Working in London
I worked in the City of London for nearly three years in the early 1960s.
The career I actually wanted to take up when I left school was journalism, and I was offered a job as a trainee reporter provided I got enough examination successes, but I didn’t achieve this, and had to look for something else.
At the beginning of 1960, I started working as a clerk in a shipping and forwarding office in the City, named Mory and Company. The office was below ground in Cunard Place, off Leadenhall Street.
I started work at 5 guineas a week (£5.50 in today’s money). When I tell groups this, in my talk “The Adventures of the Bearded Cinema Manager”, I am usually told “that’s nothing - we started for less than that”.
However, out of my five pounds five shillings I had to pay three pounds ten shillings (£3.50) to get to work. That was the cost of my season ticket on the train between Southend and London. Most of those critics didn’t have to pay anything – they simply walked down the street to the factory.
When the trains were on time (which they sometimes were), I spent three hours a day travelling, on top of the time spent actually working. The train ride took about an hour, and of course I had to walk between home and station, and between office and station.
I also had to work every other Saturday morning. It wasn’t that the work had to be actually done on the Saturday – it was just that the bosses had the power to insist on us working. So on Saturdays I would spend three hours travelling to do three hours work.
I worked for several different companies. It was the only realistic way of getting a slightly higher salary. There was no shortage of vacancies, so one could make a move and earn perhaps an extra pound a week. Among the companies I worked for were General Transport and British and Northern.
I really didn’t enjoy my job. Most of my duties were working out figures and adding up long columns – obviously without the aid of computers. It wasn’t that I was incapable of doing it – it was just very repetitive and boring.
One thing I was able to do was to leave the office from time to time, in my capacity as a messenger. I would, whenever I could, find myself on Tower Hill, where I would watch, and sometimes interact with, the entertainers. In particular, I enjoyed watching the escapologists and the popular evangelists, such as Happy Harry and his great rival Bible Jack.
While working for British and Northern, I organised and ran the company football team. I persuaded the company to pay for our kit. We used to play, mostly against other offices, generally on Sunday mornings.
After nearly four years of this, I gave myself a talking to. At this time I was now twenty years old. I pointed out to myself that if I lived my whole life again, and then again, I would still be five years away from retirement, and I asked if I wanted to do this job all that time. Not too surprisingly, the answer was “no”.
So I looked around for something more interesting to do, and joined the Rank Organisation as a Trainee Cinema Manager at the Odeon Gants Hill in September 1963.
If anybody reading this has any connection with the City, or London in general (Born? Lived? Worked? Ancestors? Relatives?), I would be very pleased to hear from them.
Posted by colin on Sunday 18th June, 2006 at 8:36am