When I was growing up in Scotland in the 1950s, many of my peers were sent to elocution lessons to help them speak “properly” (I had to fight my way through class barriers into my job. Why has so little changed?, 23 November). My mother was obsessed with the need to lose what she, and many of my teachers, referred to as “the language of the gutter”.
The wonderful irony was that growing up in Kilmarnock, with its strong association with the national bard, the focus changed in the run-up to Burns Night. Then, we were all drilled, often by the same elocutionists, in the language and pronunciation of an 18th-century farmer/poet in order to take part in poetry competitions that were treated with some reverence by people who had had their native accent, or even dialect, surgically removed.
Of course, had we continued to speak in this way the week after, we would have had the error of our ways pointed out to us in no uncertain terms. This example of the Caledonian antisyzygy can still be seen in many of our “betters”, who loudly maintain their Scottish heritage while managing to sound remarkably English.
The Caledonian cringe is, unfortunately, still with us.
Jim Marshall
Linlithgow, West Lothian
• At my Liverpool grammar school in the 1960s, we had speech therapy in our first year to try to remove local accents. It was repeated in our upper sixth year, to suitably finish us off before university. Presumably, they realised that the therapy hadn’t worked in the first place.
I have never forgotten reciting “My father’s car is a Jaguar” (it absolutely wasn’t) and something about drinking coffee from “a proper copper coffee pot” (all we knew was Nescafé).
Sue Leyland
Hunmanby, North Yorkshire
• I was interested to read Clair Battaglino’s letter (24 November) about being sent for speech therapy for her working-class accent. My prep school in Bournemouth in the late 1940s adopted a simpler and cheaper “cure” – every time a teacher heard me utter what they considered an inappropriate vowel sound, I was cuffed around the head.
Michael Fraser
Ermington, Devon
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