Anachronism, inheritance, tradition?

In the military you could see social differences as against, for example, civilian life or between officers and other ranks (soldiers) in dress, in food, in the types of social events they chose, sometimes in first names, in modes of address and most of all in accent. 

Many would call this snobbery, but there was a reason to keeping things distinct. Soldiers and officers did not socialise in the same places or in the same ways. They had separate bars and messes for meals. They never socialised in each others houses. The reason I heard for this was - and perhaps still is - because if an officer had to give a order in time of war, it could not be questioned. Maintaining social distance was one way to increase the respect of men towards officers and therefore the likelihood of that order not being questioned under the impossible condition of war.  

Many officers joined the army with a regional accent and it became replaced, in their twenties I should think, with an "officer accent" which was RP English, often with a "posh" twang. Their children, like me, grew up with and inherited this. Soldiers kept their accent. Soldiers who became officers also tended to lose their accent, sometimes to a lesser extent, unless they were Scottish (or perhaps Welsh, but I never met these).

There were things that seemed anachronistic from outside military society but that of course is just another word for "tradition" if it is deliberately maintained by a specific group. It depends on perspective.  The power of perspective was belatedly brought home to me in my late twenties or early thirties by an Irishman in a story recounted here.

On instance of a tradition within the army was RSVP cards.  These were invitations to all kinds of parties and they were commonplace. You have probably received an RSVP card to a wedding. It's an elegantly written little card that says who is getting married, to whom, where, when , the dress code and you are invited to reply or "RSVP", from the French "répondez s'il vous plaît" saying whether you plan to attend. I feel I am labouring the obvious, only I know that to my children all of this would probably be impenetrable. My parents mantelpiece from the the 1970s through the 1990s were packed with these cards, inviting them not just to weddings but primarily just to drinks and dinner parties. They had them even into the 2000s and 2010s, though in diminishing numbers as they left army life and their local civilian friends who may also have used the RSVP card convention, pre-deceased them. The advent of email also probably contributed to the cards’ decline.

Traditions like these belonged, as far as I could tell, to the upper classes and the military but then we didn't know many middle class civilian people. My uncle I suppose, ten years younger than dad, was that. He had a successful career in  sales in the chocolate and drinks industry  and ended up with a veyr nice large house in a Derbyshire village and a second holiday home somewhere on the North Yorkshire coast. But they weren't the same as us and he ribbed dad about it constantly.  Dad bore it with an endless tolerant good humour.  I never once heard him gripe about his brother.  Dad was posh, and he was, comparatively.  There was something about him.  It wasn't that he had airs and graces because he didn't.  He liked opera so that counted against him. But he'd got that from his own family and developed it.  My uncle was a folk singer.  Dad had gone to grammar school whereas my uncle hadn't, so that made him posh too. He was posh just by virtue of Sandhurst, the officer training school.  All officers were posh, eventually.  It was just the way of things.

There were many things from that proper upper social echelons  that remained in the army but which were not part of the lives of most of the families from which those officers came. Officers then either were or became, middle class. Dad was a typical example. He came from a working class family. He was the son of a policeman and a shopkeeper who sent their first son at sixteen, to Welbeck, the now defunct pre-cursor of Sandhurst, the officer training school.

Officers were not generally members of the aristocracy unless they were in certain infantry regiments like the "Blues and Royals"  - the Royal Horse Guards (Blues) and 1st Dragoons (Royals) -  is one of the two regiments that make up the Household Cavalry of the British Army, along with the Lifeguards. "Household" here refers to the royal household.

So there were officers, whose equivalent in civilian life would be middle class, probably on a social par with doctors and lawyers. Teachers were no longer really in the same sphere. But it was a special kind of middle class, because unlike ordinary middle class which might mean restaurants, foreign holidays, maybe a cleaner, maybe private school, this was a middle class that borrowed or inherited, in a social sense, customs from the upper class because that is where, of course, officers had traditionally come. 

That’s why I think RSVP cards for instance remained longer in the military for ordinary social events when the rest of society now only used them for weddings. An effervescent social life was also a hallmark of the officer culture not only because it was borrowed from an upper class but because it was a necessity to quickly integrate into a ready-made society when everyone was being moved around the world every few years. 

Nobody in ordinary society went to black tie dinners any more, even in the 1970s and 80s, unless perhaps you were aristocracy and who knew what they did. Dressing for dinner, never mind black tie belonged to a time pre-war, pre First World War perhaps, when society was clearly split into working, middle and upper class. Only the upper class then dressed for dinner - and maybe still do. But in the army, at the mess, black tie or “mess” dinners for officers still existed and also probably still do.

The mess, in our case, was the regimental headquarters, a lovely historical hall in the country just outside the garrison.  It had a terrace and gardens where we had pre-dinner drinks.  Dependents didn't go to these things very often but I did go once or twice and remember, as a sixteen or seventeen year old teenager, meeting King Constantine of Greece. There was much protocol around these dinners, which were held in a enormous dining room.  No one could leave for the lavatory for instance I think was one and there were funny stories around breaking or getting round protocol.  Women wore long dresses, men wore the very equivalent of civilian black tie, called mess kit, a tight fitting scarlet and black affair with a waistcoat. 

The place was sold off and is now a luxury hotel and spa.