When Did Britain’s Age of Deference End – and Why?

I have my own tale of deference. My great-aunt May, the daughter of a train driver, was once proposed to by a member of the Herefordshire gentry. She turned him down, on the grounds that he was out of her class. Told this as a child, I was astounded. Even then, this sort of response seemed out of date. Yet I have subsequently wondered whether more complexities were involved in this episode than appeared. My great-aunt had worked as a hospital sister with the army, coping easily it seems with crowded wards and intemperate officers. Was it just the prospect of landed acres and cut-glass accents that sapped her considerable confidence? Or, as one of a family of nine, did she perhaps not want to marry at all?