I am writing as someone who left England getting on for 40 years ago with only the occasional visit home during those years. In other words, what I have to say is no doubt unduly influenced by the radio and, latterly, television and by contact with a thriving but perhaps not wholly representative expatriate community (they all live on barges!)
Anyway, from my vantage point, changes in and attitudes to accent constitute the greatest social change in England I have seen or heard in my lifetime.
If I take my family as an example, I can say that my mother and two elder sisters were completely at ease with their "posh" accents, making no effort to "tone it down" when dealing with tradesmen and the like.
My other sister, my brother and I are far more ambivalent, tending to switch to high-definition mode only when conversing with others of our kind.
I am very much in two minds about this. On the one hand, thank goodness we've moved away from this particularly wounding aspect of class distinction which must have blighted the lives of so many. This was made very clear to me through reading Chérie Blair's autobiography. How maddening and humiliating it must have been for this immensely capable woman to be somehow judged as a lesser being because of her accent.
On the other hand, somewhere deep inside I can't help thinking we have lost something in our headlong retreat from Oxford. I know it's impossible to be objective in these things, but it just seems to me that there is something very pleasant about the upper class accent and intonation at its best, if only it could be stripped of its class connotations.
This point, in turn, was brought home to me when listening to a programme on the World Service recently by and about the late Charles Wheeler. one just doesn't here accents like that any more. And more's the pity, I dare to say!
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