The King's English and the Security of the Empire: Class, Social Mobility, and Democratization in the British Naval Officer Corps, 1918–1939

Abstract

TT he new social order that many hoped would emerge from the First World War failed to materialize in interwar Britain. The nation's political, pro mk fessional, and commercial elites continued to be recruited predominantly from families that could afford expensive public school educations for their sons.1 The national education system was maintained in a manner calculated to buttress the existing social structure rather than to foster upward mobility. State-funded education allowed, even encouraged, a modest number of working-class children to move from elementary to secondary schools, thus enabling them to rise into the lower rungs of the middle class, but access to the nation's elite public schools, and thence the professional and higher middle classes, was virtually closed to the working and lower-middle classes.2 Critics of the educational system were increas ingly vocal throughout the interwar period, but the succession of Conservative and Conservative-dominated governments, supported by like-minded officials at