V.
A Question of Asparagus 1945–1980 To understand class at the Foreign Office in the middle part of the twentieth century, we need first to understand three documents: the 1943 Eden Report; the 1944 Education Act; and the 1963 Robbins Report. The Eden Report set the tone for Foreign Office recruitment in a manner comparable to the Northcote-Trevelyan Report almost a century earlier. Eden, then in his third term as Foreign Secretary, was among the most distinguished European statesmen of his generation, and the report bearing his name called for ‘equal opportunity for all’ at the Foreign Office, promising to recruit ‘from any social sphere’. There was no pro-active talk of engagement with those social spheres, but it was nonetheless an institutional revolution with a clear rallying call: the doors of the Foreign Office were now open to all. Meanwhile, in less than three decades, the British educational landscape was dramatically reshaped by reforming postwar governments. The 1944 Education Act helped to create the Tripartite school system, whereby boys and girls took an examination at the age of eleven to determine the type of school they could attend: the cleverest were selected for places at grammar schools, which were effectively state scholarships to theoretically superior schools. Very suddenly, an educational ladder had materialised linking even the humblest of backgrounds with good qualifications and the prospect of careers in traditionally middle-class professions. Then, in 1963, came the Robbins Report. An expert economist and life peer, Lionel Robbins produced a report on the state of Higher Education in the UK in which he argued that higher education should be universally available, regardless of means. Boldly, he called for 390,000 students to be in higher or further education within ten years and 560,000 by 1980. This would require the creation of 350,000 extra places, of which the majority were to be in universities.25 His calls were heeded, and thus the system of mass-university education still in operation today was born. State-funded university places awarded on the basis of merit, on top of grammar school education, were now available to anyone, and, thanks to Eden’s pledges, this educational pathway could theoretically lead all the way to the Foreign Office. In this chapter, we will unpack these three documents and look in closer detail at their impact upon the relationship between class and the Foreign Office. We will also meet, via interviews, some of the working-class men (female working-class interviewees are much harder to find: some women were hired, but they were still subject to a marriage bar until 1973) who were recruited by the Foreign Office after the Eden Report and the 1944 Education Act. Like the age of aristocracy and the age of the ‘all-rounder’ before it, the so-called ‘golden age of social mobility’ was temporary, but, as we shall see, much of its legacy still lives with us. 26
