And, in a sort of inverse/converse situation, we have To Play the King, wherein an aristocratic politician (not civil servant) stands athwart anything smacking of socialism even when it comes from the King.
Yes. There’s milder forms of regional accents. Listen to Sir Ian McKellen talking in interviews. He has a mild Lancashire accent.
Would Estuary English be considered as a form of “in between” accent? It’s sometimes thought of as Cockney (and other working-class accents of South West England) mixing together with Recieved Pronunciation:
BrainGlutton wrote:
> In the U.S., I assure you, civil service has no upper-class cachet and never has,
> with the possible exception of the foreign service.
I wrote:
> The C.I.A. was well known in its early years for having a substantial amount of
> people from old money/prep school/Ivy League backgrounds.
Exapno Mapcase writes:
> The CIA was technically civilian, but calling it civil service is a misapplication of
> the term. Especially in the early years when the separation from it and the
> military was literally paper thin. Might as well call the SEALs civil service.
Yes, the CIA and the foreign service don’t have the distinct upper-class cachet that they used to have, but they do have a little of it. And they are clearly both civil service these days. My point is that BrainGlutton exaggerates when he says that today no civil service jobs have any upper-class cachet about them. There’s still a little bit of that air about them. It’s been slowly disappearing for decades, but it’s not quite gone.
I wrote:
> Recieved Pronunciation
I meant:
> Received Pronunciation
Yes.
There were actually several. There was the Foreign Office. The Colonial Office. The India Office. And then the Indian Civil Service, which was part Civil Service personel on secondment, but mostly was competative exams. Incidentally, to serve in anyt position of authority in the Colonies, required quite an extensive knowldge, for India at least, a working knowledge of a native language was needed. Furthermore, the Civil Service exam was not specific to departments, it was and I think still is, a general exam. Successful candiates were asked for where they perferred to go, but recruitment was on a strict need basis, it was not certain they would get it. If the Colonial Office needed 10 and the foreign office 50, that is how many they would get.
Ah yes, the India office. I was surprised to disover how few Europeans were often stationed in the African colonies or parts of India- I read somewhere that Nigeria had something like 150 Europeans administering the entire country at one point, and the Indian Civil Service didn’t have nearly as many Europeans in it as you’d think, given the size and complexity of the area being governed.
There was an episode in which Hacker explicitly labeled Sir Humphrey as being middle class. It was the one in which Hacker was trying to get government funding for his local soccer club, which was on the verge of going under. Hacker noted that Humphrey was dressed for the opera and he pointed out how it seemed to be okay for the government to subsidize middle-class entertainment like the opera, but not working-class entertainment, like football.
I had John Oliver placed as coming from somewhere in the East Midlands, and Wikipedia says he grew up in Bedford, so I guess I wasn’t too far off. He doesn’t really speak RP, but like a lot of people in the media his accent is mild, meaning “tending towards RP”. But the designation obviously covers a range of accents. The sort of posh, “far back” accent of Sir Humphrey is heard less often these days, although there are still some pretty posh RP speakers in public life, the Prime Minister David Cameron being, well, a prime example.
Oliver uses a mild regional accent, not RP.