The death of Leslie Philips at the extremely ripe age of 98 had me thinking about his suave upper-class persona versus the fact that he came from a working-class East London background, as did other professionally posh actors + showbiz personalities of the same era such as Terry-Thomas and Frank Muir. The latter quipped that despite appearances "I was educated in E10, not Eton." There are many other examples of artistes who did a kind of auto-Pygmalion job and taught themselves to speak proper. But this thing of performers adopting received pronunciation upon entry into the entertainment world is long gone. If anything, their modern equivalents would try to blunt any poshness in their speech patterns. There's this weird disjunction between a cultural ascendancy of the demotic, even as class divides and economic inequality are worsening and Eton rather than E10 continues to fill the cabinet.
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Part of this may have been from these chaps serving in the forces. The military pushed RP as a way for NCO's to communicate clearly with their men, who may have been from a different part of the country that they were from.
ReplyDeleteThat was George Martin's explanation - he had a working class background, but said it was impossible to go through the Royal Navy and not come out of it sounding somewhat posh
DeleteKenneth Williams and James Whale (the film director) also took care to disguise their actual backgrounds (Whale was the son of a Black Country blast furnaceman), which in their cases also carried a sense of further estrangement from their families (they were both gay men)
ReplyDeleteThere are a few slightly younger examples - Bryan Ferry, for instance - but the one that springs to mind first is Vivian Stanshall, whose refinement might not have been voluntary - in his telling, he was an Essex boy whose father came back from the war with a cut-glass accent, and determined that the rest of his family should also speak properly, through whatever means required ('this posh accent which had literally been bashed into me'), which explains a lot about his particular way of using it as passive aggressive parody
Some of this drive also came from theatrical training of the time: young actors needed to be able to play drawing-room comedies and Shakespeare, as that's where lots of future parts would come from. So you needed to be adaptable in how you spoke.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to watch the original film of Pygmalion (1938): Wendy Hiller's London accent is not very convincing, even it is being played for laughs. You can see why social realism in film and TV drama took off in the 60s.
Was Joe Strummer one of the first to go the other way?