Life & Society
Class conscious - Andrew Martin on why cash is not carried by the middle classes
Published 16 February 2004
It all comes down to whether you carry £5,000 worth of "readies" in a plastic bag
My son, given £1 at a car-boot sale to go away and shut up, returned with a minimalist-looking wallet, which I slowly figured out was actually a billfold. Given that it was for carrying large amounts of cash, it obviously wasn't much use to me, partly because I haven't got large amounts of cash, and partly because, like most reasonably middle-class people, I'm shy of the stuff.
Looking at the billfold, I remembered returning by train from Doncaster races 20 years ago with my dad, and seeing a man in a compartment laying out banknotes of various denominations, like someone playing patience. My dad pointed to him with an expression of awe and explained that his name was Ronnie somebody or other, and that he was a gambler who oscillated on a daily basis between being comfortably off and destitute.
My dad was paid in cash for only the first ten years or so of his 40 years as an employee of British Railways. For the final 30 years, he was paid, like all but 7 per cent of people today, by direct transfer to his bank. It is perhaps for this reason that he has long been fascinated by those rakish figures who break bourgeois convention by carrying large amounts of what he calls "readies". Sometimes, reading his Sporting Life, my dad would exclaim: "Cor, that was a big punt!" at the news of someone who'd gone into a bookies' and placed 20 grand in cash on a horse. A certain milkman also entered his hall of fame in the early Sixties for having paid five grand in "readies" for a terraced house.
I believe that houses are quite often paid for in ready cash in north London, but mainly by Arabs and Russians. It's certainly not pukka English practice, and if I see a bloke in a pub with a lot of "wedge", I assume he's essentially working class, on account of his defiance of gentility, his bold willingness to attract suspicion.
A builder I once knew up in Yorkshire told me that if you try to place more than £5,000 in cash into a bank account, you will be quizzed about where you got it. I was also told by a reformed burglar, whom I interviewed while researching a crime novel, that a good thing to say in this instance (if you have actually stolen the money) is that you run a minicab firm.
The builder told me that the largest sum of money he'd ever carried was 13 grand, and he'd transported it in a Sainsbury's carrier bag. "If you want to get mugged," he said, "then get yourself a good-quality, locking attache case." This man, like most who are willing to deal in cash, has quite a lot "off", as they say in Yorkshire - he has panache, in other words. If trying to buy a second-hand car priced at, say, six grand, he'll be quite likely to say: "Look, I'll give you £5,500 in cash", but this would work only if the seller also had a bit "off", which your average solicitor or civil servant probably wouldn't.
Middle-class people don't like to carry cash, partly because they are scared of being mugged, and partly out of meanness. Graham Greene wrote that credit cards have been such a great success because the middle classes hate writing cheques. But they also hate disbursing large amounts of cash. To hand over £50 in cash is like bleeding the money, whereas payment by credit card is painless. To enable such cash transactions as are necessary, people scurry regularly back to the ATM machines, where they withdraw as much as they dare. Here, too, are our lives made more colourless, because overwhelmingly these machines dispense £20 notes, making the much more interesting fivers or fifties relatively scarce.
In fact, I read in Word magazine recently that there's a new slang term for the ubiquitous twenties: "middle-class luncheon vouchers".
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