ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 presents an oral history of working-class individuals who applied to the new Civil Service Selection Board recruitment scheme and analyses the role it played in the construction of their own identities. It is an experiential history of social mobility, charting how perceptions about ‘talent’ were forged in the 1950s among beneficiaries of broader political attempts to establish a ‘meritocracy’ in Britain. In doing so, it intervenes in debates about the postwar ‘golden age of social mobility’ and about the social science-inspired grammar school experiment which lasted until the mid-1960s, shifting the terms of the discussion away from the existence or non-existence of the ‘golden age’ onto the identities, experiences and political attitudes of those it directly affected.
