‘Who are the working class now?’ was the Observer Magazine cover story of 22 February 1970, a series of sociological case studies by Arthur Hopcraft. He writes about the ‘squalid and grim’ reality of the precarious life of Trevor Young, 30, a farm labourer, and his wife, Jenny, despite living in a picture-postcard thatched cottage. ‘There isn’t a thing in my wardrobe that didn’t come from a jumble sale,’ says Jenny. ‘I make a daily list of shopping, and I daren’t go a penny over it.’
Trevor was as unflinchingly honest: ‘You’re just like a piece of machinery to the guv’nor. I’ve heard about one bloke being carried out on a stretcher after an accident – and the farmer just put his cards on his chest.’
Bill Mahon, 48, started working as a miner when he was 14. On day shifts he was up at 4am and at the bottom of the pit by 5.45am. Both his sons followed him into the same work. ‘There is more than resigned acceptance in this seemingly inevitable progress of the local youth to the pit,’ says Hopcraft. The pit is their life, they say: ‘Nearly all we talk about in the club is the pit. There’s not much talk anywhere about politics or the unions.’
Hopcraft ends with the similarly narrow horizons of factory worker Eileen and alludes to the coping mechanism of alcohol: ‘She has been to several nightclubs in Manchester. Her favourite drink is Tia Maria and she also likes cherry brandy, sherry, and port and lemon. Stuart [her boyfriend] drinks pints of bitter.’
The possibility of escape feels remote and Eileen sounds understandably depressed. ‘I wouldn’t mind leaving Oldham altogether,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing here, really. But I don’t suppose we will.’
And even if she wanted to talk about it, there were class differences. ‘The middle class get psychotherapy,’ concluded one psychiatrist rather pithily, ‘and the working class get pills.’
