In eighteenth and 19th century labour conflicts in Britain, such as the Luddite and Swing disturbances, it was the working classes who, fearing that technological innovations threatened their customary way of life, sought power for their protests in folk models of "upside-down" behaviour found in traditional rituals, ceremonies and dramas (e.g. men dressed up as women, blacked their faces, paraded about riotously at night demanding money and free beer from the propertied classes). In response to such displays of protest, the upper classes simply intensified their everyday roles as magistrates and paternalistic landowners to reaffirm the customary social order and their own authority.
In clear contrast, however, the 1926 General Strike exhibited a unique display of symbolic power, issuing as it did from an unexpected source not, as in previous centuries, from the workers but from the upper classes themselves whose authority had already been seriously undermined by the pre-war agitation of trade unions, suffragettes and the Irish, as well as by the Great War itself. During the strike young gentlefolk transformed a potential working class revolution into a nine day May festival in which, for example, university students and young businessmen on holiday costumed themselves in workers' uniforms, assumed roles as lorry drivers and bus conductors and threw strike parties in their offices. Even upper class women offered rides to those without transportation, acted as telephone operators and debated what to wear to the strike.
Unlike most folkloric and anthropological investigations, this paper will focus on how upper, as well as lower, classes in modern western society employ folkloric forms in innovative and symbolic ways. The upper classes drew upon traditional elite cultural forms of festival, drama and play, and their associated processes of topsy-turviness, role switching and subversion to attempt – as their earlier rural counterparts had – to revivify a dying social order whose most visible threats were labour unrest and an increasingly powerful government bureaucracy. They did not intend to turn the world upside-down, but merely to arrest the historically evolving structures of the post-World War I world and turn society right side up again.