My young life was a travellator up that mountain. I come from precisely that generation for whom attending university was a no-brainer for those in the brains game. And I come from a place in which where you would go to university wasn’t something you ever had to think about. There were only two full universities within a 400-mile radius — and one of those taught in Afrikaans.

The tyranny of choice, the terror of UCAS, the holy mysteries of “clearing”, all passed me by. As did the English “university experience”. When your university is a twenty-minute drive from your family home, you live in that family home. The upside of this model is that you can enter adulthood without much debt. The downside is that university becomes a kind of superannuated school experience: all the same friendship cliques re-establishing themselves. It can easily become a flatpack, wipe-clean lifestyle, notably low in personality formation, windswept romance and regrettable fumbling. Home by half past three. Dinner on the table at half seven. A time of bland stasis, at exactly the moment when everything from Brideshead Revisited to The Young Ones has promised you a rite of passage, adulthood and “freedom”.

These days, having lived in the country for over a decade, I can bluff Englishness easily: I’m odourless, flavourless, practically indistinguishable. But when it comes to that military service for the middle classes, The University Experience — that particular confection of shoe-vomiting on cobbled stones, of WKD-saturated student unions, of “blowing your grant on pills and Beefa then subsisting on baked beans for two months”, all the clichés — I know it only through careful study of BBC3 sitcoms and mid-period Adrian Mole.

Back then, this rankled — so much that one year into a degree, I dropped out, hopped a plane to England and spent 15 months emptying drip trays in a series of bad pubs and worse hotels, in search of a life less ordinary. Up above the bars, in scabby live-in rooms, I scanned various kinds of .gov.uk bumpf, searching for a way to join the English University Experience, until I managed to piece together that it would cost £12,000 per year excluding accommodation, no loans available. I binned the dream, and eventually returned home, thereby performing the uncommon feat of dropping-back-in.

This was still the Mbeki era, when the nation’s farcical political successes of the 90s hadn’t quite dimmed, and a sense of collective purpose still spanned from black to white. In South Africa, the key problem of student politics was “student apathy” — the student paper would run endless pointless pieces on it. A few years later, the storm clouds of Rhodes Must Fall would herald a prickly new world, but at that moment, university was positively prelapsarian. Identity politics was already inside the seminar rooms, but not yet beyond them. Cancellation was unheard of. One winter, a charity I was involved with staged a Big Brother-style live-in contest in a fake squatter camp on the main plaza. Coceka, the girl who won, did so with the slogan: “Keep the black in the shack”.

The university experience, such as it was, was a reflection of the city from which it emerged: suburban, laid-back, jocky, mildly anti-intellectual. The campus was dominated by the Commerce faculty — the eccentric if admirable British insistence on studying impractical subjects, like Spanish, Classics, or History, being largely absent. In a country with no social safety net and stonking unemployment, the wonderfully genteel mentality that leads to so many Brits spending three years studying History of Art is either for the high bourgeoisie or the terminally insane. The system of post-undergrad conversion courses and the graduate fast-tracks is a rather backwards-engineered First World bauble.

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What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

In recent years, my position has come full circle. Ever more, I feel sorry for the English. I feel sorry for the rampant grade inflation in their school system, such that every fresh year requires another wheelbarrow full of A*s to buy a simple 2:1 from Leicester de Montfort. I feel sorry for the firewall of clichés that bound their experience. Most of all, I feel sorry for the oppressively hierarchical nature of the system — the tyranny of the eternal CV distinction between Imperial and King’s, between Bristol and Durham, Nottingham and Nottingham Trent.

And that hierarchy maps onto the job market, too, when you finally get into it. I recently worked with someone who beat out 5000 applicants to a BBC traineeship. The list of fillips you need on your CV to do that these days is mind-boggling. When people talk of “late stage capitalism”, this may be what they mean: a level of competition that turns the humans underneath it into mere abstractions of tendencies.

On the rare occasions employers have been made to scan my resumé, the Higher Education section has likely only baffled and annoyed them. Where exactly does this guy stand in the great horse race of British society — is he more Manchester or is he, you know, a bit Bournemouth?

The truth is that UCT was both and neither: South Africa is simply not the scale of higher education universe that can sustain twenty different words for “upper management material”. At the school on the hill, you got some world class profs, but you also got proper dimbos. It’s neither clubbable nomenklatura nor cultural wasteland. Some of the people I met went on to real greatness. From time to time, I look up the student paper’s chief sub, now a professor at Cornell publishing things like: “Quantum-dot spin-photon entanglement via frequency downconversion to telecom wavelength”. But then you also got the same loping C students who’d been along for the ride since high school. Throw into that the kids from township schools, who slogged through remedial years on lower grades, and you’ve got a fairly balanced pool of talents, all centred around the geography of the city itself. It made for a world that felt human in scale.

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Only the rich can afford to be woke

By Gavin Haynes

By contrast, the rigidly stratified British model seems to involve taking every BBB in the country, and disinterring them to one market town in the Midlands. On this lunar landscape, the colonists will never meet anyone from outside of their IQ standard-deviation. Even the Left-wing interest in social mixing ends at the eleven-plus. A very smart friend completely mucked up his A Levels, and ended up at a lower-tier university. He describes being treated as vaguely godlike by his peers and tutors in the seminar rooms: The Guy Who Seemed To Know What Derrida Was On About. It was perhaps awkward for each party to become aware of that gulf — and of quite what it was each wasn’t getting.

But whatever they lacked, they were getting their latter-day equivalent of the Grand Tour. In the era of Massive Open Online Courses, the price of knowledge is fast approaching zero. And the price of credentialism — of having the piece of paper that pushes you through the recruiter’s door — is finally in recession, as employers get wise to years of academic hyperinflation. In a society that has mislaid many of its rituals, one consumerised Rite Of Passage seems more popular than ever. The eternal desire of kids is to escape their parental homes and go ape — the Cameron reforms simply succeeded in opening the system up to working class kids also eyeing up the same domestic tourism bargain as the middle classes. But post-Covid, it does seem that the long-awaited reckoning on the value of higher education might be about to take place. It is no longer a no brainer.

I was desperate to get out of the provincialism of the New World. But as I look back, I doubt that swimming among Oxbridge super-achievers would have given me nearly as much imaginative scope. Hothousing can be the whetstone to greatness, but it’s also a good recipe for over-narrow specialisation. When I dropped back in, I realised that everything I wanted had been there all along, if I just threw myself into it. Competition for places on the student paper was thin. You could muck about, write what you liked, build fiefdoms, get weird. I did, and it was the making of me.

Perhaps, far from the Oxbridges of the world, the platonic ideal of a university was always much closer than I’d imagined. 9-5, in the Colonies. If you’re going to dream on a spire, you want to have a sense that you’re Sebastian Flyte lounging on a lawn, not hyper-ventilating in a library.

The third leg of this post-war triptych has, arguably, cast the longest shadow, but made the faintest mark. J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls, both a sturdy warhorse of the GCSE syllabus and a renewed theatre favourite since director Stephen Daldry’s 1992 production rescued it from the sneers of posterity, premiered in Leningrad and Moscow in September 1945.

Why in the Soviet Union? On a practical level, Priestley had dashed it off quickly and no West End house had room in its schedule. More profoundly, the Soviet hero’s welcome extended to drama and dramatist alike proved that, a few months after Hitler’s downfall, the mutual warmth of the wartime alliance had outlasted Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. On both sides: after his lap of honour, Priestley published glowing reports of his Russian journey in Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express.

For sure, Priestley’s mysterious Inspector Goole — who surges out of the night in 1912 to unmask the complicity of every member of a smug industrialist’s clan in the suicide of a despairing woman — does belong to the Popular Front era of high-minded, fuzzy-edged reformism. The Inspector’s warning to the guilty plutocrats, that “We do not live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other”, mandates no specific form of remedy beyond a change of heart. Feelgood vagueness often aids longevity. Besides, the them-and-us, capital-and-labour dualism of the pre-1914 Birling family business already felt antique in 1945 — as Priestley above all knew.

The play survives not for its message but its myth, of the ghostly avenger who makes conscience squirm and brings demons to the light.

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By James Bloodworth

Despite his robust presence in education, film and stage, the writer who could imbue bread-and-butter realism with this aura of strangeness and grandeur lacks the high-status devotees who surround the other literary weather-makers of summer 1945. Orwell commands near-universal reverence; Waugh the wary respect even of ideological foes (such as the late Christopher Hitchens). Priestley, the self-proclaimed “classless sort of man” who sought to unite the string quartet, the variety act and the football crowd into a single democratic culture, has suffered the fate of the “middlebrow” conciliator (he preferred “broadbrow”) in a polarised age.

A proud all-purpose hack, he wrote voluminously (for over half a century, from the early 1920s to the late 1970s), earned much, and enjoyed his fame. Virginia Woolf, with whom he predictably sparred, sniped at him as a “tradesman of letters”. The lad from the Bradford wool office gloried in such snubs. As well he might: a decade later, his morale-boosting wartime radio talks could reach audiences of 15 million.

The West Riding artisan had become a media-age superstar. A foursquare memorial statue in his native city — greatcoat billowing out, pipe clutched in hand — looks out over the Venetian-Florentine splendour of Bradford’s 1870s town hall, with the sleeker modern lines of the National Media Museum looming behind. Its model lived through the 20th century with those two worlds close at hand, and in his head: Victorian industry, civic democracy and culture on one side, technology-driven mass communication on the other. Therein lies much of his strength.

As a witness, if not a visionary, he trounces both Orwell and Waugh. To no or little avail, fair-minded critics repeatedly point out that his 1934 book English Journey boasts a scope, zest and sheer curiosity far above its many offshoots, such as Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. From Southampton to South Shields, Blackpool to Swindon, Newcastle to Norwich, his tour broke fresh ground in its close-up attention to the middling “new England” of suburbia, leisure and mass consumption as well as to the “luxury country” of heritage cities or quaint villages, and the “wilderness of dirty brick” in slump-stricken industrial wastelands.

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Even his much-patronised novels, such as the genial concert-party picaresque of The Good Companions, that gave the Great War veteran turned Fleet Street all-rounder his first bestseller in 1929, glitter with striking nuggets of social observation. They not only catch the tenor of their times but, often, speak directly to ours. The barrel-scraping paper that briefly lionises the protagonist of Wonder Hero (1933) has dumped hard news to become “a circus in print, a vaudeville show, a Fun City, a daily comic”.

Late in his career, The Image Men (1968) features an “Institute of Social Imagistics” where nerdish whizz-kids plot (a quarter-century before the internet) to shape and shift opinion. It was Priestley himself who, in 1954, had coined the term “Admass” to invoke the dark, manipulative and tranquillising, side of the consumer culture he first saw spreading in post-Depression England.

In the Britain of 2020, it can feel as if the Institute of Social Imagistics — in both its political and commercial guises — runs the show. Its adepts crunch data to devise stereotypes then offered up to customers, or voters, as a portrait of their souls rather than a cynical, mercenary cartoon. In contrast, Priestley’s radical populism (for want of a less tainted word) imagines a people not as rival flocks, but congenially made up of knobbly, ornery mavericks and “characters” – Kant’s crooked timber of humanity. (He grew up in no insular town, but steeped in Bradford’s German, and German Jewish, culture.) He’s careful, too, to note that the tripartite division of English Journey applies within regions as much as between them, and views his three nations — picture-postcard, semi-detached and old smokestack — as “most fascinatingly intermingled” everywhere.

What he fears about the motorised, movie-going, home-improving middling folk is that they will be “swept into one dusty arterial road of cheap mass production and standardised living”. Not snobbery, but a dread of uniformity imposed by corporate trend-makers and behaviour-fixers, leads him to lament the decline of provincial diversity, the tightening grip of London, the flattening of local oddities.

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Why Britain needs a peasants’ revolt

By John Lewis-Stempel

In pre-Luftwaffe Bristol, which he loves (“both old and alive… not one of your museum pieces”) even though it once flourished on the “evil proceeds” of the slave trade, he reports that a media combine has bought up and closed down the city’s papers. So citizens funded a new title, because “gossip and chatter from Fleet Street” is no substitute for local information and debate. Time and again, what pleased, or alarmed, Priestley in 1933 should do the same for visitors now.

Most of today’s state-of-the-nation bloviators marshal their imaginary tribes like toy soldiers. They neither observe nor research, but swing the clickbait rattle for their team. Priestley, however, rolls up his sleeves — English Journey, for instance, is full of factory-floor accounts, from the Daimler plant in Coventry, Imperial Typewriters in Leicester, or an excavator works in Lincoln where engineers (those “happy children of the machine age”) design a monster that can replace 800 labourers.

Typhoons of change in trade and technology, which he saw leave the ruined North-East a “fantastic wilderness” of squalor and misery, would later blow through the streamlined Art Deco factories of this “new England” too. And Priestley’s quest for a pluralistic, inclusive “English spirit” that fosters solidarity without conformity raises more questions than it can resolve. His questions, though, still matter, still await answers — and he poses them with evergreen skill. Those job-devouring technocrats, he notes, are “miles ahead of us” already. “Either they must stop inventing, or, what is more sensible, the rest of us must begin thinking very hard.” As we must again.