Snobbery is now considered a rather outmoded and amusing social affliction that has been largely replaced by the status of wealth and or celebrity. For most people it’s almost impossible to imagine how much class distinction (or snobbery) used to dictate the social, political and cultural life of the British Empire. Society was strictly divided into nobility, landed gentry, gentry, upper class, upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class, lower class, upper working class, working class and the newly spawned ‘nouveaux rich’; identification being established by an unbelievably complicate code of practice, largely based on breading history and manifest in everything from which school, club or regiment one had been to or was a member of or served in, to the way one spoke, the words one used and the clothes one wore. For many English, analysis was obsessional and global. Indeed, while it has always been assumed that the Indian class system with its five castes, three-hundred sub castes and ninety thousand local sub-groups had been an integral part of Hindu culture, many modern historians believe it to have been the result of British colonialism.
For many people such as the Mitfords, their whole existence was completely dominated by the class system. Assured of a position in the upper echelons of society by the fact that they had inherited sufficient land and funds to afford them the mandatory ‘private means’ to avoid the lower orders necessity of ‘working for a living’; they, like many of their ilk spent a great deal of their time reminding the less privileged of their ‘place’ in society; not, as many now like to believe, with the wit and charm with which they ‘teased’ each other, but with quite vicious social bullying. Indeed, the Mitfords’ would have considered any form of social interaction with at least ninety per-cent of the population, as quite impossible.
Should a working man, or clerk have somehow saved sufficient cash to be able to have afforded a meal at The Savoy, his language (‘do you do ale?’) and dress (a regimental badge on his blazer pocket) would have betrayed him as a member of the lower orders and he would have been either refused service or made to feel so embarrassed or insulted that enjoyment of the meal would have been quite impossible and he would have been ‘obliged’ to leave. In fact, it never seems to occur to those contemporary fans of the Mitfords’ who were bought-up in the sixties, or later, when aristocracy started to be replaced by meritocracy, that they would have been treated with complete distain by both the people they find so fascinating, and their servants; for the latter often developed an even greater degree of snobbery than their masters or mistresses.
David R. Litchfield is the author of Hitler's Valkyrie: The Uncensored Biography of Unity Mitford - an account of 'the only Englishwoman who came close to being capable of changing the course of the Second World War'.