ designated upper class language and ‘non-U’, the rest. ‘U’ - upper class language - comprised words like ‘napkin’, ‘loo’ and pronouncing 'forehead’ as ‘forrid’. The non-U equivalent words for the same objects were ‘serviette’, ‘toilet’ and, well, saying ‘fore-head’ for your forehead. Mitford was apparently rather taken with this taxonomy, contacted Alan and proposed they write a book together about class and the English language. To a certain, now rather aged, segment of the English population, this book ‘Noblesse Oblige’³ is famous; it made ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ so well-known and popular that Alan went on to write several books about the linguistics of class, and for a while he was famous too.

Alan was an odd part of my childhood. When he came to stay with us, he took over my bedroom, filled it with pipesmoke and placed two bricks under the end legs so that, he said, the blood would flow to his brain during the night. He sported a long beard, tweeds and pebble spectacles, making him resemble Professor Calculus from the Tintin books. One of his hobbies was to drive his Landrover, sometimes loaded with students, onto bleak and rugged moors and aim for bogs so that the vehicle would become stuck. When once I went on one of these trips, the students yelled ‘Stick! Stick! Stick!’ as the wheels span in the mud. Then would ensue a long procedure of winching the vehicle from the mud, the apparent point of the whole exercise. From what I can make out from his papers, of which he left reams and reams, he also seems to have tried to work out the mathematical relationships inherent in language, the equations and algorithms that create sentences and meanings, long before large language models and DeepMind. He often said that mathematics was a superior form of intellectual knowledge to all others. The only letter he ever sent me was about the derivation of Pi.

I never successfully figured out my father’s relationship to Alan. In one of the histories of Bletchley, a story is related that on a train journey, Alan had drugged my father to fall asleep whereupon Alan placed him on the luggage rack so that he would be free to talk with his colleagues. My father claimed this had never happened, but it tallied with some of what I came later to learn about Alan who was, I’m afraid, a very self-centred man. Amongst his papers are many massive scrapbooks filled with copious articles about himself with no mention of his highly accomplished wife, my grandmother Stefania who, amongst other things, translated sagas from Old Norse and contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary. Alan’s papers now sit in large blue IKEA bags in storage in Wales where we used to live. One day I’ll go through them and will be sure to share my findings here on Substack.

‘U’ and ‘non-U’ were sacred in our household. We were taught to speak a particular way and to use particular words. On one occasion during my childhood, my brother called the bag where you put your bathroom things - toothbrushes etc - a ‘washbag’ (non-U). My father overheard and yelled, ‘Spongebag! Spongebag! Spongebag!’ (U) at the top of his voice. This story makes my home sound like a kind of classist tyranny. It wasn’t but nevertheless the words one used for things was taken very seriously. For my father, I think it was a way of holding onto his identity and family history, which was otherwise eroded by his - to him, tedious - profession in the financial sector, and life in the bourgeois but banal environs of a relatively wealthy part of South London. I’ve wondered whether likewise ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ was Alan’s way of holding onto his own declining class status. He had been brought up in a country house with servants. The life of a provincial academic was altogether more penurious and he ended his days living in a tiny and grotty house on the south coast, books piled up in teetering towers around his bed and paltry furniture. Alan nevetheless thought of himself as upper class and he defined ‘U’ speech as how he himself spoke, making his research rather straightforward, no doubt.

I remain proud of Alan’s secret work in helping win the war. When I was younger, I was also proud of Noblesse Oblige and ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ and was given to showing off about Alan’s invention, especially to English people of a particular generation who would indeed be suitably impressed - or pretended to be. And my speech remains of a particular class distinction. I say ‘loo’ and ‘napkin’. Thanks to my father’s policing, it would almost cause me physical pain to say ‘serviette’ or ‘couch’ a term my American wife uses to describe what I call a ‘sofa’ which stands in our ‘drawing room’, a place NOT under any circumstances to be called the ‘living room’. Americans are excused from the test, of course, as are all foreigners (though for a while Alan tried to analyse the class distinctions in other languages). And I remain an expert on class distinctions in vocabulary - I can tell an awful lot about an English person’s background from the words they use. Class, I’m sorry to say, remains important in English society.

Reviewing Alan’s books about ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ today, they read as facilely-written texts of appalling and shameless snobbery because of course ‘U’ is presented as the type of speech to which one should aspire; ‘non-U’ something to be looked down upon. The class hierarchy was never explicit but it was of course highly implicit, not least in the names of the taxonomy itself (what is and what is not). And this is one reason, it is claimed, for the appeal of the concept in the 1950’s, when Noblesse Oblige first appeared, for these were aspirational years of ‘getting ahead’, the novel ‘Room at the Top’ and transcending one’s class. ‘Non-U’ defined what one didn’t want to be, what one wanted to escape from, and Alan’s books were a textbook for this process and became very popular as a result. In England, class was in those days defined by speech, schooling and family, and not by wealth and this remains the case to this day (unlike the US, by comparison, where class is much more, but not entirely, defined by wealth). You could have holes in your socks or tweed jacket and scuffed shoes (as long as the soles were leather), but if you spoke like a toff, you might just get away with passing for one (particularly if you avoided mention of the school you attended, unless it was one of a short list of certain private, known as ‘public’, schools).

But one of the nasty secrets of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ is that it’s incredibly hard to pull off consistently unless you were brought up with it. It is all too easy to slip into ‘non-U’ by using a word a ‘U’ person would never say or do something a ‘U’ person would never do (Alan’s analysis started as linguistic but soon strayed into the behavioural). If you put milk into the tea cup or mug before you pour the tea, you are forever marked as ‘non-U’ (this is because, according to Alan, and I kid you not, the working class worried that putting the tea in first might stain the valuable cups). And if you call ‘supper’, your ‘tea’, or ‘lunch’ (U) your ‘dinner’ (non-U) likewise, you are indelibly and inescapably ‘non-U’, especially if at the end of your meal you eat ‘dessert’, ‘sweet’ or, worse, ‘afters’ instead of - ‘U’ - ‘pudding’. And these are just the easiest examples. Alan’s books may have served as manuals but to their aspirational ‘non-U’ readers they must have been as taxing to learn as ancient Greek (which, by the way, Alan also claimed to speak).

My relationship with ‘U’ and ‘non-U’, then, began as upbringing, then changed into pride and then later transformed into a certain kind of quizzical, amused distance. I thought it was all a bit silly. But today that relationship has changed once more. Because of course class, and signifiers of class, are immensely important signals of what is really going on in society. I used to think that class didn’t really matter, but now I realise that it really, really does.

Why did people buy Alan’s books? Because they wanted to consort with a certain kind of people or go to certain kinds of parties? Maybe, but surely it was ultimately about power. ‘U’ was spoken by people with power: the aristocracy, landowners, judges, lawyers, colonial governors (almost all men, and all white). The patriarchy, the owners of capital, the imperialists. If you sounded like them, that gave you at least a smidgen of their power. Power of course is as much about the appearance of power as the actuality, as tinpot dictators the world over well know. When I was in the British diplomatic service, you never heard ‘non-U’ but more a kind of upper middle class English, a sort of lower form of ‘U’. Whether conscious or not, the accent told a story of our importance in society, an importance that the mandarins wished to perpetuate and I remember being pretty comfortable with it too. When I testified to the Iraq (or Chilcot) Inquiry, I made sure to make my speech as ‘U’ as possible in order to maximise my authority as I laid out the evidence the Blair government’s illegalities and lies (the transcript of my performance is here; the video is sadly no longer available, it appears). This was also partly because I very rapidly figured out that Chilcot and his panel were upper middle-class, as I am, and I wanted him to know that I was of his people and therefore someone he could believe in. I knew this because of the why he pronounced his own name (more ‘Chilcut’ than ‘Chilcot’). When, by contrast, I speak to school children in a state school, or my anarchist friends, my speech is more likely to echo the more working class accents of my South London roots. Or, it once was more likely, because I have really tried to stop playing this game, which is of course a kind of power game of trying to assert myself through class status.

So, what is class, really? It is a signifier of social status, one’s place in the hierarchy that still comprises the social, economic and political architecture in which we all live. It reminds us that to this day that there is an ‘up’ and a ‘down’ in British society. It gives you more street cred and political popularity to be working class than it once did but still not in the ‘professional’ classes. Hence the embarrassing contortions of the new Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, who during the election campaign endlessly harped on about how his father was a toolmaker, making him working class, but all this uttered in a the decidedly middle class accent of the lawyer and chief prosecutor that Starmer became (the top of the heap in hierarchy terms). At what moment did his accent change, I wonder? But I should not criticise: he only did what was necessary in a still class-ridden society just as diplomats of working class origin, who are few and far between (I’ve known precisely one), must abandon their own original accents if they are to attain ambassadorial rank. The only working class accents I remember from the Foreign Office were those of the registry clerks who filed all the papers or, occasionally, the secretaries.

Class, then, signifies power. And British society is rife with power relationships. Named another way, these are the structures that shape who were are - our very identities - and how we are permitted to behave. These structures are the source of many outcomes for Britain’s people, almost all of them bad. They produce inequality, they systematize domination, they sustain the racism that ensures that non-white communities suffer worse health, lower professional status and crueller treatment by the police, a particular wielder of power (a lower middle class profession used to protect the power, property and privileges of the dominant class). Black people were excluded from the whole ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ thing; I doubt their reality would have even occurred to my grandfather. Class signifiers tell a story including of those to whom they don’t apply at all - some are excluded from the class calculus in its entirety. Where does this leave them in the hierarchy?

Some, like the historian Niall Ferguson, believe that power relationships are inevitable in human society. I doubt this is true, not least because of the examples I already know of the opposite (the Zapatistas, Rojava, indigenous societies). But even if he is right, do these imbalances need to be baked into the very system - its structures?

‘U’ and ‘non-U’ now reads as pretty outdated. The class-distinct vocabulary of Alan’s era is less and less heard. I used to claim to foreigners that class was less important in Britain than it was, but now I don’t believe it. Alan’s linguistic distinctions - the words he chose as upper or not-upper class - may no longer be used, but only because they have been overtaken by new ones and more subtle signifiers of class origin. Class language has gone through pretentious inversions where for a while it became fashionably ironic for middle or upper class people to use working class vocabulary or accents (‘mockney’ or ‘estuary English’), but class distinctions remain in language, as they do in a host of other ways, from how we speak to how we dress or what sports we embrace. And what class signifiers signify of course remains all too clear: a dominant class and the dominated remainder. And this will remain the case as long as capitalism endures.

In a way, I am glad that class signifiers remain. The worst part of me is tempted to use language and accent to demonstrate my own social status. Those who are impressed by such are the worst kind of people, I have realised, so the temptation is diminished. One reason the better part of me loved America, at least for a while, was because it meant escape from all that class BS and being judged by one’s accent (though it is replaced there only by a different kind of power BS). I lived in the US for seventeen years: America made me feel free (its greatest quality) partly because of the freedom from the English class system.

Class signifiers, ugly though they may be, at least allow us to tell what we’re dealing with. If everyone spoke and dressed the same, how could we work out the answer to Stalin’s perennial question ‘who, whom?’ (my favourite political saying of all time) - who is doing what to whom? Thankfully, we have class, accents and the very choice of words to tell us the answer without having to get to the nitty gritty of how power is actually exercised.

Some nevertheless say that class is on the decline in Britain. I beg to differ. As long as domination and hierarchy remain, so will class. It may be shown by different words, habits and fashions, but shown it will undoubtedly be, not least because those with the power want it to be known, subtly or otherwise. Until the revolution at last arrives, I’ll be putting the milk in after the tea and dabbing my mouth with my napkin and definitely not my serviette. Noblesse Oblige!

As usual, I’d very much welcome comments, whether in agreement or not or tell me about your own experience of class and its signifying capability.

1. The Government Communications Headquarters where the government spies on communications all over the world

2. Ross, Alan S. C., "Linguistic class-indicators in present-day English" , Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (Helsinki), vol. 55(1) (1954), 20–56

3. Noblesse Oblige roughly translates as ‘privilege entails responsibility’ which can be read as an imperative for the big to help the little, such as sitting still while the shoe polisher buffs your shoes.