Coal miner’s daughter
A side note in Fiona Hill’s testimony at the impeachment hearing is of interest:
This is a bit of a sidebar to her testimony but Hill’s low estimation of the professional environment in the UK has not gone unnoticed.
“Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered for me opportunities I never would have had in England,” Hill testified. “I grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent.”
Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. She’s saying even in 1980’s 1990’s, you couldn’t get recognition for your talent and expertise if you had a working-class accent.
It was an indictment of Britain. https://twitter.com/RobbieGramer/status/1197538764731629568 …Robbie Gramer
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@RobbieGramer
In new testimony, Fiona Hill issues scathing rebuke of 1960’s England
That is, her rebuke was not just of 1960’s Britain but of 1980’s 1990’s, in fact decidedly the latter since she was born in 1965 so she wasn’t starting her career in the 60s.
She continued:
In England in the 1980s and 1990s, this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America. For the better part of three decades, I have built a career as a nonpartisan, nonpolitical national security professional focusing on Europe and Eurasia and especially the former Soviet Union.
And then along came the rich boy from Queens.
I am very impressed with Dr. Hill’s comments today. I’ve been largely unfamiliar with who she is and her part in this (which is a testament to my lack of attention), but she has a real knack of making cogent, insightful, damning points.
I was rather delighted to hear an accent not so far from where I grew up. And she is absolutely right. As the child of a bricklayer, I’ve experienced the same. Many of my friends’ dads were coal miners. I remember the miner’s strike vividly, even though I was quite young. We used to have social events to raise money to help their families literally eat and pay rent etc.
That is why I made the same decision she did, to leave behind the country of my birth that seemed uninterested in taking advantage of my talents and education (ironically, mostly paid for by EU programs to assist low-income kids to go to university). I was very taken by the way Americans saw my story of growing up in poverty to going on to gain my doctorate and raise myself up as inspiring, rather than the British attitude that I was unwelcome in the middle class, but that the working class no longer recognized me as one of their own (a “class traitor”).
Dr Hill has been very impressive. I particularly liked her firm insistence that the conspiracy theories about the 2016 election and Ukraine were complete fiction. But she has been equally firm and precise in all her answering and I think some of the Republicans are being very disrespectful in their manner of speaking to her. Or past her, as has often been the case.
Claire, that’s sort of the opposite pattern that I experienced growing up in America. We were poor and despised, and my dad raised pigs (in a town where the only things acceptable to raise are horses and dogs). I was able to take advantage of the good schools in the rich town where we lived, and no one in high school accepted me, but as soon as I left that school behind, everyone just assumed I belonged wherever my skills and talents fit me.
American’s struggle with the idea of the classless society in some ways, but it really is better to be able to move past working class roots into the middle class if that is where your interests and talents lie. To be stifled because you have a working class accent (that can happen here, too, but it seems like it is easier to get past by gaining a large vocabulary. We aren’t so much on accent as we are on what words you use and how you say them).
I hope the orange Cheeto doesn’t ruin that for those who come next.
My freshman year political science teaching assistant was a grad student from the U.K. She was constantly bringing up questions of social class in our tutorial group, and was flummoxed when we mostly shrugged and said it wasn’t a big factor in domestic politics. We, in turn, were confused by why she kept bringing it up…..
I”m sure Dr. Hill is right, but in my opinion it’s more about being an immigrant than about there not being class barriers. I moved from the US to the UK, and would say the exact same thing she’s said about her move in the other direction. No one in the UK can spot my ‘class markers’–I can’t be immediately classified and ranked–so my self presentation, opinions and behaviours get a pass here, and have less effect on what I’m permitted to do or access, and how my performance is judged.
I was born in Appalachia, in an area and a class similar to Loretta Lynn (whose name is evoked by Ophelia’s title for anyone who’s from that place and class and is at least as old as I am). My native dialect was pretty strong. I consciously unlearned it before I was ten years old, partly because my best friend at the time did not share it (as his parents weren’t from around there), and he made fun of me for it. To be fair, I made fun of him for saying ‘warsh’, and in the end I wound up moving to Canada and thence to Germany while he stayed behind. We’ve long since lost touch, but my last contact with him revealed that he had taken on the accent that he’d inspired me to abandon.
I cannot say with certainty that my options would have been limited by my decision to regularize my accent and mannerisms, but I’m fairly confident that they would have been, especially if I had remained in the US.
And of course English people in the US and (for the most part) Americans in England (and I’m told even moreso in Scotland and Ireland) automatically get an upgrade–I tell people any English person in the US automatically gets 20 more IQ points (not that Dr Hill needed the help, but she does benefit from the effect–very few Americans she interacts with will mark her accent as ‘lower class’; more will hear it as sounding sophisticated and intellectual) and any American in England automatically gets 20 more coolness points (which I now, as a pretty ordinary overweight middle-aged woman, definitely benefit from).
She’s done well for a girl from Bishop, as we say around here.
As Claire said, this type of class discrimination happened a lot back then and continues to a lesser extent. There are, of course, factors that can override this predudice which is probably why I, a white male with a very similar accent to Hill’s, didn’t really notice it at the time.
guest beat me to pointing out that class markers aren’t always visible from opposite sides of the pond. This was most apparent to me when I was at a wedding in the US with a group of people from Middlesbrough, Newcastle and here in County Durham, all of us with accents that would mark us as working class in the UK. The Americans at the wedding kept telling us how sophisticated we sounded. On reflection, perhaps that was because they couldn’t understand a word we said; over here the primary mark of extreme poshness is that absolutely nobody else can understand your accent.
That’s a very interesting point. I was wondering about Hill’s claim some yesterday but didn’t think to put it that way. I was thinking it’s not really true that an accent marked as working class or country doesn’t hold anyone back in the US, and I’m pretty damn sure people in say West Virginia would assure us it’s not. Isn’t that a big part of what Hillbilly Elegy was all about? Isn’t that a big part of what Trump is all about? But I didn’t think of it in terms of the geography of accent-recognition.
Some Trump fan on Twitter complained about Hill’s “Prince Andrew accent.”
ROFL.
I imagine we brits are a little bit better at placing US accents than Americans are at placing ours, if only because we get more of your TV shows and movies than you do ours and because America is big and Britain is small. But it would be difficult to imagine English accents further apart on the percieved social scale than the many accents of County Durham and the born-with-a-silver-spoon-up-his-arse accent of the peodophile-adjacent-at-best ‘Prince’ Andrew.
What an amazing implied insult anyway: she has a similar (not similar in any way) accent to that Andrew gadgie so… nudge? wink? Do you think these people lean back in their chairs at the end of their working day with the impression of a job well done?
I know, I know – I ROFLd too.
Yes, and that may be one thing I didn’t have – a working class accent. Even though we were poor, we were very literate, and never developed the accent. Plus, my accent only marked me as being from somewhere besides Oklahoma, and when you want to get ahead in the world, being from somewhere other than Oklahoma is not a bad thing.
Also–re ‘classlessness’ in the US…. Shortly after I moved to the UK I was in my new office chatting with the receptionist as building work was going on nearby. She said something about how her cat likes to bite her hair, and the guy drilling holes in the wall looked over his shoulder and said ‘maybe you should stop using that herring shampoo’, and we all laughed. But I, the ‘classless’ American, was utterly shocked–and surprised at how shocked I was. Where I come from a manual labourer simply wouldn’t initiate a conversation with white-collar workers. I’m sure there’s a lot more class-related interaction going on here than I notice, but I do notice that there is usually genuine interaction–in my experience in the US interaction between classes (eg between office staff and cleaners or maintenance people, or between people buying and selling services) tends to be either performative or nonexistent.
I listened to Fiona Hill and she speaks beautifully – good diction, clear voice. But she doesn’t have much of County Durham left in her voice. She’s speaking Received Pronunciation, with a few northern vowels.
KBP:
I disagree. Her accent has changed, sure, but I was able to tell from her accent that she was raised In Bishop Aukland or thereabouts. But to be fair I have an interest in accents. I’m no Enry Iggins but I have a decent ear for that sort of thing. The little I heard of her talk sounded like County Durham to me.
Perhaps you’re right, I’ll listen a bit more.
RP? Nooo, surely not. I’m a Yank and it’s VERY unmistakable to me that she’s from t’North.
I was thinking about this early this morning while bumbling around making coffee, in terms of the Yorkshire accents in Downton Abbey, which reminded me to wonder why Carson/Jim Carter speaks something pretty close to RP (while quite distant from the dowager’s aristospeak, which is itself quite different from the earl’s). Any theories on why Carson sounds neither Yorkshire nor working class?
I listened to some other videos in which Dr Hill said some excellent stuff. Hers is recognisably a Bishop accent, changed by living elsewhere. Accents are as much about things like cadence as they are about things like how vowels are vowled, after all.
I haven’t seen a single episode of Downton Abbey but my grandad was a yorkshireman who worked as a gardener at a stately home for 60 years. He had at least one accent for tugging his forlock to and quite a different one for shouting at us. This is a man who didn’t see a motor car until he was in his 20s so perhaps his story fits with the show. I like to think his posh yorkshire accent was built from seething contempt for the undeserved aristocracy but he was a horrible old bastard to us in his native accent as well. I don’t know whether that answers the Downton Abbey question or not.
I haven’t watched any Downton Abbey but am aware that Carson was the butler, the superior position in the household staff and, back then, an aspirational position for even a middle-class man, particularly for positions in aristocratic households.
The butler was the only servant who would regularly speak both with his employers and with their house guests, so a working-class accent was not considered suitable. He would have had at the minimum a grammar school education and quite possibly university, too.
In short, one did not become the butler in any ‘good’ house unless one spoke like a gentleman. Jeeves is the classic example, though he was not a butler but a valet; a gentleman’s gentleman.
Really? Middle class? That doesn’t sound right, given the way servant-havers habitually talked about “the servants.” Yes butler is the peak of servanthood, especially in a grand house, but I’m skeptical that it was seen as middle-class. It could be a step in that direction, though: some went on to manage hotels and the like.
And Jeeves…Jeeves is a fantasy, and a comedy. The fact that he’s erudite and clever beyond Bertie’s wildest dream is the joke. He’s not a sociological datum.
But I think it’s right that a working class accent wouldn’t be good enough for a prodigy house butler – it’s just that I wonder how a Carson would get the more RP accent. Mind you they weren’t supposed to do much talking, so maybe it wouldn’t be that difficult.
The middle class thing makes more sense in the context of the times and of the duties of the butler.
Until the first quarter of the last century domestic service was one of the larger industries in Britain, and like all industries of the time it maintained a strict hierarchy. There was almost a class system within a class system, and commonly the top positions tended not to go to the working classes. The butler, especially in the larger, aristocrats’ houses with a small army of staff, was in effect a middle manager. It was a position that came with many responsibilities, a white collar role in a blue collar profession not unlike an overseer or supervisor in manufacturing industries, and was one that required the kind of education not usually available to the working classes.
Oh I know about the hierarchy. But there’s also the external hierarchy, and in that the servant class was just that. Estate agents were middle class, but butlers? I remain unconvinced.
Governesses are another outlier. They could be quite well educated, more so than their employers, but that didn’t make them not-servants. They tended to be marooned because they refused to be classed with the servants and their employers refused to class them with family, so they ate on a tray in the nursery.
Also…(this subject interests me, always has, so excuse harping on it)…there was a class system within the working class, of course. There were relatively prosperous workers who could give their kids some schooling, which would give them a better shot at jobs like butler and housekeeper rather than housemaid or boot boy. Butler & housekeeper were called Upper Servants…but middle class not so much. This is one reason servants became so very hard to find post WW2: service was a class prison for almost everyone. It was seen as degrading. Children of servants would keep it a secret.
@latsot – I don’t have a good ear for accents, about which I am sorry as I love the variety of accent in the UK. So will concede.
My own accent is New Zealand and I live in Edinburgh. A Scots accent is a hard one to pick up. I can pass as from London – I get bored with people asking me if I’m from Australia or New Zealand – but the NZ comes back strongly in times of emotion or when talking to other NZers. Then my NZ family hear some Scots intonation in my voice.
I have worked with women who would quite naturally change from modified Scots on the phone to clients to broad Scots on the phone to their family.
I don’t think anyone would describe a butler in a grand house as “middle-class”. He had a privileged position and may have been on terms of some familiarity with his employers. He may have had a higher attitude towards a tradesman than a housemaid would have. But middle-class? I doubt if an independent shopkeeper or a small scale factory owner would see a butler as, say, a match for his daughter or that a butler would be a career aspiration for his son. He would have no independent property for instance. He wouldn’t have had a vote until the 1880s.
The shift from from modified Scots on the phone to clients to broad Scots on the phone to family=code switching. Everybody does it some, and some do it a lot. It’s also about style, grammar, vocabulary and the like but accent is part of it.
KBPlayer, as a fellow kiwi i’ve formed the view that many of us have a very ‘plastic’ accent. By that i mean that we tend to rapidly adapt and change to match our environment when we live somewhere an extended period. My ex came back from London with a very rounded and softened accent (not RP though), whereas my sister came back with an Australian accent, because that’s who she hung out with.Similarly I’ve known kiwis move to the US, canada and Australia and within a few years they almost pass as natives. English, Dutch, North Americans etc coming to NZ? Not so much.
Which part of NZ were you from originally? Southland has a distinct rhotic R that I can imagine would adapt well to Scotland. People from much of the Urban South Island have a more generically English accent than say some regions or the North Island in general.
Rob – I’m from the Waikato, and spent my university years in Wellington. A flatmate with a posh English accent used to laugh at me saying “binch” for bench. I think NZers do have a “plastic” accent. I’ve just spoken to one on the phone who lives in London and was almost London.
Scots is a hard accent to pick up because of the gutturals and the rolled r’s.
I did have a boyfriend who was a good mimic and could imitate the difference in an accent between places 5 miles apart. He himself, English, but mostly lived in Edinburgh, was impossible to place.