Expatriate success stories did not always run smoothly; this chapter shows how Edgar Wilson’s class transformation was beset by anxiety around real and imagined tensions with elite management figures in London and Persia. It also charts a delayed pre-war honeymoon trip to England through Russia. But work stresses on Wilson’s career extended to his marriage, forcing long periods of reluctant separation and hazardous risks to the family in southern Persia during World War One. It elucidates a key stage in the progression of the Wilsons’ social mobility under expatriate conditions, charting events impacting Middle East shipping during the war and after, told through Edgar and Winfred’s correspondence and diaries, including sexually explicit love letters, and a perilous family trek on mules across Persian mountains. For Winifred, the experience of childbirth in Tehran early in the marriage and in England, her experience of stepmothering without Edgar, marked a steep learning curve, influencing the marriage for years ahead. Spousal correspondence is a highlight of this chapter, with intimate insights into marriage and its cosmopolitan growth under the influence of expatriation and marital sexuality.

Chapter 3 addresses how those in the Love Jones Cohort discuss being Black and middle class, and how the growth of the Black middle class is causing a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the Black community. Chapter 3 explains that the tension engendered by this divide takes the form of expressing a degree of responsibility to the larger Black community. Cohort members discussed how gender is a central component of how they experience being Black and middle class. The Cohort were hesitant about explicitly incorporating their SALA status/lifestyle as a key aspect of how they perceived being Black and middle class. Instead, the impact of their SALA lifestyle on their middle-class status was made explicit in their discussions of their lifestyles, wealth decisions etc.