The document discusses Willy Russell's upbringing in the working class and his experience working in a factory warehouse in 1969. It describes how Russell was aware from a young age of the injustice of the class system that treated the working class as second-class citizens. His father, a former miner, held socialist views and instilled in Russell a sense of sympathy for the underdog. Working in the factory warehouse, Russell witnessed firsthand the divide between the managers who drank champagne and the brutal treatment of the workers, showing how class could degrade human behavior.

1. Blood Brothers is based upon the premise that the class you belong to will,
to a large extent, determine your life chances. Willy Russell accepts that
belonging to the working-class does not inevitably lead to socialism -
otherwise how do you explain working-class Tories or racists - but he is clear
about the pressures on members of his class and the influence of his
parents.
I was brought up as a member of the class whose members were treated like
second-class citizens. I was aware from a very early age of the injustice of it.
We were the ones who went into the mines and factories, who did the manual
labour, whose sensitivities were blunted, whose intelligence was never
acknowledged. I lived in an environment where we were told every day of our
lives that we were thick, daft, stupid and unworthy. My father had been a miner
and then worked for ICI. He was not a party member or a tub -thumping socialist
but he was very firmly on the side of the underdog. He’d often bring home
people who were not waifs and strays exactly but peo ple who had suffered
some kind of misfortune. My dad gravitated towards interesting talkers and he
liked nothing better on a Saturday night than to have a heated discussion with
three or four people on politics or religion. He was part of that socialist
tradition. At eighteen he went to night school because he knew he'd never
learned much at school and in fact he became a very good mathematician. Like
many people in his generation his life would have been fantastically different if
he’d been born into my generation or into a different class, which is what Blood
Brothers is about. In his situation you knew that people of lesser intelligence,
humanity and sensitivity would be controlling your life. My mother was slightly
different. She had a great natural symp athy and aspirations. She like nice
things, delicate things, which my father distrusted. She realised that
refinement and taste had nothing to do with class whereas my father thought
they were posh or bourgeois. Both my parents were passionately opposed to
mob culture or mob thought. They could never stand unquestioning groups of
people and I was brought up to see both sides of the question.
In 1969 Willy Russell left hairdressing to work for a year in the warehouse of
a factory to raise money for college. Here he saw the class divide at its most
pernicious. He worked a forty-hour week in a room with the windows
painted black so that the workers would not be distracted. He recalls that
every day, as the workers took a ten-minute break, the managing director
and his associates would be served champagne in crystal glasses on a silver
tray.
I didn't object to them having champagne, but I did object to the insensitivity
of them having it served by waiters who walked past us every afternoon. And
back in the factory we would treat each other brutally. The foreman, himself a
member of the working class, behaved like an animal because he had a little bit
of power, and he wanted to satisfy the people over there with the champagne.
And we taunted each other in a vicious way. I thought I'd left animalistic
behaviour behind me in the playground, but it was there lurking in us.