A Taste of Honey 50 years on

Carol Midgley referred to Sutton Trust social mobility research in a Times article on Salford since the 1950s.

A Taste of Honey epitomised working-class life in the Fifties, but are Manchester’s poor any better off now?

The Salford council house where Shelagh Delaney lived hasn’t changed much in the 58 years since, at age 18, she sat down here and wrote A Taste of Honey. There is a Sky dish on the wall now but it is still instantly recognisable as the house where Delaney, whose play about a poverty-trapped mother and daughter in Salford — which was filmed in 1960 — broke new ground describing people’s restlessness, their yearning to escape their “tethers”.

The play is running at London’s National Theatre, helpfully teeing up a pertinent question: how much has changed for the poor in Salford and other UK cities? The scene in which Jo, the daughter, surveys their squalid new lodgings evoked the conditions in which people lived. “Everything in it is falling apart, it’s true and we’ve no heating,” says Jo’s mother Helen. “But there’s a lovely view of the gasworks, we share a bathroom with the community and this wallpaper’s contemporary. What more do you want?” In fact, though, was it harder for people like this to be socially mobile in Delaney’s day or, despite today’s huge regeneration schemes, was it in truth easier?

A 2011 report by the Sutton Trust seems unequivocal: social mobility is worse in the UK now than in the 1950s. A working-class pupil has less chance of escaping the deprivation cycle than they did in the mid-20th century largely because of the widening gap between state and independent schools. In 2005 a major study by the London School of Economics named 1958 as the golden birth year for social mobility, the last generation for whom movement up the social and income scale was a genuine possibility.

Children born after 1970 had no subsequent improvement in social mobility. Salford, whose hulking tower blocks were built to accommodate those displaced in the Fifties and Sixties slum clearances, still regularly appears in the worst ten places in Britain for child poverty and unemployment. Life expectancy in some of its districts is among the lowest in Britain and recent figures suggested that there were 75 people chasing every job vacancy.

Read the full article here.