Class is such a weird thing. My background is 100% working class, one grandfather started his working life down the mines but after going away to war decided he was never going down them again so got a job as an apprentice carpenter. He then joined a large construction company and eventually worked his way up to be a site manager (my claim to fame is he sacked a 16 year old Tom Jones as he was never in work, he was always too tired from performing the night before!)
The other was forced to leave school at thirteen because his older brother got a scholarship to Oxford but the only way the family could afford for him to go was for my grandfather to work instead of him. He started as a butcher's delivery boy but his family were still keen for him to have a career of sorts so got an apprenticeship as an electrician at 16. He got a degree through the OU and worked his way up to senior management at the electricity board. His working class roots never left him though and when I started working, I worked with someone who had retired from the electricity board and started a second career where I was. He remembered my grandfather and told me that the electricity board in South Wales never saw the strikes that others did and that was down to my grandfather working with the staff rather than imposing decisions on them. Grandad was long retired and in the early stages of dementia by this point so I'd never have known that if I hadn't have worked with this guy.
My grandfather's success meant my parents got to university and had good careers as teachers as a result. Dad still insists he is working class and won't hear of it when I tell him he's not. I don't consider myself working class based on the fact I am university educated, own my own home (with a mortgage) am comfortably off (although money and class aren't necessarily the same thing) and since Christmas, have a robot hoover. I am, however, fiercely proud of my working class roots and my grandfathers for their success.
My grandmother is a total snob, mainly because in a mining community, her family were shopkeepers. It sounds like her mother drummed it into her that that made them better than the mining families even though her father was a miner to begin with. He sounded like a bit of a wheeler dealer and had made enough money by the time my grandmother was two to buy the shop and leave the mine. He was killed in an accident on his final shift. My great grandmother then ran the shop on her own. My grandmother disguises her snobbery as altruism - leaving food and clothes out for the local 'tramp' (back in the 60s) but treating him like a child if her stories are anything to go by. She also employed family members as cleaners to 'help them' but really I think it was a way of demonstrating her (perceived) superiority.
My inlaws also have a strange relationship with class. My FiL was the son of a farm labourer who did well in the police then had a second career, working until he was 75, so they are now very comfortably off. My MiL is the daughter of a very young single mother who never knew her father (he left when she was 1) and grew up in poverty. Her mother then had another child with another (unknown) man when she was 16 and she more or less brought her younger sister up. This was in the 30s-50s so there must have been quite a stigma attached to it. She has never had an education or a career just a string of unskilled jobs before meeting my FiL. She then gave up work to be a housewife even though OH didn't come along for 15 years. She is the most judgemental, snobbish, person you could ever come across. She hates women who have a career, she hates the state giving help to anyone and she particularly hates anyone she decides is 'common'. She's horrified that I'm proud of my working class roots and that I tell anyone about them and won't talk about her early life at all. I'm convinced whoever wrote Keeping up Appearances met her and based Hyacinth Bucket (but had to add the comedy elements). I'm sure it's a reaction to the shame she feels (or was made to feel) from her start in life which is really sad but I hate her attitude of thinking she's better than someone else simply because she married someone who worked hard and did well for himself. Pulling up the drawbridge after yourself is one of the traits I really hate in people.
