BRITAIN/SPECIAL REPORT: UPSTAIRS/DOWNSTAIRS AT THE FACTORY

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factory and on his way home. He changes into his gardening pants and worn suede slippers and heads outside. There are chickens to feed and the new greenhouse, just four months old, to attend to. After hours of puttering, Doug joins Hilda in the sitting room for a light supper of cheese and cold cuts while they watch television. Afterward, Doug's local cribbage team plays its weekly match against another workingmen's club in the area. Peach thinks that the clubs, bustling nightly with pool, bingo and card games, have become "too social." He and Hilda much prefer the small pub next door, the Why Not Inn, with its brass-pulled draft beer and front room packed with neighbors out for a quiet evening of chat and dominoes.

"I am still a member of the working class," says Peach. "There's no doubt about that. But if I go with a union card in my hand, I shall be a very happy man. I have no desire to be identified with the bow-tie class." And yet most of the bow-tie class at Rubery Owen−the managers that Peach spars with−are working-class men who were promoted from the shop floor.

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At 8 p.m. John Owen arrives home. Although he keeps intending to mend the outbuildings at Four Ashes and expand the vegetable garden that he just got around to starting this summer, John limits himself to a brief stroll through the grounds before sprawling on one of the living-room lounge chairs with a double Scotch and a sheaf of work papers. He and Elizabeth usually have dinner trays in the living room while watching the 10 o'clock news. Once a year John travels to a reunion of boarding school friends for a weekend of cricket and camping out, but otherwise the Owens seldom venture beyond Four Ashes. Despite his athletic background, he rarely manages much more than a day of golf each week at the exclusive Little Aston Golf Club. He and Elizabeth regularly share an evening of bridge with a neighboring couple, and may go out one other night during the week. But they entertain at home only once or twice a year.

The changes in class structure that have made Doug Peach "a happy man" have left the Owens confused and somewhat embittered. Elizabeth Owen, who worked first as her father's secretary and then as John Owen's secretary, says: "I've lived with the company all my life. John is going through exactly what my father went through. He looks and acts older than his years. He needs about ten pints of beer in him before he will relax. The union men, they just start at 7:30 and finish up at 4. I still remember a power cut one winter when Daddy and I sat in our offices with our coats on and sent down our own electric heaters to the staff. But the temperature still wasn't high enough for them and they just went home. They were always niggling, riddling, shortsighted. They couldn't understand that we were trying to do things for them. That was what hurt me so deeply."

"I'm not complaining about my way of life," says Owen. "I don't go on overseas holidays or anything else, but I have everything that I want. I live comfortably at Four Ashes, but it will take me 20 years to pay it off. Outside of Rubery Owen, I don't own stocks and shares and I'm mortgaged up to my neck. My grandfather died at 60, my father had his stroke at 60, my uncle died at 56. Either we're