What happened to the working class?

The Sunday Times’s headline for the obituary of Edward Bond earlier this month was striking: ‘Briton who rose from a working class background to make an indelible mark on Theatreland.’ The month before that, the playwright Bernard Kops joined the majority, and I was interested to read in the Guardian that ‘both his father, Joel, a tailor, and his mother, Jenny were Dutch-Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Stepney Jewish primary school and, he said, “the university of the poor”, Whitechapel library, where he read voraciously and decided to become a writer, sustaining himself as a docker and barrow boy’.

The Kops obituary also mentioned his contemporary Arnold Wesker, who grew up in a council flat in Stepney. Then there was Joe Orton, who failed his 11-plus and became a theatrical sensation in the sixties – and Shelagh Delaney, a bus conductor’s daughter and another 11-plus flunker who had a massive hit with A Taste Of Honey in 1958.