The other half of it is that there is a division within working class, or course. There's upright, moral, hard working, working class, with clean houses, kids with spotless clothes (even if they are well darned) and pride.

Then there's slovenly, low, dirty, unkept working class, who didn't keep their houses spotless and the their kids clean (and drank alcohol, often to the detriment of food for the kids.)

To be the latter was to be outcast in your own community, and looked down on with pity. But never to be accepted within the community of the righteous.

So the push in working class to be 'better' wasn't to be as good as the middle classes, it was to be one of the 'good' and acceptable working class people in the area.

I grew up in very bolshy Lanarkshire (where you get to be referred to as having grown up Lanarkshire Labour, a very militant view of working class people making themselves BETTER working class people, as opposed to working up to being middle class)... so I didn't have the fear of being seen to aspire to, or to mix with, middle class people. No 'getting above your station' as such. More the old Marx one of everyone travelling first class - so I didn't get much exposure to the 'be afraid of your betters'.

Your 'betters' were simply people with more money. No one was actually 'better' than you, simply richer.

Whereas there was a very strong sense of the 'lowers'.

Much of this distinction come from Industrial Working Class, as opposed to Rural Working Class. Huge differences I've found, between the two.

Of course you were probably in a Protestant/Methodist working class environment. Mine was Catholic. Rather different views on some aspects of working class life and righteous living. But the spotless, orderly and disciplined family attendance at Sunday services probably the same. But I suspect we had more colourful head-scarves. ;-)