The British class system--as it once was--remains an oddity. In 1950 a South African, Dan Jacobson arrived in Britain from South Africa. He described the "silent language" by which people measured others and by which they, in turn, were measured. There were "tells" by which people were measured for their membership of a social class.
Jacobson called it a "kind of detective work"
. . . that reminded him of 'an insect stroking an object ahead of it with its feelings, or of a cat sniffing a person's shoes'--and that the process reflected a society 'deeply obsessively divided by a host of invidious, criss-crossing "social indicators" that would go a long way towards determining relations between its members'. [David Kynaston, Family Britain: 1951--1957 (New York: Walker and Co, 2009), p. 135.]Kynaston agrees that Britain in the 1950's was most certainly a society of class consciousness. He adds that in a survey of 11,000 respondents to a 1950-51 questionnaire, 90 percent of people assigned themselves to a social class--and to their class separation from others. Such a phenomenon or reality is indeed foreign to the colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The ubiquity of class and class consciousness remains hard to credit.
