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Leamington Letters #17: Class and Culture

26/2/2012

7 Comments

 


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Working class boy to middle class intellectual to lord of the realm. Our Melvyn: digital finger portrait by Jill Every

The famous old Regent Hotel in Leamington, which opened in 1819 and played host to the young Princess Victoria, had 100 bedrooms and a single bathroom. It is now a Travelodge. Its  dining room and public areas, once the centre of fashionable society, are currently boarded up while we await yet another mass catering chain to take over the lease. Twenty years or so ago, however, in its already fading glory, Melvyn Bragg and I serenaded a young lady called Joanna with the first couple of stanzas of Dylan’s great song; his light tenor and northern vowels harmonising rather well, I remember, with my middle-class (classless) baritone.

I’ve been a fan of Melvyn’s ever since. His popular and popularizing programmes on contemporary culture have been a pleasure, always; provocative and insightful, occasionally.

But I’m not sure where he’s going with his latest series, on class and culture. It’s good TV, for sure, racing through footage of brass bands, rock and roll, choirs, ballet and opera as he attempts to explain how working-class, middle-class and upper-class cultures have interacted. It’s autobiographical, too, because implicit in the programmes is the story of the young working-class boy from the north of England who became a rich Hampstead intellectual and now sits in the House of Lords.

In Melvyn’s terms, it all seems fairly simple and seamless. In Melvyn’s life, it probably was and is. But I don’t think he’s really getting to the heart of the matter.

I am not, any more, one of those Marxists who regard culture as part of the ‘superstructure’, a manifestation of the economic ‘base’, as the economic circumstances of man determine his consciousness. I do, however, subscribe to what Raymond Williams termed ‘cultural materialism’. Raymond’s essay “Culture is Ordinary” was a key text for many of us in the ‘60s, because he argued that culture was not separate, as it was being presented to us by our tutors, but “a whole way of life” and thus, by definition, political.

He went further, expanding the definition of culture. Yes, working class culture is choirs and brass bands, and those few proletarian novels which we studied as part of the English tripos. But it is also political organization. It is a march, a strike, an event, a movement. The cultural (and political) significance of the brass bands and the male voice choirs is not so much the music: it is, primarily, the very existence and organization of the band or choir itself.

I doubt whether Raymond would have agreed, and I suspect Melvyn does, but I see this theme also in the counter-culture of the ‘60s, in The Grateful Dead, in -  today - the culture of the Internet, and in a whole raft of similar phenomena which I hope my readers will add.

Culture is ordinary. And that is what makes it extraordinary.

Meantime, thanks to Melvyn. Always a pleasure. And, on this occasion, provocative also.

Today’s listening: Dylan’s 1961 Carnegie Chapter Hall show. One of my most treasured possessions is an original flyer for this concert (All seats $2), and this has been recently released. I don’t think it is ‘official’, and it appears to differ not at all from the ‘bootleg’ which I possess. But it’s great nonetheless.

7 Comments
Charlotte Ford
28/2/2012 03:47:17

The Download Festival, Castle Donnington was where the diversity of age class and culture came as a surprise to me. It even harkened back to the old festival going days of the 1960s, when the counter-culture opened doors that the uniformity of the popular culture was closing.
I found my eardrum shattering time there(last visit 2009) very uplifting,from a human point of view. Even the unusual loudness of classical music on the powerfull sound system between acts seemed to pull everyone present into one enormous social group. And less jostling there than at the Chelsea Flower Show !

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kevin phelps
28/2/2012 09:40:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Melv, Leamington, Grateful Dead, Marxism, Culture, Ordinary...forget all that!

Jill... bloody brilliant!

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Sean
29/2/2012 09:14:09

What is culture now? Culture to me is ordinary. It's a life lived without affectation, or even knowledge, that you're doing something that others don't. There are decreasing pockets left across this country, and perhaps the world. Certainly Bragg presenting colliery bands etc as evidence of class systems embedded into class cultures seems a little out of touch. However intelligent and insightful the man is he's still someone for whom the reality of working class or socialist life and culture is a distant, (perhaps rose-tinted?) mirage (there are others, notably Billy Connolly and every member of every 60's band now living in £5 million mansions in Berkshire)
Ways of life are political because they need to be protected, and are often misunderstood, or plainly derided by others. In the 80s football was left to us who loved football, ingrained in communities and passed down from father to son. No-one else liked it, in fact they openly despised it. But then along came Murdoch and 20 years on it's a shrunken cultural pool continually diluted by lazy, sensationalist journalism and half thought out opinions from people with no real understanding, feeling or love for the game.
As for now, my cause fighting died many years ago, in fact as I wrote some copy for Bacardi the other week I had fond memories of picketing Newcastle Poly Student Union bar over the very same rum. Amazing what 20 years does. I'm still as angry, but now sadly defeated. I just go and see Mark Thomas and Rob Newman every few years to see what those who aren't defeated are still getting up to. And continue to listen to the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and other angry music from my past.

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myers
29/2/2012 14:42:27

I met a woman at the door of the Regent hotel and we have been going around ever since! [no. 58]
Suuuperb work Jill (Mr Hockney be afraid be very afraid!)

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Max
1/3/2012 00:55:05

Thanks everyone, especially Myers and Kevin for their accurate comments re Jill's illustration. Love Charlotte's analogy with the Chelsea Flower Show, and Sean's pointed comments re rose-tinted spectacles and Berkshire mansions (although was looking to you, Sean, for a reference to the beautiful game in working-class culture.It seems strange these days to recall that many of our great clubs now in the hands of hedge funds and oligarchs began as works teams. Coventry City and Singer FC.

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Sean
1/3/2012 02:36:32

I was hamstrung a little by the fact that the best known works team in England is M********r U****d, begun by railway workers in Newton Heath. Sadly I'm unable to give them credit for anything. Apologies.

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Max
2/3/2012 01:39:46

Haha. We can't always help the origins of clubs we love. Think Liverpool were formed by a Tory breakaway from Liberal Evertonians! And the Sox record on race was appalling.

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     Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father. and grandfather. Resident in Warwick, England.

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