Talking Posh
from bbc 'The Frost Report' 1966 sketch on class.
Recently I found out that two artists I came into contact with years ago were not as I thought from a different class from my own working class origins.
The first is Julian Spalding, who was on the same BA course as me at Nottingham University in the 60’s although he started the year before.. He was an eloquent and passionate speaker who involved himself in our minor revolution on the fine art/ art history course when Hornsey students came to politicise us and we demanded to learn about art beyond Europe and America and to reinstate a student who was suspended. We succeeded in the latter but were told staff could not expand the scope of the art history as they did not know about it themselves. The course was unusual and short lived as a collaboration between the University out on a campus and the Art School in town.
Julian went on to be the director of Glasgow Art Gallery and wrote several books, in which he shows an individual taste in art and distaste for establishment views on what is good and what is discarded from the canon of modern and post modern art.
Only recently I found out his admission that he grew up on a council estate in London and made a conscious decision to change his accent to the classless ‘ Received Pronunciation’and thereby more classy bbc English that probably aided his success in life.
My father had the foresight to recommend this course of action to me and offered me elocution classes but I for political reasons of loyalty kept my Derby accent and took lessons in singing instead, leaving these when exhorted to use a long a and to sound operatic.
The other man was Victor Burgin, who loitered looking pale and interesting with a wild head of dark curls in our life studio. I thought he was a moody student but he turned out to be one of tutors, albeit avoiding interacting with us. He was a little older and already engaged in conceptual art although he never told us anything of it. I found out then that his art included taking a photo of a parquet floor and attaching it to the floor over the spot of which it was a photo.
I don’t remember him speaking at all, only that he had a relationship with a young woman student at the art school, something that was common for tutors to do at the time, and that she was featured in a national newspaper as an artist and also had an abortion. I don’t know if the relationship with Burgin was a factor in these two events.
Victoria Burgin went on to academic life in America and to carry on photographic work as a high status theoretical artist. You can see and hear him being learned and interesting on YouTube. Unlike Spalding, Burgin speaks in a very slow flat tone devoid of excitement. (Strangely he pronounces ‘semiotics’ and ‘Brechtian’’ in not the accepted ways.) He is part of the post modern art world, successful although not very famous, making art with leftwing political and feminist awareness. His accent is again classless bbc, fooling me into thinking his origin very different from my. own.
Now I find he grew up in the shadow of a steel foundry in Sheffield and had experience of manual labour. He mentions working at Nottingham but not the life class part.
Of course the sixties was actually the era when working class people were able to get a university education with the aid of government grants because of the Labour Wilson government system of grants. Actors were suddenly able to use their regional accents.
The Beatles were clearly from Liverpool.
I find these two men used a clever strategy of hiding their working class origins - in the loose sense of working class to mean the bottom sector of a three rung society, not the Marxist sense of those that work for others, not owning the means of production.
I wonder if they can still talk not posh?
I must add both Julian and Victor are clearly very clever and accomplished and interesting .
I wonder how much these differences of accent still matter, how much advantage ‘ bbc English’ gives, with its assumption of being well educated and well heeled?
How much this sort of thing applies outside UK?
