Born to be hired : 2006 : the new boy, Enders Analysis

 “How is it that jobs just seem to fall into the laps of posh people?” my daughter asked the other day.

A rhetorical question? A truism? Both? Those of us who work in industries populated largely by posh people whom we do not resemble may have observed two phenomena. Posh people are often appointed to posts for which they appear to have no relevant experience; and posh people are regularly promoted effortlessly without apparent need to demonstrate above-average talent or previous successes. Obviously not ALL posh people, but enough for such occurrences to be more than random chance.

Recently, I switched on BBC Radio Four mid-programme and heard a posh woman explaining her lengthy career. “I could have been anything,” she said confidently.

That single phrase encapsulates the social divisions so evident in Britain. If you are posh and your parents invest a small fortune in your private school education, it is drilled into you from an early age that you CAN and WILL do and be ‘anything’ in life. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to endure soul-destroying verdicts from state schools, careers services, Jobcentres and potential employers telling us of things we are not good enough to do and be in our apparently second-class lives. ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ proves not so entertaining a system when you have to make do in life with the scraps of opportunity that institutions occasionally chuck your way.

It used to be that posh offspring would join their families’ businesses or spontaneously be appointed ‘captains of industry’, as if managing a British industrial conglomerate was no different than taking daddy’s yacht out for a jaunt on a weekend. However, Britain’s post-war, post-colonial de-industrialisation (hastened during the Thatcher years) considerably narrowed such straight-ahead career opportunities. For a while, only politics, government, medicine, law and accountancy were considered suitable professions for posh people, whereas now those ambitions have had to be diversified into occupations such as … the media.

In 1973, Jenny Abramsky had joined the BBC as a lowly programme operations assistant, following an education at a London comprehensive (state) school and the University of East Anglia. After 26 years progressing through the ranks, she was finally appointed director of BBC radio. Following her retirement in 2008 from managing the largest radio operation in the world, it would be difficult to imagine a job description for her successor that would not have demanded similarly extensive experience in radio broadcasting. It is a sign of how times have changed that the BBC’s choice for the job was Tim Davie who had never worked in radio, but had attended private school, Cambridge University and was deputy chairman of Hammersmith & Fulham Conservative Association. It was transparent even then that the radio job was merely a stepping stone for Davie’s ambitions … and so it came to pass.

Occasionally a glitch in The Matrix does occur, maybe once in a lifetime, when mysterious forces within the universe collide to produce a job opportunity that would not normally appear on the precarious, non-linear career timelines endured by the non-posh. In 2006, I was unexpectedly offered an unadvertised post as a ‘media analyst’, a job title I had to search for on the internet to understand what it entailed. As the salary offered me was greater than any previously earned in Britain, it proved hard to resist.

On my first day of work at Enders Analysis, I was invited by my new colleagues to join them for lunch in a local ‘greasy spoon’. I had already spotted some clues: the office was located in Mayfair, a London district too expensive to even window shop; and the water cooler chatter was about made-to-measure suits by a tailor in Hong Kong.

“What school did you go to?” one of my new colleagues asked.

Decades had passed since I had last been asked about the school I had attended. I was now 48 years old, but I did not want to appear reticent to my peers on the first day.

“Strode’s College,” I replied.

My colleagues looked at each other as if I had mentioned a rarely-visited, faraway Pacific Island populated by savages.

“What sort of school is that?” one of them eventually followed up.

“It’s a sixth form college,” I replied.

This response evidently did not satisfy them. There was a more critical question they were burning to ask, a question that normally was not required of a new recruit. One of them dared to raise it with me.

“Is that a public school?”

In the 1984-ish world of British language, the phrase ‘public school’ means a private school where parents have to pay for their children’s education. What Americans call a ‘public school’ is known in Britain as a ‘state school’ because it is funded by the state. Although every child in Britain is entitled to a free education, a tiny proportion of parents choose a private schooling that they confidently expect will propel their offspring into an elitist trajectory.

It might have been my first day communing with my new ‘colleagues’, but my patience was already starting to be tested. I decided to respond obliquely.

“It used to be a grammar school,” I replied.

“So had it been a private school then?” one of them asked.

This question itself betrayed a flawed understanding of Britain’s school system viewed from the perspective of someone who graduated from private education. Grammar schools can only be state schools by definition. It was up to me to explain such fundamentals in the most black and white terms.

“No, it was a state school as a grammar school, and then it was a state school as a sixth form college,” I replied.

The fact that this humiliating Q&A was the first conversation with my new work colleagues turned out to be indicative of how my future in this job was going to proceed. I was not embarrassed about my education, a state-funded experience I shared with 94% of Brits. What I found difficult to process was my colleagues’ apparent belief that, thirty years after my departure, the status of my school continued to merit far more concern than anything I had done since.

Once the horrifying truth had been extracted from me that I was not ‘one of them’, their lunch chatter switched to other topics. Although I was employed as a media analyst, there were no follow-up questions about my relevant experience for the job, about employers I had worked for previously or about any successes I had achieved. It seemed as if my long career in radio counted for absolutely nothing with them. Of more importance was the type of school I had attended, a fact that certain colleagues were quick to remind me of later in this job.

Despite this rather rude introduction, I continued to join my colleagues for lunch in the same diner on following days in order not to appear unsociable. The cooked food was consistently terrible and caused me diarrhoea. Why did they go there? It soon became apparent from their chatter that one of them, my line manager, lusted after an East European waitress employed there who was probably a third of his age. Instead of castigating him as a ‘dirty old man’, his colleagues appeared to enjoy indulging his fantasies and encouraging his unwanted attentions by spending most lunchtimes being served food by this poor servant girl. I soon chose to duck out of their pantomime and went my own way to Eat or Pret A Manger for a cheaper, more wholesome takeaway sandwich.

During my first week, I had to ask my line manager’s advice about a paragraph I had written for a report. A quick visit to his adjacent private office should have lasted no more than a few minutes. Not so. I exited more than half-an-hour later, reeling from his account of sexual abuse suffered at private boarding school. One moment we had been talking about my punctuation, the next he had drifted into dark memories of bullying from many decades ago. I had not asked a question that might have prompted him to regale me with these horrific stories. Why had he considered it appropriate to burden the ‘new boy’ with such accounts?

Some months later, the whole team was required to attend a seasonal lunch at a basement restaurant in Mayfair. I hated these affairs as my colleagues would get drunk and talk even more loudly, but it was impossible to avoid such ‘team’ occasions. Sat facing each other along a long bench table adjacent to the kitchen, mid-meal I noticed under our table a liquid had started to flow around my shiny black shoes. In my lone sobriety, I raised the alarm with my colleagues, but was ignored until a chef appeared and shouted that a pipe containing used cooking oil had burst and was flooding the restaurant. Suddenly all us customers had to negotiate an extremely slippery floor, climb the stairs and exit onto the street.

On our way back to the office, I was walking alongside my line manager when he suddenly said: “Would you mind if I asked your advice about a personal matter?”

Considering some of our previous, scary conversations, I was half dreading what I might be about to hear. Why did he consider me to be someone suitable to share his private thoughts? His life experiences and his concerns seemed light years away from mine.

“The problem is my mother,” he explained. “She is spending money like water and nothing I say can seem to stop her. I am extremely worried that, when she dies, my inheritance will be insufficient for me to live on.”

“And how much do you think you will inherit when the time comes?” I asked with a great deal of trepidation.

“About one million pounds,” he replied without a hint of embarrassment.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/03/born-to-be-hired-2006-new-boy-enders.html]