For 2024, I promised to bring you messages from working-class professionals for those at the start of their careers. And, as is only fair, I’m up first!
Next month: someone else.
If you think a young working-class person might benefit from hearing from working-class professionals of different kinds, please share this with them. And if you are a working-class professional in whatever field or vocation, and you also have a message for a younger counterpart, please get in touch and let us hear it!
For those who are hard of hearing, or if you’re just like me and don’t want to listen to my voice, below the strategically placed ‘subscribe now’ button is a slightly edited transcript of the video above.
Hello everyone. I’ve been thinking that, rather than just using Substack as a way to share my writing, I might be able to ‘give something back’. Thinking what that might be, how I might possibly help people, I was thinking about when I was growing up and I didn’t know anyone who did anything other than working a shop or a restaurant or something like that. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with working in retail, but it felt the only real option when most of the people I knew did that. It felt like any ambitions I might have would just fail if I wanted to take my life in a different direction.
It was only after many years that I actually came to know working-class people who are professors, marine biologists, designers, film makers, writers. Some of them were open about being working class, but most of them didn’t mention it. And since I think I would have found it valuable to hear from working-class people doing what I considered to be interesting jobs, it might be something people would value now, too. Just to be able to visualise yourself doing something you’d find fulfilling and to have the proof that people like you are absolutely capable of making it as a writer, a doctor or whatever it may be.
That isn’t to say you will necessarily succeed – we have to also acknowledge how hard it is out there and how working-class people face barriers that can seem insurmountable – I only want to say that you can do it, and to suggest that it’s worth trying because you and your experiences are valuable and you do have something to contribute
And that’s why, over the next few weeks, I want to bring you messages from working-class professionals who are doing things they find fulfilling. I want them to tell you how they got there, and for them to give some kind of message to their younger counterparts. And I said I’d start. So, here we go!
I’m Paul Craddock, and I’m a writer and film producer. And I live in London now, but grew up on a council estate in Bolton.
I got into writing after a PhD in the history of medicine, and I did that for lots of different reasons, but could only do it because the Science Museum gave me a scholarship. And I got into film making because living in London was expensive and my Science Museum scholarship wasn’t very much – they paid my fees and gave me £3,000 per year. Not enough to live on. So I started recording lectures, then little documentaries and then I specialised in the kinds of films that interest me the most – things to do with science, the arts, museums and culture. I’ve been doing that for 15 years now. About two thirds of my income comes from film making, with the other third mostly writing and some teaching, speaking and broadcasting work as well.
I’m very happy writing words and producing films. But I didn’t mean to do that for a living. I wanted a university career and did everything I could to get there. And I made it so far, but always had to go through some back door or other. After your PhD, you generally do a postdoc or two, and to get those you need to have written several academic papers that no one pays you to write – and they can take months – a load of teaching experience, and conference presentations under your belt. I did all that. But the official routes require you to do it in something like two years from completing your PhD, which I couldn’t do because I had to actually work for a living, too. It’s a really effective way to keep poor people out of universities. Anyway, I got onto several academic projects because I talked to people and they hired me on their grants. And I was doing lecturing, too, at the time, until I realised that the pay from the lecturing didn’t even cover my rent. And if I went down a traditional career path, the pay would be so low when you consider the commitment you have to put in, I would never be able to own my own home, or even retire.
So, I decided that academic stuff would only ever be a part of what I do. So, most of my income now comes from writing and producing films. It’s an unusual and very exciting work life, and completely down to other people – encouraging me, hiring me, and just connecting with me in all kinds of different ways.
And I suppose that brings me onto my message to working-class people at the very start of their careers would be to have the courage to step into the spaces you feel you don’t belong in. It sounds very simple, but it’s not so easy when you haven’t grown up believing in yourself. So, it’s uncomfortable, but I really like what William Faulkner said, which was ‘you cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore’.
I think that’s true for everyone, but especially for working-class people who have been conditioned to live a particular kind of life. You’re educated to work in a factory or supermarket, and this is expected of you. But if you want to do something else, you’ll probably be competing against people who’ve been privately educated and fully expect to reach the top. You’ll need to work for money, which sounds obvious and like something everyone has to do until you realise that loads of people have never had a job until they worked for free getting experience as an intern in the very job they want to have, so they’ll always be ahead. And you won’t have relatives to call in favours and connect you to useful people. And that’s not to mention that you’re statistically more likely to have caring responsibilities and things like that.
The deck is stacked against you in all kinds of ways if you’re working class, so I don’t want to minimise what it takes to succeed in a professional career. But as far as I’ve been able to tell, you can get a long way by taking what is a really rather brave step and, frankly, do what the privately educated do and just insist you belong and ARE a writer, actor, scientist, doctor, designer – whatever you like – because none of these jobs are doable only by special posh people. If you have some aptitude and honest passion for something, you’re capable of doing it. The question isn’t whether you are able, or even whether people will support or believe in you – most people will – it’s just how you overcome the structural obstacles in your way. And all I’m saying is that the system is rotten, but I promise you that most people are good and if they can help you, they will. But you have to be in a position to talk to them.
I’m not sure how coherent that was, actually, but if you didn’t like it I’ll ask someone else to give you a message of their own next month!
Thanks so much for reading – and I suppose watching – this substack! And I’ll see you next week!
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